Well, first of all, notice language, ordinary language, what a weird thing it is, and yet
 we do it with such facility. We almost all of us can do it. It's a very severe impairment
 on your humanness if you are language deficient in any very serious way. Blindness is as nothing
 to being seriously language deficient, so forth and so on. So it's really the defining
 thing for us. And yet, it's almost like a half miracle. I mean, you can study it. There's
 no problem with getting vast samples of it, tape recordings. We can analyze it syntactically.
 There have been many theories of syntax, philosophies of syntax, and yet what is it? How can we
 make meaning with such facility when the rest of nature seems totally unconcerned with this?
 And what is meaning, anyway? Why is it so important to us? We say if there is no meaning,
 if life has no meaning, it's not worth living. Well, how do ants and bees and scallops stack
 up on that opinion? Do they also feel that meaning is the quintessential aspect of reality?
 And yet we make it. We make it out of ourselves. And then we get together with somebody else
 and we try to make meaning. We say, you know, you and I could have an affair, or you and
 I could start a business. This will have a lot of meaning for us. And we'll make money
 and buy more meaning. Well, whatever it is, and C.D. Broad wrote a book called The Meaning
 of Meaning, which deals with it in about 400 pages, but whatever it is, it's very important
 to us and it seems to have different modalities. For instance, dance can have meaning. Painting
 can have meaning. Spoken or textual words have meaning. But because of biases in ourselves
 as an organism, what seems to have the most meaning is what we can see. Our visual, we
 have a tremendously rich sense of visual input. Well, for some reason, under the influence
 of these psychedelic drugs and certain exercises, and who knows what else it takes to shake
 you out of your cage, but suddenly, syntactical organization, which has been invisible in
 the background of the program of meaning, becomes visible. And you actually see the
 engines of syntax. You actually behold the machinery of meaning itself. And for some
 reason, this is very satisfying. It's like an ecstasy. It's like an affirmation of some
 sort that is transcendental. There is a recognition in it that transcends the felt apperception
 of ordinary meaning. You know, in other words, that you're gazing somehow on the naked face
 of truth and beauty.
 Well, it seems to me that what all this suggests, what all this, by all this I mean the human
 capacity for the psychedelic experience, the human facility for switching these linguistic
 channels from the beheld to the seen, what all this must mean is that history is nothing
 more than the transition phase from felt intuition, the mute intuition of the animal body, to
 fully expressible three-dimensional meaning. And that the descent into matter that technology
 represents is because you can't do this entirely on the natch. There has to be a certain augmentation
 of the human organism in order to do this. It may be pharmacological, it may be neurological,
 it may be nanotechnological, and then some part of the other two. But whatever it is,
 is I think we are coming up under the underbelly of meaning, boring from beneath, and that
 we're just about to hit the jackpot. And this is what the historical process is. And the
 proliferation of media, of the discovery of perspective 500 years ago, oil painting, airbrushing,
 digital sound, all of these techniques are this summoning of the image. So we are actually
 moving toward a kind of self-fulfilling process. It's something that we're defining for ourselves
 as it approaches. And it is defining itself for itself as it approaches.
 You actually experience this on psychedelics sometimes. I mean, the way it works for me
 on mushrooms or sometimes DMT is there is a black space and then I hear what I call
 the elf music or the Irish band. And it's far away. And as it comes closer, I like see
 light. And as it comes closer, it both gets louder and the light fills the stage of awareness
 until finally the sound is subsumed under the visual impression of the thing and then
 it's all around you. And it is this domain of self-transforming language. I mean, I call
 them language elves. But what they may be is nothing more than self-reflexive, compound,
 complex sentences. It's hard to tell what they are because we're not used to having
 our sentences stand up and embrace us. But nevertheless, the nature of reality is fractal
 and it can't have been lost upon any of you that in a fractal universe, text is composed
 of characters, the characters of a given alphabet. But reality is also composed of characters,
 the characters like you and me, who live out some kind of plot. Well, when you get characters
 into a text, in other words, characters made of characters, then you begin to feel the
 textual richness and the linguistic richness that seems to be not in the forefront of reality,
 but actually to lie behind it. I mean, the final conclusion, not the final conclusion,
 that would be preposterous, but the most recent conclusion that I'm coming to looking at the
 psychedelic experience is how phenomenally text-like reality is. I mean, it's more text-like
 than one should decently say. This is much more like a work of art than anything recognizable
 from my physics class. I mean, my physics class was about atoms and electrons and momentum
 and conservation of energy. My literature class, on the other hand, was all about personality,
 motivation, history, precursive active, anticipation of action, willful suspension of disbelief.
 These are the things that I see actually going on around me. And so it's strange as we decondition
 from the being sold from the top worldview of Time Magazine and Scientific American and
 the Wall Street Journal. What we discover is ourselves active as art in a work of art.
 This is what the reclamation of experience seems to give back to us, is ourselves as
 very complex objects. You see, in the institutionalized world, we are defined always in ways that
 stress our similarity. We hear about voters, and I'm a voter, and we hear about women,
 and many of you are women, and we hear about yuppies, and we hear about the middle class,
 and we hear about those with liquidity in their portfolios. But everything is presented
 as a member of a class. We are always presented to ourselves as members of some class, and
 yet we experience ourselves as unique objects. But there is no reinforcement for that experience
 of uniqueness. I mean, you have a lover and they say, "I think you're wonderful and very
 special." That's about all the reinforcement for your uniqueness you get. And your mother
 also tells you this. But then you take a psychedelic plant and you discover, "Hey, I'm Christopher
 Columbus. I'm Magellan. I could be anybody. I'm not defined in these narrow ways. There
 are doorways in my reality to areas of experience as large as the area of experience that Christopher
 Columbus or Magellan took as their province." But it's all, this new freedom is achieved
 by directing attention back at the individual. So a lot of the debate and talk that I hear
 is about saving and restructuring institutions and that sort of thing. I'm not very much
 interested in saving and restructuring very many institutions. I think institutions have
 done us about all the good we can stand at this point. But then they wave the black flag
 of anarchy in front of you and say, "Oh, you're just an apostle of chaos and madness." Chaos,
 yes. Madness, maybe. But disorder, never. This surrender issue, when translated out
 of the realm of the individual and into the realm of the collectivity, we all, as a society,
 must also surrender to what is happening to us. Because I think history is some kind of
 psychedelic experience. And it isn't, there's nobody around who has the right plan. So it
 isn't about how we need to locate the people with the right plan and then give them a lot
 of money and get out of their way. It doesn't work like that. The right plan will emerge
 almost simultaneously in everybody's mind at the same moment. And in the meantime, we
 all are going to have this sort of half-baked plan that we can't articulate, that we can't
 quite bring out. It's a quality of the time. I'm going to talk this afternoon more about
 the quality of the time. But we can't think any more clearly than we're thinking at the
 moment when we're thinking at our best. Part of what history is, is a clarification of
 the human situation. And I think you have to press the envelope. You have to keep your
 nose against the glass, forcing the definitions into ever new territory. But not anxiously.
 It's just like a growth process. We can't evolve any faster than our language evolves.
 The language is the thing in which we're embedded. So the use of technologies like virtual reality,
 or drugs like psilocybin and DMT, or practices of various sorts if they prove effective,
 to put pressure on the evolution of language. All spiritual disciplines properly analyzed
 can be seen to be language courses. To get you to think a certain way, to get you to
 carve out of the background of undifferentiated data certain things which you previously couldn't
 see, auras, or acupuncture meridians, or states of disease. I mean, it can be anything. But
 the mind sensitizes itself to phenomena by following language into the forest, into the
 forest of the unknown. And most people have no stomach for this kind of thing. They prefer
 to stay back in the village and just kill time grinding wheat and drying meat around
 the fire. But you can almost make a kind of a fractal quasi-reductionist argument and
 say that people are like electrons. And you don't learn what electrons really are until
 you get just one of them off by itself somewhere in a magnetic field in a vacuum. And then
 you see what electrons are. If you have millions of electrons, then you have an electrical
 current. And an electrical current operates according to laws and rules and constraints
 completely different from an electron. And what we have done very perversely as a society
 is taken the laws of large numbers, how a million people act, how ten million people
 act, and then we have applied it back to ourselves as individuals. Said, "Well, why am I not
 happy?" You know? Seventy percent of everybody does X and I don't and I'm not happy then.
 You know? Trying to redefine yourself as against a very large body of statistical data. All
 of this is dehumanizing. All of this is bad mental hygiene, usually quickly cleared away
 by psychedelics. Because what they show you is that you are unique, that you are unique,
 and that the confluence of space and time that you're operating in is unique. And that
 any model that is put forward is, number one, provisional. Provisional means it can be abandoned
 at any moment. And then the second and most important thing is any model you can't understand
 is useless. So, you know, most of us can't understand most of the models. I mean, who
 here would care to walk to the blackboard and begin to describe the first stage of quantum
 electrodynamics to us? And yet we all know that our world is supposedly hung on this
 very well thought out theory that experts are in charge of. But notice -- no pun intended
 -- but notice that if experts are in charge of it, you're not. It's absolutely useless
 to you. You know nothing about it. Well, so when you start peeling away and saying, "Well,
 what do I know?" You know? It turns out it gets into thin soup rather quickly. This is
 no cause for despair. This doesn't mean you should go back to night school and study quantum
 physics. That's the wrong conclusion. It means that all of this stuff that you thought were
 the high walls of reality are just smoke blown by somebody else. These constraints are not
 binding upon you at all.
 Somebody said to me once -- their father had been a professional scientist -- and he said
 once, "I never would have seen it if I hadn't known it was there." And we all are in the
 habit of seeing all kinds of things because we know that they're there. And in many cases
 they're not there. And you just walk through and you discover all kinds of things. I mean,
 I am convinced that anybody who has a major psychedelic trip, at some point in that trip
 their eye falls on things no human eye has ever seen before, or ever will see again.
 You know, it's that big in there. It's not at all clear that we're mapping a generalizable
 reality. It may be that it's just so huge in there that never do we pass through the
 same matrix twice. Well, that means you can give up on closure. You can give up on any
 theory that will ever give you very much of a more than provisional handle on what's going
 on. And I think this is probably a good step to take, to open ourselves to the freedom
 that lies beyond culture. Culture is a kind of prison, and the only way that we know to
 get beyond it is to dissolve its boundaries. Now you can do that with psychedelics, and
 then you really explore the baseline of being. Or you can dissolve it with travel. But then
 you dissolve your own cultural programming only to discover you've fitted yourself into
 somebody else's cultural programming. And this, while definitely educational, is like
 a psychedelic drug I'm not that fond of. I do a lot of traveling, but it's not the same
 thing as replacing space and time with some kind of alternative. That comes from doing
 the hard work on five grams in silent darkness. And really what you see, I think, is the morphogenetic
 field, the invisible world that holds everything together, the knit of it all. Not the knit
 of matter and light, but the knit of casuistry, of intentionality, of caring, of hope, of
 dream, of thought. And that all is there, but it's been hidden from us for centuries
 because of the exorcism of the spirit that took place in order to allow science to do
 business. And that momentous and ill-considered choice then has made us the inheritors of
 a tradition of existential emptiness, really. But that has impelled us to go back to the
 jungles and to recover this thing. It's all of a piece, you see. These people in the Amazon
 and whatnot were keeping this cultural flame burning, but these cultures are now all dead.
 They are either dead or in a state of advanced suspended animation. The best anyone hopes
 for when they go to a rainforest culture is that it be somehow resisting the change all
 around it. There's no rainforest culture that is elaborating new forms and thriving on its
 own terms. So all the things that were learned, the legacy of the ancestors, is now laid basically
 at the feet of this high-tech electronic society. And the question is, can we dream a dream
 sufficiently noble that we give meaning to the sacrifices that have been made to allow
 the 20th century to exist? I mean, my God, the amount of bloodshed and infectious diseases
 spread around, metals ripped out of the earth, mountains moved, railroads laid across continents,
 all of this stuff as the means to reclaiming the human birthright that science hides from
 us. It's a very strange enterprise. I mean, it's hard to put it across because the thing
 is it's real. And we're in the habit of thinking that the mind can move unobstructed from one
 edge of the universe to the other, that there are no secrets. But actually there are secrets.
 At least these are secrets. And hard to tell. I mean, I tell them and you hear them and
 we seem to have been allowed a cosmic dispensation. But why that is, is very hard for me to understand.
 I would have thought that this would have been headline news 20,000 years ago, right
 up until the present. Instead, it's very tentative. Apparently this is very threatening to us.
 We are not as eager to sail over the edge collectively as we think we are. So then it
 becomes the function of the shaman, the gadfly, the go-between, to carry information back
 and forth between these worlds. I'm convinced that if there were no shamanic pipeline, there
 would be no human life as we know it on this planet. I mean, there could be climaxed animal
 life. There was no need for this higher order linguistic style of self-reflection to come
 into being. It's that something is plotted, something is working itself out in us. We
 are the cells of a much larger body, and like the cells of our own body, it's very hard
 for us to glimpse the whole pattern, the whole purpose of what is happening. And yet we can
 sense that there is a purpose, and there is a pattern. Well, the way you connect the pattern
 with the lower level is by dissolving the boundaries of the ego and the self into this
 larger thing. And then it's found to be there, reflective on many levels. It doesn't require
 a mechanism. Everything is obvious. If things don't appear simple to us, I think it's because
 we haven't thought about it long enough. Well, so that's sort of a survey of some of this
 stuff. Thank you very much.
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