The rainforests themselves may eventually be saved.
 Very large conservation organizations
 are attempting to do that.
 But the medical knowledge of how to use these plants
 is being lost at a tremendous rate.
 It will disappear in the next 30 years.
 There's no question about that
 because these people are,
 the young people are not learning the shamanism.
 They're moving into the cities
 and you only have to break that kind of chain
 in an oral tradition.
 You only have to have a one generation break
 and the 50,000 years of accumulated
 medical information is gone.
 So even in today's high-tech world,
 85% of all drugs sold over the counter
 can be traced to plants.
 So if we're serious about a cure to aid,
 new kinds of contraception,
 new forms of psychoactive drugs,
 then this botanical database needs to be preserved.
 I think that those of us who are experienced with psilocybin
 are in a position now to offer answers
 to one of the most perplexing questions
 in the entire field of biology,
 which is how did it happen
 that over a very brief period of time,
 less than two million years,
 the brain size of our species doubled
 and in doubling became the fastest transformation
 of a major organ ever recorded
 in the history of the evolution of life.
 This is according to Lumsden,
 who's a very respected evolutionary biologist.
 This is a truly perplexing problem for evolution.
 It would be perplexing were it to occur anywhere
 in the animal phylogeny.
 But what's of particular embarrassment here
 is that it occurs in the phylogeny of the animal
 who invented the theory of evolution.
 So, you know, it's particularly embarrassing.
 If we can't account for our own evolution,
 what depth and breadth has the theory
 when applied to the rest of nature?
 And, you know, one notion has been
 that you're looking for a transitional skeleton
 or intermediate forms.
 This is now been given up.
 And by looking at this problem,
 I have sort of been able to, I think,
 generate an, let's call it an idea,
 a myth, a fantasy, an explanation for our predicament.
 And it goes very briefly, something like this.
 All primates have what are called dominance hierarchies,
 male dominance hierarchies.
 This goes clear back into very primitive primates
 like squirrel monkeys.
 And it is true of us as we sit here in this room.
 We also have dominance hierarchies,
 male dominance hierarchies.
 This is why, you know, what the squawk is
 in the gender issue is that men have been running everything
 for a long, long time.
 But I maintain that there was a period
 in the history of the primates
 when male dominance hierarchies were interrupted
 and they were interrupted by the presence
 of an unusual element in the food supply.
 And this element in the food supply was psilocybin.
 And it acted as a kind of inoculation
 or unconscious vaccination against the formation of ego.
 And that at that moment with ego,
 tendency to male dominance chemically suppressed
 by mushrooms in the diet,
 all the qualities that we take to be most human
 and most ennobling in ourselves emerged.
 Language, loyalty, community, courage, love,
 devotion, self-sacrifice, planning.
 All of these things which distinguish us
 from the rest of animal nature,
 I maintain occurred under the catalytic influence
 of an exogenous neurotransmitter in the environment
 that was having profound effects on a monkey
 that was exploring a new environment
 and a new dietary habit.
 And here's the notion.
 Our remote ancestors reached a kind
 of evolutionary climactic stability
 in the arboreal forests of tropical Africa.
 And like most animal species that occupies,
 successfully occupies a niche of some sort,
 we would have stayed that way for millions of years
 at equilibrium, happily eating fruit
 and occasionally hurling shit at each other
 as we conducted ourselves through the forested treetops
 and thought would never have entered into the matter.
 However, the plot thickened about three million years ago
 when suddenly and for reasons that are hidden
 in the heart of the planet itself,
 the planet began to dry and the African continent
 became subject to waves of drought and desiccation.
 The tropical rainforests which covered Africa
 began to retreat and be intercut with grasslands.
 And in these grasslands, a very rich flora,
 I mean, a very rich fauna of animal life developed.
 New kinds of animals, grass-eating, herding animals,
 ungulate animals, cows, bison,
 various forms of antelopes, so forth and so on.
 Meanwhile, looking, turning the camera's eye
 on our remote human ancestors,
 things are getting tougher up in the treetops.
 Less fruit, less habitat in which to forage.
 And whenever an animal gets under dietary pressure,
 it does what any sensible creature would do.
 It begins to experiment with new food.
 It begins to test food in the environment.
 Now, the reason animals don't ordinarily do this
 is because foods also contain toxins
 and toxins sometimes are mutagenic.
 So the reason butterflies and birds
 and all kinds of animals specialize in their diets,
 it's a strategy to avoid mutation-causing chemicals.
 Well, so then what happens if you put an animal population
 under pressure for food and it starts experimenting
 with new forms of food?
 It begins having a higher incidence of mutation.
 And that mutation meets the selective forces
 of natural selection present in the environment.
 And lo and behold, you get sudden episodes
 of evolutionary advance.
 And I maintain that this is what happened to us
 on many levels.
 I mean, we are a kind of monkey,
 but if you set us next to our nearest relative,
 there are a lot of things about us that are different.
 Our hairlessness, the proportion of our skull
 to the rest of our body is a fetal ratio
 compared to other primates.
 Well, among the new foods encountered
 by these now ground foraging proto-ancestors of ours
 were mushrooms growing in the dung of wild cattle
 in this grassland environment.
 Now, the astonishing thing about psilocybin in small doses,
 and this was secured by research done by Roland Fisher
 in the late 50s, early 60s,
 is that in very small doses,
 doses so small that you don't feel buzzed
 or loaded or anything.
 In fact, you don't notice it.
 Visual acuity increases.
 You can give somebody five milligrams of psilocybin
 and an hour later, give them a standard optometric test
 and they will do better
 than if they hadn't taken the psilocybin.
 This is because edge detection is sensitized.
 Well, you don't have to be a rocket scientist
 to figure out if there's a food in the environment
 of a hunting and gathering animal
 that conveys increased visual acuity,
 it's the equivalent of chemical binoculars,
 then those animals which accept that food
 as an item in their diet are going
 to have greater hunting success
 than those individuals that do not.
 And greater hunting success means greater success
 at feeding your offspring.
 And that means that there would be an outbreeding
 of the non-psilocybin using members of the population.
 In other words, natural selection would then favor
 those animals using, admitting the mushroom into their diet.
 So that little chink in the armor,
 that little toehold is sufficient
 for the long march toward the stars,
 which is taking place in our species to begin.
 The next step is if you take slightly more psilocybin,
 you experience what's called arousal.
 And arousal means a kind of general restlessness,
 an inability to sit still,
 a roving and wired kind of attention.
 And in highly sexed animals like primates,
 it also means sexual arousal
 and in the male sustained direction.
 A second factor, promoting outbreeding
 of the non-psilocybin using members of the population.
 In other words, you see, it was promoting
 what anthropologists straight-facedly call
 more successful copulations.
 And you don't have to be straight-faced, however.
 So this is the second step.
 And I believe that the sexual style
 of these psilocybin aroused early ancestors of ours
 was probably orgiastic.
 This seems reasonable from looking at human styles
 on the earth today.
 And I suspect that probably an orgiastic religious style
 based on the worship of a great horned goddess
 who was honored at the new and full moon
 became a religious style that was set in place
 for 10 or 15,000 years.
 This is what was going on.
 Well, now, psilocybin on its own,
 and even more so in combination with a social style
 that included orgy, will have the consequences
 of dissolving boundaries.
 You know, this is what the orgiastic style does.
 It erodes the concept of me
 and still more the concept of my women, my children,
 my tools, my territory, my hunting ground.
 If you have an orgiastic style,
 the first important consequence is
 that men cannot trace lines of male paternity.
 There is no concept for a man of my children.
 There is only the concept of our children,
 the tribe, the group,
 and loyalty is transferred in that direction.
 The suppression of ego was very real.
 As I said earlier, in the earlier primate forms,
 ego, male dominance, was very strong,
 but it was as though this item in the diet
 was suppressing this previous rigid male hierarchy,
 and into the void created by the dissolving
 of the social glue of these primates,
 there flowed a whole bunch of new behaviors,
 behaviors such as pair bonding based on loyalty
 and mutuality of need fulfillment,
 cooperation, appropriate role assignment,
 so forth and so on.
 In other words, it got loose.
 It began to work.
 You see, every time there was a glaciation
 and there have been nine in the last million years or so,
 every time there is a glaciation,
 species, including primates,
 get locked in to islanded areas.
 Well, then when the ice melts,
 these previously islanded populations flow together
 and exchange genes,
 and there were several waves of human migration
 out of Africa and into the Middle East.
 But I maintain, based on the archaeological evidence,
 that only the last wave of migration out of Africa,
 which began only 20,000 years ago,
 were the people anything other than hunter-gatherers.
 Always before, they were just hunter-gatherers,
 but this last time, in the intervening glacial period,
 they had learned to domesticate cattle in Africa,
 and it was almost as though the human population
 was finding its way toward the cattle,
 and of course, in the dung of the cattle was the mushroom.
 So this great-horned mother goddess
 that appears at the dawn of history
 is a hypothesization of the power of cattle
 in the human imagination.
 Now, at these behaviors
 that were developed out of this encounter with psilocybin
 also involved at higher doses of psilocybin,
 remember, at very low doses, increased visual acuity,
 mid-range doses, orgiastic sexual activity,
 and ego dissolution.
 At still higher doses,
 the revelation of a religious tremendum
 so bizarre and unnerving that even today,
 we, with Husserl and all the rest of it under our belts,
 can barely face it.
 In other words, a mystery which,
 for all of our sophistication,
 the breadth and measure of it can hardly be taken,
 and that laid the basis for a sense of religio,
 a sense of ritual, a sense of a relationship to a tremendum.
 And I don't want to present this psilocybin intoxication
 entirely as if it were simply ameliorating
 the earlier evolutionary programming in the primates.
 It was doing that, but it was doing something else as well,
 because this mystery at the center
 of the psilocybin intoxication
 is not simply the contents of your unconscious mind
 or unfulfilled fantasy as Freud thought,
 or it is, in fact, a contact with a Gaian intelligence
 of some sort.
 And if you're a rationalist, as I once was
 on some long-forgotten world,
 this is an incredibly challenging notion,
 that what you're getting into is actually
 some kind of supermind, some kind of organism
 that is, you know, apparently in the atmosphere,
 in the water, in the plants, in the land.
 It's hard to say where it is or what it is,
 because it was not designed for human apprehension.
 It has its own ding on seash, its own thing in itself.
 It's like a god for any century
 of human description of it, except the 20th,
 in which we have enough knowledge about the ecosystem
 to say, well, maybe it's not, as Milton said,
 the god who hung the stars like lamps in heaven.
 It isn't that god, but it's the god of the oceans
 and the jungles and the ice caps and the rivers
 and the glaciers and the great schools of fish
 and the deserts, and it's the goddess of the earth.
 It's the mind of organic life on this planet.
 And I believe that we were its chosen vessel
 of manifestation in a certain domain.
 And this is what the Edenic myth is about.
 The nostalgia for paradise that haunts our species
 is a memory of this time, this golden era
 that ended as recently, you know, as 10,000 years ago.
 I mean, everything that we call history
 is a product of the traumatic break
 in our symbiotic relationship to the earth
 occasioned by the loss of the mushroom religion,
 which was the Ur religion.
 And, you know, an obvious question
 that anyone who's gotten this far would ask is,
 well, if it was so wonderful, why was it lost?
 Well, it was lost because the same dynamics
 which created it, which was the progressive drying
 of the African continent,
 those forces accelerated and continued.
 And where there had been Edenic grassland
 and vast herds and endless supplies of mushrooms,
 there became desert.
 There became dry land scrub, retreating water holes,
 fewer and fewer mushrooms.
 The mushroom festivals,
 which had been at the new and full moon,
 became fewer in number.
 The mushroom supply dwindled.
 Special classes of people had to be appointed
 who would be the mushroom users.
 Special times of the year had to be appointed
 when the mushrooms could be taken.
 Special places in the rain shadow of mountains
 and near water holes became the only places
 where the mushrooms could be found.
 And at that point, and these are processes
 which took millennia to occur.
 At that point, there became an anxiety and concern
 to preserve the mushrooms so that in abundant times,
 they could be gathered for times when they were scarce.
 And the strategy that would have naturally been hit upon
 would be to use honey as a preservative.
 In a world without refrigeration,
 honey is an antiseptic medium that caramelizes
 around fruits and like hummingbird tongues
 and stuff like that.
 You're always hearing Romans
 ate hummingbird tongues in honey.
 That's why, because it was a preservative.
 Problem is, honey itself has a perverse and mercurial nature
 and can change into a psychoactive drug.
 It can change into mead, which is a form of alcohol.
 It can ferment and become a kind of proto beer.
 Well, in what I develop in my book, "Food of the Gods"
 is the idea that each drug carries baggage
 that we are generally not aware of.
 Each drug promotes certain values and suppresses others.
 So if psilocybin suppressed ego, male paternity,
 and promoted sexual polymorphically perverse behavior
 and consequent diminishing of ego,
 then what mead fermented honey promotes
 is the classic things always promoted by alcohol
 in any form.
 One, a false sense of verbal facility
 in the insidious combination with a lowering of sensitivity
 to social cueing.
 You know, you can see this in any singles bar
 on a crowded Saturday night.
 People drink because they think it makes them clever
 and then able to ignore social cues from those around them,
 they boorishly proceed with their agenda,
 which usually involves getting laid or something.
 And, you know, I think that there was probably a thousand
 years in European civilization when very few people
 experienced sex without being bombed
 because that was how people steeled themselves
 for the experience, you know.
 It was recommended to give distilled alcohol
 to soldiers on the brink of battle
 when it was first invented because it fortified them.
 Well, as the mushrooms faded,
 these behaviors that had been previously well established
 in primates of male dominance and ego returned
 so that at the very dawn of human history,
 you know, let's say 6,000 BC or so,
 you get in the absence of the psilocybin,
 the disease of ego reemerges.
 It's been suppressed for 50,000 years.
 Now it spreads through the population like wildfire
 and you get urbanization, agriculture.
 Agriculture leads to surplus.
 Surplus means an end to nomadic existence.
 You become sedentary.
 You build grain towers.
 You fill these towers with grain.
 Then you have to defend them against the hungry people
 from the other tribe.
 So you get classes.
 Somebody has to coordinate the defense of this grain tower.
 Suddenly you have generals, hierarchy, male dominance,
 warfare, classism, sexism, you name it, you know,
 and the phonetic alphabet and all the rest of it
 is not far behind.
 It's the fall into history.
 And we are the unhappy inheritors of this situation.
 And one of the things that is so unique about us
 is our fascination with drugs.
 That of, you know, that elephants will break into compounds
 to get at rotting papayas and butterflies go for sugared rum
 and this and that, but human beings are incredible.


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