of hardness, darkness, Saturnian kind of lead is the heaviest, darkest metal, symbolizing the heavy, dark, leaden, depressive kind of consciousness that we can get into if we don't bring consciousness to bear on it. If we bring the fire of attention, the fire of awareness, the fire of life, perception, to this kind of consciousness, we raise it to the point where it's a reflective and conductive type of consciousness, as is gold. Very malleable, can be shaped into ornaments and artistic forms. And this would be the analogy, the imagery for expressing the change of consciousness, the actual change of your mode of thinking, your mode of responding to the world, the mode in which you perceive the world. The yogic tradition is a little bit more separated from the physical world. But it works basically with the same kind of, it doesn't work so much with animal or plant, for example, plant substances, although some aspects of yoga do, for example, the tantric tradition in India does use plants and herbs and so forth as an adjunct to consciousness work. But more concentrating on the mental techniques, the meditational techniques of yoga, but the purpose being the same, being the contact with the inner world. And animals are used as symbols, of course, you have animals and the chakras and that kind of thing. In Taoism it's interesting because there the yogic aspect of alchemy is much clearer, it's much more clearly spelled out that alchemy is also a yogic internal practice. I would see yoga and alchemy as being the Indian and Chinese equivalent to what in Europe became the alchemical tradition, which before in the pre-literate, pre-technological, Neolithic and Paleolithic culture was shamanism. Shamanism, animism, animism meaning that nature is alive. One other thing I wanted to say about alchemy is that Jung said, well, the alchemists were projecting the contents of their unconscious into matter. So they were looking at the processes going on in the retorts and having visions or hallucinations from that. They were projecting their own internal dynamics into that. And what I've come to realize is that this is both true and not true in the sense that, yes, there is projection going on, you are projecting your own images that come out of your own ancestral inheritance into these processes that you're seeing. It's not, however, necessarily an unconscious projection because the images that you're projecting are these mythic images that you've been taught, that you have learned from your teachers and from your books that you've read. The figures and the stories of the gods and the animals and so forth, the stories of the ancestors, which is what the mythology is, the story of our ancestors, are projected into these processes. It's a conscious, not an unconscious, projection. And it's also, again, to remind you of this thing about the inner and the outer, it's not only a projection. Yes, there is projection, but there is also perception. Projection and perception are the two poles of the processes of our attention in relationship to the world. We constantly project images from within us. We project meaning from us. But we also can be and need to be and need to cultivate our receptivity, our ability to perceive or to apperceive, as some people say. Apperception is a sort of contextual perception where you get not only the thing there, but the whole context in which that thing is and how it relates to you and the feelings and the associations that go along with it. That's a receptive process. And in this, there is an exquisite and poignant dance in the interplay between these projective and receptive-perceptive processes that we engage in all of our lives, because it's extremely easy to get stuck in one or the other mode. And getting stuck in one or the other mode is equally detrimental. Many psychics, for example, get stuck in the receptive mode. They are not able to make the discrimination between what's their own projection and what they are actually perceiving. And often they take on a lot of physical illnesses or psychic discontents and distress as a result of that. So, shamanism, alchemy and yoga as traditional technologies of consciousness transformation, which allow us to be in greater access and communication with the other worlds of consciousness, which exist around us. And you might say, somebody might raise the question, "Well, no, so what? Who cares? Why is it important that we have contact with these other worlds?" Well, the reason for the importance basically is, if the model that these other worlds exist, that we live in a multi-dimensional reality, is correct, then we're in deep shit trouble if we don't pay attention to the other worlds. And since all of the traditions, you know, spiritual traditions, psychic, philosophical, religious traditions of all times, including shamanism, are unanimous in asserting this claim that our ordinary attention and consciousness is limited to this pathetic fragment of the possibility to be perceived, like the Sufis say, you know, we're like a man who lives on the ground floor of a seven-story mansion, having forgotten completely that the other six floors exist above him, which are larger and more spacious and greater and more beautiful and more interesting than the one they live in. And if a lot of your essential knowledge comes through to you from these other dimensions and you've lost contact with them, you don't even have the essential mechanisms for survival. See, psychic perception or extrasensory perception or clairvoyance and all these things that shamans and the alchemists and the yogis talk about, they're not luxuries, they're not something we can indulge once we've taken care of survival. They evolved as adaptive evolutionary processes. And we've lost them to a large extent through atrophy. They've atrophied through misuse. It's very clear from anthropological research that primitive, preliterate, aboriginal cultures have abilities that we call telepathy, clairvoyance and so forth as a matter of course. They take it for granted and they use it for survival. For example, think of a hunter tribe that's in Africa, the Bushmen and the Kalahari. This has been documented that sends out a band of six hunters to track some animal, which they may be gone for five days. And they have to chase this big animal, such as a giraffe or buffalo or whatever it may be, and bring it back. So they have no telephone, telegraph, they can't send runners. How are they going to stay in communication with the tribe? It's been documented that they are in telepathic communication with the tribe. The tribe can know that it's essential to their survival. They need to know when food is going to come, whether the people are okay. Clairvoyance, which simply means being able to see some of these more subtle phenomena that are normally just disappearing into invisibility or imperceptibility, is equally essential. And your survival could hinge on it. So I see this, and we're not exactly in a position to say that our attitude has contributed to our survival. I mean, people do say that. People even say that nuclear deterrence, the nuclear buildup has prevented nuclear war so far, hasn't it? We should congratulate ourselves how well we've done. Nobody who can look at the situation we're in can say that we are survivors. We've had to concentrate on the material world in order to survive, and therefore we can't indulge in luxuries such as these weird peoples of ancient cultures had the leisure to do, apparently. It's not the way it is. One interesting difference in the shamanic practice that's now from their role in traditional culture, some of which of course still exist, is that in what you might call neo-shamanism, it's no longer the shamanism of the expert. This is one of the things I appreciate very much about what Michael Horner does. He's taken certain aspects of core, what he calls core shamanism, whether it's that or not, it doesn't matter, certain techniques shared by shamanic cultures all over the world, and shown that Westerners, Anglo, white, Westerners, middle class, with all the conditioning and brainwashing that the rationalistic, Newtonian, mechanistic world model has succeeded in impinging and putting on all of us, and can within a very short time have shamanic experiences, can open up doorways to these other worlds, can establish ally relationships, totemic relationships. They're not really totemic, because totemic means family, comes from the ancestry, and these are not, these are new, these are individual new. So everyone has the potential for becoming a shaman, becoming a practitioner of shamanism. It's no longer you need to go to the expert, the one person in the tribe who played that role, because now we've evolved all kinds of other approaches for, of course we still have experts, and it's okay to use experts, but on the other hand, what's much more important is that people, the actual you and me, all of us, anyone who cares about the world that we live in, and would like to survive, and would like to see this world pass on to our children, our grandchildren, it behooves us all to make use of every possible help, method, tool, technique, ally, spiritual, technological, as long as it helps us get there and accomplish this purpose, we'd be fools not to use it. I've recently come to understand also that there are different varieties of shamanic path, and this might help some of you think about how you might relate to that kind of path, and we can talk further about this this afternoon too. Part of this came for me out of a distinction that's made in the Polynesian-Hawaiian shamanic complex between starting with the assumption that the shamanic path is one of obtaining this otherwise unaccessible knowledge, usually not accessible knowledge, that they make a distinction between the path of the warrior and the path of the adventurer. And this is a very interesting distinction. The path of the warrior is a path that emphasizes impeccability and intense observation and attention, and it has a worldview that says the world is a dangerous place filled with malevolent forces, both ordinary human and spirit, and it's the task of the warrior to be able to defend himself, him or herself at all times, against these prevailing malevolent forces in the world around us, and therefore the path of the warrior emphasizes highly disciplined kind of practices. It tends to emphasize ordeal, self-infliction of pushing one's own limits for endurance or pain tolerance in order to extend one's limits of tolerance and steal oneself, as it were, for this ongoing combat. Basically, the impeccability to me consists, and Castaneda's books are good examples, are good descriptions of this path and this attitude. Impeccability to me consists in the sense of balance between what I've called the projective and the perceptive, not just having the vision and sort of, "Oh yeah, vision, groovy, wow," you know, taking it in. Many people have that attitude towards psychedelics. Just take it and, "Wow." Impeccability means you look back. You don't just take it. You look and you try to discriminate and to discern between what are your own projections, based on your own fears and fantasies, and what is really going on there and what really is going on there. You need to be able to observe. You need to be able to catch the details. You need to be able to see through the surface in order to get the meaning that's being expressed by that surface of form. And that to me is impeccability. Impeccability means not just indulging and having the vision. It means observing the vision that you've shown in all states of consciousness. Now, the adventure, the path of the adventure is a little bit different. The adventure actually needs to have the same impeccability and the same attention to observing, really observing and really attending to detail. However, he doesn't necessarily, and he agrees, the adventurer agrees, that the world is filled with malevolent forces, but that's not all. The adventurer, whom I actually prefer to call the explorer, so you can think of it as adventurer explorer, as a type of path, as an orientation, says, "Yes, okay, we need to be able to protect ourselves, so we'll learn the skills of the warrior." But on the other hand, reality is infinitely fluid, well, not infinitely, it's fluid and flexible within certain limits, and these limits can be extended and expanded. And the adventurer then rather tries to generate or co-create a picture of reality in which the potential for unfolding and for creative expression of everyone participating in it is maximized. So it's creating an environment, creating a setting, co-creating a space, a context, a reality, in which each and every one of us humans and the animals and the plants and nature herself can be recognized as a community of equals and can have the right to unfold their own destiny. This is what the deep ecology movement is, how deep ecology connects into shamanism. Because deep ecology says every species of plant or animal and the environmental elements themselves have an equal right to live their life without having their integrity violated by one particular arrogant species. So the adventurer, explorer and the warrior consciousness share the emphasis on impeccability, on observation, on detail, on discipline to a certain extent, but the adventurer, explorer also emphasizes creativity more. The creative play to allow the unfolding of these created realities that maximize everyone's potential. So the drawback of the warrior consciousness is that it has a tendency to become paranoid. Because this kind of suspiciousness, the world is full of malevolent forces, shades very easily into paranoia. And when you think of warrior consciousness, not so much in the shamanic context. See, the shamanic warrior consciousness is conscious warrior attitude in relationship to the inner world, to the other worlds. Warriors of course exist in the ordinary world and one way, one kind of summary statement of the kind of mess that we're in right now is to say that the warrior consciousness on this planet has run amok. When you look at the governments of the world, both first, second and third world countries, 99% of them are military cliques, military elites. The military industrial complex has been in charge of basically, they have access to the largest amount of resources, they have access to all the science and technology, they have access to the largest amount of money, they control, they dominate, they are parasitical on the economy. Because the military economy is not a life-sustaining economy. It's a life-destroying economy which doesn't produce anything of value that sustains and supports life. Therefore, it's parasitical on the rest of the economy of people who grow food and live lives and try to have babies and continue the life on this world. The difference between parasitism and symbiosis is very crucial. Symbiosis means mutual cooperative support of each other's evolutionary development. Parasitism is evolutionary development of one species or group or clan of another at the expense of another. The colonial enterprise, the entire colonialism is a form of parasitism. That's why we shouldn't be surprised when third world countries don't think of America as the land of opportunity as much as the land of imperialist oppression and exploitation. The opportunity is not for them. So we are the ones that go in there, force them to change their agriculture over to doing monocultural things which leads to and force them to grow crops that they can sell for cash to feed our, to make our hamburgers, to feed our cattle and therefore not be able to feed themselves and destroy the rainforest. They're not doing that. They wouldn't come up with that as a mechanism of survival. It's a parasitism. It's for us. We consume all that stuff and they are left with the waste matter. So this is one difference in which the shamanic revival, neo-shamanism differs from the traditional role is in its emphasis on each individual has the ability and the necessity and the right certainly to practice desirability of practicing it yourself. See for yourself. Find out for yourself. Go for yourself. Go and see. See what you can learn. The other to me very, well it's not really a difference from before, but let me say something about what I think is the significance of this and both Terence and Joan have already alluded to it. It's because the pre-literate shamanic aboriginal cultures, primal cultures have preserved this sort of shamanistic, animistic, pagan worldview is one of the reasons why it's important for us to study these cultures and to study our own past because we had that, our own ancestors had that kind of relationship to nature which is completely different. They had a relationship to nature that was based on a sense of community with nature. This is one of the things Thomas Berry, the philosopher who's just come out with this extraordinary new book called "Dreaming the Earth" emphasizes. The notion of community needs to be extended between, from the one that we usually use to the human community to a community of humans with animals, with plants, with the natural elements of the environment, the earth itself and with the spirits that dwell in it. This interconnectedness, interwovenness which we have lost, which is exemplified in and emphasized in some scientific movements particularly the Lovelock hypothesis, the Gaia hypothesis of Lovelock which states that the world apparently on scientific evidence alone behaves like a living organism, like a living, breathing, giant organism, like a supercell. And the deep ecology movement which says that ecology is not just a matter of preserving our resources, it's a matter of shifting out of an anthropocentric viewpoint, a human-centered viewpoint, into a biocentric viewpoint in which life is at the center. And our task is to do everything we can to preserve and sustain life and everything we can to avoid harming or to try to minimize the harm or the intrusion or the invasion or the destruction of anybody else's habitat. That the whole thing is interwoven in a unity. Now Gaia, the notion of Gaia, the world by itself, there are certain limitations in that view too. For one thing, I mean the Gaia hypothesis, as a scientific hypothesis, I think it's a major step forward in science. It's not quite the view of animism, because animism says that not only is the Earth alive and all the different parts of the Earth are alive, but these are sacred intelligences. If you say the Earth is alive but you're still talking from within a mechanistic worldview, then it's alive in the way other animals and plants are alive, which is basically like a machine. Animals and plants, according to mechanistic biologies, are just self-reproducing machines. Self-regulating, self-reproducing machines. It's still a mechanistic worldview. We don't need to speculate about what Lavlock's views might be personally. They might be quite different from his scientific hypothesis. So it's okay to have the hypothesis, but I think the next step that still needs to be taken, that involves an integration of science and spirituality, which have also become separated, is to recognize that nature is not only alive, the Earth is not only alive, but it's intelligent, it can communicate with it, and through direct means, and it's a sacred world. It is in fact interlinked with the existence and the viability of the Earth itself. And when you think about it, you look at the spiritual artistic expressions, the literature, the sacred texts, the symbols, the architecture, the sculptures, the paintings, and so forth. When you really see it, the role of nature, animals, plants, in all cultures, even... I mean, the cultures, the religious traditions that are most separated from nature are, of course, the three Western monotheistic, patriarchal monotheistic religions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. They have the worst record as far as a negative relationship to nature and Earth, even although there are exceptions within each tradition, particularly in individual mystics. But the overall orthodox view of the system itself tends to be, in all three of those religions, rejecting of nature, fearful of nature, and seeing spirituality as transcending nature. In Islam, you have this notion of the nafs, the animals, it's like the ego, the ego is symbolized by animals. And there are simultaneously our enemies that we have to get beyond. See, this is a very different view than you would gain from the animistic religions, which have said, "Well, the animals are not our enemies, neither the animals inside us, nor the animals around us. The animals are our brothers and sisters, our relations, all our relations, both in the spirit form and in the real form." So we can cultivate this relationship with the spirit, the soul of the animal, as well as with animals that we actually might know of, flesh and blood and fur and four legs and wings and... And the worldview that's emerging, this will be my last point now before we break, what I want to emphasize here is the recent realization that this animistic, shamanistic, pagan worldview that we're rediscovering, reconnecting with and appreciating anew its value and its significance for our time, becomes, this significance becomes even more acute when you realize that in shamanism, you know, they talk a lot about the importance of connecting with your ancestors. And in work that I've done individually and with groups, this is more and more becoming apparent that connection with the ancestors, connection with animals, spirits, guardian animals, and connection with ancestors, guardians, is an essential part of the process. And this is where the tie-in comes from psychology, psychotherapy into shamanism. Psychotherapy, you do a lot of work with your parents to clear up your relationship with your parents. Any negative charge there, that needs to happen before you can connect with your ancestors. The parents are your first ancestors. If you're not clear with them, you can't go any further back than them. And connection with the animals is actually really a part of that because the animals are our ancestors. We are animals. We are descended from animals. So the primates, the mammals, the reptiles, the amphibians and the fish, that's our animal ancestry, as orders of life, as kingdoms of life. But our human ancestry were hunter-gatherers for a couple of hundred thousand years before they started farming and building cities with walls around them. A couple of hundred thousand years of hunter-gathering, of wandering, of tribal existence, with a shamanic worldview, with a view of necessity of total sensory communication, maximal sensory communication, fluidity, discrimination with the natural world. These were our ancestors. And then you get into this realm of prehistory. Terence referred to the work of Rian Eisler, which in turn is based on the work of the archaeologist Maria Gambutas, whose major discovery over the last 20 years has been to unearth, to uncover, the goddess religion of old Europe, as she calls it. Europe before the invasions of the Indo-Europeans, the Indo-Aryans, who came from Central Asia and invaded India from the north, the Mediterranean basin, and Western Europe, in wave after wave after wave of invasion. These were nomadic horse people. They had domesticated the horse, and they had discovered how to make bronze weapons. And they started invading around 5000 BC, and wave after wave after wave pushing, and invading, and preying on, really functioning as predators on the Neolithic cultures, farming cultures, which had already existed in those areas, in old Europe, and around the whole Baltic region, the Mediterranean, including Crete, right up to northern, central Germany, southern, western Russia. That whole area, there were hundreds and hundreds of different cultures and language groups, in which the two chief features that are of significance are that these were goddess cultures, that apparently did not have any kind of superior, inferior, subordination relationship between the sexes. It was not a matriarchy, as Maria Gambutas emphasizes, not a matriarchy, which means the mothers dominate, the mothers control, rather than the fathers. It was, as Rian Isler suggested, a partnership society, in which men and women had equal value, and had clearly distinct roles. The chief divinity was female, and it was not a mother goddess. This is also important. The mother concept has been over-emphasized, I think. And it's something we can talk more about later. It's the life-giving and death-giving goddess, because we are given life by nature, but we're also killed by nature. So, this is not a mother. A mother doesn't kill you. Nature, as an intelligence, as a spirit, is what gives us life and what takes life. So, there are these images, and there are images of this goddess figure in a total, unitive relationship with animals, the snake and the bird, and various animals, toads, frogs, vultures, insects, bees, bears, bulls, sheep, goats, all the various animals, and no hierarchy within the society, other than possibly, I mean, in the buildings there would be a throne, but the throne was of the priestess, or the goddess would be in a central place, the goddess figurine would be in a central place. Second very important part is that there are no, in all these cultures, in these hundreds of things, there have never been found any weapons. There have never been found any fortifications. There is not the pattern that you find in later Sumerian, Babylonian, Greek, Egyptian, all these other cultures, which were all male god cultures, of a male king, surrounded by all this wealth and ornaments, and sometimes slaves also killed along with it, and weapons, and inscriptions about the glorious deeds, militaristic deeds that the hero, the king has done. None of that. Instead, the dead, men and women and children equally, were buried right under the house, right under the house where you eat and sleep, so that you have the connection with your ancestors, right under your feet, under your body, where you live. You're reminded of them. And what does this mean? This means, see, these people were our ancestors. The nomadic, patriarchal, warrior, sky-god people were our ancestors, and the peaceful, egalitarian, goddess-culture people were our ancestors, because of course they intermarried. I mean, they didn't just kill the others. They destroyed the religion, but they intermarried. They had children. Both of them are our ancestors. You may be familiar with Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, that habits of nature and culture get transmitted by repetition. That means the morphic field for a culture that's egalitarian between the sexes and that's peaceful, exists within us. We have it within us. We have access to it in our psychic memory, whatever that may be, however, whatever form that may take. And not only that, the morphic field of that is much stronger than the morphic field of the militaristic, aggressive, dominating, patriarchal system that started around 4,000 to 3,000 years before Christ. Because those cultures go back to 20, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000, right back into the Upper Paleolithic, where you first have little stone chips inscribed with goddess symbols. These were hunter-gatherer cultures, and then pastorless cultures, and then farming cultures. They were not fighting cultures. The fighting comes in as a result of the invaders who came in, who took over, who plundered, basically, said, "Here, these people are growing their food. This is much better than having to gather it. Let's just take it." They were able to do that because they sat up high on horses, who installed their gods. Of course, I'm not saying this is the growth picture, but of course, there is evidence for peaceful interactions also, and cultural assimilation, and all of that. But the morphic field of that cultural way of life is stronger because longer in time, more people, longer period of time, than this other, more new one. So that, when I discovered that, when I learned this from Maria Gambudo's writings and talks, it did a change in my world view, in my paradigms, that was as profound as the change that was induced when I first took LSD. Because, up to that point, I'd always believed, you know, history begins at Sumer, and begins with bloodshed and warfare. And there's been bloodshed and warfare ever since. And, in fact, the biologists go along with that and say, "Well, we're descended from these aggressive animals." You know, aggression in nature, nature raw in tooth and claw, eat or be eaten. The territorial imperative, you know, 2001, you know, bash the skull, that's it. We've always been that way, it's part of human nature, we can't change. Along comes this woman from Eastern Europe and says, "Uh-uh, no matriarchy, no weapons." For tens of thousands of years, ten times, twenty times as long as our history that we previously thought was, you know, this is our ancestry. This means these people are our ancestors, we know how to do that. We know how to live in an ecologically and peaceful, harmonious world. We've done it. So, for that reason, I'm actually extremely hopeful, although I realize, as every one of you do, that our world situation, as you look at it today, is a total and unmitigated disaster. The apocalypse, the Armageddon, is already in full swing. It's not something that's going to happen next year or 25 years from now. It's happening now. All you need to do is read the papers, look at the television. The four horsemen of the apocalypse, war, famine, poverty and destruction, they're all rampaging over the entire globe. Amnesty International just put out their report, more than two-thirds of all nation governments sanction torture, sanction torture as official government sanctioned practices. And the number is increasing, and the variety of the torturing techniques being used, and the number of people it's being used on is increasing. So, there's no stretch of the imagination that can be called progress, but there are these very, very hopeful signs, and the locus of those signs is within the psyche of every single human individual. Nowhere else. So, thank you for your attention. [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Okay. The expectation for this afternoon is simply that we will attempt to address what concerns you have, to dialogue, to give people a chance to ask questions. It seems to me that often the most fertile part of these things is the dialogue part of it, because this is where then, instead of talking heads, pontificating about whatever obsessions drive them personally, you have a chance to try and be the rudder of these public egos and steer them toward something interesting. [Laughter] So the obligation is on you for the quality of rhetoric for that kind of a session. So I don't know how much was clear this morning, how much obscure, what issues it raises for people, but if someone would like to start off with a question, we would just make our way into it. Yes. [Unintelligible] Yes. Before we go further, do you want people to take a microphone? How is this... [Unintelligible] Speak clearly when you ask your question. Sorry. Go ahead. Okay. So here's the repeated question. It's to do with drugs, psychedelics. I know that you didn't even necessarily recommend it, but you also didn't sound like you were against it. And the word has been coming out a few times. Maybe I've overdone this even-handedness trip. My question is, what is there to know about drugs and brain damage? They have advertisements with a pen and an egg going in there and it's frying your brain. Every time you do it, you knock some brain cells out. Well, you know, the president's consort urges us to simply say no. And I can't remember whether, who it was, I think it was Tim Leary the other night, was wearing a T-shirt which said, "Just say no, K-N-O-W." See how close to the surface it is and how nearly the same thing? So that's the short and obvious answer. What is there to know about drugs? A huge amount. I mean, this is a department of human knowledge called pharmacology that is the life study of many people. In terms of this question of psychedelics and being a spiritual adventurer and coming to a place in your life where you say... . [BLANK_AUDIO] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.64 sec Decoding : 2.21 sec Transcribe: 2826.06 sec Total Time: 2828.90 sec