What we should be doing is really the opposite of what we actually do.
 When we discover, what we should be doing, it seems to me, is when we discover a synthetic drug
 that seems to have promise in treatment or whatever, psychically or physically,
 then we should try to look for the plant or animal analog for the natural product that we could then work with in that way.
 We do the opposite, of course. If we find a plant that's promising, we go in there, we extract whatever it is,
 then we synthesize that and then we sell that back to the third world countries.
 And that often is then completely different.
 Cocaine, synthetic cocaine, is a completely different story than coca leaf.
 Coca leaf chewing is a health maintaining practice.
 Cocaine snorting is a death dealing practice.
 The same difference between sugar cane, raw sugar cane, or sugar beet, is a completely nutritional food.
 Refined sugar is probably an addictive poison.
 So, I see the MDMA has a potential in the use of therapy, and it's very effective that way,
 but for people that want to heighten creativity, explore visions, other states of consciousness, it's not that interesting.
 And finally, I would say that the search for the closest plant analog of MDMA has already been pursued by some people,
 and I think the closest that we've come to so far is low doses of peyote.
 Low dose peyote in extract form, tincture form, is an experience very similar to MDMA.
 The same kind of open heartedness, the same kind of empathy, the same kind of energizing of attention, with certain advantages.
 It does not seem to produce the kind of amphetamine drop afterwards that MDMA does,
 and it doesn't cut your appetite, in fact, enhances your appetite and makes you eat,
 and there seems to be something that happens with proteins which then enhance and prolong the effect.
 So, that's another reason why you get the drop in energy with MDMA, is because you don't eat, and this doesn't have that disadvantage.
 So, go with peyote.
 Yes, I want to ask you something about what's really going on, and everybody's a part of this.
 I've just been experiencing myself personally a synergy or an accelerating of some kind of, I hate to call it a psychedelic movement,
 but in the past three months, the LA Weekly article comes out and I see Terrence McKenna reopens the doors of perception,
 and then I hear on the radio a few weeks later, on KCW, Mitchell Harding talks about the time he was doing acid,
 and every Friday there's like sound of sixes, they're talking about doing acid,
 and I go, how come I haven't heard this for the past five, six, seven years at all?
 My ear's been shut, I've just been oblivious, it's just because I'm starting to listen more?
 Or have you had a similar experience in the past few weeks, maybe the past few months,
 a very fast growing interest by a lot of people, and I just have an experience in Los Angeles,
 for this, when nobody's talked about it, since like for five years, and suddenly I'm hearing all this input,
 and I'm fascinated, and I'm turned on, I'm going, this is great, why didn't I think about this six months ago?
 Why is it happening just now, and it seems to be happening so fast and so strong? Is this true for you?
 Well, I think there's some kind of critical mass, something is going on,
 but, you know, some of us have been talking about psychedelics for nearly ten years,
 and from the very beginning people said, you know, this must be it, this must be the second wave.
 I mean, people have been anticipating and announcing the second wave since 1980.
 Maybe it is, I don't know, I mean, right now the most repressive drug measure imaginable
 is making its way through the United States Congress.
 Yeah, this is a very minority position that you're looking at here.
 When George Bush is elected, they're going to confront people with the choice of
 a drug-free society with a trashed Bill of Rights or the present state of anarchy.
 They're very upset. These polls which show that, you know, the number one issue is drugs.
 What a propaganda job you have to have done.
 I mean, there are people starving by the millions, thermonuclear weapons stacked like cordwood,
 people not saluting the flag.
 And they say the number one issue is drugs?
 [Unintelligible]
 Well, I think that's it, that the drug issue, which when Ralph, God knows, after the '60s,
 but in the second wave when I started talking about it ten years ago,
 we were just trying to get psychotherapists interested in looking at these things in therapy.
 And meanwhile, all this stuff is going on about crack and heroin and Noriega and this and that.
 So I think what it is is that drugs are apparently on the historical agenda.
 We cannot exist half stoned and half down.
 We are involved in a process testing whether this nation or any nation can be...
 [Laughter]
 No, I'm kidding.
 The point is, though, you see, intelligence agencies have a huge addiction of their own,
 an addiction for untraceable money.
 And since World War II, they have, whenever they got tight for money,
 fallen back on their connections in the junk trade and the coke trade.
 And this was more or less overlooked because it allowed the creation of clandestine anti-communist armies
 in places like central Burma and South America and Iran.
 But now what's happened is that these international dope cartels
 have grown actually stronger than the governments that originally created them.
 So now there's a great deal of hand-wringing in the chancellories and war planning rooms
 because the drug thing appears to have run amok.
 And I think that we are going to have to probably look at...
 I think the government's concern is they don't know where they'll get all this illicit money if they legalize drugs,
 but they seem to have set their own house on fire.
 They have a tendency to do this.
 I mean, I think of George Bush as a man who, when he sets his hair on fire, he puts it out with a hammer.
 And the psychedelic issue is this tiny subset, never mentioned over in some corner,
 while they wrestle about who gets the money. That's the real drug issue from the point of view of government.
 Yeah, Joan.
 Well, I think there's another factor here which was mentioned earlier,
 and that is with the increase of regulation of all aspects of our lives
 so that there's a real decrease of freedom on all levels,
 that the impulse to actually create a context of liberation breaks out on many levels of society,
 not the least of which is a nostalgia for what broke open in the '60s.
 I agree.
 And not the least of which is the commercialization of shamanism.
 Oh, yeah. People want authentic experience.
 People want some way of authenticating their lives.
 I mean, we're just sinking in an ocean of bullshit and propaganda,
 led down the primrose path at the end of the 20th century,
 so narcotified and propagandized and sold out and undercut,
 and people want some way of breaking out of that.
 And it's no mistake that it's happening on the eve of the presidential election either,
 where the shadow economy of the narcotizing drugs is in the background of this whole electoral process
 and is actually the unexploded bomb in the campaign.
 But I mean, it's kind of--
 That's right.
 I mean, the drug in question is really up for grabs.
 It's not-- By the way, I don't think it's--
 You know, it's not only cocaine and heroin. It's also alcohol.
 It's the whole range of anesthetic, of sedatives.
 Well, if you want to talk about--
 A new way of talking about the drug problem would be,
 let's talk about drugs in terms of what they do.
 What do we want, and what do they do?
 So here you have a family of drugs and the typical image of the addict.
 What is a drug addict?
 Well, it's a person who has an obsessive behavior pattern that is unexamined
 and that causes them to return again and again to the same source of stimulus
 without ever cognizing the reason why.
 In other words, unexamined behavior is what is alarming about drug addiction,
 that people behave like they are obsessed.
 Well, on that scale, then the most powerful drug of the late 20th century is television and propaganda.
 And the way in which we consume propaganda is amazing.
 I mean, the most intelligent of us, the ones who hold ourselves most aloof,
 are probably junkies through and through when it comes to the media.
 And the media just makes you stupider and stupider and stupider.
 You become less able to formulate a creative response,
 less able to tell what is real and what is not,
 less able to empower yourself, and it's just more and more and more of it.
 The average American watches six and a half hours of TV per day.
 Average. Imagine if a drug that you smoke or shoot or snort
 had been introduced into this country after World War II
 and that now the average American was consuming six and a half hours a day of this thing.
 I mean, you would have the fundamentalists foaming at the mouth.
 There would be riots in the street.
 It's that we define these things so oddly. We don't attempt to make sense.
 What I was trying to say this morning about the fact that we must change our minds.
 We must change our minds.
 Business as usual will lead to exacerbated conflict over resources and turf
 and eventually thermonuclear catastrophe.
 If the evolution of consciousness is not the way to solve the world's problems,
 then I don't know what it is.
 Well, the psychedelics were originally described as consciousness expanding drugs.
 That was the phenomenological description of what they were.
 We need to intervene in our own psyches.
 We cannot afford the luxury of an unconscious mind
 to throw up a Hitler or a Khomeini.
 We cannot afford the unexamined obsessive behavior pattern
 that leads us into a conditioned response when somebody leans on our territory
 or insults our racial heritage or something like that.
 We have to realize that it is going to take creative intellectual engineering
 to steer us through the narrow valley of being.
 And it's always been that way. This is what shamanism is.
 It's using plants to balance and control what is otherwise an extremely violence prone neurotic species.
 The price we pay when the symbiotic relationship to the rest of nature is interrupted,
 we lose our bearings.
 I'm not talking metaphorically.
 I don't mean about sniffing the air and making medicine wheels.
 I mean about putting the chemicals, the enzymes from the natural environment into your body
 that create the seamless web that unites us to the purpose of the planet.
 These psychedelic compounds are bearing information.
 They are pheromones from the body of Gaia that we, by imbibing,
 can then attune ourselves to the larger purposes of nature
 so that we then can fit ourselves into the picture.
 We have a purpose.
 It is to care for the planet, to nurture it and lead it forward,
 much the way bees do, much the way termites do.
 But we are conscious creatures.
 Our caring, our honey making, our architectonic activities
 operate on a different epistemic mode because we have somehow one foot in a higher dimension.
 This is the mystery of ourselves.
 (Person in audience) Bearings, bearings. I just want to do this on the show a little longer and just look at it.
 Just because, I mean, this is a hell of a rave.
 (Laughter)
 (Dr. O'Brien) So do the number already.
 (Person in audience) It's real simple.
 (Dr. O'Brien) The mushroom is growing bullshit.
 (Person in audience) You're acting, I mean, I get this, you know, as I listen to you,
 I feel like the mushroom is out there and it's kind of like an implant when you take it.
 And it actually shifts the context.
 Whereas I look at it in a certain way as not the end, but one of the means.
 And that it's not an implant, but it's actually a context actualizer, if you will.
 It actually opens, it's a biochemical key that opens the door to what's already there.
 (Dr. O'Brien) Oh yeah, it isn't an implant, it's that if you're not stoned, you're down.
 And to glorify that in this Calvinistic way that this society does is to say, you know,
 only the depressed perceive correctly.
 (Laughter)
 Only the despairing truly understand.
 Only those who have given up hope have recognized the real situation.
 That's Western civilization's message to itself.
 And it's just ridiculous.
 No wonder people are down.
 Look at the history of Western Europe.
 All these gloomy male dominator types running around with sword and tongs
 to exterminate all unorthodoxy, to push the goddess religions to the front.
 Priestcraft, beastly little priests.
 You know, it was Voltaire, I think, who said,
 "Mankind will know no peace until the last priest is strangled in the entrails of the last politician."
 (Laughter)
 And, you know, if we're talking about shamanism,
 we're talking about the primary stratum of religious experience
 which has been ripped off and sold down the river by every band of beastly little priesties
 that have ever come along.
 And they were the inventors of hierarchical orthodoxy.
 They are the ones who taught kings and popes their trade.
 It's true that what they're against is the experience.
 They're not against--it's not the drug, per se.
 That's also true for the psychiatric drug.
 Their importance is not the drug.
 It's not the plant, even.
 It's the experience that they open up for you.
 That's the real significance.
 And that's the significant difference between psychedelic drugs and all other drugs--
 cocaine, heroin, alcohol, barbiturates, amphetamines--all alter your consciousness.
 They don't teach you anything.
 The psychedelic plants are teaching intelligences
 with which we have the ability to enter into a relationship
 with which we can learn something about our role on this planet, on this earth,
 in the network, in the interconnected web of all life.
 So you can have the experience that people have had
 that you can learn from a plant, from eating a plant,
 what it means to be a human being.
 When you think about it, that's pretty peculiar.
 Well, one teacher that I worked with called them, actually, teacher plants.
 Yes, sure.
 Sexuality is a good intermediate example here
 because orgasm is a buzz,
 and you don't have to wonder if they would have illegalized it if they could have.
 It's what alarms them, and so they make you feel guilty about masturbation.
 God forbid that you should even have impure thoughts.
 They just try to say, "Do not experience your body.
 Do not elevate your mind.
 Do not touch anything which empowers you,
 which authenticates you,
 which unifies you to yourself and other people.
 All that is bad.
 We will tell you where God is.
 We will answer all questions."
 So the drugs really, it's interesting.
 They are like an augmentation of felt experience,
 exactly like sexuality is.
 And I think it's sexuality that has kept us sane.
 If they could have repressed it, they would have.
 God knows they tried hard enough.
 Now that's been broken open.
 The clawed hand of the paternal male ego
 has been being slowly forced open for about 500 years.
 I mean, it's been a long march.
 These guys had it all sewed up around the year 1100 or something.
 3000, you say.
 Well, it comes and goes.
 Last week the Senate closed the hand a little.
 How?
 There's an anti-pornography bill that's just been passed by the Senate.
 It's on its way to the House.
 Yes, well, this is another way of...
 print, cable, television, etc.
 And mysticism, mystical experience, even without drugs.
 Mystics have always been heretics.
 They've always been at odds.
 The Church has always felt uncomfortable.
 I knew a man who was thrown out of his monastery for having mystical experience.
 Nothing to do with drugs.
 He just kept having spontaneous mystical visions,
 and they said, "You don't belong here."
 They were psychiatrically evaluated, and off they went.
 Jackie, isn't that true?
 They told him, "Go out and have a family, get it out of your system."
 The general social attitude toward madness,
 the fact that shamans, witch doctors--
 this is what they were called until 30 years ago
 when anthropology rescued the term "shaman."
 There's great fear of getting off the track,
 of leaving the idols of the tribe behind.
 And yet the momentum of the idols of the tribe
 have pushed us to the point of global catastrophe.
 We must get off the track.
 The track leads right straight over the edge into an abyss.
 Obliteration.
 Obliteration.
 But the direction--don't you think we should be talking more to our leaders?
 I mean, they should be experiencing the same psychedelic things that we're--
 Well, the question then becomes, "Who are our leaders?"
 Well, I don't know--wait a minute.
 In fact, we know who our leaders are.
 They're the people in power.
 Well, but there's different centers of power.
 For instance--
 I mean, they're the people running things.
 Different kinds of leadership, too.
 Yeah, I agree with that.
 Well, I agree.
 I think that the managerial temperament is the one who has to be reached.
 That the people who control world banking, world commerce,
 the direction of scientific research--and I think these people can be reached.
 I think that to a degree greater than we tend to realize, they are our peers.
 It's a matter simply--I think you can convince anybody of the rightness of this position.
 I don't think there are any, so I don't know.
 Well, I think I could.
 I can't imagine how you could flatten that.
 There is some interesting--
 For that reason, I worry that making it a mass phenomenon now,
 in some ways will antagonize them and make it more difficult.
 Well, I don't think we're in any danger of making it a mass phenomenon.
 I mean, Tim Leary, in the great heyday of the '60s,
 talked to more people before lunch than I have talked to in my entire speaking career.
 I mean, he addressed crowds of 150,000 people.
 That's not the way to do it.
 I think Aldous Huxley had a much better notion,
 which is to reach the people who are themselves catalytically active in society.
 And to me, that means the writers, producers, designers, choreographers, artists, teachers, politicians.
 They have so much--they're so nervous.
 They will be the last to join.
 But, for instance, bankers.
 The people who own the world need to be convinced that their investment is threatened.
 That will sober them up.
 And I think they are.
 I think the greenhouse effect, once we get this summer into the bag
 and the world statistics are jotted up
 and we see how many billions of dollars the greenhouse effect costs
 people who own the cereal-producing lands of the Western Hemisphere,
 they meet.
 They're concerned.
 I think the turn is on.
 You know, H.G. Wells said, "History is a race between education and catastrophe."
 Well, it's neck and neck in the home stretch.
 But I don't think anybody should tear up their ticket and toss it in the air.
 One interesting thing that's happening, too, is that people are now--
 this economist, Michael Phillips, for example, has made this interesting prediction
 that the '90s--see, there was an interesting parallel between the 1960s and the 1890s.
 They were also times of social revolution and new ideas.
 But those ideas didn't really get into legislation until the teen years,
 which would be 30 years later,
 when the people that were the teenagers and early adults
 during that time of social upheaval become the majority in Congress.
 See, we had--in the '60s, we had the social and the sexual and the ecological revolution.
 We even had legislation like the EPA and so forth, but they all get watered down
 and basically it comes back to making deals and business as usual.
 But by the '90s, he's predicting, again, we will have the '60s baby boom generation
 will be a majority in Congress, so that that is a time when they think that there will be
 a legislation passed that will put teeth into a lot of these movements,
 including the environmental thing, which is forcing itself on everybody's attention anyway.
 So I think there are some helpful signs in that direction.
 Nancy's halfway there with astrology. I mean, you've got to do psychedelics.
 Politics makes strange bedfellows.
 I need to say something about the high school.
 I take LSD and various psychedelics with a lot of high school children.
 And I've been scapegoated by the police in various communities
 as a threat of corrupting the morals of their children.
 And I have been in two torture chambers.
 One in Florida and one in Colorado for that.
 What I wanted to say was that the law just put all drugs, including psychedelics,
 in a taboo thing.
 And a lot of the high school children, they're taking all kinds of drugs.
 And I've taken LSD that they have given me, and it's not real LSD.
 It affects your nervous system. It makes you shake.
 It doesn't make you aware. It makes you dumb.
 But they're buying LSD in high school, anywhere from $2 to $8 a dose,
 and it's not real LSD.
 And I turned them on to real LSD, and they love it.
 [laughter]
 They play around with computers in class on real LSD.
 Well, you're a real menace to the youth.
 But you're right.
 They get great grades from real LSD.
 So what I'm saying is that somehow there has to be real LSD to distribute it.
 It feels like it does.
 Well, what there has to be is an uncorruptible source of psychedelic experience.
 In a sanctuary environment also.
 Well, in some way it has to be uncorruptible.
 And the best way that I've found is to urge people to grow mushrooms
 because the mushroom itself then acts as the purity maintainer, the quality control.
 You can see what it is.
 When you have LSD in front of you, you have a little piece of paper or a little piece of gelatin.
 Who knows what this is?
 And some way to extract the drugs from the market economy.
 This was what Undid the 1960s.
 Some people got high on LSD, and other people realized you could make a fortune on it.
 And once that realization hit home, it was all she wrote.
 So there has to be some way of taking the opportunity to create a huge financial empire out of it.
 And how this is done, I'm not sure.
 But the simplest solution, I think, is grow your own and depend on nature.
 Nature is a bountiful storehouse.
 This is where these things come from and--
 Grow or gather.
 Grow or gather.
 Somebody over here. We haven't done much over here.
 This lady.
 This question is for Terrence.
 Can you speak a bit about your experience in some of the older societies you've lived in
 and the relationship between visual artists, artisans, object makers, and shamanism?
 Could you repeat the question?
 Shall I repeat your question?
 The question was, could I speak about the relationship of artists to shamanism
 in some of the more--the preliterate Amazon societies that I've been in?
 Well, I think, you know, people have the notion about tribal people, that their life is very hard.
 In some environments, in some situations, it is.
 But people try everywhere to create leisure for themselves
 and to have an opportunity for aesthetic expression.
 In psychedelic societies, everything is art.
 I'm thinking particularly of, for instance, the Shipibo in their classic expression.
 The Shipibo are an Amazonian tribe.
 They cover every utilitarian object with design.
 Everything is an expression of the images of the internal world.
 And language and puns and this sort of thing become very important.
 Life--when you have nothing, life is easily transformed into art
 because there's a how-ness about everything.
 How you make a fire, how you cast a pot, how you cook a monkey.
 Everything is a paradigmatic activity, meaning everything is traditional.
 Everything has been done millions of times before in the way that your people do it.
 And so the individual is seen almost like just the cutting edge of the ancestral energy.
 And they even have the concept of what they call the way of the ancestors.
 And so you'll be doing something like sharpening a stick.
 And someone will come up to you and say, "Don't do it that way. We do it this way.
 This is the way of the ancestors."
 Then they show you how to do it.
 And sure enough, it is easier to do it that way,
 probably because this is the morphogenetic field of the how-ness.
 And I think Ralph mentioned this morning the confluence of yoga, alchemy, and shamanism
 in the Taoist tradition.
 And I think it's worth stressing that because to my mind, Taoism is the most refined ideal of human existence.
 It is open-ended. It always yields to a good laugh.
 It's not dogmatic. It's rooted in nature.
 It sees the world as shells of energy that can be manipulated and cultivated.
 And I really see Taoism as something broader than the nature religion that arose in southern China pre-Confucius and so forth.
 I see it as the kind of natural way of being in the world that tribally alive societies settle into.
 And it's what we're trying to recreate.
 Appropriate activity, that alone would create a world-informing revolution.
 When I say that we must change our minds, the physical accompaniment to changing our minds is that we will begin to behave appropriately,
 bury our shit, manage our resources, lower our voices.
 It's simply awareness, awareness, and awareness of awareness.
 And this is what these societies have that we have lost.
 And I think it's because the male ego is a wart on human perfection.
 And everybody has one. It's not a put-down of man.
 The male ego is a part of the repertoire of every human personality in the modern world.
 But it is unnecessary, divisive, and out of Tao.
 And this reconnection with the Tao, with the flow, with the invisible, the spirits, the energies of sky and water and earth,
 the psychedelics impel us into recognizing these things.
 But it's our own intent that can allow us to bring these things back into the world and apply them.
 So for me, that was the lesson of so-called primitive people.
 You want to talk about that?
 Well, the only thing I would add to it would be that the male ego has come out of touch, but it can be reconnected.
 There's nothing inherent in that structure, that psychic structure or function in itself.
 The ego is simply that function through which means of which we function in the world.
 What gets it into trouble is this thing of assuming that it knows the only reality and it has a claim to value over other.
 It's not a relatedness. It's a superior, separative, superior, dominating, controlling trip that it tries to run.
 But at the same time, the Taoists show to a way of functioning with decisiveness.
 Taoism is not a passive or inert or a quietistic religion or practice at all.
 It's being able to act and to function with the flow, with the grain of nature,
 so that your actions are in harmony with nature and therefore by themselves successful.
 And Taoism has proven itself to be remarkably resilient.
 It's not by any means a religion of ancient China. It's a 5,000 year or longer tradition and teaching
 that is alive and well to this day in communist China and other parts of the world.
 And we also have to recognize that we're not going to be able to go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
 We're never going to recreate great areas of wilderness we've lost.
 We're never going to be able to get away from city living.
 There is such a thing as urban shamanism and it's one of our tasks to really invent that.
 That's something brand new. Aboriginal cultures do not have it.
 How do you live in a city environment in the late 20th century while recognizing that in this city environment too,
 the other worlds, the worlds of spirits, of animals and plants, is right there in the streets of New York
 and under the concrete, in the sewers. Some of you may have seen this film, "The Last Wave,"
 which is about the Australian Aboriginal, the survival of an Australian Aboriginal culture under the streets of Sydney.
 A very interesting story.
 So this is where, you know, this is going to require all the resourcefulness that we can come up with.
 We have to study the past, take, you know, the valuable lessons that we've forgotten, bring them back into,
 put them together with the new information that we're getting, that science has presented us with,
 plus our knowledge of the limitations of the existing political structures, and go to work, and use whatever you can.
 Spoiled.
 How do we step aside from the information that, I mean, all of us here, obviously, must think about this,
 this information coming to the television or the great mediator, this fascism that's so subtle because it's so sub-embedded,
 because it's entirely a censorship of economy.
 So you experience it just a pragmatic reality, you don't experience it as what it is, controlling and telling us how we are to perceive reality.
 And, you know, we lost, we had the '60s, we had an inkling of the shamanic or the experiential, then that was pushed aside.
 So I think it's a test case to watch with this election.
 I'm sorry that you said when Bush is elected, I'd like to think that's an if,
 but when you talked about that unexploded bomb, well, let's see how the forces of disinformation can repress that unexploded bomb
 and allow Bush to get re-elected, or how to learn to continue to look between the lines and not,
 I mean, I was close to historical events, learned to look between the lines,
 and yet I ingest daily stuff that I don't question because it seems low on the order of priority,
 whether I should look and see what is this really about.
 But we're given a 360 hologrammatic redefinition of our reality entirely through the media.
 And believe it, we consent and co-create by ingesting it.
 So that's the thing, to sidestep that and look for the nature ally.
 You have to look at it with the same attitude as you look at visions presented to you in a drug state or in a dream state,
 with that same impeccability, with that same discrimination.
 Keep testing, keep looking, use what you know, compare, you know, is this true for you,
 is this, what's really behind it, what's really, what's the hidden message, what's the hidden agenda?
 And trust your instinct.
 Barraging us from television or from the media is exactly, it's a complete mix of truth
 with indescribable dosages of fantasy, hallucination, projection, disinformation, malevolent intrusions.
 And there's no shortcut, there's no way of sidestepping it.
 You can't sidestep it. You have to confront it, deal with it, look at it, know it.
 When you look at the cultural images that we've inherited, I think it's very easy to see that monotheism
 is a great deal of what lies at the root of our problem.
 Because, you know, it was Jung who made the observation that as we picture our gods,
 so then do we model our psyches, that in fact our gods are models of our psyches.
 And monotheism, which is basically the idea that God is all-powerful, omnipresent, male,
 and not to be trifled with, if that's your model of the psyche,
 well then you're describing someone who's extremely pathological.
 I mean, that is a pathological model of the personality.
 And yet, how many generations of men have behaved as though they were Yahweh?
 And we buy into this unquestioningly.
 Yahweh is the only god, the only divinity, the only god in all of world mythology
 who never has sex with a female.
 Most other creation myths involve sexual, or have consorts, any god.
 Yahweh, who is the Christian, and basically the Islamic god too,
 is the only one who never has contact with a female, either human or divine.
 Pretty interesting, that's our god.
 I just want to say this thing about abortion.
 The metaphor that you'd say that man's law would be stronger than the laws of nature
 that women experience stringently as the doors open and close, birth and death,
 and that man would impose himself on the doorway between nature through the woman's body to creation,
 that's the final metaphor.
 Well, that's omnipotence.
 Omnipotence.
 We can interfere with anything, we can do anything.
 Back there, do you want to...
 Back here, someone.
 I mean, much of, not close to all of what you say is really pearls to my ears,
 and I feel there's a resonance, especially when people have waited to hear something described in a certain way,
 it's like coming home.
 There's a real fine edge that I feel in myself when we get to a place of an us and them really strong.
 And I noticed that when this man brought up the thing about the politicians,
 there was a certain uncomfortableness and a kind of laughter that very easily came forth.
 And I know that in my work with the nuclear waste issue,
 it's very easy to get in this almost victimized role.
 It's like someone else is doing it to us.
 And it seems to me, in part of almost strategizing together,
 if we really want this truth that you're describing to really be present on this planet and in our midst,
 that there's one aspect of like we have work to do ourselves.
 That's to me the strongest thing that you said.
 If you can really embody it impeccably and continue to look at your own homework,
 that you don't have to so much worry about what's going on around you.
 But there's another place where it seems to me we do have to worry,
 be concerned or care for what's going on around us.
 And in being impeccable on that level, it seems to me that some of the mind change
 has to do with this shift of us, them and seeing them as the enemy and us as the victim.
 And I know that in the nuclear work, one of the strongest things we did was to take a group of people down to Westinghouse,
 down to where they're supposedly burying the waste in the ground,
 to see that the people that have taken on this job are actually,
 they really believe they're doing the right thing and they really believe that they're doing it for us.
 And to almost from that place of common ground start trying to share this information.
 So I'm wondering in terms, I guess I just really felt personally the comment about that
 in face of this us, them place that we can get into and to see if you have any comments about our impeccability
 in terms of dealing with this situation correctly.
 Thank you.
 Yeah, well, I don't really think in terms of us and them.
 I really resist paranoia.
 I don't believe in conspiracy theories or I don't believe that anybody is running the world.
 I think it has a life of its own.
 I think that I agree with you.
 The major task is the task of working on oneself,
 but not entirely to the exclusion of social responsibility.
 The major contribution most people can make in the theater of social responsibility
 is clarity of thought and intention.
 The general tone of the discussion arises out of the quality of the people participating in it.
 And you can reach most people if you will start with something that they are familiar with
 and then try and lead them out of it.
 I mean, I'm amazed in all the years that I've been talking about the things that I talk about,
 I have never been heckled, ever.
 No one has ever stood up quaking with righteous wrath and quoted chapter and verse
 or denounced me.
 And it's because I will argue with anybody unto the ninth hour if necessary.
 I really think that the best ideas will come to the fore
 and that there are no evil people.
 There is no group that with...
 (no audio)
 [no audio]


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.64 sec
Decoding  : 2.10 sec
Transcribe: 2675.05 sec
Total Time: 2677.79 sec