Eros And The Eschaton

to talk about tonight simply because it's the thing that is moving me to the edge of my chair

at the moment is I called the talk Eros and the Eschaton and what I could have called it is Eros

and the Eschaton what science forgot because somebody asked me recently is there any permission

to hope more specifically is there any permission for smart people to hope I mean it's easy to hope

if you're stupid but is there any basis for intelligent people to hope and I wanted to deal

with that because I think so I mean it was to me a shocking question because I live in an aura of

hope because I live in a twilight world of my own self-generated cannabinated fantasy

and I forget that not everyone is so fortunate and and that there's a lot of of despair and

uncertainty out there so I wanted to talk about this I'll talk for a while and then we'll break

and have an intermission I'll sign books if anybody needs a book signed and then we'll come back and do

Q&A on this till till we're sick of it basically

yeah and if there's a technician adjusting this help me out a little bit Eros and the Eschaton

these are the two areas that I think is the old paradigm and give permission to hope and strangely

neither of these words is that well known which gives you a measure of how completely the dominator

position has squelched subverted and and downplayed any opposition to its worldview Eros we know about in some

kind of devalued sticky kind of glitzy way because we get it in the eroticization of media and society but

really what eros means in in the Greek sense is a kind of unity of nature a kind of all pervasive order

that bridges one ontological level to another this is not permitted in the official worldview of our civilization

civilization which is science the the world of inorganic chemistry is not thought to make any statement about the organic world

and the organic world is not thought to be extrapolatable into the world of culture and and thought there are imagined to be clear breaks

in these categories I I had a biologist tell me once if genes aren't involved it ain't evolution

so that means you can't talk about the evolution of the earth as a physical body you can't talk about the evolution of human social institutions

evolution is evolution is somehow a word appropriate to biology and appropriate nowhere else

and this brings me then to the first factor easily discerned by anybody who has their eyes open

that compromises and erodes the hopeless existential view of the world that we're getting from science

and that is the idea that nature is in fact across all scales and all levels of phenomena a unity

it's not a coincidence that electrons spinning around an atomic nucleus and planets going around the star

and star clusters orbiting around the gravitational center of a galaxy it's no coincidence that these

uh systems exhibit the same kind of order on different scales and yet science would say that is a coincidence

you know p.w. bridgeman who was a philosopher of science defined a coincidence as what you have left over when you apply a bad theory

it means that you know you've overlooked something and what jumps out at you as a coincidence is actually a set of relationships

whose uh whose causeuistry is simp whose relationships to each other are simply hidden from you and what I've observed

and I think it is fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this

what I've observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity

this is a great general natural law that your own senses will confirm for you

but that has never been allowed into the canon of science

and what I mean by that nature builds on complexity is the following

when the universe was born in the dubious and controversial circumstance called the big bang

it was at first simply a pure plasma of electrons

electrons it was the simplest that it could possibly be

there were no atoms there were no molecules

there were no highly organized systems of any kind

there was simply a pure plasma of expanding energy

energy and as the universe cooled simply cooled new kinds of phenomena we say emerged out of the situation

as the universe cooled atomic nuclei could form and electrons could settle in to stable orbits as the universe further cooled

the chemical bond became a possibility

still later the hydrogen bond which is a weaker bond which is the basis of biology

so as the universe aged it complexified

this is so obvious that it's never really been challenged

but on the other hand it's never been embraced as a general and dependable principle either

follow it through with me

out of atomic systems come chemical systems

out of chemical systems comes the covalent hydrogen bond the carbon bond

carbon bond complex chemistry that is prebiotic or organic

out of that chemistry come the macro physical systems that we call membranes

gels charge transfer complexes this sort of thing

these systems are the chemical preconditions for life

simple life the life of the prokaryotes

the life of naked unnucleated DNA that characterized primitive life on the planet

out of that life come eukaryotes nucleated cells and then complex colonies of cells

and then cell specialization leading to higher animals leading to social animals leading to complex social systems leading to technologies leading to globe girdling electronically based information transfer oriented cultures like ourselves

someone said what what's so progressive about media it's the spreading of darkness at the speed of light

it can be it can be

well

so this is very interesting

that apparently

the way the universe works is

upon a com

upon a platform

of previously achieved complexity

chemical

electrical

social

biological

whatever

new forms

of complexity

can be built

that cross

these ontological boundaries

in other words what I mean by that is that biology

is based on complex chemistry

but it is more than complex chemistry

social systems

are based on

the organization that is animal life

and yet it is more than animal life

so

this is a general law of the universe overlooked by science

that out of complexity

emerges greater complexity

we could almost say

that

the universe

nature

is a novelty

conserving

or complexity

conserving

engine

it makes complexity

and it preserves it

and it uses it as the basis

for further complexity

now

there's more to this

than simply that

I think we all

observationally

could agree with what has been said

so far

the added wrinkle

or an added wrinkle

is

that

each

advancement

into complexity

into novelty

proceeds

more quickly

than the stage

that preceded it

this

is very profound

because

it

if accepted

as a serious

first principle

it

it ends

the marginalization

of our own species

to speak

to the level

of spectator status

in a universe

that knows nothing of us

and cares

nothing for us

this is

the most advanced

position

that modern science

will allow us

spectators

to a drama

we didn't write

shouldn't expect

to understand

and cannot influence

but I say

if

in fact

novelty

is the name

of the game

if in fact

the conservation

and complexification

of novelty

is what the universe

is striving for

then

suddenly

our own

human

enterprise

previously

marginalized

takes on

an immense

new

importance

we are

apparently

players

in the

cosmic

drama

and

in this

particular

act

of the cosmic

drama

we hold

a very central

role

we are

at

the

pinnacle

of the complex

of the expression

of complexification

in the animal

world

and somehow

this complexity

which is

concentrated

in us

has flowed

over

out of the

domain

of animal

organization

and into this

mysterious

domain

which we call

culture

language

consciousness

higher values

each

stage of advancement

into complexity

occurs more quickly

than the stage

which preceded it

after the initial

big bang

there was a period

of

billions

of years

when the universe

cooled

stars

condensed

planetary systems

formed

and then

the quickening

process

crossed

an invisible

Rubicon

into the domain

of

animal

and biological

organization

well

you see

since the

since

the rise

of western

monotheism

the human

experience has

been marginalized

we have been

told

that we were

unimportant

in the cosmic

drama

but we

now

know

from

the feedback

that we're getting

from the

impact

of human

culture

on the earth

that we are a

major factor

shaping

the temperatures

of the oceans

the composition

of the atmosphere

the general

speed

and complexity

of speciation

on the planet

so forth and so on

a single species

ourselves

has broken

from

the ordinary

constraints

of animal

nature

and created

a new world

an epigenetic

world

meaning

a world

not based on

gene transfer

and

chemical

propagation

and preservation

of information

but a world

based on

ideas

on

symbols

on

technologies

on

tools

on

ideas

downloaded

of the human

imagination

and concretized

in

three-dimensional

space

as

choppers

arrow points

particle

accelerators

gene sequencers

spacecraft

what have you

all of this

complexification

occurring

at a faster

and faster rate

and this

brings me

then

that

science

has overlooked

which is

the acceleration

of

complexification

that the

early history

of the universe

proceeded with

excruciating

slowness

then

life

took hold

in the oceans

of this planet

a quickening

of process

and evolution

but still

things proceeded

on a scale

of tens

of millions

to clock

major

change

then

the conquest

of the land

higher animals

higher exposure

to radiation

faster change

species following

species

one upon another

then

fifty thousand

a hundred thousand

a million years

ago

anyway

recently

the crossover

into the domain

of

culture

tool making

myth making

dance

poetry

song

story

and

that set the stage

for

the fall

into history

the

incredibly

unusual

and

self-consuming

process

that has

been going on

for the past

fifteen

or twenty

thousand years

a biological

snap

of the

finger

and

yet

in that time

everything

that we call

human

everything

that we

associate

with

higher values

has been

elaborated

created

set in place

by one species

ourselves

this

acceleration

of time

or complexity

shows

no sign

of slowing

down

in fact

the

fabric

of our own

lives

we can

almost

daily

hourly

by the

minute

feel it

speeding up

taking hold

it's a cliche

that time

is moving

faster and faster

to

not

a

perceptual

illusion

or cultural

mirage

that this

is actually

happening

to the

space-time

matrix

that time

is in fact

speeding up

that history

in which

we are embedded

because

our life

of fifty

to eighty

years

is also

ephemeral

on a scale

of ten

to fifteen

thousand years

but

nevertheless

history

is

a state

of incredible

destabilization

it's

a

it's a

chaos

tree

in the process

of happening

it begins

with

animals

kept in

balance

by natural

selection

transformation

transfer

and the language

using species

hurling its instruments

toward

the stars

there is

no reason

for us

to suppose

that this process

of acceleration

is ever going

to slow down

or be

deflected

it has

been

a law

of nature

from the very

beginning

of nature

that this

acceleration

was built

in

what poses

a problem

to us

as thinking

individuals

is that

the speed

of

involution

toward

concrescence

is now

so great

that we can

feel the tug

of it

within the confines

of our own

lives

there has been

more change

since 1960

than in the

previous

several thousand

years

there has been

more change

since 1992

than in the

previous thousand

years

change

is

accelerating

invention

connection

adumbration

of ideas

mathematical

algorithms

connectivity

of people

social systems

this is all

accelerating

and under

the control

of no one

not the

catholic church

the communist

party

the IMF

no one

is in charge

of this process

this is what

makes history

so interesting

it's a runaway

freight train

on a dark

and stormy

night

this is why

I'm not

particularly

sympathetic

to

conspiracy

theory

because I can't

make the leap

to faith

that would cause

you to believe

anyone could get

hold of the beast

enough to control

it

I mean

conspiracies

of course

we have conspiracies

up the kazoo

but none of them

are succeeding

they're all being

swept away

compromised

astonished

by new information

and endlessly

agonized

so

two factors

relating to Eros

the

movement into

complexity

and the fact

that that movement

goes ever

faster

and the second

quality

the acceleration

of the movement

into novelty

leads me to

the third point

which

is I suppose

more controversial

and I

am frankly

willing to admit

that my

sensitivity

to this third

point

is based on

my

psychedelic

experience

I mean

science

is the

exploration

of the

experience

of nature

without

psychedelics

and I propose

therefore

to expand

that enterprise

and say

we need a science

beyond science

science

we need a science

which plays

with a full

deck

and

the reason

the psychedelic

experience

is so important

here

is not

not some

namby-pamby

notion

that it expands

consciousness

or it makes you

more perceptive

or something like that

I mean that is all

true

but it isn't

strongly enough

put

cultural point

of view

is like

a crystal

you have

an amorphous

cultural

medium

which

at certain

temperatures

will form

a crystal

of cultural

convention

if you

will

and within

the geometry

of that crystal

certain things

make sense

and certain things

are excluded

from making sense

science

is

a

condensed cultural

point of view

that is

a rigid

crystal

of interlocking

assumptions

assumptions such as

matter

is primary

mind

is

tertiary

causality

works

from the past

into the future

so forth

and so on

what psychedelics

do

in terms

of their

impact

on the physical

brain

and organism

of human beings

is

they withdraw

cultural

programming

they

dissolve

cultural

assumptions

they lift

you out

of

that reassuring

crystalline

matrix

of interlocking

truths

which are

lies

and

instead

they throw

you into

the presence

of the great

who knows

the mystery

that has been

banished from

western thought

since the rise

of christianity

and the suppression

of the mystery

religions

now

the

the model

that attracts

me to the

psychedelic experience

is not

that

it makes you

smarter

a kind of

simple minded

idea

paradoxically

or

the idea

that

you are paying

attention

or

the idea

that it's some

kind of

magnifying glass

into the personal

unconscious

your trauma

your childhood

memories

the satanic abuse

your parents

laid on you

so forth

and so on

the

the model

which I like

is a geometric

model

and says

simply

that

since the rise

of the Greek

alphabet

print

linear thinking

and science

we have become

imprisoned

in a

causal

universe

of

material

connectivity

and that

this is a cultural

myth

as much as

believing that

we are the sons

and daughters

of

the great

father

who got out of his

second waterfall

to take a leak

I mean

these are just

cultural

myths

what is

revealed

through the

psychedelic experience

I think

is a higher

dimensional

perspective

on reality

and I use

higher dimensional

in the

mathematical

sense

literally

you are lifted

out of the plane

plane of cultural

assumptions

and can look

down

with the kind

of godlike

understanding

that one

obtains when

one flies in

an airplane

over a landscape

previously only

viewed from the

ground

in other words

from the

vantage point

of the psychedelic

experience

the cultural

landscape

is seen

more nearly

nearly in its

correct perspective

seen as

historically

bounded

spatially

and

intellectually

bounded

now

it's no

coincidence

that

if you

analyze

biology

what it

is

a quest

of dimensionality

the earliest

forms of

life

were

probably

slimes

or stabilized

on a clay

surface

immobile

unable

to perceive

light

with no

sense of

time

merely a

fingernail

or a toehold

in existence

and then if you

look at the entire

fossil record

what you see

is the evolution

of senses

sensory

preceptors

and organs

of locomotion

the perceptors

the eye

the hand

bring

into

the cognitive

field

the sense

of things

at a distance

and then

language

provides

models

for these

things

at a distance

similarly

fins

legs

so forth

means of locomotion

carry us

through space

this is a

journey

of dimensionality

and

essentially

what animals

are

that plants

are not

are life forms

mobile

in a very conscious

way

in the spatial

dimension

this is why

from the point of view

of evolutionary

biologists

animals

are somehow

more advanced

than plants

well

if

conquest

dimensionality

is the

criteria

then

notice

that we

again

occupy

a special

and privileged

position

in nature

because

we can not

only

run

with the best

of them

seek

and remember

and anticipate

like crazy

and other animals

are not

doing this

other animals

may imprint

past situations

of danger

or opportunity

but they

do not analyze

experience

and extrapolate

it toward

the hidden domain

of the future

and

consciousness

is the

generalized

word

that we

use

for this

coordination

of complex

perception

to create

a world

that

draws

from the past

and builds

model

of the future

and then

suspends

the perceiving

organism

in this magical

moment

called the

now

where the past

is coordinated

for the purpose

of navigating

the future

McLuhan called

it driving

with the rear-view

mirror

and the only thing

good about it

is it's better

than driving

with no mirror

at all

alright

now

what this

of dimensionality

comes to be

in the presence

of psychedelics

is

an anticipation

of the future

we can anticipate

the future

we know

to within

microseconds

when the sun

will rise

we know

within

a few percentage

points

where the prime

rate will be

in six months

some things

we can predict

fairly closely

some things

with less

precision

but the perception

of the future

is very important

to us

when we marry

the need to

perceive the future with the psychedelic experience. I believe we come up with data that is very,

very difficult for science to come to terms with. And this is the third item, or really

the second item in the list, what science forgot. It's what I call the eschaton. Now, eschaton

is a rare word, until very recently unheard outside schools of theology, which I understand

were a dying enterprise. Eschaton comes from the Greek word esk, which just means the end.

The eschaton is the last thing, the final thing. And it's very important to science to eliminate

from its thinking any suspicion that this eschaton might exist. Because if it were to exist,

it would impart to reality a purpose, you see. If the eschaton exists, then it's like a goal,

or an attraction point, or an energy sink toward which historical process is being moved. And

science is incredibly hostile toward the idea of purpose. If you are not involved in the sciences,

this may come as somewhat of a surprise to you. If you are a workbench scientist or a theoretician,

you know that this is what's called the problem of teleology. It is because modern science defined

itself in the 19th century, when the reigning philosophy was deism. And deism was the idea

that the universe is a clock made by God. And God wound this clock and has walked away from

it, and the clock will eventually run down. That theological construct was poisonous to evolutionary

theory in the 19th century. And so they said, we must create a theory of reality that does not

require a goal, does not require a purpose. Everything must be pushed from the past. Nothing

must be pulled toward the future. The problem with this is that it does not fulfill our intuitions

about reality. We can see that evolution, biological evolution, has built on chemical systems. We can

see that social and historical systems build on biology. As people with open minds, or as open as they can be

inside this culture, we nevertheless have this intuition of purpose. And it is dramatically underscored by the

photographic experience byparty Verdari That there also. Now. On

the page is created by 150 Kater, in which we use a 10 throw of genius That you dirty part of it takes the raw material of your life, your culture, your history and tells

... you this is not an existential mishmash to be lived out with dignity because there's nothing else to be done with it, some kind of

Embedded in your own sense of identity, embedded in your own sense of purpose, is a microscopic

reflection of the larger purpose that is built into the universe.

This is not just blowing smoke in the sense of it's a nice idea or it's like a religious

idea like saying Jesus loves you and so feel alright about yourself.

It isn't like that, it's a theory about reality that has teeth because reality is actually

following the script that this particular version of reality dictates.

Reality is accelerating toward an unimaginable omega point.

We are the inheritors of immense momentum in our social systems, our philosophical and

scientific and technological approaches to the world.

Because we're driving the historical vehicle with a rear view mirror, it appears to us that

we're headed straight into a brick wall at a thousand miles an hour.

It appears that we are destroying the earth, polluting the atmosphere, wrecking the oceans,

dehumanizing ourselves, robbing our children of a future, so forth and so on.

I believe what is in fact going on is that we are burning our bridges.

One by one we're burning our bridges to the past.

We cannot go back to the mushroom dotted plains of Africa or the canopied rainforests of five

million years ago.

We can't even go back to the era of Cayuse and six shooter of two hundred years ago.

We have burned our bridges.

We are preparing for a kind of cultural forward escape.

This question, is there cause for optimism?

The answer is it depends on where you placed your bets.

If you placed your bets on male-dominated institutions based on consumer fetishism, propaganda, classism,

and materialism, then God help you, you should call your broker.

If, on the other hand, you've recognized that a lifeboat strategy is involved here, that what

is really important is empowering personal experience, backing off from consumer object fetishism, freeing

the mind, empowering the imagination, then in that case, I think you can feel pretty good about

what is going on.

You know, there's a lot of talk about cultural death and disenfranchisement, and it's usually

couched in terms of some happy naked people in the rain forest or in Tajikistan making their

rugs or milking their camels or something, and isn't it too bad that their culture is being

blown up and traded in for mall culture and shopping by remote, but in fact is being destroyed,

is being sold down the river by the sorts of people who want to turn the entire planet into

an international airport arrival concourse, and that's not the victory of somebody's culture

over somebody else's culture.

Nobody ever had a culture like that.

That's just the victory of schlockmeisterism and crapola over good taste and good sense.

Well, if I were, if I were dependent on the notion that human institutions are necessary to pull

us out of the ditch, I would be very despairing. As I said, nobody's in charge, not the IMF, the

Pope, the Communist Party, the Jews. No, no, no. Nobody has their finger on what's going on. So then why hope?

Isn't it just a runaway train out of control? I don't think so. I think the out of control-ness

is the most hopeful thing about it. After all, whose control is it out of? You and I never controlled it

in the first place. Why are we anxious about the fact that it's out of control? I think if it's out

of control, then our side is winning. To me, the most confounding datum of the psychedelic experience

is this thing which I call the eschaton. And I want to talk about it a little bit this evening,

because I think it is the hardest thing for people to grasp about my particular rap. And, you know,

sometimes I've talked to many of you about psychedelic plants, shamanism, techniques, chemistry,

approaches, so forth and so on. I'm approaching this this evening as a graduate seminar. I figure

everybody has their little mojo kit and their particular way of approaching these things. And then

the question is, you know, what kind of conclusions can we draw? And the conclusion I draw is,

and this is sort of pulling together what I said before, we are central to the human drama and to the

drama of nature and process on this planet. The opposition, which is science...

Well, first, let me say this. Every model of the universe has a hard swallow. What I mean by a hard

swallow is a place where the argument cannot hide the fact that there's something slightly fishy about it.

The hard swallow built into science is this business about the Big Bang. Now, let's give this a little

attention here. This is the notion that the universe for no reason sprang from nothing in a single instant.

Well, now, before we dissect this, notice that this is the limit test for credulity.

Whether you believe this or not, notice that it is not possible to conceive of something more unlikely,

or less likely to be believed. I mean, I defy anyone. It's just the limit case for unlikelihood,

that the universe would spring from nothing in a single instant for no reason. If you believe that,

my family has a bridge across the Hudson River that will give you a lease option for $5. It makes no sense.

It is, in fact, no different than saying, and God said, let there be light. And what the philosophers of

science are saying is, give us one free miracle. And we will roll from that point forward,

from the birth of time to the crack of doom, just one free miracle. And then it will all unravel

according to natural law and these bizarre equations, which nobody can understand, but which are so holy in

this enterprise. Well, I say then, if science gets one free miracle, then everybody gets one free

miracle. And I perceive that it is true when you build these large-scale cosmogonic theories that you

have to have a kind of an umbilical cord or a point to start from that is different from all other points

in the system. So if we have to have a singularity in our modeling of what reality is, let's make it as

modest and as non-singularity as possible. The singularity that arises for no reason in absolutely empty

space instantly is the least likely of all singularities. Doesn't it seem more likely, if we have to have a singularity, that it occurs in a

domain with a rich history, with many causal streams feeding into the situation that nurtures the complexity. In other words, to put it

simply, if you have to have a singularity, doesn't it make more sense to put it at the end of a cosmogonic

process than at the beginning? And I think this is the great breakthrough of psychedelics and shamanism, that

science got it absolutely wrong. The universe didn't begin in a singularity. Who knows how the universe

began or would even presume to judge? But the universe ends in a singularity. It has been growing more

singular, more complex, more unique, more novel, every passing moment since it burst into existence. And if that's true,

true, then we represent a kind of concrescence of universal intent. We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic

accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience is the main event. The

coordination of perception, of hope, of dream, of vision that occurs inside the human heart-mind-body

interface is the most phenomenon in the universe. Now, even the physicalists will agree that the human neocortex

represents the most densely ramified matter known to exist in the biological world. And you don't have

to be a rocket scientist to see that human society, human history, human art, human literature represent

things for which there is no analog in the world of wasps, groundhogs, killer whales, and so forth and so on.

In our species, complexity has turned inward upon itself. And in our species, time has accelerated. Time has

left the gentle ebb and flow of gene transfer and adaptation that characterizes biological evolution.

And instead, historical time is generated. And so I believe that science and its reluctance to deal with the

psychedelic experience, and the way in which science has used, then, law to suppress its rival, in this case, arises out of a

profound discomfort on the part of science about this future state of complexification that is clearly the

grail, the dwell point, the end point of the human historical process. No one of us, I think, can imagine

that history could go on for another thousand years. I mean, what would it look like? At the current rate of population

growth, spread of epidemic disease, rate of invention, connectivity, depletion of resources, the atmosphere, it is

impossible to conceive of another thousand years of human history. History, then, is ending. History is a kind of gestation

process. It's a kind of metamorphosis. It's an episode in the life of a species. If you think of the the simple

example of metamorphosis, that of caterpillar to butterfly, we all know that there is this intermediate

resting stage where the caterpillar is, for all practical purposes, enzymatically dissolved and then

we're reconstituted as an entirely different kind of organism with different physical structures, different eyes,

different legs, a different way of breathing, with wings where no wings were before, with a different kind of

feeding apparatus. This is what's happening to us. History is a process of metamorphosis. It's a pupation

stage. It begins with naked monkeys and it ends with a human machine planet girdling interface capable of

releasing the energies that light the stars and it lasts about 15 or 20 thousand years and during that

period the entire process hangs in the balance. It's a period of high risk. It's like what a butterfly is

doing in a cocoon or what is happening to a child in the womb. It's a gestation process where one form of

life is being changed into another. Well this would all happen naturally and with a great deal of anxiety

I imagine as history builds to its ever more climactic and horrifying crescendo and we would all be ignorant or

very baffled about what's going on were it not for the institution of psychedelic shamanism. Remember I said

that what is dissolved are the crystalline structures of cultural assumption? Well one of the strongest

symmetries in our cultural crystal is the symmetry that gathers around the concept of past and future.

the shaman actually rises into a domain where past and future are different. The same top is not a metaphor.

It's what's really going on. If you think about shamanism in its classical guise for a moment it is about

predicting weather, predicting game movement, and curing disease. If you had a prescient or extraordinary

understanding of the future each one of us would be able to do these things. You just look into next week

and there it is. Same deal. Curing the sick actually involves very judicious choice of your patients with a

pre-knowledge of who will get well and who will not get well. So it's as though the members of the culture are

imprisoned in linear time and the shaman is not. And why not? Because the shaman has perturbed the brain

states sanctioned by the culture, sanctioned by its educational processes, its habits, its attitudes. And into that vacuum created by the

perturbation of these cultural values rushes the raw, unanalyzed datum of reality. This is what Aldous Huxley called

removing the reducing valve of consciousness. And suddenly, culture is seen to be a relative

phenomena. The stockbroker no different from the rainforest shaman, each somewhat similar to the

Trobrian Islander or the Eskimo. Culture is simply clothing upon the human experience. But the human

organism outside the confines of culture in a direct relationship to nature transcends time and space.

This was a fact, I believe, that was known in prehistory and in fact was the source of Paleolithic values

which were not material, not linear, not surplus oriented, not class oriented, not power oriented, but

rather oriented toward a kind of egalitarian partnership in an environment of great material simplicity.

Human beings lived like that for probably a half a million years, with poetry, with dance, with mathematics,

with magic, with story, with humor, with the paralyzing and toxic artifacts of the late evolving machine

worshiping monotheistic linear fanatic alphabet tight ass straight culture that we are a part of.

So now, at a kind of moment of great cultural challenge and dynamic for Western civilization,

which has for a thousand years called all the shots and shoved itself down everybody's throat,

whether they liked it or not. In the last hundred years, through the science of anthropology and ethnography

and ethno-medicine and botany, the news has arrived that these quote unquote primitive people

are in fact master technicians of journeying into a world of the neurological imagination,

a world we didn't even know exist, a world that is as distant to us as the world at the heart of the atom is

from the rainforest fishermen. And, because our own cultural values seem a little shoddy at this moment,

those on the fringes of Western civilization have begun to seek alternatives, begun to look at alternative religions,

yoga, tantra, buddhism, zen, whatever, alternative approaches to diet, vegetarianism,

macrobiotics, so forth and so on, and alternative approaches to authentic experience, which means psychedelics.

In the early stage of psychedelic involvement, everyone was sort of flying under the banner of

hands-on Freudianism or hands-on Jungianism. You know, we're going to see those archetypes,

we're going to confront those sexual repressions, we're going to journey into those traumatic childhood memories.

Now it's understood, I think, that those metaphors were fairly inadequate and that actually we stand on the brink

of an unexplored landscape of planetary size. The world of the High Paleolithic, which is a Gaian world,

a world of feeling, not analytical intellectual constructs, but a world of empowered feeling, empathy, and intuitive understanding.

An understanding that doesn't arise in a context of Greek logic, but in a context of animal knowing,

in the authentic mode of the body. So, just to bring it all around here, the great exhibit, which we must always keep in

front of ourselves and our critics, is the mystery of the human mind and body. No one knows how it is that I can command my

hand to make a fist and that it will do that. I mean, that's mind over matter. That's the violation of every scientific principle in the books.

And yet, it is the most trivial experience any of us have. We expect to command our body. We expect the mental will

keep flesh into action and it will follow. The body is the nexus of the mystery of life. And our culture takes us out of the body

and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections,

collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us.

That's why it's called escape. Because it's escape from HBO, from walking the mall, from seeing what's on the tube, from consuming trash media.

It's escape from all of that into the authenticity of the body. This is why sexuality is so edgy in this society.

They'd make it illegal if they could figure out how. It's the one drug they can't tear from our grip and so they lay a guilt trip about it.

But sexuality and psychedelics, by carrying us back to an authentic sense of the body, carry us back to the domain of authentic values.

And more and more the message that people are getting as they avail themselves of the psychedelic experience is that it is not a journey into the human unconscious or into the ghost bardos of our chaotic civilization.

It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind, that the earth is a coherent whole. It is a thinking, feeling, intending being that in terms of our value structures, it would be foolish to image as anything other than female.

And when cultural values created by male dominance and science and linearity and so forth and so on, when those values are dissolved, what is waiting there is this incredibly poignant experience of matrix.

What James Joyce called the mama matrix most mysterious, nothing more than our bodies and the earth out of which our bodies came. History, as we have lived it in the West, has been a turning of our back on that.

And now history has failed. Western cultural institutions, having become global cultural institutions, now show themselves to be adequate, to inspire, lead or carry anyone into a future worth living in.

At this moment, then, this reconnecting to the Gaian mind becomes a kind of moral imperative.

So this whole drug issue is not an issue even about criminal syndicates or about untaxed billions or about the mental health of our youth or any of that malarkey.

I mean, my God, the most destructive drugs known to the species.

I mean, say, the cause of a kind of strict genocide إstes нe, ofulpensa and cheaa Endearse into the world.

And again, the major comment of the object of this, when it comes to use, the point of civilization, generation, the ones that aren't fashioned by understanding of the context of the East Old Stumble,

where did the execute the show, which was understood, the event was between the two molecules'hos and the two.

are peddled on every street corner without restriction. The real issue is what kind of

mental worlds shall people inhabit? What kinds of hope shall be permitted? What kind of value

systems shall be allowed? And the value systems that aggrandize the possession of things,

the tearing up of the earth, competition, classism, racism, sexism, have led us to the brink of

catastrophe. Now, I think we have to abandon cultural, Western cultural values, and return to

the deeper wisdom of the body in connection with the plant, the seamless web that leads us back

into the heart of nature. And if we can do this, then this very narrow neck of cultural crisis

can be navigated. Very little of the past can be saved. The architectonics, the machines,

the systems of monetary exchange and propaganda, the silly religions, the asinine aesthetic canons,

very little of that can be saved. But what can be saved is the sense of love and caring and

mutuality that we all put into and take from the human enterprise. You know, there's a Grateful Dead

song that says, you can't go back and you can't stand still. If the thunder don't get you, then the

lightning will. And we now hold, through the possession of these psychedelics, catalysts for the human

imagination of sufficient power that if we use them, we can deconstruct the lethal vehicle that is

carrying us toward the brink of apocalypse. We can deconstruct that vehicle and redesign it into a kind

of starship that would carry us and our children out into the broad starry galaxy we know to be

waiting us. But it's a cultural test. Nature is pitiless. Intelligence is a grand experiment upon which

a great deal has been risked. But if it proves inadequate, nature will cover it over with the same

kind of cool impunity that she covered over the dinosaurs and the trilobites and the cross-opterigian

fishes and all those other folks who came before. So what we must do, I think, is see our future in the

imagination, catalyze the imagination, form symbiotic relationships with the plants, affirm archaic values,

and spread the good news that what is out of control, what is in fact dying, is a world that had become

too top-heavy with its own hubris, too bent by its own false value systems, and too dehumanized to care about

what happened to its own children. So I say, good riddance to it. Bring on the archaic revival, and let's create a new world.

And that's it. And that that was all perfectly clear before the break. This is the part I enjoy the most because I'm not into the white guy at the front of the room with all the answers trip. It's just unfortunate that I have the body I do. I'm actually a lesbian trapped in a man's body, but I've done the very best with that.

I thought that I could, which hasn't been bad, let me tell you. Yes. Wait, wait. You're going to have to yell, and then I'll repeat it.

This is a really interesting question. I can talk about it. I'll repeat the question. It's, can I talk about the relationship of advanced mathematics to modeling of consciousness in layman's terms, correct?

One of the great mysteries still to be addressed by philosophy is why is it that numbers, which are, after all, constructs of the human mind,

why is it that numbers are so incredibly powerful for the description of nature? Nature, after all, is somehow given, we find it all around us, and numbers arise in the depths of human ratiocination.

So what is the relationship of these things to each other? This may appear to be an easy question. It's such a difficult question that it wasn't even asked in philosophy until the 20th century.

It's very puzzling, and I think that it indicates a fundamental congruency between processes that are mental and the structure of the world itself.

This is why I didn't get into it too much tonight in a popular lecture like this, but I am the inventor or the purveyor of a mathematical theory of consciousness.

And I believe that more powerful than any atom smasher, more subtle than any space telescope, is the human mind.

The human mind is the most subtle and superb of all instruments for the study and measurement of nature.

When we look into ourselves, we discover the same patterns that we discover in the birth and death of a species, the flow of a river, the collapse of a corporation, or the flowering of a love affair.

It's that process is somehow under the aegis of a kind of universal equation of description.

So it doesn't matter whether it's the birth and death of your hope, or the rise and fall of the Assyrian Empire, or the evolution of the Pacific Ocean.

Processes always occur in the same way, and this is why there is congruence between the mental world of human beings and the world of abstract mathematics and the world of nature.

These things are, as it were, simply different levels of condensation of the same universal stuff.

This is why the concept of truth can have some meaning.

I mean, when you think about it, truth, why should it even be possible for us as monkeys to entertain that notion?

Where is it writ large that mammals traveling in packs should have any relationship to truth whatsoever?

And yet, the faith is that somehow thinking means something.

It's not just something we do, it means something.

It means something because there is sufficient freedom within the human system to be both right or wrong.

And this right or wrong lays upon us the obligation of mirroring nature in models which we build in our own minds.

Now, the old idea in science was that these mathematical models of nature were in fact laws, truths, eternal platonic truths that were being teased out.

In the 20th century, a slight epistemological sophistication leads to this word models, where we say we're modeling reality.

And our model is only as good as we need it to be.

If we're trying to model the flight of an artillery shell, the model needs to be only good enough to get the artillery shell to its target.

We don't need to understand the essence of lead or the nature of motion there.

We simply need the model to kick out the data that interests us.

And in the 20th century, it's been understood that all knowledge is dependent upon the question asked.

And the relationship of mathematics to nature is one of the profound indicators, I think, that truth can be known.

Maybe not the truth, but I always think of the positivist philosopher Wittgenstein, who was once asked in a classroom situation about a certain proposition,

is it the truth, is it the truth?

And he said, well, it's certainly true enough.

And, you know, that's where we are with our modeling of the world and with our mathematics.

It is the truest truth we know.

It is true enough.

Somebody else here.

Yeah, in front.

The question is from a stage magician, and the question is what is the nature of magic, or what is magic, or the wonder that it invokes.

There are two theories.

I mean, magic is not a trivial issue at all.

There are two theories about how the world works, and each one depends on a fundamental assumption about what the world is.

There's the scientific theory, which says the world is tiny packets of matter squealing along through empty space at close to the speed of light and subject to a certain set of interlocking laws.

That's what science tells us the world is.

Another theory is, and to my mind, a much more appealing and even intuitively correct theory, is the world is language.

The world is made of language.

We can say that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.

Or we can say the world is made out of wave mechanical packets of matter flying along at the speed of light.

But notice that what we get each time is words.

Our model of what the world is, is made of words.

And the world is composed of description.

Now, in the era before science, scientists like to say, people were more epistemologically naive.

What they mean by that is, they didn't have a clear understanding of the division between the inside and the outside,

between what we imagine and what actually is.

But if you live long enough, I think you discover what we imagine and what actually is, are very close to the same thing.

Now, whenever you say the world is made of language, the positivists object by saying, well, then why isn't it the way we say it is?

I didn't say it's the way we say it is.

I said it's made of language.

And part of the inspiration for my career is the realization that you could get up in front of audiences and say how the world is.

And to a small degree, for a limited time, in a limited space, it shimmers and recasts itself and becomes the thing that we say that it is.

The mind is somehow a co-creator in the process of reality through acts of language.

And language is very, very mysterious.

I mean, it is true magic.

People run all over the place looking for paranormal abilities.

But notice that when I speak, if your internal dictionary matches my internal dictionary,

that my thoughts cross through the air as an acoustical pressure wave

and are reconstructed inside your cerebral cortex as your thought, your understanding of my words.

Telepathy exists.

It's just that the carrier wave is small mouth noises.

All so-called primitive people know that the world is made of language,

that you sing it into existence, that what you say it is, is what it is,

that it is maintained in existence by an act of rational apprehension.

And it's only science which has taken this very weird approach and said,

no, no, the world is somehow independent from the act of description.

And this is not a situation where we have two separate points of view,

both open-hearted and trying their best to work hard for you.

Science carried out its analysis of nature to the point where it shot itself in the foot.

Science carried out an analysis of nature that went to such depth

that it discovered that nature doesn't exist except as an object of description,

that there are no little objects winging their way through empty space.

There is only a situation describable by a multileveled fishy formula,

and when you drop a mind into that situation,

the fishy formula condense out into a little particle which can be measured.

Mind is necessary for the world to undergo the formality of existing.

This is what quantum physics teaches.

Unfortunately, this news has not reached the other sciences.

This is a real failure on the part of science.

You see, throughout the 19th century, physics was the paradigmatic science.

It was the science everybody envied.

It's not unusual in physics for theory and experiment

to be congruent to three decimal points of accuracy.

That just causes scientists to go wild.

They love that when theory and measurement fall into congruency like that.

And so everyone wanted to be like physics.

Chemistry sought that.

Sociology, psychology, biology.

Meanwhile, physics, pursuing the exploration of matter,

broke through to a domain where matter ceased to be definable,

ceased to even exist in any ordinary way.

Seem to behave in incredibly strange ways.

Time flows backward.

Energy crosses barriers without ever going through them,

by tunneling through them in some way.

Modern biology is still afflicted with physics envy.

Meanwhile, physics has gone on to a realm of such exotic and surreal uncertainty

that it's, at this point, to the left of psychology in the precision of its metaphors.

So science has undercut itself and now exists in a state of unrecognized crisis

that hopefully the psychedelic experience will exacerbate to the point where this will arrive on the plate

of every experimentalist and observational and observer of nature.

People don't take enough, that's all.

You know, I mean, people are confused about what's going on.

First of all, taking psychedelics has a certain measure of chicness about it.

Well, everybody wants to be chic.

And you can get into the club merely by saying you took it.

But you don't want to lie like a dog.

So the way to get into the club without paying your dues is to take some pissant amount

and then run around raving about that.

So when we talk about the psychedelic experience,

it's not clear we're all talking about the same thing.

It's sort of like talking about France.

And you have the people who changed planes in the airport

and the people who moved there for 30 years

and learned the literature and got a job and married the locals.

So the way to do psychedelics is, I believe, at higher doses

than most people are comfortable with and rarely

and with great attention to set and setting.

The social use of psychedelics in the club scene

or at rock and roll concerts and so forth,

I mean, when I go to those kind of scenes,

I just smoke pot because I want to be part of what's going on.

I want to have a good time.

But you would be nuts to take a major psychedelic in that circumstance.

Socially dense environments filled with light and noise

are a strategy for coming down.

You know, I mean, if you took a drug you didn't like,

the smartest thing to do would be to jog around the block 10 times

and then chop a bunch of wood.

Very similar to dancing your ass off, in other words.

So the way I recommend doing psychedelics is in silent darkness

and with as little input from other people as possible.

I mean, I say alone if you are experienced, if you're really confident,

just alone, for crying out loud.

If that gives you pause and you must have a sitter,

and let's use the word sitter, not guide.

My God, nobody's guiding you anywhere.

They have no more notion where you are than, you know,

we know where Judge Carter is at this point.

So the sitter.

And my idea of the perfect sitter is, you know,

you have a little Tibetan bell by your side,

and the sitter is three rooms away.

And if you need the sitter, you ring the bell.

They stick their head in the room and say,

it's cool, lay down, do that.

And I, you know, as long as this question was brought up

and so much of the lecture was somewhat high-toned,

let me get into this for a minute.

There are thousands of altered states.

You know, we know them.

Orgasm, indigestion, two cappuccinos,

where tequila takes you.

So endless altered states.

And I'm not really interested in them,

more or less than any of you are.

I mean, they're part of life.

But what I'm interested in, as an experimentalist,

as a connoisseur of nature, you know,

somebody who loves fossils, butterflies, rainforests,

that kind of thing,

is this family of compounds called the indole hallucinogens.

Indoles.

And they cause hallucination.

And some people say, you know,

that I'm a fetishist about this,

that who cares,

or that there are other things besides hallucination.

Yes, I know, maybe, and of course.

But the reason I'm so fascinated by hallucinations

is because, to my mind,

when you're hallucinating,

you have an absolutely clear proof

that you are not generating this material.

You know, it's not funny ideas.

It's not racing thoughts.

It's not insight into what your boyfriend really meant yesterday.

That kind of thing we all can generate

by just inspecting our own minds.

But a hallucination is to be in the presence of that

which previously could not be imagined.

And if it previously could not be imagined,

then there is no grounds for believing

that you generated it out of yourself.

I mean, we should each know our own inventory.

You know?

You know what's in your cupboard.

You know what's in your chest of drawers.

For God's sake, you ought to know what's in your mind.

Well, then, if something comes forward

and you say, that's not mine,

that's not in my inventory,

then you have a kind of perfect proof

that this is coming from somewhere else.

And then the question becomes, where?

And we can set off into that.

Opinions differ.

And nobody has God's truth on it.

A reductionist,

somebody who didn't like these substances,

would say, oh, well, it's just neurological chaos.

It's just you've interrupted the normal functioning

of good brain chemicals.

And evil brain chemicals are now giving a sense of a chaos.

Well, that just doesn't cut the mustard.

I mean, that kind of stuff may work

if you're talking to the troops,

but not if you're talking to anybody who's ever been there.

I know what a neurological chaos would look like.

It would look like bright lights, moving patterns,

colored this, something that.

It would not be ruins,

landscapes, machines, paintings,

works of art, building plans,

weapons, bits of manufactured technological detritus.

These things are too coherent.

They're objects in some kind of superstructure of the mind.

And for me, this was the revelation.

I didn't get into this business

by being an airhead or a screwball.

My attitude was always,

if it's real, it can take the pressure.

You know, you don't have to pussyfoot around the real thing.

If they're telling you, you know,

oh, you must lower your voice

and avert your gaze or this and that,

then you're probably in the presence of crap.

Because the real thing is real.

It doesn't demand that you adjust your opinion to suit it.

It's real.

That means it is preeminent.

That means it sets the agenda.

And I studied yoga.

I wandered around in the east.

I was fast shuffled by BB-eyed little men in doughties.

I know the whole spiritual supermarket and rigmarole.

And I find nothing there to interest me

on the level of, you know,

five grams of psilocybin mushrooms in silent darkness.

I mean, that's where the pedal meets the metal.

That's where the rubber meets the road.

And the inspiration for me

to get up and talk to an audience like this

simply comes from the fact that

I cannot believe that this could be kept under wraps

the way it has.

I mean, I kidded with you earlier

that they would make sex illegal if they could.

Well, they can't, so it isn't.

But the psychedelic experience is as central

to understanding your humanness

as having sex or having a child

or having responsibilities

or having hopes and dreams.

And yet it is illegal.

We are somehow told we are infantilized.

We are told, you know, you can wander around

within the sanctioned playpen

of ordinary consciousness.

And we have some intoxicants over here

if you want to mess yourself up.

We've got some scotch here

and some tobacco and red meat

and some sugar and a little TV

and so forth and so on.

But these boundary-dissolving hallucinogens

that give you a sense of unity

with your fellow man and nature

are somehow forbidden.

This is an outrage.

It's a sign of cultural immaturity.

And the fact that we tolerate it

is a sign that we are living in a society

as oppressed as any society in the past.

My thing is not about my opinion

or what I saw in Africa

or anything like that.

This is, get it straight,

this is about an experience.

Not my experience.

Your experience.

It's about an experience which you have

like getting laid

or like going to Africa.

You must do the experience.

Otherwise, it's just whistling past the graveyard.

And we're not talking about

something like being born again

or meeting the flying saucers

or something like that

where good works and prayer are the method.

No.

If you take a sufficient dose

of an active compound,

it will deliver itself to you

on the money.

If it doesn't work,

take more.

Nobody is in a position

to dismiss this

just because it didn't work for them

on one or two tries.

This is an art.

It's an art.

It's something you coax into existence.

I mean, you have to learn to make love.

You have to learn to speak English.

Anything worth doing

is an art that is acquired.

This is part of our birthright,

perhaps the most important part

of our birthright.

These substances will deliver.

It is the confoundment

of psychology and science generally.

And that's why it's so touchy

for cultural institutions.

But you are not a cultural institution.

You are a free

and independent human being.

And these things have your name

written on them

in big gold letters.

Yes, here.

Can you please speak to clairvoyance

and whether or not

it's a subset of psychodelics

or vice versa?

Clairvoyance.

Um...

Clairvoyance.

forms of paranormal activity, I think, are part of a 5% leakage around normal culturally

sanctioned brain function. If you read Stan Grof's books about LSD, which is one case

history after another, virtually every paranormal phenomenon ever catalogued has occurred under

the influence of LSD, seeing things at a distance, recovering past lives where then you could actually

check the data and it happened, knowledge of things going on at a distance, I think that

we are caged by our cultural programming and that this is the most powerful imprisoning

factor in our lives, that if we could train ourselves simply to remember our dreams, psychedelics

would become obsolete. If we could train ourselves simply to pay attention to our ordinary states

of consciousness as we live through our days and nights. Culture is a mass hallucination and

when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it is worth. Language

is partially the key here. We cannot move into a reality that we cannot describe. If we can't

describe a world, we can't be there. And so the interesting place to be is at the cutting

edge of language. And it's interesting that the legacy of the 1960s is a legacy of language

evolution. I mean concepts like ego trip, vibe, bummer, so forth and so on. I mean we sneer

at these concepts but there was no word for these things before. Once there is a word then that

word is like a stepping stone out into the fog. And as long as we let the establishment set

the language agenda, we will be imprisoned in the tiny rather pedestrian world of consumerism

and schlocko values that the establishment has prepared for us. So the way I think of these

psychedelics or a different way is that they're catalysts for the imagination. Catalysts to say

what has never been said, to see what has never been seen, to draw, paint, sing, sculpt, dance and act

what has never before been done, to push the envelope of creativity and language. And what's really

important is I call it the felt presence of direct experience, which is a fancy term which just simply

means we have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture. Don't watch TV. Don't read magazines.

Don't even listen to NPR. Create your own road show. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe.

And if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered. You're giving it all away to icons.

Icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that, you know, you want to dress like X or have lips like Y or something.

This is shit brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion. And what is real is you and your friends and your associations,

associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we're told, no, we're unimportant. We're peripheral.

Get a degree. Get a job. Get a this. Get a that. And then you're a player. You don't even want to play in that game.

You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron

consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. Where is that at?

Well, religion is simply the word we use to describe our intuition that there is something outside the realm of culture

culture and the three-dimensional surfaces of things that there is a hidden dimension to reality. Call it a plan, a purpose, a loving God, a cosmos instead of a chaos.

And psychedelics, I believe, reveal a greater order than the order of the human world. This is why the way I do them is either in darkness,

which means surrounded by the body, my body, which is part of nature, or in nature itself, in the mountains, at the beach, in the jungle.

Because what we are lacking existentially is any sense of order, meaning, and beauty in the world.

Because the society we're living in has no order or beauty or meaning. It's just a scam and a rat race.

But if you take the psychedelics in these contexts where the culture and its artifacts are suppressed, then you connect up to the greater whole.

The question of God, meaning in Milton's phrase, the God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven, I don't think psychedelics can address that definitively.

But there is another God, a goddess, the goddess of biology, the goddess of the coherent animal-human world, the world of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the planet.

In short, our world, the world we were born into, that we evolved into, and that we came from.

That world the psychedelics want to connect us up to.

Because our individuality as people and as a species is an illusion of bad language that the psychedelics dissolve into the greater feeling of connectedness that underlies our being here.

And to my mind, that's the religious impulse.

It's not a laundry list of moral do's and don'ts or a set of dietary prescriptions or practices.

It's a sense of connectedness, responsibility for your fellow human beings and for the earth you're walking around on.

And because these psychedelics come out of that plant-vegetable matrix, they are the way back into it.

I want a woman here.

Good question.

Well, the answer is, I think, pretty obvious.

Yes.

How do we emancipate people from the foolishness of the drug war?

How do we, as a community, as a point of view, how do we gain legitimacy?

This is a really important question.

I mean, if you look around yourself tonight, you don't see the uneducated, the unhealthy, the demented, or the deluded.

And yet, this is the stereotype of our subculture.

Instead, what you see are well-dressed, creative people holding down positions in society, the parents of children, the heads of departments, the authors of books, the painters of paintings.

You may not have noticed, but in this society, they're not handing out rights.

Ask black people.

Ask members of any sexual minority.

They don't hand out rights in this society.

And we, meaning we psychedelic people, by and large, this isn't always true, but by and large, we tend to be white and middle class.

A translation of those two terms into gutless would not be inappropriate.

We have the most to lose, and so we're not given to hurling ourselves into the breach or building barricades in the street to hurl our bodies against the machine.

Nevertheless, if you don't claim your political birthright, it will never be given to you.

And black people, and gay people, and American Indians, Native Americans, all of these people have learned that you don't go on bended knee to petition the official culture for your rights.

You have to take them.

And people ask me, you know, how can you stand up and say the things you do?

Why don't they take you away?

They don't take me away because they're more chicken shit than you think.

They're more off balance than you think.

They're more uncertain of themselves than you think.

The legitimacy of this point of view is established in their minds.

The reason drugs are illegal and suppressed and blah, blah is because you can make a shitload of money off them in that context.

It's a money issue.

Do you think a loving government is trying to keep you from jumping out of third floor windows and that's why LSD is illegal?

I mean, give me a break for crying out loud.

If this government felt strongly enough about certain issues, all of us between 18 and 26 would be sent off to die for that policy decision.

So the government is not interested in your health.

The government is artificially interested in inflating the prices of certain substances in order to create a focus for clandestine money that is used then to destabilize unfriendly governments, murder labor union leaders, kill and blackmail the editors of left wing newspapers, so forth and so on.

Drugs are enormous big business and not psychedelic drugs.

Psychedelic drugs, the only one that ever amounted to anything as a financial enterprise was cannabis.

And cannabis is many things besides psychedelic.

The schedule one, the most repressed schedule, don't produce great amounts of money at all.

What they do produce is questioning minds.

They cause people to ask questions.

They cause people to ask for clarification.

They cause people to challenge cultural values because they decondition you.

It doesn't matter whether you're a Hasid, a communist apparatchik, a rainforest shaman.

If you take psychedelics, you will question your first premises.

And that is a business that all governments, right, left, middle, are in the business of repressing.

They don't want to have to explain why things are done as they are.

But if we don't begin asking for that explanation, they're going to run this planet right into ruin.

And we are the generation responsible.

You are the generation that is responsible.

You can't claim that you grew up in a village in Nigeria and you didn't know.

You can't claim that you're the child of poor Bangladeshi parents and you had no opportunity.

The responsibility rests upon the educated and the financially capable of doing something about it.

And by that measure, you and I are probably in the upper 3% of people on this planet.

And if we don't take responsibility, then that responsibility will devolve to others, BDI'd others with an agenda that would stand your hair on end.

Yes, over here.

This will be the last question, so make it hit.

Let's go back and talk about schizophrenia for just a second.

The question is, you know, schizophrenia involves basically breaking with ordinary value systems.

And how does it relate to the psychedelic state?

And people who have schizophrenic relatives in their family tree, how should they relate to the psychedelic experience and so forth?

I mean, I'm extrapolating, but that's the basic thing.

Well, there are different things to be said about this.

I mean, first of all, you know, how many psychiatric residents who are the people who come most in contact with schizophrenics, whatever that means,

how many psychiatric residents have ever seen an undrugged schizophrenic?

Very, very few, because the very first thing that happens is for the convenience of physicians and the nursing staff, some outlandish drug is brought into the picture,

which then deflects this healing process from ever reaching any kind of natural conclusion.

Schizophrenia is just a catch-all term for mental forms of mental behavior that we don't understand.

In the 19th century there was a term melancholia, which we would now call bipolar depression and so forth and so on.

But all forms of sadness, unhappiness, maladaptation, so forth and so on were poured into this label melancholia.

Now, schizophrenia is a similar thing.

I can remember an experience I had years ago.

I was in the Tolman Library at the University of California, which is the psych library, and I was looking up some drug or something.

And I just saw a book and I pulled it off the shelf, a book about schizophrenia.

And it said, the typical schizophrenic lives in a world of twilight imagining, marginal to his society, incapable of holding a regular job.

These people live on the fringes, content to drift in their own self-created value system.

I said, that's it. That's it. Now I understand.

We have no tradition of shamanism. We have no tradition of journeying into these mental worlds.

We are terrified of madness. We fear it because the Western mind is a house of cards.

And the people who built that house of cards know that.

And they are terrified of madness.

Tim Leary once said, or I gave him credit for saying, he later told me he never said it.

But whoever said it, this was a brilliant statement.

Someone once said, LSD is a psychedelic substance which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it.

Right? That more people have exhibited psychotic behavior from not taking LSD but just thinking about it than ever exhibited it from taking it.

Certainly in my family, I watch my parents both go psychotic from the mere fact that LSD existed.

They would never have taken it. There is a great phobia about the mind.

The Western mind is very queasy when first principles are questioned.

Rarer than corpses in this society are the untreated mad because we can't come to terms with that.

A shaman is someone who swims in the same ocean as a schizophrenic.

But the shaman has thousands and thousands of years of sanctioned technique and tradition to draw upon.

In a traditional society, if you exhibit quote unquote schizophrenic tendencies, you are immediately drawn out of the pack and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans.

You are told you are special. Your abilities are very central to the health of our society.

You will cure. You will prophesy. You will guide our society in its most fundamental decisions.

Contrast this with what a person exhibiting schizophrenic activity in our society is told.

You don't fit in. You are becoming a problem. You don't pull your own weight.

You are not of equal worth to the rest of us. You are sick. You have to go to the hospital. You have to be locked up.

You are on a par with prisoners and lost dogs in our society.

So that treatment of schizophrenia makes it incurable.

Imagine if you were slightly odd and the solution were to take you and put you, lock you into a place where everyone was seriously mad.

That would drive anyone mad.

If you've ever been in a madhouse, you know that it's an environment calculated to make you crazy and to keep you crazy.

This would never happen in an aboriginal or traditional society.

I wrote a book. I mean, this has to be the wrap up because we're over time.

But I wrote a book called The Archaic Revival. I signed it tonight for some of you.

The idea there is that we have gone sick by following a path of untrammeled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom line-ism.

We have gone very, very sick.

And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies or strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease.

And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing.

Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing.

The list is endless.

What do all these things have in common?

They represent various styles of rejection of linear values.

The society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival, by a reversion to archaic values.

So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity or scarifying themselves or showing a lot of flesh or dancing to syncopated music or getting loaded or violating ordinary canons of sexual behavior,

I applaud all of this because it's an impulse to return to what is felt by the body, what is authentic, what is archaic.

And when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very center of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling.

And at the center of that impulse is the shaman, stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious living mystery.

That's what the world is. The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists.

The world is a living mystery. Our birth, our death, our being in the moment, these are mysteries.

They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration, empowerment and hope for the human enterprise.

And our culture has killed that, taken it away from us, made us consumers of shoddy products and shoddier ideals.

We have to get away from that. And the way to get away from it is by a return to the authentic experience of the body.

And that means sexually empowering ourselves and it means getting loaded, exploring the mind as a tool for personal and social transformation.

The hour is late. The clock is ticking. We will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball.

We are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived lives and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world.

Now the challenge passes to us. The living that the yet to be born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under.

And that's what the psychedelic experience is about, is caring for, empowering and building a future that honors the past, honors the planet and honors the power of the human imagination.

There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet as the human imagination.

Let's not sell it straight. Let's not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies.

Let's not give our control over to the least among us. Rather, you know, claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light.

The tools are there. The path is known. You simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead and get with the program of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.

Thank you very, very much. Thank you.