I am most pleased and most happy to introduce our very special guest speaker tonight, Mr.
 Ernst McKinley.
 It's a pleasure to be here. It's wonderful to see so many familiar faces and so many
 faces period. I've never been to Port Hueneme before. Probably some of you feel the same
 way. But I've been doing a lot of traveling recently. I was in New York last weekend at
 the Open Center and in Prague two weeks before that. So this is the end of a long season
 of traveling. I'm not home yet, but at least I'm in my own time zone. I want to especially
 thank Andy Voth and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Oxnard for inviting me to participate.
 It represents a real commitment to free speech and First Amendment rights, I think, for an
 art museum. Art museums have been taking some knocks recently, and so I think they doubly
 should be commended for their courage.
 And I want to explain, as Andy mentioned, this is a benefit for Botanical Dimensions,
 which explains the double price over the ticket. All of this money will go to the preservation
 of medicinal plants with a history of shamanic usage. That is the special focus of our botanical
 garden in Hawaii. And before I start the formal lecture, I'd like to just say a little bit
 about that. As you know, the rainforests of the world are being cleared at a very frightening
 rate. And perhaps voices are beginning to be heard to halt this destruction of the natural
 environment. But whether it's halted or not, the destruction of the knowledge of native
 peoples concerning the uses of the plants in the rainforest, this is disappearing without
 doubt in the next 30 years, because these people are moving into cities, taking jobs
 in the ordinary market economy, and thousands of years of accumulated folk medical knowledge
 is being lost.
 So the real world political work that Cat and I do is associated with Botanical Dimensions.
 We conceived it together many, many years ago, and then about six years ago, Cat took
 it over, put it on its official feet, made it a non-profit foundation, and has run it
 day to day since then with tremendous energy and efficiency. So I'd like to acknowledge
 Cat McKenna here.
 [applause]
 My better half. In fact, my only good half.
 And then I wanted to underscore what Andy said, a very special event two weeks from
 now at the Carnegie Museum. Roy Tuchman, Roy of Hollywood, bon vivant, counter-cultural
 figure, informational ferret of our time, will be recast as an experimental composer
 of great energy and imagination, and I hope you'll all turn out for Roy. He's been a wonderful
 force in my life and I think in the cultural life of Southern California. Both Roy and
 Diane have done a wonderful job in raising the quality of public dialogue in Southern
 California, which I think is a precondition for any kind of clear thinking about our future
 or our political situation. So here's to Roy and Diane.
 [applause]
 Okay. Well, the theme that unites these lectures is creativity and the techniques by which
 the artist can refine his or her vision, expand the vision, communicate the vision. And before
 I get into that issue, I thought I would talk just a little bit about my notion of creativity
 per se. What is it in and of itself? And when I think like that, of course, I cast my mind
 back to nature. Nature is the great visible engine of creativity against which all other
 creative efforts are measured. And creativity in nature has a curious distribution. It's
 something which accumulates through time. If we stand back and look at the universe,
 we see that at its earliest moments, it was very simple. It was a plenum. It was without
 characters or characteristics. It was what in Hindu mythology is called the Turaya, which
 is described as attributeless. And naturally, if something is without attribution, you can't
 say much about it. It takes a while for it to undergo a declension into more creative
 realms. And these creative realms are distinguished as domains of difference. The precondition
 for creativity is, I think, disequilibrium, what mathematicians now call chaos. And through
 the life of the universe, as temperatures have fallen, more and more complex compound
 structures have arisen. And though there's been many a slipping back in this process,
 over very large spans of time, we can say that creativity is conserved, that the universe
 becomes more creative. And out of that state of creative fecundity, more creativity is
 manifest. So that from that point of view, the universe is almost what we would have
 to call an art-making machine, an engine for the production of ever more novel forms of
 connectedness, ever more exotic juxtapositions of disparate elements. And out of this, I
 believe, arises implicitly a set of principles that we can then apply to the human artist
 in the human world. Nature's creativity is obviously the wellspring of human creativity.
 We emerge out of nature, almost, and this idea, I think, was fairly present close to
 the surface of the medieval mind. We emerge out of nature almost as its finest work of
 art. The medieval mind spoke of the productions of nature. This is a phrase you hear as late
 as the 18th century, the productions of nature. And human creativity emerges out of that,
 whether you have a model of the Aristotelian great ladder of being, or a more modern evolutionary
 view where we actually consolidate emergent properties and somehow bring them to a focus
 of self-reflection.
 Now, I'm sure that we couldn't carry out a discussion of this sort without observing
 that the prototypic figure for the artist, as well as for the scientist, is the shaman.
 The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the
 scientist, and the artist into a single notion of caregiving and creativity. And I think
 that to whatever degree art over the past several centuries has wandered in the desert,
 it is because this shamanic function has been either suppressed or forgotten. And different
 images of the artist have been held up at different times.
 The artist as artisan, the artist as handmaiden of a ruling class or family, the artist as
 designer for the production of integrated objects into a civilization. This notion of
 the artist as mystical journeyer, as one who goes into a world unseen by others and then
 returns to tell them of it, was pretty much lost in the post-medieval and renaissance
 conception of art up until the late 19th century or early 20th century, where, beginning with
 the Romantics, there is a new permission to explore the irrational. This really is the
 bridge back to the archaic shamanic function of the artist, permission to explore the irrational.
 The Romantics did it with their elevation of titanic emotion, romantic love specifically.
 The symbolists in the mid-19th century did it by a re-emphasis on the emotional content
 of the image and a rejection of the previous rationalism. And that emphasis on the image
 and on the emotions set the stage then for what I take to be the truly shamanic movements
 in art, which begin really with Alfred Jarry in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Jarry,
 you may remember, was the founder of something called the Ecole du Pathéphysique, the Pathéphysical
 College. Jarry announced, "Pathéphysics is the science." The problem was nobody could
 understand what it meant or what it stood for, including Jarry. Jarry was tight with
 L'Entremont, who you may recall said, "I am fascinated with that kind of beauty that
 arises when a sewing machine meets a bicycle on an operating table." See, this was a true
 effort to bend the boundaries of art, to create new permission, permission really for the
 unthinkable. And this, again, reinforces the shamanic function. What do we mean when we
 say the unthinkable? We mean the envelope of that which can be conceived. And for at
 least 200 years, the ostensible mission of the artist has been to test the conceptual
 and imagistic envelope of what the society is willing to tolerate. And this has taken
 many forms. The deconstruction of imagery that we get with abstract expressionism going
 back into impressionism and the pointillists, or the permission for the irrational imagery
 of the unconscious, surrealism, and German expressionism make use of this permission.
 Always the idea being to somehow destroy the idols of the tribe, dissolve the conceptual
 boundary of ordinary expectation. Well, in order to do this, it seems to me, there is
 a precondition for the creation of art, which I call understanding. And I don't mean this
 in an intellectual sense. I mean it in the sense that Alfred North Whitehead intended
 when he defined understanding as the apperception of pattern as such. As such, there's nothing
 more to it than that. You see, if we were to look at this room and we were to squint
 our eyes, and I'm doing this right now and I see that the room divides itself into people
 dressed in red and people dressed in blue. This is a pattern and it tells me something
 about what I'm looking at. Now I shift my depth of field. Now I'm looking at where men
 are sitting and where women are sitting. This is a different pattern and it tells me more
 about what I am looking at. The number of these patterns theoretically present in any
 construction is infinite. That says to me then that the depth of understanding cannot
 be known. It cannot be known. Everything is imminent. William Blake makes this point,
 you know, that you can see infinity in a grain of sand. So understanding then is the precondition
 for creativity. And this understanding is not so much intellectual as it is visual.
 In thinking about this, I realized what an influence upon my own ideas in this area Aldous
 Huxley was. Not the Huxley that we might ordinarily associate with my concerns, the Huxley of
 the doors of perception and heaven and hell, but the Huxley of a very modest book that
 he wrote in the early 50s called The Art of Seeing. The Art of Seeing. And in that book
 he makes the point that a good art education begins with a good drawing hand. That to be
 able to coordinate the hand and eye and to see into nature, to see into the patterns
 present as such, is the precondition for a kind of approach to the absolute. Now out
 of this process of seeing, which I'm calling understanding, the creative process ushers
 in novelty. And many of you have heard me speak of novelty in another context, in the
 context of nature as a novelty producing engine of some sort. And ourselves almost as the
 handiwork of nature. But this same handiwork of nature which we represent, we also internalize
 and re-express through the novelty of the human world. Well now, if we take seriously
 the shamanic model as a basis for authentic art, then certainly in the modern context
 what we see missing from the repertoire of the artist are shamanic techniques. And it's
 for the discussion of these shamanic techniques, I believe, that I was brought here this evening.
 So I want you to cast your mind back to a great seminal moment, germinal moment, in
 the history of human thought, which was about 25,000 years ago, the great glaciers that
 had covered most of the Eurasian landmass began to melt. And human populations that
 had been islanded from each other for about 15 millennia began to re-contact each other
 and reconnect. And out of this comes what is called the Magdalenian Revolution from
 18,000 to 22,000 years ago. And what it is, is nothing less than a tremendous explosion
 of creativity and aesthetic self-expression on the part of the human species. We find
 for the first time bone and antler technology takes its place along with stone technology.
 Musical instruments appear over a wide area. And cave paintings, some paintings in areas
 and recesses so remote from the surface of the ground that it takes several hours to
 reach them, are painted and set up in dramatic tableaus specifically designed to bring together
 sound, light, and dance in hierophanies, extravaganzas of aesthetic output that invoke a kind of
 transcendent other that human beings for the first time are trying to come to grips with
 and make some kind of cultural statement about. And this pulling into matter of the ideas
 of human beings, first in the forms of beadwork and chipped stone and carved bone, within
 20,000 years ushers into the kinds of high civilizations that we see around us and points
 us toward the kind of extraplanetary mega-civilization that we can feel operating on our own present
 like a kind of great attractor. Now, this whole intellectual adventure in exteriorization
 of ideas is entirely an aesthetic adventure until very recently utility is only a secondary
 consideration. The real notion is a kind of seizure by the tremendum, by the other, which
 then forces us to take up matter, clay, bone, flint, and put it through a mental process
 where we then excrete it as objects that have lodged within them ideas. This seems to be
 the special, unique, transcendental function of the human animal is the production and
 condensation of ideas. And what made it possible for the human animal is language. If you're
 seeking the thumbprint of the transcendental on the myriad phenomena that compose life
 on this planet, to my mind the place to look is human language. Human language represents
 an ontological break of major magnitude with anything else going on on this planet. I mean,
 yes, bees dance and dolphins squeak and chimpanzees do what they do, but it's a hell of a step
 from there to Wallace Stevens, let alone William Shakespeare. Language is the unique province
 of human beings and language is the unique tool of the artist. The artist is the person
 of language. And I've given a lot of thought to this because the work that I've done with
 psilocybin mushrooms and the observations of psychedelic plant use in the Amazon centered
 around ayahuasca lead me to the conclusion that it is the synergy and catalysis of language
 that lies behind not only the emergence of human consciousness out of animal organization,
 but then its ability to set a course for a transcendental dimension and pursue that course
 against all the vicissitudes of biology and history over 10 or 15,000 years. Language
 has made us more than a group of pack hunting monkeys. It's made us a group of pack hunting
 monkeys with a dream. And the fallout from that dream has given us our glory and our
 shame, our weaponry, our technology, our art, our hopes, our fears. All of this arises out
 of our own ability to articulate and to communicate with each other. And I use this in the broadest
 sense. I mean, for me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity. Song, dance,
 sculpture, poetry, all of these cognitive activities, when we participate in them, we
 cross out of the domain of animal organization and into the domain of a genuine relationship
 to the transcendent. As you know, shamans in all times and places gain their power through
 relationships with helping spirits, which they sometimes call ancestors, sometimes call
 nature spirits. But somehow the acquisition of a relationship to a disincarnate intelligence
 is the precondition for authentic shamanism. Now, nowhere in our world do we have an institution
 like that, that we do not consider pathological, except in the now very thinly spread tradition
 of the muse, that artists alone among human beings are given permission to talk in terms
 of my inspiration, or a voice which told me to do this, or a vision that must be realized.
 The thin line, the thin thread of shamanic descent into our profane world leads through
 the office of the artist. And so if society is to somehow take hold of itself at this
 penultimate moment, as we literally waver on the brink of planetary extinction, then
 the artist, like Ariadne following her thread out of the labyrinth, is going to have to
 follow this shamanic thread back through time. And you know, one of the most disempowering
 things that has been done to us by the male dominant culture is to brush out our footprints
 into the past. We don't have a clue as to how we got here. Most people can't think further
 back than the first Nixon administration, let alone the arrival of the Vikings, the
 fall of Catalhoyuk, the melting of the glaciers, so forth and so on. We have been disempowered
 by a rational tendency to deny our irrational roots, which are a kind of embarrassment to
 science, because science is the special province of the ego, and magic and art are the special
 province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed, I think.
 So how seriously, then, are we to take this, I'll call it an obligation, to follow the
 shamanic thread back into time? Well, I think that it is a matter of saving our own souls,
 that this is the real challenge. You know, I love to dig at the yogins by saying nobody
 ever went into an ashram with their knees knocking in fear over the tremendous dimension
 they know they were about to enter through meditation. Still truer and more sad, still
 more true and more sad, is the notion that very few of us pick up our sculpting tools
 or our airbrush with our knees knocking with fear, because we know we are invoking and
 acting with the muse at our elbow. And somehow, I think the artists need to recover this sense
 of mystery. One of the most depressing things to me about the art scene, and I had a chance
 to reconnect with this because I was just in New York, is it now has a kind of directionless
 quality. You can go into a gallery and you cannot tell whether it is 1990, 1980, 1970,
 or 1960, because a kind of eschatological malaise has settled over art. All notion of
 any forward movement toward a transcendental ideal has been put aside for the exploration
 of idiosyncratic vision. And I grant you, this is a tension, and perhaps in the question
 period we can talk about this. There is a tension between the individual vision and
 the notion of an attractor or a collective vision which wants to be expressed. But to
 my mind, this is the same dichotomous tension that haunts the individual in his or her relationship
 to Tao. We don't want to be lost in ego, but on the other hand, if we completely express
 the Tao, we have no sense of self. The ideal seems to be a kind of coincidencia appositorum,
 a kind of literalizing of a paradox where what we have is Tao, but we perceive it as
 ego. And in the application of this notion to the art problem, I would say what we need
 is a situation where schooling, if you want to put it that way, or a tendency toward a
 coherent vision expressed by many artists, is spontaneous. Each artist imagines that
 they are pursuing their own vision, yet obviously they are in the grip of an archetype which
 is rising through the medium of the unconscious. Now the last time we saw this in American
 art was in abstract expressionism, which was probably in terms of the values, in terms
 of tension and the amount of emotional gain between one artistic moment and another, the
 break between abstract expressionism and what preceded it was the most radical break in
 American art in this century. Abstract expressionism actually carried us in to a confrontation
 with what the quantum physicists were telling us, that the universe is field upon field
 of integrated vibration, that there is no top level, there is no bottom level, that
 the ordinary structures of provisional space-time are simply that, that if we can rise out of
 the human dimension, then we discover these larger, more integrated dimensions where mind
 and nature somehow interpenetrate each other. A vision like that, a coherent vision, has
 yet to announce itself here in the post-history, pre-apocalypse phase of things. Well, I guess
 I have a kind of reactionary side when I think about the creative endeavor. I believe that
 the psychedelic experience as encountered by each of you in the privacy of your own
 mind, or as encountered by a pre-literate society somewhere in the world, that that
 psychedelic experience is in a way the Rosetta Stone, not only for understanding the encryption
 that our own lives represent each to ourselves, but it's also a Rosetta Stone for uncoding
 the historical experience. Art is this endeavor to leave the animal domain behind, to create
 another dimension, orthogonal to the concerns of ordinary history. And this orthogonal domain
 to my mind is glimpsed most clearly in the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience
 shows you more art in an hour and a half than the human species has produced in 15 or 20,000
 years. Now, this is an incredible claim. This is why I make it. The energy barrier which
 separates us from this tremendous repository of transcendental imagery is very low. It's
 a matter of a little personal commitment and the substances which make the transition possible.
 The perturbation of brain chemistry is easily done. What is not so easily done is the assimilation
 of the consequences of this act. Ordinarily, we assume that consciousness is channeled
 between tremendously deep walls, that there is no way to force a confrontation with the
 other or the transcendent or the unconscious. We tend to assume that we're going to have
 to do double duty at the ashram for three decades before you're vouchsafed even a glimpse
 into these places. This is not true. Culture, and this is my message to artists and to anybody
 else who cares to notice, culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness. And
 this plot prosecutes its goals through a limiting of language. Language is the battleground
 over which the fight will take place. Because what we cannot say, we cannot communicate.
 And by say, I mean dance, paint, sing, meme. What we cannot say, we cannot communicate.
 We can conceive of things that we cannot communicate. And I think every one of us here has done
 that and that's a thrilling thing. That is the deep homework. The psychedelic inner astronaut
 sees things which no human being has ever seen before and no human being will ever see
 again. But in fact, this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.
 And what motivates me to talk to groups like this is the belief that we do not have centuries
 of gently unfolding time ahead of us in which to gently tease apart the threads of the human
 endeavour and create a bright new world. That's not our circumstance. This is a fire in a
 madhouse. And to get a hold on the situation, I think we are going to have to force the
 issue. Well, one way of forcing the issue or a chemical definition of forcing the issue
 when you're talking about a chemical reaction is catalysis. We want to catalyse consciousness.
 We want to move it faster toward its goals, whatever those goals are. Well, I believe
 that to the present moment, language, again in the broadest sense, speech, dance, musical
 composition, language has just been allowed to grow like topsy. It's been a kind of every
 man for himself situation. Now, what we really need as we see ourselves moving from one species
 among tens of thousands of species on this planet, over the past 10,000 years, we have
 redefined ourselves. And now, like it or not, we are the custodians of the destiny of this
 planet. Our decisions affect every life form on the planet. And yet, we are still communicating
 with each other with the extremely precise medium of small mouth noises mediated by ignorance
 and hate. [laughter]
 This doesn't seem like the way to do business as we approach the third millennium. So, what
 I'm hopeful for and what I actually see happening, I mean, I think that we're on the right track.
 The birth of a new kind of humanity is going to take place, but there are still a lot of
 decisions to be made. How violent shall this birth be? What toll shall it take upon our
 mother, the earth? What shape shall the baby be in when it finally is delivered? These
 are the decisions that artists can mediate and control. Most people are afraid of the
 unconscious. This is why you can have a psychedelic compound like DMT, which is very much like
 ordinary brain chemistry, appears completely physiologically harmless, only lasts ten minutes,
 extremely powerful, and generally in this society, you have no takers. This is because
 there has been a failure of moral courage. And the failure of moral courage is perhaps
 most evident in our own community, the community of the artists. In a way, it's the poets that
 have failed us because they have not provided a song or sung a vision that we could all
 move in concert to. So now we are in the absurd position of being able to do anything, and
 what we are doing is fouling our own nest and pushing ourselves toward planetary toxification
 and extinction. This is because the poets, the artists, have not articulated a moral
 vision. The moral vision must come from the unconscious. It doesn't have to do, I believe,
 with these post-meaning movements in art, deconstructionism, and this sort of thing.
 I mean, I'm basically putting out a very conservative, but I think exciting program for art, that
 art's task is to save the soul of mankind, and that anything less is a dithering while
 Rome burns. Because if the artists, who are self-selected for being able to journey into
 the other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found. Ideology
 is extremely alien to art. Political ideology, I mean. And if you will but notice, it is
 political ideology that has been calling the shots for the last seven or eight hundred
 years. We can transcend politics if we can put some other program in place. You cannot
 transcend politics into a void. And I believe that a world without ideology could be created
 if what were put in place of ideology were the notion of the realization of the good,
 the true, and the beautiful. You know, the three-tiered canon of the platonic aesthetic.
 The reconnect, the notion of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Then use psychedelics
 to empower the artists to go into this vast dimension that surrounds human history on
 all sides to an infinite depth and return from that world with the transcendental images
 that can lift us to a new cultural level. The muse is there. The dull maps that rationalism
 has given us are nothing more than whistling past the graveyard by the bad little boys
 of science. You only have to avail yourselves of these shamanic tools to rediscover a nature
 which is not mute, as Sartre said in a kind of culmination of the modern viewpoint. Nature
 is not mute. It is man who is deaf. And the way to open our ears, open our eyes, and reconnect
 with the intent of a living world is through the psychedelics. Now, as you know, biology
 runs on genes, and genes are the units of meaning of heredity. But we could make a model
 of the informational environment that is represented by culture, and in fact, this is done. A word
 has been invented, meme, M-E-M-E, meme. A meme is not the smallest unit of heredity.
 A meme is the smallest unit of meaning of an idea. Ideas are made of memes. And I think
 the art community might function with more efficiency in the production of visionary
 aesthetic breakthroughs if we would think of ourselves as an environment modeled after
 the natural environment where we as artists are attempting to create memes which enter
 an environment of other memes that are in competition with each other. And out of this
 competition of memes, ever more appropriate, adapted, and suitable ideas can gather and
 link themselves together into higher and higher organisms. Now, in order for this to happen,
 there is an obligation upon each one of us to carry our ideas clearly, because in the
 same way that a gene must be copied correctly to be replicated, or it will cause some pathological
 mutation, a meme must be correctly replicated, or it will cause a pathological mutation.
 For instance, I would say what the Nazis did to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy was a
 bad cop... A miscopied meme became a toxic mutation inside a culture. So, I would suggest
 to the people in this room tonight that you take a good look around at who's here. Artistic
 people, psychedelic people, look pretty much like everybody else out in society. But we
 have come here tonight self-selected for our interest in the empowering capacity of psychedelic
 plants and the empowering capacity of art. So, we represent an affinity group, a population
 with a potential for mutagenic impact on the ideological structures of the rest of society.
 So, look around. Someone here has what you need. And if you can only figure out who it
 is, you can make a novel connection to move them into a new level of creativity. Well,
 what is this new level of creativity? Some of you may be familiar with the theme that
 was very big in medieval religious art, which was the apocalypse of Saint John or of somebody.
 There are a number of these apocalypses. And I think that many of us may come out of a
 kind of secular background or have not given this kind of a religious idea too much consideration.
 But my idiosyncratic conclusion based simply on trying to be honest about the content of
 the psychedelic experience is that human history really is on a collision course with a transcendental
 object of some sort. It is not going to be business as usual into the endless unfolding
 confines of the future. The very fact that human history is occurring on this planet,
 the very fact that a primate has left the ordinary pattern of primate activity and gone
 into the business of running stock markets and molecular biology labs and art museums,
 indicates to me the nearby presence in another dimension of a kind of hyper-organizing force,
 or what I call the transcendental object. And I believe that this transcendental object
 is casting an enormous shadow over the human historical landscape. So that if you're back
 in ancient Judea, you have an anticipation of the Messiah. If you are at Eleusis, at
 the height of the practice of the Eleusinian mysteries, you have an anticipation of the
 dark god. These anticipations of an unspeakable transcendent reality that are always clothed
 in the assumptions of the individual artist and the society in which he or she is working
 are in fact genuine, and that you don't have to give yourself over to fundamentalist religion
 to connect with the fact that human history is an adventure. And this adventure has a
 number of startling reverses and sudden plot shifts that are very difficult to anticipate,
 and that we are coming up on one of those. The civilization that was created out of the
 collapse of the medieval world has now shown its contradictions to be unbearable. And though
 no one of us knows what the shape of the new civilization will be, somehow in the singing
 of the ayahuasca songs in the rain forest, in the tremendous hyper-metallic transcendental
 off-planetary flash of psilocybin, in the teaching of the self-transforming machine
 elves that seem to dwell in the DMT dimension, we see that the ordinary linear expectations
 of history are breaking down, and that the truth of the eminence of the mystery is breaking
 through all the structures of denial of the male-dominator paradigm that has been in place
 so long. The way to make this birth process smooth, the way to bring it to a conclusion
 that will not betray the thousands and thousands of generations of people who suffered birth
 and disease and migration and starvation and lonely death so that we could sit here this
 evening, the redeeming of the human enterprise all lies then in helping this thing come to
 birth. And each artist is an antenna to the transcendental other. And as we go with our
 own history into that thing and then create a unique confluence of our uniqueness and
 its uniqueness, we collectively create an arrow, an arrow out of history, out of time,
 perhaps even out of matter, that will redeem then the idea that man is good, redeem the
 idea that man is good. This is the promise of art, and its fulfillment is never more
 near than the present moment. Thank you very much.
 [Applause]
 I think we'll take a 10 or 15 minute break and then we'll come back and you can have
 questions and we'll do that for a little while. Thanks very, very much. Now I'm happy
 to take questions. Here.
 You spoke about science being in the realm of ego and art and shamanism being in some
 other realm of decline and mayhem. My own psychedelic experience convinced me of the
 existence of that other realm, but I felt not enough sense of personal power to be that
 antenna that you're saying that artists can be for bringing that to the other until I
 became convinced of the existence not only of me within that other realm, but that other
 realm within me. And perhaps the psychedelic experience prepared me for that second awareness,
 but perhaps you could comment on how, if possible, that second awareness could be more easily
 accessible in the psychedelic experience.
 What do you mean by the second awareness? Say a little more about it.
 Of being aware that other realm is something that's also very personal and...
 Well, yes. It's a landscape that begins within the self and seems to extend into the world.
 One of the very puzzling things about the psychedelic experience is that it argues that
 we are not atomic individuals running around in some kind of society, but that if you actually
 drain the psychic water away, you'll discover that we're all connected at the roots, that
 it isn't a journey to another world, it's a journey inward to a world that is already
 present and there. The astonishing thing is how alienated we are from our own interior,
 from the interior world, to the point where we can hardly recognize it. I've talked a
 lot about the alien nature of the psychedelic experience and how it seems to be mappable
 over something as radical as the UFO experience. This is because we truly do not know who we
 are. The past 10,000 years have been so disempowering to us. We are really like the children of
 a dysfunctional relationship. We don't know where we have come from. It's very hard for
 us to emotionally connect with the consequences of what we're doing. That really horrifies
 me that this is a society that loots the future. The symbol of that is devouring of children.
 We literally, for our own comfort in the present moment, are making it very difficult for future
 generations to contemplate having anything approaching the level of resource availability
 that we have. This kind of situation could not be tolerated if we had not gone through
 a tremendous series of traumatic, emotionally disemboweling experiences. You know the Native
 Americans have a litmus test for all activity. Does it serve the children? So much of what
 we do is so anti-future that it's almost as though the fundamentalist position exists
 to permit the destruction of the environment. I mean, this was perfectly encapsulated by
 this clown James Watt, who was Secretary of the Interior and said, "We don't need to
 expand the national parks because Jesus is coming." I mean, this is a mentality so against
 the grain of the obvious that it has to be looked upon as pathological.
 Another question here in the corner.
 How are you?
 I've known you for a long time, but you've never met me. I'm one of Roy's night people.
 I guess, I don't know, I guess I've got to preface this remark in saying that I got about
 a $50,000 education and three degrees, college degrees in psychology, but I've never learned
 anything like I've learned from listening to Roy's show on KTVR Kids.
 [applause]
 In pursuing those degrees, I decided to learn a little bit about it hands-on, so I went
 to a psychology school in New York. I've been there for a long time, and I've been in the
 same class for a long time, and I'm a psychologist. I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm
 a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist,
 I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist,
 I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist,
 I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist,
 I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist,
 I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist,
 I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist,
 I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist,
 I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist,
 I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist,
 I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist,
 I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist,
 I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist,
 I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychologist,
 or a drug for example you know here we're in the middle of a drug abuse
 problem but caffeine has been entirely institutionalized since the Industrial
 Revolution it's the only drug that has been honored in every labor contract
 that is signed anywhere you have the coffee break the coffee break is the
 workers guarantees the workers right to stimulate themselves and in fact
 ultimately obligates the workers to stimulate themselves because the machines
 and the tasks that they have been given totally reinforce the need for coffee
 and the typing pool couldn't exist without coffee similarly alcohol alcohol
 is tremendously spun in to patterns of male dominance how many women have their
 first sexual imprinting in an atmosphere of male dominance and alcohol abuse I
 mean it almost goes hand in hand and certainly up until the 20th century
 there was about 800 years there when I don't think anybody got laid in Europe
 unless they were juiced because you know first of all people didn't bathe enough
 to make it an appetizing thing to contemplate unless you know you were you
 know pretty lit so and and terrible terrible distortions of Western politics
 and religiosity have taken place because of drugs for example and this is to me
 one of the most shocking examples imaginable slavery died with the fall of
 the Roman Empire Rome had a system of labor called the latter fundia which was
 essentially a slave work crew and that institution died with the fall of Rome
 during the medieval period if you had a if you if you were into slavery it meant
 you had one slave and this slave was extremely well looked after and cared
 for because they were a symbol of munificent opulence on your part that
 you could afford such a luxury it was like having a Maserati to have a slave
 well then around 1400 before the discovery of America in the eastern
 Atlantic islands of Madera they began experimenting with the growing of cane
 sugar and it was fine except that the sugar has to be boiled at a hundred and
 thirty degrees and no one would work around that they discovered that they
 had to chain people to the cooking apparatus of the for the extraction of
 sugar and they began bringing Africans to do this and they not only reinvented
 slavery for the deliberate production of sugar which was utterly unnecessary to
 the diet of Europe I mean there hadn't been a ton of sugar imported into Europe
 in the previous thousand years and suddenly they felt this tremendous need
 for sugar and they reinstitutionalized slavery with the added insult that for
 the first time a particular race was singled out as being somehow made for
 slavery and this is the beginning of black xenophobia on the part of
 Europeans the association with the sugar trade by 1800 every pound of sugar being
 imported into England was being produced by slave labor and slavery was going at
 a rate that had not been seen since the Rome of Caligula all in the name of
 commerce all in the name of having this essentially trivial kick from sugar so
 it's really important to educate ourselves as to what constitutes a drug
 and how drugs are legislated against and suppressed or promoted and advertised
 entirely according to whether they fit into the agenda of the reigning model of
 culture whatever that may be yeah here yes
 who are the shamans of art that you share with us as a model?
 of our times you mean?
 well times that we associate with or are familiar with
 oh good so within the 20th century the great art the great shamanic artists
 well you know it's just an opportunity to list a bunch of prejudices obviously
 certainly the Grateful Dead seem to me to be you know nobody's done it longer
 better than they have and rock and roll generally is an extremely powerful form
 of shamanic performance when I look over the 20th century James Joyce for what he
 did for language the permission he gave to make language a living object Jackson
 Pollock is a great personal hero of mine here was a boy from Cody Wyoming who
 managed to cut his way to the heart of the New York art world to my mind he was
 the abstract expressionist par excellence and the high waters of
 American art have never reached higher than that
 Bob Dylan the Rolling Stones maybe these aren't the answers you expected because
 these are such mass such movers of masses of people art doesn't have to
 operate on that huge scale I mean art can be extremely intimate but shamanic
 art art that moves us to a sense of the transcendental there's been too little
 of that in this century not since the surrealists has there been a movement
 with the stated goal of carrying people into an unimaginable world and I have a
 lot of respect for the surrealists especially Max Ernst I think Ernst's
 career was broad and deep over a long period of time the art that excites me
 now is the art of the moving image I'm a little impatient with gallery art
 because so much of it has become the handmaiden to the interior decorating
 business and that was never the intent you know the moving image to my mind is
 the connecting theme in the 20th century between art and dream and psychedelics
 so film is the extremely powerful art form that emerges into its own in the
 20th century and film seems to me an anticipation of psychedelic of what is
 possible with psychedelics I have great hope now for art produced by the
 interaction of human beings and computers and crude as it is and
 controversial as it is I think virtual reality will eventually have a
 contribution to make but it it's long in the future the technologists have to
 perfect the medium and then the artists have to work with it my own favorite
 artists which I don't offer as fulfilling that shamanic intent but
 they're simply my favorites are Vladimir Nabokov as a novelist this is
 flawless stuff emotionally intellectually complete and hilariously
 funny William Gibson's accomplishment in creating cyberpunk and envisioning a
 future so real that you can taste this is a tremendous accomplishment but I
 feel about art the way I feel about rock and roll and the way I think most
 psychedelic people must feel which is it's such pale stuff compared to what's
 out there I mean I feel like we are if we could open the sluice gates to the
 dimensions that we explore psychedelically we would just be
 inundated by art and as it is we receive it in thimblefuls how can we open
 ourselves up to this because I really believe that the art unites us it
 dissolves the boundaries between us it empowers us it makes us a collectivity
 you notice that the great overweening control structures the government for
 example never communicates to us with images that are aesthetically pleasing
 it always communicates with images that convey obligation which is a downer in
 anybody's book so somehow we have been the consumers of imagery when we should
 become the producers of it and all the people in the 20th century who have made
 that work are serve to inspire in that direction I don't know there are so many
 of you is somebody in the back who's a way up there
 or are we are actually in the old inhibitors and this is why the DMT is
 poorly active in the eye was the group my question is some form of ayahuasca
 are made without the DMT so is this to say that the alkaloids are
 mean marmalade DHH are hallucinogenic or are the alkaloids such as
 just inhibiting the MAO from limiting serotonin and dopamine levels in the brain
 I don't know if you follow that. No I follow it the question is do I remember it
 the question is is it so that the beta-carboline alkaloids inhibit MAO and
 thus make DMT active in ayahuasca and yes this is not debatable it's now
 secured by my brother several years ago he published on this it was always
 hypothesized that it that the beta-carbolines were MAO inhibitors but
 then ultimately they proved it well so then the questioner went on to ask if
 this is so then what about these cases where beta-carboline alkaloids are
 reportedly taken without DMT and then what does this mean is it hallucinogenic
 on its own and the answer is harmaline is hallucinogenic by itself but fairly
 close to the threshold of toxicity so the ordinary strategy in the Amazon is
 to combine the DMT with the beta-carbolines and that makes the DMT
 highly reactive it is not then destroyed in the gut as would ordinarily
 be the case but crosses into the bloodstream and through the blood-brain
 barrier and reaches the brain I think achieving hallucinogenic levels with
 beta-carbolines without DMT is probably a pretty unpleasant experience although
 some of these deep jungle tribes do do it you don't want to get the idea that
 just because somebody lives way up river that they know what they're doing
 Manuel Cordova Rios in his second book the Rio Tigre and beyond it talks about
 going on curare collecting and rosewood collecting expeditions to people of the
 Aguaruna Jivaro group and discovering that their ayahuasca was garbage that
 they just didn't know how to make it even though you know they were
 bare-assed Indians living off in the woods and he showed them how to make it
 and they practically made him a cultural hero they said you know my god we've
 been drinking swill for untold millennia and you you came and fixed us up and
 this is a puzzling thing to us as outsiders because we assume they're
 always going for the gusto but sometimes not you know I mean cultures have
 peculiar peculiar adaptations this lady yes
 we be evolving you mentioned that we went from
 we actually be going to be actually go to energy and we say that ours should
 say all I would say pardon me the last time I would say that you can't it's
 not safe not safe but chronic well you touch on a very interesting point one
 that I in my own mind I'm not clear about is it that we are to transcend
 this world and go into some titanic dimension of energy or spirit that we
 can scarcely imagine is that what this birth is is the only way we can grant
 peace to this planet is to turn ourselves into you know electrons moving
 in an interbium cube that we bury on the dark side of the moon is it something
 like that I'm troubled by that because I would like to keep it all together I
 would like to see us as a part of nature but I'm not so uninformed concerning the
 historical adventure that I don't know that what is called Gnosticism is a very
 strong strain in the human animal and especially in Western thought and
 Gnosticism in its most severe form can be boiled down to the proposition that
 we are strangers here we don't belong here this is not our world we come from
 a place made of light and we will never rest until we return to it now the
 problem with that formulation is it sets us up for tremendous discontinuity and
 unhappiness until we achieve that return to the realm of light it's a kind of
 Faustian thing you know and yet the other possibility which I as the as a
 co-founder of a botanical garden and a lover of nature inclined to is isn't
 there some way that we can make our peace with the earth isn't there some
 way that we can have our cake and eat it too and I more and more to my own
 discomfiture conclude that there isn't that the human adventure is a
 forward-going adventure that we do close off options we never again are going to
 be you know a small tribe of hunter-gatherers with our flocks on the
 plains of Africa enjoying our mushrooms and our orgies at every full moon
 somehow long long ago that option was cut off shucks
 but but I think that it's good to cultivate this poignancy that if we're
 going to go storm our tourists at least we should do so with some sense of what
 has been left behind and not just turn our selves into mechanical technocrats
 somehow the living spirit has to be brought with us and this is really the
 high task for shamanism how can we who have always as shamans had a
 relationship to the spirits of the earth of the waters of the sky if we are
 setting out for alpha in Sagittarius or something like that how can we do that
 and not leave our soul behind you know the the Arabs have the belief that the
 a man's soul can move no faster than a camel gallops so if you if you drive in
 your Mercedes from Jeddah to Riyadh you have to rest for a while so your soul
 can catch up well I don't think we should leave our human soul behind
 somehow we have to internalize the entirety of the biological world if we
 are going to become a spacefaring species otherwise we are going to get
 out there and discover that something vital was left behind and this is a
 great tension between ourselves and the earth between our destiny as an energy
 using dream concressing spacefaring stormtrooper kind of species I mean
 that's all male dominance and male mentality talking and the need to
 somehow fold that into a nurturing stance a preserving stance a stance that
 recognizes that the conservation of our archaic values is really our only hope
 and those two things exist in a dynamic tension this is maybe the issue that the
 artistic community can clarify and that must be clarified before we can make a
 definitive step into the future right now we're uncertain stewardship or
 angel hood which shall it be maybe I'll take one more question some poor soul
 over here yes in the back
 that's very never wanted to embrace
 I would like to say
 well I don't really think of it as the Nietzschean Superman I but something
 you said you know that poem by Yates called sailing to Byzantium and there's
 this wonderful phrase in there I'm not sure I can quote it perfectly but it goes
 something like this once out of nature I would be a thing of gold and gold
 enamelling once out of nature he means once he's dead once out of nature I
 would be a thing of gold and gold enamelling and then he says something
 about a nightingale set to sing for the lords and ladies of Byzantium of what
 has been and what will be but what it is you see is the image of the condensation
 of a quasi mechanical object the soul as object as objectification and to my mind
 this is where the image of the UFO has something to teach us the UFO is not an
 extraterrestrial machine that haunts the skies of the earth the UFO is a totality
 symbol thrown off by our tangential approach to the end of history I think
 that yes the Nietzschean Superman that whole thing was tried by the Nazis and
 they realized it in its full expression and it was nightmarish what I'm
 proposing is more there's no man in it it's the concrescence of the collective
 soul of humanity that somehow I see history as an alchemical task and
 process and the artist as artificer it is the task of the artist to complete
 this alchemical concrescence and it's a kind of irrational thing it is
 irrational it's that mind and matter are approaching each other on a trajectory
 that will bring them together with no
 damage to the quintessential nature of each and we can't imagine that because
 for us things are mind or matter we can't conceive of a coincidencia
 appository and yet it's that which we must hold in our mind if we want to see
 truth I mean even in quantum physics they teach you that the universe is
 composed of what they call islands of Boolean algebra embedded in an ocean of
 ordinary algebra what they mean is they're having their archaic and eating
 it - they're trying to say that it's both and and this it is an irrational
 process it isn't a Nietzschean program of realization it's a kind of an opening
 something wants to be born the promptings of our religions with all the
 irrational and hysterical trappings that attend them nevertheless have a core
 perception that there is between man and nature a kind of compact and this
 compact is it's the it's it will be redeemed I mean I really think that this
 is the psychedelic faith that we are the prodigal species we have descended into
 the inferno of matter to try and recover the pearl of immortality the pearl of
 immortality is the perfected and reconstructed earth and somehow we are
 to be the critical factor in this equation or the point species we are not
 acting for ourselves we are the energy manipulating species that believe that I
 believe carries the hopes of all life all nature is watching this drama the
 life of our star is finite the life of the planet is finite but potentially
 self-reflecting understanding may be in fact immortal and yet it is breaking out
 of the trappings of matter and this is a process so large so strange that I don't
 think a single mind can encompass it within a single moment it's something
 that we triangulate over and over again and for me the psychedelic experience is
 how you do that the psychedelic experience is literally a rising into a
 higher dimension in the geometric sense and from that higher dimension the
 psychedelic Voyager carries out a transecting of the lower dimensional
 object which is the world and in the same way that we can build up an image
 of a cone out of an infinite number of ellipsoidal transections we can build up
 a true model of the world by carrying out a number of these transections from
 a higher dimension and then it shows us how the world really works and when you
 understand how the world really works I'm beginning to get just a hint of it
 it works through love and dream and intention to connect through love and
 dream and intention toward connection and these are ultimately irrational
 values and they ultimately must be irrationally embraced because the
 momentum toward a rational conclusion is tremendous but unfortunately
 completely fatal and this is the invitation that the artist has always
 extended toward a radical break with the momentum of rationalism it's simply that
 now in this moment of tremendous crisis when the artist is at last called upon
 to perform and there must be no stitches dropped because this dance is the dance
 of transformation of the planet itself this is the moment of empowering this
 is what all the shamanism of the past built toward this final magical
 invocation James Joyce said man will be dirigible that's simply a way of saying
 that we will find a way to make our dreams and the dreams of the planet and
 the life it carries one dream and the way to do it is to reconnect up to the
 guy in mind through the channels of communication that were always there but
 that have not been really taken up since the late Neolithic it's time for us to
 call home and you know how to do it it's just a matter of having the courage to
 do it to act and then to have that empowering act spread back through the
 psychology of the planet I am very optimistic I think we are awakening to a
 new day from a long long night of the soul but it must be done collectively
 gently lovingly and with a complete faith that we are an infant held in the
 arms of nature that nature wants this to happen that we are not an aberration we
 are granted peculiar but we are not an aberration we are a necessary oddness to
 the completion of the whole and this is our glory and this is why we've been
 graced with self-reflection and we can redeem that tremendous empowerment by
 going forward in love and faith to save the world through art and the pursuit of
 meaning thank you very very much
 [Applause]
 Thank you.
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