[ Music ] >> The Amazon in 1970, I became very shortly impressed with the need to attempt to preserve living plants that had a potential medical impact, plants with a folk history of healing or psychoactivity or some other function that made them worth saving. And the first notion was that we would buy land in Columbia. And I did this and to this day own 10 unclaimable hectares near Florencia in southern Cacataw. But I would have to wrestle with coquinaros and M19 and several other factions to be able to even walk that land. So over the years, the idea sort of was fallow. And then about six years ago, Cat and I decided that our nine acres of land that we owned in Hawaii could be turned into a non-profit foundation and put toward this project. And we did that and we organized to buy nine and a half additional adjacent acres. So what we have is a project in Hawaii of 19 acres of rainforest land that's land at about 2200 feet with 80 inches of rainfall a year. And 2200 feet in Hawaii at 19 degrees north latitude is roughly equivalent to 7000 feet in the Andes at zero, which means it quite nicely approximates what's called the montane or cloud rainforest of the Amazon. So we found that we could bring plants there and propagate them and they would survive. And this is what we've been doing. Nicole was someone that I met in, let's see, 1980 when I was down there on a joint Harvard-University of British Columbia expedition that was getting my brother his PhD. We knew Nicole's books, her book. But in the course of bringing in all these plants from the bush and spending time with her at UNAP, the botanical facility there that Francisco Ayala runs, her knowledge, her enthusiasm for all of this stuff, her conviction that there really was a medically important dimension to all these plants spurred us onward. Well, now the foundation has been up and running for several years. Many of you are contributors to it and generously support it. Those of you who are not aware of it, I call it to your attention. It seems pretty clear that the destruction of the rainforest, the war against drugs, the issue of higher consciousness, the issue of the first world's relationship to the third world, all of these disparate sociopolitical concerns are somehow spun together. The issue has to do with plants, people, land, resources, and the future. If the botanical, ethnomedical heritage in the warm tropics is not preserved in the next 30 years, it will just be lost forever. And this is not only a South American problem. The forests of Africa are even more heavily impacted by human usage and sound extraction processes. The forests of Eastern Indonesia are next, I'm sure. And in each case, the whole, you know, they say there can be a technological fix for almost anything. But once a species becomes extinct, that's it for all eternity. That particular genome, that particular solution to life's vicissitudes will never be expressed again. So what we're trying to do is save that which is literally priceless. No price can be put upon it. Now the argument is being made that sound extraction processes are more profitable than clear-cutting and turning rainforest into pasturage. This is certainly true, but we can't be certain that this message is going to be heard. Also, and this is the particular focus of our concern, rapid as the destruction of the rainforest is, even more rapidly, the human knowledge is fading because these people are being absorbed into a global capitalist economy. They don't become shamans. They become outboard motor repairmen, tour guides, hotel managers, this sort of thing. They work in sawmills. If this knowledge is lost, the presence of the plants doesn't really mean anything in terms of its impact on human health and quality of life. So and then the area where this is most acute, most controversial, most subject to manipulation by dominator philosophies is the hallucinogens, the linchpin of the shamanic ability to access these higher dimensions of information. And as we know, governments are extremely concerned to suppress any sort of chemical strategy that dissolves social conditioning. And shamanism is precisely this in its hallucinogenic incarnation. So one of the things Botanical Dimensions has stressed is the collection of the magical plants, the plants which have psychoactivity, the plants which are allowing these people to stretch the envelope of what is possible in the domain of cognitive activity. And I will argue, I'm sure, sometime before this meeting is over, that this is very important, that the archaic revival, which is this larger umbrella phenomenon under which the entire 20th century is operating, the archaic revival is going to include the revivification of these shamanic forms. In a way, in a way, human history for the past several thousand years is nothing more than an awakening to the power of the archaic revival. You know, it's a cliche of social dynamics that you never appreciate something until you lose it. And some people think this is what first marriages are for. History is a kind of horrified realization that something has been lost, that there is an itch hard to scratch in the civilized context, that we have, out of fear, really, descended into patterns of domination of each other, of the environment, of our children, of our social relations with exogamous groups. We have descended into a dominator pattern that is basically based on clutching, on fear. And I'm sure most of you have heard me argue that this is the consequence of ceasing, basically, to do enough hallucinogens in the diet. That, in fact, what human beings were flirting with over many, many tens of millennia, let's say from 100,000 years ago to 15,000 years ago, human beings were in a flirtatious situation with a symbiotic relationship with this mind resident in vegetable nature. Now, you all know what classic symbiosis is in biology. It's where, let's take the example of the little fish who lives in the sea anemone, and big fish don't bother it. It gains protection. The sea anemone gains access to larger prey, which come to investigate the little fish. That kind of symbiosis is genetically locked in. And if you take the little fish away from the anemone and put it, let us say, in an aquarium without anemones, it doesn't die. It doesn't go into an immediate physiological crisis. No, what happens is it simply has a low body weight and a short lifespan. In other words, it is under stress. And I believe-- I hope I'm not deluding myself-- but I believe that the lost secret of human emergence, the undefined catalyst that took a very bright monkey and turned that species into a tormented, self-reflecting poet dreamer, that catalyst has to be sought in these tertiary alkaloids in the food chain that were catalyzing higher states of intellectual activity. And I've pointed out to you ad nauseum, I'm sure, the reciprocal feedback relationship that was working there. In the case of the mushroom in the veldt situation in Africa, it was promoting at low doses visual acuity, which was feeding back into the hunting and gathering process, making those animals with this increased visual acuity more adaptively successful, hence more reproductively successful, hence they're outbreeding their competitors. At higher doses, psilocybin actually causes a generalized arousal, which includes sexual arousal. Again, it becomes a catalyst for increased reproductive success. More instances of copulation in a situation like that lead to more successful births of those into family structures where the alkaloid has been accepted into the food chain. Well, this would be only an obscure topic of interest to primatologists were it not for the fact that it is a crisis in consciousness which confronts us globally. Consciousness is the commodity that if we do not have enough of it, do not produce it fast enough, then the momentum of the processes we set in motion in our ignorance is going to sterilize the planet and do us all in. So we have to have consciousness. Well, then you look at the smorgasbord of ethnographic possibilities, and you discover this institution of shamanism. It is the institution of planner, of visionary, of manager, of large system coordinator. That's what it's about. You call it magic on one level. You call it curing. You call it folk psychiatry or weather prediction. Shamans have been involved in all of these things. But as Nicole made so eloquently the point last night, to these deep forest people, it is ordinary. It is ordinary. They live in a different cultural dimension than we do. Dimensions which to us are completely value dark are to them completely transparent. And dimensions which to us are extremely rich and complex, the inner world of the nucleus of the atom, let us say, are for them totally value dark. They don't even cognize the possibility of asking the question. But nevertheless, the specialization in these various domains is not something where one is as good as another. Consciousness is the domain of immediate experience. How are we going to save this planet? How are we going to take the lethal cascade of toxic technological and ignorance producing habits that are loose on this planet and channel them toward some kind of a sane and livable world? Well, the answer is emerging in culture, out of the collectivity of global consciousness. It is what I call the archaic revival. It is this very large turnover in the mass mind. Some people call it a paradigm shift. It's an effort to recover the sensory ratios, the feelings, and the attitudes of 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, before fear, before ego, before male dominance, before hierarchy, hoarding, warfare, propaganda, child abuse, all of these things. And the answer lies, as was indicated last night, in integration into the dynamics of nature. Well, so far as my analysis gives it to me, the only way you can abandon yourself to the dynamics of nature is to break through the language shell. You must cut through the aura of programming and cultural assumptions that surround us from the moment we are able to speak. The only way this can be done is by dissolving the boundaries of ego. Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual, who is a member of a neurotic culture, against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, culture is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable. Now, I don't know-- so you see, what I see going on in the Amazon is a very radical, psycholytic therapy, where they are dissolving, literally dissolving, the boundaries of self, culture, and ego assumption. And then what you discover is not the white light, or what William James called a blooming, buzzing confusion, although in the first few minutes it can be like that. But what you really discover is sentient, organized, living, loving nature, that nature is a force. Nature is a mind, a personality, organized with intentionality, organized with feeling, humor, grace, and conviction. Conviction. And if you can get right with that conviction, then that's the secret of dancing in the waterfall. That's the secret of the shaman's apparent transcendence of the rules of mundane statistics, because that is what it is. The shaman doesn't violate physics. He just-- he or she simply knows how to push the improbable to its greatest extent. And in Eastern philosophy, this is called the Tao, abandonment to the flow, fitting of the small pattern into the larger pattern. Well, I think these things are very important, because I think that psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, it's a good idea, but it will never reach any kind of operational effectiveness until we look to these native healers all over the world and study their methods. And their methods are chemical and personal. It's a combination of care, attention, intention, and chemistry that allows consciousness to be made malleable and then recast in other forms. So I find myself this weekend explaining myself. That's what I feel like I'm doing. Why does someone who extols the self-transforming elf machines of the DMT space also claim to be a conservationist, also have a mathematical dog and poodle show? Well, it's because all of these things emerge out of the concrescence of consciousness, its intention toward its own transformation. Nature is the answer. It's not enough to be like Wordsworth. It's not enough to-- this is not-- Mao Tse-tung said, the revolution is not a dinner party. And certainly, the ecological revolution is not a dinner party. Poetic sensitivity to the death of the planet is not what we're striving for here. What we're striving for is to halt, overturn, and back out of the impending death of the planet. It is very clear now that consciousness will decide that the planet-- there are not rosy futures of suburban housing and ratatouille to be extended endlessly into the future. We are approaching a bifurcation where it is either going to become heaven or hell, one or the other. And I think that this archaic intuition, which I see reaching clear back to the birth of the 20th century and the 19th century, back to people like Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire and the pataphysicians, the surrealists, the physicists around Einstein, Freud, modern art, modern dance, jazz, all of this stuff is an effort to reclaim the primitive, to reclaim the archaic, to reject all that powdered wig algebra that comes down through the French, English, German tradition of constipated male dominance. And instead, you know, intuit. That's what it is in Freud and Jung and the New Age. And intuit our way out. But now, the intuition is rising to the surface. We no longer have to operate without the presence of the goal firmly in hand. The goal can now be stated. What this is all about is a return to archaism with the lessons learned in history. That's where we were happy. The fall was a fall into a veil of tears, into a world of limitation and pain and suffering and infectious disease and so forth and so on. It's a prodigal journey into a lower dimension that can now be ended by a collective cultural decision to commit to this Taoist, shamanistic, feminized, cybernetic, caring, aware, present kind of being. I mean, it's nothing more than what each of us is in our very best moments. But we have to extend those very best moments to fill whole lifetimes. You know, think of the number of people who suffered and died that we could sit under this tree this morning. I mean, in the last million years, nine times the glaciers have ground south from the poles, freezing the world into ice and confining human populations to subtropical valleys and the warm tropics. Nine times the interglacial periods have come and human populations have spread out over the earth. They didn't have radio. They didn't have antibiotics, contraception, statistical analysis or the partial differential equation. And yet somehow they managed to get us here. Are we then, as the heirs of that wave front, of the inheritors of a billion-year process, are we in one generation to turn it into a massive pottage? I think not. I certainly hope not. I would like to believe that we could make that leap to conscious awareness that would allow us to take hold. Now, the problem, it was easy the first 10 years that I sat before you, because what we were doing was getting to know each other, to verify that we in fact existed, that I wasn't crazy, you weren't crazy, so forth and so on. Now, what looms ahead is the mess of politics. And this, I'm sure you have no stomach for. I certainly don't. I'd rather be stoned and rocked in the arms of the goddess. But as a matter of fact, this dominator thing is not going to be unhooked and put to bed without a struggle. Everyone is going to have to be counted. I've talked to you in recent months about memes, memes being the smallest potential units of ideas. They're like genes. We are the nucleus of a mutant meme, the meme of plant consciousness, hallucinogenic consciousness, shamanistic consciousness. We have to refine this meme, replicate it through repetition, and spread it through society in the same way that a plant sheds seeds into an ecosystem. The idea will compete. The idea is a good one. It's adaptive, it's clever, it's tough, it's invasive, it can make use of many contexts to promote its own existence. But it can't do any of that if we don't replicate it and get it out. So I see these kinds of meetings as an opportunity for building community, as an opportunity for people to look around themselves and connect with the other people who are here. We cannot be told from the rest of the population unless we self-select and gather together at a single point in space and time. When we do that, we recognize each other. When this meeting is concluded, we will merge back into the larger stream of the body politic. But carrying this meme of the Gaian resurgence, the Gaelanic wave that must come. I mean, people say it's so wonderful that you articulate these feminist ideas and so forth. I do it because I don't want to be dead. I do it because I don't want my children to have no world to live in. There is no choice. The walls are high and the current is moving very fast. What we need to do is merely keep our spirits high and learn to sing the song. That's just something or other. (audience laughing) Nicole, would you like- - It's very daunting. - Well, don't be daunted. Here, let me give you that. Would you like the little- - I have one. - Well, but does that do this? (audience laughing) - Does it? - No. - No. - Here you are, my dear. Do you want to hold this or do you want to bellow? - Thank you. - There you are. - Perhaps I'd be better without it because as you see a very large, you see it all. I have seen a very small bit of it. I've seen that little bit up close. And it's not a bit that has been in everybody's window. They don't have it at Macy's. But I've learned a lot from it. I've learned that we are only a small part of a very great unity, as you were pointing out. As a matter of fact, our feminization, so many of our ideas are really only, they've been held by these so-called primitives. Well, I guess they are primitives, means they came first. (audience laughing) And so many of our ideas, for example, I am convinced that theirs was originally a feminist society because you find traces of it everywhere. A woman in the Amazon is a chattel, they say. But I've so often tried to buy some native artifact from a man and he'd say, "I'll have to ask my wife." On the other hand, it shows up, the reverse shows up in many ways, like with the duck I was talking about, Kuvaad this morning. Kuvaad is the Amazonian method, employed by many, or rather system, which is employed or enforced in many tribes. When mama's going to have a baby, she simply goes to the edge of the river, possibly with a friend, another woman, and has it. And that's it. She comes back after washing up a bit, and papa gets in his hammock. And he is a sick man for anything from two days to two weeks, depending on which tribe it is. And she takes care of him. Well now, is that really subservience? Or is it the sort of dominance, female dominance? I've never been able to decide. But it is not one that we could put over in our society. And you find traces of an ancient, ancient mother worship all through it. They'll speak of the, as you know, they are animists, which seems pretty reasonable when you're amongst them, because trees have spirits, rivers have spirits. They are entities, they are personalities, and they have a will of their own, according to native belief, and sometimes mine. And that power is described as residing in the mother, the mother of the tree, the mother of the river. The spirit of it is the mother. Well, the mother, all through Amazonian tribes, cultures, as far as I know, the system is that mother has acquired authority, usually over the girls for a long time, but over the boys only when they're very small. When they're bigger, they go out and learn to hunt fish with papa, and they get initiated. The initiation for the girls is somewhat more peculiar. The Tikuna, for example, when a girl reaches marriageable age which can be any time she reaches puberty, they give a great fiesta after keeping her locked up for six months in a little circular hut built in the center of the big communal residence. And then at the end of that, she's brought out, and there's a very great and very drunken fiesta with all the men wearing elaborate masks. The girl is beautifully dressed with feathers and paint, but the men wear these hideous masks, and they chase her around, supposedly scaring her to death. And then at the end of it, she is seated at dawn on a tapir skin, and two old women will pull out every hair in the poor girl's head. It's called the pelacion, the peeling. And that is to teach her that matrimony is no bed of roses. (audience laughs) The hair grows back, and she is immediately available for marriage. But that doesn't sound very matriarchal. But maybe there are the seeds of it, because when the hair grows out, it's almost like a rebirth. Her beauty is reborn, her interest is reborn. And hair in some civilizations has a certain mystical property, a certain power. Nothing like the power of the name, of course. The power of the word we hear about a lot in our Bibles and so forth, and in a lot of courtrooms. But the power of the name is even greater in the Amazon. And for example, if you know the name of people in some tribes, a private name, you have power over him, a mystical power. And no amount of force can break that power. But that is why there's a very, very bad manners amongst the Witotos to say, "What is your name?" If you ask him his name, he'll give you a Spanish name like Agustin or Lucia, but never the Witoto name. And it is a great honor, I have had the great honor of being given the name in Shipibo, because I've had a lot of time with that tribe. And they're good friends. And my name is K'ai-ru-z'na, which means widely scattered. You also get a secret name. Now that's the name the other members of the tribe will use. But then you get a secret name which only the shaman and you will know. And I unfortunately wrote my own notebook, which I lost. It's so secret that I don't know it myself. But the name I have, when I go into a tribe and I say a group of Shipibos or K'onipos, their language is almost the same, that I am K'ai-ru-z'na, I'm immediately accepted as one of them. But as if I say I'm Nicole, I'm an outsider. The name has power. Now part of that power is something that is very important when you're dealing with, as a shaman with people. It's quite, I think, rather important for them to know the real name, because the name is your soul. Any hidden tribes, of course, are very rigid. And something, in some areas, they still keep the ayahuasca ceremony very secret from outsiders, not secret amongst themselves, of course, because it is an entrance into the real world, as I said. Terence can explain that to you. And in that, you can see, or the shaman would see for you where you lost such and such a thing, or who is your secret enemy, or if somebody's sick, who is the witch doctor who sent the god that made him sick, or even killed him, because no death, strangely enough, in the tribes I know, no death is ever normal. Death is not accepted as a natural thing. It is an act. It is something that is put upon you by another person. The witch doctor, of course, is not now so much, but there used to be a great deal of killing in wars, wars mostly for honor, revenge killings. Honor is such a big thing with them, and it is so closely associated with revenge that some of the tribes, the warrior tribes, were dying out. There were almost no able-bodied males left, there were 40 in the Aguadruna and all the Yolotl tribes, and in fact, their attitude toward killing was rather different from ours. I heard one of them would become a convert and telling how, what a good Christian he'd become, and he said, "I gave up drinking very easily." That was no trouble. "I gave up women and doing things I shouldn't very easily." But giving up killing, that was a different matter. I had to think for a long time. And you see, I was a good killer, a very good killer. Everybody knew me, and I liked to kill people. It's a great, it's a sport, and it's a sport that gives you the same kind of honor that becoming a champion is anything any sport in our civilization can do. Therefore, the lifespan was actually very short, until slavery began. But even now, I remember one case in which a boy was killed in a hunting accident, and the one who shot him, had to be, remember, a fellow who was not very good, very friendly with the family of the boy who was killed, and they were, were thoroughly under the control of a missionary, and they went to her, fortunately, a woman with a great sense of humor, and said, "You don't mind if we kill him, do you?" And the brother of the dead boy said, she said, "Well, no, you can't do it. "You can sort, you mustn't." And they argued, and they argued, and he said, "Well, what will people say if I don't?" Because it is a matter of honor, and this all goes back to, I was talking about yesterday, honor being the one thing they can keep. The one possession of value. And it makes quite a difference in your civilization. - Well, I think going to these people with an attitude of interest in their medicine has given them a sense that they didn't have from the petroleum people or the rubber people. - Well, I don't get that anyway, because there aren't very many of us doing that. They are accustomed to seeing people who have these marvelous chains, the magic saws that'll cut a tree in 10 minutes. It would take them all day to hack through with a machete. And you have the machines that will land on the water, the planes. Those people must be superior, and they act superior, and impose their will in a superior way. So the kids are very much impressed. They don't want it. Those people have their medicine coming in boxes and in little bottles, all wrapped up in paper. And if you offer an oil driller a plant to cure his eye infection, he's going to laugh at you. And he'll probably say, "Don't be dumb." And so they get very much ashamed. And they not only won't confess to doing anything, they will not learn anything. So it's all being lost. And that's why I've had to scurry around so, and try to get all I can. I find it might take long as a flyer in the jungle had been bad, you would point out. So I listened. And he noticed an old woman in one of the villages who had been terribly crippled, who suddenly, not very suddenly, took several months. But she was straightening up and running around and striding out in very good shape. And he asked her, "How come?" She explained to him she had taken this onanopsis. So he tried something, he said, "Well, Ted was diabetic." He got rid of his rheumatoid arthritis quite quickly and very successfully. By quickly, I'm saying a couple of months. But to his astonishment, he no longer needed the insulin he was taking. And now he takes it for that instead of for the, because you have to keep taking that one, at least 10 things you do. And there are all these things, and I think what I could do for AIDS, why can't we get somebody investigating these? Why isn't more work done? Why isn't there big noise? Everybody says it's because, well, who knows, maybe suggestion. It's a little hard to suggest laboratory tests or to influence microscopic slides. And it's a little hard to, well, it's a great deal harder to influence minds into accepting the fact that some of these primitive people can know things we don't. Their hallucinogens are the thing, I've asked which doctors, how they learned about the plants. They will say, well, the plants tell us. And then when you get really talking over with them and you're very good friends, they will explain that they, as they take their ayahuasca, one man told me, he takes it under a tree and he goes higher and higher and higher and higher in the tree. And as he goes up, different plants at different levels come to him and explain their uses. And he's very good as a curandero, a healer. Plants do tell you, I actually got a plant, a plant once told me that that was a new Hampshire. (audience laughing) And I was in a very bad way with a bad attack of dysentery and visiting a friend. I didn't know any doctor. She was away for a couple of days. I didn't know any doctors to get a prescription for paragoric. And I walked out in the garden, out in the back and there was a whole lot of stuff around, a little plant, it looked like a ground of some sort. And somehow that plant, I knew all of a sudden it would be good for me. And I looked it over carefully 'cause that's a very reckless thing to do, take any plant without knowing that some are extremely toxic ones. And it was, I checked the flower and it was a labiated mint family. Practically none of those are very toxic. And so I made a tea of it and I drank it and it fixed me right up. And several, then my hostess came back and I asked her what the name of the thing was. It said it was ground ivy. And that in all the herbal books is recommended very highly as a cure for intestinal problems of that nature. They do tell you, but you have to know them, you have to, they have to know that you love them. You probably are fully aware of the reaction, the emotional reactions of plants. They've been told in a number of books. What's the name of that guy? I knew him too in New York. He had a, he was teaching the police forces of the whole country to do lie detector tests. No. - No, I don't know. - It was the first one. And he invited me up to see his plants react. And he put, you probably all know this. He put on the little gadgets on him and he had this huge desk. And the whole top of it was all very electronically elaborate and he'd get, if you pushed with a burning match, a plant, you'd get a reaction like that on the ground. Well, that's awfully well known, but if they can react defensively, why can't they react in other ways? Or rather not react, act. The witch doctors will tell you they can, that the mother of the plant is what does it. And the mother of the plant is best and most often met and chatted with through the influence of some psychedelic drugs, some consciousness changing. The pumales, which are snuffs used in Colombia. The ayahuasca, I think is the widest, the most widely used, but there are dozens of them. And in fact, they have to be a little careful because they will tell you this or that will get you mariado. But it won't. The ayahuasca and things like that, they'll assign the people who don't know very much and who want very much to impress you, will assign fantastic powers to plants that really don't do very much. But there's the ones that do very much, do it thoroughly. And with a will of their own. I've met bad ones too. I remember one ayahuasca ceremony when something started pressing on me on both sides and crushing me. I was having a bad trip, but it wasn't just that. I said, "You can't do this to me." I said it loud. I am stronger than you are. You are not going to dominate me. And it went away. And just then, the witch doctor's assistant, the shaman's assistant came over to me and said, "Something is wrong here." I started with this fan to direct the spirits. Fans, I thought. He was aware that something was wrong. I said, "It's already all right." It was. But you can't, you see, you can fight back, even in the middle of the dream. Which to me makes the dream rather more convincing, the fact that it can get nasty on you. And want to harm, there are things that want to harm you. And that is just also the method. Have you ever had that experience? - Oh, yes. You mean of difficulty in the psychedelic dimension? - Of having an evil one. - Yes. You know Don Fidel Mosambique. One-- - You took me there, you and Dennis. - Oh, that's right, yes. This was an ayahuascaro, very accomplished, and Kat and I lived with him for many weeks in 1976. And there were many ayahuasca sessions, but one night, about 30 people in a blackened shed. And these buildings in the Amazon are built up on stilts because of floodwaters. And the singing had been going on for hours and hours. And suddenly in the midst of a silence, or rather a song ended. And as this song ended, the wind started to blow. And a dog began barking outside. And in the next room, an infant began to scream. And this confluence of disruption, the shaman jumped to his feet to the middle of the room, quivering, and imparted a shivering motion to the whole house, and just made the whole house shiver. And then you could feel this thing lift. The wind died down, the baby calmed, the dog stopped barking. And nobody in that room had to be told that there had been a near pass of something very peculiar there. It's a wave mechanical medium, the dimension that ayahuasca conveys you into. And it's like surfing. The same wave that can lift you up and carry you ecstatically toward the shore, if you cut it wrong, can drag you down and beat your head against the bottom of the ocean till your contact lenses fall out. So there are techniques and there are moods. Something you said, Nicole, about the plants being aware of the approach of the match. I had an experience this summer which brought all this home to me. It was actually a double experience. It was quite peculiar. We have a plant in the botanical garden in Hawaii called lupuna. It's a magical plant. It's a plant that the Indians say should never be approached, except if you're celibate. And it's a very heavy, magical plant. - Is it the tree? - The tree, yeah. And I didn't know this when I first planted the plant. So I've planted it perhaps not in the best place, perhaps too close to public traffic waves. And near it, there is an old dead tree with a big branch which sticks way out. And my caretaker and I were down there with our machetes working one morning in this area. And we heard this sound like the crack of a rifle. And we both stood up, put down our machetes. We're scanning around when suddenly we see this dead branch break off directly above the puku lupuna tree, this branch of an ohia tree, which must have weighed many hundreds of pounds, was falling right toward this little tree, which is about this high. And I swear, about 20 feet above the ground, this log weighing several hundred pounds just exploded into pieces, was just blown literally out of the air and landed in a series of several hundred pound fragments all around this lupuna tree. So, and I, it was approached being supernatural. I mean, I looked at Kenny and said, did you see what I saw? And so this seemed to me an instance of a plant being able to protect itself. But I was very concerned. This is now the coda on the story or the second half. I was concerned because this dead tree from which the branch had fallen is a tree that we have covered with ayahuasca. And so I went running up to see how much damage had been done to this specimen plant and how much of it had been dragged out and disrupted. And none had. And then I recalled that though I had trained the ayahuasca up into this tree, it had always refused to grow out on this one branch. And this was the branch that broke. And there was a old Hawaiian mountain pot grower there who looked at this situation and uttered the sage remark, "It can sense instability." And so it didn't go out on that limb. And I thought, well, wow, is this true? Could it sense instability? And then I tried to figure out, well, how could it sense instability? And then someone offered the idea that, well, maybe the pressure of the wind on a dead and weakened limb has a different vibe than the pressure of the wind on a solid and growing limb. And this thing could actually sense that the limb was rotted and wouldn't go out onto it. Well, so then I began looking around at all the other ayahuasca vines climbing on dead trees in the neighborhood. And I noticed that there were certain limbs that they always avoided. And no matter how densely they ramified through other parts of the tree, they would not go out onto these certain weakened, extended branches. Well, for me, it was like an object lesson. It was an objective lesson that some of these things that we say about plants are true. Well, then all you have to do is the thing that Nicole says I do best, which is pull back to the cosmic perspective and say, if a plant in a Hawaiian forest, a vine in a Hawaiian forest refuses to go out on a weakened tree branch because it senses instability, then what are the resources that the global ecosystem can bring to bear on the situation when it senses the instability that is represented by human history? It means that the vegetable world is able to react. The vegetable world is sensing and processing information. Now, we can't know its thoughts, in my little example about the ayahuasca, we can't know its thoughts, but we can see what value it was seeking to maximize by creeping out on that weakened limb. It wanted to live. It didn't want to go into a situation of danger where then it would be jerked to the ground by hundreds of pounds of falling inert material. It wanted to live. It sought to maximize life. Well, how much greater then must be the power of the endangered rainforest? (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) ♪ When the days they fly by ♪ ♪ Lightning fast I'm waiting for the thunder ♪ ♪ I don't know where you're going ♪ ♪ Or where you're from ♪ ♪ But would you like to come on under ♪ ♪ Would you like to come on under ♪ ♪ Would you like to come on under ♪ ♪ I feel cold but my head is dry ♪ ♪ And the sky is falling apart ♪ ♪ I'm coming down ♪ ♪ Let me walk you around ♪ (scatting) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.64 sec Decoding : 3.65 sec Transcribe: 3453.05 sec Total Time: 3457.34 sec