[PAUSE]
 Can you hear?
 Everybody can hear?
 Good.
 Well, I like to lead with good news.
 So let me assure you that at no point this evening
 will I read from or quote the poet Rumi.
 [LAUGHTER]
 [LAUGHTER]
 It's a pleasure to be in Sacramento.
 It's a pleasure to be in California.
 I lived here for about 30 years before moving out
 about eight months ago.
 Lived over in Occidental.
 So I sort of feel like this is a hometown congregation.
 You may have seen the story in the Bee this morning.
 It was a reasonable detailing of my theory of evolution.
 I noticed that one expert wouldn't even
 give his name to allow his no comment to have attribution.
 [LAUGHTER]
 Gentlemen, this is no way to behave
 in the face of an ideological revolution.
 Anyway, and plus it isn't even my weirdest idea.
 [LAUGHTER]
 But that was left unmentioned, thankfully, in the article.
 But since the article dealt so specifically with evolution,
 and because that probably is my best candidate for entree
 into any kind of respectability, something I crave intensely
 in every atom of my body, I thought
 I would discuss it with you this evening
 and try and make it seem a little less absurd
 than my critics might make it seem.
 First of all, let me lay out for you the nature of the problem.
 Right now the nature of the problem is finding the damn
 phone and shutting it off.
 [LAUGHTER]
 No, the nature of the problem is that evolutionary theory tells
 us that we are some kind of advanced animal of some sort,
 and science has waged a noble struggle over the past 150
 years to secure this position against all attacks
 by orthodox religious thinking.
 And yet, there is, after it's all said and done,
 the sense that if we are an animal,
 we are a very, very peculiar sort of animal,
 indeed a unique animal, an animal capable of language
 and coordinated planning, an animal not
 bound to a particular social or sexual style.
 We have monogamous human societies,
 polygamous societies.
 This is very different from animals.
 We have poetry.
 We have mathematics.
 We have drama.
 A whole spectrum of effects that is far from anything
 that we find in animal organization.
 And this problem has fascinated me for a long, long time,
 as it's fascinated a lot of people,
 because obviously it's a great embarrassment
 to the theory of evolution that it can't account
 for human consciousness.
 Because after all, human consciousness
 produced the theory of evolution.
 So you see, it's a significant failure there.
 So obviously, if you accept the basic rules
 of the evolutionary game, which are
 that there is random mutation, which means gene drift,
 mixing of genes through sexual reproduction, cosmic rays,
 which cause birth defects and mutations, this sort of thing,
 and natural selection.
 And these two factors, natural selection and mutation,
 are sufficient to account for praying mantises, chipmunks,
 tropical rainforests, but not us.
 And the reason is that we emerge too quickly
 from the background of the rest of ordinary nature.
 In the space of about two billion years,
 the human brain doubled in size.
 And Lumholtz, who is an orthodox evolutionary biologist,
 calls this the most dramatic transformation
 of a major organ of a higher animal
 in the entire history of life.
 And it happened to us.
 It happened to that very organ that
 is responsible for the theory of evolution.
 So what extraordinary confluence of factors
 could have come together there to take, essentially,
 an arboreal monkey, an ape of some sort, that
 had been at an evolutionary climax
 in the canopy of the rainforest for a couple of million years?
 What extraordinary set of factors
 could then set that creature marching down
 the road toward Elvis, the internet, Bill Clinton,
 and all the rest of it?
 Well, you would imagine, or I imagined
 when I first started thinking about this,
 that there must be some huge edifice of established theory
 that we have to go up in there and blow up.
 Surely, somebody has staked out this ground
 and made some kind of an argument
 about human consciousness.
 Well, in terms of science, not, or almost not.
 I mean, in terms of religion, it's simple.
 I mean, God made us from the clay of the earth.
 In terms of science, the best shot
 is pretty weak soup from my point of view.
 Here's what science is telling us,
 that when you throw something, you
 have to plan, because once you let go of whatever
 it is you're throwing, you can no longer control it.
 And so because we were small and weak and hunted in packs,
 we learned to throw like hell at very large, onrushing, woolly,
 fellow mammals of various sorts.
 And you had to plan your throw.
 Consequently, we developed brain capacity to do this
 and had enough left over to invent quantum physics,
 paint the Mona Lisa, invent the phonetic alphabet, philosophy,
 religion, and all the rest of it.
 In other words, it was the coordination
 of the hand and the eye to the throwing arm.
 This is what the orthodox folks tell us,
 that gave us this extra brain capacity that we sort of then
 managed into human civilization.
 Well, notice that this would make
 the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder the gum-chewing,
 big league baseball pitcher.
 Because he can put that pill right across the plate
 at high speed time after time.
 As somebody who learned everything
 they know about sadomasochism in PE class,
 I'm not really ready to embrace this theory.
 It definitely runs against my paradigm.
 So I've built another story.
 And it, to my mind, meets the objections,
 answers the question, where did consciousness come from?
 But instead of doing it very nicely and neatly,
 it raises, in the very act of answering this question,
 other questions, maybe more closer to home,
 questions that reflect on our social organization,
 our politics, how we treat each other in the here and now,
 even with implications for the future.
 But we'll get to that.
 For the moment, let me just run through this for you.
 There's sort of a basic situation
 that all theories of evolution have to come to terms with.
 And this is that our remote proto-hominid, primate, ape,
 ancestors lived and developed in Africa.
 If you have a non-African theory of human origin--
 and there are such things, but the evidence
 is strongly against you.
 If it were stock, I'd sell.
 The evidence is pretty strong that whatever
 happened that brought us out of the animal body,
 it happened in Africa.
 Well, all animals tend to-- and plants, for that matter--
 tend to reach evolutionary climax and occupy a niche
 and stabilize in that niche.
 Cockroaches, ants achieved this hundreds of millions of years
 ago and have not changed greatly since.
 Most of biology is this iterative occupation
 of a climaxed niche.
 Very little of biology is the pushing forward
 into radical new forms, new species, still rarer,
 new genera.
 For that, there has to be disruption
 of some sort of the environment.
 And it can be the meandering of a river or an asteroid strike
 or the retreat of a glacier, something
 which creates open land.
 Well, for five, six million years now,
 the African continent has been slowly drying.
 And three million years ago, it was
 covered by rainforest at the equator from east to west.
 And that was the environment of the human ancestor types.
 They were canopy dwelling.
 They were fruit eating.
 They ate some percentage of insects, composed their diet.
 They had a pack signaling repertoire
 that was fairly complicated by animal standards.
 And there they were, happily living in the canopy.
 But Africa began to dry up.
 And they came under nutritional pressure.
 Now, simpler animals, insects, for example,
 when their food source is withdrawn,
 they usually buy the farm.
 They don't have much flexibility of diet.
 If you've ever tried to raise caterpillars
 into butterflies for your children,
 you know that if you give the caterpillars the wrong leaves,
 they just can't make any sense out of it and they die.
 More advanced animals, when confronted
 with dietary pressure or disappearance of ordinary food
 supplies, before they give up the ghost,
 they will experiment with other food sources in the environment.
 Now, the reason this isn't normally done
 is thought-- the reason animals are conservative in their food
 choices, it's thought to be a way of avoiding
 mutational influences in the form of tertiary chemicals,
 toxins, viruses, and things like this
 that would be in unusual foods.
 One of the things that accompanies
 our acquisition of consciousness is gastronomy,
 the appreciation of flavor, the approach
 to food that makes it an art.
 Animals don't do this.
 They're just trying to get enough protein
 to keep the old engines running, the notion of flavoring
 is counterintuitive to animals.
 And flavoring's probably, in part,
 a mutagenic influence to our diet.
 When our remote ancestors came under environmental pressure,
 their environment was shrinking.
 The rainforest was being replaced by grasslands.
 And nutritional pressure, their ordinary diet
 of fruit and insects was being restricted.
 They began exploring this new environment of the grasslands.
 And this is the era of knuckle walking,
 turning into bipedalism.
 It's the era of the coordination of binocular vision,
 so forth and so on.
 There was a paper published recently
 which anticipates my point, but I can't wait to hit you with it.
 A paper published recently about canopy-dwelling monkeys
 who only leave the canopy for the acquisition
 of one particular food.
 And the food they will come to the ground for and risk
 predation is mushrooms.
 So it seems perfectly reasonable to suggest
 that our remote ancestors exploring
 the new environment of the grasslands
 would have encountered, as you would if you
 were to go to the tropics, psilocybin-containing
 mushrooms growing in the dung of cattle.
 Many dung-growing, so-called coprophytic, coprolithic
 mushrooms produce psilocybin, among them
 Stropharycubensis, which is one of the largest
 and pandemically distributed of these mushrooms.
 I'm sure that our early ancestors also
 tested other kinds of food.
 They were testing everything.
 They were digging for corms with pointed sticks.
 And I'm sure there were many ecological and medical
 disasters as a consequence of this.
 For instance, the birth control steroids
 in modern birth control pills are produced by Dioscorea vines
 grown on plantations in Mexico.
 Well, Dioscorea is the family of sweet potatoes.
 Imagine a hungry band of primates
 that come upon a patch of sweet potatoes
 that are heavy in these steroids.
 It would raise holy havoc with their reproductive cycle.
 It would interfere with menstruation, ovulation,
 lactation, fertility.
 And human genetic history is the story
 of many such encounters with mutagenic influences
 in the environment, most of them catastrophic, detrimental,
 lethal.
 But in some few cases, there would
 have been solitary results, advantages conferred
 upon the animals that accept these new foods into their food
 chain.
 And I want to particularly emphasize psilocybin
 because I believe it's the key.
 You see, we're looking for some kind of factor
 which could have exploded the human brain
 size at a rate 10 times faster than evolution normally
 takes place.
 So it's going to be an unusual situation, perhaps
 the need to throw a boulder a distance accurately,
 or perhaps contact with an unusual food item or drug
 containing plant.
 But it was something unusual.
 If it weren't unusual, it wouldn't
 have taken this planet a billion and a half years
 to bring forth its first intelligent species.
 Well, so let's look at psilocybin
 then in a little more detail.
 It has a number of properties not specifically related
 to its psychoactivity that make it an ideal candidate
 for a catalyst for the emergence of consciousness
 in an advanced animal.
 First of all, and at the early stage
 of human invasion of this new grassland environment,
 proto-hominid invasion I should say, we were testing foods.
 We would certainly have tested this food.
 I've seen these things the size of dinner plates
 in the Amazon after a rain.
 And they are silvery with blue and purple shading.
 They are the most dramatic thing in the environment,
 whether you know anything about them as psychoactive agents
 or not.
 Certainly, they would have been tested for food.
 I've seen baboons in Kenya investigating cow pies
 and flipping them over because beetle grubs nestle
 underneath them.
 So cow pies are a natural vector for hungry baboons
 so that everything is in place.
 It's trivial to suggest otherwise, I would maintain.
 OK.
 The first quality of psilocybin, which isn't specifically
 related to its psychoactivity, is
 that in small doses, doses that are the kind you might obtain
 if you were just sort of eating it along with little roots,
 grass roots, small bugs, so forth and so on,
 visual acuity is improved.
 Specifically, edge detection is improved.
 Well now, it seems to me you don't
 have to be a rocket scientist to figure out
 that if you're in a highly competitive evolutionary
 environment in grassland, an environment characterized
 by large predators hunting cats and also characterized
 by small ungulate prey, that having an increased sensitivity
 to edge movement might make the difference between whether
 or not you live to tell the tale or you become somebody's
 dinner, or it would certainly make the difference
 between going home empty handed and taking dinner home
 with you.
 So a factor which enhanced edge detection on those animals
 accepting that food supply into their food chain,
 they would have a slightly increased chance
 of evolutionary success as opposed
 to the non-psilocybin members of their group.
 And this increased hunting success
 would tend to outbreed the non-psilocybin-using members
 of the group.
 At slightly higher doses, in highly sexed animals
 like primates, all alkaloids are what
 are called CNS stimulants, central nervous system
 stimulants.
 That means that they produce arousal.
 And in sexually extremely active animals like primates,
 arousal means erection, usually in the male, usually followed
 by hanky-panky, what anthropologists
 and primatologists call successful instances
 of copulation.
 Well, again, what is this?
 It's a second factor tending to outbreed
 the non-psilocybin-using members of the population.
 They're now definitely moving to the rear of the parade.
 They don't have as much hunting success.
 They don't have as much food for themselves and their offspring.
 They're not having as much sex, so they're not
 having as many offspring.
 And in terms of rising and falling numbers,
 those that have some allergy, prejudice,
 or fear of the mushroom are just being shunted out
 of the breeding population.
 Well, at still higher doses, approaching effective doses
 of 20 milligrams or more, in other words,
 4 grams dried and up or 45 grams wet and up,
 hunting is out of the question.
 Sex is something you can consider,
 but it's out of the question.
 And you are basically nailed to the ground in a state of mind
 which we, for all of our sophistication,
 our logical positivism, our superconducting super colliders
 and all the rest of it, haven't a clue as to what it is,
 what it means, what its implications are.
 The full-blown psychedelic experience
 of which we can only speak in terms of religious herophany,
 epiphany, apocatastasis, and all those other great Greek words,
 ataraxia.
 In other words, we like it, but we don't understand it.
 And it is, therefore, the basis for religion.
 Well, so right there, you have a three-step process
 driven by nothing more than hunger and curiosity that
 leads remote primate ancestors to a confrontation
 with what Rudolf Otto called the holy other, the holy,
 the numinous, the transcendental.
 And this is on slightly less firm ground,
 but in my own personal experience
 and having collected psychedelic experiences lifelong,
 I feel confident in saying that at high doses,
 psilocybin causes glossolalia.
 Glossolalia is syntactically structured,
 language-like behavior in the absence of meaning.
 Speaking in tongues is what Christian fundamentalists call
 it, but they don't have a monopoly on it.
 It's ancient.
 It occurs in all cultures.
 It's shamanic.
 And what it is is it's a kind of neurological seizure
 where linguistic organization spontaneously is verbalized.
 No animal does this.
 It must have something to do with the acquisition
 of language by human beings.
 And what I think is going on is that probably language
 was entertainment long before it was meaning,
 that it's a kind of tuneless singing,
 and that having discovered that we could make
 an almost endless repertoire of small mouth noises,
 we did this for each other, for amusement, for to pass the time.
 I mean, God knows there was a lot of it.
 And it probably was very late in the evolution of this ability
 that some very tight-ass, irrational type said,
 you know, we could attach a specific meaning
 to a specific sound, and then every time I made that sound,
 you'd know what I meant, and then you
 could go and get it for me.
 You see?
 It's a sort of-- it's the as long as you're up,
 get me a grants theory of language.
 So that's the basic idea.
 And I really believe that sometime in the last 50,000
 years before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise
 came into existence, a situation in which men and women, parents
 and children, people and animals,
 human institutions and the land, all were in dynamic balance.
 And not in any primitive sense at all.
 Language was fully developed.
 Poetry may have been at its climax.
 Dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy,
 there's no reason to think that these things were not
 practiced as adroitly as we practice them today.
 And it was under the aegis of the boundary-dissolving
 influence of psilocybin.
 We were nomadic.
 We were breeders and caretakers of cattle.
 We worshipped a great goddess.
 We followed a yearly round in a vast grassland cut
 by crystal streams that were washing down out
 of the higher altitudes.
 And we were probably black as your hat for that matter.
 And it was great.
 Well, if it was so great, what happened?
 Well, the very forces which created this situation--
 and you will recall what it was.
 It was the drying of the African continent,
 forcing us out of the trees, forcing us to change our diet,
 forcing us to accept a dung-growing mushroom.
 And there were other factors forcing us
 into consciousness as well.
 When we became omnivorous, the first form of consciousness
 is having the point of view of your prey.
 Predatory animals have the highest form
 of animal consciousness, big cats.
 But it's a consciousness of the exterior world.
 Psilocybin forced us beyond that into consciousness
 of the imaginal world, the world of the imagination
 inside our heads.
 What happened was the mushroom faded.
 The climate changed.
 What had been everywhere became seasonal,
 moved into the rain shadows of mountains,
 became the prerogative of a special class of people
 called shamans who were like the designated hitters for dealing
 with the hyperspace of the mythos.
 In other words, over millennia, the connection
 went from available to everyone all the time
 to ever more tenuous, ever more tenuous,
 finally faded out entirely.
 It's even more complicated than that.
 Because surely people would have,
 as they saw this happening, make attempts
 to preserve the mushroom.
 And in a world without refrigeration,
 the only effective way to do this is preservation in honey.
 You can dry mushrooms.
 But in a world without hermetically sealed peanut
 butter jars, drying is a very short-term strategy
 for preservation.
 The only thing which will really work is preservation in honey.
 The problem there is that honey itself, especially
 aboriginal honeys, which have a lot more water in them
 than what you get in those little plastic bears
 at the A&P, aboriginal honeys are very runny.
 And so what do they do?
 They themselves have the capacity
 for turning into a psychoactive substance, alcohol.
 But alcohol promotes a completely different set
 of cultural values and attitudes than psilocybin.
 Psilocybin is a boundary-dissolving hallucinogen.
 Mead alcohol gives an enhanced sense
 of verbal acuity in the presence of lowered sensitivity
 to social cues.
 In other words, one can make an ass of oneself.
 But now I want to backtrack for a minute.
 I will return to this thing about the loss of the mushroom.
 But there's something that I want to go over with you
 that's really important in all this to me.
 And that is, this isn't simply the story
 of how an intoxicant promoted consciousness,
 and then we fell into history by losing that intoxicant
 and went on to other intoxicants with consequences
 to be evaluated.
 It's that, but it's more.
 Because psilocybin had a very, very peculiar effect
 over and above what I've mentioned so far.
 And it is this over and above effect
 that makes my theory so controversial and so--
 and academics, I think, so phobic of it.
 Because it rips open a whole can of worms.
 And this is the problem.
 All primates clear back to squirrel monkeys and old world
 monkeys.
 All primates form dominance hierarchies.
 This means that the sharp fanged, hard bodied,
 young males control everybody else.
 The women, the elderly, the sick, the children,
 homosexuals, everybody finds their place somewhere
 in this dominance hierarchy run by these dominant alpha males.
 We are no different.
 We also, as we sit here this evening,
 operate under this kind of a social organization.
 I mean, we complain about it.
 We analyze it.
 We are aware of it.
 But we live under it.
 It's how it is.
 So here is my suggestion.
 That what psilocybin did was it changed behavior.
 It interfered with primate behavior.
 Specifically, it interfered with this tendency
 to form monogamous pairs and dominance hierarchies.
 And so the ordinary tendency of the primates
 to organize themselves that way was interrupted, medicated out
 of existence, if you like, vaccinated against,
 if you like, by the presence of psilocybin in the diet.
 And this over-emphasizing or chemical accentuation
 of sexuality occasioned by the arousal of the psilocybin
 was sufficient to dissolve the ordinary tendency
 toward monogamy and replace it with an orgiastic sexual style.
 Or they coexisted simultaneously.
 I mean, who knows?
 We weren't there.
 It's sort of the way I imagine it
 is that at every new and full moon,
 there were group mushroom parties, which basically simply
 got out of hand regularly.
 And so the monogamous pair bond would be under pressure,
 if not completely eliminated.
 Many cultures have this, even to this day.
 I mean, in a sense, Mardi Gras is a festival
 where the rules are dissolved.
 And nobody is supposed to go to their spouse the Monday
 after and say, was that you I saw dressed as Marie Antoinette?
 Because the rules are-- there is permission to break the rules.
 And many societies do this.
 The result of an orgiastic style like that
 is men cannot trace lines of male paternity.
 And so there is a tremendous social glue,
 a tremendous force for the cohesion of community.
 Men don't then think in terms of my children.
 They think in terms of our children,
 the children of the group.
 And under the aegis of this group,
 this polymorphic sexual style, group, child care,
 and extended family rearing, we produced everything
 that we think of as human, that we value-- our art, our music,
 our philosophy, our sense of each other's worth,
 body painting, tattooing, piercing.
 All the accoutrements that distinguish us
 from animal existence were put in place
 when we had a different kind of mind than we have now.
 We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization
 and male dominance and anxiety over female sexual activity
 related to feelings of male ownership.
 That all came later.
 We became human beings in this other world of values
 and psychological attitudes.
 Problem is that, as I say, the mushroom faded.
 But by the time it had faded, we were no longer
 the wordless symbiotes of cattle,
 the barely sentient hunters of the African plain.
 By the time we were finished with the mushrooms,
 we had language.
 We had social institutions.
 But what we began to lose was-- you
 can get as wet-eyed as you want about it--
 but respect for each other, a sense of each other's
 individuality, a sense of love, a sense of community.
 And it must have been, though it happened
 over a long period of time, very much like what
 we're living through now.
 A sense that people are no damn good and getting worse.
 A sense that why can't we be as we once were?
 Where is our sense of each other?
 Where is our ability to care for each other?
 So forth and so on.
 I wrote a book called Food of the Gods,
 in which I tell this story in the first third of the book
 that I've just told you.
 And then I show that what history is, essentially,
 is a careening, out-of-control effort
 to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.
 One of the things that marks us as humans that is unique
 is our obsessions with drugs, our ability to addict.
 We addict not only to substances.
 We addict to each other.
 We addict to ideologies, Marxism, Christianity, skinkism,
 as practiced in Washington, whatever.
 And we addict to each other.
 I mean, I am a romantic with the best of them.
 But I can't help noticing that a broken heart and heroin
 withdrawal show very similar presentations.
 Really.
 Insomnia, sweating, sense of diminished self-esteem,
 hysteria.
 It's very, very similar.
 So a psychologist looking at a person
 with an addictive syndrome will say, well,
 you were damaged in childhood.
 There is some trauma there that you're trying to compensate.
 You're trying to compensate.
 Well, I'm not that keen on all this psychologizing.
 But I do think that we could apply this model to ourselves
 on a grand scale.
 We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb,
 thrust into the birth canal of history,
 and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire
 into the cold, hard world of modern science,
 existentialism, and all the rest of it.
 And we have searched the planet for substances
 which would assuage our sense of pain.
 And there are things out there.
 Alcohol, the whole morphine family, so forth and so on.
 But these things always have consequences.
 There's a price to be paid.
 The very knowledge of psilocybin was lost to the entire planet,
 except for some tribes in the Mexican mountains,
 for several millennia, until Valentina and Gordon Wasson
 went in the early 1950s and found these mushrooms
 and brought them out.
 And then Albert Hoffman, who had earlier discovered
 LSD, synthesized the compound and made it available.
 That was '55.
 Well, by '66, all human research with these things
 had been forbidden.
 It's not that science mowed this field and moved on.
 It's that science has never really been here.
 We haven't looked at the implications of diet
 on early human evolution.
 We don't have a theory for the evolution of consciousness,
 of any consequence.
 And yet, the factors I've laid out for you--
 increased visual acuity, an impact
 on sexual and social behaviors, triggering
 of glossolalia-like phenomena in the presence of a boundary
 dissolving psychedelic experience--
 these are catalysts sufficiently dramatic that, inculcated
 into a cultural style, I think they explain a great deal
 about where we came from and who we are.
 Now, the irony of all of this is that we
 live in a society that has made all practically
 any discussion of this illegal.
 Certainly, if I were to end this lecture by handing out
 doses of psilocybin, I would be gently taken by the elbow
 and led away forever.
 The Western mind is particularly phobic of this subject.
 I mean, we have bent our laws so that people
 can jump out of airplanes in the pursuit of thrills,
 so that they can bungee cord off major highway bridges
 and freeway overpasses.
 So concerned are we to fulfill society's need for thrills.
 But this is something else.
 It provokes all kinds of alarmed reactions.
 And perhaps you believe unfairly.
 I think that when you examine the situation,
 it's possible to understand very clearly why
 this is such a social issue.
 Because what these things do-- if you look-- and now I'm
 slightly broadening my rap to include other psychedelics
 besides psilocybin, but psilocybin is certainly
 true in all cases.
 What these things do, if you had to generalize
 100,000 psychedelic experiences, the ones where people thought
 they were God, the ones where people had to be taken to the ER
 room and have their stomach pumps, all of them,
 if you generalized, what these substances do
 is they dissolve boundaries.
 They dissolve boundaries.
 If you love it, you'll love it.
 If you hate it, you'll hate it.
 But that's what they do.
 They dissolve boundaries.
 Now, the reason this provokes a lot of social anxiety
 is because all societies are about the maintenance
 of boundaries.
 It doesn't matter whether you're a stockbroker in New York,
 a Zen monk in Kyoto, a Hasid in Jerusalem.
 Your society is held together by boundaries and definitions.
 And anything which dissolves those boundaries
 and introduces relativity into cultural modeling
 is felt to be threatening.
 Because we like to believe that our reality is somehow
 sanctioned, that this is how it should be.
 But in fact, that's just a cultural judgment.
 All cultures think that their culture represents
 a sanctioned reality.
 It doesn't.
 It just represents the current download
 of their linguistic enterprise.
 At the core of the Western anxiety about boundaries
 is something that we are very proud of,
 that we believe we invented.
 We call it the ego.
 Sometimes we call it the democratic individual.
 We say no Eastern society could have produced this.
 We took this from the Greeks.
 We perfected it through the Romans.
 We brought it up through the medieval period.
 John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and all those folks
 fixed it up for us in the 18th century.
 Thomas Jefferson ironed out the wrinkles.
 And modern America is the shining example
 of what you can do if you empower the ego, the citizen,
 the individual.
 We want nothing of tribalism, still less of collectivism,
 and God forbid, nothing whatsoever
 to do with communism.
 See, all these things set us going.
 But in fact, the ego is appropriate only
 to a certain point.
 I mean, yes, we need egos so that when
 you take someone to dinner at a reasonable restaurant,
 you place food in your mouth, not their mouth.
 This is what the ego is for.
 It tells you who pays.
 But in fact, what the ego is is the return
 to consciousness of this psychic structure related
 to the patterns of dominance.
 And the way I think of the ego is
 it's like a cyst or a calcareous growth
 or a tumor that gets going in the personality.
 And if not treated, it becomes chronic.
 And then there is no cure.
 There can only be a certain amount of maintenance
 and medication of it.
 But it's incurable, except unless we
 resort to not only non-prescription drugs,
 but drugs currently illegal.
 In other words, the psychedelics,
 through this boundary-dissolving function,
 dissolve that boundary as well.
 And so they promote a larger sense of the world
 than the values of capitalism, competitiveness, object
 fetishism, property acquisition, and the bottom line, empower.
 So the issue, as was always sensed since the '60s forward,
 I think, is not simply an issue of religious freedom
 or an issue of an eccentric minority social practice being
 tolerated by the majority the way they tolerate handing out
 pamphlets in airports or something like that.
 The issue is, in fact, what kind of people shall we be?
 And then what kind of society shall we put in place?
 And that's why my theory of evolution
 is not simply a dry footnote on an issue that
 involves anthropologists, primatologists, and biologists.
 But it turns into a political issue.
 Because our unhappy, addicted, ego-driven condition
 has become not simply the source of our own unhappiness--
 that was bad enough-- but now it's
 the source of great discomfort and dislocation
 for all life and human society on the planet.
 We are out of control.
 We are basically severely addicted to things
 and cannot stop ourselves.
 And we know, or we should know, that there is not
 enough petroleum, heavy metal, so forth and so on,
 in the planet to give all the thing addicts all the things
 that we know they must have in order to be happy.
 We have spread this intellectual virus from pole to pole,
 to Turkmenistan and Barneo, to the upper Amazon
 and to the Tajiks.
 Everybody wants kids.
 Everybody wants the pause that refreshes.
 What are we going to do about this?
 Well, so far, we've been treating it
 like an endless garden party.
 There's no serious plan on the table to deal with this at all.
 I think that the momentum of human history
 is pushing us inexorably toward some kind of day of reckoning,
 in which we are either going to have to turn consciously
 toward brutality and selfishness and say, well, let India go.
 Let Bangladesh go.
 Triage costs too much.
 Can't possibly fix the problem.
 In order to maintain our locked compounds
 and our 50 channels of television
 and the endless availability of arugula,
 we have to let India go.
 We're going to have to turn that way.
 In other words, each consciously participate in a choice
 to brutalize the human enterprise.
 Or we're going to have to seriously talk
 about very major restructurings of our society.
 And I don't really know how we do that.
 I was living in Northern California a couple of years
 ago when they wanted to close an airbase near here.
 And the newspapers were filled with weeks,
 for weeks, with analysis of whether Western civilization
 could absorb this hammer blow at the very heart
 of its institutions of closing one friggin'
 airbase, for crying out loud.
 That's not my idea of major change.
 We may have to give up some of our pretty things.
 We may have to discipline some of the irresponsible social
 philosophies that run amok among us.
 And no, I don't mean the advocacy of psychedelic plants.
 I mean the Roman Catholic Church's position
 on population control in the third world.
 I mean, the Germans take quite a knock for the Holocaust.
 But the Catholic Church manages to push more people
 into death, disease, and degradation every year
 than the Holocaust managed in its entire show.
 And it's thought rather crass to even mention the fact.
 It seems to me, as long as these Catholic bishops can
 show their face in public, that we are in complicity
 with mass murder.
 It's not pleasant news, but what are you going to do about it?
 Islamic fundamentalism, another bunch
 of knotheads with an anti-human agenda.
 What are we going to do about this?
 Are we going to go gently into that good night
 of planetary chaos, extreme distortion of class structure,
 defense of what we have at any cost
 against those who have nothing?
 There doesn't seem to be any other plan on the horizon.
 Arthur Kessler, who probably never thought
 he would be quoted by Terence McKenna,
 very conservative character.
 You'll recall he was a Marxist who turned on Marxism
 and led a very interesting intellectual life.
 He wrote a book 30 years ago called
 The Ghost in the Machine.
 And he made a case similar to mine, but a little simpler.
 He observed, human beings are hardwired for homicide.
 This is what we do best, because this was something
 we had to do, apparently, at some point in our past,
 at least in Kessler's view.
 He didn't believe in a mushroom paradise.
 But he reached the same conclusion
 that I have, which is we need a pharmacological intervention
 on antisocial behavior, or we are not
 going to get hold of our dilemma.
 And there have been dystopias based on drug intervention,
 on aggressive behavior.
 You all remember Brave New World,
 where every time anybody raised their voice,
 they were given a gram of Soma and told,
 a gram is better than a dam.
 And so nobody ever had a thought in their head.
 Well, that's a terrible drug.
 Let's not introduce that.
 Uh-oh, the bad news is we've had it for decades.
 It's called television.
 We have millions of people in larval, low-awareness lives
 in their little condominium apartments,
 just ladling this garbage into their minds.
 The average American watches 5 and 1/2 hours of TV a day.
 So imagine how much time these people watch.
 I mean, to think of that as human at all,
 if that were a drug, we'd be up in arms.
 If people were loaded at home with that level
 of mental condition, day after day after day,
 we would do something about it.
 So I can't propose a grand solution.
 But I do think that it is pregnant with implication
 that here at the end of the 20th century,
 with all of these problems hammering down on us,
 the news comes from the rainforests and the deserts
 that these aboriginal people, while we made the descent
 into history and got the top quark
 and planted the flag on the moon and all that,
 they kept the faith.
 And they have a materia medica, a toolbox,
 that can carry us back into a connection with the planet.
 Now, the question might be asked,
 do you have such overwhelming faith in what is, after all,
 a substance, a drug?
 I mean, don't psychedelics just cause
 you to see pretty pictures and patterns
 and tally up your gains and losses,
 and then you come down and that's it?
 And the answer is no.
 What is mysterious here-- and I mentioned it
 in the early part of my talk-- what is mysterious here
 is this thing we call the psychedelic experience.
 Those people nailed to the ground
 around the campfires 50,000 years ago,
 they didn't know what it was.
 And when we go in there, armed with our Heidegger
 and our Husserl and our Wittgenstein and our Merleau-Ponty,
 we don't know what it is either.
 There has been no progress in 60,000 years
 in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity.
 It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible
 to us as it was to them.
 Well, what is that?
 As secular people, we rarely experience religious awe,
 especially of the uncontrollable sort.
 I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so
 central is that it is a connection
 into a larger modality of organization
 on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you
 up to the mind of nature herself.
 The planet is not just a hodgepodge
 of competing species.
 That's the old evolutionary model.
 That's been obsolete for decades.
 The new evolutionary model is that where we see species,
 nature sees only a gene swarm, genes moving at various speeds,
 being transferred around, a large percentage of them
 by sexual propagation, but a large percentage of them
 by asexual and vegetative propagation,
 and still others by more exotic methods of propagation,
 such as go on in the fungi and the bacteria.
 The world is a gene swarm.
 And people like Lin Margolis and James Lovelock
 have been suggesting for years that the earth is
 a kind of thermostatic self-regulator.
 Well, if you carry that idea far enough,
 thermostatic self-regulator is a way
 of saying a kind of computational engine,
 a kind of computer, a kind of mind, a kind of mind,
 the Gaian mind.
 The reason those mushroom-eating, orgiastically
 behaving people worshipped a great horned goddess,
 the reason they imaged the numinous other as feminine
 was because they had a connection
 into a kind of overarching intelligence
 that they instinctively and intuitively felt to be feminine.
 And we retain this in our languages
 as the idea of mother nature and the femininity of the land
 and so forth and so on.
 But it's just become a distant metaphor to us.
 I think our intelligence is a source of toxicity to nature
 and discomfort to ourselves, unless our values are
 based on planetary values, are linked
 to the values of the rest of nature.
 And that means we need to fit ourselves more appropriately
 into the scheme of things by limiting our numbers,
 by limiting our extraction of natural resources
 and toxification of the environment.
 We need to realize that there is a hegemony of life
 on the planet, not necessarily a hegemony of intelligence.
 Intelligence is not a license to trample.
 The proper role of intelligence in a planetary ecology
 is that of gardener, caregiver, and maintainer of balance.
 Well, so where do we go?
 And what do psychedelics have to say about that?
 Well, I believe that psychedelics show us
 something which capitalist, consumer, fetish-oriented
 society doesn't want us to know.
 What psychedelics show us is the incredible richness
 of our minds, that you, little you,
 can produce more art in a 20-minute burst
 of hallucinatory intoxication than the Western mind has
 produced in the last 500 years.
 Our socially created space is incredibly impoverished.
 We have Picasso's contribution and Pollock's contribution
 and everybody's contribution, but it altogether
 is as nothing compared to the richness that
 resides in each one of us, a half inch behind your eyebrows.
 We are told, oh, well, if you want beauty,
 you have to own a Lexus.
 Or if you want a sense of satisfaction,
 then you need a triple car garage, on and on.
 This is absolutely not true.
 These are substitute addictions that will never
 satisfy for the genuine article.
 And the genuine article is a connection
 in to the Gaian mind.
 Well, I don't believe or expect for a moment
 that ever again, naked, tattooed, and joyous,
 we will herd our cattle across the grasslands of Africa.
 I mean, there are six million of us.
 That chance has been blown.
 But what can we do to ameliorate our situation?
 Well, I have always been an optimist.
 I'm more optimistic right now than I
 have been for a long time.
 Because sometimes when you're an optimist,
 you're an optimist simply on principle.
 You believe it's going to turn out all right,
 but you don't see how it possibly could.
 I'm beginning to see how it possibly
 could turn out all right.
 And my notion is, first of all, I
 follow in my thinking about shamanism,
 and I follow the great historian of religion,
 Mercille Illiard, who got it almost all right,
 except that he never embraced psychedelics.
 He thought they were decadent.
 But that was just his French European education,
 and he came too early.
 But anyway, Illiard wrote a book called "Shamanism,"
 and then he subtitled it "The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy."
 Now, he wrote the book in French.
 In French, technique has a connotation
 that it doesn't have in English.
 It means both a way to do things, and it means technology.
 Later, the French sociologist Jacques Goulul
 wrote a book called "Propaganda."
 And the little banner under which
 his book flew, which is printed right on the frontispiece,
 is he says, there are no political solutions, only
 technological ones.
 The rest is propaganda.
 And then he spends 200 pages explaining
 what he means by political solutions,
 technological solutions, and propaganda.
 By Goulul's understanding, I agree.
 I think ideology is toxic, all ideology.
 It's not that there are good ones and bad ones.
 All ideology is toxic, because ideology
 is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.
 I mean, if you adopt some ideology-- Leninism, Mormonism,
 it doesn't matter-- then you have all the answers.
 You just go and look in the catechism.
 Well, I don't know why they issued you a brain.
 They could have just given you the catechism.
 Technology, as the counterpoint to ideology,
 is a very different animal.
 Now, right now, we're going through a technophobic phase,
 because people think technology means exploding nuclear power
 plants and irradiated food and TV.
 But all technology really means, in the McLuhan sense,
 is the extensions of man, the extensions of man.
 And so language is a technology.
 Shamanism is a technology.
 Psilocybin is a technology.
 And certainly, the internet is a technology.
 It's slowly, I think, dawning on a number of people
 that if we're talking about hallucinogens
 as consciousness-expanding drugs,
 then the only difference between a drug and a computer
 is that one is slightly too large to swallow.
 And our best people are working on that problem,
 even as we speak.
 The drugs of the future will be much more like computers.
 The computers of the future will be much more like drugs.
 And I think what we have to recognize
 is that we are in a very brief and low-energy technical phase
 in technology.
 Basically, we're at the tail end of the petrochemical steam era.
 And where we are headed is toward the solid-state,
 fiber-optic, global community of the internet.
 And when I was in San Francisco two weeks ago,
 the buzz was all about VRML, the virtual reality markup
 language whose protocols are being set now,
 so that we will be able to build websites on the net
 that you can put on your helmet and walk around in.
 Sun Microsystems is about to introduce something
 called Hot Java, which will let you build and interact
 with your website without going through your server.
 Bandwidth is broadening as we speak.
 The whole world is being brought into the domain of electricity.
 And you may not know it, but Marshall McLuhan
 thought that this was the descent of the Holy Ghost.
 As a convert to Catholicism-- he sort of
 went the opposite direction of me--
 as a convert to Catholicism, he decided
 that the descent of the third person of the Trinity
 and the worldwide spread of electricity
 were the same event.
 So I think that what we have to do
 is dematerialize culture in every way possible.
 And that means pharmacologize culture, computerize culture,
 network culture, virtualize culture,
 and make of it, thereby, a tool for the production
 of our poetic flights, a technology for the putting
 in place of our dreams as exhibits
 that we can show each other.
 This is what it is.
 This is what technology can be in the service of boundary
 dissolution.
 In the service of boundary maintenance,
 you get hydrogen bombs and sarin.
 In the surface of boundary dissolution,
 you get psychoactive substances and the internet
 and sexual experimentalism, social justice, tolerance,
 and community.
 And the choice is to be made on an individual level
 by each and every one of us.
 I don't advocate a mass outbreak of psychedelic use.
 I think these things are a private matter.
 The only thing comparable to them in our human experience
 is our sexuality.
 And that's a private matter.
 How we define it, how we express it, how we act it out,
 who we do it with, what we think about it,
 and what we choose to say in public about it
 is all in our hands.
 I do not think that the government,
 under the guise of some phony, alarmist,
 pseudoscientific rhetoric, should
 attempt to control the evolution of consciousness.
 After all, if these things truly are consciousness expanding,
 it doesn't take too much intelligence
 to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that
 is causing our flirtation with extinction
 and planetary disaster.
 If there is any way to raise consciousness-- diet, drug,
 machine, sexual practice, mantra, yantra, whatever it is--
 we should be furiously exploring and applying it.
 Because if we should fumble the ball,
 if we should actually-- where our ancestors,
 over thousands of generations, did not fail,
 if we are to fail, the magnitude of the tragedy
 will be immense.
 Because failure is not inevitable.
 It is not inevitable that we should fail.
 There are ideas, personalities, technologies,
 available right now, which, if honestly explored
 and implemented, could rescue the human enterprise
 from the disgrace that hovers over us.
 We don't want this to end in a toxified garbage
 pit ruled by Nazis, which is the way we may well be headed.
 The Gaian mind has always been there.
 Nature, originally, through the plants and shamanism,
 provided the tools for us to access
 this incredible natural database.
 Through the vicissitudes of history,
 previous generations lost the key in Western society.
 Since the 1960s, the key has been re-found.
 It's a matter of great social controversy.
 It's a matter of great risk to those who take it,
 how they will be viewed by their peers.
 But there is no longer-- ignorance
 is no longer an excuse.
 Anthropology, in the last 100 years,
 has laid at our doorstep the tools
 necessary for an archaic reconstruction of society
 and human values within that society.
 It's inconceivable that Western industrial capitalism could
 run on another 500 or 1,000 years.
 It will not continue as it has.
 It will deteriorate under the pressure of resource scarcity.
 And what few democratic values we have obtained,
 what little space for reasoned discourse has been created,
 will be the first to be swept away.
 So it's very, very important that people take back
 their minds and that people analyze our dilemma
 in the context of the entire human story,
 from the descent onto the grassland
 to our potential destiny as citizens
 of the galaxy and the universe.
 We are at a critical turning point.
 And as I say, the tools, the data
 that holds the potential for our salvation is now known.
 It is available.
 It is among us.
 But it is misrepresented.
 It is slandered.
 It is litigated against.
 And it's up to each one of us to relate
 to this situation in a fashion that
 will allow us to answer the question that will surely
 be put to us at some point in the future, which
 is, what did you do to help save the world?
 Well, I'll knock off now.
 I'll sign books.
 We'll take like a 10-minute break.
 And then we'll come back and do questions.
 Thank you very much for your attention.
 [APPLAUSE]
 And that, in fact, what we are involved in here
 at the end of the 20th century is
 some kind of accelerated forward escape into transformation.
 And when I lecture that subject, I more or less
 imply that it's inevitable.
 In other words, it's not that we have to do x, y, or z,
 that it's on track.
 I think it is on track.
 But I also think there's a place for the kind of politics
 we discussed this evening.
 Because as the world gets crazier and crazier,
 a lot of people are going to get very, very anxious.
 This thing in Oklahoma City is an example
 of people getting anxious.
 So what needs to be done is to spread the idea
 that anxiety is inappropriate.
 It's sort of like we who are psychedelic
 have to function as sitters for society.
 Because society is going to thrash and resist and think
 it's dying and be deluded and regurgitate
 unconscious material and so forth and so on.
 And the goal and the role, then, for psychedelic people,
 I think, is to try and spread calm.
 I'm very convinced that things are
 going to get a lot nuttier than they are.
 And they're a lot nuttier now than they have been for a while.
 But it doesn't mean the bad people are winning
 or that we're going to fumble the ball or anything.
 The mushroom said to me once, it said,
 this is what it's like when a species departs for the stars.
 It's a birth thing.
 It's complicated.
 If you had never seen a human birth
 and you came around the corner of a building
 in your daily round and it was happening,
 it vibrates medical emergency.
 I mean, blood is being shed, tissues stretched.
 It doesn't.
 You really have to have your chops together
 to step back and say, how wonderful, new life coming
 into the world.
 Because that's not the vibe of it.
 And I think that's the circumstance that we're in.
 This is the birth canal to a new order.
 And at the moment, it looks like suffocation, constriction,
 limitation, possible death.
 But we need to inform ourselves and get a big perspective.
 And there's no way to get a big perspective like education
 and psychedelic experiences.
 If we can see history for what it is,
 it's a 25,000 year, nearly instantaneous transition
 from one state of being to another.
 And yes, there are 1,500 generations
 of people who live in that paper thin transition time.
 But when it's over, it's over.
 And we will leave history behind the way
 you dump used placenta, I'm sure.
 Yeah.
 I wonder, is there any reliable information
 on the relationship between psychedelics
 and early Christianity?
 Reliable information on psychedelic use
 in early Christianity?
 The answer is no.
 I mean, there is a book by John Allegro
 called "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross."
 He was a very respected Dead Sea scholar
 till he wrote that book.
 And that basically finished his career as a classicist.
 He says some incredibly provocative things
 in that book.
 To judge whether he's right or wrong,
 you would have to be an Assyrian philologist, about which I
 know nothing.
 So to the layperson, it seemed to be quite an impressive book.
 But apparently to his specialist colleagues,
 it was sloppy thinking and a travesty and reason
 to deny tenure.
 Saint Augustine was a montanist before he-- no,
 he was a Manichean before he converted to Christianity.
 And he mentions that Manicheans forbade the use of mushrooms,
 the eating of mushrooms.
 He doesn't say the use of mushrooms.
 But the ancient Middle East, we don't know very much
 about psychedelic sacramentalism.
 It may have been there.
 It may not have been there.
 Absence of reference is not proof of absence
 because of cult secrecy and other factors like that.
 We do know that the-- or we feel we're on firmer ground
 in saying that the Greek mystery religions emphatically probably
 were psychedelic, especially the Eleusinian mysteries,
 the mysteries which were practiced
 on the plain outside of Athens every year
 for over 2,000 years.
 And everybody who was anybody in the ancient world
 made the journey to Eleusis to celebrate the greater
 mysteries, which were celebrated in September.
 Interesting approach to psychedelics there.
 You could only legitimately participate
 in the mystery at Eleusis once in your life.
 So imagine if you had a single high-dose psychedelic
 experience under ideal conditions, in other words,
 in darkness, under the care of experts.
 And then the rest of your life, you
 had to sort it all out based on what happened that one evening.
 It was extraordinarily powerful for the ancient world.
 Eventually, it was destroyed.
 Alaric the Visigoth, who was a barbarian,
 but that didn't stop him from being a convert to Christianity.
 Alaric the Visigoth burned Eleusis on his way
 to North Africa to burn other things.
 Yeah.
 I was wondering, Terrence, if you'd
 had a chance to read "The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger
 Penrose, I think.
 It's an argument against the idea of AI,
 artificial intelligence.
 And whether you were able to follow his argument,
 because I would take it that you'd probably
 be opposed to his argument.
 I haven't read the book.
 I like Roger Penrose's early work.
 He's saying artificial intelligence is impossible.
 Yeah.
 Based on-- and he goes through the Turing--
 and I heard you bring it up once.
 The Turing test.
 The Turing test for artificial intelligence.
 And he also brings in the incompleteness theorem.
 Oh, Gödel's incommensurability thing.
 Maybe a little on that.
 A little Gödel, please.
 [LAUGHTER]
 In 2/4 time.
 Well, I don't have a particularly strong opinion
 one way or another on AI.
 I certainly think computers can be a lot more intelligent
 than they are before we settle the question of whether they
 can pass the Turing test.
 You all know the Turing test is this test.
 Alan Turing was a mathematician.
 He figured it out during World War II.
 And it's basically, if you call x on a telephone
 and you can't tell whether x is a person or a machine,
 then x passes the Turing test.
 And every year, they have Turing tests
 where judges converse by telephone
 with computers and people and try and decide
 which are the computers and which are the people.
 And it's still pretty easy because the people
 exhibit exasperation, incorrect information,
 misinterpret the question, so forth and so on.
 There are some wild thinkers out there, far wilder than me.
 If you want to read a wild book, read Hans Moravec's book,
 Mind Children, The Future of Human and Artificial
 Intelligence.
 There is a book.
 And I'm having a memory lapse here.
 Help me out.
 Tipler.
 I said, help me out with a memory lapse.
 You don't have to read my mind, for God's sake.
 Yes.
 Thank you, Creon.
 Tipler's book is the end of all speculation
 where artificial intelligence is concerned.
 I think machine-human interfacing is very important.
 I think that the debate about whether a computer can
 think like a human being is kind of not very interesting.
 Computers think like computers.
 Already, vast amounts of what we call human society
 are entirely run by machines, including
 very important financial sectors, market decisions,
 resource extraction decisions, inventory resupply decisions
 that feed clear back from the warehouse to the mine.
 In other words, machines say how much tin should be extracted
 and at what rate, and therefore, to a certain degree,
 say who should come to work and who shouldn't on certain days.
 A lot of design work of circuitry,
 engineers will simply tell a computer what the circuit
 should do and leave the actual architecture of the circuitry
 to machine decision.
 This means more and more parts of the human world
 are being given over to machines to design.
 But when you see how much of the world
 looks like the arrival concourse of an international airport,
 having computers design the world might not be a bad idea.
 Definitely, computers figure in our future.
 I mean, I wasn't joking when I said drugs and computers
 are migrating toward each other.
 I can imagine a world-- and this is not the ultimate world
 by any means-- a world five, six, seven years in the future
 where the equivalent of today's advanced Macintosh
 would be something you glue on your thumbnail
 and communicate with that way.
 And beyond that lie enormous computational and data
 accessing abilities that may be accessed through implants.
 We're going to have to decide how much of the monkey
 we want to take with us into the future.
 We don't want to take the homicidal killer.
 We don't want to take the male dominator.
 But it would probably be a mistake
 to leave the body entirely behind.
 After all, the body gives us our orientation in the world
 and our sense of ourselves as somehow
 co-extensive with animal life.
 But how much of what we call human is really human
 is going to be a major topic for discussion
 from here to the end of time.
 Yeah, in the back.
 Two questions on ecstasy.
 Number one, what's your take on MDMA
 and what's the optimum grounds to take
 to achieve sexual ecstasy?
 Sexual ecstasy on ecstasy?
 [LAUGHTER]
 Sexual ecstasy on mushrooms.
 Oh, on mushrooms.
 Oh, I see.
 Well, first about MDMA.
 Well, there is no doubt that from here to the end of time,
 whether it be 18 years or 1,000 years away,
 science is going to produce more and more psychoactive drugs.
 There are psychoactive drugs on the shelf
 now waiting for human testing and government
 approval around the world.
 We cannot explore the brain.
 We cannot explore neurochemistry without these drugs
 being a natural consequence of this program of research.
 MDMA is a psychosized amphetamine,
 like MDA, like mescaline, which is a naturally occurring
 compound of this type.
 In the hands of a skilled psychotherapist,
 MDMA leads to conflict resolution,
 insights into relationships, this sort of thing.
 I'm not entirely convinced that it's the silver bullet
 for these conditions.
 Every drug that has made its way onto the alternative culture
 scene has first billed itself as a love drug.
 That's an unfailing market ploy to get a drug
 to the forefront of public attention.
 Cannabis was sold to us as a love drug.
 LSD, psilocybin, ebogaine, MDMA is no different.
 MDMA does promote a certain kind of empathy,
 not a whole lot of vigorous sexual activity.
 In terms of what dose of psilocybin
 leads you into a sexual rather than a visually acute
 or visionarily extatified situation,
 I would say for a 145-pound person, probably two
 to three grams is this agitated, sexually active,
 or if no sex is happening, maybe dancing and drumming.
 In other words, thoroughly aroused, busy, active dose.
 As the dose rises, activity slows.
 And finally, you just want to sit down.
 And then finally, you just want to lay down.
 And then you're into the other phase.
 Behind you, there was another question.
 Yeah, I was going to say that John Lilly has
 an interesting speculation about the future possibilities
 of solid state entities in this autobiography of a scientist.
 But I was really curious if you have anything
 to say or know about the credibility of the author
 William Cooper, who wrote a book called The Gold and the Pale
 Horse.
 Do you know that book?
 This is the Flying Saucer debunker.
 [INAUDIBLE]
 And isn't he the one who said that he
 was the CIA guy for a long time?
 [INAUDIBLE]
 Well, this is slightly off the track,
 or might seem to some people to be slightly off the track.
 I don't know William Cooper's book.
 I regard that whole Flying Saucer thing
 as a civil war in a leper colony.
 But I do think, having been like probably most of you,
 very interested in flying saucers from the time
 I was a kid and I grew up when it was all happening,
 a couple of years ago, I accepted an invitation
 for the first time to go to a Flying Saucer conference.
 If you've never been to one and you're
 interested in flying saucers, go.
 You will have more insights into the phenomenon
 in a conference like that than in 10 years of studying it.
 Because what's perfectly clear is
 that these people are self-selected for gullibility.
 It's not their fault. It's just that
 the ticket through the front door is, would you believe
 this, would you believe this.
 I think probably what happened, historically speaking,
 is that in 1947, when the first UFOs were seen,
 it was a weird world.
 The explosion of the atom bomb, the work
 toward the hydrogen bomb, people didn't
 know Einstein and Truman and all this.
 They didn't know what it really meant.
 They thought that it is conceivable
 that the solar system is monitored.
 And it is conceivable that this is the switch which
 turns on the monitor and brings attention.
 I mean, they were in awe of the atom bomb.
 And they realized they were tampering with cosmic forces.
 And then, at this moment of cosmic awe and realization
 of tampering, they begin to get reports of spacecraft
 entering the skies of Earth and interacting with human beings.
 Well, what they did-- the CIA had just been founded in '48
 and so forth and so on-- what they did
 is they put a lot of time and effort
 into infiltrating all these groups that claimed knowledge
 of what was going on.
 And as a survivor of the new left,
 I can tell you when the government gets interested
 in infiltrating-- I mean, two out of every three members
 of SDS was a government informant
 at the height of its membership.
 So I believe that what happened was
 these flying saucer groups were massively infiltrated
 by the government in the course of its pursuing
 its constitutional obligation to maintain the public welfare.
 And by '54 or '55, the government
 was perfectly convinced that whatever flying saucers were,
 they did not pose a threat to the integrity of the air
 defenses of North America.
 And that was their real concern.
 But bureaucracies are weird creatures.
 They really exist only to perpetuate themselves.
 So at some point inside these agencies,
 they must have had to face the fact
 that they had massively infiltrated
 a bunch of very flaky people.
 And now their choice was to either end the program,
 tell the budget people that, no, they
 wouldn't be needing that $10 million this year,
 or keep going with it because they now
 had a group of people self-selected for gullibility.
 And that group of people became the victims
 of every chemical experiment, weird technology, propaganda
 experiment, and so forth and so on,
 because their friends and relatives had already
 written them off as completely untrustworthy.
 Who would believe them, no matter what story they told?
 So I really felt I was among severely damaged people.
 And it wasn't their fault. It's that they
 had become part of something that
 had become part of something that
 had become part of something.
 And they never really had a fighting chance.
 Do strange lights haunt the skies of Earth?
 You bet their booties they do.
 But the flying saucer cults are a social phenomenon
 and largely unrelated to whatever this anomaly is.
 Yeah.
 [INAUDIBLE]
 the femoralization of technology.
 Do you think there will come a time
 when we are indistinguishable from our technology?
 And would that be sort of apotheosis
 that you speak about in your books?
 No, I think it would go the other way,
 that we're moving toward a time when our technology is
 indistinguishable from us.
 In other words, I don't want us to all
 turn into 7,100 ADAV.
 That doesn't seem like a good idea.
 But on the other hand, I could imagine as a hopeful scenario
 a future world of, let's say, 500 or a billion
 healthy, happy, well-fed people of all races,
 political persuasions, gender preferences, and so forth
 and so on.
 And those people would essentially
 live as our archaic ancestors did,
 very little material culture, very nomadic.
 But if you could transport yourself
 into the body of one of these people,
 you would discover that when they close their eyes,
 there are menus hanging in space.
 In other words, the computer that
 was on the back of the thumbnail, five years later,
 that computer moves into being a kind of an implant,
 a black contact lens that is sewn into your eyelids at age
 six, so that when you close your eyes,
 you're actually looking at an interface.
 And the entire database of the culture
 could be placed there.
 You see, really what computers are doing
 is they're making what we call the collective unconscious
 conscious.
 All data, all images are potentially
 accessible through the network.
 And I'm still getting used to the idea of the network
 myself.
 Like I keep thinking, oh, I have this timeline.
 I could get somebody's chronology
 and put it at my website.
 And then I remember, no, no.
 All I have to do is point to their website.
 I don't have to copy or move anything.
 If there is one list, that's all the world needs.
 Anybody else who needs that list can point to it
 from their website.
 So the speed at which new structures can be created
 is astonishing.
 I mean, almost literally overnight,
 you can build a website and begin
 to point at other websites and bring resources into yours.
 This is a technology which is going to turn out to not be
 what people think it is.
 It's going to be a technology for showing each other
 the inside of our heads, for showing each other our dreams.
 One thing I didn't talk about in the main part of the lecture
 is that psychedelics are catalysts for language.
 They speed up and catalyze the language formation process.
 And a culture cannot evolve any faster
 than its language evolves.
 And it cannot be any more glued together than the bandwidth
 that its languages will tolerate.
 And so what this technology that is putting in place
 is going to mean is the way in which it will dissolve
 boundaries is by making us transparent to each other.
 I mean, I can imagine a child of the future.
 We all bring home our drawings to stick on refrigerators
 and things like that.
 In the future, we won't stick them on refrigerators.
 We will stick them in our website.
 And everything will go into our website.
 And by the time we're 25 or something,
 our website will be the size of the American
 Museum of Natural History.
 And you can wander through it.
 And as a gesture of intimacy, you
 can invite someone else to wander through it.
 Well, that's who you are.
 It's your imagination.
 And I think, in a sense, I've said at times
 that the cultural enterprise is an effort
 to turn ourselves inside out.
 We want to put the body into the imagination.
 And we want the imagination to replace the laws of physics.
 With these technologies, we can probably do that.
 But it'll have to run on psychedelic design principles,
 or it's certain to be a mess.
 Yeah.
 Yes, what could you tell us about the problems
 that some people experience with the digestibility
 of the mushrooms and how it can lead to pain and some discomfort
 and sometimes to a nightmarish type experience?
 Well, first of all, let me say this.
 There are several mushrooms which contain psilocybin,
 which grow in cow dung.
 What I urge people to do, if you're serious about this,
 is to grow your own.
 This is moderately self-serving, because I
 wrote a book about how to grow your own mushrooms.
 But there are many such books.
 You don't have to buy mine.
 You only need it if you want the best one.
 But you see here, and Stamets's book is excellent.
 And if you want to go large scale,
 Stamets's book is the one.
 But let me say something then.
 After the brain, the stomach is the most heavily
 innervated organ in the body.
 And anxiety has a way of cropping up as a stomach ache.
 So a lot of people have anxiety in the first hour
 of taking mushrooms.
 And they believe that something in the mushroom
 is giving them gastric distress.
 It really isn't.
 It's more like a case of butterflies on an empty stomach,
 because you should take mushrooms on an empty stomach.
 You can try a suppository.
 You can try another drug if you want.
 But there is, in this psychedelic business,
 something to be said for simply disciplining your hind brain.
 Also, you can suppress nausea with cannabis.
 So a mixture of self-discipline, pharmacological, steering,
 so forth and so on.
 If you have a severe reaction to the mushroom,
 you probably shouldn't take it.
 I mean, after all, it is a fungus.
 And as mammals, we have developed
 some pretty strong allergenic reactions to fungi, some of us.
 And certain reactions to psilocybin
 are not psychedelic reactions, like enormous sweating
 or something like that.
 That's more an indication of an allergy.
 If you're going to get into psychedelics,
 one of the things you have to do is learn your way around.
 Psychedelic sophistication doesn't
 mean you took everything there is in combination
 with everything else there is at high doses
 with your friends at rock concerts.
 It means that you figured out what worked for you
 and then really put the pedal to the metal.
 You know?
 Yeah?
 I recently came across David Henson's work
 on corbidly rearranged monatomic elements.
 And he found that these monatomic heavy metals conduct
 the active superconductor to conduct light and force
 through our nervous system.
 Are you familiar with his work at all?
 No.
 You've stumped the star.
 I mean, I'm interested in organic superconductivity
 and room temperature superconductivity.
 But I don't know his work, so I can't comment on it.
 It's fairly new.
 He said he's going to be coming out
 with a book in six to nine months called Ormes, O-R-M-E-S,
 Ormes, which is Ormally Rearranged
 Monatomic Elements.
 I'm sure it will find its way to my desk.
 Now all these hands.
 Oh, he should be the guy, you tell me.
 All right.
 How much of our consensus reality
 do you think is based on inexorable physical laws,
 things that aren't of our own creation?
 And how much, if any, is subject to change without notice,
 simply based on a consensus belief of what should be
 or what is going to be?
 How do you think things work?
 Well, I mean, this is sort of where I'm at.
 I mean, as you were asking the question,
 my tendency would be to say none, that none of our reality
 is based on inexorable physical law.
 But I only want that to be true.
 I'm not sure it is true.
 He had this thing about what he called stubborn facts.
 And he said there are some stubborn facts.
 And you can cut your philosophy any way you want.
 But if you don't take account of the stubborn facts,
 you'll have a problem.
 A lot of reality is made of language.
 How much, I'm not sure.
 But my hope is that a great deal is made of language.
 Rupert Sheldrake, who's a good friend of mine,
 and we sort of think along the same lines,
 he believes that there are not inexorable physical laws,
 that there are just very old habits.
 He would think of the speed of light as a very old habit.
 These physical constants may be changing.
 We don't know.
 I mean, take the speed of light.
 We've measured it on one planet since 1906
 and cheerfully extrapolated to every corner
 of the known universe with no sense
 that there might be a problem there at all.
 Yet, if you're a critic of this, you
 can look at the speed of light as measured from 1906,
 and you will notice that the values have been slowly
 going up.
 It's apparently going slightly faster
 than it was a century ago.
 Well, people just dump on that and say, no, no, you poor moron.
 You don't understand.
 It's that the instrumentality has become more precise,
 and so the measurement may have changed slightly.
 Oh, yeah?
 Well, it seems to me in that case,
 the points should cluster.
 How come the more recent ones are faster than the earlier
 ones consistently?
 In other words, it's not that we're
 getting measurements which cluster around a value.
 It's that we're getting measurements
 which are going out this way, toward faster.
 I think language is the key to making reality.
 I think our language is a very weak language.
 Computer languages may be more powerful, VRML or mathematics.
 But I believe the world is made of language.
 That's the magical belief.
 But then the challenge to that belief is, OK, wise guy,
 so how come the world isn't the way you say it is?
 Well, that's ungenerous.
 I think because it doesn't work quite like that,
 consensus is set by societies, by millions of people.
 Reality is a phenomenon of many linguistically operating
 subsystems.
 Maybe if you and I were stranded on a desert island,
 we could get a reality going.
 We probably could, but it would surely
 be shattered when somebody showed up
 to take us home again.
 Over here.
 Why would one be the only ones that use the mushrooms?
 And secondly, is there any written documentation
 of this mushroom paradise?
 The documentation-- well, there wouldn't be anything written,
 of course.
 It's earlier than that.
 But the documentation-- it is well known
 that the Sahara was wetter in the past,
 even as recently as Roman times.
 Pliny called it the breadbasket of Rome.
 And we know that human populations were out there.
 In the Tsele Plateau of southern Algeria,
 there are rock paintings, rupestrous paintings,
 that show shamans with mushrooms sprouting out of their bodies
 and in their hands.
 So we have mushroom use.
 We have evidence of mushroom use at the era
 of the great-horned Paleolithic goddess.
 The presence or absence of monogamy and polygamy
 is debatable.
 However, the archaeology of this area
 has not been well studied and won't be soon.
 Thanks to Islamic fundamentalism,
 Algeria is no place to do archaeology right now.
 Now, to the first part of your question,
 why was it human beings who ate the mushrooms?
 Well, to use the mushrooms as a doorway to higher intelligence,
 you would have had to already come a certain distance
 down the path of higher animal organization.
 We were bipedal.
 We had a pack signaling repertoire.
 We had binocular vision.
 And the reason we used the mushrooms
 was because we were under nutritional pressure.
 There may have been other animals
 under nutritional pressure, but they
 may have been more tightly bound to their original diet.
 Or they may simply have had behavioral organization
 that the mushroom couldn't dissolve or break through.
 There has been talk among evolutionary biologists
 about if there were no primates on this planet, what
 order of animals might occupy the conscious niche
 or be able to come in there?
 And interestingly, raccoons are candidates.
 Raccoons have well-positioned eyes.
 They have a very complex hand.
 And years and years ago, I used to grow mushrooms.
 And I grew them by my own method, naturally, in jars.
 And I would have waste rye infected with jars.
 And jars infected with mycelium-permeated rye.
 And I would put it out on the back porch at night,
 or I did once.
 And I awoke in the middle of the night to this terrific racket.
 And there were raccoons on the back porch.
 They could smell the rye infested with the psilocybin
 containing mycelium.
 They could unscrew the lids and plunge their mitts
 into this stuff.
 And as I turned on the lights, I saw
 these little bandit faces with this mycelial crumbs
 on their little upturned muzzles.
 And they wouldn't back off.
 [LAUGHTER]
 They would-- and the other thing was,
 they were standing up on their hind legs.
 So they were standing on their hind legs, holding a jar,
 holding the stuff, and tottering toward me.
 So I just took one look and backed off.
 And for the rest of the evening, you
 could tell that they were approaching
 the orgiastic boundary.
 Because the carrying on, the sexual squeaking and squealing
 and thumping and pounding going on in the backyard