It wasn't Tess Oskarstens, who was I think a Swedish or German anthropologist.
 In 1920, he was studying the Cornelius Indian in southern Ecuador, and he wrote an article
 saying that the women took some plant, which is called piri-piri, and they swallowed it
 so that they could cohabit, as he put it in a refined way, with men and not have children.
 And at the time he was attacked violently in 1920, everybody said, "This man's out of
 his mind, he's silly."
 It invalidated quite a lot of his very good work, because everybody knew that nothing you
 took by mouth could stop a woman from having a child.
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 - It would be nice to know how many of our present beliefs
 make about that much sense.
 The more you see of jungles,
 the more you wonder about those things.
 And anyway, there are,
 they were the hardest of all things to get.
 You see, all medicines at the beginning at least,
 now that the acculturation process
 is proceeding at such a rate
 that the old taboos have worn kind of thin in some places.
 But when I first started doing this,
 medicine is magic and magic is secret.
 You don't tell anyone.
 One tribe would be using a totally different set
 of medicinal plants from another tribe.
 Their pharmacopoeias will be quite different.
 They'll overlap a bit,
 but the Witotos will know a plant
 that will heal infected third degree burns,
 I've seen this, without any scarring.
 And the Okinas who were,
 even in the same language group, didn't know it
 because an Okina girl told me
 how a Witoto woman cured her
 and her tribe hadn't known this.
 And they just keep it separate, it's secret.
 Even when it's a friendly tribe
 and a somewhat related tribe.
 So it was a lot of,
 it made it rather a sporting proposition
 to see how much you could work out of them.
 And being a woman and traveling alone
 made it a lot easier because there was no threat to anybody.
 I'd have a boatman and his wife, that's all,
 and an interpreter picked up at the edge
 of the language area.
 And also I'd travel in very inconspicuous
 and not necessarily by choice,
 rather ordinary and poverty-stricken way.
 And so that made it better too.
 You go in all with fancy equipment
 and a fine boat and half a dozen people,
 you're not going to get very far.
 Because they're too used to being put down.
 And that in itself is a put down,
 to go in looking very elegant.
 So I managed to get quite a lot of stuff
 and it was, it was really rather more fun, you know,
 something to be gamed,
 so you could feel you were pretty smart.
 And the one thing that I,
 even when I had formed a very strong friendship,
 I could not for years get anyone to tell me about,
 was their contraceptives.
 I knew they had them.
 I knew because some missionaries, medical missionaries,
 had told me of cases in which a woman
 with malformed pelvis had had a terrible time giving birth
 and they told her she couldn't have any more children.
 And she, in this particular case, the woman said,
 "Oh, that's too bad."
 And said, "Are you going to leave your husband?"
 "Why should I do that?"
 The woman said, "He's a nice man, why would I leave him?"
 "But you can't have any more children."
 And she said, "I'll take some medicine."
 But she wouldn't tell what it was.
 And she never had another child.
 And over the time they were with them,
 there were about four tribes,
 four women in the tribe who had that same experience.
 And so they were convinced that oral contraceptives
 did exist and were effective.
 But at that time, I think it was about,
 when I first heard about it, it was about 1951,
 before I'd even really started going after medicinal plants.
 And the contraceptives, oral contraceptives,
 did not get publicity and get on the market until 1960.
 So I believed them.
 And I thought it would be kind of interesting to get them.
 But you just draw a blank when you mention them.
 In fact, you may ruin a good,
 when you're building a relation with,
 you've gone into some tribes that are kind of far away
 and not used to white people.
 And maybe it hasn't seen them very often.
 And then you're getting along fine,
 you say something about a contraceptive.
 Once I just said, I smell piri-piri, which is,
 and you know, I've had 20 piri-piris
 for all different purposes, rheumatism, contraceptives,
 and some you wash your husband's pants with
 and he'll be impotent with another woman.
 And they're used for everything.
 They've got one for whatever it is.
 So, but every time,
 I even got myself practically thrown out
 a couple of times just by mentioning them.
 And so, finally, it took a long, long time.
 But you will eventually,
 if you keep going into different tribes
 and meeting different people,
 get a sudden understanding.
 It's like the leap of an arc between two electric poles.
 And now and then it happens.
 And then you're in, you're very lucky.
 And so I did find a Heberot woman who got them for me.
 And even then I had a very difficult time
 getting away with them.
 Because, but we managed.
 And, well, it was very funny, actually, how I managed.
 I had been thinking about this.
 I was going up the Rio Corrientes.
 And there's a Heberot, you've been up there?
 - Not the Corrientes.
 - And there's a Heberot colony
 up about halfway up the river,
 on the way to the Makwassari.
 And they were having a great fiesta
 and everyone was getting very drunk when we arrived.
 And you don't want to hang around when,
 it's, fights are apt to happen when Indians get drunk.
 And so we went home with this one woman
 who was taking her husband home to clean him up.
 I think he'd been a little sick.
 And it has not been said that bad manners at all
 for a man to get roaring drunk and throwing up.
 Because that's part of the fiesta,
 it's almost a ritual.
 And so they,
 she and I sat and talked and with me,
 she spoke Spanish, very bad Spanish,
 very, sometimes pretty hard to understand,
 but she did know a little.
 She didn't like my boatman and his wife,
 neither did I by that time.
 And,
 and so she wouldn't speak Spanish.
 In fact, I found those three people in the tribe
 who spoke Spanish excellently,
 or at least intelligibly, that's excellent in the jungle.
 And she didn't,
 when they had left, she said to me in Spanish,
 first thing she said, "Where's your husband?"
 And I said, "Oh, I didn't know that Indians
 had divorces then."
 I said, "Well, we are not married anymore.
 He is in one place, I'm in another place.
 He is no more my husband."
 Thinking I was giving a good shock,
 I said, "Oh, me too."
 (audience laughing)
 And so she had been married to a very brutal man,
 she told me, and he beat her and so forth.
 Finally, he abandoned her to her great delight.
 And her stepfather was the witch doctor of that tribe.
 So he told her,
 it was a long time before she was willing to marry again.
 She's had a bad time.
 And her little daughter,
 there's no question of custody
 the child stays with the mother in jungle divorces.
 And he told her that she ought to marry again,
 and she finally did find a man she thought was,
 who was very good to her,
 and he was quite an important guy in the tribe.
 He even had a pair of shoes,
 and they were bright yellow.
 And he was the only person on the,
 only Indian on that river who had a pair of shoes.
 And he was an awfully nice man too.
 And so she married him, but she would not give him a child.
 And I said, "Well, how did you manage that?"
 She said, "Well, of course I took the medicine."
 And I thought, "Oh, at last."
 And so she told me she'd give it to me when I got,
 and I was going up the river,
 I said, "Give it to me when I get back."
 I didn't want it, for one thing,
 I didn't want to carry it around,
 'cause I knew by then that anything that has to do
 with the giving or withholding of life,
 things that ease birth, ease labor,
 and they had some very good ones,
 and things that, and the contraceptives,
 and the abortifacients,
 they have very good things for abortion.
 All of those are so secret
 that you have to be awfully careful
 and awfully sure you're really in and intimate
 before you mention them.
 At least you didn't know,
 they're easing up now as they're losing their taboos,
 they're losing their culture,
 they're also losing their knowledge of the violence.
 So it doesn't help much.
 And so she gave them to me when I came back down,
 but they were having another fiesta,
 and the men were all sitting together
 at one end of the house, it was an Indian house,
 has a trunk in front to climb up
 because they built a throne and stilts
 because of the floods,
 and then just a platform and a roof,
 and nice and airy.
 And they were all sitting around there,
 it was raining,
 and the women got me the plants
 because, and I was just about to get them down
 to the canoe when some of the old men
 who were sitting in a little row in the back
 came over and looked at the plants and looked at me,
 and then they started talking,
 and my friend Tessa started explaining,
 didn't work, and they said,
 she was looking very distressed,
 and so was Auntie, her auntie had helped in this deal.
 And I had been thinking about this,
 I'd learned the trick from a man in Shanghai
 who had a hard time getting the best
 of his Chinese servants sometimes.
 And so, through the interpreter,
 I said, tell Tessa to tell them,
 I already knew the names of all these plants,
 I knew all about them.
 So Tessa did, I suppose, and she spouted evil,
 and said, okay, if that's the case,
 what's the name of this one?
 So I, through the interpreter, said,
 well, tell him, of course I don't speak his language.
 So I couldn't tell him what this bench is in,
 I don't know the word for bench.
 I couldn't tell him what the rain is,
 but I can tell him what it is in my language.
 It is a,
 this one I think is a logarithm.
 (audience laughing)
 And this is an isosceles quadrangle,
 which is a wild combination.
 And you know, they do sound magical.
 And they are magic to me, I don't understand it at all.
 (audience laughing)
 And I got by with it.
 Because Tessa said, I know the name of this plant,
 and the old witch doctor whom I had bribed
 by giving him a glass eye,
 which was what he could, I figured he could sort of
 pull a few fashions if he ever gotten a problem with magic.
 And so it worked beautifully,
 and I left rather quickly,
 and got them in the canoe and off we went.
 But that's how secret they are.
 (Tessa sighs)
 And now.
 - Now I'll let you off the hook.
 Thank you.
 Yes, well, I mean, I talk a lot about
 how this plant knowledge is being lost,
 even more quickly than the rainforest itself.
 And I think very few modern ethnographers
 have taken the time to learn it the way you have.
 And very few modern ethnographers have been able
 to gain the confidence of women the way you have.
 - They haven't tried.
 - No, they haven't tried.
 But I know horror stories of clashes
 between insensitive anthropologists and tribal groups.
 - Well, you have to keep your antenna out all the time.
 And you have to take your time and not be in a hurry.
 - I have been sometimes, and got myself thrown out.
 - By being in a hurry.
 Yes, Nicole is the only white person I have ever met
 who has been able to convince me
 that they actually enjoyed being in the jungle.
 And Nicole does enjoy being in the jungle.
 - Oh, why not?
 - There are 10,000 reasons why not.
 (audience laughing)
 - It is the most exciting, the most beautiful,
 and also, and the most sort of sacred,
 it has a spirit, a very strong spirit.
 And also has a great pleasure of thinking,
 imagine me doing this, and feeling like somebody important.
 - That's right. - For yourself.
 - That's right.
 - And you, I don't get that chance very often.
 - But I traveled years later to many of the same places
 that Nicole describes in her book,
 "The Witch Doctor's Apprentice."
 And the model, let me tell you, for exploratory writing,
 is you go nowhere, and then you exaggerate
 when you write about it.
 And all these hairy-chested guys
 who are running around the Amazon
 with machine guns and helicopters
 inevitably exaggerate the difficulty.
 And if you read Nicole's book,
 it sounds as though the Amazon basin
 is just dotted with wonderful, clean, friendly villages
 filled with happy, fascinating people.
 - Oh, nuts, I don't.
 (audience laughing)
 My books aren't phony.
 - No, that's what I mean, you don't exaggerate.
 But Sebastian Snow and some of these other people--
 - Oh, well, I knew Sebastian.
 He came to my door and said,
 "I met him many years ago."
 Somebody banged on the door,
 "Who's this nice little blond boy?"
 And-- (audience laughing)
 And he said, "I'm Sebastian Snow,
 "the writer of 'Geographical Society.'"
 I said, "That's nice, I'm a fellow, too."
 He said, "Well, I'm not yet, but I'm going to be."
 (audience laughing)
 So then--
 - No, well, I think the acid test
 for every Amazon explorer is
 how hard you find it to stay at Eureka.
 And I became-- - Oh, well, that was not--
 - That was a hellhole.
 Well, Alfred Russell Wallace in 1858
 described it as absolutely unbearable.
 You had a terrible time there.
 I had an awful time. - Well, not only that,
 but I lived in a double boiler.
 - You lived in one of those metal buildings
 that they put up. - Yeah.
 - Yes, so did I, yes.
 Why would people put up with this kind of stuff
 unless they felt they were in touch
 with a living world of--
 - Because the people they sent down, they didn't know.
 It was the Colombian police.
 And they sent down people who were from Bogota,
 grew up in Bogota, didn't know a thing about the jungle,
 and they sent them for a year and a half
 so they didn't have time to learn anything.
 - Very lonely boys from Boyacá.
 - And the thing that's bad about that place
 is that they have the most stinging gnats
 I have ever seen, three kinds of stinging insects
 that fly in clouds, really in clouds.
 And there are the little black gnats that make a blister.
 There are the little black gnats that make a bloody spot.
 And there are the tabanos,
 you know, the triangular black flies--
 - This is the one we were trying to remember yesterday.
 - Tabano. - Tabano, yeah.
 And they eat through the heaviest jeans or anything else
 and they make a very painful, burning bite.
 Of course, the mosquitoes are on duty too,
 but they're never led by evil.
 Now, that is the most awful.
 - It's an awful place.
 (audience laughs)
 Nicole visited La Charrera long before I was there,
 even before John Sullivan was there.
 That's how out in front of the pack--
 - I was there in '59.
 - You were there in '59.
 I didn't get there till '71.
 - They're a wonderful group of nuns and priests there.
 - Yes, I wonder how they're faring
 in the middle of the Koch Wars.
 - But I haven't heard they're killing any Catholic priests.
 - No, I think that airfield is very important
 to the Coconeros and probably they strive
 to keep decent relations there.
 - They're all Catholics too.
 - Oh, yes, absolutely.
 The higher horror of the whiteness
 is certainly a Catholic trait.
 Well, let's see here.
 I'm a little off balance
 because I held a weekend at Esalen two weeks ago
 and they allow the people who participate
 in the workshops to evaluate people and I got dinged
 and somebody wrote an evaluation and said,
 "Terence McKenna is the William Buckley
 "of the psychedelic left."
 - Good God.
 - And he needs to learn to listen.
 So you'll see me doing or trying to do a lot of listening
 this weekend.
 I have a kind of obsessive need
 to create a certain kind of closure.
 So excuse me for about five minutes and I'll do it.
 It's just to satisfy an itch of mine.
 It's the need to try and tie this all together
 and make some kind of sense of it.
 I mean, what does a plant that heals wounds
 have to do with hallucinogens?
 And what do these things have to do
 with a global planetary crisis in the ecosystem?
 And what does that have to do with each of us?
 Well, to create an overarching metaphor
 that can connect all this together,
 I think what we have to do is think in terms
 of the exhaustion of our own cultural forms.
 I mean, that's what we're living through
 is a global dying created by the exhaustion
 of our cultural forms and the vitality
 of the cultural forms that we see
 in these so-called primitive,
 I call them preliterate people.
 As Nicole pointed out, they have nothing,
 but what they seem to have that we cannot seem
 to get a grip on is a kind of dynamic equilibrium
 with their environment and peace of mind
 in the felt experience of the moment.
 These are the two things we don't have.
 As a society, we cannot seem to make peace with nature.
 As human beings, as individuals,
 it's very hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.
 I mean, I consider my own life the search for peace of mind.
 Forget enlightenment, forget shunyata, all this stuff.
 Just a little peace of mind would be a tremendous boon
 as far as I can see.
 So I really think that there's a confluence here
 of themes and possibilities.
 It has this richly plotted texture
 that always lets you know that you're in the presence
 of a higher order of things.
 It's that the shamans whom we admire,
 who we idealize, seem to be at the center
 of this environment, the warm jungle, the tropics,
 the warm tropics, that we find it necessary to destroy.
 So it's a perfect image of us being at war,
 not only with ourselves, but with nature itself.
 And you've heard all about how the Amazon
 and the Congo Basin in Eastern Indonesia
 are all being cleared and lumbered
 and turned into cattle ranches.
 This is a tragedy, obviously.
 We understand and can perceive the dynamics of that.
 But how to make sense of a situation
 where as the World Bank and the IMF attempt
 to halt this kind of destruction,
 on the other side of the coin,
 the United States State Department and the DEA
 and these agencies propose and are planning
 to carry out the defoliation of the Wayaga Basin.
 So there's a schizophrenia here that is not academic.
 I mean, are we trying to get the patient well,
 or are we pulling the plugs one by one?
 We seem to be acting in both dimensions simultaneously.
 And I think it's because we have not in this culture
 awakened to the depth of the crisis that surrounds us.
 There's a lot of kind of self-congratulatory back-slapping
 going around these days over the fact
 that communists everywhere are in hot water
 and have to admit that they did it wrong.
 And this gives a lot of satisfaction
 to people who feel that that means we did it right.
 We didn't do it right.
 They did it wrong and now admit they did it wrong.
 We do it wrong and have yet to even raise the possibility
 of turning away from what we are doing.
 The internal contradictions of Marxism
 were based on a false definition of what people are.
 People do not respond to central planning,
 hortatory propaganda and stereotyping.
 Neither do people respond to an ethos of self-denial
 or a view of human beings that denies the fact
 that we have certain itches which must be scratched.
 So, I think that the collapse of Marxism
 is only the collapse of the outer edge
 of the societal and civilizing assumptions
 that we have made.
 After all, Marxism is nothing more than
 the millenarian retread of Christian millenarianism.
 And so is modern science,
 yet another secular retread of Christian millenarianism.
 So, our culture is in trouble, not trouble.
 We are at a terminal crisis,
 a bifurcation that can only go one of two ways.
 Horror beyond your wildest imagination
 or breakthrough to dignity, decency, community
 and caring beyond your wildest imagination.
 Now, where do you look for models?
 Where do you go?
 The answer is so obvious.
 You go to nature.
 Nature has been playing this game
 for three billion years on this planet.
 We have been playing the game,
 we the apostles of Christian scientism,
 for about 2000 years.
 Nature has an economy, an elegance,
 a style that if we could but emulate it,
 we could rise out of the rubble
 that we are making of the planet.
 You know, it was the geographer Carl Sauer who said,
 "Man found the planet a climaxed primeval forest.
 He," and notice the gender here,
 "He will leave the planet a weedy lot."
 A weedy lot.
 Well, now this is a metaphor
 where you change climaxed rain forest for weeds,
 but it's also true.
 By clearing land, we promote the kind of plant evolution
 that stresses very rapid seed production
 and annular cycles of growth, in other words, weeds.
 And this tendency to find perfection
 and then to leave rubble in our wake
 has haunted us for the past three or 4,000 years
 of our history.
 Now, with the ozone shield disappearing,
 with acid rain falling on the earth
 that can melt blocks of marble,
 with the CO2 levels rising,
 with the levels of strontium and chlorofluorocarbons,
 and you know the litany,
 we have now one last chance to fish or cut bait.
 And the place where nature has provided the models
 for how to respond to this situation
 is the climaxed rain forest.
 Only the climaxed tropical rain forest
 has the kind of complexity of signal transfer,
 movement of nutritional materials,
 movement of electromagnetic radiation
 that we find in the modern city.
 It is a cliche of modernity that the city is a jungle.
 The problem is it isn't jungle enough.
 And I think it's the task of the new shamans
 to take the metaphor of the jungle,
 which is a metaphor of tremendous wealth,
 tremendous variety, a tremendous outpouring of form
 and of energy and of potential fulfillment
 of various bifurcation patterns of flow,
 to take that and enrich our own lives with it.
 And the way this is done is by empowering
 the presence of experience.
 The main thing that you get
 with these so-called primitive, preliterate people
 and with people like Nicole,
 who have spent time in this situation,
 is they are in the moment.
 They know how to have fun.
 They know how to work.
 They know how to live.
 And the reason they understand this
 is because they are focused within the confines
 of the felt presence of experience.
 They do not live by abstraction.
 And abstraction is the knife poised at our hearts.
 We are so much the victims of abstraction
 that with the earth in flames,
 we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room
 and look at the thermostat.
 That's the level of disimpassioning
 that abstraction has laid upon us.
 Well, hopefully this weekend, there will be passion.
 There will be an effort wherever there is abstraction
 to drag it down into the felt presence of the moment.
 I think basically what we are,
 are a kind of green anarchy,
 an effort to revivify social forms
 that have been atrophied in the West,
 at least since the destruction of the Lucis,
 probably in most places thousands of years before that.
 This is our last chance.
 I have done the best I could
 in terms of trying to sift through all these options
 and as a communicator, offer the best way out.
 And, you know, I could only do my best.
 And so that's what you get.
 I can't preach scientism
 because I don't believe in it.
 I can't preach Buddhism
 because I can't understand it.
 The only thing I can preach
 is the felt presence of immediate experience,
 which for me came through the psychedelics,
 which are not drugs, but plants.
 It's a perversion of language
 to try and derail this thing into talk of drugs.
 There are spirits in the natural world
 that come to us in this way.
 And so far as I can tell,
 this is the only way that they come to us
 that is rapid enough
 for it to have an impact upon us
 as a global population.
 This weekend will be different
 because we will be hewing close to the source.
 Nicole is a priceless repository of information,
 more even than she knows.
 If I could declare her a national treasure,
 I would.
 The number...
 Who knows what this woman knows?
 Who knows how much human suffering,
 the alleviation of how much anxiety,
 lies in the hands of perhaps half a dozen people
 of Nicole's caliber
 who have paid their dues in these jungles.
 This information is flowing through our fingers
 and disappearing.
 In another 30 years, it will be all gone.
 Every time I go to the Amazon,
 I can feel the way in which it's slipping away.
 When my brother and I go off
 looking for these unusual hallucinogens,
 often we have the experience
 where when we finally find the person
 who claims they know what we're after,
 the line goes like this.
 "Well, I've never taken it,
 but as a child,
 I remember seeing my grandfather prepare it,
 and I think I can do it."
 If it weren't for us standing there,
 asking that it be done,
 it would never have even risen
 into the gentleman's mind as a possibility.
 This is the knife edge upon which this knowledge is poised.
 If it can be saved,
 it gives me hope that we can be saved.
 If we can't save this kind of knowledge,
 we cannot save ourselves,
 because this kind of knowledge is ourselves.
 Culture is a garment which you put on.
 Medical systems are pieces of jewelry
 which you wrap around your throat or neck.
 Religious ideals are like objects
 which you push through pierced nostrils and earlobes.
 If we cannot come to terms
 with that which allows us to give birth with ease,
 to die with dignity,
 and to live in health,
 then what kind of a future do we have?
 No future at all.
 So this is not a meeting of obscurantists
 or enthusiasts for some private vista of transcendence.
 This is a meeting of political activists,
 people who are socially committed to themselves,
 to each other, to the larger idea of community,
 and who understand that when you talk about Gaia,
 it's only an abstraction unless you talk about plants.
 The division between the masculine and the feminine
 is only trivially a difference between men and women.
 It is fundamentally a division between plants and animals.
 Plants are the enveloping feminine matrix
 of control and refurbishment.
 Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around,
 an extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.
 So the archaic revival, if it means anything,
 it means reconnecting the Gaian mind,
 which is a vegetable mind,
 a feminine, enfolding,
 boundary-dissolving, planetary mind
 that is not an abstraction, not a stereotype,
 not something used to create hortatory propaganda,
 but a living, breathing reality,
 a reality which is the only thing which stands between us and Armageddon.
 We will pursue this in detail over the next two days.
 Thank you very much.
 (Applause)
 (Applause)
 (Applause)
 (Applause)
 (Applause)
 That was great.
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