[Music]
 The title of the weekend that I'll be giving here at CIIS is "Ethnobotany and Shamanism, Psychedelics Before and After History."
 This is the third year that I've lectured at CIIS, a course which the core content is a survey of the psychedelic plants of planet Earth and the cultures that have used them,
 and then discussion of their chemistry, geographical distribution, history of usage, impact on the growth of ideas and historical institutions, and so forth.
 It's basically an effort to pack a psychobotany course into a weekend, and it is always preceded by this Friday night lecture in which I attempt to give an overview and a sort of state-of-the-art report on psychobotany and why anyone should place any importance upon it.
 So I sort of think of this lecture as the philosophical implications of psychobotany, past, present, and future.
 So that is the theme that will guide the lecture this evening.
 For me, personally, it has been an experience of never being able to really anticipate the direction in which this line of thought would develop.
 It seems to have a life of its own, a richness of its own, that is not predictable by the conscious mind.
 About three years ago, I began trying to think about feminism and what role it had, if any, to psychedelics and the role they had played in shaping culture.
 It seemed at the time to my critics and to some degree to me that it was almost a kind of opportunism.
 It's such a safe issue to clothe yourself in that no matter what you're doing, if you can make it part of the feminist agenda, you somehow have become inviolate.
 It now seems to me that this thread in thinking about the impact of shamanic and specifically visionary shamanism's impact on culture,
 it has grown in my own mind more and more important. The rise of the consciousness of Gaia, which is the notion of the planet as at the very least a self-regulating system,
 and possibly at the other end of the scale as actually a kind of conscious intellect, a kind of super being or over-soul,
 that by the control of planktonic populations on the surface of the sea can regulate rainfall,
 and thus control the density of vegetation on the continents and thereby regulate the composition of the atmosphere,
 and by a series of interlocking, interwoven feedback loops actually create a kind of biological or organic homeostasis,
 which is the precondition for the evolution of advanced organisms.
 And this idea of Gaia or of perceiving the earth as a living organism has been, I think, the intellectual or philosophical centerpiece of what feminism has done with its agenda in the last 15 years or so.
 But this enthusiasm for the goddess, this enthusiasm for the seamless web of life, has not yet clarified itself as a philosophical intention sufficiently to draw certain obvious conclusions
 about the relationship that it should have to shamanism, number one, and most specifically to psychedelic shamanism.
 Now, why? What is the connection there?
 Well, what I would like to suggest is that the condition of cultural neurosis in which we as moderns reside might operationally be described as ego inflation,
 and that specifically it is the masculine ego that is inflated.
 Now, the cause for this has been sought by various different commentators on culture,
 but none of them have suggested that the tumorous growth of the masculine ego as a cultural and individual institution
 is specifically due to the absence of the dissolving agency of psychoactive ecstasy induced by plants.
 Do you see where I'm going with this?
 So that, in fact, the modern enthusiasm for shamanism and secondarily or in a connected mode with psychedelics
 is actually an intuitive feeling back toward this state of non-neurotic empathy that characterized archaic time,
 and that is what has specifically been lost by the descent into the historical process.
 And this notion that there is that something was lost which is tangible
 then allows us to set a radical reconstructive agenda for society,
 because if what was lost was tangible rather than say the goodwill of God Almighty,
 which is not something tangible, and that's the culture myth that we lost the goodwill of God Almighty,
 so we had to leave Eden and descend into toil.
 But notice that if we take the story of Eden more seriously, more literally,
 what we're dealing with is a struggle over use and abuse of available psychoactive compounds in the Edenic environment.
 And that, in fact, the challenge to Yawa was the challenge of the woman who sought to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge,
 to have the knowledge of good or evil, which would place the man and the woman on an equal footing with God.
 And this aspiration to gnosis, this desire to transcend the ordinary and penetrate into the realm of existential truth,
 was enough to get them canned out of Eden.
 Now I want to cast further back into time and sort of lay the groundwork for this case about the male ego.
 But before I do that, I want to ask you to review in your own mind for a moment
 certain curious facts about the religions of Western culture,
 the tradition of monotheism as it's practiced in the West.
 First of all, this is the only, and any student of myth who wishes to correct me is welcome to do so,
 this is the only theogony, the only God system that I know of,
 in which the head honcho has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with women,
 does not have a mother, does not have a consort, does not have a daughter.
 It's a locker room religion from the get-go.
 Now it was the insight of Carl Jung and his school
 to understand that myths are narcissistic reflections of our own aspirations as individuals and societies.
 And when you look at the monotheistic hypostatization of God with omnipotence, omniscience,
 all power, all moral suasion, everything is held in the hands of the Father God,
 who is characterized by wrath and an obsession with punishment
 and with the carrying out of what are essentially punishments related to taboos,
 in other words sins which are not clearly sins for any reason other than that they are forbidden.
 And this model of God became the model for the personalities,
 the atomic personalities that were creating the civilizations that worshipped in this fashion.
 In other words that became a way to be omniscient, omnipresent, brooking no opposition,
 swift to punish, stern in all demands, so forth and so on.
 And this shift, and it was a shift because the pre-pottery Neolithic level in the Middle East
 seems very clearly and generally to be a goddess culture, a religion based on pastoralism
 and a large amount of gathering integrated into hunting.
 That goddess oriented wandering pastoral religion gave way to the fixed settlement Neolithic male dominated model
 that in its many adumbrations has persisted into the present moment.
 Well as I said I believe the reasons for this lie further in the past,
 in the moments of human emergence that occurred 15, 20,000 years before the appearance of the goddess cultures in the ancient Near East.
 The critical moment I believe occurred in Africa during the process of the desertification of the African continent.
 The previously arboreal pack hunting, or arboreal primates descended onto the grasslands,
 which was an environment of increased nutritional pressure.
 And there bipedalism, binocular vision, the opposable thumb which had probably existed earlier,
 all these things were channeled into creating a highly efficient omnivorous pack hunting creature.
 And the key word here is omnivorous.
 One of the great and unexplained lacunas in modern evolutionary theory is that evolutionary primatologists
 have not made any attempt to discuss the impact on human evolution of changes in diet,
 which were swift and unusual in this evolving grassland situation.
 Let me explain what I mean.
 Most animals have a very selective and restricted diet,
 so consequently whatever the chemical composition of that diet, over millions of years of exposure,
 the animal forms a relationship of adaptability to whatever its food source is.
 When an animal population becomes omnivorous, under pressure on the availability of nutrition,
 suddenly the animal begins to test for possible food sources in the environment.
 Well, this testing for food sources in the environment introduces a vast number of mutagenic compounds
 into the bodies of these animals.
 Not only psychoactive compounds, but depressants, stimulants, things which interfere with RNA transcription,
 things which enhance or suppress the immune system, things which retard or clarify vision,
 things which suppress appetite, things which interfere with the estrus cycle.
 Remind yourself for a moment that orthonovum and the birth control pills are all derived,
 the compounds in those pills are derived from Dioscoria plants grown in huge plantations in Mexico,
 a kind of tropical yam.
 Well, yams in the tropics are now and always have been a major food source for foraging primates,
 and yet some varieties of yams contain so much of these hormone-like substances
 that they send the reproductive cycle and ovulation and all these things just into a tizzy.
 Well, you can imagine the impact, the evolutionary speed-up that this decision to go omnivorous
 would have on these evolving primates.
 And I maintain that the prolongation of infantile traits in human beings,
 some of which persist throughout our entire lives, such as that too.
 I was thinking of our relative hairlessness and stuff like that.
 You're right, it's a puzzle.
 Every generation thinks that the generation which it spawns is more infantile yet than it was.
 And somebody wrote me a letter recently suggesting that this was a good thing
 and that it would end with us simply skipping the life in 3D phase
 and you would just go from fetus to chip and skip over this whole messy three-dimensional cultural phase.
 But I digress.
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.68 sec
Decoding  : 1.15 sec
Transcribe: 1149.91 sec
Total Time: 1151.74 sec