We have been infected with the idea of original sin, and this is part of what keeps us infantile.
 We actually believe, I think, every single one of us at some level, that we are flawed,
 unfit, and this is paralyzing, because if we start talking about redesigning human nature,
 people say, "Oh, wow, this is what Hitler was talking about."
 As soon as you start redefining human nature, you redefine it worse.
 The beast returns.
 It means we have no faith whatsoever, and we believe that the given situation is the
 best of all possible worlds, is what that's saying.
 I don't believe that.
 I agree there have been horrendous misapplications of the wish to redesign human nature, but
 on the other hand, the style which lets it just develop like an untended, weedy lot has
 produced a fairly weedy lot of leaders with no great apparent commitment to the salvation
 of the human race either.
 What it comes down to is responsibility.
 Politics without responsibility is fascism, and politics responsibly practiced is the
 only other option available.
 All this goes back to this theme of the primacy of experience, recapturing the primary importance
 of yourself, first of all, and then your affinity group, the people around you.
 McLuhan said that this would happen naturally, and from what I see over the past few years,
 it seems to me this is so, that he called it electronic feudalism and said that the
 nation state would dissolve under the impact of electronic media.
 His timetable was a little too short.
 This is really a problem for profits.
 But he was perfectly right.
 What happened in Tiananmen Square, what happened in Eastern Europe, was entirely the product
 of information technology just conveying images, just conveying images from the West dissolved
 the whole myth of Marxism, which relied on a false view of reality.
 The thing is, these images are value neutral.
 They're corrosive wherever they move.
 The same forces that destroyed the Communist Party in Eastern Europe will destroy the ruling
 families of the Arabian Peninsula with equal ease, because what it is, is it's an anti-oligarchic
 virus that has gotten loose in the language ocean of the planet.
 I mean, the thing that happened in Tiananmen Square, you could feel every government on
 earth heave a sigh of relief when they got that under control, because the nightmare
 of every government on earth is a million peaceable people assembled in the main square
 of your capital city demanding that you pack up for Switzerland.
 I mean, that is it.
 And if it happens, if it happens in Bucharest, you go.
 If it happens in Tehran, you go.
 If it happens in Washington, you go.
 Nobody says no to a million people in the streets.
 That's what the Shah of Iran found out.
 I mean, he made a decree that if more than three people gathered in any place, they would
 be shot dead.
 The next day, two and a half million people marched screaming beneath his window for his
 head.
 You look at a scene like that and say, you know, hey, it's time to retrench.
 It's time to seriously cut a deal here.
 Well, this is a long, rambling answer to the question, you know, what is to be done?
 How can we make a difference?
 And I think the way that it's to be done is by empowering individual discourse and recognizing
 the power of the individual.
 Huge amounts of global civilization are operating on automatic pilot.
 You know, you think that if you were to walk into the World Trade Center or the Pentagon
 or NATO headquarters in Brussels, that there would be smart people furiously running things.
 There are idiots everywhere at every level of organization.
 I mean, if you were to attend a cabinet meeting, one guy will be asleep with his face in his
 plate.
 I swear, you know, it makes no difference.
 And we, the little people down in the labyrinthine streets of the city, looking up at the castle
 as the great ones come and go, you know, we believe that they're all about the fine business
 of humanity.
 But, you know, it's just a fiction.
 It's an absurdity.
 And to the degree that we proclaim it so, the meme spreads and the dream of the oligarchs,
 the autocrats, the programmers is dissolved.
 This is why the psychedelic thing is so controversial, such political dynamite, because ultimately
 it dissolves the linguistic structures that it finds pre-existing, whatever they are.
 I really believe this.
 I mean, talking to shamans in the Amazon, ultimately when you get to know them, they
 will tell you, you know, you think this is easy?
 You think because I am a Witoto, you think because I wear a gourd on my penis, I am somehow
 more able to do this than you are?
 No, every time I go, I know it may be the last time because it's so hard.
 It's so challenging to who I am.
 It always is.
 I mean, it's a real edge.
 It's not an edge that you go and map and then the next time it's not an edge.
 It's that every time you go, you discover this edge.
 It's the great gift, the great challenge, the great miracle of human existence is that
 within each one of us there is this dimension which we can choose to access, which is a
 constant challenge to our existential modality.
 You know, you don't have to mush your way up jungle rivers and rip jewels from the eyes
 of idols and stuff like that.
 You can on a Saturday evening in the privacy of your own living room become your own Magellan
 and you are no less courageous than Magellan.
 Maybe Magellan is a bad example since he didn't make it all the way around.
 Your own Columbus.
 And this dimension of freedom has always been 95% of what the human experience was about
 in terms of risk and thrills.
 And religion is not the mumblings of men wearing dresses.
 It just isn't.
 Nor is it all of this philosophical mumbo jumbo that arises out of rational discourse
 and brain specialization.
 It's that somehow part of the package of being a living, thinking being is that you get a
 universe inside of you.
 You know, you get a galaxy-sized object inside you that you can access.
 And there there are the mountains, the rivers, the jungles, the dynastic families, the ruins,
 the planets, the works of art, the poetry, the sciences, the magics of millions upon
 millions upon millions of worlds.
 And this is apparently who we each are.
 We're a little bit of eternity sticking into three-dimensional space and for some reason
 occupying time in a monkey body.
 But when you turn your eyes then inward, you discover the birthright, the existential facts
 out of which this particular existence emerged.
 And without going dewy-eyed, without lining up with all the religious people, it's more
 real than religion because it's apparently rooted in biology.
 And it's a great secret, a great secret and a great comfort because it means, you know,
 mystery didn't die with the fall of Arthur or the fall of Atlantis or the fall of anything.
 Mystery is alive in the moment, in the here and now.
 It just simply lies on the other side of a barrier of courage and it isn't even that
 high a barrier.
 It just is a barrier high enough to keep out the insincere and the misdirected.
 But for those who will claim it in the midst of the historical chaos of the late 20th century,
 they become the archaic pioneers.
 They become the first people to carry the Ouroboric serpent around to its own tail and
 to make a closure.
 And to the degree that any one of us has this connection back to the archaic in our life,
 it makes where we have been make a lot more sense and it makes where we're going seem
 a lot more inviting, which it really is, I think.
 Well that's all I have to say.
 I think we can probably, it's a little early.
 Does anybody have anything they want to add?
 Yeah.
 We've been talking about the ego a lot and its dissolution and breaking through the boundaries
 of it.
 And it sometimes sounds like ego has a pejorative connotation.
 On the other hand, we've just been talking very briefly about the fact that it's up to
 each of us in our own unique individuation to claim what can be claimed and that even
 the small individual little ego can virtually change the world if it has the right place
 to stand.
 It seems like these...
 So how do you balance these things?
 Yeah, I just, really the question is what is the future of the ego as we know it?
 Say post-2012, will the ego really be more of a group ego or a transformation of our
 ego or is the ultimate goal to shut our egos completely and become some form of individuation
 which we can't even dream about at this point?
 Well you're right.
 There's a dynamic tension there.
 Sometimes when this comes up, I answer it by saying that you need an ego.
 If you didn't have an ego, you wouldn't know whose mouth to put food in when you have dinner
 with someone at a restaurant.
 So ego is necessary to keep straight whose orifices are whose and that's the main function
 of ego.
 But then there is a deeper level to it.
 Somehow the way I imagine it is that the ego is, the correct expression of ego is when
 there is ego present but it is perceived as Tao.
 In other words, Tao is this state where you just go along and somehow get along.
 And ego is a state where you're somehow pushing the river and that's how you get along.
 I think the ego of the future will be much less possessive and that it's the possessiveness,
 the projection of the domain, really, of the ego outside of itself.
 Specifically the control of other people, sexual partners, children, parents.
 The way I imagine this pastoral situation of 12 or 15,000 years ago to work was people
 simply had group values because the children were group-owned.
 And that made such a tremendous difference in how the society imaged itself.
 People lived for the group and at the core of the group were the children and people
 always put them first.
 So everyone identified with the children, everyone was willing to face risk to preserve
 the core of the younger gene pool and that that was what made the difference.
 This concern for male paternity is really a poisonous factor.
 When you look at primatology generally, it's pretty clear that as a group of species, primates
 do tend to male dominance.
 That even the apes and the squirrel monkeys and the new world primates, in the wild there's
 usually an alpha male that's dominant.
 So this symbiosis between human beings, cattle, and psychedelic plants that allowed the feminine
 to emerge was something that was emerging against the grain of primate organization.
 So really what has happened is we have returned to a more animal kind of existence.
 We are more like beasts than the people of 10, 15,000 years ago because they were using
 psychedelics to artificially, you could say, or pharmacologically inflate feminine values.
 And this allowed them to become civilized people.
 I mean I have some elaborate theory about this, but I think that women are responsible
 for the emergence of language because I think that the division of labor that we know went
 on very early because of the male's larger body size in the upper half of the body, that
 the males tended to specialize toward hunting.
 Hunting puts a premium on physical strength and stoicism, meaning sitting a long time
 with your mouth shut.
 And then you have a limited number of commands.
 The women, and bladder control is very important, where women fail that test.
 So then what the women were doing was they were specialized as gatherers of plants and
 roots and insects and stuff like that.
 Well this is a tremendous pressure to develop descriptive taxonomy because gathering is
 the art of descriptive taxonomy.
 You want to know that you want the little bulbous root with the yellow flowers that
 grows down between the shattered granite boulders near the creek.
 It's all language, language, language.
 And the pressure is life and death.
 If you eat the wrong plant you become very sick or you abort your fetus or you die.
 So those who were well able to describe the objects of the gathering side of the economy
 were quickly outbred those who weren't.
 And language may have even been a kind of secret ability of women at some point.
 You see psilocybin synergizes language-like bursts of activity and may have been the thing
 which set it over.
 But what happened in this woman situation with language is a good example of what often
 happens with cultural innovation.
 The women possessed all this knowledge about hunting, about the gathering of plants and
 the magical use and preparation of plants.
 But at a certain point the database became so huge that it underwent a collapse conceptually
 and some brilliant woman realized we don't have to know about 600 plants and all these
 locations and seasonal variations and all this.
 We just have to concentrate on five plants and really learn all about those plants and
 then we can dispense with all this stuff.
 And this was probably because in the nomadic cycle they would encounter their own middens
 from the year before and there there would be cereal grains sprouted and you quickly
 put it together.
 But the specialization represented by agriculture, that was the beginning of the end as far as
 I'm concerned.
 Because at that point there was retraction away from nature.
 It was no longer about letting nature guide you to gather and find what you needed.
 It was a kind of paranoid, a kind of rip-off attitude.
 It was, you know, let us exploit these five plants.
 This means tilling the ground.
 It means the end of nomadism because now we're going to settle in one place and we're going
 to redirect the flow of water and we're going to become agriculturalists.
 It's an entirely different psychology.
 Weston Labar said that psychedelic shamanism died when it became important to get up in
 the morning and go out and hoe the corn.
 And then people replaced the psychedelic gods with the gods of wheat and corn.
 The Tammuz, the corn god of ancient Babylon, then appears.
 And gods of agriculture and male dominance go hand in hand.
 The previous religion at the edge of the high Neolithic was this religion of the great horned
 goddess.
 And it was a religion of nomadic pastoralism, orgiastic sexual activity, psychedelic drugs,
 and tremendous emphasis on cattle.
 Cattle were the great bridge to all these concepts.
 We start out as a baboon-like creature wandering behind these herds of ungulate cattle.
 I've seen baboons do this in Kenya, flipping over cow pies, looking for carrion beetle
 grubs as a source of fat and protein.
 But then we went from predation on carrion, the kills of larger animals, to slowly actually
 domesticating these things.
 And the milk and the blood and the manure and the meat and the mushroom would all be
 seen to be things which came quite naturally from the cow.
 The cow was like the supreme feminine symbol.
 And all over North Africa and the ancient Middle East, you get this late Paleolithic
 great horned goddess.
 The cattle religion and the emergence of consciousness seemed to go hand in hand.
 One time I was waiting for a load of mushrooms to come on and it was very strong.
 I had sort of miscalculated and I had gotten too much.
 And I could see this thing just coming at me, huge force.
 And I heard a voice.
 It was actually the Swiss Air stewardess from Frederico Fellini's Eight and a Half.
 But it was that voice.
 And she said, "They say it helps to lay down, cowboy."
 And I was amused at the time, or later when I had time to be amused, I was amused.
 But then I realized this mode of address, cowboy, is probably typical of the mushroom
 because for most, 95% of its existence, most of what it's dealt with are cowboys and cowgirls
 because these are the people who follow along behind the cows.
 These are the people who invented astrology from watching the stars.
 And many people, myself included, have reported the experience of looking at the stars stoned
 on psilocybin and having the mushroom supply dotted lines between the constellations.
 I mean, there it is.
 There's the map.
 Yes, pastoralists, herders, they invented the calendar from watching the horizon.
 And what we looked at last night was partially a calendar.
 It's very interesting.
 If you look, if you want a meditation on shamanism, politics, time, and so forth, look at hexagram
 49 in the I Ching, which is revolution.
 And you might go to this expecting a treatise on political upheaval.
 And it says instead, the magician is a calendar maker.
 He measures the seasons and sets them right.
 And it's this idea of reconstruction of time.
 The message that I get out of the psychedelics is that we need to reframe the largest frames
 in our linguistic cosmology, means reformation of the calendar, reformation of language,
 that we cannot evolve any faster than the languages that we are imprisoned within.
 We are linguistic creatures somehow.
 And so we need strategies, catalysts, enzymes, whatever it is, practices that force the evolution
 of language along conscious lines.
 If we don't do this, the old styles of thinking, the old concepts are just going to pull us
 down.
 Well, to my mind, this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction because
 psychedelics are the only force in nature that actually dissolves linguistic structure,
 lets the mechanics of syntax be visible, allows the possibility for the introduction, rapid
 introduction and spread of new concepts, gives permission for new ways of seeing.
 And this is what we have to do.
 We have to change our minds.
 Well that's it.
 Thank you very much.
 I enjoyed this.
 [Applause]
 Enjoy this.
 [APPLAUSE]


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