And as Polyidos sat there bewailing his fate and rending his clothes and calling out on
 the gods to help him, a snake entered the chamber through some unseen tiny chink.
 And the snake approached the corpse of the child lying in a dripping pool of presumably
 dark attic honey on the polished stone of the sarcophagi.
 And Polyidos emerged out of his reverie and struck out at the snake and killed it because
 he was afraid it would violate the body of the child.
 And then seeing that the snake was dead, he went back to his reverie.
 And a few minutes later a second snake appeared and came to the body of the first snake and
 reacted very violently.
 And before Polyidos could move to catch it, quick as a wink, it was across the room and
 lost through a small aperture in the floor.
 And hours passed and the depth of Polyidos' despair grew and multiplied as he realized
 the hopelessness of his situation.
 And then suddenly the second snake appeared again.
 And this time it was carrying in its mouth a branch of a small herb.
 And it approached the corpse of its companion and regurgitated the branch into the mouth
 of the dead snake.
 And the dead snake was revived and the two snakes went away.
 And Polyidos was struck dumb with amazement.
 And he called to his jailers and he described this herb to them, which was well known to
 him for its use in other medical matters.
 And the herb was brought to him and he chewed it up and he regurgitated it into the mouth
 of the corpse of young Glaukos.
 And the child was revived and Polyidos' ass was saved.
 So he emerged and the king and the queen were jubilant and the court was jubilant and the
 king said, "You can have anything that you wish."
 And Polyidos, who was actually a foreigner in Crete, said, "I want to journey to my homeland.
 I want to return to my homeland."
 And King Minos was on the brink of granting the boon when Queen Pasiphae intervened and
 whispered in his ear and said, "You cannot allow a magician of this power to leave the
 kingdom.
 We must somehow gain his knowledge before we allow him to depart from us."
 And so King Minos backtracked and made a different deal and said, "You can return to your homeland,
 but first you must teach all your magical arts to my son Glaukos, who you have resurrected."
 And so Polyidos, not liking it, but seeing the power of the king, acceded to the demand.
 And over the course of many years, he taught all his shamanic and magical arts to Glaukos
 and he schooled him in all of the esoteric knowledge that had made Polyidos the unique
 person able to recover, find the lost child.
 And finally, he went to the king and said, "I have taught all I know to your son.
 Now fulfill your promise and allow me to leave your kingdom."
 And so the king was agreed.
 And on the appointed day of departure, a royal retinue accompanied Polyidos to the quay where
 he was to grab the boat out to Syracuse.
 And they were embracing and the last goodbyes were being said.
 And finally, it only remained for Polyidos to make his departure to Glaukos.
 And he approached Glaukos and he said, "As my pupil, as the one that I have initiated,
 I have one last request.
 It is that now at our farewell, you spit into my mouth."
 And Glaukos thought it was a bizarre request, but he did as his master bade him.
 And Polyidos boarded the ship and they cast off and sailed away.
 And as the royal family was standing on the quay looking out to sea, Glaukos realized
 that all the magical information that had been given to him over the years had been
 contained in the glob of spittle and that the master had reclaimed his knowledge and
 sailed away.
 So that's the story of Glaukos and Polyidos.
 One funny part is that in the original, at first you said they wanted to find, they couldn't
 find the body.
 And then you said they knew where the body was and we needed to revive it.
 Oh yeah, I blew the story.
 He did, Polyidos, once chosen, he dreamed and saw the body in the honey, but they were
 so flipped out that the kid was dead that the fact that he had found the body didn't
 buy him much slack.
 Yes, thank you for clarifying that.
 Now the reason, let me say a little bit about it.
 It's a very interesting story.
 I found it while I was searching for proto-Hellenic myths related to mushrooms.
 And there's something funny going on in this story.
 The fact that the blue-gray child is preserved in the honey and then is resurrected through
 the intercession of another herb, an herb known to the snake.
 And recall from the Genesis myth that the snake is always the keeper of the vegetable
 secrets.
 It was the snake who had the inner skinny on the flora and fauna of Eden.
 And so the snake comes bearing information that then concerns this herb of immortality
 and the ability to resurrect the dead.
 And it shows, I think, the very late persistence of these Paleolithic themes of shamanic power
 carried and transmitted through plants.
 If any of you have any other insight into this, why perhaps in the afternoon...
 The raqus may have eaten a mushroom and gone into some kind of coma state where he appeared
 dead and then the task was to revive him.
 So they found an herb that restores people who are apparently dead.
 In the Gilgamesh story, there's also an herb of immortality that the snake absconds with.
 The snakes have always been especially credited with knowing the secret of regeneration because
 of the sloughing their skin and all that.
 And you know, people in Mexico who go to Huatla and places like that and collect the mushroom,
 the on-the-road, old-style way of preserving the mushrooms was to put them in honey.
 And it turns into a totally black mess.
 It turns into the alchemical prima materia.
 It turns into the exudate of the grave.
 But if you have the courage to eat it, it is then reborn inside of you.
 And honey, the role of honey as a...
 Well, any of you have read Levi Strauss, "Honey and Ashes" and "The Raw and the Cooked" know
 that this is a symbol of semen, of sunlight, of sweetness.
 I mean, it's a very rich kind of symbol.
 There are even, it's reputed, hallucinogenic honeys in the Amazon.
 This is a whole unexplored area where nobody has ever been able to walk into a laboratory
 and slam down a quart jar of hallucinogenic honey.
 But there are persistent reports filtering back from wild-eyed travelers.
 (laughter)
 Remember the microphone.
 The metaphor of honey, the manas from heaven, yes.
 Would you recommend preserving mushrooms in honey?
 No, I don't recommend preserving mushrooms in honey if you have a good freeze-dryer and
 modern refrigeration.
 But otherwise, you see, the honey draws the moisture out and it like candies it and crystallizes
 it and makes it impervious.
 Honey is highly antibiotic.
 Nothing rots that is immersed.
 You have to eat all the honey?
 Parents, can you make sure that they actually talk into the microphone?
 Yes.
 Mr. Coffee is going to...
 You had a story to tell.
 No.
 No?
 I guess.
 I take my word.
 Oh, I tailored myself to your needs, sir.
 Now I have nothing to say.
 (laughter)
 Come on, you can't back out.
 Yes, I can.
 Yes, he can, as a matter of fact.
 (laughter)
 Well...
 It's not a story, but it's sort of a joke.
 She has a joke.
 A joke.
 Well, it's a deathbed joke.
 When I was deathing my father, a couple of days before he died, he told me a dream he
 woke up and he said that he was sitting on the top of the peaks and the elders came and
 gave him the beads and they contained the secrets of the universe and they described,
 they went through the rosary of all the beads and showed him all the secrets of the universe.
 And he understood that he was going to die and that he'd been given this gift before
 he died.
 And then they left him there, telling him that they would see him.
 He looked down in the beads and he couldn't remember any of the secrets of the universe.
 (laughter)
 Yes, well, there's something about dreams where meaning, puns, or some great truth is
 portrayed but it can never be quite brought back.
 And it seems simple, silly, profound, but mostly difficult to remember.
 And a friend of mine, the closest to my mind that anybody ever came to capturing this was
 a friend of mine told me about a dream he had that was very complex and many, many things
 happened but in the final scene there was a raft covered with Edwardian furniture and
 naked mermaids and it was floating out to sea and the mermaids were waving to my friend
 who stood on the beach and the last thing he heard them call out to him was, "Deja vu!
 Deja vu!"
 (laughter)
 He said, "This sounds like it means something."
 (laughter)
 Well, anyone who wishes to say, I mean, you don't have to feel constrained.
 You have to feel constrained.
 (laughter)
 Maria Gambutis says that snakes are the goddess.
 Any symbol of the snake that you see in the archaic something or other is a goddess?
 Well, too bad Maria Gambutis can't mud-wrestle Sigmund Freud.
 (laughter)
 I'd like to invite people also, in terms of telling stories, also dreams I think would
 be, you know, often do contain good stories and you might search your memory particularly
 for dreams.
 I mean, I have a personal interest, I think it kind of ties in with the theme of this
 weekend and this theme of the wild man or the wild woman, the wild creature, the half-animal,
 half-human part of our own nature.
 If you ever had a dream that seemed to be about such a being, this would be a very significant
 dream, very centrally related to what we're talking about here.
 There was a book published very recently that I enjoy plugging because the guy is so perverse
 and he's a post-structuralist, Marxist, Jacques Derrida, labor organizer, rationalist type,
 but he wrote an amazing book about ayahuasca called "Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild
 Man."
 And if you want to be plunged into the world of real shamanism as it is practiced today
 among very sophisticated people, I mean, this guy got it.
 His name is Michael Taussig and you have to take off your hat to this guy because being
 an anthropologist at the University of Chicago and a Marxist, he took it over and over and
 over again, not sipping it.
 He actually just got flattened with these people and talks about it and just throws
 out the gauntlet to orthodox anthropology.
 And he's no true believer.
 This is no Carlos Castaneda.
 This is somebody very few of us here would actually be comfortable with because you can
 tell this guy is abrasive, thinks everybody else is a moron, thinks people who hear voices
 should see a psychiatrist.
 And yet you get the whole thing.
 It's all there.
 Shamanism, colonialism and the wild man.
 The thing that I got from that book was that what he points out is that the people in the
 Amazon region, having experienced 250 years of savage colonial oppression, are returning
 to Ayahuasca to heal themselves and to get a retreat, as it were, to restore themselves
 and to heal themselves from the outrageous wounds and the humiliations imposed on them
 by the colonial robber barons that run the rubber plantations down there, who regularly
 torture and massacre the Indians just for sport and convert them to slavery, basically.
 And so the Ayahuasca is healing and also reconnecting them with their original existence in the
 jungle, which fits with his Marxist analysis of the major human cultural patterns being
 a reaction against economic oppression.
 And the role of hallucinogens there does, I mean, there is other evidence for that in
 Africa, for example, where the tribe that uses the Iboga root, from which ibogaine is
 derived, are the Fong people in the Congo area.
 And they themselves say in their visions and their descriptions of their journeys with
 it, which they say puts you in touch with your ancestors, and they acknowledge their
 own ancestors who went on these great, had to do these great migrations to get away from
 Muslim and Christian soldier armies and so forth, and credit the, and even another people,
 the pygmy people who live even further in the forest.
 So the Fong are village dwellers, and so they credit the Iboga and the use of the Iboga,
 having learned that from the pygmies who showed them this is how you live in the forest, which
 is the earliest strata, really the wild, even more wild than they were.
 I mean, from our point of view, they'd be wild, but this is even further, more nature,
 deep forest.
 So they learn from them how to reconnect with that living source in the deep forest and
 at the same time escape the depredations of the colonialist oppressors.
 It's interesting in the case of Iboga, there's no known reference to it before 1850.
 So this is like a use of a hallucinogen in a tribal context for which there is no evidence
 of great age at all.
 The peyote use over a widespread area is also similar.
 The older strata of archaeological digs in the southwest seems to indicate that peyote
 use came in fairly late.
 This brings up a point that I wanted to make in discussing and imaging the figure of the
 shaman, which is not to get into a naive cult of the wild man.
 Some of you may know the book The Rio Tigre and Beyond by Manuel Cordova Rios, or it's
 by F. Bruce Lamb, but it's about Manuel Cordova Rios, who was a great ayahuasquero.
 And he describes going on curare collecting and rosewood collecting expeditions into really
 uncontacted tribal areas in the Amazon.
 And there he would meet people brewing ayahuasca, completely bare-ass, scarified, hunter-gathering
 types and they didn't know how to do it.
 And it was weak.
 He took it with him and it was just a stone drag.
 So if you know the book, you know that he himself had this history of involvement with
 ayahuasca.
 So he made it for them the way he thought it should be made and showed them how to make
 it.
 And they had no resistance at all.
 They said, "My God, you really know how to do this.
 Our whole culture will now be different.
 We've just been making weak tea."
 So there is this thing about how the real access to the shamanic mystery is a shifting
 doorway.
 You never know where you're going to find it.
 When we were in the Amazon in '83, we were dealing with pretty authentic tribal people
 and asking them about these orally active DMT drugs and the best they could do was to
 say, "Well, I saw my grandfather make it a couple of times before he died and he died
 twenty years ago, but I think I could make it."
 The tradition was just in the act of fading away.
 But then among the pharmacology students of the Universidad Nacional de Peru, we found
 that with the help of Harvard Museum botanical leaflets, they had reconstructed these aboriginal
 drugs so that they were extremely powerful and hit the mark every time.
 So shamanism is not the depth of a shaman's authenticity is not measured by the authenticity
 of the culture.
 The woman or man who is a shaman, it depends on their unique personality.
 My brother once suggested that a good definition for a shaman would be an extra-environmental
 and that this is the attitude to cultivate.
 Be a stranger everywhere.
 Always stand on the outside.
 Always be the alien and you will have the proper attitude for furthering in yourself
 the tendencies that make you into a person who sees deeply into reality.
 Another way of thinking about a shaman is it's a person, this is the definition I created
 when my son was much younger and he asked me, "What is a shaman?"
 And I said, "A shaman is a person who knows how the world really works."
 And this is the task of every one of us, to find out how does it really work?
 How does it really work?
 You inherit always a cultural model which is relatively trivial and idiotic and in all
 complex situations will fail you.
 So how does the world really work and to what degree does the cultural model stand in the
 way rather than serve as a springboard too?
 In the case of our own culture, I think quite a bit.
 This thing about the disappearing knowledge reminds me of something I wanted to share
 with you too.
 Some of you may know this woman called Anne Armstrong who is a very, very gifted seer,
 seeress, psychically call her or intuitively call her now, seeress, somebody who can tune
 into personal and metapersonal kind of larger cultural visions of the past and the future.
 So she was once asked in a context of a small conference about the history and future potentials
 of psychedelic plants and visionary plants.
 And she got from her vision that, said something like, "Well, these kinds of psychoactive visionary
 plants have been used by humans since the most ancient times for the purpose of helping
 humans come closer to God, basically, using kind of God language or we might say in a
 more abstract way, come closer to a real understanding of the evolutionary design of life on this
 planet and what our role really is.
 So the kind of role of psychedelics that we've been talking about here.
 But what happens and that the intelligences, the conscious beings that inhabit these plant
 forms, plant species, reach out to the human world, essentially, to establish this kind
 of cooperative, symbiotic, mutually supportive evolutionary relationship.
 But then if humans start forgetting what the purpose of that is and start misusing the
 plants for their own personal purposes, then the plant spirits withdraw.
 And they withdraw into the recesses of history.
 So they become inaccessible.
 Like Tams was saying, the knowledge is lost because the people are no longer using it
 for the purpose for which the plants really want them to be used.
 This is like really treating the plant spirits as equal intelligences to us, not as something
 to be used, but as something to be shared and communicated, exchanged.
 Or the knowledge becomes forgotten, like with the mushrooms, they were regarded as a myth
 up until the '50s.
 Still in the '20s and '30s, there were anthropological texts that referred to the magic mushroom
 as a myth.
 I mean, a fairy tale, in other words, a non-true story, a fantasy.
 And until the '50s, until Watson rediscovered Maria Sabina up in the mountains of Oaxaca
 brewing and doing the mushroom velada, that was the belief.
 Or another way they become inaccessible, the elusives, the ergot beverage was lost.
 Of course it was suppressed.
 The somer thing was suppressed or lost or both.
 Or another way they become inaccessible is by being made illegal, prohibited, as happened
 with LSD and all these others very quickly.
 Becomes accessible, same with MDMA.
 MDMA was used, like LSD was, for about 10 years by therapists and serious people wanting
 to use it to explore the potentials of the human mind.
 Then at a certain point, a certain threshold gets crossed, people start realizing the potential
 for making profit by distributing it to large numbers of people who otherwise wouldn't really
 have any interest in it.
 It's manufactured not for the purpose of helping people expand their consciousness, but for
 the purpose of making certain people rich.
 Then it becomes illegal, immediately.
 And then it becomes illegal, then you've got the various maniacs, the perverts, the exploiters,
 the barbarians, the people like Manson who completely misuse it, pervert it for the opposite
 of what it was originally intended to be, and it becomes essentially inaccessible.
 It's interesting to try and understand how this kind of knowledge could ever be lost.
 I mean, like Soma is a good example.
 The whole of the Rig Veda, especially the ninth mandala of the Rig Veda, is just this
 ecstatic hymn to Soma, to some kind of intoxicating plant juice thing that was expressed in a
 series of pumps and grinders that was the central mystery of this invading Indo-European
 civilization for a couple of thousand years.
 And then around a thousand BC, for inexplicable reasons, even the knowledge of what this plant
 was seemed to be lost.
 Well, how can such information that is so central to a full experiencing of human potential
 once found ever be forgotten?
 And I think that the only scenario that I've been able to come up with that would account
 for something like that is if you have a visionary plant and it's used by the population, but
 then you specialize and create a professional class that uses it, and then that professional
 class makes it illegal for all other classes.
 And then the professional class which is using this entheogen coincidentally is also the
 ruling class.
 Well, then when the lower echelons of society have had enough of being ruled, then there
 are slave revolts and popular uprisings, and the priestly class that held this secret as
 its own source of power is probably wiped out to the last bald-headed priest, and with
 them dies the information.
 So the holding close of the information is the first step toward losing it.
 Well, and I think the other aspect of that is the active suppression by the priest caste
 of the knowledge.
 They don't, and the same pattern exactly happened in Europe with all the witches, the
 herbs preserved by the witches, the ruling priests of the church, and in India I think
 something similar may have happened.
 The priests always want people, like Blake says, the priesthood abstracts the deities
 and says, "We have a special relationship to this deity, and we are the ones, we are
 the experts, we will intercede for you, we will be the intermediary.
 You talk to the deities and they will talk to you through us.
 We will tell you what the gods say, because we have this superior connection to them,
 and you do what they say, and you pay us, you support us.
 That's the deal."
 And the people buy the deal, and part of the deal consists, and then you can't take the
 medicine because the medicine would make the people communicate with the god directly.
 That's what the peyote Indians say, you know, a white man goes to church and talks about
 god and an Indian goes to the peyote teepee and takes peyote and talks with god.
 And so the priesthood immediately, they don't want people to have mystical experiences,
 whether with mushrooms, soma, herbs, datura, no matter what it is.
 And then they want the power and the wealth, they control the power and the wealth anymore,
 finally they said they don't need to take the mushrooms themselves either.
 Because actually if they continue to take the mushroom, they would, or the psychedelic,
 they would have to question their own power trip.
 So they rather want to maintain the power trip rather than constantly question it.
 So they suppress it.
 I think the only way soma could have been wiped out is by systematic suppression.
 It's all there in Genesis.
 I mean basically the story of this struggle over access to a plant and the first prohibition,
 you know, you can do anything you want, but do not eat of the fruit of this plant.
 And then the other knowledge, the tree of knowledge and the other source is saying,
 you know, you will become as him, you will know your true condition in the cosmos.
 Now is it that you will know your true condition in the cosmos or is it that you will be cast
 down into an unending and eternal hell unto the thousandth generation?
 This is essentially Nancy Reagan's position.
 So the issue is knowledge, the true, you know, if you look for an archetype of the shaman
 in the Western pantheon, the archetype of the psychedelic user, it has to be Prometheus.
 It is Prometheus who steals the fire from divinity and carries illumination down to
 the human species.
 In a fennel stalk.
 And for that must suffer the most outlandish torture and indignity ever dreamed up by the
 Western imagination.
 I have a story.
 Okay, and then we'll break.
 Tell your, get your mic and do your thing.
 Okay, so I want to change from the image of the primordial man, the sort of primitive
 man of nature who is the other half of ourselves to the primordial man in the sense of the
 wizard or the genie or the excellence.
 The immortal.
 The immortal one in us.
 And in the story his name is Khazr who is a Muslim figure who kind of runs around on
 the edge of reality rather like Elijah for the Jews.
 Elijah was taken up in a chariot of fire and never died.
 And in the, and so he's always present and he can come to the rabbis and sit after midnight
 and stand in front of their desk and teach out little pieces of scripture to them.
 And so Khazr comes to people in their dreams or in vision.
 And in the Hindu tradition, Babaji is this man.
 So the story starts with a little, an ordinary man living in a small village on the frontier
 of Afghanistan and northern Russia there.
 And he's the official in charge of collecting taxes, the weights and measures.
 So people who come through, they go through him.
 And he has a perfectly nice life with a wife and a child and so on.
 And one night in the middle of the night comes to the foot of his bed this figure, Khazr
 Babaji, and he's dressed in an emerald green cloak with an emerald green pointed hat and
 they have gold and silver stars and sickle moons embroidered upon the cloak and the hat.
 And he has a long pointed gray beard and piercing green eyes and these eyebrows curl up at the
 edge.
 And he says to the little man, "Meet me at the river in three days at sunset."
 And the little man is totally trembling and he wakes up in the morning and goes to his
 little tax office and he tells the big boss who's in charge of him, "Excuse me, but in
 three days' time I have to leave and I'm quitting the job now and I can't do anything about
 it."
 And they say, and the rumor spreads through the village.
 Immediately he's gone mad.
 He's gone crazy.
 And his wife comes to hear of it because he doesn't have the courage to tell her himself
 and, "Oh dear, he's gone crazy.
 What can we do?
 Perhaps we didn't feed him the right food or whatever else he takes."
 But anyway, three days later he's standing at sunset at the edge of the river and he
 sees far up river coming towards him this man with a great emerald green cloak and the
 tall hat and the pointed beard and they meet and they acknowledge each other and Hezer
 says, "Jump in the river."
 So, shall I continue?
 So he jumps in the river.
 Robert Bly taught us that when the storyteller stops, then you're supposed to encourage him
 to go on.
 Otherwise he doesn't know.
 He's boring you, you know.
 So, oh good.
 That's what I was doing to you.
 I was trying to encourage you, you know, just in the traditional way to make you know that
 we love your story.
 So, he jumps in the river and fortunately he can paddle a little bit and swim a little
 bit.
 So he's in the river and it's carrying him and it's nearly dawn when a small fishing
 boat comes by and sees him and says, "Oh, you're nearly at the mouth of the river.
 It's dangerous here."
 And they take him up onto the boat and they take him to shore where they have a small
 hut, palapa they call it, yes, and they make him, help him with the nets and they feed
 him of course from the fish that they've caught and then they take him out with them in the
 early morning and they teach him how to read the stars to know what time of the night it
 is and when to set out for the fishing.
 And they teach him about the tides and about the seasons and then one night he's sleeping
 in his little hammock in the fishing village and who should come by but Hazard Nabi who
 says, "Leave here before dawn, walk over those mountains and see what happens."
 Shall I continue?
 Yes, continue.
 He comes to a green valley over the mountains and he sees some men harvesting and putting
 the wheat up on a cart and carrying it to the farmhouse and coming back for more and
 he stands by the road watching them and they call him and they say, "Hey, it's the harvest
 time, come and help us."
 So he helps and he loads the hay and then in the evening he's in the farmhouse and they
 sit him down at the table with all of them and the next morning he's up for breakfast
 and it's the farmer's daughter who brings him the porridge and the cereal and everything
 and it's looking quite nice and he learns about planting and about the seasons and the
 autumn and the springtime and how to keep the seeds and he's quite interested in the
 farmer's daughter after all and life is not so bad and there's cream and there's honey
 and then who should come in the middle of the night but Hazard and says, "Without saying
 goodbye to these people because you like them, before the dawn comes, leave and go to that
 far city and become a dealer in furs and skins."
 Go on.
 More, Hazard, more.
 Yes, yes, each time he gets right up in the middle of the night and rushes off with nothing.
 Oh no, they'd given him a small salary so he had to take the money that he'd earned
 and go and set himself up so he goes there and he buys some skins and soon because of
 his non-attachment and because he didn't really do this out of ambition the gods smile on
 him even though nature is indifferent.
 Sometimes if your mood is right then those nymphets and other devas and goddesses who
 inhabit nature can actually help us and give us the illusion, I think, that nature is on
 our side even if it really isn't.
 So he has this illusionary experience and becomes quite rich and one of the main merchant
 ladies of the city takes an interest in him and they decide that they're going to buy
 a house together and then improve their investments and share their knowledge of dealing in things
 and they're putting their money together and discussing this and they found the right house
 and who should come in the middle of the night but Hazard Nabi with his emerald green cloak
 and all his paraphernalia and said to him, "Give me the money you've earned," which is
 the part I really like about the story, "and go to that small village in the mountains
 and apprentice yourself to the potter."
 Or is it the green grocer?
 I always change this part of the story.
 Anyway, shall we go on?
 So he goes, he gives the money to Hazard and he goes to the small village in the mountains
 and he apprentices himself to the green grocer and people come to buy their vegetables and
 so on and they talk to the green grocer and they pay him and they talk to the green grocer's
 assistant and then they go away and they feel nice and then some of the ladies in the village
 have a headache and they go to the green grocer and they come back from the green grocer and
 their headache's gone and then someone's sick and they go to the green grocer's shop and
 he isn't there and they just speak to the assistant and they go away and they're not
 sick anymore and so this becomes a byword in the village and finally the leaders of
 the village come to talk to the person and then even the scholars from other places come
 and they examine him and they ask him to tell them what it is that has brought him to this
 deep knowledge and which marvelous teachers he has had and which theological schools he's
 studied in and then he tells them the story of his life.
 I don't know if you remember it.
 I could tell it again.
 Would you like me to tell it again?
 No, no.
 You're not going to tell it again, are you?
 And so they make up some story which makes it very important, his life, and they say,
 "well he's really hiding the truth from us and he must have studied with this great peer
 and with this great teacher and had these tremendous initiatic experiences" and it's
 simply called the story of the man with the inexplicable life and my question out of it
 is how the primordial man and the kind of alchemist, how they play against each other
 and with each other in our struggle to become more than just our human self, to discover
 our natural primordial self and also to discover this godlike self.
 Well anyone who's written Curriculum Vitae has grappled with that problem.
 Okay gang, that's it.
 We'll meet here at three.
 So it is not a metaphor that we are in a state of symbiotic abandonment to our mother.
 It isn't a symbolic statement at all.
 It is simply a true statement that we are so far out into the history game that we don't
 understand this, that our ennui, our existential angst is all because we don't know jack shit
 about what's going on and the reason we don't is because we have accepted prohibitions against
 finding out what's going on.
 We are infantile as a matter of fact.
 Our whole spiritual engine of transcendence is infantile.
 It rests on the daddy figure who is the priest, the guru, the wise man, some beady-eyed character
 from Bengal or elsewhere who's going to just straighten us all out.
 There is a complete kind of wrong-headedness that we have inherited as part of our historical
 legacy.
 It's that we do not value direct experience.
 We do not trust ourselves.
 We do not pay attention to the immediate input from the living world.
 We are always casting away from ourselves.
 What do the experts say?
 What did Buddha say?
 What did Plato say?
 What did somebody on the other side of the world, what are they saying now?
 We give ourselves away and the reason is because we are bereft.
 You know that phenomenon of the 40-year-old guy with the sports car and three marriages
 behind him?
 This guy is desperate.
 He is bereft.
 I always think of that amazing phrase in Lady Chatterley's Lover where Constance Chatterley
 faces the fact that she is, as she says in the book, "to be had for the taking."
 To some degree, we all have reached such a state of spiritual bereavement and abandonment
 that we are to be had for the taking.
 This makes us susceptible.
 It makes us marks, to use a word that's dear to William Burroughs.
 Shamanism is an effort to get outside the carny midway, to actually walk between the
 tents and to discover the cool night that is going on away from the sound of the change
 makers and the barkers.
 And it has to do ... I maintain and I become less and less tolerant of any other view,
 which is either a sign that I'm slowly losing my mind or I'm slowly just ... eventually
 I'll just be like John Lilly.
 I just won't give a shit, you know.
 Really say what I think.
 But I really believe that authentic shamanism is psychedelic shamanism.
 And then people say, and nobody's said it yet, but it's okay to say it, "Can't you get
 there some other way?"
 [silence]
 .


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