Human beings addict to approximately 20 or 30 substances, very tight physiological addictions.
 And then there's all our ideological addictions, you know, to Marxism, to capitalism, to the
 Republican Party, you name it.
 And then we have behavioral addictions of all sorts.
 Somebody gets up in the morning and throws open their front door, and if the Times isn't
 lying rolled at their feet with a red rubber band around it, they go into shock because
 an addiction is being interrupted.
 The fix, which was supposed to arrive on time, has been delayed, and now this person stomps
 back into their house, menace to wife and child because the newspaper didn't arrive
 on time.
 So this curious tendency of our species to addict, I think, is because, you know, if
 a person is an addictive type, then people say, "Well, they probably were abused in childhood,
 and this is the consequence of some kind of childhood trauma."
 Well, I would submit to you that we exhibit this pathology.
 We appear to be the inheritors of some kind of dysfunctional relationship, and I maintain
 that it was torn from us at the birth of mind when we were forced out of the African Eden
 and into a much drier, harsher Middle Eastern climate where we then had to toil in the veil
 of sorrows.
 Well, now, what is the point of this?
 Or is this just some re-visioning of archeology, some egghead game?
 Or what is the point?
 Well, the point is that the consequences of this dysfunctional behavior stemming from
 ego and the dominance hierarchy in our behavior has ruined our planet, toxified the air and
 water, allowed our population to soar beyond the carrying capacity, poisoned our lives
 with propaganda, and made us each feel guilty, powerless, and doomed.
 I mean, this is the major riff being run in the society at large, is that we're doomed.
 We've looted the planet.
 We've destroyed our children's future.
 We have the ethics of rats, and now we're going to go down the tube.
 Well, I say, before we despair completely and just toss in the towel, we need to make
 one last try at escaping our demonic other, and that the way to do it is through, and
 this leads me by a sort of Viconian recurso, back to the archaic revival.
 We need to reach back into time and attempt to understand what happened to us and how
 we fell into history and how its institutions have served us badly and diminished and degraded
 our humanness.
 And then we need to begin a fundamental reconstruction of human institutions with an eye toward creating
 a viable, balanced, nature-honoring, human-honoring set of institutions.
 So does this mean I advocate in a world of epidemic diseases that we return to orgies
 on every new and full moon?
 I don't think so.
 It's hardly possible.
 But what it does mean is that the tool which lay behind all these changes, which was the
 ego-dissolving power of psilocybin, needs to be looked at very carefully.
 We need to examine the possibility that we could re-engineer ourselves so that we could
 emotionally connect with the consequences of what we have been doing to ourselves and
 the planet.
 I mean, when people take psychedelics, this is what they realize.
 They lose the hold on their little world.
 You know, they're saving money for a Mercedes or breast implants or some damn thing.
 You know, then you take one of these things and then you get the big picture.
 And then you realize just where that Mercedes lies in, you know, the long march to the stars.
 In other words, we see this in the rainforest cultures today.
 They have no high level of material culture.
 And yet it's not because they're not interested in beauty or poetry.
 It's that they simply live in a much more mental world than we do.
 The peculiar obsession of the Western mind is its demonic relationship to matter.
 That we don't believe anything is real unless it's made of stuff.
 And you know, any idea, any notion has to somehow be concretized.
 This is a kind of neurotic response in my opinion.
 I mean, the cultures with those civilizations with no material culture whatsoever are in
 a much more dynamic relationship to nature.
 It's our obsession with stuff that is pushing us toward Armageddon.
 I mean, we seriously propose to bring every man, woman, and child on earth to the level
 of the life standard, roughly approximating that of the average dweller of this island.
 Well, I've got news for you.
 There isn't enough metal, glass, plastic, and petroleum in the planet to do that.
 And in fact, it's causing the toxification of our world.
 Unfortunately, we live under a social system that is stuff obsessed.
 We must have money in order to get things.
 And the number of things around that they're telling you you need is beyond your ever being
 able to satisfy yourself.
 We have been told that what is within is nothing, you know, and that all meaning lies in the
 exterior world.
 So only science has meaning, only property has meaning.
 And in fact, the felt presence of immediate experience is the only thing you will ever
 truly possess.
 The felt presence of immediate experience.
 It's the quality of that that determines whether you're a happy or unhappy person.
 And you can be dying of intestinal parasites in some hut in the Amazon, and if your felt
 quality of immediate experience is superior, then you're superior to the guy who's being
 chauffeured around in an air conditioned limousine in some urban center somewhere.
 Our whole cultural delivery system denies this, you know?
 So we have the concept of entertainment and of drugs.
 I mean, to my mind, television is a far more insidious drug than heroin, and that they're
 very comparable.
 They're cousins.
 The difference between heroin and television is that at least on heroin, you can think
 your own thoughts.
 On television, they don't even give you the option to do that, you know?
 You imbibe a manufactured data stream, the main purpose of which is to introduce you
 to the cosmetically enhanced surfaces of certain products, which you don't need.
 The average American watches six hours of TV a day.
 This means that millions and millions of people are being maintained in a semi larval stage.
 I mean, we might as well store them in enormous underground banks somewhere, and someday we
 may.
 I mean, this society is hard enough to manage.
 What if all these people unplug themselves and began running around making demands on
 the political institutions and the infrastructure?
 Then we'd really have a problem.
 So better they should stay in the suburbs.
 People magazine is delivered, the telly is there.
 They trouble no one, but they do consume.
 There is no mundane future.
 I mean, if we had the chairman of the World Bank and those people here, they draw curves
 that will stand your hair on end.
 They show you that the world population, the extraction of petroleum, the rise of poverty,
 the poisoning of the atmosphere, the accumulation of toxins in the food chain, you draw all
 these curves and you discover that sometime between the year 2000 and 2040, life as we
 know it becomes absolutely impossible on the surface of this planet.
 That's what the sober, unstoned people say.
 So then the rest of us are supposed to come to terms with this in some sense, and you
 can either despair and say, "Well, then we're just, you know, the momentum of a thousand
 years of chuckle-headedness is just going to slam us into the wall of planetary limitation
 at a speed of about 5,000 miles an hour," or, "We have to sort through our toolkit and
 find the right wrench to get this sinking submarine back up to the surface.
 Let's disarm Captain Nemo and his friends and put the people who want to go into the
 lifeboats into the lifeboats and then these clowns can do any damn thing they want to."
 Well, when you sort through the cultural toolkit, trying to find the magic key, it is hallucinogenic
 plants.
 As far as I can tell, I mean, I'm just one guy, but I read widely, I travel widely, I've
 been around the block, and my impression is that this is a tremendous long shot, but it's
 the only plan around.
 Nobody else has any other plan.
 What are you supposed to do, wait for the friendly space brothers to come and pull your
 chestnuts out of the fire?
 I just don't get, I'm underwhelmed by the evidence that that's about to occur.
 Maybe it's about to occur.
 I don't regard myself as having an answer.
 I more like have a clue.
 I sorted through, just as I assume you are doing, trying to figure out, taking seriously
 what Alan Watts and Joe Campbell and all those people, Jung, trying to figure out what are
 these people talking about?
 Is it just abstract?
 Can it ever be reached?
 And I sat at the feet of various rishis, roshis, geshes, and gurus.
 I swept up around the ashram and so forth and so on.
 These people just don't have the moxie.
 I mean, maybe they've got something, but we don't have a thousand years to unravel this
 thing.
 It is a sinking submarine.
 Chatter is now out of bounds.
 Plato said, "Time is the moving image of eternity."
 And my model for these psychedelics is, if you push me, ultimately mathematical.
 I mean, I think that when we say we dissolve a boundary, when we say that the psilocybin
 dissolves all boundaries, another way of putting that is to say that we rise to a higher dimension
 where what were boundaries now have been erased.
 And I mean another dimension in a very mathematical and formal sense.
 And there is a dimension from which the past, the present, and the future are equally discernible.
 And you go into that place.
 Shamanism, a good definition of shamanism, a psychedelic definition is, a shaman is somebody
 who has seen the end.
 That's all.
 And if you've seen the end, then you come back and take your place in the play with
 an entirely different attitude.
 In the mountains of the Sierra Mazateca of central Mexico, there are Mixtec and Mazatec
 Indians, the only place in the world where living mushroom cults with ancient roots still
 exist.
 The mushrooms were discovered in 1953 by Gordon and Valentina Wasson because they went to
 these villages and uncovered this thing.
 People thought it had been wiped out with the Spanish conquest, but it hadn't.
 It had just retreated into the Oaxacan interior and been kept alive.
 One way that I think about these aboriginal peoples is that they kept the secret while
 we descended into history.
 They stayed at home and kept the old, old secrets and we descended into matter.
 We made a kind of pilgrimage and we call it human history.
 Now it's over.
 Now we have to take what we've learned from this demonic pilgrimage into the domain of
 the material and use it to save the planet, to care for the planet.
 The only justification for history is if we use what we've learned to care for life on
 the planet.
 We may end up using thermonuclear weapons to destroy incoming space junk that imperils
 the ecology of the planet.
 There may be tasks for which only high technology is adequate.
 If an asteroid is going to strike the earth, you don't want to be a rainforest shaman in
 that situation.
 You want to be in command of intercontinental ballistic missiles with high lift capability
 that can take a 50 megaton weapon out there and blow this thing to smithereens.
 I see our bodhisattvic obligation as a biological obligation, that we are to care for the earth.
 After all, the earth cared for us and we're like scabies or something.
 It can't be very much fun for a planet to have a species on it which is always extracting
 petroleum and spreading plutonium around and dumping junk into the oceans and the atmosphere.
 My God, what is this?
 It's a raging viral infection of some sort.
 And yet, we may be the means to a technology that will actually then give us a destiny,
 save history from just being madness, century after century of rape and pogrom and just
 the horror that it is.
 I'd like to redeem that.
 I'm like Stephan Dedalus.
 I'd like to awaken from the nightmare.
 Mersiliad once made a wonderful statement.
 He was comparing our culture to a dying person.
 And he said, "In the same way that a dying person sees their whole history flash before
 their eyes, a dying culture will frantically publish everything in one last final spasm
 of fear.
 Every Egyptian text, every Tibetan text, every Hopi prophecy, everything will be published,
 published, published because they're looking for answers.
 Somewhere it has to be.
 Did the Tibetans know it?
 Did the Wittoto know it?
 Did the Inuit know it?
 Who knows it?
 We've got to find out."
 And eventually, they'll get around to saying, "Well, now, what about these psychedelic people?
 We've been jailing them and hounding them for years.
 They claim they have an answer."
 And they'll say, "Get them.
 Get them on the line.
 We'll talk to anybody at this point."
 Bad times lie ahead.
 Things are going to get worse before they get better, but they're going to get better.
 The problem, as I see it, with the West is in a search for philosophical economy, of
 which there's nothing wrong with philosophical economy, but in a frantic search for philosophical
 economy, we did great damage to our intuition.
 And what this gave us is monotheism.
 Monotheism is a very good idea on the first pass and not such a good idea on the second
 pass, because if you take a page from Jung, as I try to do, you know that the religious
 ontology of a culture reflects its innermost psychology.
 And the idea of monotheism, one God, omnipresent, omnipotent, unforgiving, and everywhere, is
 an image of the male ego.
 That's all it is.
 It's an enshrining of the ideal personality as defined by that society.
 And yet what it creates is a complete denial of the messy, felt, pluralistic, feminine,
 organic, emotional side of being.
 So one has become enslaved to a kind of platonic abstraction of which all life and color and
 feeling has been poured out of it.
 And you just have the patriarchal ego.
 And this is not very far behind us.
 I mean, some of us were probably raised by people like this.
 The idea of male rectitude, we're all pretty mellow, even the most uptight of us, compared
 to the style of male presentation of, say, 100 years ago.
 Now, 100 years ago, women referred to their husbands as "mister."
 Get into it.
 You know, in the 16th century, medical students had to steal corpses off the gallows and from
 battlefields in order to do dissections, because the church would not allow dissection of corpses
 to take place.
 So medical students of that era risked imprisonment in order to obtain corpses so that they could
 find out how the human body worked.
 This is the kind of situation that we're in.
 Constipated patriarchal institutions are standing directly astride the forward progress of the
 human race.
 I mean, you know, if you want to boil it down to a slogan, and I'll just leave you with
 this, we call these substances "consciousness-expanding agents."
 Well, now, if consciousness does not play a major part in the future history of our
 species, then what kind of a future history are we talking about?
 You know, are we going to become stupider, duller, more animal-like?
 I don't think so.
 Consciousness is our defining quality, and it must be nourished, encouraged, catalyzed,
 never more so than now, because we have a planet in peril.
 The entire evolutionary enterprise may rest on the kinds of decisions we make about how
 we order and carry out our priorities over the next 50 years.
 We need all the help we can get, and these plants have always been there to render counsel
 and give advice to evolving human populations that would humbly and reverently seek their
 input.
 That's all.
 Thank you very much.
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