as it is passed before you, as you look into it,
 you have a very strong and I believe genuine impression
 that this thing that you're being shown,
 though it's no larger than a Kaiser roll,
 is somehow absolutely confounding to the principles
 and assumptions of this world.
 That in other words, if I could condense this thing
 into my hand right now, I wouldn't have to convince you,
 I wouldn't have to preach to you,
 I could just show you, say, look at this.
 And in the visual confrontation with this thing,
 it's self-evident that this is impossible.
 Matter, light, they don't behave this way.
 It's as though you have brought back a chunk
 of another dimension.
 And then what they're saying about these things
 is you can do this, do what we are doing.
 And then the urgency becomes almost strident.
 They say, do what we're doing, do it now.
 And you say, wow.
 And then you feel, or I felt at any rate,
 an upwelling in myself, like a calling forth.
 Then out of my mouth comes language or at least syntax,
 but without meaning, some kind of glossolalia
 where the modality of language is preserved,
 but the meaning is not.
 And it's a kind of an ecstasy.
 It sounds like gibberish in three-dimensional space,
 but in that space, it seems to be the key
 to unlocking a world made out of syntax and meaning.
 And I come before you with all of this stuff,
 unfinished.
 This is not a teaching or a system or an anything.
 It's an eyewitness account of a hyper-dimensional
 automobile accident or something.
 We're not saying what the conclusions are.
 We don't know what the conclusions are,
 but this is big news.
 And when I first encountered this kind of stuff,
 I was a young art historian
 at the University of California.
 And I assumed that any motif,
 no matter how out there or bizarre,
 you would be able to look at the painting,
 folklore and sculpture of somebody on this planet
 and find a trace.
 And it seemed as though this defeated that idea.
 It was almost counter the idea
 of the collective unconscious,
 because it argued that you, Joe, anybody,
 Sally, somebody, can break through on your own,
 an ordinary person, to a place that Verrucchio never saw,
 Michelangelo didn't anticipate it,
 Yeats didn't know, Blake hadn't a clue,
 Melville wasn't briefed, and yet there it is.
 To me as an intellectual, it was very confusing,
 because I think as intellectuals,
 we always assume that progress will be built
 on the shoulders of the giants that have preceded us.
 The idea of something actually 100% brand new
 and unexpected is pretty daunting.
 And here it was, 30 seconds away,
 simply by the act of ingesting
 this natural neurotransmitter.
 Well, those of you who've been there
 know exactly what I'm talking about.
 Those of you who haven't been there,
 I can't imagine how you can even sit
 through this kind of thing,
 because it makes the folks from the Pleiades
 and all that other stuff out there
 seem mundane by comparison.
 The other thing is, we're not talking about
 camping out in cornfields night after freezing night
 with your eyes glued to the stars in One Hope.
 This is a no-fail method for plunging deeper
 into these spiritual realms than the tantric yogas
 or the practitioners of X, Y, or Z dare scarcely suppose.
 It's repeatable, it's on demand.
 It does not depend upon your state of moral purity
 or tantric accomplishment.
 It's something that is our birthright,
 as much as our sexuality, our language, our eyesight,
 our appreciation of music.
 It's an innate human thing.
 And to try and return to the premises of your question,
 I tried to formulate theories about what could this be.
 Well, the first impression that I had
 based on a reading of how weird this all was,
 was this must be a parallel continuum,
 a la Philip K. Dick and like that,
 that just apparently over some kind
 of neurological energy barrier that's all around us
 all the time, these things are there
 and they are not made of matter,
 so the laws of physics don't apply, and like that.
 And then I entertained different possibilities
 and I still entertain numerous possibilities
 'cause I haven't got it figured out yet.
 One possibility is that these things
 are actually human beings from the future.
 I mean, if you take the content of the experience seriously
 and say, I am apparently in contact
 with diminutive English speaking creatures of some sort,
 well then they have got to be either intelligent beings
 from another part of the universe
 or humans from some extraordinarily advanced future world
 where human beings are now made of language
 and are only two and a half feet tall.
 So I would put it rather far in the future,
 or, and I just simply offer this
 in the spirit of intellectual completeness.
 If you ask a shaman or what these things are,
 they don't hesitate, they just say,
 oh, well, those are the ancestor spirits.
 This is what it's all about is ancestor spirits.
 Well, it takes a while for the implications
 of this to sink in.
 They're talking about dead people.
 That's what an ancestor spirit is.
 They're suggesting that the dearly departed
 do not evanesce into sunlight
 or something cheerfully nonspecific like that,
 but that this actually is simply one level
 of a cosmic system of some sort
 where birth and death are transitions from level to level.
 Well, this is just exactly the kind of thing
 that I'm intellectually set up to doubt
 and to feel a kind of scorn for,
 because people have been running around
 since time immemorial claiming this sort of thing
 with an incredibly underwhelming body of evidence
 to back them up.
 And yet, if you try to approach the problem scientifically,
 I think you would agree that in terms of likelihood,
 although operating in this realm, what this means,
 I'm not sure, but that in terms of likelihood,
 it's more likely that these are human souls
 in another dimension than that we are being contacted
 by friendly extraterrestrials,
 or even that we share the earth with an invisible race
 of syntactical tribal elf legions of some sort.
 But I think this conclusion is the one
 that we would tend to resist most strenuously.
 I mean, I think it's the most intellectually challenging
 position to take vis-a-vis Western thinking
 to claim that we have to reopen the question
 of life after death in a serious way,
 not the cheerful round of reincarnation
 that haunts some of the zanier offshoots
 of Eastern religion, but actually say,
 you are going to die, and when you die,
 you are going to undergo a metamorphosis of some sort
 that is not particularly going to be designed
 to preserve your humanness, what you call your humanness,
 or to set you on a cloud with lyre and gown
 for the rest of eternity,
 but that actually the greatest adventure,
 the greatest adventures still lie ahead.
 And these things, intimations of immortality
 are vouchsafed by these plant hallucinogens.
 Why this should be, why it should be possible
 to get a look over the great divide, I have no idea.
 I think about these things constantly.
 My life is mostly questions.
 My friend, Rupert Sheldrake,
 who some of you may know his books,
 he and I have talked about it.
 He thinks that there is a chemistry of dying,
 that in the same way that there is a chemistry
 of giving birth, there is a chemistry of dying,
 and that DMT parallels and anticipates this.
 He calls it not a hallucinogen, but a necroptic substance.
 It actually anticipates the death state itself.
 I once had the fortunate opportunity
 of being able to turn a very prominent Tibetan Lama
 onto DMT, a name that you would recognize,
 although not one of the top five,
 but a more wizened, older, stranger character.
 And he did it and I said, "So what about it?"
 These people, these Tibetan Buddhists,
 they have a pretty good map of the territory.
 He said, "It's the lesser lights."
 He said, "You can't go further than that
 "without breaking the thread of return."
 He said, "Beyond this, there's no returning."
 And so, in a very real sense, it's a look over the edge.
 But then, even that doesn't solve all the mysteries.
 I mean, what is it about this wish
 to convey a language which is seen?
 What's that all about?
 Is it that perhaps language has always been a gift
 from the other?
 We don't, it's a little hard to picture
 how the kind of language I'm using right now
 ever got started.
 I mean, notice that language is a behavior.
 It's a behavior, that's all it is.
 It's something, it's a complex activity
 having to do with small mouth noises
 and the neurological processing of same.
 We must have been essentially as we are before language.
 It's like break dancing or something like that.
 You're fully set up to do it,
 and people have been for millennia.
 But until somebody actually does it,
 it only exists as a formal possibility in the organism.
 And I wonder how many of these things there are.
 I mean, break dancing is an interesting example,
 albeit somewhat trivial.
 But it shows that after five, six, 7,000 years
 of civilization, you can come up with a behavior
 that nobody has ever seen before.
 I've spent a lot of time thinking about language
 and how, what a limited tool it is,
 and yet how our whole world is held together
 by nothing more than small mouth noises.
 And it's incredible, the entirety of global civilization
 is held together by small mouth noises
 and symbolic notations of same,
 which have an even more rarified level of abstraction.
 Our separateness, our notion of self and world,
 of self and species, all rest on the carrying capacity
 of these small mouth noises.
 One of the things that has interested me,
 some of you have heard me talk about this,
 is I think good psychedelic trips inspire a lot of homework,
 which usually means reading in curious areas.
 And I discovered that octopi, cephalopods,
 which in case you're not up on your evolutionary biology,
 these are mollusca, they're not even vertebrates.
 They're related to escargot and banana slugs.
 I mean, you can hardly imagine a form of life
 more alien to ourselves.
 I mean, we broke off from the other primates
 three million years ago, but the invertebrates
 and the vertebrates separated from each other
 about 700 million years ago.
 Well, an interesting thing going on with octopi,
 most people have heard that they can change color.
 And most people, I think, assume this means
 that like certain lizards and certain butterflies,
 they camouflage themselves against their background.
 That's not what's going on.
 Color and texture for octopi are the medium of language.
 You could almost say that an octopus is a naked mind,
 because as the octopus goes through certain internal changes,
 hunger, sexual need, whatever, color changes accompany
 these shifts of internal state and appear
 on the surface of the octopus.
 It is almost as though it wears its language
 like an overcoat.
 It is clothed in its own meaning.
 Well, obviously in that kind of situation,
 you have always been suspended in an ambiance of language,
 unlike ourselves, where apparently language was invented
 one bright summer day or series of bright summer days.
 And if you have a language such as we have,
 small mouth noises with culturally assigned meaning.
 In other words, if I say, where can I get a taxi?
 If I don't say this to a person who speaks English,
 it means nothing to a Ukrainian or a Chinese.
 Octopi don't have this problem.
 There are not culturally localized languages.
 There's only a language of the body, the genes.
 It's unambiguous.
 You see, even those of us in this room,
 if you were to check,
 our internal dictionaries are different.
 We have only the assumption
 of one-to-one mapping of meaning.
 I mean, if I ask you, where is the restroom?
 This is fairly ambiguous, unambiguous,
 because it deals with ordinary situations.
 But as soon as conversation leaves the main
 and well-trodden path of discourse,
 ambiguity enters into a tremendous degree.
 We overlook this as a courtesy to each other.
 I mean, you almost never hear one person say to another,
 now, would you explain to me what I just said?
 The reason you don't hear this said very often
 is because the thin illusion of communication
 would break down completely
 if we actually demanded of our listeners
 that they repeat back to us.
 The only situation in which that happens on a regular basis
 is the pedagogical mode, where the teacher teaches,
 and then by test and recitation,
 determines that the pupil has understood.
 But in polite discourse among adults,
 we consider this an imposition, if not an insult.
 So somehow these creatures are elves of language,
 catalysts for the concrescence of cognition.
 And I don't know if these things can be understood.
 After all, we're embedded in the world
 created by our own meanings.
 C.D. Broad, I think it was C.D. Broad,
 wrote a book called "The Meaning of Meaning."
 Or no, it was F.H. Bradley, actually.
 I think Broad's book was called
 "The Mind and Its Place in Nature."
 Probably these two should be read back to back,
 just to see how positivists handle these kinds of problems.
 The meaning of meaning is a real problem,
 but it also tends to be solipsistic or tautological.
 Can we expect brain to give a full accounting of brain?
 Can we expect mind to give a full accounting of mind?
 Anybody who's studied logic for 10 minutes
 can tell you that that's impossible
 because it is tautological.


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