[Music] Behind me is the skyline of modern Prague. In the 16th century, this city became an alchemical center and figured in one of the most interesting episodes in the evolution of European thought. Rudolf II ruled from here in a court of great extravagance. And upon the death of the old emperor, the princes of the Northern League met to choose from among themselves a successor. Their choice was Frederick the Elector Palatine, who held court at Heidelberg. Frederick was all that a young prince of the Northern League could hope to be. Surrounded by brilliant courtiers, married to a daughter of the King of England, he represented the alchemical hopes of Catholic Europe. And in the fall of 1619, having been recently chosen emperor, he moved his court from Heidelberg to Prague, bringing with him some of the most brilliant occult minds of the era, Johannes André, Count Michael Meyer, the alchemical printer Theodor de Bray. But the reign of the Winter King and Queen, as this incident is called, was not to last. But the alchemical fantasies of Frederick the Elector Palatine of Bohemia and his queen were destined to fail. For by the early spring of 1620, a local bishop had raised an army and had been joined by Habsburg troops who laid siege to Prague. And that siege, after a number of weeks, succeeded. Among those taking part in the siege was a young French soldier who had been wenching and traveling across Europe in the style of the times, René Descartes, destined to be the founder of modern scientific materialism. I like to think that perhaps Descartes actually encountered his beckon, Michael Meyer, prince of alchemists, in the confused situation that prevailed when Prague fell. For Meyer was lost in the siege of Prague, never to be heard from again. It's instances like this in the history of European thought that have inspired a group of American thinkers to form the Bohemian Institute of Prague, a think tank, theater group, and video production center to be established here in Prague and to celebrate the occult and spiritual heritage of this great city, a city which, had its alchemical visions been completed, modernity would have been a far different affair. Alchemy is an ancient art, one of the magical arts, associated with dying and the gilding of metals and tracing its origins back to ancient Egypt. But its modern culmination is here in the city of Prague, where in the 16th century, under the patronage of the Emperor Rudolf, the great alchemists of Europe gathered and pursued their art. Including Kepler. Including Kepler. Alchemy is more than a technique for the conversion of base metals into gold. It is the culminating metaphor in the search for a union of spirit and matter. And whether or not this union was ever achieved is as mysterious as much of the rest of this ancient city. But whatever the success of the alchemists, they left us with a metaphor for spiritual transformation that is extraordinarily applicable in the modern era. It was for this reason that the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung made alchemical motifs as important a part of his theory of the unconscious as the contents of dreams or folklore. You see, before modern science, the separation between observer and observed was more naively understood than in our own world. And the alchemist staring into the swirling content of his retorts and his alembics was seeing in his own imagination, not the processes of natural chemistry, but an intermingling of psychological processes and material processes in a domain of epistemic confusion that we have grown distant from. Nevertheless, the legacy of our own science is one of pollution of the earth, toxification of the oceans. Something has been lost from the western vision of nature by the exclusion of the notion of spirit. And it's fitting that in an effort to recapture that lost something, we return to Prague, the center of European occult thinking and a beacon to any future thinking on these matters. Well, Ken, you've certainly spent a number of years on these questions. I'm talking with Dr. Kenneth Ring. We're in the Prague Botanical Gardens. Dr. Ring is the author of The Omega Project and is the world's leading expert on the near-death experience. Ken, I know recently you've been interested in UFOs. How did you get from UFOs or from near-death experiences to UFOs? That seems quite a leap. Well, on one perhaps mistaken day, I picked up a copy of Whitley Strieber's book, Communion, came out some years ago. And though I had no interest in, in fact, an aversion to UFO studies, I found that some of those effects that he was talking about, of those experiences, seemed very reminiscent of those that followed NDEs. And so I wanted to explore the connection. Why do you think that these abduction phenomena never happen to what I would call smart people? In other words, it's always some poor soul who lives in a trailer park who has this happen. No, I don't think so. I think that there are people who have these experiences that come from a pretty wide swath of the social register, up and down. What I found in my studies is actually the people who are prone to these experiences are folks with a troubled background. They often report traumatic childhoods. They report sexual abuse, stressful childhoods. They're people who, even as children, seem to be susceptible not to fantasy, but to alternate realities. Not everybody is equally likely to have this kind of experience. I don't think these folks are pathological or come from some particular social stratum, but they have particular kinds of psychological characteristics that predispose them to have these kinds of experiences. How do you relate this phenomenon to your own field of expertise, which is the near-death experience? What I found is if you look at the phenomena themselves, they seem extremely different in terms of their feature surfaces. You look at the near-death experience, it's a very blissful experience, it's very beautiful, people have very many positive things to say about it. You look at the abduction experience, people are traumatized by it, deeply frightened, disturbed by it. They seem at antipodes. But if you look at the structure of these experiences, the structure is the same. They have the structure of shamanic journeys, of initiations. You're taken from the ordinary world, you're taken to another world, you learn things, you are transformed in that world, and you bring back those transformations with you. What I found was that the same kind of background that's typical for people that report UFO encounters, not limited to but including abductions, is exactly the same kind of profile that you find for people that have had NDEs, near-death experiences. Same kind of person is prone to them, so I talk about an encounter-prone personality who's susceptible or vulnerable to these kinds of experiences more than the average person. But the key thing that relates these two phenomena, and perhaps others like them, are the transformations that tend to take place in the lives of people afterward. People with both kinds of experiences say afterward they are more appreciative of life, more appreciative of nature, they have a deeper feeling of self-worth, they are more compassionate individuals, or less materialistic, they are more spiritual, and not necessarily more religious. In fact, they may be less religious, but they're more spiritual. They're more psychic, they're more intuitive. What seems to be the outcome of these experiences is however different the experiences themselves may be in their content, the effect is the same. You go through an ordeal of either nearly dying or the shock of a UFO encounter, and you're changed by that experience. Like Nietzsche said, "That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger." These people are stronger spiritually, they seem to function at higher levels of intuitive understanding, of psychic awareness, it's an expanding experience for both. Well, it's interesting that the personality profile is the same, but in one case the reaction is positive, the other negative. Do people have near-death experiences without coming near to death? Sure, there are lots of ways, and I think the near-death experience is misleading because it implies there's something unique that happens at the point of physical death or when people enter clinical death, and that's not true. There are many different pathways that lead to essentially the same experiences without having to throw yourself under the tires of the nearest oncoming truck. Many different ways to get into this kind of experience. So relate it a little bit to the psychedelic experience. I'd be happy to. I've talked with a lot of people, I'm sure you've talked to many more, who have had high-dose LSD sessions or other kinds of psychedelic sessions who have told me, in effect, "Well, I never came close to death, but I know exactly what you mean when you talk about a near-death experience because I've had the same thing." The out-of-body experience, the feeling of moving into a beautiful, radiant, illuminated space, the sense of being flooded with total universal knowledge, of being transformed in the instant and bringing that transformation back. To me, it's like the light or spiritual reality or whatever this thing may be called is available all the time. There are just different access routes to it. The psychedelic is clearly one route that leads to that destination. The near-death experience is another. People following a spiritual path and deeply committed to it could have the same kind of revelation, the same kinds of insights. So I think that it's a question of equifinality, many different pathways leading to the same destination and the same transformative effects. That's what I think is important about those experiences. Well, now, we've had psychedelic experiences and near-death experiences presumably for millennia. Is this abduction thing new, or are we just getting the old stuff repackaged in a funny way? Well, I think that it's related to things that have always happened to humankind, interaction with the invisible world of spirits. Your phrase, I think, was "silks of the air," the elementals, the fairies. Folklore, I think, is certainly related to this particular phenomenon. However, even among folklorists like Eddie Bullard, for example, who's the one who's looked into this most closely from the standpoint of the UFO abduction phenomenon, there seem to be aspects of this experience that make it unique unto itself, make it similar to the folkloric experiences of former times, and yet it's in a kind of technological gloss, I think maybe because the alien is kind of the mythic archetype of our time. It's not fashionable to see angels and spirits and demons anymore, but the myth of the extraterrestrial is everywhere you look. And so I think, in a way, this particular kind of archetype has been clothed in the imagery and the kind of space-age technology and talk and so on that's characteristic of our own time. So I think there's something unique to it and something that relates to the folkloric experiences of former times, too, because contact between the invisible world and the physical world, that's probably as old as man is old. But you're--essentially it sounds as though you're fundamentally a psychologist in that you don't take this at face value. I don't take these as literal experiences of an incursion into physical space-time reality of little beings from other places that have come to do nasty things to people. That, oddly enough, it seems odd to me, seems to be the dominant view of American ufologists. I'm not a ufologist, as you say, I'm a psychologist. In Europe, I think the interpretation is quite different. I don't take these experiences literal, but I take them as real within an alternate reality, within what Henri Corbin calls an imaginal realm. They're real enough, you know, people-- for example, people who have near-death experiences will say things like, "This experience was more real to me than you and I sitting here talking about it is real. It's more real than life itself." There is a reality to these experiences, but I think it's a profound mistake to think it's the same thing as space-time ordinary sensory world reality. So what you're saying is that these are symbolic constructs. Yes, there's a symbolic aspect to them. And I think the important thing-- you know, I think there are two attitudes toward the UFO question. It's a mystery, but there are two types of mysteries. There are mysteries like in detective stories that beg for some kind of solution and you only feel satisfaction when the solution at the end is revealed and all the reason is given. Then there are mysteries that are meant to be explored. True mysteries. And meant to be savers, yes. True mysteries, and these mysteries beg for exploration, not for explanation, if I can put it that way. And the UFO seems to me-- the UFO phenomenon is the second category of mystery. That's why I personally, and perhaps temperamentally, I'm opposed to the idea of trying to package it as though it were something as simple as other beings-- however amazing that would be in itself-- other beings coming from other places in the galaxy to invade or to have some contact in human affairs. I think the mystery is likely to be much more profound than that. And another thing, if I may say, that I think hooks together the near-death experience with the UFO experience, whatever its basis may be, is when people come out of these experiences and have worked it through, they come to have a worldview that is very similar to one another and is very similar to what's being talked about all the time at this conference, and that's an ecological worldview. The heightening of ecological sensitivity, the increase of concern with the welfare of the planet, is one thing that unites these two people, even though they have these very disparate experiences. What they say about what they've learned from these experiences, what the meaning of these experiences for them is, that the fate of the Earth is in our hands and we'd better wake up to do something about it very quick. So I see these experiences perhaps being orchestrated by-- I think this is similar to your view--perhaps a planetary mind, an overmind, a mind at large, which is in some sense the expression of our deepest yearnings and perhaps our deepest fears, that are feeding back these kinds of experiences in the form of archetypal experiences, archetypal images, so as to impress people who might not otherwise be impressed, to take the kind of action necessary to correct the direction in which the Earth is headed. So it's a kind of confoundment. It is. Its purpose is to be inexplicable. Exactly. That's exactly how I conclude my book. The point of these experiences is to be baffled by them, almost as though they're a kind of a koan that we're not meant to solve, but we're meant to kind of chew over until our rational mind cracks and we begin to think in entirely new ways and hopefully act in entirely new ways. So it's a way of keeping us from closure. Exactly. It's sort of a deconstruction phenomenon, you could even say. It's saying to us, "The world is not so simple as you might choose to suppose." Exactly so. We're going to be talking with Rupert Sheldrake, one of Britain's most controversial natural scientists. Sheldrake is the proponent of a theory called "morphic resonance." He believes that the presence of the past actually impinges on processes in the present and the future. In other words, our world is as it is because of how it once was. This is not a genetic theory, not a theory of natural selection, but a field theory which holds that actions and situations in the past are able, through the mere act of having happened, to shape future and present events. Rupert, this immense Baroque building is the Museum of Natural History in Prague, and I wanted to bring you here because I thought it would be an appropriate place to discuss your ideas because, after all, a museum is a kind of archive of morphology. Exactly, with these stuffed animals and skeletons of photographs, snapshots of forms frozen. But of course, each animal behaves and moves, each animal develops as an embryo to its adult form, and each one evolves. So it's triply dynamic. We have to reconstruct that in our minds. But the whole thing really is a reflection, I think, of the memory behind each species. Each species is the repository of an entire process of memory. Well, now, this is the part of your thinking which goes well beyond orthodox theoretical biology. Say a bit more about that. Well, the orthodox view is that all these amazing forms and all the behavior and instincts that the animals expressed were all coded in the chemical genes. So a materialist theory. That's a materialist theory. I think it goes far beyond that and involves a memory of instincts, a memory of behavior, a memory of form. That is not materially based. Not materially based. A collective memory on which each species draws. So here we are in the hall of paleontology. This is sort of the archive of all these morphogenetic forms that have persisted through time. Can you say how your notions go beyond Darwinian and Mendelian genetics and evolutionary theory? Well, I agree with the conventional theory that there are genes. They're important and inheritance. They give each organism the chemicals it needs. But as well as that, you see, there's the morphic fields, the organizing fields of these forms. And the forms, like we see in these shapes here, are all determined by the fields. They determine the way organisms develop. These are all extinct types. And I would say that the memory is not only inherent in the species while they're alive. Even after they're dead, even after they're extinct, the world is still filled with, as it were, the ghosts of extinct species, the memories of species that no longer exist. So the memories of evolution are cumulative. They build up. And sometimes we see, in the course of evolution, extinct forms of shellfish, for example, come back again after 10, 20 million years. These are called evolutionary iterations, evolutionary repeats. And they're explained in terms of atavism, the recapturing of ancient memories. But in a sense, you're saying that after the species is extinct but the fossil form lives on, then it is somehow a catalyst to this recursion of form. There's an entire memory built into nature. The world is, as it were, haunted by the ghosts of extinct species. Each species is influenced by all the past members of its species, but behind that, all the forms that have gone before, which is why, in the course of embryonic development, we see echoes of the embryonic forms of remote ancestors, the way that we develop through a fish-like stage with gill slips and so on. But in a case like that, then, how is it possible for new form to emerge at all? Well, this is where novelty comes in. Well, no one can account for novelty except perhaps yourself. To say that it's blind chance, as the conventional view tells us very little, almost nothing, it's really just simply saying novelty is unintelligible. There are different ways of thinking of it. The founders of paleontology, like Cuvier, the great fossil pioneers, the pioneers of this kind of museum, had thought that they were all reflections of platonic archetypal forms, timeless forms. That wouldn't really explain creativity. It would simply say there were pre-existing forms that were merely manifested. Other people would think of creativity as going on as evolution proceeds. So a bird like this didn't exist at one time. Then, usually by a sudden jump, it would appear. And then, through repetition, it would become increasingly habitual. Then, become extinct. And the potential habits, the memory, would persist in nature, although it wouldn't be expressed. Well, tell me this. Do you think that a person holding this point of view has a license for more optimism than people who are trying to operate in the ordinary scientific paradigm? In other words, how does this idea reflect back into the dilemma of the human world here at the brink of the third millennium? Well, several ways. Firstly, this theory leaves the nature of creativity open. It may be blind chance, but it could be anything else as well. There could be a directing intelligence. All we know is that new things appear. We don't know how they appear. Secondly, it tells us that habit is a very important principle in nature, and it makes us aware of the importance of our own habits, personal and cultural. But thirdly, the theory tells us that when new things happen, by morphic resonance, they can spread around the world much more quickly than they might otherwise be able to. And this could be a ground for optimism. It means that change can happen faster than we might otherwise believe. And fast change seems to be very necessary if we're to survive. So what you're saying is we don't have to rely on mechanisms like cultural diffusion or direct communication. These new concepts, new paradigms are in the air, as it were. Yes. And of course we all know about modern telecommunications, you know, modern mass media. But morphic resonance means that new attitudes, new patterns of behavior can spread much quicker than one might otherwise have thought. Tell me this, then. How is the theory of morphic resonance doing? Is it behaving according to its own predicted trajectory, or is it meeting unexpected resistance? It's meeting expected resistance. I see. But the idea certainly seems to be catching on. I mean, there's a sense in which this idea of a kind of habit appeals to people. It makes sense, the idea of a collective memory. The idea that what we learn is like a kind of remembering of what others have learned is intuitively plausible to me and to many other people. And I would say certainly the idea is getting easier to explain than it was when I first thought of it. Well, I've heard it said that it very elegantly and neatly solves problems which are uninsoluble by any other means in biology. Could you just name a couple of these areas where it makes clarity out of chaos? Well, there are many. One is the development of form in embryos, the way that a bird like this could grow from an egg. And how any organism develops from an egg is a great mystery. And the idea of morphogenetic fields, form-shaping fields, is the basis of the whole theory. That's what I started from. And so it helps to explain the problem of form. It helps to explain the inheritance of instincts as well, how new patterns of behavior develop and spread. So these are two of the areas that it helps. So is it the non-material presupposition that makes it so difficult for orthodox science to accept this into its canon? Yes, it's the idea of a kind of non-material memory on which each member of the species draws and in turn to which it contributes. It's very like Jung's idea of the collective unconscious. This is an idea that's in one form familiar to people already. But because modern science is steeped in a kind of materialistic way of thinking, the idea that everything has to involve material and material transfer is very important for a lot of scientists. Of course, in the light of modern physics, it's a very old-fashioned idea. To get a television program from the transmitting station to the receiving set doesn't involve couriers carrying cans of videotape. It goes through as vibrations through a field. And I think that radio and television have broken us out in our everyday thinking from the 19th century materialistic paradigm because fields and vibratory connections through fields are now the stuff of everyday life. And the idea that all forms of information transfer have to involve material is no longer tenable. But many people's scientific thinking, including that of many scientists, is still locked into a kind of 19th-century materialism. Well, probably because the theory of genetics has been so successful and it is a theory of material particles, it sounds as though biology has been dragging its feet somewhat behind physics in terms of its acceptance of field theory. Well, modern neo-Darwinian theory is based on the discoveries of geneticists in the 1910s. And following Mendel in the 1850s and '60s. And it's based on old-style atomistic particulate theory. The whole basic way of thinking was formed long before quantum theory came into being. It takes almost no account of modern developments in physics. It takes almost no account of modern cosmology. The idea that the laws of nature could evolve along with the cosmos. It's locked into an earlier form of classical physics. And I think that what I'm suggesting is much more in accordance with the modern spirit of physics. Whereas most of biology is still an attempt to reduce the phenomena of life to high school physics, which is essentially classical physics of the 19th-century type. Well, essentially you're attempting to go beyond reductionism, it sounds. Yes, I think so. And what are your expectations for success? In other words, of their experimental strategies, which are supporting this point of view, or is it largely theory? Where do you stand with it? Well, experiments are going on in the realm of morphic resonance, principally in the realm of behavior at the moment. Animal behavior, human behavior. But the theory applies to crystals as well as to plants and animals. And chemical tests are some of the most potentially exciting. I'm doing some work on crystal forms and crystal phenomena. The main experiments there in the human realm, so far they've been very encouraging. They suggest that people can learn more quickly what others have already learned. And that's also the area where the theory could be most immediately applied. For example, in education. Well, the theory seems to imply that its own correctness depends largely on its being heard and repeated. Well, the theory implies that the more it's heard and repeated, the easier it will be for people to grasp the theory, to understand it. Yes, that's true. And so it seems to be. So it seems to be. So it seems to be. We're in Prague's Museum of Natural History, talking with Jill Purse of London, England. Jill is an expert in Mongolian overtonal chanting. So Jill, tell me something about your work with sound. Well, I'm trying to. I like to think that to re-enchant means to make magical through chanting. And what has happened to our society is we've become disenchanted, which literally means that we've stopped chanting. And this has been a gradual process in what we call the developed Western society. The more developed our society, the less we chant and sing. And chanting is a very powerful way of healing and a way of tuning ourselves with ourselves, with our environment, with our family, with the sacred place, with the sacred time, keeping us in tune with all our environment and with God. And we stopped doing that. We started to stop doing that when we stopped believing in God, when we started measuring things in the 17th century. And we found that it felt better and we felt we had more control by measuring than we did by chanting and by praising God, by petitioning God, and by participating with God, which are the three ways that we've always made a reciprocal relationship with he or she who seem to be in control of our life and destiny. And when we stopped doing that, we stopped doing that because we felt that counting gave us a greater sense of control of our environment and meant that we ourselves had a greater chance of survival. But why this particular Central Asian shamanic approach to it? Well, what's happened now is that we've come back, what we've found is that science, since the 17th century, the development of science and the direction of science has, quite far from giving us the control that we thought it was, it's led us in an unprecedented way to be, and only through science, to be less in control of our environment than anybody has ever been. We have never been in such a dangerous situation. We have never been so vulnerable. And this is entirely because of science. And so all the control that we thought we were gaining has actually turned out to be quite the reverse. And so we are completely out of control. And so we again have to find out how do we do it. If science has failed, what other ways may succeed? What other ways can we again create a reciprocal relationship with this great and powerful force? And so we have to look at the old traditions. And do we go back to being good Christians, good Hindus, good Muslims, or good Jews? Or do we try and, if we're a Hindu, become a Muslim? If we're a Buddhist, become a Christian? If we're a Christian, become a-- Or do we try and reinvent it all? The problem really is what song do we sing? And so what I've tried to do is to find a way of chanting which is deeply cultural. It comes from Central Asia and in particular Mongolia. But what I think is so extraordinary about this way of chanting is that it deals with sound, with the harmonics of sound, which is a way not of culturally dividing the octave, which is what all other forms of music have as their central core, which is that if you divide the octave, this is a cultural affair. How you do it differs whether you're Indian or whether you're Western. But what this is based on is based on the harmonic series, which is simply a way of making our own geometry audible. It's a way of allowing us to hear in a sonorous way our own structure. And this is a profound recognition. It's a profound remembering because we are hearing what we are. So it's a kind of organic music or organic sound. Absolutely. It's the most organic sound because we're making audible our biology. Well, I brought you here to this wonderful Baroque room because I was hoping that perhaps you would honor us with an example of this since I'm sure it's easier to hear than to describe. Yes. Do you think you're up for that? Yes. Okay, my dear. Please have a go at it. [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] [The sound of the Baroque music] David White, a transplanted Yorkshireman, lives in Washington State, USA. He is a published poet and a performer of his own poetry and the poetry of others. His work reflects a special sensitivity to the ecological crisis and the problem of a burgeoning planetary population. [Sound of running water] You mentioned this concept, the ecological imagination. So obviously this is sort of the distillate for you, some of your thinking. So say something about it. What is it exactly? Well, it's an imagination where the image itself has many different realities constellated within it. It isn't an image that you're trying to impose on the world. It's an image that's received after you've remained quiet and you're willing to pay attention to the miracle of creation as it is. Now that miracle may take the form of despair and alienation as it has over the last 60 years, but you pay attention to it. You know, we live in a monocultural society where you plant wheat in one field and you spray down on either side so you get one crop. And the soil, which comes from the same root as the word "soul," suffers as a result. You know, in the eastern Palouse of Washington State, they've lost 25 to 50 feet of topsoil, you know, through intensive mining, almost mining agriculture. You know, here we are in the botanic gardens in Prague, where plants have been brought from all over the world. In some ways, it's a wish by humanity to recreate the beauty and imagination of the rainforest or of an ecology where things fit together exquisitely. And we have this inside us. We have this patterning, this understanding that the world fits together absolutely exquisitely and we have a possibility of fitting together too. So the poet remains silent, looks out at the world, receives all the images that comes in and tries to say the one word that represents the whole ecology of everything that is received. And hopefully will give birth to that world in the word, in the line. This suggests somehow that the word is made flesh, or in your metaphor, the flesh is made word. Yes. Yes, or the word is made ecology. The word is made ecology. Well, so this is an aesthetic of nature, almost Emersonian in its scope. This is a far cry from futurism or the glorification of the technological that a lot of 20th century poetics has been about. Do you see yourself as a part of a conservative impulse in poetry or a reforming impulse? How does that work? No, I don't see it as being conservative. It may be looked at that way from the areas of art which say Andy Warhol inhabited where the whole emphasis was on the latest wave that was breaking on the shore. Fashion. Yes, fashion. And the whole sea that was behind each wave as it came from the shore was ignored. And so I think what there is now is a resting back, a swimming out, a diving down into that sea to reestablish our eldership. I think much of what's happening in the 20th century is a reestablishment of eldership. I mean, here we are in Prague. Prague has been almost, has been asleep almost like Rip Van Winkle for the last 40 years. Anyway, 40 years, possibly longer. And it's awaking again. It's awaking and there's so much awaking in the world today. And I think poetry has always been the art where you remind people of what life is about and what is essential to it and what's, as Pericles said, what is sweet and what is terrible about life, that you have to know both those things. And the poet ignores neither. So hopefully it's not the kind of conservatism where you're trying to go back to some Edenic, Rousseauistic past where everyone can gather under one oak tree and discuss the problems of the village. That's never going to, never going to happen. But the poet neither, he does not hide or she does not hide the beauty of life and does not hide the alienation. You know, this century we've had tremendous emphasis on looking into the cracked mirror of alienation and saying, look at where we are. I mean, Eliot's The Waste Land was all about that. But there's another side to it, too. You can only do that for so long. Otherwise, you know, you have no more impetus to go on. That there has to be, here, let's go here. There has to be some kind of healing. There can only be so much of this existential angst and... Well, you see, Sartre, he came up to a tree, you said, and he put his finger on the tree and he says, he said, "Life is absurd because I cannot understand that tree. I cannot become, I cannot get my soul into that tree." Well, the Zen patriarchs have been talking about this for 1,500 years. And you weren't supposed to get your consciousness into the tree. You were supposed to pay such tremendous attention to the tree that it came to find you. Yes, Sartre said, "Nature is mute," which is, to me, one of the most amazing statements any 20th century philosopher has made in terms of defining alienation. I think that would have to be it. Well, I don't think the French have been very successful with their philosophers over the last 350 years, if I may make a phrase or statement. They are welded to materialism. Well, so at this conference there's been a lot of talk about hope. Where do the poets come down? Are you singing a funeral dirge for a world passing away, or is this the bright birth of the new young prince? Well, hopefully, I mean, hopefully neither in some ways, because you simply have to speak life as it is. So at this time we're speaking tremendous change. We're speaking the stakes are very high. You can fail in life. An individual human being can fail in life. A species can fail in life. I mean, in some ways we always live out our destiny, no matter what we do. It just depends what level you want to live out that destiny. Do you want to live out your destiny on the level of frustration? Because you can do that. Or do you want to step further and deeper into it? So Poitras always says the stakes are very high. And it relies on the fact that life itself is magnificent. You speak about the magnificence of life, not in a Pollyannish sense, or in a sense in which you're going to ignore all the difficulties and terrible beauties of life, but in the sense that it's magnificent because you can fail at it. And we as a species can fail. So the hope of the poet is that you can speak to the magnificence of life such that people will be reminded that life is magnificent and you can fail at it. And the stakes are very, very high, the stakes of your life. So that's almost a bardic manifesto. Do you feel moved to speak some poetry? Will move from talking about poetry to speaking poetry? Yes. Well, we spoke about the tree earlier and having the world come and find you. And I'm reminded of a very simple poem. This is a very powerful poem for me. It's a teaching story, actually, out of the Northwest Indian tradition, where the story is there to tell a young boy or girl what to do when they're lost in the forest, or to answer the question, you know, when the young boy or girl asks the question, "What do I do when I'm lost in the forest?" The elder tells the story. It's been rendered into marvellous modern English by David Wagoner, who has the chair of poetry at the University of Washington in the Northwest United States. And it's a very simple poem called "Lost." And here it says, "Take the burden off your shoulders," basically, the story. And he says, the young boy or girl says to the elder, "What do I do when I'm lost in the forest?" And the elder says, "Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost." "Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are, it's called here, and you must treat it as a powerful stranger, must ask permission to know it and be known. Listen, listen, the forest breathes. It whispers, 'I have made this place around you.' If you leave it, you may come back again saying, 'Here,' saying, 'Here.' If you leave it, you may come back again saying, 'Here.' No two trees are the same to raven. No two branches are the same to ram. If what a tree or a branch does is lost on you, then you are surely lost. If what a tree or a branch does is lost on you, then you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you." Alexander Shulgin, Sasha to his friends, is nothing less than the godfather of psychopharmacology, an expert on the cyclosized phenolethylamines, that is, psychoactive compounds useful in the emotional recovery of traumatic events. Shulgin has given his life to the study of the pharmacology of the psychedelic experience. In Prague, he told me, "Greater frontiers lie ahead. The next lost continent to be explored by Alexander Shulgin, the psychoactive tryptamines." Sasha suggested that I join him for a stroll among the graves of the cemetery of the Jewish ghetto of Prague, Europe's oldest ghetto. There, walking among the stones, we reminisced and speculated about the history and the future of psychopharmacology. What do you make of your Russian colleagues here? I'm fascinated by what he's doing, and I'm intrigued by his ability to get out what he is doing into the West, because the status of the physician in Russia is not what we have come to respect in the West. You're talking about Yevgeny Kropensky? I imagine you don't view ketamine with... well, how do you view ketamine? It's an anesthetic, and it's a dissociative thing, and it puts me out of body. It's very dissociative. It puts me out of mind. You're away, and I, frankly, with a full bladder like being here, and you suddenly realize that someone has a full bladder, and at only one intellectual level you realize it's you. Yes. No, it's so seriously disassociated in me that I felt it was a great victory when I finally realized that this was a drug. For a long time I couldn't figure out what it was or who was even asking the question. Sure, but they kept calling it vitamin K, which is a fascinating euphemism for allowing to have some semblance of a food additive or a dietary supplement. But I had the interesting pleasure of being back at a big company in the East the day they had bought the rights to distribute ketamine, and I informed them, "You do realize that ketamine is being made by Park Davis and shipped off to Mexico, and it's imported in gallon, not gallon, but liter bottles, all with a percentage of preservative, and it comes right back into California in the trunk of the car." And what a shock, you did not know there was any of these whatsoever. Never could have conceived of human abuse. Oh, about 20 years ago there was a class of compounds called quinucleidines, and for about three or four years I just noticed that there was no publishing in the Russian literature whatsoever on the area of quinucleidines. Then all of a sudden the Russian literature started publishing, and then we went into a sort of a gap. And then quinucleidine benzate, which is one of the most potent of the anticholinergics, was suddenly revealed that the Russians were working on it as a chemical warfare agent, and then we were working on it as a defense against their chemical warfare agent. And it's active, it's active, 10, 20 micrograms. 10, 20 micrograms? It makes you really wonky. It's like atropine. Delusion, confusion, but they designed these fantastic bombs that they can explode and send out millions of little hypodermic needles. And so they don't have to worry about wind blowing it down, wind or upwind. So it's essentially a chemical cluster bomb of some sort. Cluster bomb, but with little hypodermic needles. Yeah, it's elegant. So that's probably in the inventory. It's already in the inventory. Well, someone mentioned to me that you had expressed interest now, that you felt you had sort of done the work you wanted to do with cyclosized phenolethylamines, and that you were going back to looking at tryptamines. Very much so. That's the other side of the coin. It's as rich and unexplored areas as phenolethylamines were 20 years ago. So are you going to illuminate it for us? Oh, absolutely. I've already made the t-butyl, t-butyl methyl, isopropyl methyl is well known, but the secondary butyl methyl is not known. They're all active by smoking. And what are they, could you in a blind test pick one out from another, or are they sort of... I don't know yet. I doubt it somehow. I think they're all going to be fast, impactful, and all very much like DMT. Duration-wise or presentation-wise? Probably, perhaps a little bit more potent. A little bit more potent? DMT is not that off-fired potent. It takes, you know, 10, 20, 50, no more, 50, 100 milligrams. 50 to 70 milligrams. Some of these we're getting into maybe 20 to 30 milligrams, but not active enough. You have to get up to a certain degree of shrubbery on the nitrogen to get it all active. And how many of these compounds do you imagine there are that are simple variants? As casually you can make 30, 40, 50. Why do you suppose it is that this fast-acting, easily manufactured, spectacular hallucinogen is so rarely met in the underground? I don't know. I have heard that there is, it's there in some quantity. I heard about a seizure in Boston, I believe it was in Ayahuasca, and they seized it on the basis that it contained DMT. Right, that was the Santo Daime people from Brazil. But, you know, we live in a society where people jump out of airplanes and hang by bungee cords over bridges, and DMT, which is always described as an easy synthesis, is just not that. It violates one of these economic laws, Gresham or Graham or somebody. Something that I've always wanted to ask you, which is, unlike me, you seem remarkably resistant to what I call the implications. I mean, how can you just do these things over and over again and not be nutty as a fruitcake? So? Well, are you? Are you? I think I relaxed in the event. But unlike me, you don't feel the need to rave about that aspect of it. Not particularly. I'd rather quietly stay half in the closet and continue doing what I'm doing. But you do, you've probably seen more uncharted internal landscape than half of mankind put together. I mean, that would not be an immodest claim. They're a little bit charted now. Well, a very little bit. Very little, that's right. But the seeds are there to be used by anyone else. That's the reason for the book, just to get it all recorded into a documented form. But it always puzzles me. I mean, I think Hoffman and Wasson and certainly to some degree Schultes, to some degree you. Nobody wants--everybody says, "Well, I'm just a humble botanist," or "I'm just a hard-working workbench chemist." Nobody wants to actually say, "This must be very, very important." We must, because it's so uniquely beyond ordinary expectation. Yes, but the importance is going to take a long time to realize. What you can't build without the tools, and you have to have the tools, and these are the tools that allow the building to be done. I'm not a builder. I'm a toolmaker. And that's probably one of the reasons I have not described a lot of landscapes. Others are even different. If we could compare it to the invention of the telescope, probably within 50 years of the invention of the telescope, the major solar system new paradigms were put in place. This seems very elusive. It seems hard for us to go beyond simply saying it exists, it's really far out, and then we sort of fall silent. What do you think about that? I think the silence is in part imposed upon us by a very unsympathetic authority body. And maybe it's just as well, because that way a lot of work can be done and sort of recorded for posterity. And the time the pendulum swings, they will swing back. And the time will come when this work will be used, research will be done with these tools. Well, obviously you believe in it strongly. What would you say to a critic who said, "What's so great about this? Are you and your friends in any significant way different from the rest of humanity?" No. And I don't see why I would be critical. I'm not offending him. I can see no way in which I'm offending him. I'm quietly doing my little alchemist thing at home. But you really must think that it does make a difference. I think it does. I think it will. It will. I don't think it does now. So we really are cursed with being pioneers. Yeah. It's not so bad. It's not so bad. It has a nice-- I mean, they'll hang your picture in the main hall years hence and say, "These were giants." I would rather have my picture hanging in the main hall than me hanging in the-- Well, some people manage both. Both. And you may end up that way, too. It's a short, happy life. It's kind of neat. But this is your territory, too. What's your feeling? Do you feel that that's a fair-- I think that I have always, from the very first psychedelic experience, had the uncanny intuition that, yes, this has been around for 50,000 years, but it's somehow going to be critically important in our lifetime that we will need it for something, maybe just to think our way out of the mess that we're getting into. But if it's needed, we have it. Yes. That's the beauty. The tool is there for the time when the need is obvious. And this may be our lifetime. So essentially what you're doing is you're placing tools on the shelf, screwdrivers for screws that haven't been invented yet. Exactly that. Except it's a good tool. Its use will depend upon someone who has that particular view of me. Well, it's a wonderful thing. Where do you hope to be in 10 years or so with all of this? Probably starting on a third book. Do you think-- I know you're working on a book about legalization. Not actually. I'm working with a group who is more or less funded to make arguments that would be-- to address arguments that would be raised in the legalization process. What would be the answer of how drugs would be legalized? How would they be made available? Should it be in an open supermarket or should it be under some sort of governmental control? And it's a research-- more than that, a policy group setting up for that. I think it's futile in the present state. In terms of practical impact? I don't think anyone's going to seriously entertain legalization. So it may be a fueled process, but it's a fun process. Because in the process you begin evaluating your own relationship to drug law, drug regulation, drug control. If you were in charge of it, how do you see it happening? I mean, are there drugs you would keep legal or do you think it should be-- What I would do if I were running, I would keep certain laws that would protect people of innocence. I would have absolutely no drugs with children who are too young in age. God knows what they are. So 16, 18, 21. Maybe alcohol monogamy. Right. Absolutely unallowed giving drugs to anyone without their consent. Naturally. Informed consent. Knowledge. Education. I would make absolutely available at all levels about propaganda, restriction, information that is factual about drugs. Then I'd open the drugs door. And you people, would they overuse? Maybe. But I think that would very quickly dampen itself out to maybe about what we have now. We would remove the criminality, remove the violence, remove the entire social disruptiveness that these drug laws have caused. Would you encourage the government to see these drugs as a vehicle for gaining tax revenue? Or do you think the government should stay off that? Probably some tax revenue would be valid as with other drugs of abuse, other things of abuse. Similarly to alcohol and tobacco. It's a good model and perhaps it's a valid one. Well, that's pretty much what I suggested in my book. But I agree with you that it's easy to sit down and come up with a fine plan overcoming the political hurdles of an American... People have too much to benefit on the laws being what they are and even becoming more intense. And until you change that motivation, that reward... Yes, well the most cynical and the most naive people in America are keeping the drug problem going. The most cynical by dealing and importing drugs and the most naive through the kind of Christian terror of... Look at the monstrous industries that have been built up with it. The drug urine screening, shameful. Right. But they're multi-billion dollar things. This kit, that GCMS, this instrumentation, these people who make little wax urine bottles. There's no justification for urine screening at any time of anyone under any circumstance on a random basis. Well, and the notion that in a democratic society people would get into that kind of thing is incredible, I think. It's completely contrary to the principles of our society. The assumption of innocence. We blew it because it's not in the Constitution. It should have been in it, but it wasn't. But taking a urine sample on a random basis is an assumption of guilt. But what is in the Bill of Rights is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Declaration of Independence. Declaration of Independence. But that could be used as a sufficient basis for... It's a form of self-image. And we should maintain it, essentially. Yeah, well the first thing that goes when society hits the wall is democracy. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] or visit our website. {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 4.23 sec Decoding : 5.63 sec Transcribe: 3944.77 sec Total Time: 3954.63 sec