William Blake used to say, "Nothing is lost. Nothing is lost." And this seems literally
 to be true. It seems as though something once articulated, a statement, the reverberations
 are unto the last syllable of recorded time. Somehow it's all there. Now when I said these
 things approached and spoke in English, I didn't mean to make it sound as mundane as
 it might sound. You know, Greek religion was characterized by what was called the Logos
 in the Hellenistic period. And the Logos was an informing voice. And all the great thinkers
 of Hellenistic times, Plato, Socrates, Xenophon, Thucydides, all of these people were in contact
 with the Logos. It was the sine qua non of Hellenistic religion. And it was a speaking
 and informing voice that tells you the right way to live. Well, we don't know what to make
 of this. And at a certain point in the evolution of the Western mind, judging by the writings
 of people who were contemporaneous with those times, the Logos fell silent. There was actually
 a date. Some of you may know the story of the fishermen pulling their nets off the Isle
 of Rhodes and they heard a voice from the sky say that Great Pan is dead. And this was
 at the change of the eon, the beginning of the age of Aquarius. It was almost as though
 there was something in the ancient world that has gone latent that we can no longer touch
 or imagine. Gordon Wasson, who discovered with his wife Valentina the mushrooms, told
 a very interesting story in one of his books about how in Mazatecan, the people who are
 speakers of Mazatecan, when they chant what the mushroom says, they have created a special
 form for this, which goes like this, "Zabazabazabazabaz, tsuh." This word "tsuh" means "says." "Zabadabadabadada
 says, dadadadadadada says." I didn't know this at the time I took mushrooms the second
 time and in my head I heard the mushroom speaking in English but adding the word "says" to the
 end of the sentence. So it was almost like this thing could speak in Mazatec, it could
 speak in English, but it always kept its cadence and its structure.
 The other thing about psilocybin and the DMT thing is that it seems to be a catalyst for
 glossolalia. This is why I think it must have had something to do with the evolution of
 language. I mean, when you take psilocybin you can fall spontaneously into states of
 glossolalia. Sometimes on DMT it's almost impossible to control, it just spontaneously
 comes out. Oh, what is glossolalia? Well, here's an example of it, then I'll define
 it. [speaking in Mazatec]
 It's language-like activity in the absence of meaning. And it's a very interesting thing
 neurologically, because notice that speech, ordinary speech, is this highly variable stream
 of data. We are set up to make these small mouth noises. As a public speaker I'm very
 aware of the fact that one can speak without tiring almost longer than you can do any other
 major human motor activity. But the glossolalia, such as I just did, it is clearly under the
 control of rules, but there is no meaning conventionally conceived of there. But there
 is syntax. And I think probably that language was invented millennia before meaning, and
 that you could almost call language toneless singing, and that people used to sit around
 the campfire and amuse each other by making funny noises. As a kid I used to do this.
 And then it was only much, much later that anything approaching linguistic conventionality
 was imposed on this, and that that's a lower function. The other thing I want to say about
 this glossolalia thing is you may say, "Well, you're just making it up when I do that."
 But really the experience I have when I do it is that I stand aside, then this variable
 data stream comes out through my mouth. Well, now it has to reflect something about me.
 It's a statement about my internal situation in that moment. And it's evolving and changing
 as rapidly as if I were saying, "You know, I had a migraine headache last night, and
 I got up about four and took an aspirin and da-da-da-da-da. I'm telling you about my situation."
 But the glossolalia must be speaking to something about my situation, or it wouldn't be possible
 to do it at all. Not only is something not real unless it can be said, but the counter-positive
 of that is that once something can be said, it becomes almost too real. It displaces other
 possibilities. I mean, so we're living in a set of constructs, some architectural, some
 ideological, and they can be very oppressive. I mean, how do you get rid of the notion of
 linear time and space very easily? It's the slow work of consensus. One of the things
 that I feel I'm doing very consciously in these kinds of meetings is we're trying to
 launch and replicate memes. You all know this concept? A meme is the smallest unit of an
 idea in the same way that a gene is the smallest unit of organism. And so these things, DMTLs,
 transcendental object at the end of history, so forth, these are memes. And in the same
 way that genes are copied and spread around and that fidelity of copying is the key to
 genetic success, fidelity of meme replication is the key to communication. I mean, if I
 give a speech on something and then you hear it and then you go out and somebody says,
 "So what did he say?" and you give a completely cockeyed account of what has been said, well,
 then the meme has been betrayed. But if you can actually transfer the meme to somebody
 else's mind and then they can copy it and pass it on, then the meme, it's almost as
 though the ideological environment were like a rainforest or a coral reef. Evolution is
 taking place. Stupid memes, dumb memes, have short lifetimes and they disappear, you know?
 And memes of great power are able to thrive in many intellectual and ideological niches
 and to make many marriages of convenience with other memes, and so they are stabilized
 and passed along. Somehow we have to become hip to the power of language. And instead
 of just willy-nilly creating linguistic structures sort of ad hoc, we need to begin to consciously
 engineer our linguistic intent. And then, you know, so far in the 20th century, this
 has not been a program with a very happy history because only jerks have gotten a hold of it.
 Nazis and people with narrow social programs that say, "We're not going to call each
 other Mr. and Mrs. or Hey, you. We're going to call, everybody's going to call each other
 comrade." And then this will create the notion of comradeship, which to a certain degree
 it does. But, you know, manipulating these things for political ends, I mean, the Jews,
 it was okay to put Jews in ovens because the official language for talking about Jews was
 that they were untermensch, subhuman, not like us, whoever we are. So once the definition
 had been changed, people said, "Well, it's okay to mistreat Jews. You know, they're not
 even really people." And this kind of thinking goes on all the time. It's called stereotyping
 and it always is an easier substitute. It's a cheap substitute for clear thinking.
 David Brown asked me the question, "What about life after death?" And I was somewhat of a
 side bar. The Buddhists at the folk level in India do say, "You cannot attain enlightenment
 unless your mother is dead," which is a kind of an odd notion, seeming to imply that she
 had to precede you into hyperspace. When you die, what you do is you literally, as appears
 to happen, you dissolve. And where you go is forward and backward into time, not like
 a gas released into time, but along the tracks and trails of the genetic machinery. In other
 words, you flow into your children and you become... Well, let's make a very simple model
 and say at the moment of death, you become your children and your parents. A few moments
 later, you become your grandchildren and your grandparents. You're spreading down. It's
 almost as though the thing which you were, which was this focus of ego and individuality,
 then it dies. And it's almost as though the mountain begins to slump back into the generalized
 pool of consciousness and being. That's why I have somewhat less patience maybe than I
 should have with the idea of channeling and come as you were parties and that sort of
 thing. Because it seems to me the key to understanding the idea of reincarnation and past lives is
 that you were everybody. Of course, that's who you are. Here comes everybody. You weren't
 just that shepherd girl or that Roman empire emperor or that Greek... You're everybody.
 And you can find your way into the great genetic telephone system and ring anybody's bell in
 history. Well, then it would be absurd to claim you were that person. That would be
 as absurd as claiming that anybody you could call on the telephone is who you are. No,
 it's that we are everyone. And the great turning object in hyperspace that is the genetic,
 I don't know, trans-dimensional object, casts off glinting reflections of this personality,
 that personality. And astrology has a role to play here and other things. But the bottom
 line is we are all drawn of the same stuff. I think one of the most profound insights
 you can have on psychedelics, and I certainly have it, is that we are all interchangeable.
 Anybody could do my job and I'm pretty confident I could do almost anybody's job. We define
 ourselves otherwise, but in watching the rise of my own career, it's a kind of being deputized,
 chosen for the job. It's just they said, "Well, him, he can do it. He has the gift of gab,
 so give him the credit line." But it could have been anybody. Our uniqueness is real
 on one level, but on another level, it's fairly illusory. It's sort of a coincidencia positorum.
 You have to hold these two antithetical things in your mind at once in order to correctly
 perceive the proper level of ambiguity that's resident in reality. It ain't simple, folks.
 Yeah.
 Can I just ask this question? Do I understand you to say that to find our truer self, we
 have to go back to the worm-like stage and reach out for the pharmacological, the natural
 pharmacological that is in the Abaddon Basin and all those plants and things to find our
 true inner being, ego, whatever?
 I don't think we have to go back as far as the worm-like stage. I think what we have
 to do is we have to get out of history. History is a con game run by frightened men and their
 obedient stooges. We had a moment of happiness. There was a moment of completion. I guess
 I should explain my position on this. You see, there have always been dominance hierarchies
 in primates. As far back as you go, clear back to squirrel monkeys, there are what are
 called male dominance hierarchies. Well, so then in us, this was interrupted by psilocybin
 use over a period of probably a couple of hundred thousand years. The psilocybin, forget
 that it's psychedelic for a moment, just think of it as an inoculation against ego. And so
 for 200,000 years or so, it was a dietary item which suppressed this normal monkey behavior.
 And so then females were shared. The sexual style was orgiastic. There were no awareness
 of lines of male paternity and the children belong to the group. This was not quote unquote
 natural. The natural way is for the men to dominate, to control the females, to the old
 tooth and claw. But for a couple of hundred thousand years, it was artificially interrupted
 by the presence of mushroom in the paleolithic human diet. Well, then when, because of climatological
 factors and other factors that we can discuss in another meeting, the mushroom became unavailable.
 The old monkey behaviors reemerged only about 12,000 years ago. But in the previous 200,000
 years, language had been discovered, fire, tool making, song, a whole bunch of forward
 leaps had been made. Well, then when the psilocybin was withdrawn and the patterns of male dominance
 reasserted themselves in an environment where fire and language had been achieved, it exacerbated
 it. It made it much more nightmarish. It made it much more difficult to step away from.
 And all of history is the unhappy story of our, essentially our withdrawal and our agony
 over being unable to reach this connection back into the Gaian mind, which when we had
 it, we lived in Eden. We were balanced. But it faded and history was the consequence.
 Now in the last 50 years, information has arrived on our plate. Lo and behold, in the
 final ticking of the final hour of our dilemma, that actually shows us the way back. If we
 but have the wisdom to understand this and then the fortitude to apply what we know.
 One more question.
 Can you talk for a minute about motivation in relationship to psychoactive substances?
 You mean motivation to take psychedelics?
 To take action.
 To take action. Well, I think that the psychedelic community has not yet recognized or named
 itself as a community. We're well behind gays and black people and all these other minds.
 We're still trying to figure out if we are a community. And if we are a community and
 we have a domain of action, I think where it lies, it's not that we're all supposed
 to become dope dealers. It's that we're all supposed to become artists. That the transformation
 of culture through art is the proper understanding of what you can do with psychedelics besides
 blow your own mind. And I really think what we need to do is put the art pedal to the
 floor and understand that this is art. We are involved in some kind of enormous piece
 of performance art called Western Civilization. And it's been a C minus performance so far.
 And they're just about to reach out with the hook and drag us off stage unless we begin
 pulling rabbits out of the hat pretty furiously. Art is poised for this, but art is ambivalent
 because the society is ambivalent. That's why meetings like this where you actually
 hear it said, the sooner the better. The clock is ticking. This is not a test. There will
 not be a retry. This is the window of opportunity between the unknown and eternity. If not taken,
 then the entire enterprise could be lost. The whole thing from the cave paintings at
 Lascaux to Whitney Houston, it could all go down the drain if we don't act to preserve
 it through an act of human cognition plus courage.
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