You see, boundary dissolution is what is needed here.
 Boundary dissolution of all type.
 Our separateness is an illusion.
 There is a kind of human bedrock.
 That's why I think that the world sweep toward democracy
 is far more than simply a political trend.
 Democracy is not exactly a style of government
 per se or exclusively.
 Democracy is a biological institution of some sort
 because there is no theory, there is no abstraction,
 there is no ideology.
 I mean, democracy is as close as you can get to anarchy
 and still have any theory of organization at all.
 You know, I wrote a book which is around and about
 called "The Archaic Revival"
 and that's why my belief in the archaic revival
 is what brings me out to events like this.
 I mean, I think the term new age
 and some of these other terms are pretty trivializing
 and basically designed by the mavens of marketing
 to draw you in.
 But there is an impulse throughout the 20th century
 in Freudianism, in abstract expressionism, in Dada,
 psychotherapy, sexual permissiveness,
 psychedelic experimentation, jazz, rock and roll.
 These are all facets of an impulse toward the archaic,
 toward the primitive, the non-straight, the anti-bow tie,
 the wish to blow up the staid world
 created by the fine ladies and gentlemen of the 19th century
 with their Chryster ethics and their long dresses
 and all of that business.
 There is an impulse toward the archaic.
 This is very healthy.
 This is what happens when a society
 seeks to revivify itself.
 When the medieval world exploded
 in the face of the Italian city-states
 and the new classes that were emerging,
 they reinvented classicism.
 It was actually the second time
 classicism had been rediscovered.
 It was also trotted out by the Arabs in the 9th century
 when they needed a stabilizing metaphor
 for the Umayyad Caliphate and those civilizations.
 Now, in the 20th century, we can't go back
 to ancient Greece and Rome or Babylon,
 and in a sense, the new age, I think,
 is an effort to go back to a kind of
 Minoan/Egyptian world which never existed
 except perhaps in the minds
 of certain menopausal theosophists.
 But the impulse is laudable,
 however screwy the results,
 but I think we have to reach further back
 that all of history is what our urtext,
 the Bible, tells us it is.
 It's a confusion, a kind of punishment,
 a wandering in the wilderness,
 and that where we really want to be
 is naked, singing in the rain forest,
 stoned and exalted,
 one with the souls of the ancestors,
 one with the Gaian spirit of the planet.
 And I don't mean to imply that psychedelics
 simply act negatively, dissolving ego,
 dissolving social constructs,
 dissolving programming and neurosis.
 That's all true, but what is left
 when all this dissolving has taken place
 is not simply a tabula rasa, a clean slate.
 What is left is what we forgot,
 what we have been so long away from,
 which is a connection into the reality
 of the Gaian mind.
 The great news that all shamanism can attest to
 and is built on is the news
 that there is a sentient, minded, caring entity
 that surrounds and holds the planet
 in its hands, in its heart,
 and beyond comprehending.
 I mean, call it Gaia, call it God,
 call it the spirit of nature.
 It doesn't matter what you call it.
 It transcends the rational apprehension
 of higher primates, and yet it is there.
 We know that our own peculiar form of self-reflection
 emerged in just a couple of million years
 out of animal organization.
 Well, what we don't know is how many other forms of mind
 are possible and how many times
 in the two billion year history of life on this planet,
 intelligence has been able to shed
 the dark chrysalis of matter
 and launch itself into nearby dimensions
 in which it finds completion and happiness.
 And I think that this is the great news
 that informs the shamanic religions,
 that we are not alone, and that the other
 that we can make our way toward
 is not a galactarian intelligence from beta reticuli
 that is part machine symbiote,
 part banana slug, or something like that.
 That the coherent-minded entity
 that we make our way toward
 is actually a reflection of what is best in our hearts,
 that we carry in ourselves the seed of this thing,
 and that we are like the guy in the story
 of the prodigal son.
 We have fallen into history, and out of this misfortune,
 out of this experience, we can make gold
 if we return to the fold of the ancestors,
 if we can somehow take what we've learned from history
 and fold it back into the experience of being truly human.
 And this is the challenge, and it faces us
 on the political level, issues such as
 all kinds of community issues, such as racism
 and sexism and classism, these are community issues,
 and then issues between the human community and the planet,
 our inability, you see, to emotionally connect
 with the consequences of what we're doing.
 I mean, we as a species present a perfect picture
 of pathology, because what real psychotic behavior is
 is behavior that one cannot emotionally connect
 with the consequences of what is being done.
 And when you realize that we are literally looting
 the cradle of future human life,
 that we have decided that we are not simply
 transient occupiers of this domain,
 but that it is ours to trash, to use up,
 to do with as we wish, leaving nothing for the future,
 then you realize the depth of our need
 for immediate and widespread therapeutic,
 indeed, pharmacological intervention on our state of mind,
 because we have wandered from anything like
 real human values, and the reason psychedelics
 are so threatening in this society
 is because they immediately throw into high relief
 the internal contradictions of the dominator style
 of doing business, and this is what must happen.
 The momentum toward catastrophe built up over centuries
 is immense.
 The only antidote to that that I have seen,
 extrapolating from what I've seen it do
 to single individuals, are the shamanic hallucinogens,
 because when you cut right to the bone,
 what has to happen is we must change our minds.
 If we don't change our minds, we're going to go down
 with this self-generated titanic
 called Western civilization,
 and we have the power to change our minds,
 but it won't come from hortatory preaching.
 If that would work, then we would have turned the bend
 at the Sermon on the Mount, but as it is,
 I think we turned the bend sometime in the 20th century,
 either when Albert Hoffman invented LSD,
 or Gordon Wasson found the mushrooms of Oaxaca,
 or Richard Schultes brought back news of ayahuasca
 from the Amazon basin.
 You see, we have to humble ourselves.
 We have to give up the titanic, ego-driven idea
 that we can do it by ourselves as religions and yogins
 and all that beady-eyed crowd are into promising.
 The first step on the path of real self-transformation
 is the admission that you must humble yourself
 so thoroughly that you need to form a pact
 with an organism that begins its life in a mound of manure.
 You know, it's a true alchemical journey.
 You return to the dross, and out of that
 which everyone has rejected, literally,
 the compost of being, you find the jewel,
 and the jewel can be grown, cultivated,
 brought to fruition, internalized, globalized,
 shared to create a transforming option
 that does honor to a human experiment
 that has been going on far too many millennia
 for us to fumble the golden opportunity away.
 Is there anybody who's burning with their own agenda
 that, oh, here's a burning person, yes.
 - I had an experience about three years ago now,
 maybe four years ago, where I was on a,
 it was a jetty, and I had a feeling
 that I was talking to some people,
 and they were telling me that when we leave this planet,
 we become stars.
 I'm just wondering, have you got any more
 on the outer space connection?
 - Well, I mean, I think, you know, I mean,
 it's funny for me to be talking at a place like this,
 because I am actually a rationalist.
 It's simply that my experience has been very, very peculiar,
 and I thank God for it, because I think most rationalists
 actually live lives which reinforce their rationalism,
 maybe because they don't poke around enough
 in the edges of things.
 I mean, you know, we have orthodox ideology,
 I don't know what it is now, free markets,
 democracy, and physics, or something,
 and then you press out a little bit to the fringes,
 and you discover that reality is not only not
 as you supposed it to be,
 but it's not like anybody supposed it to be.
 The maps we have are largely based on conjecture
 and naive hope, the hope that there's nobody
 hiding in the woods, the hope that there's nobody
 waiting behind the hill.
 When I first started taking psychedelics,
 it all ran pretty much according to Hoyle, LSD.
 It seemed like a tremendous tool for insight
 into the structure of the personality,
 kind of high-powered, turbo-charged,
 self-directed psychotherapy, you know,
 which is certainly useful, illuminating,
 but doesn't violate the laws of physics
 or threaten the foundations of Western science
 and philosophy.
 What has interested me and become the focus
 of my personal life, I guess, are these tryptamine,
 hallucinogens, DMT, psilocybin, and then ayahuasca,
 which is simply a strategy for making DMT orally active.
 And, you know, one could accept, I think,
 insights into one's upbringing,
 insights into the structure of philosophy
 or mathematics or something like that,
 but what is hard to accept are,
 you called them gibberish people.
 I call them self-transforming elf machines
 or tykes or fairies.
 And to my mind, this is confounding.
 This is no mere extension of the models of the psyche
 that we inherit from Freud and Jung.
 It begins to look as though
 that the mind is not even in the brain.
 There's some kind of extended landscape of possibility.
 And I speak as somebody who's been there,
 who's seen this stuff, but who doesn't,
 I don't have an agenda.
 I'm, in a sense, I'm sort of chicken shit
 because the motivation for my public career
 is to get a whole bunch of people to march with me in there
 to check again because,
 you know, well, I talk in the book I wrote for Bantam,
 Food of the Gods, about DMT because I think it's,
 in a sense, the case where all the issues
 are most intensely brought together.
 It's a naturally occurring neurotransmitter,
 endogenous in the human brain.
 It also is very fast acting.
 It clears your system very quickly.
 Not only clears your system,
 but leaves no trace whatsoever.
 You can't even feel that you have done
 some kind of substance a half hour after you do this stuff.
 Nevertheless, the content of the experience itself
 is absolutely paradigm challenging.
 And the chief reason is because
 there are these entities in there.
 And on psilocybin, you hear them.
 They speak to you, what you were describing.
 It's almost as though this is some kind of a mandala
 of pharmacological approaches to the mystery.
 And DMT lands you right in the center of the bullseye.
 I mean, 30 seconds after smoking DMT,
 you confront these things, which look like,
 I mean, it's very hard to force language
 into these dimensions and then bring it back.
 But what they look like to me is self-transforming,
 self-dribbling basketballs or something.
 I mean, they come bounding forward.
 When you enter into the space, there's a kind of a cheer.
 You know, hooray, and suddenly you're there.
 And this is not the cumulative effect of spirulina
 or hanging out at Fyndhorn or imbibing
 any of these ideologies which permit this kind of thing.
 I mean, I come out of, you know,
 Jean Genet and existentialism and Sartre,
 a very much more mainstream, down, dreary Western approach.
 These things do not require belief
 to sustain their existence.
 You may doubt, you may deny, and yet there they are.
 And it's not some kind of neutral panorama
 like window shopping.
 It's an encounter.
 It's a situation in which you see them,
 they see you, and the relationship
 between you and them is very rapidly evolving.
 They seem to have been waiting.
 And the impression I get is,
 well, it's not an impression I get, it's what they say.
 They say, "Here you are again, how wonderful."
 It's not exactly in English, you understand.
 And they have, you know, they're not made of matter.
 The question is, you know, what is the ontos
 of these things?
 What is their exact ontological status?
 And as far as I can tell, they're made of language.
 They are not composed of DNA, sinew, tissue, and blood.
 They're composed of syntax.
 They are like self-articulating sentences
 or language that has no requirement for a speaker.
 It is its own self-generating system of meaning.
 And in, you know, the immediate impression you have
 is if you're a sane person is, you know,
 my God, what is this?
 And then is it okay?
 Am I number one?
 Am I still alive?
 And you check through, you know, take a quick inventory.
 Breathing, normal, blood pressure, normal, heart, normal.
 But what you're seeing is a complete replacement
 of the ordinary world.
 And these things, which are not enough
 like elves, gnomes, and fairies,
 it's almost as though, you know,
 you would look to folklore to provide evidence
 for the existence of these things.
 But the elves, gnomes, and fairies of folklore
 are a little too predictable, a little too humanoid,
 a little too Disney-esque for what you're dealing with.
 These things actually appear to be as alien a form of life
 as it would be possible for a human being to imagine
 and still cognize that it's alien intelligence at all.
 And they are performing an extraordinary activity
 in that place, which is they possess a language
 that can be seen with the eyes.
 And this is fascinating to me.
 I really think that there's something to be learned here.
 This is what they want you to learn.
 They come forward, they utter statements,
 which remember, you don't hear with your ear,
 but which you see as condensed sculptural objects,
 which are like Fabergé eggs
 or beautifully tooled machines of glass, shell, and crystal,
 except these things are in motion.
 They're opening up in front of you,
 and they're pressing in.
 There's a kind of frantic intensity
 to this kind of an encounter.
 It's like a "Bugs Bunny" cartoon
 running backwards at twice normal speed.
 I mean, stuff is just flying all over,
 and they're saying, "Don't abandon yourself to amazement.
 Don't just go gaga with disbelief.
 Try and focus on what we're doing."
 And then if you are able, even moderately,
 to focus on what they're doing,
 what they're doing is they're offering you these objects,
 and they're saying, "Look at this, look at this."


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