Well, what else is hanging for anybody this morning?
 About healing, using methods, techniques.
 Well, shamanism, we tend to lose sight of the fact that for the people who actually
 practice shamanism as a day-to-day thing, healing is what it's always all about. And
 the shaman isn't making these journeys for his own education or so forth. It's always
 to heal. I don't really see the mushrooms as specifically a cure in the ordinary sense
 for X, Y, or Z condition. It's more that in the psychedelic state, this is kind of hard
 to articulate and sounds like mumbo-jumbo, and maybe it is. But I've noticed that in
 the psychedelic state it's as though within the parameters of the body, the ordinary laws
 of physics are somewhat in suspension. And there is a great deal to be learned by somebody
 about touch and light and sound, especially sound, I think. Sound, to me, is the key to
 understanding and going deeper with the psychedelic thing, not only in the healing modality, and
 in that case it's about sound directed into the body. Because we do have extraordinary
 senses on psilocybin and on these other tryptamines. And I'm not mystical or woolly-eyed about
 this and I don't make any claims about what senses, but if you sit down with a person
 or a watermelon, for that matter, when you're stoned and sing into it, the quality of the
 hallucination is such that there is a way of thinking about it where you could say this
 is an acoustical hologram of the interior of their body. I don't say that. I just say,
 "My goodness, isn't it strange that I seem to be able to see the inside of the watermelon
 when I'm doing this?" Touch, I'm not an aura man under ordinary circumstances. I'm not
 sensitive to these things that you have to be sensitive to. If you have to be sensitive
 to something, that's not for me, because I'm basically insensitive. But nevertheless, there
 do seem to be qualities of density to the energy around the body. And I suppose, see,
 I'm not really an experimentalist in these areas. Like, I don't immediately grab somebody
 and start kneading them and working them over. I tend to just sit and watch. But I do see
 all these possibilities. Sound has such, I mean, sound does pierce non-dense objects
 and return an echo. And we may have neurological processing capacity that we're unaware of
 or that is ordinarily suppressed. For instance, I am very able, I have quite a good ability
 to navigate in darkness. I always have been able to do this. It doesn't seem that strange
 to me. I mean, I'm pretty good at it, to the point where there have been times in the Amazon
 when I've gone for water at night and literally forgotten to take the flashlight and gotten
 there and gotten halfway back before I noticed. And it's a combination of projective memory,
 so forth and so on. I noticed in the Amazon when I was quite keyed up that I had a sense
 that I've never heard anybody talk about. It was a kind of geometric sense that told
 me the shortest distance between any two points in terms of energy expenditure. It was something
 which I could see that aboriginal people would just absolutely have to have. It's a whole
 thing about following the edges of ridges and never descending unless you have to, and
 always keeping to the high ground. And my mind would just tell me this stuff, draw these
 lines through space.
 The fact that ayahuasca, which makes possible this visual language that seems to me the
 evolutionary compass for language and culture, the fact that the compounds which allow that
 occur in the ordinary brain suggests that we could be as much as close as a one gene
 mutation away from different styles of neuro processing. And we don't know to what degree
 technology pushes these things around. Did the people of manuscript culture have the
 same serotonin ratios as we have? How much, to what degree is culture a chemical feedback
 mechanism operating on us as a species? I mean, we're like fish trying to discover water.
 These are fairly subtle issues, but the payoff is being able to design our way toward a more
 humane culture. Because what the psychedelics are teaching on one level, I think, is that
 our prison and our palace is language. And that to date we have just allowed it to grow
 like topsy, because it was like an unconscious function. But it no longer need be an unconscious
 function. After all, we are now writing languages like crazy for computers, defining for them
 what concepts they can and can't think, what forms of logic, what algebras shall and shall
 not be permitted. We need to also think about taking control of the design process of language.
 Up to this point, the only people who have gotten onto this principle have been fascists
 of one sort or another. Either Joseph Goebbels and his crowd, or advertising weasels, or
 people like that. Everyone else has been sort of the victim of the linguistic agenda of
 those cliques. It's like the Bob Dylan song, "The strong men make the rules for the wise
 men and the fools." Well, if the rules are syntactical rules, then nobody even realizes
 they've been hijacked and held up. It's just that you can't think any other way, so why
 do you have this itch that you can't seem to ever scratch? Well, it's because it's freedom
 calling out to you from the unconscious.
 I don't really talk about all this with any sense of urgency. One of the issues that sometimes
 comes up, or often comes up in these groups, is, "Am I saying it's all okay? Is it all
 okay? Is there a political agenda? What should be done?" It was Mahatma Gandhi who said,
 "What you do has very little importance, and it's very important that you do it." And I
 think that's how we have to act. We have to each choose a small area, and then act in
 that limited area with all the existential commitment we can muster, but not with anxiety.
 Anxiety, the Weipo Yang, the Chinese Taoist alchemist, said, "Worry is preposterous. Worry
 is preposterous. You don't know enough to worry." Do liver cells worry? Do skin cells
 worry? It's just a complete waste of metabolic energy. The better thing is to function well
 in place, and then to wonder. Wonder is sort of worry without animal anxiety, but it's
 living in the light of non-closure. We're not going to get this thing wrestled into
 a box. Not positivism, not Islam, not the Kabbalah, no, no. All these things are very
 good tries, nice efforts. We set them on their pedestals in a long row in the Museum of Noetic
 Good Tries, but it isn't in that. It's in the moment, in the recapturing of direct experience.
 My publisher in New York for this new line of books he's bringing out has coined the
 battle cry, "Take back your mind." And I think that's a pretty good way of putting it. Take
 back your mind, because we have transferred our loyalty to mythical structures, structures
 about sexual politics, about what a man is supposed to be, what a woman is supposed to
 be, how much money a person is supposed to have, how much art they're supposed to produce,
 how many times a week they're supposed to get laid. We have all these images that we're
 supposed to live up to, very complex, all being sold down to us through a culture whose
 motivations are very murky and highly suspect. I mean, culture is not your friend. All these
 people who want you to smell good and drive the right car and have your extra facial hair
 removed and all that, these are not your friends, these people. And it pays to remember that.
 That there's a struggle on for loyalty, that you are much more, you look much better to
 the institutional structure if you work hard, consume quietly, choose from the political
 menu without a lot of fuss and that sort of thing. But in fact, this kind of business
 as usual has led to the sort of lethal crisis we're in. Our real problem, well, it's two
 things which are two sides of the same coin. It's ego and an inability to emotionally connect
 with the true outline of the situation. Because the true outline of the situation is fairly
 horrendous. It's that somewhere around 1945, or you name it, but that seems all right,
 we began to loot the future as a strategy for survival. Some kind of ethical norm was
 shattered. In the same way that in late, well, in early mercantile civilization, there was
 this horrifying moment when even though slavery had been dead for a thousand years, they realized
 that if they brought back the wholesale sale and transport of human beings, they could
 make millions in sugar. And it was like the heart of darkness reared up and they went
 for it. And our circumstance is somewhat similar. We have embarked on a similar kind of, you
 know, descent into an ethical dark dimension by looting the future. And this is going on
 at a faster and faster rate. I mean, this current situation in the Middle East, much
 could be said about it, but any moral justification seems preposterous. I mean, what's happening
 is 8% of the world's people use 35% of the world's petroleum and are ready to blow everybody
 off the map to keep it that way. I mean, this is nothing more than a manifestation of junkie
 psychology on a mass scale. It's, you know, we're addicted, they've got it, we're happy
 to pay for it, but if they won't sell it, we'll break into their house and take it,
 because by God it will go into our good right arm. That's the plan. And, you know, it's
 the culmination of the whole machine age metaphor. I mean, this is the golem of Metropolis. This
 is the robot mind run amok. This is Frankenstein. This is Brave New World. It's a world where
 lethal, habitual activities can nevertheless not be controlled. And it's a perfect example
 of a culture with lockjaw of the mind. I mean, we're just going to march off the edge of
 a cliff, apparently.
 Three days ago in the New York Times, the American estimates of casualties in the first
 30 days of successfully invading Kuwait and Baghdad were published. 50,000 American casualties
 in the first 30 days if we win. This is the number of people who died in the Vietnam War
 over the whole stretch of the war. Well, so then if you win, means, you know, standing
 in the middle of a sea of fire with 550 million enraged Arabs looking to cut you down. It's
 a complete misunderstanding. And I mention it not only because it looms large in our
 future. I mean, I think, you know, we're arranging the deck chairs of the Titanic sitting
 here talking about this. It's basically June of 1939 and everyone is planning their summer
 vacation in the Catskills. But it's also an example of how these institutions can't save
 themselves. I mean, everybody knew in 1973 that this moment would come, that policies
 needed to be put in place, a dollar a barrel tax on oil, some minor, minor thing. But no,
 it's just a mindset that is self-destructive. And, you know, the fundamentalists are in
 anticipation of the end of the world and so forth and so on. There isn't going to be any
 end of the world. There's no easy way out like that. And you're hearing this from the
 prophet of 2012. All of these fantasies, all of these infantile fantasies will be acted
 out. So, you know, if you want your mini-apocalypse, you know, you can have it and we can bomb
 Baghdad and gas Tel Aviv and fire the oil sands and kill millions of people on both
 sides. And you know what? It ain't going to bring the guy from Galilee and it ain't going
 to bring friendly flying saucers from Marturus. All it's just going to bring is a deeper,
 bigger mess for the human race to try and clean up. Anybody who thinks that, you know,
 you're going to save the world by setting it on fire is going to be sadly disabused.
 So it's a rare moment for the collectivity to try to anchor itself in larger visions.
 You know, the reason human society is haunted by messiahs and tin horn visionaries preaching
 on every corner and people waving little books of different colors is because there is no
 full development of the individual. There's this kind of arrested, prolonged adolescence.
 And it's created through institutions. Institutions are a demonic force in human life because
 they give permission for us to cease developing and to put our loyalty behind some weird creed
 that has been worked out usually by a bunch of guys wearing dresses. And then they, you
 know, hand it down to the rest of us. Anarchy and chaos, you know, anarchy is always just
 that's, oh, surely not, my dear fellow. That's so awful to contemplate. But what it's coming
 down to is a real make or break revelation on what is human nature. You know, the French
 cartoonist Möbius asks the question in one of his books, "Is man good?" And he answers
 it, "Sufficiently seasoned and marinated, yes." But we're actually going to get the
 chance to answer this question because all barriers to the expression of our will, our
 vision, our dream is falling away. And, you know, are we some kind of anti-life, sadomasochistic,
 suicidal contradiction? Or, you know, can we break through the millions of years of
 primate programming and alpha male hierarchical dominance and so forth to actually uncover
 the angelic force that we glimpse within ourselves, that we glimpse with high definition? I mean,
 it's really there. If there is a demon in human nature, there is surely equally an angel
 of equal power. So then it's just about breaking this free. And I don't think it can happen
 in the monkey body, on the surface of this planet. Somehow there has to be an act of
 surrender to our own nature and then concomitant with that, a kind of making of a peace with
 nature as it is. And I don't know how to envision the future. In the past year, you know, there's
 been a lot of flack about virtual reality. Does this hold any hope? And, you know, if
 we think of the virtual reality thing as a wave, six months ago I would say it was very
 up. Now enough people have done it to be disappointed. And a bunch of people are saying, "Holy shit,
 you must be kidding. This is going to save us?" Because it is hokey and crude and mechanistic
 and, you know, surrounded by a clique of visionary weirdos with a strange light in their eyes
 that you probably wouldn't want to leave alone with your chickens. But nevertheless, I count
 myself one of these people. But still, there are some interesting ideas. The thing is,
 there is going to be some kind of fusion of technology, spirit and mind. I mean, the drugs
 of the future will be more like computers. The computers of the future will be much more
 like drugs. And we're beginning to see this. When you crawl inside a virtual reality rig
 and discover, you know, that it's taken $200,000 worth of equipment to make you think that
 you're walking around in an unfurnished office of a third-rate bureaucrat somewhere, it looks
 pretty grim. But on the other hand, when Henry Ford built his automobile, the main objection
 people had as to why it would never catch on was, "There are no roads." You know? And
 he admitted this was a barrier, but clearly had a grander vision than everybody else he
 was talking to. Maybe this is where we should sort of lead the discussion and then leave
 it, because I think this is the toughest issue for groups like this. This is where we sort
 of divide and it's not easy to hold it all together. And that is, you know, is the psychedelic
 agenda somehow the preservation, nurturing, caring for, and completion, and even reconstruction
 and recovery of what we have destroyed and ravaged and mauled to get where we are at
 this moment? Or are we stuff of a different nature? And is our destiny to weave webs,
 you know, that hang between the stars and leave forever behind this small, wet, humble,
 life-infested place and go and live in the constructs of our imagination forever in silicon
 and so forth and so on? And this is, at least in my personality, these things are almost
 equally balanced. I mean, I feel very torn. I don't like the Gnostic, Manichean need to
 say, "Well, there must be a total split, that man and nature cannot coexist. Man, for
 the sake of humanity and for the sake of nature, must go into our own dimension, that the imagination
 is our cosmos and we are to inhabit it." I don't know. I'd be interested in what people
 think. The psychedelics go both ways. There seem to be psychedelics that vote one way,
 like the mushroom, which has a vast, extraplanetary, almost galactic-scale vision of interrelated
 intelligences and information transfer between species, and a scale of time where the coming
 and going of suns is just something which is going on. Ayahuasca, on the other hand,
 like claims you for your humanness, pours you into your body and puts an oar in your
 hand and sets you out on a black river in the middle of the night to hunt catfish. And
 you just feel life, human life, what it is to be born, to die, to have relationships
 with people, to make and lose fortunes, to have and lose dreams, all of this tremendously
 emotional stuff. And then there's a gradient in between. So the psychedelic quest then,
 or the psychedelic life, becomes ultimately a meditation on what is human nature. Is it
 these titanic aspirations to the techno, organo, metallo, immortal kind of existence? Or is
 it some kind of Tao-like, Zen-like acceptance of place and position and destiny? Or can
 it be both? I mean, I have fantasies where I see a world, and I don't know how we get
 there. I mean, don't ask me how we get there. But a world of many, many fewer people, and
 people live basically as people lived 25,000 years ago, basically naked, except that everybody
 has a little thread, like Brahmins have in India, a little thread that goes around your
 shoulder and around your waist. And on this thread, you could get maybe a couple of thousand
 small beads on this thread. Well, each one is essentially a menu, an interface into a
 piece of software which is hidden in hyperspace. And by just moving this thread around and
 touching these beads, you navigate into mental dimensions. I mean, I can imagine the person
 of the future would look like a rainforest primitive, but when they closed their eyes,
 there would be menus hanging in space, and you select and navigate and move through these
 things. But then there are issues, different aspects of the same issue of the human split
 with nature. What do we do with the human body, the monkey body? Is it a monkey animal
 body that drags us down into territoriality and violence? Or is it somehow the glory and
 the purpose? Where do you put the body in a psychedelic value system? If we're talking
 about more and more ephemeralization, depersonalization, decentralization, electronic diffuseness,
 well then where is sexuality in all that? Still more, where is biology in all that?
 We are the generation of people who actually will take the reins of the human dream in
 a way that it's never been taken before. As recently as a single generation ago, there
 were like insoluble problems of a technological and resource delivery type. Now it's basically,
 I think I began this weekend by saying this, all problems have become problems of human
 psychology. Everything can be done. It's all about how do you convince people in a democracy
 to pay for it? How do you convince people in a whatever to follow along? All problems
 have achieved a human dimension. The state of the atmosphere, it's a human problem. The
 temperature of the ocean, human problem. Everything has to do with changing and re-engineering
 the human mind. Now the real barrier to doing this as I see it is the cultural momentum
 of the past, and that's a very nice and sanitized way of saying fundamentalist religion. Fundamentalist
 religion goes into a tizzy when you start to, they would say, tamper with human nature.
 This is why drugs, abortion, homosexuality, notice that what these things all have in
 common is they slightly seek to tweak or define human nature. And this is extremely unwelcome.
 But if we're all God's chillin', how come we've rigged the earth with dynamite and are
 flipping coins to see who gets to set it off?
 [CHUCKLES]


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