And you've got to get people getting pushy.
 Hear, hear.
 Get pushy.
 We've been polite too long.
 I mean, the gentlemanliness of this debate about saving the world.
 Is it gentlemanliness or timidity combined with laziness?
 Timidity, gutlessness, cupidity, ignorance, momentum, all those good values.
 Well why don't we break for lunch and come back to this at 1.30.
 Thank you very much.
 Thank you.
 This is a wrap up session.
 I'm going to have to leave at its termination.
 I want to express my special deep thanks to Nicole, who has performed gallantly and above
 and beyond the call of duty.
 Thanks, David.
 Well, I'm a war horse at this, my dear.
 I feel like I led a virgin into a dance hall.
 But you dance very well.
 Thank you.
 I would like my fantasy is to see Nicole become the Mother Teresa of Rainforest Salvation.
 We'll keep her card playing and heavy drinking off the front pages and sell her as Mother
 Teresa in green.
 But this is serious business that we're engaged in.
 And it is, on one level among ourselves, it is communication and sharing and opening and
 building consensus.
 But when we turn away from our family and out toward the uncomprehending or even hostile
 world outside, then it becomes propaganda.
 It becomes the struggle for the hearts and minds of people everywhere.
 And I think most people are with us.
 It's simply that they haven't had it explained to them in such a way that they were able
 to realize that.
 In other words, we're not out to convert anybody to anything.
 We're out to help people discover that they agreed with this point of view all along.
 It has to be so because after all, we stand for something fairly simple and unambiguous.
 Life, survival, continuity, caring, relationship, feeling, joy.
 Who's going to vote against this if it's properly explained to them?
 So I view these things as consciousness raising sessions in the old style and hope that you
 will see it as more than even privately inspiring entertainment.
 But that you will go out and get these points of view to people, get these attitudes out,
 not unto the greater glory of Terrence McKenna or Nicole Maxwell or the Ojai Foundation,
 but because this needs to be said.
 It needs to be empowered.
 The first step toward solving any problem is an awareness that the problem exists.
 Now we're all very tired of that because we've been suffering and agonizing over the problem
 of a dying earth, some of us for years.
 Nevertheless, the astonishing news is some folks haven't heard or have only heard recently.
 And it's very important not to panic them or alarm them, but to inspire them and motivate
 them and bring them into the project of reclaiming the earth.
 I mean, this is our legacy.
 This is our birthright.
 It is the legacy and birthright of our unborn children.
 And you know, there isn't even, there may be there is, but I don't know it.
 Rich as Greek is, there isn't a word for being so perverse that you devour your own children.
 The Moneads, the women possessed of Dionysic frenzy, what was always put against them was
 that they devoured their own children.
 This is a propaganda image that to be smeared with this is to be tainted very deeply.
 Well, it is literally true that we are guilty of a crime which the ancients could barely
 conceive.
 We are looting the planet for our pleasure.
 Our condominiums, speed boats and electronic gadgetry is literally part of the legacy of
 our children.
 What kind of people comprise the larger society in which we are embedded that they would do
 a thing like that?
 It's a crime beyond war.
 War, you simply slaughter all the fools who volunteer for it and all the fools who stand
 around and watch.
 But to destroy the potential of a future for our children is a crime that boggles the mind.
 And this is the final stage of the dominator metaphor.
 When I picked up the New York Times a year ago and read that the United States State
 Department was advocating the spraying of aerial herbicides over the Ouijaga Basin to
 eradicate coca, to me it felt like a turning point comparable to the assassination of John
 Kennedy or Pearl Harbor.
 It was so clearly perverse, so clearly directed against itself.
 The contradictions become so odious that at a certain point people of moral dignity feel
 they have no option left except to somehow throw themselves on the cogs of the machinery
 to try and halt it from carrying out the program of Moloch, the program of self-devourment
 that we have set in motion.
 Now if ever there was a moment to talk to your neighbors, clarify your own thinking,
 support organizations that are trying to make a difference, now is the time.
 And we can make a difference.
 And I know you have heard that and it's a cliche and there's a tendency not to believe
 it.
 I'd been here, we only, Botanical Dimensions was fairly narrowly focused until a couple
 of years ago on saving shamanic hallucinogens.
 Then really through Katz's process, the need was felt to encompass this whole problem of
 destruction of the warm tropics.
 So I began writing letters to the UN and the IMF and the World Bank and all of these people
 expecting to find a vast, well-funded edifice of her typing pools and computer networks
 and people doing something.
 I discovered that very little is going on.
 We have advanced a long, long way down this path on yak alone.
 There is not somewhere vast organizations toiling to contact every Brazilian politician
 and put the twist on him, toiling to contact every American corporation that is contributing
 to this atrocity and threatening them with stock sell-offs, boycotts and whatever.
 All the obvious things that you may think are being done, you may then dismiss by saying,
 "Well, I'm sure I shouldn't do that.
 Surely somewhere a staff of 50 is working on that problem."
 Well when you look into it, you discover it is not happening.
 If any one of you has moderate or great wealth and have decided not to pitch in with saving
 the rainforest because you think a lot of people are working in that field already,
 forget it.
 The number of people waving their arms about it is legion.
 The number of people who are actually attempting to halt it is countable on the fingers of
 two hands.
 And every issue, I think, is like this.
 The gas weapons, the fight against formula over breastfeeding, all of these organizations
 piddle along on peanuts, absolute peanuts.
 If someone were to give me or the Ojai Foundation a million dollars and say, "Do your good work,"
 word would get out of the phenomenal generosity of this person.
 Imagine, a million dollars.
 Did you know that the standard issue Air Force fighter plane costs $120 million?
 One, one.
 And they line these things up on the runways of various airfields 120 deep.
 We are completely paralyzed or unable to perceive the disparity in the way the money is spent.
 If someone were to give or had even the power to give, because private wealth is not like
 governmental wealth, if you're a private person and you control a fortune of $500 million,
 you are among the thousand richest people in the world.
 If you're a government with a budget of $500 million, you have your hand in everybody's
 pocket around the world because you're a beggar.
 If someone were to give to the new age the price of one fighter plane, and half the governments
 in the world have dozens of these things, that $120 million would write a ticket to
 rebirth for every center in the state.
 All the movies, films, pilgrimages, conferences, conscience raising, experimental programs,
 a fringe scientific research, all of that would be prosecuted to a glorious end.
 The amazing thing is we who have no money have all the ideas.
 If the cost of one fighter plane were spent on the promotion of ideas to save the world,
 the world would probably advance 50% closer to its own salvation.
 So what is the matter with us?
 Why are we so perverse?
 What is it that drives the inertia of these dominator systems?
 Because we're not asking for half the military budget, not even close.
 And yet we're not being cut any slack at all.
 And it doesn't make any sense.
 People love to talk about the new freedom in the Soviet Union and how exhilarating it
 must be.
 My hope for the Soviet Union is that they shame us with the level of their freedom of
 discourse and their ability to look their past in the face and reassess where they are
 going.
 So this is not a plea for a million dollars.
 This is a plea for consideration of the perverseness of the way we set our priorities.
 The world can be saved.
 It's simply a matter of diverting, I would say, 5% of GNP to do it.
 Well only a terminally psychopathic person would refuse to divert 5% of their energy
 flow toward their own salvation.
 If we can't get our act together to do that, I think the calm and cool judgment of Gaia
 Almighty is, "Who needed such clowns?
 I'll hang out with the octopi, the dolphins, the butterflies, and the termite nests.
 I don't need this headache.
 I don't need acid rain.
 I don't need strontium in the environment.
 I don't need extraction of petroleum products and tons of junk in orbit in order to foster
 what?
 Shakespeare?
 There hasn't been a Shakespeare for 500 years.
 These clowns aren't producing anything.
 H-bombs don't make it in the Gaian scale of values."
 So the point here is tremendously perverse misdirection of resources.
 A tremendous patience with institutions that have proven that they are either ineffective
 or actually the enemy.
 You know, institutions like the Brazilian government, large pharmaceutical companies,
 capitalism, so forth and so on.
 Why are we so patient when our world, our children's world, the world of all future
 life on earth hangs in the balance?
 I think that the time is really coming when people are going to have to stand up and be
 counted.
 And I hope when you leave here this afternoon that you will feel that our group experience
 has given you permission to come out of the environmental closet, the psychedelic closet,
 the caring for the fate of the human family closet.
 Because all of these things are either dismissed as perverse, dangerous, or air-headed.
 And obviously they are not.
 This is the most serious business that we could be about.
 This is what we were born to do.
 It must be.
 Because if this is not what we were born to do, then what we were born to do is witness
 the death of the only living world we know.
 And I for one am not ready to stand mute witness to that kind of an atrocity.
 Do you want to add anything, Nicole?
 And then we'll take more questions.
 Anybody out here?
 We'll take questions now until around three o'clock.
 Daniel.
 Well, yes, I mean, we're sort of in a bind, a time bind.
 We now have many of these medically interesting or potentially medically interesting plants
 growing, but they're not yet large enough that we can make bulk biomass harvest for
 research.
 In the next two or three years, we hope to be able to do this.
 We are growing Castano Sperma Mostralis, which is a plant with a potential impact on inhibiting
 the AIDS virus.
 And we're beginning to supply a lab with that.
 Hopefully Sangre de Grado will come on.
 Tababouia.
 Tababouia.
 We're growing that and we're hoping to create a scheme.
 We have that.
 The Ancaria.
 The Ancaria, the Anentius.
 Those are terribly important.
 I have seen them work.
 I have seen a man who was sent to Lima with cancer in a terminal with just no prognosis
 at all.
 I went over his medical records and he had 10 percent cancer cells in the bloodstream.
 At the time, they came to him in the hospital and said, you know, the doctor said, "It's
 awfully sad, but you've got to leave because you're going on strike tomorrow."
 And so that was the biggest break he ever had.
 Some friends came to take him home and the doctors told him, "He's got about nine days
 left.
 He's dying now."
 They took him home and they started him on his uña de gato and a few other things.
 The other things were for the, he had a cystitis and generalized septicemia as well.
 And in two weeks he was walking around.
 The strike lasted 31 days and the doctors were absolutely floored.
 They didn't believe he was the same person.
 When I met him, he was back at his original job.
 He was 54 years old, I think, or 58, which was teaching ballet and flamenco.
 And flamenco, I have done a lot of dance, and flamenco is the most exhausting thing
 I have ever attempted.
 I've known him now for ten years or so and he's still fine.
 I took the director of the Ciba Gagi Cancer Ontology Investigation Laboratories.
 He came over from Basel to visit his daughter, who is a friend of mine in Peru.
 I took him to see him.
 He flipped.
 He said, "You've got to get me some of that stuff."
 He examined the man and said he had one small node, totally inactive, on a bone, on one
 rib bone.
 He said, "You've got to get me some of that."
 I did.
 I knew where to buy it in Lima and bought him a good quantity.
 He took it with him.
 He said, "I've got to start research on this immediately."
 Then he had the nerve to write me and say, "You must never tell anybody about this."
 They hadn't even paid me for what I put up for the stuff I bought them.
 And I didn't ask them to.
 And I haven't heard from him since.
 But that is what I consider one well-established case with proper evidence.
 It is one of many I have run into who have told me about it, but I have not personally
 read their medical records from a cancer institute.
 And with things like that, are we going to let this all be destroyed?
 Are we going to just say, "Well, you know, that was one case."
 And of course, it isn't one case, there are many.
 Aren't we going to insist on some real investigation in a public way so that everybody knows what
 happened and the results are not kept privately for one organization?
 That's murdering people.
 Because just to keep that information secret, I think, would be a sort of mass murder.
 Yes.
 A lot of your stories, Nicole, have involved ... part of the players in the story have
 involved an encounter with a physician, similar to the one you just told.
 Yes.
 And many of the stories make the physicians look muddled-headed.
 No, no, not necessarily.
 They are muddled-headed.
 But physicians.
 Perhaps that's the answer to my question.
 It's not the physicians.
 The question is, are there physicians in or around the jungle that are allies, from your
 point of view?
 There are a few.
 There are more and more coming in to do research on it.
 Not so much in this country.
 Germany.
 I have just been over there at the invitation of an institute that was founded by the wife
 of the president, who ... he was president until 1984.
 And she is an M.D.
 They have now 44,000 members.
 They are testing things like that.
 In Germany, you can buy all these things, you see.
 They're offered to the general public, and physicians supervise their use in many cases.
 Why can't we?
 Why does it have to be kept secret?
 What's your notion?
 What's the answer?
 Why is it being kept secret?
 The answer is to get people saying, "That stuff's there.
 We want to see it researched."
 Why isn't somebody doing some clinical investigation?
 And you say European ...
 In Rome, Dr. ... oh, I have his name written down somewhere.
 I brought with me his name.
 There's a man at the University of Rome who's working on this, and he's doing some very
 interesting work.
 I think it was he that established the low toxicity of une de gatto, which was ... he
 found to achieve any semblance of a toxic effect, they had to give more than one gram
 per kilo body weight of concentrated extract.
 That's kind of a high dose.
 But this country, no.
 A good example or a good case that shows how all this works is the AIDS problem, which
 as soon as it was identified and they knew what they had on their hands, they took two
 directions.
 Some of these big pharmaceutical companies, it's called rational drug design, where you
 know what you want this molecule to do and you design it.


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