[00:00:00 - 00:00:03] Well, let's see here. [00:00:03 - 00:00:11] I think what we have to do is think in terms of the exhaustion of our own cultural forms. [00:00:11 - 00:00:17] I mean, that's what we're living through, is a global dying created by the exhaustion [00:00:17 - 00:00:27] of our cultural forms and the vitality of the cultural forms that we see in these so-called [00:00:27 - 00:00:31] primitive, I call them preliterate people. [00:00:31 - 00:00:38] As Nicole pointed out, they have nothing, but what they seem to have that we cannot [00:00:38 - 00:00:46] seem to get a grip on is a kind of dynamic equilibrium with their environment and peace [00:00:46 - 00:00:51] of mind in the felt experience of the moment. [00:00:51 - 00:00:54] These are the two things we don't have. [00:00:54 - 00:00:58] As a society, we cannot seem to make peace with nature. [00:00:58 - 00:01:06] As human beings, as individuals, it's very hard for us to be at peace with ourselves. [00:01:06 - 00:01:12] I mean, I consider my own life the search for peace of mind. [00:01:12 - 00:01:17] Forget enlightenment, forget shunyata, all this stuff. [00:01:17 - 00:01:24] Just a little peace of mind would be a tremendous boon as far as I can see. [00:01:24 - 00:01:31] So I really think that there's a confluence here of themes and possibilities. [00:01:31 - 00:01:39] It has this richly plotted texture that always lets you know that you're in the presence [00:01:39 - 00:01:44] of a higher order of things. [00:01:44 - 00:01:54] It's that the shamans whom we admire, who we idealize, are seen to be at the center [00:01:54 - 00:02:02] of this environment, the warm jungle, the tropics, the warm tropics, that we find it [00:02:02 - 00:02:04] necessary to destroy. [00:02:04 - 00:02:16] So it's a perfect image of us being at war not only with ourselves but with nature itself. [00:02:16 - 00:02:21] You've heard all about how the Amazon and the Congo Basin in eastern Indonesia are all [00:02:21 - 00:02:27] being cleared and lumbered and turned into cattle ranches. [00:02:27 - 00:02:28] This is a tragedy, obviously. [00:02:28 - 00:02:33] We understand and can perceive the dynamics of that. [00:02:33 - 00:02:41] But how to make sense of a situation where as the World Bank and the IMF attempt to halt [00:02:41 - 00:02:50] this kind of destruction, on the other side of the coin, the United States State Department [00:02:50 - 00:02:57] and the DEA and these agencies propose and are planning to carry out the defoliation [00:02:57 - 00:03:00] of the Wajaga Basin. [00:03:00 - 00:03:06] So there's a schizophrenia here that is not academic. [00:03:06 - 00:03:12] Are we trying to get the patient well or are we pulling the plugs one by one? [00:03:12 - 00:03:17] We seem to be acting in both dimensions simultaneously. [00:03:17 - 00:03:26] I think it's because we have not in this culture awakened to the depth of the crisis [00:03:26 - 00:03:28] that surrounds us. [00:03:28 - 00:03:35] There's a lot of kind of self-congratulatory back slapping going around these days over [00:03:35 - 00:03:43] the fact that communists everywhere are in hot water and have to admit that they did [00:03:43 - 00:03:44] it wrong. [00:03:44 - 00:03:52] And this gives a lot of satisfaction to people who feel that that means we did it right. [00:03:52 - 00:03:54] We didn't do it right. [00:03:54 - 00:03:58] They did it wrong and now admit they did it wrong. [00:03:58 - 00:04:04] We do it wrong and have yet to even raise the possibility of turning away from what [00:04:04 - 00:04:05] we are doing. [00:04:05 - 00:04:13] The internal contradictions of Marxism were based on a false definition of what people [00:04:13 - 00:04:14] are. [00:04:14 - 00:04:21] People do not respond to central planning, hortatory propaganda and stereotyping. [00:04:21 - 00:04:34] Neither do people respond to an ethos of self-denial or a view of human beings that denies the [00:04:34 - 00:04:38] fact that we have certain itches which must be scratched. [00:04:38 - 00:04:45] So I think that the collapse of Marxism is only the collapse of the outer edge of the [00:04:45 - 00:04:50] societal and civilizing assumptions that we have made. [00:04:50 - 00:05:00] After all, Marxism is nothing more than the millenarian retread of Christian millenarianism. [00:05:00 - 00:05:07] And so is modern science, yet another secular retread of Christian millenarianism. [00:05:07 - 00:05:10] So our culture is in trouble. [00:05:10 - 00:05:12] Not trouble. [00:05:12 - 00:05:20] We are at a terminal crisis, a bifurcation that can only go one of two ways. [00:05:20 - 00:05:28] Horror beyond your wildest imagination or breakthrough to dignity, decency, community [00:05:28 - 00:05:32] and caring beyond your wildest imagination. [00:05:32 - 00:05:35] Now where do you look for models? [00:05:35 - 00:05:37] Where do you go? [00:05:37 - 00:05:40] The answer is so obvious. [00:05:40 - 00:05:43] You go to nature. [00:05:43 - 00:05:47] Nature has been playing this game for three billion years on this planet. [00:05:47 - 00:05:55] We have been playing the game, we the apostles of Christian scientism, for about two thousand [00:05:55 - 00:05:56] years. [00:05:56 - 00:06:04] Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style that if we could but emulate it, we could [00:06:04 - 00:06:09] rise out of the rubble that we are making of the planet. [00:06:09 - 00:06:16] You know it was the geographer Carl Sauer who said, "Man found the planet a climaxed [00:06:16 - 00:06:18] primeval forest. [00:06:18 - 00:06:27] He and notice the gender here, he will leave the planet a weedy lot, a weedy lot." [00:06:27 - 00:06:35] Now this is a metaphor where you change climaxed rainforest for weeds, but it's also true. [00:06:35 - 00:06:44] By clearing land, we promote the kind of plant evolution that stresses very rapid seed production [00:06:44 - 00:06:47] and annular cycles of growth. [00:06:47 - 00:06:50] In other words, weeds. [00:06:50 - 00:06:58] And this tendency to find perfection and then to leave rubble in our wake has haunted us [00:06:58 - 00:07:01] for the past three or four thousand years of our history. [00:07:01 - 00:07:08] Now with the ozone shield disappearing, with acid rain falling on the earth that can melt [00:07:08 - 00:07:19] blocks of marble, with the CO2 levels rising, with the levels of strontium and chlorofluorocarbons [00:07:19 - 00:07:26] and you know the litany, we have now one last chance to fish or cut bait. [00:07:26 - 00:07:33] And the place where nature has provided the models for how to respond to this situation [00:07:33 - 00:07:36] is the climaxed rainforest. [00:07:36 - 00:07:45] Only the climaxed tropical rainforest has the kind of complexity of signal transfer, [00:07:45 - 00:07:52] movement of nutritional materials, movement of electromagnetic radiation that we find [00:07:52 - 00:07:53] in the modern city. [00:07:53 - 00:07:57] It is a cliche of modernity that the city is a jungle. [00:07:57 - 00:08:01] The problem is it isn't jungle enough. [00:08:01 - 00:08:08] And I think it's the task of the new shamans to take the metaphor of the jungle, which [00:08:08 - 00:08:19] is a metaphor of tremendous wealth, tremendous variety, a tremendous outpouring of form and [00:08:19 - 00:08:27] of energy and of potential fulfillment of various bifurcation patterns of flow, to take [00:08:27 - 00:08:32] that and enrich our own lives with it. [00:08:32 - 00:08:41] And the way this is done is by empowering the presence of experience. [00:08:41 - 00:08:48] The main thing that you get with these so-called primitive, preliterate people and with people [00:08:48 - 00:08:55] like Nicole who have spent time in this situation is they are in the moment. [00:08:55 - 00:08:57] They know how to have fun. [00:08:57 - 00:08:59] They know how to work. [00:08:59 - 00:09:01] They know how to live. [00:09:01 - 00:09:07] And the reason they understand this is because they are focused within the confines of the [00:09:07 - 00:09:10] felt presence of experience. [00:09:10 - 00:09:13] They do not live by abstraction. [00:09:13 - 00:09:17] And abstraction is the knife poised at our hearts. [00:09:17 - 00:09:24] We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the earth in flames, we can barely [00:09:24 - 00:09:29] rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat. [00:09:29 - 00:09:37] That's the level of disimpassioning that abstraction has laid upon us. [00:09:37 - 00:09:42] Well, hopefully this weekend there will be passion. [00:09:42 - 00:09:49] There will be an effort wherever there is abstraction to drag it down into the felt [00:09:49 - 00:09:50] presence of the moment. [00:09:50 - 00:09:59] I think basically what we are is a kind of green anarchy, an effort to revivify social [00:09:59 - 00:10:06] forms that have been atrophied in the West at least since the destruction of Eleusis, [00:10:06 - 00:10:10] probably in most places thousands of years before that. [00:10:10 - 00:10:12] This is our last chance. [00:10:12 - 00:10:21] I have done the best I could in terms of trying to sift through all these options and as a [00:10:21 - 00:10:25] communicator offer the best way out. [00:10:25 - 00:10:30] And you know, I could only do my best. [00:10:30 - 00:10:31] And so that's what you get. [00:10:31 - 00:10:36] I can't preach scientism because I don't believe in it. [00:10:36 - 00:10:41] I can't preach Buddhism because I can't understand it. [00:10:41 - 00:10:49] The only thing I can preach is the felt presence of immediate experience which for me came [00:10:49 - 00:10:54] through the psychedelics which are not drugs but plants. [00:10:54 - 00:11:01] It's a perversion of language to try and derail this thing into talk of drugs. [00:11:01 - 00:11:08] There are spirits in the natural world that come to us in this way. [00:11:08 - 00:11:16] And so far as I can tell, this is the only way that they come to us that is rapid enough [00:11:16 - 00:11:22] for it to have an impact upon us as a global population. [00:11:22 - 00:11:28] This weekend will be different because we will be hewing close to the source. [00:11:28 - 00:11:34] Nicole is a priceless repository of information, more even than she knows. [00:11:34 - 00:11:39] If I could declare her a national treasure, I would. [00:11:39 - 00:11:43] The number, who knows what this woman knows? [00:11:43 - 00:11:51] Who knows how much human suffering, the alleviation of how much anxiety lies in the hands of perhaps [00:11:51 - 00:11:58] half a dozen people of Nicole's caliber who have paid their dues in these jungles. [00:11:58 - 00:12:04] This information is flowing through our fingers and disappearing in another 30 years. [00:12:04 - 00:12:06] It will be all gone. [00:12:06 - 00:12:13] Every time I go to the Amazon, I can feel the way in which it's slipping away. [00:12:13 - 00:12:19] When my brother and I go off looking for these unusual hallucinogens, often we have the experience [00:12:19 - 00:12:25] where when we finally find the person who claims they know what we're after, the line [00:12:25 - 00:12:27] goes like this. [00:12:27 - 00:12:36] Well, I've never taken it, but as a child I remember seeing my grandfather prepare it, [00:12:36 - 00:12:39] and I think I can do it. [00:12:39 - 00:12:43] If it weren't for us standing there asking that it be done, it would never have even [00:12:43 - 00:12:47] risen into the gentleman's mind as a possibility. [00:12:47 - 00:12:53] This is the knife edge upon which this knowledge is poised. [00:12:53 - 00:12:58] If it can be saved, it gives me hope that we can be saved. [00:12:58 - 00:13:04] If we can't save this kind of knowledge, we cannot save ourselves because this kind of [00:13:04 - 00:13:07] knowledge is ourselves. [00:13:07 - 00:13:10] Culture is a garment which you put on. [00:13:10 - 00:13:16] Medical systems are pieces of jewelry which you wrap around your throat or neck. [00:13:16 - 00:13:22] Religious ideals are like objects which you push through pierced nostrils and earlobes. [00:13:22 - 00:13:29] If we cannot come to terms with that which allows us to give birth with these, to die [00:13:29 - 00:13:35] with dignity, and to live in health, then what kind of a future do we have? [00:13:35 - 00:13:37] No future at all. [00:13:37 - 00:13:45] So this is not a meeting of obscurantists or enthusiasts for some private vista of transcendence. [00:13:45 - 00:13:51] This is a meeting of political activists, people who are socially committed to themselves, [00:13:51 - 00:13:56] to each other, to the larger idea of community, and who understand that when you talk about [00:13:56 - 00:14:03] Gaia, it's only an abstraction unless you talk about plants. [00:14:03 - 00:14:14] The division between the masculine and the feminine is only trivially a difference between [00:14:14 - 00:14:16] men and women. [00:14:16 - 00:14:23] It is fundamentally a division between plants and animals. [00:14:23 - 00:14:31] Plants are the enveloping feminine matrix of control and refurbishment. [00:14:31 - 00:14:39] Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around, an extremely Yang solution [00:14:39 - 00:14:43] to a peculiar problem which they faced. [00:14:43 - 00:14:51] So the archaic revival, if it means anything, it means reconnecting the Gaian mind, which [00:14:51 - 00:15:01] is a vegetable mind, a feminine, enfolding, boundary-dissolving, planetary mind that is [00:15:01 - 00:15:09] not an abstraction, not a stereotype, not something used to create hortatory propaganda, [00:15:09 - 00:15:15] but a living, breathing reality, a reality which is the only thing which stands between [00:15:15 - 00:15:20] us and Armageddon. [00:15:20 - 00:15:30] History is a kind of horrified realization that something has been lost, that there is [00:15:30 - 00:15:41] an itch hard to scratch in the civilized context, that we have, out of fear really, descended [00:15:41 - 00:15:48] into patterns of domination of each other, of the environment, of our children, of our [00:15:48 - 00:15:52] social relations with exogamous groups. [00:15:52 - 00:16:00] We have descended into a dominator pattern that is basically based on clutching, on fear, [00:16:00 - 00:16:08] I'm sure most of you have heard me argue that this is the consequence of ceasing basically [00:16:08 - 00:16:17] to do enough hallucinogens in the diet, that in fact what human beings were flirting with [00:16:17 - 00:16:24] over many, many tens of millennia, let's say from a hundred thousand years ago to fifteen [00:16:24 - 00:16:35] thousand years ago, human beings were in a flirtatious situation with a symbiotic relationship [00:16:35 - 00:16:41] with this mind resident in vegetable nature. [00:16:41 - 00:16:49] Now you all know that what classic symbiosis is in biology, it's where, let's take the [00:16:49 - 00:16:55] example of the little fish who lives in the sea anemone and big fish don't bother it, [00:16:55 - 00:17:03] it gains protection, the sea anemone gains access to larger prey which come to investigate [00:17:03 - 00:17:10] the little fish, that kind of symbiosis is genetically locked in and if you take the [00:17:10 - 00:17:19] little fish away from the anemone and put it let us say in an aquarium without anemones, [00:17:19 - 00:17:27] it doesn't die, it doesn't go into an immediate physiological crisis, no what happens is it [00:17:27 - 00:17:35] simply has a low body weight and a short life span, in other words it is under stress and [00:17:35 - 00:17:45] I believe, I hope I'm not deluding myself, but I believe that the lost secret of human [00:17:45 - 00:17:55] emergence, the undefined catalyst that took a very bright monkey and turned that species [00:17:55 - 00:18:06] into a tormented self reflecting poet dreamer, that catalyst has to be sought in these tertiary [00:18:06 - 00:18:15] alkaloids in the food chain that were catalyzing higher states of intellectual activity and [00:18:15 - 00:18:24] I've pointed out to you ad nauseum I'm sure, the reciprocal feedback relationship that [00:18:24 - 00:18:33] was working there in the case of the mushroom in the belt situation in Africa, it was promoting [00:18:33 - 00:18:40] at low doses visual acuity which was feeding back into the hunting and gathering process, [00:18:40 - 00:18:48] making those animals with this increased visual acuity more adaptively successful, hence more [00:18:48 - 00:18:56] reproductively successful, hence they're out breeding their competitors, at higher doses [00:18:56 - 00:19:04] psilocybin actually causes a generalized arousal which includes sexual arousal, again it becomes [00:19:04 - 00:19:12] a catalyst for increased reproductive success, more instances of copulation in a situation [00:19:12 - 00:19:20] like that lead to more successful births of those into family structures where the alkaloid [00:19:20 - 00:19:23] has been accepted into the food chain. [00:19:23 - 00:19:31] Well this would be only an obscure topic of interest to primatologists were it not for [00:19:31 - 00:19:40] the fact that it is a crisis in consciousness which confronts us globally, consciousness [00:19:40 - 00:19:47] is the commodity that if we do not have enough of it, do not produce it fast enough, then [00:19:47 - 00:19:53] the momentum of the processes we set in motion in our ignorance is going to sterilize the [00:19:53 - 00:20:00] planet and do us all in, so we have to have consciousness. [00:20:00 - 00:20:07] Well then you look at the smorgasbord of ethnographic possibilities and you discover this institution [00:20:07 - 00:20:17] of shamanism, it is the institution of planner, of visionary, of manager, of large system [00:20:17 - 00:20:24] coordinator, that's what it's about, you call it magic on one level, you call it curing, [00:20:24 - 00:20:33] you call it folk psychiatry or weather prediction, shamans have been involved in all of these [00:20:33 - 00:20:40] things, but as Nicole was made so eloquently the point last night, to these deep forest [00:20:40 - 00:20:48] people it is ordinary, it is ordinary, they live in a different cultural dimension than [00:20:48 - 00:20:56] we do, dimensions which to us are completely value dark are to them completely transparent [00:20:56 - 00:21:04] and dimensions which to us are extremely rich and complex, the inner world of the nucleus [00:21:04 - 00:21:12] of the atom let us say, are for them totally value dark, they don't even cognize the possibility [00:21:12 - 00:21:20] of asking the question, but nevertheless the specialization in these various domains is [00:21:20 - 00:21:33] not something where one is as good as another, consciousness is the domain of immediate experience, [00:21:33 - 00:21:42] how are we going to save this planet, how are we going to take the lethal cascade of [00:21:42 - 00:21:51] toxic technological and ignorance producing habits that are loose on this planet and channel [00:21:51 - 00:22:01] them toward some kind of a sane and livable world, well the answer is emerging in culture [00:22:01 - 00:22:08] out of the collectivity of global consciousness, it is what I call the archaic revival, it [00:22:08 - 00:22:16] is this very large turnover in the mass mind, some people call it a paradigm shift, it's [00:22:16 - 00:22:27] an effort to recover the sensory ratios, the feelings and the attitudes of 15 to 20,000 [00:22:27 - 00:22:37] years ago, before fear, before ego, before male dominance, before hierarchy, hoarding, [00:22:37 - 00:22:47] warfare, propaganda, child abuse, all of these things and the answer lies as was indicated [00:22:47 - 00:22:56] last night in integration into the dynamics of nature, well so far as my analysis gives [00:22:56 - 00:23:04] it to me, the only way you can abandon yourself to the dynamics of nature is to break through [00:23:04 - 00:23:14] the language shell, you must cut through the aura of programming and cultural assumptions [00:23:14 - 00:23:20] that surround us from the moment we are able to speak, the only way this can be done is [00:23:20 - 00:23:29] by dissolving the boundaries of ego, ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic [00:23:29 - 00:23:37] individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter and culture [00:23:37 - 00:23:44] which we put on like an overcoat, culture is the collectivized consensus about what [00:23:44 - 00:23:49] sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable. [00:23:49 - 00:23:59] Now I don't know, so you see what I see going on in the Amazon is a very radical, psycholithic [00:23:59 - 00:24:08] therapy where they are dissolving, literally dissolving the boundaries of self, culture [00:24:08 - 00:24:15] and ego assumption and then what you discover is not the white light or what William James [00:24:15 - 00:24:21] called the blooming, buzzing confusion, although in the first few minutes it can be like that, [00:24:21 - 00:24:31] but what you really discover is sentient, organized, living, loving nature, that nature [00:24:31 - 00:24:40] is a force, nature is a mind, a personality, organized with intentionality, organized with [00:24:40 - 00:24:53] feeling, humor, grace and conviction, conviction and if you can get right with that conviction [00:24:53 - 00:25:00] then that's the secret of dancing in the waterfall, that's the secret of the shaman's apparent [00:25:00 - 00:25:07] transcendence of the rules of mundane statistics because that is what it is, the shaman doesn't [00:25:07 - 00:25:16] violate physics, he or she simply knows how to push the improbable to its greatest extent [00:25:16 - 00:25:26] and in Eastern philosophy this is called the Tao, you know, abandonment to the flow, fitting [00:25:26 - 00:25:31] of the small pattern into the larger pattern. [00:25:31 - 00:25:37] Well I think these things are very important because I think that psychology, psychiatry, [00:25:37 - 00:25:45] psychoanalysis, it's a good idea but it will never reach any kind of operational effectiveness [00:25:45 - 00:25:53] until we look to these native healers all over the world and study their methods and [00:25:53 - 00:26:05] their methods are chemical and personal, it's a combination of care, attention, intention [00:26:05 - 00:26:13] and chemistry that allows consciousness to be made malleable and then recast in other [00:26:13 - 00:26:15] forms. [00:26:15 - 00:26:24] So I find myself this weekend explaining myself, that's what I feel like I'm doing, why does [00:26:24 - 00:26:32] someone who extols the self-transforming elf machines of the DMT space also claim to be [00:26:32 - 00:26:40] a conservationist, also you know have a mathematical dog and poodle show, well it's because all [00:26:40 - 00:26:48] of these things emerge out of the concrescence of consciousness, its intention towards its [00:26:48 - 00:26:57] own transformation, nature is the answer, it's not enough to be like Wordsworth, it's [00:26:57 - 00:27:05] not enough to, this is not, you know Mao Tse Tung said the revolution is not a dinner party [00:27:05 - 00:27:11] and certainly the ecological revolution is not a dinner party, poetic sensitivity to [00:27:11 - 00:27:16] the death of the planet is not what we're striving for here, what we're striving for [00:27:16 - 00:27:24] is to halt, overturn and back out of the impending death of the planet, it is very clear now [00:27:24 - 00:27:34] that consciousness will decide that the planet, there are not rosy futures of suburban housing [00:27:34 - 00:27:41] and ratatouille to be extended endlessly into the future, we are approaching a bifurcation [00:27:41 - 00:27:48] where it is either going to become heaven or hell, one or the other and I think that [00:27:48 - 00:27:57] this archaic intuition which I see reaching clear back to the birth of the 20th century [00:27:57 - 00:28:05] and the 19th century, back to people like Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire and [00:28:05 - 00:28:13] the pataphysicians, the surrealists, the physicists around Einstein, Freud, modern art, modern [00:28:13 - 00:28:22] dance, jazz, all of this stuff is an effort to reclaim the primitive, to reclaim the archaic, [00:28:22 - 00:28:30] to reject all that powdered wig algebra that comes down through the French, English, German [00:28:30 - 00:28:39] tradition of constipated male dominance and instead, you know, intuit, that's what it [00:28:39 - 00:28:49] is in Freud and Jung and the new age, intuit our way out but now the intuition is rising [00:28:49 - 00:28:58] to the surface, we no longer have to operate without the presence of the goal firmly in [00:28:58 - 00:29:05] hand, the goal can now be stated, what this is all about is a return to archaism with [00:29:05 - 00:29:13] the lessons learned in history, that's where we were happy, the fall was a fall into a [00:29:13 - 00:29:22] veil of tears, into a world of limitation and pain and suffering and infectious disease [00:29:22 - 00:29:31] and so forth and so on, it's a prodigal journey into a lower dimension that can now be ended [00:29:31 - 00:29:42] by a collective cultural decision to commit to this Taoist, shamanistic, feminized, cybernetic, [00:29:42 - 00:29:50] nurturing, aware, present kind of being, I mean it's nothing more than what each of us [00:29:50 - 00:29:57] is in our very best moments but we have to extend those very best moments to fill whole [00:29:57 - 00:30:05] lifetimes, you know, think of the number of people who suffered and died that we could [00:30:05 - 00:30:12] sit under this tree this morning, I mean in the last million years, nine times the glaciers [00:30:12 - 00:30:19] have ground south from the poles, freezing the world into ice and confining human populations [00:30:19 - 00:30:26] to subtropical valleys and the warm tropics, nine times the interglacial periods have come [00:30:26 - 00:30:32] and human populations have spread out over the earth, they didn't have radio, they didn't [00:30:32 - 00:30:40] have antibiotics, contraception, statistical analysis or the partial differential equation [00:30:40 - 00:30:47] and yet somehow they managed to get us here, are we then as the heirs of that wave front, [00:30:47 - 00:30:53] of the inheritors of a billion year process, are we in one generation to turn it into a [00:30:53 - 00:30:55] massive pottage? [00:30:55 - 00:31:04] I think not, I certainly hope not, I would like to believe that we could make that leap [00:31:04 - 00:31:11] to conscious awareness that would allow us to take hold, now the problem, it was easy [00:31:11 - 00:31:17] the first ten years that I sat before you because what we were doing was getting to [00:31:17 - 00:31:24] know each other, to verify that we in fact existed, that I wasn't crazy, you weren't [00:31:24 - 00:31:34] crazy so forth and so on, now what looms ahead is the mess of politics and this I'm sure [00:31:34 - 00:31:41] you have no stomach for, I certainly don't, I'd rather be stoned and rocked in the arms [00:31:41 - 00:31:47] of the goddess but as a matter of fact this dominator thing is not going to be unhooked [00:31:47 - 00:31:56] and put to bed without a struggle, everyone is going to have to be counted, I've talked [00:31:56 - 00:32:03] to you in recent months about memes, memes being the smallest potential units of ideas [00:32:03 - 00:32:14] they're like genes, we are the nucleus of a mutant meme, the meme of plant consciousness, [00:32:14 - 00:32:21] hallucinogenic consciousness, shamanistic consciousness, we have to refine this meme, [00:32:21 - 00:32:28] replicate it through repetition and spread it through society in the same way that a [00:32:28 - 00:32:36] plant sheds seeds into an ecosystem, the idea will compete, the idea is a good one, it's [00:32:36 - 00:32:43] adaptive, it's clever, it's tough, it's invasive, it can make use of many contexts to promote [00:32:43 - 00:32:51] its own existence but it can't do any of that if we don't replicate it and get it out, so [00:32:51 - 00:32:58] I see these kinds of meetings as an opportunity for building community, as an opportunity [00:32:58 - 00:33:05] for people to look around themselves and connect with the other people who are here, we cannot [00:33:05 - 00:33:12] be told from the rest of the population unless we self-select and gather together at a single [00:33:12 - 00:33:18] point in space and time, when we do that we recognize each other, when this meeting is [00:33:18 - 00:33:26] concluded we will merge back into the larger stream of the body politic but carrying this [00:33:26 - 00:33:36] meme of the Gaian resurgence, the guy-lanic wave that must come, I mean people say it's [00:33:36 - 00:33:42] so wonderful that you articulate these feminist ideas and so forth, I do it because I don't [00:33:42 - 00:33:48] want to be dead, I do it because I don't want my children to have no world to live in, there [00:33:48 - 00:33:58] is no choice, the walls are high and the current is moving very fast, what we need to do is [00:33:58 - 00:34:07] merely keep our spirits high and learn to sing the song. [00:34:07 - 00:34:14] My friend Ralph Abraham is a proponent of this school of mathematics called chaotic [00:34:14 - 00:34:24] attractors or dynamics and this is the notion that many processes are not pushed from behind [00:34:24 - 00:34:32] by the momentum of cause-uistry as in the ordinary Newtonian model of process but that [00:34:32 - 00:34:40] there are what he calls attractors or basins of attraction and these are things which lead [00:34:40 - 00:34:47] processes forward, for instance a somewhat trivial example would be if we had a large [00:34:47 - 00:34:54] bowl and a marble and every time we release the marble up near the rim of the bowl we [00:34:54 - 00:34:59] would notice that it unfailingly rolled to the bottom of the bowl and located itself [00:34:59 - 00:35:05] somewhere near the center of the bottom of the bowl, we could say that the bottom of [00:35:05 - 00:35:12] the bowl acts as a basin of attraction for the marble, in other words the marble finds [00:35:12 - 00:35:20] its most that its energy state is most at equilibrium when it locates itself in the [00:35:20 - 00:35:26] trough of the bowl, so there is a way of analyzing processes to see them as though they were [00:35:26 - 00:35:34] led rather than pushed and I think it's fruitful to see human history this way, you see what [00:35:34 - 00:35:46] we deny as a culture of materialist positivist reductionists is the presence of spirit in [00:35:46 - 00:35:54] the world in ourselves or in nature and so western science is very concerned to deny [00:35:54 - 00:36:04] what is called telos, telos is a greek term for purpose, purpose the same idea as the [00:36:04 - 00:36:10] attractor that I was trying, if you have a target, if you're driving a car toward a goal, [00:36:10 - 00:36:18] the goal is your telos, it decides how you will steer the car, well it has been for the [00:36:18 - 00:36:28] past 150 years extremely fashionable in sociology and biology because of Darwin to deny telos [00:36:28 - 00:36:36] in nature to say that you know any apparent order in nature is made up of the disorder [00:36:36 - 00:36:43] of random mutation meeting the disorder of natural selective processes and these two [00:36:43 - 00:36:53] streams of converging disorder create a kind of apparent or virtual order which is an illusion, [00:36:53 - 00:36:58] this is the orthodox theory and when you take this Darwinism and put it into historical [00:36:58 - 00:37:07] theory, theory of human processes in time, you get the modern position in academic philosophy [00:37:07 - 00:37:15] about history which is that it is and the official phrase is trendlessly fluctuating, [00:37:15 - 00:37:22] that's what we're asked to believe, we are embedded in a 10,000 year old process of trendless [00:37:22 - 00:37:28] fluctuation, in mathematics this is called a random walk, it means you just go over here [00:37:28 - 00:37:33] a few steps and then you go this way and then you go back, you're like a drunk lurching [00:37:33 - 00:37:43] around in this face space and this is the highest vision of human purpose that the reductionist [00:37:43 - 00:37:51] vision can offer, well what the intuition of religion is, especially western religion [00:37:51 - 00:37:57] and I wouldn't even bother to mention it except that it also is the strong intuition of a [00:37:57 - 00:38:05] lot of psychedelic experience that there is some kind of attractor in the historical face [00:38:05 - 00:38:11] space, there is something which is drawing everything toward it, it's like a higher dimensional [00:38:11 - 00:38:20] entity that casts an enormous shadow over the human landscape so that you know at sitting [00:38:20 - 00:38:30] around campfires 50,000 years ago people felt this vague tug toward organization, order, [00:38:30 - 00:38:38] cognitive activity, epigenetic activity, epigenetic activity means coding stuff not in your genes [00:38:38 - 00:38:48] but in dance, gesture, ritual and ultimately in clay and on paper and in electronic storage [00:38:48 - 00:38:57] methods, this proliferation of complexity is a response to and an anticipation of this [00:38:57 - 00:39:04] transcendental object at the end of historical process, you see if it weren't for our presence [00:39:04 - 00:39:13] on this planet even modern science at its present primitive state could give a fairly [00:39:13 - 00:39:22] good accounting of what's going on that out of complex polymers arose super complex polymers [00:39:22 - 00:39:27] which were self replicating and that was life and then you have an animal population but [00:39:27 - 00:39:38] the fly in the ointment of this rational model of reality is ourselves, we are clearly imbued [00:39:38 - 00:39:47] with a higher dimension which we call spirit in a way that ordinary matter when imbued [00:39:47 - 00:39:54] with a higher dimension is called life, in other words we represent a different ontological [00:39:54 - 00:40:04] level in the career of organization because we hope, we despair, we plan, we remember [00:40:04 - 00:40:12] and we misremember, we lie, we fabricate, we delude ourselves and all of these things [00:40:12 - 00:40:21] are uniquely human functions, well I think that shamanism which is the focus of our concern [00:40:21 - 00:40:30] here is a kind of anticipating of the whole pattern and that this is really the way to [00:40:30 - 00:40:38] think about shamanism when thinking of it as a force that can steady and complete an [00:40:38 - 00:40:47] individual human life, the shamans are not in history in the same way that we are by [00:40:47 - 00:40:56] having access to this higher dimension that they go to in their trance states and their [00:40:56 - 00:41:04] states of intoxication, they gain a fractal overview on process, on life, I mean after [00:41:04 - 00:41:12] all isn't that what we mean by wisdom, is wisdom is understanding how things really [00:41:12 - 00:41:20] work, how they really work, love affairs, the raising of children, the managing of corporations, [00:41:20 - 00:41:27] the prosecution of wars, how do these things really work, not the deluded and fumbling [00:41:27 - 00:41:34] attempts of the proponents of this or that school but a Taoistic insight into the actual [00:41:34 - 00:41:44] appropriate dynamics of everything, well how do you gain that kind of an insight, the answer [00:41:44 - 00:41:51] is you must have a superior model, you must have a superior model, now if you believe [00:41:51 - 00:41:57] you know that the world is composed of three levels and they are held up on the back of [00:41:57 - 00:42:03] a woman who sits on a giant tortoise who floats in space, this is a model of the universe, [00:42:03 - 00:42:14] it can take you a certain distance but what model of the universe can actually offer reassurance [00:42:14 - 00:42:23] in all kinds of situations, well strangely enough I think that these models come from [00:42:23 - 00:42:32] the frontiers of mathematics that it is not mere coincidence that the storms of visionary [00:42:32 - 00:42:41] hallucination that the shaman encounters are very much like the storms of form and color [00:42:41 - 00:42:48] that are spewed out of a Cray 3 supercomputer when it conducts a thousand iterations per [00:42:48 - 00:42:56] second inside the Julius set or the Mantelbrot set or one of these other compound complex [00:42:56 - 00:43:03] mathematical objects that we are beginning to see, you see mathematics up to this point [00:43:03 - 00:43:10] has been a computational science because mathematicians used pencils and blackboards and chalk to [00:43:10 - 00:43:20] describe their objects and consequently an excruciatingly difficult vocabulary kept most [00:43:20 - 00:43:27] people from appreciating what mathematics was about, now the computer is to modern mathematics [00:43:27 - 00:43:37] like the telescope was to 16th century astronomy, the computer becomes a window into domains [00:43:37 - 00:43:44] of hyper complex computability that previously could barely even be conceived but that now [00:43:44 - 00:43:51] at a rate of millions approaching billions of iterations per second, Ralph works on the [00:43:51 - 00:43:57] MMPP machine, the multiple parallel processing machine at Goddard Space Flight Center, it [00:43:57 - 00:44:06] does 800 mega flops per second, 800 million floating point decimal calculations per second, [00:44:06 - 00:44:13] so you can dream dreams with a machine like that and strangely enough at the edge of the [00:44:13 - 00:44:19] super technology of the dominator culture at Goddard Space Flight Center with guys high [00:44:19 - 00:44:25] priest standing around in white coats when you get it up and running, what you see is [00:44:25 - 00:44:32] what an ayahuasca shaman sees on a Saturday night in the Amazon, you see that you are [00:44:32 - 00:44:39] navigating through a complex higher dimensional phase space where by varying the inputs of [00:44:39 - 00:44:45] amplitude and frequency in one case using an electronic box, in the other case using [00:44:45 - 00:44:54] the human voice, you sing your way through a mathematical domain which is a higher resonance [00:44:54 - 00:45:02] of reality and you learn how the world really works, how things happen, well how the hell [00:45:02 - 00:45:04] do they happen? [00:45:04 - 00:45:11] Well on the simplest level they happen like this, they have a beginning, they have a middle [00:45:11 - 00:45:18] and then they die away as an oscillation, a damped oscillation, now this simple truth [00:45:18 - 00:45:27] to which we all nod assent is in fact the hardest thing, the hardest swallow there is [00:45:27 - 00:45:34] for the dominator ego and the dominator personality because what this simple truth says, things [00:45:34 - 00:45:42] come into being, they achieve their inflorescence and they fade away is as Heraclitus put it, [00:45:42 - 00:45:53] "pante treya" all flows, nothing lasts, nothing is saved and this is you know our glory and [00:45:53 - 00:46:07] our agony that you know the people we love and the people we hate are swept away by time, [00:46:07 - 00:46:17] empires, dynasties, continents are swept away by time and yet our search for security is [00:46:17 - 00:46:25] cast in the dominator culture as a search for permanence, you know, I want to buy a [00:46:25 - 00:46:32] house, I'd like to get my trust fund functioning a little better, I'd like to pay off X, Y [00:46:32 - 00:46:40] and Z, you know a search for permanence, so what you do when you do that is you set yourself [00:46:40 - 00:46:49] at war against the cosmos which is a heroic stance if you're trying to produce Melvillian [00:46:49 - 00:46:58] opera out of your life, you know Ahab says in Moby Dick, he's talking to his first mate [00:46:58 - 00:47:06] Starbuck who signifies Christian right reason and he says, he's raving about going after [00:47:06 - 00:47:14] the whale and he says you know we'll chase it over both sides of earth and round perdition's [00:47:14 - 00:47:27] flame and Starbuck says to seek revenge on a dumb brute seems blasphemy and he says blasphemy [00:47:27 - 00:47:37] Starbuck speak not to me of blasphemy I would strike out the sun if it insulted me for could [00:47:37 - 00:47:45] it do that then could I do the other since there is ever a sort of fair play. [00:47:45 - 00:47:54] Well you know this is locker room talk, the notion that there is fair play between a man [00:47:54 - 00:48:01] and a nearby star is the finest expression of the dominator ego I can imagine and of [00:48:01 - 00:48:07] course you know the story of Moby Dick can be read on many levels but finally it is the [00:48:07 - 00:48:15] story of the submergence of the male ego in the oceans of the unconscious born to its [00:48:15 - 00:48:21] destruction and transformation by an encounter with the maternal matrix in the form of the [00:48:21 - 00:48:28] vagina dentata of the of the sperm whale and everything that it symbolized. [00:48:28 - 00:48:34] So I don't think we want to go that way I don't think we want to set ourselves up as [00:48:34 - 00:48:44] the crusaders for permanence but that means softening to the fact of the flow and of the [00:48:44 - 00:48:45] impermanence. [00:48:45 - 00:48:53] Nicole has made the point very eloquently that these people in the Amazon have nothing. [00:48:53 - 00:49:00] The wonderful thing about the Amazon is that nothing lasts nothing is worth having I mean [00:49:00 - 00:49:09] a book forget it clothing houses everything is just swept away by the incessant recycling [00:49:09 - 00:49:18] of material so all there all that is permanent are values personality strength honesty decency [00:49:18 - 00:49:25] dignity these are things which can be erected against the flow and have some hope of permanence [00:49:25 - 00:49:39] so I think you know shamanism is a is permission to transcend anxiety by accepting the transience [00:49:39 - 00:49:50] of all form and this is a truth of the universe that cannot be ignored so once it is integrated [00:49:50 - 00:50:01] then it's as though resistance in the electrical circuits that surround your integration into [00:50:01 - 00:50:11] the world begins to fall you accept that the present moment is the richest apex of being [00:50:11 - 00:50:18] that on the downside back into the past it shades off into memory and its vagaries in [00:50:18 - 00:50:27] the future it shades off into a series of adumbrations and anticipations the I think [00:50:27 - 00:50:35] that the shamans gain this tremendous authenticity that you feel in their presence the good ones [00:50:35 - 00:50:43] because they have seen the end they have a model of how process happens and so they don't [00:50:43 - 00:50:52] push and they don't clutch and then energy flows through them and our our civilization [00:50:52 - 00:51:01] has to learn this you know I think I said at one point in this weekend to only Gorbachev [00:51:01 - 00:51:09] is taking the position that we did it wrong and that we need to deconstruct and yet every [00:51:09 - 00:51:19] society did it wrong we all did it wrong capitalism it's wonderful that you can get a safety pin [00:51:19 - 00:51:25] at 4 a.m. within a half mile of anywhere in the United States and I'm sure the Russians [00:51:25 - 00:51:32] wish they had it so good but is that the be all and the end all of cultural values that [00:51:32 - 00:51:40] you can walk the flora fluorescent lit aisles of Kmart and congratulate yourself that whether [00:51:40 - 00:51:48] it be gas can sanitary napkin or whatever it's there waiting for you I don't think so [00:51:48 - 00:51:54] I think that we have built in the termination of our world just as surely as the Marxist [00:51:54 - 00:52:00] world built in a tripwire into its social mechanism it's just that we're going to have [00:52:00 - 00:52:09] to pay the piper shorten more downstream if we descend into the Dominator metaphor and [00:52:09 - 00:52:16] play its game we're probably going to be snuckered because they've had a long long time to figure [00:52:16 - 00:52:27] out all the angles what I find myself more and more leaning to is sharing the meme of [00:52:27 - 00:52:35] the irrelevance of conservative institutions history is not a process for which you ask [00:52:35 - 00:52:43] permission history is just something you make and then other people pick up the pieces Henry [00:52:43 - 00:52:52] David Thoreau understood this very well when he wrote his famous treatise on civil disobedience [00:52:52 - 00:52:59] the growth of culture is something that comes out of the animal body Russo called it the [00:52:59 - 00:53:09] general will you know man proposes and God disposes but in the realm of civil polity [00:53:09 - 00:53:17] the people propose the people dispose and government is allowed to propose but that's [00:53:17 - 00:53:24] all and now what we are involved in really is a debate about human nature who are we [00:53:24 - 00:53:32] what are we the French cartoonist Mobius put it very well in his book where he asked the [00:53:32 - 00:53:41] question is man good this is what we're going to find out and I my feeling is that it isn't [00:53:41 - 00:53:51] decided yet that it is you know HG Wells called history a race between education and disaster [00:53:51 - 00:53:57] well you know they're in the home stretch neck and neck it's clearly going to be a photo [00:53:57 - 00:54:05] finish but there is a a responsibility on everyone who sees this to communicate it to [00:54:05 - 00:54:13] other people and to act upon it for a copy of this recording please call sound photosynthesis [00:54:13 - 00:54:27] at 415-383-6712 or write post office box 2111 Mill Valley California 94942 copyright sound [00:54:27 - 00:54:28] photosynthesis