[00:00:00 - 00:00:05]	 So, I guess that's the end of my introduction.
[00:00:05 - 00:00:07]	 Here's Terence McKenna.
[00:00:07 - 00:00:15]	 [applause]
[00:00:15 - 00:00:19]	 Can you all hear me?
[00:00:19 - 00:00:21]	 Can you hear in the back?
[00:00:21 - 00:00:23]	 Yeah?
[00:00:23 - 00:00:25]	 Not very well?
[00:00:25 - 00:00:28]	 Make them hear in the back.
[00:00:28 - 00:00:36]	 [laughter]
[00:00:36 - 00:00:38]	 Okay.
[00:00:38 - 00:00:40]	 That's much better, isn't it?
[00:00:40 - 00:00:42]	 Is it better in the back?
[00:00:42 - 00:00:44]	 Good, good.
[00:00:44 - 00:00:52]	 Well, I would like to join with Roy in thanking all of the people who made this possible.
[00:00:52 - 00:00:58]	 Mary Fowler worked long and hard to make this happen.
[00:00:58 - 00:01:04]	 Eric Ali did the wonderful graphics for the poster.
[00:01:04 - 00:01:10]	 Pam here has controlled and managed traffic flow here this evening.
[00:01:10 - 00:01:17]	 Diane and Roy are incomparable treasures in the L.A. community.
[00:01:17 - 00:01:25]	 I was talking to someone today who said they had listened to KPFK very carefully in the month that Roy and Diane were away,
[00:01:25 - 00:01:29]	 and it just ain't the same thing.
[00:01:29 - 00:01:38]	 It's terrifying to think that two human beings in a city of, what, 11 million are what's holding up the hip.
[00:01:38 - 00:01:48]	 [applause]
[00:01:48 - 00:01:50]	 The hip end of things.
[00:01:50 - 00:02:00]	 As Roy said, this is a benefit for KPFK and in a larger sense for botanical dimensions.
[00:02:00 - 00:02:12]	 Botanical dimensions is the nonprofit that Kat and I and Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Messner, Ralph Abraham, Frank Barr,
[00:02:12 - 00:02:24]	 a number of people have organized to carry out plant rescue operations for medicinal plants and plants with a history of shamanic usage.
[00:02:24 - 00:02:38]	 And we have a botanical farm in Hawaii, 20 acres, maintain collectors in South America and occasionally support collecting in Africa.
[00:02:38 - 00:02:48]	 And this is our real world political work beyond the communicating and the publishing and that sort of thing,
[00:02:48 - 00:03:00]	 where we actually try to impact some of the more, some of the negative so-called progressive changes that are taking place in the third world
[00:03:00 - 00:03:10]	 and disrupting rainforest culture and causing this shamanic and folk pharmacopeia to be lost.
[00:03:10 - 00:03:15]	 So I appreciate your being here tonight in support of that.
[00:03:15 - 00:03:23]	 It's very important work, far more expensive than I thought it was when we organized the foundation.
[00:03:23 - 00:03:28]	 And it's ongoing, so we never really seem to be ahead.
[00:03:28 - 00:03:33]	 So I want to thank you for your support of that.
[00:03:33 - 00:03:43]	 In line with that, I've been living with Kat and our two children in Hawaii on the Big Island for the past year
[00:03:43 - 00:03:49]	 and not really doing any public speaking because there was none to be done there.
[00:03:49 - 00:04:01]	 And it was a very good opportunity to get out from under the electronic umbrella of the sprawl of North American culture
[00:04:01 - 00:04:15]	 and to sort of look at it and assess it as this practice of speaking with groups of people has become more and more a part of my life.
[00:04:15 - 00:04:24]	 It has sort of changed in my mind from the addressing of certain topics and the building of a talk around a theme
[00:04:24 - 00:04:35]	 to more just pointing and looking and saying, "Well, here we are. Here's where we've arrived tonight.
[00:04:35 - 00:04:50]	 What is the situation? What is the state of the world? What is the state of the union?"
[00:04:50 - 00:04:58]	 I think psychedelics had a very large impact. I'm sure there's no argument on this in the 1960s.
[00:04:58 - 00:05:03]	 But in a way, it was not ever anchored in anything.
[00:05:03 - 00:05:14]	 It was never explained to anybody by anybody how it fit into the historical context of what had preceded it,
[00:05:14 - 00:05:19]	 perhaps because no one actually knew at that time.
[00:05:19 - 00:05:30]	 For instance, there was no--the invoking of shamanism as an explanation for how plant hallucinogens work on psyche
[00:05:30 - 00:05:36]	 is completely alien to the literature of the 1960s. It just isn't there.
[00:05:36 - 00:05:48]	 And speaking of aliens, the theme of alien intelligence or of hyperdimensional organized intellect is contacted in the psychedelic state.
[00:05:48 - 00:05:58]	 That also was an absent theme. It was basically presented--the psychedelic experience was basically presented
[00:05:58 - 00:06:08]	 as an exploration of the contents of the personality with a little bit of overflow into aesthetic issues.
[00:06:08 - 00:06:19]	 So I remember in the early days, we would stack our Abrams books on Hieronymus Bosch and Piero della De Francesca and Giotto.
[00:06:19 - 00:06:29]	 And then the idea following Aldous Huxley was that you would imbibe the meaning of these great works of art
[00:06:29 - 00:06:40]	 behind the kind of psychic freedom that the psychedelic substance was going to graft on to your ordinary consciousness.
[00:06:40 - 00:06:53]	 Well, I think all those kinds of metaphors were useful, but it's been now 20, 25 years of looking at that phenomenon
[00:06:53 - 00:07:02]	 and also of having the future continue to overtake us with ever more demands upon our cultural resourcefulness
[00:07:02 - 00:07:16]	 and our ability to cognize the cultural situation. And I think now it can be seen somewhat differently.
[00:07:16 - 00:07:27]	 And so these two nights in Los Angeles, which are called "Understanding and Imagination in the Light of Nature,"
[00:07:27 - 00:07:41]	 are a kind of effort to take several telescoping steps backward and place the adventure of psychedelic self-exploration
[00:07:41 - 00:07:51]	 in context, to frame it in a number of different ways. Because I think it's very important for us to know,
[00:07:51 - 00:08:00]	 as the Hermetic Mysteries urge us to know, whether we have come, where we are, who we are, and whence we are going.
[00:08:00 - 00:08:12]	 All issues that the psychedelic experience, especially to my mind the plant hallucinogens, bring into close focus.
[00:08:12 - 00:08:23]	 Here is an opportunity for a theater of cultural growth that is unparalleled.
[00:08:23 - 00:08:31]	 How did we find ourselves in this situation? What is exactly the nature of the cultural situation
[00:08:31 - 00:08:41]	 in which then the psychedelic response is called forth as part of a spectrum of cultural responses?
[00:08:41 - 00:08:51]	 Basically what's been going on in Western civilization for about 500 years is the exploration of the metaphor of materialism,
[00:08:51 - 00:09:02]	 which began as a simple limiting case. Since we're at the Philosophical Research Society, it behooves us to talk philosophy
[00:09:02 - 00:09:12]	 for a moment and remind you that there is what's called Ockham's Razor. William of Ockham was a late medieval philosopher,
[00:09:12 - 00:09:22]	 and his razor was that hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity.
[00:09:22 - 00:09:32]	 In other words, the simplest explanation should be preferred in all cases. The fewest number of elements should be put forward
[00:09:32 - 00:09:48]	 as necessary for an explanation. Following William of Ockham's statement of this notion as a logical way of proceeding,
[00:09:48 - 00:10:01]	 the assumption was made then, a provisional assumption at the beginning, that matter could be separated from the notion
[00:10:01 - 00:10:11]	 of soul and spirit, that it could be divided into its simplest units, and out of the activity of those simple units,
[00:10:11 - 00:10:21]	 a model could be built up that would explain more complex phenomena in the world. Cartesian materialism,
[00:10:21 - 00:10:35]	 which was applied very successfully to physical matter, to the chemical elements, and so successfully, in fact,
[00:10:35 - 00:10:48]	 that the provisional nature of the assumption was soon forgotten in the explanatory zeal of the people who had latched on
[00:10:48 - 00:10:56]	 to this method. And so it was then applied out of the chemical realm, but moved into the biological realm.
[00:10:56 - 00:11:06]	 And the search was on for the biologically irreducible units, which in the 17th century was the cell,
[00:11:06 - 00:11:14]	 and great excitement about the cell. And then in the 20th century, of course, first the nucleus of the cell,
[00:11:14 - 00:11:23]	 then ultimately DNA as the constituent of the nucleus, which was controlling protein synthesis.
[00:11:23 - 00:11:35]	 But strangely enough, the elucidation of the mechanics of the gene through this program of reductionism did not issue
[00:11:35 - 00:11:45]	 into the same kind of control over the products of the gene that the same program had, the same kind of fruit that had been born
[00:11:45 - 00:11:54]	 in the analysis of physical matter. And in the early years of this century, when the effort was made to extend the metaphor
[00:11:54 - 00:12:07]	 into psychology, the true inadequacy of it became clearly seen, so that the effort to break the personality down into types,
[00:12:07 - 00:12:22]	 or complexes, or archetypes, or behavioral strategies all failed. And at the same time that this process of disconfirmation
[00:12:22 - 00:12:34]	 was happening in the social sciences, physics, which had been old reliable in the matter of supporting this particulate,
[00:12:34 - 00:12:45]	 pointillistic, materialistic school of explanation, began in fact to betray it, because the analysis of matter was pushed
[00:12:45 - 00:12:59]	 to deeper and deeper levels, until finally phenomena began to be elucidated, which seemed incomprehensible in the mechanical model.
[00:12:59 - 00:13:09]	 It seemed as though what had been thought of as points of matter were in fact spread through time, and the notion of simple location
[00:13:09 - 00:13:19]	 began to give way to talk of clouds of probability and this sort of thing. All of this reaching a culmination in 1923
[00:13:19 - 00:13:28]	 with the Copenhagen conference on quantum physics, where basically a new vision of matter was elucidated.
[00:13:32 - 00:13:45]	 And strangely enough, the new view of matter seemed to have a very mentalist sort of aura about it. It no longer was a theory of simple location,
[00:13:45 - 00:14:00]	 calculable energies, and specific predictions. It was probabilistic. Now this reemergence of the need for a wave mechanical description of matter
[00:14:00 - 00:14:15]	 can I think now be seen from the vantage point of 55 years as the first stirrings, or among the first stirrings of the reemergence of the spirit.
[00:14:15 - 00:14:32]	 And I think that what understanding and imagination in the light of nature argues for is the presence and reemergence of the awareness of spirit in the world.
[00:14:32 - 00:14:52]	 This is what the so-called and long heralded paradigm shift is all about. It is a vast turning over of the intellectual universe, which will eclipse many idea systems
[00:14:52 - 00:15:11]	 and support many more. It is the idea of fields. Spirit need not be defined or even conceived in any sort of 19th century or mentalist or animist way.
[00:15:11 - 00:15:32]	 What spirit is, is a field of deployed energy that is somehow co-present at more than one point in space and time. It is the shadow that haunts the particularized world
[00:15:32 - 00:15:46]	 of Newtonian matter. And it is strangely enough, the commonest object of experience. In other words, as we move through our lives, as we project our hopes,
[00:15:46 - 00:16:04]	 as we plan our days, as we execute our jobs, we move in this realm of spirit. The problem is that we have been very slowly but very efficiently corralled
[00:16:04 - 00:16:18]	 inside an intellectual system which gives no credence to spirit and therefore has had a curious effect on the validation that we give our own lives.
[00:16:18 - 00:16:34]	 For instance, if you look at positivist philosophy, which is the dominant philosophical paradigm in academic philosophy, there you learn that there are primary and secondary qualities
[00:16:34 - 00:16:51]	 to the world. And the primary qualities are charge, spin, angular momentum, velocity, this sort of thing. Things which nowhere come tangential to the felt world
[00:16:51 - 00:17:05]	 of the individual. Well then there are also so-called secondary qualities. Color, taste, tone, feeling, all the things that make up the world that you and I experience.
[00:17:05 - 00:17:21]	 So somehow we are not traveling in first class on this metaphysical airliner. We're back there with the secondary qualities and the good stuff is all up front and it is described and manipulated
[00:17:21 - 00:17:38]	 by incomprehensible equations and you have to enter into a priesthood to become part of it. Well, it's to our credit, I think, that we are waking up.
[00:17:38 - 00:17:56]	 And one of the reasons that we are waking up is because into the objects of common experience by an exhaustive search of the objects of common experience, diligent, clear-thinking seekers
[00:17:56 - 00:18:14]	 after understanding people who are practicing, who took seriously the Constitution's assurance of the pursuit of happiness, have Robert Bork not withstanding,
[00:18:14 - 00:18:27]	 have found more than the right of privacy in the Constitution, but have actually found the right to alter your own consciousness for purposes of personal growth.
[00:18:27 - 00:18:47]	 Well, consciousness is like a still pool. If it is unperturbed, it returns a clear image of the world in the same way that the unperturbed surface of a pond will become a mirror to the environment around it.
[00:18:47 - 00:19:10]	 But if consciousness is perturbed by being shifted from its ordinary modalities, then the extraordinarily tenuous and provisional nature of what we call reality swims into our can.
[00:19:10 - 00:19:23]	 And we see, you know, that what we take to be solid objects, what we take to be here and now, what we take to be personal identity versus other in the form of other personalities,
[00:19:23 - 00:19:31]	 that all of these things hang by the most tenuous of linguistic threads and cultural conventions.
[00:19:31 - 00:19:57]	 And that beneath the surface of those conventions is utter terra incognito, a no man's land, the unexplored territory behind cultural assumptions, suddenly, starkly, totally and controversably illuminated to the inspection of the individual.
[00:19:57 - 00:20:12]	 Well, this is feeding, indeed, to my mind, it is the major factor responsible for the reemergence of the awareness of the spirit.
[00:20:12 - 00:20:34]	 It holds out the possibility that we can create a new definition of our own humanness, that it was fine for purposes of disentangling from the medieval church to take the materialist route and to follow it into Darwinian evolution,
[00:20:34 - 00:20:48]	 to recognize our ascent from previous primate forms and to sort of claim a dimension of existential freedom.
[00:20:48 - 00:21:05]	 But that is not the whole story. That essentially is the legacy or the achievement of modernism, which was fully worked out by 1927 or eight, I would say.
[00:21:05 - 00:21:18]	 I mean, those people, the pataphysicians, the quantum physicists, the Dada, the surrealists, Alfred Jarry, Andre Breton, it was all worked out.
[00:21:18 - 00:21:37]	 And those of us who were born after that time and have come into this sort of pseudo eschaton of regurgitation of modern values in art, fashion and literature have been living in this kind of a goldfish bowl ever since.
[00:21:37 - 00:21:54]	 I mean, really, it's astonishing the degree to which in the most progressive and fast moving century in the last 10 or 20, for that matter, there has also been an extraordinary backward current,
[00:21:54 - 00:22:13]	 a very strong recidivism that has held at bay the true exfoliation of what modernity was supposed to mean. That's why within the 20th century, the further back you go, the more utopian the projection of the future becomes.
[00:22:13 - 00:22:36]	 And the further into the 20th century you go, the more like a dystopia it becomes as we get not elevated railways, immortality and hot pants, but, you know, bread lines and germ warfare and doublespeak and all of these things.
[00:22:36 - 00:22:53]	 So into this situation of retrenchment and cultural recidivism and the working out of modern values, which are materialist values, comes then the beginning of the postmodern era.
[00:22:53 - 00:23:22]	 I prefer a different term, which I call compressionism, the compressionist era, which follows the modern era. And its theme is the reemergence of the presence of the spirit and its major cultural exhibit or the major cultural force driving it is the discovery of relativism with regard to consciousness,
[00:23:22 - 00:23:47]	 which does not only mean psychedelic drugs and hallucinogenic plants per se, it also means media. It also means literary expectation, reorientation of the senses through design, urban planning, the entire spectrum of effects which feeds consciousness back into itself
[00:23:47 - 00:24:07]	 is enunciating this theme of the emergent spirit. And it is not necessarily a welcome theme because all institutions attain a certain momentum toward the preservation of their own vested interests.
[00:24:07 - 00:24:27]	 And science and the handmaiden of science, which is modern technocratic government, have created a number of cultural institutions that have a friction with the reemergence of the spirit.
[00:24:27 - 00:24:45]	 First and foremost is the notion of the public. The public is this weird idea that was generated in the wake of the printing press that there were vast numbers of people who could be treated atomistically.
[00:24:45 - 00:25:07]	 They didn't have to be thought of as individuals. They could be thought of as various classes, masses of people to be manipulated. And if you could sell the public on the idea of democracy, which is another one of these atomistic notions,
[00:25:07 - 00:25:27]	 the notion of democracy is that for us all to get together and have it work, we have to assume that we're all alike. See? So we each have a vote and then you may be tall, you may be short, you may be rich, you may be poor, you may be black, you may be white, but that doesn't matter.
[00:25:27 - 00:25:47]	 We'll give everybody this charge, one vote, and then we'll see how these populations work themselves out. What they don't tell you is that at the same time that you build this definition of the citizen, you also build the institutions which subvert the citizen.
[00:25:47 - 00:26:04]	 So the citizen is not free to act out and express the wishes of the citizen. The citizen is a consumer of ideological models that are sold to the citizen through agencies of mass propaganda.
[00:26:04 - 00:26:21]	 So there's this peculiar playing off of one against the other. In the meantime, what has also been happening is the institutions of language, which previously were pretty much left to develop on their own.
[00:26:21 - 00:26:37]	 And that was the situation well into the 19th century. Through the power of the printing press, the evolution of language also became something under the control of these institutions.
[00:26:37 - 00:26:53]	 And they very quickly have replaced whatever reality may have been impinging into the lives of the citizens with concepts. Concepts replace reality.
[00:26:53 - 00:27:10]	 You come into the world with a blank slate and everything is what William James called a blooming, buzzing confusion. Well, then one by one, you isolate phenomena in this confusion and you name it.
[00:27:10 - 00:27:29]	 Once a sector of reality has been named, it stays still. It ceases to behave the way it would behave for itself. It begins to behave syntactically because it has been changed into a linguistic object.
[00:27:29 - 00:27:51]	 When things behave syntactically, they are either subjects or objects or the syntactical machinery which relates these two together. In that case, materialism, dualism, projection of authenticity beyond the self are all reinforced.
[00:27:51 - 00:28:08]	 So these are the factors which have impeded the spirit. Into this comes the psychedelic experience. It has a tremendous force to revivify the spirit, particularly because it is not an ideology.
[00:28:08 - 00:28:31]	 It is not something someone figured out. It is an experience. And this is important to bear in mind. It horrifies me. I'm sure you've heard me say it. To think of someone going from birth to the grave without ever coming tangential to the psychedelic experience.
[00:28:31 - 00:28:47]	 It's like going from the birth to the grave without ever discovering sex. It means that you died as a preadolescent. You never really came into your birthright.
[00:28:47 - 00:29:12]	 And we have been infantilized by our cultural institutions to accept the notion of ourselves as citizens consuming these regurgitated scientific models which are then hashed through by Madison Avenue and then handed down to us by the organs of mass culture.
[00:29:12 - 00:29:29]	 And this is supposed to be what we anchor our lives on. It's no wonder that drug abuse, child abuse, self abuse is rampant in this society because it all has been taken away from us.
[00:29:29 - 00:29:45]	 You may read 1984 and think, well, thank God it isn't that bad yet. Well, the only difference between us and 1984 is we dress better.
[00:29:45 - 00:30:07]	 So I think that little gatherings like this, and I feel like this is definitely a family gathering, this meeting was sold out before there was any promo other than Roy's show and a small mailing we did.
[00:30:07 - 00:30:25]	 So you are people who have passed through a very narrow filter. You stay up late. You listen to KPFK and you tolerate Terrence McKenna. So you are either thrice blessed or thrice cursed.
[00:30:25 - 00:30:37]	 I don't know which it is. But anyway, it feels to me like a family gathering. It feels to me like we are figuring this out. And there aren't that many of us, I think.
[00:30:37 - 00:31:04]	 But what we understand as a group or what I imagine that we understand is that there is this twilight of reductionism. There is this end of the old model. And yet we're not ready to proclaim the twilight of reductionism to simultaneously be the funeral of reason.
[00:31:04 - 00:31:24]	 You see, there are a lot of people, a much larger group than we represent, who are prepared to bury reason along with reductionism. And I think reason may have been caught in bed with reductionism, but it may have been set up.
[00:31:24 - 00:31:35]	 And the cake that I have on it and is, as they used to say in Watergate, linked but not tainted.
[00:31:35 - 00:31:56]	 So I am a very, some people even, someone said I was accused of being narrow minded the other night. Because I come to this very honestly through the sciences.
[00:31:56 - 00:32:13]	 Through trying to really find out what was going on and not just accept everything that came down the pike. I mean, I will believe anything if there's evidence, if it's self consistent, if the case is well made.
[00:32:13 - 00:32:32]	 I mean, I think that the first thing the truth will be is a pleasure to hear, you know, and not some turgid and tormented thing where you have to go to six meetings and not talk to anybody who doesn't believe it and all of this sort of thing.
[00:32:32 - 00:32:47]	 So I think it's important as the, what I call the archaic revival gets rolling, it is important for us to clarify where we are coming from.
[00:32:47 - 00:33:12]	 When we were simply the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe, it hardly mattered. But responsibility will devolve on us to say what we mean and to have a position which is not only convincing to the converted, but convincing to the skeptics.
[00:33:12 - 00:33:26]	 That's who I'm after, you know, because I think that a great instance of cultural blindness is what we're confronted with on the issue of psychedelics.
[00:33:26 - 00:33:50]	 Psychedelics are to the science of psychology what the telescope was to astronomy in Galileo's time. And we are in a situation of increasing global pressure on our species, increasing outbreaks of neurosis, unhappiness, psychic epidemics.
[00:33:50 - 00:34:10]	 And we are leaving our best tools behind because of fairly preposterous cultural prohibitions. Cultural prohibitions which deny us our best weapons for overcoming the situation that we are in.
[00:34:10 - 00:34:22]	 And this is really an intolerable situation because the fate, nothing less than the fate of the human species probably hangs in the balance.
[00:34:22 - 00:34:47]	 We cannot afford the luxury of an unconscious. We cannot afford stupidity, closed mindedness, racism, sexism, consumer materialism, selfishness, an absence of globalism.
[00:34:47 - 00:35:02]	 These things are not necessary for us, for our moral edification so that we can feel like well bred ladies and gentlemen. These things are necessary for us so that we don't destroy ourselves.
[00:35:02 - 00:35:19]	 And the fact that this message is so slow coming out is a strong argument for activism on the part of anybody who thinks they have even the faintest glimmer of what is going on.
[00:35:19 - 00:35:42]	 You know, the future will not wait. I see the most crypto fascist and intransigent of institutions slowly waking up to fairly basic facts such as that a nuclear war is probably a bad investment.
[00:35:42 - 00:35:57]	 You know, so that even as Neanderthal a type as President Pinocchio is willing, isn't that a cruel thing for me to say?
[00:35:57 - 00:36:17]	 Is waking up to the fact that it just don't pay. But you know we have a lot of problems. It isn't going to be the millennium even if we achieve a massive cut back in strategic weapons.
[00:36:17 - 00:36:42]	 There's still going to be propaganda, sexism, starvation, inability to correctly manage resources. These things will plague us unto the last syllable of recorded time unless we begin to undergo this kind of intellectual cohesion.
[00:36:42 - 00:36:57]	 The compression of our intent, the recognition of our group mindedness as a feeling, as a will that can act in the historical context.
[00:36:57 - 00:37:16]	 And to my mind the psychedelics have always existed in the plants to promote precisely this. There were not language using tool making tribes of human beings in the absence of hallucinogenic plants.
[00:37:16 - 00:37:30]	 The hallucinogenic plants create the context for integrated organizational activity. This has been going on for at least 15, 20,000 years.
[00:37:30 - 00:37:51]	 The problem is that through a series of factors which we needn't go into in depth here, but factors which impinged on European civilization particularly, civilizations were able to evolve outside of the noetic input from Gaia.
[00:37:51 - 00:38:05]	 Outside of the biological radio that envelops the planet and inputs into balanced tribal societies with functioning shamanic institutions.
[00:38:05 - 00:38:21]	 In Europe somehow the chain was broken, the link back to the elder gods and goddesses and to the biological organization of human society before history was lost.
[00:38:21 - 00:38:39]	 And this curious kind of ungoverned intellectual development occurred. Ungoverned in the literal sense of a machine which slips from the control of its governor.
[00:38:39 - 00:39:01]	 And in that situation materialism which is an insupportable philosophy actually if you have an openness, a sensitivity, any kind of cultivated feminine response to nature it is utterly impossible.
[00:39:01 - 00:39:15]	 Recall that the Cartesian, the point of view of Cartesian materialism pushed Descartes to actually claiming in public debate that animals were machines.
[00:39:15 - 00:39:36]	 He said they feel nothing. The apparent display of pain is simply something which we project onto them because we alone have a soul and Descartes you see himself had not gone over completely to materialism.
[00:39:36 - 00:39:46]	 He believed there was a human soul but it came tangential at only one point to the human body.
[00:39:46 - 00:39:55]	 Somewhere in the pineal gland there was a switch and the soul was running things like a telephone switchboard operator from there.
[00:39:55 - 00:40:09]	 Well very shortly after Descartes his followers just said well we don't need this. This soul concept was just a thing to stay on the right side of the church and we don't need it and they cut it loose.
[00:40:09 - 00:40:32]	 Well once you cut that loose then you have all kinds of permission. You have permission to rape and exploit nature, permission which had already been reinforced for Western man by the New Testament but now raised to the nth degree by the assumption that nature is utterly without soul.
[00:40:32 - 00:40:47]	 And this philosophy persisted well into the 1950s. The essence of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism was can be summed up in the statement nature is mute.
[00:40:47 - 00:41:04]	 That was Sartre's position on nature. How many people thinking themselves existentialists and hanging out in coffee houses actually ever worked through what the consequences of the existential point of view was.
[00:41:04 - 00:41:18]	 Nature is not mute. You really have to have worked yourself into a weird place to believe that you know. In fact nature is entirely something else.
[00:41:18 - 00:41:40]	 Nature is communication because nature is psyche. This is what we haven't understood. We have somehow talked ourselves into the belief that into the natural world of Eden God came and made man and from man woman.
[00:41:40 - 00:41:56]	 And that men and women are of so ontologically a different level than the rest of nature that no conclusion about us can be drawn from an examination of nature.
[00:41:56 - 00:42:24]	 Nothing could I mean it's impossible for me to understand how this idea persists and has such momentum in the 20th century where hierarchy theory has very very clearly explicated the notion of the linkage of higher order systems to subsystems that are physically more simple.
[00:42:24 - 00:42:41]	 So you see really what we have is a kind of fractal universe. In fact it's not greatly different from the alchemical view of the 16th century where people said as above so below.
[00:42:41 - 00:42:56]	 The microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm. What this is really saying is that at the level of a planet you get a certain level of organization and spectrum of peripheral effects.
[00:42:56 - 00:43:12]	 The same thing such as self reflection, self regulation, intent, goal projection, steering toward perceived goals. You get the same kind of thing on the level of a society.
[00:43:12 - 00:43:32]	 Can be a beehive or a herd of antelope or whatever and you get it in the human individual and the human society. So really what is to be seen is that we are the cutting edge of becoming.
[00:43:32 - 00:43:48]	 We are not a thing apart. We are a unique level of a multi-leveled organism and we have been called forth out of nature by nature for a purpose.
[00:43:48 - 00:44:08]	 And what is our task as individuals I think is to discover what that purpose is and then to align ourselves with it in a way which allows the plan whatever it is to most smoothly unfold.
[00:44:08 - 00:44:18]	 Well what it seems to be is a progressive invocation of spirit. The theme with which I began the evening.
[00:44:18 - 00:44:45]	 That through language, through abstraction, through magical invocation, the formulation of religions, the projection of art, the field phenomena, the phenomena which are diffused in space and time and not easily located are forcing or intruding their way into three dimensional space and time.
[00:44:45 - 00:44:59]	 If you were an extraterrestrial in a starship in orbit around this planet, what you would see looking down is a gene swarm.
[00:44:59 - 00:45:24]	 The species that seem to us to be animal forms extremely stable in time are actually highly permeable membranes over millennia and tens of millennia with genes crossing over, moving around and being basically obedient to the expression of some kind of teleological form.
[00:45:24 - 00:45:34]	 And it was the concern of 19th century biology to eliminate teleology, to eliminate purpose and directedness.
[00:45:34 - 00:46:03]	 But it's very hard to avoid the impression of some kind of attractor ahead of this planet embedded in its history and somehow channeling everything toward it so that the progressive acceleration of human society, of information production, of communication, the proliferation of languages, natural and synthetic,
[00:46:03 - 00:46:22]	 all of these things are not something going on in the human domain and somehow sealed from the general state of nature, but are in fact part of the general state of nature.
[00:46:22 - 00:46:45]	 And the human experience or the human animal as the carrier of this catalytic process, this speeding up and accelerating a process on the surface of the planet is not sealed from nature, but the leading edge, the leading edge of a process on this planet.
[00:46:45 - 00:47:00]	 Now, teleology was so antithetical to 19th century science because they were trying to pull away from the telos of medieval scholastic philosophy.
[00:47:00 - 00:47:12]	 They didn't want God, these 19th century English atheists, Darwin and Lyle and that crowd.
[00:47:12 - 00:47:29]	 However, we have come through the so-called death of God and the elimination of a theological res undetra for the universe.
[00:47:29 - 00:47:47]	 And now we're looking more at a telos which we would operationally define rather than define it based on ancient revelation, which was the previous method was the older the book, the truer it must be.
[00:47:47 - 00:47:51]	 And the Bible is the oldest book and therefore it must be true.
[00:47:51 - 00:47:59]	 This is what Merciely odd calls the nostalgia for paradise paradigm of time.
[00:47:59 - 00:48:08]	 We are overcoming that. It can now be seen that there is, in fact, some kind of transcendental object.
[00:48:08 - 00:48:13]	 And it's best to try and describe it phenomenologically.
[00:48:13 - 00:48:24]	 We don't know what it is, but we do know that it's an enormous attractor of some sort. And we are in the field of attraction.
[00:48:24 - 00:48:31]	 And by we, I mean all life on the planet is being drawn into this nodal point.
[00:48:31 - 00:48:50]	 And it is possible to anticipate it through the psychedelic experience, because apparently the natural and the linguistic world are worlds which are organized along the principle of fractal curves.
[00:48:50 - 00:48:55]	 Fractal curves are recently discovered mathematical objects.
[00:48:55 - 00:48:57]	 Not all of them are recently discovered.
[00:48:57 - 00:49:05]	 Some were known as late as the late 19th century, but most have been discovered using computers in the last 10 or 15 years.
[00:49:05 - 00:49:18]	 And they are self similar curves such that when you take a subset of one of these mathematical objects, it is found to have the whole pattern embedded in it.
[00:49:18 - 00:49:35]	 The Fourier transforms that describe holograms are these kind of things, coastlines, mountain ranges, data of all sorts when analyzed in a certain way is found to be fractal.
[00:49:35 - 00:49:46]	 Apparently the world is a kind of vast spiral fractal that is achieving greater and greater closure with itself.
[00:49:46 - 00:50:05]	 And we experience this density of closure and this compressionism as the spectrum of effects which we call human evolution, human history, emergence of high technology, the present moment, the rush toward apocalypse.
[00:50:05 - 00:50:17]	 The most intense moments that the universe has ever known are the next 15 seconds and beyond that lies still more intense moments.
[00:50:17 - 00:50:37]	 Novelty as a kind of generalized paradigm of the compression of connectedness throughout the cosmos is accelerating moment by moment in the rocks, in the trees, in the stars, and in us.
[00:50:37 - 00:50:48]	 And so what we call history, which is not as modern, the modern theory of history is that it's what they call trendlessly fluctuating.
[00:50:48 - 00:51:01]	 That's their model of the world. You get order at the atomic level, order at the biological level, order, order, order, and suddenly you reach human beings trendlessly fluctuating.
[00:51:01 - 00:51:17]	 It's as though we were affected by the Brownian movement of random particles and yet we somehow out of all this ordering we're to believe that then emerges the trendless fluctuation of human history.
[00:51:17 - 00:51:24]	 Actually this is nonsense. It's simply that there has never been a thorough going theory of history.
[00:51:24 - 00:51:46]	 However, now we are ready for them because these wave mechanical ideas, the notions of closure, Sheldrake's idea about the presence of the past, the way in which the past drives the present, all of these things lay us open for an understanding of the compression and densification of time.
[00:51:46 - 00:51:58]	 And this is what is experienced in the psychedelic experience. Really, you know, Whitehead said of Dove Gray that it haunts time like a ghost.
[00:51:58 - 00:52:27]	 Well, I think that the compression of the three dimensional universe at the end of time haunts time like a ghost. It's the cosmic giggle. Here a messiah, there a shaman, there an ecstatic poet, and there the tiny ripple that is simply a congruent coincidence in the life of a single individual.
[00:52:27 - 00:52:50]	 Robert Anton Wilson called this the cosmic giggle. It's when something protrudes through the forward flowing momentum of rational casuistry and causes it to flow around it and eddy and churn and then you like you see through for a moment and you say, well, what is it?
[00:52:50 - 00:53:12]	 There was a plottedness for a moment. There was the hand of the maker there, but now I don't see it anymore. That is the going behind the veil. That is the seeing into the structure of being that lies behind the conventionalized languages.
[00:53:12 - 00:53:34]	 That's why coincidence is so often reported as an accompanying phenomenon for the psychedelic experience because really syntax is dissolved and syntax is a filter for this sense of eminent connectedness.
[00:53:34 - 00:53:52]	 And when the syntax goes, the eminent connectedness flows in. Then it's a question of what you do with it. If it causes you to believe that you are going to save the world, then you haven't gotten the message right. That's inflation.
[00:53:52 - 00:54:14]	 And inflation is very bad. It drives up interest rates. So if you get that kind of a take on it, you are misusing it. Nevertheless, the most advanced yogic techniques that are known are the techniques of the so-called Anuttharayoga Tantra.
[00:54:14 - 00:54:31]	 The tantric yogic techniques. And there the prescription is, it says in Herbert Gunther's "Treasures of the Tibetan Middle Way," you should think of your house as a resplendent palace.
[00:54:31 - 00:54:48]	 Think of your utensils as made of beaten gold. And think of yourself as having a body made of living mercury. What this is in Western psychological terms is an invitation to inflation.
[00:54:48 - 00:55:08]	 But if it is approached with the right analysis of mind, basically that there is nothing but body-mind and there is no particularization in time and space, then there is no inflationary feedback into the ego.
[00:55:08 - 00:55:25]	 And this is the kind of opportunity that the psychedelic opens up. It is, I've said many times, quoting Plato, "Time is the moving image of eternity."
[00:55:25 - 00:55:43]	 Time is the moving image of eternity. What the shaman does is he or she leaves the mundane plane and in Iliad's phrase is able to trigger a rupture of plane.
[00:55:43 - 00:56:03]	 And the rupture of plane carries the shamanizing person into another dimension. Literally another dimension. And in that other dimension, all of time and space is beheld, as James Joyce said, "in a nutshell."
[00:56:03 - 00:56:23]	 And in the nutshell of time and space, everything is seen to be a part and an aesthetically pleasing, integral, necessary part of the transcendental object.
[00:56:23 - 00:56:33]	 In fact, what this universe is, is a lower dimensional slice of that same transcendental object.
[00:56:33 - 00:56:43]	 Well, I guess what impels my career and what I really can't get over is that what I'm saying to you is true.
[00:56:43 - 00:56:58]	 You know, that I mean, we sit here, we gather here, and even though we're talking about this extremely far out thing, still all the forms are in place.
[00:56:58 - 00:57:08]	 I'm here, you're there, everybody sits on their ass, nobody sits on their head. It all appears fairly mundane.
[00:57:08 - 00:57:19]	 How can it be that what we are talking about is the nearby presence of an impossibly alien dimension?
[00:57:19 - 00:57:42]	 Now, if that alien dimension had been reported back to us by a robot probe dropped into the methane oceans of Europa, we would be all hot to go there to organize a 20 billion dollar expedition and a 15 year plan and go out there and find out what is happening.
[00:57:42 - 00:57:53]	 The amazing thing is that, you know, each one of us in our own living room can be this Magellan, can penetrate into these dimensions.
[00:57:53 - 00:58:11]	 It really seems quite freaky to me. Freaky to me that such a thing is possible and yet that we are such monkeys or so culturally constrained or so blind that this is not what we're all talking about.
[00:58:11 - 00:58:26]	 All the time, and by we all I mean all five billion of us on this planet, because we appear to be being pushed down a featureless corridor toward a furnace.
[00:58:26 - 00:58:48]	 And yet, if you would notice, there are all these doors along the side of the so-called featureless corridor and nobody seems to have cognized that you can just open these doors and walk through and short circuit the inevitability of planetary disaster.
[00:58:48 - 00:59:03]	 Amazing. Amazing. Because we pride ourselves on our commitment that science allows us to look anywhere, inspect any possibility.
[00:59:03 - 00:59:19]	 Our models are not dictated to us by the church or by government or by industry, when in fact they are dictated to us by the church, government, industry, mammalian organization.
[00:59:19 - 00:59:43]	 And so we are no better off than all those benighted people in those previous ages where we look back upon them and say, well, they must have been so limited by their worldview because they didn't know about quantum physics and ketamine and Michael Jackson and cable TV and all of these things.
[00:59:43 - 00:59:58]	 But the fact of the matter is that unless we push through culture to nature, we too are dupes. We too are somehow being sold a line.
[00:59:58 - 01:00:15]	 And yet nature is there outside of the cities. You drive an hour and a half from where we're sitting and you're in the high desert and it is demon haunted, paleolithic space.
[01:00:15 - 01:00:32]	 It holds the same promise for us as moderns that it held for the Luiseno Indians who were initiated into it, into their shamanic institution before the conquest, before history.
[01:00:32 - 01:00:50]	 So nature is the final arbiter of cultural forms. This is what Taoism understood. And this is what I believe the psychedelic plant thing is pushing us toward.
[01:00:50 - 01:01:15]	 It was not immediately apparent that this was so, because as I said at the beginning of this talk in the 60s, the psychedelics came out of the laboratory and only the most scholarly of the trippers bothered to study the natural origins and the anthropological and ethnographic context in which these things were coming from.
[01:01:15 - 01:01:24]	 Like the Eleusinian mysteries or the Mexican morning glory mysteries or the Watson discovered mushroom mysteries.
[01:01:24 - 01:01:53]	 But if we can somehow link a respect to nature, a sensitivity to Gaia, a valuing of ourselves, a complete placing of our own feelings and our own perceptions in the forefront of trustworthy sources and the psychedelics integrated into our lives.
[01:01:53 - 01:02:18]	 Then there will be a tremendous cultural impact, a tremendous reorientation, because the message that nature is trying to give the steering signal on the human species comes through the accessing of this shamanic dimension outside of history.
[01:02:18 - 01:02:28]	 Revolutions are made by tiny percentages of the populations in which they are, in which those revolutions are wrought.
[01:02:28 - 01:02:49]	 The important thing is clarity and connectedness and a clear understanding of who one's antecedents are, what the source antecedents are and what the target goal is.
[01:02:49 - 01:02:53]	 New Age is a pale label for what is going on.
[01:02:54 - 01:03:03]	 New Age sounds too much like New Nixon, New Reagan, new retreaded everything.
[01:03:03 - 01:03:21]	 What is happening is an archaic revival, a harking back to cultural models 10 to 25,000 years old because the profane fall into history is actually ending.
[01:03:21 - 01:03:44]	 The way the fall into history ends is with the progeny of Adam, the human race recovering the control of the human form, the control of the human soul, the ability to turn ourselves into whatever we wish to be.
[01:03:44 - 01:03:56]	 This comes through the union of imagination, through understanding into nature, the invocation of the dream.
[01:03:56 - 01:04:00]	 This is what the Australian Aboriginal Society is talking about.
[01:04:00 - 01:04:03]	 This is what the dream time is.
[01:04:03 - 01:04:13]	 Finnegan's Wake says, "Up in the end, prospector, you warp your woof and spread your wings, sprout all your worth."
[01:04:13 - 01:04:29]	 This up in the end, this end of time, this birth into angelhood lies ahead of us, but it is really part of the archaic return to the paradisical mode before history.
[01:04:29 - 01:04:34]	 The psychedelic hallucinogens are the catalysts.
[01:04:34 - 01:05:02]	 The minds that they touch become the catalysts within the society in general, and from there, the fashions, the social forms, the kinds of conscientiousness, the innate decency that is called forth by the authenticity of the experience is what will transform us.
[01:05:02 - 01:05:19]	 I mean, in the same way that an affair can become a love affair if there is mutual authenticity of behavior rather than simply a kind of flirting, flirtation.
[01:05:19 - 01:05:44]	 In that same way, our affair with Gaia can be a love affair if we can summon to ourselves the vision to make it so, and it means really being aware of the vastness of the options, of the precipice that late 20th century historical human beings stand on.
[01:05:44 - 01:05:48]	 We are about to leave for the stars.
[01:05:48 - 01:05:51]	 This is what is happening on this planet.
[01:05:51 - 01:05:55]	 A species prepares to depart for the stars.
[01:05:55 - 01:06:00]	 To do that, energy has to be marshaled.
[01:06:00 - 01:06:12]	 The lessons of the long march out of the trees and to this moment have to be collated, sifted, refined, concentrated.
[01:06:12 - 01:06:14]	 That is the alchemical gold.
[01:06:14 - 01:06:22]	 The historical process is the story of a prodigal son of a wandering and a return.
[01:06:22 - 01:06:27]	 The return is meaningless without the wandering.
[01:06:27 - 01:06:38]	 The wandering has no meaning unless its fruits are given birth after the return.
[01:06:38 - 01:06:45]	 I think that the last thousand years has been the prodigal journey into matter.
[01:06:45 - 01:07:02]	 It ends finally with modern pharmacology, modern ethnobotany discovering in the jungles of the Amazon and the mountains of Mexico the body of Eros, Osiris, fallen since the time of the flood,
[01:07:02 - 01:07:09]	 but awaiting the reemergence of the cognizant human connection.
[01:07:09 - 01:07:14]	 That is what the archaic revival holds out.
[01:07:14 - 01:07:16]	 It's actually our salvation.
[01:07:16 - 01:07:19]	 I mean, I think I'm fairly hard-nosed.
[01:07:19 - 01:07:21]	 I don't see any hope for us.
[01:07:21 - 01:07:30]	 I don't see any hope for institutional transformation unless it is done with an awareness of the transcendental object
[01:07:30 - 01:07:45]	 and the religions that we inherit from the past are so screwed up that the only way to validate and empower the transcendental object is by self-experience, by direct accessing.
[01:07:45 - 01:07:49]	 And people say, "Well, but can't it be done on the natch?"
[01:07:49 - 01:07:57]	 No, it can't be done on the natch, generally speaking, because if it could be, it would have been done.
[01:07:57 - 01:08:10]	 I mean, there are plenty of elder societies on this planet who have the rap down, you know, but look at the kind of societies that they erect.
[01:08:10 - 01:08:18]	 I mean, horrifyingly dehumanized societies seem to be the breeding place of the most sublime religions there are.
[01:08:18 - 01:08:23]	 So, no, I think it has to be, there has to be a humbling.
[01:08:23 - 01:08:37]	 We have to bow our heads and abandon the dualism that we inherit out of Christianity and science and the whole Judeo-Christian-Islamic schtick.
[01:08:37 - 01:08:42]	 We have to realize that it requires a symbiotic partner.
[01:08:42 - 01:08:46]	 It's a hand-in-hand effort.
[01:08:46 - 01:09:04]	 And if we are willing to take the hand which nature offers in the strange form of the alien vegetation spirit from the stars that seems to infuse us on plant hallucinogens, then we will go forward into a bright new world.
[01:09:04 - 01:09:07]	 It's a partnership. It's a challenge.
[01:09:07 - 01:09:13]	 It's the only game in the planetary village.
[01:09:13 - 01:09:37]	 And I appreciate your letting me share with you my notion of it this evening. Thank you.
[01:09:37 - 01:09:43]	 We're going to take about a 10 or 15 minute break and then do question and answers.
[01:09:43 - 01:09:54]	 There are a bunch of handouts, catalogs, events coming up, stuff on tables at the back of the room, which I urge you to take a look at.