[00:00:00 - 00:00:06] Mystic Fire Video and Audio proudly presents Terrence McKenna [00:00:06 - 00:00:09] History Ends in Green [00:00:09 - 00:00:14] This is tape one of a six cassette series [00:00:14 - 00:00:34] [Music] [00:00:34 - 00:00:40] I've been traveling a lot and speaking a lot to different kinds of people [00:00:40 - 00:00:50] and most recently in Europe where it was a tremendous kind of bridge building thing [00:00:50 - 00:00:55] to get everything rhetorically lined up and squared around [00:00:55 - 00:01:00] to where I could even introduce the subject of psychedelics. [00:01:00 - 00:01:07] So I see that I've returned to the home congregation here [00:01:07 - 00:01:15] and because you know this seems to be the overwhelming focus of this group [00:01:15 - 00:01:21] which is interesting it's even sometimes sort of confining to me [00:01:21 - 00:01:26] because I would wander maybe in other directions but [00:01:26 - 00:01:33] every prophet is the captive of his earliest ideological expression. [00:01:33 - 00:01:40] You know I mean Lenin couldn't do much about Leninism once it had passed a certain point. [00:01:40 - 00:01:50] So in hearing what people's interests were and trying to think about it in new ways [00:01:50 - 00:01:54] you know the uniting thing in the 20th century [00:01:54 - 00:02:02] I think one of the things that sets the 20th century completely apart really from previous times [00:02:02 - 00:02:11] if not ontologically then by degree is the focus on the moving image [00:02:11 - 00:02:15] and the role that this has had in shaping 20th century culture [00:02:15 - 00:02:18] and it comes really in three forms. [00:02:18 - 00:02:25] It comes in the natural and available form of the dream [00:02:25 - 00:02:31] which always to some degree has shaped human culture [00:02:31 - 00:02:37] but for Freud and Jung in the early 20th century and their followers [00:02:37 - 00:02:44] the dream took on a whole new significance that it had never had before. [00:02:44 - 00:02:51] It was seen as a cryptic messenger from a hidden world [00:02:51 - 00:02:57] and as these things seem to work out concomitantly [00:02:57 - 00:03:03] a technology of the moving image was developing which was film [00:03:03 - 00:03:10] and film and the dream then become almost the two defining poles [00:03:10 - 00:03:17] of the evolution of the aesthetic of the 20th century over the first half of it we'll say. [00:03:17 - 00:03:26] And then in 1953 because that's when Gordon and Valentina Wasson discovered the mushroom [00:03:26 - 00:03:33] or earlier if you want to date it to Hoffman's discoveries in Switzerland or the German work in the 20s [00:03:33 - 00:03:41] or later if you want to date it to the discovery in '56 of DMT by Zara [00:03:41 - 00:03:47] but at any point at any rate at some point the third triad is introduced [00:03:47 - 00:03:52] which is the hallucinogenic or psychedelic experience [00:03:52 - 00:04:02] and all three of these areas of concern have adumbrations in the primitive [00:04:02 - 00:04:11] the stress on dreaming even the magic lantern and prestidigitation feats of Renaissance magic [00:04:11 - 00:04:20] have a relationship to early film and of course the psychedelic experience is absolutely archaic. [00:04:20 - 00:04:29] Nevertheless the coming together of these three concerns in this particular fashion in the 20th century [00:04:29 - 00:04:40] set the stage I think for an important part of what I will call during this weekend the archaic revival [00:04:40 - 00:04:50] and the archaic revival is nothing less than a strategy for cultural survival on a global scale [00:04:50 - 00:04:57] and it's a strategy that is taking place in the animal body of mankind [00:04:57 - 00:05:02] it's not an intellectual strategy or a rational strategy [00:05:02 - 00:05:18] this is what happens whenever a society is slammed to the wall it unconsciously reaches back through its history or its mythology for a steadying metaphor [00:05:18 - 00:05:28] now the last time this happened in the West and worked was at the time of the collapse of the medieval Christian eschatology [00:05:28 - 00:05:35] at the time of the rise of urbanization and banking and secular society [00:05:35 - 00:05:51] the model of the Christian universe was no longer serviceable and very suddenly philosophers, politicians, social planners reached into the past for classic models [00:05:51 - 00:06:04] and this was in the 15th and 16th century and they created classicism, the revivification of Roman law, Greek architecture, Greek polity [00:06:04 - 00:06:12] all of this happened a thousand to fifteen hundred years after these things had been completely abandoned [00:06:12 - 00:06:24] but then they became the basis for modern secular civilization and our laws are Greco-Roman and our architecture and our aesthetic and so forth and so on [00:06:24 - 00:06:36] well the way this is happening in the 20th century is number one at a much more deep and profound level because it's a global reflex [00:06:36 - 00:06:43] the entirety of modern civilization has shot its wad in some sense [00:06:43 - 00:06:55] you know from the perspective of 500 years a society that cannot put bread on its grocery shelves such as the Soviet Union [00:06:55 - 00:07:01] and a society such as our own that is three trillion dollars in debt [00:07:01 - 00:07:08] the difference is negligible, I mean both of these societies are functionally bankrupt [00:07:08 - 00:07:21] so we're living through and have been living through throughout the 20th century an experience of the dissolution of boundary and form [00:07:21 - 00:07:33] everything has been in a state of flux throughout the 20th century, I mean it opens with the concept of the Edwardian gentleman and lady [00:07:33 - 00:07:42] firmly in place, class structure, class privilege, race privilege, sex privilege [00:07:42 - 00:07:50] the entire structure of the assumptions of the post medieval world are in place and functioning [00:07:50 - 00:08:09] now 90 years later none of this is in place and to my mind the major factor working to achieve this end has not been the two world wars [00:08:09 - 00:08:19] or the exploration of the unconscious by Dada and Surrealism or the breakdown of classical design mores or any of this stuff [00:08:19 - 00:08:32] it's been the psychedelic experience, the psychedelic experience is a genuine paradigm shattering phenomenon [00:08:32 - 00:08:44] we claim that we want this, this is what lies behind the love of flying saucers and you know the Loch Ness monster and all of this [00:08:44 - 00:08:54] we want a paradigm shattering object, piece of evidence, body of testimony, something like that [00:08:54 - 00:09:01] but what we don't realize is we have it, we have it as somebody over here on this side of the room said [00:09:01 - 00:09:11] you know it's a matter of courage and this places it in a special mode [00:09:11 - 00:09:25] it's not something where we can just validate it and then you know found an institute and appoint experts and expect them to issue a report [00:09:25 - 00:09:36] it's something actually at the center of our being and my motivation for talking to audiences like this is simply that [00:09:36 - 00:09:50] I cannot conceive of mature human beings going from the cradle to the grave without ever finding out about this [00:09:50 - 00:09:56] I mean it's not like not finding out about sex or something you know it's just too weird [00:09:56 - 00:10:04] it's a part of our birth right, it's not a cultural artifact, it's not like being able to ride a bicycle [00:10:04 - 00:10:14] or something like that where you can imagine that pygmies or Amazonian Indians go from birth to the grave and they never ride a bicycle and they never miss it [00:10:14 - 00:10:19] but this is a little more existentially front and center than that [00:10:19 - 00:10:33] I mean this is as far as I can tell the dimension in which we most fully experience ourselves as ourselves [00:10:33 - 00:10:41] well you know culture we have to be very careful about the corrosive effects of culture [00:10:41 - 00:10:50] some of you may know about these, it was reported in Time magazine a month or two ago about these forms of salamanders [00:10:50 - 00:11:02] that never if the conditions of alkalinity in the lakes are at a certain level they never mature into the adult form [00:11:02 - 00:11:22] they actually can reproduce in a juvenile form so there can be generations of these salamanders that don't even suspect the existence of an adult form that lies beyond the sexually mature functional adult form [00:11:22 - 00:11:29] and this is how I sort of think of what the effect of human culture has been on us [00:11:29 - 00:11:36] starting about 15 or 20 thousand years ago for reasons that we'll discuss tomorrow [00:11:36 - 00:11:42] ego began to emerge as a factor in human societies [00:11:42 - 00:11:49] for the moment let's just say it had to do with the concern for tracing male lines of paternity [00:11:49 - 00:12:00] in other words once men had it enough together to understand the role that sexuality was playing in childbearing [00:12:00 - 00:12:05] then there became this concern to trace male lines of descent [00:12:05 - 00:12:17] and suddenly sexuality had to be very carefully controlled and the concept my children, my women, my food, my territory came into being [00:12:17 - 00:12:33] before that there was a kind of orgiastic polymorphic sexuality that did not promote this kind of boundary formation at the edge of the body's effectiveness [00:12:33 - 00:12:50] in other words the ego was not a concept as rooted as it is in us and I think that the shift from this boundary-less group-oriented consciousness which was psychedelic [00:12:50 - 00:13:03] to the egocentric materialistic consciousness that typifies western society clear back to Sumer [00:13:03 - 00:13:15] that this is the neurotic wrong turning and that when we look back into the causes of it we can see and argue fairly persuasively [00:13:15 - 00:13:26] that it has to do with an abandonment of this relationship of ecstasy induced by plants [00:13:26 - 00:13:34] that there was almost a kind of symbiotic relationship between early human beings and plants [00:13:34 - 00:13:49] specifically psychedelic plants and that this relationship is not something airy-fairy or unclear or operationally undefined for its participants [00:13:49 - 00:13:58] you get yourself lined up with and arranged correctly in relation to this thing by taking psychoactive plants [00:13:58 - 00:14:05] and that this is how human societies were regulated over let's say a million years [00:14:05 - 00:14:20] and there was nothing magical or untoward about it, it was simply that these evolving primates had a population regulatory mechanism [00:14:20 - 00:14:30] that integrated them into the larger body of nature and this is what has been lost in the historical process [00:14:30 - 00:14:47] so that human culture has become you know charitably a random walk, uncharitably a kind of cancerous exponential cascade of unstoppable effects [00:14:47 - 00:14:58] now the thing is that we are in a position to understand this now if not actually do something about it [00:14:58 - 00:15:05] H.G. Wells said history is a race between education and catastrophe [00:15:05 - 00:15:14] well never more so than today because the world is set on a course of catastrophe [00:15:14 - 00:15:26] the emotional constipation and rigidity of the past thousand years that has set us up as territorial apes with thermonuclear arsenals [00:15:26 - 00:15:32] all of that is just set to you know go critical [00:15:32 - 00:15:44] nevertheless you know we are minded creatures in the presence of an evolving and rapidly shifting landscape of problems [00:15:44 - 00:16:01] and I think that it's a very hopeful sign to look around and notice that the only barrier to the solution of our problems are intellectual barriers [00:16:01 - 00:16:04] barriers in our own mind [00:16:04 - 00:16:14] we have the money, the technology, the mass communications, the scientific expertise, the remote sensing telemetry [00:16:14 - 00:16:26] what we don't have is the will to self direct all of this technical apparatus toward a rational solution of our problems [00:16:26 - 00:16:33] but that means that the solution to our problems lies almost entirely in the human domain [00:16:33 - 00:16:44] and the human domain is the area where we observe the highest rate of unpredictable perturbation [00:16:44 - 00:16:51] so I don't see the situation as terminal or desperate at all [00:16:51 - 00:17:02] the mushrooms take on the chaos at the end of history is this is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for the stars [00:17:02 - 00:17:07] it is chaotic but it is not disordered [00:17:07 - 00:17:11] it is more like a birth than anything else [00:17:11 - 00:17:20] I mean there is rending of tissue, there is a sense of crisis of unstoppable forward motion [00:17:20 - 00:17:26] but it turns out all according to plan, all to good end [00:17:26 - 00:17:38] the trick is to somehow attain this vision of the ordered correctness of what is happening when it seems so chaotic [00:17:38 - 00:17:45] and then to template it, to strengthen it each for ourselves [00:17:45 - 00:17:51] and then to replicate it and communicate it as a meme [00:17:51 - 00:17:58] because there is no percentage in paralysis here at the brink [00:17:58 - 00:18:05] the only possibility is of some kind of forward escape [00:18:05 - 00:18:13] you know a forward escape is when you attain the goal by simply rushing through the gauntlet [00:18:13 - 00:18:22] and I think that this history that is a race between education and catastrophe is going to turn out to be a forward escape [00:18:22 - 00:18:29] there will be a moment of complete abandonment to the irrational [00:18:29 - 00:18:37] and we will look tomorrow at the time wave and look at Saddam Hussein and his role in all of this [00:18:37 - 00:18:47] but he is not the final act, this is somewhere late in act one, all this malarkey that we are having to put up with [00:18:47 - 00:18:53] but up in the end which in this case means downstream in time [00:18:53 - 00:18:58] we will sprout all our worth and woof off [00:18:58 - 00:19:04] but it is hard for him to fly through before we get there [00:19:04 - 00:19:10] I guess I should say just a little bit about how I got into this [00:19:10 - 00:19:21] and I think curiosity is probably the ultimate value in my cosmology [00:19:21 - 00:19:27] it's what's gotten me anywhere I've ever been [00:19:27 - 00:19:33] it's the only impulse that I trust completely [00:19:33 - 00:19:46] and it's alive in most people as children but it gets somehow squelched or misdirected or something [00:19:46 - 00:19:54] and so when I look back through my own life I see this psychedelic impulse [00:19:54 - 00:20:01] before there was ever a word or a name for what it was [00:20:01 - 00:20:08] and I've tried to think back as far back as I can [00:20:08 - 00:20:15] and I have very early memories like to the eighth month but they don't seem to relate to this [00:20:15 - 00:20:23] but I remember it must have been, I was born in '46, it must have been in late '48 [00:20:23 - 00:20:34] I found a magazine of my father's which I now must have been the October 1948 issue of Weird Tales [00:20:34 - 00:20:46] and it had these illustrations in it and one of the illustrations was of a hooded figure gazing into a cradle [00:20:46 - 00:20:57] and I got this somehow as an image of the strange, the other, the uthra [00:20:57 - 00:21:03] and I think this is the other thing that for me was the hook into the psychedelic [00:21:03 - 00:21:12] was a kind of deep Irish love of the weird from the very get-go [00:21:12 - 00:21:20] so curiosity and the love of the weird, the edgy, the bizarre [00:21:20 - 00:21:30] and this led me into, and I guess maybe a certain degree of obsessive character [00:21:30 - 00:21:37] I mean I'm spending time on this because I'm trying to understand the psychedelic personality generally [00:21:37 - 00:21:44] but I did have a tendency to really focus in on whatever I was into [00:21:44 - 00:21:57] and I think the first thing was rocks and this was, you know, it was for me an introduction into the size of time [00:21:57 - 00:22:04] because it wasn't just any rocks that interested me, it quickly became clear that it was fossils [00:22:04 - 00:22:12] and I lived in western Colorado and I could go out into these dry arroyos and bring back datable objects [00:22:12 - 00:22:18] 170 million years old, you know, stack them up and look at them [00:22:18 - 00:22:24] so then I got this dizzying sense of the depth of time [00:22:24 - 00:22:29] and you know there are those little museum pamphlets where it shows a billion years [00:22:29 - 00:22:34] and the last million years is up here and then it goes down here and spreads out [00:22:34 - 00:22:42] and then the last 10,000 years, I got that, I assimilated this notion of deep, deep time [00:22:42 - 00:22:52] and then, you know, it was almost like an intellectual ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny [00:22:52 - 00:23:01] the rocks, the inanimate mineral world soon couldn't confine this restless imagination [00:23:01 - 00:23:07] so then it became about insects, butterflies specifically, moths especially [00:23:07 - 00:23:15] as an excuse to be alone in the middle of the night around bright lights, you know, with cyanide [00:23:15 - 00:23:23] and you know, I don't know if any of you have ever been touched by this particular obsession [00:23:23 - 00:23:31] but because we're insectivores, because our food getting habits are wired into a brain [00:23:31 - 00:23:40] 50 million years old in the insect gathering habit, you know, this is a very deep, almost orgasmic response [00:23:40 - 00:23:47] that you can touch in the human organism and I pursued it again and again in life [00:23:47 - 00:23:54] to the point where I did it as a professional in the jungles of Indonesia and the Amazon [00:23:54 - 00:23:59] and you know, it's horrifying to tell in Buddhist company [00:23:59 - 00:24:06] but when you come upon one of these long-winged iridescent ornithopterids [00:24:06 - 00:24:13] of the sort that Baron Giderot's child sent his collectors out for in the late 19th century [00:24:13 - 00:24:19] and you come upon one of these things hanging under a leaf looking for all the world [00:24:19 - 00:24:25] like it weighs at least half a pound and you know, wrestle it into your net [00:24:25 - 00:24:32] it's as close to having a heart attack as I ever want to guess [00:24:32 - 00:24:42] and then this thing, at some point, I did a lot of reading and at some point I discovered that I had defined myself narrowly [00:24:42 - 00:24:50] and that I was turning into a scientist and I was reading people like Henry James and Aldous Huxley [00:24:50 - 00:25:00] and they were sneering at what I was becoming and talking about a mysterious realm of human thought called the humanities [00:25:00 - 00:25:06] which I had no notion of what this was, I couldn't even figure out what it possibly could be [00:25:06 - 00:25:16] well then I discovered it meant music, painting, architecture, dance, philosophy, design [00:25:16 - 00:25:22] in short, the human world, the human world as opposed to the natural world [00:25:22 - 00:25:31] so then, you know, I just turned upon that with a vengeance, left off the bugs and the minerals [00:25:31 - 00:25:39] and it became about Henry James and Fragonard and mannerism, all of this stuff [00:25:39 - 00:25:47] but the transition, because I was hitting adolescence at that point, was rocketry [00:25:47 - 00:25:59] and the pineal joy of launching potentially semi-fatal projectiles into space at twice the speed of sound [00:25:59 - 00:26:08] you know, the whole gravity's rainbow cycle that I was very consciously aware was about the thrill of liftoff [00:26:08 - 00:26:17] all this tormenting of mice and cutting up of aluminum shaft into stuff to be dumped out at the top of the trajectory [00:26:17 - 00:26:23] was just to satisfy physics teachers and anxious parents and all that [00:26:23 - 00:26:33] and the real thing was, you know, this amazing moment of launch when this potassium perchlorate and sugar fuels [00:26:33 - 00:26:39] would just propel these things with ear-splitting intensity [00:26:39 - 00:26:47] and then at that point, you know, all this curiosity, all this edge work led me [00:26:47 - 00:26:55] because I fancied myself also developing as a novelist to read all of Aldous Huxley [00:26:55 - 00:27:04] well, as you know, it moves from a spectrum of these polite novels of English society like after, well, [00:27:04 - 00:27:10] "Chrome Yellow" and "Antique Hay" and through works like "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" [00:27:10 - 00:27:20] to then the sexual dystopia of "Brave New World" and then finally to "The Doors of Perception" [00:27:20 - 00:27:30] and when I read "The Doors of Perception" I knew then that this was something huge [00:27:30 - 00:27:37] because he was claiming, you see, what was happening to me as an intellectual and I think it happens to most people [00:27:37 - 00:27:47] is exploration of reality was leading to the conclusion that it was a no exit situation [00:27:47 - 00:27:54] it was some kind of rational labyrinth from which there was no exit [00:27:54 - 00:28:01] no exit meaning no magic, no possibility of a miracle [00:28:01 - 00:28:08] that, you know, there weren't 25,000 year old cities under the sands of Arabia [00:28:08 - 00:28:12] there weren't flying saucers underneath the Greenland ice cap [00:28:12 - 00:28:25] it didn't work for me, for me rationalism was more powerful than, you know, sort of menopausal fantasy as it's currently practiced [00:28:25 - 00:28:34] and so it was drying up, the miraculous was just turning into ordinary reality [00:28:34 - 00:28:47] and then I discovered psychedelic plants and it was like the descent of an angel into a desert of reason [00:28:47 - 00:28:55] because, that's an interesting sort of metaphor, the descent of an angel into the desert of reason [00:28:55 - 00:29:06] as you probably know, when Descartes was 21 years old he shipped out in a Habsburgian army to kick some ass in Eastern Europe [00:29:06 - 00:29:18] and learn some manly soldiering skills and he was in Ulm in southern Germany in August of 1620 [00:29:18 - 00:29:27] Ulm later to be the birthplace of Einstein and Descartes, who was completely wet behind the ears, didn't know anything [00:29:27 - 00:29:34] had a dream and in the dream an angel, this is apropos of the metaphor [00:29:34 - 00:29:44] an angel appeared to him and said the mastery of nature is to be achieved through measure and number [00:29:44 - 00:29:51] so what's interesting about that then is that he went on to found modern science [00:29:51 - 00:30:00] which was to be the very temple of rationalism and reason but it was based on the revelation of an angelic being [00:30:00 - 00:30:04] who spoke to him from another dimension [00:30:12 - 00:30:18] this was the kind of impact that the psychedelic experience had for me [00:30:18 - 00:30:31] it was as though there was a doorway, a literal doorway out of the completely otherwise flawless set of cultural assumptions [00:30:31 - 00:30:48] that kept me a Catholic altar boy in a small Colorado town in a Western democracy in a context of anti-communism, religious fundamentalism, consumer capitalism, so forth and so on [00:30:48 - 00:30:56] the whole bag of tricks and illusions was suddenly exposed for that [00:30:56 - 00:31:10] and beyond that you see like that traveler sticking their head out through the world system and seeing a whole different set of rotations and revolutions [00:31:10 - 00:31:17] you see another dimension of some sort [00:31:17 - 00:31:23] and then for me the question became of what sort, what is this? [00:31:23 - 00:31:32] number one what is it? number two how did they manage to keep the lid on it? and number three what can you do with it? [00:31:32 - 00:31:49] well coincidentally upon all this or let's call it coincidentally society was just going bananas around somewhat similar issues [00:31:49 - 00:32:02] because I was born in 1946 so that means in 1966 I was 20 years old and somehow fate had conspired to put me in Berkeley, California [00:32:02 - 00:32:09] so I happened to be at like the ground zero of the cultural explosion [00:32:09 - 00:32:24] but I had been following all this stuff for years it just seemed to me a weird parallelism that my internal growth and obsessions were now somehow becoming the obsessions of society generally [00:32:24 - 00:32:28] being 20 years old I just thought it was a kind of vindication [00:32:28 - 00:32:33] I knew I'd been right since I was 16 so here was the payoff [00:32:33 - 00:32:44] but then it didn't exactly work out like that these concerns moved through society like a wave [00:32:44 - 00:32:58] and then other stronger what the Qing calls prepotent systems of arrangement reasserted themselves [00:32:58 - 00:33:05] and instead of a kind of psychedelic utopia there was a kind of anti-psychedelic dystopia [00:33:05 - 00:33:15] and everything that psychedelics had tended to call into question which were the great sins of the 20th century [00:33:15 - 00:33:25] the misuse of propaganda, the abuse of imagery, the distortion of information [00:33:25 - 00:33:33] these are all uniquely modern new sins if you will [00:33:33 - 00:33:46] and I talked last night a little bit about the connection between dreams, the unique province of 20th century psychological theory, film and the psychedelics [00:33:46 - 00:34:03] all of these things and I see it also active in art that as soon as you move beyond impressionism the whole history of art in the 20th century is about the dissolution, deconstruction and attempt to reconstruct the image [00:34:03 - 00:34:19] so that movements as different as analytical cubism and abstract expressionism all are seen to be struggling with the dissolution and reemergence of the image [00:34:19 - 00:34:36] well what it means is what all this constellation of cultural effects is saying is that the previously assumed to be [00:34:36 - 00:34:50] I don't know how to say it, existentially pre-potent order of society, of linear society is actually an illusion and that we can move beyond it, we can dissolve it [00:34:50 - 00:35:09] but not only we can, we cannot not do this so then the goal becomes and this is where McLuhan is important to try and raise into consciousness the process that we are undergoing before it is a fita complete [00:35:09 - 00:35:28] before we are in the act of looking back then at a historical event because I now am convinced that the impulse that I feel in myself and that I see in other people [00:35:28 - 00:35:45] toward the psychedelic experience has to do with its potential historical impact even though God knows we are all aware this is how religion has always been practiced [00:35:45 - 00:36:05] yet somehow this million year old sociological phenomenon, orgiastic group minded shamanism in a context of nomadic pastoralism, this phenomenon was only interrupted 10 or 15 thousand years ago [00:36:05 - 00:36:17] and is apparently the state of dynamic equilibrium where we function at our best, where we feel at our most human [00:36:17 - 00:36:37] what has happened to us is a kind of false bottom in our social dynamic, it's a series of self reinforcing situations of dis-ease, it begins with what I talked about last night [00:36:37 - 00:37:01] about concern for male paternity, but once men wanted to trace the descent line of the male genes previously self expressive, orgiastic group minded sexuality became compartmentalized into concerns of territoriality, ownership, so forth and so on [00:37:01 - 00:37:22] but then that wasn't the end of it, there then the rise of hierarchical kingship, the amazing, you see the problem with human beings is that we ride very close to a kind of bifurcation point [00:37:22 - 00:37:39] in terms of whether our loyalty is transferred to the group or to the individual, and this can be sent either way, I mean if there were to be landslides at both ends of highway 1 and a food shortage [00:37:39 - 00:37:56] we would coalesce marvelously into a survival machine where we would all place group values higher than our own needs, and nobly so this would happen, but in situations of abundance and non-scarcity [00:37:56 - 00:38:11] then it's like a slime mold without the formality of coherency, we just then dissolve into this sort of every man for himself egocentric style [00:38:11 - 00:38:32] and then another bad break along the way that may or may not have been fated, may have just been a bad break is the evolution of the phonetic alphabet which creates a tremendous distance between cognition and the objects of linguistic intentionality [00:38:32 - 00:38:47] and this gives permission for all kinds of forms of brutalization, it actually gives permission for ideology, ideology to my mind is the denial of the obvious and the substitution for something else [00:38:47 - 00:39:00] where you say no that's not how people are, we have a Marxist model or we have a Freudian model or we have John Stuart Mills model, who knows, but somebody's model [00:39:00 - 00:39:15] so ideology, someone said language was invented in order that people could lie, and in large measure this is true, that we proceed by deception [00:39:15 - 00:39:34] I'll defend this at some point in this weekend because another word for it is modeling, we model but we also fall in love with these models, and it's the falling in love with the model that then turns it into an agenda [00:39:34 - 00:39:53] where it was not a free form projection of a flow of facts toward the conclusion but then it becomes instead an agenda, a synthetic creode, high walls down which you expect to see a process poured and confined [00:39:53 - 00:40:06] so in spite of the fact that this phenomena has been around for a long time, why then does it appear so important? [00:40:06 - 00:40:27] Well, it's because this small group, group minded, sexually amorphous psychology, the psychology not the model itself, is what we have to recover I think in order to survive [00:40:27 - 00:40:39] and I'm not so interested in talking about the odds of making it, it's just this is the only thing that will work [00:40:39 - 00:40:47] and I said last night, the good news is that the domain in which we must operate is all within our own minds [00:40:47 - 00:41:05] if we can change our minds, we can take hold of this process and halt it, I believe that the presence of these psychedelics in the plant metabolism, in the biosphere [00:41:05 - 00:41:19] allowed a kind of informational symbiosis between human beings with a highly obsessive capacity and the biosphere generally [00:41:19 - 00:41:31] and that we have no word for this that we're comfortable with, the closest word we have for it is somehow tied up with the concept of religion, religio [00:41:31 - 00:41:41] but for us religion is some kind of abstract dialogue carried on with a philosophical principle, that's not what it is [00:41:41 - 00:41:52] religion originally was the dimension of the self that directly interfaced nature or the over self [00:41:52 - 00:42:01] and this happened through the use of psychedelics, so the reason the weekend is called "History Ends in Green" [00:42:01 - 00:42:17] and what this whole Gaian awareness thing is to my mind, is it's not a nary fairy attempt to recast a new image for religious ontology [00:42:17 - 00:42:33] it's the actual discovery of the minded presence of the planet which has always been here, which is real, it's an existential fact like chlorophyll or the moons of Saturn [00:42:33 - 00:42:52] the planet has a biological mind of some sort, once you articulate this notion it doesn't seem that unlikely after all the planet is clearly a boundary defining topology [00:42:52 - 00:43:09] it's had 2 billion years to make itself meta stable, undergo all kinds of auto poesis, we see the evidence of this around us in the form of the climaxed biome of the planet [00:43:09 - 00:43:24] we see that biology and water chemistry has been very active, but what we don't see is that as active as the chemistry of water or electron transfer [00:43:24 - 00:43:40] have also been the invisible alchemies of, call it spirit, call it mind, call it the morphogenetic field, whatever it is, and that is the frontier of our awareness [00:43:40 - 00:43:55] every society in history has had the erroneous belief that it just required 6 more months and 5% more data and then they would have a full picture of reality [00:43:55 - 00:44:11] but the fact of the matter is our society at its present state of sophistication, the only science we have that can be given any serious creditability at all is physics [00:44:11 - 00:44:33] the most primitive of all sciences, the science of momentum and moving bodies in 3 dimensional space, when you move on to biology, essentially what we have are a series of interlocking fables and a few bright spots of light in certain areas [00:44:33 - 00:44:47] when you move on to psychology, what you have are shouting charlatans, each claiming domain over their own special area, it's like a medieval fair [00:44:47 - 00:45:13] so the belief that our intellectual maps are somehow adequate is just whistling past the graveyard and the way we have achieved this illusion of good maps is by tossing out all the disturbing and unintegratable phenomena [00:45:13 - 00:45:28] for instance dreams were trivialized and ignored for centuries, madness was something that you can find a way, like criminality, was not to be looked at [00:45:28 - 00:45:40] sexuality, I don't have to remind you that as recently as 120 years ago people were putting bloomers on piano legs to preserve youth from impure thoughts [00:45:40 - 00:45:51] we talk about a rejectionist style toward reality, we have just begun to open our eyes to what is around us [00:45:51 - 00:46:10] so then front and center, when we begin to explore, let's take a conservative position toward exploring the universe, let's explore from the center outward, that means from within the confines of the mind-body system [00:46:10 - 00:46:25] before we generalize about tectonic plates or the motion of the rings of Uranus or something like that, just start from the body out, well immediately you discover total terra incognito [00:46:25 - 00:46:48] psychology gives us a flickering model of ordinary consciousness under ordinary circumstances and everything else is up for grabs and then we discover that at the center of human concerns is this weird itch about invisible worlds and higher order entities [00:46:48 - 00:47:02] and sources of hidden knowledge and we've discovered that people have been at that for 100,000 years and the centerpiece technique which is to trigger these non-ordinary states of consciousness [00:47:02 - 00:47:19] with all our sophistication we have no better grip on what this is than people in the late Neolithic, they knew more than we did because they'd logged more time on in the real modality [00:47:19 - 00:47:34] we have models, we say the drug molecule is translocating to the synapse and displacing ordinary neurotransmitters and raising therefore the endogenous level of electron spin resonance, this is not any kind of explanation about what's going on [00:47:34 - 00:47:58] this is just the chant, the incantation, you know, the people who are logging time in there, they come back with maps of reality that fit very uneasily with our cheerful Cartesian, democracy and atomistic, causal, entropic models [00:47:58 - 00:48:12] and they say no, no, the universe is an infinite honeycomb, each honeycomb ruled over by different spiritual forces, each commanded through different languages, magical techniques, gestural repertoire [00:48:12 - 00:48:30] everything is language, everything holds information for man, everything is somehow constellated on the presence of observing mind, well in the West we thought we got Recosmogonic myths with the Ptolemaic universe [00:48:30 - 00:48:45] even before Copernicus, but now it turns out that the centrality of mind gets reintroduced, not only by the evidence of the psychedelic experience, but for instance [00:48:45 - 00:49:03] the school of philosophy of science around L.L. White and people like that have pointed out that if you use as your index complexity [00:49:03 - 00:49:19] then you suddenly discover that human beings have moved back to the very center of the universe, that the most complex physical material in the universe in terms of density of connectedness is the human cerebral cortex [00:49:19 - 00:49:38] that if novelty and density of connectedness is what is being conserved then somehow we are central, well so then other issues are raised, if we are central then the modern model of history [00:49:38 - 00:49:52] which is, I don't know if it's ever been explicitly stated for you, but the modern model of history is that it is trendlessly fluctuating, this is the largest structure in which we find ourselves embedded [00:49:52 - 00:50:11] we call it the last 10,000 years and the best guess of the people who spend the most time looking at it is that it trendlessly fluctuates, that means it's like a drunk on a random walk, you see that processes are channeled toward conclusions [00:50:11 - 00:50:25] that in the evolutionary, well leave that aside for a minute, in the realm of physical chemistry you see that the progressive cooling of the universe allowed more and more complex chemistry [00:50:25 - 00:50:40] first electrons could settle down into stable orbits around atomic nuclei, then molecular bonds could form, at still lower temperatures polymerization could form and therefore templating type molecules like DNA [00:50:40 - 00:50:58] the universe seems to be an engine for the conservation of complexity until we reach the social sciences where they want to tell us that history is just dropped into this process willy-nilly [00:50:58 - 00:51:20] is not factually modeled on anything that precedes it, does not express an internal coherence and is a completely trendless process, yet notice that this completely trendless process is atomically composed of the most complex matter material organization in the universe [00:51:20 - 00:51:35] the human cerebral cortex, well I mention this because part of what I'm interested in with this weekend is trying to get a handle on what is history, what does it mean [00:51:35 - 00:51:52] it began only 1500 generations ago, which if we were fruit flies would be three weeks ago, so you know it's not something really basic to human beings [00:51:52 - 00:52:10] but it's a process that got started about 1500 generations ago and it's clearly a cumulative runaway process, it's going on outside the realm of ordinary genetics, ordinary genetic change is very conservative and slow [00:52:10 - 00:52:27] this is a cancerous type process but in the cultural domain it's an epigenetic process meaning it's not scripted in the genes but like writing and TV and painting it goes on outside of the genes [00:52:27 - 00:52:43] well where does it go on? Well it goes on in the domain of language and to my mind language is the critical area to focus on in terms of where the psychedelics are operating [00:52:43 - 00:52:59] and how if our interest is to trap them doing their elfin work then the place to look is in the domain of language, why? Well first of all look at what language is [00:52:59 - 00:53:18] it's a weird kind of ancillary add on process to the human organism, no other monkeys do it in quite the same way and I don't argue that there is not linguistic and grammatical activity in monkeys, dolphins, termites what have you [00:53:18 - 00:53:38] but it's very different from what goes on in human beings, obviously for instance you probably know that the soft palate of the human being drops lower in the fetal form than in any other primate by 40% or something [00:53:38 - 00:53:57] and what the embryological interpretation of this is that the human animal is hard wired for language and if you notice what it is it's small mouth noises, rapidly modulated small mouth noises [00:53:57 - 00:54:13] and it's a conventionalized, it's a highly conventionalized style of behavior which allows transduction of thought, it's a form of telepathy, a striving toward a crude telepathy [00:54:13 - 00:54:31] because if you analyze what's happening in the linguistic act it's that we've all gotten together and we agree that there are these small mouth noises and we agree that a given set of small mouth noises means a certain thing [00:54:31 - 00:54:47] and we've spent so much time together and so conventionalized our responses to each other that your dictionary of small mouth noises is theoretically supposed to match my dictionary of small mouth noises [00:54:47 - 00:55:07] so the words going through the air and pinch upon your ear you make a rapid search of your dictionary and you come up with what you assume is a one to one match and we rarely get together to check out just exactly how good a match it was [00:55:07 - 00:55:19] occasionally someone will ask a question and we will see that they understood that the match and so the match was good because I see a lot of transcripts of my talks [00:55:19 - 00:55:33] I know that typists hear the most amazing things and without ever questioning what they hear they type these things that when I read them you know they're complete malapropisms [00:55:33 - 00:55:47] but this is what was heard and as the level of discourse rises or the density of the technical language increases it becomes much much shakier [00:55:47 - 00:56:04] I mean I just had the experience of lecturing in Czechoslovakia in Prague to the film academy and you know you can go a long ways on sincerity but there's a long ways still to go [00:56:04 - 00:56:19] just nodding and smiling doesn't do it especially when the concepts are fine tuned and it's where they're fine tuned that they're always interesting it's in the nuances of it [00:56:19 - 00:56:42] well I think probably that this activity was originally stimulated by the use of psychedelics that in fact most of what is human about us has to do with the presence of psychedelic and mutagenic compounds in our diet [00:56:42 - 00:56:57] when we made the transition from being fruititarian, vegetarian, arboreal tree dwellers to becoming nomadic pastoralists [00:56:57 - 00:57:13] if you think about it you can see how this would work quite neatly the reason animals specialize their diets is to hold down the amount of exposure to mutagenic chemicals [00:57:13 - 00:57:28] so most animals have highly specialized diets that's because then they can develop pathways to sequester mutagens or to just avoid the exposure to them initially but if you put pressure on an animal [00:57:28 - 00:57:44] on its original food source where it's actually facing a situation of possible extinction or dietary transformation it will begin experimenting expanding its repertoire of foods [00:57:44 - 00:58:00] well this brings exposure to mutagens in a very steep curve and this means consequently more expression of mutagenic genes become available for natural selection [00:58:00 - 00:58:14] and so this is the situation in which you might then see a sudden punctuated movement forward in the evolution of adaptive traits of the organism [00:58:14 - 00:58:32] but how this worked in the early human situation was drying up of the African continent forced protozoal types onto the grassland where they began foraging for [00:58:32 - 00:58:47] and insects had been part of their diet in the canopy situation they began foraging it's also thought they began perhaps predating on carrion kills killed by larger carnivores like lions [00:58:47 - 00:59:02] in any case they began forming a relationship that had them following along behind these evolving ungulate herds of mammals on the African belt and in that situation they encountered the coprophytic mushrooms [00:59:02 - 00:59:09] the mushrooms which grow in cow dung preferentially and many of these contain psilocybin [00:59:09 - 00:59:12] Please continue to tape 2.