Sounds True presents In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge,
 a weekend workshop with Terence McKenna.
 Researcher, author, and philosopher,
 Terence McKenna has spent 25 years
 studying the foundations of shamanism
 and the ethno-pharmacology of spiritual transformation.
 His books include Food of the Gods
 and The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide,
 and most recently, The Archaic Revival.
 He is also the founder of Botanical Dimensions,
 a non-profit botanical research project.
 In this weekend workshop,
 Terence McKenna examines time and its mysteries,
 the nature of language,
 and the techniques of ecstasy
 that have developed in non-Western societies
 to navigate to and from invisible worlds.
 And now, recorded live in Boulder, Colorado,
 In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge,
 a weekend workshop with Terence McKenna.
 - How to slice into this pie.
 I try to never do it the same way
 because I don't want to get bored,
 but that lays a sort of obligation on me
 that I'm not always able to meet.
 Two things, I think, are going on inside this wrap
 as currently packaged.
 First of all, I'm very interested in talking
 about the impact of psilocybin
 on human evolution and values and institutions.
 And then, so that you don't think
 we've just fallen into fringe anthropology 101,
 I'm interested in taking the insights from that discussion
 and trying to apply it to the modern
 or post-modern, as the case may be, dilemma,
 trying to draw some implication
 from looking at human prehistory
 and the set of factors that were in place
 at the moment of human emergence.
 And since I feel pretty much among friends and fringes here,
 it doesn't trouble me to confess
 that my book, Food of the Gods,
 I really conceived of as a kind of intellectual Trojan horse.
 It's written as though it were a scientific study,
 footnotes, bibliography, citations of impossible
 to obtain books, and so forth and so on.
 But this is simply to assuage
 and calm the academic anthropologists.
 The idea is to leave this thing on their doorstep,
 rather like an abandoned baby or a Trojan horse,
 and they will open their doors to it and take it inside,
 only to discover that out of this very staid,
 rational discourse pour the self-transforming
 elf machines from hyperspace with their own agenda.
 (audience laughing)
 I feel like I should say this,
 it's more for my ease than yours,
 that I reached the conclusions that I now espouse
 through skepticism, reason,
 rationalism, and tough argument.
 So it may sound ditzy, flaky, and soft-headed,
 but that's just because you're hearing it wrong.
 (audience laughing)
 The guiding input was experience,
 and in a way, what we're gathered here to talk about tonight
 is an experience which is not only rare,
 transformative, challenging, but also,
 for reasons which we'll probably get around to, illegal.
 So it's a very peculiar situation.
 Very few experiences are illegal,
 and our models of the world are built up
 based on our experience.
 So if you make an experience illegal,
 you're essentially saying it is off-limits
 for model-building.
 You can't include that in your model
 because it isn't really there in some sense.
 And this is the situation in Western society
 vis-a-vis the psychedelic experience.
 To my mind, the psychedelic experience
 is as much a part of being human
 as sexuality, personal independence, child-rearing.
 These are the things which are scripted into us
 as opportunities for exercising our peculiar situation
 vis-a-vis the phenomenon of being.
 And a society which would deny that
 is a society whose secret, or maybe not so secret,
 agenda is the infantilization of its citizens.
 I mean, if we are not capable of dealing with these things,
 then who is?
 And are the people who made the rules,
 did they carefully, conscientiously, and at depth,
 explore these dimensions and decide they were unfit
 for human consumption?
 Or was it done more hastily, more mindlessly,
 and with more fear?
 I would submit to you that it's the latter.
 Well, first of all, I want to talk about
 the impact of psychedelics,
 especially in this case psilocybin, on humanness.
 And then if there's time, maybe we can talk a little bit
 about what is so great about it.
 I had a philosophy professor once, Paul Feyerabend,
 some of you may know his books,
 and he opened his Epistemology 101 course by saying,
 "I'm going to teach you what truth is,
 "and then I'm going to teach you what's so great about it."
 Well, I won't claim to teach
 what the psychedelic experience is.
 That you will have to find out on your own.
 But I think it is legitimate to discuss
 what's so great about it.
 You know, are we, by any measurable index,
 superior or inferior to people who do not have
 this experience?
 Because if not, then really,
 the psychedelic position is no more than a kind of cult
 to be lined up along with Roman Catholicism
 and all the other cults out there.
 Speaking as a former member, of course.
 Well, my notion of the way to legitimate
 the importance of psychedelics is by showing,
 and I think one can show in fairly short order,
 that these things are not alien to the human experience,
 or ancillary, or the province of uneducated
 little brown people down in the rainforest,
 or anything like that.
 I submit to you that the psychedelic experience
 and the impact of psychedelic plants on human beings
 is central to understanding who we are
 and how we got this way.
 And if we can explore this issue
 and convince ourselves that there's some merit
 in this point of view, then it will simply,
 it will do more than rewrite the annals
 of a staid science like anthropology.
 It will actually change how we relate to each other
 and to the planet that we're in the process
 of grinding into pollution.
 So that's the raison d'etre for the politics behind it.
 Now, here's the spiel.
 Sometime in the last three million years,
 our remote ancestors, the proto-hominids,
 were disrupted in their evolutionary climax
 in the canopies of the great rainforests of Africa.
 You see, most animal species evolve into a niche,
 tighter and tighter and tighter.
 We see this with termites and cockroaches
 and most life forms, this is what happens to them.
 Only if the niche is somehow disrupted or destroyed
 does the game veer away from its tendency
 toward closure, and this is what happened to us.
 Our remote ancestors would have lived happily
 in the climaxed rainforests of Africa
 in the same way that primates to this day live happily
 in the climaxed rainforests of Indonesia and South America,
 but for the fact that the dynamics of the planet,
 and this ultimately is, if we're looking for a cause,
 or some people would say a villain,
 then it's the climatological dynamics of the planet
 which began to limit these rainforest habitats,
 and a new kind of habitat began to form in Africa,
 which was grassland.
 It's very recent, and under nutritional pressure
 and under a pressure that was the result
 of this retreating environment,
 our remote ancestors descended from the trees
 and began to adapt themselves
 to the new world of the grassland,
 and they did this over a period of probably
 a couple of million years.
 Now, I maintain, and if any of you
 are evolutionary biologists or anthropologists,
 this is the nub of my position.
 Here's what's new scientifically.
 What they teach you about evolution
 is that it's caused by mutation,
 which is a random process,
 which then meets another random process,
 which is natural selection,
 and out of these two random processes,
 lo and behold, you get sea urchins,
 birds of paradise, gray whales, and human beings.
 Now, when you inquire as to what is the source
 of this mutation, you will be told it's cosmic rays,
 incident, incoming hard radiation
 which can disrupt chromosomes,
 and then most of these mutations are lethal,
 some huge percentage of them,
 but a vanishingly small number of them
 actually confer adaptive advantage,
 and they are then preserved in the genome and passed on.
 Now, what I want to suggest,
 and I've never seen it thoroughly treated
 by evolutionary thinkers,
 is that food is the unexamined source
 of evolutionary pressure.
 It can be.
 If you know anything about animal species,
 you know that most animals tend to specialize their diet.
 Insects are famous for this.
 If you find a caterpillar and you want to raise it in a jar,
 you must give it the food plant you found it on
 because they don't just eat leaves.
 It doesn't work like that.
 They have species-specific adaptations.
 Now, why is this?
 It's because it's a strategy to limit exposure
 to toxic and mutagenic chemicals
 that other life forms are sequestering in their tissue
 to discourage predation, essentially.
 Well, so then what happens when a animal population,
 such as our remote ancestors,
 comes under pressure from a dwindling habitat
 or a limited availability of food?
 Well, what happens, if you have any sense,
 is you start experimenting.
 You start digging up roots you never thought about before
 and chewing on them.
 You start eating leaves.
 You start eating insect protein.
 You experiment with the slaughter of small animals
 and so forth and so on.
 And this is precisely what our remote ancestors did.
 This is the much-lamented transition
 from fruititarian holiness
 to predatory carnivorous messiness.
 But had we not been willing to lower our gourmet standards,
 we would have entered the fossil record at that point.
 So, so, here we have these proto-hominids
 foraging into this new grassland environment,
 beginning to beat on prairie dogs and stuff like that.
 And, and, simultaneously, as we all know,
 evolving in this African veldt environment
 were great herds of ungulate animals,
 proto-cattle, bison, wildebeest, antelopes,
 many, many different kinds of animals.
 And one of the curiosities of nature
 is that many mushrooms prefer the dung of ungulate animals
 to just going out and making a deal
 with the raw, natural environment.
 They like the leavening that goes on with vegetable material
 when it passes through the double stomach
 of an ungulate animal.
 As a headline, what this means is mushrooms grow in manure.
 And so, our remote ancestors,
 testing for insects and eating small animals,
 would certainly have encountered
 the so-called coprophytic or coprophilic,
 the dung-loving mushrooms.
 And they would have tested them for food.
 Years ago, when I was in Kenya,
 I observed baboon troops
 in this very environment we're discussing,
 and their habit was, they were very interested in cow pies,
 because they had learned from experience
 that if you rush over to a relatively old cow pie
 and flip it over, there's a high probability
 of beetles or beetle grubs under there,
 and so these were vectors for food getting.
 Well, I did not observe mushrooms in Africa,
 but I observed mushrooms in the Amazon,
 and they can attain the size of a dinner plate.
 I've never seen them in cultivation quite that large.
 But you come out after a hard rain,
 and these things are landed like little flying saucers
 or frisbees in the meadows.
 They would certainly have been tested
 for their nutritional potential.
 And psilocybin, different from all other chemicals
 in nature, including, as far as I can tell,
 all other hallucinogenic chemicals in nature,
 psilocybin has a unique set of characteristics
 which implicate it, to my mind, very strongly
 in the catalyzing of the emergence of humanness
 out of proto-hominid and hominid organization.
 And it works like this.
 It's very relatively easy to understand
 as major scientific breakthroughs go.
 At least you're not going to be asked
 to do any partial differential equations this evening.
 Psilocybin, in very low doses, doses so low
 that if you were to take a dose this low,
 you could conceivably forget you had done it
 and just go out and shop and fiddle around.
 But at doses so low that they do not register
 as a psychedelic experience,
 psilocybin imparts measurable improvement in visual acuity.
 Roland Fisher did this work in the late '50s and early '60s,
 and they built an experimental device
 where a person who could not be seen by turning a crank,
 there were two parallel bars,
 and by turning a crank,
 this person could rotate one of the parallel bars
 so that it was no longer parallel.
 And lacking talking rats,
 they went to the next preferred experimental animal,
 which is graduate students,
 and they would sit a graduate student
 down in front of this device,
 give them a very low dose of psilocybin,
 and then put a buzzer in their hand
 and say, "When the two bars are no longer parallel,
 "push the buzzer."
 And Fisher collected large amounts of data
 which showed that the people who had taken the psilocybin,
 and the other people were given placebo, of course,
 could detect this deformation
 long before the unstoned subjects were able to do so.
 And Fisher, who was a totally straight European scientist,
 in fact, a Vienneser,
 when I talked to him about this stuff,
 he was very cagey, and he was funny.
 In fact, he said, "Well, you see, it's very interesting.
 "Apparently, here we have data
 "which argues significantly
 "that we are perceiving reality better
 "with the drug than without the drug."
 (audience laughs)
 Yes, yes.
 For him, that was a joke.
 I mean, he never did anything with it.
 It was just a throwaway line.
 But it stuck with me.
 And I don't think you have to be a rocket scientist
 to see that if you are a hunting animal
 in a situation of nutritional pressure,
 as our remote ancestors were,
 and there is a food in that environment
 which will give you better vision,
 then by God, the animals which accept that item
 into their diet are going to be more successful hunters
 than the ones that do not.
 And consequently, they will outbreed
 those members of the population
 that have some aversion to this exotic food.
 Either they don't like the look of it,
 or they don't like that it grows in manure,
 and they don't like the taste of it.
 But those who accept it as a dietary item
 will be more successful at getting food,
 and consequently, more successful
 at raising their offspring to sexual maturity.
 And that's the name of the game in Darwinian evolution.
 You must raise your offspring to sexual maturity.
 Then the genes flow forward.
 If you fail in that, you get an F in the evolution game.
 Well, okay, so visual acuity, that's all very fine,
 but psilocybin has other properties
 which build on that initial pharmacological peculiarity.
 If you take slightly larger doses of psilocybin,
 and this is typical of many indoles,
 you get, with many of which are hallucinogens,
 you get what is called CNS arousal,
 central nervous system arousal.
 You all know this feeling.
 It's the feeling of two double cappuccinos in short order.
 It's that you do not sleep, you are very restless,
 you are very alert, your attention is scanning,
 scanning, scanning, and in highly sexed animals
 like primates, arousal means exactly what it sounds like.
 It means erection in the male animal.
 Now, isn't that interesting?
 That is a second factor feeding back
 into this increased success with offspring business.
 Not only are you a better hunter,
 but you're a more highly sexed creature,
 and you're having more of what straight anthropologists
 refer to as successful copulations.
 An amazing phrase, actually.
 Meaning, of course, that impregnation
 is a consequence of this sexual activity.
 Now, the other thing that psilocybin does
 at or slightly above this arousal level,
 and this is very important for the argument,
 is it causes what I call boundary dissolution.
 And boundary dissolution in human beings,
 like you and me, means ego loss.
 And I believe that this would have promoted
 a social and sexual style based not on monogamous pairing,
 but on orgy.
 The scenario is fairly easy to imagine.
 It's that these remote ancestors of ours
 would take these mushrooms,
 and they, probably at the new and full moon,
 the thinking is that ritual was originally lunar-timed,
 and then they would, and we're talking about
 nomadic groups of people,
 probably no more than 80 to 100 people,
 and then there would be group sexual activity.
 Now, an interesting social consequence
 of orgiastic social styles,
 besides a whole lot of fun, of course,
 is it's impossible to trace lines of male paternity
 in that kind of a situation.
 You see, women know whose children are whose
 because they see the child come out of their body
 and they nurse the child.
 But men do not, in that situation,
 have their children, my children.
 What they have are our children, the tribal group.
 And this boundary-dissolving thing,
 let's dwell on this for a moment
 because this is central to my argument
 and it has political consequences for our own lives.
 All primates, clear back down
 into squirrel monkeys and lemurs,
 all primates have what are called
 male dominance hierarchies.
 And what this means is that the most,
 the males with the longest claws,
 the hardest muscles, and the meanest dispositions
 take control of everybody else.
 Women, children, weaker males,
 everybody comes under the thumb
 of the alpha males of the pack.
 This is true, as I said, of squirrel monkeys,
 howler monkeys, so forth and so on.
 It is also true of us sitting here in this room.
 This is a male-dominant society.
 I mean, there's a lot of complaining
 and hair-pulling about it.
 And there's a political alternative
 in the form of the women's movement
 and feminist sensitivities.
 But for most people, male dominance is the rule.
 Well, I would like to suggest
 that our peculiarly
 discomforted relationship to reality
 is a consequence of the fact that
 for a long period of time,
 perhaps as short as 20,000 years,
 perhaps as long as a million years,
 as a species, and not consciously,
 we accepted into our diet
 a drug that had the consequences
 of suppressing male dominance,
 that this was the social consequence
 of accepting psilocybin into the diet.
 The ego is a structure
 that forms in the psyche
 like a calcareous tumor or a growth
 if you do not have regular recourse
 to the cure.
 And the cure is psilocybin
 and the boundary-dissolving sexual and social style
 which it carried in its wake.
 So the reason that we, as a people,
 are haunted by the idea of a lost paradise,
 a perfect world sometime in the misty past,
 is not, you know, Mercier Lallard
 called it the nostalgia for paradise,
 and thought it was a kind of a longing
 that had no basis.
 But I think that it's entirely a memory
 of a period when male dominance
 was chemically suppressed,
 ego was chemically suppressed,
 and by male dominance and ego,
 I don't mean to lay this entirely on men.
 I mean, I would wager
 probably everyone in this room
 has more ego than they need,
 certainly starting with me.
 And that's part of the paradox
 that you're supposed to enjoy in this,
 is, you know, the ambiguity
 of me preaching the loss of ego.
 (audience laughs)
 So, essentially, you know,
 what happened was a chemically driven leap
 in evolution as a consequence
 of the suppression of these behaviors
 that favored male dominance.
 As a species, we would have continued
 with male dominance forever
 had it not been for psilocybin in the diet.
 And it established a situation
 in which, in less than two million years,
 the human brain size doubled.
 This is without contest
 the greatest mystery
 in the whole of evolutionary theory.
 Lumsden, who is a brilliant evolutionary biologist,
 called the doubling of the human brain size
 in two million years
 the most spectacular transformation
 of a major organ of a higher animal
 in the entire fossil record.
 Well, now, it would be spectacular enough
 if it were the liver of an otter
 or the pancreas of an elephant.
 But notice that it is the organ
 which created the theory of evolution itself
 and all other theories.
 So we're getting a little tautological here, folks.
 There's something fishy going on.
 What was it that caused
 this explosive doubling in human brain size?
 Well, I maintain that it was
 the new behaviors that emerged
 with the suppression of ego
 and their reinforcement
 in this situation of nomadic pastoralism.
 And that there was a period,
 let's call it from the melting of the last glaciers
 in Tell Chathah-yuk, 6,500 BC,
 there was a period when men and women
 were in balance with each other,
 children and adults were at peace with each other,
 and human beings and the planet
 were at peace with each other.
 And then it was lost.
 And we fell into history.
 You know, the long slog toward Armageddon
 is what was initiated in its place.
 Well, now, if it was so wonderful,
 why would anybody ever let go of it?
 Why was it lost?
 Well, we have to go back to the very forces
 which created this situation.
 Remember, I said it was the climatological dynamics
 of the planet created the grasslands
 in place of the rainforest.
 Continuation of those processes
 turned those grasslands into desert.
 And where there once were waterholes,
 running rivers, grasslands,
 and vast herds of animals and their human symbiotes,
 suddenly there was encroaching desert, fewer waterholes.
 The mushrooms began to be seasonal,
 began to be located only in the rain shadows of mountains.
 The great mushroom festivals,
 which had been at the new and full moon,
 became solsticial and then equinoctial
 and then biennial or something.
 Anyway, you get the picture.
 It was fading.
 And I don't think people took this lying down.
 No pun intended.
 I think that there was great anxiety
 about the fading of the mushroom
 and the loss of the sacrament.
 And so these people searched for a strategy for preservation.
 Well, in a world without refrigeration,
 there is only one, well, no,
 there are two strategies for preservation
 of a delicate food like that.
 One is air drying, which is not terribly satisfying
 because as soon as a rain cloud comes along,
 your dry stuff absorbs moisture out of the air
 and turns yuck.
 And so the only real option is preservation in honey.
 And this was done, I'm sure.
 It's still done in Mexico to this day
 in remote mushroom-using villages.
 People preserve it in honey.
 Now, the problem here, and this is a lot,
 my book goes into this kind of thing a lot
 because Food of the Gods,
 because what Food of the Gods is really about
 are the hidden factors
 that drugs lay upon us that we are not even aware of.
 And if you are attempting to preserve
 a hallucinogenic mushroom in honey,
 what you have to be aware of is that honey itself
 is potentially a psychoactive drug.
 Honey will turn into mead.
 It will ferment into a crude kind of honeyed alcohol.
 Well, if the mushroom brings suppression of ego,
 group sexual activity, and the formation of group values,
 what does alcohol bring?
 Alcohol has two effects primarily.
 It lowers sensitivity to social cueing
 at the same time that it confers
 an exaggerated sense of verbal facility.
 (audience laughs)
 In other words, people turn into jerks behind this.
 I mean, you only have to go to a busy singles bar
 somewhere here in Boulder,
 and you will see the alcohol ambiance
 being acted out right in front of you.
 So, and it's perhaps not so true of our generation,
 but I think probably for a thousand years,
 nobody got laid in Western civilization
 unless they were juiced,
 because Christianity was laying such a heavy trip
 on everybody, and people barely took their clothes off.
 In other words, you had to become blindly intoxicated
 to do what comes naturally.
 And I think up until very recently,
 how many women have their first sexual imprinting
 in an atmosphere of alcohol abuse?
 I mean, some huge percentage, I imagine.
 So that is the story, basically, of the fall into history.
 The loss of this mushroom cult happened right at the time
 that we were inventing agriculture.
 And agriculture and the suppression of orgy
 have something in relationship to each other
 on two unrelated levels.
 First of all, you suppress orgy
 because once you have agriculture,
 it's no more about psyching yourself up for the great hunt.
 It's all about getting up before dawn
 and going out and hoeing the weeds out of the crops.
 So it doesn't promote a party mentality.
 (audience laughing)
 The other thing is that as human mental capacity
 was evolving, remember that exploding brain size,
 as human mental capacity was evolving,
 women in these nomadic groups began to notice
 a curious fact, which was every year,
 they would return roughly to the same places
 they had been the year before,
 and in the discards from last year's camp in the midden,
 they would discover food plants growing.
 And some brilliant woman or group of women put it together
 and said, aha, we buried food here last year,
 and now there is food here.
 Must be something about putting food into the ground
 gets you food.
 In other words, they were able to cognize
 a cause and effect relationship
 that were separated over many months of time.
 At the same time that women were putting this together,
 men were noticing that the act of sex
 had certain consequences nine months later.
 The same perception had different impacts on both sexes,
 but it was an ability to coordinate
 a temporally separated cause and effect.
 Well, once men got onto the notion of male paternity,
 they realized that these aren't our children.
 Some are mine.
 Some are somebody else's.
 And from that notion, you go to my child,
 to my woman, to my hunting area,
 to my weapons, to my sib group.
 You get it all, you see.
 The ego is born, and it is born
 in an atmosphere of complete paranoia.
 The first consequence of agriculture,
 well, it has a number of consequences,
 but one consequence is it's a tremendously efficient way
 of producing food.
 That's obviously why people got into it.
 What does efficiency mean?
 Surplus.
 What does surplus mean?
 Haves and have-nots.
 The most spectacular architectural edifice
 of 10,000 BC on this planet was the grain tower at Jericho.
 It had thick walls to hold the grain,
 and it had high walls so you could climb up on top of it
 and drop rocks on the people who were trying to get into it.
 Surplus makes nomadism impossible,
 'cause you can't drag this huge amount of grain with you.
 So you get sedentary populations.
 And then, since the people who want the grain
 are killing your people in fury
 when they can't get the grain,
 you decide to put a wall around the whole encampment.
 Now you have a small town.
 Now you have urbanism.
 Now you have the division between nature
 and secular society.
 You have classes.
 You've got it all.
 And I maintain that this is the long march into hell.
 And our particular obsession with drugs
 as a species, I maintain, can be traced back
 to this transition.
 That, you know, yes, elephants love fermented papayas
 and so do butterflies and so forth and so on.
 But this kind of intoxication is not what we're about.
 We addict severely to several dozen substances,
 less severely to probably a hundred more,
 and we addict to everything.
 What we call romantic love shows a lot of similarities
 to hard drug addiction when you separate the lovers.
 You know, sleeplessness, suicidal tendencies,
 bursting into tears, hysteria, loss of weight.
 You can't tell whether this person is getting off heroin
 or has separated from their partner.
 Well, if you take an individual who is alcoholic
 or has some kind of serious drug problem,
 current thinking is this can be traced
 to traumatic abuse in childhood.
 This is what happened to us.
 Traumatic abuse in childhood.
 We were literally torn out of a symbiotic relationship
 to the earth by the forces of male dominance,
 agriculture, sedentary living, so forth and so on.
 And we've been trying to scratch an itch
 that we can't find ever since.
 And it has, you know, money doesn't do it,
 power doesn't do it, nothing seems to do it.
 We cannot, we seem to be the unhappy monkey,
 and we take this unhappiness out on each other
 with a vengeance.
 And you see, what happened was when the mushroom faded,
 the million years of pharmacologically interrupted patterns
 of male dominance reasserted themselves.
 But it was no more a foraging monkey with this style,
 it was a creature with language, tools, music,
 social organization, and suddenly it got very ugly.
 And people began fighting over the women.
 Said we don't want to have orgies anymore.
 This woman is my woman.
 Touch her, you die, and so forth and so on.
 And we are living out the legacy of this.
 Well, before I talk about the social consequences of it,
 for us, I want to go back to the question,
 what was so great about it?
 I mean, we've talked about orgy,
 but you can have orgy without psilocybin.
 What was so wonderful about that proto-historical mode?
 Well, this is where it becomes slightly more woo-woo.
 (audience laughing)
 Because what we have to talk about is
 what is the psychedelic experience anyway?
 And I maintain that if we're talking about psilocybin,
 and we're talking about taking it in nature
 as these people did, that yes, first come the dancing mice,
 the little candies, the colored grids,
 and so forth and so on.
 But what eventually happens quickly, like 10 minutes later,
 is there is an entity in the trance, in the vision.
 There is a mind there waiting that speaks good English
 and invites you up into its room.
 And once there, you realize that this is what all the hoopla
 about the Gaian mind and the rebirth of the goddess
 and all that is about.
 It's not a metaphor, folks.
 It's a headline in biology.
 We are not the only intelligent-minded species
 occupying this planet.
 We may be the only bipedal hairless mammal
 with intelligence on this planet,
 but there is something out there spread through the grasses,
 the forests, the rivers, and the oceans.
 Our own emergence into intelligence
 took less than two million years.
 Life has been on this planet for a billion and a half years,
 and we don't know how many strange pathways beckon,
 but at some point, a kind of mind came into existence,
 and it is real.
 It's what lies behind the religious impulse in our species.
 There really is somebody else sharing the local mind space,
 and I don't believe we're talking theology here.
 In other words, this is not,
 in Milton's wonderful phrase,
 the god who hung the stars like lamps in heaven.
 It's not about that.
 For me, that's a big question mark,
 but it is the god, goddess, of this earth.
 It is the biological mind.
 It is that all boundaries are illusions,
 and that life is a thinking, feeling,
 entelechy of some sort,
 and we are just like a little droplet
 that has somehow escaped from the river of cognition,
 and now imagine that we're the only water in the cosmos.
 Not so, it turns out.
 The reason the psychedelic experience
 is so baffling and transformative,
 even as we sit here with your heads full of Heidegger
 and Husserl and, I don't know, Wilson Phillips
 and all this stuff, is because in the face,
 in contact with that, we have no more sophistication
 than our orgiastic, mushroom-munching ancestors.
 Civilization doesn't give you a leg up on this stuff.
 In fact, it makes it harder to figure out what's going on,
 because we have defined nature as dead, you know?
 Atoms screaming through empty space,
 ruled by tensor equations of the third degree.
 That's our picture of what nature is.
 That isn't what it is.
 It's a mind of some sort.
 Okay, what is the implication of all this?
 Is this just some kind of fringe-o,
 anthropological revisionism?
 No, it isn't, because the fall into history
 and its consequences is, at this point,
 a loaded gun held to the head of the entire planet.
 We are about to pull over the soup cauldron,
 and if we do this, then two and a half billion years
 of evolutionary advance will be shot.
 Nobody else ever dropped the ball,
 so we appear to be vying for this peculiar honor.
 If we do not awaken to the consequences of ego,
 then we are gonna run this system right over the edge.
 The whole thing which characterizes our dilemma
 as a global society is our inability to feel,
 feel the consequences of what we are doing.
 You know, we've got the data.
 The ozone hole is disappearing.
 The planktonic life in the sea will die if it does.
 That will disrupt the food chain.
 The world food supply will drop by 60%.
 Everybody who isn't white as a sheet
 will have to starve in that case, and so forth and so on.
 I mean, we actually toy not only with our own extinction,
 but with the extinction of all life on the planet
 and with the extinction of the idea
 of dignity and decency itself.
 Well, I'm not in this psychedelic game
 because I think it's easy
 or because I think it's going to be a cinch.
 I'm in it because I think it's the only game in town.
 You know, if hortatory preaching could have done the trick,
 then the Sermon on the Mount would have turned the corner.
 If cautionary data flowing back to ruling institutions
 could do the trick, then sometime after Thomas Malthus,
 people would have begun to hit the brakes.
 Nothing seems to work.
 We're sick.
 We need pharmacological intervention.
 The ego is permitting us to slowly, not so slowly,
 commit suicide.
 And, you know, the fact that we cannot act collectively,
 that we are suspicious of all forms of collectivism,
 that we really are all for one and one for all
 is not our style.
 Instead, what we have going is a cat fight.
 And, you know, no less a straight person
 than Arthur Kessler in a book called
 The Ghost in the Machine said,
 "Humans are so wired for beating the brains out
 of woolly mastodons."
 That's what evolution has equipped us to do,
 not negotiate weapons treaties
 and destroy bacteriological factories.
 We have to force our evolution.
 We have to chemically restructure the primate brain
 so that we do not commit suicide.
 And the only way to do it in the time left
 is for the psychedelic community to stand up
 on its hind legs and roar.
 And, you know, maybe they'll build camps for us.
 And, but the point being,
 I think there's a moral imperative to try what works.
 I mean, you know, in the 60s, psychedelics were called
 consciousness expanding drugs,
 a good old phenomenological description.
 Well, if consciousness does not loom large
 in the future history of our species,
 then what the hell kind of future is it going to be?
 No future at all, I maintain.
 So if there is even the slightest iota of possibility
 that these things do what I'm saying they do,
 then we need to get Johnny Quick on it and check it out,
 because we may be beyond the point of no return right now.
 Nobody knows how bad this ozone hole thing is
 or what's locked up at Rocky Flats
 or behind the Iron Curtain or dumped in the Arctic Ocean.
 We may be past the fail safe point right now, folks.
 There is no time to lose.
 It is time to engage the powers that be
 in a little more serious dialogue
 than the just say no horseshit that's been peddled recently,
 because we're talking about the survival of life
 on the only planet that we are certain has life on it.
 This may be the site of a cosmic experiment
 with universal implications, and it rests in our hands.
 Everybody here tonight is here because a whole bunch of people
 didn't drop the ball.
 And you think you've got problems?
 Nine times in the last million years,
 the ice has moved south from the poles, miles thick.
 No antibiotics, no electronic communication, nothing.
 And I'm sure these people were miserable,
 and they dragged through it, and they lived,
 and they passed it on.
 Now we're it.
 And we will be judged the lamest of the lame
 if we cannot come to terms with this
 and begin to talk about what is going on.
 This is not obscure.
 As I said, I view the psychedelic experience
 as central to humanness, as our sexuality.
 We cannot allow dominator institutions
 to infantilize us and to tell you where your mind can
 and cannot go.
 We even have a piece of paper locked up
 in a vault in Washington, DC that
 guarantees life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
 Well, now, what could the pursuit of happiness
 possibly mean if it doesn't mean the freedom
 to practice your own relationship to nature
 and its gifts?
 So I think we have been entirely too casual
 about the importance of the psychedelic experience.
 This is for one reason, because we cannot publicly get together
 and discuss it in detail.
 And one of the things that I think
 is very important about get-togethers like this
 is if you will look around, you will
 notice that we cannot really be distinguished
 from the rest of society.
 Some of us live under bridges.
 Some of us clip coupons.
 There's a wide spectrum of people here.
 But this is your affinity group.
 This is your community.
 Someone in this room actually has what you need.
 And I have acted as a filter.
 So out of millions living along the front range,
 here we've gotten it down to 200.
 I can't go any further than that, folks.
 The rest is up to you.
 Well, I guess the last thing I want to say,
 and then we'll take a little intermission
 and then come back and do questions afterwards,
 which is my favorite part.
 But I want to just for a minute invoke
 the psychedelic experience without regard
 to the evolutionary forces that created it
 or the political institutions that suppress it and so forth,
 and just say, in case there's some soul in this room who's
 never had this experience, that this is extraordinary news.
 We are not talking about something like a dream.
 It is not like meditation.
 No, you can't get there by yourself.
 And Babaji is equally useless, because you and Babaji
 are starting from the same place in this game.
 It requires pharmacological perturbation
 of ordinary neurochemistry in order to see this mystery.
 And it is a mystery.
 It is not going to be reduced to the firing of synapses
 or repressed sexual desires or day residues or anything
 like that.
 It is the very thing which all these religions
 are yammering about.
 It's there.
 It's real.
 I mean, if you think that the world is empty of adventure,
 then you just haven't been hanging out
 with the right crowd.
 I mean, on a Saturday night within the confines
 of your own apartment on five grams of psilocybin mushrooms
 in silent darkness, I guarantee you,
 you will believe that Ferdinand Magellan should
 take second place to you.
 You will see things which no human being has ever
 seen before and that no human being will ever see again.
 That's how big that universe is.
 The incredibly constricted space-time locus of the here
 and now that evolution has forced upon us
 for survival purposes is simply one point
 in an apparently infinite hologram of explorable data
 that is the human world.
 I mean, the entire world of every science fiction novel
 and story ever written is minuscule compared
 to the universes of strangeness and peculiarity
 that are accessible to any one of us
 if you will but apply the method.
 And if you're not willing to apply the method,
 then you're going to sweep up around the ashram
 till hell freezes over and not understand what is going on.
 I mean, I think, you know, I'm sorry to be so hard on religion.
 I think it has its place.
 Its place is the inspiration of ethical behavior.
 You know, religion should teach ethical behavior.
 But it has very, very little to say
 about the mystery of being other than that it's there.
 And that's not practicing religion.
 Practicing religion is dancing with the mystery,
 losing and finding yourself in the mystery.
 And people often say to me, you know, well,
 how does this relate to other forms of spiritual work?
 Well, the answer is maybe not at all.
 I mean, I've certainly taken a lot of psychedelics
 and I think I see no sign of spiritual attainment
 or ethical perfection or anything so la-di-da as that.
 I don't know what this is all about,
 but I do know it's ours.
 It belongs to us.
 We are the creatures of mind.
 And 95% of what mind is lies on the other side
 of the psychedelic boundary.
 Ordinary consciousness is just like keeping
 the accounts of life, but there's more to life
 than the account books.
 I mean, everything else is out there.
 The color, the affection, the humor, the terror,
 the mystery, the incredible strangeness of it all.
 This is the domain that we want to claim and explore.
 And if we can find the collective institutional courage
 to do it, I think this current planetary crisis
 will be seen for what it really is.
 And what it is is it's not a dying.
 These are not the last rites for intelligence.
 This is a birth process.
 I mean, if you were to come around-- if you'd never seen
 somebody give birth and you came around the corner
 and it was in progress, you would be thoroughly, profoundly
 alarmed.
 I mean, it looks like an enormous tumor is making its way
 out of somebody and they are being split in two
 and blood is being shed and there's pleading and screaming
 and thrashing.
 It would be a real leap of understanding for you to say,
 oh, how wonderful.
 New life is emerging.
 This is the way we do it.
 Well, this is the way we do it.
 I mean, we are in the birth canal
 right now of a planetary civilization.
 Literally, the amniotic oceans of 500 years ago,
 that's all gone.
 There is no frontier.
 There is no going back.
 The peace of the fetal environment is gone.
 And now, in transition, literally,
 the walls are closing in.
 You can't breathe.
 You can't eat.
 You can't find your way.
 It appears to be the end.
 But there's light at the end of the tunnel.
 The problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind.
 And if you don't go to the back side of your mind,
 you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel.
 And once you see it, then the task
 becomes to empower it in yourself and other people,
 spread it as a reality.
 God did not retire to the seventh heaven.
 God is some kind of lost continent in the human mind.
 And if we will but explore the human mind,
 we can reclaim these relationships
 with our own authenticity and shed the childishness
 of historical existence and gender politics
 and all the rest of it and move on
 to the real business of establishing
 a real civilization.
 Thank you very much.
 Does anyone want to ask a question?
 Or is it all just perfectly clear, utterly convincing?
 And yeah.
 Are there examples?
 Of psilocybin?
 Bad effects.
 Somebody once said, what's wrong with DMT?
 And I said, well, nothing unless you
 fear death by astonishment.
 But your question is a good one.
 First of all, I talked a lot about how what we have to do
 is destroy and ablate ego.
 However, there is a very small percentage
 of us who have a hard time creating any ego whatsoever.
 And for these people, boundary dissolution is no problem.
 Their boundaries are dissolving all the time on them.
 I would say that they are at the contraindicated end
 of the spectrum, that if you're fearful already and fighting
 to keep from being overwhelmed by confusion at what's
 going on in your life at the paper box factory or something,
 then probably tossing in megadoses of hallucinogens
 is not the way for you to do it.
 Or if you do, if you're just bent on doing that,
 then I would say do it in the presence
 of some kind of professional.
 And how you find a professional in this legal climate,
 you'll have to discuss with me privately.
 I don't want to make it sound, though--
 I mean, it's a tricky thing.
 I don't want to make it sound like it's
 absolutely riskless.
 Physically, I think it's pretty safe,
 unless you are awed in some way.
 But you need to know.
 You don't want to find out you're awed an hour and a half
 into it.
 But the problem comes with the mind.
 If you are delicately balanced, if your whole life
 has been about not looking at that or that or that,
 then this is not your game.
 You should go back to watching Jeopardy.
 And the kind of person who is called to this
 is a person who has an exploring soul.
 I mean, I am not a courageous person in the sense
 that you won't find me shooting white water.
 You don't see me rappelling down the faces of cliffs.
 But from the time I was the tiniest little kid,
 I was into the weird.
 What's weird?
 Weird is the compass heading.
 And if you keep your compass always pointed
 toward the peculiar, the bizarre, the unspeakably alien,
 then you'll find these places.
 The people who think life is all cut and dried
 and are perfectly happy to have Carl Sagan and George Bush
 explain all of reality have never
 left the broad, swift stream of mundane thinking.
 But off in the byways and tributaries,
 there's a wonderful alchemical saying,
 which I generally mangle, but I think
 it goes something like this.
 The tallest mountains, the oldest books,
 the widest deserts, there you will find the stone.
 And what it is is it's a prescription
 for exploring weirdness.
 That's all.
 It's not going to be on MTV.
 It's not going to be in, God forbid,
 Esquire.
 It's going to come from doing your homework,
 visiting strange people in strange lands,
 and checking it out.
 What I can't give you, to return to your question,
 is I can't give you a guarantee that it will be fun.
 The Rolling Stones have that wonderful line,
 you don't get what you want, you get what you need.
 This stuff is ruthless.
 And if there's something that you're trying not to look at,
 it's going to get you for sure.
 But ask the veterans.
 Most people will tell you, you learn more from the bad trips
 than you do from the good ones.
 The good ones are ecstatic and connect you up
 to nature and other people.
 The bad ones show you your kinks and your limitations
 and your thought errors and that sort of thing.
 It's not an easy row to hoe.
 That's why I think there's a little bit
 of social confusion about it.
 One of the things I should make clear
 is I really advocate high doses rarely.
 I think the worst thing you can do
 is get into a style of psychedelic diddling,
 where you take half a gram every day.
 All this is doing is giving you a tolerance to psilocybin.
 You're not having the psilocybin experience.
 You're having the tolerance to psilocybin experience.
 Really, the way to do these things
 is to do them rarely so that your whole system can reassert
 itself and come to equilibrium, and then just slam it.
 And this is amazing.
 I mean, I think that this works for all these psychedelics.
 I'm an inveterate cannabis user, and I wish, in a way,
 that I could get a slightly better grip on my cannabis use
 because I think the real way to do cannabis
 is like once a week, by yourself, in silent darkness,
 with the strongest stuff you can get,
 and then immense amounts of it.
 And people call it a recreational drug
 and a this and a that.
 Hey, done that way, it will catapult you
 into places where it's-- I love it.
 The great place to get to on cannabis,
 and some people never in their whole life
 touch it, is the place where you say, my god,
 I've done too much.
 [LAUGHTER]
 It's not easy, folks, but it's worth shooting for.
 Basically, what you should do is do some homework,
 read some books, talk to your friends,
 and then hang on Hannah.
 It's like-- it's very much like riding an enormous roller
 coaster.
 Once that baby rolls out of the station, do not stand up.
 Do not try to climb out of your car.
 Shut up and hang on with the faith
 that most people have lived through this.
 Somebody else.
 Yeah.
 The purple.
 Yeah, I have three real quick literary questions
 about your writing, and then one important question.
 Well, having just heard that I'm a pothead,
 please ask them one at a time.
 [LAUGHTER]
 What is your first literary question?
 OK.
 One of the assertions that you make
 is that low dosage was an equivalent evolutionary
 mechanism.
 My own experience is different than that.
 Many of my associates' experiences
 are different than that.
 And we believe that high dosage may have been a more common
 usage method.
 Well, I don't mean to imply that people first used it
 in low doses and then middle and then higher over time.
 What I meant to imply-- I think they were using low, middle,
 and high doses from the very get-go,
 but they were using low doses to hunt,
 middle-range doses for orgy and ceremony,
 and truly high doses for this boundary-dissolving tremendum.
 Second literary question.
 When I read about Chadwick Hiack,
 I liked you picking up on Malire and Isler,
 and I liked your use of dominator and partnership
 terminology.
 That was wonderful.
 But I disagreed when you said that the cows were
 an indirect expression of the fungus found in the arctic.
 I found that to be kind of a legal device.
 But I kind of thought it went after the reason
 that you can't hunt cows.
 Well, I'm not wedded to that.
 First of all, Chautauqua Hiauck, for those of you
 who haven't read the book or know about Chautauqua,
 was this immensely sophisticated civilization
 that existed in the seventh millennium BC.
 We're talking 6,000 years before zero.
 This civilization existed and was destroyed.
 And the characteristic of it is shrines dedicated to cattle.
 And in my book, I argue that this was probably
 the last outpost of this partnership society.
 But it was still--
 I think the real golden age of mushroom use
 was probably from about 30,000 years ago
 to about 15,000 years ago.
 And by the time Chautauqua Hiauck comes along,
 it's a fading or yearly or seasonal thing.
 And now the last question, the important one.
 One of the assertions that you made earlier
 was that these indole-based plant pollution
 agents actually change people that use them.
 And the unfortunate thing that I observed
 is I can't agree with that assertion.
 It seems that as many people-- it
 seems like only a really few people are changed by it,
 only those who are predisposed to change.
 And I'd like-- one of the questions you asked
 was, well, it doesn't make us better.
 It doesn't make us different.
 And I'm just not convinced at all.
 But I see people taking mushrooms
 and going around doing shingles-things,
 and just being the jerkies they are.
 I mean, and I'm telling you, there's just--
 there's a lot of plants.
 And I don't see it happening.
 Well, I--
 I'm not saying it seems like it happens.
 My argument would be that people don't take it enough,
 don't take it frequently enough, that there
 are a lot of people who really would rather not get loaded,
 but who feel they must take some psychedelic drug in order
 to keep membership in their peer group.
 So what they did-- you know, you can always spot these people,
 because their first question at the get-go
 is, will I be able to drive?
 I love this question, because it indicates
 a real tough nut on your hand.
 In every sense of the word, no, you will not be able to drive.
 So, you know, I--
 one of the things that inspires me to do this
 is I want to get to the people who've
 taken three grams of mushrooms, and the people who've
 taken 150 mikes of LSD.
 And I want to convince those people that they never
 got close to what I'm talking about,
 even though they had a life-transforming experience
 and saw things totally differently.
 They never got close to what I'm talking about.
 And so what you have to do is convince people
 to take high doses, and then that's to break them through,
 and then frequently enough that they
 don't forget what the deal is.
 So I think if you take a psychedelic population
 and divide it into those who have done five grams and above,
 then you will see an exceptional slice, but not the dabblers.
 The dabblers don't count.
 And we all can be, or at times, guilty of this, I think.
 And then-- is that your last question?
 Does that do it for you?
 Or do you want to be thought psychotic?
 You choose.
 I will not occupy your position.
 Well, I'd love competition.
 I mean, the competition is terrible.
 That's the entire basis of my success.
 Yeah.
 You, because you were before, if you still wish.
 [INAUDIBLE]
 Here's one you like to think of.
 You like to have it dark and grim, quiet, can't close your eyes.
 And I love the fact that it was very [INAUDIBLE]
 play-taping, so it got to the book in the day.
 [INAUDIBLE]
 A lot of these things [INAUDIBLE]
 Right.
 [INAUDIBLE]
 I guess you think your way is preferable.
 Why?
 Because-- I mean, I don't know if it's preferable.
 But here's the thing.
 People are going to think you're a nut if you come down and say
 that Johann Sebastian Bach or Jerry Garcia is God.
 And this is what you will have to say if you listen to the dead
 or the B minor math.
 So what I'm interested in is I want to know the thing in itself,
 not what it does to Bach, not what it does to a river flowing
 through a forested valley.
 I want to see what it can do with darkness and silence.
 And I think most people think it'll be boring,
 probably because they've been hanging out with these BDI gurus
 meditating, and God knows there's nothing more boring on Earth
 than most meditations.
 However, psychedelic-- sitting in a darkened room on five dried grams
 of psilocybin mushrooms is nothing like meditating.
 And that's where it can get at you.
 My relationship to it is always one of I want to know what it is.
 And so I think this sensory deprivation method is the only way
 to get at that.
 Other people might not like that.
 People say, "Well, you mean you put down the whole thing
 of going into nature?
 Isn't nature the great affirmation in all this?"
 And the answer is, "Yeah, but it works for me sort of without the drugs."
 Plus--and this is just maybe my own weirdness,
 but I'll share it with you--I have noticed that these things
 are incredibly disruptive of the ordinary flow of kazooistry.
 Do you all know the concept of synchronicity?
 Well, if you don't stay in your room with the lights out
 and the phone unplugged, the damnedest things will happen to you.
 I mean, you couldn't pay me to go into an American city
 even mildly loaded because adventures beckon.
 Now, some people like that.
 Some people say, "Let's take 500 mics and go meet weird people."
 Uh-uh. Not this cookie.
 Yeah.
 In replying to your statement, what I find happens there
 is that you create an experience where you are taking in
 other people's dogma.
 You're bringing in something that's already done,
 and I feel like through the PEEV experience,
 you create something new, and something new expresses the thought
 from the deaf, which is why I also play the artist sometimes.
 But one thing that I did learn is that the high doses are very interesting.
 We're taking way far beyond the small doses.
 And I've experienced it with both homeopathy and natural medicine
 and more abstracts in terms of making my own medicine,
 but in terms of psychedelics, if you take that into--
 and my question is coming next, of course--
 if you take that into a situation where you remove the whole electrical pattern
 that you do in homeopathy, do you think that there could be
 a more potent experience through that solution?
 Are you asking me do I think a homeopathic preparation
 for a psychedelic would be effective?
 It would be homeopathically effective.
 I wouldn't expect it to be experientially effective.
 I would say that since what we do out here is a direct creation
 of what we are inside, that's the current paradigm that I'm in,
 that if you do change it in the same manner that you change it homeopathy,
 you're changing the experience so that you then create the world's material charge
 that it would be even more potent and even more immediate,
 that it really doesn't have a reality.
 But don't you think that if that were true, and since in a high dilution like that
 no molecular trace of the original compound remains,
 that you have then just found the solution to the legalization conundrum?
 I'm trying to read that because one thing that's very much in the field of civil medicine now
 is that we're getting a lot of political flack for having medicines out there,
 but homeopathy is seemingly through with today that's happened in years.
 Because in a materialist world it's assumed to be bogus.
 [laughter]
 Right. Yeah.
 Of course though, like, we're a family, so we're looking for something.
 Well, this seems to me not an abstract proposition at all.
 Let the best homeopaths succuss the strongest hallucinogens and set them out,
 and let's give it a whirl.
 [laughter]
 Over on this side. Yeah.
 This question may be too personal and embarrassing to answer, but I'm just wondering--
 Oh, I can hardly wait.
 [laughter]
 Why are you in jail?
 Ah, why am I not in jail? Hmm.
 Well, that's an interesting question.
 And number one, I don't know.
 Here's what I've come up with.
 Notice that I use big words.
 [laughter]
 I don't boil--I don't try to boil it down to a shoutable slogan.
 Like, "Turn on, tune in, drop out."
 Uh-uh, that--then they come. They come.
 So that's one possibility, that simply if you are defined in their eyes as an intellectual,
 then they automatically put you in the harmless category and send resources elsewhere.
 That's one possibility.
 The other possibility is slightly more disturbing, but in the interest of thoroughness, let me raise it.
 Perhaps I'm sanctioned.
 Perhaps they decided, "We don't really understand what this stuff is, and we can't have a mass movement,
 but let one guy just kind of keep the pilot light on in case we ever change our minds about this.
 He will have kept the pilot light on."
 And the other possibility, which is probably too naive, but in the interest, again, of exhaustive thoroughness,
 maybe they just haven't noticed yet.
 You know, Tim Leary, who's a friend of mine, would address 25,000 people at a throw.
 My crowds are--you know, a couple of times a year, they creep over 1,000.
 And I think the key is to keep it low-key.
 And we don't want to, you know, Dodger Stadium filled or anything like that.
 It's very good to atomize it and spread it through.
 Now, the other thing is, you know, I advocate plant hallucinogens,
 and people always say, "Well, what about LSD?
 I mean, didn't LSD change your life?
 Didn't it change all our lives?
 Why aren't you into LSD?"
 And the answer is certainly yes and yes.
 The reason I'm not into LSD is not having to do with the effects of LSD, which I think are marvelous,
 but with the fact that a couple of enterprising second-year biochemistry students
 can produce six or seven million hits in a long weekend.
 Six or seven million hits of an illegal drug.
 Suddenly, this is the realm of governments and criminal syndicates
 and revolutionary disruption of populations.
 My brother and I wrote "Psilocybin, the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide."
 If you work like a dog for six months, maybe you can produce 2,000 or 3,000 hits.
 So that's the thing. LSD had chemical qualities that made it terrifying to the government.
 I mean, anybody with $50,000 worth of backing and two years of biochemistry
 could turn themselves into a major threat to political stability in this country.
 So they slammed that. They're not going to put up with that.
 The thing I love about the mushrooms is, you know,
 if you're a dedicated mushroom grower, you produce this piddling amount,
 and if they come and drag you away because it is illegal, all they get is you.
 No syndicate collapses, no pyramid disappears.
 So it's invasive and low-key and slowly spreading.
 The other thing is, mushrooms are--this is a cultural thing--
 mushrooms are inherently non-threatening.
 They're absurd, you know.
 They're what we put decals of on serving trays,
 and bath towels bear mushrooms on them.
 It's a kind of silly thing.
 And so I think that they don't really understand what a powerful hallucinogen this is.
 Well, that's enough on why I'm not in the can.
 Yes, one moment.
 [inaudible]
 You spoke about the evolutionary process
 and how it was disturbed by the absence of the mushrooms.
 Don't you think that it would be a more creative and beneficial process
 if we worked on evolving our minds without using an external drug?
 What happens if the government does come in and decides to completely wipe it out
 or if things happen where we can't access that thing of consciousness anymore
 and then things--you know, they just step backwards again,
 wouldn't it be so much more productive to teach people how to get rid of that drug?
 Absolutely, if we could do it.
 I mean, I'm not yet convinced, see.
 I mean, you've got your gurus.
 But if you ever get close to any of these people in these guru scenes,
 close enough where you can just say to them, "Look, level with me.
 Is this stuff as good as 5 grams in silent darkness?"
 And they say, "Are you serious?"
 The other possibility is technology on two fronts, mind machines.
 The problem with mind machines is, you know,
 you have to smoke a bomber to put up with it more than 10 minutes.
 I mean, you quickly satisfy yourself that this can't possibly be it
 because it is lights, but it is contentless,
 while the psychedelic experience is all content.
 The other possibility, and I've put in some time in this beat, is virtual reality.
 And I have more hope for virtual reality
 because virtual reality is a technology for showing--
 that would allow us to show each other the inside of our heads,
 our dreams, our visions.
 And I think that sufficiently perfected,
 it might have the consequences of these psychedelics.
 The problem is it carries a huge amount of negative freight.
 You know that it's not going to be a tool for us to show each other the inside of our minds.
 It's going to be a tool to sell us crap that we don't want.
 It's going to be a tool for yet more realistic, vicarious, and gratuitous violence.
 It's going to be a tool for more pornographic degradation of women.
 So it seems to me, while it holds out the possibility of a technically driven psychedelic,
 it has a lot of negative freight.
 I agree with your premise, but I'm driven by a tremendous sense of urgency.
 I mean, why try to create a technical alternative to psilocybin when you've got psilocybin?
 It's not a technical alternative, I'm saying.
 Like, I think that people should use mushrooms as a step.
 And once you get there, you try and you keep going without that tool.
 I mean, because what we want is, I mean, we want to transcend this plane.
 We want to be on a higher plane, a higher state of awareness.
 You're not going to get to that plane ultimately if you have to keep coming back into the plane
 to get yourself to get out of the plane again.
 Well, how about this?
 Maybe there's something wrong with that metaphor.
 Because notice it has to do with planes and transitions.
 It's an inherently dualist metaphor.
 This concludes tape one.
 Our program continues with tape two.


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