[silence]
 It's not a fear of being killed. It's a fear of being sort of screwed.
 In other words, it's a fear of being taken to the cleaners, being had,
 having my purse slashed, essentially.
 It's a feeling which I associate with the Crawford market in Bombay,
 where in a dark period in my past, I had to carry out intricate semi-legal transactions,
 which left me sleepless for nights.
 So then I had the idea, why do I think that?
 Why do I get this feeling from the ancestor souls that they are trying to take me for a short ride?
 And I realized it's because they are traders.
 They are traders of means.
 This is what they love. They collect and trade ideas.
 So when you burst into this shamanic space where Yggdrasil, the magic world ash,
 is rooted on a plane of travertine and flames before you,
 when you break into this place, what they offer are gifts.
 They say, "Look at this. Look at this. Look at this."
 And these things are like miracles, toys, bubbles, Fabergé eggs, Cellini gold work, jewels.
 And yet they sing. They speak poetry.
 They create their own objects, which they offer to you.
 And in the midst of all of this cacophonous elfin confusion and opulence and syntactical richness,
 you're trying to perform the eidetic reduction and figure out what the hell is going on here
 and what's real and what's not and what you can tell your lover and what you can tell your mother.
 And it's a craziness.
 After many years of being completely fa-bludgeoned by this kind of thing,
 I finally understood, through making a kind of composite map of these trips,
 many of them overlaid over each other, that the place that you break through to,
 and all the high-dose tryptamine experiences lead toward this,
 it's like a receiving area for a human being.
 It's like a playpen. It's someone very odd's idea of a reassuring environment for a human being.
 You know, sort of a cross between French Bordello and early hyperspace.
 I mean, there's a lot of cut plush velvet and chrome and domed and...
 And you're supposed to like this. You're supposed to say, "How thoughtful!"
 But somebody is looking in from another dimension and saying,
 "The human subject seems to have accepted the conditions in the reception area." Something like that.
 I don't know what to make of this. I mean, I started out a rationalist
 and have ended up the pathetic creature you see before you.
 And it was because I poked into the wrong places.
 I discovered, and many of you probably have too or are soon about to,
 that reality is a very thinly spun cultural fiction.
 And as long as you stay on Main Street, it all holds together pretty well, you know?
 But my God, just walk down one of these alleys off Main Street
 and you discover, you know, channeling, psychic healing, the dreams of Atlantis, the this, the that,
 and endless cornucopia of fuzzy thinking.
 And in that, you know, there are nuggets of genius.
 Because Main Street is clearly nowhere's ville.
 I mean, it's just male dominator, linear, post-Cartesian, high-tech, materialist, positivist,
 and so forth and so on, the litany you know so well.
 So the great excitement for me in this shamanic dimension and why I speak to it
 and what excites me is the fact that here is something totally unexpected,
 beyond our wildest, wildest dreams.
 I mean, you may have believed in flying saucers,
 but did you ever believe that they would land in your bedroom?
 I mean, that's the promise which this stuff holds out.
 Something is curiously awry with our cultural machinery
 and apparently we have a huge blind spot to a dimension of animate, organized, and non-human intelligence.
 You know, is it God? Is it the space people?
 Is it the goddess, the guy in mind, the vegetable matrix of the planet,
 the light pump of the solar system? Who knows what it is?
 The fact is not to know what it is, but to experience it, to verify that this is going on.
 And that's the big news that the cataloging of cultural bric-a-brac brings back in the example of shamanism.
 Saying, you know, "Oh, this, that turned out to be phony,
 and this was done with smoke and mirrors, and for this they used pig guts or something."
 But these people, and that was how I did it.
 I mean, I went to India years ago as an ingenue and sat at the feet of these guys and sought wisdom.
 And, you know, it wasn't until I got to the jungle that people were willing to show me into this,
 the dimension that exceeded my wildest dreams.
 I mean, that's it, and my dreams are pretty wild, and they were then, and I'm sure yours are as well.
 And yet, even if we dream together, we cannot dream the frontiers of what is possible.
 Because in our world of entropy and tawdryness and betrayal and stupidity,
 there is also the unspeakable, improbable presence of this thing in these plants.
 And I believe it called us forth out of primate organization.
 I believe that history is an effort to come to terms with this,
 a kind of hysterical love affair with the unthinkable, where, you know, you embrace it for a thousand years,
 then you burn all your cities and books and persecute it for a thousand years,
 and then you go mad and flip the coin again, because it's here with us.
 It is with us, tangible, experienceable, and yet not rationally apprehendable.
 It is the confounding of rationalism.
 And rationalism is the weapon by which the ego segregates the world,
 me and them, inside, outside, my tribe, their tribe, the good people, the bad people.
 This segregation of the ego.
 This is the neurotic response that somehow comes out of the trauma of our evolution on the planet.
 Our mother has been turbulent. Our childhood was turbulent.
 I evoked this this morning when I talked about how nine times the glaciers rolled south from the poles.
 I mean, we were left alone in the apartment a lot, is the practical equivalent of this.
 So now, finding our way back, we can't get out of this mess without a miracle.
 I mean, it's like the Grateful Dead saying, you know, you need a miracle every day.
 And the only miracle around seems to lie in this strange domain of this shamanic dimension,
 that against all odds and probability, there is help or something nearby.
 Anyway, the strange flickering light of an unvisited farmhouse,
 and we're broken down on the road with a double flat and rain is pouring.
 So we are going to have to make our way toward this thing which beckons and which seems to have shaped our history.
 And these Amazonian people kept the faith during the prodigal wanderings of Western man, men, through history.
 The Amazon peoples kept this faith, which the memory of which they had carried over the land bridge from the Eurasian continent.
 The oldest religion in history.
 The doorway out of ordinary time and into the presence of the elder things, whatever they may be.
 We don't even know. Our history is a fiction spun so thin that we are like children in the face of this possibility.
 H.P. Lovecraft, where are you now that we need you?
 Well, anyway, that's just sort of a way of evoking the space, the depth of the mystery.
 What we are talking about is not bright colors or paisley wallpaper that is found not to exist in the morning.
 But, you know, the best kept secret in the whole history of the human race,
 the fact that there is this alien dimension nearby and accessible through plants at great risk and with great benefit.
 Something to which we have become culturally completely deadened.
 And hopefully a gathering like this is a permission.
 Now that we are poised with a knife at the heart of the world to ask the question, you know, what is the world?
 What is this thing we are about to kill out of our greed for condominiums and parking space?
 Do we understand what we are doing? Can we understand what we are doing?
 Difficult questions. Let's hope that there are easy answers.
 Because we have hardly time for any other sort.
 Because the momentum of this thing is so great.
 The answer must be nearby. It must be within us.
 Because we haven't time to go anywhere else or meet anyone else and understand them and apply their solution.
 We don't have that kind of time. We have to dream it up.
 The submarine is sinking now. What are you going to do about it?
 Well, I think that... I personally felt that I searched the surface of reality like a blind person.
 Probing for a chink, an opening, a possibility in the seamless surface of the high walls that seem to ham us in.
 The prison of Gnostic iron that the Mandaeans placed at the center of the universe.
 And the chink in the armor is this radiant otherness that is showing through the plants.
 And what it is, who knows, what it's for, who knows.
 But that it loves us, that it too is reaching out toward us, is self-evident.
 And how can we not respond to that? We don't know what reality is.
 We don't know who we are. We don't know where we are.
 We are lost and this is beckoning light, warmth, affection and understanding for the plight of humanity.
 Shamans have always healed their people and predicted the weather and predicted the movement of game and this sort of thing.
 Out of resonance with this greater mind in nature which has sheltered the human family over millennia.
 I mean, it is the unseen partner. It is the goddess. It's a real thing.
 And now it must somehow be invoked operationally again because of our predicament as a result of having turned away from that.
 So the task is to understand all this, each in our own way, and then to communicate it to others, to understand each in their own way.
 And to build a Gaelanic consensus for life. For life.
 Because it's the only thing we know that has given us self-reflection.
 So, Nicole, do you have anything to say about that?
 Well, I believe, Terence, that you have been given a much wider experience in this.
 A much more vivid and probably valuable experience than most people.
 Why is that? Why do, for example, most of the Indians I know have...
 Perhaps they're just not able to explain it or to talk about it.
 But most of them say, "Well, they saw a tigre and some snakes or they went to a beautiful city."
 A much simpler understanding.
 I think it's language.
 You think? It could be. It very well could be.
 I think that every single one of these Indians has seen things no human soul ever saw before.
 That it's a richness of beauty before which one is inarticulate.
 As to why I can do it, well, maybe necessity is the mother of invention.
 I'm not a stockbroker.
 And we can always blame the Irish.
 But I don't like to do that because that shuts everybody else out.
 And I don't believe for a moment, and in fact I might say that,
 to me the important thing about this experience is I really believe that everyone can have it.
 That this is something almost... it's no exaggeration to compare it to sexuality.
 This is a potentiality in the human organism that if you go to the grave without knowing about this,
 it's rather equivalent to going to the grave with your virginity intact.
 This is an enormous area of what it is to be alive.
 And it blows my mind to think that the last 50 generations of people in Europe
 created all that philosophy and science and diplomacy and so forth and so on
 without a single person being stoned for a single moment all those centuries.
 I mean, it's pretty much gristle and beer, isn't it, folks,
 when you look at the accomplishments of European civilization.
 So I think it takes practice, though, to access these states, and I'll respond...
 That was another thing I was going to ask. Your initial experiences, were they anything like that?
 My initial experiences were kind of funny. It always seemed to hit me very hard.
 I was thinking the other day of, for some reason I hadn't thought of it for years,
 I think I was remarking the anniversary of it or something,
 about the very, very first time that I took LSD.
 And I took it in someone's apartment in San Francisco.
 And for me, the world divided into two great polar opposites.
 And perhaps it's still true in some strange way.
 One side of the thing was called the Ayostex, and they were like God.
 They were everything profound. I mean, to utter this word was to hurl yourself on the ground
 and press your face into the dirt. It was like invoking a Faustian flame, miles in extent.
 That was the Ayostex. At the other polarity were this something called the Pinkestairs.
 And they were hilarity and elfin dissolution into the minute.
 And I was just hurled between the antipodes of these two crazed, concrescent concepts
 for about 14 hours. And very peculiar.
 But by techniques, what I wanted to say was, because it will be useful, I assume, to people here,
 you do it in darkness and in silence and in reverence, on an empty stomach,
 free from distraction, with attention to breath. That's all.
 Now, what do we see? What does this operationally look like?
 It looks like a person sitting alone in a dark room, quietly breathing or meditating or something like that.
 That's all you see. That's the exterior manifestation of the sadhana.
 And what is going on is this person is navigating an internal river system of great complexity.
 Syntactical Niagara's are pouring over internal precipices of perception and remembrance.
 It's very intense. I have had experiences where I swore that everybody from Seattle to San Diego
 must have just thrown themselves under their desks to escape the blast.
 And it was just happening between my ears.
 It's like watching a thermonuclear explosion through 50 feet of absolutely clear crystal.
 And you know, you're in violet, but what's raging in the optical pathway is like the collapse of a universe,
 or the birth of a universe.
 The first time you took ayahuasca, was it that intense?
 No. It took years of fiddling with ayahuasca because they don't make it right.
 I won't take anybody's but my own just because they're not heavy enough on the foot pedal of the psychotria.
 I think they want to graze the surface of it.
 And I want impact.
 So I really push that because that's what fascinates me, the visions.
 I mean, some people say you're just a vision freak, that these wonderful feelings and thoughts,
 and it's true that that all is there, but there is something so convincing to my mind about a hallucination
 because it's so intricate and happening in real time.
 And you're just looking at this thing jaw agape.
 You could never draw it. You could never have previously imagined it.
 And yet it must in some sense be said to be yours because it's happening in your mind.
 And so then you wonder, well, what is my relationship to this thing?
 It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
 Did I make it? Does it come out of me?
 Or is it no more me than me standing looking at the evening star?
 What is the source of this transcendent beauty that resides within the human nervous system?
 I confess I don't have the answer.
 I think that's what--I mean, I am basically a Platonist.
 And then when you couldn't support that anymore because of advances in modern philosophy,
 I retooled as a phenomenologist, but I'm still basically a Platonist.
 And I believe that the good, the true, and the beautiful are somehow facets of the same notion.
 And for me, the pursuit of beauty has been the fastest way to get entangled with the true and the good.
 Now, for somebody else, it might be different.
 But this beauty that we find resident within ourselves
 is, I think, the strongest argument that I personally know of, that we are more than clay,
 that we are caught up in a cosmic drama of salvation and redemption of some sort.
 I don't say what sort. I'm very leery of that.
 But that we are caught up in a cosmic drama of salvation and redemption,
 and the covenant that she has made with human beings is symbolized by the psychedelic experience,
 in the same way that God's covenant with man was symbolized for Noah by the rainbow.
 The psychedelic experience is the magical iridescence that is thrown off ordinary matter,
 vouchsafing some kind of insight into a transcendent level of organization that is behind appearances.
 Anybody want to say anything? Yeah.
 I had a question. I wondered what role the psychedelics had in creating the differences between the religions that come out of the Orient
 and the ones that come out of the Middle East and the far-imperial tradition.
 Well, as I wrote this book for Bantam, and trying to study the relationship of drugs to culture over thousands of years in many places,
 and what I came to feel was that in a cultural situation where you have a strong plant hallucinogen,
 one of these pipeline-to-the-goddess plants,
 women will tend to be in the powerful positions in the society,
 because I'm convinced that women were the developers of language,
 that the gathering part of the hunting-gathering equation, which was the women's part,
 had more evolutionary pressure on it to develop syntax in order to differentiate these hundreds and hundreds of plants, some toxic, some food.
 And I think that when the primal partnership society on the Saharan grasslands of Africa began to break up,
 it happened very slowly, you see.
 At the climax of the African cattle-goddess-mushroom partnership equilibrium,
 my supposition is that probably mushrooms were being taken every two weeks or month
 in a group situation with group sexual practices,
 because of the CNS arousal component of the psilocybin being what was going on.
 Well, okay, so this is the experience that these people were building their civilization around,
 and it was an experience of boundary, dissolution, tribal-mindedness, group sensuality and group values.
 Well, as the African continent dried up and this pastoral lifestyle became more and more difficult to support,
 and the distance between waterholes over centuries, we're talking now, grew greater,
 it became harder and harder to hold these mushroom ceremonies on time,
 to have this experience regularly, to keep it part of the society, and eventually it died out.
 And there was also another factor working here, which was as the climate dried,
 it became more and more important to find a way to preserve the mushrooms,
 so that they could be used then at the regular ceremonies.
 Well, the preferred agent for preservation, I discovered, in the Neolithic, was honey.
 Well, the only problem with that is that honey itself is a natural product subject to fermentation.
 So as the mushrooms got scarcer and the climate drier, and there were more and more preserved mushrooms in honey,
 and then fewer and fewer preserved mushrooms in more and more honey,
 you got a slow switch over to a mead cult, an alcohol cult.
 And at that very early period in the Middle East, then, you get the emergence of the Dominator model.
 At 9500 BC, from Scandinavia to Arabia, you get what's called the Tanged Point Technocomplex.
 Means suddenly a lot of chipped flint, not distributed along river bottoms where game was frequent,
 but distributed on the wrong side of walls around former habitation sites.
 In other words, war has come to the world of 9500 BC.
 This is because agriculture over-succeeded. Surpluses meant sedentary lifestyles and defense of inventories.
 Suddenly, there were people who had food and people who didn't have food,
 and a whole economy of pillage and strife emerged.
 So I'm really very unenamored of monotheism in all of its forms.
 I understand its philosophical attraction.
 One, it's the attraction of simplicity. Let there be one God.
 After all, isn't that the simplest solution?
 But taking a Jungian tack on that, we image in our personalities the kinds of gods that we permit ourselves to worship.
 And if you have an image of God as omnipotent, omnipresent, infallible, all-seeing,
 this is the Dominator archetype incarnate.
 And then everyone images it in their psyche, and you get the birth of the ego.
 This thing, it's like a tumor that forms in the personality in the absence of psilocybin.
 In the absence of psilocybin, these assumptions begin to get going about my territory, my women, my food,
 and there's no end to it, you know. It's the death of everything.
 So this long strain of Dominator culture that comes out of the Middle East gets unfortunately reinforced,
 whether serendipitously or by design is not clear,
 by the choice of a phonetic alphabet to put down these early Middle Eastern languages.
 You see, phonetic alphabet gives tremendous permission for abstraction,
 because what is symbolized is not a little picture, not the thing, but the sound of the name of the thing.
 So you're three steps removed. It isn't enough that you communicate in symbols.
 Here you don't communicate in symbols. You communicate in a still, one-stage, further-removed thing.
 So, yeah, cultural styles are, I believe, drug-based, based on very old relationships with intoxicants.
 And it basically divides along two lines.
 The soporific, you know, these things which loosen social strictures and give permission to express the Dominator model,
 and then these other more nebulous, visionary kinds of things.
 So it's a suppression versus enhancement thing.
 This might be a good point, to make the point, since there's so much talk about drugs in today's world,
 that the pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position.
 Well, that should be clear, because the way I think of drugs and what is objectionable about them
 is by analyzing cause and effect.
 Well, what is it that we don't like about drugs?
 Well, we don't like that they cause unexamined, repetitive, self-destructive behavior.
 In other words, they make you stupid and self-destructive and habitual on those items.
 Well, this is precisely the kind of behavior patterning that psychedelics break up and destroy.
 You cannot carry out unexamined, self-destructive, habitual behavior in the presence of psychedelics,
 because they will show you too strong an image of the consequences.
 You know, these amazing statistics that were reported with curing alcoholism with LSD,
 before they made LSD illegal, where they would give chronic alcoholics one 500-gamma LSD trip with a sitter,
 and something like 60% of these people were going dry and sticking with it.
 Well, people said, "My God, LSD is a cure for alcoholism."
 No, no, it's a cure for stupidity.
 It's not a cure for alcoholism. That's infantile.
 It merely gives you an image of the consequences of your behavior.
 And this image is so horrifying that you modify your behavior forthwith.
 Others? Yes.
 Yeah.
 I would like to ask Nicole, please. I wasn't clear, and I would be very interested in,
 when you experienced, for example, the ayahuasca with the people, was this with women or was this with men?
 It was with a mixed group.
 Was it a mixed group?
 Yes.
 Was there ever a time when it was just with women?
 No. No, no. They don't think about it that way. People just go. People.
 People.
 Yes. Someone who has a problem, perhaps is hoping to solve it,
 and by finding out what happened to his wallet or her string of pearls or something like that,
 because they don't very often wear pearls in that society,
 but it's a totally heterogeneous group.
 It's whoever happens to come, with the permission of the shaman, of course.
 And you've never been able to determine, for example, any difference in symbolism or visual material
 that would come perhaps from a feminine psyche as from a masculine psyche?
 I don't know. There seem to be far fewer women who have taken it.
 Would you know why?
 No, I don't know why.
 Women usually take it when they're in tribal situations, in the culture.
 The ones who are not too acculturated usually take it when they are ill,
 and frequently it is a diagnostic tool for the shaman.
 He takes it with the woman, and then he knows where the evil dot has gone that is making her ill,
 and how to remove it.
 Thank you.
 I'm interested in the relationship of the psychedelic and the art process,
 in that when I choose to have a psychedelic experience,
 I make a conscious choice to take ayahuasca or LSD or whatever,
 and choose and control the time and place and the company I'm in.
 But when it comes over me in an uncontrollable way,
 when I get an idea for a form or a painting or something like that,
 it's not something that I can control.
 It's a similar process in that you go into a different experiential mode.
 I found that we can sit here and talk about this, and we laugh about elves and things,
 but in the real world, people don't like it.
 It's like Main Street, where you were talking about Main Street.
 If this happens to me and I feel like I really need to do my work,
 because the muse is there, I can't say, "Well, the muse is here. I have to go paint.
 Somebody else emptied the garbage."
 People get angry at me and say, "That's irresponsible.
 There's no place for an artist or a seer unless you've got--
 So you're Terrence McKenna, so therefore it's okay for you to come off the wall,
 because you're going to be funny and entertaining,
 but it's not okay for just any old person like me to do that."
 You're about to get what you came for.
 Yes, it is. Yes, it is.
 You lose your job.
 Well, then you can do what I do.
 The reason I do this is because I lost my job.
 No, I mean, I see what you're saying.
 I mean, it is problematic.
 If one person believes it, it's a psychosis.
 If two people, it's a folley adieu.
 Three, a cult. Four, a movement, and so on.
 What we're trying to do here is empower the meme, give permission,
 and say, "You just got comfortable with gays and black people.
 Well, guess what? You're now going to have to elbow over one step further,
 because there are all us low-Ds out here,
 and we're tired of being thought of as stupid.
 We're not stupid. In fact, we're smarter than you are.
 And we're tired of being said, "This is not the Cheech and Chong hour."
 And the deeper answer to your question about art is,
 I think that these two things are basically spun together
 and are completely one and the same process.
 I mean, on a historical scale, the way I think of these psychedelics
 as they're catalysts for ideas.
 They are actually like enzymes.
 An enzyme, well, let me define a catalyst first.
 A catalyst is a chemical which makes a reaction go faster,
 but it isn't itself consumed in the reaction.
 And an enzyme is an organic catalyst.
 Okay, so psilocybin, these things, they're like organic enzymes for creativity,
 for the imagination.
 We have this peculiar faculty called the imagination.
 It's like a wonderful, omni-adaptable hand.
 It's an internalized hand.
 We use the imagination to grasp situations
 and to remake models of reality.
 And this is what's given us the one-up on the tape bearer,
 the cheetah, the gorilla, is the imagination.
 Now, artists have always been the carriers of the banner of the imagination,
 but it becomes much more cogent and pregnant with importance
 in the modern context because the whole cultural enterprise
 is becoming designed.
 I mean, I don't have to tell this to people from L.A.
 L.A. is one of the most heavily designed cities in the world.
 The entire cultural fabric, the coral reef of human accretions,
 is becoming an expression of art.
 And I think this is, we might as well talk about this now
 or at least brush by it, this is where our future lies,
 in the realm of the imagination, somehow.
 I mean, I can't quite put all the pieces together for you this afternoon,
 but some afternoon I will.
 It's just not--I don't know what to say yet.
 It's too early.
 But downstream, and the technology is already taking shape,
 we are going to go into the imagination.
 We are going to live in a world that touches the earth
 no more lightly, no more heavily than a thought.
 And this is a reasonable cultural goal.
 Money can be made doing this.
 This is not sky-blue stuff.
 We can retool the culture toward this revivifying of archaic sensation
 and make money at it and back off a little from this other thing,
 which is so tremendously destructive.
 And it basically has to do with turning it over to artists.
 People ask, "What can I do?
 What can little me do in this onrushing planetary
 chaostrophy that has seized everyone?"
 Well, I think the answer is cognitive activity.
 Dance, poetry, painting, writing, computer graphics, code writing,
 whatever your gig is.
 But cognitive activity is our salvation.
 It always has been, and it must be now.
 There's no going back.
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