in one of these things. I was at that one with Luke. Yeah. These things, it's got humor behind it. I mean, it's a grand silliness of some sort. I'm willing to be proven wrong. I grappled with it like everybody else for six months, but the density of flakiness around it is incredible. And the number of people whose private agendas are being served by this. I mean, if it were happening north of Hudson Bay, there'd be no money in it. You'd have to be able to drive there from central London in order for it to work. Well, then people always say, "But it's happening all over the world, my good man. Haven't you heard?" Show me. Show me. It's not happening all over the world. Some clumsy attempts appeared in Kentucky. And there was something in Germany. And so forth and so on. But it's really hair-raising to be among these people and to see how uncommitted to finding out what it is they are and how totally committed they are to preserving it from rational inspection. They don't want to talk about any alternative other than whatever the pet theory of the week is about how it's happening. Now, I see it as part of the ingression into novelty. Things are going to get weirder and weirder. There's no doubt about that. But it doesn't mean that there is a conscious extraterrestrial agency. I mean, I find it pretty weird that there are 500 women who think they have fetuses removed from their bodies by extraterrestrials. That's so weird that suggesting that it's true seems a little like overkill to me. I mean, what is going on that would make a woman do that sort of thing? There's always, if you're a careful observer of one of these things, there's always, Jacques Vallee wrote about this, a residuum of absurdity that is suppressed by the witness because the witness knows that if they told the whole story, their story is not credible. This is called the built-in absurdity of these paranormal things. And when somebody tells you a story about a UFO encounter that does not have this element of self-contradicting absurdity in it, they're manipulating the evidence to make it seem more woo-woo-woo, I think. And I'm not a rationalist except, well, I've seen things that violated the laws of physics. I believe the laws of physics can be violated. I believe there may well be extraterrestrials somewhere in the universe. Do you believe the Vonage manuscripts may have something to do with some type of alien intelligence? No, I think the Vonage manuscript is a solved problem, and that this guy Leo Levertov's translation is correct. What we found was, you know, it was a catharite manual for the dying. That's much more exciting than trying to claim it as a book from another dimension, because now we gain an insight into what catharism was really about. I think there is a residuum of the irrational and the paranormal, but these things like flying saucers and Atlantis and the crop circles, they're like viruses upon the healthy body of language. There's something wrong with language and communication, because it's never as you imagine it's going to be, people are being sold a phenomenon that if they were to go, they would discover that aspects of it were suppressed or misrepresented. The people who are dealing with the crop circles are having a great time. It's the longest drinking party on record in that part of England. I guess I should say this, because I know it's a bummer to have your favorite weird thing dumped on. But my technique, which I recommend to you, is don't believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite. Therefore, you have given up a portion of your freedom, and freedom is the dearest thing we've got. You don't have to believe anything. You can just provisionally work your way through stuff. And then probe the edges. The edges will satisfy. I think that the proper way to contact the other is with hard-headed rationalism exercised under weird conditions. I went to India, visited some of these yoga people and accomplished saints. I'm telling you, for my money, it was hokum. There was an ulterior agenda, either having the wish to relieve you of your cash or to violate some body cavity. That was the ulterior agenda. When I went to the Amazon, with the same attitude of skepticism, and talked to the shamans there, they delivered the goods. So you just investigate these things, and the key question is, what can you show me? If they've got it, they can show it. There's no mumbo-jumbo around the real thing. But if they say, "Oh, well, you know, the tape recordings miraculously erased themselves last night." Or, "We'll show you, but you have to sweep up around the ashram for a dozen years to prove you're worthy." Or, "You are not worthy. That's the one where you head for the door. You are not worthy." The real thing is the real thing, for crying out loud. It can be displayed. It doesn't require this weird, fuzzy relationship of worth and insight and so forth and so on. And that's how I got to psychedelics. Psychedelics work. If you think that I'm bullshitting you, go home and take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness, and then we'll talk. That's the sine qua non. But it'll work, on demand. I'm not saying, "And wait 40 years, or purify yourself, or get your aura stitched up, or any of the rest of it." It'll work. It'll blow your mind to shreds. It's real. This other stuff is just, you know, all these gurus, they need to find honest work. They need to join the rest of us in contemplating the mystery of reality. They don't know what they're talking about. If they knew what they were talking about, they wouldn't have to shuffle the deck when you're out of the room. And that's what's going on. Somebody must be outraged and terribly disappointed. Yeah. Getting back to the PMT. You get the same experience each time you take it under similar conditions. Do other people report the same things, the same teaching machines? And how does it relate to your death experience? I can't think in order. Yes, I do have the same experience they get each time I take it. Do they say, "Nice to see you again"? They say, "You've sent so many, but you come so rarely." And then the more interesting question, do other people see it? You get information. Yeah, do I get information? Do other people see it? What I've thought about this question a lot, because it's a question of communication. If they saw it, could they tell me? If they told me in their language, would I understand what they were telling me? What I've decided is that the experience is an archetype. It's the archetype of the circus. Why? Don't ask me why. I don't know why. But, for instance, I've listened to many, many people talk about their DMT experiences, and inevitably, this is the box into which it will fit. I gave it to a woman once up in Washington, an anthropologist. It was a sub-threshold dose, because she coughed. I could tell she didn't get it. And when she came down, she said, "It was the saddest carnival I've ever been to." She said, "The rides weren't open. The tents were shuttered, and there were little gumpapers blowing between the stands." The circus is an interesting archetype, because it has a number of facets. First of all, you have the three central rings under the big top. That's the dome. And in the central ring, there's light and color and clouds. Remember that Maria Sabina called the mushrooms the little clowns. And these clowns, the circus is for children. And when you take DMT, one of the things I didn't mention in my description of it is you have a peculiar impression of your own body geometry. Your head seems to be very large in relationship to your torso. You are, in fact, an infant in some sense. You become a child. This leads to thinking about the 52nd fragment of Heraclises, which says the Aeon is a child that play with colored balls. Nobody knows what this saying means, but it's persisted for about 3,000 years, so it must mean something. But outside the three rings, there's another aspect to the circus. It is spun into Eros, because above the center ring and up near the top of the dome is the beautiful woman with long blonde hair in the tiny, skimpy, spangled costume. And a very complicated narrative-type dream. And the alarm rings, and by the time your feet hit the floor and you stagger into the shower, it's gone. It's not partially gone, it's all gone. And all you can say is, "I was having this amazing dream. I have no idea what it was." The DMT thing can leave you just that quickly. And also, and I think this has a bearing on this, I studied the production of DMT in normal metabolism, and it peaks in normal human beings between 3 and 4 a.m. This is when the deep dreaming is going on. This is when the intense REM states are being experienced. So I think that where the dead and the living get together is in the dream time. Australian aborigines have been trying to tell us this for as long as we would listen. And also, a lot of people, it's possible to repress it very, very quickly. I think, for instance, I've seen people... One way you can tell if someone has really gotten a good DMT trip is they lay down, they become very still, but if you look closely at their face with their eyes closed, you can see that their eyes are moving wildly underneath their closed eyelids. This is because they're in REM state, and they are watching whatever it is they're seeing. They are looking at it. I remember giving DMT to a person years and years ago, a person who might have been a candidate for the description "psychologically fragile," and it was clear that she got it, because she was a hash smoker, and she took three or four enormous hits, laid down, her eyes were wildly rotating around in her head. When she came out of it, said, "What was it?" She said, "It was nothing. I don't remember anything. I don't remember anything at all. And furthermore, I don't think I want to have anything more to do with it." And didn't. I think that this is something that only shows as much of it as you can stand, and some of us cannot stand much at all. This occurs with psilocybin as well. I've had experiences with psilocybin where I've said to it, after hours of hallucinations of one sort or another, I finally say, "What I'm really interested in is your true essence. Can you show me what you are for yourself, rather than for me? What are you for yourself?" Well then, it's just like a cold wind blows through, and black velvet curtains begin to rise, and after 30 seconds of this, you just say, "That's enough of what you are for yourself." Because you can tell it's headed in a direction you can't tolerate at all. You can't stand. I have a friend who said of psilocybin, he said, "My goal, every time I take it, is to stand more of what it really is." And this is why it's incredibly kind to beginners. Beginners basically need have no fear if they will regulate the dose reasonably, because it wants to recruit you. And so it says, you know, "Here it is. Whatever you wanted. Aliens, outer space, elves, erotic imagery. Here it is. Doesn't this feel safe? Not so bad. We're your friends. We're not like all the others. Come back soon." It's after you gain familiarity with it where it says, "You know, there are aspects to me that we've never really talked about." "Oh yeah? Like what?" "Well, like this." "Oh, no. Let's go back to the Disney loop." This is the DMT that you smoke compared to the brain DMT that we all have running through. Is there a difference, like NN dimethyltryptamine, and what's in our brain? No, no. It's the same thing. Exactly the same? It's the same thing. DMT occurs in two forms, the salt and the hydrochloride. And both forms occur--well, no, I'm not sure that both forms occur in metabolism, but the only difference is that one is water-soluble and the other isn't. So basically, then again, we are holding, then. I mean, if DMT is illegal, then what we have in our brain running through us is considered illegal. Yeah, we are potentially bustable. You know, in light of what I said, one of the most interesting frontiers that the New Age has brought forward that I think bears more serious study than the channelings of Amon Hothep's barber and all that, is lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming, if it--I don't know whether those people--I don't know those people personally. I don't know what their motivation is. But if it's true that you can take control of the dream state, then this would be something worth spending even a lot of time on. Because the dream state is more like the tryptamine geography than anything else. One of the most fascinating things about DMT that should certainly be mentioned, as long as we're exhausting ourselves on this subject, is once you've had DMT, once you've smoked it and this experience has occurred, you can have a dream years later in which you're with a bunch of people and something's going on and you enter the atrium of the Hotel California and you take a floor to the basement or something, and then you're in a room with people and someone whips out a little glass pipe and you smoke it and it happens. It doesn't sort of happen. It happens. A hundred percent. That means that's exciting data, because that means that we have the wherewithal to trigger this experience in ourselves on the natch, at least while we're asleep, and I presume that with sufficient patience and subtlety and biofeedback equipment, and I don't know what you would take, but if you spent a million dollars you could probably deliver it on time, we can trigger this most intense of all hallucinogenic ecstasies, most boundary-dissolving of all possible human experiences on the natch, but we have to somehow find our way to the button, and apparently in normal waking consciousness it isn't there. I spend a lot of time, I mean I didn't mean to be so flip about the UFOs, I've spent years trying to think about the UFOs and studied all the theories, one that I still may be part of the truth is maybe it is so that we generate and sequester DMT somewhere in our brain, and under unusual situations this sequestered DMT can suddenly be dumped into the brain fluid or into the bloodstream and then you have a DMT experience or some kind of quasi-DMT-like experience, because I read an interesting paper a few years ago, I can't remember the name of the guy who wrote it, it was an anthropological paper, it was called "The Felt Presence in Unusual Environments", and it talked about how it is apparently a basic trait of human beings to, when in the wilderness, especially unfamiliar wilderness, people sense something there, the felt presence in unusual environments. It may be that, now imagine if you are in the wilderness in a situation not entirely familiar to you, so that you are edging up toward this felt presence thing, and suddenly DMT stored in your brain is for some reason, perhaps a pathological reason that it shouldn't happen, but it's shunted into your brain, well now suddenly you feel there's something here, there's someone here, there's someone with me, the hair on the back of your neck stands up, and then you see coming toward you a disturbance in your perceptual field. Now, you're supposed to be alone, there isn't supposed to be a disturbance in your perceptual input, but there is, you are alarmed, it may be dangerous, you must identify what this is, well every one of us carries around inside us a cultural inventory of what weird events might possibly be. If you're a medieval peasant farming the hills of Tuscany, and this happens, you immediately conclude that it's the Virgin, or it's an angel, and lo and behold as it comes closer it clothes itself in heavenly rainment, and it is the Virgin, and so you are encountering the Virgin. Well now what if you're a Southern Californian steeped in the religious faiths of Malibu, and this happens too, you will conclude, "My God, it's a UFO!" I mean, haven't you been with people who every airplane that flies over they're willing to proclaim is an extraterrestrial intervention? It's because this explanation lies very close to the surface. When we don't know what something is, we want to know, we want to English it, we want to name it, and we grasp the nearest thing at hand. It's very important to avoid this reflex in order to see what is it really, what is it really, let it be what it is. Yeah? Four small points. On that one, I noticed I did a book in '73 on the flat earth, and I interviewed perhaps 500 people, and in a large number they start with, it's a traditional poetic joke, it's called negative parallelism, where you identify and negate, identify and negate, so it looks like a low-flying plane. No, it's too low. It looks like a semi with its out-of-order lights on, and only as the third or fourth identification, which is traditional to classic tropes of the 13th century, would they identify it as, "My God, it's a UFO." Point one. Another one, the strangest one, was an old lady in Texas, and I said, "How did you know it was a UFO?" She said, "Because it had UFO printed on the undercastle." I like that. The next one was a judge. I went down to Fascagoula, it was the Hickson and Parker. Famous case. I've got to see them again, because I want to see how they've done it. Very interesting case. And the judge and the clerk of courts and two other people were riding home during that period, and two of them in the car saw a UFO, and the others couldn't see it. So let's say one saw it because the antique drop was on the plane, another was his clerk and decided he'd better see it, and the other two were just strangers. Last point. There's a guy called Orfeo Angelucci, who was an early contactee, who gave me a useful handle on kind of talk about working the edges. He was out and he met the captain of the ship, and the ship's captain said during the interview, "Why don't you go and get me a bottle of soda pops?" And then they went on with their event. So I began looking for what I called soda pop factors, whether it was an element or more than one element, absolutely unrelated to the story, that was somehow a touch of human... An intrusion. Intrusion, yes. Let me say one thing about it. You don't even have to be cynical to the point of believing in the Pascagoulas situation, that the second guy saw the UFO because he was the clerk. These drug molecules have resonant rings. They are aromatics. It may be that there's a pheromone thing happening here, and that a state of mind can be transferred from one person to another through body odor. This may be how the states of telepathy are achieved on psilocybin, because you do smell funny, and this smell may be more than funny. It may be carrying information. There's a very interesting phenomenon that is well documented called allophrenia. Do you all know what allophrenia is? Allophrenia is when a friend of yours gets put in the hospital for schizophrenia, and you, being a good Samaritan, decide to take them a box of candy, and during the visit to your friend, you behave so bizarrely that you don't get to leave the hospital. Allophrenia, schizophrenic behavior on the part of non-schizophrenics in the presence of schizophrenics. I've experienced this. I had a friend. I visited him in the hospital. And the way--here's how it works. It's really interesting. I visited my friend in the hospital. He was nutty as a fruitcake, but he was my friend, and he was talking 90 to nothing, so I wanted to communicate with him. So instead of saying to every single statement he made, "I don't understand you. You're nuts. That makes no sense whatsoever," I began trying to agree with him, trying to understand him, and then it sort of got the momentum of a game going where he would say, "You know, I'm really Sir Hans Sir Hans," and I would say, "Yes, but your teacup is on backwards." And a doctor walking into this situation would have a hard time telling who's nuts and who's not. Well, was that because I decided to play along with him, or why did I decide? There was an ambiance that gave permission for erratic, irrational, peculiar behavior, and I suppose if you were borderline schizophrenic in that situation, that's all it would take to push you over the edge. I know you're probably thinking about the Cleaner CCM stuff. You told me about that yourself. I finally just recently read all those papers again, and I think you're really right, that there is some sub--it's what he calls the olfactory subconscious-- that there is perception below what is olfactorily normally perceived, and this is profound information transformation of messages that are perceived and stuff. Yeah, I think that there could be something to it. Yeah, people who study human behavior have noted that when a person enters a room full of people, unconsciously, the first thing they do is they take a deep breath. What that's doing is giving you a whole bunch of information, and you can tell. You can say, "I walked into the room and the vibes were terrible because Herbert had just slugged Alice three minutes before and everybody was freaking out about it," or, "I just walked into the room and I could tell something weird was happening, but I couldn't figure out what it was, and what it was was Alice and Fred heard me coming, so he took his hand out of her blouse as I opened the door." This kind of thing. In other words, information that is coming in through the olfactory senses. There are psychiatrists who diagnose schizophrenia by what they call the "sniff test." You know, this is one of the most subtle and difficult of all mental dysfunctions to diagnose, and some people just lean over your anterior fontanelle and take a hit and say, "Him to therapy, her to release, and him to medication," because they are confident enough that the smell will do it. There is even one theory of schizophrenia that holds that what schizophrenia is is a dysfunctional pheromone system, so that you, who are the schizophrenic, your real problem is that you smell funny, not stink. People aren't aware of that, but it's that there is something about you that causes people to treat you strangely, and you, reacting to being treated strangely by people, get weirder, and they, reacting to you getting weirder, treat you more and more strangely. So what you have here is a feedback cycle that ends with nets being dropped over you and you taken away. But the original cause was that you were giving off a chemical which made people treat you in a way that caused you to react to them adversely, and that started the cycle going. Or they say that you perceived olfactory hallucinations, not that you just smelled weirdly, but that you perceived... Oh, that you were misinterpreting incoming olfactory hallucinations. That's right, there's a whole section in the Internet that talks about olfactory hallucinations. The reason we're talking so much about this is because if you look at these pheromone molecules and lay them next to these drug molecules, it's all one family. These are all small planar molecules. There's even one area where it comes together pretty spectacularly. That is, in the pineal gland of human beings, there's a great deal of, like, something like, 12% of the brain's energy is being channeled into the pineal gland. Well, if you know anything about evolutionary theory, you know that you don't waste energy in unnecessary functions or you become extinct. So there's a reason why 12% of the brain's energy is being channeled into the pineal gland, though we don't know what it is. And then when you look at what's going on in the pineal, a neuro compound called adenoglomerotropane is being transduced by light into melatonin. Well, this compound, adenoglomerotropane, in ordinary biochemical nomenclature, is 6-methoxy-tetrahydroharmalan. It's a near relative of the compounds in the ayahuasca. Well, so then a reasonable question is to ask, well, then what's happening to all this melatonin that is being produced in the pineal? Well, then if you tag it and follow its path through the metabolic system, you discover that the stuff is making its way quite directly to the surface of the skin. And then it's volatilizing away. What's happening here? A hallucinogenic molecule is being turned into a [inaudible] in the very center of the brain, and this pheromone is then hurrying on its way to the surface of the skin where it volatilizes off and affects the ambient social environment in which you're living. This begins to look like a system of neurotransmitters and neuroregulators that operate not only within the body, but on the surface of the body and in the ambient social environment. I don't know if this relates to--I'm not a chemist or anything like that-- but there's this stuff on the market called tryptophan, I believe. Right, it's an amino acid. And it was taken off the market not too long ago. And supposedly it made your dreams more clear or more vivid, something like that. Well, it's the precursor for DMT. If you wanted to make DMT in the laboratory, tryptophan would be one of the pathways that you could start from. The reason tryptophan was taken off the market-- there was a lot of confusion initially, but it was a poisoned batch. It turned out all of the world's tryptophan was coming from one enormous stainless steel vat near Nagoya, and that it had been infected by a bacterium. And so we're stuck with the fact that tryptophan will probably never again be available in health food stores. But it wasn't tryptophan that was the coke. I knew someone whose life was completely messed up by that. From the tryptophan? From the poisoned tryptophan. From the poisoned tryptophan. So by taking the tryptophan, then it caused DMT to be more-- Well, no, saying it that way is saying too much. We don't know that. All we can say is tryptophan is an amino acid. It's used in the biosynthesis of many different compounds, including DMT. DMT peaks when dream states are peaking, and tryptophan does seem to induce deeper dreaming. That sort of correlation makes sense. It's a rational case. You know, we could sit here, sometime we could have a weekend entirely devoted to thinking of simple experiments that could be done in the laboratory with and without human beings if only these things weren't illegal. I mean, there is so much to be learned and so little work being done because it's not sanctioned. I mean, my brother is a pharmaceutical chemist, pharmacologist, plant physiologist, and his professional life is very touch and go because he's known to be a hallucinogen man, and they don't hire you, they don't publish you, they don't fund you, they don't want to know. You have to be a very dedicated person to stick with hallucinogenic chemistry when you could get over into something else and make a lot of money. So you don't see a conspiracy then with the tryptophan being taken off the market because it made dreams be more vivid. You see it as just a bad batch. I mean, I made the connection, and stop just thinking that I'm not a conspiracist, but it seemed to me awfully funny that that was taken off and being made by one batch, and that batch got tampered with or whatever. Well, there may have been some form of hanky-panky, but in all fairness, you know, there are many approaches to the synthesis of DMT. Indole is probably what most chemists would probably prefer to start from indole. And indole is an industrial precursor used in so many hundreds of ways that you could never push indole off the market. You'd have to reinvent half the pharmaceutical industry. But where I'm going with that is I'm talking about just being able to get it from a health food store. Here it was tryptophan, and it made your dreams more vivid. I don't know if that's what people are using it for. I don't think so. But here it was, so maybe they felt that people were dreaming too much, or they were having too vivid dreams that, hey, we can't have this anymore. We've got to sort of get it off the market. I think probably as long as you're asleep, they're fine about it. It's when you wake up that they get nervous. As long as you keep your eyes closed or you're glued to the boob tube, they're quite happy to minimalize you, marginalize you, and make you larval. Yes. I was thinking about this thing with the elves and so forth, and I was also thinking about it in relationship to, let's say you smoke DMT, you have the experience. You can put the term elves on them or speculate that what we have in various mythologies or thought systems, elves, refers to that. I was wondering what you think about other types of deities that people may encounter in some sort of visionary experience, either with hallucinogens or not. What do you make of that? Do you have more of an archetypal interpretation, or do you think that they exist in some hyperdimensional reality in some form? I'm just curious what you make of that. I guess I have an archetypal interpretation. I recall from some book of Robert Anton Wilson's where he suggests, he says you should pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary every day and make offerings to her and put up her picture until she appears. Then switch to Shiva and do it until Shiva appears. Then Mickey Mouse. And just keep doing this until you satisfy yourself that none of these things are more real than any other and that whatever their ontological status, they're all equal in ontological status. Apparently the human brain is far more malleable than we can conceive of or imagine. We become imprisoned within a language and an ideology, and it literally becomes our reality. And yet it isn't our reality. It's just something provisional. I've not had that experience. I prayed for years as a kid, but perhaps the agam bite of Inuit was already present in me and making it impossible for me to succeed. But in the case of the elves, there's sort of a cultural archetype of the elves, but at the same time you seem to be saying that there is a deeper reality that this is based on. Well, and the DMT elves are a lot weirder than the Disney elves. The Disney elves are really sanitized. These things are pretty frightening in a way. I mean, they are if you let yourself be frightened because they're, you can't, they want, well how can I put it, they play too rough. They are not, they are not mean, but they're not careful either. It's like hanging out with a gang, you know. As long as you're their friend, you really feel, aren't I cool, look who I'm hanging out with. But then you realize if you said the wrong word or made the wrong move, everybody would turn and look at you. I recently wrote the introduction for a new edition of Evans Vance's book, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. And if you're interested in elves, this is the book to read. You all know who Evans Vance was. He was the great Tibetologist who, as a student at Cambridge in 1913, before he went to Tibet, he did his doctoral thesis, 1913 this was, and he went around to Brittany and Wales and Ireland, to the old, old people. I don't think he talked to anybody under 80. And he said, "Tell me stories about fairies." And he collected the most amazing stories about fairies and fairy encounters. And I learned from re-reading that book that, you know the Christian notion of purgatory, which is a place where you go that is neither heaven or hell, where you do time for minor infractions and then you get moved on to heaven? This idea was created, I always assumed that it was dreamed up by some bishops of Rome, some synod or something. It was dreamed up by St. Patrick, to convert the pagan Irish, to convince them that fairyland was part of the Christian man. And he was so successful in converting the pagan Irish, that when letters went back to Rome describing how he did it, purgatory became a general doctrine of the church, and then it was used very successfully to convert the pagan Slavs. So purgatory is fairyland dressed up in Christian terminology. And what is the idea of fairyland? It's the idea that the dead live all around us, linger among us as disincarnate souls, and the fairies that Evans-Vance was describing were very ambiguous morally. I mean sometimes they would only sour the milk, but their favorite concern of fairies is, UFO freaks pay attention, stealing babies. That's what fairies like to do. I don't know about surgically ripping off fetuses, that seems to be a modern touch. But in Ireland people in the countryside do not leave babies, small babies unattended in their cribs for fear of fairy theft. And the fairies substitute. They don't just leave an empty crib. They leave a withered, strange little creature that is supposed to fool the human beings. And whenever there is a child born who is wasting and old-looking and undersized, there's always the assumption that there was a healthy baby there. But now there's been a fairy switch. Fairies respond to riddlery. This has to do with this thing about language, and the strange relationship of the Irish to intoxication, fairies, and language, suggests that here we might have a restricted gene pool that has somehow indemnified itself in the direction of these peculiar concerns. Present company accepted. What was the name of that book again? "The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries" by Evans Mann. ...at least a couple of final points, which is, you know, what is this all good for? I think what it's good for, I think the mystery that we're making our way toward, much more of which will be revealed later as we live in to the next 20 years, is that we have lost connection to a very important part of reality, which I call the Gaian mind, but which I think is more popularly understood as the goddess, goddess consciousness. But the goddess is not as envisioned by, at Ephesus, you know, a woman studded with breasts. The goddess is the living earth. It is not to be anthropomorphosed into some kind of human or quasi-human form. And when we were taking mushrooms on the plains of Africa, before the invention of agriculture, as nomads, we were rocked in the cradle of the goddess. And, you know, differences between men and women, between parents and children, between those who had much, if anybody had much, and those who had little, and between human beings and the animal and vegetable kingdom, were minimal because everything operated in the light of this reference experience, boundary dissolution and a sense of the intelligence of the earth. Now, we are so alienated from the intelligence of the earth, that when we encounter it, we assume it came from halfway across the galaxy to rescue us. It isn't from across interstellar space. It's something that is partially in ourselves and partially in the world around us. And if we could but clear the prejudices of materialism from our approach to the world, most especially from our language, which by its subject-object bias, by its linear syntax, and by God knows what else that's built into it, hopelessly precludes us from contacting this reality, if we could clear all that away, we would discover a dimension of immense support and affection for human beings and for our enterprises. But as long as we pursue the destruction of the earth and the elaboration of materialist ideology and the suppression of psychedelic states and the suppression of the feminine, we are going to be alienated, feel abandoned, and operate in an ambiance of rampant pathology. So, to my mind, the hallucinogens are a call to return to the archaic style, to recapture the tools, techniques, languages, and attitudes that existed and flourished on this planet before A.D. 10,000. And we must do this. If we don't do this, then we are setting ourselves up for a very unhappy future. We are living in a very unhappy world. Maybe your world is not unhappy, but tell that in Bosnia, tell it in Somalia, tell it to the AIDS-infected masses of Africa. The apocalypse is no longer a rumor. It's arrived in many parts of the world. And we, as the children, the inheritors of the culture which created this catastrophe, and as the people who are still living on high ground, as the waters of poverty, epidemic disease, and misery rise ever higher, have a certain obligation to respond to this. Moral decency demands it. And we can no longer tolerate the evolution of consciousness, the exploration of our relationships to each other, and the source of meaning itself, to be regulated, stigmatized, and degraded by the most frightened, the least educated, the least balanced, and the least caring among us. And this is what we've got at the present moment. The male dominator mentality is in the process of running us and all life on this planet into extinction. I don't have answers. That must be clear by now. I have questions and offered techniques, and there's nothing new about these techniques. They have been around for a hundred thousand years, and for 90,000 of those hundred thousand years, they worked very well. And we existed in harmony with the rest of nature, fully human, fully able to philosophize, argue, love, riddle, perform theater, make masks, so forth and so on. But in the last 10,000 years, we have fallen into a pathology, because the umbilical connection to the mind in nature has been severed, lost, pissed away, ignored, degraded, turned away from. It is a psychedelic relationship to these plants. Without that, you are not yourself. Without that, you are half human. And this is how we behave. We behave as though we have a soul, but it's stapled in Yeats' immensely compelling phrase, "to the body of a dying animal." This needs to be corrected, reconstructed, addressed. Otherwise, we are going to go into the books, if there are books, and into the cosmic record, which there surely is a cosmic record, as jerks, lame, didn't get it, couldn't put it together. And this would be a terrible legacy, because we are not going into these crises in a state of total anesthesia. We have the answers. We have the political machinery to do something about this. We have the sense of crisis. We have the goodwill and affection for each other. But we are somehow unable to put all this together in a configuration that would allow us to change our minds, admit that history was a bad idea, that science betrayed us, that it's a tale told by an idiot, and to strike out in a new direction. We are like the frog in the proverbial pot who never moves as the temperature climbs toward the boiling point. Sooner or later, you have to just get up on your hind legs and say, "Enough already!" Now, maybe this is beginning to happen, and maybe it isn't, but it's not for us to judge as spectators at a hockey game. It's for us to get in and roll up our sleeves and participate in. Do what you think is right. Think about what you think is right, and once you've thought about it, then do it. And it doesn't have to fit in with my program or my agenda. I have a deep and abiding faith that Mother Nature will sort out the options, and from the offerings of all of us, select those that will be salvational and solitary for all the rest of us. But if you don't act, you didn't participate. I mean, this is not a roadshow, you know. It's your life, your planet, your world, and the tools to reclaim it are present at hand. You've heard this now. Now you have to ask yourself, "What are you going to do about it?" That's really all I have to say as we're finished here. So thank you very much. [Applause] [Music] I've got some news for you about the reality of the universe you're living in. 'Cause there ain't no line separating you from everything that you see. Just release your mind and the big design and the truth will set you free. I'll tell you inner and outer space are exactly the same, yeah. You know we all hear those voices speaking inside of our brain, yeah. And then we might have to redefine what's considered insane, yeah. When inner and outer space are exactly the same, uh-huh, uh-huh. Now for all you people who think it makes any sense to keep on building bombs. Don't you think it's time we direct our attention to the brain behind the gun? 'Cause all that destructive energy was spawned from a spark in our mind. When we learn to tap the true source of power, there's no limit to the love we'll find. Inner and outer space are exactly the same, yeah. I said we all hear those voices speaking inside of our brain, yeah. When we might have to redefine what's considered insane, 'cause we live in a crazy world. I said inner and outer space are exactly the same. ♪ Inner and outer space, second sense of outer space ♪ ♪ Inner and outer space, space, space ♪ ♪ Inner and outer space, space, space, space, space ♪ ♪ Inner and ou-- ♪ (applause) [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 1.80 sec Decoding : 1.67 sec Transcribe: 4106.79 sec Total Time: 4110.25 sec