[APPLAUSE] Well, this talk-- how many of you were at the Whole Life Expo yesterday? How many of you bought a quartz crystal there? [LAUGHTER] We need to hold the line on one each-- one person, one crystal is, I think, a reasonable way to handle the destruction of the tropical rainforest that is going on to allow the airlifting of crystalline silicon to Malibu. So be aware that if trees die, that these objects find their way into our hands, which reminds me that-- and I'll remind you-- this is a Botanical Dimensions benefit. Botanical Dimensions is a non-profit corporation that Kat and I founded, and Rupert Sheldrake, and Ralph Messner, and Ralph Abraham, and Leo Zepp. Some of you may know Leo. He died recently. He was on our board. And what we do is we preserve plants with a history of human usage, especially ceremonial usage. Understand what I'm saying? [LAUGHTER] And no one else in the world is doing this at the moment. The World Wildlife Foundation, and Earth First, and these very large conservation organizations are-- their approach to the ecological crisis in Latin America is to preserve huge tracts of virgin forest, which is a very laudable and necessary thing to do. But even more fragile than the rainforest itself is the web of relationships and information that the traditional people living in the rainforest have evolved within it. They have a medical knowledge and a pharmacopoeia whose age has to be estimated in millennia. And if we do not act in the next 25 years to preserve this information and the plants that it is about, it will be lost forever. And we're talking immune stimulators, antibiotics, neurotoxins, hallucinogens, flavorings, foods, the entire gamut of gifts from vegetable nature, many of them in the Amazon, are in danger of being lost. Naturally, the focus is largely on the plants of shamanic usage because knowledge of their use is even more endangered because it rests in the hands of fewer people. These shamans are not training new generations of apprentices largely. The younger men are going off to the sawmills and to work in the large cities that have sprung up along the Amazon. And if we don't preserve this information, it will be lost. So this is what your money is going toward. We have a 19-acre site on the big island of Hawaii. And there we gather plants from all over the world and grow them there with no [INAUDIBLE] that they be available then for people who want to do research. And that can be straight academic research. It can be homeopathy. It can be shamanism. It can be aroma therapy. We're not judgmental. We just want to make this biological material available. So arts decided that we would call this Places I Have Been. And I immediately added the caveat. Hopefully, that means both in my mind and on Earth. So maybe I'll add an example of what Botanical Dimensions does, which ties in with the travel theme. I was on assignment for a magazine in January. And I went to southern Thailand. In fact, it's an amusing story. You may notice I'm wearing very trendy, yuppie rags from the Banana Republic. Yeah, well, clap fast, because the Banana Republic is being dissolved into the gap, which is basically a ghetto cheater. And the genius behind Banana Republic wanted to have a travel magazine. And he decided that he would call the travel magazine Trips. I have to smile. And he further decided that he would have a monthly column, which he wanted to call Our Man in Nirvana. And believe it or not, I was asked if I would like to be Our Man in Nirvana. Well, actually, I said I had to think it over and discuss it. But it was like a dream come true. Can you imagine a situation where all expenses paid, you roam the world looking for the most beautiful places? And when they publish, you get $1 a word. And when they don't publish what you write, you get $0.25 a word, which is more than most magazines pay when they publish. So I went to southern Thailand on this assignment. By the way, since this happened, the magazine has gone defunct. It had one issue. It's not the first time that I have stowed away aboard the sinking ship. But to the botanical point of the story, which shows you the kinds of adventures and courage and dedication that Botanical Dimensions brings to bear on its task, I was in Thailand, naturally. And you access Thailand through Bangkok. And I had read in Richard Evans Schulte's book, The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens, about a plant called kratom. And it said it was illegal in Thailand. Well, friends, Thailand is the source of one third of the world's heroin. It is the destination of most of the sex tours that originate in Frankfurt and Dusseldorf, places like that. In other words, they run pretty loose scene in Thailand. And here, this plant is illegal. And I thought, well, this is pretty amazing. What's going on? So I was staying with an art dealer friend. And he had the Thai wife. So I put the problem to her. And she said, yes, oh, yes, the most degenerate people know all about this. And knowing my friend, I said, well, then you must have some [INAUDIBLE] in touch with this. And so we put out the word. And lo and behold, we got samples of this plant, rootstock. And it was very hush-hush. And everyone was either giggling or looking at us with thin, hard expressions as we scored this plant. And we now have it. It is now growing in Hawaii. It is available for certified biochemists and biochemical researchers to determine what this thing is. What we learned as we made our way toward it was why it's illegal. It's illegal because it inhibits and interferes with heroin addiction. [LAUGHTER] So who knows if this is true? But say it were true. Well, that means this is ethnobotanically one of the great coups of the decade. And it explains, then, why the Thais are of such an ambivalent state of mind about it, because it's poised like a dagger at the heart of their economic life, if it's real. So this is the kind of thing that we're involving. I saw a review article recently on over 120 plants of African origin that have immune-stimulating properties. Well, in the age of AIDS, every clue, every claim concerning plants which stimulate the immune system should just be run to ground. I would think that would be a very reasonable strategy, along with the millions that are being spent in other ways, to work on this problem. And in fact, from my brother Dennis, who's at NIMH, we've obtained seeds of a number of these immune-stimulating plants and are growing them out in Hawaii. The mention of Dennis causes me to think I should tell you Dennis and his wife Sheila had their first child just over a week ago, Beth de Merrill. So the tradition will not die. [LAUGHTER] This is not yet a doomed house. [LAUGHTER] Normally, you hear me rail about psychedelics, and there will be a question and answer period. So you can probably bathe me into that. But I will actually treat seriously the theme of places where I've been. Because when I went to Thailand in January on this travel writing assignment, and I went on to Goa, south of Bombay, I was shocked and disappointed, really, to see how few Americans are on the road. It is apparently something which is not happening for Americans the way it is for Europeans. The German mindset is completely fixated on overseas travel. Everybody works like a dog 10 or 11 months out of the year, and then they go as far away from Germany as they can get. They really go far. The island of Koh Samui, Goa, all of these places, and the Australians as well. And my commitment to psychedelics, as I have had to define it for myself for speaking to groups like this, is really a commitment to the primacy of direct experience. I think we are endlessly ripped off and impoverished in this society by being denied the opportunity to validate our own felt presence, the immediacy of our own being. We sell it out to the TV. We sell it out to the great life we're going to have after we quit working 16 hours a day. We sell it out to all kinds of ideals that then turn us into their puppets. And of course, psychedelics mitigate that very strongly. They dissolve programming and break up habitual behavior patterns. But strangely enough, so does travel. And this may be why there are so many kids on the road. Of course, it may be because they're all indicted. [LAUGHTER] We have to be reasonable, perhaps, to the people. Nevertheless, they seem to take very well to the road. And when you go traveling in these exotic places, and then you return to the folks back home, one of the weirdest experiences you can have is for someone to say to you, oh, were you gone? Was I gone? [LAUGHTER] I barely escaped having my head shrunk in the jungle to Sarawak. [LAUGHTER] Oh, I haven't seen you around. I guess you haven't been around. The point of the story being that a body in motion seems to stretch the temporal dimension incredibly. So that if you put yourself into a situation where every night your head hits the pillow in a different place, you're living at about 10 times the speed of your office-dwelling colleagues back at home. And it's a cliche that travel is the best education, but it's really only a cliche to the people who stay at home. [LAUGHTER] It's absolutely the truth. There is nothing which dissolves your behavior patterns and your assumptions and your bowels. [LAUGHTER] [INAUDIBLE] in remote third-world countries. It is actualizing the metaphor of the quest, you see. It's actually taking upon yourself the heroic role, as the Jungians define it, the role of the hero, and going out into three-dimensional space and time on a mission for a reason. As a traveling freak years ago, we always had great contempt for tourists. A tourist is ipso facto a person who has "I am irrelevant" written across their forehead. I mean, it's a sappy notion, basically, to be a tourist. So what you must be in the travel adventure, I think, is an agent on a mission. And we always did it that way. We were always after something-- a plant, a tonka, a meeting with the BBI guru of some sort, a drug, or an artifact of some sort. And then you have this mission. You can behave in this wonderfully cavalier way that sets you up for adventure. You arrive in the capital city of country X. Do you want to see the cathedral? No, thank you. Do you want to see the National Art Gallery? No, thank you. We just want to get whatever it is. And by moving that way, the sense of high purpose and mission, nature responds. One of the little aphorisms that the mushroom has passed along over the years, and I think it's true, is nature loves courage. [INAUDIBLE] Nature loves courage. And I thought for a moment, and I said, how does nature respond to courage? And the answer came back immediately by removing obstacles. That's how nature treats the courageous, by opening doorways, by moving you along. It's the old fools rush in where angels fear to tread sort of idea. So my travels began for me really seriously in 1967. I was fed up with America, uncertain about the draft. And I had it, basically. I was living in Berkeley, where they were beating on our heads every night, smelling tear gas, didn't leave the streets. And I was with a woman, and we decided that we would emigrate to the Seychelles Islands. We had a book called An Encyclopedia of the Islands of the World. And I knew what the requirements were. It had to be tropical, English had to be understood, and it had to be remote. And I had never heard of the Seychelles Islands. Now they're a very cheeky sort of travel destination. But at that time, it was Mars. And so we set out. And she was Jewish, and we were young. And so I received a summons from her father here in Los Angeles, who wanted to discuss our plans. And I was prepared for anything, but he was a wonderful person, actually, a dear man. And he said, I'm not going to put on you what you call a trick. I just have one request. The Seychelles are on the other side of the world. Therefore, you could go via Hong Kong in the Far East, or you could go via Europe and Israel. It's my wish that you go by way of Israel. I said, done. Can I go now? [LAUGHTER] And this was October of 1967. The war, the '67 war, was fairly cool. And the plan was, by the time we got to Israel, we had far less money than we thought we would ever have. And the government of Israel was so interested in promoting immigration at that point that they had a deal where if you worked on a kibbutz or a moshav for six months, they'd give you an air ticket anywhere. So Stephanie was decided to stay in Israel and go to Mosha Balmgor on the Sea of Galilee and follow me to the Seychelles in six months with the ticket that she would earn this way. So I went on to Africa. And she fell in love with the guy in the next bunk. [LAUGHTER] And they forgot my name. [LAUGHTER] Well, you're a goodie. Absolutely. So-- but it was very funny, because I didn't want to linger in Israel. I was on a mission. Everybody around me was caught up in the Zionism and the aftermath of the war and this and that. And here I was an Irishman. And when people asked me where I was going, I said the Seychelles Islands. And they're like, what does that have to do with it? And so I went to what my guidebook described as Eilat, Israel's bustling southern port. Well, I discovered that at that time, one boat a month of the Zim Line, which was the Israeli state freight line, came in there. And so I realized I was stuck there for a while. And I discovered in the dry arroyos, washing down to the Red Sea, the most amazing collection of freaks-- Colombians, Danes, fed up kibbutzniks, Bedouins who had run away from-- all of these people sitting in this place dedicated to the notion that you should smoke as much hash every day as you possibly can. And they had a wonderful technique which beats anything I've ever seen. You know how in India you smoke a chila? And it's a ceramic cylinder. And you mix the hash and tobacco, stuff it in, and hold it with a wet claw and do this number. OK, so what these guys were into was you take a-- preferably a Dr. Pepper bottle-- and you break it on a rock near the bottom. And then at that time, Israel's smallest denomination coin was called an agaroth. And it had-- it was like a gear. It had deep indentations in from the edge. So you could take a one agaroth coin and drop it into the neck of this Coke bottle or Dr. Pepper bottle and then just work up a mass of stuff about like this. So that when you fired this thing across the surface, you had a burning surface-- [LAUGHTER] --the size of a small pancake. And these guys would-- [LAUGHTER] --absolutely flakking you out. So I did that for a while. [LAUGHTER] And by the time I got to Kenya and made my way to Mombasa, which was the place where this boat was that was going to take us to-- to take me to Seychelles, I thought maybe I should dry out a little. But I had scored in Mombasa from the Shushan Boys, this outlandish black camp. But I took the boat to the Seychelles. And I was there a couple of weeks. And I arranged a small house out on an island which was almost like the island in the cartoons, the one tree island. [LAUGHTER] It wasn't quite that small. But there were about 50 families on this island, all spoke Creole. And there were coconut trees on this island. Every coconut tree had a number painted on it in white paint. And there were 2,115 coconut trees on this island. So I was there to write a book and to wait for Stephanie. So I decided that I had been smoking much too much coming through Israel and down through Africa. So I took this lid and I nailed it above my kitchen door. And I said, I won't smoke until I finish this book. And I will set myself a regime. And I will work every day. And I did. I'd get up every morning, fry my eggs, feed the stray dog, be at the typewriter at 8. I would work until 2 in the afternoon, come to Calorie High Water, and I would brew tea and amuse myself. And it was terrible. I was insomniac. I was-- my dreams-- I was both insomniac and my dream states were completely out of control. And I wrote this book. And it was called Cryptorapt, Meta-Electrical Speculations on Contemporary Culture. [LAUGHTER] And it ran to like 220 pages. So as I was closing in with the end of this book, I began to think-- and I began to think about the lid nailed over the door. Finally, I decided that my gift to myself would be to get really stoned when this book was done. So finally, the book was done. The index was done. It was all done. I was just sitting there. And I had my little evening meal. And then I rolled these enormous bombers. I dragged my lawn chair out into the concrete. And the lagoon was latching in there. And I smoked a couple of these things in short orders. I was just waiting for this wonderful sense of relief and accomplishment and so forth to sweep over me. And this abyss began to grow in my mind. I kept pushing it back, saying, no, relief. [LAUGHTER] We're calling relief. Calling relief. And finally, I had to look at it. And it was a realization which grew over about 15 seconds from the faintest whisper of suspicion to an absolutely incontrovertible certainty. And it was the knowledge that this book I had written was the most outlandish garbage. [LAUGHTER] Dirty, submarine, self-congratulatory, prolax, insulting, overwritten. And I was like frozen. Because, friends, this was true. [LAUGHTER] True. So then I realized, you're nuts to try and navigate without this stuff. Because it just makes you-- being straight makes you into a moron. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] There's a whole family of one-liners like that. One is, reality is for people who can't handle drugs. [LAUGHTER] The best version of that I ever heard was something which I thought Tim Leary had said, but I asked him recently, and he couldn't remember ever saying it. Of course, he's a brain demon. [LAUGHTER] Tim once said, LSD is a drug which has been known to cause psychotic behavior in people who don't take it. [LAUGHTER] So that was really my first foray out into the world. I went back to Bombay, and then back to Berkeley. And by that time, it was early 1968. And I got back to Berkeley just in time for the street uprisings of May and June and July of '68, which really was the-- that was the cauldron of my generation. I don't know how many of you were there the night we burned the Bank of America. These great-- [LAUGHTER] [INAUDIBLE] [LAUGHTER] [INAUDIBLE] When I first started public speaking, I had the illusion that you all were there, and that I was talking to the same people, and that we were that tight. And suddenly, I realized there are people in this room who weren't born, probably, the night that went down. Anyway, I was in Berkeley all that summer and fall. And some of you may remember S.I. Hayakawa, who was a later political opportunist, who, at that time, was cutting his way to power as president of San Francisco State. And there was a very radical strike action against San Francisco State throughout September, October, November. It really was a standoff. Every day, we would riot. Every day, they would call out the tax squad. And then we would do it the next day, and then take off two days on weekends. And what finally ended it was Christmas vacation. It was never a resolution. But it was really a crazy scene. It was one of the most Orwellian things I've ever seen, because San Francisco State has a big quad with square cubical buildings on all four sides of it. Well, the tax squad, intelligence people, the FBI, and the CIA, who knows who, would put their observers up on these rooftops. And they were filming with telescopic cameras and all this. And obviously, they also had closed circuit TV, because you never saw Hayakawa. You never saw him. But there were these huge loudspeakers mounted on the corners of these buildings. And they would hold rallies. And the Black Panthers would speak. And some guy would get up and say, now, you all know why we're here. We're here for business. And the Business Administration Building was one of the building theories. He said, we're here for business. And the crowd would just begin moving toward the Business Administration Building. Meanwhile, the cobblestone walkways were suddenly mobile in the hands of the crowd. And you could hear Hayakawa's voice saying, you're clearly escalating. You're clearly escalating. And then the tax squad would sweep in and so forth and so on. And it was just bedlam. Well, finally, Christmas vacation ended there. And the next day, as I was leaving my apartment in the hills behind Berkeley, I noticed this guy in a car with a funny license plate and a clipboard mounted on a little stand so you could write while you drove. And he seemed to be taking a lot of interest in my comings and goings. So I told my friend that I thought we had shot our wad and reminded him that the first duty of a revolutionary is to survive. And so we bought air tickets to Luang Prabang, Laos, but Hong Kong. And went to Laos and then on to India. And then back to the Seychelles. There was a possibility at that time of getting real estate in the Seychelles. And it was really all that traveling in Asia which pointed me toward my eventual interest in psychedelics and the Amazon. Of course, I knew about LSD because I went to Berkeley in that decade. But I didn't really understand that these things had been used for 15,000, 25,000 years, that there was this rich history that was, in fact, the world's oldest religion. It's interesting to read the press of the '60s, even the underground press like the San Francisco Oracle, and see what themes were not present in the '60s consciousness. They were either absent or rarely mentioned. The theme of shamanism was absent or rarely mentioned. Nobody had connected up the notion that there was this tradition like this. The notion that UFOs and disempowering extraterrestrial intelligence might have something to do. Remember how it was presented as an aesthetic experience by one school. That was the school where you listened to the Boppebe Meiner Mass and looked at paintings by Caravaggio and Rembrandt. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. And then the other school was the psychoanalytic, this is good for you even though you hated school, which is just-- well, I think there was something to be said for that, actually. But anyway, in traveling around India and keeping my wits about me, I became very, very cynical. And if those of you who follow me fairly closely know that I am no friend of the guru racket. That I think if what we're out for is self-empowerment and increasing our own self-authenticity, then the first step in the process is not to give over your loyalty to some BBI weasel from Bengal. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] And I went to these guys. I mean, I was open-minded. I took yoga very seriously. I practiced it. I studied the Hindu metaphysics. The reason I was most in nature, the longest, was to study the Tibetan language. And so I was not a know-nothing physician. But I always said the same question. What can you show me? And the best thing I ever-- nobody could ever show me really anything. I said, well, you're obsessed with materialistic effects. [LAUGHTER] That's right, uncle. And if you don't have any, I'll be moving on. [LAUGHTER] Because they had the idea that I would like to sweep the ashram courtyard for a few years before they laid on the skinny. And the other thing was I noticed that these guys were as dedicated to smoking hash as I was. It clued me that they couldn't have cornered the market on transcendental consciousness too thoroughly. And so I-- well, the most impressive thing I ever saw-- and I respect the Mahayana tradition very much. I think it's a deep psychological insight into what humanness is. But I don't think they have a doorway into hyperspace. I don't think anybody has a doorway into hyperspace except psychedelic shamans, whether they live in Redondo Beach or Bukalpa or Central Africa. So then I realized that these traditions were simply that. They were vitiated traditions. And that all of this talk about paranormal abilities could be traced back to earlier strata. And the earlier strata always have the same word written on it-- shamanism. That was it. The pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet-- shamanism. The roots of Taoism-- shamanism. The roots of the Vedic civilization-- shamanism. The ancient Hebrew civilization-- arising out of shamanism. So forth and so on. So then I said, well, where in the world is shamanism happening today? Well, the answer is many places. But in its most authentic and intense form, it's happening in the Amazon basin. And it is based on the use of plants to which an almost symbiotic relationship has been formed. And as quickly as I could arrange it-- and my brother's thinking was evolving along these same lines-- we found our way to South America and went to Bukalpa, went to Iquitos, went to Puerto de Guisano in Southern Colombia. And there, the same challenge that caused so much discomfort to the yogins and the bhikshus and the bhikshunis and the geshes and the roshis and the rishis didn't seem to bother these cats. I said, what can you show me? And he said, well, look, let me put an edge on my machete and we'll go out here half a mile and cut some vine and brew it up. And then I've got this other plant growing in my dooryard. And my grandfather showed me how to do this. And we'll just put it together. And there it was. The thing which is our birthright as a species, but which the powers of profane secularism would deny us. I mean, some of you may have heard me say yesterday, it's very clear, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Well, we've interpreted that to mean the right to run over the other guy on the way to getting your claws on your third Mercedes. But that isn't really it. The untrammeled permission which we have given capitalism to cheapen our values is not what the notion of the pursuit of happiness means. It means the pursuit of existential authenticity means the pursuit of meaning in the world. Well, it just so happens because we are the descendants of these primate and proto-hominoid and hominoid populations that have this symbiotic relationship to plants and to vision. And so that is the source of their spiritual life. It is, therefore, not only our birthright, but it is the natural path for us to take. You see, this thing of drugs is simply a language game. What we are are omnivorous animals. And we are also sensual animals. Most animals aren't either of these things. Most animals eat one thing or a few things. But to be an omnivorous animal willing to eat fruit, roots, meats, eggs, shellfish, nuts, and so on, extremely unusual. And then to have an interest in flavoring, in shifting things the way things taste, for that I would say, this is a quality of consciousness. And we are unique in possessing it. And the current fixation with drugs, which states it as a new phenomenon, is completely misrepresenting what is going on. Throughout history, human populations have had their societies, their religions, and indeed, their entire cultural machinery sculpted and created in response to the kinds of foods, spices, drugs, and medicines that they were involved in. Think, for example, of the impact of coffee on the evolution of modern European industrialism. How the office worker and the coffee habit are mutually reinforcing activities where one could probably not function without the other. When coffee first made its appearance, it was served in very sleazy bars where loose women and pretentious intellectuals hung out together and criticized the Enlightenment and got so rattled that they would just talk all night. That was what a coffee was until it was understood that what it really is is speed. And it lets you do the job. And then the modern office culture came into being. Think of the manipulation of opium policy by the British East India Company in the Far East. How many people are aware that the island of Java, which has the densest population per square mile of any large area in the world, has that large population because the Dutch in the 19th century paid people to have children because the sugar industry was so labor intensive. So in order that white sugar could grace the tables of upper class Europe, the demographics of an entire section of Southeast Asia were just plunged into hell. The examples are endless. Tobacco, the influence of the Eleusinian mysteries on the development of Greek philosophy, the way in which the CIA used heroin in the 1960s to quell the revolts in the ghetto, so forth. And so on. These are just typical examples of this. Well, I digress slightly. I mention it because I think it's important for us, as people with a core interest, to be as articulate, a spokesman and a spokespeople as we can be, because we are living through a kind of hysteria, the equivalent of the Great Red Scare of 1919. What people need to realize, what this society needs to realize, is that the pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position because drugs, as defined by the establishment of cocaine, heroin, and so forth, reinforce unexamined, machine-like behavior patterns, obsession, and a narrowing of consciousness down to a single focus. The acquisition of the drug. This is the exact opposite in all cases psychedelics do. Psychedelics dissolve social programming, break up habitual behavior patterns, and incline you to the broadest sort of perspective possible. Which they see as an even greater threat, I think. That's precisely why the psychedelics are swept up in the hysteria about the hard drugs. The government is making lots of money on hard drugs and keeping a lot of people under its thumb. The psychedelics, by being deconditioning agents, are just like bringing in gasoline to a bonfire. You're absolutely right. That is the nature of the controversy. That it lifts you out of the ritual genuflection to the idols of the tribe, consumerism, workaholic behavior patterns, duties, and the whole gamut of bourgeois ideals that has made us such a poverty-stricken culture. So thank you very much for being here. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING] To obtain information about this tape or to request a catalog containing hundreds of other audio and video recordings from the cutting edge of cultural evolution, please write Sound Photosynthesis PO Box 2111, Mill Valley, California. Or browse our website at sound.photosynthesis.com. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music) {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.65 sec Decoding : 3.16 sec Transcribe: 2636.05 sec Total Time: 2639.86 sec