ascended to the tropical veldt and grassland We migrated across the deserts of the near and Middle East which were not so desert us at that time But we also were able to cross the Himalayas we exist in the Arctic in the rainforest We exist at the level of the we toto or the modern New Yorker We are adaptable and this is what has kept our options open and this is what I think we have to Recognize and conserve and the psychedelics do that the psychedelics are To my mind although people have actually argued this with me although it seemed really incontrovertible to me That they are deconditioning agents That they make you question What Marxist Mormon whatever you are if you take psychedelics you will ask questions that cannot be answered within the paradigm in which you were Brought up and that's important because all of these social systems are only means to the next level of ascent What we see in the Soviet Union today is a hang-up They have an ideology which allows no means to the next level of ascent They are caught forever in the Hegelian dialectic. There's no escape. It's it's hopeless and So they have occupied an evolutionary niche very successfully But now what are they going to do and every society is confronted with this because every society Erects institutions which try to freeze the historical process. It's almost as though we are continuously calcifying and Yet we must not let that happen I think it was Ludwig van Bertalan fee who said human beings are not machines but in every situation given Their own will they will behave like machines Fall into routines and just cease to examine what is in front of them So I think that the psychedelic thing is very important. I'm sorry to see it It's clouded. It's a murky picture I Don't see I think people should do more of it and Reflect and that there should be much less Missionary work that the goal is not to get as many people stoned as possible The goal is to make sure that everybody who gets stoned gets really stoned So that we don't have a bunch of confusion about just exactly what we're talking about No nibblers. I mean I meet people who the only drug they have ever taken is MDMA and we're trying to have a Conversation about the nature of the psychedelic cosmology. It's weird sledding, you know Okay cybernetics psychedelics Space is the other one and I see all of these things as just completely One thing and I as I said this morning I think the difference between Jose and I one difference is that he is interested in creating a planetary consciousness out of the surrender of The ego of individuals to this higher vision of what should happen. I think that there already is this Superhuman organism and that our freedom is largely illusory. We are all moving to the tune of What Freud called the super ego what I call the overmind because I don't like the notion of super ego is a little Torch light parades and that sort of thing But the overmind the notion of simply a control mechanism which is almost Cybernetic but which is leading everything forward and actually is orchestrating what is happening So that all of these human groups which aspire to hegemony You know Wall Street the Communist Party the Zionists you name it. They are all frustrated Because there seems to be an invisible impeding force against their Imaginations and their vision of how things should be And no matter how many guns they pile up no matter how much propaganda They churn out the historical continuum has a way of stabbing them in the back and and surprising them Endlessly, this is I think because they are fools playing with a master, which is the super ego and Intel this and what we as individuals can do is help that process by not participating in the projections of anxiety That these various factions are pushing that arise out of their frustration with their inability To get a handle on things. I don't want them to run things Wall Street or the Communist Party or anybody I think that it works very nicely that it is run invisibly from the unconscious I think it was Charles Fort who said there there comes steam engine time and then there will be steam engines and and That is what is happening with modern technology even to the point of the atomic bomb I am willing to explore the notion that the atomic bomb has been a wonderful force force for cohering people's minds around the question of planetary survival that if we had come out of World War two with aerial bombing and mustard gas and But nothing quite horrifying enough To shock people awake. I think it's remarkable that we have lived in such a stable world since 1945 that it is never Only once was it used against a human population and my god think of the hatred and the loathing that is loose on this planet and yet the bomb has sobered people and every political movement for Social cohesion and enlightenment that is post 1945 has built its rhetoric around the bomb the peace movement to some degree the hippies the risk the existential response of the beat generation all of these Rich cultural phenomena have been reflections on the bomb So the bomb is good the thing that is important is not to use it then then it becomes a problem I think that this thing that has broken about Nuclear winter is very interesting but capitalism is very interested in making money a Decimated earth is not good real estate And I think that the nuclear winter issue is the beginning of the end of the nuclear Log jam that because the Soviet Academy of Sciences conducted an independent study they reached the same conclusion The people who were skeptical of Sagan and the others they researched it. They reached the same conclusion war is Obsolete and this is actually understood by the people who frighten us the most I really think that they have come to see it as a bad deal and no money maker and In that case there will be change the novelty wave is affecting all of these institutions the strategies are changing at the very topmost level because It's no good to have a no-win situation so and As far as the space travel thing is concerned I really think that inner and outer space are the same thing and that we will come to understand this through research on psychedelics That when the Iowa scarrow in the Peruvian Amazon tells you he goes to the Milky Way He is not Really kidding you see no matter how radical we are in our assumptions It's very hard to not assume that we don't at least have 95 percent of the picture. I mean for instance we put you we believe in things like elementary particles and Well these things may be no closer to the mark than the notion that the world was Created when the ant king got out of his canoe at the second waterfall to take a leak You know these may be preposterous notions the polite approach that is usually taken is to say well Everybody has a bit of the peace the Mayans had a bit of the peace the the Buddhas they know something those Sufis they're pretty sharp the mushroom suggested that nobody Has a piece of the action That it's all wrong. It's all completely 100% bullshit you see and That's a very cleansing notion to begin to explore to return to ground zero and start out with how radical a Construction can we carry on with this world? What is the real nature of language? This is what all of these fine theories leave out. It's what mine leaves out It's what Jose's leaves out. It's that you know what is this phenomenon called? Language where by making little mouth noises we coax Roughly congruent notions into each other's brains and then gabble Joyfully over this achievement you know Reality is not made of electrons or Quarks or any of these things it is clearly made of language and all of these abstractions The faceless myths that were mentioned this morning are totally naive about language They just view it like a fish views water. You know it's good to speak clearly that's important But other than that they haven't a word to say about the epistemic basis of language science is most guilty of this because Science is a very old institution Consequently its most fundamental assumptions are Were carried out in the atmosphere of greatest epistemological naivete You know things like that the universe is knowable at all Things like that induction is a good way to think Induction is when you say well if it happened ten times it'll probably happen the eleventh time Probably there's a loaded word that science is very big on So so the real revolution is to come I think in language and the way in which psychedelics and cyborganism and Cybernetics all come together is that we each need to carry out a very basic Analysis of what we think about language and what we think it is and what we think it does for instance I've noticed and This may be because I'm male, but I've noticed that there are all these things flying around which can't be discussed and I finally realized that their emotions is What they are and that we have a very very limited vocabulary of emotions we experience an amazingly rich interior gradient of Shifting modalities of which we never can say I mean you say I like you. I don't like you. I'm uncomfortable I really feel weird. I mean this is just like you know metroglyphs about emotion Ralph Metzner and I have been playing with the idea that there is a and Certainly Robert Graves and other people have preceded us in this but that there is hardwired into the human brain a kind of er Language that is older than agreed-upon Dictionaries that is in fact to hear it is to understand it the problem Is the only thing it can convey our emotions? but the emotions that it can convey are so finely graded and so rich in their adumbrations and resonances that it's like a form of magic and we call this glossolalia and classify it as a psychotic or near psychotic phenomenon brain origin Uncertain cultural use uncertain so forth and so on Ralph and I have even toyed with the notion of holding weekends where we would insist that every Rationally apprehendable utterance be followed by an utterance which was not rationally apprehend able the non rationally apprehend able utterance would anchor you in the emotional Gestalt of the moment and that would be like the carrier wave which do it I Thought you'd never ask Is TD may he adequate while what the Kapiti King it had me said the Gilgit walk one baby the Octane And it again behang be quack teen a TGS VP kept acne to be it keep eating What is being what is being conveyed Once you get used to it is the anchoring in the gestalt tone of the emotional moment That's right You discover these things on psychedelics, but they are clearly Subject to creole dis a tion in other words to being learned that you can lay down these pathways in the brain And it's marvelous I think this is fundamental to language learning anyway Because this is how the child learns and how you learn when you're in a foreign country, and you don't study from a book You understand long before you can speak. That's right, and you don't know what's being said You can pick it up and the child is always spoken to in terms which are way above anything But it's it's verbal Comprehension, but it understands So we need to learn to be able to create these linguistic constructs which are not meaning tied, but which communicate one of the most interesting things about psilocybin is that on high doses This a synesthesia takes place where when you articulate in this emotional Miscellanea you actually can condense Objects which are beheld in other words you take control of the mechanism of the hallucinations and you create These hyper these toy like jewel like self-transforming grammatical complexes You are speaking some kind of trans linguistic language Which is beheld rather than heard and you know philo judaist talked about the more perfect Logos, and he said the more perfect logos will be be beheld rather than heard But it will pass from being heard to being beheld without ever crossing over a discernible barrier of transition And I have experienced this and I think other people have Where you hear the glossolalia like wave and it comes closer and closer and then at a certain point It is manifest as a topology, and I think many of the psychedelics communicate in these visual languages After taking ayahuasca you know and sitting with these people in darkened huts in the Amazon After hours and hours of it your eyes are just bugging out of your head you just have spent hours looking and looking and looking and drinking in this visual data and This is how Really dense information is conveyed not a linear string of little mouth noises where the brain rushes to the Conventionalized dictionary and then grimly reconstructs the intention provided nothing to finely Sculpted was intended, and I think you know what's happening with the monitoring of brain states Ralph Abraham who was here this morning is the director of the visual mathematics project at Santa Cruz Glossolalia language drugs Cybernetics all of these things are the means to transforming the human self-image It's almost impossible to imagine what a society would be like where this glossolalia held to sway Equal with speech. I think the pre-celtic people or I mean the Celts of Ireland May have been into this because they rarely spoke without punning and you were expected to pun on Multiple levels and the pun far from being trivial is a step toward this hyper dimensional linguistic Construct it's almost like a fractal a pun is a word with one and a half dimensions or more in it and It resonates this historical this vision that I conveyed this morning of the co-presence of resonant epochs in time Could only be conveyed if someone could transform their language in such a way That it was implicit that this was happening and we were all Noticing it and experiencing it the way we are noticing and experiencing the greenness of this tree the fall of the sunlight Through the leaves we could also also be experiencing the ebb and flow of middle of Mesopotamian Empires and Hellenistic religions and so forth and so on the fourth quadrant of the mandala and then I will open it up for questions of which I hope there are many is Feminism and I feel very trepidatious Wading into this but nevertheless I really feel in some ways it is the most important of all of these because it is Going to work The change that is going to go on between us as Individuals what is happening? I think is nothing less than an awareness that the most appropriate way to talk about The intellect key on the of this planet is to call it her and to admit that the goddess worship which was repressed by the rise of the patriarchal religions is Now its return is necessary. I don't want to say that the patriarchal interlude Which lasted to three thousand years was not necessary I think it was necessary, but the fear will go out of the bomb When the hand that rocks the cradle holds the bomb Essentially and all the bad little boys of the 19th and the 20th century who have been fiddling with their chemistry sets now need to Recognize that this all has to be handed over to cooler heads Who have not been scarred by the historical experience in the way that I think masculine intelligence has been and Psychedelics I count as a feminizing force because they introduce you to the unconscious Frenetics I count as a feminizing force because it hardwires that same Unconsciousness and raises it into inaccessibility No longer are these things the theoretical constructs of psychologists they become you know living realities in our lives and The transformation of the species into us into a space-faring whether interior Exterior or something else kind of space is only going to happen if this feminizing influence can now take the heat off the technological processes which were necessary to move us here and Feminism really it has nothing to do with gender. It's just an attitude toward being in the world that is Open I think basically to the trans linguistic if you had to strip it of all Biological notions of what feminism is feminism is a kind of mentality which operates Exterior to language and there's no it's like the nagwal and the tonal. There's no unifying those two things or Encompassing one with the other it just is not like that these things are Alchemical opposites and as such the only way they can be unified is in a kind of coincidencia Positorum a union of opposites where the identity of each element is still fully expressed This is not a rational concept. It's like being in two places at one time nevertheless it is a concept that is psychologically and experientially a very very valuable And I I see as I say all of these forms of self exploration and Technological expansion and even space I mean if the earth is our mother then certainly outer space is our dark blue great-grandmother So I Sort of give this as a background on what was said this morning because I I wanted to convey The one thing I have to convey which is uniquely mine Which is this strange wave and that's mine But it's it's difficult to understand and its importance is open to debate it may be trivial in the extreme This afternoon I sort of wanted to speak as a member of the culture of Who is trying to figure it out like everybody else using the same data banks that everybody else is? using and I it was in Hawaii that I thought about this a lot and I think these are the four pillars or the four quadrants of the mandala that lead in to the coincidencia positorum which is the flying saucer the exteriorized soul of the human race at the end of time the transcendent object that will carry us all Completely out of these concerns and into an entirely different set of concerns of which we have not the faintest inkling So are there questions or debate in the back dawn? Oh, yes, there's a wonderful story a Gordon Watson story where he he took a Sarah I think 12 grams or anyway a lot in Oaxaca up on a mountain and He sang all night long and just this exultant Ecstatic singing and when he came down to the village the next morning the people said we didn't know you spoke Mazatecan you sing beautifully I had an experience which reflects on this which is In 75 when we first wrote the mushroom book and we were really doing it a lot because we had a lot of batch testing to do and that kind of thing I It would get into these Poetic dialogues where it would just be spilling off its vision of things, but at the end of each of these Sentences it would say says Says blah blah blah blah says and again And I thought you know strange strange speech habit, and then I read in Lawson that the word sin Occurs at the end of these speech utterances of Maria Sabina's and that it is the Mazatec word for says So it's just like you know the mushroom is uncanny drugs Models of what drugs do will not encompass it that's why the extraterrestrial thing is so compelling, and I don't know whether the mushroom is a radio or the extraterrestrial itself When I said this morning that if you can if you understand the DNA as a species you will take control of your form I always have the notion that the mushroom has done this and that's why it touches Matter so very lightly I mean the mushroom is a very thinly spread mycelial Network through a field or a meadow somewhere the the carpa for what we call the mushroom is a And a pertinence to the sexual process as Ralph Abraham said one time it's for sex thrills and sunbathing and that's all it's for the mushroom is perfectly able to propagate itself by Vegetatively growing through the soil, but the mushroom if we believe it is an entity It lives in its own imagination It has gotten so rid of a physical form That all it is is a little bit of white stuff in the soil and a raging trip in an unknown dimension which you can only slice into by allowing it to low translocate into your nervous system and Then it continues to give off its experience of itself Which is an immersion in pure imagination? You know for it the thought is the fact of the matter. It's as though the mushroom were made of pure light You know if you think about what it would be like to be made of light Light moves at relativistic speeds therefore if a photon has no perception of time if a photon could think and Thought I am now going to cross the galaxy and then did cross the galaxy The photons perception of how long that took would be zero The photon is a particle which in the physics we know Exit has the experience as though it were the imagination And I think that this inner outer space that we keep talking about that We're headed into is like the inner outer space of the mushroom these things can be found to be Contiguous and somehow two aspects of the same thing arising out of a misperception having to do with edges that we're very interested in the inside and the outside the surface of my body and how and the interior of my body and But these inside outside distinctions are preposterous Obviously infinite space is infinite space And then we're only quibbling about how it's experienced by whether you send a thought or an instrument orientated probe obeying Newtonian ballistics Have you thought possibly of running a program next to the Historical calendrical one you have there of say the advent of tea and English society and the advent of coffee in say American society and relationships that say between Arab societies, which are heavy coffee drinkers and You mean to try and track the the drug effect because obviously every society is bound together by a network of drugs I mentioned the other day that The change that's taken place in the United States with the program to stop people from smoking cigarettes Tobacco being a leveler and then the rise in stress after that and then the whole industry built upon stress There's obviously a relationship between the drugs used in a society that's right and at what the society does well We were talking last night. My brother wants to say and is in fact publicly lectured to this point that the missing link in the Question of how did human this emerge so quickly? You know there was basically a hominoid form a human like form three million years ago But really it's in the last 50,000 years that the human brain size has undergone this immense expansion the human brain has grown more in the last 50,000 years than in the previous three million years and he wants to suggest that the catalyst for that was actually that when when the when Africa turned drier and People started living on the ground and hunting in packs They encountered herds of ungulate animals And they would track them for days and this tracking of herds of animals brings you through a lot of their manure Naturally and so they would have noticed this very anomalous Object in the world of natural objects, which is the mushroom. It's very large It's very noticeable, and they would have eaten it and this would have conferred a sufficient adaptive advantage the expansion of consciousness that they would have It would have been sufficient to prime the pump to develop consciousness I talked to Roland Fisher years ago about some of these ideas He did experiments very interesting experiments at NIMH in which they could Impart they had two parallel metal bars and they could by turning a screw deform one of the bars slightly so they were no longer parallel to each other and they would take straight people and people who had given been given Small doses of psilocybin and they would sit them down in front of this thing and they would say push the buzzer when the bars are no longer parallel and They discovered that people on small doses of psilocybin could pick this up much sooner than Normal people and so Rollins conclusion. He said there you see here's perfect proof Scientific proof that taking drugs gives you a truer picture of the world Well, it's a joke of course, but if we're talking about hunters Looking hurling spears and trailing after animals a five percent increase in visual acuity is a staggering adaptive Advantage and that's just one of the most trivial effects of the mushroom is this improvement of visual Acuity what it does for language is Totally unexplored what it does for memory what it does for all kinds of things is unexplored If we you know before they were called psychedelics before they were called all the thing In theogens and all these things they were simply given a phenomenological description consciousness expanding drugs Well if you take that seriously Consciousness is what it's all about Consciousness is what we certainly need. It's what we're in short supply of we are not going to weather the Cultural crises that are bearing down on this planet without a great deal of consciousness Being generated, so if there is any agent in the environment drug teaching Practice you name it that actually? Increases consciousness it is going to loom very important in my experience Cognizant drugs are pretty much unique in the power and the efficacy That they bring to the process of promoting consciousness Yeah over here. We say something no Yeah, go ahead I Talked about I I you you if you you you (speaks off mic) (speaks off mic) (speaks off mic) (speaks off mic) (speaks off mic) (speaks off mic) (speaks off mic) (speaks off mic) (laughs) (speaks off mic) (speaks off mic) - Well, my experience of it is not that it's no sweat, it's the most terrifying thing I do in my life. (speaks off mic) (speaks off mic) - Makes you question. - Why it's not happening. (speaks off mic) - Well, a lot-- (speaks off mic) (speaks off mic) (speaks off mic) - Right. - You're generalizing a lot of times. (speaks off mic) - But I think you have a valid point in that the problem in our society is that we have no shamanic tradition, no schedule of initiation. We don't know whether our kids should take these drugs at 14 or eight or, and this is a real problem. I've often, you know, if in a archaic society, it's all laid out for you. The elders understand, they bring you into it, there's ritual, there's initiation. It's amazing that we're all here, some of the things we've been through. I mean, I've made the analogy to a person walking, that a psychedelic drug is like the situation of a person walking along the beach, and they come upon a beautiful sailboat, and they know nothing about sailing. Well, what are the odds that they will be able to enjoy the thrill of sailing if they have no teacher? And I don't mean, I'm loathe to buy into the notion that one human being has anything to teach another, except things like close your eyes, be quiet, turn off the music. These are teachings of great importance. (woman speaking faintly) Right. - I think that there's a part in there too where we've got hold of the wrong end of the stick. I don't think that consciousness can be expanded. I think it's always at its maximum, and that there are inhibitors around by, let's say, habit, and that these inhibitors can be released by drugs, or can be accentuated. Obviously, tobacco is an accentuator of the inhibitor, because it levels things out. And there are other drugs which will release the inhibitor, so that consciousness seems to be more, but it really isn't. One has just released inhibitor. Does that make any sense? - Well, yeah, but I wanna make sure who gets inhibited is the one. (all laughing) - Yeah, but you see, yeah. Yeah, yeah, but now you see, yeah, now it's random, you see. - Right. - It's just random. - Do you agree with what he said, Tom, that the mushrooms release the inhibitors, or is there something about it that's different? - Well, the mushroom is such a special case, you know. It certainly draws your attention to an unusual part of reality, if it's there all the time. The fact that it seems to be a communicator is puzzling. I still haven't made up my mind about it. When people ask me how I choose drugs, I started out a radical. Nobody else was talking about drugs. Now I find I'm the anchor dragging the ship, because I say it should be a plant, number one. It should have a history of shamanic usage, number two. It should have a similarity to brain chemistry. And I am extremely unenthusiastic about MDMA and all these things. It's a plant with a history of shamanic usage. I always say, if you can get two out of the three, let's go do it. (all laughing) Sure. - What drugs are you offering? - It's simply that at four times the effective dose, it's approaching being toxic. There's this notion called the LD50, which is how much of a drug you have to give to 20 mice to kill 10 of them. In other words, 50% of the sample dies, right? The LD50 for MDMA is too close to the effective dose. Absolutely, absolutely. You see, LSD is the safest drug in terms of physical. We're always speaking here of pure chemicals, not street stuff, because no one has ever figured out the LD50 of LSD. You can take 5,000 times the effective dose, and after 16 hours, you just shake your head and walk away from it. Psilocybin, the LD50, is 275 times the effective dose. You have heart failure. You die of acute coronary thrombosis. This is not to put down MDMA. Most drugs are toxic. - It's like when you talk about MDMA, but MDMA, I'm sure there are really amazing things on it. I mean, you can ask him after the high-life. - Well, anyway, my point is that these shamanic drugs that are hallowed by millennia of usage are much safer. The other thing about them is that they're the strongest psychedelics that exist. This is the great paradox. The safest drugs are the strongest. All it requires is courage, courage which I do not have all the time, and in fact, quite rarely for the biggies. And that's very interesting. I've said many times, you know, the problem is not to, with regard to psychedelics, the problem is not to find the answer. The problem is to face the answer. We've got the answer. We don't, Sasha doesn't have to do another thing. We've got the answer. The question now is, do you have the guts to do it? (static crackling) [BLANK_AUDIO] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.64 sec Decoding : 2.08 sec Transcribe: 2852.27 sec Total Time: 2854.99 sec