(water rushing)
 (water rushing)
 (water rushing)
 - They are forcing the evolution
 of the modality of language.
 It may be that the processing of language
 is not hardwired, not physiologically wired.
 It's a software function
 having to do with culture, language,
 upbringing, and so forth.
 Because some people claim they are great visualizers
 and that they do think visually and so forth.
 And we have no reason to deny this.
 So it may be that we are just a one gene
 or even an expression of gene ratios difference
 away from an entirely different way
 of processing communication between each other.
 And this is what the new age, the end of history,
 the anticipation of this great breakthrough
 that we can feel but not really outline is about.
 If that seems far-fetched to you,
 you should notice how far-fetched
 the original emergence of language must have been.
 Because I think people were fully people
 and totally mute or unable to articulate a thought.
 And then either an accumulation of neurons
 or some synergistic effect was brought into play
 and lo and behold, spoken language emerged out of that.
 Well, something similar could happen to us.
 In the morning session, I talked about
 the forced evolution of language,
 paying attention to our language.
 I really think that the way to think of these psychedelics
 is as catalysts for the imagination.
 If any of you are chemists, you know
 a catalyst is something that when you add it
 to a chemical process, the process is tremendously
 speeded up, but in the end, the catalyst is not destroyed.
 The catalyst is reconstituted at the end.
 So psychedelics, one way of thinking of them
 is as a catalyst for cognition.
 The original description of psychedelic drugs
 was they were consciousness expanding drugs.
 Well, if we take the idea that they are consciousness
 expanding seriously for even a moment,
 then we have to put a lot of attention in on this
 because it's the absence of consciousness
 that is murdering us and our planet.
 We need all the consciousness we can get.
 We need to wring it out of computers, get it out of plants,
 raise it in ourselves and our children.
 Wherever we can get it, we need it.
 And the present, you know, the present situation
 with the planet is very dire, very dire because of us.
 Our unchecked evolution in a single direction
 along the gradient of culture has now created
 a toxic planet that is an endangered planet.
 Since this situation has arisen entirely
 within the confines of history,
 aren't we going to have to look outside of history
 in order to redress this problem?
 I think so.
 And when we do look outside the history,
 then we find the institution of plant shamanism there
 waiting to inform us, to educate us,
 and to show us how to set a course
 out of the present dilemma.
 I don't think we can find our way out by ourselves.
 I don't think we can get high by ourselves.
 And I don't think as a species
 that we can save this planet by ourselves.
 We have to have a partner.
 We have to get an ally into this situation.
 Just in closing, and as an example,
 the mushroom has a tremendous problem-solving ability.
 And because we can talk to it, we can ask it questions.
 We can actually get a non-human perspective
 on human problems.
 A few weeks ago, I made this statement
 before a group of people somewhere.
 And after the talk was over,
 somebody came up to me and said,
 "Well, so why don't you ask the mushroom
 how to save the world?"
 And I just put it off, thought it was the wrong attitude.
 But then later I wondered about this question,
 how to save the world.
 And I thought, well, maybe I've been too circumspect
 with the mushroom.
 Maybe I should just put it to it.
 So I carried out the experiment
 and put to them, how do we save the world?
 And now I don't offer this as the solution.
 I'm going to tell you the mushroom's answer
 so that you can see how our backs
 aren't quite to the wall yet.
 There are still avenues to be explored.
 I said to the mushroom, how can we save the world?
 There was a hesitation of one third of a second,
 approximately.
 And then the mushroom said,
 "No woman should raise more than one natural child."
 And I said, "What?"
 Said, "No woman should raise more than one natural child."
 So I took that home with me and I thought about it.
 Here are the consequences of following
 that piece of advice.
 The population of the earth would be cut in half
 in 50 years.
 50 years following that, it would be cut in half again.
 50 years after that, in half again.
 In 150 years, the population of the earth
 could be under a billion people.
 Nobody was shot.
 No wars were fought.
 No one was told they could not have a child.
 No one was coerced.
 No one was starved.
 Then I started looking into this thing
 about children and population.
 And most of you, like me, probably imagined
 that the world has a population problem.
 And this population problem is going on
 in places like Pakistan and Bangladesh
 because Dagnabbit, those little brown people,
 will just not stop having children.
 Well, I looked into it and I've got a surprise for you.
 A child born in America will use between 600 and 1,000 times
 more natural resources and energy
 than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh.
 Suppose you went to Bangladesh and you met a woman,
 a young woman of childbearing age,
 and she told you that her ambition in life
 was to have 1,000 children.
 You'd be appalled.
 I mean, what kind of social responsibility is this?
 What kind of person are you that you want to do this?
 An American woman having one child
 is having the equivalent of those 1,000 infants.
 Now, another interesting thing about this suggestion
 made by the mushroom,
 that each woman should rear one natural child.
 When we think of population control schemes,
 the first objection is,
 my God, you can never sell this to people.
 They have these religions,
 they have these centuries of tradition and so forth.
 It just won't wash.
 Notice that what the mushroom suggested
 is most likely to be accepted
 by the person most important to convert.
 We don't want to convert the women
 of the back streets of Bangladesh to this policy.
 We want to convert the women of Sherman Oaks,
 Malibu, Santa Monica, Grosse Pointe,
 Boston, New York, Philadelphia,
 because these are the women
 whose children are using the resources.
 So here is, in one sentence,
 the mushroom was able to answer a question I put to it
 with a suggestion I had never dreamed of
 that seems, at first glance anyway,
 to stand up pretty well,
 and I've spent a lifetime trying to figure out ways
 to solve human problems.
 See, we're a little stupid,
 because we're all alike.
 Something years ago the mushroom said to me,
 which deals with this,
 was people are always,
 this question of enlightenment,
 and the mushroom said,
 "For one human being to expect
 "to obtain enlightenment from another
 "is like a grain of sand on the beach
 "expecting to attain enlightenment
 "from another grain of sand on the beach.
 "Don't you get it?
 "You're all grains of sand."
 I mean, Joe Schmoe, who runs a body shop,
 and Mukta Ruby Baba are the same people.
 There's no difference between those two guys,
 no reason to assume so.
 So I think we need help,
 and that little exercise in what do you do
 about the population problem shows
 that there are suggestions out there
 we haven't thought of, avenues we haven't tried.
 When I thought about why haven't we tried
 to this avenue of one woman, one natural child,
 it took me about 30 seconds to understand
 that it's real hard to make a buck
 in a situation when population is retracting
 at a rate of 50% per generation,
 and our whole world is based on making a buck.
 I told this idea to someone, and they said,
 "But if the women of Malibu stop having children,
 "they will lose all their political power
 "because political power is numerical."
 This is not true.
 Political power is power,
 and if the women of Malibu stop having children,
 they will be quite a bit wealthier than they already are.
 Notice that this deciding to voluntarily
 have one natural child is also very helpful
 to you personally,
 that a woman will have to work less hard,
 will have to cut fewer deals
 with the in-place structure of male dominance
 if she has only one child.
 A woman with two children has got to cut a deal
 with male dominance, or she has a trust fund or something.
 The reason we are, I think, instinct,
 we have a tendency to clench at this suggestion
 and not follow it through,
 is because we imagine that there is something holy
 and sacred about the nuclear family,
 and that we don't want to attack this biological unit
 that has such integrity.
 But this is a bunch of nonsense.
 The nuclear family has no biological integrity whatsoever.
 It's a creation of the post-industrial Reformation.
 The extended family is the natural human unit
 to ease the pressure of child-rearing on young women
 and to give everybody the benefit of contact,
 intergenerational contact and so forth.
 No, this nuclear family that our politicians
 are always beating their breasts about
 is the absolute cauldron of neurosis in this society,
 as far as I can see.
 And when you look at the demographics of what is happening,
 the number of women with one,
 the number of households that are one woman,
 one child household,
 I think you can see that maybe our unconscious
 has already been in communication with the mushroom,
 and it's just the ego who's gonna get the news last.
 Well, I don't wanna spend too much time on that,
 but it's an example of how these things
 offer solutions to human problems.
 And if it can offer solutions to a human problem
 like overpopulation by 6 billion people on a planet,
 then it can surely take care of the needs and concerns
 of a group of rainforest hunter-gatherers
 that number 70 or so people.
 I doubt they can conceive of a question
 that it doesn't have an answer to,
 because it can operate on many levels simultaneously.
 And this is an example of consciousness in action.
 You see, me plus nothing had nothing new to say
 about the population problem.
 Me plus psilocybin had a whole new take, a suggestion.
 We can swat it down and ultimately decide
 it's a bunch of malarkey,
 but at least there was a new thought,
 a new try, a new hope.
 This is the consequences of consciousness.
 And we're beset by problems like this.
 And we shouldn't assume that they are insoluble
 simply because we haven't solved them.
 In fact, we must assume that they are soluble
 or else we are not gonna have a place
 to hang our hat in 50 years.
 But the solutions come through an act of humility,
 an act of opening to the dynamic of nature,
 the feminine, the psyche.
 The ego is the calcareous knot of tumorous tissue
 that stands outside of all that
 and cannot be trusted and cannot be relied upon.
 And so by attempting to dissolve that,
 to mitigate its hard edges,
 to smooth it out into the greater context of being,
 then we really discover what humanness is about,
 because humanness is not something that can be encompassed
 from the point of view of the ego.
 That's why having created the ultimately egoistic society,
 we've created a society with so little humanity in it.
 And I see the psychedelics as a,
 and make the world a better place than we found it,
 which is certainly not our record so far,
 but it's not too late.
 I mean, H.G. Wells called history
 a race between education and disaster.
 It's not mere coincidence nor even mere synchronicity
 that at this moment in time and space
 with these tremendous crises bearing down upon us,
 that we have reached out to the archaic peoples
 with a new attitude,
 not an attitude of how can we enslave them,
 but how can we learn from them.
 And my hope is that here in the final ticking
 of the clock of history,
 we are going to end our prodigal descent
 into the desert world of the ego
 and return with what we have learned,
 the fruits of the prodigal journeying of the errant sun,
 which is what history has been,
 return with the fruits of that prodigal wandering
 to the larger human family that waits on us
 in the rainforests, in the deserts, in the marshes,
 in the thorn forests of this planet.
 The archaic people are waiting for us to get on the train
 and then the train will be able to depart.
 But we have to awaken to our past
 and then we can set a course toward a meaningful future.
 That's the wrap, basically.
 (audience applauding)
 (audience cheering)
 (audience applauding)
 [APPLAUSE]


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