(static)
 - Brian, when you get a minute, I can.
 Well, this morning was sort of an intro
 in case people needed to be brought up to speed.
 We discussed basically the distribution
 of these psychoactive plants with a history of shamanic use
 and then discussed a little bit about the history of them.
 And I didn't really finish with that
 because I want to stress that this,
 I think what we talked about this morning
 is we got them all to a good place.
 We got them all to paradise in Africa with clear vision,
 much food and plenty of horsing around.
 And then we broke for lunch.
 The forces that created that partnership society
 in pre-history, the forces that allowed the emergence
 of a non-male dominant social style
 were the same forces which then eventually
 destroyed it as well, because it was nothing more
 than climatological change is what was happening.
 As the African continent became drier,
 the grasslands retreated, the water holes
 became less frequent and further apart,
 and the mushroom came under pressure
 because of increased dryness.
 And at that point, I think probably
 the mushroom festivals became less and less frequent.
 The whole thing became more tenuous
 and there was great pressure then
 to try and figure out how to preserve the mushrooms
 through the dry times of the year
 to have them available for ceremonies.
 And I think that it's the use of honey as a preservative
 that really set the stage for things to go wrong
 because honey turns into a psychedelic compound on its own
 if you do nothing to it, but leave it alone.
 It ferments, it becomes mead,
 and mead is a primitive kind of alcoholic beverage.
 So over several millennia,
 what began as an ecstatic mushroom cult
 turned into a beer cult, a cult of alcoholic intoxication.
 And then you get the same shift of ratios
 that you see in our own society.
 I mean, how many women in our own society
 have their first sexual experiences
 in an atmosphere of alcohol abuse and misuse?
 The two almost go together.
 And less in the 20th century.
 And before the 20th century,
 it's almost possible to imagine
 nobody got laid for a thousand years in the West
 without being pretty juiced up
 because it was pretty unappetizing, I imagine.
 So this is a way in which sensory modalities
 and emphasis on different aspects of psyche
 change over time without a culture even being aware of it.
 And then I talked this morning a little bit
 about the fall into history,
 the neurotic dysfunctionalism
 that characterizes historical existence.
 And I think it's worth going back to that
 because some people have the idea
 that psychedelics are a kind of instant psychotherapy
 and that they address the concerns of the individual,
 but they're not concerned to link it up to history
 to see what it was for us in the past
 and what its absence has done for us.
 I think that the whole phenomenon
 that we call the fall into history
 is the scenario of abandonment
 that we underwent as we broke the umbilical connection
 to the Gaian matrix of organic life.
 That's what we were embedded in in this African context.
 But when Africa dried up and we moved out of Africa
 and into the Middle East,
 we then were transformed from nomadic pastoralists
 into primitive agriculturalists
 and then later city builders.
 And the entire pattern of male dominance and anxiety
 is set in place.
 If you look at the world of 7,000 BC,
 the most sophisticated human structure on the earth,
 of let's say 7,500 BC, is at Jericho
 in what is now Palestine.
 And what is it?
 It's a grain storage tower built at Jericho, 7275 BC.
 It indicates that the primitive pastoral nomadic form
 has given way now to an agricultural form
 that allows for the accumulation of surplus
 and hence the need to defend sane
 and hence the establishment of a have and have not psychology
 and so forth and so on.
 So all of the institutions that we now must attempt
 to reform and grapple with began then.
 Urbanization, kingship, male dominance,
 representative politics, all of these things begin then
 and are further exacerbated a couple or 3,000 years later
 by the Western decision to go with a phonetic alphabet
 as a method of communication.
 See, a phonetic alphabet further removes your way
 from anything concrete or real or related to nature.
 There's no ideogram, there's no glyph,
 there isn't even a rebus.
 There is simply an abstract symbol which stands for a sound.
 I mean, this is about as far away
 from the hands-on approach of language that you could get.
 Well, the culture that made these decisions,
 which is our culture, the culture of Europe
 and the ancient Middle East,
 has evolved into the dominant culture on the planet
 and has put in place institutions like science and so forth
 and so on.
 Our metaphors have grown ever more cogent
 in their ability to manipulate matter and energy
 as they have evolved less and less relevance to ourselves.
 So now we have ideological systems of tremendous power
 that none of us can understand or relate to,
 which is a kind of an odd relationship to knowledge
 since knowledge is supposed to be
 an experience of empowerment,
 not an experience of disempowerment.
 But our society has done it differently.
 And so we all wander around with a sense of disempowerment
 because we're surrounded by accomplishments
 that we couldn't possibly duplicate.
 Well, I mention all this
 because I think that it shows where the solution lies.
 If we were in balance 15,000 years ago
 and it was achieved through the use of psychedelics,
 de-emphasis of the ego,
 non-existence of the nuclear family
 and the suppression of the concept of ownership,
 we should look at these as possible styles of existence
 that might be put in place in the future.
 That's this psychedelic society
 that you've heard me talk about at various times.
 Well, that's probably enough on that.
 Bill, you thought so too.
 - When I said we'd look at the geographical distribution,
 the history, and then the phenomenology,
 I thought that we would put most of the phenomenology
 of the thing in here, in this section,
 because it's important to establish
 just what we're talking about
 and also to empower people to describe their own experiences
 which are often so peculiar
 that unless there is a group such as this,
 a person tends to just define themselves as starkers.
 I mean, what else can you say about some of this?
 But if you're starkers
 and you get 10 people to agree with you,
 you're not starkers anymore, you're a movement.
 So I mentioned this morning at DMT
 and I made of it the kind of paradigmatic compound
 because it's so brief, so natural, so powerful,
 so quick to recover from.
 And it's also a very good paradigmatic case
 when talking about what the psychedelic experience
 is like to have,
 because I think if you have the DMT experience
 on the way to the center of that flash,
 you'll probably have all the other ones.
 It seems to lie at the center of the mandala.
 The most startling thing about the DMT flash,
 and I mentioned this this morning
 when we were talking about Jung,
 is how astonishing it is.
 That death by astonishment seems the major danger.
 And this is even if you're an art historian,
 a Jungian, an aficionado of symbols and so forth and so on.
 It seems to come from some dimension orthogonal
 to the human world.
 And it is not a unitary experience
 the way the famous white light
 and all these other wordless, indescribable,
 elusive, mercurial things are.
 It isn't like that at all.
 It's extremely multiplistic
 and it's extremely specific in its presentation.
 And when you smoke DMT,
 you have the feeling that you have burst into a place
 that you have not had a psychological experience.
 You are not having a mental experience.
 You have burst into some kind of a space.
 And within that space,
 the first shock is that it's inhabited.
 And this is the shock I've never recovered from
 because it was just the last thing I expected to find
 inside a chemical compound
 was the equivalent of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
 It is inhabited by entities,
 is the only word to describe them.
 And they are, as I've said many times,
 they are like jeweled, self-dribbling basketballs.
 And there are many of them.
 And they come out of the background
 and they present themselves to you.
 They're literally vibrating up and down with excitement.
 They're faceted and rotating.
 And they see you as clearly as you see them.
 They even greet you.
 Some of you may recall the Pink Floyd,
 the old Pink Floyd song,
 "The gnomes have learned a new way to say hooray."
 I think it's on Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
 It's the first album those Floyd fans were looking puzzled.
 It's 'cause it was 40 years ago or something.
 Anyway, as you burst into this space,
 the gnomes say hooray.
 And they present themselves.
 And they are truly the gnomes
 of Central European fairy tales, archetypal gnomes.
 They sing.
 And out of their singing, elf and chatter,
 condense objects,
 which look like nothing at all in this world.
 I mean, the closest I've been able to come to them
 are the eggs of Fabergé.
 You know, these constructs in sapphire and ivory
 and crystal and vitreous glass
 that the French designer Fabergé created.
 Well, these things are like that,
 but they're like that raised
 to some excruciating pinnacle of completion.
 Because as they show you these objects,
 you know beyond any possibility of contravention
 that if a single one of these objects
 were to exist in this world,
 it would change this world forever.
 If a single one of these objects were to exist in this world,
 we would spend a thousand years studying this object.
 The last time this happened was a guy gave a speech
 up on a hill about moral obligation.
 We studied it for a thousand years.
 This is the same kind of thing.
 And these Fabergé hyperdimensional objects
 are themselves undergoing a dynamic transformation.
 They're not static objects like the Fabergé eggs.
 They are undergoing changes,
 singing, condensing other objects.
 These objects are crawling all over the ground
 in front of you, clamoring for your attention.
 Now, remember, 12 seconds before you were sitting
 in a suburban living room somewhere,
 grappling with some drugs somebody wanted you to take.
 Now all that's gone and here are these things.
 I call them tykes because I wanted to capture
 the sense of their childlikeness.
 I don't know why I called them tykes, actually.
 It just seemed like the appropriate thing.
 If some of you are classicists or students
 of the literature of the pre-Socratic philosophers,
 you might recall the 52nd fragment of Heraclitus,
 which says, "The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls."
 The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls.
 And when you break your way into the presence of the Aeon,
 it's extremely, I don't know, it's upsetting.
 You can't believe it's happening.
 There's a lot of cognitive dissonance.
 You could believe this if it just weren't happening to you.
 And there is this tremendous affection and interest
 in humanity.
 And then there is urgency, a lot of urgency.
 The tykes want to initiate you.
 They have a message.
 And the message is, you can do what we are doing.
 And what they're doing is using their voices
 to make physical objects condense out of the air.
 And they're saying, you can do this.
 Do it.
 Do it.
 Do it.
 And they're on you.
 And they jump in and out of your chest,
 which is something that is described in the Amazon, too,
 the Hikuli in the tryptamine snuff cults of the Yanomami.
 They jump in and out of your chest.
 And they are saying, do this thing.
 Do it.
 Do it.
 Suspend your belief.
 And eventually, you do do it.
 You discover that you can drop the filter of meaning
 that your voice can move back several registers.
 And out comes elf chatter.
 And this elf chatter is able to ring the air in front of you
 like a washcloth and get alchemical gold to drip out
 of the air and to begin to condense in front of you.
 Well, by this time, most people would like to call time out
 so they can make phone calls to various philosophers.
 But there is no time out.
 It just keeps going.
 And these things have a very-- the aura of strangeness,
 of alienness, is palpable.
 There's an emotion in there that we just
 don't have in this world because it's composed
 of unbelievable alienness in the presence
 of unbelievable familiarity.
 It's an ecstasy that is a coincidencia appositorum.
 Simultaneously, it is both what it is and what it is not.
 And the human mind can't handle that.
 That's called cognitive dissonance.
 I mean, you just go into a conniption fit of some sort.
 Well, the very first time I smoked DMT in 1967,
 with absolutely no expectation, this happened to me.
 And it has happened every time since.
 And then I've had occasion to observe people taking DMT
 in countries where it's legal.
 And what I see is there is an archetype which
 surrounds DMT, which you must make your way through it.
 But at the center of the archetype,
 the archetype is not present.
 And only the alien is present.
 The archetype is that of the circus or the carnival.
 The carnival.
 Think for a moment about the carnival.
 It has two aspects.
 One is blazing light and activity
 at the center of the triple ring.
 The lady in the spangled costume is high above the main floor.
 And the lions and the tigers and the clowns
 are parading around.
 That's part of it.
 But it has another aspect.
 Just off to the side of the big tent,
 there are the sideshows, the hoochie-coochie dancers,
 the two-headed man, and so forth and so on.
 In other words, there's this kinky, peculiar, shadow side
 of it.
 And I often-- if any of you are fans
 of the film of Federico Fellini, here
 is a man who understood the archetype of the circus
 and how, if you remember in Amarcord, that circus,
 or if you remember in Giulietta di Spiri,
 the flaming doorway into the room with the bed,
 with the bed springs and the crate paper flames.
 These are carnival images that relate back to DMT.
 When you finally come into the center of it,
 these are all seen to be veils.
 It veils itself that way because that's how you-- it's
 the old candy-to-the-baby routine.
 It treats us as people who would like to go to the circus.
 And then it takes us to the circus.
 But then there is a revelation beyond that.
 And I don't know how many people present in this room
 have confronted the thing I'm talking about.
 I always, at this moment, am aware
 that some people are saying, my, doesn't he perfectly get it?
 And other people are saying, huh?
 What is this?
 What is this guy talking about?
 The point I want to make is it's real.
 It's not vague.
 You don't have to strain for it.
 Nobody wonders whether or not it happened to them.
 It's just like somebody walking up to you
 and taking you by the arm and saying, there's something
 I insist on showing you.
 Come this way, please.
 And I am very-- it was the presence of the entities
 that shattered the person who I was because I
 was a scientific rationalist, a reductionist.
 I had no room for L in my cosmology.
 And here they were, hundreds of them.
 So it seems to me that this is a central question
 that shamanism has always dealt with,
 perhaps not with the kind of ontological sophistication
 that we imagine ourselves to have.
 But this is the question that must be asked.
 Who's in there?
 Who is this?


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