[00:00:00 - 00:00:09]	 Mystic Fire, video and audio, proudly presents Terence McKenna, History Ends in Green.
[00:00:09 - 00:00:13]	 This is tape two of a six cassette series.
[00:00:13 - 00:00:34]	 [Music]
[00:00:34 - 00:00:45]	 Well, psilocybin once encountered in the diet acts very quickly to outbreed non psilocybin using individuals
[00:00:45 - 00:00:55]	 because like many indoles, if there's a small amount of psilocybin in the diet, visual acuity is measurably increased.
[00:00:55 - 00:00:59]	 And Roland Fisher did work on this in the early sixties.
[00:00:59 - 00:01:10]	 Well, you can see that if an animal that is living by predation and also it's thought by the people who disagree with this theory,
[00:01:10 - 00:01:16]	 the people who do not think that mushrooms played a major role in human evolution,
[00:01:16 - 00:01:26]	 believe that the throwing arm is the unique human capability and that when you see a pitcher get a ball across a plate,
[00:01:26 - 00:01:31]	 what is it to how far is it from the pitcher's mound to the plate?
[00:01:31 - 00:01:42]	 Sixty feet. That kind of control on an object hurled at that speed, no other animal can do anything even approaching that.
[00:01:42 - 00:01:53]	 And that this hand-eye coordination gave us our leg up, literally, or our arm up to be able to knock out large animals at a distance.
[00:01:53 - 00:02:02]	 Well, even if you believe that theory, you see it too depends on a very close coordination of hand and eye.
[00:02:02 - 00:02:09]	 Well, if you bring into this a chemical factor in the diet, which increases visual acuity,
[00:02:09 - 00:02:17]	 animals that are allowing this item in the diet will very quickly outbreed the non mushroom users.
[00:02:17 - 00:02:28]	 And I submit that this happened. Then further accelerating the tendency toward preferential use of mushrooms is the fact that at higher doses,
[00:02:28 - 00:02:39]	 but still subpsychedelic doses, these same mushrooms will trigger arousal, general CNS, central nervous system arousal.
[00:02:39 - 00:02:45]	 But this also includes then sexual arousal and erection in males.
[00:02:45 - 00:02:51]	 Well, so what does this mean? It means that it's a party drug at that dose.
[00:02:51 - 00:03:04]	 It means that there is this impetus to copulation in a situation in which the better hunters have been more successful at getting food.
[00:03:04 - 00:03:16]	 So this increased copulatory activity and subsequent increased number of births is happening in an environment with an increased food supply.
[00:03:16 - 00:03:23]	 So you see all these factors are converging to outbreed the non mushroom using individuals.
[00:03:23 - 00:03:38]	 Well, then the final culminating factor in this is at yet higher doses, the mushroom ushers into the boundary dissolving ecstasy that we call the psychedelic experience.
[00:03:38 - 00:03:57]	 And that in that kind of a social small group situation would have led, I think, to primitive religious observance, ritual group sexuality, food sharing, mate sharing, so forth and so on.
[00:03:57 - 00:04:19]	 And I really believe that this this lifestyle, if you will, of nomadic pastor lives nomadic pastoralism, God disoriented religion driven by psychedelic indoles in the diet, that for fifty thousand approaching seventy five thousand years.
[00:04:19 - 00:04:24]	 This is how people lived. And they were fully realized people.
[00:04:24 - 00:04:41]	 I mean, there was a tremendous oral poetry, epic works of art and theater, a complete realization of human potential in the dynamic context of this nomadic relationship to nature.
[00:04:41 - 00:04:46]	 I mean, this was Eden. This was when we were at peace with our humaneness.
[00:04:46 - 00:04:51]	 Well, then, you know, what happened? Is there a search for scapegoats?
[00:04:51 - 00:04:55]	 Who's to blame? And the answer is nobody is to blame.
[00:04:55 - 00:05:15]	 The very process which brought this paradise into being, which was the drying up of the African continent and the forcing of of our proto human ancestors onto the belt and into the bipedal nomadic tribal language using mode.
[00:05:15 - 00:05:34]	 The very forces which created that destroyed it, because eventually the great grasslands of the Sahara, the huge water holes, the vast herds of game gave way to increase encroaching dunes, shrinking water holes.
[00:05:34 - 00:05:47]	 The mushroom festivals, which I imagine at one point were probably lunar festivals, became then yearly festivals because of scarcity of the mushroom.
[00:05:47 - 00:05:59]	 And there became then anxiety about availability of mushrooms and therefore a certain cultural pressure to find methods of preserving them.
[00:05:59 - 00:06:06]	 And this need turned naturally to the preserving powers of honey.
[00:06:06 - 00:06:16]	 And so there was a transitional phase of not fresh mushroom festivals, but preserved mushrooms in honey.
[00:06:16 - 00:06:24]	 The problem is honey itself has the capacity to turn into a psychotropic substance through fermentation.
[00:06:24 - 00:06:42]	 It becomes mead. But the imprinting that takes place in a mead culture, mead cultures are cultures of male dominance, repression of female sexuality, hierarchy, warfare, wheel chariots, the whole shtick.
[00:06:42 - 00:06:47]	 And so, you know, there was and this all happened over thousands of years.
[00:06:47 - 00:06:49]	 This very gradual transition.
[00:06:49 - 00:06:55]	 There was never a conscious moment of tragedy.
[00:06:55 - 00:07:08]	 But you see, what was happening was a new psychic function was taking hold in the human animal.
[00:07:08 - 00:07:20]	 In the situation of the monthly boundary dissolving group mushroom festivals, ego was not allowed to form.
[00:07:20 - 00:07:27]	 And I really view psilocybin as almost an inoculation against the formation of ego.
[00:07:27 - 00:07:31]	 It is a site. It is an ego lytic compound.
[00:07:31 - 00:07:41]	 So notions of male dominance, of possession of property, children, domesticated animals or women.
[00:07:41 - 00:07:50]	 None of this went on in this situation where the boundary dissolution was reinforced by frequent mushroom use.
[00:07:50 - 00:07:58]	 But as soon as the mushrooms become less available, this thing begins to grow in the human personality.
[00:07:58 - 00:08:02]	 Literally like a cancer or a tumor.
[00:08:02 - 00:08:13]	 It's a calcareous growth on the psyche that if we do not have this embeddedness in the vegetable matrix of Gaia,
[00:08:13 - 00:08:20]	 then anxiety arises, a lot of it sexual and related to self-identity.
[00:08:20 - 00:08:22]	 And I don't have to discuss this with you.
[00:08:22 - 00:08:28]	 I do just refer you to Freud and the whole gang. Everybody understands how bent we are.
[00:08:28 - 00:08:32]	 The question is why? And I think this is why.
[00:08:32 - 00:08:39]	 Because we have been in a permanent state of neurotic disequilibrium for 15,000 years.
[00:08:39 - 00:08:48]	 And every move to attempt to correct this has pushed us further away from the goal that we want to have.
[00:08:48 - 00:08:56]	 And now we arrive at the late 20th century, nuclear arsenals fully in hand.
[00:08:56 - 00:09:08]	 We have made since the 15th century a demonic pact with matter that has allowed us great insight into the destructive properties of matter.
[00:09:08 - 00:09:12]	 Made us, you know, handmaiden to the devil.
[00:09:12 - 00:09:19]	 We are still completely dark about our own motivations, how to educate our children,
[00:09:19 - 00:09:24]	 how to put in place a set of values that don't loot the future.
[00:09:24 - 00:09:28]	 And all of these problems appear to be getting worse.
[00:09:28 - 00:09:33]	 So, you know, I don't know.
[00:09:33 - 00:09:45]	 Well, my response to this is to advocate the only thing that I think will work, but it's not a political position.
[00:09:45 - 00:09:54]	 Because a political position always implies willingness to compromise and negotiate with the other side.
[00:09:54 - 00:10:01]	 And there really is no willingness to negotiate on the part of the psychedelic position.
[00:10:01 - 00:10:04]	 Because it's pretty non-negotiable.
[00:10:04 - 00:10:09]	 We're at the end of a process, call it 2000, 5000, you know, choose your date,
[00:10:09 - 00:10:20]	 but a long process of denial of human nature first, and then war against human nature.
[00:10:20 - 00:10:28]	 And it goes so deep into our culture that we don't even know where the basement level is.
[00:10:28 - 00:10:38]	 I mean, for instance, to my mind, monotheism, which is the great intellectual edifice of the West,
[00:10:38 - 00:10:46]	 touches the three major religions of the West that have developed in a continuous strain since Abraham.
[00:10:46 - 00:10:54]	 Monotheism is the institutionalizing of this egocentric model.
[00:10:54 - 00:11:05]	 And it has a certain philosophical appeal in one God, you know, everything, all roads lead to Rome.
[00:11:05 - 00:11:10]	 You can trace everything back to the Ur source, the Urquella.
[00:11:10 - 00:11:22]	 But that anal retentive appeal in itself takes place within a context of values of male dominance,
[00:11:22 - 00:11:28]	 print created linearity, uniformity, so forth and so on.
[00:11:28 - 00:11:37]	 And I think what we have to get into is real permission for sloppiness, for loose-endedness,
[00:11:37 - 00:11:44]	 for the abandonment of any myth of closure, that there is no closure.
[00:11:44 - 00:11:51]	 There are models and there are questions, but all models are provisional.
[00:11:51 - 00:11:59]	 And anybody who says they have answers is highly, highly suspect.
[00:11:59 - 00:12:02]	 Too many people claim answers.
[00:12:02 - 00:12:09]	 What's being claimed here is a technique, and then you figure out your own questions and your own answers.
[00:12:09 - 00:12:12]	 And it's different for everybody.
[00:12:12 - 00:12:17]	 There really is no ideology associated with psychedelics.
[00:12:17 - 00:12:25]	 And if you look at the people who've been involved with it, they've said completely different things and contradictory.
[00:12:25 - 00:12:34]	 And some are rationalists and behaviorists to this day, and others are, you know, spiritual visionaries,
[00:12:34 - 00:12:37]	 hierarchical, shamanic types.
[00:12:37 - 00:12:51]	 The main thing is to reclaim the experience as the first step toward being politically empowered in order to act.
[00:12:51 - 00:12:57]	 In other words, we're in -- and I indicated this last night, although more gently --
[00:12:57 - 00:13:04]	 that we're in a state of enforced infantilism about the capacity of our minds,
[00:13:04 - 00:13:09]	 that the culture we are living in is an infantile culture.
[00:13:09 - 00:13:15]	 Now, we look back at the Victorians putting pants on the piano legs,
[00:13:15 - 00:13:21]	 and we just shake our heads and say, you know, those poor, misguided people.
[00:13:21 - 00:13:24]	 Well, but that's only four generations ago.
[00:13:24 - 00:13:33]	 We have similar weirdness going on in our own culture, but about the mind.
[00:13:33 - 00:13:44]	 I mean, we look askance at the mind the same way that a Victorian nanny is uncomfortable in the presence of bare furniture.
[00:13:44 - 00:13:47]	 We fear it.
[00:13:47 - 00:13:49]	 We don't want to look at it.
[00:13:49 - 00:13:58]	 And to my mind, many -- most of the techniques that come out of the New Age are based on a guaranteed lack of success.
[00:13:58 - 00:14:00]	 That's what they offer.
[00:14:00 - 00:14:09]	 Because the last thing anybody wants is real change, because real change is uncontrolled change.
[00:14:09 - 00:14:14]	 The issue that hovers around the psychedelic experience -- it was mentioned last night.
[00:14:14 - 00:14:16]	 It's strong in my life.
[00:14:16 - 00:14:21]	 I haven't found any real solution other than hold your nose and jump.
[00:14:21 - 00:14:24]	 But the issue is surrender.
[00:14:24 - 00:14:26]	 This is something real.
[00:14:26 - 00:14:33]	 You don't find people going into the ashram in the morning to meditate with their knees knocking in fear
[00:14:33 - 00:14:39]	 because of how terrifying and profound they know that meditation is going to be.
[00:14:39 - 00:14:49]	 But if they were going in there to smoke DMT, you know, they would be fully riveted on the modalities of what was about to happen.
[00:14:49 - 00:14:52]	 I mean, we can tell shit from Shinola.
[00:14:52 - 00:14:58]	 It's just that we don't always prefer Shinola.
[00:14:58 - 00:15:06]	 And I'm not like -- I don't advocate it -- you know, people -- like sometimes there are people who are disappointed
[00:15:06 - 00:15:09]	 because they say, well, how often do you do it?
[00:15:09 - 00:15:11]	 Well, the answer is not very often.
[00:15:11 - 00:15:17]	 I mean, if I can get it in a couple or three times a year, I feel like I'm hitting it pretty hard.
[00:15:17 - 00:15:22]	 And the more successful it is, the less often you have to do it.
[00:15:22 - 00:15:26]	 I mean, I know people who say DMT is their most favorite drug.
[00:15:26 - 00:15:29]	 And when you say, well, when was the last time you did it?
[00:15:29 - 00:15:31]	 They say, well, 1967.
[00:15:31 - 00:15:34]	 It only lasted four minutes.
[00:15:34 - 00:15:36]	 They're still processing it.
[00:15:36 - 00:15:39]	 And they are still processing it.
[00:15:39 - 00:15:41]	 They're not just whistling Dixie.
[00:15:41 - 00:15:53]	 I mean, it is to my mind just the most -- well, I mentioned this earlier, the question, how do they keep the lid on this stuff?
[00:15:53 - 00:16:01]	 And I suppose here I'm preaching to the converted because many people last night said they had an interest in this kind of thing.
[00:16:01 - 00:16:08]	 But they don't keep the lid on sexuality.
[00:16:08 - 00:16:14]	 No society has ever had it so under control that people didn't have sex.
[00:16:14 - 00:16:22]	 I mean, they may have had sex under weird conditions and under, you know, ritual strictures and this and that.
[00:16:22 - 00:16:30]	 But we are like this salamander that has the option of never developing into its mature form.
[00:16:30 - 00:16:33]	 And to my mind, that's a tragedy.
[00:16:33 - 00:16:48]	 Because this is our birthright and somehow our inability to get a grip on our global problems has to do with this immaturity about our mental state.
[00:16:48 - 00:17:01]	 The two I feel very strongly are linked and that of course we can't get control of the world because we are children in some profound way.
[00:17:01 - 00:17:04]	 And we don't like being children.
[00:17:04 - 00:17:09]	 But the culture has reinforced a form of infantilism.
[00:17:09 - 00:17:19]	 And the way I explain it to myself is it's a kind of unwillingness to go it alone on a certain level.
[00:17:19 - 00:17:26]	 I don't know how many of you remember in Brave New World Huxley's brilliant dystopia.
[00:17:26 - 00:17:38]	 But there's a scene in there where Bernard, who is the guy who's out of it in the novel because in his fetal fluid they got an alcohol contaminant.
[00:17:38 - 00:17:42]	 And so he's different from everybody else in this society.
[00:17:42 - 00:17:45]	 And he occasionally has original thoughts.
[00:17:45 - 00:17:53]	 And he and his assigned girlfriend for the evening or whatever she is are in a helicopter.
[00:17:53 - 00:18:00]	 And they sweep out past the crematoria where they're recollecting elements for reuse.
[00:18:00 - 00:18:05]	 And he suspends the helicopter over the Black Bay.
[00:18:05 - 00:18:16]	 And she immediately becomes very agitated, restless, anxious and pleads with him to return to the city.
[00:18:16 - 00:18:22]	 And what it is is it's her anxiety over being alone in the presence of nature.
[00:18:22 - 00:18:25]	 She literally can't take it.
[00:18:25 - 00:18:42]	 And I think there are a lot of people in our society and each of us in our own way at different times who have within us this neurotic and infantile creature that can't face it alone.
[00:18:42 - 00:18:49]	 And that this going it alone thing is very important.
[00:18:49 - 00:19:01]	 You know, Plotinus, the great Neoplatonic philosopher, he spoke of the mystical experience as the flight of the alone to be alone.
[00:19:01 - 00:19:13]	 And in the psychedelic experience, there is this issue of surrender because a lot of people want to diddle with it.
[00:19:13 - 00:19:23]	 They want to be able to say they did it, but they don't ever want to face an actual moment where they put it all on the line.
[00:19:23 - 00:19:33]	 And yet the whole issue with this stuff is to let it lead, to let it show what it wants to show.
[00:19:33 - 00:19:43]	 So somehow individually, we have to reclaim our experience.
[00:19:43 - 00:19:58]	 The real message, more important even than the psychedelic experience, the real message that I try to leave with people in these weekends is the primacy of direct experience.
[00:19:58 - 00:20:08]	 That as people, the real universe is, you know, within your reach always.
[00:20:08 - 00:20:13]	 Everything not within your reach is basically unconfirmed rumor.
[00:20:13 - 00:20:21]	 And we insert ourselves like ants or honeybees into hierarchies of knowledge.
[00:20:21 - 00:20:24]	 So we say, well, what's going on in the world?
[00:20:24 - 00:20:38]	 Well, turn on CNN, you know, and then somehow we are ordered then say, aha, OK, it's eighty five degrees in Baghdad and the wind is out of the northeast at 15 miles an hour.
[00:20:38 - 00:20:44]	 And we feel somehow better now because we're getting the information.
[00:20:44 - 00:21:00]	 But what we have done is sold out direct experience and all institutions require this of us that we somehow redefine ourselves for the convenience of the institution.
[00:21:00 - 00:21:17]	 And this redefinition always involves a narrowing a denial so that, you know, if you want to be in Marxist society, if you want to function in Marxist society, you have to define yourself as a Marxist human being.
[00:21:17 - 00:21:24]	 Well, it turns out in a Marxist society, there are no homosexuals because that just happens in decadent society.
[00:21:24 - 00:21:35]	 So then, you know, if you happen to notice any tendency like this in yourself, you have to deny its existence because it's does this just doesn't happen in a Marxist society.
[00:21:35 - 00:21:39]	 And similarly, every society has this in our society.
[00:21:39 - 00:21:43]	 If you hear voices, we have mental hospitals for you.
[00:21:43 - 00:21:55]	 If you if you have vast visions of the future, you know, we have drugs that can help you and make this go away.
[00:21:55 - 00:22:12]	 So we. So then somehow in modern society, the discovery of psychedelics is the discovery that all of this cultural machinery is just Wizard of Oz stuff.
[00:22:12 - 00:22:26]	 You remember the scene in the Wizard of Oz where the curtain is swept back and they see the little guy there and he says, booming out over the loudspeaker, ignore the little man pulling the levers.
[00:22:26 - 00:22:29]	 Ignore the little man pulling the levers.
[00:22:29 - 00:22:47]	 Well, the little man pulling the levers is what sweeps into view with psychedelics and you discover a culture is provisional, you know, whether we have nine wives or three, whether we tattoo ourselves blue, whether we eat insects or not.
[00:22:47 - 00:22:51]	 All of these things are just decisions that we make.
[00:22:51 - 00:22:59]	 And then we congratulate ourselves on our wisdom and we live within that and we hunt down and kill all the people who disagree with this.
[00:22:59 - 00:23:11]	 And that's called having a culture, having a way of life, being somebody that. With you know, I don't see history as a long turning.
[00:23:11 - 00:23:23]	 I see it. The metaphor that I like is that of the prodigal son, that there was a reason for this long descent into matter, this peregrination.
[00:23:23 - 00:23:27]	 It was a shamanic journey of some sort.
[00:23:27 - 00:23:49]	 You know, the shaman goes into the the whirlpool or ascends the world tree to go to the center of the axis of the cosmos to recover the pearl, the pearl or the gift or the lost soul and then return with it.
[00:23:49 - 00:23:50]	 And this is what history was.
[00:23:50 - 00:24:03]	 I think it was a descent into the hell worlds of matter, energy, space and time for the purpose of recovering something that was lost.
[00:24:03 - 00:24:05]	 It wasn't lost by us.
[00:24:05 - 00:24:21]	 It was lost by the breathing, the dice is stole of the planet, just climax of climate moved us into paradise and then moved us out of paradise.
[00:24:21 - 00:24:27]	 I mean, you might that the story of Eden is the story of history's first drug bust.
[00:24:27 - 00:24:37]	 I mean, it's the story of a whole lot of tension over who's going to take or not take a certain plant which confers knowledge.
[00:24:37 - 00:24:46]	 And Yawa wandering in the garden says to himself, if the man and the woman eat of the fruit, they will become as we are.
[00:24:46 - 00:24:52]	 The issue was co-equality, co-knowledge with the creator.
[00:24:52 - 00:24:59]	 Well, where where do we stand in man's existential march?
[00:24:59 - 00:25:01]	 How does that work?
[00:25:01 - 00:25:06]	 Can we always accept the subservient infantile position?
[00:25:06 - 00:25:17]	 I mean, is knowledge to be dispensed by gods and if not gods, then the institutions that appoint themselves as gods over us?
[00:25:17 - 00:25:26]	 Or is it actually that maturity begins with somehow claiming this birthright?
[00:25:26 - 00:25:28]	 And it is a birthright.
[00:25:28 - 00:25:38]	 And I don't know if this if if a society can survive the claiming of this birthright by a large number of people.
[00:25:38 - 00:25:45]	 Certainly in the 1960s, when this was attempted, everything everybody got very agitated.
[00:25:45 - 00:25:53]	 And then it was frozen out in in so-called primitive or preliterate societies.
[00:25:53 - 00:26:07]	 There is the office of the shaman and the the shaman is deputized to act for all of us in the same way that we have airplane mechanics to fix jet engines.
[00:26:07 - 00:26:14]	 We have shamans to explore these hidden and fairly terrifying other dimensions.
[00:26:14 - 00:26:29]	 The people who self-select themselves into a group like this in a society like that would be the candidates for this kind of shamanic voyaging.
[00:26:29 - 00:26:36]	 Well, so then what is it finally all for or is it for anything?
[00:26:36 - 00:26:42]	 Is it just maybe my problem that I think it's for something?
[00:26:42 - 00:26:46]	 Well, it is and it isn't. I mean, see, we have real problems.
[00:26:46 - 00:26:54]	 We could perish from this planet in some kind of radioactive petroleum war or what have you.
[00:26:54 - 00:27:07]	 And it wouldn't change the fact that shamanism did exist, that these dimensions were there and were explored by courageous, high minded people for thousands of years.
[00:27:07 - 00:27:25]	 But I think that the scientific mind and maybe even the American mind can bring something special to it that somehow technology has a role to play.
[00:27:25 - 00:27:39]	 And I think maybe what this has to do with is I've talked a bit in the past, a lot in the past about what I call visible language.
[00:27:39 - 00:27:48]	 Visible language is something that I encountered in psychedelic states, could never have dreamed it up by myself,
[00:27:48 - 00:27:57]	 encountered it as an existential fact, then had to sort of reason backward from it to what would it be good for?
[00:27:57 - 00:27:59]	 Well, what is it? What is visible language?
[00:27:59 - 00:28:05]	 Well, it's very simply it's language which you look at rather than hear.
[00:28:05 - 00:28:08]	 And don't ask me how this can happen.
[00:28:08 - 00:28:25]	 It obviously has something to do with synesthesia in the brain, with swapping neural processing units and somehow shunting a stream of data which would normally be ideally interpreted.
[00:28:25 - 00:28:28]	 Instead, it goes to the visual cortex.
[00:28:28 - 00:28:44]	 And this occurs often in DMT intoxication and it has a long and noble history in the Amazon in ayahuasca shamanism.
[00:28:44 - 00:28:52]	 Ayahuasca, as you probably know, is a combinatory drug made of a vine combined with the leaves of another plant.
[00:28:52 - 00:28:56]	 And it makes DMT orally active.
[00:28:56 - 00:28:59]	 Normally, DMT is destroyed in the gut.
[00:28:59 - 00:29:07]	 But you take it in combo with this other thing, beta carboline, and then it's active.
[00:29:07 - 00:29:14]	 Well, in the Amazon, these people sing what they call Icaros, magical songs.
[00:29:14 - 00:29:21]	 And these magical songs are given to them by the spirits, whatever those are, invisible entities.
[00:29:21 - 00:29:31]	 But the magical songs are invariably criticized pictorially and sculpturally rather than musically.
[00:29:31 - 00:29:34]	 Nobody ever talks about how these things sound.
[00:29:34 - 00:29:37]	 People only talk about how they look.
[00:29:37 - 00:29:44]	 And I had read about this and heard about it and went down there and spent time again.
[00:29:44 - 00:29:53]	 Curiosity is the only method poking around, finally got somebody who knew how to brew this stuff to make this happen.
[00:29:53 - 00:30:00]	 And, you know, I had seen it before on DMT, but on DMT, it's somewhat out of control.
[00:30:00 - 00:30:10]	 It's as though your entire syntactical engine has sprung out of your chest and is rattling around on the floor in front of you.
[00:30:10 - 00:30:15]	 This concludes side A.
[00:30:15 - 00:30:22]	 Well, first of all, notice language, ordinary language, what a weird thing it is.
[00:30:22 - 00:30:25]	 And yet we do it with such facility.
[00:30:25 - 00:30:27]	 We almost all of us can do it.
[00:30:27 - 00:30:35]	 It's a very severe impairment on your humanness if you are language deficient in any very serious way.
[00:30:35 - 00:30:42]	 Blindness is as nothing to being seriously language deficient, so forth and so on.
[00:30:42 - 00:30:48]	 So it's really the defining thing for us.
[00:30:48 - 00:30:54]	 And yet, you know, it's it's almost like a half miracle.
[00:30:54 - 00:30:57]	 I mean, you can study it.
[00:30:57 - 00:31:01]	 There's no problem with getting vast samples of tape recordings.
[00:31:01 - 00:31:03]	 We can analyze it syntactically.
[00:31:03 - 00:31:08]	 There have been many theories of syntax, philosophies of syntax.
[00:31:08 - 00:31:10]	 And yet what is it?
[00:31:10 - 00:31:20]	 How can we make meaning with such facility when the rest of nature seems totally unconcerned with this?
[00:31:20 - 00:31:23]	 And what is meaning anyway?
[00:31:23 - 00:31:25]	 Why is it so important to us?
[00:31:25 - 00:31:31]	 We say if there is no meaning, if life has no meaning, it's not worth living.
[00:31:31 - 00:31:37]	 Well, how do ants and bees and scallops stack up on that opinion?
[00:31:37 - 00:31:44]	 Do they also feel that meaning is the quintessential aspect of reality?
[00:31:44 - 00:31:46]	 And yet we make it.
[00:31:46 - 00:31:48]	 We make it out of ourselves.
[00:31:48 - 00:31:52]	 And then we get together with somebody else and we try to make meaning.
[00:31:52 - 00:31:58]	 We say, you know, you and I could have an affair or you and I could start a business.
[00:31:58 - 00:32:01]	 This will have a lot of meaning for us.
[00:32:01 - 00:32:08]	 And, you know, we'll make money and buy more meaning.
[00:32:08 - 00:32:18]	 Well, whatever it is and C.B. Broad wrote a book called The Meaning of Meaning, which deals with it in about 400 pages.
[00:32:18 - 00:32:21]	 But whatever it is, it's very important to us.
[00:32:21 - 00:32:24]	 And it seems to have different modalities.
[00:32:24 - 00:32:33]	 For instance, dance can have meaning, painting can have meaning, spoken or textual words have meaning.
[00:32:33 - 00:32:43]	 But because of biases in ourselves as an organism, what seems to have the most meaning is what we can see.
[00:32:43 - 00:32:49]	 Our visual, we have a tremendously rich sense of visual input.
[00:32:49 - 00:32:58]	 Well, for some reason, under the influence of these psychedelic drugs and certain exercises and who knows what else it takes to shake you out of your cage.
[00:32:58 - 00:33:07]	 But suddenly syntactical organization, which has been invisible in the background of the program of meaning, becomes visible.
[00:33:07 - 00:33:12]	 And you actually see the engines of syntax.
[00:33:12 - 00:33:18]	 You actually behold the machinery of meaning itself.
[00:33:18 - 00:33:22]	 And for some reason, this is very satisfying.
[00:33:22 - 00:33:24]	 It's like an ecstasy.
[00:33:24 - 00:33:30]	 It's like an affirmation of some sort that is transcendental.
[00:33:30 - 00:33:40]	 There is a recognition in it that transcends the felt apperception of ordinary meaning.
[00:33:40 - 00:33:46]	 You know, in other words, that you're gazing somehow on the naked face of truth and beauty.
[00:33:46 - 00:33:55]	 Well, it seems to me that what all this suggests, by all this I mean the human capacity for the psychedelic experience,
[00:33:55 - 00:34:01]	 the human facility for switching these linguistic channels from the beheld to the seen.
[00:34:01 - 00:34:10]	 What all this must mean is that history is nothing more than the transition phase from felt intuition,
[00:34:10 - 00:34:19]	 the mute intuition of the animal body, to fully expressible three-dimensional meaning.
[00:34:19 - 00:34:29]	 And that the descent into matter that technology represents is because you can't do this entirely on the natch.
[00:34:29 - 00:34:35]	 There has to be a certain augmentation of the human organism in order to do this.
[00:34:35 - 00:34:43]	 It may be pharmacological, it may be neurological, it may be nanotechnological, and then some part of the other two.
[00:34:43 - 00:34:52]	 But whatever it is, we are coming up under the underbelly of meaning, boring from beneath.
[00:34:52 - 00:34:57]	 And that we're just about to hit the jackpot.
[00:34:57 - 00:34:59]	 And this is what the historical process is.
[00:34:59 - 00:35:12]	 And the proliferation of media, of the discovery of perspective 500 years ago, oil painting, airbrushing, digital sound,
[00:35:12 - 00:35:17]	 all of these techniques are this summoning of the image.
[00:35:17 - 00:35:22]	 So we are actually moving toward a kind of self-fulfilling process.
[00:35:22 - 00:35:28]	 It's something that we are defining for ourselves as it approaches.
[00:35:28 - 00:35:33]	 And it is defining itself for itself as it approaches.
[00:35:33 - 00:35:36]	 You actually experience this on psychedelics sometimes.
[00:35:36 - 00:35:44]	 I mean, the way it works for me on mushrooms or sometimes DMT is there is a black space.
[00:35:44 - 00:35:52]	 And then I hear what I call the elf music or the Irish band.
[00:35:52 - 00:35:54]	 And it's far away.
[00:35:54 - 00:35:59]	 And as it comes closer, I like see light.
[00:35:59 - 00:36:05]	 And as it comes closer, it both gets louder and the light fills the stage of awareness.
[00:36:05 - 00:36:12]	 Until finally the sound is subsumed under the visual impression of the thing.
[00:36:12 - 00:36:14]	 And then it's all around you.
[00:36:14 - 00:36:20]	 And it is this domain of self-transforming language.
[00:36:20 - 00:36:22]	 I mean, I call them language elves.
[00:36:22 - 00:36:28]	 But what they may be is nothing more than self-reflexive compound complex sentences.
[00:36:28 - 00:36:34]	 It's hard to tell what they are because we're not used to having our sentences stand up and embrace us.
[00:36:34 - 00:36:39]	 But nevertheless, the nature of reality is fractal.
[00:36:39 - 00:36:45]	 And it can't have been lost upon any of you that in a fractal universe,
[00:36:45 - 00:36:52]	 text is composed of characters, the characters of a given alphabet.
[00:36:52 - 00:37:01]	 But reality is also composed of characters, the characters like you and me who live out some kind of plot.
[00:37:01 - 00:37:07]	 Well, when you get characters into a text, in other words, characters made of characters,
[00:37:07 - 00:37:21]	 then you begin to feel the textual richness and the linguistic richness that seems to be not in the forefront of reality, but actually to lie behind it.
[00:37:21 - 00:37:26]	 I mean, the final conclusion, not the final conclusion, that would be preposterous.
[00:37:26 - 00:37:33]	 But the most recent conclusion that I'm coming to looking at the psychedelic experience
[00:37:33 - 00:37:38]	 is how phenomenally text-like reality is.
[00:37:38 - 00:37:43]	 I mean, it's more text-like than one should decently say.
[00:37:43 - 00:37:51]	 This is much more like a work of art than anything recognizable from my physics class.
[00:37:51 - 00:37:57]	 I mean, my physics class was about atoms and electrons and momentum and conservation of energy.
[00:37:57 - 00:38:05]	 My literature class, on the other hand, was all about personality, motivation, history,
[00:38:05 - 00:38:14]	 precursive active anticipation of action, willful suspension of disbelief.
[00:38:14 - 00:38:19]	 These are the things that I see actually going on around me.
[00:38:19 - 00:38:31]	 And so it's strange as we decondition from the being sold from the top worldview of Time Magazine and Scientific American and the Wall Street Journal,
[00:38:31 - 00:38:37]	 what we discover is ourselves active as art in a work of art.
[00:38:37 - 00:38:46]	 This is what the reclamation of experience seems to give back to us, is ourselves as very complex objects.
[00:38:46 - 00:38:55]	 You see, in the institutionalized world, we are defined always in ways that stress our similarity.
[00:38:55 - 00:39:05]	 We hear about voters, and I'm a voter, and we hear about women, and many of you are women,
[00:39:05 - 00:39:09]	 and we hear about yuppies, and we hear about the middle class,
[00:39:09 - 00:39:16]	 and we hear about those with liquidity in their portfolios.
[00:39:16 - 00:39:20]	 But everything is presented as a member of a class.
[00:39:20 - 00:39:29]	 We are always presented to ourselves as members of some class, and yet we experience ourselves as unique objects.
[00:39:29 - 00:39:34]	 But there is no reinforcement for that experience of uniqueness.
[00:39:34 - 00:39:39]	 I mean, you have a lover and they say, you know, I think you're wonderful and very special.
[00:39:39 - 00:39:43]	 That's about all the reinforcement for your uniqueness you get.
[00:39:43 - 00:39:47]	 And your mother also tells you this.
[00:39:47 - 00:39:57]	 But then you take a psychedelic plant and you discover, you know, hey, you know, I could, I'm Christopher Columbus.
[00:39:57 - 00:40:01]	 I'm Magellan. I could be anybody.
[00:40:01 - 00:40:05]	 I'm not defined in these narrow ways.
[00:40:05 - 00:40:19]	 There are doorways in my reality to areas of experience as large as the area of experience that Christopher Columbus or Magellan took as their province.
[00:40:19 - 00:40:28]	 But it's all, this new freedom is achieved by directing attention back at the individual.
[00:40:28 - 00:40:40]	 So, you know, a lot of the debate and talk that I hear is about saving and restructuring institutions and that sort of thing.
[00:40:40 - 00:40:45]	 I'm not very much interested in saving and restructuring very many institutions.
[00:40:45 - 00:40:51]	 I think institutions have done us about all the good we can stand at this point.
[00:40:51 - 00:41:01]	 And, you know, but then they wave the black flag of anarchy in front of you and say, oh, you're just an apostle of chaos and madness.
[00:41:01 - 00:41:07]	 Chaos, yes, madness, maybe. But disorder, never.
[00:41:07 - 00:41:17]	 You know, this surrender issue when translated out of the realm of the individual and into the realm of the collectivity.
[00:41:17 - 00:41:28]	 We all as a society must also surrender to what is happening to us because I think history is some kind of psychedelic experience.
[00:41:28 - 00:41:35]	 And it isn't. There's nobody around who has the right plan.
[00:41:35 - 00:41:42]	 So it isn't about how we need to locate the people with the right plan and then give them a lot of money and get out of their way.
[00:41:42 - 00:41:45]	 It doesn't work like that.
[00:41:45 - 00:41:52]	 The right plan will emerge almost simultaneously in everybody's mind at the same moment.
[00:41:52 - 00:42:02]	 And in the meantime, we all are going to have this sort of half baked plan that we can't articulate, that we can't quite bring out.
[00:42:02 - 00:42:05]	 It's a quality of the time.
[00:42:05 - 00:42:09]	 I'm going to talk this afternoon more about the quality of the time.
[00:42:09 - 00:42:18]	 But we can't think any more clearly than we're thinking at the moment when we're thinking at our best.
[00:42:18 - 00:42:23]	 Part of what history is, is a clarification of the human situation.
[00:42:23 - 00:42:33]	 And I think you have to press the envelope and have to keep your nose against the glass, forcing the definitions into ever new territory.
[00:42:33 - 00:42:38]	 But not anxiously. It's just looks like a growth process.
[00:42:38 - 00:42:44]	 We can't evolve any faster than our language evolves.
[00:42:44 - 00:42:47]	 The language is the thing in which we're embedded.
[00:42:47 - 00:43:03]	 So the use of technologies like virtual reality or drugs like psilocybin and DMT or practices of various sorts if they prove effective to put pressure on the evolution of language.
[00:43:03 - 00:43:11]	 All spiritual disciplines properly analyzed can be seen to be language courses.
[00:43:11 - 00:43:24]	 To get you to think a certain way, to get you to carve out of the background of undifferentiated data certain things which you previously couldn't see.
[00:43:24 - 00:43:33]	 Or as or acupuncture meridians or, you know, states of disease. I mean, it can be anything.
[00:43:33 - 00:43:46]	 But the mind sensitizes itself to phenomena by following language into into the forest, into the forest of the unknown.
[00:43:46 - 00:43:50]	 And most people have no stomach for this kind of thing.
[00:43:50 - 00:43:59]	 I prefer to stay back in the village and just kill time grinding wheat and drying meat around the fire.
[00:43:59 - 00:44:11]	 But, you know, you can almost make a kind of a fractal quasi reductionist argument and say that people are like electrons.
[00:44:11 - 00:44:22]	 And you don't learn what electrons really are until you get just one of them off by itself somewhere in a magnetic field in a vacuum.
[00:44:22 - 00:44:28]	 And then you see what electrons are. If you have millions of electrons, then you have an electrical current.
[00:44:28 - 00:44:36]	 And an electrical current operates according to laws and rules and constraints completely different from an electron.
[00:44:36 - 00:44:48]	 And what we have done very perversely as a society is taken the laws of large numbers, how a million people act, how 10 million people act.
[00:44:48 - 00:44:55]	 And then we have applied it back to ourselves as individuals. So why am I not happy?
[00:44:55 - 00:45:01]	 You know, 70 percent of everybody does X and I don't and I'm not happy then.
[00:45:01 - 00:45:10]	 You know, trying to redefine yourself as against a very large body of statistical data.
[00:45:10 - 00:45:20]	 All of this is dehumanizing. All of this is bad mental hygiene, usually quickly cleared away by psychedelics.
[00:45:20 - 00:45:32]	 Because what they show you is, you know, that you are unique, that you are unique and that the confluence of space and time that you're operating in is unique.
[00:45:32 - 00:45:39]	 And that any model that is put forward is, number one, provisional.
[00:45:39 - 00:45:52]	 Provisional means it can be abandoned at any moment. And then the second and most important thing is any model you can't understand is useless.
[00:45:52 - 00:45:57]	 So, you know, most of us can't understand most of the models.
[00:45:57 - 00:46:05]	 I mean, who here would care to walk to the blackboard and begin to describe the first stage of quantum electrodynamics to us?
[00:46:05 - 00:46:14]	 And yet we all know that our world is supposedly hung on this very well thought out theory that experts are in charge of.
[00:46:14 - 00:46:21]	 But notice, no pun intended, but notice that if experts are in charge of it, you're not.
[00:46:21 - 00:46:25]	 It's absolutely useless to you. You know nothing about it.
[00:46:25 - 00:46:30]	 Well, so when you start peeling away and saying, well, what do I know?
[00:46:30 - 00:46:37]	 It turns out it gets into thin soup rather quickly. This is no cause for despair.
[00:46:37 - 00:46:42]	 This doesn't mean you should go back to night school and study quantum physics.
[00:46:42 - 00:46:54]	 That's the wrong conclusion. It means that all of this stuff that you thought were the high walls of reality are just smoke blown by somebody else.
[00:46:54 - 00:46:57]	 These constraints are not binding upon you at all.
[00:46:57 - 00:47:11]	 Somebody said to me once their father had been a professional scientist and he said once, I never would have seen it if I hadn't known it was there.
[00:47:11 - 00:47:17]	 And we all are in the habit of seeing all kinds of things because we know that they're there.
[00:47:17 - 00:47:24]	 And in many cases, they're not there. And you just walk through and you discover all kinds of things.
[00:47:24 - 00:47:40]	 I mean, I am convinced that anybody who has a major psychedelic trip, at some point in that trip, their eye falls on things no human eye has ever seen before or ever will see again.
[00:47:40 - 00:47:48]	 You know, it's that big in there. It's not at all clear that we're mapping a generalizable reality.
[00:47:48 - 00:47:57]	 It may be that it's just so huge in there that never do we pass through the same matrix twice.
[00:47:57 - 00:48:02]	 Well, that means you can give up on closure.
[00:48:02 - 00:48:12]	 You can give up on any theory that will ever give you very much of a more than provisional handle on what's going on.
[00:48:12 - 00:48:22]	 And I think this is probably a good step to take to open ourselves to the freedom that lies beyond culture.
[00:48:22 - 00:48:31]	 Culture is a kind of prison. And the only way that we know to get beyond it is to dissolve its boundaries.
[00:48:31 - 00:48:37]	 Now, you can do that with psychedelics and then you really explore the baseline of being.
[00:48:37 - 00:48:47]	 Or you can dissolve it with travel. But then you dissolve your own cultural programming only to discover you fitted yourself into somebody else's cultural programming.
[00:48:47 - 00:48:56]	 And this, while, you know, definitely educational, is like a psychedelic drug I'm not that fond of.
[00:48:56 - 00:49:15]	 I do a lot of traveling, but it's not the same thing as replacing space and time with some kind of alternative that comes from doing the hard work on five grams in silent darkness.
[00:49:15 - 00:49:32]	 And really what you see, I think, is the morphogenetic field, the invisible world that holds everything together, the knit of it all.
[00:49:32 - 00:49:43]	 Not the knit of matter and light, but the knit of casuistry, of intentionality, of caring, of hope, of dream, of thought.
[00:49:43 - 00:49:58]	 And that all is there. But it's been hidden from us for centuries because of the exorcism of the spirit that took place in order to allow science to do business.
[00:49:58 - 00:50:17]	 And that momentous and ill-considered choice then has made us the inheritors of a tradition of existential emptiness, really.
[00:50:17 - 00:50:24]	 But that has impelled us to go back to the jungles and to recover this thing.
[00:50:24 - 00:50:34]	 It's all of a piece, you see. I mean, these people in the Amazon and whatnot were keeping this cultural flame burning.
[00:50:34 - 00:50:44]	 But these cultures are now all dead. They are either dead or in a state of advanced suspended animation.
[00:50:44 - 00:50:54]	 I mean, the best anyone hopes for when they go to a rainforest culture is that it be somehow resisting the change all around it.
[00:50:54 - 00:51:02]	 There's no rainforest culture that is elaborating new forms and thriving on its own terms.
[00:51:02 - 00:51:14]	 So all the things that were learned, the legacy of the ancestors is now laid basically at the feet of this high-tech electronic society.
[00:51:14 - 00:51:30]	 And the question is, you know, can we dream a dream sufficiently noble that we give meaning to the sacrifices that have been made to allow the 20th century to exist?
[00:51:30 - 00:51:44]	 I mean, my God, the amount of blood shed and infectious diseases spread around, metals ripped out of the earth, mountains moved, railroads laid across continents.
[00:51:44 - 00:51:57]	 All of this stuff as the means to reclaiming the human birthright that science hides from us.
[00:51:57 - 00:52:05]	 It's a very strange enterprise. I mean, it's hard to put it across because the thing is, it's real, you know.
[00:52:05 - 00:52:19]	 And we're in the habit of thinking that the mind can move unobstructed from one edge of the universe to the other, that there are no secrets.
[00:52:19 - 00:52:25]	 But actually there are secrets. At least these are secrets.
[00:52:25 - 00:52:35]	 And hard to tell. I mean, I tell them and you hear them. And we seem to have been allowed a cosmic dispensation.
[00:52:35 - 00:52:45]	 But why that is, is very hard for me to understand. I would have thought that this would have been headline news 20,000 years ago, right up until the present.
[00:52:45 - 00:52:52]	 Instead, you know, it's very tentative. Apparently this is very threatening to us.
[00:52:52 - 00:52:58]	 We are not as eager to sail over the edge collectively as we think we are.
[00:52:58 - 00:53:10]	 So then it becomes the function of the shaman, the gadfly, the go-between to carry information back and forth between these worlds.
[00:53:10 - 00:53:21]	 I'm convinced that if there were no shamanic pipeline, there would be no human life as we know it on this planet.
[00:53:21 - 00:53:31]	 I mean, that could be climaxed animal life. There is no need for this higher order linguistic style of self-reflection to come into being.
[00:53:31 - 00:53:38]	 It's that something is plotted. Something is working itself out in us.
[00:53:38 - 00:53:50]	 We are the cells of a much larger body. And like the cells of our own body, it's very hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern, the whole of what is happening.
[00:53:50 - 00:53:54]	 And yet we can sense that there is a purpose and there is a pattern.
[00:53:54 - 00:54:06]	 Well, the way you connect the pattern with the lower level is by dissolving the boundaries of the ego and the self into this larger thing.
[00:54:06 - 00:54:14]	 And then it's found to be there, reflective on many levels. It doesn't require a mechanism.
[00:54:14 - 00:54:23]	 Everything is obvious. If things don't appear simple to us, I think it's because we haven't thought about it long enough.
[00:54:23 - 00:54:30]	 Well, so that's sort of a survey of some of this stuff. Thank you very much.
[00:54:30 - 00:54:33]	 [Applause]
[00:54:33 - 00:54:38]	 Please continue to tape three.
[00:54:38 - 00:54:48]	 [BLANK_AUDIO]