[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 six of a six cassette series.
[00:00:14 - 00:00:34]	 [Music]
[00:00:34 - 00:00:39]	 Well, what else is hanging for anybody this morning?
[00:00:39 - 00:00:46]	 How about healing using the methods that we have been using?
[00:00:46 - 00:01:00]	 Well, shamanism, we tend to lose sight of the fact that for the people who actually practice shamanism as a day-to-day thing, healing is what it's always all about.
[00:01:00 - 00:01:09]	 And the shaman isn't making these journeys for his own education or so forth. It's always to heal.
[00:01:09 - 00:01:20]	 I don't really see the mushrooms as specifically a cure in the ordinary sense for X, Y or Z condition.
[00:01:20 - 00:01:32]	 It's more that in the psychedelic state, this is kind of hard to articulate and sounds like mumbo jumbo and maybe it is.
[00:01:32 - 00:01:45]	 But I've noticed that in the psychedelic state, it's as though within the parameters of the body, the ordinary laws of physics are somewhat in suspension.
[00:01:45 - 00:02:00]	 And there is a great deal to be learned by somebody about touch and light and sound, especially sound, I think.
[00:02:00 - 00:02:09]	 Sound to me is the key to understanding and going deeper with the psychedelic thing, not only in the healing modality.
[00:02:09 - 00:02:21]	 And in that case, it's about sound directed into the body because we do have extraordinary senses on psilocybin and on these other tryptamines.
[00:02:21 - 00:02:29]	 And I'm not mystical or woolly eyed about this and I don't make any claims about what senses.
[00:02:29 - 00:02:51]	 But if you sit down with a person or a watermelon, for that matter, when you're stoned and sing into it, the quality of the hallucination is such that there is a way of thinking about it where you could say this is an acoustical hologram of the interior of their body.
[00:02:51 - 00:03:04]	 I don't say that. I just say, my goodness, isn't it strange that I seem to be able to see the inside of the watermelon when I'm doing this touch?
[00:03:04 - 00:03:10]	 I don't I'm not an aura man under ordinary circumstances.
[00:03:10 - 00:03:14]	 I'm not sensitive to these things that you have to be sensitive to.
[00:03:14 - 00:03:21]	 If you have to be sensitive to something, I don't I'm not that's not for me because I'm basically insensitive.
[00:03:21 - 00:03:33]	 But nevertheless, there do seem to be qualities of density to the energy around the body.
[00:03:33 - 00:03:38]	 And I suppose, see, I'm not really an experimentalist in these areas.
[00:03:38 - 00:03:44]	 Like I don't immediately grab somebody and start needing them and working them over.
[00:03:44 - 00:03:50]	 I tend to just sit and watch. But I do see all these possibilities.
[00:03:50 - 00:04:02]	 Sound has such I mean, sound does pierce, you know, non non dense objects and return and echo.
[00:04:02 - 00:04:11]	 And we may have the neurological processing capacity that we're unaware of or that is ordinarily suppressed.
[00:04:11 - 00:04:19]	 For instance, I am very able. I have quite a good ability to navigate in darkness.
[00:04:19 - 00:04:23]	 I always have been able to do this. It doesn't seem that strange to me.
[00:04:23 - 00:04:31]	 I mean, I'm pretty good at it to the point where there have been times in the Amazon when I've gone for water at night.
[00:04:31 - 00:04:44]	 And literally forgotten to take the flashlight and gotten there and gotten halfway back before I noticed that, you know, and it's a combination of projective memory, so forth and so on.
[00:04:44 - 00:05:00]	 I noticed in the Amazon when I was quite keyed up that I had a sense that I've never heard anybody talk about was a kind of geometric sense that told me the shortest distance between any two points.
[00:05:00 - 00:05:09]	 In terms of energy expenditure. And it was something which I could see that aboriginal people would just absolutely have to have.
[00:05:09 - 00:05:19]	 It's a whole thing about following the edges of ridges and never descending unless you have to and always keeping to the high ground.
[00:05:19 - 00:05:26]	 And my mind would just tell me this stuff, draw these lines through space.
[00:05:26 - 00:05:38]	 The fact that ayahuasca, which makes possible, you know, this visual language that seems to me the evolutionary compass for language and culture.
[00:05:38 - 00:05:55]	 The fact that the compounds which allow that occur in the ordinary brain suggests, you know, that we're just we could be as much as close as a one gene mutation away from different styles of neural processes.
[00:05:55 - 00:06:00]	 And, you know, we don't know to what degree technology pushes these things around.
[00:06:00 - 00:06:09]	 Did the people of manuscript culture have the same serotonin ratios as we have?
[00:06:09 - 00:06:18]	 How much to what degree is culture a chemical feedback mechanism operating on us as a species?
[00:06:18 - 00:06:21]	 I mean, we're like fish trying to discover water.
[00:06:21 - 00:06:31]	 These are fairly, fairly subtle issues. But the payoff is being able to design our way toward a more humane culture.
[00:06:31 - 00:06:43]	 Because what the psychedelics are teaching on one level, I think, is that we are that our prison and our palace is language.
[00:06:43 - 00:06:51]	 And that today we have just allowed it to grow like topsy because it was like an unconscious function.
[00:06:51 - 00:07:04]	 But it no longer need to be an unconscious function. After all, we are now writing languages like crazy for computers, defining for them what concepts they can and can't think.
[00:07:04 - 00:07:10]	 What forms of logic, what algebra is shall and shall not be permitted.
[00:07:10 - 00:07:20]	 We need to also think about, you know, taking control of the design process of language.
[00:07:20 - 00:07:26]	 Up to this point, the only people who have gotten onto this principle have been fascists of one sort or another.
[00:07:26 - 00:07:36]	 Either Joseph Goebbels and his crowd or advertising weasels or people like that.
[00:07:36 - 00:07:44]	 Everyone else has been sort of the victim of the linguistic agenda of those cliques.
[00:07:44 - 00:07:51]	 You know, it's like the Bob Dylan song, the strong men make the rules for the wise men and the fools.
[00:07:51 - 00:07:58]	 Well, if the rules are syntactical rules, then nobody even realized Jack and held up.
[00:07:58 - 00:08:07]	 It's just that, you know, you can't think any other way. So why do you have this itch that you can't seem to ever scratch?
[00:08:07 - 00:08:12]	 Well, it's because, you know, it's freedom calling out to you from the unconscious.
[00:08:12 - 00:08:19]	 I'm not I don't really talk about all this with any sense of urgency.
[00:08:19 - 00:08:28]	 One of the issues that sometimes comes up often comes up in these groups is, you know, am I saying it's all OK?
[00:08:28 - 00:08:35]	 Is it all OK? Is there a political agenda? What should be done?
[00:08:35 - 00:08:47]	 And, you know, it was Mahatma Gandhi who said, what you do has very little importance and it's very important that you do it.
[00:08:47 - 00:09:01]	 And I think that's how we have to act. We have to each choose a small area and then act in that limited area with the with all the existential commitment we can muster.
[00:09:01 - 00:09:06]	 But not with anxiety, you know, anxiety.
[00:09:06 - 00:09:17]	 The weepo yang, the Chinese Taoist alchemist said, worry is preposterous. Worry is preposterous.
[00:09:17 - 00:09:26]	 You don't know enough to worry. You know, do liver cells worry? Do skin cells worry?
[00:09:26 - 00:09:34]	 It's just a complete waste of metabolic energy. The better thing is to function well in place and then to wonder.
[00:09:34 - 00:09:42]	 You know, wonder is sort of worry without animal anxiety.
[00:09:42 - 00:09:51]	 But it's living in the light of non closure that, you know, we're not going to get this thing wrestled into a box.
[00:09:51 - 00:10:01]	 Not positivism, not Islam, not the Kabbalah. No, no. All these things are very good tries.
[00:10:01 - 00:10:08]	 Nice efforts. We set them on their pedestals in a long row in the Museum of Noetic.
[00:10:08 - 00:10:21]	 Good tries. But it isn't in that. It's in the moment, in the recapturing of direct experience.
[00:10:21 - 00:10:31]	 My publisher in New York for this new line of books he's bringing out has coined the battle cry, take back your mind.
[00:10:31 - 00:10:36]	 And I think that's a pretty good way of putting it. Take back your mind.
[00:10:36 - 00:10:44]	 Because we have transferred our loyalty to mythical structures.
[00:10:44 - 00:10:51]	 You know, structures about sexual politics, about what a man is supposed to be, what a woman is supposed to be,
[00:10:51 - 00:10:58]	 what how much money a person is supposed to have, how much art they're supposed to produce, how many times a week they're supposed to get laid.
[00:10:58 - 00:11:04]	 We have all these images that we're supposed to live up to. Very complex.
[00:11:04 - 00:11:13]	 All being sold down to us through a culture whose motivations are very murky and highly suspect.
[00:11:13 - 00:11:26]	 I mean, is it the culture is not your friend. You know, all these people who want you to smell good and drive the right car and have your extra facial hair removed and all that.
[00:11:26 - 00:11:36]	 These are not your friends, these people.
[00:11:36 - 00:11:51]	 It pays to remember that, you know, that there's a struggle on for loyalty that you are much more, you look much better to the institutional structure.
[00:11:51 - 00:12:03]	 If you work hard, consume quietly, choose from the political menu without a lot of fuss and that sort of thing.
[00:12:03 - 00:12:11]	 But in fact, you know, this kind of business as usual has led to the sort of lethal crisis we're in.
[00:12:11 - 00:12:18]	 Our real problem. Well, it's it's two things which are two sides of the same coin.
[00:12:18 - 00:12:29]	 It's it's ego and an inability to emotionally connect with the true outline of the situation.
[00:12:29 - 00:12:33]	 Because the true outline of the situation is fairly horrendous.
[00:12:33 - 00:12:44]	 It's that some somewhere around 1945 or you name it, but that seems all right.
[00:12:44 - 00:12:51]	 We began to loot the future as a strategy for survival.
[00:12:51 - 00:13:02]	 As some kind of ethical norm was shattered in the same way that in late.
[00:13:02 - 00:13:11]	 Well, in early mercantile civilization, there was this horrifying moment when even though slavery had been dead for a thousand years,
[00:13:11 - 00:13:22]	 they realized that if they brought back this wholesale sale and transport of human beings, they could make millions in sugar.
[00:13:22 - 00:13:29]	 And it was like the heart of darkness reared up and and they went for it.
[00:13:29 - 00:13:35]	 And our circumstances is somewhat similar.
[00:13:35 - 00:13:43]	 We have embarked on a similar kind of.
[00:13:43 - 00:13:54]	 Descent into an ethical dark dimension by looting the future, and this is going on at a faster and faster rate.
[00:13:54 - 00:14:00]	 I mean, this current situation in the Middle East, much could be said about it.
[00:14:00 - 00:14:06]	 But, you know, any moral justification seems preposterous.
[00:14:06 - 00:14:19]	 I mean, what's happening is eight percent of the world's people use thirty five percent of the world's petroleum and are ready to blow everybody off the map to keep it that way.
[00:14:19 - 00:14:25]	 I mean, this is nothing more than a manifestation of junkie psychology on a mass scale.
[00:14:25 - 00:14:30]	 It's you know, we're addicted. They've got it. We're happy to pay for it.
[00:14:30 - 00:14:37]	 But if they won't sell it, we'll break into their house and take it because by God, it will go into our good right arm.
[00:14:37 - 00:14:49]	 That's the plan. And, you know, it's it's the culmination of the the whole machine age metaphor.
[00:14:49 - 00:14:56]	 I mean, this is the golem of metropolis. This is the robot mind run amok.
[00:14:56 - 00:15:00]	 This is Frankenstein. This is brave new world.
[00:15:00 - 00:15:10]	 It's a world where lethal habitual activities can nevertheless not be controlled.
[00:15:10 - 00:15:18]	 And it's a perfect example of culture with lock jaw of the mind.
[00:15:18 - 00:15:23]	 I mean, we're just going to march off the edge of a cliff, apparently.
[00:15:23 - 00:15:39]	 Three days ago in the New York Times, the American estimates of casualties in the first 30 days of successfully invading Kuwait and Baghdad were published.
[00:15:39 - 00:15:45]	 Fifty thousand American casualties in the first 30 days.
[00:15:45 - 00:15:53]	 If we win, this is the number of people who died in the Vietnam War over the whole stretch of the war.
[00:15:53 - 00:16:06]	 Well, so then if you win means, you know, standing in the middle of a sea of fire with 550 million enraged Arabs looking to cut you down.
[00:16:06 - 00:16:12]	 It's a it's a complete it's a complete misunderstanding.
[00:16:12 - 00:16:17]	 And I mention it not only because it looms large in our future.
[00:16:17 - 00:16:23]	 I mean, I think, you know, we're arranging the deck chairs of the Titanic sitting here talking about this.
[00:16:23 - 00:16:32]	 It's basically June of 1939 and everyone is planning their summer vacation in the Catskills.
[00:16:32 - 00:16:38]	 But it's also an example of how these institutions can't save themselves.
[00:16:38 - 00:16:49]	 I mean, everybody knew in 1973 that this moment would come, that policies needed to be put in place, a dollar a barrel tax on oil, some minor minor thing.
[00:16:49 - 00:16:55]	 But no, it's just a mindset that is self destructive.
[00:16:55 - 00:17:06]	 And, you know, the fundamentalists are in anticipation of the end of the world and so forth and so on.
[00:17:06 - 00:17:10]	 There isn't going to be any end of the world.
[00:17:10 - 00:17:13]	 There's no easy way out like that, even.
[00:17:13 - 00:17:16]	 And you're hearing this from the prophet of 2012.
[00:17:16 - 00:17:22]	 All of these fantasies, all of these infantile fantasies will be acted out.
[00:17:22 - 00:17:27]	 So, you know, if you want your mini apocalypse, you know, you can have it.
[00:17:27 - 00:17:34]	 And we can bomb Baghdad and gas Tel Aviv and fire the oil sands and kill millions of people on both sides.
[00:17:34 - 00:17:43]	 And you know what? It ain't going to bring the guy from Galilee and it ain't going to bring friendly flying saucers from our tourists.
[00:17:43 - 00:17:49]	 All it's just going to bring is a deeper, bigger mess for the human race to try and clean up.
[00:17:49 - 00:17:59]	 Anybody who thinks that, you know, you're going to save the world by setting it on fire is going to be sadly.
[00:17:59 - 00:18:09]	 It's a rare moment for the collectivity to try to anchor itself in larger visions.
[00:18:09 - 00:18:18]	 You know, the reason human society is haunted by messiahs and tin horn visionaries preaching on every corner
[00:18:18 - 00:18:32]	 and people waving little books of different colors is because there is no there is no full development of the individual.
[00:18:32 - 00:18:38]	 There's this kind of arrested, prolonged adolescence.
[00:18:38 - 00:18:41]	 And it's it's created through institutions.
[00:18:41 - 00:18:52]	 Institutions are a demonic force in human life because they give permission for us to cease developing
[00:18:52 - 00:19:01]	 and to put our loyalty behind some weird creed that has been worked out usually by a bunch of guys wearing dresses.
[00:19:01 - 00:19:07]	 And then they, you know, hand it down to the rest of us.
[00:19:07 - 00:19:16]	 Anarchy and chaos, you know, anarchy is always just that's surely not my dear fellow.
[00:19:16 - 00:19:18]	 That's so awful to contemplate.
[00:19:18 - 00:19:29]	 But what it's coming down to is a real make or break revelation on what is human nature.
[00:19:29 - 00:19:36]	 You know, the French cartoonist Mobius asks the question in one of his books, is man good?
[00:19:36 - 00:19:42]	 And he answers it sufficiently seasoned and marinated. Yes.
[00:19:42 - 00:19:53]	 But, you know, we're actually going to get the chance to answer this question because all barriers to the expression of our will,
[00:19:53 - 00:19:57]	 our vision, our dream is falling away.
[00:19:57 - 00:20:10]	 And, you know, are we some kind of of anti life, sadomasochistic, suicidal contradiction?
[00:20:10 - 00:20:21]	 Or, you know, can we break through the millions of years of primate programming and alpha male hierarchical dominance and so forth
[00:20:21 - 00:20:31]	 to actually uncover the angelic force that we glimpse within ourselves, that we glimpse with the high definition?
[00:20:31 - 00:20:41]	 I mean, it's really there. If there is a demon in human nature, there is surely equally an angel of equal power.
[00:20:41 - 00:20:45]	 So then it's just about breaking this free.
[00:20:45 - 00:20:52]	 And I don't think it can happen in the monkey body on the surface of this planet.
[00:20:52 - 00:21:10]	 Somehow there has to be an act of surrender to our own nature and then concomitant with that, a kind of a kind of making of a peace with nature as it is.
[00:21:10 - 00:21:18]	 And I don't know how to envision the future in the past year. You know, there's been a lot of flack about virtual reality.
[00:21:18 - 00:21:28]	 Does this hold any hope? And, you know, if we think of the virtual reality thing as a wave six months ago, I would say it was very up.
[00:21:28 - 00:21:37]	 Now enough people have done it to be disappointed. And a bunch of people are saying, holy shit, you must be kidding.
[00:21:37 - 00:21:55]	 This is going to save us because it is hokey and and crude and mechanistic and, you know, surrounded by a clique of visionary weirdos with a strange light in their eyes that you probably wouldn't want to leave alone with your chickens.
[00:21:55 - 00:22:00]	 But nevertheless, I count myself one of these people.
[00:22:00 - 00:22:11]	 So but still, there are some interesting ideas.
[00:22:11 - 00:22:20]	 The thing is, there is going to be some kind of fusion of technology, spirit and mind.
[00:22:20 - 00:22:28]	 I mean, the drugs of the future will be more like computers. The computers of the future will be much more like drugs.
[00:22:28 - 00:22:49]	 And we're beginning to see this when you crawl inside a virtual reality rig and discover, you know, that it's taken two hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment to make you think that you're walking around in an unfurnished office of a third rate bureaucrat somewhere.
[00:22:49 - 00:23:02]	 It looks pretty grim. But on the other hand, when Henry Ford built his automobile, the main objection people have as to why it would never catch on was there are no roads, you know.
[00:23:02 - 00:23:16]	 And he he admitted this was a barrier, but clearly had a grander vision than everybody else he was talking to.
[00:23:16 - 00:23:25]	 It's this is maybe this is where we should sort of lead the discussion and then leave it, because I think this is the toughest issue for groups like this.
[00:23:25 - 00:23:31]	 This is where we sort of divide. And it's not easy to hold it all together.
[00:23:31 - 00:23:53]	 And that is, you know, is the psychedelic agenda somehow the preservation, nurturing, caring for and completion and even reconstruction and recovery of what we have destroyed and ravaged and mauled to get where we are at this moment?
[00:23:53 - 00:24:18]	 Or are we stuff of a different nature and is our destiny to weave webs, you know, that hang between the stars and and leave forever behind this small, wet, humble life infested place and go and live in the constructs of our imagination forever in silicon and so forth and so on.
[00:24:19 - 00:24:25]	 And this is, you know, at least in my personality, these things are almost equally balanced.
[00:24:25 - 00:24:38]	 I mean, I feel very torn. I don't like the Gnostic, Manichaean need to say, well, there's a there must be a total split that man and nature cannot coexist.
[00:24:38 - 00:24:53]	 Man for the sake of humanity and for the sake of nature must go into our own dimension. But the imagination is our cosmos and we are to inhabit it.
[00:24:53 - 00:24:58]	 I don't know. I'd be interested in what people think. The psychedelics go both ways.
[00:24:58 - 00:25:23]	 There seem to be psychedelics that vote one way, like the mushroom, which has a vast, extra planetary, almost galactic scale vision of interrelated intelligences and information transfer between species and a scale of time where the coming and going of suns is just something which is going on.
[00:25:23 - 00:25:37]	 Ayahuasca, on the other hand, like claims you for your humaneness, pours you into your body and puts an oar in your hand and sets you out on a black river in the middle of the night to hunt catfish.
[00:25:37 - 00:25:56]	 You know, and you just feel the life, human life, what it is to be born, to die, to have relationships with people, to make and lose fortunes, to have and lose dreams and all of this tremendously emotional stuff.
[00:25:56 - 00:26:10]	 And then there's a gradient in between. So the psychedelic quest then or the psychedelic life becomes ultimately a meditation on what is human nature.
[00:26:10 - 00:26:30]	 You know, is it these Titanic aspirations to the techno, organo, metallo, immortal kind of existence, or is it some kind of Dow like, Zen like acceptance of place and position and destiny?
[00:26:30 - 00:26:42]	 Or can it be both? You know, I mean, I have fantasies where I see a world and I don't know how we get there. I mean, don't ask me how we get there.
[00:26:42 - 00:27:03]	 But a world of many, many fewer people and people live basically as people live 25,000 years ago, basically naked, except that everybody has a little thread like Brahmans have in India, a little thread that goes around your shoulder and around your waist.
[00:27:03 - 00:27:20]	 And on this thread are you could get maybe a couple of thousand small beads on this thread. Well, each one is essentially a menu, an interface into a piece of software which is hidden in hyperspace.
[00:27:20 - 00:27:34]	 And by just moving this thread around and touching these beads, you navigate into mental dimensions. I mean, I can imagine the person of the future would look like a rainforest primitive.
[00:27:34 - 00:27:45]	 But when they close their eyes, there would be menus hanging in space and you select and navigate and move through these things.
[00:27:45 - 00:27:53]	 But, you know, then there are issues, different aspects of the same issue of the human split with nature.
[00:27:53 - 00:28:03]	 You know, what do we do with the human body? Monkey body. Is it a monkey animal body that drags us down into territoriality and violence?
[00:28:03 - 00:28:15]	 Or is it somehow, you know, the glory and the purpose? How do you, where do you put the body in a psychedelic value system?
[00:28:15 - 00:28:26]	 If we're talking about more and more ephemeralization, depersonalization, decentralization, electronic diffuseness.
[00:28:26 - 00:28:34]	 Well, then where is sexuality in all that? Still more, where is biology in all that?
[00:28:34 - 00:28:47]	 It's very, you know, we are the generation of people who actually will take the reins of the human dream in a way that it's never been taken before.
[00:28:47 - 00:29:00]	 Recently, as a single generation ago, there were like insoluble problems of a technological and resource delivery type.
[00:29:00 - 00:29:13]	 Now it's basically, I think I began this weekend by saying this, it's all dementia, all problems have become problems of human psychology.
[00:29:13 - 00:29:19]	 Everything can be done. It's all about how do you convince people in a democracy to pay for it?
[00:29:19 - 00:29:23]	 How do you convince people in a, you know, whatever to follow along?
[00:29:23 - 00:29:32]	 If all problems have achieved a human dimension, the state of the atmosphere, it's a human problem.
[00:29:32 - 00:29:36]	 You know, the temperature of the ocean, human problem.
[00:29:36 - 00:29:42]	 Everything has to do with changing and reengineering the human mind.
[00:29:42 - 00:29:50]	 Now the real barrier to doing this, as I see it, is the cultural momentum of the past.
[00:29:50 - 00:29:58]	 And that's a very nice and sanitized way of saying fundamentalist religion.
[00:29:58 - 00:30:07]	 Fundamentalist religion goes into a tizzy when you start to, they would say, tamper with human nature.
[00:30:07 - 00:30:19]	 This is why drugs, abortion, homosexuality, notice that what these things all have in common is they slightly seek to tweak or define human nature.
[00:30:19 - 00:30:23]	 And, you know, this is extremely unwelcome.
[00:30:23 - 00:30:33]	 But, you know, if we're all God's children, how come we've rigged the earth with dynamite and are, you know, flipping coins to see who gets to set it off?
[00:30:35 - 00:30:38]	 This concludes Side A.
[00:30:38 - 00:30:51]	 We have been infected with the idea of original sin, and this is part of what keeps us infantile.
[00:30:51 - 00:31:00]	 We actually believe, I think, every single one of us at some level, that we are flawed, unfit.
[00:31:00 - 00:31:14]	 And this is paralyzing because if we start talking about redesigning human nature, people say, oh, wow, you know, this is what Hitler was talking about.
[00:31:14 - 00:31:18]	 As soon as you start redefining human nature, you redefine it worse.
[00:31:18 - 00:31:20]	 The beast returns.
[00:31:20 - 00:31:31]	 It means, you know, we have no faith whatsoever, and we believe, you know, that the given situation is the best of all possible worlds is what that's saying.
[00:31:31 - 00:31:33]	 And I don't believe that.
[00:31:33 - 00:31:40]	 I agree there have been horrendous misapplications of the wish to redesign human nature.
[00:31:40 - 00:31:58]	 But on the other hand, the style which lets it just develop like an untended, weedy lot has produced a fairly weedy lot of leaders with no great apparent commitment to the salvation of the human race either.
[00:31:58 - 00:32:02]	 What it comes down to is responsibility.
[00:32:02 - 00:32:06]	 Politics without responsibility is fascism.
[00:32:06 - 00:32:15]	 And politics responsibly practiced is, you know, the only other option available.
[00:32:15 - 00:32:33]	 All this goes back to this theme of the primacy of experience, recapturing the primary importance of yourself, first of all, and then your affinity group, the people around you.
[00:32:33 - 00:32:37]	 McLuhan said that this would happen naturally.
[00:32:37 - 00:32:52]	 And I, from what I see over the past few years, it seems to me this is so that he called it electronic feudalism and said that the nation state would dissolve under the impact of electronic media.
[00:32:52 - 00:32:55]	 His timetable was a little too short.
[00:32:55 - 00:32:58]	 This is really a problem for prophets.
[00:32:58 - 00:33:00]	 But he was perfectly right.
[00:33:00 - 00:33:21]	 I mean, what happened in Tiananmen Square, what happened in Eastern Europe was entirely the product of information technology just conveying images, just conveying images from the West dissolved the whole myth of Marxism, which relied on a false view of reality.
[00:33:21 - 00:33:24]	 The thing is, these images are value neutral.
[00:33:24 - 00:33:27]	 They're corrosive wherever they move.
[00:33:27 - 00:33:38]	 The same forces that destroyed the Communist Party in Eastern Europe will destroy the ruling families of the Arabian Peninsula with equal ease.
[00:33:38 - 00:33:47]	 Because what it is, is it's an anti oligarchic virus that has gotten loose in the language ocean of the planet.
[00:33:47 - 00:33:57]	 I mean, the thing that happened in Tiananmen Square, you could feel every government on earth heave a sigh of relief when they got that under control.
[00:33:57 - 00:34:09]	 Because the nightmare of every government on earth is a million peaceable people assembled in the main square of your capital city demanding that you pack up for Switzerland.
[00:34:09 - 00:34:12]	 I mean, that is it.
[00:34:12 - 00:34:21]	 And if it happens, if it happens in Bucharest, you go. If it happens in Tehran, you go. If it happens in Washington, you go.
[00:34:21 - 00:34:25]	 Nobody says no to a million people in the streets.
[00:34:25 - 00:34:27]	 That's what the Shah of Iran found out.
[00:34:27 - 00:34:34]	 I mean, he made a decree that if more than three people gathered in any place, they would be shot dead.
[00:34:34 - 00:34:40]	 The next day, two and a half million people marched screaming beneath his window for his head.
[00:34:40 - 00:34:51]	 You look at a scene like that and say, you know, hey, it's time to retrench. It's time to seriously cut a deal here.
[00:34:51 - 00:34:56]	 Well, this is a long rambling answer to the question, you know, what is to be done?
[00:34:56 - 00:34:59]	 How can we make a difference?
[00:34:59 - 00:35:12]	 And I think the way that it's to be done is by empowering individual discourse and recognizing the power of the individual.
[00:35:12 - 00:35:17]	 Huge amounts of global civilization are operating on automatic pilot.
[00:35:17 - 00:35:25]	 You know, you think that if you were to walk into the World Trade Center or the Pentagon or NATO headquarters in Brussels,
[00:35:25 - 00:35:29]	 that there would be smart people furiously running things.
[00:35:29 - 00:35:34]	 There are idiots everywhere at every level of organization.
[00:35:34 - 00:35:40]	 I mean, if you were to attend a cabinet meeting, one guy will be asleep with his face in his plate.
[00:35:40 - 00:35:43]	 I swear, you know, it makes no difference.
[00:35:43 - 00:35:53]	 And we, the little people down in the labyrinthine streets of the city looking up at the castle as the great ones come and go,
[00:35:53 - 00:35:58]	 you know, we believe that they're all about the fine business of humanity.
[00:35:58 - 00:36:02]	 But, you know, it's just a fiction. It's an absurdity.
[00:36:02 - 00:36:18]	 And to the degree that we proclaim it so, the meme spreads and the dream of the oligarchs, the autocrats, the programmers is dissolved.
[00:36:18 - 00:36:25]	 This is why the psychedelic thing is so controversial, such political dynamite,
[00:36:25 - 00:36:35]	 because ultimately it dissolves the linguistic structures that it finds preexisting, whatever they are.
[00:36:35 - 00:36:43]	 I really believe this. I mean, talking to shamans in the Amazon, ultimately when you get to know them, they will tell you,
[00:36:43 - 00:36:51]	 you know, you think this is easy? You think because I am a wittoto, you think because I wear a gourd on my penis,
[00:36:51 - 00:37:00]	 I'm somehow more able to do this than you are? No, every time I go, I know it may be the last time because it's so hard.
[00:37:00 - 00:37:06]	 It's so challenging to who I am. It always is. I mean, it's a real edge.
[00:37:06 - 00:37:17]	 It's not an edge that you go and map and then the next time it's not an edge. It's that every time you go, you discover this edge.
[00:37:17 - 00:37:25]	 It's the great gift, the great challenge, the great miracle of human existence is that within each one of us,
[00:37:25 - 00:37:36]	 there is this dimension which we have to access, which is a constant challenge to our existential modality.
[00:37:36 - 00:37:45]	 You know, you don't have to mush your way up jungle rivers and rip jewels from the eyes of idols and stuff like that.
[00:37:45 - 00:37:58]	 You can on a Saturday evening in the privacy of your own living room become your own Magellan and you are no less courageous than Magellan.
[00:37:58 - 00:38:07]	 Maybe Magellan is a bad example since he didn't make it all the way around. Your own Columbus.
[00:38:07 - 00:38:19]	 And this dimension of freedom has always been 95% of what the human experience was about in terms of risk and thrills.
[00:38:19 - 00:38:27]	 And religion is not, you know, the mumblings of men wearing dresses. It just isn't.
[00:38:27 - 00:38:38]	 Nor is it all of this philosophical mumbo jumbo that arises out of rational discourse and brain specialization.
[00:38:38 - 00:38:50]	 It's that somehow part of the package of being a living, thinking being is that you get a universe inside of you.
[00:38:50 - 00:38:57]	 You know, you get a galaxy sized object inside you that you can access.
[00:38:57 - 00:39:08]	 And there there are the mountains, the rivers, the jungles, the dynastic families, the ruins, the planets, the works of art, the poetry, the sciences,
[00:39:08 - 00:39:17]	 the magics of millions upon millions upon millions of worlds. And this is apparently who we each are.
[00:39:17 - 00:39:27]	 We're a little bit of eternity sticking into three dimensional space and for some reason occupying time in a monkey body.
[00:39:27 - 00:39:41]	 But when you turn your eyes then inward, you discover the birthright, the existential facts out of which this particular existence emerged.
[00:39:41 - 00:39:55]	 And, you know, without going dewy eyed, without lining up with all the religious people, it's more real than religion because it's apparently rooted in biology.
[00:39:55 - 00:40:02]	 And it's a great secret, a great secret and a great comfort because it means, you know,
[00:40:02 - 00:40:13]	 mystery didn't die with the fall of Arthur or the fall of Atlantis or the fall of anything. Mystery is alive in the moment, in the here and now.
[00:40:13 - 00:40:21]	 It just simply lies on the other side of a barrier of courage. And it isn't even that high a barrier.
[00:40:21 - 00:40:28]	 It just is a barrier high enough to keep out the insincere and the misdirected.
[00:40:28 - 00:40:39]	 But for those who will claim it in the midst of the historical chaos of the late 20th century, they become the archaic pioneers.
[00:40:39 - 00:40:48]	 They become the first people to carry the Ouroboric serpent around to its own tail and to make a closure.
[00:40:48 - 00:41:02]	 And to the degree that any one of us has this this connection back to the archaic in our life, it makes where we have been make a lot more sense.
[00:41:02 - 00:41:10]	 And it makes where we're going seem a lot more inviting, which it really is, I think.
[00:41:10 - 00:41:16]	 Well, that's all I have to say. I think we can probably. It's a little early.
[00:41:16 - 00:41:27]	 Does anybody have any anything they want to add? Yeah, you've been talking about the ego a lot of this dissolution through the boundaries of it.
[00:41:27 - 00:41:42]	 And it sometimes sounds like ego has a pejorative connotation. On the other hand, you just talking about the fact that it's up to each of us in our own unique individuation to claim what what can be claimed.
[00:41:42 - 00:41:51]	 And that even the small individual little ego can virtually change the world if it has the right place to stand.
[00:41:51 - 00:41:59]	 It seems like these so how do you balance these things? Yeah, I just really the question is, what is the future of the ego as we know it?
[00:41:59 - 00:42:17]	 After, say, post 2012, will the ego really be more of a group ego or a transformation of our ego or is the ultimate goal to shed our egos completely and become some form of individuation which we can't even dream about?
[00:42:17 - 00:42:28]	 Well, you're right. There's a dynamic tension there. Sometimes when this comes up, I answer it by saying, you know, that you need an ego.
[00:42:28 - 00:42:36]	 If you didn't have an ego, you wouldn't know whose mouth to put food in when you have dinner with someone at a restaurant.
[00:42:36 - 00:42:46]	 So ego is necessary to keep straight whose orifices are whose. And that's the main function of ego.
[00:42:46 - 00:43:07]	 But then, you know, there is a deeper level to it. Somehow the way I imagine it is that the ego is the correct expression of ego is when there is ego present, but it is perceived as Dow.
[00:43:07 - 00:43:21]	 In other words, Dow is this state where you just go along and somehow get along. And ego is a state where you're somehow pushing the river and that's how you get along.
[00:43:21 - 00:43:40]	 I think the ego of the future will be much less possessive and that it's the possessiveness, the projection of the domain, really, of the ego outside of itself.
[00:43:40 - 00:44:06]	 Specifically the control of other people, you know, sexual partners, children, parents. The way I imagine this pastoral situation of 12 or 15 thousand years ago to work was people simply had group values because the children were group owned.
[00:44:06 - 00:44:22]	 And that made such a tremendous difference in how the society imaged itself. People lived for the group and that the core of the group were the children and people always put them first.
[00:44:22 - 00:44:37]	 So everyone identified with the children, everyone was willing to face risk to preserve the core of the younger gene pool and that was what made the difference.
[00:44:37 - 00:44:59]	 This concern for male paternity is really a poisonous factor. And see, when you look at primatology generally, it's pretty clear that as a group of species, primates do tend to male dominance.
[00:44:59 - 00:45:11]	 That even the apes and the squirrel monkeys and the new world primates in the wild, there's usually an alpha male that's dominant.
[00:45:11 - 00:45:27]	 So this symbiosis between human beings, cattle and psychedelic plants that allowed the feminine to emerge was something that was emerging against the grain of primate organization.
[00:45:27 - 00:45:52]	 So really what has happened is we have returned to a more animal kind of existence. We are more like beasts than the people of 10, 15 thousand years ago because they were using psychedelics to artificially, you could say, or pharmacologically inflate feminine values.
[00:45:52 - 00:46:15]	 And this allowed them to become civilized people. I mean, I have some elaborate theory about this, but I think that women are responsible for the emergence of language because I think that the division of labor that we know went on very early because of the male's larger body size in the upper half of the body,
[00:46:15 - 00:46:28]	 that the males tended to specialize toward hunting. Hunting puts a premium on physical strength and stoicism, meaning sitting a long time with your mouth shut.
[00:46:28 - 00:46:39]	 And then you have a limited number of commands. The women and bladder control is very important where women fail that test.
[00:46:39 - 00:46:49]	 So then what the women were doing was they were specialized as gatherers of plants and roots and insects and stuff like that.
[00:46:49 - 00:47:00]	 Well, this is a tremendous pressure to develop descriptive taxonomy because gathering is the art of descriptive taxonomy.
[00:47:00 - 00:47:11]	 You want to know that you want, you know, the little bulbous root with the yellow flowers that grows down between the shattered granite boulders near the creek.
[00:47:11 - 00:47:23]	 It's all language, language, language. And the pressure is life and death. If you eat the wrong plant, you become very sick or you abort your fetus or you die.
[00:47:23 - 00:47:36]	 So those who were well able to describe bits of the hunting gathering of the gathering side of the economy were quickly outbred those who weren't.
[00:47:36 - 00:47:42]	 And language may have even been a kind of secret ability of women at some point.
[00:47:42 - 00:47:52]	 You see psilocybin synergizes language like bursts of activity and and may have been the thing which set it over.
[00:47:52 - 00:48:00]	 But what happened in this woman situation with language is a good example of what often happens with cultural innovation.
[00:48:00 - 00:48:10]	 The women possessed all this knowledge about hunting, about the gathering of plants and the magical use and preparation of plants.
[00:48:10 - 00:48:30]	 But at a certain point, the database became so huge that it underwent a collapse conceptually and some brilliant woman realized we don't have to know about 600 plants and all these locations and seasonal variations and all this.
[00:48:30 - 00:48:40]	 We just have to concentrate on five plants and really learn all about those plants. And then we can dispense with all this stuff.
[00:48:40 - 00:48:47]	 And this was probably because in the nomadic cycle, they would encounter their own middens from the year before.
[00:48:47 - 00:48:52]	 And there there would be cereal grains sprouted and you quickly put it together.
[00:48:52 - 00:49:05]	 But the specialization represented by agriculture, that was the beginning of the end as far as I'm concerned, because at that point there was retraction away from nature.
[00:49:05 - 00:49:12]	 It was no longer about letting nature guide you to gather and find what you needed.
[00:49:12 - 00:49:17]	 It was a kind of paranoid, a kind of rip off attitude.
[00:49:17 - 00:49:23]	 It was, you know, let us exploit these five plants. This means tilling the ground.
[00:49:23 - 00:49:34]	 It means the end of nomadism, because now we're going to settle in one place and we're going to redirect the flow of water and we're going to become agriculturalists.
[00:49:34 - 00:49:37]	 It's an entirely different psychology.
[00:49:37 - 00:49:48]	 Weston LaBar said that psychedelic shamanism died when it became important to get up in the morning and go out and hoe the corn.
[00:49:48 - 00:49:55]	 And then people replaced the psychedelic gods with the gods of wheat and corn.
[00:49:55 - 00:50:00]	 The Tammuz, the corn god of ancient Babylon, then appears.
[00:50:00 - 00:50:07]	 And gods of agriculture and male dominance go hand in hand.
[00:50:07 - 00:50:14]	 The previous religion at the edge of the high Neolithic was this religion of the great horned goddess.
[00:50:14 - 00:50:29]	 And it was a religion of nomadic pastoralism, orgiastic sexual activity, psychedelic drugs and tremendous emphasis on cattle.
[00:50:29 - 00:50:34]	 Cattle were the great bridge to all these concepts.
[00:50:34 - 00:50:39]	 We start out as a baboon like creature wandering behind these herds of ungulate cattle.
[00:50:39 - 00:50:51]	 I've seen baboons do this in Kenya, flipping over cow pies, looking for carrion beetle grubs as a source of fat and protein.
[00:50:51 - 00:51:02]	 But then, you know, we went from predation on carrion, the kills of larger animals to slowly actually domesticating these things.
[00:51:02 - 00:51:16]	 And the milk and the blood and the manure and the meat and the mushroom would all be seen to be things which came quite naturally from the cow.
[00:51:16 - 00:51:21]	 The cow was like the supreme feminine symbol.
[00:51:21 - 00:51:30]	 And all over North Africa and the ancient Middle East, you get this paleolithic, late paleolithic great horned goddess.
[00:51:30 - 00:51:38]	 The cattle religion and the emergence of consciousness seem to go hand in hand.
[00:51:38 - 00:51:49]	 One time I was waiting for a load of mushrooms to come on and it was very strong.
[00:51:49 - 00:51:55]	 It was I had sort of miscalculated and I had gotten too much and I could see this thing just coming at me.
[00:51:55 - 00:51:58]	 Huge force.
[00:51:58 - 00:52:01]	 And I heard a voice.
[00:52:01 - 00:52:08]	 It was actually the Swiss air stewardess from Frederica Fellini's Eight and a Half.
[00:52:08 - 00:52:10]	 But it was that voice.
[00:52:10 - 00:52:20]	 And she said, they say it helps to lay down cowboy.
[00:52:20 - 00:52:27]	 And I was amused at the time or later when I had time to be amused, I was amused.
[00:52:27 - 00:52:38]	 But then I realized this mode of address, cowboy, is probably typical of the mushroom because for most 95 percent of its existence,
[00:52:38 - 00:52:46]	 most of what it's dealt with are cowboys and cowgirls because these are the people who follow along behind the cows.
[00:52:46 - 00:52:51]	 These are the people who invented astrology from watching the stars.
[00:52:51 - 00:53:03]	 And many people, myself included, have reported the experience of looking at the stars stoned on psilocybin and having the mushroom supply dotted lines between the constellations.
[00:53:03 - 00:53:08]	 There it is. There's the map.
[00:53:08 - 00:53:10]	 Yes.
[00:53:10 - 00:53:18]	 Pastoralists, herders, they invented the calendar from watching the horizon.
[00:53:18 - 00:53:22]	 And, you know, what we looked at last night was partially a calendar.
[00:53:22 - 00:53:31]	 It's very interesting if you look if you want a meditation on shamanism, politics, time and so forth.
[00:53:31 - 00:53:37]	 Look at hexagram forty nine in the each thing, which is revolution.
[00:53:37 - 00:53:42]	 And you might go to this expecting a treatise on political upheaval.
[00:53:42 - 00:53:49]	 And it says instead the magician is a calendar maker.
[00:53:49 - 00:53:52]	 He measures the seasons and sets them right.
[00:53:52 - 00:53:58]	 And it's this idea of reconstruction of time.
[00:53:58 - 00:54:11]	 The message that I get out of the psychedelics is that we need to reframe the largest frames in our linguistic cosmology.
[00:54:11 - 00:54:23]	 Means reformation of the calendar, reformation of language that we cannot evolve any faster than the languages that we are imprisoned within.
[00:54:23 - 00:54:26]	 We are linguistic creatures somehow.
[00:54:26 - 00:54:41]	 And so we we need strategies, catalysts, enzymes, whatever it is, practices that force the evolution of language along conscious lines.
[00:54:41 - 00:54:50]	 If we don't do this, the old styles of thinking, the old concepts are just going to pull us down.
[00:54:50 - 00:55:04]	 Well, to my mind, this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction because psychedelics are the only force in nature that actually dissolves linguistic structure.
[00:55:04 - 00:55:15]	 Let's the mechanics of syntax be visible, allows the possibility for the introduction, rapid introduction and spread of new concepts.
[00:55:15 - 00:55:20]	 Gives permission for new ways of seeing.
[00:55:20 - 00:55:25]	 And this is what we have to do. We have to change our minds.
[00:55:25 - 00:55:31]	 Well, that's it. Thank you very much. I enjoyed this.
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