[00:00:00 - 00:00:11] Can you all hear what I'm saying? [00:00:11 - 00:00:12] Yes. [00:00:12 - 00:00:18] [laughter] [00:00:18 - 00:00:21] And how many of you can see what I'm saying? [00:00:21 - 00:00:29] [laughter] [00:00:29 - 00:00:34] Before I tell you the story that I came here to tell, [00:00:34 - 00:00:43] I will talk a little bit about the practical side of what we've been discussing in the past couple of days [00:00:43 - 00:00:49] as it impacts on the life of my partner and myself. [00:00:49 - 00:00:54] We're going to talk a lot this morning about plants, [00:00:54 - 00:01:00] and it will be about plants as they were used thousands of years ago [00:01:00 - 00:01:04] and in places far distant from here. [00:01:04 - 00:01:11] But implicit in what I'm saying is very real-world work that we're doing in Hawaii [00:01:11 - 00:01:18] to preserve plants with a history of human and shamanic usage, [00:01:18 - 00:01:24] because our focus of interest is the Amazon and shamanism. [00:01:24 - 00:01:27] We've concentrated in that area. [00:01:27 - 00:01:32] But throughout the world, there are, as you know well, [00:01:32 - 00:01:38] very fragile ecosystems on the brink of disappearing forever. [00:01:38 - 00:01:43] But even more fragile than these natural ecosystems [00:01:43 - 00:01:50] is the web and legacy of human understanding that has been gathered through the millennia [00:01:50 - 00:01:54] by the native peoples in these areas. [00:01:54 - 00:02:01] And throughout the warm tropics especially, the impact is very great. [00:02:01 - 00:02:07] The young men and women are not apprenticing themselves to the elder shamans. [00:02:07 - 00:02:11] The men go off to work in sawmills. The women become waitresses. [00:02:11 - 00:02:18] They are being sucked into the engine of world capitalism. [00:02:18 - 00:02:27] And in a single generation, this legacy of plant information that reaches back 20,000, 50,000 years [00:02:27 - 00:02:29] will in large measure be lost. [00:02:29 - 00:02:34] We're seeing this in the Amazon. Much has already been lost. [00:02:34 - 00:02:43] So Kat and I and Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard and Rupert Sheldrake, [00:02:43 - 00:02:50] Ralph Abraham, Ralph Metzner, Frank Barr, a number of people have gathered together [00:02:50 - 00:03:00] and formed a nonprofit foundation whose showcase project is a 19-acre botanical garden in Hawaii [00:03:00 - 00:03:08] that preserves these plants and supports native collectors in Peru and other places [00:03:08 - 00:03:17] so that this botanical material can be preserved with no real plan for it other than its preservation. [00:03:17 - 00:03:24] It is there available to psychotherapists, biochemists, homeopathists, [00:03:24 - 00:03:29] anyone who has a legitimate angle on these things. [00:03:29 - 00:03:36] So I want to mention that to you this morning because we always are soliciting support, [00:03:36 - 00:03:41] not only financial support but donations of time and equipment. [00:03:41 - 00:03:49] And if you come to the Hawaiian Islands, you could put us into your loop at times when we're there [00:03:49 - 00:03:52] and we would be happy to show you around. [00:03:52 - 00:03:59] The garden is at about 2,200 feet above sea level with 70 inches of rainfall a year, [00:03:59 - 00:04:03] which at 19 degrees north, which is what it is, [00:04:03 - 00:04:11] approximately duplicates what's going on in the montane rainforest of the equator at about 8,500 feet, [00:04:11 - 00:04:14] which is the so-called cloud forest. [00:04:14 - 00:04:17] So it's a beautiful place. [00:04:17 - 00:04:23] It's a highly charged place because magical plants from throughout the world are growing there. [00:04:23 - 00:04:32] And I mention it to show that we don't entirely live in our heads in these matters. [00:04:32 - 00:04:34] [laughter] [00:04:34 - 00:04:36] The Big Island. [00:04:36 - 00:04:38] The Big Island of Hawaii. [00:04:38 - 00:04:42] The Big Island is larger than all the other Hawaiian islands combined, [00:04:42 - 00:04:45] and it has fewer people than any other island. [00:04:45 - 00:04:48] And where, if old Hawaii lingers on at all, [00:04:48 - 00:04:56] it's probably in the desolate districts of the Big Island. [00:04:56 - 00:04:58] Well, so that's enough of that. [00:04:58 - 00:05:06] Now I want to address the concerns that we've been dealing with over the past two days. [00:05:06 - 00:05:19] And from my perspective, we sort of designed this weekend with the notion of showcasing Rian's thought, [00:05:19 - 00:05:21] and I think we've done that very well. [00:05:21 - 00:05:24] And for those of you who haven't had a chance to hear her, [00:05:24 - 00:05:28] she very kindly has promised to join me this afternoon. [00:05:28 - 00:05:31] She didn't originally intend that. [00:05:31 - 00:05:39] We have a very fertile kind of dialogue going among all the people who have been here over the past two days. [00:05:39 - 00:05:42] And so we will return to that. [00:05:42 - 00:05:48] To put what I'm going to say this morning in context, I just want to briefly review the basis of her theory. [00:05:48 - 00:05:56] It is quite simply that the absence of patriarchy does not imply matriarchy. [00:05:56 - 00:06:05] The most natural and most long-running form of human organization is what Rian has named partnership society. [00:06:05 - 00:06:15] Partnership societies were the norm up until, pick a number, 4,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, [00:06:15 - 00:06:23] in any case eventually falling with the fall of Minoan Creek to Mycenaean invaders around 1000 BC. [00:06:23 - 00:06:31] And that set us into the era of dominated cultures, which she believes, and I agree with her, [00:06:31 - 00:06:45] is a temporary, I won't say aberration, a temporary necessary adaptation, but one that we can now move beyond. [00:06:45 - 00:06:55] My, Rian's approach is basically to say what happened, that there was partnership society, [00:06:55 - 00:07:08] and then she's very insistent that there was a confluence of factors which caused the shift from the partnership society to the dominated culture. [00:07:08 - 00:07:18] I, being cast more in the fanatical mode, prefer to think that there was one major cause, [00:07:18 - 00:07:33] and that its adumbrations can be explicated by the methods of archaeology, good logic, and a little visionary imagining. [00:07:33 - 00:07:41] And so I want to tell you the story this morning. Remember I said yesterday the best idea will win. [00:07:41 - 00:07:48] And so we're sort of in a contest in the manner of the great Celtic poetry contest of old, [00:07:48 - 00:07:56] where the person who can dream up the best idea will have the satisfaction of seeing it realized. [00:07:56 - 00:08:04] And if you want to do that kind of total revisioning of the position of human beings in the world, [00:08:04 - 00:08:17] I think you have to take at first a deconstructionist approach, and take away everything that impedes the construction of the new point of view. [00:08:17 - 00:08:24] So I want to take away a number of notions and just get rid of them. [00:08:24 - 00:08:36] One notion is that nature is a competition of tooth and claw, and that the swiftest, the fiercest, the meanest will always come out on top. [00:08:36 - 00:08:45] This is just a notion that was attractive to a Victorian gentleman who happened to be in charge of a world-screwing empire. [00:08:45 - 00:08:48] [laughter] [00:08:48 - 00:08:59] Any modern biologist will tell you that what is being maximized in biological systems is cooperation, integration, [00:08:59 - 00:09:05] mutual reinforcement, and mutual meeting of need. [00:09:05 - 00:09:17] Obviously if an organism can insinuate itself into the energy loop of another organism, it will have more of its own energy to play with. [00:09:17 - 00:09:26] And this is the strategy that is operating, especially on the microbial level, in the earth, around the roots of plants. [00:09:26 - 00:09:36] You know, there are mycorrhizal relationships, fungi that surround the roots of plants, mediate and buffer the liquids passing into the plants, [00:09:36 - 00:09:41] and in turn have a release of nutrients that supports them. [00:09:41 - 00:09:46] We see symbiosis in all kinds of situations in nature. [00:09:46 - 00:09:58] What has never been really even suggested, let alone researched, is that perhaps the unique qualities that attend our own species [00:09:58 - 00:10:06] are somehow reinforced and stabilized by our own symbiotic relationship, [00:10:06 - 00:10:13] that we are also symbiotes of some sort to other organisms in nature. [00:10:13 - 00:10:19] Now, a symbiotic relationship can be broken apart. [00:10:19 - 00:10:29] The little fish which live in the protection of the tentacles of anemones, and thereby draw larger fish in for the anemones to feed upon, [00:10:29 - 00:10:40] can live in the absence of the anemone, but when they do, they produce smaller individuals that experience a shorter lifespan, [00:10:40 - 00:10:43] and the population is generally more limited. [00:10:43 - 00:10:56] So, when a creature that has evolved a symbiotic relationship is through catastrophe or design separated from its, the other member of the pair, [00:10:56 - 00:11:07] life goes on, but there is a sense of burden, a sense of moving against the flow, a sense of abandonment. [00:11:07 - 00:11:20] Well, this sense of abandonment being moved against the flow is a very good description of the psychological set we inherit at the beginning of our history, [00:11:20 - 00:11:32] because as we discussed a little bit yesterday, our history begins with us being tossed out of a garden by Jehovah as Narc, [00:11:32 - 00:11:45] because the woman had exercised her right to conscious self-exploration and awareness by eating of the fruit of the tree of life. [00:11:45 - 00:12:01] It suggests to me that it was the relationship with the fruit of the tree of life that made early human beings somehow co-equal with the dragon god who was the keeper of the garden. [00:12:01 - 00:12:12] So that the fall into history is a mythological way of saying that we were separated very early from something very dear to us. [00:12:12 - 00:12:22] It was rent away from us, and inevitably the image that must come into all our minds is the image of a child being separated from its mother. [00:12:22 - 00:12:35] Well, in the present dialogue within the new age, we've gotten to the point of sharing the notion that we have become separated from the mother, our earth, [00:12:35 - 00:12:43] but it operates at the level of a kind of poetic notion or a reassuring abstraction. [00:12:43 - 00:12:58] I mean, how do we reconnect to our mother, the earth, by talking about it? Is it done through agriculture, or is that a violation of the mother? How is it to be done? [00:12:58 - 00:13:04] Well, what I'm going to say this morning is sort of a blend of myth, mania, and science, [00:13:04 - 00:13:13] where we take the best from each category and try to weave together an argument that would convince a skeptic. [00:13:13 - 00:13:21] So those of you who have heard me do this before, bear with me. It grows in my mind. I adumbrate detail. [00:13:21 - 00:13:28] It has to be made tighter and tighter and ever more convincing. [00:13:28 - 00:13:38] Because the goal is if we can change the myths about our origins, we can change the expectation about our future, [00:13:38 - 00:13:46] because the future, the post-historical future, is somehow going to be a revivifying of the myth of origin. [00:13:46 - 00:13:51] So if we go into it with the wrong myth, we may get in trouble. [00:13:51 - 00:14:06] And I think a patriarchal, egocentric, Apollonian, Solarian myth that would send us sort of as insect robots to the stars in spaceships the size of Manhattan, [00:14:06 - 00:14:13] needs, is unbalanced, a certain leavening. [00:14:13 - 00:14:18] Okay, so enough with prologue. Here is the story. [00:14:18 - 00:14:31] The story begins a long time ago, and it really has no beginning, because at its inception it's locked in to the geological and geophysical mechanics of the planet. [00:14:31 - 00:14:42] It begins somewhere in the last four million years with a slow drying trend across the northern hemisphere of the planet, [00:14:42 - 00:14:51] affecting especially the tropical forests of Africa, which at this time are unbroken from north to south. [00:14:51 - 00:14:59] And over the next million and a half years, Africa grows progressively drier, not desert. [00:14:59 - 00:15:03] It was not even desert as recently as Roman times. [00:15:03 - 00:15:10] Pliny describes the Sahara Desert as the breadbasket of Rome. [00:15:10 - 00:15:21] But over a million and a half years, Africa grew drier, and the great tropical forests were replaced by a lush grassland environment, [00:15:21 - 00:15:30] a grassland environment broken by enormous oases of remnant rainforest. [00:15:30 - 00:15:41] And in this remnant rainforest, the arboreal primates that lie far back in our family tree began to respond to environmental pressure [00:15:41 - 00:15:55] and began to shift from a fruit-eating, almost entirely fruit and insect-eating diet to a more omnivorous diet because of the limitation of protein. [00:15:55 - 00:16:06] They also began to experiment with descending from the trees to hunt small rodents and small animals that were inhabiting the grasslands, [00:16:06 - 00:16:11] which were rich with evolving cereals of different sorts. [00:16:11 - 00:16:22] Now, while all of this was going on, ungulate animals, animals like bison and cattle and buffalo and wildebeest and ibex and antelope, [00:16:22 - 00:16:27] were evolving in great numbers on the African veld. [00:16:27 - 00:16:34] So this drying trend was creating the savannas of the world. [00:16:34 - 00:16:38] There never before had been savanna land on this planet. [00:16:38 - 00:16:47] But it was coming into being in the interior of Sumatra, across the African veld, and in parts of India. [00:16:47 - 00:16:52] And this special ecology of ungulate animals was evolving. [00:16:52 - 00:17:01] Now, the primates who had been living in the trees already had a highly evolved pack signaling system. [00:17:01 - 00:17:10] As you know, if you've observed howler monkeys or woolly monkeys in the jungle, they have a language of chirps and squeaks and shouts [00:17:10 - 00:17:19] that is fairly dense, at least in the existential moment. [00:17:19 - 00:17:26] Meaning they're not talking philosophy. They're tending to business. [00:17:26 - 00:17:35] So attending this exploration of the surface, this leaving of the trees, was a tendency toward bipedalism, [00:17:35 - 00:17:42] which reinforced the already existent tendency to binocular vision that had evolved in the arboreal environment. [00:17:42 - 00:17:47] So you see, there's a kind of confluence here of factors. [00:17:47 - 00:17:59] Bipedalism, omnivorousness, binocular vision, a repertoire of pack signals, a social mode of existence already very old. [00:17:59 - 00:18:10] And into this situation comes the opportunity to evolve in the grasslands into a larger pack hunting group [00:18:10 - 00:18:19] that is now including meat in its diet and that is competing with these animals of the veld. [00:18:19 - 00:18:28] There was a very interesting conference held a couple of years ago in which very straight paleontologists concluded [00:18:28 - 00:18:35] that the great wave of extinction of the giant mammals that went on about three million years ago [00:18:35 - 00:18:38] was actually a human induced phenomenon. [00:18:38 - 00:18:47] And this is why the woolly mammoth and dimetrodon and the giant tree sloth and the giant armadillo [00:18:47 - 00:18:54] and these huge, huge, the Irish elk, these huge animals that used to roam the planet no longer exist. [00:18:54 - 00:18:58] The human impact was already happening that far back. [00:18:58 - 00:19:05] Rian's bailiwick seems to be sort of from the invention of agriculture to the atomic bomb. [00:19:05 - 00:19:09] The area that I'm interested in has that embedded in it. [00:19:09 - 00:19:17] I'm interested in sort of the time from the last glaciation to the first starship, whatever that may be. [00:19:17 - 00:19:29] And, okay, to make a long story slightly shorter, the critical factor that enters in when you look at the evolution of human beings [00:19:29 - 00:19:35] is a sudden and unexplained doubling in brain size about 50,000 years ago. [00:19:35 - 00:19:44] Before that time, the human brain had enlarged itself only about 12% in the previous two and a half million years. [00:19:44 - 00:19:48] But suddenly, 50,000 years ago, the brain size doubled. [00:19:48 - 00:19:54] At the same time, the Neanderthal flowering came to an end and they began to fade. [00:19:54 - 00:19:58] The last Neanderthal skeleton that we have is 20,000 years old. [00:19:58 - 00:20:03] So over a period of 20,000 years, these two species shared the planet. [00:20:03 - 00:20:09] The X factor, the thing which changes everything, is, in my opinion, [00:20:09 - 00:20:21] the fact that these pack hunting baboon-like proto-hominoid primates encountered in the process of trailing behind these large mammalian herds that had evolved in the grassland, [00:20:21 - 00:20:24] they encountered the manure of these creatures. [00:20:24 - 00:20:33] And in this manure were the coprophytic psilocybin-containing mushrooms, specifically Staphylocubensis. [00:20:33 - 00:20:44] And I have observed the habits of baboons in East Africa, and it is, they are creatures of the belt, they are omnivorous, they scramble around, [00:20:44 - 00:20:52] and every time they come to a cow pie, they flip it over because they're looking for grubs and bugs which make up a major part of their diet. [00:20:52 - 00:20:56] And they sniff, they're great sniffers and food testers. [00:20:56 - 00:21:05] Well, the mushroom in this kind of environment is an extremely noticeable natural object. [00:21:05 - 00:21:11] I've seen Staphylocubensis mushrooms the size of dinner plates in Amazonian pasture. [00:21:11 - 00:21:22] It's standing on stalks 14 inches high, and the thing has, you know, this pearlescent, phallic, lunar, solar, I mean, it's everything. [00:21:22 - 00:21:27] It's the perfect sacramental plant for a partnership society. [00:21:27 - 00:21:35] It is as strongly phallic and solar as it is lunar and feminine. [00:21:35 - 00:21:45] It's associated with the moon, and yet it has, you know, this brilliant golden-yellow color, and it is yet a thing of the night, [00:21:45 - 00:21:50] and it's taken at night to enter into the mysteries of the night mother. [00:21:50 - 00:21:58] So, looking for support for this idea, and I mentioned this earlier, [00:21:58 - 00:22:07] I discovered that in the 1960s, Rollin Fisher at the University of Maryland had given psilocybin to graduate students [00:22:07 - 00:22:10] and then given them standard visual acuity tests, [00:22:10 - 00:22:20] and he had discovered that small amounts of psilocybin actually increase scoring on a standard visual acuity test, [00:22:20 - 00:22:27] and he was a very straight Viennese guy, but he had this health and quality, and he said to me, [00:22:27 - 00:22:33] "You see, my little friend, this is a case," as if I needed convincing, [00:22:33 - 00:22:44] "This is a case where intoxication on a drug actually gives a truer picture of reality than the absence of the drug." [00:22:44 - 00:22:47] And it was true. It was empirically so. You see better. [00:22:47 - 00:22:53] Well, you don't have to know a lot about evolutionary theory to know that if there is a food [00:22:53 - 00:22:59] or in the food chain of a population of animals that confers increased visual acuity, [00:22:59 - 00:23:08] and this animal is a hunting animal, then those individuals of the species that have this enzyme, alkaloid, steroid, [00:23:08 - 00:23:14] whatever you want to call it, in their diet are going to have a selective adaptive advantage, [00:23:14 - 00:23:18] and their reproductive strategy will try and so forth and so on. [00:23:18 - 00:23:27] So, this was astonishing to me because this is an argument which is very appealing to the straightest kind of evolutionary biologists. [00:23:27 - 00:23:35] And then I began thinking about the ignored role of foods in evolution [00:23:35 - 00:23:45] and the fact that we are omnivorous through what appears to be a series of chance events, which I just discussed. [00:23:45 - 00:23:54] This omnivorous habit lays us open to tremendous numbers of mutagens, stimulants, depressants, [00:23:54 - 00:24:06] quasi-sterilizing agents, spermicides, ovicides, neurological enzymes of all sorts. [00:24:06 - 00:24:13] And so, really, this is a great untapped area for evolutionary biology to look at. [00:24:13 - 00:24:19] Is it possible that the unexplained extension of adolescence in humans [00:24:19 - 00:24:23] was somehow in effect synergized by steroids in the diet? [00:24:23 - 00:24:31] What about the fact that women have a hidden ovulation, unlike other primates? [00:24:31 - 00:24:38] There are a lot of questions about our sexuality and lactation, menstruation, [00:24:38 - 00:24:46] all of these enzyme-controlled processes that might be very suggestible in the study, [00:24:46 - 00:24:53] in effect of steroids, alkaloids, hallucinogens and whatnot in the proto-human diet. [00:24:53 - 00:25:01] I don't know how many of you know, but the birth control pill is made from diascoridine, which is yams. [00:25:01 - 00:25:09] Thousands of acres of Mexican land are in these steroid-rich diascoridine yams from which, [00:25:09 - 00:25:13] I forget the names of the pills, is it orthonolvum? Whatever they are, it's made. [00:25:13 - 00:25:20] Now, yams, sweet potatoes, are a staple of human populations in the tropics. [00:25:20 - 00:25:30] And yet, when you look at them chemically, there's a gradient from food to powerful reproduction-affecting drugs. [00:25:30 - 00:25:35] And if primitive populations were not aware of this, or perhaps were aware of it, [00:25:35 - 00:25:39] then they wouldn't have been using these effects or being subject to these effects. [00:25:39 - 00:25:45] So this is a rich area. Leave alone the subject of the hallucinogens. [00:25:45 - 00:25:51] I mean, you could look at stimulants and neurotoxins and all these other things I named. [00:25:51 - 00:25:56] But of course, my special interest was the hallucinogens, because what I was interested in [00:25:56 - 00:26:01] was the emergence of consciousness and this doubling of brain size. [00:26:01 - 00:26:04] How could it have happened so quickly? [00:26:04 - 00:26:16] Well, the scenario that I'm left with is that once this visual acuity thing was being reinforced in these pack-hunting primates, [00:26:16 - 00:26:23] the next level of discovery, and I suppose all these discoveries I'm going to talk about were made almost simultaneously, [00:26:23 - 00:26:37] was that twice the dose that increases visual acuity makes sexual activity extremely interesting, prolonged, variegated, and unusual. [00:26:37 - 00:26:46] And it's fairly clear that these primates, looking at all the other primate species and their social activity and carrying on, [00:26:46 - 00:26:49] I mean, we don't call it monkey business. [00:26:49 - 00:26:51] [laughter] [00:26:51 - 00:26:58] So here you have this thing impacting so far in two critical areas. [00:26:58 - 00:27:03] Number one, survival. You can see better to hunt your food and flee your enemy. [00:27:03 - 00:27:07] Number two, it's an aphrodisiac and a stimulant. [00:27:07 - 00:27:16] This will have an even more intense driving effect on the reproductive strategy of those individuals that are using it. [00:27:16 - 00:27:26] Quite simply, they have sex more often, so naturally they have their reproductive gene pool is advanced. [00:27:26 - 00:27:35] But neither of these things, fascinating though they are, is to my mind the major stimulus that put this thing so center stage [00:27:35 - 00:27:42] in calling us out of the monkey body and toward angelhood, [00:27:42 - 00:27:48] because after all, it's good for monkeys to see better and monkeys do enjoy sex, [00:27:48 - 00:28:02] but the way in which we differ from monkeys is our free command of mental constructs not present in the immediate environment. [00:28:02 - 00:28:04] In other words, memory. [00:28:04 - 00:28:08] Memory is the key to culture, I think. [00:28:08 - 00:28:13] You have to have memory as a precondition for language, because if you don't have memory, what good is language? [00:28:13 - 00:28:15] You have nothing to say. [00:28:15 - 00:28:21] Memory is the precondition for writing, for all forms of epigenetic coding, et cetera. [00:28:21 - 00:28:30] So to my mind, what's interesting about these vision-enhancing, sexually stimulating alkaloids in the food chain [00:28:30 - 00:28:35] is their impact on consciousness at yet higher doses. [00:28:35 - 00:28:45] At doses four or five times that which affects visual acuity, you are suddenly conveyed into the realm of, [00:28:45 - 00:28:53] for want of a better word, we would have to call it the holy or the tremendous or the mystery or the mysterious. [00:28:53 - 00:29:00] And at this point, suddenly the historical experience of the last 10,000 years falls away and is practically useless. [00:29:00 - 00:29:06] We are no better positioned to understand the thing encountered on high doses of plant hallucinogens [00:29:06 - 00:29:10] than were the people of the late Neolithic. [00:29:10 - 00:29:15] It remains utterly, overwhelmingly incomprehensible. [00:29:15 - 00:29:22] It remains a living, breathing mystery experienced in the here and now. [00:29:22 - 00:29:30] And so, as Gordon Wasson and others were quick to point out, it becomes the compass for the religious quest. [00:29:30 - 00:29:38] And the understanding of that mystery and abiding in that mystery becomes then the compass of the historical [00:29:38 - 00:29:43] and prehistorical religious quest of human beings. [00:29:43 - 00:29:56] And in this culture this comes as news, I guess, because for over 2,000 years we have been the victims of a dominator culture [00:29:56 - 00:30:04] that left no stone unturned in trying to stamp out and suppress direct access to the logos, [00:30:04 - 00:30:11] which was what these psychedelic sacraments that haunt prehistory were all about. [00:30:11 - 00:30:20] What was happening at Eleusis, what was happening at Delphi, what was happening in the pagan mystery religions of the proto-Hellenic period [00:30:20 - 00:30:29] was all the technological groping toward an accessing of the mystery. [00:30:29 - 00:30:38] Eden, I believe, was this world of the African grasslands of 12 to 25,000 years ago [00:30:38 - 00:30:55] when in great pinnacles of wind-cut stone that rose above the desert, a partnership society based on human equilibrium in the gender question, [00:30:55 - 00:31:04] pastoralism in terms of a lifestyle, and access of the goddess through her gift of the mushroom, [00:31:04 - 00:31:09] that was this warfareless Edenic paradisical time. [00:31:09 - 00:31:19] And it persisted until fairly recently. It persisted until 4,000 or 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 BC. [00:31:19 - 00:31:27] Then the desertification of the Sahara became really serious, and those people, those Neolithic people, moved east [00:31:27 - 00:31:38] and became the Neolithic pre-dynastic civilization in the Nile Valley, and then still further in the Tigris-Euphrates drainage, [00:31:38 - 00:31:47] the tribal people who by a thousand years preceded the civilizations that we know so much about, Sumer, Ur, and so forth. [00:31:47 - 00:32:01] And they carried with them a goddess religion that was, I am willing to suggest, was where the central mystery was the mushroom. [00:32:01 - 00:32:11] Now, the psychological dominance of the ego is something that came to be in the wake of these disruptive migrations [00:32:11 - 00:32:22] out of the home range of the lead to a search for all kinds of substitutes, probably the invention of asceticism, [00:32:22 - 00:32:34] and the rise of a priestly class. The shaman, in the absence of the sacrament that is truly living, [00:32:34 - 00:32:48] becomes a theologian and a dogmatist and begins to put in place precepts and prohibitions, and suddenly nature is no longer friendly and supporting. [00:32:48 - 00:32:59] Suddenly nature must be dealt with through a system of taboos and sacrificial efforts to propitiate, this sort of thing. [00:32:59 - 00:33:13] This is indicative of alienation, even though we find it at very primitive levels of society that we might at first brush be willing to embrace as expressions of a pure lifestyle. [00:33:13 - 00:33:22] But I really don't think so. I think that the notion of sacrifice, which has been written about by Freud and Zimring and all kinds of people, [00:33:22 - 00:33:37] already indicates an uncertainty about our relationship to this other that previously, you know, we were her children, we were entirely embedded in her, her rhythms, her needs, her energy flows. [00:33:37 - 00:33:50] And the reason why I think all this is important, other than being an academic argument among primatologists and anthropologists, [00:33:50 - 00:34:01] is because of what I've called the archaic revival, the fact that we are trying to grow toward a new model of how to be in the world. [00:34:01 - 00:34:13] And if you, this is not the first time a society has been slammed to the wall. And if you are a student of history, you know that when societies reach great crises points, [00:34:13 - 00:34:31] their reflex is inevitably conservative and to pull back. And the form this pulling back takes when the situation is truly desperate is to look back into the past for a stabilizing model that worked once before. [00:34:31 - 00:34:47] The last time this happened in a context that we're probably all familiar with is when the medieval world began to crack to pieces because of those spices that were being brought in from the East. [00:34:47 - 00:34:59] They seem to have a real need to put pepper on their steak. There may have been more than spices in those via, in those Genoan cargo boats. [00:34:59 - 00:35:08] But anyway, at the end of the medieval world, the Christological eschatology began to crack apart. The Jews were turned loose to be bankers. [00:35:08 - 00:35:15] The Italian city states were turned loose to make money and towns began to spring up. [00:35:15 - 00:35:24] The lost platonic corpus was translated into European languages and a whole new world came into being. [00:35:24 - 00:35:38] And the feeling of alienation and uncertainty and anxiety was assuaged by looking back into the past and saying, we need a model and the medieval Gothic model won't work. [00:35:38 - 00:35:48] We will become like Rome at its most grandulous. We will become like Greece at its most clear and philosophically brilliant. [00:35:48 - 00:35:58] This is called classicism. It was invented in the fourteen hundreds, you know, 2000 years after Plato taught. [00:35:58 - 00:36:05] Suddenly it was decided in Europe that a platonic society would be created. And we are the inheritors of that society. [00:36:05 - 00:36:16] We live under Roman law and Greek aesthetics and so forth and so on because people who were sick of the medieval world decreed that it should be so. [00:36:16 - 00:36:27] And the model worked up until the late 19th century when the Greek analytical method met the instrumentalities of the Industrial Revolution. [00:36:27 - 00:36:41] And we began to get the new science or the big science, the science that was not about a country gentleman making notebook scratchings on the warblings of birds and the flow of streams. [00:36:41 - 00:36:48] But where you actually say, my God, we can go for it. We can understand. We can extract the energy from the stars. [00:36:48 - 00:36:58] We can light the fires of heaven in the deserts of our planet. This whole Faustian kind of science where suddenly it isn't about understanding. [00:36:58 - 00:37:04] It's about power and about calling this power down upon your enemy. [00:37:04 - 00:37:15] So we are now eighty decades in to this era of mastery of energy and tremendous Faustian power. [00:37:15 - 00:37:33] And we need a new model. And I think that the new model is such a huge form emerging onto the historical stage that we shouldn't be deluded that it's something which has come about since the. [00:37:33 - 00:37:44] The early 70s or that it was invented in the 60s, it reaches at least back to the late 19th century. [00:37:44 - 00:37:55] I mean, people like Alfred Jarre and Rene Claire and Marcel Duchamp and these people, they were enunciating long before Freud and Jung, [00:37:55 - 00:38:05] the presence of the unconscious as a frontier into which the locomotive of Marxist history looked like it was headed with no return ticket inside. [00:38:05 - 00:38:10] And that's actually what happened in the dreams of 19th century rationalism. [00:38:10 - 00:38:20] The utopian schemes of Bellamy and Marx and all these people ran smack into the world of the unconscious, [00:38:20 - 00:38:33] the world of the shaman, the world of the psychedelic experience of modern art, of sexual liberation, of the stream of consciousness novel, cubism, futurism, space flight, all of these things. [00:38:33 - 00:38:44] And these are. Well, it's interesting to see, for instance, how modernism was invented by Picasso in some tellings of the story, [00:38:44 - 00:38:50] but he couldn't do it until he had studied all these primitive masks from the coast of West Africa. [00:38:50 - 00:39:01] And this is what everybody was who was anybody in Paris in 1915 was decorating their apartments with were these images of the primitives. [00:39:01 - 00:39:08] So we are, I think, returning to the archaic mode. That's at least what is the shining hope. [00:39:08 - 00:39:23] And what opposes it is the momentum of historical society, which is linear and cares to extend itself centuries into the future, male dominated, technocratic, [00:39:23 - 00:39:30] object worshiping and superficial in the most unsuperficial sense of the word. [00:39:30 - 00:39:39] I mean, we have raised the banality to an archetype. [00:39:39 - 00:39:49] Wrote a book called The Banality of Evil. Well, you know, I agree with the conclusions of the book, but if if evil is banal, what is not? [00:39:49 - 00:39:53] You know, this is a kind of pulling of energy out of the felt moment. [00:39:53 - 00:40:04] So Marshall McLuhan saw it. Tim Leary saw it. Bucky saw it. Probably everybody in their dog saw it coming. [00:40:04 - 00:40:13] What is happening is a kind of meltdown of pre-created values and a kind of release into a new cultural space. [00:40:13 - 00:40:16] But it's a cultural space that is new only to us. [00:40:16 - 00:40:26] It is easily recognized as the cultural space in which shamans of great ability and courage have been operating for the past 50,000 years. [00:40:26 - 00:40:33] They can show us the way. We can find our own way by following their example. [00:40:33 - 00:40:42] The big news is that orthogonal. That means at right angles to orthogonal to the entire historical process is a.