Well, this was the kind of impact that the psychedelic experience had for me.
 It was as though there was a doorway, a literal doorway,
 out of the completely otherwise flawless set of cultural assumptions
 that kept me, you know, a Catholic altar boy in a small Colorado town,
 in a Western democracy, in a context of anti-communism,
 religious fundamentalism, consumer capitalism, so forth and so on.
 The whole bag of tricks and illusions were suddenly exposed for that.
 And beyond that, you see, like that traveler sticking their head out
 through the world system and seeing a whole different set of rotations and revolutions,
 you see another dimension of some sort.
 And then for me the question became, you know, of what sort? What is this?
 Number one, what is it? Number two, how did they manage to keep the lid on it?
 And number three, what can you do with it?
 Well, coincidentally upon all this, or let's call it coincidentally,
 society was just going bananas around somewhat similar issues.
 Because I was born in 1946, so that means in 1966 I was 20 years old.
 And somehow fate had conspired to put me in Berkeley, California.
 So I happened to be at like the ground zero of the cultural explosion.
 But I had been following all this stuff for years.
 It just seemed to me a weird parallelism that my internal growth and obsessions
 were now somehow becoming the obsessions of society generally.
 Being 20 years old, I just thought it was a kind of vindication.
 You know, I knew I'd been right since I was 16, so here was the payoff.
 But then, you know, it didn't exactly work out like that.
 These concerns moved through society like a wave.
 And then other stronger, what the I Ching calls pre-potent systems of arrangement
 reasserted themselves. And instead of a kind of psychedelic utopia,
 there was a kind of anti-psychedelic dystopia.
 And everything that psychedelics had tended to call into question,
 which were the great sins of the 20th century, the misuse of propaganda,
 the abuse of imagery, the distortion of information.
 I mean, these are all uniquely modern new sins, if you will.
 And I talked last night a little bit about the connection between dreams,
 the unique province of 20th century psychological theory, film, and the psychedelics.
 All of these things, and I see it also active in art,
 that as soon as you move beyond impressionism, the whole history of art in the 20th century
 is about the dissolution, deconstruction, and attempt to reconstruct the image.
 So that movements as different as analytical cubism and abstract expressionism
 all are seen to be struggling with the dissolution and re-emergence of the image.
 Well, what it means is, what all this constellation of cultural effects is saying,
 is that the previously assumed to be, I don't know how to say it,
 existentially prepotent order of society, of linear society, is actually an illusion.
 And that we can move beyond it. We can dissolve it.
 Not only we can, we cannot not do this.
 So then the goal becomes, and this is where McLuhan is important,
 to try and raise into consciousness the process that we are undergoing
 before it is a fite accompli, before we are in the act of looking back then
 at a historical event. Because I'm now convinced that the impulse that I feel in myself
 and that I see in other people toward the psychedelic experience
 has to do with its potential historical impact.
 Even though, God knows, we're all aware this is how religion has always been practiced.
 Yet somehow this million year old sociological phenomenon,
 orgiastic group-minded shamanism in a context of nomadic pastoralism,
 this phenomenon was only interrupted 10 or 15 thousand years ago.
 And is apparently the state of dynamic equilibrium where we function at our best,
 where we feel at our most human.
 What has happened to us is a kind of false bottom in our social dynamic.
 It's a series of self-reinforcing situations of disease.
 It begins with what I talked about last night, about concern for male paternity.
 Once men wanted to trace the descent line of the male genes,
 previously self-expressive, orgiastic, group-minded sexuality
 became compartmentalized into concerns of territoriality, ownership, so forth and so on.
 But then that wasn't the end of it.
 There then the rise of hierarchical kingship.
 The amazing, you see, the problem with human beings is that we ride very close
 to a kind of bifurcation point in terms of whether our loyalty is transferred to the group
 or to the individual. And this can be sent either way.
 I mean, if there were to be landslides at both ends of Highway 1 and a food shortage,
 we would coalesce marvelously into a survival machine
 where we would all place group values higher than our own needs.
 And nobly so, this would happen.
 But in situations of abundance and non-scarcity, then it's like a slime mold.
 Without the formality of coherency, we just then dissolve into this sort of
 every-man-for-himself, egocentric style.
 And then, you know, another bad break along the way that may or may not have been fated,
 may have just been a bad break, is the evolution of the phonetic alphabet,
 which creates a tremendous distancing between cognition and the objects of linguistic intentionality.
 And this gives permission then for all kinds of forms of brutalization.
 It actually gives permission for ideology.
 Ideology, to my mind, is the denial of the obvious
 and the substitution for something else, where you say,
 "No, that's not how people are. We have a Marxist model, or we have a Freudian model,
 or we have John Stuart Mill's model. Who knows? But somebody's model."
 So ideology, someone said language was invented in order that people could lie.
 And in large measure, this is true, that we proceed by deception.
 I'll defend this at some point in this weekend, because another word for it is "modeling."
 You know, we model, but we also fall in love with these models.
 And it's the falling in love with the model that then turns it into an agenda,
 where it was not a free-form projection of a flow of facts toward the conclusion,
 but then it becomes instead an agenda, a synthetic creode,
 high walls down which you expect to see a process poured and confined.
 So, okay.
 So in spite of the fact that this phenomenon has been around for a long time,
 why then does it appear so important?
 Well, it's because this small group, group-minded, sexually amorphous psychology,
 the psychology, not the model itself, is what we have to recover, I think, in order to survive.
 And, you know, I'm not so interested in talking about the odds of making it.
 It's just this is the only thing that will work.
 And I said last night, you know, the good news is that the domain in which we must operate is all within our own minds.
 You know, if we can change our minds, we can take hold of this process and halt it.
 I believe that the presence of these psychedelics in the plant metabolism, in the biosphere,
 allowed a kind of informational symbiosis between human beings with highly evolved information processing capacity
 and the biosphere generally,
 and that we have no word for this that we're comfortable with.
 The closest word we have for it is somehow tied up with the concept of religion, religio.
 But for us, religion is some kind of abstract dialogue carried on with a philosophical principle.
 That's not what it is.
 Religion originally was the dimension of the self that directly interfaced nature, or the over self.
 And this happened through the use of psychedelics.
 So the reason the weekend is called "History Ends in Green,"
 and what this whole Gaian awareness thing is, to my mind,
 is it's not an airy-fairy attempt to recast a new image for religious ontology.
 It's the actual discovery of the minded presence of the planet, which has always been here, which is real.
 It's an existential fact, like chlorophyll, or the moons of Saturn.
 The planet has a biological mind of some sort.
 Once you articulate this notion, it doesn't seem that unlikely.
 After all, the planet is clearly a boundary-defining topology.
 It's had two billion years to make itself metastable,
 undergo all kinds of autopoiesis.
 We see the evidence of this around us in the form of the climaxed biome of the planet.
 We see that biology and water chemistry has been very active.
 But what we don't see is that as active as the chemistry of water or electron transfer
 have also been the invisible alchemies of, call it spirit, call it mind, call it the morphogenetic field, whatever it is.
 And that that is the frontier of our awareness.
 Every society in history has had the erroneous belief that it just required six more months and 5% more data,
 and then they would have a full picture of reality.
 But the fact of the matter is, our society at its present state of sophistication,
 the only science we have that can be given any serious creditability at all is physics.
 The most primitive of all sciences, the science of momentum and moving bodies in three-dimensional space.
 When you move on to biology, essentially what we have are a series of interlocking fables
 and a few bright spots of light in certain areas.
 When you move on to psychology, what you have are shouting charlatans,
 each claiming domain over their own special area.
 I mean, it's like a medieval fair.
 So the belief that our intellectual maps are somehow adequate is just whistling past the graveyard.
 And the way we have achieved this illusion of good maps is by tossing out all the disturbing and unintegratable phenomena.
 For instance, dreams were trivialized and ignored for centuries.
 Madness was something that you can find a way, like criminality was not to be looked at.
 Sexuality, I don't have to remind you that as recently as 120 years ago,
 people were putting bloomers on piano legs to preserve youth from impure thoughts.
 I mean, you talk about a rejectionist style toward reality.
 I mean, we have just begun to open our eyes to what is around us.
 So then front and center, when we begin to explore, let's take a conservative position toward exploring the universe.
 Let's explore from the center outward.
 Well, that means from within the confines of the mind-body system.
 Before we generalize about tectonic plates or the motion of the rings of Uranus or something like that,
 just start from the body out.
 Well, immediately you discover total charactera incognito.
 Psychology gives us a flickering model of ordinary consciousness under ordinary circumstances,
 and everything else is up for grabs.
 And then we discover that at the center of human concerns is this weird itch about invisible worlds
 and higher-order entities and sources of hidden knowledge.
 And we discover, well, people have been at that for a hundred thousand years,
 and the centerpiece technique, which is to trigger these non-ordinary states of consciousness,
 with all our sophistication, we have no better grip on what this is than people in the late Neolithic.
 They knew more than we did, because they'd logged more time on in the real modality.
 I mean, we have models. We say, you know, the drug molecule is translocating to the synapse
 and displacing ordinary neurotransmitters and raising, therefore, the endogenous level of electron spin resonance.
 This is not any kind of explanation about what's going on.
 This is just the chant, the incantation, you know.
 But the people who are logging time in there, they come back with maps of reality
 that fit very uneasily with our cheerful, Cartesian, democratie-anatomistic, causal, entropic models.
 And they say, no, no, the universe is an infinite honeycomb,
 each honeycomb ruled over by different spiritual forces,
 each commanded through different languages, magical techniques, gestural repertoire.
 Everything is language. Everything holds information for man.
 Everything is somehow constellated on the presence of observing mind.
 Well, in the West, we thought we got rid of these kinds of cosmogonic myths
 with the Ptolemaic universe, you know, even before Copernicus.
 But now it turns out that the centrality of mind gets reintroduced,
 not only by the evidence of the psychedelic experience,
 but for instance, the school of philosophy of science around L.L. White and people like that
 have pointed out that if you use as your index complexity,
 then you suddenly discover that human beings have moved back to the very center of the universe.
 That the most complex physical material in the universe,
 in terms of density of connectedness, is the human cerebro-cortex.
 That if novelty and density of connectedness is what is being conserved,
 then somehow we are central.
 Well, so then, you know, other issues are raised.
 If we are central, then the modern model of history,
 which is, I don't know if it's ever been explicitly stated for you,
 but the modern model of history is that it is trendlessly fluctuating.
 This is the largest structure in which we find ourselves embedded,
 call it the last 10,000 years,
 and the best guess of the people who spend the most time looking at it
 is that it trendlessly fluctuates.
 That means it's like a drunk on a wander walk.
 You see that processes are channeled toward conclusions.
 That in the evolutionary, well, leave that aside for a minute,
 in the realm of physical chemistry,
 we see that the progressive cooling of the universe
 allowed more and more complex chemistry.
 First, electrons could settle down into stable orbits around atomic nuclei.
 Then, molecular bonds could form.
 At still lower temperatures, polymerization could form,
 and therefore, templating-type molecules like DNA.
 So the universe seems to be an engine for the conservation of complexity
 until we reach the social sciences,
 where they want to tell us that history is just dropped into this process,
 willy-nilly, is not fractally modeled on anything that precedes it,
 does not express an internal coherence,
 and is a completely trendless process.
 Yet notice that this completely trendless process
 is atomically composed of the most complex matter,
 material organization in the universe,
 the human cerebral cortex.
 Well, I mention this because part of what I'm interested in with this weekend
 is trying to get a handle on, you know, what is history?
 What does it mean?
 It began only 1,500 generations ago,
 which if we were fruit flies would be three weeks ago.
 So, you know, it's not something really basic to human beings,
 but it's a process that got started about 1,500 generations ago,
 and it's a clearly accumulative runaway process.
 It's going on outside the realm of ordinary genetics.
 Ordinary genetic change is very conservative and slow.
 This is a cancerous-type process,
 but in the cultural domain it's an epigenetic process,
 meaning it's not scripted in the genes,
 but like writing and TV and painting, it goes on outside of the genes.
 Well, where does it go on?
 Well, it goes on in the domain of language.
 And to my mind, language is the critical area to focus on
 in terms of where the psychedelics are operating
 and how, if our interest is to trap them doing their elfin work,
 then the place to look is in the domain of language.
 Why?
 First of all, look at what language is.
 It's a weird kind of ancillary add-on process to the human organism.
 No other monkeys do it in quite the same way.
 And I don't argue that there is not linguistic and grammatical activity
 in monkeys, dolphins, termites, what have you,
 but it's very different from what goes on in human beings.
 Obviously, for instance, you probably know that the soft palate of the human being
 drops lower in the fetal form than in any other primate
 by 40 percent or something.
 The embryological interpretation of this is that the human animal is hard-wired for language.
 And if you notice what it is, it's small mouth noises,
 rapidly modulated small mouth noises.
 And it's a highly conventionalized style of behavior
 which allows transduction of thought.
 It's a form of telepathy, a striving toward a crude telepathy.
 Because if you analyze what's happening in the linguistic act,
 it's that we've all gotten together,
 and we agree that there are these small mouth noises,
 and we agree that a given set of small mouth noises means a certain thing.
 And we've spent so much time together and so conventionalized our responses to each other
 that your dictionary of small mouth noises is theoretically supposed to match my dictionary of small mouth noises.
 So the words going through the air impinge upon your ear,
 you make a rapid search of your dictionary,
 and you come up with what you assume is a one-to-one match.
 And we rarely get together to check out just exactly how good a match it was.
 Occasionally someone will ask a question, and we will see that they understood that the match,
 and so the match was good.
 Because I see a lot of transcripts of my talks,
 I know that typists hear the most amazing things,
 and without ever questioning what they hear, they type these things,
 that when I read them, you know, they're complete malapropisms.
 But this is what was heard.
 And as the level of discourse rises, or the density of the technical language increases,
 it becomes much, much shakier.
 I mean, I just had the experience of lecturing in Czechoslovakia, in Prague, to the film academy,
 and you know, you can go a long ways on sincerity,
 but there's a long ways still to go.
 Just nodding and smiling doesn't do it,
 especially when the concepts are fine-tuned,
 and it's where they're fine-tuned that they're always interesting.
 It's in the nuances of it.
 Well, I think probably that this activity was originally stimulated by the use of psychedelics,
 that in fact most of what is human about us
 has to do with the presence of psychedelic and mutagenic compounds in our diet.
 When we made the transition from being fruititarian, vegetarian, arboreal tree-dwellers,
 to becoming, you know, nomadic pastoralists.
 If you think about it, you can see how this would work quite neatly.
 The reason animals specialize their diets is to hold down the amount of exposure to mutagenic chemicals.
 So most animals have highly specialized diets.
 That's because then they can develop pathways to sequester mutagens,
 or to just avoid exposure to them initially.
 But if you put pressure on an animal, on its original food source,
 where it's actually facing a situation of possible extinction, or dietary transformation,
 it will begin experimenting, expanding its repertoire of foods.
 Well, this brings exposure to mutagens in a very steep curve,
 and this means, consequently, more expression of mutagenic genes become available for natural selection.
 And so this is the situation in which you might then see a sudden punctuated movement forward
 in the evolution of adaptive traits of the organism.
 Well, how this worked in the early human situation was drying up of the African continent,
 forced proto-human arboreal types onto the grassland where they began foraging for--
 and insects had been part of their diet in the canopy situation.
 They began foraging. It's also thought they began perhaps predating on carrion kills,
 killed by larger carnivores like lions.
 In any case, they began forming a relationship that had them following along
 behind these evolving ungulate herds of mammals on the African veld.
 And in that situation, they encountered the coprophytic mushrooms,
 the mushrooms which grow in cow dung preferentially.
 and many of these contain psilocybin.


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