Welcome to an evening with Terrence McKenna,
 Unfolding the Stone, Making and Unmaking History and Language,
 being held Saturday, June 1st, 1991 in Los Angeles.
 This is tape TMK 91-1, tape one of a two-tape set.
 Just a couple of announcements.
 Lux Natura is being phased out slowly,
 so if there's anything that you people want, that they have,
 tonight's the night to get it, because it's all here in one place at one time.
 It will still be available through your normal channels,
 but this is the time to get it.
 Also, conference recorders are here,
 and they're doing duplications of this talk on site.
 He's an old friend of all of ours, so I'd like you all to welcome Timothy Leary.
 [Applause]
 I, for one, am overjoyed to be here.
 [Applause]
 This is one of those special, special evenings that we will all treasure.
 You know, as soon as I drove to that parking lot,
 and I saw people getting out of the car,
 many of whom were still carrying uniforms
 and dazed expressions of grateful deadheads.
 [Laughter]
 How many people were at the Dead concert? Yeah!
 And they're coming over later. They're just ending now,
 so believe me, we'll have an infusion of wildness there.
 Terrence McKenna means a great deal to me.
 I would say he's one of the five or six most important people on the planet.
 [Applause]
 I can't even think of any others.
 [Laughter]
 Short-term memory loss, but...
 [Laughter]
 I was talking... Oh, by the way, I should tell you,
 Terrence and I keep meeting in the most wonderful, mythic, adventurous places.
 I was doing a wild tour through Germany about, oh, a year ago,
 and we came to Heidelberg, and we were being guested by some people
 that came right out of Hermann Hesse.
 I mean, wizards and gnomes and, you know, that sort of thing.
 Heidelberg.
 And there in a restaurant, while I was having a sandwich
 before performing with some cybernetic people,
 there was Terrence McKenna, and it was just so perfectly Hesse,
 Journey to the East.
 And so we meet again here tonight.
 You know, I was talking to Terrence backstage before we began,
 and we both agree that what he will be saying tonight
 has been said over and over again at all those high moments in human history
 when those who have gone within and understood about the brain
 and the inner treasures, we all come back and pretty much say the same thing.
 The problem is, though, that once you say it, you know,
 you can't go on saying it and saying it and saying it.
 And when Terrence came along a few years ago and was saying what I'd been trying to say,
 but naturally better, upgraded, up to date,
 I was so overwhelmed with gratitude, and I publicly thank you for that, Terrence.
 [Applause]
 By the way, the role that Terrence is playing right now
 is one that takes not only vision, but it also takes fucking courage.
 [Applause]
 We were saying backstage that Terrence and I are a small group of philosophers
 who make our living not in the ivory tower, if you call it living,
 but just speaking it, chatting it, raving it, ranting it,
 and no one has ever done it with more poetry and elegance than the speaker tonight.
 I'm going to say one more thing, and then we will have what we've all been waiting for.
 Terrence reminds us that all human wisdom, all energy,
 comes from our beloved, synergetic partners, the vegetable queendom.
 It all comes from the plants.
 Now, round of applause to the vegetables.
 [Applause]
 Now, we all know that the human body, we have to have food.
 It comes from vegetables.
 We have used vegetables over the years, the essence of vegetables,
 in the form of wood to develop fire, gas, oil, and so forth.
 Oil, by the way, is the number one crack addiction of the modern industrial society.
 But what we forget, and what we look to Terrence for tonight,
 is to be reminded that plants have given us an even more important gift.
 They give us the gift of vision.
 They give us the illumination.
 And throughout human history, there are the eaves and the pandoras.
 Usually, it's a woman who takes this wonderful vegetable
 and gives it to humanity and says, "Be illuminated."
 And now, for our illumination and our pleasure,
 please join me in welcoming Terrence McKenna.
 [Applause]
 Good job.
 [Applause]
 Well, I want to thank Tim.
 That was a wonderful introduction.
 I'm sure I wouldn't--I know I wouldn't be here tonight if it weren't for Tim Leary.
 He was the pathfinder.
 He cut the way through the woods.
 He gave us all permission to be very much the people that we are tonight.
 And it's wonderful that one Irishman can hand it on to another
 and that we can keep it in the bardic tradition.
 Before I get started, I want to thank a number of people
 who put a lot of energy into this event to make it go.
 Steve Marshank promoted and organized this.
 He's been at it for months and months.
 Roy, Roy Tuckman, Roy of Hollywood, and Diane--
 [Applause]
 They have supported me and given generously of hundreds and hundreds of hours of their time
 to put these psychedelic ideas across.
 Believe me, you hang your ass out to dry when you take this position.
 Tim mentioned courage.
 Nobody has had the kind of courage that Roy and Diane have had
 to push that message into this town.
 So we salute them.
 [Applause]
 And Eric Alley did the wonderful poster.
 He's done them for these events for years.
 He's a beautiful artist.
 Christian Duffy and Jim Essex are here to see that you find your seat and stay in it.
 And we thank them for that.
 And last and certainly most importantly, Cat Harrison McKenna,
 my partner in building the dream of Botanical Dimensions.
 I sit up here and take the limelight and the glory.
 Cat, who fashioned Botanical Dimensions into the functioning entity that it is,
 she manages it from day to day.
 We had a $51,000 balloon payment that I talked to you about in Port Hueneme.
 It's paid off. It's finished.
 The land in Hawaii will forever be dedicated to the preservation of plants
 with medical significance and significance to the human family.
 And that credit all goes to Cat.
 So let's hear it for her.
 [Applause]
 And that brings me to, for those of you who haven't followed this so closely,
 to pointing out that this is a benefit for Botanical Dimensions.
 That's why it was $17 plus a pop.
 And what is Botanical Dimensions?
 It's a small response on our part to a major problem.
 You all know that the rainforests of the world are disappearing at a tragic rate.
 And maybe that process can be halted through pressure on the World Bank
 and the International Monetary Fund and these enormous international agencies.
 But whether or not the clearing of the rainforest is halted,
 the loss of folk medicinal knowledge on the part of these tribal societies
 that have lived in balance and equilibrium and respect with nature for millennia,
 that is tragically going.
 There's no question about it, because you can't put people into a museum diorama
 and ask them to parade around in jockstraps while the rest of us drive BMWs.
 They move into the cities.
 These people work in the sawmills.
 They take jobs in the tourist industry.
 And 25,000, 50,000 years of medical knowledge is lost.
 And Tim did homage to the vegetables.
 Even in today's high-tech world, fully 75% of all the drugs,
 prescription drugs, other kinds of drugs on the market, above ground, underground,
 come from plants.
 This is a priceless reservoir of complex chemistry,
 but it's meaningless unless the human experiences, the human lore is preserved.
 And this is what Botanical Dimensions is about.
 We have collectors in Peru, in other parts of the world,
 and we bring seeds, rootstock, living plants to Hawaii,
 and there these things are grown, as in a living library,
 toward the day when a more enlightened society will have the wisdom
 and the good sense to team up with the vegetable world
 and create a more humane medicine, a more humane religion
 that has some real life and light in it.
 So that's what we're doing out there.
 Any help any of you can give us, we're deeply appreciative.
 Spread the word.
 Since we began this project, many imitators have sprung up,
 and this was our intent and our hope, and great good work is being done.
 So please support the conservation of folk, botanical, and medical knowledge.
 [Applause]
 So then before I dig into this, let me just explain how it'll work.
 I'll talk for a while, then there'll be an intermission,
 and then we'll come back and given however much time is left over,
 there'll be a Q&A and we'll have a mic for you to line up behind.
 Okay. All right.
 First of all, thank you all for being here.
 I know we're up against the Grateful Dead, my favorite band.
 I'm going to quote them repeatedly.
 It's a thousand to one chance that this would happen,
 and it just shows the world is stranger than you can suppose.
 [Laughter]
 The name of this talk is "Unfolding the Stone,"
 and I wanted to talk about this.
 It's a departure for me because I think we've just been through a real hammering over the past ten months.
 I mean, if you've still got your optimism intact, and believe me, I do, you've been through the fire.
 This has not been an easy ten months for the people of this planet or the planet itself.
 And so I want to sort of reach back tonight and invoke a vanished tradition,
 get to the heart of it, and try to show how we can bring this forward in our lives
 to empower hope in the most dark of situations,
 and in fact, to even make these dark situations the raw material of a clearer, stronger hope
 than might ordinarily be the case.
 A few days ago I was talking to a friend of mine,
 and he wanted to tell me the story of sitting in the presence of a 104-year-old Vietnamese monk.
 And the guy had basically kept his mouth shut, the monk,
 hadn't said much around the monastery where he just sort of cleans up,
 but then he announced he wanted to talk about meditation.
 And he opened his remarks by saying, "We are all luminous beings.
 Why then do we not appear before each other radiant in our illumination?"
 And this is the conundrum of life. This is the problem.
 It was T.S. Eliot who said, "Between the idea and the reality,
 between the motion and the act, falls the shadow."
 And why is that?
 As psychedelic people, this is the problem that we grapple with in our own lives,
 and when we look out at the world, you've heard me say many times,
 "We have the vision, we have the money, we have the technology,
 but why can we not then appear before each other as radiantly luminous beings?
 And why cannot we reclaim our planet from toxification, disease, overpopulation, bonehead politics?"
 You know the list. What's the hang-up here? What is the problem?
 Why is perfection so distant?
 Well, what I've learned from life and vegetables and travel and books
 can be summed up in two Greek words.
 It's the central message of the philosopher Heraclitus,
 and he was always my favorite philosopher, but whenever I would read about him,
 he was called "the crying philosopher."
 And I had to live to be 44 years old to understand the poignancy of Heraclitus' message.
 He said in a nutshell, "Pante rea," all flows, all flows, nothing lasts, nothing is permanent.
 And this is the hardest message life has to teach,
 because what it says is your joy is transient, your anguish is transient,
 your fortune, your home, your dream, your moments of great ecstasy,
 your moments of great insight, your moments of great empowerment,
 everything is flowing through your hands at the moment that you are aware of it.
 William Blake, who in a way set this engine going a couple of centuries ago,
 said, "What is the price of experience?
 Is it bought for a song or wisdom for a dance in the street?
 No, it is bought with all that a man has, his wife, his home, his children."
 Now, this is not a pessimistic message, and William Blake was not a pessimistic guy.
 He was the same guy who told us that if we could but cleanse the doors of perception,
 we would perceive the world as it is, infinite in a grain of sand.
 How can we take this poignancy, this sense of impermanence,
 and weld it into something which is paradoxically indestructible,
 and has meaning in our lives, and gives us not only the strength to carry on,
 but the power to be exemplars, the power to stand up before other people,
 and let them then feel the power of vision in the paradox of permanence,
 in the face of the need for indestructibility.
 Well, to answer that question, I felt that we had to leave the narrow confines of 20th century thinking,
 and we had to reach back into the byways of human thought
 that have been, by most of us, somewhat passed over and forgotten,
 because after all, modern life makes great demands on us.
 It's enough to just keep your checkbook balanced and your insurance paid.
 We can't all spend our time delving in the libraries of the noetic, and gnostic, and hermetic, and magical traditions.
 But I thought it was worthwhile to talk to you about this tonight,
 because we have been through such a difficult ten months.
 And it was also Heraclitus, the all-flows guy, who said, "All is war. All is war."
 And what he meant was, everything occurs in the presence of its opposite,
 and out of that, there is generated the friction, the heat, and the light
 that all comes together in an indissoluble package as part of life.
 So what I want to talk to you about tonight, and how it relates to unfolding the stone,
 is the notion of alchemy of all things.
 Alchemy, as I'm sure many of you know, is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.
 But many of you may imagine that alchemy is simply a discredited,
 pre-scientific obsession of unbalanced minds, interested in changing base metals into gold,
 lead into the stuff of commerce.
 This is the benighted reputation that alchemy has acquired in a century,
 so given over to the literal and the material and the non-spiritual, that it's lost all touch
 with the adumbrations of meaning that vibrate behind the perceptions of the alchemist.
 The central conception of alchemy is the conception of the philosopher's stone.
 What is it? It's the universal panacea at the end of time.
 It's the chocolate cake that your mother made once a week when you were a child,
 the panis supersubstantialis. It's all things to all men and all women.
 If you are hungry, you eat it. If you're dirty, you shower under it.
 If you need to go somewhere, you sit on it and you fly there.
 If you have a question, it answers it.
 It's something that the human mind senses in itself and related to, invoked,
 worshipped over centuries before the slow rise of the patriarchy and rationalism
 and materialism turned it into a myth, a fairy tale.
 It is not a myth or a fairy tale. It is the burning primary reality
 that lies behind the dross of appearances.
 Alchemy is based on a philosophy called hermeticism that was developed
 in the first and second centuries by Gnostic thinkers, Greeks, Jews,
 people inside the Roman Empire as it was beginning to show the first signs
 of degradation and decay who felt a profound disaffection with their world,
 a disaffection that on the scale of those times was as profound
 as our own existential disaffection.
 And the hermetic philosophers drew back from the rise of Christianity
 with its doctrine of the fall of man and original sin and the stain of Adam and Eve
 and that whole thing and took a different tack and made two points
 which I think we need to recover and live out for ourselves.
 And the first point was that man, which means men and women, human beings,
 are divine beings, not lower than the angels, higher than the angels.
 The message of the alchemical and hermetic thinkers and the corpus hermeticum
 actually uses the phrase, "Man is God's brother."
 We have no idea what it would mean in our own lives if we could throw off
 the notion of ourselves as fallen beings.
 We are not fallen beings.
 When you take into your life the gnosis of the light-filled vegetables,
 the psychedelic plants that have stabilized the sane societies of this world for millennia,
 the first message that comes to you is you are a divine being.
 You matter. You count.
 You come from realms of unimaginable power and light,
 and you will return to those realms.
 The second point that these philosophers wanted to make was that fate can be overcome.
 Fate can be overcome.
 Now, for the Greco-Hellenic world, what that meant was the starry engines
 of the machinery of fate that they saw strewn across the night sky
 because they were intensely aware of the power of the zodiac,
 the stellar shells inhabited by demons that extended out to the unimaginable imperium
 of the All-Father that was beyond fate.
 And into that world of astrological fatedness, which is such a strong idea for the Greek mind,
 the philosophists announced fate can be overcome.
 And they had a novel answer for how this could be done.
 It can be done through magic, a word not often enough heard in the present world.
 The overcoming of fate is achieved through magic,
 and then the stellar machinery becomes not an invasive force into one's life,
 but an empowering force.
 Now, some of us may believe in astrology, and some of us may not.
 We are all strongly influenced by the notion of fate, of our powerlessness.
 In an existential world, Jean-Paul Sartre said, "Nature is mute."
 And we, embedded in the media-dense, message-dense, programming-dense matrix
 of these hyper-societies that we have created,
 often feel, I think, like hapless atoms, running endlessly
 according to the blueprints and programs of unseen masters,
 whether it's the banking industry, Madison Avenue, whoever.
 We tend to disempower ourselves.
 We tend to believe that we don't matter.
 And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves,
 we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.
 So, the rebirth of a sense of the stone and its possibility within each of us
 entails these two ideas, our divinity and our power to overcome fate.
 There is no inevitability in our lives
 unless we submit to the idea of inevitability,
 and then give ourselves over to it.
 Okay.
 I wish there were more jokes, but it's just been such a tough go.
 It's been a tough go, I have to tell you.
 Where can we look in the world to see some confirmation of what I'm saying?
 How can we draw it down from being, you know,
 an airy-fairy wrath of a bardic Irishman?
 Well, I think that the place to look is history.
 Now, if you go to the academies, to those ivory towers that Tim was talking about,
 and ask, "What is history?"
 they will tell you that it's a random walk, an endlessly pointless fluctuation.
 Empires rise and fall, migrations of people come and go,
 that it is essentially meaningless.
 I don't believe this.
 I don't even think there's strong evidence for it,
 because what I perceive when I look at the world,
 not only the world of history, but the world of nature,
 out of which history has emerged,
 I see novelty, something wonderful, maddening, paradoxical,
 and ever-increasing, ever more conserved.
 Every iota of novelty that comes into existence is somehow saved and passed on.
 That's why when we walk or drive down Melrose, we see Egyptian fashion motifs,
 we see fashion statements drawn from the 14th century, the 2nd century,
 Assyria, Egypt, Angkor Wat,
 all of the novelty of history coalesces in the living moment.
 It's always been that way.
 Every society in the moment of its existence has lived as a resonance,
 a completion, and a distillation, good alchemical word,
 a distillation of what has proceeded before.
 And so the alchemical idea that spirit can be redeemed from matter
 begins to get teeth when you connect the idea of spirit up to the idea of novelty,
 which has not ordinarily been done.
 But novelty is the life of the party,
 and the life of the party is to be high-spirited.
 And this is what we need to focus on as the thread in the dark labyrinth
 of the prison of the material world that can lead us back to the light.
 The universe is an engine for the production of novelty.
 It always has been since the first moment of the Big Bang 20, 25 billion years ago.
 Simpler states have been replaced by more complex states,
 which have then set the stage for yet greater complexity.
 Well, the drift of this then is that the emergence of language and tools and culture
 and higher ideals like courage and love and self-sacrifice,
 these are not flukes, sports, mistakes.
 These are further steps along the way in the process of the great alchemical furnace of being,
 heating and casting and dissolving and recasting and purifying and recasting alchemical gold.
 And so hard as the world may appear, dark as the hour may appear,
 in reality we exist in a dimension of greater opportunity,
 greater freedom, greater possibility than has ever been.
 The challenge then is to not drop the ball, is to know this and to act on it
 and to slough off all the leeches and backhandlers and weasels and crypto-fascists
 who want to deny that and turn man into a machine for their own purposes.
 Alchemy has always perceived this and has delineated stages in the transformational process.
 And these stages are worth talking about, not in the details, but in the two bipolar states which define this.
 They used a bastard Latin and they called them the negrito and the albedo.
 The negrito is the precondition for transformation.
 And what is it? It's shit. It's detritus. It's flotsam. It's debris.
 It's being HIV positive. It's being deep into your fourth marriage and sinking fast.
 It's bankruptcy. It's serum hepatitis.
 It's the inevitable dark night of the soul that comes upon us.
 And these dark nights of the soul come upon all of us.
 Nobody gets through this world without a little dung raining down on them, believe me.
 I mean, you may evade it for decades, but then there will be a knock on the door.
 You know, it's said that the millstones of fate grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.
 So what do we do with that?
 Well, the answer is we welcome it.
 This is what the alchemists awaited.
 The negrito, the primamateria, the dark matter, the chaos, the chaos that is the precondition then for redemption.
 And God knows we've got lots of chaos right now.
 I mean, we have war, famine, revolution, millions of homeless people on the move.
 The nation state is dissolving.
 The relief agencies of the world can't keep up.
 The various secret societies, mafias and cabals that have always tried to tie us into chains, they're all working overtime.
 We are in the negrito condition.
 Hallelujah.
 This means, this means that the kissing has to stop, but the fun can begin, the real fun.
 The other end of this bipolar condition in alchemy was called the albedo or albedo,
 depending on whether or not you came from a coal mining town in Colorado like I did.
 The albedo, the whitening.
 And that means that out of the chaos can come a new beginning, a new reality, a new hope.
 And then the process is one of, and you see these alchemists existed in a philosophically more naive, we quote, more naive world than we do.
 So they actually projected onto the processes of matter their own interior psychic condition.
 So they did work with matter and fire and furnaces and retorts.
 And what they would do is they would take the primal materia, lead or excrement or something else,
 and then they would heat it and turn it to ash and then calcinate the ash or pour solvents through the ash and get an extract and then heat that and sublimate it.
 And out of this, almost as a footnote, came modern chemistry.
 But that was not the important side of it.
 The important side of it was that they were projecting mental states onto the swirling retorts of their laboratory.
 It was like a magical mirror for them.
 It was in fact, dare we say the P word, it was psychedelic.
 What psychedelic means is getting your mind out in front of you by whatever means necessary so that you can relate to it as a thing in the world and then work upon it.
 So from the negrito to the albedo, there were a series of these stages.
 Now I said a few minutes ago that magic was the key.
 And by magic, I mean the reclaiming and the reconstruction of language to a sufficient degree that it becomes at first possible, then probable, then inevitable to each one of us that miracles can happen.
 Miracles can happen.
 The Grateful Dead have a song, "We need a miracle every day."
 We do need a miracle every day.
 Well, is that too tall an order?
 I don't think so.
 I don't think so.
 Years ago, one of these talking vegetables said to me, said, "Mind conjures miracles out of time."
 Out of time.
 Time is the prime material on which the alchemical process works.
 The alchemists, again in their naive way, believed that precious metals, diamonds, gold, sapphires actually grew in the earth because for this alchemical point of view, everything was a lie.
 And my friend Rupert Sheldrake is leading the charge to create a new birth of that perception inside science.
 The idea that nature, all of nature, is alive.
 Not simply organic cellular nature, but that the earth itself is a living being.
 So, mind conjures miracles out of time.
 And the proof that this can be done, and it's an incontrovertible proof, and I defy any naysayer or bring down to overcome it, is ourselves.
 We are the proof that mind can conjure miracles out of time.
 If it weren't for us, there would just be birds and foxes and coral reefs and glaciers.
 But nature was not content with that level of novelty.
 A million years ago, a hundred thousand years ago, nature grew discontented and said, you know, "Let's raise the ante.
 Let's go to higher stakes poker in this planetary game.
 Let the monkeys speak.
 Let them build fires.
 Let them elaborate tools.
 Let them march forward onto the stage of creation."
 And remember, I said the hermetic faith was that humankind could act as the brothers and sisters of God.
 Not moats in God's creation, but co-partners in the invocation out of being of yet greater novelty.
 Why?
 For play.
 For fun.
 Just the cosmic madness of it all.
 The pure cussedness of it all.
 To raise the stakes higher and higher and higher.
 Now, I keep going back to this thing of "Can it be done?"
 Because I want to convince you, because I'm so certain.
 I love Herman Melville and his rhetoric.
 And friends of the whale, bear with me.
 For Herman Melville, the whale was not the endangered creature it is today.
 It was the dark cosmic God of Christianity that haunts us and tries to pull us down.
 And there's a wonderful speech in Moby Dick where Starbuck, the first mate, you remember, wimpy little Starbuck.
 He stood for Christian right reason.
 And he says to Captain Ahab, "To seek revenge on a dumb brute seems blasphemy."
 And Ahab says, "Blasphemy, Starbuck?
 Speak not to me of blasphemy.
 I would strike out the sun if it insulted me.
 For could it do that?
 Then could I do the other?
 There is ever a sort of fair play."
 And that's the point of that rap.
 There is a sort of fair play.
 You've been told from the cradle that the deck was stacked against you.
 Fall of man, original sin, so forth and so on.
 It's bullshit.
 It's absolute bullshit.
 There is a sort of fair play.
 And if you can get in touch with that in your life, you know, when Mohammed wouldn't come to the mountain,
 the mountain came to Mohammed.
 That's fair play.
 And if you can have that perception, the world will begin to work for you.
 It will begin to move toward you as the mountain moved toward Mohammed.
 The mushroom said to me once, "Nature loves courage.
 Nature loves courage."
 And I said, "What's the payoff on that?"
 And it said, "It shows you that it loves courage because it will remove obstacles.
 You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.
 You dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under.
 It will lift you up."
 This is the trick.
 This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted,
 who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood.
 This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall.
 This is how magic is done.
 By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering that it's a feather bed.
 And there's no other way to do it.
 This is why I have always taken the position that as modern people, you know,
 we can't go out and set armies marching or launch religions and who would want to anyhow.
 But to the people who say adventure has fled, it's all humdrum.
 I just know, you know, that they have forgotten the five grams of psilocybin sitting in their refrigerator.
 I mean, Magellan may have had excitement rounding the horn,
 but you in your living room later tonight can put him in the shade if you have the courage to do the things that are necessary to do.
 And we know what they are.
 And of course, the first thing to do is to tell society to fuck off because they don't know what's going on.
 This is a matter between the person and the plant.
 And all the detritus of history, all the games that people have tried to lay on you.
 You know, they just want to get you down in the ditch that they're in.
 We know this because aboriginal societies have never broken the faith.
 The living gnosis is still there.
 Not for people who paint themselves blue and dance around buck naked, but for us as well.
 But it takes an act of courage, not a weekend at Esalen, not a trip to the ashram where they tell you that if you'll sweep up for a dozen years,
 then they'll hand on a whammy.
 No, the speed with which you can reach death is under 45 seconds if you know where the elevator shaft is.
 And you do.
 You do.
 I don't have to tell you.
 I've been telling you.
 Well, so there's one more alchemical metaphor or stage that I want to mention here because I think it refers to this psychedelic possibility.
 Not all the alchemists included this stage in their recensions of the work.
 But for me, I think it's central.
 Again, in their church, bastardized church Latin, they called it the cow of the peacocks tail.
 Now, the physical basis of this is if you've ever played around with metal and fire,
 you know that there are certain metals that when they pass through a certain temperature range, iridescent colors play across the surface and sometimes even freeze.
 And in the glazing of pottery at low temperatures in Raku, what these pottery masters are aiming for are these wonderful iridescent surfaces that play across the glaze
 and then can be frozen into it.
 Well, this is the peacock's tail.
 And in alchemy, this was thought to precede the final whitening, the passage into the pure, the goal, really.
 And rather than see the present world as exclusively a veil of tears and the black prison, and none of these metaphors are mutually exclusive.
 You see, the alchemists, the great strength of alchemical thinking and the way in which it is completely antithetical to science.
 And in fact, why science has so much contempt for it is because the alchemists have the wisdom to see that everything occurs in the presence of its opposite.
 That it's not either or, it's both and.
 They call this the coincidencia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites, the union of opposites.
 This is a great truth, because I think all of us live under the rubrics of am I good, am I bad, am I lazy, am I obsessed?
 And the answer is that it is never one or the other.
 It does a tremendous injustice to being to ignore the union of opposites.
 Now science in order to do its work, which is essentially a technological work, not a deep philosophical work.
 It's a minor art science.
 That's all it is.
 It's a minor art.
 It's the art of the physically possible.
 But it has presumed to be the arbiter of all thought, all feeling, all worth.
 My God, the hubris of Rene Descartes to divide the world into the primary and secondary qualities.
 And what are the primary qualities?
 Motion, mass, spin, momentum.
 And what are the secondary qualities?
 Color, feeling, taste, tactility.
 It tells you that you're nothing.
 You never touch reality.
 You live in that world of sense and therefore can only aspire to the real world through some kind of mathematical disembowelment of your own, what your own body, what your own feelings are telling you.
 So in the Caldecavones, the peacock's tail, this is where the contradictions meet and generate heat and light and an excruciating sense of poignancy and meaning and identity.
 And our world, as we experience it tonight, is quintessentially, another good alchemical word, is quintessentially that coincidencia appositorum.
 Now, where do we meet this most dramatically in our own lives?
 I think we meet it in the phenomenon of birth.
 If you had just parked your flying saucer in the bushes and came from a world where sexuality was unknown and people were grown in vats or something,
 and you came upon a woman in the act of giving birth, it would appear to be a catastrophe in progress, a tragedy at the limit of tragedy.
 Blood is being shed.
 Anguish is on the surface.
 Real agony pervades the situation.
 And yet, and yet, nature in her wisdom has bound pain and ecstasy, death and completion, regeneration and dissolution into that experience in such an indissoluble fashion that no woman can miss the point.
 No woman can miss the point.
 Unfortunately, men have traditionally averted their eyes.
 This has gone on in a hut at the edge of the village.
 Nobody wanted to be there.
 Maybe the shaman would be there, but he was loaded in order to be there.
 And the mystery of mysteries goes on outside the sight of men.
 Now, in our world, we are caught in this kind of metaphor. A cosmic birth, a birth of planetary scale is underway.
 There is agony.
 There is no doubt about it.
 I remember an embryologist who once taught me pointed out that the fetus in the womb is literally sculpted by the hand of death, that the immature hand of the fetal organism is a webbed claw,
 and that it isn't that the flesh retracts to form the human hand, it's that the cells in between die and slough off into the amniotic fluid and are carried away.
 The fetal child is literally sculpted into life by the hand of death.
 And our world is in this kind of a circumstance.
 There are no rational solutions at this point.
 We are now in the hands of the miracle makers, the shamans, the mind of the planet, the life of the ocean, and the atmosphere.
 And it's going to get tougher.
 And so we have to forge the indestructible adamantine stone of alchemical hope, because heavier challenges lie ahead.
 A hundred years from now, two hundred years from now, I cannot but imagine that this planet will be empty of human beings.
 Not because we have become extinct, but because we have gone to our fate.
 And it's unimaginable at this moment, because we are in the planetary birth canal.
 We are at the peak of transition right now, and the walls are literally closing in.
 We are being suffocated.
 We are fighting like a strangled man to try and save ourselves.
 And yet we have to believe, and I invite you to educate yourself about the history of the planet.
 There is no reason not to believe that we will come through.
 We will come through.
 There is light at the end of the tunnel.
 There is a meaning to history, but it's an alchemical meaning.
 History is a vast alchemical engine for the forging of an alchemical humanity.
 And I don't have the answers, believe me.
 I don't know whether we go to another star, whether we become eight angstroms high and all live in a block of metal underneath Mount Everest,
 whether we march off to the heart of the sun.
 The scenarios are endless, because the human imagination has such a power to bootstrap itself to higher and higher levels.
 What would Paleolithic man have made of the religion of pharaonic Egypt?
 What would the pharaohs have made of the engines of war and hydraulic machinery created by the Romans?
 What would the Gothic scholastic enlightenment have made of the age of cybernetics, psychedelics, and virtual reality?
 The imagination is the alchemical deus ex machina that can lift us out of time, out of the negrado of history, and into higher and higher and higher states of being.
 Now, there is no reason to simply then ride along in this process, because another perception of the alchemist that is central to getting this all lined up so that it works is the idea of the macrocosm and the microcosm.
 What does that mean?
 It means that the world truly is fractal in the most profound sense, meaning that what is going on on some very large scale is condensed, intensified, and recapitulated on smaller scales,
 so that the dynamics of a love affair are the dynamics of an empire. Both are the dynamics of the evolution, expansion, and extinction of a species.
 There is only one way that things can happen, and whether we're talking about microphysical events or the life of an entire solar system, the curve of binding energy is going to be the same.
 And that means that this redemption of spirit from matter, that is the historical process that we are embedded in, we can do our part by working on our small section of this, which is our self.
 This is why alchemy was so fascinating to the Jungian psychologists, because they saw that this work of redeeming spirit from matter is nothing more than the work of redeeming the self from the contaminated dross of the traumatized and damaged psyche
 that we each inherit from our passage through the parental shit pile.
 We each have that gift to deal with. That negrado is within ourselves, and this is why we're in therapy, and this is why we take psychedelics and meditate or do whatever we do,
 because we all have this dross within us, and this is a great gift. It means that we can begin consciously the process of distillation and sublimation and casting of ourselves into that golden being,
 that luminous creature that this 104-year-old Vietnamese monk sensed and evoked to my friend.
 But it's more than that. We do that alchemical work to perfect our own sense of the union of opposites, our own sense of the presence of the living alchemical stone within, in order that we may then participate, act in, and be part of the transformation of the planet.
 And it is an immense transformation, and there is no reason to doubt it, because the emergence of organic life from what preceded it is as dramatic a miracle as anyone could imagine.
 The emergence of language from mute bestiality, which is only a hundred thousand years in the past, is as dramatic a miracle as anyone could imagine.
 The emergence of a planet instantaneously unified by electricity and media is, and this is only 50, 60 years in our past, it's still going on, is as dramatic a miracle as anyone could imagine.
 It's absolutely irrational to not be filled with the fire of consuming hope. You just have to overcome the leveling that we inherit from these empty, existential, scientific ideas.
 And when we do that, and lift our eyes to the real, living, spiritually empowered reality that exists in nature, in society, in our lover, in ourselves,
 then you see that the peacock's tail, the cauda pavonis, is a transcendental object at the end of time, an enormous, unspeakable something that beckons across the historical landscape,
 that casts an enormous shadow, that reaches clear back to the earliest moments of the universe, that we have always been in the grip of that iridescent, strange attractor.
 It has propelled our poetry, our art, our best moments, have always been when a tiny scintilla, another good alchemical word, a tiny spark of that alchemical completion
 burned for a moment in our mind, in our life, in our perception. And we occupy a special position in regard to this.
 Millions, thousands of generations of human beings have come and gone, and could only glimpse this in the ecstasy of eroticism and psychedelic empowerment and ritual magic,
 but we are the last people. Beyond us lies the mystery. If we have but the courage to move forward into that abyss,
 to believe that nature will reward the dreamer, then we can complete that wonderful Irish toast which says, "May you be alive at the end of the world,"
 because it's that close. It cannot wander much longer. All of the preconditions have been met, and the peacock's tail grows daily, whiter and more radiant and more brilliant,
 as we sense now, breaking into our dreams, breaking into our waking lives, the presence of this attractor. It has always given people meaning,
 that we are the privileged inheritors of that meaning, and we have then the privilege of putting it all together in one piece,
 and standing ready at the end of history to go into the mystery and be completed. So that's the end of my song.
 [Applause]
 Take a break, and we'll be back in 15 minutes, and if you've got questions, and God, I hope you do, we'll deal with them.
 Thank you very, very much.
 [Applause]
 Do you know what insomniac dyslexic philosophers do?
 [Laughter]
 They sit up all night wondering if dog really exists.
 [Laughter]
 It's also an intelligence test.
 [Laughter]
 Also, I'd like to point out to you, just to keep you current, that Nina Graboi, who is an old friend of mine and of Tim's,
 has a new book out called One Foot in the Future, and this is a lady who lived a life that went from the center of Nazi Europe to Millbrook and beyond,
 and it's a wonderful book. It's out in the bookstores, and I just call your attention to it.
 Okay, let's have some questions here.
 Okay, can you hear me?
 I can hear you.
 This is not a joke, I'm afraid. I'm more serious again.
 I believe that among the fundamental rights that people have to fight for, for self-empowerment,
 one of them is the right to commit suicide, just like the right to take psychedelics and all that,
 and I'm wondering if in your world travels you might have come across some wisdom about plants that people have taken for, say, relatively easy suicides,
 like hemlock, or what you know about them.
 Oh, I mean, with your point, I mean, I think people should be free to do whatever they want to do with themselves.
 The classic answer is obviously the poppy, opium and its products.
 Even, I mean, this is the modern instrument of dying, is morphine injection unto death.
 In the Minoan civilization, the fascination with poppies reached such a proportion that when they translated the linear bee texts,
 at first they took the symbol for poppies as the symbol for wheat, because the tonnage that was being recorded,
 as being produced and used, was so huge.
 So, yes, the waters of lethe, the waters of forgetfulness, the poppy will carry you to the gates of death and beyond, if that's your intent.
 Now, just back to the issue of empowerment, usually any derivatives of poppy, you have to go through doctors or authorities.
 In fact, just aside here, people who are dying in the hospitals, I understand, they don't even give morphine anymore.
 Well, why bother with the derivatives?
 The poppy grows, it's still a relic, ornamental in many suburban gardens.
 I noticed in someone's garden recently poppies that had been as expertly etched as if we were on the highlands of Laos.
 So the gnosis of it hasn't died.
 You're right that the heroin and morphine are extremely controlled drugs, but again, the poppy is there.
 If I were making drug policy, I would promulgate what I think of as the Vegetable Drug Act and simply say, "Plants are legal. All plants should be legal."
 People hold up opium as the scourge of mankind, and yet it was used medically for 3,000 years,
 and it was only in, I think, 1603 that the British physician John Playfair was the first person to notice that it was addictive.
 So it took 3,000 years of using it before anyone actually came to grips with the fact that it was addictive.
 Can I ask you quickly about hemlock? What do you know about that?
 About what?
 Hemlock.
 I know about it. I think it's a rather painful way to go, actually.
 Really?
 I go back to the opiates.
 Because some herbalist told me it wasn't.
 Well, it will deliver you into Charon's boat for sure.
 But your impression is that it's painful?
 My impression is that the poppy would be the way to go.
 Okay. Thank you.
 Thanks for keeping it light.
 Yeah.
 Hi, Terence. My name is Joel.
 I was born in South America in the Amazon.
 After that, I went to Germany to study chemistry thanks to Sandor Basel.
 In Germany, I think people think in a way that you want to educate the society.
 It's an alchemy society.
 In a way, I guess we learn, for example, Jesus Christ was one of the first alchemists.
 And the Romans tried to make a mock of him because he was saying, you know,
 they put a sign on the cross saying INRI.
 And people said, "Oh, this is Jesus Nazareth."
 And it was not.
 It was the Latin word that we learn in chemistry.


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.92 sec
Decoding  : 1.47 sec
Transcribe: 4872.85 sec
Total Time: 4875.23 sec