All right, why don't we sort of slowly roll into this.
 I'm always amazed that so many people can get their act together on a Sunday morning.
 I know, what happened to the complacencies of the penoir and all that.
 Okay, I have a couple of announcements.
 First of all, I think you found on your chair when you came in a sound photosynthesis order
 blank.
 That's if you're just dying to have more tapes of lectures.
 They have a huge selection, more than anybody else, and you can deal with that.
 There's a sticker on those things that begins with the words HTTP.
 Those who know, know that this is a website address, and those who don't know soon will.
 So if you want to check out sound photosynthesis website address, that's the URL, the universal
 resource locator, which I wish I had one now.
 Okay, in case I forget, remind me at the break, and David will be here to help, that we'll
 go over the paper requirements for the folks who are going to do a paper for this class.
 And I think that's that.
 Oh, there you are on time as promised.
 I was just saying that at the break we'll go over the paper constraints.
 Well, I don't want to spend the whole time this morning in Q&A, but we'll do it for a
 few minutes to let stragglers find their way in.
 And then I'll flail you with my agenda for a while.
 If there are...
 Oh, yes.
 I'm curious about the other internet websites that have access to technology, especially
 mobile.
 Oh, that's a good question.
 There are a number, first of all, the alt.drugs conference.
 Most people know about this.
 There are thousands, a couple of thousand people participating in that, and it's now
 fragmented into alt.psilocybin, alt.psychedelic, alt.mescaline.
 There's a whole subset of those.
 If you don't like news groups, there is an email conference.
 Anybody here in that email conference?
 Well, I can't remember.
 I was in it.
 But the problem with these email conferences is you think, "Oh, great.
 I'll meet some people interested in what I'm interested in."
 You join and the next day there are 80 messages in your email and you spend hours a day pouring
 through the email.
 I just joined a conference where I get dispatches from the front in Chiapas, including all the
 latest statements from subcommandante Marcos.
 I just picked up the mail.
 There were 130 messages, half in a language I barely read.
 But there's a lot of action on the net.
 I have a website, too, but I'm not going to give out the public number yet because it's
 not cool enough yet.
 It's more like a construction zone with yellow ribbons strung around and a sign which says,
 "Someday something really cool will be here."
 That's how a lot of the internet is.
 It's a vast, vast construction zone.
 But that's probably enough on that.
 If you're using the internet, you should use it more.
 If you're not using it, you should really put that at the top of your agenda because
 it's going to become increasingly indispensable as a part of your cultural toolbox.
 I have to pay 35 cents a minute to reach the internet because I'm on a cellular modem from
 US Cellular at 7200 baud and I still spend far more time and money than I should there.
 Yeah.
 I was wondering, are there any other methods that you've explored in society to reach that
 whole dimensional stage that foundry-less mention we were talking about, like sensory
 deprivation, anger, and mental agents, and myopathy, that anything where you tap into
 the same?
 Well, this question always comes up and my answer is the answer of a fanatic and a purist.
 Not really.
 I mean, the best substitute for psychedelics, which takes a lot more time, energy, and dedication,
 is penniless travel in Asian countries.
 But it's not nearly as pleasant and the risk to your gastrointestinal tract is orders of
 magnitude greater.
 It's an interesting question.
 And I may be a special case, more lumpen than others.
 I mean, naturally in this business all the time I meet people who say, "I hallucinate
 all the time.
 I don't understand what the excitement is about."
 Well, it's a very hard thing because you either have to say, "You don't know what I'm talking
 about," or you have to define yourself ever after as an impoverished individual with a
 genetic constitution that places this out of your reach.
 If I had psychedelic experiences not in the presence of psychedelic substances, I would
 be alarmed.
 I'm not shooting for being high on the natch.
 Why?
 When the substances work perfectly well and being high on the natch indicates a physiological
 situation that may be problematic or could be problematic.
 I practiced yoga and silent sitting and I find all these things very, very interesting
 but pretty non-competitive with psychoactive.
 One of the things that was so astonishing to me when I first got into all this, my original
 impulse at university was toward art history.
 Well, art history, you study the evolution of style and motif over space and time.
 That's basically what it's about.
 A good art historian has a fairly complete inventory of world style, which I felt I did.
 Well, then I took DMT and it was absolutely unfamiliar.
 I could make no comparison.
 It wasn't like Tibetan tantric painting.
 It wasn't like Amazonian bark cloth painting.
 It wasn't like Jan van Eyck.
 It wasn't like Hieronymus Bosch or Jackson Pollock or anybody else.
 I thought, how extraordinary.
 If you take the Jungian view that the function of artists is to explore and communicate the
 unconscious to the rest of us, then how bizarre that 3,000 years of Eastern and Western art
 and nobody passed very close at all to the DMT space.
 That's why, and yet it is without contest, I think, a Niagara of orgasmic beauty.
 I mean, if I had to say one thing that DMT is, it's alien beauty.
 Well, if the purpose of art and those who follow Aristotelian and Platonic aesthetics
 believe that the purpose of art is the communication of the beautiful, well, why is it then that
 so little of this has been communicated?
 I mean, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that at the peak of a psychedelic experience,
 you see more art in a half an hour than the human race has produced in the last 1,000 years.
 You, little you.
 Well, the relationship then of the individual to genius is very puzzling.
 Any one of us, if we could just get the door jammed open, would then become a Duchamp,
 a Da Vinci, in other words, a major formative force on their contemporaries.
 I'm hoping we'll be able to do that with virtual reality.
 I mean, I see virtual reality as a technology that will allow one person to show another
 the contents of their mind, and that when we get the cross-fertilization and creativity
 that will flow from that, we'll create art that will make everything done to this point
 look like scratchings in the dirt.
 I mean, at least that's my hope.
 Yeah?
 [INAUDIBLE]
 I'm wondering what, then, do you think the role of women is in all of this transformation?
 Do you feel that women somehow are always here, men are coming up to that level, and
 women are going no further?
 Because as somebody that, let's just say, has dropped into that hundreds of times,
 I can assure you that I'm not waiting around for someone to catch up.
 If a man catches up, then I can go to prison.
 Well, nobody ever put it quite like that before.
 So you get points for that.
 They put it many ways, but not like that.
 I don't think the last word has been said on this subject.
 In Science News last week or the week before, there are 120 anatomical differences between
 the brains of men and women that are not genital-related.
 I think that we're on the brink of a whole frontier of discovering who and what women are.
 They were just thought to be soft boys up until fairly recently.
 And the most enthusiastic proponents of feminism, I think, don't understand how deep a subject
 they've grabbed onto.
 In a way, I would sort of plead guilty to your metaphor that I do sort of see women
 as out of history.
 They are an historical creatures and men invented history, lost themselves in it.
 And femininity, if you want to call it that, Gaian consciousness, if you want to call it that,
 psychedelic spirituality, if you want to call it that, is beckoning, does sort of hold the
 high ground and is drawing history back toward a feminizing archaic mode.
 But race is a phenomenon of groups of people.
 In a sense, so is femininity.
 As an individual, you have to deal with the cards you're dealt.
 And we all have a feminine, a masculine, an androgynous, so forth and so on component
 in our psyche.
 But in a sense, I guess I'm a conservative because I don't see history doing anything
 other than recapturing what once was and which once was definitely under the aegis of the
 feminine.
 Like, for instance, the World Wide Web, this vast technological artifact that's being put
 in place.
 All it is, is a hard wiring of female intuition.
 It's the engineering mentality is catching up with the feminine outlook.
 But your question disquiets me.
 I'm not sure.
 Again, it's important as an individual not to identify with the characteristics of a
 group.
 And it's very tricky because you're constantly dinned into thinking of yourself as black,
 gay, white, poor.
 But those are not really qualities of individuals.
 Individuals are more complex than that.
 I mean, you may have a gay component.
 You may have a black portion of your genetic heritage.
 But don't define yourself as a group.
 That's a trick that was launched by print in the act of creating this peculiar entity
 called the public.
 The public is a fiction of the print created galaxy.
 You are not a citizen and you are not part of the public unless you seriously do damage
 to your humanness in order to fit yourself into such a narrow definition.
 Yeah.
 Since the chemicals act on the brain, females have this huge hormonal swing and wave.
 I find that I have certain experiences during certain times of the month that I would consider
 that a male has a very high rate of hormonal swing and wave.
 And I think that's because the male brain is a very complex body.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's got a lot of hormones.
 It's like step one, but it's never been done.
 Again, how does menstruation affect this?
 How does menopause affect this?
 How does the postpartum chemistry affect this?
 These are easily answered scientific questions
 that have never been looked at because of gender bias
 in the scientific establishment.
 Yeah?
 [Indiscernible]
 That's a very straightforward theory.
 If psychedelics inhibit and compete with testosterone,
 obviously their impact on men is going to be much more profound
 than their impact on women.
 Right there you have a hypothesis.
 [Indiscernible]
 No.
 The amount of research, you know,
 the first psilocybin project is underway now,
 the first one in 30 years,
 and they're just trying to define the basic pharmacodynamics
 of the substance.
 They haven't looked at this stuff.
 I should say to you, you know,
 I'm urging you aspiring young professionals into these fields.
 Let me caution.
 That's because I'm an enthusiast,
 and I want to know the answers to these questions.
 Professionally, it's a life of hell.
 You will not be promoted.
 Your colleagues will look upon you as a freak.
 You will find yourself, you know,
 my brother can talk to this point.
 It's not a pleasant thing to associate yourself
 with psychedelics professionally.
 Yeah?
 I guess something that I feel like you need to take responsibility for
 is the use of words like profound and transformative
 because what is profound and transformative for a male,
 if it's more profound for a male,
 it might be just a different profound and transformative
 that's not on the male scale of what is profound and transformative,
 and I think that it's irresponsible to say
 that it's more profound for males,
 especially when no research has been done
 on the way in which these drugs affect.
 Well, I guess what I meant by more profound
 is that I think the average male is set down further
 from where he started than the average female is
 at the conclusion of a psychedelic experience.
 One of the things--let me mention this,
 as long as we're on this subject.
 This is just throwing this out,
 but one of the things that's always fascinated me
 is the difference between male and female orgasm
 and how male orgasm--
 here's a place where it seems to be reversed.
 Male orgasm seems to lie fairly close to the surface
 and be a fairly unspectacular event most of the time,
 where why is the female sexual response so much more dramatic
 and why is there an orgasmic response at all?
 In other words, many animals don't have such a response.
 You can build an urge--
 you can build a sexual urge into an organism
 without this payoff of immediate experiential fireworks.
 There are species of fish where the female lays the eggs
 and the male swims over them and releases the sperm,
 and that's sex in that species.
 I sense--and I've never been able to articulate it--
 that the DMT flash is very orgasmic in some sense.
 It's somewhat like a full-body orgasm,
 but it has components in it
 which are only encountered otherwise in orgasm,
 and I wonder what this orgasmic response is for,
 what evolutionary role it fulfills.
 It seems to emerge late in animal organization.
 This is not something you trace back to flatworms or something.
 It seems most intensified in the primates,
 and again, I have no answers,
 but I would bet when this is all teased apart,
 the chemistry of orgasm and the neurochemistry of orgasm
 and the chemistry of the DMT flash
 are going to be found to be at least cousins of each other in some sense.
 I wanted to make a comment about the gender issue that's been coming up,
 and I think that in my experience with suicide,
 it has had an effect of healing and bringing back to wholeness, of balancing.
 So if you have too much testosterone, like you probably have,
 or if you have too much of one thing,
 it'll bring you back and direct you and stem you.
 And since males usually do all the talking,
 that's why we say suicide has had a feminizing effect.
 Well, it has a feminizing effect on most of the people
 who have been doing the talking who take suicide.
 I've also had experiences where I've been very--
 times when I've been depressed and weak,
 where suicide has not made me very feminine.
 It's actually given me power in my life.
 I felt very like--I won't remember one time--
 I went out and really liked the sound of bottles breaking.
 I would break a bottle and go "Yah!"
 It would make me feel really good.
 It would actually build up, almost a building up of an ego,
 when my ego was down.
 And when my ego was too big, it would pull it back down again.
 So that would then, you know, what Kiki was saying,
 that would then fit in--you know, that everyone who takes it
 will be balanced, will be kind of redirected and led further along.
 So it's a kind of regulator, is what you're saying.
 Yeah, it gets you back in tune with what's real.
 You know, extreme feminism and extreme activism are neither real.
 They're both extremes.
 And it'll bring you back into a more integral wholeness of the way the world is.
 Well, I would certainly agree with that as a description of ayahuasca.
 There's a lot of work being done right now.
 I mean, I'm sure you all have heard of Prozac,
 which is the most widely prescribed antidepressant in the world now.
 Six or seven years ago, it didn't even exist.
 Well, what's interesting about Prozac is that it is a therapeutic competitor.
 This is the same system that the psychedelics are working on.
 And I think probably we're converging on some kind of a breakthrough
 where sexual dysfunction, depression, psychedelic states
 are all going to be seen to be various twiddlings of the serotonergic system.
 And probably whole new families of drugs will come out of this.
 I have never taken any antidepressant.
 At my brother's urging, I took Prozac.
 And I've always been contemptuous of all of the Valium, that whole thing.
 That's not our church, for sure.
 But I was very, very impressed with what Prozac was doing.
 And in a way, it was a strangely painless kind of psychedelic.
 What Prozac seems to do is put you where Ayahuasca puts you four days after the trip.
 In other words, there's no dramatic episode of intoxication.
 There's just a slow kind of getting real, which means dropping your illusions,
 which are usually what is depressing you.
 I think Prozac is being misprescribed in the sense that it's thought of as an antidepressant.
 I don't think that's quite correct.
 I think it's the cure for seasonal light deficit syndrome.
 I think that as tropical primates, we pay the terrible price for conquering the temperate and subarctic zones of the world.
 And that is six months of kind of downness out of the year.
 And that can be chemically corrected.
 Our genetics are designed for the arboreal tropics,
 and yet we insist on living in places like Boston and Hamburg,
 which are so far north that you're physiologically dysfunctional seven months out of the year.
 And you don't know it because so is everybody else there.
 [audience member] In your data, you work with Prozac in conjunction with MDMA to sort of offset some of the--
 you know, MDMA can get real speedy.
 Does Prozac help to tone that down when you work with that at all?
 There may be a confusion here.
 The way I'm familiar with Prozac being mentioned in connection with MDMA
 is that MDMA has a toxic effect on the dendritic spines of the nerves.
 This is part of what you buy into with MDMA.
 But strangely enough, if you pre-dose yourself with Prozac,
 not as Prozac is supposed to be taken for depression where you take it for 30 days and then like that,
 but if you just take a 20 milligram capsule of Prozac six hours before you take MDMA,
 it absolutely blocks this toxic effect.
 I have mixed feelings about mixing drugs and handing this information on,
 but on the other hand, this is a group of professionals.
 You should know this. It's a fact.
 It was published in Brain, the Journal of Neurophysiology and so forth and so on.
 MDMA by itself has a physiological profile that causes me to stay away from it.
 I have no quarrel with the effect, the experience,
 but when you can see histological damage to macro structures in the nerve,
 you want to slow down a little and send a few tens of thousands ahead of you.
 Yeah.
 Is that just with doing it once that you'll have that sort of damage or some damage?
 Well, every time you take it, it has this effect.
 But let me say something about this damage that MDMA does.
 It does damage. You can see it.
 However, there is no behavioral sequela.
 What does this mean? It means you don't act funny.
 You don't fall down twitching or your eyes go out of focus or become manic.
 So you can have two opinions about this.
 Well, if it destroys the structure, then there's no behavioral consequence.
 You must not have needed that structure.
 However, when we start tossing out chunks of our brain based on our own judgment,
 you have to wonder about that.
 You can always take psilocybin and say to it in the middle of the second hour,
 "I do the MDMA." And that's how I do my MDMA.
 [inaudible]
 who works with healing plants and his method is to communicate with the plant.
 He says the plants are bursting to tell us what their purpose is, how they can help us.
 We just have to learn how to listen.
 It's the same way that you're saying that PC is communication and information.
 But what he does is once the shaman has made contact with the plant,
 he doesn't have to give that plant to the person.
 He can use the messenger plant.
 And they use Moxa in a whole new type of tincture.
 And because he knows the information of the plant,
 he can send the messenger for the information without actually having to give the plant itself.
 I'm wondering whether anybody's done that with psychedelics or whether you see that that's feasible to do with psychedelics.
 I assume, being a practical person, that it must not be feasible.
 Because as you know, in the highly succused homeopathic preparations,
 no physical trace of the original material can be found.
 If there were such a thing as homeopathic psychedelics,
 they would be impossible to prosecute under the drug laws.
 That's not what I'm asking.
 What are you asking?
 I'm asking if, seeing it as information, that you can actually have a messenger plant.
 Like you were saying the shaman is the messenger between the worlds.
 What he's doing is using a fairly innocuous plant as the messenger between the information
 of a huge array of pharmacopoeia of what plants can do.
 And using just a drop of that messenger to be able to give an experience.
 Well, in a sense, there's a parallel idea in the Amazon,
 which is shamans take ayahuasca and then they take very, very minuscule amounts
 of other plants that they want to learn about.
 And they say that the ayahuasca then informs them of the properties of the other plant.
 This whole business of information and how it moves around in nature
 is an area where we are uniquely ill-fitted to understand it
 because we are objective materialists.
 And it's very hard for us to understand and operate on the assumption
 that the world is made of language.
 We may say it so, but we don't know how to operationally operate
 with that perception as we learn how to do that.
 I agree with you. Not only plants, everything seeks to communicate.
 Everything is somehow completed in an act of mutual recognition and understanding.
 Nature is alive, not only biological nature, but the atoms and the continents
 and everything seeks to communicate.
 I think what psychedelics are is a kind of opening of our portals
 to this constant stream of communication that evolutionary necessity has shut us away from.
 Yeah.
 And psilocybin, if it's to be thought of as a communication between the mind of man and plants,
 why does it speak in such galactic terms?
 Because when I'm ghost building high, I'm going to have visions of UFOs
 and things that are not of this Earth.
 Very similar to the DNP flash, like you said.
 I actually have had precisely the same hallucinations at times.
 That's the way I see heavy doses of psilocybin speaking to me,
 not really about things here on this planet.
 Well, I agree with you. That's my experience.
 And in trying to account for it, you have to look at fungi.
 Fungi are primary decomposers.
 That means they can only live on decaying life.
 That suggests to me that they are late evolving, or at least not early evolving.
 Mushrooms are very soft-bodied, and so are all fungi.
 There is no fossil record of a mushroom older than 40 million years.
 Well, that's a tiny fraction of the time life has been on the Earth.
 Now, when I asked a paleontologist about this, he said,
 "Well, they're soft-bodied and they don't fossilize easily."
 But hey, we have flatworms from the Gunflint Chirth of South Africa.
 They're 4.3 billion years old.
 If they left a trace in the fossil record,
 you'd think there would be more of a trace of mushrooms.
 If you decondition your presuppositions and just look at the mushroom,
 it looks to me, number one, as though it is capable of surviving an extraterrestrial environment.
 In other words, if you have mushroom spores and you want to store them for long-term longevity,
 you seek an environment as much like outer space as you can find.
 You store them in liquid nitrogen at -200 degrees, and they will last virtually forever.
 If you look at the color of Stropharycubensis spores,
 that's in the brown-gilled mushroom family,
 the spores are deep purple, almost black.
 That's the color you would paint a spacecraft
 if you wanted to absorb long-wave radiation.
 If you look at the spore, what is it?
 It's a packet of crystallized DNA.
 A single mature Stropharycubensis mushroom, when it's sporulating,
 will shed up to 3 million spores a minute for up to two weeks.
 Three million spores a minute for two weeks.
 These things are microscopic, so small that the perturbations and agitation of air molecules,
 which are called Brownian motion, can actually percolate these things into the outer atmosphere,
 where then energetic cosmic events can actually detach them from the terrestrial medium,
 and they slowly, like planetary dandruff or something, drift off into space.
 Well, it seems so obvious to me, maybe it's because I live in Hawaii,
 but the most predictable major revolution in biology that you can imagine is,
 of course, within a few years it will be realized that the Earth is an island.
 That's all. But the biota that is present here, much of it probably drifted in, in cosmic debris.
 When stars go supernova, planets are destroyed,
 it's a cliche of cosmic consciousness to say, you know,
 the atoms in your body were once in the hearts of distant stars.
 Well, if that's true, then some of the atoms in your body were once in a part of distant planets,
 and some vanishingly small fraction may have been part of the biota of extraterrestrial ecosystems.
 The other thing about the mushroom that's very suggestive to me is it appears to be,
 or there is a place, a perspective from which you can look at it,
 that it appears to be not an organism, but an artifact.
 It is incredibly well designed at a very high level of design criteria.
 For example, on this planet, one of the most advanced ethical systems we've been able to evolve is Buddhism,
 which teaches vegetarianism.
 If a Buddhist could design their own genome, they would become a fungus,
 because a fungus is a primary decomposer.
 It's the only karmaless place in the entire food chain.
 There is no karma for the fungi. They don't destroy any life whatsoever.
 So here you have this thing designed to traverse extraterrestrial space,
 occupying a karmaless niche in the ecosystem,
 and when complexed with a mammalian nervous system,
 a galactarian archive of historical data becomes accessible.
 We have only known about DNA since 1950, less than 50 years,
 and we're already confidently talking about completely redesigning the human genome,
 and so forth and so on.
 Well, if we pursue along these lines for 500 years, we will look the way we want to look.
 And, you know, trivially, we may all want to be Keanu Reeves or something,
 but once the cultural agenda cuts in, if, say, Buddhism took over
 in the presence of an advanced molecular genetics,
 then we could design ourselves into a karmaless niche in the universe.
 I wish that we could bring, I don't know who it is,
 but the content of the mushroom experience, which was what launched your question,
 is so evidently alien and non-human and self-referential to a world we don't know,
 that to me it would require a commission and several years of study
 to decide that this thing is not an extraterrestrial.
 Our notions of extraterrestrials to this point have been incredibly self-reflexive.
 Once you have fully in grasp the size of the universe
 and the amount of time that is available,
 then the idea that someone would come in a metal ship
 with an interest in your gross industrial output and a desire to cure cancer
 is absolutely preposterous. That's such a culture-bound notion.
 It's like expecting them to arrive with a load of pizzas ready for delivery.
 The trick is going to be to recognize the extraterrestrial.
 The very notion alien means unfamiliar.
 So it's not going to be like we think it is.
 The real task will be to recognize it.
 And we have discovered, after only a thousand years,
 that toxic metal-based technologies are fatal.
 And we have pushed our entire planet into planetary crisis
 by coming to this realization rather late in the game.
 If long-term survival is the name of the game for intelligent life in the universe,
 then the way we're doing it is not the way to do it.
 It's going to have to be non-polluting, biologically based,
 molecularly based, so forth and so on.
 And as you run down the list,
 the mushroom begins to look more and more like the real thing.
 And then, of course, the content of the experience
 is so different from other psychedelics,
 and so other-oriented,
 that I am puzzled that we've been at this now nearly 30 years
 and we still don't have a consensus.
 I don't know what it is.
 Is it that when you take the mushroom,
 you lose all ability to then operate in the world of straight judgments and understanding?
 It's very puzzling.
 I think probably the biota of the Earth is riddled with extraterrestrial genes,
 if not organisms, and possibly intelligences.
 But they're not interested in your fetal tissue,
 or putting implants in you,
 or taking you up and slicing you up in very large-scale surgical wards.
 I find all that paranoid and pathological.
 I can talk about that if you want, but it's not really our subject.
 In a talk in 2002, you talked about the DNT molecule
 as being extremely unusual.
 I'm not a chemist.
 There's something about the number pole position of the molecule.
 Can you talk about that a little bit?
 Yes.
 There are different ways to look for extraterrestrials.
 One way is to build a vast radio telescope and search for a signal.
 The way I would do it, if I were in charge of things,
 is I would search the terrestrial ecosystem for anomalous molecules,
 molecules that have no near relatives or history
 of evolutionary development in terrestrial organisms.
 Well, it turns out you don't have to look far.
 It's psilocybin.
 Psilocybin is 4-phosphoryloxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine.
 It's the only 4-phosphorylated indole in nature.
 The only one.
 [INAUDIBLE]
 OK, well, here you have a pentaxyl group.
 It's a five-sided thing.
 And then you have a benzene molecule off it.
 And these molecules have numbered positions, 1 through 6.
 And then you have a phosphorus group.
 It can attach at any one of those six positions.
 Attached in the 4 position, this is unheard of.
 It only occurs in this one case.
 Well, that's very odd.
 I mean, if we believe nature is a continuum of evolutionary adumbration,
 then to have suddenly out of nowhere a completely anomalous molecule sticking up
 suggests it may have come in from somewhere else.
 Yeah?
 Isn't psilocybin very similar in structure to serotonin?
 It's similar.
 I mean, serotonin is 5-hydroxy-tryptamine.
 Serotonin is ubiquitous in life on this planet, from flatworms to man.
 It's in every organism there is.
 Brain serotonin?
 Well, some--
 That's the one that I read was similar in structure to psilocybin.
 You'll get chemical in your brain.
 Yeah, the structure--
 Yes, I mean, here's the thing.
 Serotonin is 5-hydroxy-tryptamine.
 Psilocybin is 4-phosphoryloxy-N-N-dimethyltryptamine.
 What you've got then is 4-N-N-dimethyltryptamine as opposed to 5-hydroxy-tryptamine.
 Yeah, these things are a chemical family.
 Yeah.
 My curiosity is getting raised about this alien UFO, people's experience with psilocybin,
 having that sort of galactic experience.
 And since we're talking about consciousness and transformation,
 what role do you think that either the psilocybin bringing images in
 or this sort of cultural mythology around, you know, close encounters,
 what role do you think that's playing?
 Why is that coming up?
 In terms of the consciousness shift that we're trying to make, what's that about?
 Well, if you want--I mean, if you're interested in UFOs,
 one of the first books ever written is, I think, one of the best.
 It's called "Flying Saucers, a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky" by Jung.
 And what he says is that--I hope I don't have to do too much backgrounding for an audience like this--
 but as you know, Jung analyzed alchemy and said that in the presence of a psyche
 epistemologically naive about the real nature of matter,
 the contents of the unconscious will be projected upon chemical processes.
 Well, our level of naivete about the cosmic environment
 is approximately at the same level of sophistication as the 16th century's grasp of matter was.
 And so Jung said that--he talked about in alchemy what's called the rotundum,
 that which spins.
 And he said the spinning rotundum is a symbol of the psyche.
 The flying saucer, I believe, is a symbol of the eschatological object at the end of time.
 That we are being pulled into a confrontation with--call it the other, call it the ancestors,
 call it Jesus, call it the Galactarian civilization.
 It's all and more than any of these things.
 And I believe--and I'm fairly alone in this, I think--
 that the pressure and the chaos that we're experiencing at the end of the 20th century
 is because we are drawing near to a bifurcation point in the--
 there's not even words for it--in the dimensionality of our cosmos.
 I mean, we're very close to some kind of cusp, some kind of breakthrough point.
 History is, in fact, the enunciation that an animal is standing too close to the transcendental object
 and is, in fact, beginning to be transformed into a partial simulacrum of the transcendental object.
 That's what we are--half beast, half angel.
 One foot in the slime, one foot in the platonic super spaces.
 As far--I mean, I suppose we have to talk at least briefly about the abduction thing.
 I think that this is much ado about nothing.
 It's very clear to me that every abduction case around,
 except for a vanishingly small number that we can put in the classical category of stigmata,
 can be explained by one simple fact.
 People are losing the ability to distinguish dreams from memories.
 That's all. That's all.
 If you lose the ability to distinguish dreams from memories,
 you'll have a very strange history to recite to people.
 And I think this is a cause by television, it's caused by a number of things.
 I grew up during the '50s when movies like "The Day the Earth Stood Still,"
 "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," and so forth were coming out.
 And I distinctly remember a fever that I had when I was about 12
 in which I had a horrifyingly real dream of gray-faced, cat-eyed aliens
 who were doing something to me that I didn't care for and so forth and so on.
 Well, if I were to be placed into the hands of an obsessive hypnotherapist,
 I guarantee you in two weeks we'd come out with the realization that it wasn't a dream,
 that it actually happened.
 But that's...
 And also the content, if you analyze the content of the abduction scenario,
 it's pure paranoia.
 And I can get off on this, but I don't really want to.
 The normal rules of evidence are not being applied.
 Here's... Let me go off on this just a little bit to say, you know,
 how do you live your life in the light of a universe that is strange and vast?
 Well, you can just believe anything anybody tells you,
 in which case, you know, fetal removal by extraterrestrials vies with your attention
 as you seek Elvis in the aisles of the local supermarket,
 as you worry about the fall of Atlantis and so forth and so on.
 But over time, there has been something evolved called the rules of evidence,
 colloquially known as how to tell shit from Shinola.
 And the first thing is there should be an economy of explanation.
 This is called Occam's razor.
 In other words, hypotheses should be no more complex than is necessary
 to explain whatever it is you're trying to explain.
 So if inability to tell dreams from memories explains abduction,
 why do we have to reach for the idea that geneticists from Zanabalganubi
 are moving secretly among us with a surgical agenda
 and also carry out unscheduled proctological examinations in the middle of the night?
 I mean, really now?
 And what I want to say about that is I got where I am, whether it is enviable or not,
 but I got where I am by being tough, not by being gullible.
 And so I've rejected vast amounts of things, not only dubious things,
 but I've probably tossed a few babies out with the bathwater as well.
 But ask tough questions. Make it make sense.
 And be, as they say in Hawaii, be akamai, be smart.
 Understand the subtleties and the potential degradation of language.
 And then trust only yourself. Trust only yourself.
 Photographs are useless. Anecdotes are useless.
 What happened to your best friend last weekend when you weren't there is useless.
 You can entertain all that information, but what you have to...
 Given the slipperiness of language, given the limitations of the human organism,
 you have to stay with primary experience and extrapolate out from there.
 And if you have had fetal tissue removed, then you have to deal with it.
 But the testimony of 700 people you don't know doesn't have to bother you at all.
 Yeah.
 In light of your dialogue with the mushroom, how do you see the big picture of the agenda
 if this is an extraterrestrial force that catalyzed consciousness on the planet?
 You mean what's happening?
 I think that nature... Well, I mentioned this yesterday, that biology...
 Let's leave nature out of this for a minute.
 Biology is some kind of chemical strategy for the conquest of dimensionality.
 I said this yesterday, but I'm not sure I was understood.
 And what I mean by that is the entire history of biology,
 from the first naked DNA to this moment,
 is a history of progressively taking more and more control of more and more dimension.
 First primitive life moved. It had no eyes. It simply felt its way.
 That means it was like two-dimensional life.
 It just feels its way down a linear creode of sensation,
 defecating, eating, undergoing mitosis, and so forth and so on.
 But it's a two-dimensional thing.
 Well, then life acquired light-sensitive chemistry,
 which it sequestered on the surface of itself, driven by serotonin, interestingly enough.
 And this light-sensitive chemistry gave the idea of a gradient
 that organism had, however dimly, the notion here and there.
 And to have the notion of going from here to there,
 you have to add in the notion now and then.
 What these notions being added in are dimensional vectors into the reality space.
 Well, then the entire history of life from, let's say, the cross-octorygian fishes
 to Homo habilis is simply the history of developing more efficient organs of motion
 in the three-dimensional world. Better eyes, better arms, better legs, mobility, motility, so forth and so on.
 Then, with the appearance of true human beings and language,
 an entirely new dimension, let's call it the fourth dimension of time,
 begins to be invaded in a very subtle way.
 It's that monkeys can't tell stories to each other about past experiences or hoped-for denouements.
 Human beings can. That act of linguistic recollection is a small conquest of dimensionality.
 Well, once you invent writing, then all of the past can, in a sense, be kept in the present.
 The present is not a narrow slice of experience fading off into the past and the future.
 It becomes instead like a train moving into the future.
 The future is unknowable, but the past can be recollected and analyzed.
 And if the analysis is sophisticated enough, one can begin to triangulate outward toward the future.
 The history of science is the history of prediction.
 Well, what is prediction? It's taking control of a previously uncontrolled dimension, the future.
 And I think that the rise of electronic technology,
 the rise of extremely complex language-using societies,
 means that we're about to go wholly in to the fourth dimension, the temporal dimension.
 And we see ourselves as distinct from our technologies.
 You see, like when you are in a car, you think, "I am a human being driving a human invention."
 But there is a point of view from which, no, you are just a human being
 who has put on another level of humanness, which happens to have wheels under it,
 and is rolling along. In other words, genetics, that changes the stuff of our bodies.
 Epigenetics, which we call ideology and technology,
 changes the environment in which our bodies operate.
 And I think we're getting set basically to decamp into the imagination.
 That the imagination is as real a place as across the river is if you've just acquired eyes.
 It's something you're seeing for the first time and then generating an appetite to go into.
 And this has been kicking around for 15 or 20,000 years.
 A shaman is a seer, is a prophet, is a higher dimensional mathematician.
 And they may not use tensor equations to express what they're doing,
 but mathematics before symbols is experience.
 And so I really believe history is ending very soon.
 I cannot conceive of a hundred years in the future at the present accelerated rate of development.
 We have unleashed such novelty that I think we're in the terminal phase
 of decamping from three-dimensional space.
 We are leaving the womb of Newtonian being for something else, the imagination.
 And the birth is tumultuous. An entire planet is at risk.
 And eventually, toxemia seems to be setting in.
 We've used up all the nutritional resources in the womb.
 The walls are closing in. We're suffocating.
 Our political systems don't work. Our social systems are breaking down.
 If you're a realist, a pessimist, then you just say, well, this is it, folks.
 This is the smash-up. The party lasted 20,000 years and here comes the bill.
 But you might think that if you were a fetus trapped in a collapsing womb at transition,
 you could not conceive of the stockbroker, fashion designer, or whatever,
 that you are going to be in another dimension, in another reality that you're being born into.
 And I think our aspiration is the conquest of death.
 Our religions promise it. And if our gods can't deliver, we'll elbow them aside and do it ourselves.
 Thank you. And these things aren't decisions made by a single person or even a group of people.
 They come from the bone. It's who we are. We aspire to be magic.
 And we probably, given our track record, will achieve it.
 As I said yesterday, James Joyce said, "Man will be dirigible."
 It's a humorous thing to say, but yes.
 I don't really understand what you mean by that, like even for the birth of imagination.
 You mean like that Star Trek episode where they have no bodies and the guy makes himself into a big cat?
 Well, one of the nice things about my position is I don't have to entirely understand myself
 because I'm self-defined as a primitive.
 When we talk about decamping from Newtonian space and you're asking me, "What would it look like?"
 I'm as puzzled as you are. I don't know. Is it nanotech?
 Are we going to become ant-high and all live in one acre of the rainforest?
 Are we going to find a way to completely transpose ourselves into the net
 and just shed our bodies the way we once shed the placenta that connected us?
 I once said the body is the placenta of the soul.
 But is that a religious statement or a technological goal?
 What do we mean the body is the placenta of the soul?
 And then people get really agitated because a lot of people, and I include myself among them,
 rather like the body.
 And you can imagine a debate in the archaeozoic ocean when people of a very scaly and lantern-jawed type
 said, "Listen, we're leaving for the land."
 You cannot live on the land. There's no water on the land.
 The land is our whole being. We're defined by the water, the joy of swimming, the great...
 on and on and on.
 Well, some organisms turned their back on that.
 And so then we had the conquest of the land.
 It's a big thing. It's a big thing.
 Because what we're being asked is, "What is humanness?
 What can you discard and still be human?
 Can we discard our bodies and still be human?
 Can we discard our ethics and still be human?
 I'd rather keep my ethics and get rid of the body.
 But we are sexual creatures.
 What is life? What is sex without a body?" for crying out loud.
 How does that work and look?
 But it is really not ours to decide.
 We have grabbed hold of a tiger several billion years ago.
 Nature is a bootstrapping process, and it seems fairly unsentimental.
 There's no tears shed for the great sauropods that once stalked the planet.
 They were wiped out in an asteroid impact.
 That allowed the arise of the angiosperms and the mammals.
 We are the children and the inheritors of a planetary catastrophe.
 If this planet hadn't been wrecked 65 million years ago, we'd still be here.
 We wouldn't be here.
 Well, then what is our position on planetary catastrophe?
 We're in the process of making one.
 Is it so that 65 million years in the future,
 an organism filled with love and justice and intelligence
 will look back at our skeletons in the shale and say,
 "Well, they had a good thing going, but if it hadn't been for their extinction,
 we wouldn't be here."
 The very large scale is very large indeed.
 One of the things that's so interesting about the visionary plants
 is that they give you a large, large picture.
 I think the vegetable mind views death in a different way.
 Vegetables are eternal in a sense.
 Through vegetative propagation, they can live virtually forever.
 Life lies very close to the surface in us,
 and if it's crushed out, we're very alarmed.
 Our sense of uniqueness is so highly evolved
 that our own death becomes for us the most universal tragedy we can conceive of.
 That's a serious ego dislocation I maintain.
 Yeah.
 [inaudible]
 Well, nature has two impulses.
 In the particular case, the impulse is always toward equilibrium.
 Animal species seek to establish niches for themselves in ecosystems
 that can then be maintained indefinitely,
 just the way you seek a job where you'll then get money
 and without working too hard or eating too much excrement,
 you'll be able to maintain yourself indefinitely.
 If you look at all of nature right now,
 the human species is where the evolutionary cutting edge
 has become concentrated.
 And then if you look at the human species,
 the place where the changing novelty has been concentrated
 is in high-tech industrial democratic civilization.
 I don't call it Western anymore because its leading exponent is Japan,
 but high-tech industrial democracies are the only social systems
 that are still evolving and changing.
 So I think they also serve who only stand and wait.
 These traditional societies perform the role very much
 of an animal species at equilibrium in an ecosystem.
 They preserve values related to stability and homeostasis.
 Meanwhile, in these places where these creative forms
 have begun to cascade, novelty is what's being explored.
 But the novelty feeds back and changes the context
 in which these equilibrium-seeking systems operate.
 The universe, I believe, is an engine for the production
 and conservation of novelty.
 The universe will sacrifice everything
 achieved to achieve something new.
 You can see that in looking at this asteroid impact 65 million years ago.
 This was a climaxed planetary ecosystem of tropical forests
 from pole to pole filled with complex animals and ecosystems
 and many phyla represented, but it was all thrown away
 to make way for the mammals and the angiosperms.
 I mean, speaking teleologically.
 So I think novelty is what nature values above all else.
 And that, interestingly, leads on to the notion of an ethic for us
 because that confers immediate central importance on the human enterprise.
 The orthodox view is that we're a chance anomaly,
 an eccentricity in the cosmic game.
 But if the conservation of novelty is what the universe is about,
 then we are its pride and joy, its crown jewel,
 the firstborn son and heir apparent.
 And the other thing is this ingression or this movement into novelty
 has been going on since the beginning of the universe,
 but always ever faster, ever faster.
 So in the early universe, once things settled down after the Big Bang,
 it was dull for a long, long time.
 I mean, there wasn't much happening. There weren't even stars.
 There was just hydrogen aggregating.
 And then eventually there were aggregates of hydrogen so large
 that the pressures at the centers of those aggregates of hydrogen
 caused a new property to emerge, fusion.
 And fusion cooks out heavy elements like iron and sulfur and carbon.
 And when carbon cooks out, new emergent properties become possible.
 Molecular chemistry rather than simple atomic systems comes into play.
 Well, then elaborate that for a few billion years and you get long chain polymers.
 They're like super molecules and they have the quality or the ability
 to template and reproduce themselves.
 Well, so suddenly you get a whole new emergent domain in nature,
 the domain of the self-copying, self-replicating molecules.
 And then they begin to embed themselves in membranes and so forth.
 And then you get nucleated cells and then colonies of nucleated cells.
 And from there to advanced mammals, it's just a matter of time.
 And then the organs of locomotion seem to have been perfected.
 The fastest animal in the world can run 70 miles an hour, something like that.
 And so then the development seems to concentrate in the nervous system.
 The coordination no longer of space but of information.
 Information becomes the new coinage.
 Advanced binocular vision systems evolve.
 Pack signaling systems evolve in social animals.
 And then at some point, the level of complexity is sufficient to cross a boundary
 into true language, true representation of the past in the present
 through symbolic activity.
 In each case, these stages are happening faster and faster and faster.
 Language is probably less than 100,000 years old.
 It may be half that age.
 Well, good grief.
 That's less than 3,000 generations in the past.
 Language, that's yesterday.
 And yet, since the inception of language, look at what has happened.
 Urbanism, global conquest of the environment,
 mathematical conquest of nature.
 We can call down the fires that burn in the hearts of stars
 to the deserts of this planet or, if necessary, down upon the heads of our enemies.
 That's an extraordinary feat for protoplasm to be able to undertake.
 Extraordinary.
 And so I think this accelerating novelty indicates that we are on the brink
 of just going down the novelty well and becoming as unrecognizable to ourselves
 as we would be to Tyrannosaurus Rex if it were introduced to us
 as the heirs to its struggle and dreams.
 Yeah.
 One of the most interesting things to me is the landscape in the end.
 I'm just correcting my mistakes because it's incorrect.
 In the book, I always talk about what it's going to look like.
 I think there was one line that said, it was September 21, 2012,
 that the 22nd may look just like the 21st.
 There may be no change on the surface.
 It may look the same.
 And I'm curious how that basically--
 Are we going to be walking around in small yards or are we going to be self-dribbling things
 that you talked about yesterday?
 Or is that day going to pass by and, I don't know,
 there's 1% of the year and 99% of the dozens?
 Or is it going to be that 100% of the year or is there going to be 17?
 Well, one way it could happen is that as we get closer and closer to it,
 our ability to accept these strange things becomes broader and broader.
 So when the moment finally comes, yes, you are a self-dribbling jeweled basketball,
 but hey, it ain't no big deal and you saw it coming years ago, so what?
 I don't know.
 I vacillate on all of this because as a rationalist,
 I'm very puzzled by my intellectual burden of a completely irrational revelation.
 I would never have wished this upon myself.
 I'm much more comfortable as a fairly hard-nosed skeptical thinker.
 Yet I've spent so much time with this idea that I guess I have become infected with it.
 It now seems to me as reasonable as anything else.
 There is, unremarked by science, a universal tendency toward complexity through time.
 It's a law as real as the law of the speed of light or the segregation of genes,
 but science has never said that because science is, as practiced out of the 19th century,
 is militantly anti-teleological.
 In other words, it denies any end goal, any goal, any purpose, any predefined end state.
 Science just thinks the universe is a random walk,
 but I think it's becoming harder and harder to maintain that idea in the face of the evidence.
 There are too many choices.
 If you have a protein of several thousand atoms,
 it has 10 high 16 folding configurations it can choose from.
 If it worked through those things by trial and error,
 it would take the life of the universe for that molecule to figure out its minimum energy configuration and assume it.
 So there is a kind of logic or there are constraints that we aren't aware of that push processes toward completion.
 And I think the new sciences of chaos theory, dynamics, complexity, fractals, strange attractors,
 are going to deliver this into our understanding.
 It's a very exciting time.
 We're taking the first intellectual steps toward the real re-understanding of nature,
 since at least the invention of the calculus and probably the invention of Greek mathematics.
 Yeah.
 [inaudible]
 Like a chain reaction.
 Well, you put your finger on it.
 The key word is connectedness.
 I'm very interested in the philosophical, if you want to put it that way,
 implications of the world wide web and the Internet.
 I mean, the Internet is a fascinating thing.
 You can't see it.
 Therefore, if you're not into it, the world appears to have remained the same.
 Nothing has changed.
 And yet, actually, the largest human artifact ever created has sprung into being in the last five years.
 It's as big as this planet.
 And nobody controls it.
 It has no central control.
 No one can decide that it shall be this or shall be that.
 There are certain areas under limited control.
 Well, but what does the Internet do?
 Well, it connects us together.
 It broadens and deepens and makes more immediate the cultural database that we're all swimming in.
 And I think that probably it is a model for, not a model,
 but it is an anticipation of this transcendental object at the end of time.
 I mean, I have said in these lectures, you know, my idea of the future perfect state
 is a world of 500 million human beings of all races, genders, sexual persuasion, so forth and so on.
 500 million well-fed, healthy people living mostly in warm climates, largely naked,
 very little physical, cultural manifestation.
 But if you could project yourself into one of these people's minds or bodies,
 you would see that when they close their eyes, there are menus hanging in space.
 Those menus are there because at age three, there was a surgical implant behind the eyelids
 of something like a very small contact lens.
 And that is the philosopher's stone.
 That is the culmination of 10,000 years of technical evolution and engineering dreams.
 And what it boils down to is a little black disk that's surgically implanted behind your eyelid,
 and that's your interface to the culture.
 And you can move into the net, which is, of course, virtually implemented.
 It's not text. It's not even hypertext.
 It's a three-dimensional, non-material world ruled by the laws not of physics, but the imagination.
 And I call this turning the body inside out.
 This is what the cultural enterprise is for.
 We want to live in the imagination with the body as a freely commandable object in the imagination.
 In other words, replace the laws of physics with the laws of dream or imagination.
 This is culturally within our reach right now.
 I mean, if it were as important as piling up nuclear stockpiles
 or screwing people over in a hundred different ways,
 we'd have it in five years, not 17.
 As it is, we'll probably have to wait 17 years.
 But the fact that we can make a model like that,
 that's a bridge from where we're sitting to a spiritually transcendental realm that's within reach,
 is, I think, very positive.
 Now all we have to do is fill in the blanks,
 keep taking psychedelics so that our engineering standards stay high,
 so that we stay focused on the goals that we're trying to maximize,
 and then try to promote the idea that anxiety is inappropriate.
 Anxiety poisons the will to action.
 And I really think that this is going to be the task of the high-tech alternative culture,
 is to provide an optimistic vision.
 Because you see, the people who run the world are becoming more and more panic-stricken.
 Because a world is ending.
 Their world is ending.
 The world of the shell game and the international corporation
 and the propagandized passive electorate and all these things that have been...
 That game is ending.
 And there is no substitute vision being discussed at the upper echelons
 of the control mechanism of this society.
 It's coming from the grassroots.
 The people at the top are too paralyzed with the poisons they've imbibed
 by feeding at the trough of the old order.
 They can't think their way out of their dilemma.
 In fact, they have to pay guys with ponytails just to turn on the machines in the morning.
 They're so distanced from the things they rule.
 Yeah.
 I'm wondering that, in my experience and other people's talking to me about taking hallucinogens,
 you talk about dissolving the boundaries.
 Another way to look at it is, you talk about anxiety, if anxiety or fear eventually goes away of the other.
 Which, if you have a boundary, there is another.
 And in terms of like men, if women are more other for men than vice versa,
 that on a hallucinogen, a man can get to a place where he observes and goes beyond the boundaries
 to know that it's not the other.
 And if a woman is in that place, what I, from my own personal experience and from other people talking to me,
 is though women kind of find their voice in the way of the world to say how it's okay not to have all these experiences of the other.
 And in some hope of things accelerating, my mother was born in 1921 and is very conservative,
 kind of comes to the point where she's 73 years old or whatever and has a 77 year old boyfriend at dinner
 and is very proud and laughing and says, "Well I'm living in a different thing your mother would say that."
 And I kind of like to hear what you would say about in terms of otherness and how psychedelics can,
 what the dissolving of the boundaries does and how it can carry that to other people.
 Well, first of all, it's important in all these discussions to remember there is nothing on earth
 as much like a woman as a man.
 The next species over, whatever it is, the difference is enormous.
 The other thing to remember is if you believe in evolutionary theory, then this has always amazed me,
 women are the creation of choices made by men.
 Men are the creation of choices made by women.
 The aesthetic difference is striking.
 I mean, apparently men prefer smooth, gentle, nurturing, curvaceous forms,
 and apparently women, their aesthetic is fulfilled by a rougher cut.
 We are reflections of the desires of the opposite gender because we've been subject to selection in the sexual process that way.
 As far as, everybody is struggling to keep up with the evolution of the culture.
 I experienced the same thing.
 I mean, my father is a very conservative character and he's now 80,
 and he seems to go out of his way to be outrageous.
 It's maybe the one good thing television is doing, is that straight people, and by that I don't mean non-gay,
 I mean in the sense of non-psychedelic, straight people can't escape from the weirdness of the culture.
 No matter who you are, you have to look at this stuff.
 It's in your face and eventually you bend.
 So approaching the other is a process of redefining yourself to be more acceptable to it.
 There's a coming to meet.
 It becomes more familiar as you become more familiar with it.
 But the truly other, what Rudolph Otto called the totally other, is other in principle.
 It's like the archetype of the other and it can't be assimilated.
 But wherever the other is particularized in a person, a work of art, a place,
 it can be approached through a process of templating yourself to it.
 We become what we behold, no matter how bizarre what we behold may be.
 Well, it's a little past time to take a break.
 Let's take a break.
 Those of you who are doing a paper, why don't you gather up here and David and I will lay out the guidelines.
 The rest of you, why don't you give us just a little bit of space so we can work this academic thing out.
 Let's see, I have some guidelines and David has...
 The civilization lose a piece of knowledge that central to its functioning.
 Well, the only scenario I can come up with is an increasingly autocratic elite ordering everybody around
 until finally there is a populist revolt and those people and their books
 and their buildings are all put to death and burned.
 This may be a similar thing may have happened to the Maya.
 The Mayan civilization looking at the archaeological evidence was an incredibly steep social pyramid.
 So steep that it's conceivable the execution of a few thousand people
 would essentially disembowel the accomplishments of the civilization.
 Kill the architects, the scientists, the astronomers, the scribes and the artisans
 and what you've got left are rainforest swidden farmers and then they go and do what they've always known how to do.
 I don't believe in the case of Soma that it could have been a matter of it being available and then slowly disappearing.
 I mean the Rick Vedas speaks of intoxicating hundreds of people a day.
 It speaks of the Soma gushing from the Soma presses in these enormous amounts.
 Well, clearly it was something easily available, obtained and processed
 and yet it died out completely and was not really replaced with anything else.
 So why? I think cultural institutions are more fragile than we imagine
 and this brings up the issue of substitutes.
 In the scenario I told you yesterday about psilocybin in the Sahara
 and how it created a partnership paradise which then faded as the mushroom faded.
 As I try to imagine how that would have felt, I think probably what happened was
 at some point in the African past the mushroom was everywhere on the grasslands.
 Whenever it rained it appeared, it rained frequently, the cattle, the dung of the cattle was everywhere,
 the mushroom was everywhere. Well then it began to dry up
 and the first thing that would happen, and we're talking millennia in each step,
 the first thing that would happen is the mushroom would become seasonal.
 So then you would have great mushroom festivals once a year rather than continuous mushroom taking. Seasonal.
 The next thing is as the drying continues it would retreat into the rain shadows of mountains seasonally.
 Now you have to make pilgrimages long distances seasonally to the mushroom place.
 Well in parallel with this diminishing supply of mushrooms would logically be a rising anxiety about that.
 So what would you do? Well you would create strategies for the preservation of it in times of scarcity.
 Smoking meat, burying eggs, the primitive, you know, aboriginal peoples know how to do these things.
 The obvious method of preserving mushrooms still used to this day in the Sierra Mazateca
 in a world without refrigeration is to put them into honey.
 Honey is an antiseptic medium and the sugar in honey will draw water out of a fragile thing like a mushroom
 and tend to preserve it. The problem is if you've ever dealt with aboriginal honeys,
 you know they're not like the stuff we get in the little plastic bears.
 Aboriginal honey is very watery and what the consequences of this are is that the preserving medium, honey,
 itself has the capacity to transmute into a psychoactive substance, alcohol.
 So suddenly you see people of good intention trying to preserve their mushrooms
 but unbeknownst to themselves they're turning into an alcohol cult
 because fewer mushrooms, more and more honey.
 Then and as the supply continues to shrink, finally you give up on intoxicating everybody
 and you just say we're going to establish a professional class of people, shamans,
 and they will take the mushroom since we can't all take it.
 So then you have knowledge of it retreating into a professional class
 and in aboriginal society these professional classes are always hedged about with secrecy.
 So then you actually have a situation where there is a body of cultural knowledge
 which not everybody possesses, in fact which very few people possess.
 Well at that point through war, epidemic, schism, or natural catastrophe
 you could lose that core of experts and then you would simply be adrift.
 So it's a very complicated issue and the history of each one of these things
 is fraught with these kinds of episodes.
 The other thing is, just to keep the complexity of it before you,
 styles of usage change. I mentioned that the 19th century Eita shish, we smoked it
 and it has very different impacts on our psychologies and our art and so forth and so on.
 Another example is, a good example close to home, LSD.
 In the 60s you couldn't play the game unless you took 500 mics.
 These days you split half a blotter, it's probably 70 mics
 and that is what people call an LSD trip.
 It's half an order of magnitude smaller than what was being done 30 years ago.
 Well so naturally people say entirely different things about LSD now than they did then.
 The other thing that makes this very complicated, I mean nature is not cutting you any slack here,
 is you can have a species of a plant genetically fairly defined and taxonomically fairly defined
 and it can have a horrific number of variables bearing upon it.
 The favorite example here would be Amanita muscaria.
 More ink has been spilled over Amanita muscaria than almost any other plant I can think of.
 It was identified as Soma, the subject matter of these ecstatic hymns of praise that filled the Rikvedas.
 But when you actually take Amanita muscaria, if you only get a bellyache you're lucky.
 This is not at all a reliable intoxicant.
 Well what's going on here? Well here's what's going on.
 Amanita muscaria because of its genetic makeup is subject to geographical variance.
 That means the Siberian Amanita, the New Mexico Amanita and the Andean Amanita
 are experientially different creatures.
 So geographical variation.
 Then there is edaphically induced variation.
 Depending on the soil and the mycorrhizal host, the chemistry of the mushroom will be different.
 Well then there's brood differentiation.
 The first flush will have a different chemistry than the third, fourth or fifth flush of the same organism.
 Again this is where the guru may have a role to play.
 You shouldn't take Amanita muscaria unless you are with someone who says
 I have taken these mushrooms from this place at this time of year in this fashion and attained success.
 But if you just go out and eat the first Amanita muscaria you find,
 your experience could range from nothing to a medical emergency.
 And very few people who have just gone out and eaten Amanita muscaria
 have any kind of experience that could be mapped over an ecstatic hallucinogenic experience.
 But occasionally you will hear a story so wild that you can tell
 under certain very narrowly defined conditions this thing must be tremendously effective.
 But what those conditions are we don't know.
 Yeah.
 A student wrote about, I guess it's a reg made up,
 talking about drinking the piss of Shiva and Soma and this whole thing.
 And his interpretation, maybe it was more than an interpretation,
 the evidence showed that they would drink the urine of the animals that ate the mushrooms,
 like the antelope or the reindeer or the cows.
 That way it was purified of these toxins through the animals' system
 and they would drink a potion that was...
 Well, yes, I mean, I really respect Gordon Watson,
 but in this particular area I think he spread more confusion than light.
 It is certainly true that Amanita muscaria is a shamanic intoxicant of great age
 and used among the Arctic peoples of Siberia in the Tunguska and Amur River basin.
 But... and it is true that one of the great hazards of Amanita taking in that area
 is that when you go out on a snowy night to take a whiz,
 these reindeer come and knock you over headfirst in order to get to the yellow snow
 because they're so into it.
 But reindeer are not cattle and there are no reindeer in India
 and cattle don't seek out mushrooms to eat them.
 The thing that, to my mind, breaks down Watson's theory is, first of all,
 the inadequate intoxication, but second of all,
 you can tell from the Rig Veda that hundreds of people were being intoxicated with this stuff,
 that basically people were just lining up and passing through a line
 and it was being ladled out.
 Well, Amanita muscaria has a mycorrhizal relationship to birch and spruce.
 That means it grows only in association with the roots of those plants.
 To this day, no mycologist has ever successfully cultivated it on the Gnatch.
 So when you find it, it's a rare thing.
 To find one or two is cause for rejoicing.
 To find half a dozen is a miracle.
 I've never heard of anybody finding more than that.
 I've seen other Amanitas in great abundance.
 If you're an Amanita fan, check out Baker's Beach in January.
 Do you all know where it is? It's at the bottom of 25th Avenue.
 The number of Amanita pantherinas that come up in that sandy soil down there,
 you can literally gather a couple of grocery bags of it.
 But even at that, how far will a couple of grocery bags go
 if you have several hundred people to intoxicate?
 So I don't see how it could possibly have been Amanita muscaria.
 I think a whole bunch of mistakes were made by Wasson
 and the people who followed him in arguing so strenuously for that.
 Wasson himself admitted that he never obtained a satisfactory intoxication from Amanita.
 So again, you have to be aware of all of these variables.
 And I think it's fine to respect those who have preceded us into this.
 Lots of hard work has been done.
 But on the other hand, they're just fallible, career-mongering human beings
 like all the rest of us. And it never hurts to double-check.
 I mean, what you haven't confirmed for yourself,
 you should view as simply informed speculation.
 But you do need to check for yourself.
 Yeah.
 [inaudible]
 I mean, the pure compound.
 Frankly, in 30 years, there has been very, very little chemically purified psilocybin.
 I once took a small white capsule that was said to be pure psilocybin.
 It may have been. It was like a very warm and friendly flavor of LSD.
 But it didn't have the voice.
 Now, there's a famous story that when Hoffman isolated psilocybin,
 he then, to prove the isolation, he manufactured some.
 And then he and Wasson took it back with them to Watle.
 And they gave it to Maria Sabina.
 And she said, "The spirit of the mushroom is in the little pill."
 But let's face it, Maria Sabina was a sly old woman
 who really knew how to play on the gringo's harp.
 And I don't think it's the last word that she said that.
 I mean, the implication may have been,
 "Why don't you go back to Basel and leave us alone for crying out loud?
 Haven't you done enough good here?"
 Yeah.
 [Audience member]
 I'm interested in something you mentioned in past talks
 about the synchronicity surrounding the use of mushrooms.
 I heard a story about the Hollywood restaurant.
 Oh, yeah, the Rod Steiger story.
 Well, yes.
 I mean, I don't know quite what to make of this.
 Again, there are more questions than answers.
 But one of the things that you will quickly experience
 if you get into this, and most of you probably already know,
 is that rational, and by that I mean statistically
 extrapolatable expectations, seem to be superseded on these trips
 by a kind of magical connectedness.
 All kinds of strange things happen on trips that really happen.
 It's not hallucination. These things really happen.
 It's almost as though the ordinary laws of causality are obviated
 and you become a magnet for the strange, the peculiar.
 And sometimes these synchronicities are trivial.
 Sometimes they're the difference between life and death.
 As an example of the latter, I've told this story before,
 but one time years ago, Dennis and a girlfriend of his
 went up into the mountains behind Boulder
 and they took Argyria nervosa, Hawaiian baby wood rose,
 and it was much stronger than they expected
 and it lasted much longer than they expected.
 And so night fell.
 And behind Boulder, up around Netherlands, it's 12,000 feet.
 I mean, when night falls, the temperature plummets.
 You're immediately in a situation of crisis.
 Night fell. They were completely lost.
 They had no clue where they were or how to get back to the car
 and it looked grim.
 And so they're looking out over these valleys and mountains and so forth,
 trying to spot something.
 And finally, across the valley, they see what my brother assumes
 is a car come around the corner because they see the headlights.
 And so they descend down into this canyon.
 It takes them an hour. It's pitch dark.
 They climb up the other side
 to arrive in a parking lot to find their car.
 Not only to find their car, but to find that the lights are on.
 Well, they had left the car some 12 hours before.
 The battery would have been run down if the lights had been on all that time.
 It means the lights, they saw the lights come on
 when they looked out across the valley full of fear,
 wondering where they were.
 So, you know, it's just a story,
 unless you're the person whose life was saved by this incident.
 And you can see then why Aboriginal people would have this faith
 in the primacy of mind, probably because mind is in fact primary.
 And it's only because we've locked ourselves down
 into a set of reductionist expectations
 that we live in a world so brutally under the aegis of laws
 like entropy and seriality and so forth and so on.
 Yeah.
 [Audience member]
 I don't know much has been made about this difference we had.
 I don't recall the conversation and haven't read the account of it.
 If Rupert's theory holds any water, it's the same thing
 and we can both still believe whatever we like to believe.
 I think that without argument, though,
 generally the plant experiences are richer
 and it's not difficult to see why.
 If you take mescaline, you have a mescaline trip.
 If you take peyote, you have a mescaline
 plus 13 other mescaline-like alkaloids.
 Unhalamine, unhalamine, peyotine, lofoforin,
 there's a whole spectrum of these things in there.
 And I think that gives a more, a richer experience.
 I don't, it's not an absolute ontological difference
 between Sasha and I on that issue.
 Where I might argue that there is a real difference
 is between drugs created yesterday in the laboratory
 and drugs that have a huge history behind them
 because I believe that in some sense,
 I mean this is not rationally defendable, but it's an intuition,
 in some sense when you take a plant, it takes you.
 And you make a contribution to the high,
 a tiny, you know, it's like you add one brick to the wall
 so that then when, essentially when you take psilocybin,
 you are experiencing all the previous psilocybin trips
 that ever were. That's what the psilocybin trip is.
 So I remember once when I, years ago, the first time I did ketamine,
 my impression was it's an empty vessel.
 It's an unfurnished hotel. It's a blank canvas.
 It's a psychedelic experience, but it's incredibly impoverished
 in that not enough people have done it to fill the space
 with stuff for the rest of us.
 Now in a thousand years, ketamine may be a very rich experience
 because so many people will have carved their initials on that tree.
 But I think, you know, as we learn from the plants,
 the plants learn from us and they adjust the content.
 So I'm not, I don't, I'm not of this school that says
 what we need is a drug we don't have.
 You know, somebody wrote an essay called
 "What We Need Is A New Drug" quoting the lyrics of the song.
 I think that we have the substances we need.
 What we don't have are the techniques and the intelligence
 to know what to do with them.
 What about the DMT ayahuasca difference?
 Because that is the act of the greedy.
 And they do seem to give completely different highs.
 Well, not if you take enough ayahuasca.
 If you take really a lot and sit and breathe
 and work with it for an hour or so,
 you can eventually get to a place where you just say
 this looks like a DMT flash to me.
 But that's a lip-numbing dose of ayahuasca.
 You know, harming has a slightly anesthetic effect.
 So if you take a dose of ayahuasca and your lips go numb,
 you are definitely topping out.
 That's an effective dose.
 Many people have never felt that.
 But it's a sign that you're approaching the effective limit.
 Yeah.
 Are you familiar with the alleged CIA testing of people
 in a mental hospital in a mental park in the '60s
 that Ken Kiki took part in?
 The Langley-Porter experiments, yes.
 I was just curious what happened with those studies.
 Was the government bound from those?
 You were saying that these studies in the University of New Mexico
 were going to be the newest studies.
 And I'm thinking of those, I'm wondering what came out of those.
 I can't really answer in detail.
 Those were not pharmacodynamical studies.
 They were more like psychotherapeutic studies.
 They were giving mescaline to people and working with states of dysfunction.
 But they weren't trying to understand the physiological parameters of it.
 Joe Adam and the guy who became the regent, Willis Harmon,
 all of those people were associated with those experiments.
 Mescaline was well studied during the '20s.
 I mean, if you've not read Heinrich Clouvert's book on hallucination,
 it's a very nice piece of work and done very early.
 He actually tried to create a vocabulary of hallucination.
 It's kind of silly, but he taught his subjects to identify colors
 by their place in the spectrum.
 So people would say, you know, spiked basketball moving at 4 o'clock,
 700 nanometers shifting toward 800 nanometers,
 and this sort of thing.
 Which it doesn't quite give you the flavor, I'm afraid.
 Yeah.
 [Audience member]
 [inaudible]
 Yeah, no, that's worth talking about,
 because I use the vocabulary in a specific sense,
 and if I don't explain it, I'm not really understood.
 There is a definite distinction.
 I mean, most people who've never taken these things think,
 well, don't you see colors and isn't it like that?
 There are three, at least three, discussable stages here.
 First of all, there's what's technically called hypnagogia.
 Hypnagogia is when you close your eyes
 and you see little lights and stars and drifting debris
 and that sort of thing.
 That's hypnagogia.
 Then there's what I would call, I guess, hallucinations.
 And there's a spectrum, and it's very interesting
 when they simulate or talk about hallucinations,
 they only talk about the onset of hallucination.
 When you take a psychedelic, here's the timeline.
 Let's say it's psilocybin.
 At one hour, you begin to feel the state of arousal,
 give or take a few minutes.
 Well, then when you close your eyes,
 there's this black background that is typical
 of the baseline of consciousness.
 Well, then after a few minutes,
 there are these sort of amoeboid afterimage colored lights
 that come toward you and stream past you.
 And this is actually called streaming.
 This is how it's referred to.
 And these things are either that afterimage violet
 or that afterimage chartreuse that we all know.
 And these things sort of come,
 and if you don't take a sufficient dose,
 that's it with theme and variation.
 And now we're in the land of the famous geometric grids,
 floating shapes, this sort of thing.
 But that is not the payoff of psychedelics.
 The real payoff is visions.
 And visions are not dancing mice
 and rows of little candies doing calisthenics
 and all that detritus.
 Vision is something which has emotional content.
 That's why light shows and fancy computer graphics
 and all that, they stop short at this point.
 Because no matter how visually complicated
 something is going on a screen,
 if it doesn't somehow touch your heart and your soul,
 then it's just a complicated pattern of some sort.
 But if it also contains information
 specific to your circumstance,
 then it's completely engaging.
 And that's what I shoot for
 and consider the visionary trip.
 It's coherent. It's not like a dream.
 It's not that coherent.
 It's not a little story in which you appear
 in a strange circumstance with odd people.
 It's not like that.
 But it is not simply a visual experience.
 The content is multidimensional and deeply mental
 and largely informational.
 And that's the proof of the pudding.
 And there is no way to achieve it
 any other way that I've ever noticed.
 Relative to my remarks this morning about orgasm,
 and this is part of the clue,
 I've noticed that in the post-coital aura,
 if you want to put it that way,
 there are these blue and green lights streaming past,
 usually not for very long,
 maybe a minute's worth
 after a completely satisfying sexual release.
 But it doesn't go to the next level,
 which it always does do with the psychedelic.
 But the fact that they share that phenomenon for a moment
 suggests something, suggests that--
 [audience member] Is your dose helping you reach that last level?
 It's both. And I used to think not.
 I used to think it was entirely dose.
 But I've realized from talking to people
 that what seems natural and obvious to me
 seems odd to some people.
 What you have to do is you have to look at the back of your eyelids
 with the expectation that you will see something.
 And it's a plane in the field.
 Now, if you're in front of the plane,
 that means you're thinking, "Oh, I'm getting high.
 "I feel weird. My agenda is this.
 "I need to think about that.
 "Do I need to go to the bathroom? Where is the water?"
 If your attention is here, if your attention is beyond it,
 you also won't see it.
 Like I've noticed, you can't talk and see it at the same time.
 The act of verbalizing requires so much mental focus
 that you can't see this stuff.
 So what you have to do is look at the back of your eyelids
 as though it were a flat surface
 and just keep looking at it, and keep looking at it,
 and if there's any flicker of color or light or movement,
 concentrate and keep looking, concentrate and keep looking.
 And it usually doesn't take more than a minute or two of that
 for it to completely open up in front of you.
 The other thing is I plead with it.
 I address it.
 And I say, "Do what you will. I'm entirely yours.
 "Please don't hurt me, but do with me what you will."
 And if that invoking, that announcing that you are ready
 is very important in this matter of the speech of the mushrooms,
 the reason a lot of people don't have that experience
 is because you have to initiate the conversation.
 You can be loaded for hours on mushrooms,
 and if you will never say, in the silence of your mind,
 it doesn't have to be spoken, but you must say, "Hello?"
 It will never directly address you. It's shy.
 But if you will say, "Hello," it's there.
 It says, "Yes," and you're off.
 And another thing--we're so defensive and locked down.
 Another thing that's very important, and all Aboriginal people know this,
 is the importance of chant and song.
 If you get into a hard place,
 the Western reflex seems to be to assume the fetal position
 and wait with the belief that in some hours,
 if you don't go mad, this hell, whatever it is,
 will be lifted off of you.
 Well, this is the worst thing you could possibly do in that situation.
 If you get into a place that is difficult,
 sit up, gulp air, and sing.
 And the reasons for this are obvious on different levels.
 First of all, it's an assertion of your existential right to be.
 You don't just whimper and fold.
 You sit up. You sing.
 Second of all, it oxygenates your brain.
 And mental, though these places may be,
 they have some root in matter and physiology.
 Flood your brain with oxygen, and the demon, whatever it is,
 will be washed away, or at least transformed.
 And so, by techniques of invocation, of chant, of song, of concentration,
 self-discipline, and I don't mean rigorous self-discipline,
 nothing like what yoga demands.
 I just mean pull yourself together, for God's sake,
 pay attention to what's going on.
 You can make it your vehicle.
 And then the other thing, which I always do,
 but it's controversial, I suppose, to say it,
 is cannabis.
 Cannabis is the rudder on your ship.
 If you come into a place that you don't care for,
 just take a hit of cannabis, and then do your chanting,
 and you will move through it.
 But don't clench.
 Realize that you are an energetic system,
 and the addition of cannabis, or oxygen, or water,
 is going to change the situation.
 So take responsibility.
 And then finally, you have to discipline your hind brain.
 In the presence of the strange and the overwhelming,
 the primate locks into a fight-or-flight syndrome.
 But it's an adrenal, it's an adrenaline release,
 and adrenaline is a very short-acting compound.
 All you have to do is wait, and the fear will come,
 and it will spike, and if you don't go mad,
 and start screaming, or tear your clothes off,
 and run into the street, but if you just sit,
 it can't sustain the spike.
 It chemically is impossible to remain petrified for very long.
 Eventually, you just say, "Well, all right, so I'm terrified,
 so what about it?"
 And then you begin to drift down.
 So it's not an easy thing, but it can be mastered,
 and it's mainly practical attention.
 The more exotic techniques, mantra, yantra,
 physiologically unlikely positions, and so forth,
 that all works as well.
 But I think just breath, and sound, and cannabis, and intent
 will carry you through most difficulties.
 Yeah?
 I have a question about cannabis.
 When I was younger, I could smoke very easily, readily,
 at any time, whether I was sitting in class, or playing soccer,
 or any time, and it would feel very good, and calming,
 and I'd just kind of be stoned.
 And after a while, and now I can barely smoke anymore,
 because I get really kind of sketched out,
 and not really paranoid, but a little bit like that.
 I'm just wondering, would--
 You mean you feel uncomfortable with yourself in social situations?
 You don't know what to do?
 Yeah, but not only that, but even sometimes when I'm alone,
 and I don't smoke out with other people anymore,
 but even when I'm alone, I have to be--
 I can't just sit. I usually end up, I don't know,
 wanting to go mountain biking or something, run up a hill.
 Well, I mean, I think our responses change over life,
 not only to drugs, but to other things.
 I think also you have to find what works for you.
 I know people who take LSD in small amounts very often,
 because they say they can work better on it.
 I tried it. I tried to--
 I felt I wasn't getting enough work done, and they said,
 "Oh, well, you'll be able to do 12 hours of work a day
 if you just take 50 mikes after breakfast."
 I couldn't do it. I mean, it sketched me out.
 I found myself pacing the floor, and, you know,
 just it was madness.
 I, on the other hand, can, before breakfast,
 smoke enough cannabis that most people would simply go back to bed,
 and that sets me up for hours and hours of work.
 So you sort of have to learn yourself.
 These people who are these enthusiasts for detour,
 they've got to be some different kind of person than I am,
 because they genuinely take pleasure in something
 which would just drive me right up my tree.
 So one of the things that you have to honor in this domain,
 more than in most human endeavors, is our human uniqueness.
 I remember years ago I took a course.
 It was a funny course, too.
 It was called Forensic Pathology, if you can imagine,
 and it was taught by, if you can imagine,
 Sasha Shulgin, Forensic Pathology, right?
 So one of the things he did in this class
 is he brought in a little vial of some substance,
 and there were 500 people in this class.
 It was at Cal.
 So we passed it around.
 No big deal.
 You sniff it, a kind of a nondescript odor,
 pass it on to the next person.
 Out of the 500 people,
 three had an incredibly violent reaction to this stuff,
 and then Sasha explained there is a known gene
 for reacting to this thing.
 People who have this gene
 are 50,000 times more sensitive to this substance
 than people without it.
 Well, just extrapolate that range to every substance in nature,
 and you will see why, in a sense,
 learning what drugs you should and shouldn't take
 is as big a task as deciding what kind of person
 you should or shouldn't go to bed with,
 what kind of investments you should or shouldn't make.
 In other words, it's a lifetime task of mistake-making,
 learning, self-observation, and correction,
 and what's sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander.
 And you have to honor your individuality.
 The shamans say, you know,
 if the plant wants you, it will take you.
 You will know if there is a lock and key fit.
 And I think part of late adolescence
 is drug experimentation for this purpose.
 I think if you go through life
 taking vast amounts of drugs of all sorts,
 then you didn't quite get it right.
 The idea is to find what works for you
 and then put the pedal to the metal.
 And if it's LSD or whatever it is,
 because the things have personalities.
 It's like making a friendship.
 And some people are going to want to be your friend
 and some people are going to think you're a jerk
 and you don't want to hang out with those people
 because they make you feel bad.
 After you said that, you had very convincing arguments
 in your books about how the other people don't have the best
 and how similar it is to general brain chemistry and so forth.
 So, I don't want to answer here,
 but all these other subjective things,
 would you come into it against an argument like that?
 Forgive me, I can't remember the book.
 No, I'll reconstitute it for you.
 Yes, in one of my books I said
 if you're thinking of taking a substance,
 you should ask yourself three questions.
 First of all, does it occur in a plant?
 Because that tells you that at least it is not toxic to organic systems.
 Does it occur in a plant?
 Second question, does it occur in a plant with a history of human usage?
 If the answer is yes, then you have your human data sample.
 If people somewhere have been taking this plant for millennia,
 then you know that it doesn't cause blindness, miscarriages, madness, tumors,
 so forth and so on.
 And the third and narrowest gate is,
 does it have an affinity, a relationship to ordinary brain chemistry?
 Because you don't want to insult the physical brain.
 You don't want to damage yourself in this enterprise.
 Psilocybin will pass this test.
 Stretching the rules a bit, LSD will pass this test.
 In other words, LSD is a relative of compounds
 that have been used for a long time.
 Whether or not it's a constituent of brain chemistry is debatable.
 But now the interesting thing about applying this test,
 you might say, oh, well, what a downer.
 Everything's getting tossed out.
 No, the strongest stuff remains.
 DMT passes this test with flying colors.
 It's already in your brain just as you sit here.
 It has a long history of human usage in many parts of the world,
 and it occurs in many, many species of plants.
 And it is the strongest hallucinogen known.
 So this is a reasonable test to apply.
 That's to avoid basically danger and damage.
 Then once you've done that, the final here is,
 old pilots like to say,
 [no audio]
 You should ask yourself three questions.
 First of all, does it occur in a plant?
 Because that tells you that at least it is not toxic to organic systems.
 Does it occur in a plant?
 Second question, does it occur in a plant with a history of human usage?
 If the answer is yes, then you have your human data sample.
 If people somewhere have been taking this plant for millennia,
 then you know that it doesn't cause blindness, miscarriages, madness, tumors,
 so forth and so on.
 And the third and narrowest gate is,
 does it have an affinity, a relationship to ordinary brain chemistry?
 Because you don't want to insult the physical brain.
 You don't want to damage yourself in this enterprise.
 Psilocybin will pass this test.
 Stretching the rules a bit, LSD will pass this test.
 In other words, LSD is a relative of compounds
 that have been used for a long time.
 Whether or not it's a constituent of brain chemistry is debatable.
 But now the interesting thing about applying this test,
 you might say, "Oh, well, what a downer.
 Everything's getting tossed out."
 No, the strongest stuff remains.
 DMT passes this test with flying colors.
 It's already in your brain just as you sit here.
 It has a long history of human usage in many parts of the world,
 and it occurs in many, many species of plants.
 And it is the strongest hallucinogen known.
 So this is a reasonable test to apply.
 That's to avoid basically danger and damage.
 Then once you've done that, you have to figure out
 of those candidates remaining, who is your friend,
 who you have an affinity for.
 All right, why don't we break now, and you're going to--
 - Before we break, I just have to evaluate the--
 - I know, here, as old pilots like to say.
 So you should now be in the last crack mood,
 meaning that you're getting your last crack at me.
 What turns have been left unstoned, and what stones left unturned?
 Yes.
 - I was just thinking about spirology,
 when the showman asked about having a different experience
 with smoking cannabis now, and I think about cycles and spirology
 and the different aspects of it, that may be also related to different cycles.
 I also wonder about spirology in relation to doing experiences,
 like the experiences with your friends,
 but they may not be logical for you.
 Do you know anything about that?
 - I don't really know anything about it.
 I do think--it's puzzling when you feel that the initial conditions
 have been recreated, but the results you get are completely different.
 And astrology then offers itself as an explanation.
 Well, the last time you did it, the moon was in Taurus,
 now it's in something else.
 Again, this is something that could be looked at.
 Is there a time--I don't believe everything the mushroom tells me.
 I just treat it like everybody else.
 You can't trust anybody 100%, but the mushroom does seem to have the idea
 that it's good when the moon is in Scorpio.
 I've just experientially noticed that,
 that things seem to go better in the psychedelic realm
 when the moon is in Scorpio.
 I'm a triple Scorpio.
 Hey--
 - [inaudible]
 - Yeah, yeah.
 - [inaudible]
 - Hey, wait a minute here.
 Yeah.
 - [inaudible]
 - Well, they're probably smoking K'nik-K'nik
 and aboriginal tobaccos and various things.
 You know, it's a very odd thing.
 I mean, you talk about cultural evolution and that sort of thing.
 Did you know that smoking was unknown in Europe and Asia
 until it was brought from the New World at the time of the Spanish conquest?
 Rome never smoked its opium.
 It put it in wine.
 Opium was never smoked in China until after tobacco was introduced.
 In fact, the smoking of opium in China arose largely as a result
 of trying to drive out tobacco smoking as a habit.
 This method of drug delivery, which you would assume was paleolithic,
 was unknown to the civilization that we evolved in.
 The New World seems particularly expertise in these dimensions.
 For example, enemas are one of the very few things
 that have entered our culture as a cultural contribution
 unique to the Amazon basin.
 Enemas, they had rubber.
 They had natural rubber, and they discovered that some substances
 were so toxic that you didn't want to put them into your stomach,
 but that they would be active if you would directly insert them.
 So the enema was invented millennia ago in South America,
 but was a mad idea from the point of view of European medicine
 until it was tried.
 And then, of course, it became the rage.
 And there are then successive rages of upper colon focus
 that sweep through our society every once in a while.
 Yeah?
 You can start on the idea that you speak about in the essay
 about the plant as a model for consciousness and for culture.
 Yeah, that was an essay that originally appeared in Whole Earth Review,
 I think called "Plant, Plan, Planet."
 And what I was trying to say there was
 there is a great deal to be learned from emulating plants,
 especially in the culture of crisis that we're in.
 First of all, plants, they have to deal with their toxic byproducts
 because they can't move away from them the way we do
 and move into new niches.
 Plants are homeostatically self-regulating.
 Plants are small solar factories, essentially.
 Plants do all their work at temperatures below 115 degrees.
 Notice that we do--our technologies operate at 600 degrees and up
 and then produce all kinds of heavy metal toxins and poisons
 and this sort of thing.
 Also, in a sense, the dowel-like passivity of plants,
 the way in which they accept their circumstances,
 essentially an animal is an organism that can move away
 from the circumstances of its own being.
 And so for all of these reasons, plants seem like an excellent model
 for the kind of future that we should be building.
 We want to go to lower energies.
 We want to go to more organic starting and ending materials
 in industrial processes.
 We want to create a kind of integrated homeostatic cohesion
 in our societies.
 In all these cases--and a solar-based society--
 in all these cases, the plants provide the model.
 They've been showing how to do these things very efficiently
 for a very long time.
 Yeah?
 [inaudible]
 I heard that from Rick.
 It's very interesting.
 I haven't actually looked at the data.
 The only reason astrology is not scientifically respectable
 is because no one can hypothesize how the coupling takes place.
 In other words, how can the transit of Mercury be coupled
 to an event system on this planet?
 But don't despair.
 We know that the sun radically affects the weather on the Earth,
 but no coupling system has ever been proven for that either.
 It's just the statistical correlations are so overwhelming
 that it's impossible to ignore.
 I think probably the key to understanding astrology
 is you're going to have to go outside of astrology
 to understand it to something like fractal resonance.
 The reason the pattern in the stars is repeated in the pattern of your life
 is because there's only one pattern to begin with.
 It isn't that the stars cause you to be the way you are
 any more than that you cause the stars to be the way they are.
 There is not a causal relationship here.
 What there is is a series of adumbrations and reflections.
 This is a great discovery that has been made in the past 10 years,
 one of the greatest intellectual steps ever taken by human beings.
 A new law of nature is now discernible, and I can state it for you.
 It's that nature is self-similar across scales.
 Do you understand what that means?
 It explains why an atom looks like a solar system
 and why they both look like a galaxy,
 because nature is self-similar across scales.
 It means that if a certain architectural conceit works on one level,
 nature will use it on any other level where it seems appropriate.
 And so on many, many levels the same patterns repeat.
 So it wouldn't surprise me at all if in the next while
 we got the equivalent of astrology, but quantumology.
 Quantumology, where instead of calculating downward from the stars
 to the context of human fate, you calculate upward from the atom
 to the context of human fate.
 And if you keep calculating, you can go from quantumology to astrology
 and leave out sociology and show that these things are reciprocal reflections of each other.
 Then the mystery and the woo-woo of astrology, I think,
 would just simply disappear and be replaced by an "of course, how could it be otherwise"
 kind of understanding.
 Yeah?
 [INAUDIBLE]
 Well, somebody said the thing that has changed least in Western civilization
 in the last 300 years is the classroom.
 I mean, this could be 1500.
 I mean, everything else has changed, but what do we do?
 We come with sharpened pencils and sit and listen to elderly, lecherous professionals
 and to try and stay out of their clutches long enough to get a degree,
 and then we go out and play the game.
 I think that this is somewhat a field, but something very profound is happening
 in the way in which we modern people process information.
 I don't know how many of you are familiar with Marshall McLuhan,
 but McLuhan argued that an equally profound transition occurred
 with the introduction of print.
 Print is not simply writing that's easy to read and reproduce.
 Print is an entirely different creature than anything that had been produced before.
 It has qualities that no other medium has, specifically its linearity,
 its uniformity, its interchangeability.
 What I mean by that is that every A, every capital A looks like every other capital A.
 They are interchangeable.
 When a friend of yours writes you a note, you look at it.
 That's the precondition to reading it.
 When you open a book, you immediately read it.
 You don't look at it at all.
 There's no puzzle over how the A is sitting there on the page with that white back.
 No, we just read.
 And the difference between looking and reading is very great.
 McLuhan called it the contrast between a manuscript culture,
 which is ear-oriented, and an eye-oriented visual culture.
 What's happening to us, and I was talking to somebody about this at the break,
 is the rise of the image.
 The image is in the ascendant.
 Ever since the invention of photography, let's say, in the middle 19th century,
 followed by color photography, followed by color lithography,
 followed by moving pictures, followed by television,
 followed by the Internet, VR, stereograms, and all the rest of it,
 something is happening.
 Our culture is forcing our visual education.
 And I think one of the problems with education is that we are trying to use
 a print-created institution to educate electronically biased human beings.
 And it's created a kind of a speed bump of illiteracy.
 One of the things that is put against your generation,
 you generation Xers here, is that you're not literary.
 You're not a literary culture.
 But I--and it's true, don't deny it.
 None of you can quote Milton.
 But I also think it's a temporary thing.
 Your children will not be like you.
 Your children will be fully visually literate.
 They will have assimilated this new medium and operate under its aegis
 while you are in a transition phase.
 And so the kind of dumbing down of culture that has had to occur
 as we go from a fully literate culture to a fully electronic culture
 is, I think, transitional.
 I mean, everybody says, you know, people learn everything from TV.
 Kids know every star, every show, every plot.
 And say, why do they know that junk when they can't memorize
 the sequence of U.S. presidents?
 Well, make a good enough TV show about it, and they probably will.
 Not that I'm a fan of TV, but I am a fan of the visual image.
 And I think TV betrays it to some degree.
 HDTV may correct that.
 But it gives psychedelics an interesting role
 because they are such stimulants to the visual imagination.
 It's almost like they lead us deeper in this cultural direction
 that we have great appetite for.
 And now, you know, with CD-ROMs and multimedia and websites and all that,
 we just can't wait to show each other stuff.
 Everybody's building a website.
 Everybody wants to invite you over to see their latest visual creation.
 And I think that language itself is headed in this direction,
 that our language is literally becoming more colorful,
 more sparkling, more engaging.
 And it's because it's becoming more visual.
 And eventually, it may be an entirely visual exercise.
 The rise of icons is an interesting example of this.
 But now, wherever you go in the world,
 if you will push yourself just a little bit,
 you can understand what's going on
 because signage is so iconographic.
 It doesn't matter whether you're in Germany or France or Argentina
 or where you are.
 The signage is in an international language of visible symbols
 that unite us all.
 You see, the thing is the word is ambiguous
 to a far greater degree than the image.
 And so when we communicate in words,
 we communicate incompletely.
 If we communicate in images,
 it's much closer to fulfilling the intent of communication,
 which is to erase the boundaries between the messenger
 and the messages being sent to.
 Yeah?
 [inaudible]
 Well, that's why I called my book,
 one of my books, "The Archaic Revival,"
 because you see, I really think--
 The thing that McLuhan was trying to say
 was that every medium, be it print,
 he even treated the electric light as a medium.
 Every medium has a hidden agenda,
 which the users of the medium are not aware of
 until it's too late.
 For instance, in his discussion of the automobile,
 it was invented to convey people from place to place.
 In practical terms, what it was was a bedroom away from home.
 And a whole generation of people discovered sexuality
 much earlier than they would have because of the automobile.
 That wasn't its intent, but that was its effect.
 Similarly, McLuhan says you could never have the concept
 of the citizen if it was not preceded
 by the invention of movable type,
 because the citizen is an interchangeable social unit
 the way a ladder is an interchangeable unit in topography.
 Also, the linearity of Western thought
 is a product of the fact that when we communicate in print,
 we arrange our thoughts in lines.
 That isn't done in some languages, but in ours it is.
 Well, then we impute that quality of our communication method
 to reality itself.
 My hope is that through holography and virtual reality
 and HDTV and a deep awareness of McLuhan
 that we could create what I would call a bias-less media.
 In other words, it would be a media that would do to you
 exactly what reality does to you
 instead of pushing you in some other direction.
 And it would be then a return to the archaic.
 And it might be technically very sophisticated,
 but the final impression must be
 I am not looking at a screen, I am not turning the pages of a book,
 I am not listening to earphones,
 I am really having this experience and it is really real.
 I've never heard the VR prophets talk about it
 as a bias-less form of media,
 but I think that's what we're headed for.
 Well, when media becomes bias-less,
 media becomes reality.
 And this is within reach now.
 [inaudible]
 Well, I don't know about HDTV.
 It seems slow coming.
 I saw it in Frankfurt and I was shocked.
 Have you seen it?
 It's not at all what I expected.
 I expected, you know, the hype is it's just like a movie.
 It's that clear.
 High-definition television,
 it's an entirely different way of doing TV.
 Well, it's much weirder than film.
 It's a window.
 It's freakishly three-dimensional.
 I mean, you can't tear your eyes off of it.
 You can't believe how intensely real it is.
 In fact, it's sort of hyper-real in some way.
 To the issue of virtual reality,
 I don't know, I was a speaker at Seagraph last August
 and at one point I turned to Brenda Laurel and I said,
 "I think we can stop hyping virtual reality.
 It appears to have attained lift-off speed
 because, you know, Softimage, Disney,
 they were all there with mega-million dollar outlays
 and they haven't yet figured out how to deliver it,
 but it may be cheap.
 It may come over the wire.
 It may cost you a quarter.
 It may not be the fantasy of the virtual reality salon in your house.
 It may just simply come over the wire.
 I think the economics of it may delay or accelerate it,
 but that the appetite for it is so great that it is for sure on its way.
 What's holding it back is the technology
 because the demands that we make of our hardware
 when we move to VR are incredible.
 I mean, look at these eucalyptus trees blowing in the wind out here.
 Look at how each leaf has a unique reflective index of its own
 which is changing in time.
 Think of the computational energy that would have to be brought to bear
 to convincingly reproduce that in a VR environment.
 I mean, it's orders of magnitude more computationally demanding
 than anything currently being done.
 However, you know, it's said of the computer,
 well, it's said of the automobile,
 if it had evolved at the same rate as the computer,
 a car would now go 375,000 miles an hour on a nickel's worth of gas
 and cost you 200 bucks.
 So we shouldn't assume at all that we're reaching the limits
 of the potential limits of the computer.
 I'd say we're probably about halfway there.
 There is right now a fiber optic experimental line
 between the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota
 that is able to transfer 630 gigabytes per second.
 That's the Encyclopedia Britannica in under a 30th of a second.
 That's bandwidth. That can handle anything.
 We just have to run that experimental cable
 into every city and home on the planet and then we'll have it.
 You know, McLuhan had an interesting idea.
 McLuhan's a weird character because a very advanced thinker
 but a convert to Catholicism, so forth and so on.
 He finally concluded that electricity is the physical descent
 of the Holy Ghost into history.
 That as the planet, as our cities turn to light
 and everything is linked together informationally,
 that this is the unfolding presence of the third person of the Trinity.
 And, you know, since electricity is a fairly mysterious item anyway,
 who is to say not?
 In practical terms, it may lead to something very much like that.
 A gathering of us all together in cyber hyper shamano space.
 [laughter]
 Yeah.
 [inaudible]
 Sure, I'll describe it briefly.
 I've tried to stay off it because I tried to keep this botanically focused.
 For those of you who don't know it, I have other burdens to bear
 other than my psychedelic advocacy.
 One of them is that I am the purveyor of a theory of history
 which has many different aspects about it.
 And I've used some of the terms like novelty,
 aggression of novelty, concrescence.
 But I believe that I have discovered or was told
 a mathematical algorithm that allows us to replace probability theory
 with a waveform that predicts where in time novelty will cluster
 and where in time very probable events should be assumed to concentrate.
 It's a very neat mathematical theory.
 It's all very solid and so forth and so on.
 It has as all theories do what I call a hard swallow built in.
 To illustrate what I mean, the hard swallow in normal cosmology
 is called the Big Bang.
 If you can believe that, you'll believe anything.
 This is the idea that the universe sprang from nothing
 in a single moment for no reason.
 Notice that whether that's true or not, it's the limit case for credulity.
 I mean, if you can believe that, it's a little hard to know
 what you would dig your heels in on.
 The hard swallow in my theory is that it seems to all calculate out
 to prove that we're less than 18 years away
 from an event as dramatic as the Big Bang,
 but sort of the Big Bang in reverse, what I call the Big Surprise.
 That this process of boundary dissolution that we have been experiencing
 in our historical and cultural adventure is accelerating by a factor
 such that half of the history of the universe is going to unfold
 in the next 17 years, as much will happen, in other words,
 in the next 17 years as happened in the previous 17 or 20 billion years.
 That in fact, history is the phenomenon which immediately precedes this event.
 Sort of in the way that the dilation of the cervix is the phenomenon
 which immediately precedes the birth of an infant.
 History is the indicator event that says the transcendental object
 hidden in the protean depths of nature is about to shed all its foils
 and emerge in its hyperdimensional nakedness at the end of time.
 And it would be a mad thing to hypothesize except that
 the mathematical algorithm allows very accurate predictions of the past.
 Now at first that may sound silly, but notice it's easy to predict the future.
 Who the hell can nay say it?
 It's very difficult to predict the past because it's already happened.
 So whether you were right or wrong or not is going to be immediately determinable.
 And I believe based on this theory's ability to describe the past
 that we should take very seriously the idea that we are in fact
 the carriers of a process of universal metamorphosis
 that is reaching its culmination.
 You may find that impossible to imagine that in 18 years
 the world will turn itself inside out.
 But I think if you sit with it a while, try to imagine that not happening.
 Try to imagine this world 500 years from now
 if we continue with business as usual and no vertical gain, it's inconceivable.
 We have painted ourselves into some kind of a corner.
 I grant you my schedule is a little breathtaking, only 18 years.
 But I'll bet you if my schedule were 100 years
 you'd feel that it was uncomfortably long viewed.
 Sometime in the next little while it's going to be apparent to everybody
 that the human adventure is building towards some kind of quantized transition point.
 We are not going to wander in the miasma of techno-worship, male dominance,
 resource exploitation and ever burgeoning human population forever.
 It's impossible. It's a self-limiting exercise.
 And to the degree that we can educate ourselves and communicate with each other
 we can hasten this process or at least make it easier for the planetary culture to go through.
 Yeah.
 So given that metaphor of preparing for another birth,
 would it be presumptuous to look at the plants coming into this North American culture
 as sort of like, when I was getting ready to birth, for about four hours before
 I started getting flooded with visions and hallucinations of going into the other world
 and I'm seeing that the plants in this culture and their reawakening in the last 30 years
 could be sort of that momentum to help move us into this new birth process?
 Oh, I think so, because I think what we're going to, history is ending, but time will continue.
 Well, what is time without history for human beings?
 Well, it's the archaon. We're going back into the archaic
 and apparently as central to the archaic as nuclear physics and economics is to our world
 was shamanism and hallucinogenic plants.
 So I think we're preparing to make a return.
 Nothing happens without a reason and nothing is unannounced.
 This is something the mushroom told me. It's a very interesting idea.
 Nothing is unannounced.
 If you are sensitive enough, you can never be taken by surprise
 because there is always the wave which precedes the actual arrival of the event.
 And a lot of people talk about the end of the world, but it's almost entirely couched negatively.
 I feel that I am without a doubt the most optimistic person I have ever met or heard of.
 And yet after I give some of my lectures, people come up to me and say it was frightening.
 It was an appalling vision of what, it's that you missed the point.
 I'm telling you, God's kingdom is 18 years away.
 How could you possibly interpret that as negative?
 And say, well, but aren't you saying that everything will be changed and transformed and swept away?
 Well, yes, but that's the way of it.
 You want a psychedelic truth, 30 years of psychedelic voyaging, I can distill it for you.
 This is not a psychedelic truth. This is truth.
 Here it is.
 Yes.
 You can learn this from drugs, you can learn it from life, you can learn it from death,
 you can learn it any way you like, but by God, you will learn it.
 Nothing lasts.
 Nothing lasts.
 Not your enemies, not your friends, not your youth, not your dreams, not your fears, not your hopes,
 not even yourself.
 Nothing lasts.
 I mean, this has been said often, but felt rarely.
 Heraclitus said, "Panteria," all flows.
 And the lie of Western psychology is that something is stable.
 God's nature, the equinoctial points, something lasts.
 And because of this lie, we are perpetually in a state of anxiety,
 because the truth of our experience is nothing lasts.
 And yet the truth that our culture tells us is, you know, save your immortal soul,
 make a contribution, preserve, protect, conserve, stabilize, retain.
 It's pointless.
 And so the central truth of being is the felt presence of immediate reality.
 That's all you will ever have.
 And so the quality of the felt presence of immediate experience
 is what you want to impact and determine.
 And everything else is rumor, hearsay, hope, dream, memory, projection.
 But the felt presence of immediate experience, if that is not satisfying to you,
 you have to change your life.
 You have to do something.
 And the fact that Western psychology and civilization is a vast exercise
 in delayed gratification, and the consequences of that are endless unhappiness
 and neurosis and fetish substitution and so forth and so on for reality.
 It should be liberating to know that nothing lasts.
 But instead it paralyzes with a sense of ephemerality
 when what it should do is empower an enormous sense of freedom.
 And I think this ability to accept the inevitable passing and coming to be
 of phenomena is what psychedelic wisdom is really about.
 Anybody, anything, hit me.
 [Audience member asks question]
 You mean my views on the web?
 [Audience member asks question]
 Where did I learn my views from?
 Well, Ralph Abraham, you should visit his website.
 It's http://hypatia@ucsc.edu.org
 Well, it's basically just a URL, url://hypatia@usc.org.net.edu.org, I'm sorry.
 It's a funny question.
 I'm puzzled because I never thought of these as my views on the net.
 Aren't these the views of the net?
 I mean, is anybody saying anything different?
 I mean, I assume this is what unites the faithful in the religion of net worship.
 But maybe I'm wrong.
 [Audience member asks question]
 Well, that's more alarming.
 The businessmen will, wherever there is a frontier,
 I mean, first come the explorers, then come the missionaries,
 then come the hookers and the businessmen.
 And we've got plenty of hookers and plenty of businessmen on the internet now.
 It's the content.
 I'm McLuhan enough to not so much be obsessed with the content.
 It's not what is on the net that's important.
 It's the net itself.
 It's what it is.
 It's the fact that if you want to find something out, you now can.
 It's the greatest democratization of information that's ever occurred.
 I mean, the head of the CIA under Jimmy Carter didn't have intelligence as good as I do
 because I can go on to the net and access these various databases.
 So the thing that is so empowering about the net, I think,
 is Tim Leary had a slogan back in the '60s.
 He used to tell his audiences, "Find the others. Find the others."
 Well, how do you find the others?
 In the '60s, you put a flower in your hair and headed for San Francisco.
 Today, you go on to the net and go to the well, and you can find the others.
 It doesn't matter how obscure, peculiar, or bizarre your interest is,
 I guarantee you, you can find 10 or 15 people who passionately share this thing.
 And that empowers you, and it builds communities.
 And community is the enemy of authoritarian organization
 because community springs from the heart.
 Authority springs from theory.
 Keeping us in a de-communal state is a major part of the agenda of anybody controlling us.
 That's why the internet is so terrifying to people because, obviously, it strengthens dissidence.
 And, you know, just last week, this stupid thing happened in Congress, the Digital Decency Act.
 Ask yourself, how many times have you been told that child pornography, bestiality, so forth and so on,
 is being purveyed to thousands of people on the net?
 Then, if you have any experience of the net, you realize that that's like thinking of San Francisco
 as that one corner at Broadway and Columbus where they peddle girly mags.
 That's just a part of San Francisco. It's a complex civilization.
 We have all kinds of people. Everybody should be able to do what they want.
 But to define San Francisco that way would then lead you to the conclusion,
 well, maybe we better seal off San Francisco and clean up this hideous evil that's breaking loose.
 This is what's being done on the web.
 The public is being manipulated by major media to think that the web is just swarming with pederasts, fetishists,
 but please, every now and then, restrict the web and to get regulation and put cops on every node and so forth and so on.
 And this is very bad. It should be resisted. It probably will succeed.
 I don't think it will destroy the web. I think it will be a speed bump.
 But please know that a war is going on for your loyalty in this issue.
 And don't allow, you know, pornograph-phobes and people like that to stampede you
 into the idea that the web is a tremendous social evil poised at the souls of our children.
 My God, you have to have $10,000 of equipment and an engineering degree to make your way into these places.
 I don't think there are too many eight-year-olds wandering around traumatized by what they're finding at alt.pix.erotic.
 Seems idiotic to me.
 Yeah.
 It comes to the DEA. There are a lot of discussions going on because the government seems to condition a lot of our lives around usage of psychoactive plants.
 And there are different discussions going on in the Bay Area about just how to deal with it.
 Some people are advocating going public, coming out, and which I cannot agree with.
 Other people are advocating the First Amendment challenge and having a number of test cases going through it, which are fairly constructive.
 And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about the, when you go to general social labor,
 how to deal with these governmental...
 Porn drug issues?
 Yeah.
 It's a complicated thing because there are two levels.
 There is, first of all, the drug problem we are told we have,
 which is too many people are taking too many bad drugs and committing crimes in order to obtain money to buy drugs
 or committing crimes in order to transport, manufacture, and deal drugs.
 And this has dehumanized our society and it's a terrible scourge and we have to do something about it.
 That's level one of the drug problem.
 What you are not told is that governments are the chief offenders.
 Most drugs in the world are either produced by governments or produced with the connivance of governments.
 And our little bailiwick, the psychedelics, don't even figure in this issue because not enough money is being made.
 The only psychedelic that ever made anybody any money was LSD.
 And on a scale where we're talking about methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin,
 the fortunes made off of LSD were minuscule.
 The drug thing is a con.
 Governments need vast amounts of untraceable cash, they believe,
 because they turn it over to their secret police agencies who then pursue secret agendas
 where they try to control events by illicit and non-sanctioned means.
 And by that I mean rigging elections, murdering labor leaders, hounding liberal editors into retirement,
 smearing people, so forth and so on.
 The hard drug markets of this world are entirely in the hands of governments.
 Somebody pulls a stunt in Kuwait and we're there in a moment.
 We send troops to Haiti, but these mysterious jungle warlords in Burma seem untouchable.
 Nothing can be done.
 They're beyond the reach of any army, any aerial bombing campaign.
 It's just mysteriously indestructible, these warlords in Burma.
 Well, it's because they are the producing end of an illicit, world-girdling organization
 whose purpose is to deliver drugs to the market.
 I believe that the CIA got into this game for, you could almost say, for good reasons from their point of view.
 The CIA in the middle 60s, as well as the rest of the American establishment,
 was confronted with the spectacle of black people determined to burn down the core of every city in America
 until they got social justice.
 The decision was made to bring hundreds of tons of chemically,
 pharmaceutically pure China white number three heroin into those ghettos
 and just basically dump it on the ground and see what happens.
 And it totally broke the back of black radicalism
 and turned everybody into a junkie or a gangster somewhere in that system.
 Well, then when we lost the Vietnam War, the way the geopolitical thing came down was
 Khomeini got the heroin industry and China white was traded in for Iranian brown, a lower grade of heroin.
 Well, since Khomeini is not a nice man in our pantheon,
 heroin suddenly became highly repressed.
 But at the same time, as the Vietnam War wound down,
 these insurgencies in South America were being started up and cocaine was brought onto the scene.
 And I can remember in like '72, '73, '74, a particular cover of Time magazine,
 cocaine, the new drug of choice. And it was just this far short of an endorsement.
 It was all about movie stars were doing it and everybody was doing it.
 A huge picture of lines on the cover. That's a decision to sell.
 That's an ad campaign, a very high profile ad campaign.
 Well, I think I said to you yesterday in the international drug trade,
 the real cost of these drugs is in transporting them.
 Because you have to pay somebody to bring 10 kilos of heroin into the United States,
 unless you know fools, you're going to have to pay them 40 or $50,000,
 a fraction of the worth of that heroin. But nevertheless, if you haven't sold it yet,
 it may be tricky to get that kind of scratch together.
 Well, that's for 10 kilos of junk. You have to pay $50,000 to transport it.
 But if you have a C-130, you can bring 50,000 pounds of heroin
 and it will cost you far less per unit volume.
 So the CIA had all these airplanes and they simply diverted them to the drug trade.
 You probably have been following this recent scandal involving the US Forest Service.
 Has this been in the papers here? It's been well rehearsed in Hawaii.
 Well, as you know, the US Forest Service uses C-130s to drop fire retardant chemicals on forest fires.
 When the Air Force was downsizing three years ago,
 the Forest Service requisitioned 15 C-130s.
 By manipulating paperwork and painting out serial numbers and painting on other serial numbers,
 only three of those C-130s ever reached the Forest Service.
 The other 12 mysteriously disappeared. Do you know what a C-130 looks like?
 Do you know how hard it is to lose one of those puppies?
 Twelve of them disappeared without a trace.
 Well, guess where? And guess what they're lugging back and forth?
 Now the CIA itself is addicted to the money.
 The original impulse, "break the back of black radicalism,"
 has been replaced by a more obvious impulse, "make a lot of money."
 Where do you get a quick billion dollars if you need it in a hurry?
 It's called, "you take a floater on drugs." That's what you do.
 And the amount of money is so great that anyone can be corrupted.
 These boats that come up from Columbia that lie off the coast of Florida,
 the so-called "mother ships," a guy with a fast cigarette boat
 can make three trips to and from one of those mother ships on a cloudy night.
 The standard pay for one of those trips, which takes about 40 minutes,
 is $125,000. You can make $375,000 a night doing this,
 and you're not a player, you're not a kingpin, you're not a major figure,
 you're a totally disposable peon.
 So imagine how much money there is to be made at the top.
 Who can refuse a $10 million bribe?
 People come in and say, "Listen, we'd like to give you $10 million,
 and we've bought a house for you in the highlands of Malaysia and a Ferrari,
 and we'd just like you to go and live there and do whatever you want."
 And the choice is a bullet in the head.
 So which would you prefer? We're perfectly at ease either way,
 so you figure it out and call us back.
 Nobody can resist that kind of thing.
 So we're in a situation where we are being radically manipulated by governments
 because they are addicted to a style of piratical rogue capitalism
 that is just simply the greatest windfall ever imagined.
 I mean, there has never been anything like the modern illicit drug trade
 in the history of the world.
 Ten years ago, the drug trade and the international arms trade
 were on a par with each other.
 Today, the international drug trade makes ten times as much money
 as the international arms trade, and there's no end in sight.
 In terms of psychedelics and the situation many students are facing
 in their process of becoming psychologists, clinicians,
 who want to work with psychedelics and yet feel that their careers would be destroyed
 if they were to do so, or if they were to do so in court,
 and the general social or governmental pressures on that.
 Here are some quotes about, in the '60s, "one who was tried,"
 and the communication flows now.
 I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the psychedelic situation now.
 Well, some of you may know Bobby Faust in New York.
 He's an interesting guy.
 He has an idea.
 He says that he advocates something which he calls civil obedience.
 He says not civil disobedience, but civil obedience.
 He says everybody who smokes pot should take their pot on a certain day
 and march down to the cop shop and demand that justice be done,
 and that if everybody who smoked pot did that, the courts would be so clogged,
 the entire madness of the whole thing would be exposed for everyone to see,
 and it would just be impossible to enforce.
 That's a strategic idea.
 It might work.
 From observing American society as long as I have, it's very clear to me
 they don't hand out rights around here.
 The only people who have any rights are people who demand them,
 and you can look at how black people broke free in the '60s.
 You can look at how the gay community got itself together in the '70s and '80s,
 and apparently, unless you're willing to stand up for what you are,
 you're going to be forever stigmatized.
 Black people, they couldn't escape it.
 The reflectivity of their skin marked them,
 but it was very, very courageous for gay people,
 many of whom were way in the closet and doing well in straight society,
 to risk all that and say, "No, look, this is what's going on.
 This is who I am.
 Now, if there's a problem, it's your problem, not my problem."
 And homosexuality was a crime in many states, in most states, just as drugs are.
 So I think really, if we're serious, we're going to have to risk something.
 We're going to have to risk our jobs, our reputations,
 perhaps some of our friendships, and just say, "Look, this is what it is.
 Now, if you don't like it, don't do it, but don't legislate for the rest of us.
 Society is a very complex enterprise, and what's good for you may not be good for me.
 And if it's to be done in mass action, that's better.
 We all feel better if we march in a group than if we march alone.
 But we drug people are incredibly--we fold too easily, I think.
 I think we feel great shame on some level about what we've done.
 I mean, it's very hard to stand up to a really straight person and say, "Yeah.
 No, no, I didn't try it. I just did it ten minutes ago.
 We're not talking about my wild college days.
 We're talking about 35 seconds before I stood in your presence.
 And see, I'm not falling down. I'm not about to commit murder.
 I'm just like you are, except I have this different preference."
 And force that, and it's the task of a generation.
 You know, the right wing, they understand far better than we do.
 I mean, when Pat Buchanan says it's cultural war, he's talking about us.
 We're the counterculture. We're the enemy.
 And the response of a desperate foe is an ever more desperate lashing out.
 And Christianity is not going to go quietly into that good night.
 It's going to get nuttier as it approaches its terminal delirium.
 The killing of abortion doctors is a good example.
 What does that do for the right-to-life movement?
 It totally discredits them.
 It moves them from a position that is maybe different from yours, but arguable,
 to just nuts.
 We no longer have to make any kind of effort to sway those people
 or come to terms with them. They're crazy people.
 And you would no more try to convert them to your point of view
 than you would try to convert somebody who pulled a gun on you in an alley.
 Yeah?
 What do you see happening with the D&D trade? I mean, obviously there's probably not much for trade right now
 because there seems to be a very good substance out there.
 Though one would probably argue, you would argue, that more people should use it and see it.
 And this is very much...
 You mean, do I think there'll be more of it?
 Yeah, well, and how that will progress.
 It will become something, you know, like the mushroom industry is fairly well developed
 because it's a very profitable type of thing.
 And it seems to be, to a large extent, a money-driven type of occupation
 that people go into, going into it for money, and it's about money.
 Well, yes. I mean, the mushroom thing is a little different in the sense that
 a dedicated mushroom grower who works day and night can produce maybe 10,000 hits of mushrooms in a year.
 A chemist working with sufficient material can produce millions of doses of a pure compound.
 I think the reason mushrooms have flourished in such an...
 Have you noticed how... Mushrooms have been around since 1975.
 Have you noticed how the press never writes about it?
 Never interviews with underground mushroom growers, never exposes it, never talks about it.
 That's, I believe, because to expose it is to inspire ever more people to do it.
 It's very easy to do. You don't have to have a lot of capital backing.
 You don't have to have a degree in biochemistry.
 You don't have to be able to handle explosive materials.
 It's a very quiet, calm, cottage industry kind of thing.
 I think DMT... Well, first of all, I know there's more DMT around in the last year and a half than in the previous 20 years.
 I don't know who's making it or where it's coming from, but I'm certainly grateful to them.
 I think there will be more and more.
 One thing about DMT that holds it back as a commercial commodity is, you know,
 once you... If you sell somebody a gram, you may not see them for a year.
 If you sell somebody a gram of cocaine, they'll be back eight hours later.
 The speed at which people consume their DMT once...
 I know somebody who has two grams of DMT and I said, "You're not using it very fast."
 And he said, "Yes, well, I'm saving it for my grandchildren."
 I said, "You're not even married, for God's sake."
 So it's more an act of love and dedication.
 But I think there are enough people out there who care more for hell-raising and outrage than money
 that we can depend on them to produce some of this stuff.
 And some people make it simply in order to have it for themselves.
 And then, of course, they overproduced by a factor of a thousand,
 so they might as well dump the rest of that stuff.
 But I would love to see a national... It's always puzzled me why there aren't four-inch headlines
 on every newspaper on the planet saying, you know,
 "Drug discovered which opens doorway to hyperspace."
 How can they keep it secret? How can it be a secret?
 I mean, we live in a culture where people regularly jump out of airplanes for recreational pleasure.
 That's the kind of culture we live in.
 And yet DMT has not made its way very deeply into that culture.
 And if what people want is thrills, my God, are their thrills still uncapped?
 However, I've noticed the surrender issue works here.
 I've talked to people who sailed solo around the world, climbed the north face of Everest,
 shot the rapids on the Mekong and so forth.
 They say, "Oh, well, you're a real hairy-chested guy. Would you like to smoke some DMT?"
 And, you know, "Absolutely ashen." "No, absolutely not. Are you crazy? That stuff's dangerous."
 "Well, what about the time you parachuted into Kilimanjaro at the 22,000-foot level?"
 "Well, I knew what I was doing. I was in..." So, I don't know.
 Different thrills for different folks.
 [Audience member] You once mentioned briefly, and I think for a split second,
 I noticed this in your thought on the utilization question,
 an argument being made that these cowpats are overusing the brain.
 Oh, yeah. No, that's a very serious thing.
 Here's the legal history of how this all went down.
 In the middle '60s, it must have been around '67,
 somebody somewhere jumped out of a window on LSD and managed to kill themselves.
 Every newspaper in the country, if not the planet, did in-depth, detailed background, you know, maps,
 how he walked to the balcony, the arrow, the whole thing.
 And LSD was legal at that time.
 So then there was a huge hue and cry about how it had to be made illegal.
 And this was in California.
 And the California state legislature, with almost no debate,
 with no professional witnesses, with no scientific evidence placed before them,
 not only made LSD illegal, they made psilocybin, DMT, ibogaine,
 and figure this one out, bufotenin was made schedule one.
 Now, get this, bufotenin is inactive in human beings.
 Why was it made schedule one?
 Because two weeks before this debate took place,
 a paper was published suggesting that it might cause hallucinations in human beings.
 In other words, they just went through the scientific literature
 and anything described as a hallucination, a hallucinogen,
 was poured in to this California drug bill.
 Well, and so then it was passed.
 Well, then six weeks later, somebody jumps out of a window somewhere else.
 This time, it's not even clear drugs are involved,
 but the mere suggestion that they might have been involved is enough to create a national debate
 and the Congress, rather than hold hearings and adduce scientific evidence,
 says just take the California statute and federalize it.
 And so that was done.
 So, what the consequences of this are, is in the case of a drug, a substance like psilocybin,
 no scientific evidence has ever been offered to any legislative body
 saying there was anything wrong with it.
 It was specifically made illegal simply because it causes hallucinations.
 No health risk is involved.
 Nothing was known about psilocybin at that time.
 So, that's the first attack on these laws.
 They were not properly formulated in the first place.
 They were not based on reality or social need.
 Second of all, DMT, it has now subsequently become known,
 is an ordinary constituent of human metabolism.
 How can you make possession of this substance illegal
 when every man, woman, and child on earth is holding?
 It's like the ultimate catch-22.
 We are all criminals, all the time.
 They don't have to throw pot around your apartment.
 They can just draw blood from your good right arm
 and there's the damning evidence right there.
 So, in the light of all this silliness, it would seem logical, I think,
 to go back and have a scientific review
 and a complete revision of the scheduling of these drugs.
 Look at the scheduling anyway.
 Schedule 1, what is it?
 Compounds with absolutely no medical use whatsoever.
 Cannabis is in there, even though it's the preferred treatment for glaucoma
 and for chemotherapy to suppress nausea in chemotherapy.
 Heroin is in there.
 And then, all psychedelics.
 You move to Schedule 2,
 and the first thing that jumps out of you is cocaine is Schedule 2.
 Marijuana is considered to be a more dangerous and devastating drug than cocaine.
 Why? Because, by the rules of the game,
 cocaine is used in certain medical procedures
 to anesthetize the optic nerve sometimes
 and to anesthetize nerves in the throat for certain forms of surgery.
 So, because it has this obscure medical use,
 it's Schedule 2.
 And this doesn't make any sense at all.
 These drug laws have never been rationally put in place.
 The original stigmatization of cannabis
 was carried on by the Hearst newspapers
 because they spent a huge amount of money
 buying Canadian forest for newsprint
 just as the hemp industry was beginning to develop
 as a supplier for paper.
 And when they realized that they had badly invested in Canadian timber,
 they decided that they would put the hemp industry out of business.
 And so, they discovered that it's marijuana
 among those wily, dark-skinned folks south of the border
 who are so unclean and peculiar.
 And they began to attach it to a stigmatized racial group
 and managed to hound it out of existence.
 This game has never been played fairly.
 It has always been played to benefit markets,
 capitalists, and producers.
 It has never been handled in a rational and scientific manner.
 And it should be because there's very little doubt
 that the future holds an endless cornucopia of psychoactive drugs.
 This thing I told you about yesterday, Salvorin Alpha.
 What's to become of this?
 I have some friends who have a church
 and a bunch of pagan folk.
 And I told them about this and they immediately filed it
 as a sacrament of their church.
 Now, they couldn't have done this if it were illegal.
 But it's, at the moment, legal.
 And so, they proclaimed it a sacrament of their church
 and are using it ritually and hope that when it inevitably becomes illegal,
 they will be in a position to argue that it was legal
 and they used it as an exercise of religious freedom.
 And now, it can't be taken away from them.
 But the existence of something like Salvorin Alpha tells you
 there may be hundreds of psychoactive drugs of all types.
 And we just simply need a rational process that serves who?
 That serves the user, not the producer, the purveyor.
 But these are medicines.
 They should be subject to the same standards of purity and so forth
 that the pharmaceutical industry.
 I mean, what's always put against drugs is that they're unclean and dirty.
 But that's because they're made in illicit clandestine labs
 that have been forced underground by witless government policies.
 And now, you know, it's not even a matter of debate.
 We've got the Dutch data.
 We know that when you legalize drugs,
 people don't immediately start smoking reef for 24 hours a day
 and committing acts of public fornication.
 That hasn't happened anywhere.
 That's a fantasy of the Christian right wing.
 No, all that happens when you legalize drugs
 is that people continue to do what they've been doing,
 whether they use drugs or not.
 So, it's a shell game.
 And if any of you ever reach positions of policy making
 or influence on policy making,
 I hope that you will try to input into this process
 and rationalize it because it's one of the great unregulated scams on the planet.
 And millions and millions of people are being victimized.
 Third world poverty is being exacerbated.
 Criminal syndicalism is flourishing.
 Ordinary law-abiding people are being criminalized.
 People are being made to feel guilty about simply trying to understand
 their own spiritual yearnings and their own place in the cosmos.
 It's a tragic situation and it's retarding cultural transformation.
 Yeah.
 Are other countries more likely to develop this than New York?
 Is North America particularly able to take a look at this?
 Oh, absolutely.
 Germany, for example, I've been coming and going from Germany for seven or eight years.
 It's always been loose.
 You could always sit in a reasonably sleazy restaurant after dinner
 and make a spliff and hand it around and nobody would say anything.
 And now the hemp laws have been declared unconstitutional.
 They're more liberal than I would be in Germany.
 In other words, they say that you can possess a gram of heroin
 every 24 hours without legal consequences.
 That seems to me a little loose.
 I mean, maybe I've known more junkies than the head of the German Supreme Court,
 but it seems a little loose.
 You can possess up to 40 grams of hashish for your own personal use
 and you can grow up to 12 plants without stigma.
 And it's interesting.
 I was in Germany in May of this year and this law had just been passed six weeks before
 and I was staying in Berlin.
 Berlin, like San Francisco, has many residential districts
 that are high, narrow, three-story houses.
 You could look down these streets and there are all these balconies
 and just peeking above every balcony were the heads of the allowed 12 cannabis plants per person.
 And you could see that the entire city of Berlin was just slowly turning green.
 And while I was there, I saw an interview with the chief of police
 and he said, "Yeah, we love this new cannabis law.
 I've been able to assign resources to real crime problems
 and look at our statistics on how few stolen car deals there have been."
 The police are now freed to do what they should be doing,
 which is maintain public order, not messing around with what people are doing
 in the confines of their own minds.
 If it weren't for Europe, I think this situation would be frozen out forever.
 But we will eventually be humiliated into liberalizing our drug laws.
 That's all.
 You know, we are...
 I had always traveled all over the world,
 but I'd never really been to Europe until about eight years ago.
 And when you go there, you discover what...
 Some people say it was de Tocqueville and some people say Charles de Gaulle,
 but someone said, "America, it's a footnote on European civilization."
 And you go there and you discover, "Oh, this is where it all came from.
 This is where they invented all of this stuff."
 What peculiarly complicates our situation is
 Europe is a genuinely secular society.
 And the concept of a Christian right wing being able to dominate the political agenda,
 it's inconceivable to them.
 I mean, they have Christian fundamentalists, of course,
 but it's a curiosity, a testament to their tolerance,
 not a knife poised at the heart of political dialogue,
 as it is in this country.
 We have allowed ourselves to become too rigidified
 in this meddling, sort of neo-Lutheran attitude toward each other.
 I mean, don't people understand that the essence of sophistication is tolerance?
 Tolerance, that's all.
 And as Frost once said, "The secret of happiness is learning to enjoy people you don't approve of."
 And I would add, "And the second secret is learning to enjoy foods that you don't approve of."
 Yeah.
 [inaudible]
 I think Americans are paranoid of nature.
 Our history is one of conquest.
 And though we slaughtered a lot of Indians, we never tell it that way.
 We say we tamed the frontier.
 And so nature herself is set up as the enemy of American destiny.
 And that's why the incredible artificiality of our culture
 and our incredible anxiety in the face of chaos.
 We're order freaks.
 That's why it's so disturbing to people to imagine that people around them might be stoned
 because they don't know what stoned is.
 So that terra incognito becomes frightening to them.
 We're a very infantile society.
 I had some German friends visit me in Hawaii and they wanted to go to the beach.
 So we all went down to the beach and we're laying out the towels and everything
 and my friend whipped her top off.
 I said, "You can't do that here."
 And she said, "You're not serious."
 And I said, "Well, didn't you know that you can't go topless on American beaches?"
 And she said, "Well, I'd heard that, but I just didn't believe it.
 I thought they meant some American."
 I said, "No, this is over the top."
 So I can't imagine that that will change before the end of the world.
 This society is so rigid that the sight of a tit shakes the entire social edifice from foundation to top.
 That's how paranoid, how clenched, how fragilely balanced the American enterprise is.
 It's a craziness.
 It's a cultural craziness to people who come from outside of it.
 They can't believe it.
 And so she put her top on, but just shaking her head, you know, "Oh."
 Because up to that point she thought it was just sort of like Europe, but exotic and interesting.
 But suddenly she realized, "Oh no, these people are cannibals."
 And best watch what you say and do.
 Yeah.
 I was curious if you've ever tried that toad skin thing.
 And if you're a vegetarian, you had a problem with it.
 I'm not a vegetarian, and it shocks many people.
 And my riposte is simply, the most intelligent beings I've ever met are plants.
 So why shouldn't I eat meat?
 You know, you want me to chow down on a turnip in good conscience?
 You can't be serious.
 What was the other part?
 Oh, the toad foam.
 If you're a vegetarian, did you eat it?
 Because you're talking about earlier vegetarians.
 I have been vegetarian for long periods in my life.
 Now I sort of follow the hippie philosophy that your body knows what it wants, even if it's a snicker.
 The deeper wisdom of the body.
 As far as toad foam, it isn't toad skin.
 So we don't have to worry about the fate of the toad is not sacrificed in this process,
 unless your milking technique is excessively vigorous.
 The substance is 5-methoxy DMT, and many people like it.
 I don't prefer it simply because it's just like DMT, except there's no vision.
 And that's a little like saying it's just like the Philadelphia Philharmonic, only there's no orchestra.
 But it is a huge tryptamine-like feeling that because it's not been studied,
 the toxicology of it is not well understood.
 And I've seen people get pretty uncomfortable with it.
 I've never seen anybody vomit on DMT.
 I have seen it repeatedly on 5-MeO.
 One piece of information about 5-MeO, which don't draw any conclusions, but it's worth knowing,
 is that it's fatal to sheep.
 I mean, if you inject sheep with 5-methoxy DMT,
 they fall down and their little legs shake in the air, and that's all she wrote.
 Well, we're not sheep, but if you think you might be one,
 I would suggest that you don't try this stuff.
 Well, I think we're at the end of the road here.
 I feel a little guilty that there wasn't more hard botany,
 but I feel confident that David and Ralph and the other people participating in this course
 will get this to you.
 There's a great deal to be learned.
 There's a great deal of camaraderie among the people who do this work.
 I think most people who work in this field feel that we're struggling at the frontier
 of the envelope of human potential,
 and that great good is potentially here,
 and that part of the saving of the planet and the saving of humanness
 involves saving these plants and the shamanic dimensions that they throw open to us.
 Gaia wishes to communicate, and these are the channels of communication
 by which she reaches us through and around our own fears and silliness,
 and to the degree that we can rescue this tradition, save these species,
 legitimize this research, and carry ourselves deeper into the endless riches
 of the world of the spirit, to the degree that we do these things,
 I feel we've advanced the universal project of bringing the good to manifestation.
 So I wish you all luck in your professions.
 I hope that you take your chosen field by storm.
 If any of you need to reach me, come through a friend or through the CIIS front office.
 David usually knows where I am.
 If you think I can help you by introducing you to someone
 or pointing you toward a reference or in any other way, feel free.
 This is very important work.
 Whether we succeed or fail, it would be tragic not to make the effort
 because I think we really align ourselves with the Gaian intent
 when we bring these things to the community and share them.
 Thank you very much.
 [Applause]


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