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 - This summer past, we journeyed to Prague, Czechoslovakia,
 to attend the International Transpersonal Conference,
 a meeting of philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists,
 writers, ecologists, and thinkers on global subjects.
 Throughout the conference, we were able to track down
 and interview some of the movers and shakers
 whose ideas and hopes will shape the new millennium.
 Prague was a fitting venue for this meeting.
 Poised as it is at the center of European crisis and promise,
 it is a metaphor for the transformation of the planet
 and of human psychology that must take place
 if we are to provide a sane future for our children.
 (bells ringing)
 (people chattering)
 I'm standing in the center of one of Central Europe's
 most beautiful and mysterious cities.
 This is Prague, Czechoslovakia, and I'm Terence McKenna.
 We're here to meet with some of the world's
 most outstanding thinkers to discuss science,
 spirituality, and the mounting global crisis.
 And it's fitting that we should meet in this,
 the capital of ancient Bohemia,
 for Prague and Bohemia have always stood
 for intellectual innovation, chance-taking,
 and the life of ideas.
 In the Jugendstil splendor of one of Prague's
 most famous concert halls, we encountered Richard Alpert
 and persuaded him to have lunch with us.
 Alpert, who now calls himself Ram Dass,
 is one of the most enduring figures
 from the American cultural upheaval of the 1960s.
 Alpert, whose career reaches from Harvard University
 to the plains of the Punjab, has transformed himself
 into a spokesman for humanities ignored and downtrodden.
 And Ralph Abraham was sitting across the table
 watching me have this conversation,
 and after Steiger left, Ralph leaned over to me
 and he said, "So you see, Terence,
 "the mushroom is telling you that it can reach out
 "and touch you anywhere."
 And I thought, that was amazing.
 - Well, anytime you would like to,
 or feel that you have the time to guide me
 through anything at all, I'd be happy to be your...
 - Oh, and excuse me, sir.
 You are not the famous Terence "Mushroom" McKenna?
 That is you, my friend, I am aware of?
 - It is.
 - That's him.
 - Oh, how wonderful.
 Yes, pleased to welcome you on our Bohemian highway.
 I especially bring you a very good black coffee
 and espresso, and if you may tell me,
 who is the attractive elderly gentleman
 you brought on your side on your companionship here?
 - This is Mr. Da.
 - Oh, the MS Da's, yes?
 - No, the Ram Da's.
 - Oh, the CD Ram.
 - CD Ram, yes.
 - CD Ram Da.
 - The LSD Da's.
 - LSD Da's, yes, the one, yes.
 - Wonderful, take this, and we'll be making you
 very bohemian.
 And so this is...
 - I am so happy to be in your fair country.
 - Oh, my country, very fair,
 and happy to have the LSD experience.
 You know, you have...
 - What is your name?
 - My name is Wader.
 - Wader, happy to meet you, Wader, a pleasure.
 - Yes, senior Wader, okay.
 - Senior Wader.
 (laughing)
 - You don't think there's any...
 - It would need the external form of the mushroom.
 It would never have happened for me.
 I only argue from my own experience.
 - Yeah, but you and I were both so thick in crap
 when it had, you know, that's why we needed it.
 - Well, but there are a few others out there.
 We didn't corner the market on being thick in crap.
 - Yeah, but I'm talking about somebody
 like a Ramona Maharshi or somebody like that.
 - Oh, well, these people.
 - I mean, there are people.
 - Sure, but the idea is not to come up with something
 that the best among us can make hay with,
 but a democratic, something which addresses the species.
 The thing that seemed to me so important
 about the psychedelic experience was that it happened to me.
 I wasn't reading John Chrysostom or Meister Eckhart.
 Of course those guys.
 - Right on, it happened to me.
 It happened to me, yes.
 - And so I assume that I am a very ordinary person.
 Therefore, if it happened to me,
 it could happen to anyone.
 And that's really something.
 - That's the question of all.
 You know, there's a set of assumptions there.
 One, that you're a very ordinary person.
 And whether the same chemical given to a dozen people
 would bring about 11 other people like this.
 - Similar experience.
 - And I think it would be not,
 the outcome would be very different.
 And that's, I keep getting cast into an evolution
 of consciousness model about individuals,
 because there's such marked individual differences
 as to three people come before my guru,
 one completely goes, and the other two get a chapati.
 And people take psilocybin and they,
 some go like that and they go like that,
 and some go like that.
 - Well, don't you think a good metaphor for it
 would be sexuality?
 Apparently there are some people
 who can kind of take it or leave it.
 And others of us, it rears its ugly head
 with great presence.
 Yet everybody has to come to terms with it.
 - I notice as I get older,
 I move from one of these categories to the other.
 It leaves so much space in my life.
 I don't know what to do with my free time.
 - I hope it never happens to me.
 - Just clinging.
 Just clinging.
 - No, just aspiring to cling.
 Actually, I live the life of an ascetic.
 It's my aspirations that are pulling me down.
 Well, see, the nice thing about this evolutionary argument
 is that you can sort of make the snake
 take its tail in its mouth.
 - Exactly, it does.
 - The escape is not into some science fiction future.
 - No.
 - It's into an archaic recursion of some sort.
 We once knew everything we need to know.
 So what we are trying to find out is lost knowledge,
 not new knowledge.
 And if you direct people back toward 10,000,
 20,000 years ago, they see a kind of completion
 that an open-ended future is...
 - Seems to me it's a confusing thing
 to use time in that way,
 because it makes the artifacts of that period
 seem to be valued as opposed to the artifacts of this period.
 It seems to me that I, I mean,
 whether you call it not science fiction,
 but science fiction can also be very compassionate.
 It can be very historically relevant.
 It doesn't have to be,
 it's just using a different set of artifacts to work with.
 - Well, for instance,
 I see most of what's happened in the 20th century
 as being unconsciously driven
 by this fascination with the archaic.
 - Fascination with the archaic?
 - Yes. I mean, wow, that was,
 of all the things I predicted you'd say, it wasn't that.
 Tell me what else.
 - For instance, impressionism
 deconstructs the hard image of realism
 and gives you a feeling-toned thing,
 which was very antithetical to Victorian, Edwardian thought.
 Then Freud and Jung describe different aspects
 of the unconscious, but to do it,
 Jung, Freud has to talk about
 repressed, primitive, sexual imaginings.
 Jung talks about folklore, fairy tales, and mythology.
 Meanwhile, the Dadaists and the Surrealists are saying,
 we have to break up the linear expectations
 of the bourgeois mind.
 And then you get Jackson Pollock
 and those people who say the image itself
 has to be thrown out.
 And then, to my mind, the psychedelic thing in the '60s,
 based on rock and roll and a boundary-dissolving psychedelic,
 we, almost by a random walk,
 are finding our way toward shamanism,
 tribalism, nomadism.
 - Go beyond the isms to find,
 tell me what we're really finding.
 - We're finding a world made out of mind rather than stuff.
 - Right, okay, we're finding a world made out of mind.
 Every time you describe which mind you find,
 that's just limiting, a limiting condition.
 I mean, if we just find the thing of mind-created stuff,
 live in that, then what happens?
 - Well, I mean, there is a transcendental dimension
 beyond language, it's just hard as hell to talk about it.
 But if you live in it and talk from there,
 then the forms that it will manifest in
 become just the forms it manifests in.
 It's nothing more or less than that.
 - So you mean you download the unspeakable into language
 and let the chips fall where they may?
 - Well, they don't fall where they may.
 They fall in a perfectly harmonious pattern.
 - Well, that's them falling where they may.
 - Where they may, where they will.
 - Yeah. - Yeah.
 - Well, so what I'm hearing from you
 is you have a very strong sense of the pattern,
 strong enough that your necessarily limited
 personal viewpoint doesn't tend to get in the way.
 You can always push the reset to hope button,
 and then you hope, almost on principle.
 - Trump has said to me,
 "Stand halfway between hope and hopelessness."
 I thought that was very useful.
 - And is that, eh?
 - No, it's, is it? - What is it?
 - Ah! - It's ah!
 - It's the ecstasy of total horror
 and total beauty at the same moment.
 That's what I feel again and again.
 That's when I'm with somebody dying of AIDS.
 My God, my heart's breaking.
 It's horrible.
 It's a ghastly, social ostracization,
 this, that, opportunistic illness, and there's,
 and there's another part of me that's giggling.
 And I can hardly handle the,
 the multifrenia of it all,
 in the sense of the, the perfection of it all,
 and the beauty of the moment,
 and the horrible shit of it, you know?
 - Well, it all is spun together.
 Is that because you feel confident
 that the self is somehow indestructible,
 or because you don't even ask that question?
 - You gotta watch the words indestructible,
 'cause that has a time dimension.
 I mean, I think the, that awareness is,
 that, ah.
 - But for example, do you think this is the stage
 upon which all acts are performed,
 or that we move up and down many levels?
 - No, this is one of the stages.
 Oh, infinite number of,
 probably infinite number,
 because I just look into two minds,
 and I see two different ones,
 and those are all on just this one.
 Now, I feel like, like I have this friend, Emmanuel,
 you know, this spook that has no body.
 And Emmanuel's two lines to me were,
 "Death is absolutely safe," first thing.
 That's a very profound statement.
 The next thing he said,
 "It was like taking off a tight shoe."
 And then I said to him, "Emmanuel, what am I doing here?
 "Who made this error?
 "What am I doing on this plane?"
 He said, "You're in school.
 "Why don't you try taking the curriculum?"
 - And the curriculum is?
 - Life.
 - Any life?
 - It means the exploration of the clinging of mind
 within the world of projected form.
 - So the exploring life.
 - It's the exploring life with the,
 it's purposive,
 in the sense of returning back into the Garden of Eden.
 It's a return.
 There is a return metaphor underlying all of it.
 - And I'm sure you're asked this all the time, so am I.
 Maybe we give different answers.
 Do you think that this can be done without psychedelics
 fast enough to have an impact on the global situation?
 (audience chattering)
 - I could conceive that it could be.
 You asked do I think.
 I don't really have an opinion whether it will or won't,
 but I could see it go either way.
 Like John Seed said to me,
 it's too late as far as the rainforest is concerned.
 He says the inertia is too great in the whole system.
 It's too late.
 So I said, "Okay, John."
 I mean, it was the first time somebody said it to me
 just like that.
 He said, "It would take a miracle."
 I said, "Oh, that threw me back on whatever that was."
 And then he said, "But after all," he said,
 "we came up out of the ocean and came onto land."
 He said, "We have quite a lineage of miracles.
 "I wouldn't underestimate us."
 That was a nice one.
 - Well, so my question to you is,
 are psychedelics a miracle?
 - Psychedelics are a miracle, yes.
 They may not be the only miracle.
 - Are they the miracle we need?
 - I don't know that.
 I don't know that.
 I think they may have already done what they were to do.
 - Really?
 That's interesting.
 I've never heard anybody say that.
 - I think what is done is so much more powerful
 than anybody yet recognizes.
 See, I see that all this destruction
 is just the process of transformation.
 The question is whether we'll keep it together.
 In the process of transformation.
 And that's why all I'm interested in doing
 is becoming a person and helping others become a person
 who in the process of the dramatic stuff
 will keep some equanimity and keep there's some love
 and some presence in that process.
 But that's, psychedelics may play a role in that.
 So you're right, that comes back to your question.
 - Well, see my assumption in trying to think
 about thousands of psychedelic trips rather than just mine,
 what they seem to do generically
 is they seem to dissolve boundaries.
 - Yes.
 - And the ego is in the business of creating,
 maintaining and defending boundaries.
 So I really see the psychedelics as directly intervening
 in the core process, which is running us over the edge,
 which is our inability to emotionally connect
 with the consequences of what we're doing.
 If for a single moment we could feel what we're doing,
 we would stop.
 - I understand.
 - But we do not.
 - It's interesting 'cause you take images
 that all of us know of the girl running down the street
 naked in Cambodia, or something like that.
 And we say that wasn't strong enough.
 It won the life of the year award,
 but it wasn't strong enough.
 It didn't stop everybody and say,
 "Holy shit, what are we doing here?"
 So what would be strong enough to do that?
 And you say, well, psychedelics,
 but that's in a one-on-one thing.
 I mean, we're talking major game players at this moment.
 I mean, put China into your computer.
 - How do you deal with it?
 - I mean, either you're spraying it or it's water
 or it's some other level of consciousness that does it.
 There is a certain level of trauma that's possible
 that can soften the ground.
 Not Three Mile Island and not Chernobyl,
 but I mean, I don't want to create this with my mind,
 but I can imagine a certain trauma,
 like in Marin when they ran out of water.
 It was interesting.
 Suddenly all the ego barriers and everything
 and neighbors were talking who'd never even met each other.
 - People were taking showers together.
 - Yeah, exactly.
 The whole process was happening.
 I'm sure marriages, babies were conceived,
 everything as a result of that trauma, of that denial.
 So a massive, significant trauma.
 I just got to tell you one scary image.
 There's a saint in India who lived up to about 1930,
 I think or so.
 And one of his devotees said to me,
 one night he was sort of looking off into the distance
 and he said, "There'll come a time," he said,
 "when you'll walk five miles," and he said,
 "you'll sight the light from a fire of another person
 "and you'll be so happy to know another person exists."
 - Quite a prediction.
 - Isn't that quite a prediction?
 It's in there, it's just in there somewhere.
 - Interesting.
 - Yes, well, I agree.
 I think that what's going to happen is that--
 - Gentlemen, everything is fine with the evolution
 of coffee and consciousness,
 not very good with you two.
 You have come just at the right time.
 This is just what I wanted to know.
 You tuned into a higher level.
 - A higher level, a high level.
 - A very high, yes.
 - I eat Bohemian mushroom soup today.
 - Ah.
 - Are you a big eater?
 - We were just talking about that.
 - Oh, yes, you like Bohemian mushroom soup?
 - I like mushroom.
 - Let me sprinkle liberally some water on your chalice, sir.
 - Oh, please.
 Liberally sprinkle his chalice for sure.
 I am a chalice, so it's fine if you wish to.
 - Oh, I know you by your true name,
 you're Mr. Chalice, sir.
 Yes, very good.
 You also some water in your--
 - No, no.
 - I was confused.
 Let me put this here and have fun with the shaman's strudel.
 Bohemian, very good.
 - Thank you very much.
 - Recall when things are getting dangerous.
 - I'll call you.
 - I'll be right back.
 - Not to worry.
 - Good, good.
 - Can I ask you a personal question?
 - You can ask me anything you'd like, Terrence.
 - It's not a personal question to you,
 it's a personal question from me.
 How do you like having the projection
 of special identity constantly laid on you?
 - It's a sadhna.
 It's my practice.
 - That's a good answer.
 Although you didn't say how you liked it.
 - I like it to the capacity I have to transpose it.
 If I can't, I mean, sometimes these are going very fast,
 to just keep it transposed, then I love it.
 I love it.
 It's like a fire.
 The minute I start to lose it, it's a fucking drag.
 It really is.
 Because, I mean, you know, I was in a situation in Miami
 where all these women with blue eyes and curfew-ed hair
 were grabbing at the buttons of my jacket.
 And I thought, oh, I don't want this.
 Whatever this life is, I don't want to be part of this.
 This is, they eat your flesh, finally.
 - Sure.
 - But I realize at any time, I can walk away from it.
 And it's my, you know, I'm a free agent.
 - So do you never get in a situation where you say,
 gee, I'd like to do X, but Ram Dass would never do that?
 - My stock and trade, or my coinage,
 is in sharing just those predicaments publicly.
 See, I've turned it into, right?
 - You've managed to, but public confession
 is the subtlest form of wastory.
 - Of wastory, yes.
 (both laughing)
 I do it myself.
 Say, I'm not a good guy, don't follow me.
 I'm a bad guy.
 Then I leave the stage and say,
 now I can really be a bad guy.
 You often see my holly pictures.
 That's one of my lines in my lecture.
 I don't, I'll tell you, I only see the stuff
 that would disturb me as inside myself.
 It has nothing to do with out there.
 Out there is just being what it is,
 and I'm responding with my own stuff.
 And if my stuff is my enemy, it's gonna get too much for me.
 And if it isn't, you know, depends on how much I can
 consume it, joyfully participate in it,
 passionately, all of it.
 - Well, you've sort of achieved a unique synthesis.
 I mean, you're almost a secular holy man,
 because I don't think people, I don't care much
 about what you believe or who you light candles to.
 Basically, I think I heard you describe yourself once
 as a kind man.
 And you've gotten incredible mileage out of that
 because there are so few.
 - It's far out.
 - Right? - Yeah.
 - Yeah, I mean, this is--
 - Well, when you talked about coming back
 into the boundarylessness, to me,
 that's the whole quality of compassion,
 has that boundarylessness to it.
 It's that your suffering's my suffering,
 and your joy's my joy, and you are me, and here we are.
 And if you hurt, I'm responding to your hurt,
 not 'cause I'm a good guy and you're needful,
 just because here is, this is suffering,
 and this is the response to suffering.
 And we're both part of the same thing.
 And that's the way I like to play it from.
 That's, to me, it's like riding a wave.
 It's the joy of just being part of the force
 of compassion in the universe.
 - Well, when you look, you mentioned in your talk
 the other night, since some people think the '90s
 are going to be a second turn of the spiral,
 I observed the '60s as a spear-carrying 14-year-old.
 I was down in the masses.
 What were the mistakes that are avoidable
 if there's a second chance?
 - They're inevitably going to be avoided.
 The first mistake was idealism, the first mistake.
 And the mistake was thinking that because you had seen it,
 you could just go like that and everybody else would see it.
 And you could just say, "It's all love,"
 and then everybody would love.
 I mean, that was, it was a naivete.
 It was naivete.
 It was not working on ourselves deeply enough
 to be without the clinging of mind
 that made us try to use it.
 It was our lurking righteousness that got in our way.
 - Can you make a revolution, though,
 without an inner righteousness?
 - That's exactly, that's the far-out question
 of where would the action come from?
 And there's this line in Buddhism that says,
 "Out of emptiness arises compassion."
 And what I've experienced is that there is a way
 in which I can sit down in front of a truck
 or feed a person or go make love or go surf,
 and there is an appropriateness in every one of those acts.
 And for me to hear that, I've really got to shut up.
 And my work is to keep shutting up,
 to hear which one it is.
 And if it is a revolution, it's a revolution.
 So be it. So be it.
 You know the story of the monk and the army general?
 You know, and the army general's disemboweling all the monks?
 And his reputation has spread far and wide
 as a cruel, cruel man.
 And he comes into this village and he says to his adjutant,
 "Tell me what's happening."
 The adjutant said, "All the people are frightened.
 "They're bowing down to you.
 "All the monks in the monastery have fled to the hills,
 "but one monk."
 And the general was outraged about this one monk.
 And he gets up and he goes to the monastery
 and he pushes open the doors of the monastery
 and he walks into the courtyard.
 And there's the monk standing in the middle of the courtyard.
 And he walks up to him and he says,
 "Don't you know who I am?
 "I could take my sword and run it through your belly
 "without blinking an eye.
 "And don't you know who I am?
 "I could have your sword run through my belly
 "without blinking an eye."
 - That's great.
 - That's the place from which revolutions can heal
 rather than just starting the cycle all over again.
 - Then this is the place we never found in the '60s.
 I mean, I've always said we, it was all well and good.
 - Well, we reduced it to revolution rather,
 and although we had the taste of evolution,
 we reduced it to revolution.
 - Well, and the day they came with machine guns,
 we didn't stand like that monk.
 Everybody said, "Oh my God,
 "you could get killed playing this game."
 And I flew to Laos and India for three years.
 - But already we had produced the they
 by us being so busy being we.
 - True.
 - 'Cause so that they even noticed we.
 The fact that they noticed us
 was because we were busy being,
 we were busy making statements instead of just being it.
 - So maybe, I mean, this is just occurring to me,
 that being in a place like Prague,
 the real thing we have to learn here
 is how to make a velvet revolution.
 - Exactly. - Non-confrontation.
 - Exactly right, exactly right.
 That's why I admire Havel so much.
 That's why he's way up there in my,
 'cause he's a compassionate leader.
 He's got wisdom, not just knowledge.
 He is tuned.
 There's a quality of his heart that feels present.
 And he said in this op-ed article,
 I just read his letter last month.
 - I've read it too.
 - You know, at one point he said,
 we have to allow the naturalness to come back,
 the personal stuff, the heart stuff.
 I mean, he was right there with all of the,
 do you see, I mean, I don't wanna put you on the spot,
 but I don't, let me preface it by saying,
 do you see anybody who could play that role
 for the millions of kids in England and the United States
 who are now asking, where do we go from here?
 No.
 - Is that good or bad?
 - I guess the situation hasn't demanded
 the emergence of that being it.
 - Of those kinds of kids.
 - 'Cause it can't be anybody that comes forward
 and says, I'm it.
 - Oh no, it has to be someone who the people say,
 you're in demand, the formation.
 I mean, you watch, does the man make the time
 or the time make the man?
 And you can feel how what took a certain person 20 years
 like to ride a bicycle, somebody later on
 can ride a bicycle like that
 'cause the whole culture rides bicycles.
 There's some process where the situation emerged
 where the person has to come forward
 and they're just forced out.
 I mean, I go and I look at all the senators
 that are running for this or that
 and I go to breakfast with them and I listen and I tune
 and Jerry Brown I hung out with and I said,
 he's got interesting ideas, but his heart,
 my God, he's got work to do, this poor guy,
 he's suffering so much and I just keep, I love him
 and I want those ideas out,
 but I want him to work on himself.
 - Do you really care in terms of political terms
 whether Jerry Brown makes himself palatable to an electorate?
 - I care because I worked with the Mayan widows in Guatemala
 and I feel like I'm representing them
 and our government, our administration's policies
 are killing them and their children and their husbands
 and some way I've got to play my part
 as a member of a society that is imposing so much suffering
 on so many people.
 I can't just walk away and say,
 oh, I'm helping the nice Mayans.
 I've also got to realize I'm an American citizen
 that's hurting the Mayans
 and I've got to play both games to change one way
 and to do the other thing.
 - So there's a kind of, not to go egghead here,
 but a kind of coincidencia positorum
 because on one level what you're saying is,
 it's all right, don't worry,
 and on another level, you clearly are involved
 in a search for defining your role,
 your, where you would do some good.
 - Optimum judo move.
 - Optimum judo move.
 So it isn't enough to just say,
 the system will take care of itself.
 - I am part of the system, but it's taking care of itself.
 - So it's a sense of acting without acting through self.
 - It's being not identified with the actor
 and not being identified with the fruits of the action.
 That's, I mean, to me, one of my basic texts
 is the "Bahagavad Gita" and those are the two injunctions.
 And I really hear those and they're very weird.
 How you do an act when you're not identified
 with being the actor and you're not attached to the fruits.
 I mean, I leave this funny, continuous paradox
 that suffering stinks and suffering's grace.
 And I live with both of those all the time.
 - Well, I think most people do.
 - I think most people have made, taken a position.
 - Oh, that suffering is bad, they hate it,
 they want to keep it away from them.
 - Or that it's grace and it's, you know, lovely.
 - Well, and then the great masses of people
 never really draw the distinction
 because for them, suffering is like air and water.
 - It's life, it's life.
 - It comes with it.
 Burying the many children you've buried.
 - That's why I found in the villages in India,
 less suffering than I found
 around the middle class in America.
 - Certainly less whining.
 - Well, less preoccupation with what they don't have.
 - Well, they have a philosophy of reincarnation
 that must sustain them.
 - There is something else that's feeding them.
 - Where we have a philosophy of, you know,
 if you don't get it now, you never will.
 - We threw out in the councils of Nicaea, Trent,
 and Constantinople, just the thing that would have healed,
 but we did it so that the church could have power over.
 - Well, I think it was Frederick Nietzsche who said
 there was only one Christian and they crucified him.
 (laughing)
 - Yes, is that true?
 - That's so good.
 It's such a good line.
 - Here comes.
 - Now, have you been waiting for me?
 Because I'm the waiter, I need to wait.
 - We've been looking everywhere for you, sir.
 - Oh, I'm sorry.
 I have been waiting for the here and now,
 but that was somewhere else.
 Well, can I help you here?
 - You can help us here and you can help us there.
 - Very good, I'll help you here.
 I hope you enjoy my conversation.
 - No, I mean you.
 - It's fine.
 - Do you have a check or is this all on the house?
 - No, no, I am the check.
 I am the check.
 (laughing)
 This is Prague, my sir.
 God is everywhere, but check land is here, you know?
 (laughing)
 Okay, I'll keep one more bottle for you
 in the refrigerator.
 - You can leave it here, it's Prague.
 You can hold it and reserve.
 - But not in the here and now.
 In the somewhere else, maybe later.
 See you.
 - Well, I was asking you what did we do wrong in the '60s.
 One thing that has occurred to me,
 and I certainly felt it with my friends,
 was we assumed it would go on forever.
 We had no notion of window of opportunity.
 We just thought we'd blown the doors off the hinges
 and they would never be put back on.
 To me, the most amazing transformation in my lifetime
 is not the revolution of the '60s,
 but the counter-revolution of the '70s,
 where they managed to put the cuckoo clock
 back together again, even though we'd kicked it all over.
 - Did they or didn't they?
 That's what I'm, see, you keep thinking
 there was that opportunity and it closed,
 and I think it happened then.
 And all of the '70s and '80s,
 all that was this kind of reverberation to this process,
 and that I'm here and you're here,
 and we're both still here, and it's the '90s,
 and I got a lot of people that, you know,
 I talk now in middle America,
 and I look at my audiences and they've never taken dope,
 they've never read Eastern holy books or anything,
 and I just say the same stuff I was saying in the '60s
 that I was saying to people with flowers and big pupils,
 and these people in the middle,
 you know, they're corseted, nice people,
 and they're going, and I think, far out, look, it happened.
 And I was looking the other way.
 Well, that's true.
 And that's where you're looking for the resonance
 of a person to come forth that speaks from that consciousness
 with the assurance of the truth of it, you know?
 That's what I think, why all this business
 of a Christ figure, I mean, I see how seductive it is,
 but how we've gotten very cynical
 because we've projected into such a person,
 a purpose, a purpose,
 instead of just that light forming
 out of the needs of the moment,
 create that light to which,
 because I find if I speak from a true enough,
 for a moment, when I can do it,
 from a true enough place in my heart,
 it reduces the paranoia,
 the subtle veils of paranoia in another person.
 I don't do it to them, it just falls away,
 because they test, they're testing,
 and they don't get from me anything that says like that.
 And I just watch them like a flower,
 they do like that.
 And I think, boy, I give a lot to just be that instrument.
 That's worth working for.
 Well, that's a great role.
 But it's a role for everyone else.
 That's the role, that's the role.
 That's what I said to the ITA,
 I said, you know, just don't talk about it.
 Exemplify it.
 Let's do it, let's be it for God's sake.
 Well, you know, Blake said a wonderful thing.
 He said, if I can get it right,
 "If the truth can be told so as to be understood,
 it will be believed."
 Right, exactly, exactly.
 So all you have to do is say it.
 Exactly.
 When can you say it simply enough?
 Is it only said in silence simply enough?
 Or are there words?
 Or is there music, or is there what?
 There's words, there's music, there's silence, there's gesture.
 Because it's always going to exceed one's grasp.
 See, my mantra is the Gandhi line,
 "My life is my message."
 Yes, you said that the other night.
 That's very good.
 Every level of being, of every level of being.
 I think I'm at a little lower level
 because I'm very aware that I have to struggle
 to say, "My life is my message."
 I would almost rather say, "My message is my message.
 Please don't look at my life because I'm a fallible human being
 and I'm constantly fucking up."
 But you see how that weakens your message.
 You see how that quality means that the message doesn't come from the root, the central.
 There's a way in which it waffles.
 True.
 And that's the thing.
 I really can't...
 Once I saw the possibility of that, I said, "Why waffle?"
 What is worth holding on to that's worth waffling about?
 Well, I once said to Leo Zeff, I'm sure you knew Leo.
 I said to him in a meeting.
 I loved him, I know.
 I said, "Leo, you're finished.
 You're completed.
 You're baked.
 Me, I'm half baked.
 And I hope that the rest of my life will finish the baking process."
 But you're not half baked.
 That's what's interesting.
 I mean, when you and I talk, you and I hear each other perfectly.
 Truth.
 And so where are we hearing each other from?
 I mean, then we each play our game the way we play our game.
 And you can play your game saying, "I'm half baked."
 That's your strategy if you choose.
 It's a mercurial strategy.
 Yes, I understand.
 Here's to mercurius.
 You have somehow been able to survive the gauntlet of American media
 in a way that your colleagues and comrade in arms didn't seem to.
 They either had to step away from their leader role
 or they transmuted it into some lesser thing.
 So now Allen Ginsberg is poet laureate.
 Tim Leary keeps the club scene in Los Angeles interesting.
 Yes, but you, in a sense, never backed down, never retooled.
 You were also not first among equals back in the original thing.
 But when all is said and done, I was always the second.
 In a way, it's like birds.
 Once behind the lead bird, you don't have to do much.
 You're just kind of riding along on the--
 Well, and Ralph tells me to be third is the real good position.
 It's like being the young prince.
 You won't ever be king.
 Actually, it was only until about five years ago.
 In the past five years, they've stopped introducing me as Tim Leary's partner.
 Which, I mean, I think that was great.
 I see him as one of my first teachers, great teacher.
 But I don't have the fun for me.
 I have no model of myself.
 I mean, I don't know who I am.
 I don't know whether I'm an anachronism from the '60s or I'm just about to have a--
 A prophet to be.
 Yes, I have no idea.
 And I don't care.
 That's what I saw.
 Because either of them, all the things you get neither way are a drag
 and they're beautiful equally.
 Well, I think you're a prophet to be.
 I think we all are.
 I think we all are.
 As Bilbo Baggins once said, "The greatest adventure still lies ahead."
 I believe that.
 I'll believe that when they lower my box.
 I do, too.
 I do, too.
 Exactly.
 Good.
 Exactly.
 Well, thanks for coming by.
 I'm sure you had many, many demands on you.
 Thank you.
 It was a pleasure.
 I was afraid of you up until now.
 Now I'm delighted to be here.
 No, no.
 Don't be afraid of me.
 People who are afraid of me don't know me or they know me better than you ever will.
 [Laughter]
 Angela Sarian is an anthropologist and workshop leader from California
 who brings the unique perspective of her Basque ancestors
 to the formulation of a new discipline which I would call neo-shamanic anthropology.
 So there you have it, as the king said to Mozart.
 Yes.
 Yes, as the caterpillar on top of the mushroom said, "Who are you?"
 [Laughter]
 Well, so I looked over your newsletter.
 Ah.
 And it looks like sort of a neo-shamanism.
 That's the category that you are now defining in your public talks.
 Is that right?
 Yeah, I'm doing a lot of that, but mostly universals, what we all have in common,
 finding those basic roots which then take us back to indigenous cultures.
 Archetypes?
 Archetypes.
 Especially the archetype of the warrior and the healer and the teacher and the visionary.
 Those are the four that the shamanic or indigenous cultures really focus upon.
 Well, so you're genuinely in the mainstream of the archaic revival.
 It is thought about that way, Terrence.
 [Laughter]
 Well, actually, I'm sort of subliminally plugging one of my books,
 which is called "The Archaic Revival,"
 but the notion is that what this whole cultural thrust of the 20th century,
 and especially the last 30 years, will ultimately be understood to be about
 is a return to aboriginal models.
 And that means especially shamanism, and to my mind, especially psychedelic shamanism.
 Yes, yes.
 You know, the Renaissance went through a rebirth of classicism,
 probably without ever really articulating that that's what was happening.
 But I think this shamanic, aboriginal, ecological, feminine partnership impulse
 is now pretty explicit, too.
 So that's what I mean.
 Yeah. Well, I think that--I love the title, like, "Archaic Revival,"
 because at the same time, what's coming up is everyone talking about a new world order.
 And yet, in order to understand what constitutes a new world order,
 we need to take a look at what the current world order is.
 And so we really have essentially four worlds.
 We have the industrialized first world, and we have the socialist bloc,
 which will be the second world, and we have the third world countries,
 which are really the developing countries like Brazil.
 But the fourth world is really the aboriginal, indigenous cultures
 that are within cultures but don't have the same kind of rights.
 And the first three worlds say that the land belongs to the people,
 but the fourth world says that the people belong to the land.
 And so that people belonging to the land is really an--it's your archaic revival,
 but it's getting back to nature and owning those roots brings up that revival,
 which is the shift that we're going to need to make in order to do the new world orders,
 to get the people back to the land.
 Well, it's too bad that there's no place in the world where that aboriginal position is in a governing position.
 Starting for the first time in the last three years is the establishment of the World Indigenous Council.
 And this summer in July is the first time that there will actually be a vote
 to have a seat on the United Nations where there will be representatives
 from each of the world indigenous peoples.
 And so that's--I'm real hopeful about that.
 Really, you mean every Amazonian tribe could potentially have a delegate in the union?
 Yes, yes. Or that they themselves could have a council
 and vote who would be their best representatives as a bioregional group.
 Well, you know, it always--there's some phrase in Latin, I can't remember what it is,
 but it means that he who does not expand his borders will have his land taken by somebody else.
 And this was the theory that drove colonization in South America.
 All of these countries like Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela,
 actually encroach on a vast aboriginal core of that continent, which should be self-governing.
 And were it self-governing, it would be a tremendous--
 Huge force.
 Huge force.
 Yeah. It's amazing that I really think that for the last 20 years,
 there's been this whole east-west bridging, but we're really starting in the last five years
 to this north-south kind of bridging.
 And I really feel that the Latin American countries, which there are 12,
 plus the indigenous force countries, that the northern force would be Europe, Russia, Canada,
 but the whole southern force is like Africa, Asia, and the Latin American countries.
 So that whole force, those two forces really coming together.
 So even though you're a spiritual teacher, you talk global politics, like a State Department second string.
 I do. I do.
 I was thinking about the grandparents of the planet being the old Asian cultures and all the Pacific Rim,
 and then the exciting thing that's happening in Europe for the first time in history,
 that 11 countries are coming together to form a European coalition,
 it puts the child of the planet, which is like America or the United States,
 which is so based on a hero myth or a heroine myth and fierce independence,
 that the call in the next 50 years is for Americans to learn about community,
 which indigenous societies and the grandparents of the planet, the old Asian cultures,
 and now the parents of the planet really modeling teamwork and collaboration and community,
 is that America is going to need to really learn about collaboration and community and cooperation.
 And in order to do that, then there's going to need to be going back to what would be the archaic revival
 or that beginning to shift so that there can be a new world order where that fourth world is addressed.
 Well, don't you think sort of what's happening is that people have a very strong local sense of place, loyalty,
 and then they are forming a planetary loyalty, but in a way all the levels in between are dissolving,
 so people don't think of themselves as Americans, they think of themselves as Northern Californians and earthlings,
 sort of like that. But in a way, federal Europe, which is no longer a sure thing, you know,
 because of these recent developments, goes against that.
 I sort of think maybe McLuhan was right and that there is going to be a kind of electronic feudalization
 where many more small states will emerge and the reason for the nation state appears to be slowly disappearing.
 And the states, I think the crisis that came to Marxism is coming now for the republican oligarchy in America.
 I think you're right. I think there is a terrific shift of power that's going on that out of maybe the hierarchical types of power
 to people power and I see two major forces contributing to that, which is one, the computer or the electronic,
 because it's people based, individual based, bringing the power back to the individual,
 and also free enterprise rather than capitalism or communism. There is that middle road coming in.
 So I think that when we take a look cross-culturally at the three kinds of power,
 the power of presence or the power of communication or the power of position, the willingness to take a stand,
 is that it's going to be very important to see how those shifts of power really are going back to empowerment of the people.
 So what are you looking toward in the future, personally and globally?
 I've been doing a lot with taking a look at what's found that's similar in all art globally,
 because I feel that what humanity consistently creates in art is really reinforcing deep spiritual processes.
 And so what I've found is that there are five shapes that are found consistently in all art globally.
 One is the circle and the other is the cross, like the plus sign, the equidistant cross, and the triangle and the square and the spiral.
 And you can see them all here in Prague, everywhere you look, I mean, in all the decor are those shapes repeated over and over and over again.
 So I began to look cross-culturally to see if cultures attributed the same meaning to those shapes,
 and found that 92% of all the cultures attribute the same meaning to the circle,
 which is the process of individuation or to the cross-relatedness and interconnection and interface,
 and the square, stability and foundation setting.
 So does this imply a genetic syntax of form or something like that?
 I think that it's part of the archaic revival in that there would be a cellular, deeply cellular imprinting of some kind.
 Well, that's what I mean by genetic.
 Yeah, yeah, yeah, really do.
 The triangle being the visionary or searching, seeking, questing process or the planning, dreaming process,
 and the spiral being the need for variety or the need for change or growth and evolution.
 So it's been really wonderful.
 It's part of a new book that's coming out called Signs of Life,
 and showing how those images come up in all of the continents and are also found in literature and poetry,
 and put all that together in one place.
 So do you spend much time thinking about the future?
 I do.
 What's your take on it?
 I think that it's exciting for me to think that we're being called in the next 50 years to our own creative fire.
 That we all have salvation myths and we all have doomsday myths,
 but there's a whole body of myths in mythology that have been totally overlooked that I think we're being called to,
 which are creation myths.
 And what are the creation myths but stories about how to build new worlds internally and externally.
 And I think that for 2,000 years we've done the polarity dance,
 and we're moving into a both/and world rather than an either/or world.
 And I'm excited about the future, that if we can really move into the wisdom of the plant kingdom,
 and if we can move into the deep wisdom of nature as a mirror of our own nature,
 and remember our creative fire, I think it will be a wonderful time in history.
 I'm so glad I was born at the time. I was born to be a part of this evolutionary renaissance.
 How do you see it happening? Do you see a breakthrough with technology or an abandonment of technology?
 Do you see pharmacological engineering? Do you see new religions?
 Do you see, in other words, it's easy to hope but very hard to get the details in focus.
 Yeah. I think that what I see is that there'll be both the bridging of the natural and the technological.
 So a more cellular technology, a more organic infrastructure.
 And I think that computers are here to teach us about those organic structures.
 I think that we're learning different kinds of systems to really see what are the inherent systems within nature and within our own nature.
 So to the degree that we can mirror nature, we can re-spiritualize, re-humanize technology and interpersonal relations.
 Yeah. Which will be wonderful.
 Well, I've come right down the line on that.
 Yeah.
 And to me, psychedelics are just simply the best catalyst, but anything which works should be pushed to the limit.
 To that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
 I don't know. I was just thinking that somehow we've got to think about possibilities.
 I was thinking about in the Rosicrucian era, which is very close here to Prague,
 is that they would often say you can count the seeds in an apple, but you can't count the apples in a seed.
 And I think we're moving in that era where we really think of the possibilities and the seeds that we have been planting
 or the fact that computers are teaching us about instant feedback or instant response and acknowledgement
 and the power of acknowledgement and feedback to allow organisms to grow.
 And that's why children in many ways know that instinctively, that they're mesmerized by,
 that they can get a yes or no or go back or fatal error or whatever it might be.
 Well, it's a kind of explicit hard wiring of our own unconscious.
 No more do we create cultural artifacts that are simply our furniture, but now our thoughts, our values are embodied in this stuff.
 Yeah, it's very exciting.
 It really is.
 I envision a future world where people who are nomadic, Aboriginal, physically perfect, living basically naked.
 But if you were inside one of these people's minds, you would see that when they close their eyes,
 there are menus hanging in space, that the culture has been shrunk down to something rather like a contact lens,
 which is in the forefront of their eye.
 And they look into culture by closing their eyes.
 And when they open their eyes, nature in her radiance is all around.
 Absolutely.
 Well, it's great talking to you.
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