Well, psilocybin once encountered in the diet acts very quickly to outbreed
 non-psilocybin using individuals because, like many indules, if there's a small
 amount of psilocybin in the diet, visual acuity is measurably increased. And
 Roland Fisher did work on this in the early 60s. Well, you can see that
 if an animal that is living by predation and also it's thought by the
 people who disagree with this theory, the people who do not think that mushrooms
 played a major role in human evolution, believe that the throwing arm is the
 unique human capability and that when you see a pitcher get a ball across the
 plate, what is it to, how far is it from the pitcher's mound to the plate? 60 feet.
 That kind of control on an object hurled at that speed, no other animal can do
 anything, even approaching that. And that this hand-eye coordination gave us our
 leg up, literally, or our arm up to be able to knock out large animals at a
 distance. Well, even if you believe that theory, you see it too depends on a very
 close coordination of hand and eye. Well, if you bring into this a chemical factor
 in the diet which increases visual acuity, animals that are allowing this
 item in the diet will very quickly outbreed the non-mushroom users. And I
 submit that this happened. Then further accelerating the tendency toward
 preferential use of mushrooms is the fact that at higher doses, but still
 sub-psychedelic doses, these same mushrooms will trigger arousal,
 general CNS, central nervous system arousal, but this also includes then
 sexual arousal and erection in males. Well, so what does this mean? It means
 that it's a party drug at that dose. It means that there is this impetus to
 copulation in a situation in which the better hunters have been more successful
 at getting food. So this increased copulatory activity and subsequent
 increased number of births is happening in an environment with an increased food
 supply. So you see all these factors are converging to outbreed the non-mushroom
 using individuals. Well, then the final culminating factor in this is at yet
 higher doses, the mushroom ushers into the boundary dissolving ecstasy that we
 call the psychedelic experience, and that in that kind of a social small group
 situation would have led, I think, to primitive religious observance, ritual
 group sexuality, food sharing, mate sharing, so forth and so on. And I really
 believe that this lifestyle, if you will, of nomadic pastoralism,
 god disoriented religion driven by psychedelic
 indulge in the diet, that for 50,000 approaching 75,000 years this is how
 people lived. And they were fully realized people. I mean there was
 tremendous oral poetry, epic works of art and theater, a complete realization of
 human potential in the dynamic context of this nomadic relationship to nature.
 I mean this was Eden. This was when we were at peace with our humaneness. Well
 then, you know, what happened? Is there a search for scapegoats? Who's to blame? And
 the answer is nobody is to blame. The very process which brought this paradise
 into being, which was the drying up of the African continent and the forcing of
 of our proto-human ancestors onto the veldt and into the bipedal nomadic
 tribal language-using mode, the very forces which created that destroyed it.
 Because eventually the great grasslands of the Sahara, the huge water holes, the
 vast herds of game gave way to encroaching dunes, shrinking water
 holes. The mushroom festivals, which I imagine at one point were probably lunar
 festivals, became then yearly festivals because of scarcity of the mushroom. And
 there became then anxiety about availability of mushrooms and therefore
 a certain cultural pressure to find methods of preserving them. And this need
 turned naturally to the preserving powers of honey. And so there was a
 transitional phase of not fresh mushroom festivals but preserved mushrooms in
 honey. The problem is honey itself has the capacity to turn into a psychotropic
 substance through fermentation. It becomes mead. But the imprinting that
 takes place in a mead culture, mead cultures are cultures of male dominance,
 repression of female sexuality, hierarchy, warfare, wheel chariots, the
 whole shtick. And so, you know, there was, and this all happened over thousands of
 years, this very gradual transition. There was never a conscious moment of tragedy.
 But you see what was happening was a new psychic function was taking hold in the
 human animal. In the situation of the monthly boundary dissolving group
 mushroom festivals, ego was not allowed to form. And I really view psilocybin as
 almost an inoculation against the formation of ego. It is an
 egolytic compound. So notions of male dominance, of possession of property,
 children, domesticated animals, or women, none of this went on in this situation
 where the boundary dissolution was reinforced by frequent mushroom use. But
 as soon as the mushrooms become less available, this thing begins to grow in
 the human personality, literally like a cancer or a tumor. It's a calcareous
 growth on the psyche that if we do not have this embeddedness in the vegetable
 matrix of Gaia, then anxiety arises, a lot of it sexual and related to self-
 identity. And I don't have to discuss this with you, you just refer you to
 Freud and the whole gang, everybody understands how bent we are. The question
 is why? And I think this is why. Because we have been in a permanent state of
 neurotic disequilibrium for 15,000 years and every move to attempt to correct
 this has pushed us further away from the goal that we want to have. So now we
 arrive at the late 20th century, nuclear arsenals fully in hand. We have
 made since the 15th century a demonic pact with matter that has allowed us
 great insight into the destructive properties of matter, made us
 handmaiden to the devil, and yet we are still completely dark about our own
 motivations, how to educate our children, how to put in place a set of values that
 don't loot the future, and all of these problems appear to be getting worse. So
 you know, I don't know, well my response to this is to advocate the only thing
 that I think will work, but it's not a political position, because a political
 position always implies willingness to compromise and negotiate with the other
 side, and there really is no willingness to negotiate on the part of the
 psychedelic position, because it's pretty non-negotiable. We're at the end of a
 process, call it 2000, 5000, you know, choose your date, but a long process of
 denial of human nature first, and then war against human nature, and it goes so
 deep into our culture that we don't even know where the basement level is. I mean,
 for instance, to my mind, monotheism, which is the great intellectual edifice
 of the West, it touches the three major religions of the West that have developed
 in a continuous strain since Abraham, monotheism is the institutionalizing of
 this egocentric model. And it has a certain philosophical appeal in one
 God, you know, everything, all roads lead to Rome, you can trace everything back to
 the Ur-source, the Ur-quela, but that anal retentive appeal in itself
 takes place within a context of values of male dominance, print-created linearity,
 uniformity, so forth and so on. And I think what we have to get into is a real
 permission for sloppiness, for loose-endedness, for the abandonment of
 any myth of closure, that there is no closure. There are models and there are
 questions, but all models are provisional, and anybody who says they
 have answers is highly, highly suspect. Too many people claim answers. What's
 being claimed here is a technique, and then you figure out your own questions
 and your own answers, and it's different for everybody. There really is no
 ideology associated with psychedelics. I mean, if you look at the people who've
 been involved with it, they've said completely different things and
 contradictory, and some are rationalists and behaviorists to this day, and others
 are spiritual visionaries, hierarchical, shamanic types. The main
 thing is to reclaim the experience as the first step toward being politically
 empowered in order to act. In other words, we're in, and I indicated this last
 night, although more gently, that we're in a state of enforced infantilism about
 the capacity of our minds, that the culture we are living in is an infantile
 culture. Now, we look back at the Victorians putting pants on the piano
 legs, and we just shake our heads and say, "You know, those poor misguided people."
 Well, but that's only four generations ago. We have similar weirdness going on
 in our own culture, but about the mind. I mean, we look askance at the mind the
 same way that a Victorian nanny is uncomfortable in the presence of bare
 furniture. We fear it. We don't want to look at it, and to my mind, most of
 the techniques that come out of the New Age are based on a guaranteed lack of
 success. That's what they offer, because the last thing anybody wants is real
 change, because real change is uncontrolled change. The issue that
 hovers around the psychedelic experience, it was mentioned last night, it's strong
 in my life. I haven't found any real solution other than hold your nose and
 jump, but the issue is surrender. This is something real. You don't find people
 going into the ashram in the morning to meditate with their knees knocking in
 fear because of how terrifying and profound they know that meditation is
 going to be, but if they were going in there to smoke DMT, you know, they would
 be fully riveted on the modalities of what was about to happen. I mean, we can
 tell shit from Shinola, it's just that we don't always prefer Shinola. And I'm
 not like, I don't advocate it, you know, people, like sometimes there are people
 who are disappointed because they say, "Well, how often do you do it?" Well, the
 answer is not very often. I mean, if I can get it in a couple or three times a
 year, I feel like I'm hitting it pretty hard. And the more successful it is, the
 less often you have to do it. I mean, I know people who say DMT is their most
 favorite drug, and when you say, "Well, when was the last time you did it?" They
 say, "Whoa, 1967." It only lasted four minutes. They're still processing
 it, and they are still processing it. They're not just whistling Dixie. I mean,
 it is, to my mind, just the most... Well, I mentioned this earlier, the
 question, how do they keep the lid on this stuff? And I suppose here I'm
 preaching to the converted, because many people last night said they had an
 interest in this kind of thing. But they don't keep the lid on sexuality. No
 society has ever had it so under control that people didn't have sex. I mean, they
 may have had sex under weird conditions and under ritual strictures and
 this and that, but we are like this salamander that has the option of never
 developing into its mature form. And to my mind, that's a tragedy, because this is
 our birthright, and somehow our inability to get a grip on our global problems has
 to do with this immaturity about our mental state. The two, I feel, very
 strongly are linked, and that of course we can't get control of the world
 because we are children in some profound way. And we don't like being children,
 but the culture has reinforced a form of infantilism. And the way I explain it to
 myself is, it's a kind of unwillingness to go it alone on a certain level. I
 don't know how many of you remember in Brave New World,
 Huxley's brilliant dystopia, but there's a scene in there where Bernard, who is
 the guy who's out of it in the novel because in his fetal fluid they got an
 alcohol contaminant, and so he's different from everybody else in this
 society, and he occasionally has original thoughts. And he and his assigned
 girlfriend for the evening, or whatever she is, are in a helicopter and they
 sweep out past the crematorium where they're recollecting elements for
 reuse, and he suspends the helicopter over the Black Bay, and she immediately
 becomes very agitated, restless, anxious, and pleads with him to return to the
 city. And what it is, is it's her anxiety over being alone in the presence of
 nature. She literally can't take it. And I think there are a lot of people in our
 society, and each of us in our own way at different times, who have within us this
 neurotic and infantile creature that can't face it alone, and that this going
 it alone thing is very important. You know, Plotinus, the great Neoplatonic
 philosopher, he spoke of the mystical experience as the flight of the alone to
 the alone. And in the psychedelic experience there is this issue of
 surrender, because a lot of people want to diddle with it. They want to be able
 to say they did it, but they don't ever want to face an actual moment where they
 put it all on the line. And yet the whole issue with this stuff is to let it leave
 to let it show what it wants to show. So somehow, individually, we have to reclaim
 our experience. The real message, more important even than the psychedelic
 experience, the real message that I try to leave with people in these weekends
 is the primacy of direct experience. That as people, the real universe is, you know,
 within your reach, always. Everything not within your reach is basically
 unconfirmed rumor. And we insert ourselves like ants or honeybees into
 hierarchies of knowledge. So we say, "Well, what's going on in the world? Well, turn
 on CNN." And then somehow we're ordered, then we say, "Aha, okay, it's 85
 degrees in Baghdad and the wind is out of the northeast at 15 miles an hour." And we
 feel somehow better now, because we're getting the information. But what we have
 done is sold out direct experience. And all institutions require this of us, that
 we somehow redefine ourselves for the convenience of the institution. And this
 redefinition always involves a narrowing, a denial, so that, you know, if you want
 to be in Marxist society, if you want to function in Marxist society, you have to
 define yourself as a Marxist human being. Well, it turns out in a Marxist society
 there are no homosexuals, because that just happens in decadent societies. So
 then, you know, if you happen to notice any tendency like this in yourself, you
 have to deny its existence, because this just doesn't happen in a Marxist society.
 And similarly, every society has this. In our society, if you hear voices, we have
 mental hospitals for you. If you have vast visions of the future, you know, we
 have drugs that can help you and make this go away. So then somehow, in modern
 society, the discovery of psychedelics is the discovery that all of this cultural
 machinery is just Wizard of Oz stuff. You remember the scene in the Wizard of
 Oz where the curtain is swept back and they see the little guy there, and he
 says, booming out over the loudspeaker, "Ignore the little man pulling the levers!
 Ignore the little man pulling the levers!" Well, the little man pulling the levers
 is what sweeps into view with psychedelics, and you discover, aha,
 culture is provisional. You know, whether we have nine wives or three, whether we
 tattoo ourselves blue, whether we eat insects or not, all of these things are
 just decisions that we make. And then we congratulate ourselves on our wisdom and
 we live within that, and we hunt down and kill all the people who disagree with
 us, and that's called having a culture, having a way of life, being somebody. But
 with, you know, I don't see history as a wrong-turning. I see it, the metaphor
 that I like is that of the prodigal son, that there was a reason for this long
 descent into matter, this peregrination. It was a shamanic journey of some sort,
 you know, the shaman goes into the the world pool or ascends the world tree to
 go to the center of the axis of the cosmos to recover the pearl, the pearl or
 the gift or the lost soul, and then return with it. And this is what history
 was, I think, it was a descent into the hell worlds of matter, energy, space, and
 time for the purpose of recovering something that was lost. It wasn't lost
 by us, it was lost by the breathing, the disaster of the planet, just climax of
 climate moved us into paradise and then moved us out of paradise. I mean, you must
 have noticed that the story of Eden is the story of history's first drug bust. I
 mean, it's the story of a whole lot of tension over who's going to take or not
 take a certain plant which confers knowledge. And Yahweh, wandering in the
 garden, says to himself, "If the man and the woman eat of the fruit, they will
 become as we are." The issue was co-equality, co-knowledge with the Creator.
 Well, where do we stand, you know, in man's existential march? How does that
 work? Can we always accept the subservient, infantile position? I mean, is
 knowledge to be dispensed by gods, and if not gods, then the institutions that
 appoint themselves as gods over us? Or is it actually that maturity begins with
 somehow claiming this birthright? And it is a birthright. And I don't know if a
 society can survive the claiming of this birthright by a large number of people.
 Certainly in the 1960s when this was attempted, everything, everybody got very
 agitated and then it was frozen out. In so-called primitive or pre-literate
 societies, there is the office of the shaman. And the shaman is deputized to
 act for all of us in the same way that we have airplane mechanics to fix jet
 engines. We have shamans to explore these hidden and fairly terrifying other
 dimensions. The people who self-select themselves into a group like this, in a
 society like that, would be the candidates for this kind of shamanic
 voyaging. Well, so then what is it finally all for? Or is it for anything? Is it just
 maybe my problem that I think it's for something? Well, it is and it isn't. I
 mean, see, we have real problems. We could perish from this planet in some kind of
 radioactive petroleum war or what have you. And it wouldn't change the fact that
 shamanism did exist, that these dimensions were there and were explored
 by courageous, high-minded people for thousands of years. But I think that the
 scientific mind, and maybe even the American mind, can bring something
 special to it, that somehow technology has a role to play. And I think maybe
 what this has to do with is, I've talked a bit in the past, a lot in the past,
 about what I call visible language. Visible language is something that I
 encountered in psychedelic states. Could never have dreamed it up by myself,
 encountered it as an existential fact, then had to sort of reason backward from
 it to what would it be good for. Well, what is it? What is visible language? Well,
 it's very simply, it's language which you look at rather than hear. And don't ask
 me how this can happen. It obviously has something to do with
 synesthesias in the brain, with swapping neural processing units and somehow
 shunting a stream of data which would normally be audially interpreted. Instead
 it goes to the visual cortex. And this occurs often in DMT intoxication. And it
 has a long and noble history in the Amazon, in ayahuasca shamanism. Ayahuasca,
 as you probably know, is a combinatory drug made of a vine combined with the
 leaves of another plant. And it makes DMT orally active. Normally DMT is destroyed
 in the gut. But you take it in combo with this other thing, beta-carboline, and
 then it's active. Well, in the Amazon these people sing what they call Icaros,
 magical songs. And these magical songs are given to them by the spirits,
 whatever those are, invisible entities. But the magical songs are invariably
 criticized pictorially and sculpturally rather than musically. Nobody ever talks
 about how these things sound. People only talk about how they look. And I had read
 about this and heard about it and went down there and spent time. Again,
 curiosity is the only method. Poking around. Finally got somebody who knew
 how to brew this stuff to make this happen. And, you know, I had seen it before
 on DMT, but on DMT it's somewhat out of control. It's as though your entire
 syntactical engine has sprung out of your chest and is rattling around on the
 floor in front of you.


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