[00:00:00 - 00:00:12] Well, the world and its double is how we styled this. This is simply a high visibility flashy [00:00:12 - 00:00:23] way of reminding people whose eyes fall upon that text that the world has a double. The [00:00:23 - 00:00:33] world is not entirely or completely what it seems to be. Culture, and by culture, I mean [00:00:33 - 00:00:46] any culture anywhere, anytime, gives you the message that everything is humdrum. Everything [00:00:46 - 00:00:56] is normal. In other words, culture denies experience. We all have had, and even a population [00:00:56 - 00:01:08] of non-psychedelic people have had prophetic dreams, intimations, unlikely strings of coincidences, [00:01:08 - 00:01:17] all of these sort of things. These are experiences which cultures deny. Cultures put in place [00:01:17 - 00:01:23] of, I'm sure you've heard this word, a paradigm. And then what fits within the cultural paradigm [00:01:23 - 00:01:34] is accentuated, stressed, and what doesn't fit inside the cultural paradigm is denied, [00:01:34 - 00:01:44] marginalized, argued against. And we live at the end of a thousand year binge on the [00:01:44 - 00:01:53] philosophical position known as materialism in its many guises. And the basic message [00:01:53 - 00:02:02] of materialism is that the world is what it appears to be, a thing composed of matter [00:02:02 - 00:02:13] and pretty much confined to its surface. The world is what it appears to be. Now, this [00:02:13 - 00:02:20] on the face of it is a tremendously naive position because what it says is the animal [00:02:20 - 00:02:29] body that you inhabit, the eyes you look through, the fingers you feel through, are somehow [00:02:29 - 00:02:39] the ultimate instruments of metaphysical conjecture, which is highly improbable. It seems to me [00:02:39 - 00:02:48] metaphysical conjecture begins with the logic of the situation and then proceeds in whatever [00:02:48 - 00:02:59] direction that logic will carry you. Well, if logic is true to experience, then we have [00:02:59 - 00:03:09] to make room in any theory for invisible connectedness between people, anticipation of the future [00:03:09 - 00:03:20] that has not yet occurred, shared dreaming, all kinds of possibilities that materialism [00:03:20 - 00:03:28] has denied. For approximately 500 years, the great era of the triumph of modern science, [00:03:28 - 00:03:39] materialism has had the field all to itself. And its argument for its preeminence was the [00:03:39 - 00:03:50] beautiful toys that it could create, aircraft, railroads, global economies, television, spacecraft. [00:03:50 - 00:03:59] But that is a fool's argument for truth. I mean, that's after all how a medicine show [00:03:59 - 00:04:07] operates. The juggler is so good, the medicine must be even better. This is not an entirely [00:04:07 - 00:04:17] rational way to proceed. And now, at the end of 500 years of the practice of rational "scientific [00:04:17 - 00:04:30] culture," we're literally at the end of our rope. Reason and science and the practice [00:04:30 - 00:04:39] of unbridled capitalism have not delivered us into an angelic realm. Quite the contrary, [00:04:39 - 00:04:46] they've delivered 3% of us into an angelic realm, completely overshadowed by guilt about [00:04:46 - 00:04:54] what's happening to the other 97% of us who are eating it. It's not a pretty picture, [00:04:54 - 00:05:01] modern civilization. Most people in the world today are quite miserable, actually. They [00:05:01 - 00:05:08] have very little hope. Their religions, their traditional value systems are being eroded [00:05:08 - 00:05:17] by Dallas and Hawaii Five-O, which are on the village television every night. Lifespans [00:05:17 - 00:05:24] are being shortened by pesticides, chemicals, all kinds of things in the environment. And [00:05:24 - 00:05:34] there is very little political light on the horizon. So I believe that it's reasonable, [00:05:34 - 00:05:43] looking at this situation, to say that history failed and that the grand dream of Western [00:05:43 - 00:05:52] civilization has, in fact, failed. And now we are attempting, with basically a carved [00:05:52 - 00:06:02] wooden oar, to turn a battleship around. And it's a very frustrating undertaking. The momentum [00:06:02 - 00:06:16] for catastrophe is enormous in this situation. But it's not 100% certain that catastrophe [00:06:16 - 00:06:24] is what we're headed for, because we are not 100% unconscious. There are people struggling [00:06:24 - 00:06:31] to figure out how to control population, struggling to figure out how to balance the relationship [00:06:31 - 00:06:39] between the masculine and the feminine, struggling to bring amelioration of hunger and disease [00:06:39 - 00:06:47] to various parts of the world. So we're in essentially a tragic situation. A tragic situation [00:06:47 - 00:06:59] is a catastrophe when you know it, you see. And part of the Western impulse has been to [00:06:59 - 00:07:10] subjugate all other cultural styles to our own. And this has taken the form of actually [00:07:10 - 00:07:20] swallowing and digesting Native American culture. The ethnicity of European culture has been [00:07:20 - 00:07:32] replaced by the mega culture of nuvo Europa, whatever that means. Cultures are melted down [00:07:32 - 00:07:39] in the belly of the Western scientific beast, and then they become structural members in [00:07:39 - 00:07:49] an ever-expanding edifice of Western scientism. However, the psychedelic experience, as practiced [00:07:49 - 00:08:00] by shamans in many, many parts of the world, is apparently a bite too large to swallow. [00:08:00 - 00:08:10] Psychedelics arrived on the Western agenda only about 100 years ago, when German chemists [00:08:10 - 00:08:19] brought peyote to Berlin and extracted mescaline. And for the next 50 years, up until about [00:08:19 - 00:08:31] 1945, 55 years make it, very little happened. Mescaline did not, though it was taken by [00:08:31 - 00:08:41] Havelock Ellis and William James and F. Weir Mitchell, it did not spawn a craze. It did [00:08:41 - 00:08:50] not influence large numbers of intellectuals particularly. Then in the 40s, LSD was discovered. [00:08:50 - 00:09:01] In the 50s, DMT and psilocybin were discovered. And then in 1966, all these things were made [00:09:01 - 00:09:08] illegal. There was no real opportunity for Western science to grapple with these things [00:09:08 - 00:09:17] before they were decided to be too hot to handle, made not only unavailable to people [00:09:17 - 00:09:25] such as you and I, ordinary people, but taken off the agenda of scientific research. In [00:09:25 - 00:09:34] the Middle Ages, the church forbade dissection of human bodies, and medical students would [00:09:34 - 00:09:43] visit battlefields and the gallows at night and steal the bodies of victims of war and [00:09:43 - 00:09:51] executed prisoners in order to learn human physiology. Where that spirit of scientific [00:09:51 - 00:09:57] courage has gone, I don't know, but there's very little of it left. Now people feed at [00:09:57 - 00:10:03] the trough of government grants and enormous corporate research budgets, and the idea of [00:10:03 - 00:10:12] actually pursuing truth or attempting to understand the phenomenon in an unbiased fashion, divorced [00:10:12 - 00:10:20] from its commercial, social, and political dimensions is unheard of. On hallucinogens [00:10:20 - 00:10:29] and boundaries of solutions. If you look at thousands of these experiences, is they dissolve [00:10:29 - 00:10:37] boundaries, they dissolve boundaries between you and your past, you and the part of your [00:10:37 - 00:10:45] unconscious you don't want to look at, between you and your partner, between you and the [00:10:45 - 00:10:52] feminine if you're masculine, and vice versa, between you and the world, all the boundaries [00:10:52 - 00:11:01] that we put up to keep ourselves from feeling our circumstance are dissolved. And boundary [00:11:01 - 00:11:12] dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society. People get very, [00:11:12 - 00:11:18] people meaning government institutions become very nervous when people begin to talk to [00:11:18 - 00:11:25] each other. Yes, the whole name of the Western game is to create boundaries and maintain [00:11:25 - 00:11:31] them. The church and the state, the poor and the wealthy, the black and the white, the [00:11:31 - 00:11:37] male and the female, the young and the old, the gay and the straight, the living and the [00:11:37 - 00:11:46] dead, the foreign and the familiar, all of these categorical divisions allow a kind of [00:11:46 - 00:11:55] thinking that is completely cockamamie. After all, reality is in fact a seamless, unspeakable [00:11:55 - 00:12:05] something and we understand that to perceive it separately is a necessary adjunct to the [00:12:05 - 00:12:13] act of understanding, but it is not the end of the program of understanding. The particulate [00:12:13 - 00:12:27] data has to be recombined in a paradigm, a seamless overview of what is happening. And [00:12:27 - 00:12:34] the drugs that Western society has traditionally favored have either been drugs which maintain [00:12:34 - 00:12:44] boundaries or drugs which promote mindless, repetitious physical activity on the assembly [00:12:44 - 00:12:54] line, in the slave galley, on the latifundia, the slave driven agricultural project, whatever [00:12:54 - 00:13:02] it is. In the corporate office. This is why every labor contract on this planet, at least [00:13:02 - 00:13:10] in Western civilization, contains a provision that all workers shall be allowed to use drugs [00:13:10 - 00:13:17] twice a day at designated times, but the drug shall be caffeine. Now, the reason caffeine [00:13:17 - 00:13:25] is so welcome in the workplace is because the last three hours of the workday are utterly [00:13:25 - 00:13:31] unproductive unless you goose everybody with two cups of coffee and then they can go back [00:13:31 - 00:13:38] to the word processor, the widget tightening machine or whatever they are doing and mindlessly [00:13:38 - 00:13:46] and happily carry on. If it were suggested that there be a pot break twice a day, you [00:13:46 - 00:13:54] know, you would think that civilization was striking the iceberg or something. So, and [00:13:54 - 00:14:06] alcohol, our society is an alcohol, red meat, sugar and tobacco culture. And all of these [00:14:06 - 00:14:13] are forms of speed, basically, in the way that we use them. And yes, you can tranquilize [00:14:13 - 00:14:20] yourself on alcohol, but you're pushing toward levels where a lifetime of tranquilizing yourself [00:14:20 - 00:14:28] on alcohol will be a short lifetime if you use it that way. So, there's a lot of tension [00:14:28 - 00:14:42] in society between the great exploring soul and the assembly line citizen. The citizen [00:14:42 - 00:14:52] is defined by obligation and by the boundaries that define, you know, the next citizen, either [00:14:52 - 00:15:00] because it's a neighbor or worker or employer or something like that. And the grand exploring [00:15:00 - 00:15:08] soul is marginalized as an eccentric or if necessary, more seriously marginalized as [00:15:08 - 00:15:16] mad in some way. I mean, madness basically, up until the level of physical violence means [00:15:16 - 00:15:21] you are behaving in a way which makes me feel uncomfortable. Therefore, there's something [00:15:21 - 00:15:35] wrong with you. Yes. So, this, this now it's interesting. And this is one of the points [00:15:35 - 00:15:41] that's dear to me. I mean, they arrive in different orders each time. But I think of [00:15:41 - 00:15:53] history as a kind of mass psychedelic experience. And the drug is technology. And as technology [00:15:53 - 00:16:04] gets more and more perfected as a mirror of the human mind, the cultural experience becomes [00:16:04 - 00:16:11] more and more hallucinatory. And for at least the past couple of hundred years, boundary [00:16:11 - 00:16:20] dissolution has been underway at every level of Western civilization. I mean, you could [00:16:20 - 00:16:29] push it further back. The Magna Carta, the fact that princes and lords of the realm would [00:16:29 - 00:16:37] actually attempt to force the king's signature on a document defining their privileges. They [00:16:37 - 00:16:46] are after all ordinary human beings. The king is the divine appointed region of God in heaven. [00:16:46 - 00:16:52] So this was a severe boundary dissolution within the context of the age in which it [00:16:52 - 00:16:58] was taking place. They were actually saying, you as Christ's representative on earth should [00:16:58 - 00:17:06] cede some of this omnipotence to us mere mortals suspended in the political process. Well, [00:17:06 - 00:17:16] that leads then to broader demands for human rights, for the idea that a permanent and [00:17:16 - 00:17:23] large segment of society kept in permanent poverty is unacceptable. We got rid of debtors [00:17:23 - 00:17:34] prisons and things like this. As the collectivity of our humaneness becomes an intellectual [00:17:34 - 00:17:44] legacy for all of us, there is a dissolving of boundaries of race, class, status, language, [00:17:44 - 00:17:50] so forth and so on. And the whole of the 20th century has seen a massive acceleration of [00:17:50 - 00:17:58] this. The breakdown of the Soviet Union was in fact simply, it was even so described, [00:17:58 - 00:18:08] the lifting of the iron curtain, meaning a membrane has suddenly disappeared. And more [00:18:08 - 00:18:16] and more of these membranes are disappearing. And what is emerging then is a more and more [00:18:16 - 00:18:24] psychedelic experience, meaning a sense of acceleration of information flow, a sense [00:18:24 - 00:18:33] of rising ambiguity about what it all means. Everything seems to carry both a good facet [00:18:33 - 00:18:39] and a detrimental facet. The ambiguity of everything is increasing. The connectedness [00:18:39 - 00:18:48] of everything is increasing. And I will argue later in the day that this is a general tendency [00:18:48 - 00:18:57] of the time and space in which we are embedded and that we ourselves are a reflection of [00:18:57 - 00:19:09] this. There is life carrying us. What is this all about? Is it carrying us toward extinction [00:19:09 - 00:19:16] so that the rest of nature can heave an enormous sigh of relief and then get back to the business [00:19:16 - 00:19:24] of nest building, mating flights and oviposturing and whatever it is that they're doing out [00:19:24 - 00:19:35] there? Or is it carrying us toward some kind of a transition? If you look back through [00:19:35 - 00:19:44] the history of life, which is a long history, I mean it reaches back a billion years, every [00:19:44 - 00:19:55] advance happens suddenly, unpredictably, and in a very short period of time. Some of you [00:19:55 - 00:20:01] who stay tuned to the scientific literature may have noticed this series of articles that [00:20:01 - 00:20:09] were around last week about what they're calling the big bang of biology. That there was a [00:20:09 - 00:20:17] period of time, incredibly brief, perhaps between a million and ten million years when [00:20:17 - 00:20:28] all the fila of life on this planet radiated into existence. Sometime between 525 and 535 [00:20:28 - 00:20:38] million years ago, just it all snapped into existence. The episode in which life left [00:20:38 - 00:20:49] the sea is a similar highly confined transition event. People recently have written about [00:20:49 - 00:20:58] what they call punctated or punctuated evolution. Evolution is not apparently a slow curve [00:20:58 - 00:21:08] of unfoldment. It is instead a series of equilibrium states punctuated by violent fluctuations [00:21:08 - 00:21:19] in between and then a new equilibrium state. So history, I believe, is not an aberration [00:21:19 - 00:21:26] any more than leaving the sea could be called an aberration of marine existence. I mean, [00:21:26 - 00:21:32] obviously it is not marine existence and obviously we are not living in the same world as ground [00:21:32 - 00:21:41] hogs and hummingbirds psychologically. But leaving the sea did not represent an ontological [00:21:41 - 00:21:50] transition. It represented an extremely dramatic shift of modality. And this is what history [00:21:50 - 00:21:59] is. History is characterized by its brevity for one thing. I mean, we have packed more [00:21:59 - 00:22:09] change into the last 10,000 years than the billion years which preceded it. I mean, we [00:22:09 - 00:22:19] and yet as entities, as animals, meat, we have not changed at all in 10,000 years. If [00:22:19 - 00:22:28] you were to go back to that era, the people would be exactly like people we see today. [00:22:28 - 00:22:35] They wouldn't be so racially heterogeneous because the great gene streamings and migrations [00:22:35 - 00:22:42] that characterize history have not yet taken place, but essentially perfectly modern people. [00:22:42 - 00:22:52] Well, then history is apparently, if we view it as a process that nature tolerates, if [00:22:52 - 00:23:02] not encourages, then history is essentially, apparently, important enough to place, to [00:23:02 - 00:23:11] jeopardize the stability of all the rest of the natural ecosystemic world. It's as though [00:23:11 - 00:23:19] nature is saying, "We are willing to place the entire planetary ecology in danger for [00:23:19 - 00:23:28] 50,000 years in order for the opportunity to be explored of language using technologically [00:23:28 - 00:23:37] expressing intelligence carrying all of life to the next level." And it's a terrifying [00:23:37 - 00:23:47] enterprise because apparently to carry life to the next level, tremendous intellectual [00:23:47 - 00:23:55] sophistication is required about the release and control of energy. The problem is energy [00:23:55 - 00:24:03] can be used to destroy as well as build. So as the human enterprise has moved toward greater [00:24:03 - 00:24:11] and greater power and ability to manipulate the environment, the stakes in the cosmic [00:24:11 - 00:24:19] game have risen. And now what we have is approximately $100 billion sitting in the center of the [00:24:19 - 00:24:28] crap table and one roll of the dice more, and we're going to either win it or lose everything [00:24:28 - 00:24:37] because intelligence, if we fail, will never again reach the kind of levels on this planet [00:24:37 - 00:24:46] that we have reached. Why? Because we have extracted all the available metals near the [00:24:46 - 00:24:57] surface of the earth. An evolving species following after us will find the earth strangely [00:24:57 - 00:25:06] depleted of usable materials down to the 1500 foot level. And so intelligence coming beyond [00:25:06 - 00:25:13] us will find it just does not have the resources to make the leap to technical civilization. [00:25:13 - 00:25:22] So it's beginning to look like a one shot deal. And the psychedelics are in there for [00:25:22 - 00:25:29] two reasons. First of all, because they allow us as individuals to break out of the flat [00:25:29 - 00:25:38] cultural illusion and to rise up and look at this situation. So it's for us a tool to [00:25:38 - 00:25:49] understand our predicament. But the psychedelics are also what has driven this circumstance [00:25:49 - 00:25:58] to arise in part because what psychedelics do, and I think this isn't too challengeable, [00:25:58 - 00:26:07] is they catalyze imagination. They drive you to think what you would not think otherwise. [00:26:07 - 00:26:13] Well notice that the enterprise of human history is nothing more than the fallout created by [00:26:13 - 00:26:22] strange ideas. You know, let's build a pyramid. Let's build a windmill. Let's build a water [00:26:22 - 00:26:31] wheel, you know, and then empires, philosophies, religions arise in the wake of these situations. [00:26:31 - 00:26:36] I've argued in the past and I'm going to try not to repeat it here today because I think [00:26:36 - 00:26:41] you've all heard it, but I will just mention it in a sentence or two that the critical [00:26:41 - 00:26:50] catalyst propelling us out of the slowly evolving hominid line and caused us to take an orthogonal [00:26:50 - 00:27:00] right hand turn into culture, language, art, yearning, probably was the inclusion of psychedelic [00:27:00 - 00:27:07] plants in our diet during that episodic moment when we went from being fruititarian canopy [00:27:07 - 00:27:16] dwellers to omnivorous pack hunting creatures of the grassland. And it was the inclusion [00:27:16 - 00:27:23] of psilocybin in our grassland diet that caused us to discover that there is a mind and you [00:27:23 - 00:27:31] can perturb it. I mean, think about, I mean, I don't think you could discover consciousness [00:27:31 - 00:27:37] if you didn't perturb it because as Marshall McLuhan said, whoever discovered water, it's [00:27:37 - 00:27:45] certainly wasn't a fish. Well, we are fish swimming in consciousness and yet we know [00:27:45 - 00:27:51] it's there. Well, the reason we know it's there is because if you perturb it, then you [00:27:51 - 00:27:58] see it and you perturb it by perturbing the engine which generates it, which is the mind [00:27:58 - 00:28:06] brain system resting behind your eyebrows. If you swap out the ordinary chemicals that [00:28:06 - 00:28:17] are running that system in an invisible fashion, then you see it's like dropping ink into a [00:28:17 - 00:28:23] bowl of clear water. Suddenly the convection currents operating in the, in the clear water [00:28:23 - 00:28:31] become visible because you see the particles of ink tracing out the previously invisible [00:28:31 - 00:28:40] dynamics of the standing water. The mind is precisely like that and the psychedelic is [00:28:40 - 00:28:47] like a dye marker being dropped into this aqueous system. And then you say, oh, I see [00:28:47 - 00:28:57] it works like this and like this. Well, if psychedelics are catalyst for the imagination [00:28:57 - 00:29:04] and if history is driven by the imagination, it is driven through the fallout from the [00:29:04 - 00:29:13] imagination, which is technology and culture. Technology and culture is, are the consequences, [00:29:13 - 00:29:26] the derivatives of the ratio senation of the mind and technology has like biological life, [00:29:26 - 00:29:36] but on a much faster or accelerated timeframe, technology has this weird tendency to transcend [00:29:36 - 00:29:43] itself, to bootstrap itself. You know, if you have a, if you have a cart, then it implies [00:29:43 - 00:29:52] better wheels, better bearings, better structure, and then higher speed, more control, more [00:29:52 - 00:29:59] feedback from the machine. That means we need gas gauges, RPM readouts, so forth and so [00:29:59 - 00:30:08] on. Technology, strangely enough, created by a biological creature has itself this self [00:30:08 - 00:30:17] transcending quality, but ever accelerating. This is the important point because the ever [00:30:17 - 00:30:29] accelerating accretion of technology means that history is strangely foreshortened at [00:30:29 - 00:30:36] the future end because it happens faster and faster. It's like a process that begins very [00:30:36 - 00:30:43] slowly, but once started has the quality of a cascade every, or you know, the rate at [00:30:43 - 00:30:52] which falling bodies move, 32 and a half feet per second, per second, each second it accelerates [00:30:52 - 00:30:59] to twice the rate of infall that was occurring in the previous second. Technology is like [00:30:59 - 00:31:11] this, and we now are in a domain where if we attempt to propagate technological development [00:31:11 - 00:31:22] forward 50 years, it becomes unmanageable as an, as an intellectual task. We can talk about [00:31:22 - 00:31:29] the automobile, what it might look like 50 years from now. It would float, it would go [00:31:29 - 00:31:37] 500 miles an hour, it would be guided by your mind, so forth and so on. These kinds of ideas. [00:31:37 - 00:31:48] But when you think that every artifact of our world will undergo that kind of transformation [00:31:48 - 00:31:56] and that the synergy among these transformed objects will create phenomena and situations [00:31:56 - 00:32:04] that we can't anticipate, that's the key thing. Our inability to anticipate the synergies [00:32:04 - 00:32:17] between our technologies. I mean the computer, LSD, spacecraft, holograms, organic superconductivity, [00:32:17 - 00:32:25] those are just six areas where the integration of those concerns will produce unimaginable [00:32:25 - 00:32:34] consequences. Yeah. The ultimate boundary dissolution is the dissolution of ego. I mean, [00:32:34 - 00:32:42] we hope, we straight people hope that they never meet it except at death. Of course, [00:32:42 - 00:32:52] they don't realize going to sleep at night is a kind of ego dissolution. But the government [00:32:52 - 00:33:00] is expressive of this dominator culture that we're living in. The ego is a very recent [00:33:00 - 00:33:10] invention and its hold on reality is very tenuous. And consequently, it walks around [00:33:10 - 00:33:16] imbued with fear. I mean, it feels itself to be a mouse in a world of dinosaurs. That's [00:33:16 - 00:33:24] because it's a very recent development. I guess I have to go back to this scenario of [00:33:24 - 00:33:34] human development and say just very briefly, here's how I think this worked. I'm not going [00:33:34 - 00:33:45] to run through the whole evolutionary scenario, but this thing about ego. All primates have [00:33:45 - 00:33:52] what are called dominance hierarchies. That simply means that the hard bodied, long fanged, [00:33:52 - 00:34:04] young males kick everybody else around. They control the females, the children, homosexuals, [00:34:04 - 00:34:11] the elderly, everybody is taking orders from this dominance hierarchy. And this is true [00:34:11 - 00:34:19] clear back into squirrel monkeys. It's a generalized feature of primate behavior. And it's an aspect [00:34:19 - 00:34:29] of our behavior as we sit here. Women, the feminine is not honored, the elderly are marginalized, [00:34:29 - 00:34:43] homosexuals, that whole issue. Many of our social and political ills stem from this attitude. [00:34:43 - 00:34:51] But you see, I believe that when we left the trees and admitted psilocybin into our diet, [00:34:51 - 00:35:00] that it has the effect of dissolving boundaries and making this maintenance of a dominance [00:35:00 - 00:35:08] hierarchy very, very difficult. First of all, the key on one level to maintaining the dominance [00:35:08 - 00:35:18] hierarchy is monogamous pair bonding. That's where it begins. If in a society taking a [00:35:18 - 00:35:28] lot of psilocybin, monogamous pair bonding breaks down because of CNS activation and [00:35:28 - 00:35:37] sexual arousal. So in a psilocybin using culture, there will be a tendency to orgiastic sexual [00:35:37 - 00:35:47] behavior rather than monogamous pair bonding. What that does is it causes an incredible [00:35:47 - 00:35:57] social cohesion. Because in an orgiastic society, men cannot trace lines of male paternity. [00:35:57 - 00:36:05] So men's attitude toward children is, these children are all ours. We the group. It's [00:36:05 - 00:36:12] a glue that we in our paranoid social style with everybody having the deed to their property [00:36:12 - 00:36:24] and their 11 foot high fence can hardly imagine. But psilocybin was artificially suppressing [00:36:24 - 00:36:32] this dominator behavior style in the primate, the evolving proto hominid, now hominid, now [00:36:32 - 00:36:42] human being. When psilocybin was taken out of the diet, the old, old primate program [00:36:42 - 00:36:49] was still there. It had not been bred out. The genes were always there. It's just that [00:36:49 - 00:36:57] for 50,000 or 100,000 years, we medicated ourselves literally religiously. We religiously [00:36:57 - 00:37:05] medicated ourselves every new and full moon, perhaps oftener. These orgies were happening, [00:37:05 - 00:37:15] creating social cohesion, propagating everybody forward. The problem was when the psilocybin [00:37:15 - 00:37:23] was taken away, we had been under its influence for perhaps half a million years. We had evolved [00:37:23 - 00:37:31] language, rudimentary abstract philosophy, a sense of religion. We had invented technology [00:37:31 - 00:37:38] in the form of using fire and chipping flint and all that. The psilocybin goes away and [00:37:38 - 00:37:46] suddenly these skills, these tools, these technologies are in the hands of marauding [00:37:46 - 00:38:00] apes, not anymore cohesive, caring human social groups, but marauding territorial apes driven [00:38:00 - 00:38:09] by the desire to control all weaker members of the social group. That's our circumstance. [00:38:09 - 00:38:17] We have the tools that would allow us to sculpt paradise, but we have the reflexes and value [00:38:17 - 00:38:30] systems of anthropoid apes of some sort. The split between our conscious hopes, our best [00:38:30 - 00:38:41] foot and the bottom of the human scale is appalling. Look at the spread. It's a spread [00:38:41 - 00:38:51] from Mother Teresa to serial killers. You don't get serial killers in the chipmunk [00:38:51 - 00:39:01] population or the grasshopper population. These animals are not so set at variance with [00:39:01 - 00:39:10] their basic nature that these kinds of pathologies can erupt. We, on the other hand, are half [00:39:10 - 00:39:21] angel, half pack hunting killer ape. We're an object fetish society. Our entire psychology [00:39:21 - 00:39:29] is characterized by a profound discontent. That's what we're about. It doesn't matter. [00:39:29 - 00:39:35] No matter what's going on, after a little while, we get restless and move on. Other [00:39:35 - 00:39:48] animal species are embedded in a kind of world of endless genetic cycling. No fox grows bored [00:39:48 - 00:39:59] with hunting. Yet, our thing is a profound dis-ease. I believe it's because, and slowly [00:39:59 - 00:40:08] you forced me to do this whole rap, which I swear I wouldn't do, I believe it's because [00:40:08 - 00:40:20] the psilocybin led us halfway toward a kind of godhead. But then it disappeared and we [00:40:20 - 00:40:27] are left in this very peculiar situation. This is the myth of the fall. We are half [00:40:27 - 00:40:36] angel, half beast. These two natures are united in every one of us. When you take psilocybin, [00:40:36 - 00:40:46] you feel generally a great sense of community and ascent to a higher level. If you completely [00:40:46 - 00:40:57] restrict your intake of intoxicants of any sort, then you get the teetotaler type personality, [00:40:57 - 00:41:07] which is characterized by incredible smugness, limited intellectual horizons, and an unbearable [00:41:07 - 00:41:16] aura of self-congratulation that makes it pretty hard for the rest of us to put up with. [00:41:16 - 00:41:25] Yes. Yeah. See, here is the final piece of this evolutionary key. Psilocybin, in small [00:41:25 - 00:41:32] amounts, increases visual acuity. This is not an arguable point. I mean, you can just [00:41:32 - 00:41:41] give people psilocybin and give them eye tests and people with astigmatism see better. Your [00:41:41 - 00:41:48] edge detection ability is greatly increased. Well, you can see that an animal like our [00:41:48 - 00:41:57] remote ancestors in a hunting environment in the grassland, if there is an item of diet [00:41:57 - 00:42:04] that will make you a better and more efficient hunter, the equivalent of chemical binoculars [00:42:04 - 00:42:11] lying around on the grassland, those animals that avail themselves of this technology will [00:42:11 - 00:42:22] be more successful hunters. And so it was. Psilocybin, animals using psilocybin were [00:42:22 - 00:42:29] more successful at raising their offspring to reproductive age. Well, then at slightly [00:42:29 - 00:42:37] higher doses, you get this CNS arousal, which in highly sexed animals such as primates, [00:42:37 - 00:42:45] arousal means sexual arousal and erection in the male. So then there's and without the [00:42:45 - 00:42:52] overwhelming influence of Christian ethics to guide their behaviors, I'm sure these organisms [00:42:52 - 00:43:01] simply flopped in a heap and, you know, sorted it all out later. So so that's the middle [00:43:01 - 00:43:11] range of the dosage, low dose success in hunting, medium dose social cohesion achieved through [00:43:11 - 00:43:21] ego dissolution and orgiastic sexuality. Yes, higher doses, five grams and up. Hunting is [00:43:21 - 00:43:30] out of the question. Sex is out of the question. You're just nailed to the ground by the campfire. [00:43:30 - 00:43:38] And in the course of the evening, you discover religion, philosophy, art and, you know, all [00:43:38 - 00:43:51] of that. So so here is a unique chemical that at every dose level synergizes activity that [00:43:51 - 00:44:03] leads to greater coherency and and self expression. The the driving of the imagination. Yes. In [00:44:03 - 00:44:09] the question back here, you said we can't create what we can't conceive of. This is [00:44:09 - 00:44:18] why what the psychedelic experience does really is it stretches the envelope of the imaginable. [00:44:18 - 00:44:25] I mean, what can be imagined can be created. What cannot be imagined is not part of the [00:44:25 - 00:44:36] play. So psilocybin really was a stimulant for the production of intellectual product [00:44:36 - 00:44:49] in the form of songs, rituals, dances, body painting, abstract ideas. All of these things [00:44:49 - 00:44:56] have are are what we are most unique. Well, that's how it seemed to me. It seemed to me [00:44:56 - 00:45:05] culture is a shabby lie. Or at least this culture is a shabby lie. I mean, if you if [00:45:05 - 00:45:15] if you work like a dog, you get 260 channels of bad television and a German automobile. [00:45:15 - 00:45:23] You know, what what kind of perfection is that? Our we have our secular society religion [00:45:23 - 00:45:34] is completely devalued. And our consumer object fetishism is the only kind of worth that we [00:45:34 - 00:45:40] collectively recognize. I'm sure you've all seen the t shirt that says he notice he who [00:45:40 - 00:45:49] dies with the most toys wins. That is in fact, the banner under which we're flying here. [00:45:49 - 00:45:57] And the level of unhappiness is immense. I mean, the level of unhappiness among the poor, [00:45:57 - 00:46:02] they've always been miserable. But we've managed to create something entirely new in human [00:46:02 - 00:46:11] history, an utterly miserable ruling class. I mean, there seems no excuse for that. Well, [00:46:11 - 00:46:18] I guess this leads us to a subject worth talking about, which is, it's very important to talk [00:46:18 - 00:46:27] to the state or the substance or if you don't talk to it, it won't talk to you. It follows [00:46:27 - 00:46:34] the rules of ordinary etiquette. And it does not speak to strangers. But if you will say [00:46:34 - 00:46:45] to it, the simplest thing like, Hello, then it will say, Hello. And say, is someone there? [00:46:45 - 00:46:51] He says, Yes, you know, ready and willing, what's up? But if you don't speak to it, it [00:46:51 - 00:47:00] won't do that. That is, to my mind, the strangest property of psilocybin is this speaking in [00:47:00 - 00:47:11] English business. I mean, LSD doesn't do that. Ayahuasca doesn't do that. Psilocybin does [00:47:11 - 00:47:17] for some reason. This is not my illusion. Nearly everybody who's spent time with it [00:47:17 - 00:47:27] has commented on this. On DMT, you see who you hear on the mushrooms. On the mushrooms, [00:47:27 - 00:47:34] you almost never encounter something that you can see. You see hallucinations, but you [00:47:34 - 00:47:41] do not see the author of the data stream that's saying, Did you know? I'll bet you did know [00:47:41 - 00:47:52] the standard form of address. But on DMT, they come bounding out of the woodwork. The [00:47:52 - 00:47:59] strangest things happen on DMT, the most intense, and you can remember them. DMT is not like [00:47:59 - 00:48:07] a psychedelic drug in the sense that you're getting into the contents of your hopes, memories, [00:48:07 - 00:48:16] fears, and dreams. It's much more like a parallel continuum. It's much more as though you've [00:48:16 - 00:48:23] broken through to some alien data space. One of the most puzzling things about DMT is it [00:48:23 - 00:48:37] does not affect your mind. It simply replaces the world 100% with something completely unexpected. [00:48:37 - 00:48:46] But your relationship to that unexpected thing is not one of exaggerated fear or exaggerated [00:48:46 - 00:48:55] acceptance, as in, Oh, great, the world has just been replaced by elf machinery. Your [00:48:55 - 00:49:02] reaction is exactly what it would be if it happened to you without DMT. You're appalled. [00:49:02 - 00:49:09] You say, What happened? Because you don't feel your mind moving. You just see that the world [00:49:09 - 00:49:17] has been replaced by something that you could not have even conceived of or imagined before. [00:49:17 - 00:49:25] And these entities, these things which look like dribbling, you know, self-dribbling jeweled [00:49:25 - 00:49:40] basketballs, something that the NBA might take an interest in, you see them and they [00:49:40 - 00:49:48] present themselves to you. They use language to condense visible objects out of the air. [00:49:48 - 00:49:54] Now I don't know why they're doing that. I mean, perhaps on one level I assume that they're [00:49:54 - 00:50:00] trying to teach you to do that. On another level, they seem to be giving a demonstration [00:50:00 - 00:50:08] of the fact that reality is made of language. They're saying, you know, if you don't believe [00:50:08 - 00:50:14] reality is made of language, here, I'll make you one. And then blibble de blibble de blip, [00:50:14 - 00:50:20] and there it is. And they hand it to you to be passed around in, you know, slack-jawed [00:50:20 - 00:50:31] amazement among the human beings. This technology that they possess of these objects made of [00:50:31 - 00:50:39] gold and emerald and chalcedony and agate that are morphing themselves even as you look [00:50:39 - 00:50:49] at them are, you know, technological dream come true. I mean, the lapis as elf excrescent [00:50:49 - 00:50:58] or something like that. And why they are there, I don't know. And, you know, many, many questions. [00:50:58 - 00:51:04] Where are they when you're not stoned? You know, do they have an autonomous existence [00:51:04 - 00:51:11] somewhere? Or do they spring into existence a microsecond before you encounter them? Are [00:51:11 - 00:51:16] they rooted in the dynamics of your psyche? Or are they no more rooted in the dynamics [00:51:16 - 00:51:24] of your psyche than the World Trade Center? It's not clear. I mean, I think I mentioned [00:51:24 - 00:51:33] at some point just briefly that the archetype of DMT is the circus. These things are clowns [00:51:33 - 00:51:40] at one level. They're clowns. I mean, when you think of the circus, it's a very complex [00:51:40 - 00:51:47] archetype. The circus is for children. It's a delight. But then, you know, and you take [00:51:47 - 00:51:54] a child to a circus and there are three rings and absurd clown antics going on. But then [00:51:54 - 00:52:02] you lift your eyes up to the top of the tent and there the lady in the tiny spangled costume [00:52:02 - 00:52:11] is hanging by her teeth working without nets. It's about Eros and death. I think my first [00:52:11 - 00:52:19] awareness of Eros was being three or four and these women in these tiny costumes spinning [00:52:19 - 00:52:28] around and realizing, you know, if she falls, she dies. And then away from the center ring [00:52:28 - 00:52:35] and all this action, there are the sideshows, the goat-faced boy, the thing in the bottle, [00:52:35 - 00:52:45] the Siamese twins and Fuzzy Charlie. All of that is also very DMT-like. It really is the [00:52:45 - 00:52:52] archetype of the circus. I can remember when I was a kid in this small town in Colorado, [00:52:52 - 00:52:59] every year at the 4th of July, the carnival would come to town for a week and set up. [00:52:59 - 00:53:05] We anticipated it throughout the year. But as soon as the carnival came to town, then [00:53:05 - 00:53:11] you couldn't play outside after 9 o'clock at night because carny people are different, [00:53:11 - 00:53:19] we were told. And, you know, their means of support, sexual proclivities and choice of [00:53:19 - 00:53:27] intoxicants might have run counter to this Midwestern Catholic mining town I was in. [00:53:27 - 00:53:35] And so then there's this sense of the disruption, the danger, the drama, the interest, the fun, [00:53:35 - 00:53:41] and then they go away and life is as if they had never been there at all. And that's what [00:53:41 - 00:53:50] DMT is like. I mean, it's a secret of such magnitude that it's inconceivable how it has [00:53:50 - 00:53:57] ever been kept. Because, you know, in a world where information was fairly weighted, we [00:53:57 - 00:54:03] would spend as much time talking about DMT as we spend talking about, I don't know, the [00:54:03 - 00:54:11] West Bank or something. And as you see, by studying our newspapers, we, DMT is rarely, [00:54:11 - 00:54:17] if ever mentioned, I mean, never would be a good rule of thumb. We're very, the Western [00:54:17 - 00:54:26] mind is very queasy around these experiences that cast into doubt its cherished illusions [00:54:26 - 00:54:32] about how reality is put together. And when you get to DMT, you have hit the main vein. [00:54:32 - 00:54:38] I mean, I hold it in reserve as the ultimate convincer. I mean, that's for these, there [00:54:38 - 00:54:45] are these people running around, you know, who say, oh, you people who are into drugs, [00:54:45 - 00:54:54] give me a good branch whiskey and a little TV. I think you're deluding yourself. Say, [00:54:54 - 00:55:01] do you? Well, have you got five minutes to invest in this proposition, my cheerful friend? [00:55:01 - 00:55:08] Because if you do, have I got news for you? It also seems to me, you know, considering [00:55:08 - 00:55:14] the fact that DMT is a naturally occurring neurotransmitter that you return to the baseline [00:55:14 - 00:55:21] of consciousness in 15 minutes, that it's utterly harmless. What's the matter with our [00:55:21 - 00:55:28] critics? Why are they so phobic of it? You know, what is it? Are you tainted forever? [00:55:28 - 00:55:36] If you know the position of your enemy, why are they so afraid to give it a chance? Well, [00:55:36 - 00:55:44] I think I can answer my own question, quoting a wonderful thing Tim Leary said years ago. [00:55:44 - 00:55:51] He said LSD occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it. [00:55:51 - 00:55:59] Right. That is the problem, I believe, that these drugs are causing outbreaks of psychosis [00:55:59 - 00:56:06] among people who won't get near them. And they are turned into frightened, paranoid [00:56:06 - 00:56:12] order freaks reaching for, you know, extra legal and extra constitutional means to make [00:56:12 - 00:56:18] your life hell. Obviously, their minds have been severely bent by the absence of this [00:56:18 - 00:56:24] drug. However, the knowledge of it seemed to practically undo them. [00:56:24 - 00:56:29] Next, Terence discusses the potential teachings of DMT. [00:56:29 - 00:56:37] Yeah, I mean, the first teaching is priceless. It's that the world is beyond your ability [00:56:37 - 00:56:47] to conceive or imagine. So give up any short term plan to conceive or imagine. I think [00:56:47 - 00:56:53] really the worth in these psychedelics is simply that they allow you to triangulate [00:56:53 - 00:57:00] upon reality. I mean, in other words, if all you've got is awake and asleep, you can't [00:57:00 - 00:57:07] go far with that. But if you've got awake, asleep and DMT as points, you can build a [00:57:07 - 00:57:17] much more dimensionally rich model of consciousness. I think that it has to do with your own intelligence. [00:57:17 - 00:57:24] Truly stupid people aren't interested in psychedelics because they can't figure out what the point [00:57:24 - 00:57:32] of it is. It feeds off intelligence. It's a consciousness expanding drug. If you don't [00:57:32 - 00:57:38] have any consciousness, it can't expand it. And I've met people who say, yeah, well, all [00:57:38 - 00:57:45] this stuff and big bugs talk to you and say strange stuff. They say, yeah, well, you should [00:57:45 - 00:57:54] have paid a little attention. I mean, it's amazing to me how people don't seem to like [00:57:54 - 00:58:04] the less intelligent you are, the less challenging the psychedelic experience becomes because [00:58:04 - 00:58:12] the less capable of entertaining the implications you are. Because you just say, well, yeah, [00:58:12 - 00:58:22] a lot of bright lights and there's some talking bugs and spaceships and I don't know. Well, [00:58:22 - 00:58:29] it's because they, I guess it's because those people are so ingrained in cultural values [00:58:29 - 00:58:37] that they assume it's not real. They just, they assume it's a trip, whatever that means. [00:58:37 - 00:58:44] It means you have permission not to take this experience seriously. It's a trip. But what [00:58:44 - 00:58:55] I've noticed is that based on quantum mechanics need for an observer as part of any system, [00:58:55 - 00:59:02] that's big news for our field of study because what it means is hallucinations are as real [00:59:02 - 00:59:09] as anything else. I mean, a hallucination is not like a Chevrolet, but on the other hand, [00:59:09 - 00:59:14] a Chevrolet is not like a hallucination. Why should we demand that these things co-map [00:59:14 - 00:59:21] over each other? A hallucination is a species of reality as capable of teaching you as a [00:59:21 - 00:59:28] video tape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life. The question [00:59:28 - 00:59:36] is does DMT talk to you the way psilocybin does? It's interesting that these two compounds [00:59:36 - 00:59:44] so closely related to each other, both have something to say about language, but they [00:59:44 - 00:59:53] say it in precisely opposite ways. Psilocybin, it's a teaching voice that speaks to you in [00:59:53 - 01:00:01] your language. I had a very interesting experience that was an example of this to me. When I [01:00:01 - 01:00:08] first started growing mushrooms, I had to do a lot of batch testing. I was taking mushrooms [01:00:08 - 01:00:14] a lot. I would get into these places with it where it would say, "Da da da da da da [01:00:14 - 01:00:23] da da da da da says. Da da da da da da da da da da says." It would make these declarative [01:00:23 - 01:00:30] statements and then it would always put the word "says" on the end of the sentence. I [01:00:30 - 01:00:35] thought, you know, weird, but what do you expect of a talking vegetable? What's weird [01:00:35 - 01:00:44] and what isn't? So then I heard Wasson's publication called Maria Sabina and Her Mushroom Valada. [01:00:44 - 01:00:52] It's a set of six tapes of a mushroom session that Maria Sabina did in 1956. So here is [01:00:52 - 01:00:59] Maria Sabina raving in Mazatec and it's going along like this. Da da da da da da da da --- interrupted