[00:00:00 - 00:00:11]	 I want to welcome you to the Phoenix Bookstore. I am Jeannie Brittingham-Erstead. I go by the name of She Who Remembers. I do audio tapes for KPFK.
[00:00:11 - 00:00:21]	 And I was thinking how I wanted to introduce Terrence. I took my name She Who Remembers because of my love of history and the ancient.
[00:00:21 - 00:00:26]	 And there was a wonderful book about the ancient Anasazi Indians called She Who Remembers.
[00:00:26 - 00:00:37]	 Well, in Terrence's tribe, he's got to be He Who Remembers. And I told my kids I was going to see a wonderful storyteller tonight.
[00:00:37 - 00:00:42]	 So I'd like you to all help me in welcoming Terrence McKenna.
[00:00:42 - 00:00:50]	 [Applause]
[00:00:50 - 00:00:57]	 There are copies of Archaic Revival here also.
[00:00:57 - 00:00:59]	 Okay.
[00:00:59 - 00:01:01]	 We'll wake up the world.
[00:01:01 - 00:01:08]	 Well, it's a pleasure to be here. This is Friday. This must be Santa Monica.
[00:01:08 - 00:01:12]	 It's sort of been that kind of a week.
[00:01:12 - 00:01:21]	 I'm humbled and amazed to see so many people turned out for this.
[00:01:21 - 00:01:28]	 Basically, I'm here to promote a new book of mine called Food of the Gods from Bantam.
[00:01:28 - 00:01:37]	 And I understand that there are also here tonight copies of the Archaic Revival, which is technically not released yet.
[00:01:37 - 00:01:48]	 So you can be well ahead of the curve if you get a copy of that, because I don't think it will be generally released for about three weeks.
[00:01:48 - 00:01:57]	 So let me just say a little bit about this book that I've been working on for a couple of years.
[00:01:57 - 00:02:07]	 And then we can talk about it for a half hour or so, and then I'll sign copies for the hard core, so to speak.
[00:02:07 - 00:02:11]	 [Laughter]
[00:02:11 - 00:02:25]	 What I wanted to do with this book, The Food of the Gods, was I wanted to set down in as careful and as well-documented a fashion as possible
[00:02:25 - 00:02:35]	 the argument for looking again at the impact of psychedelic plants on human evolution,
[00:02:35 - 00:02:48]	 on the emergence of all of the higher qualities that we associate with our own unique species out of simple animal organization.
[00:02:48 - 00:03:01]	 And I wanted to do this not because I wanted to carry out some kind of academic criticism of the orthodox theory of evolution,
[00:03:01 - 00:03:16]	 although that was part of my intent, but really because I felt that if we could change the way we think about how psychedelics were used in the past,
[00:03:16 - 00:03:23]	 it would change the way we think about these things in our present situation.
[00:03:23 - 00:03:32]	 Many of you probably lived through a portion of the 1960s psychedelic revolution,
[00:03:32 - 00:03:44]	 and there psychedelic plants and experiences and drugs were presented sort of as instantaneous psychotherapy.
[00:03:44 - 00:03:56]	 There was not in the 1960s the awareness that these were not something new, these experiences and compounds,
[00:03:56 - 00:04:08]	 but really what was being discovered was the world's oldest religion, religion as it was practiced during the first million years
[00:04:08 - 00:04:22]	 before it was taken over by BDI little priests with their shopping lists of moral commandments and prescriptions.
[00:04:22 - 00:04:33]	 Basically you see there is a great mystery about human emergence out of animal organization.
[00:04:33 - 00:04:50]	 The orthodox theory of evolution works very well for explaining how higher plants emerged out of simpler plant forms,
[00:04:50 - 00:05:06]	 how higher animals emerged from lower forms, but the great unsolved mystery of evolution generally is located in our own peculiar story
[00:05:06 - 00:05:17]	 because in less than a couple of million years the human brain size doubled during the last three million years.
[00:05:17 - 00:05:28]	 This has been called the most explosive development of the organ of a higher animal in the entire evolutionary record.
[00:05:28 - 00:05:38]	 So then the question becomes what was the cause, what was the detonator, what was the catalyst
[00:05:38 - 00:05:49]	 which literally revealed the presence of the human soul floating on a platform of primate organization.
[00:05:49 - 00:06:02]	 And the case that I have made is I think very simple, very easy to understand and has deep implications for how we live our own lives today
[00:06:02 - 00:06:11]	 and how we organize our societies today. It's a very simple three step process.
[00:06:11 - 00:06:27]	 As the climaxed tropical rainforests of the cradle of humanity began to recede a million or so years ago in Africa
[00:06:27 - 00:06:40]	 which is the cradle of the human race, our remote fruit eating ancestors who were perfectly happy having achieved a kind of evolutionary equilibrium
[00:06:40 - 00:06:55]	 in the canopies of these tropical rainforests were forced down onto the grasslands in a situation of great evolutionary pressure.
[00:06:55 - 00:07:08]	 They were having to learn new forms of locomotion, bipedalism, a new way of coordinating the visual system, binocular vision
[00:07:08 - 00:07:15]	 and most importantly they were coming under dietary pressure.
[00:07:15 - 00:07:29]	 And one of the points that I make in my book very strongly is that orthodox thinking about evolution has never admitted the importance of diet
[00:07:29 - 00:07:43]	 into thinking about evolution. We all know that evolution proceeds through random mutation which then meets a force called natural selection.
[00:07:43 - 00:07:56]	 But usually random mutation is presented as something which is to be traced back to cosmic rays and radiation present in the environment.
[00:07:56 - 00:08:12]	 Certainly this is one of the inputs into the process of mutation. But you see when an animal or a human being suddenly expands their diet
[00:08:12 - 00:08:27]	 suddenly begins to eat foods and experiment with foods that they have never experimented with before, these foods, these plants contain all kinds of exotic chemicals
[00:08:27 - 00:08:46]	 natural insecticides, agents that cause these plants to taste very bitter so that animals will reject them as food and these chemicals are mutagenic agents.
[00:08:46 - 00:08:59]	 So diet, a sudden shift in diet exposes a population to many more mutagenic influences than it was facing previously.
[00:08:59 - 00:09:10]	 This happened to our proto-ancestors and as they began testing new foods in the grassland environment of the African veldt
[00:09:10 - 00:09:27]	 they came upon psilocybin containing mushrooms which were growing in the dung of wild forms of cattle which were also evolving in this new grassland environment.
[00:09:27 - 00:09:49]	 Well now the key or one of the pivotal concepts in my notion is related to the fact that psilocybin actually in very low doses increases visual acuity.
[00:09:49 - 00:09:59]	 Edge detection and a kind of visual clarity is an affect of very low doses of psilocybin.
[00:09:59 - 00:10:08]	 The equivalent in fact of having a plant in the environment which confers chemical binoculars on its user.
[00:10:08 - 00:10:23]	 Well you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that if there's a plant which gives better vision and there's a hunting and gathering animal in the proximity of that plant
[00:10:23 - 00:10:38]	 that the animals that admit that plant into their diet will be more successful hunters, more successful gatherers, they will obtain an expanded food supply for their offspring
[00:10:38 - 00:10:45]	 and they will tend to outbreed the non psilocybin using members of the population.
[00:10:45 - 00:10:59]	 Now at slightly higher doses psilocybin like all CNS stimulants causes what pharmacologists and medical people call arousal.
[00:10:59 - 00:11:13]	 This simply means a kind of undirected restlessness, a state of high alertness, restlessness, pacing and in a highly sexed species like ourselves
[00:11:13 - 00:11:19]	 it means erection in the male and subsequent sexual activity.
[00:11:19 - 00:11:30]	 This is a second factor then which would promote the outbreeding of the non psilocybin using members of the population you see
[00:11:30 - 00:11:39]	 because the psilocybin using members of the population have an expanded food supply, more sex, more offspring.
[00:11:39 - 00:11:44]	 Naturally they will tend to push out other members of the group.
[00:11:44 - 00:11:59]	 Well then finally at the psychedelic dose level of these mushrooms you get a very important quality, in fact the centrally important quality for my argument
[00:11:59 - 00:12:08]	 which any of you who have ever taken these things have experienced yourselves and that's what I call boundary dissolution.
[00:12:08 - 00:12:14]	 And here's the notion in a nutshell.
[00:12:14 - 00:12:24]	 When you look back through the primate phylogeny, clear back to the primitive primates, the squirrel monkeys and those sorts of animals
[00:12:24 - 00:12:29]	 there are always what are called male dominance hierarchies.
[00:12:29 - 00:12:42]	 There's an alpha male animal who through brute force usually takes the most desirable females under his command
[00:12:42 - 00:12:55]	 and sets his lieutenants over, his male lieutenants over the rest of the females and this is how these monkey societies order themselves.
[00:12:55 - 00:13:11]	 Well because psilocybin is a boundary dissolving hallucinogen and because the essence of ego consciousness which is necessary for these boundary hierarchies
[00:13:11 - 00:13:17]	 and for these dominance hierarchies, the essence of ego is boundary definition.
[00:13:17 - 00:13:33]	 So what I'm actually suggesting in this book is that we self-medicated ourselves into a state of gender equality and partnership
[00:13:33 - 00:13:47]	 consciously or unconsciously by allowing this item in our diet which suppressed ego and hence suppressed male dominance hierarchies.
[00:13:47 - 00:13:58]	 And so the ordinary momentum of primate evolution was interrupted and for a period of about, who knows, pick a number,
[00:13:58 - 00:14:13]	 somewhere between 15 and 50,000 years ending about 10,000 years ago, we actually lived in a kind of paradise
[00:14:13 - 00:14:24]	 where human beings were at equilibrium and in balance with the earth, where men and women were in balance with each other
[00:14:24 - 00:14:37]	 and I should have mentioned this sexual arousal which went along with the mushroom taking promoted a style of orgy
[00:14:37 - 00:14:47]	 probably at festivals which were lunar, at the new and full moon everybody basically just jumped each other's bones in a big heap
[00:14:47 - 00:15:00]	 and the social consequence of orgy as a social style is that it makes it impossible for men to trace lines of male paternity.
[00:15:00 - 00:15:10]	 This is very important. There is in a society which practices orgy no concept for men of my children.
[00:15:10 - 00:15:23]	 There is only the concept of our children meaning the tribe, the group. So male loyalty goes toward the group
[00:15:23 - 00:15:34]	 and this is very important because once men discovered male paternity, they discovered ownership of hunting grounds,
[00:15:34 - 00:15:45]	 food supplies, women, you name it and it tended to feed back into the formation of the ego structure.
[00:15:45 - 00:15:59]	 Well, and so I believe that really that was the golden age of humanity that we all long for and have a great poignancy for
[00:15:59 - 00:16:11]	 that has even been called the nostalgia for paradise. I believe we have this nostalgia for paradise because we are the victims of a fall.
[00:16:11 - 00:16:23]	 You see what happened was this African grassland environment which was necessary for the ecology of the mushrooms
[00:16:23 - 00:16:34]	 and therefore necessary to maintain this partnership paradise. Eventually it all dried up. The Sahara turned to desert.
[00:16:34 - 00:16:42]	 These people were forced out of Africa into the ancient Middle East and we fell into history.
[00:16:42 - 00:16:51]	 And this is the moment at which agriculture was invented. Agriculture because you have to stay in one place
[00:16:51 - 00:17:01]	 and tend the crops and defend the surplus of these successful agricultural efforts means the end to nomadism.
[00:17:01 - 00:17:15]	 It means the birth of cities. It means the creation through surpluses of classes of those who have and those who have not.
[00:17:15 - 00:17:23]	 It promotes kingship. It creates the need for standing armies. You can tell the drift here.
[00:17:23 - 00:17:34]	 All the institutions that we associate with male oppression, with hierarchy, with dominance come into play at that point.
[00:17:34 - 00:17:47]	 So my, I don't want to spend too much time on this, but just in a nutshell that situation is the situation in which we were born
[00:17:47 - 00:17:55]	 and came to consciousness. The paradisical situation of gender partnership that then dissolved.
[00:17:55 - 00:18:05]	 It was really a return back to the earlier primate style of male dominance and hierarchy when the mushroom was no longer available.
[00:18:05 - 00:18:13]	 We returned to our old monkey ways and we have been practicing those monkey ways ever since.
[00:18:13 - 00:18:23]	 Even as we reach toward the sequencing of the human genome, the exploration of the solar system, the exploration of the heart of matter.
[00:18:23 - 00:18:32]	 Nevertheless, we do it from a psychologically damaged perspective. Now, the question of drugs.
[00:18:32 - 00:18:41]	 Why as a species are we so obsessed and so addictible to so many things?
[00:18:41 - 00:18:49]	 There are a few animals who will break into a compound for fermented fruit or something like that,
[00:18:49 - 00:18:55]	 but we addict to dozens of substances and behaviors.
[00:18:55 - 00:19:06]	 Well, I believe that you can make an analogy to a person who was abused or traumatized as a child.
[00:19:06 - 00:19:23]	 The entirety of human history has been acted out in the light of the traumatic severing of our connection into the Gaian mother goddess
[00:19:23 - 00:19:35]	 planetary matrix of organic wholeness that was the centerpiece of the psychedelic experience back in the high paleolithic.
[00:19:35 - 00:19:49]	 In other words, the world of hallucination and vision that psilocybin carries you into is not your private unconscious
[00:19:49 - 00:20:01]	 or the architecture of your neural programming, but it is in fact a kind of intellect key, a kind of being,
[00:20:01 - 00:20:08]	 a kind of Gaian mind. For paleolithic human beings, it was the great goddess.
[00:20:08 - 00:20:20]	 Once you sever from this matrix of meaning, what James Joyce called the mama matrix most mysterious,
[00:20:20 - 00:20:31]	 once you sever yourself from that, then you have nothing but rationalism, ego, and male dominance to guide you.
[00:20:31 - 00:20:40]	 And that's what has led us into the nightmarish labyrinth of technical civilization, overpopulation,
[00:20:40 - 00:20:48]	 classism, racism, sexism, propaganda, so forth and so on, all the ills of modernity.
[00:20:48 - 00:20:59]	 So I wrote this book making this argument because I believe that if we could import into straight society,
[00:20:59 - 00:21:11]	 almost as a Trojan horse, the idea that these psychedelic compounds and plants are not aberrational,
[00:21:11 - 00:21:23]	 they are not pathological, they are not some minor subset of the human possibility that only freaks and weirdos become involved with,
[00:21:23 - 00:21:33]	 but rather they are in fact the catalyst that called forth humanness out of animal nature.
[00:21:33 - 00:21:46]	 If we could entertain this as a possibility, it would change the way we think about so-called primitive societies, shamanism,
[00:21:46 - 00:21:55]	 the psychedelic experience, society's efforts to control and eradicate these substances.
[00:21:55 - 00:22:04]	 And I believe that we are really in a race on this planet now between education and disaster.
[00:22:04 - 00:22:18]	 And it is the momentum of the ego that threatens to shove us over the cliff into Armageddon, famine, overpopulation.
[00:22:18 - 00:22:32]	 You can kiss goodbye to democratic values. We are all going to live in an Orwellian anthill if we don't, what, change our minds.
[00:22:32 - 00:22:42]	 We have to change our minds on a dime. I'm not talking about a 500 year program to slowly straighten things out.
[00:22:42 - 00:22:53]	 We have, I believe, less than 30 years to come to terms with the dissolving ozone hole, the toxification of the oceans,
[00:22:53 - 00:23:03]	 the greenhouse effect, the spread of epidemic disease, the rise of fascism, the relentless efforts of the free marketeers
[00:23:03 - 00:23:10]	 to deal product in every corner of the planet. We must change our minds.
[00:23:10 - 00:23:23]	 And what we have to do is have recourse to these same shamanic plants and shamanic practices that allowed our remote ancestors
[00:23:23 - 00:23:34]	 to come to terms with the mystery of being and their situation on this planet vis-a-vis the rest of nature.
[00:23:34 - 00:23:46]	 So I think it's very important at this time to make this argument as clearly as possible, to launch the idea into society,
[00:23:46 - 00:24:01]	 and let argument and debate rage. Now you may think that I'm proposing blowing up some already existing edifice of theory
[00:24:01 - 00:24:11]	 about how human beings came to be. This is not the case. As a matter of fact, orthodox anthropology hasn't a clue.
[00:24:11 - 00:24:21]	 We are the fly in the soup of natural sciences, explanation of the evolution of species.
[00:24:21 - 00:24:27]	 It's easy to understand how one kind of hummingbird emerges from another.
[00:24:27 - 00:24:38]	 It's not very easy to understand how creatures that build something like Los Angeles can emerge out of creatures who hunt ants
[00:24:38 - 00:24:49]	 by sticking grass stems down their holes, you know. We represent some kind of primary break with nature at the animal level.
[00:24:49 - 00:24:58]	 And I believe it's because we have a symbiotic relationship with all of nature. We are wired for this.
[00:24:58 - 00:25:08]	 There are drug receptors in our brains, in our physical brains that have been carried along for a thousand generations
[00:25:08 - 00:25:18]	 without really being called into use. But now is the time. If we really believe that these things expand consciousness,
[00:25:18 - 00:25:36]	 then we must study them, use them, apply them, because it's the absence of consciousness that is creating a terminal crisis,
[00:25:36 - 00:25:42]	 not only for us as a species, but for every living thing on this planet.
[00:25:42 - 00:25:57]	 And I think the psychedelic experience is as much a part of being alive as sexuality, language, the things which fulfill us
[00:25:57 - 00:26:10]	 and give meaning to the human experience are left incomplete and impossible to assimilate if we don't place the capstone
[00:26:10 - 00:26:24]	 on the edifice of our being in the world. And the capstone on that edifice is our right, our obligation, and the privilege
[00:26:24 - 00:26:33]	 of dissolving our ordinary ego boundaries and merging with the mind and purpose of the planet.
[00:26:33 - 00:26:42]	 This is what I was trying to say in the book, and this is what I hope I'm able to communicate to you this evening.
[00:26:42 - 00:26:50]	 Thank you very much.
[00:26:50 - 00:27:00]	 Okay, the first one. If you were in jail 20 years ago and you had to choose between Finnegan's Wake and McLuhan books
[00:27:00 - 00:27:08]	 or any drug, which would you choose? How about today?
[00:27:08 - 00:27:18]	 Has something happened in 20 years that should make these different choices? Well, I think I would choose, I think I would probably choose
[00:27:18 - 00:27:21]	 I'm in prison, right?
[00:27:21 - 00:27:25]	 You can either read or get high.
[00:27:25 - 00:27:27]	 Well, in spite of the flash of something like