What I want to talk about this morning is an idea. I've talked about it in a couple of places. Some of you may have heard it before. I think it bears repeating. It's a much more serious idea than what I put out yesterday, which had a note of whimsy in its genesis. This idea is important, whatever that means, because it would change not only the area of its concern, but our view of the world generally. Easter is an appropriate time to discuss this because it concerns the genesis of man, of consciousness and self-reflection, which is what the Easter mythologem is also an expression of. So what I wanted to talk about this morning is a new notion of how human evolution occurred and what the critical factors were in it, and how to draw a picture for us that shows how our intellectual complexity and symbol-manipulating facilities could have emerged naturally from a background of animal existence and over a fairly rapid period of time. Over the last three to five million years, actually, the African continent has been growing more dry and has experienced fluctuations of aridity. Nevertheless, as recently as 2,000 years ago, the Roman historian Pliny called North Africa the breadbasket of Rome because wheat was being grown over thousands and thousands of acres. Now, it's in this same area of Northern Africa, the Great Rift Zone, the Serengeti Plain, where physical anthropologists place the origin of human beings. And it has to do with the following sequence of events. Arboreal primates living in an unbroken continental rainforest ecology achieve a close adaptation to existence in the canopy. And this is stabilized for millions of years. They are insectivores. They have the opposable thumb and binocular or rudimentary binocular vision. The drying up of the African continent caused the breakdown of this continental rainforest into a configuration of patches of forest with grassland in between. And in this grassland ecology, herds of mammals evolved, proto-cattle, proto-bison, exotic mammals like giraffes and gazelles of all types. At the same time, the primate adaptation to this increasing aridity was to begin to descend from the trees and to hunt in packs and to shift from a diet of canopy fruits and berries and roots dug from the ground to an omnivorous diet that could include meat. So in this situation, these tribal monkeys developed a complicated repertoire of signals to aid in pack hunting in exactly the same way that wolves are known to do. Now, into this situation, and their habit was nomadic and to follow behind these great herds, either killing the animals that were less well and could be killed by the crude means at their disposal or living off the kills of other carnivores. And this is still the habit of baboons. Now, into this situation comes a mushroom which grows in the manure of the ungulate animals that have evolved on this plain. And in this protein-intensive environment where there is pressure on the availability of protein, these foraging primates are testing every object in the environment for its food value. So, Roland Fisher, who was a researcher into the effect of psychedelic drugs and the structure of consciousness, showed that small doses of psilocybin, sub-psychedelic, sub-threshold doses of psilocybin, actually increase visual acuity. And he had a very elegant experiment where two parallel lines could be deformed by turning a dial, and you would put graduate students in front of this, stoned and unstoned, and ask them to press a buzzer when the lines appeared to them to no longer be parallel. And he showed that consistently a small amount of psilocybin allowed you to detect this change sooner than an ordinary subject was able to. And he said to me, he said, "You see, this proves that in some cases drugs give you a clearer picture of reality than their absence." And what it means is that these primates who were inculcating the mushroom into their diet were gaining a subtle adaptive advantage over their fellows who were avoiding the mushroom because they were gaining in visual acuity, which is one of the critical parameters that a pack-hunting carnivore would be subject to in that kind of an environment. So, without any teleology being involved, without any invocation of an extraterrestrial intelligence, we see that a feedback loop was established in the food chain of these primates very early on. Those who ate the mushroom tended to survive and outbreed those who did not. At the same time, the relationship between these animals and these herd ungulate mammals was shifting from a hunting situation to a situation of domestication, which was bringing the mushroom ever more into the fore. And if you look back at the archaeological evidence in North Africa, especially the paintings, the late Neolithic paintings on the Tassili Plateau in southern Algeria, you see there magnificently portrayed herds of cattle, and beautifully painted, more sensitively portrayed cattle than you find at Altamira and Lascaux. And you see also shamans dancing with mushrooms sprouting out of their body and with mushrooms clutched in their hands, groups of them running, holding them on high with geometric matrices of connected dots all around them. And now, of course, in that area, it's very similar to this. It's an area of sculpted sandstone and cross-cut arroyos with undercut cliffs. And it's very dry, but in some places the Neolithic detritus is several meters deep. And the people who lived in the Tassili Plateau, when the aridity of the Sahara further increased, are the people who migrated east to the Valley of the Nile and established the proto-Egyptian civilization of 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. The important point I want to make about this later phase of the human involvement with the mushroom was that it was always intimately connected with cattle. And the goddess religions of ancient North Africa and the Middle East are religions of cattle goddesses. And this connection between the cow and the mother goddess and the mushroom is some kind of key to understanding the evolution of religious sensitivity in early man in that part of the Middle East. It carries forward into historical time with the mysteries at Eleusis, where there is a clear indication that a psychedelic substance was being used, either ergotized rye or a mushroom of some sort. And this notion that it was the presence of the mushroom on the African veldt at a critical bifurcation of primate evolution that created the feedback loop which eventually developed into self-reflecting consciousness. Because you see, at lower doses, the psilocybin is giving increased visual acuity and it seems like increased symbol processing ability. It's a strange effect on the language centers. But of course, inevitably, they would have also discovered its higher dose effects, which would be to convey them into an inner tremendum that became then the cultural guiding image. In other words, it was perceived as a god, as a goddess, as the goddess, and became then the arrow for cultural dynamics and evolution. And the reason I think this is important is because the spin-off implications of the acceptance of an idea like this would bring us into much greater harmony with our environment. We sort of have the anxiety of an orphan about our origins because our best people in physical anthropology don't give very good accounts, can't seem to make sense of how we could have been forced out and emerged out of primate organization. And so there's been much talk in the 20th century about the search for the missing link, which was always conceived of as a physical skeleton of a certain kind of intermediate hominoid form. But it isn't a missing link, I think. It's a missing factor. And the factor which accelerated the forward evolution of the brain size of this particular primate line was the inclusion of psychedelic plants in the diet, which then fed the tendency towards symbol formation and self-reflection. If this idea gained wide acceptance, some of our laws and some of our ways of relating to nature and to medicine plants in particular would have to be altered and brought into line. This is the source of our humanness. Apparently the psychoactive compounds being elaborated by plants throughout nature are regulators of various forms of evolution in animals. And food chains and all this, which appear very trivial on the surface, are actually the message bearing medium of the hand of God, which is forming and sculpting nature along these various creodes of development. And the thing to understand about this or why this has impact in the future is because it's a continuous process, which we can foster and husband and help develop in healthy ways if we recognize that it's going on. I mentioned elusives as this kind of thing going on in historical time. Also, of course, Soma, the sacrament of the Vedic civilization, appears to have been a mushroom, was certainly a psychedelic plant. And it isn't only psychedelic plants, it's all plants which affect and shift consciousness. I mean, a history of the human race could be written, analyzing it not in terms of class struggle or the impact of great personalities, but as a shifting set of interactions between sugar, tobacco, opium, caffeine, alcohol and psychedelics. So that we need to understand that... Chocolate. Chocolate. That these foods, cocaine, that these foods and drugs and spices are, we have subtly overlooked them and taken them for granted. They are regulating human history and individual self-expression, how much you know, how you look, how pure your transmission of your genetic heritage to the next generation. All of these things are being regulated and controlled by these plants in this way. Now, if we could create a civilization or even a clique within a civilization that understood this and had its fingers on a vertical monopoly of research from the jungle to the clinical hospital, great things could be understood. This is the way to do it, to systematically explore these relationships and see that Gaia apparently works through the intercession of catalytic compounds that convey revelation. And revelation is then the factor which has historical impact. The people, the messiahs and the teachers are merely the pipelines for ideas. And the metabolic release of these ideas in the macro environment is being controlled by the plant-animal interaction. And so it will be on into the foreseeable future. And by understanding this, a kind of new science looms into view, a kind of integrated dynamical understanding of the flux of energy mediated by chemistry in the environment so that the guiding image of culture can be revitalized and realized in a much shorter period of time. And this whole shortening period of time thing has also been going on for a while. You see, it isn't astonishing, I think, that self-reflection could emerge given basic primate organization. But what is astonishing about it is the speed with which it happened. I mean, in the last 30,000 to 50,000 years, the human brain has changed more than it changed in the previous 3 to 5 million years. So a factor has entered, a catalyst is in the mix. And it must be something in the food chain or something in the environment or the hand of almighty God or the extraterrestrials or elf invasion from hyperspace. But something is causing this accelerated development. And what I've said this morning could be criticized as being reductionist. I've tried to give a very sober account of it. I haven't said why the mushroom appeared in the manure or discussed whether it has awareness or a stake in the catalyzing of this primate evolution. I just introduced it as a chemical factor. And that's how it would be written if it were presented to a straight audience. The fact of the matter is that it raises all kinds of questions. I mean, why is this process being catalyzed in the primates? Is it just by happenstance? Where has the mushroom been? Is it-- what is its relationship to the evolution of other forms of life on this planet? Did it drift in from the stars? If so, long ago or recently? And with intent or by chance? And just a host of questions. But the thing that puts us in such an existential situation individually and culturally is this puzzlement over our origins. We are not, strictly speaking, religious in the 19th century way, so that we cannot really, I think, accept that God sculpted us from clay and set us down here on a world he created. And yet, if you were to look for the thumbprint of God on this planet, you would certainly have to focus in on the human beings and their activities as a special case of natural phenomena, perhaps so special a case that it had to be accorded a separate ontological status. We are different. And why and for what? I think that probably we are the agent of change that Gaia has unleashed upon herself, that the planet itself is aware of the finiteness of planetary existence. And it's sort of like the story of the ant and the grasshopper. You can have a planetary consciousness which says, "Well, I look forward to three to five billion years of sentient existence, and then I'm willing to be extinguished with the death of my star." Or you can have a planet with an ant-like mentality that says, "I can sense winter coming three to five billion years down the line, and I'm going to organize some wild strategy to break through the tyranny of the energy cycle of one star. And I am going to organize biological existence so that energy can be brought, greater and greater amounts of energy can be brought under control so that eventually a kind of liberation can occur where life can burst out of the planetary cradle and disperse itself through the universe." And there are apparently several strategies for this. One is evolve intelligence and build starships. Another is become a mushroom and produce three to five million spores per minute during sporeulation that are particles small enough to percolate by Brownian movement away from the atmosphere of a given planet, and by sheer numbers and the slow gradient of drift by light pressure and that sort of thing, emanate through the universe. And establish yourself in any planetary regime that is suitable. The obvious next great revelation in biology, and it's strange that we can state it because once it's stated by Carl Sagan, it will be headlines everywhere, but it's obvious that space is no barrier to life. It's a barrier in the same way that the Pacific Ocean was a barrier to life's colonization of the Hawaiian Islands, but that's all. It's just a tight filter. But spores and starships and shamans probably get through to other closed topologies in orbit around other stars. There must be a dimension somewhere where all surfaces in the universe are contiguous, and if you could move into that dimension, you could just walk to Zeta Reticuli. So the means by which life will penetrate these larger dimensions that free it from its dependency on the energy cycles of the material universe are not by any means clear. I mean, it may be that it's about organizing the mind and building an inner vehicle that moves off into the imagination. The imagination may be, in fact, a three-dimensional slice of a higher-dimensional universe that is holding all of this in being and causing it to happen. The imagination, it's hard to account for it in evolutionary terms if it is not somehow mapping a field of data that is important for development. So that's that notion, the notion of the importance of psychedelics in the formation of this species and the continuing formation of the cultural design. I think what the psychedelics do is they decondition from cultural programming and allow models to be replaced at a much greater rate of speed so that the culture that uses psychedelics can trim itself to every historical current. And this is really the challenge of the future. We are moving as a culture faster and faster through the temporal medium, through the historical space, and this is creating a compression of events. And it's almost like an airfoil approaching the speed of sound. There is a wave of concussive shock building in front of our culture, and we have to almost redesign ourselves in mid-flight in order to push through that barrier and into the different order, the different set of laws that will prevail once we have gotten through that. But this whole sense of everything accelerating and of all historical input being intensified and all previous times being somehow co-present, this is the phenomenon of the winding down of a universe or the building up of an eschatological shockwave in front of a vehicle that is trying to transit out of history and into some kind of millenarian space that is not subject to the anxiety that history involves. And that's what the whole crisis around the millennium and the whole 20th century really is about, is this effort to create a complete summation that can also be used as the force to propel us beyond everything that we have been or fought before. Because there's obviously no other escape from the culture crisis. It is... That kind of situation is called a forward escape. It means the only thing you can do is move forward into the crisis at ever greater speed, because the only solution is to pass through it and move beyond it. And as we move toward the millennium, and as the intelligence of our machines, the size of our databases, the desperation of our politicians, the intensity of the visions of our visionaries, all of this will build to a crazy, concatenatious climax. It can't be any other way, because Christian civilization has wired us up for these things at the end of every thousand year period. I mean, in the year 1000, everything just went haywire. I mean, people stood in the streets for months, gaping at the sky. No work got done. There was such an eminent expectation of the onslaught of the millennium. Nevertheless, this archetype of renewal is seeking in thousands and thousands of ways to be born. And I think the rediscovery of psychedelics, LSD, everything that Wasson did, all of these things are critical factors in this cultural mix that is going to gel toward the recognition of the things which we hold as cliches, you know, that the inside and the outside are the same thing, that the universe can be crossed by thought in an instant, that all information is somehow co-present, and so on. Are there any questions about any of this? Yes, I said that what we take for granted, that the inside and the outside are the same thing, these things will be assimilated by the larger culture. And things like, you know, human-machine interface and the ego identification with the body, I think all these things are going to be obviated. But you see, we don't know what man is, and we have a strong association that humanness is related to the monkey body. But yet our whole historical career has been of projecting ideas into technical accretions. And now that we have computers and things which mimic intelligence, we are beginning to explore, you know, what is humanness ontologically. That's what people are really talking about when they say, "Can machines think? Will machines think?" They mean, is what we have focused in on as the defining factor of our being that sets us apart from all other things, something which we could manufacture? And the answer is probably to some degree, yes, because much of what is intelligence, or appears superficially to be intelligence, is simply data and retrieval. So that, you know, more and more of the culture is being hardwired into an electronic coral reef that is simply the outermost of each of our own exoskeletons. We all have telephones in our homes. Many of us have computer terminals. These things introduce us to a global skin of information that, as the hardware grows more and more unobtrusive, we will more and more come to identify these things with our own ego. And we won't even realize that we're being charged for thinking about certain questions because we're actually accessing a database somewhere which is feeding us data. So that the commonality of mind is, I think, going to be... It's somehow the triumph of socialism will be the commonality of mind in a capitalist context, that there really will be an ocean of thought that you will swim in and that will be composed of deeper and deeper levels of integrated information. Perhaps this is all that hyperspace is, is the entirely expressed informational ghost of this physical universe, and that it's in the informational reconstruction of the physical universe that the mind will eventually come to swim like a fish, and will come and go from various constellations of aggregation and integration. I mean, you see, what's going to happen is that the rules of the imagination are going to replace physics, so that we are going to be able to do and be whatever we can imagine. Well, none of us have probably ever put in much thought to what would I be if I could be anything I could imagine. And just 20 minutes of that meditation will lead you into pretty strange places. So what would it be like if a culture evolved for a thousand years in that way? I mean, if you could be anything. I guess the first step everyone takes is they imagine themselves as the flying saucer, the lenticular mind object made of light that can move at any speed and become any object and answer any question. Well, it's an archetype of wholeness. Jung, in his Flying Saucer book, talked about this thing in alchemy called the rotundum, which was the thing which spins, you know. And it's also in alchemy called the scintilla, the spark. And it's simply because it's round and spins, it's a symbol of wholeness. But it's like the exteriorization of the human soul, the realization that expressing what is within us may culturally eventually mean actually exteriorizing the human soul and interiorizing the human body so that this world is traded in for the imagination. I mean, this is sort of what art has always been trying to do. But we're talking about a breakthrough in ways and means on such a scale that you can just march off into this art. Terence, do you find it reasonable to anticipate that eventually human technology will succeed in producing computers that are just as conscious as we are and can be able to do anything that we can do? Oh, yes. Well, Cat and I did that without even a flashlight battery, just by having children. I mean, there's an epigenetic component and a genetic component. But what I'm saying is the difference between these things may become dim indeed. In other words, why shouldn't all-- you know, the way a person is made is that a DNA message is read by RNA, and it's a group of codons, nucleotide bases, which are then templated. And then a ribosome reads it and assembles little pieces correctly, and then the protein is created. Well, there's no reason why anything should be made any other way. All machines should be produced by the transcription of molecular templates. So then all our machines will become strangely quasi-biological. Chevrolets will not be manufactured. They will be grown in yeasty vats. And when they talk to you, the question becomes very moot as to whether this is a pet, a friend, a colleague, or-- because that's-- you see, nature works with very low energies. DNA can make anything, and there's no smelting, no huge release of toxic byproducts. And the amazing thing about these proteins is that the ribosome stamps them out, and they come out like a line, but they have forces, electrostatic and other kinds of forces, scripted into them so that they fold in very, very complicated ways. And they always fold the same way. And their memory of how to fold, where this comes from, is one of the great mysteries of molecular biology. It's not at all understood. Well, imagine if we could make machines which just emerged as a strange form of spaghetti, which then folded itself into jet planes, refrigerators, automobiles, color television sets, lipstick cases, and what have you. This has to do with my notion that really the next evolutionary leap is-- well, I shouldn't call it an evolutionary leap, because it's a leap in epigenetic. There's a leap in epigenetic development, but is what I call the genesis of visible language, that there is an ability just under the surface of human organization waiting to be coaxed out either through yoga or slight genetic engineering or something like that. And it is something that was anticipated by the Alexandrine philosopher Philo-Judeus. He talked about the logos, which is this teaching voice, this informing thing which is heard. And he was interested in what he called the more perfect logos. And he said, what is the more perfect logos? And then he answered his own question and said, it would be a logos which went from being heard to being beheld without ever crossing over a border of transition. In other words, a form of synesthesia. Well, using ayahuasca and DMT and compounds like this, which are very closely related to our ordinary brain chemistry and practice and dedication, you can begin to explore places where a vocal synesthesia becomes a colored topological manifold. And you can communicate, you can show someone your thoughts by singing in such a way as to condense visible objects into the air in front of them. And these objects are, they are hyper words. They are words which you don't hear, but which you see. And they are, and like objects, they have sides and facets and can be rotated and examined from all sides. Well, now the biases in our language that cause us to say things like, I see what you mean, when we mean, I understand you fully, shows that we really place a greater emphasis on seeing the truth than on hearing the truth. So the truth seen is somehow more valid than truth heard. And ayahuasca is a perfect example of a plant which communicates with a visible language. The mushroom, you often hear it, and often the hearing evolves into a visible synesthesia field of photonic input. But the ayahuasca always communicates visually. And it's like the Mayan glyphs or something. It's this fantastically complicated surface which is conveying alien meaning. After an ayahuasca trip, you just feel like your eyes are sticking out of your head because you've just been looking as one looks at the page of a book for hours and hours as this strange alien three-dimensional language flows through your mind. But I believe that this is a human ability just under the surface and that in psychedelic states of mind, this happens to people. This is why all the fiddling with glossolalia. It's in the hope of reaching that concordance of chemistry and the moment that will allow this to happen. Because it's for some reason very satisfying. It's like an utterly harmless city. It seems to have, it is true magic. And the person doing it is utterly transported by their ability to project visual beauty. But it appears to have no use other than entertainment of oneself and others. But eventually, when it is integrated as a cultural mode, I think it will be, it is what telepathy will be. Telepathy will not be hearing other people's thoughts in your head. Telepathy will be when you switch into the language that lets people see what you mean. It'll be the see what I mean language. And I think that the psilocybin from the very beginning was catalyzing the language centers. And that in fact, the kind of language I'm speaking to you right now is a prototypic type of this eventual development in human organization. And that this is the thing that makes humans unique, is this ability to make small mouth noises, which are arbitrarily encoded with conventionally agreed upon meanings, which allows us then a vast control of a previously invisible linguistic space. And it's in that linguistic space that we have erected our cathedrals and conducted our pogroms and gone about all our forms of business. And becoming aware of this, of language as a thing to journey into and language as a thing to avoid the pitfalls of. To be, you know, the Buddhists say, awareness of awareness. Maybe it's easier if one thinks of it as awareness of language. I wanted to say this thing of the visual language, because they'll have their mouth open and there will literally be these beautiful things coming out of their mouth with flowers and they interpret it as flowery speech, but perhaps they were in fact doing what you're talking about. Well, they don't interpret it as flowery speech. They call it that. But yes, I think that's what it must have been. This is all very puzzling to me. And if anybody knows, if anybody is an acoustics person or I don't know what's going on exactly, but the question of how, what is voice and what can you do with self-generated sound? How neutral is it to your own organism? In other words, any of you who read The Invisible Landscape, the theory in there is that you take a certain drug, a certain plant, and you hear an interiorized tone, which is not a psychological phenomenon, but rather it is actually the electron spin resonance of this highly biodynamic molecules by the millions entering into the synaptic cleft and competing with the endogenous transmitter there for uptake, and that this is molecularly real and hence can be treated as a variable to be manipulated with the input of other kinds of sound, such as sound which cancels it or sound which reinforces it, to then manipulate these molecules in one's body. And this is really, I think, the frontier of shamanism worldwide, that everybody is trying to figure out how far you can go with sound and what you can do with it, and also how dangerous is this? How permanent can some of these brain changes be? And what is the mechanism? Is the electron spin resonance thing pretty close to it, or is that just a myth and an entirely different set of coupling mechanisms are making that happen? But all of the ayahuasca shamans are great hummers and great controllers of their voice, and they do operate on your body with light and sound, and there are sounds which can slice into your body. And it seems to me this is where experiential and experimental work with these things should concentrate to try and understand just how much of humanness can we take control of? How bound in are we? What do these special abilities mean? And what traditions, if any, have anticipated them? . . [BLANK_AUDIO] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.70 sec Decoding : 2.01 sec Transcribe: 2725.50 sec Total Time: 2728.22 sec