I've been traveling a lot and speaking a lot to different kinds of people and most recently in Europe where it was a tremendous kind of bridge building thing to get everything rhetorically lined up and squared around to where I could even introduce the subject of psychedelics.
 So I see that I've returned to the home congregation here.
 [laughter]
 And because this seems to be the overwhelming focus of this group, which is interesting, it's even sometimes sort of confining to me because I would wander maybe in other directions, but every prophet is the captive of his earliest ideological expression.
 You know, I mean, Lenin couldn't do much about Leninism once it had passed a certain point.
 So in hearing what people's interests were and trying to think about it in new ways, you know, the uniting thing in the 20th century, I think one of the things that sets the 20th century completely apart really from previous times, if not ontologically, then by degree,
 is the focus on the moving image and the role that this has had in shaping 20th century culture.
 And it comes really in three forms.
 It comes in the natural and available form of the dream, which always to some degree has shaped human culture.
 But for Freud and Jung in the early 20th century and their followers, the dream took on a whole new significance that it had never had before.
 It was seen as a cryptic messenger from a hidden world, and as these things seemed to work out, concomitantly, a technology of the moving image was developing, which was film.
 And film and the dream then become almost the two defining poles of the evolution of the aesthetic of the 20th century over the first half of it, we'll say.
 And then in 1953, because that's when Gordon and Valentina Wasson discovered "The Mushroom," or earlier, if you want to date it to Hoffman's discoveries in Switzerland or the German work in the '20s, or later, if you want to date it to the discovery in '56 of DMT by Zara.
 But at any rate, at some point, the third triad is introduced, which is the hallucinogenic or psychedelic experience.
 And all three of these areas of concern have adumbrations in the primitive, the stress on dreaming, even the magic lantern and prestidigitation feats of Renaissance magic have a relationship to early film.
 And of course, the psychedelic experience is absolutely archaic.
 Nevertheless, the coming together of these three concerns in this particular fashion in the 20th century set the stage, I think, for an important part of what I will call during this weekend, "The Archaic Revival."
 And "The Archaic Revival" is nothing less than a strategy for cultural survival on a global scale.
 And it's a strategy that is taking place in the animal body of mankind.
 It's not an intellectual strategy or a rational strategy.
 This is what happens whenever a society is slammed to the wall.
 It unconsciously reaches back through its history or its mythology for a steadying metaphor.
 Now, the last time this happened in the West and worked was at the time of the collapse of the medieval Christian eschatology, at the time of the rise of urbanization and banking and secular society.
 The model of the Christian universe was no longer serviceable.
 And very suddenly, philosophers, politicians, social planners reached into the past for classic models.
 And this was in the 15th and 16th century.
 And they created classicism, the revivification of Roman law, Greek architecture, Greek polity.
 All of this happened a thousand to fifteen hundred years after these things had been completely abandoned.
 But then they became the basis for modern secular civilization.
 And our laws are Greco-Roman and our architecture and our aesthetic and so forth and so on.
 Well, the way this is happening in the 20th century is, number one, at a much more deep and profound level because it's a global reflex.
 The entirety of modern civilization has shot its wad in some sense.
 You know, from the perspective of 500 years, a society that cannot put bread on its grocery shelves, such as the Soviet Union, and a society such as our own that is three trillion dollars in debt, the difference is negligible.
 I mean, both of these societies are functionally bankrupt.
 So we're living through, and have been living through throughout the 20th century, an experience of the dissolution of boundary and form.
 Everything has been in a state of flux throughout the 20th century.
 I mean, it opens with the concept of the Edwardian gentleman and lady firmly in place.
 Class structure, class privilege, race privilege, sex privilege, the entire structure of the assumptions of the post-medieval world are in place and functioning.
 Now, 90 years later, none of this is in place.
 And to my mind, the major factor working to achieve this end has not been the two world wars or the exploration of the unconscious by Dada and surrealism, or the breakdown of classical design mores, or any of this stuff.
 It's been the psychedelic experience.
 The psychedelic experience is a genuine paradigm shattering phenomenon.
 We claim that we want this.
 This is what lies behind the love of flying saucers and the Loch Ness monster and all of this.
 We want a paradigm shattering object, piece of evidence, body of testimony, something like that.
 But what we don't realize is we have it.
 We have it, but as somebody over here on this side of the room said, it's a matter of courage.
 And this places it in a special mode.
 It's not something where we can just validate it and then found an institute and appoint experts and expect them to issue a report.
 It's something actually at the center of our being.
 And my motivation for talking to audiences like this is simply that I cannot conceive of mature human beings going from the cradle to the grave without ever finding out about this.
 I mean, it's not like not finding out about sex or something.
 It's just too weird.
 It's a part of our birthright.
 It's not a cultural artifact.
 It's not like being able to ride a bicycle or something like that where you can imagine that pygmies or Amazonian Indians go from birth to the grave and they never ride a bicycle and they never miss it.
 But this is a little more existentially front and center than that.
 I mean, this is, as far as I can tell, the dimension in which we most fully experience ourselves as ourselves.
 Well, you know, culture, we have to be very careful about the corrosive effects of culture.
 Some of you may know about these, it was reported in Time Magazine a month or two ago, about these forms of salamanders that never, if the conditions of alkalinity in the lakes are at a certain level, they never mature into the adult form.
 They actually can reproduce in a juvenile form.
 So there can be generations of these salamanders that don't even suspect the existence of an adult form that lies beyond the sexually mature functional adult form.
 And this is how I sort of think of what the effect of human culture has been on us.
 Starting about 15 or 20,000 years ago, for reasons that we'll discuss tomorrow, ego began to emerge as a factor in human societies.
 For the moment, let's just say it had to do with the concern for tracing male lines of paternity.
 In other words, once men had it enough together to understand the role that sexuality was playing in childbearing, then there became this concern to trace male lines of descent.
 And suddenly, sexuality had to be very carefully controlled, and the concept "my children, my women, my food, my territory" came into being.
 Before that, there was a kind of orgiastic polymorphic sexuality that did not promote this kind of boundary formation at the edge of the body's effectiveness.
 In other words, the ego was not a concept as rooted as it is in us.
 And I think that the shift from this boundaryless, group-oriented consciousness, which was psychedelic,
 to the egocentric, materialistic consciousness that typifies Western society, clear back to Sumer,
 that this is the neurotic wrong-turning, and that when we look back into the causes of it, we can see and argue fairly persuasively
 that it has to do with an abandonment of this relationship of ecstasy induced by plants.
 That there was almost a kind of symbiotic relationship between early human beings and plants, specifically psychedelic plants.
 And that this relationship is not something airy-fairy or unclear or operationally undefined for its participants.
 You get yourself lined up with and arranged correctly in relation to this thing by taking psychoactive plants.
 And that this is how human societies were regulated over, let's say, a million years.
 And there was nothing magical or untoward about it.
 It was simply that these evolving primates had a population regulatory mechanism that integrated them into the larger body of nature.
 And this is what has been lost in the historical process, so that human culture has become, you know,
 charitably a random walk, uncharitably a kind of cancerous exponential cascade of unstoppable effects.
 Now, the thing is that we are in a position to understand this now, if not actually do something about it.
 H.G. Wells said, "History is a race between education and catastrophe."
 Well, never more so than today, because the world is set on a course of catastrophe.
 The emotional constipation and rigidity of the past thousand years that has set us up as territorial apes with thermonuclear arsenals,
 all of that is just set to go critical.
 Nevertheless, we are minded creatures in the presence of an evolving and rapidly shifting landscape of problems.
 And I think that it's a very hopeful sign to look around and notice that the only barrier to the solution of our problems are intellectual barriers,
 barriers in our own mind.
 We have the money, the technology, the mass communications, the scientific expertise, the remote sensing telemetry.
 What we don't have is the will to self-direct all of this technical apparatus toward a rational solution of our problems.
 But that means that the solution to our problems lies almost entirely in the human domain.
 And the human domain is the area where we observe the highest rate of unpredictable perturbation.
 So I don't see the situation as terminal or desperate at all.
 The mushroom's take on the chaos at the end of history is, this is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for the stars.
 It is chaotic, but it is not disordered.
 It is more like a birth than anything else.
 I mean, there is rending of tissue, there is a sense of crisis, of unstoppable forward motion, but it turns out all according to plan, all to good end.
 The trick is to somehow attain this vision of the ordered correctness of what is happening when it seems so chaotic,
 and then to template it, to strengthen it, each for ourselves, and then to replicate it and communicate it as a meme.
 Because there is no percentage in paralysis here at the brink.
 The only possibility is of some kind of forward escape.
 You know, a forward escape is when you attain the goal by simply rushing through the gauntlet.
 And I think that this history that is a race between education and catastrophe is going to turn out to be a forward escape.
 There will be a moment of complete abandonment to the irrational.
 And we will look tomorrow at the time wave, and look at Saddam Hussein and his role in all of this.
 But he is not the final act.
 This is somewhere late in Act I, all this malarkey that we're having to put up with.
 But "apne yent," which in this case means "downstream in time," we will sprout all our worth and woof our wings.
 But we have a lot of shit to fly through before we get there.
 I guess I should say just a little bit about how I got into this.
 And I think curiosity is probably the ultimate value in my cosmology.
 It's what's gotten me anywhere I've ever been.
 It's the only impulse that I trust completely.
 And it's alive in most people as children, but it gets somehow squelched or misdirected or something.
 And so when I look back through my own life, I see this psychedelic impulse before there was ever a word or a name for what it was.
 And I've tried to think back, as far back as I can, and I have very early memories, like to the eighth month.
 But they don't seem to relate to this.
 But I remember in -- it must have been -- I was born in '46.
 It must have been in late '48.
 I found a magazine of my father's, which I now must have been the October 1948 issue of Weird Tales.
 And it had these illustrations in it, and one of the illustrations was of a hooded figure gazing into a cradle.
 And I got this somehow as an image of the strange, the other, the outre.
 And I think this is the other thing that for me was the hook into the psychedelic, was a kind of deep Irish love of the weird from the very get-go.
 So curiosity and a love of the weird, the edgy, the bizarre.
 And this led me into, and I guess maybe a certain degree of obsessive character.
 I mean, I'm spending time on this because I'm trying to understand the psychedelic personality generally.
 But I did have a tendency to really focus in on whatever I was into.
 And I think the first thing was rocks.
 And this was, you know, it was for me an introduction into the size of time.
 Because it wasn't just any rocks that interested me.
 It quickly became clear that it was fossils.
 And I lived in western Colorado, and I could go out into these dry arroyos and bring back dateable objects, 170 million years old, you know, and stack them up and look at them.
 So then I got this dizzying sense of the depth of time.
 And, you know, there were those little museum pamphlets where it shows a billion years, and then the last million years is up here, and then it goes down here and spreads out.
 And then the last 10,000 years.
 I got that. I assimilated this notion of deep, deep time.
 And then, you know, it was almost like an intellectual ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.
 Because the rocks, the inanimate mineral world, soon couldn't confine this restless imagination.
 So then it became about insects, butterflies specifically, moths especially, as an excuse to be alone in the middle of the night around bright lights, you know, with cyanide.
 And, you know, I don't know if any of you have ever been touched by this particular obsession, but because we're insectivores, because our food-getting habits are wired into a brain 50 million years old in the insect-gathering habit,
 you know, this is a very deep, almost orgasmic response that you can touch in the human organism.
 And I pursued it again and again in life, to the point where I did it as a professional in the jungles of Indonesia and the Amazon.
 And, you know, it's horrifying to tell in Buddhist company, but when you come upon one of these long-winged, iridescent ornithopterids of the sort that Barong Gide Rothschild sent his collectors out for in the late 19th century,
 and you come upon one of these things hanging under a leaf, looking for all the world like it weighs at least half a pound, and, you know, wrestle it into your net, it's as close to having a heart attack as I ever want to get.
 And then this thing, at some point, I did a lot of reading, and at some point I discovered that I had defined myself narrowly, and that I was turning into a scientist.
 And I was reading people like Henry James and Aldous Huxley, and they were sneering at what I was becoming and talking about a mysterious realm of human thought called the humanities,
 which I had no notion of what this was. I couldn't even figure out what it possibly could be. Well, then I discovered it meant music, painting, architecture, dance, philosophy, design, in short, the human world.
 As opposed to the natural world. So then, you know, I just turned upon that with a vengeance, left off the bugs and the minerals, and it became about Henry James and Fragonard and mannerism and all of this stuff.
 But the transition, because I was hitting adolescence at that point, was rocketry and the penile joy of launching potentially semi-fatal projectiles into space at twice the speed of sound.
 And, you know, the whole gravity's rainbow cycle that I was very consciously aware was about the thrill of liftoff. All this tormenting of mice and cutting up of aluminum chaff into stuff to be dumped out at the top of the trajectory was just to satisfy physics teachers and anxious parents and all that.
 And the real thing was, you know, this amazing moment of launch when this potassium perchlorate and sugar fuels would just propel these things with ear-splitting intensity.
 And then, at that point, you know, all this curiosity, all this edge work led me, because I fancied myself also developing as a novelist, to read all of Aldous Huxley.
 Well, as you know, it moves from a spectrum of these polite novels of English society, like after, well, "Chrome Yellow" and "Antic Hay" and through works like "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" to then the sexual dystopia of "Brave New World" and then finally to "The Doors of Perception."
 And when I read "The Doors of Perception," I knew then that this was something huge, because he was claiming, you see, what was happening to me as an intellectual, and I think it happens to most people, is exploration of reality was leading to the conclusion that it was a no-exit situation.
 It was some kind of rational labyrinth from which there was no exit. No exit meaning no magic, no possibility of a miracle.
 That there weren't 25,000-year-old cities under the sands of Arabia. There weren't flying saucers underneath the Greenland ice cap. It didn't work for me. For me, rationalism was more powerful than sort of menopausal fantasy as it's currently practiced.
 And so it was drying up. The miraculous was just turning into ordinary reality. And then I discovered psychedelic plants.
 And it was like the descent of an angel into a desert of reason, because... That's an interesting sort of metaphor, the descent of an angel into the desert of reason.
 As you probably know, when Descartes was 21 years old, he shipped out in a Habsburgian army to kick some ass in Eastern Europe and learn some manly soldiering skills.
 And he was in Ulm in southern Germany in August of 1620, Ulm later to be the birthplace of Einstein.
 And Descartes, who was completely wet behind the ears, didn't know anything, had a dream. And in the dream, an angel, this is apropos of the metaphor, an angel appeared to him and said, "The mastery of nature is to be achieved through measure and number."
 So what's interesting about that then is that he went on to found modern science, which was to be the very temple of rationalism and reason, but it was based on the revelation of an angelic being who spoke to him from another dimension.


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