Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to welcome you to the Phoenix bookstore.
 Terrence McKenna is here tonight and we do have copies of many of his different books here.
 And if you want to purchase them after the talk, you can bring it up and have him sign it.
 Also, there will be audio recordings of this talk available very shortly after it's done.
 This afternoon, I got a phone call from a friend who said, turn on KF5 right now on Darryl Gates.
 Terrence McKenna's on with Darryl Gates, the guy who wants to shoot pot smokers in the back.
 And he did an excellent job, I must say. I did call my dad and make sure he was listening, too.
 Anyway, I think all of you know who he is, so I'm just going to turn this over to him. Terrence McKenna.
 Can everybody hear? Good. Well, it's great to be here.
 It's always fun to come to the West Side and see the usual suspects all assembled.
 I'm here to flog a new book. It seems like they're coming out about once a year and that will continue on into next year.
 The object of attention at the moment is true hallucinations.
 And I'm very up for this because my other books were basically speculation, philosophy, ideas, art, historical comment on psychedelics, so forth and so on.
 This is autobiography narrative. It has action, heartbreak, erotic outrage, climax, denouement, all those good literary type things.
 And I wrote it basically because a lot of people have said it seemed to them incomprehensible how my brother and I got to where we are in terms of the way in which we furnished our heads.
 And this is basically the story of the formative two weeks in our lives.
 In 1971, I was 23. My brother was 19. I'd spent several years in Asia already, having been run out of Berkeley because of the revolution.
 And we were graduates of the LSD revolution, but it had left us wanting more, specifically wanting the kinds of experiences that the classical commentators on psychedelics described.
 And by that, I mean people like Havlock Ellis in The Dance of Life or S. Weir Mitchell, who wrote about mescaline.
 LSD for us never delivered visions. It delivered insight and feelings and complex thoughts, but not visions,
 not activity in the visual cortex that these classical commentators had led us to expect.
 And I had been in India for a number of years and pretty well managed to convince myself that whatever spirituality had ever been there,
 it had evaporated thousands of years ago and that what we were left with was a very grasping and mendacious priestly hierarchy that was about as cynical as religion gets.
 And I was raised Catholic, so I know what I'm talking about.
 And so then we decided, well, where the gnosis must be is in the Amazon, where we knew there was a pristine aboriginal shamanism based on hallucinogens.
 And I stress our youth because I think people imagine that you can only make contributions if you're old and laden with degrees and that sort of thing.
 And basically, our pure, reckless inventiveness carried us further into the heart of the mystery than I would ever have believed possible.
 And I should say a little bit about the method because I think it's important.
 Rationalism in confrontation with the weird edges is what's always worked for me.
 In other words, if you're a true believer, if you have some pre-packaged philosophy, then you're going to miss a great deal because you're pre-programmed to ignore what doesn't fit into your model.
 And it doesn't matter what your model is, but if you are simply the open-minded skeptic/witness, and then if you push at the edges of the phenomenal world,
 you know, go to the highest mountains, the oldest cities, the deepest deserts, the most remote jungles, and just simply put yourself in these circumstances, the cosmic giggle can get at you.
 You know, it can't get at you if you're pursuing your job delivering messages for Matthew and son or whatever it is you've got going.
 But if you will tear the human atom of your individuality out of the collectivity and set yourself into a wilderness, a desert, an uninhabited island,
 then this thing can rise out of the depths and communicate if it chooses, shape your life for sure, blow your mind.
 And there's almost a kind of unconsciousness, which is the precondition for success in this area.
 When you are superbly educated and completely alert to all possibilities and scanning the horizon for action, this is the equivalent of watching a pot to wait for it to boil.
 It won't happen. It's when you become preoccupied, broke, a touch of dysentery, a little confusion in the mix, and then it can sink its teeth into you.
 So I thought Harper, who published this and I think did a beautiful job with the production of it,
 has informed me that I, by joining up with them, am no more the cheerful extemporaneous ad-lib artist of the past,
 that I have been elevated into the high and holy realm of being a littérature.
 And what that means is you have to read and it's not really my métier, but it pleases them no end back where they cut the checks.
 So I will, in fact, read to you from my new book. And I should say a bit about our goal.
 You can't just willy-nilly head off to sit in the desert. You have to have an agenda.
 However flimsy and based on misinformation, the agenda tells you what you're supposed to do next.
 So our agenda was we had been interested, as I'm sure many of you have been and are, in the psychedelic flash that accompanies DMT, which is extraordinarily brief.
 It's like a minute and a half, two minutes tops.
 And we had the notion that if you could get in there for a half an hour,
 you might be able to bring back something really astonishing for the rest of the gang to puzzle over.
 Of course, you might leave your mind behind in the process, but nothing is for sure, right?
 So it turned out that Richard Evans Schultes, the great doyen of psychedelic botany,
 had reported a few years ago a psychedelic plant complex called ukuhe,
 which was used by a dwindling tribe of Indians called Witoto.
 And it was orally active. It was a little pill that they made out of the resin of a tree.
 And the literature insisted that they used this ukuhe to speak with little men.
 Well, you can imagine the effect that had on us.
 I mean, after all, speaking with little men is something that's very dear to our hearts.
 Hardly to speak of speaking with little women.
 So we set off for the Amazon to contact this Indian tribe to try and see if we couldn't persuade them to reveal how they made this stuff,
 or at least to score from them if all else failed.
 And and what this meant then in practical terms was going to a place called La Chorera.
 You like that? Choro is a funny word in Spanish.
 It's not exactly a waterfall. It's not that steep.
 It's where a river goes at about a forty five or steeper.
 Colloquially, it refers to the angle of the dangle on a male liquid evacuation.
 I think the proper way to put it. So a choro is a stream at a forty five degree angle that's moving very rapidly.
 And this place, La Chorera, about which we knew practically nothing except these Indians were there,
 turned out not to be your ordinary anonymous jungle mission out there in the big green.
 It turned out this place had a hellacious history attached to it because it was the place from which the Putumayo rubber boom was administered.
 Not very many people know or recall that before Waco, before Talzahatar, before Auschwitz, before Guernica, before Armenia,
 before these great episodes and spasms of extinction in the 20th century,
 it was all rehearsed between 1912 and 17 in the Peruvian Amazon when British banks bankrolled essentially Peruvian mafias
 to wage a war of terror on these Indians. And the issue was rubber for the World War.
 This was before synthetic rubber had been invented. And these Indians were told you bring in X number of kilos of rubber per month.
 And whatever you fall below your quota, that weight in your own flesh will be removed by machete.
 And these Indians went from forty five thousand to thirty five hundred by the time we got there.
 So in spite of this beautiful climaxed rainforest and we were actually moving through a landscape of ghosts and catastrophe.
 And when you would walk these jungle trails in the afternoon with the sunlight slanting in,
 you would swear you could hear the footfalls of manacled foot, feet and low voices conversing.
 I mean, it was a very strange place. So here's a picture of it.
 Most of the Amazon basin is made up of alluvial deposits from the Andes.
 La Chorera is different. A river, the Agaraparaná, flows and into a crack.
 It becomes very rapid, then drops over an edge, a lip, creating not exactly a waterfall,
 but a narrow channel of water, a flume whose violent outpouring has made a sizable lake.
 La Chorera is a paradisical place. You push very hard and suddenly you are there.
 There are no stinging or biting insects. In the evening, mist drifts across a large pasture,
 creating a beautiful pastoral scene. There is the mission, the foam flecked lake below,
 the jungle surrounding, and much to my surprise, white cattle.
 The afternoon following our arrival at the edge of the pasture, which had been cleared by the Spanish priests
 who had managed Mission La Chorera since its establishment in the 20s,
 I held and turned over in my hand perfect specimens of the same species of mushroom
 I had eaten near Florencia just a week or two before.
 In the pasture before me were dozens of these mushrooms.
 After examining several, my brother concurred, pronounced them the same Stropharyocubensis
 we had found before, one of the largest, strongest, and certainly most widely distributed
 of any of the known psilocybin mushrooms.
 What to do? We had no data on the proper dosage of psilocybin.
 Our expedition's thinned-down drug and plant file was concerned with flowering plants,
 not fungi. Collectively, we seem to remember that in the Oaxacan mushroom ritual
 described by Gordon Wasson, mushrooms were always eaten in pairs.
 With several pairs consumed, we determined to eat six mushrooms each that same evening.
 And then here is my journal entry for this day, February 23rd, 1971.
 Are we indeed now in some way camped on the edge of another dimension?
 Yesterday afternoon, Dave discovered Stropharyocubensis in the damp pastures behind the house
 where we had hung our hammocks.
 He and I gathered 30 delicious psilocybin-saturated specimens in about half an hour.
 We each ate six and spent last night on an enormously rich and alive, yet gentle and elusive trip.
 In between strange lights in the pasture and discussion of our project,
 I am left with the sense that by penetrating the local psychedelic flora this way,
 we have taken a giant step toward deeper understanding.
 Multifaceted and benevolent, as complex as masculine, as intense as LSD,
 the mushroom, as is said of Peyote, teaches the right way to live.
 This particular mushroom species is unclaimed, so far as I know, by any aboriginal people anywhere,
 and thus is neutral ground in the tryptamine dimension we are exploring.
 Through this unclaimed vegetable teacher, one can gain entry into the world of the elf chemists.
 The experience of the mushroom is subtle,
 but can reach out to the depth and breadth of a truly intense psychedelic experience.
 It is, however, extremely mercurial and difficult to catch at work.
 Dennis and I, through a staggered description of our visions,
 noticed a similarity of content that seemed to suggest a telepathic phenomenon
 or some sort of simultaneous perception of the same invisible landscape.
 A tight headache accompanied the experience in its final stages,
 but this was quick to fade and the body strain and exhaustion,
 often met with in unextracted vegetable drugs, was not present.
 The mushroom is a transdimensional doorway which sly fairies have left slightly ajar
 for anyone to enter into who can find the key and who wishes to use this power,
 the power of vision, to explore this peculiar and naturally occurring psychoactive complex.
 We are closing distance with the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter,
 the emergence of life from the dark chrysalis of matter.
 That was after one trip, you know. I got it and the lock began to tighten.
 And so then much of the rest of the story, with a few flashbacks
 and some philosophical musing on the content,
 deals with a series of ideas which Dennis began to develop based around the question,
 "Do you know what we could do with this stuff?"
 And then he proceeded to answer his own question.
 And he had an idea which I do confess I find rather hard to put out in 10 minutes
 and feel that I've done an adequate job. That's what the book is for.
 I think in the 10-minute version it sounds fascinating but preposterous.
 In the book I think we make it fascinating and entirely credible.
 And the concept was he seemed to have gotten a very deep connection
 into this Logos-like gnosis-conveying force in the mushroom.
 And it began talking about how you could use this thing to essentially
 give birth to your own soul as a physical object.
 You know, we all have a mind or a soul but it's an invisible organ.
 It isn't like your left hand or your nose.
 We never see it and we don't know whether it's in the brain or it surrounds the body
 but it's very real to us. We think with it.
 So he was suggesting that there is a way to, and some of you have heard me say this in the past,
 that we need to turn the body inside out, make the soul visible,
 make the body something commanded in the imagination.
 Well, he took this as a set of engineering specs and set to work to figure out how to do it.
 And the method is given in here.
 I had to arm-wrestle Harper fairly strenuously because they said,
 you know, these notes of your brothers, I mean, they're overstated, scientifically specious,
 riddled with the incomprehensible, so forth and so on.
 He said, yes, but it worked.
 And driven by the thought that there may be someone who will read this book,
 who is far smarter than Dennis or I, then all the details must be here.
 If you want to read it as an adventure story, that's fine.
 You just skip over Dennis's notebook entries.
 But if you see it as a recipe book, then that's where you want to place your attention.
 So he became very highly agitated and irascible and just obsessed by this idea of this experiment
 to condense the mind, give birth to the soul,
 emanatize the eschaton, call down the flying saucers, fuse spirit with matter,
 create the universal panacea at the end of time,
 and lead a triumphant humanity into hyperspace or something like that.
 And my attitude was, hell, there's no swerving him from this.
 He can talk of nothing else.
 So let's just cut to the chase and do the damn experiment.
 And surely nothing will happen.
 And then he can make of that what he wishes.
 And the rest of us will go back to botanizing, trying to get tight with these Indians
 and push forward this program to get this DMT thing.
 Because essentially the presence of these mushrooms has totally overturned our original agenda.
 Well, then he performed the experiment.
 And to the point that he performed the experiment,
 I had been what I thought of as the indulgent, fair-minded witness.
 He performed the experiment and promptly went bananas.
 He had said before that he might experience what he called a psychic reversal.
 But I had just, you know, he'd said a lot of things going into this,
 and I hadn't weighed it that heavily.
 Within minutes of finishing this experiment,
 it became clear that not only was he highly agitated and raving constantly,
 but he also didn't seem to be able to hear other people.
 He talked right through people.
 And when you would point out to him that this was an incredibly rude thing to do,
 then there would just be a huge amount of confusion and apologizing.
 And he seemed genuinely not to be able to hear other people and was raving constantly.
 Meanwhile, at the moment the experiment was performed,
 I, who had to this point just been sort of playing along,
 it was as though he reached into my deepest plumbing and he just threw a switch.
 And this channel opened and it began to inform me.
 It was not like any drug I've ever taken.
 It was not like any experience I'd ever had.
 There was no hallucination.
 What there was was what I would describe as pure understanding.
 Understanding that amplified itself every hour, every minute.
 I mean, I had only to take a cup and dip up a glass of water from the spring
 and pour it past my eyes.
 And I could say, "I understand water."
 Or pick up a leaf and look at it and have some kind of huge, wordless,
 but very emotionally deep understanding of the ecosystem, the jungle,
 the connections to the planet.
 I mean, it seemed to me that I was very close to what looked like enlightenment of some sort.
 I mean, just an ability to be absolutely at peace, fully in the moment,
 and just everything became a teacher.
 Everything was able to communicate to me its essence.
 But what was bringing me down in this situation was that Dennis's condition
 was creating a huge wave of accusation and confusion in our small expedition.
 Some people thought he should be airlifted to a hospital.
 Other people thought we should simply wait for him to ascend into heaven.
 And it's hard to reconcile that kind of thing, you know.
 And many, many strange things went on.
 And I'll give you a flavor of our psychology at this time.
 The day after the experiment, or the evening following the experiment,
 the experiment was done sometime around dawn in the early morning hours of March 5th, 1971.
 The evening of March 5th, we all hung our hammocks together in this hut.
 And I got up in the middle of the night to take a leak
 because of the condensed milk that you have to drink when you're an explorer.
 And I checked everybody out and everybody seemed to be sleeping soundly.
 And then I lay in my hammock a long, long time and everything seemed peaceful and still.
 But as breakfast unfolded the following morning, the 6th of March, the morning after this,
 it became clear that the restful sleep I had imagined we had all shared had been anything but that.
 From Dennis, still disorganized but expansive,
 comments emerged that he had, or imagined he had, a very active night.
 Upon close questioning, it came out that he was completely convinced
 that sometime during the night he had arisen and dressed
 and then had a series of nocturnal adventures.
 These involved going alone in the darkness to the thundering immensity of the Choro over a mile away,
 then returning to climb and spend some time in a large tree near the edge of the mission,
 then making his way back across the pasture and returning to his hammock, strung among all the others.
 The thought of him wandering around during the night on those trails without his glasses,
 which he had thrown away in the first minutes after the experiment,
 he announced that they were no longer necessary and just flung them away.
 He also had thrown away all of his clothes and methodically smashed everybody's watch.
 Without his glasses, falling in and out of shamanic ecstasy,
 perhaps howling and otherwise paleolithically comporting himself, was too much for me.
 It was a breach of the collective cool.
 Even though I was 90% certain that it had never really happened,
 I was determined to eliminate all possibility of such rambles in the future.
 Dennis's story was the classic description of a shamanic night journey.
 He said that he had gone to the Choro and had meditated in the mission cemetery we had visited before.
 He had begun to return to the camp when he confronted a particularly large Enga tree
 near where the path skirted the edge of the mission.
 On impulse, he had climbed it, aware as he did that the ascent of the world tree
 is the central motif of the Siberian shamanic journey.
 As he climbed the tree, he felt the flickering polarities of many archetypes.
 And as he reached the highest point in his ascent,
 something that he called the vortex opened ahead of him, a swirling enormous doorway into time.
 He could see the cyclopean megaliths of Stonehenge,
 and beyond them revolving at a different speed and at a higher plane,
 the outlines of the pyramids gleaming and marble faceted as they have not been since the days of pharaonic Egypt.
 And yet further into the turbulent maw of the vortex,
 he saw mysteries that were ancient long before the advent of man,
 titanic archetypal forms on worlds unimagined by us,
 the arcane machineries of sentient agencies that swept through this part of the galaxy
 when our planet was young and its surface barely cooled.
 This machinery, these gibbering abysses touched with the cold of interstellar space
 and aeon-consuming time rushed down upon him.
 He fainted, and time, who can say how much, passed him by.
 So this is the kind of stuff we were dealing with.
 And my point in writing the book, I mean, there are many stories of people going bananas,
 and then there are many stories where there's a very radical break with reality,
 and you either have to believe it or not believe it.
 And I'm thinking of Carlos Castaneda, Whitley Strieber.
 I mean, after all, proctological examinations carried out in your bedroom
 by gray-faced aliens from another world, that's a pretty radical break with my reality.
 But here it rides the edge, because this is a true story.
 It is, to the best of my ability, unembellished.
 But it argues that guys like Strieber and Castaneda actually do have their finger on something.
 It is rare to violate the laws of physics and universal expectation based on experience,
 but it's not impossible.
 It happened to us.
 There were several things that can be isolated out of our story
 that simply secure answers to certain questions that people have asked since time immemorial.
 For example, we had telepathic experiences that absolutely satisfy me
 that under some conditions, one person can not only penetrate another person's thought,
 but what he did was much more spectacular than that.
 He penetrated into my memory.
 He was able to talk about things that had happened to me
 that I had never told him about and that I was not consciously thinking about.
 So it was as though somehow our minds had become fused.
 There were numerous other things.
 Unfortunately, there isn't time to get into all of this.
 But the point is, and I started out by saying this,
 rationalism and the investigation of the unusual with a fair and open mind
 is the working prescription for securing for yourself
 that the world is stranger than we can suppose
 and certainly stranger than science can suppose,
 certainly stranger than the cultural myths that we are living under dare to suppose.
 And I don't know where all this goes, you know,
 because this story happened to real people,
 every single one of whom is still alive as we speak.
 There was no happily ever after,
 except in the sense that the Logos promised that the point of view,
 I guess is the way to put it, would spread, would become generalized.
 And when I recall that in 1971, I was penniless,
 wanted by Interpol, careerless,
 and you know, pretty much the Amazon was the end of the line for me.
 I spent all my money going in to La Charrera.
 I did not have a clue.
 I was at the end of my rope.
 And now this strange meme based on psilocybin,
 elf machines in hyperspace,
 the collapse of the vectors of history in 2012,
 the whisperings from the transmundane other,
 this whole thing that we've released seems to be sustaining itself.
 Basically because of people like you,
 because somehow we're all part of this story.
 I really believe that this is about a discovery of some sort,
 so huge that we can't even put a name to it.
 I mean, Columbus could say, "I found land."
 And Galileo could say, "There are mountains on the moon."
 You know, is it then for me to say,
 "There are elves inside our head, our collective head,"
 and that somehow this is going to have an impact?
 I'm convinced of it, that it is for a purpose,
 that the entire ecology of the planet
 is attempting to communicate ever more exotic messages to us
 as the culture crisis deepens.
 And it's too much for one person or one small group of people
 to try to come to terms with.
 It has to be laid before the bar of public opinion.
 And people have to deal with this in the context
 of their own psychedelic experiences and their own hopes and fears.
 And perhaps, you know, if this is done and we can reach a consensus,
 then we may well discover that the hallucinations
 that have prompted us into religion and art and music and mathematics
 over millennia of time actually were true hallucinations all the time.
 Well, that's all I have to say about that.
 I'll answer some questions and I understand you're going to read them.
 Yeah. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
 Somehow I think you wrote this.
 I wrote it?
 It sounds like something you would write.
 Is the TV computer satellite that surrounds the whole planet
 have a collective psychedelic effect on the world population?
 Are psychedelics a mirror of this or an antidote
 or an anesthetic to the environment?
 Why do you think I would ask a question?
 I don't know.
 Well, the wording, I guess.
 I don't know. I mean, in a sense,
 it seems to me that what's happening is in our minds and outside our minds,
 if there is an outside our minds, but in the three-dimensional space of culture,
 we're undergoing an informational revolution of some sort.
 All data is rising to the surface.
 Nine million computers a month are being connected into networks worldwide
 at the very moment that some unknown number of people,
 because we can't get data on this, are taking psychedelics per month.
 And clearly the thing that is unique about us as a species
 is that we have made much of information.
 You know, ants have scripted it down into a few pheromonal signals.
 Coyote packs have a kind of a pre-language.
 You can make what you wish of the dolphins and the whales,
 but no species has ever grabbed on to information the way we have.
 And I believe that history is a self-limiting process,
 that we are coming to the end of it,
 that business as usual has been taken off the menu,
 and that if you take all these curves, the curve of petroleum extraction,
 the curve of the spread of epidemic diseases,
 the curve of the dissolution of the ozone hole,
 the curve of the rise of global population,
 if you plot all these curves together,
 you reach the conclusion that sometime in the second decade of the next century,
 the contradictions become so excruciating,
 that the entire thing is going to be forced into some kind of phase transition.
 It may be extinction, it may be a planetary Bosnia,
 or it could be something positive,
 but business as usual is off the menu.
 And the psychedelics connect you up to this looming event,
 because we are now having journeyed toward it for at least 10,000 years,
 we're less than 20 years away from it.
 So it is imminent in every sense of the word,
 and to contact it, all you have to do is close your eyes,
 smoke a bomber, eat a mushroom, sit in yoga for a moment.
 I mean, it is very, very near,
 the energy threshold between us and the transcendental object
 is very, very thin, and that's why things are so peculiar,
 because the architecture of our collective lives,
 and the architecture of our individual lives,
 have fallen under the domain of a kind of a tractor.
 And this is the attractor, which, when it penetrated into our primate ancestors,
 it drew out of a higher animal ourselves.
 We are literally being sculpted on a scale of a million years,
 an animal species, some kind of advanced monkey,
 is being turned into the carrier for a projection from the transmundane,
 that leaves us with one foot in the primate world,
 and one foot firmly planted in the angelic world.
 We are a species in the process of being alchemically transformed by the other,
 and we can't know what that means for ourselves, for the fate of the planet.
 It is an absolute mystery.
 It is the mystery of our own becoming.
 I don't know if that was the answer to the question, but...
 The Supreme Court...
 Picky, picky.
 The Supreme Court has ruled against the Native American church use of peyote.
 How will this impact other people's use of the sacrament?
 Well, not at all, I hope.
 I mean...
 Progress of human civilization in the area of defining human freedom
 is not made from the top down.
 No king, no government, no parliament ever extended to the people
 more rights than the people insisted upon.
 And I think we've come to a place with this psychedelic thing,
 and we have the gay community as a model,
 and all the other communities, the ethnic communities,
 we simply have to say, "Look, LSD has been around for 50 years now.
 We just celebrated the birthday.
 It ain't going away."
 We are not going away.
 We are not slack-jawed, dazed, glazed, unemployable, psychotic creeps.
 We are pillars of society.
 You can't run your computers, your fashion houses,
 your publishing houses, your damn magazines.
 You can't do anything in culture without psychedelic people in key positions.
 And this is the great unspoken truth of American creativity.
 And so I think it's time basically to come out of the closet
 and just say, "You know, I'm stoned and I'm proud."
 If that's a problem for you, you've got a problem, fella.
 Talk about hemp and its possibilities for our future.
 Hemp, yes.
 Well, this is interesting.
 You all know the basic pitch for hemp,
 and I wouldn't be what I am if it weren't for cannabis.
 I think, and I want to see it legalized,
 although I'm very, very skeptical.
 I don't think the people who want it legalized
 have fairly confronted what it really is.
 The argument is twofold, as I understand it, for legalizing hemp.
 Number one, a lot of money could be made off all these wonderful cloths
 and products and lubricants and medicines and so forth.
 And the other argument relates to its psychoactivity,
 and the argument made there is, "It's no big deal. It's no big deal."
 Well, I actually think it is somewhat of a big deal.
 And I think the people who don't want to see it legalized see it that way.
 Cultures are shaped by the drugs that they take and that they suppress.
 We are a sugar, red meat, and alcohol culture, primarily,
 with tobacco and alcohol to shore all that up.
 To think for a minute about a drug like coffee, caffeine,
 every labor contract in Western civilization contains a clause
 which secures the worker's right to halt the assembly line twice a day
 to fuel up on a drug known to cause liver damage and all kinds of problems.
 Well, now, why isn't there a cannabis break?
 The reason is that caffeine perfectly fits in to a program
 that would have you busily screwing widgets onto wonkits
 and moving them along the assembly line.
 In other words, it promotes capitalist values,
 performing repetitious tasks in a state of sort of glazed acceptance.
 Cannabis, on the other hand, what is always said about it,
 makes you inefficient, lazy, uninterested in earning your Mercedes
 and your house.
 Fighting a war.
 Yeah. So I think that if we could,
 I'm very interested in this cannabis thing.
 I think it might be the wedge through which we can push the whole psychedelic agenda.
 I guarantee you, if it's legalized, it will be a tremendous big deal
 because cannabis promotes feminist values, anti-capitalist values,
 values that promote introspection rather than manic social values
 of the sort that you see alcohol promoting.
 It would make an immense change in the architecture of the culture.
 Who deciphered the Voynich manuscript?
 For $25,000?
 Well, for those of you who don't know what the question is about,
 it refers to a very interesting manuscript that I've written about
 that is an unread or unreadable book.
 It's written in an unknown language.
 No other example of this language has ever been found.
 And the CIA spent a lot of time trying to decipher this book
 because it's at least 500 years old.
 And it drove them bonkers to believe that modern code cracking machinery
 could not deal with a medieval manuscript.
 I mean, modern code making is orders of magnitude more sophisticated
 than anything that the 14th or 15th century possessed.
 So they spent a lot of money trying to understand this code
 and essentially failed.
 Now, very recently, a gentleman on the East Coast named Dr. Leo Levitov,
 and this is the answer to the question, Leo Levitov,
 wrote a book called The Solution to the Voynich Manuscript.
 And he has, he believes, figured out what it is.
 And the reason the CIA couldn't decipher it, according to Levitov,
 is because it was never encrypted in the first place.
 He says it isn't an encrypted manuscript.
 It's an artificial alphabet being used to write down
 a rural form of polyglot medieval Flemish
 with a huge number of old French and old high German loan words.
 So there you have it, folks.
 Do you know if Illinois bunchweed, is it bunchweed or bundleweed?
 I think it's bundleweed.
 Is available from any commercial nursery.
 I believe it's available from of the jungle in Sebastopol, California.
 I'm not their sales rep, so I don't keep weekly track on their inventory,
 but I believe it's available from of the jungle.
 Call information.
 Yeah.
 What future modifications to the TimeWave software are ideally in store?
 Oh, what a great question.
 Well, the TimeWave software is being put out both in an MS-DOS version and a Mac version,
 and they're both pretty flashy.
 And in a sense, that finishes the program of bringing to the public the TimeWave
 in its raw and sort of naked form.
 What we're moving on to now is a sort of a game,
 which would be a time travel simulator.
 It would be created in an immersive technology.
 This phrase, immersive technology, now replaces previous buzzwords, virtual reality.
 Dump that.
 Only outsiders call it that now.
 It's called immersive technology.
 And the idea is to build in a CD-ROM environment,
 a huge visual database to accompany the TimeWave.
 And then the TimeWave could easily be configured into a game
 where in a certain historical period, if you encountered some difficulty
 and you mastered it, you would be catapulted forward one resonance.
 And the idea would be to move from the Big Bang to the transcendental object
 at the end of time and beat out the competition.
 And it's a very sly way.
 And I'm not big on products or games,
 but it's a very sly way of teaching people history.
 And you could make so many paths through the data
 that the game would never play the same way twice
 or it would take thousands of times to do that.
 And a lot of talent seems to have come forward for this.
 So that looms.
 What happened to your theory about change versus non-change
 and the cataclysmic events to come?
 Did that become the TimeWave continuum?
 Yeah, that's right.
 I referred to this a little earlier when I was talking about how business as usual
 is off the menu and all these curves are converging.
 I really believe that the core insight for me of the psychedelic experience
 and I believe that it is objectively real
 is the discovery that history is a finite phenomenon of some sort.
 It began 8,000 years ago and it will end at some point in the future.
 Well, that's not terribly upsetting or challenging
 unless one specifies at what point in the future.
 And I maintain for reasons most of which are too complicated to go into here
 that it is about 20 years in the future that the planet can no longer sustain us.
 We can no longer create any kind of existence that we could consider humane
 and that technology, population, the way in which psychedelics are stimulating the imagination,
 the way in which culture generally is driving the imagination,
 that we are on the brink of being able to design ourselves
 and place ourselves into a new world of some sort.
 And I'm vague on the details.
 It's not outer space. It's not some kind of a managed Orwellian collectivist paradise.
 It's something more profound than that.
 We are perhaps going to download ourselves into a gold ytterbium cube
 that we will supercool and bury a thousand feet beneath Copernicus
 and there all walk on the virtual beaches barefoot and alive.
 I don't know.
 But what is happening here at the end of the 20th century, you see,
 is a kind of birth process.
 We, you know, I mean, think of the fetal life in the womb.
 You're endlessly adrift in the omniotic ocean, weightless.
 Food and oxygen are being delivered without even your awareness through the umbilical cord.
 It is paradise.
 And if you were there and you were in control of your fate,
 you would choose to prolong it forever.
 But what happens instead is that you get squeezed into the birth canal.
 Then the paradise turns into hell, strangulation, pressure.
 You are literally being squeezed to death.
 To ask the fetus at that point to conceive of the wonderful, satisfying life
 that it is going to have 40 years hence as a stockbroker,
 living in Bel Air and collecting minor works of Cubist art, is ridiculous.
 Because, you know, that's not where we're at at the moment.
 And so I believe that culturally we are in the birth canal
 and everything appears to be being destroyed.
 The oceans, the atmosphere, the very integrity of our own bodies
 because of all these diseases, ideological contamination, you name it.
 But we simply must push forward.
 It's a forward escape.
 We can never go back, you know, to the game-dotted plains of archaic Africa.
 That's gone. It's all gone.
 The only way out is forward.
 It's called a forward escape.
 And I'm interested in propagating this notion
 because, number one, I believe it,
 and number two, it is a message of hope
 without which I think people are going to be very challenged
 because things are going to get worse, apparently much worse.
 I mean, it would not cause me to break stride
 if the mess in Bosnia spread until it stretched
 from the Arctic Circle to Turkey and from Vienna to Vladivostok.
 I mean, those people are setting themselves up for hell on earth
 and we will be dragged into it in some fashion,
 even if we only have to witness it.
 So history is turning into a white-knuckle ride, for sure.
 And without the faith in some kind of transcendental phase transition,
 I think there's a tendency to despair and to panic and to nihilism.
 And religion has failed.
 You know, what religion gives us is what we saw last week in Texas.
 They can only conceive of phase transition as apocalypse,
 as Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods.
 That isn't what it is.
 We are closing distance with the first moments of true human civilization.
 You know, when people actually do treat each other with respect,
 when there actually is a place made for the celebration of human differences,
 when we actually do feel the suffering of the people around us and respond to that.
 So without psychedelics and the models that they make possible,
 hope is, I think, a very, very fragile thing.
 And that's why I take the position that I do,
 because I think that we are on the brink of the adventure
 for which we left the trees and left the African plain.
 But it's not a sure thing.
 It rests in our hands, as it always has.
 I mean, remember that in the last million years,
 nine times the ice has moved south from the poles, miles high,
 pushing before it our ancestors, people wrapped in skin, naked as jaybirds,
 marginal as can be, no antibiotics, no global weather forecasting, no nothing.
 And they didn't drop the ball.
 They survived. They took care of their children and their elderly.
 They passed the skills and the technologies and the insights and the songs
 down the long stream of time.
 Can we do any less?
 We who have in our hands the power to shape the planet for good or evil,
 we who can communicate with each other globally in a moment,
 it would be a pretty sad commentary on the notion of cultural progress
 and intelligence if they could keep the faith and we can't.
 So it all went for this.
 It will all be made clear in the lifetime of most of us.
 And so I just want to sort of close on that note, invite you to keep the faith,
 invite you to explore the edges and to make of yourself a vessel,
 a conduit for the world-transforming logos that is trying to speak to all of us
 to create a sane and viable and celebratory world for our children and their children.
 Thank you very much.
 (Applause)


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