So there were questions outstanding when we parted this morning, so why don't we just take that up then?
 [unclear]
 Well, I mean, as somebody who lived through all that, I guess it was the hardest lesson that we had to learn
 was how big a revolution you can have and how quickly they can toss water on it and have business as usual.
 Eric Jansch introduced me to the term "metastable," and it certainly is true that many, many things are metastable.
 You think it looks easy to push it over, but when you start pushing, you discover that the Leaning Tower of Pisa
 goes 800 feet underground or something, and it's not moving anywhere.
 I don't know. I think that there's a real constipation in the historical process.
 We talk about how the 20th century is this century of tremendous change and innovation,
 but actually they've been remarkably successful in forestalling any true outbreak of the future.
 I mean, the most science fiction moment in the 20th century, or one of the most science fiction moments to date,
 is probably 1939. I mean, if you think about 1939, if you think about the V2 rockets raining down on London
 and Germany in the grip of a leader with a genetic race theory that he plans to establish for a thousand years,
 this is science fiction-style talk, rocket bombs and master races and robot armies and all that stuff.
 Well, so then it was quenched. Fascism was sort of quenched. Actually, it infected everybody who got near it
 to the point that everybody was a fascist, but also everybody went back to work realizing very self-centered ideals.
 In the United States, what had happened was that paradise had been promised,
 the generation that would defeat fascism, but because it isn't easy to deliver paradise, it had to be tacky.
 So then you get Levittown and the suburbs and modular building and Bauhaus-styles of design.
 This is an effort to create a proletarian paradise. The Marxists talked proletarian paradise,
 which the American middle class actually created during the '50s.
 Then in the '60s, what happened was, well, the precondition for social upheaval seemed to be
 an extremely unpopular war being prosecuted thousands and thousands of miles from home.
 And then LSD, which was a unique phenomenon because so much could be made so easily.
 I mean, there are few weapons on earth, even gas. It's hard to create enough poison gas to kill a million people.
 A guy with a small bathroom can create enough LSD to stone a million people.
 But I think that what the lesson I drew from the '60s is that history can't be rushed,
 and that history is not made by individuals, even righteous individuals.
 You know what Shakespeare said, "All the world's a stage, and its people merely players.
 They have their entrances and their exits, and each man in his time plays many parts."
 It is a work of literature somehow. And the '60s, for all of what it was, it must be that it was only prelude.
 And they managed to get the lid back on, but I think at great detriment to themselves,
 because the change is like a gas, you know? If you plug the keyhole, it comes in under the door.
 If you plug under the door, it comes in over the transom. There's no end to it.
 And forestalling it makes it more violent.
 I mean, what I would like to see would be a conscious engineering of change,
 where you actually anticipate social change and try and make it easier.
 A perfect example is the stupid situation now in the Middle East.
 It's been known since the early Carter administration that we should put policies in place
 which de-emphasize our need for Middle East oil.
 So for 20 years, they looked at that situation and never did anything.
 Now they say they have to fight a world war because of that.
 Well, it's just bad management, is what it is.
 But I think that this crisis in the Soviet Union and in the East Bloc countries,
 which was presented as a crisis of Marxism, is actually a crisis of centralized institutional control everywhere.
 And that a lot of America's assumptions will be swept away.
 It came first to places like Czechoslovakia and Poland.
 But do you think that the United Arab Emirates and Qatar and places like this can be far behind?
 I mean, these are oligarchic states ruled by single families, dynastic lines.
 It's the most reactionary form of government you can have.
 So what I see happening in the world is fragmentation on a vast scale to be applauded in all cases.
 This is not a bad thing. This is what McLuhan said would happen.
 It isn't going to be a world federalist state ruled from Geneva with a spaceport in Antarctica and all that malarkey.
 It's just going to be thousands and thousands of local and somewhat integrated.
 Like the European model is interesting because there it's simultaneously falling to pieces and integrating itself at the same time.
 Integration of currency and economics, but preservation of cultural diversity and that sort of thing seems to me to be what's happening.
 But nobody has to shout and nobody has to go into the streets. It's much bigger than that.
 And as far as the thing in the Middle East is concerned, I think probably, well, I'll talk more about it this afternoon.
 But it has an inevitability to it that is huge.
 The United States is in the process of playing a fairly desperate hand.
 They could just stand so much of all that disarmament and troop reduction stuff and then they just finally couldn't stand it anymore.
 But I think it's good news that nobody is in charge of the historical process because even the best motivated people have the wrong idea.
 More faith in the unconscious. It's gotten us this far, God knows.
 You were talking about syntax and language and being able to go back on the other side and look at it.
 Chomsky, I think, wrote some books about what that syntax all looks like. I was just wondering what you saw when you went on the other side.
 Well, Chomsky's idea, which he called transformational grammar, was he eventually dreamed of being able to write the rules not only for English, but for all rationally apprehendable languages.
 And he felt there were 15 rules of deep structure. I never could really understand the fine print on Chomsky. It seemed pretty tormented to me.
 What I discover most spectacularly in the DMT state is there are these entities there, which I call self-transforming machine elves.
 And they look sort of like self-dribbling jeweled basketballs. And they have a linguistic intentionality. They want to communicate.
 The songs that they sing condense as objects in three-dimensional space. I've compared them to the eggs of Fabergé, but that does them...
 They're much more interesting than that. They are like crystalline, jeweled, semi-see-through, opaque, movemented things, which look like sculptures, but you can tell while you're looking at them they're actually sentences.
 And the sentences are saying themselves in some weird way. And in the way that a good sentence, a good long sentence, has all its clauses operating and its articles rotating smoothly and its gerunds running up and down their tracks and everything.
 In the same way that a good sentence does that, these little objects have this same kind of linguistic coherency. Well, then what the entities in this space are doing is they're urging me, the recipient, to explore this and to do it.
 To sing these songs, to make these objects condense. And I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what this could possibly be about in terms of new ideas about it. The only new idea I've had about it is it's occurred to me with some force over the past year and a half or so,
 that the conclusion that I never looked at carefully, because my mind tried to shy away from it, was that maybe these things have something to do with the dead. That if you were to ask a shaman what these entities were, he would just say without hesitation, "Oh, well, these are the ancestors. These are the spirits of the ancestors."
 There's a hair-raising quality to contacting these things. They are both very familiar and yet somehow freakishly bizarre. And the presence of the familiarity with the bizarre creates a kind of cognitive dissonance that's very...
 Well, there's just nothing else that feels quite like that. I wrote an introduction recently for a reprint of Evans Vance's book, "The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries," and I discovered when I re-read that book that the doctrine of purgatory, which is good church doctrine,
 it's a realm where souls go to be cleansed for a few millennia. They're not so sinful that they go to hell, but they go to purgatory for a few thousand years before they enter heaven.
 I always assumed that this idea came out of the Roman contact with Gnostic ideas, but I discovered in writing the introduction for "The Fairy Faith" that St. Patrick invented the idea of purgatory, and he invented it when he was converting the Irish to Christianity.
 He did it as a way to Christianize the notion of fae, of fairyland. And the Celtic pure belief is that the dead go to a realm that is co-present all around us. We can't see them, but all around us is just jammed with souls in wild states of activity.
 And that if you have the eye, a certain talent, you can see these things. Well, Patrick, in order to have an appeal to these Celtic peasants, made purgatory part of the Christian cosmogonic scheme.
 But when you actually smoke DMT, you burst into a space which seems very much to fit the description of this elfin inhabited space. Because if you think about what is the gnosis of elves, elves are artificers.
 They make things in metal and jewels and glass. This is the archetype of the elves, that they are underground craftsmen. And they are humorous, but their humor is highly unpredictable and sort of not necessarily running in your favor.
 They're somewhat cruel and boisterous and like that. Well, when you break into this space, you discover that you're in fairyland. You're in fairyland as much as Darby O'Gill or any of the rest of these people, whoever made it across.
 And the secret of the elves, what they really fabricate is language. This is why in Irish mythology, if you can get elves on your side, you can make great poetry. Because they're the keepers of linguistic artifice.
 And getting elves on your side makes you into a master poet. Well, it's interesting then that in the Amazon, where there is a tradition of taking DMT, there are these things called "hiruki". And they're actually described as bouncing demons.
 And the hiruki, you're supposed to get, they come into being when you're stoned, and you're supposed to get them into your chest. You're supposed to invite them into your chest somehow. Well, then the number of these things you have inside of you determines what kind of a real man you are. And this is generally a male practice.
 Well, I noticed that these DMT tykes, as I call them, they jump in and out of your body too. They seem to be trying to teach you something about the body image or their relationship to your self-identity. And all the time, they're saying, "Make these objects do what we're doing."
 Well, then you go down to the Amazon, to the Ikaro singing ayahuasqueros, and they are using voice to make objects. So what we're on the track of here is a physiological ability, or a pharmacologically driven physiological ability to transduce language as something seen.
 Well, now you see, if you could see what I mean, it would be as though we were the same person. Seeing what I mean is a much more intimate relationship to my intent than hearing what I mean.
 You can hear what I mean and go and look it up in your little dictionary and get it all wrong if your dictionary and mine are different. But if you see what I mean, we will be in agreement because I see what I mean too.
 So, if meaning were something that one could sculpturally command in three-dimensional space, and we would walk around and look at it. Well, part of what I was doing in Linz, in Austria, was trying to get these virtual reality people hooked into this as a concept.
 Because you see, with the present virtual reality, do you all know what virtual reality is? Everybody knows what it is. Virtual reality is a technology where you put on a helmet and you have little, and then you think you're in this place, some other place, under engineering control.
 Well, what you could do is you could slave the parts of English speech to geometric objects. So that, for instance, every time you use the word "and," a rotating turquoise dodecahedron appeared over your left shoulder.
 Similarly, all the parts of the dictionary could be slaved to physically, or to visually beholdable objects. Well then, as I would speak, this thing would be happening over my left shoulder, a kind of self-constructing grammatical tinker toy.
 Well, I maintain that very quickly people would stop listening and start looking, and that they would be getting it. In fact, they would be getting more than if they were listening, because the way in which these syntactically visible parts of speech can be connected and shaded and presented and emphasized and italicized and underlined and brightly colored and set in different fonts and so forth and so on.
 In other words, many more dimensions to the intent to communicate can be brought into play. And I think this is what technology is probably driving for and what the psychedelic experience will inspire, is this kind of sculptural linguistic modality where meaning is something that we behold.
 Do you identify only with the visual type? I mean, people respond to auditory messages?
 Well, we have to find out whether there are visual types and audio types, or whether there are generalized human biases embedded in cultural conventions.
 You know, McLuhan talked about how at the inventing of printing, there was a shift from the eye culture, as he called it, to the ear culture. That before printing, if somebody gave you a piece of manuscript, it was in cannabula. It was written, it was manuscript.
 And therefore, you had to look at it. After printing was invented, every E looked like every other E. And so, print acquired uniformity. And uniformity, you don't, when we read, we do not look.
 You don't look at the page, you read it. And your eye rips through it. You don't linger over each letter and try to piece out how it's different from the other Fs on that line and stuff like that. But in manuscript culture, you do.
 Similarly, print created an expectation then of uniformity in the way that the eye expected the letters to always present a uniform appearance. There began to be the idea of uniformity of social appearances.
 And previously, the largest social class had been the guild. But suddenly, you get people talking about the ruling class, the middle class, the lower class, white collar, blue collar. These are linear uniform terms for describing lots of non-linear, non-uniform phenomena.
 And then finally, of course, with the machine age, you get the idea of interchangeability of parts. This is an idea that would never emerge in a, could only emerge in a print culture. Because in a print culture, the interchangeability of the parts of print becomes an established convention.
 So you say, well, we want to make tractors or hay mowers. So let's not just make one hay mower, let's make 50 of them and let's make them all at once and let's lay out the pieces and then let's assemble them in teams. And this kind of thinking arises out of the bias of a technology. McLuhan talked a lot about technological biases.
 Isn't this going back to the Chinese ideogram where they had 50,000 symbols at one time and now they have only about 5,000 in newspapers and the average person only knows that much?
 Well, yeah, I mean, language is becoming more glyphic. Reality is becoming more iconic. When you travel in Europe, you're aware that you're skating along on a thin surface of icons that if you're careful will never break through and let you down.
 You know, you can read all this international jargon about where the dog can poop and not to smoke and not to open the window and so forth and so on. Yeah, we need an iconic language and we're tending back toward it. Now, an iconic language like Chinese has also undergone huge amounts of local conventionalization.
 So I don't think we're all going to end up learning Chinese unless it's going to return more to its ancient form. Mayan is an interesting case because Mayan is a rebus language where you use icons not to symbolize things but sounds. Do you see the difference?
 So for instance, if we want to, in rebus language you would put a picture of an eye, a saw going through wood, an ant running across the ground, and a rose and that would be a sign which said, "I saw ant rose."
 The icons symbolize sounds, they don't symbolize meaning. This makes it hellishly difficult to reconstruct a lost language that is written this way because the language, what you have are the symbols of sounds and you don't have the sounds anymore. So how can you reconstruct a language? This is the problem Mayan decipherment has had to grapple with.
 When you're talking about visual language I keep thinking of pre-Limbuli deaf people. They process language in the right hemisphere and their language is visual-spatial and they interpret language in a visual-spatial way and when they try to teach you sign language they keep saying, "Think in pictures, stop thinking in words, think in pictures." Have you ever had any contact with deaf people or deaf community?
 Not with the community, I've known deaf people and yes, you're right, this thinking in pictures, this is something that happens at a certain point in most psychedelic experiences. You realize that the quality of our ordinary thought, or at least in my case, it is language, it's a stream of words.
 And then it can become this much richer, fuller, imagistic type thinking. This is very elusive, I mean it's so close to the level of human organization that probably there are some people in this room who are doing it right now.
 There are art movements like the Pre-Raphaelites or the Romantics that put great stress on this kind of thing, even had exercises to elicit this kind of thinking. I mean, I think that we're, and McLuhan is trying to get at this by talking about the effects of technology, it's that we haven't realized just how fluid the mental modality is.
 You know, Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages was thought to be a great saint, and he would prove his sainthood by, they would come to him with a Bible or a work of theology, and they would open it in front of him and let him look at it for a few minutes, and then close it and question him about it.
 And he could answer questions. And they thought this was a proof of his sanctity. And all he was doing was silently reading. He was the only man in Europe who could silently read. And everybody else had to sound the words.
 Well, we can't quite wrap our mind around that, because for us this is just something you do. You know, it's not even as hard as riding a bicycle. Well, how many of these things are there where we are down between narrow walls of expectation, and just a little tweak of our programming would make a real difference?
 One of the things that fascinates me about the psychedelics, that we haven't talked about at all this morning, because it's kind of on a technical bend, is how close the most interesting ones are to ordinary brain chemistry.
 It isn't that the strangest, weirdest drugs give the strangest, weirdest experiences. No, the drugs that are most like what you have in your brain at this moment give the strangest, weirdest experiences.
 The ones that are just one tweaked atom away from ordinary consciousness are the ones that give the profound, world-dissolving experiences. So this suggests to me that what we deal with when we deal with psychedelics is future chemical states of mind, future ratios of neurotransmitters in the human brain.
 Is it that the 5HT2 and A receptors for serotonin are slowly, over time, centuries, being swapped out for a receptor that will accept a more energetic molecule like DMT?
 We know that DMT occurs in ordinary human metabolism, but we don't know why. Is it increasing over time? We don't know, because we've only been measuring it 20 or 30 years.
 I mean, the place where evolution is going to be visible is in consciousness, because this is where the chemistry is most delicately poised to augment or suppress function.
 So we're very well set up to observe evolution and shift in conscious modalities, and this is no neutral, cooled-out scientific endeavor. The rate at which we can do this probably determines the rate at which we can save ourselves and the planet from ruin.
 Music. You haven't mentioned the function of music in your non-linear communication group, instead of verbosity.
 Well, music is this very old form of art which appeals to this thing I'm talking about, not quite with the kind of linguistic specificity that maybe we would desire ultimately.
 But music is a language of emotion that hovers between the seen and the heard pretty ambiguously. I mean, for the romantics, they were one of these groups of people who talked about synesthesia.
 This is this technical term for the senses moving from one modality to another, tasting colors, feeling music, hearing light. And a lot of the talk in the 19th century among symbolists and pre-Raphaelites and romantics was about these synesthesias and how to trigger them.
 And strangely enough, this led to the first bout of "psychedelic drug experimentation." It was the romantic pursuit of synesthesia through opium that created the first wave of opium addiction in literate English society.
 I mean, Coleridge and De Quincey and these people were quite consciously trying to use drugs to create and push the definitions of art out further.
 Somebody said, "Architecture is frozen music," from which it must follow then that music is unfrozen architecture. Liquid architecture.
 The architectonic quality of hallucinations when they're driven by music is very striking. And the way in which all these things come together, it has almost a kind of gothic elegance.
 The way tone can be used to create impressions of large vaulted space and this sort of thing. I mean, it's really an unexplored thing. And I think technology is going to teach us a lot about making that kind of art in particular.
 Yeah?
 Vaclav Havel couldn't see me because he had Margaret Thatcher. It's true. Frozen architecture. No, I mean, Czechoslovakia is an interesting case because you can see Prague's reputation before the revolution was that it was the gloomiest city in Europe.
 And you can certainly see that it would have been a gloomy city if people had been marching around in uniforms and there had been bread lines and fear and loathing.
 With communism gone, people stay up all night and dance in the streets and suddenly it just looks charming and unwashed. And we just need to get the soot and industrial grime off all this Jürgen Stiele and art deco architecture and it will be just fine.
 The thing about Czechoslovakia is if you scratch a Czech, you find a Celt because the Celts were there a long, long time ago building fortresses on all the hills.
 And when you look at the people in large crowds of which my God, do they know how to get crowds together. There are crowds of them everywhere. They have that same Celtic cast that you get at a West Coast Grateful Dead concert.
 I mean everybody has brown hair. Czechoslovakia was exciting because all these places have an opportunity to redefine freedom, to be even more free, to push it further.
 And what I was doing there to have a mission, to have a reason to be there, was visiting the National Museum Department of Mycology and leaving off spore prints and growers guides with people in the department who I thought might like to grow psilocybin mushrooms.
 And being good Slavs, they were very open to this and very excited by the idea of growing mushrooms. You know cultures can be divided into mycophilic and mycophobic.
 And mycophobic cultures are like the English for whom all mushrooms are toadstools and you should put it down because you don't know where it's been. This is the basic English attitude.
 Well then Slavs and Celts, there are hundreds of words in these languages for mushrooms and without it, so you can imagine that it's a different attitude.
 Prague is further west than Vienna. It's the real center of old Europe and of course because of the court of Rudolf II, it was the court of all this alchemical, Protestant alchemical political plotting and lots of intrigue.
 That's why we're called Bohemians, is because that radical style of free thought began in the principalities of Bohemia with people deciding nobody should wear clothes or we should get rid of money.
 And then everybody would do this until the local bishop would get an army together and come and kick some sense into everybody. But over and over in Bohemia, this kind of outbreak of radical free thought was typical.
 A couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to have a simple Iowaska in the company of a medicine circle and during the first part I was enraptured by these glorious visions.
 Then there was a sudden shift of perspective and I realized suddenly that the visions were all taking place on the side of a snake, a large giant snake.
 The visions were actually being projected on its skin and the snakes started writhing and moving.
 Later I found that most of the other people in the circle were having visions of snakes too.
 And then recently in the later Shaman's Drama there's a series of wonderful Iowaska paintings and almost all of them have snakes in them.
 What do you make of that? Is that a common thing with Iowaska?
 Well, it's an interesting question. Why do drugs have identities like this and do they have them?
 Well, the answer is yes, they certainly do.
 And it's one of the puzzling pieces of information that I always keep in front of myself when trying to understand these things.
 That it's irrational that, for instance, no matter who you are, you know, Viennese Jew, Icelandic ski instructor, Irish pub owner,
 if you take Iowaska you will see large snakes, large cats and dancing black people in this order of statistical frequency
 with black people being not as common as cats and snakes, cats being not as common as snakes, snakes being the most common.
 What's going on here? How can it be that a chemical compound that can be defined down to the quantum mechanical positions of the atoms
 nevertheless seems to have, carry informational content of some sort?
 Well, I don't know, but here is one possibility and maybe there are others.
 Maybe this is support for Sheldrake's hypothesis of formative causation, that actually around the drug a complex of ideas
 has accreted itself in some kind of psychological hyperspace. A pattern has been worn in hyperspace, which is the pattern of how this drug works.
 And it's really in some sense a composite of all the trips of all the people who ever took it.
 Well, since for the first 20,000 years all the people who ever took Iowaska had snake and jaguar fear as a major source of anxiety,
 we discover that up front. But of course now why the dancing black people? This becomes less easy to understand.
 It wouldn't be the consciousness of the plant, I mean...
 Well, this is the other possibility, see, that the reason these things are so message specific is that this is the plant.
 This is its presentation. Like with Iowaska particularly, its language is visual.
 I mean, after a strong Iowaska session your eyes are bugging out of your head.
 It's like a visit to Madison Avenue to buy prints. I mean, you've just looked at so many prints and looked and looked
 and compared the Bruegel to the Bosch and the Bosch to the Buffon, all this stuff.
 You know, look, look, look. But then, for instance, with mushrooms it's actually verbal.
 It speaks, it tells you things in plain English in a conversational mode.
 I don't understand. The more I live, the longer I see of all this stuff, the less I feel that I understand of what is going on.
 Don't you think there's a consciousness in the plant?
 You mean a psychedelic plant like that?
 Well, maybe all sorts of plants. I don't know.
 Yeah, but why would it have one presentational mode over another?
 Because it's a particular chemical composite that becomes its own unique life force or composite biology or whatever.
 But in that it has its own consciousness.
 Well, I guess this is what we're left with, that these are the masks by which we understand these things.
 What happens with the mushroom is it always has a presentational personality,
 but then when you inquire you discover that this presentational personality is created for your convenience
 and that behind it lurks God knows what.
 And then when you begin to talk to it about that, that's when the trip turns off to the left and begins to get peculiar
 because you're inquiring into its inner nature.
 I mean, with the mushroom you can actually say, "Show me more of what you really are,"
 and immediately the trip will take a turn away from the dancing mice and all that cheerful, hypnagogic riffraff.
 And towards something, you know, "Woo!" Say, "Okay, that's enough of who you really are. Reassure me now."
 So yeah, these things are like personalities, minds.
 But the question for me is, it's such a strange way to communicate that here is a life form that it can't communicate unless you eat it,
 unless it's inside you, and then somehow the moray of its being and your being mesh together,
 and then these images spring into being.
 But it is in the very act of passing away, being consumed in your metabolism.
 It's like some kind of act of love or something.
 Do you ever ask it what it's like having eaten you or being digested?
 What is it like to take a person?
 Yeah.
 Well, I asked it once what it wanted to be called, and it said, "Call me Dorothy."
 Dorothy.
 And I said, "Why?"
 And it said, "Because this seems like Oz to me."
 I just report these things. I don't know why it wanted to be called Dorothy.
 When you say it turns left, when you take that point of inquiry, the trip goes in the other direction.
 And then you've had enough, aren't you? Say, "All right, I'm ready. I want comfort."
 Could you say a little more about that?
 You mean how to steer it through these places?
 Or why you want to turn back, or what is that experience?
 Well, you have the feeling. It's a very complex feeling when you deal with the other.
 It's your friend, sort of. And it's predictable, sort of.
 But everything has this vibe about it where you don't want to push too much.
 And I've given a lot of thought to trying to think about where have I had this feeling that I have when I meet the DMT elves.
 And it's a feeling of exhilaration, but caution, accomplishment, but doubt.
 And I decided that where I knew this feeling from was years ago in my dissolute youth,
 as a hash trader in the back streets of Bombay, we would enter into these labyrinths
 where these guys with shining eyes and deformed limbs would take us back into these warrens of streets.
 And they would know that we had enough money on our body to ransom them all for five years' income.
 And we would know that they knew, and yet we would be there to conclude a business deal over a psychedelic substance.


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.64 sec
Decoding  : 2.20 sec
Transcribe: 3139.35 sec
Total Time: 3142.19 sec