We need to deconstruct and yet every society did it wrong. We all did it wrong. Capitalism, it's wonderful that you can get a safety pin at 4am within a half mile of anywhere in the United States. I'm sure the Russians wish they had it so good. But is that the be-all and the end-all of cultural values, that you can walk the fluorescent lit aisles of Kmart and congratulate yourself? That whether it be gas can, sanitary napkin or whatever, it's there waiting for you. I don't think so. I think that we have built in the termination of our world just as surely as the Marxist world built in a tripwire into its social mechanism. It's just that we're going to have to pay the piper more downstream in a while. What's happening globally is that the contradictions of all of these social systems are rising into evidence. We have lethal ideas. The world is haunted by a number of lethal ideas. The hot lethal idea at the moment is crack. We're exhorted, it's terrible. Eleven-year-old children are apparently the sole source of support for a $14 billion industry. Civilization is going over the edge. As a former member of the High Church of Rome, I feel it's incumbent upon me to point out to you that the policies of the papacy on population are shoving more people into early death, disease and degradation than any drug scourge you could imagine. And I haven't heard any call for the extradition of the Pope. So, it's just a matter of cultural style and blindness, where you think the suffering is coming from and who you think is responsible for it. If we descend into the dominator metaphor and play its game, we're probably going to be snookered, because they've had a long, long time to figure out all the angles. What I find myself more and more leaning to is sharing the meme of the irrelevance of conservative institutions. History is not a process for which you ask permission. History is just something you make and then other people pick up the pieces. Henry David Thoreau understood this very well when he wrote his famous treatise on civil disobedience. The growth of culture is something that comes out of the animal body. Rousseau called it the general will. Man proposes and God disposes, but in the realm of civil polity, the people dispose and government is allowed to propose, but that's all. And now what we are involved in really is a debate about human nature. Who are we? What are we? The French cartoonist Möbius put it very well in his book where he asked the question, "Is man good?" This is what we're going to find out. And my feeling is that it isn't decided yet, that it is... H.G. Wells called history a race between education and disaster. Well, you know, they're in the home stretch, neck and neck. It's clearly going to be a photo finish. But there is a responsibility on everyone who sees this to communicate it to other people and to act upon it. I think we forget, we, all of us, what a tiny percentage of the human race we represent and how many people are just so lost in propaganda and unexamined cultural values. People are worrying about how to get the next $600 end table or just trivia. And yet the world rolls inexorably toward a confrontation with transformation or ruin. How can the word be spread without just spreading panic? Well, I think it has to do with empowering this notion of a planetary process, a Gaian birth, which we are midwife to, which is a functional role but not a central role. The process is going to happen. Our job is to ease it, to reassure the mother, reassure the spectators, help the child, bring everything to a calm fruition. But we are ultimately witnesses to the process, not its cause. In the ethics of the position of witness, we can find, I think, a place to stand that will allow us to feel responsible and exercise moral responsibility without feeling paralyzed by the magnitude of the task. Things are getting better and better in every way. I mean, it's a complex process because the world lives through death. I mean, you can see, if you're an embryologist, that when the little paddle of the fish human in the fetus begins to change into a hand, the way in which the fetus develops is through the sculpting hand of death. Death carves away tissue. Cells are shed into the amniotic fluid. They die. And out of this process of inward dying, the undifferentiated fish-like fetus turns into a miniature anticipation of a human being. There is something totally consuming about the way nature builds life out of death. The Amazon is a wonderful example of this because the Amazon is the most living place you have ever seen. And at any given moment, all organic material is bound in living systems, 95% bound in living systems. You don't find forest-floored detritus and rotting logs and stuff like that in the Amazon. If a leaf falls, within minutes or hours at most, it has been found by leaf-cutter ants or some other pathogen that begins to return it to the cycle of life. This kind of economy, this kind of stability through utilization of flow, is the design principle that we have ignored for several thousand years and that offers a way out. Dynamic equilibrium, an abandonment of the possibility of closure. Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, language. You just have to live in this state of dynamic disequilibrium, which if sustained long enough and in sufficient taste, becomes a life well-lived. The shaman knows this because they plunge into this realm where everything is transient flow, an interlocking field where the materiality of the ordinary reality is overcome by the quantum mechanical, wave mechanical, maternal face behind appearances. And again, it must be Moby Dick mourning, Ahab says, "If you would strike, strike through the mask." It is behind the mask. Reality is a mask because reality enforces this idea of permanence, but not if carefully examined. Women know this because women see birth, bury the dead, raise the children. They exist in this domain of flow, but the male dominant ego, because it is transient and has great anxiety about that, refuses this primary intuition. And when I say that the original partnership society was stabilized through boundary dissolution, that's what I mean, the dissolution of the assumption of permanence. Me, my existence, my women, my food, my children, my weapons, my land, my this, my that, all of that is seen as a fiction. That's why primitive people are so amused by us and our concerns and our clutching, because they know easy come, easy go. And if we could learn this one thing, this is what the plants are trying to teach, I think, that the border between life and death, between being and not being, between me being me and me being you, is so trivial and so arbitrary that it can only be seen as the outer iridescence on the real reality within. This is the secret of a happy life, I think. I mean, I certainly don't claim to achieve it. I am fraught with the agonvite of inwit and the torments of the 42-year-old Irish male California, heavily mortgaged soul. But I saw it. I saw it. I saw what it was. And what it is, is it's a coming to terms with impermanence. And that gives you authenticity that nothing can take away, and courage and presence in the moment and humor and survivability. And if you hold instead to the inviolate pearl of that which cannot be destroyed, everything becomes your enemy. Time becomes your enemy. Space becomes your enemy. And you are doomed to that Ahab fate, because, hey, it's bigger than any of us. You can't push the river. Well, that's just by way of summation, trying to say, you know, what is at the pith essence of shamanism, aside from the colorful cultural forms, the dances, the feats of curing and leisure d'armain? Essentially, it all rides, I think, on this vision that all things are impermanent, nothing lasts. All things are in the process of coming to be and passing away, until the last syllable of recorded time. Well, that was that. Nicole, do you want to try your own summation? This afternoon I see basically as an opportunity for people to get their final questions answered. So if you want to make any kind of statement this morning, that would be fine. Well, I had planned, I rather wanted to, but it doesn't follow. It doesn't matter. To discuss some of the medicinal plants that are available in the jungle, that are disappearing as we cut and slash and burn, and that can do so much, if only they are, people will go after them and bring them in, test them, and discover how best to use them. Well, I think you should do that. I think it's good to go from the general to the specific. Yeah, go for it. Well, there is, I've mentioned several of them, but I've had some peculiar experiences myself, because in the first place, it's very difficult when you have only anecdotal reports or information on plants. You don't know quite what to believe. People exaggerate, and people get a little bit imaginative, because it makes themselves more important. And then, too, I'm peculiarly subject to that, because I haven't gone after things that have been medically tested, scientifically investigated. I've gone after what isn't known, because, well, the other's there, let the technicians take over, but the other stuff, the stuff I've been after, is still in the minds and customs of people who are rapidly disappearing, and who are losing that knowledge, and the knowledge that's kept them alive and remarkably healthy through we don't know how many millennia. So I thought, that's what I want. Now, to find out how much of it is highly elaborated report is about one of the two hardest things, to check diagnosis, which you just about can't do, and to check the truth of the reports of cures, because there are, we know, of course, that everything from aspirin to cocaine came originally from plants, but how many of them are just analogs of what we have, how many of the things that I learn about are merely analogs of things we already have, more conveniently available from pharmaceutical outfits, and how many do not do the things they are supposed, claim to do, and how many are real, and they're there for us and we need them badly, and can do things that we can't do without, well, surgery, like the burn remedies, that even with a great deal of plastic surgery can't really be equaled in their efficiency. So the first thing I've done always is, yet if it's in a tribe, that's easier, because you can ask different people different questions that are really the same question but asked in different ways, about did he have white stuff on him, you've got to, of course you say it was infected, you have the remotest idea what you're talking about, but did it have a lot of white goo, I'm still on the subject of burns, like the sap of the capinuri on it, well that's pretty apt to be pos, and it's pretty apt to be, and pos means infection, you go about it that way, it's a very long and tiresome process, and then you get it from one person, then you have to get it from another, and then another, and another, and some of them say well it wasn't much, and some of them say, so you do the best you can, and set it aside as something that must be investigated, like I've been particularly interested in burns, because it seems to me such a horrible thing, to be terribly disfigured, and I noticed that you almost never see anything like that in the jungle, and yet they have a lot of fire problems, and in the first day they clear their land by slashing and burning, and somebody's kid quite frequently falling into something that's on fire, or the fire in many areas, a stove is mud held together by four logs, and the fire is built on that, and the fire turns, it's very clayey soil, almost everywhere in the Amazon, and that turns to adobe, and it makes a good hard surface to build a fire on, well I was going up the Napa with Norman Farnsworth, who is our leading pharmacognosist, and a bunch of other scientists, and I was taking up to a Witoto outfit, that's friends of mine, because they wanted a jungle expedition, and we stopped to pick up a friend of mine, who is one of the most knowledgeable people I know, in the area of medicinal plants, and he's a Peruvian gentleman, who married, well he had a wife in Lima, but he sort of went jungle, he had a charming wife in the jungle, and we got there when their six month old baby, had just the day before, crawled into the fire, the stove on the earthen floor, the place they were living, and the child's arms, the ventral surface, from wrist to elbow, both arms, was completely without skin, it was raw red, meat red, meat, and it was quite a pinkish red, and the two doctors, the two MDs who were with us immediately said, "Oh we'll take care of that", and he said, "No you don't", they said, "Well we'll do something to stop the pain, let's at least put some local anesthetics on it", he said, "Does the baby look as if it were in pain?" And the baby was at that moment, in the arms, had been picked up by one of the scientists, the pharmacologist, who had a bright red beard, and the baby was laughing himself, laughing and grabbing the beard with both hands, and they said, "Well no, maybe it doesn't hurt him", and so my friend, Godoy his name was, said, "Well he would, yes he'd come along, he'd just put a dressing on the baby first, and his wife would keep the dressings going while he was gone, and he got a good old piece of yucca, you know that is the staple food, it is mania, it is cassava, it has all sorts of names, but it is the staple food, starch, of the jungle, the entire Amazon region, you find it everywhere from Colombia to Paraguay, down to Argentina, everywhere, and because it is a very suitable jungle crop, from the time it is planted, you have a harvest in six months, and it is an ideal climate and soil for it. Well, he took a piece of that, peeled it, and inside there is, inside the brown peeling, it is a tuber, like potato, there is a sort of slimy, the inner skin you might call it, it is a bastard thing, but, so it, he took that and put the, the inner part is gelatinous, and he put that on the baby's arms, and bandaged it with good, clean, white bandages, and we went on up the river, we were gone eight days exactly, and we came back, we dropped Godoy off of his house, we went in to see him, and the baby had grown perfect skin, there was one area, I measured it, about two centimeters where the skin had not yet completely grown back, the rest of it was perfect, you could not see at all, where the burner had been, it was new, it was clean, it was perfect, no change in texture, or color, no borders, no puckering, no anything. Now that is the most available of all possible medicines, but you have got to be careful not to get, I think it would be a bad idea to use the one that is full of cyanide, some, strangely enough, some yucca has to be cooked to get rid of the cyanide in it, which is an integral part of it, and then that is the yucca brava, and it is the same species, I have never figured this out, I am not a botanist, they claim they can figure out why, but it is well known which ones have the poisonous principle, and which ones are totally without it, and I would want to be very sure I used the one without, I think. So that is one of two plants that I know that does exactly that same thing. Of course this was a very young baby, a six month old, very healthy baby, but I assume, I have not seen another case, that the method does not seem to be known, even to the tribes, in any of the tribes I am familiar with. Now that sort of thing could be investigated cheaply, did you want to say something, doctor? That could be investigated so cheaply, so easily, why doesn't somebody? Got me? I am ready to go. How is that spelled? Y-U-C-A. It is the staple food of the cities and the jungle, everywhere except the mountains, it does not grow in cold climates. I am sure you could get it in the... You can buy it in the Puerto Rican stores. Oh yes, you can buy it in all the stores, but you must get a very young tuber. I was told by my friend, Godoy, it has to be quite a young one, but it is available anywhere, just make sure you don't get the one. It indicates that sometimes these kind of remedies lose their efficacy when you take them out of the social, cultural, and psychological environment or milieu that they were used in. No, I haven't found that. Because I did not believe on myself, because I... well, there wasn't anything else. But, you remember my knees? Yes, I do remember. When the motorcycle hit me and Iketa, Terrence and Dennis were there at the time. And I got out of it very well, and the thing, except that all the scabs healed up, but my knees never went back to normal size, they stayed swollen, and they got worse and worse, and of course they hurt, but you can ignore things, I have a high pain threshold. And it kept going until the left knee began to fold up every now and then, I'd go lurching along like an old drunk, and that was embarrassing. So I went over to see some friends in Nepucab, and I got an American doctor with him. And he said, "Uh-uh, I can't handle this. You've got some bad tendon damage in there. It needs surgery, and I'm not a surgeon. You have to go to Lima." Well, I was not trusting any Peruvian surgeons at that particular time. I know one who's very fine, but he's a neurosurgeon. And the state of medicine in that country is not the highest. Anyway, knees are very tricky. So I thought, "Well, why not try some of these kooky things that my montarasas, my jungle men, the people who get plants for me, have suggested," because they kept saying, "Put capinuri on it, capinuri." So I did, and that's very sticky sap of tree. And the tree is clevisia nitida. It's a rubeaceae. And I put it on, and you're not supposed to get it wet. You're supposed to let it dry. Well, I don't know how you do that to your knees and still take a shower a couple of times a day, as you must do in that climate. And so I just put it on fresh each time, and pretty soon the pain stopped very quickly. I'd put it on, put a folded gauze over it with adhesive tape, and that was all. And they healed up perfectly, and they're still fine, and I have no problem, no pain, no swelling, no whatever. And it doesn't make sense, but I'm very glad it works. And then that to me is fairly good proof that it works. I was preparing to go to the States for surgery, because I was quite certain there was no use in doing this, but try it, try it. And so I've had several things that worked like that. There is, for example, a thing that dissolves kidney stones. I don't have kidney stones, but kidney stones and gall stones. Though they're not identical chemically, it worked perfectly for both of them. And my doctor in Iquitos, when I was first there, I had a doctor who was born in Iquitos, was a very good doctor, and he'd been educated in Argentina, I believe it was. And I had a hot gallbladder. I went to him, and he, after, when he saw the x-rays, he said, "Oh, Jesus, shame. It's a pity you haven't got gallstones. If you had gallstones, we could just get rid of them like that with such this plant, chanca piedra, they call it, which means, incidentally, chanca is Quechua, that's the language of the Inca, for smash, shatter. And piedra, of course, is rock. And many times you find the names of things are quite indicative of their use, but the use has been forgotten. For example, amor seco. Seco means dry, and I doubt that there's anyone who knows what amor means. And that's a contraceptive. But it's only widely known by tribes. About five tribes I know use it. I know that the Yucan-Nacampa, the Yahuah-Nacampa, and the Shipibo, the Conibo, and the Piro use it. Well, anyway, I managed to get the... Well, actually, I healed the gallbladder with the first medicine plant I'd ever had, which is boldo, which was investigated, I think it was about 1920 or '30, no, '20, by Johns Hopkins, and was put on the market, officially. It doesn't come from the jungle, it comes from Chile. It grows only in Chile, oddly enough. Makes a perfectly delicious tea, and it's great for gallbladder infections. But it doesn't dissolve stones, and the other really does, because my doctor told me that he had had some... In the neighborhood of a hundred, I think it was 93 cases, that he had found it utterly successful in curing. And also, a man came to visit me from Germany. In Germany, they have a far more generous attitude toward medicinal plants. There is great interest. Germans are not known for being bad scientists. They're pretty good at their stuff, especially in pharmacology. But they allow the sale of medicinal plants and the prescription of them very freely. And this man had a store for plant medicines, and he'd come to Peru to get another shipment, a chunk of pedra. He told me that he had had it for sale for one year, he'd used up all he had, and that he had asked the people who came to him and bought it to give him reports on progress, on the final result. And he had had 94% reports of perfect cures, and the other 6 were people who never came back to tell him. Now, that is a plant that could be grown very easily in the United States. I understand that laser actually takes care of those things very well, but at the present time it's still very expensive. This stuff is a weed that grows everywhere very easily, you know it. And just grow it in any sunny, warm place. California would be perfect. Where would you find seedlings for that? Could you buy those from California? No, you can't buy it now, but these things, that's the point I'm making, these things must be brought in. They really need to be brought in. And incidentally, the capinuri does the same thing as in Syria, you know the tooth one? Well, that I first learned about from a policeman, a jungle policeman. The police of Peru used to be excellent. Times have changed a bit, I'm afraid, but their jungle police was composed of men who had grown up in that environment, who knew their way around, knew what to do, knew how to track, knew all that. And what's more, they usually took an Indian with them to check their tracking, because nobody can do it like the Indians. And they were going after an escaped murderer when he developed a frightful toothache. And he had a camper tracker with him. And the camper said, "Oh, that's all right, I'll fix it." And he went off and came back about ten minutes later with a leaf on which he had a little bit of very sticky, gooey, yellow-white substance, sap of a tree. And he said, now, and in his hand he had a piece of capock, which grows in the jungle. And he said, "You take a little piece of capock, cotton is what, because I have no cotton there, didn't have any cotton there." Cotton does grow wild in Peru, but not there. And he dipped it in. He said, "Now, be very careful to put this in the cavity, and don't let it touch another tooth, because," he said, "it will take the tooth out. And it will not, if it hits a tooth next to it, a healthy one, it will take that out, too." And so he put it in, and he said, "It just," the pain stopped immediately. He said, "It just felt very, very cold." And during the next 30 days, the tooth gradually broke up and came out in little bits. He had no infection, no bleeding, no pain. But the tooth was gone. I had thought originally that this meant the roots went, too. They don't, because a dentist from Atlanta, Dr. Hodges, I've forgotten his first name, Ben Hodges, who was a really, very good dentist there, came down, and he was interested in this. And he did a trip up the rivers, examining people who had removed, because lots of the people, the mestizos, the Indians know this, and lots of people had teeth out that way. And he examined some, many that had been done years before. There was never an infection. He couldn't figure out why, because the root's still there. But he found no trouble at all. Now, that is a very handy way to get rid of a tooth. I'd much prefer it to a root than an owl. I tried it. It didn't work. But we had kept the stuff in the refrigerator for a week first. It apparently has to be used fresh. And I should imagine the only way to get it up for testing in the States would be by freezing, flash freezing. That ought, I should think, to bring it up without too much change. Those are two of the more generally popular things. But there are others. What was the name of that, what was the shaft's name? It is Chlorophyllia tinctoria, C-H-L-O-R-O-P-H-O-R-I-A, T-I-N-C-T-O-R-I-A. And it is, I think, a Euphorbia C. Yeah. I'm fairly sure it is. But you can always find the family if you've got the genus. And... Then another of the things that urgently needs development now is the treatment for hepatitis. Dr. Walter Lewis and his wife, Dr. Memory Elvin Lewis, who is a very strong feminist and must be mentioned in all his work, have found that the roots, they have confirmed what is generally known in some populations there, that the roots of certain palm trees, there are two that we know about for sure, will take in, they make an infusion of them, you know, make a tea of it, actually they boil them a little while, it's a decoction, not an infusion, and drink the... the broth. And that will very nicely do away with hepatitis. And Dr. Lewis found it very efficient for hepatitis B as well, as the more ordinary and easily treated types. Now that is the root of Utopia edulis, which is a palm tree. And that is... They have found that the Ashwar Indians, who were visited by Dr. Lewis, were using and getting the same results with, because there is a lot of hepatitis. Another palm tree, it's an Iriartia, it's called Pornatacha. And he suspects that most of the palms in that area, at least, the species that grow there, the genuses that grow there, genera that grow there, will do the same thing. That hasn't been tested. But he has found them... he's a very good phytochemist, and he found them chemically very similar. Now those... there's no reason why those things can't be broken down chemically and tested. But because things like palm roots, Chancapieda, the one for gallstones, is very easy... a very effective drive. And so are the palm roots. Those are sold in the market in Lima. They're very popular there because they've got to be quite well known. Then there... let's see, what other diseases? There... for eyes. I was going up Rio Tigre on my way far in, and a man, a settler, stood up, standing on the bank, jumped up and down, kept waving and waving, and we pulled over to see what was the matter. And he... when we got close, I have never seen a more hideous pair of eyes. One of them was dripping pus and blood. The other was just swollen and had some pus in it. It wasn't running down his face. And they were in very bad shape. He had been cutting, clearing land, and he got some sawdust... sawdust... sawgrass, whipped across his eyes, cutting the corneas, which got very badly infected. The jungle's a great place for infections. Well, I offered him immediate... I had brought both penicillin and tetracycline ointments, and also even old, faithful yellow oxide and mercury in the last... you know, if you couldn't get anything else. And he'd had all of those. He got them from a military base that was just up the river, and from a trader who came along who had the yellow oxide and mercury. At the military base, he got the antibiotics. Well, the antibiotics had rather helped the eye that looked not quite so bad. The other one, nothing had helped. And so I didn't know what to do. And my boatman said, "But look, amigo, you're standing on the remedy." And he was standing on some... it's a grass, and it grows about so high. And he said, "You take this, and you pull it apart at the node, and then you run your fingernail down, and out will come one crystalline drop of sap." The juice of that grass. "You put two drops of that in each eye every morning and every night, and we'll find you cured when we get back." And so the man thanked him, and he said he would do it, and I never heard of that. So sure enough, when he came back two weeks later, it was exactly two weeks, too, he--I know because I had to pay the boatman by the way-- he was jumping up and down and waving, and he was the happiest guy you ever saw. He said, "My eye, look, look, look." Well, one eye looked-- I have seen more bloodshot eyes on people with a bad hangover. And the other one, it was still a little inflamed, the one that had been so very bad. But there was no pus, no blood. It was obvious the treatment was a success, and the infection was gone, and the healing was progressing rapidly. And well on its way, on the right eye was-- no, actually it was the left, I was going to say-- was perfect--not quite perfect, but I mean it was-- except for being a bloodshot. And the other one, the sweat-- [no audio] [ Silence ] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.65 sec Decoding : 2.04 sec Transcribe: 2650.24 sec Total Time: 2652.92 sec