Evolving Times

Can you hear? Everybody can hear? Good. Well, I like to lead with good news, so let me assure

you that at no point this evening will I read from or quote the poet Rumi. It's a pleasure

to be in Sacramento. It's a pleasure to be in California. I lived here for about 30 years

before moving out about eight months ago. Lived over in Occidental, so I sort of feel

like this is a hometown congregation. You may have seen the story in the bee this morning.

It was a reasonable detailing of my theory of evolution. I noticed that one expert wouldn't

even give his name to allow his no comment to have attribution.

Gentlemen, this is no way to behave in the face of an ideological revolution. Anyway,

and plus it isn't even my weirdest idea, but that was left unmentioned, thankfully, in

the article. But since the article dealt so specifically

with evolution, I'm going to read it to you.

Okay.

And because that probably is my best candidate for entree into any kind of respectability,

something I crave intensely in every atom of my body, I thought I would discuss it

with you this evening and try and make it seem a little less absurd than my critics

might make it seem.

First of all,

let me lay out for you the nature of the problem. Right now, the nature of the problem

is finding the damn phone and shutting it off.

No, the nature of the problem is that evolutionary theory tells us that we are some kind of advanced

animal of some sort, and science has waged a noble struggle to find the damn phone. And

the fact that this is the case is simply the moral of the directorial thought.

The different kind of people we know about będą we have a certain set of human beings

that are not completely human. They do this sort of thing. They discard the idea of the

human being. There is a topic which is very interesting in the medical field, the cross-neurological

field, and that is that human beings can, through the power of science, free themselves from

the power of science.

Mutually, they can be as ordinary as they can be, and they can be believed to be

under such mental control.

It is as if they are the only human being in the world that is not under such kind

of spiritual control as humans are, in the sense that someone who is an individual

being, but is not an individual being, is in fact a child, but is not an individual.

And yet, there is, after it's all said and done, the sense that if we are an animal, we are a very, very peculiar sort of animal.

Indeed, a unique animal, an animal capable of language and coordinated planning, an animal not bound to a particular social or sexual style.

We have monogamous human societies, polygamous societies. This is very different from animals.

We have poetry, we have mathematics, we have drama, a whole spectrum of effects that is far from anything that we find in animal organization.

And this problem has fascinated me for a long, long time, as it's fascinated a lot of people.

Because...

Because, obviously, it's a great embarrassment to the theory of evolution that it can't account for human consciousness.

Because, after all, human consciousness produced the theory of evolution.

So you see, it's a significant failure there.

So, obviously, if you accept the basic rules of the evolution,

then it will cause some kind of neural

But you also have this idea of the un-ideal, that you can do it, and you can do it.

Yes, you can do it.

And so, then you have this idea of the secondary game,

which are that there is random mutation.

Which means gene drift, mixing of genes through sexual reproduction.

Cosmic rays which cause birth defects and mutations, this sort of thing.

And natural selection.

And these two factors,

account for praying mantises, chipmunks, tropical rainforests, but not us.

And the reason is that we emerge too quickly from the background of the rest of ordinary

nature.

In the space of about two billion years, the human brain doubled in size.

And Lumholtz, who is an orthodox evolutionary biologist, calls this the most dramatic transformation

of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire history of life.

And it happened to us.

It happened to that very organ that is responsible for the theory of evolution.

So what extraordinary confluence of...

.

...factors could have come together there to take essentially an arboreal monkey, an

ape of some sort, that had been at an evolutionary climax in the canopy of the rainforest for

a couple of million years.

What extraordinary set of factors could then set that creature marching down the road

toward Elvis.

Elvis, the internet, Bill Clinton, and all the rest of it.

Well, you would imagine, or I imagined when I first started thinking about this,

that there must be some huge edifice of established theory

that we have to go up in there and blow up.

Surely somebody has staked out this ground

and made some kind of an argument about human consciousness.

Well, in terms of science, not, or almost not.

I mean, in terms of religion, it's simple.

I mean, God made us from the clay of the earth.

In terms of science, the best shot is pretty weak soup from my point of view.

Here's what science is telling us.

That when you throw something, you have to plan.

Because once you let go of whatever it is you're throwing,

you can no longer control it.

And so because we were small and weak and hunted in packs,

we learned to throw like hell

at very large, onrushing, woolly fellow mammals of various sorts.

And you had to plan your throw.

Consequently, we developed brain capacity.

We had the ability to do this, and had enough left over

to invent quantum physics, paint the Mona Lisa,

invent the phonetic alphabet, philosophy, religion,

and all the rest of it.

In other words, it was the coordination of the hand

and the eye to the throwing arm,

this is what the orthodox folks tell us,

that gave us this extra brain capacity that we sort

of then managed into human civilization.

Well, notice this.

That this would make the pinnacle

of the evolutionary ladder the gum-chewing,

big league baseball pitcher.

Because, you know, he can put that pill right across the plate

at high speed time after time.

As somebody who learned everything they know

about sadomasochism in PE class, I'm not really ready

to embrace that.

I'm not ready to embrace this theory.

It definitely runs against my paradigm.

So I've built another story.

And it, to my mind, meets the objections, answers the question,

where did consciousness come from?

But instead of doing it very nicely and neatly, it raises,

in the very act of answering this question, other questions.

Maybe more closer to home.

Questions that reflect on our social organization, our politics,

how we treat each other in the here and now.

Even with implications for the future.

But we'll get to that.

For the moment, let me just run through this for you.

There's a sort of a basic situation that all theories

of evolution have to come to terms with.

And this is that our remote proto-hominid, primate, ape ancestors lived and developed in Africa.

If you have a non-African theory of human origin, and there are such things, but the evidence is strongly against you.

If it were stock, I'd sell. The evidence is pretty strong that whatever happened that brought us out of the animal body, it happened in Africa.

Well, all animals tend to, and plants for that matter, tend to reach evolutionary climax and occupy a niche and stabilize in that niche.

Cockroaches, ants achieve this.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, and have not changed greatly since.

Most of biology is this iterative occupation of a climaxed niche.

Very little of biology is the pushing forward into radical new forms, new species, still rarer, new genera.

For that, there has to be disruption.

There is this prosperity of some sort of the environment.

And it can be the meandering of a river, or an asteroid strike, or the retreat of a glacier, something which creates open land.

Well, for many, for five, six million years now, the African continent has been slowly drying.

And 3 million years ago, it was covered by rainforest.

At the equator.

And in the interstate.

from east to west, and that was the environment of the human ancestor types.

They were canopy-dwelling, they were fruit-eating, they ate some percentage of insects, composed

their diet.

They had a pack signaling repertoire that was fairly complicated by animal standards.

And there they were, happily living in the canopy.

But Africa began to dry up, and they came under nutritional pressure.

Now simpler animals, insects for example, when their food source is withdrawn, they

usually buy the farm.

They don't have much flexibility of diet.

If you've ever tried to raise caterpillars into butterflies for your children, you know

that if you give the caterpillars the wrong leaves, they just can't make any sense out

of it, and they die.

More advanced animals, when confronted with dietary pressure or disappearance of ordinary

food supplies, before they give up the ghost, they will...

...

... experiment with other food sources in the environment.

Now the reason this isn't normally done is thought, the reason animals are conservative

in their food choices, it's thought to be a way of avoiding mutational influences in

the form of tertiary chemicals, toxins, viruses, and things like this, that would be in the

food, in unusual foods.

One of the things that accompanies our acquisition of consciousness is gastronomy.

The appreciation of flavor.

The approach to food that makes it an art.

Animals don't do this.

They're just trying to get enough protein to keep the old engines running.

The notion of flavoring is counterintuitive to animals.

And flavoring's probably...

... probably, in part, a mutagenic influence to our diet.

When our remote ancestors came under environmental pressure, their environment was shrinking,

the rainforest was being replaced by grasslands, and nutritional pressure, their ordinary diet

of fruit and insects was being restricted, they began exploring this new environment

of the grasslands.

and this is the era of knuckle walking

turning into bipedalism

it's the era of the coordination of binocular vision

so forth and so on

there was a paper published recently

which anticipates my point

but I can't wait to hit you with it

a paper published recently

about canopy dwelling monkeys

who only leave the canopy

for the acquisition of one particular food

and the food they will come to the ground for

and risk predation is mushrooms

so it seems perfectly reasonable

to suggest that our remote ancestors

exploring the new environment of the grasslands

would have encountered

as you would if you were to go to the tropics

psilocybin containing mushrooms

growing in the desert

dung of cattle

many dung growing so-called coprophytic

coprolitic mushrooms

produce psilocybin

among them stropharia cubensis

which is one of the largest

and pandemically distributed

of these mushrooms

I'm sure that our early ancestors

also tested other kinds of food

they were testing everything

they were digging for corms

with pointed sticks

and I'm sure there were many

ecological and medical disasters

as a consequence of this

for instance

the birth control steroids

in modern birth control pills

are produced by diascoria vines

grown on plantations in Mexico

well diascoria is the family of sweet potatoes

imagine a hungry band of primates

that come upon a patch of sweet potatoes

that are heavy in these steroids

it would raise holy havoc

with their reproductive cycle

it would interfere with menstruation

ovulation

lactation

fertility

and human genetic history

is the story of many such encounters

with mutagenic influences in the environment.

Most of them catastrophic, detrimental, lethal.

But in some few cases, there would have been solitary results,

advantages conferred upon the animals that accept these new foods into their food chain.

And I want to particularly emphasize psilocybin because I believe it's the key.

You see, we're looking for some kind of factor which could have exploded the human brain size

at a rate ten times faster than evolution normally takes place.

So it's going to be an unusual situation.

Perhaps the need to throw a boulder a distance accurately,

or perhaps contact with an unusual food item or drug-containing plant.

But.

It was something unusual.

If it weren't unusual, it wouldn't have taken this planet a billion and a half years

to bring forth its first intelligent species.

Well, so let's look at psilocybin then in a little more detail.

It has a number of properties not specifically related to its psychoactivity

that make it an ideal candidate for a catalyst

for the emergence of consciousness in an advanced animal.

First of all, and at the early stage of human invasion of this new grassland environment,

proto-hominid invasion, I should say, we were testing foods.

We would certainly have tested this food.

I've seen these things the size of dinner plates in the Amazon after a rain, and they are silvery

with blue and purple shadows.

They are the most dramatic thing in the environment,

whether you know anything about them as psychoactive agents or not.

Certainly, they would have been tested for food.

I've seen baboons in Kenya investigating cow pies and flipping them over

because beetle grubs nestle underneath them, so cow pies are a natural vector for hungry baboons.

So that everything is in place.

It's trivial to suggest otherwise, I would maintain.

Okay, the first quality of psilocybin, which isn't specifically related to its psychoactivity,

is that in small doses, doses that are the kind you might obtain if you were just sort of eating it along with

little roots, grass roots, small bugs, you know, so forth and so on,

visual acuity is improved.

Specifically, edge detection is improved.

Well now, it seems to me you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that if you're in a highly competitive evolutionary environment

in grassland, an environment characterized by large predators hunting cats, and also characterized by small ungulate prey,

an environment characterized by large predators hunting cats, and also characterized by small ungulate prey,

that having an increased sensitivity to edge movement might make the difference between whether or not you live to tell the tale,

or you become somebody's dinner, or it would certainly make the difference between going home empty handed

and taking dinner home with you.

So a factor which enhanced edge detection on those animals accepting that food supply

and then putting itself into their plate types,

that's an easy pass I would recommend,

is fidgeting, Romanian turtle diving,וט

chain, they would have a slightly increased chance of evolutionary success as opposed

to the non-silocybin members of their group.

And this increased hunting success would tend to outbreed the non-silocybin-using members

of the group.

At slightly higher doses, in highly-sexed animals like primates, all alkaloids are what

are called CNS stimulants, central nervous system stimulants.

That means that they produce arousal.

And in sexually extremely active animals like primates, arousal means erection, usually

from sexual activity.

In the male, usually followed by hanky-panky, what anthropologists and primatologists call

successful instances of copulation.

Well, again, what is this?

It's a second factor tending to outbreed the non-silocybin-using members of the population.

They're now definitely moving to the rear of the parade.

They don't have as much hunting success.

They don't have as much food for themselves and their offspring.

They're not having as much sex, so they're not having as many offspring.

And in terms of rising and falling numbers, those that have some allergy, prejudice, or

fear of the mushroom are just being shunted out of the breeding population.

Well, at still higher doses, approaching effective doses.

In other words, 4 grams dried and up, or 45 grams wet and up, hunting is out of the

question.

Sex is something you can consider, but it's out of the question.

And you are basically nailed to the ground in a state of mind which we, for all of our

sophistication, our logical positivism, our superconducting, supercolliders, and

all the rest of it, haven't a clue as to what it is, what it means, what its implications

are.

The full-blown psychedelic experience of which we can only speak in terms of religious

hierophany, epiphany, apocatastasis, and all those other great Greek words, ataraxia,

you know.

In other words, we like it, but we don't understand it, and it is, therefore, the

basis for religion.

Well, so right there, you have a three-step process driven by nothing more than hunger

and curiosity that leads remote primate ancestors to a confrontation with what Rudolf Otto called

the holy other, the holy, the non-holy.

And who is the reason for all of that?

Well, the of this is the transcendent, the powerful and the natural, and the luminous,

the transcendental.

And you know, this is on slightly less firm ground, but in my own personal experience,

and having collected psychedelic experiences lifelong, I feel confident in saying that

meaning. Speaking in tongues is what Christian fundamentalists call it, but they don't have

monopoly on it. It's ancient. It occurs in all cultures. It's shamanic. And what it is,

is it's a kind of neurological seizure where linguistic organization spontaneously is verbalized.

No animal does this. It must have something to do with the acquisition of language by human

beings. And what I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before

it was meaning. That it's a kind of tuneless singing. And that having discovered that we

could make an almost endless repertoire of small mouth noises,

we did this for each other, for amusement, for to pass the time. I mean, God knows there was a lot of

it. And it probably was very late in the evolution of this ability that some very tight assed,

rational type said, you know, we could attach a specific meaning to a specific sound. And then

every time I made the sound, I made the sound. And then every time I made the sound, I made the

sound. And then every time I made the sound, I made the sound. And then every time I made the

sound. And then every time I made the sound, I made the sound. And then every time I made that sound,

you'd know what I meant and then you could go and get it for me.

You see?

It's the sort of, it's the as long as you're up, get me a grant theory of language.

So that's the basic idea. And I really believe that some time in the last 50,000 years,

before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence.

A situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals,

human institutions and the land, all were in dynamic balance.

And not in any primitive sense at all.

Language was fully developed.

Poetry may have been at its climax.

Dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy.

There's no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today.

And it was under the aegis of the boundary-dissolving influence of psilocybin.

We were nomadic.

We were breeders and caretakers of cattle.

We worshipped a great goddess.

We followed a yearly round in a vast grassland cut by crystal streams

that were washing down out of the higher altitudes.

And we were probably black as your hat.

For that matter.

And it was great.

Well, if it was so great, what happened?

Well, the very forces which created this situation, and you will recall what it was.

It was the drying of the African continent.

Forcing us out of the trees.

Forcing us to change our diet.

Forcing us to accept a dung growing mushroom.

And there were other factors forcing us into consciousness as well.

When we became omnivorous, the first form of consciousness is having the point of view of your prey.

Predatory animals have the highest form of animal consciousness.

Big cats.

But it's a consciousness of the exterior world.

Psilocybin forced us beyond that.

Into consciousness of the imaginal world.

The world of the imagination inside our heads.

What happened was the mushroom faded.

The climate changed.

What had been everywhere became seasonal.

Moved into the rain shadows of mountains.

Became the prerogative of a special class of people called shamans.

Who were like the designated hitters.

For dealing with the hyperspace of the mythos.

In other words, over millennia, the connection went from available to everyone all the time.

To ever more tenuous, ever more tenuous.

Finally faded out entirely.

It's even more complicated than that.

Because surely people would have, as they saw this happening.

Make attempts to preserve the mushroom.

And in a world without refrigeration.

The only effective way to do this is preservation in honey.

You can dry mushrooms.

But in a world without hermetically sealed peanut butter jars.

Drying is a very short term strategy for preservation.

The only thing which will really work is preservation in honey.

The problem there is.

That honey itself.

Especially aboriginal honeys.

Which have a lot more water in them.

Than what you get in those little plastic bears at the A&P.

Aboriginal honeys are very runny.

And so what do they do?

They themselves have the capacity for turning into a psychoactive substance.

Alcohol.

But alcohol promotes a completely different set of cultural values.

And attitudes than psilocybin.

Psilocybin is a boundary dissolving hallucinogen.

Mead alcohol gives an enhanced sense of verbal acuity.

In the presence of lowered sensitivity to social cues.

In other words.

One can make an ass of oneself.

But now I want to backtrack for a minute.

I will return to this thing about the loss of the mushroom.

But there's something that I want to go over with you.

That's really important in all this to me.

And that is.

This isn't simply the story of how an intoxicant promoted consciousness.

And then we fell into history by losing that intoxicant.

And went on to other intoxicants.

With consequences to be evaluated.

It's that.

But it's more.

Because psilocybin had a very, very peculiar effect.

Over and above what I've mentioned so far.

And it is this over and above effect.

That makes my theory so controversial.

And academics, I think, so phobic of it.

Because it rips open a whole can of worms.

And this is the problem.

All primates clear back to squirrel monkeys and old world monkeys.

All primates form dominance hierarchies.

This means that the sharp fanged hard bodied young males control everybody else.

The women.

The elderly.

The sick.

The children.

The intellectuals.

Everybody finds their place somewhere in this dominance hierarchy run by these dominant alpha males.

We are no different.

We also, as we sit here this evening, operate under this kind of a social organization.

I mean we complain about it.

We analyze it.

We are aware of it.

But we live under it.

It's how it is.

So here is my suggestion.

That what psilocybin did was it changed behavior.

It interfered with primate behavior.

Specifically, it interfered with this tendency to form monogamous pairs and dominance hierarchies.

And so the ordinary tendency of the primates to organize.

To organize themselves that way was interrupted.

Medicated out of existence if you like.

Vaccinated against if you like.

By the presence of psilocybin in the diet.

And this over emphasizing or chemical accentuation of sexuality occasioned by the arousal.

Of the psilocybin.

Was sufficient to dissolve the ordinary tendency toward monogamy.

And replace it with an orgiastic sexual style.

Or they coexisted simultaneously.

I mean who knows.

We weren't there.

It's sort of the way I imagine it.

Is that at every new and full moon.

There were group mushroom parties.

Which basically simply got out of hand.

Regularly.

And so the monogamous pair bond would be under pressure.

If not completely eliminated.

Many cultures have this even to this day.

I mean in a sense Mardi Gras is a festival where the rules are dissolved.

And nobody is supposed to go to their spouse the Monday after.

And say you know was that you I saw dressed as Marie Antoinette.

And because you know the rules are there is permission to break the rules.

And many societies do this.

The result of an orgiastic style like that.

Is men cannot trace lines of male paternity.

And so there is a tremendous social glue.

A tremendous force for the cohesion of community.

Men don't then think in terms of my children.

They think in terms of our children.

The children of the group.

And under the aegis of this group.

This polymorphic sexual style.

Group child care and extended family rearing.

We produced everything that we think of as human.

That we value.

Our art.

Our music.

Our philosophy.

Our sense of each other's worth.

Body painting.

Tattooing.

Piercing.

All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence.

Were put in place when we had a different kind of mind.

Than we have now.

We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization.

And male dominance.

And anxiety.

And sobriety.

Over female sexual activity.

Related to feelings of male ownership.

That all came later.

We became human beings in this other world of values.

And psychological attitudes.

Problem is.

That as I say.

The mushroom faded.

But by the time it had faded.

We were no longer the wordless symbiotes.

Of cattles.

The barely sentient hunters of the African plain.

By the time we were finished with the mushrooms.

We had language.

We had social institutions.

But what we began to lose.

Was you know.

You can get as wet eyed as you want about it.

But respect for each other.

A sense of each other's individuality.

A sense of love.

A sense of community.

And it must have been.

Though it happened over a long period of time.

Very much like what we're living through now.

A sense that people are you know.

No damn good.

And getting worse.

A sense that you know.

Why can't we be as we once were.

Where is our sense of each other.

Where is our ability to care for each other.

So forth and so on.

I wrote a book called.

The Food of the Gods.

In which I tell this story.

In the first third of the book.

That I've just told you.

And then I show.

That what history is essentially.

Is a careening.

Out of control effort.

To find our way back.

To this state of primordial balance.

One of the things that marks us as humans.

That is unique.

Is our obsessions with drugs.

Our ability to addict.

We addict.

Not only to substances.

We addict to each other.

We addict to ideologies.

Marxism.

Christianity.

Skinkism.

As practiced in Washington.

Whatever.

And we addict.

To each other.

You know.

I mean.

I am a romantic.

With the best of them.

But I can't help noticing.

That a broken heart.

And heroin withdrawal.

Show very similar presentations.

Really.

Insomnia.

Sweating.

Sense of diminished self esteem.

Hysteria.

You know.

It's very very similar.

We.

A psychologist.

Looking at a person.

With an addictive syndrome.

Will say.

Well you were damaged.

In childhood.

There is some trauma there.

That you're.

You're trying to.

Compensate.

You're trying to compensate.

Well I'm not that keen.

On all this.

Psychologizing.

But I do think.

That.

We could apply this model.

To ourselves.

On a grand scale.

We were essentially.

Torn.

From.

Our lives.

From.

Our lives.

From.

Our lives.

From.

Our lives.

We were essentially.

Torn.

From.

The.

Gaian.

Womb.

Thrust.

Into.

The.

Birth.

Canal.

Of.

History.

And expelled.

Sometime.

Around.

The.

Fall.

Of.

The.

Roman.

Empire.

Into.

The.

Cold.

Hard.

World.

Of.

Modern.

Science.

And.

There.

Are.

Things.

Out.

There.

You.

Know.

Alcohol.

The.

Whole.

Morphine.

Family.

So.

Forth.

And.

So.

But.

These.

Things.

Always.

Have.

Con.

Sequences.

There's.

A.

Price.

To.

Be.

Paid.

Charles.

Johnson.

Watson.

Went.

In.

The.

Early.

1950s.

And.

Found.

These.

Mushrooms.

And.

Brought.

Them.

Out.

And.

Then.

Albert.

Hoffman.

Who.

Had.

Earlier.

Discovered.

LSD.

Synthesize.

The.

Compound.

And.

mowed this field and moved on it's that science has never really been here we

haven't looked at the implications of diet on early human evolution we don't

have a theory for the evolution of consciousness of any consequence and yet

you know the factors I've laid out for you increased visual acuity and impact

on sexual and social behaviors a triggering of glossolalia like phenomena

in the presence of a boundary dissolving psychedelic experience these are

catalysts sufficiently dramatic that inculcated into a cultural style I think

they explain a great deal about where we came from and who we are now the the

irony of all of this is that we don't

live in a society that has made all practically any discussion of this

illegal certainly if I were to end this lecture by handing out doses of

psilocybin I would be gently taken by the elbow and led away forever the

Western mind is particularly phobic of this of this subject

I mean we have bent our laws so that people

can jump out of airplanes in the pursuit of thrills so that they can bungee

cord off major highway bridges and freeway overpass is so concerned are

we to fulfill society's need for thrills but this is something else it wonderful

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believe unfairly. I think that when you examine the situation, it's possible to understand very

clearly why this is such a social issue. Because what these things do, if you look, and now I'm

slightly broadening my wrap to include other psychedelics besides psilocybin, but psilocybin is

certainly true in all cases. What these things do, if you had to generalize 100,000 psychedelic

experiences, the ones where people thought they were God, the ones where people had to be taken

to the ER room and have their stomach pumps, all of them, if you generalized, what these

substances do is they dissolve boundaries. They dissolve boundaries. If you love it, you'll love

it.

If you hate it, you'll hate it. But that's what they do. They dissolve boundaries. Now, the reason

this provokes a lot of social anxiety is because all societies are about the maintenance of

boundaries. It doesn't matter whether you're, you know, a stockbroker in New York, a Zen monk in

Kyoto, a Hasid in Jerusalem, your society is held together by boundaries.

And definitions and anything which dissolves those boundaries and introduces relativity into

cultural modeling is felt to be threatening because we like to believe that our reality is

somehow sanctioned, that this is how it should be. But in fact, you know, that's just a cultural

judgment. All cultures think that their culture represents a sanctioned reality.

It doesn't. It just represents the current download of the, their linguistic enterprise.

The, at the core of the Western anxiety about boundaries is something that we are very proud of,

that we believe we invented. We call it the ego. Sometimes we call it the democratic individual.

We, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we,

we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, got broke from copied truths and

world dividedness with a packet of Two Locals .

It turns out it wasn't.

inaire 14.

?One minute break.

the citizen, the individual.

We want nothing of tribalism, still less of collectivism,

and God forbid, nothing whatsoever

to do with communism.

See, all these things set us going.

But in fact, the ego is appropriate only

to a certain point.

I mean, yes, we need egos so that when

you take someone to dinner at a reasonable restaurant,

you place food in your mouth, not their mouth.

This is what the ego is for.

It tells you who pays.

But in fact, what the ego is is the return

to consciousness of this psychic structure related

to the patterns of dominance.

And the way I think of the ego is it's like a cyst,

or a calcareous growth, or a tumor that

gets going in the personality.

And if not treated, it becomes chronic.

And then there is no cure.

There can only be a certain amount of maintenance

and medication of it.

But it's incurable, except unless we resort

to not only non-prescription drugs,

but drugs currently illegal.

In other words, the psychedelics,

through this boundary dissolving function,

dissolve that boundary as well.

And so they promote a larger sense of the world

than the values of capitalism, competitiveness, object

fetishism, property acquisition.

And the bottom line, empower.

So the issue, as was always sensed since the 60s forward,

I think, is not simply an issue of religious freedom,

or an issue of an eccentric minority social practice being

tolerated by the majority the way they tolerate handing out

pamphlets.

it's in airports or something like that. The issue is, in fact, what kind of people shall

we be? And then what kind of society shall we put in place? And that's why my theory

of evolution is not simply a dry footnote on an issue that involves anthropologists,

primatologists, and biologists, but it turns into a political issue. Because our unhappy,

addicted, ego-driven condition has become not simply the source of our own unhappiness,

that was bad enough, but now it's the source of great discomfort and dislocation for all

life and human society.

We are out of control. We are, basically, severely addicted to things, and cannot stop

ourselves. And we know, or we should know, that there is not enough petroleum, heavy

metal, and so forth and so on, in the planet to give all the thing-addicts, to give all

the things-addicts, to give all the things-addicts, to give all the things-addicts, to give

all the things-addicts, to give all the things-addicts, all the things that we know

they must have in order to be happy. We have spread this intellectual virus from

pole to pole, to Turkmenistan and Barneo, to the upper Amazon and to the Tajiks. Everybody

wants kids. Everybody wants the pause that refreshes. What are we going to do about

this?

Well, so far, we've been treating it like an endless garden party. There's no serious

plan on the table to deal with this at all.

I think that the momentum of human history is pushing us inexorably toward some kind

of day of reckoning, in which we are either going to have to turn consciously toward brutality

and selfishness, and say, well, let India go. Let Bangladesh go. Triage costs too much.

Can't possibly fix the problem. In order to maintain our locked compounds and our fifty

channels of television and the endless availability of arugula, we have to let India go.

We're going to have to turn that way. In other words, each consciously participate in a

choice to brutalise the human enterprise, or we're going to have to seriously talk about

very major restructurings of our society. I don't really know how we do that. I was

living in Northern California a couple of years ago, when they wanted to close an air

base near here, and the newspapers were filled with weeks for weeks with announcements they

were being blamed for. They were saying, we ought to go to the playoffs, we ought to

analysis of whether Western civilization could absorb this hammer blow at the very heart

of its institutions of closing one friggin' air base, for crying out loud.

That's not my idea of major change, you know?

We may have to give up some of our pretty things.

We may have to discipline some of the irresponsible social philosophies that run amok among us.

And no, I don't mean the advocacy of psychedelic plants.

I mean the Roman Catholic Church's position on population control in the Third World.

The Germans take quite a knock for the Holocaust, but the Catholic Church manages to push

away.

They push more people into death, disease, and degradation every year than the Holocaust

managed in its entire show.

And it's thought rather crass to even mention the fact.

It seems to me as long as these Catholic bishops can show their face in public that we are

in complicity with mass murder.

It's not pleasant news, but what are you going to do about it?

Islamic fundamentalism, another bunch of knotheads with an anti-human agenda.

What are we going to do about this?

Are we going to go gently into that good night of planetary chaos, extreme distortion

of class structure, defense of what we have at any cost against those who have nothing?

There doesn't seem to be any other plan on the horizon.

Arthur Kessler, who probably never thought he would be quoted by Terence McKenna, a very

conservative character.

You'll recall he was a Marxist who turned on Marxism and led a very interesting intellectual

life.

He wrote a book 30 years ago called The Ghost in the Machine.

And he made a case similar to mine but a little simpler.

He observed, human beings are hardwired for homicide.

This is what we do best because this was something we had to do, apparently, at some point in

our past, at least in Kessler's view.

He didn't believe in a mushroom paradise.

But he reached the same conclusion that I have, which is, we need a pharmacological

intervention on antisocial behavior, or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma.

There have been dystopias based on drug intervention on aggressive behavior.

You all remember Brave New World, where every time anybody raised their voice, they were

given a gram of Soma and told,

A gram is better than a gram.

And so nobody ever had a thought in their head, well, that's a terrible drug.

Let's not introduce that.

Uh-oh.

The bad news is, we've had it for decades.

It's called television.

We have millions of people in larval, low-awareness lives in their little condominium apartments,

just ladling this garbage into their minds.

The average American would not be able to do that.

The average American watches five and a half hours of TV a day, so imagine how much time

these people watch.

I mean, to think of that as human at all.

If that were a drug, we'd be up in arms.

If people were loaded at home with that level of mental condition, day after day after day,

we would do something about it.

So my, I don't have, I can't.

I don't want to propose a grand solution, but I do think that it is pregnant with implication

that here at the end of the 20th century, with all of these problems hammering down

on us, the news comes from the rainforests and the deserts that these aboriginal people,

while we made the descent into history and got the top quark and planted the flag on

the moon and all that, they kept the faith.

And they have a materia medica, a tool box, that can carry us back into a connection with

the planet.

Now, the question might be asked, why do you have such overwhelming faith in what is

after all a substance, a drug?

I mean, don't psychedelics just cause you to see pretty...

pictures and patterns and tally up your gains and losses and then you come down

and that's it and the answer is no what is mysterious here and I mentioned it in

the early part of my talk what is mysterious here is this thing we call

the psychedelic experience those people nailed to the ground around the

campfires 50,000 years ago they didn't know what it was and when we go in there

armed with our Heidegger and our Husserl and our Wittgenstein and our

Merleau-Ponty we don't know what it is either there has been no progress in

60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity it is as

terrifying as awesome as ecstatic as

irreducible to us as it was to them well what is that as secular people we

rarely experience religious awe especially of the uncontrollable sort I

believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a

connection into a larger

modality of organization on the planet which is a fancy way of saying it

connects you up to the mind of nature herself the planet is not just a

hodgepodge of competing species that's the old evolutionary model that's been

obsolete for decades the new evolutionary model is that where we see

species nature sees only a gene swarm genes moving at various speeds being

transferred around a large percentage of them by sexual propagation but a

large percentage of them by asexual and vegetative propagation and still others

by more exotic methods of propagation such as go on in the fungi and the

bacteria

The world is a gene swarm, and people like Lynn Margolis and James Lovelock

have been suggesting for years that the Earth is a kind of thermostatic self-regulator.

Well, if you carry that idea far enough,

thermostatic self-regulator is a way of saying a kind of computational engine,

a kind of computer, a kind of mind, a kind of mind, the Gaian mind.

The reason those mushroom-eating, orgiastically behaving people worshipped a great horned goddess,

the reason they imaged the numinous other as feminine,

was because they had a connection into a kind of overarching intelligence

that they instinctively and intuitively felt to be feminine.

And we retain this in our languages as the idea of Mother Nature

and the femininity of the land and so forth and so on,

but it's just become a distant metaphor to us.

I think our intelligence is a source of toxicity to nature

and discomfort to ourselves.

Unless our values are based on planetary values,

are linked to the values of the rest of nature.

And that means we need to fit ourselves more appropriately into the scheme of things

by limiting our numbers,

by limiting our extraction of natural resources,

and by limiting our consumption.

And that's the way we're going to do it.

And toxification of the environment.

We need to realize that there is a hegemony of life on the planet,

not necessarily a hegemony of intelligence.

Intelligence is not a license to trample.

The proper role of intelligence in a planetary ecology

is that of gardener,

caregiver, and maintainer of balance.

Well, so where do we go?

And what do psychedelics have to say about that?

Well, I believe that psychedelics show us something

which capitalist, consumer, fetish-oriented society

doesn't want us to know.

What psychedelics show us is the incredible richness

of our minds, that you, little you,

can produce more art in a 20-minute burst

of hallucinatory intoxication than the Western mind

has produced in the last 500 years.

Our socially created space is incredibly important.

We have Picasso's contribution and Pollock's contribution

and everybody's contribution, but it altogether is as nothing

compared to the richness that resides in each one of us

a half inch behind your eyebrows.

We are told, you know, oh, well, if you want beauty,

you have to own a Lexus.

Or, you know, if you want a sense of satisfaction,

then you need a triple car.

Or, you know, if you want to be in a garage,

then you need a garage, on and on.

This is absolutely not true.

These are substitute addictions that will never satisfy

for the genuine article, and the genuine article

is a connection into the Gaian mind.

Well, I don't believe or expect for a moment that ever again,

naked, tattooed, and joyous, we will herd our cattle

to America.

I mean, there are six million of us.

That chance has been blown.

But what can we do to ameliorate our situation?

Well, I have always been an optimist.

I'm more optimistic right now than I have been for a long time

because sometimes when you're an optimist,

you're an optimist simply on principle.

You believe it's going to turn out all right.

But you don't see how it possibly could.

I'm beginning to see how it possibly could turn out all right.

And my notion is, first of all, I follow in my thinking

about shamanism, and I follow the great historian of religion,

Mersi Eliade, who got it almost all right except that he never embraced

psychedelics.

He thought they were decadent.

But that was just his French-European education,

and he came too early.

But anyway, Eliade wrote a book called Shamanism,

and then he subtitled it The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.

Now, he wrote the book in French.

In French, technique has a connotation that it doesn't have in English.

It means both a way to do things,

and it means technology.

Later, the French sociologist Jacques Ellul wrote a book called Propaganda.

And the little banner under which his book flew,

which is printed right on the frontispiece,

is he says there are no political solutions,

only technological ones.

The rest is propaganda.

And then he spends 200 pages explaining what he means

by political solutions, technological solutions, and propaganda.

By Ellul's understanding, I agree.

I think ideology is toxic.

All ideology.

It's not that there are good ones and bad ones.

All ideology is toxic.

Because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.

I mean, if you adopt some ideology,

Christianism, Mormonism, it doesn't matter,

then you have all the answers.

You just go and look in the catechism.

Well, I don't know why they issued you a brain.

They could have just given you the catechism.

Technology, as the counterpoint to ideology,

is a very different animal.

Now, right now, we're going through a technophobic phase,

because people think technology means exploding nuclear power plants

and irradiated food and TV.

But all technology really means, in the McLuhan sense,

is the extensions of man.

The extensions of man.

And so language is a technology.

Shamanism is a technology.

Psilocybin is a technology.

And certainly the internet is a technology.

It's slowly, I think, dawning on a number of people

that if we're talking about how lisinogen says consciousness expanding drugs,

then the only difference between a drug and a computer

is that one is slightly too large to swallow.

And our best people are working on that problem.

Even as we speak,

the drugs of the future will be much more like computers.

The computers of the future will be much more like drugs.

And I think what we have to recognize

is that we are in a very brief and low-energy technical phase in technology.

Basically, we're at the tail end of the petrochemical steam era.

And where we are headed

is toward the solid-state, fiber-optic, global community of the internet.

And when I was in San Francisco two weeks ago,

the buzz was all about VRML,

the virtual reality markup language

whose protocols are being set now

so that we will be able to build websites on the net

that you can put on your helmet

and walk around in.

Sun Microsystems is about to introduce something called Hot Java,

which will let you build and interact with your website

without going through your server.

Bandwidth is broadening as we speak.

The whole world is being brought into the domain of electricity.

And you may not know it,

but Marshall McLuhan thought that this was the descent

of the Holy Ghost.

As a convert to Catholicism,

he sort of went the opposite direction of me.

As a convert to Catholicism,

he decided that the descent of the third person of the Trinity

and the worldwide spread of electricity

were the same event.

So, I think that what we have to do

is dematerialize culture

in every way possible.

And that means pharmacologize culture,

computerize culture,

network culture,

virtualize culture,

and make of it, thereby,

a tool for the production of our poetic flights,

a technology for the putting in place

of our dreams as exhibits

that we can show each other.

This is what it is.

This is what technology can be

in the service of boundary dissolution.

In the service of boundary maintenance,

you get hydrogen bombs and sarin.

In the surface of boundary dissolution,

you get psychoactive substances

and the internet

and sexual experimentation.

In the surface of boundary dissolution,

you get virtual experimentalism,

social justice,

tolerance,

and community.

And the choice is to be made

on an individual level

by each and every one of us.

I don't advocate a mass outbreak

of psychedelic use.

I think these things are a private matter.

The only thing comparable to them

in our human experience is our sexuality.

This is a private matter.

How we define it,

how we express it,

how we act it out,

who we do it with,

what we think about it,

and what we choose to say in public about it

is all in our hands.

I do not think that the government,

under the guise of some phony,

alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric,

should attempt to control

the evolution of consciousness.

After all,

if these things truly are consciousness expanding,

it doesn't take too much intelligence

to realize that it is the absence of consciousness

that is causing our flirtation

with extinction and planetary disaster.

If there is any way to raise consciousness,

diet, drug, machine, sexual practice,

mantra, yantra,

whatever it is,

we should be furiously exploring and applying it.

Because if we should fumble the ball,

if we should actually,

where our ancestors over thousands of generations

did not fail,

if we are to fail,

the magnitude of the tragedy will be immense

because failure is not inevitable.

It is not inevitable

that we should fail.

There are ideas, personalities, technologies

available right now

which, if honestly explored and implemented,

could rescue the human enterprise

from the disgrace that hovers over us.

We don't want this to end in a toxified garbage pit

ruled by Nazis,

which is the way we may well be headed.

The Gaian mind has always been there.

Nature originally,

through the plants and shamanism,

provided the tools for us to access

this incredible natural database.

Through the vicissitudes of history,

previous generations lost the key

in Western society.

Since the 1960s,

the key has been refound.

It's a matter of great social controversy.

It's a matter of great risk

to those who take it,

how they will be viewed by their peers.

But there is no longer,

ignorance is no longer an excuse.

Anthropology in the last hundred years

has laid at our doorstep

the tools necessary

for an archaic reconstruction

of society

and human values

within that society.

It's inconceivable

that Western industrial capitalism

could run on another five hundred

or a thousand years.

It will not continue as it has.

It will deteriorate

under the pressure of recent

resource scarcity.

And what few democratic values

we have obtained,

what little space

for reasoned discourse

has been created,

will be the first

to be swept away.

So it's very, very important

that people take back their minds

and that people analyze our dilemma

in the context of the entire human story.

From the descent

onto the grassland

to our potential destiny

as citizens of the galaxy

and the universe.

We are at a critical turning point.

And as I say,

the tools,

the data

that holds the potential

for our salvation

is now known.

It is available.

It is among us.

But it is misrepresented

It is slandered.

It is litigated against.

And it's up to each one of us

to relate to this situation

in a fashion that will allow us

to answer the question

that will surely be put to us

at some point in the future.

Which is,

what did you do

to help save the world?

Well, I'll knock off now.

I'll sign books.

We'll take like a ten minute break

and then we'll come back

and do questions.

Thank you very much

for your attention, Pastor.

And that in fact,

what we're involved in here

at the end of the 20th century

is some kind of accelerated

forward escape

into transformation.

And I,

when I lecture that subject,

I more or less imply

that it's inevitable.

In other words,

it's not that we have to do

X, Y, or Z,

that it's on track.

I think it is on track,

but I also think there's

a place for the kind of politics

we discussed this evening.

Because as the world

gets crazier and crazier,

a lot of people are going to get

very, very anxious.

This thing in Oklahoma City

is an example of people

getting anxious.

So what needs to be done

is to spread the idea

that anxiety is inappropriate.

It's sort of like

we who are psychedelic

have to function as sitters

for society.

Because society is going to thrash

and resist

and think it's dying

and be deluded

and regurgitate

unconscious material

and so forth and so on.

And the goal

and the role then

for psychedelic people I think

is to try and spread calm.

I'm very convinced

that things are going to get

a lot nuttier than they are

and they're a lot nuttier now

than they have been for a while.

But it isn't,

it doesn't mean the bad people

are winning

or that we're going to fumble

the ball or anything.

The mushroom said to me once,

it said,

this is what it's like

when a species departs

for the stars.

It's a birth thing.

It's complicated.

If you had never seen

a human birth

and you came around

the corner of a building

in your daily round

and it was happening,

it vibrates medical emergency.

I mean, blood is being shed,

tissues stretched,

it doesn't,

you really have to have

your chops together

to step back and say,

how wonderful,

new life,

new life coming into the world.

Because, you know,

that's not the vibe of it.

And I think that's the circumstance

that we're in.

This is the birth canal

to a new order.

And at the moment,

it looks like suffocation,

constriction,

limitation,

possible death.

But we need to inform ourselves

and get a big perspective.

And there's no way

to get a big perspective

like education

and psychedelic experiences.

If we can see history

for what it is,

it's a 25,000-year

nearly instantaneous transition

from one state of being

to another.

And yes,

there are 1,500 generations

of people

who live in that

paper-thin transition time.

But when it's over,

it's over.

And we will leave history behind

the way you dump

a used placenta,

I'm sure.

Yeah?

I wonder,

is there any reliable information

on the relationship

between psychedelics

and early Christianity?

Reliable information

on psychedelic use

in early Christianity?

The answer is no.

I mean,

there is a book

by John Allegro

called

The Sacred Mushroom

and the Cross.

He was a very respected

Dead Sea scholar

till he wrote that book.

And that basically finished

his career as a classicist.

He says some incredibly

provocative things

in that book.

To judge whether he's right

or wrong,

you would have to be

an Assyrian philologist.

About which I know nothing.

So to the lay person,

it seemed to be

quite an impressive book.

But apparently,

to his specialist colleagues,

it was sloppy thinking

and a travesty

and reason to deny tenure.

Saint Augustine

was a Montanist

before he,

no, he was a Manichean.

Before he converted

to Christianity.

And he mentions

that Manicheans

forbade the use

of mushrooms,

the eating of mushrooms.

It doesn't say

the use of mushrooms.

But the ancient Middle East,

we don't know very much

about psychedelic sacramentalism.

It may have been there.

It may not have been there.

Absence of reference

is not proof of absence

because of cult secrecy

and other factors like that.

We do know that the,

or we feel

we're on firmer ground

in saying

that the Greek mystery religions

emphatically probably were psychedelic,

especially the Eleusinian mysteries,

the mysteries which were practiced

on the plain outside of Athens

every year for over 2,000 years.

And everybody who was anybody

in the ancient world

made the journey to Eleusis

to celebrate the greater mysteries

which were celebrated in September.

Interesting approach

to psychedelics there.

You could only

legitimately participate

in the mystery at Eleusis

once in your life.

So imagine if you

had a single high-dose

psychedelic experience

under ideal conditions,

in other words,

in darkness,

under the care of experts,

and then the rest of your life

you had to sort it all out

based on what happened

that one evening.

It was extraordinarily powerful

for the ancient world.

Eventually it was destroyed.

Alaric the Visigoth,

who was a barbarian,

but that didn't stop him

from being a convert to Christianity.

Alaric the Visigoth,

burned Eleusis

on his way to North Africa

to burn other things.

Yeah?

I was wondering, Terrence,

if you had a chance to read

The Emperor's New Mind

by Roger Penrose, I think.

It's an argument against the idea

of AI, artificial intelligence.

And whether you were able

to follow his argument,

because I would take it

that you'd probably be opposed

to his argument.

I haven't read the book,

I like Roger Penrose's early work.

He's saying artificial intelligence

is impossible.

Yeah, based on,

and he goes through the Turing,

and I heard you bring it up once.

The Turing test.

The Turing test

for artificial intelligence,

and he also brings in

the incompleteness theorem.

Oh, Gödel's

incommensurability thing.

Maybe a little on that.

A little Gödel's

incompleteness theorem.

Gödel, please.

In two-four time.

Well, I don't have

a particularly strong opinion

one way or another on AI.

I certainly think computers

can be a lot more intelligent

than they are

before we settle the question

of whether they can pass

the Turing test.

You all know the Turing test

is this test.

Alan Turing was a mathematician.

He figured it out during World War II,

and it's basically

if you call X on a telephone

and you can't tell whether X

is a person or a machine,

then X passes the Turing test.

And every year,

they have Turing tests

where judges converse

by telephone with computers

and people

and try and decide

which are the computers

and which are the people.

And it's still pretty easy

because the people

exhibit exasperation,

incorrect information,

misinterpret the question,

and so forth and so on.

There are some wild thinkers

out there, far wilder than me,

of, you know,

if you want to read a wild book,

read Hans Moravec's book,

Mind Children,

The Future of Human

and Artificial Intelligence.

There's a book.

And I'm having a memory lapse here.

Help me out, Tipler.

I said help me out

with a memory lapse.

You don't have to read my mind,

for God's sake.

Yes.

Thank you, Creon.

Tipler's book is,

the end of all speculation

where artificial intelligence

is concerned.

I think machine-human interfacing

is very important.

I think that the debate

about whether a computer

can think like a human being

is kind of not very interesting.

Computers think like computers.

Already, vast amounts

of what we call human society

are entirely run

by machines,

including very important

financial sectors,

market decisions,

resource extraction decisions,

inventory resupply decisions

that feed clear back

from the warehouse to the mine.

In other words, machines say

how much tin should be extracted

and at what rate,

and therefore to a certain degree

say who should come to work

and who shouldn't

on certain days.

A lot of design work of circuitry,

engineers will simply tell a computer

what the circuit should do

and leave the actual architecture

of the circuitry to machine decision.

This means, you know,

more and more parts of the human world

are being over,

given over to machines to design.

But when you see how much of the world

looks like the arrival concourse

of an international airport,

having computers design the world

might not be a bad idea.

Definitely computers figure in our future.

I mean, I wasn't joking when I said

drugs and computers are migrating

toward each other.

I can imagine a world,

and this is not the ultimate world

by any means,

a world five, six, seven years

in the future

where the equivalent of today's

advanced Macintosh

would be something you glue

on your thumbnail

and communicate with that way.

And, you know, beyond that lie,

you know, enormous computational

and data-accessing abilities

that may be accessed through implants.

We're going to have to decide, you know,

how much of the monkey

we want to take with us into the future.

We don't want to take the homicidal killer.

We don't want to take the male dominator.

But we, it would probably be a mistake

to leave the body entirely behind.

After all, the body gives us

our orientation in the world

and our sense of ourselves

as somehow coextensive with animal life.

But how much of what we call human

is really human

is going to be a major topic

for discussion

from here to the end of time.

Yeah, in the back.

Two questions on ecstasy.

Number one, what's your take on MDMA

and what's the optimum grams to take

to achieve sexual ecstasy?

Sexual ecstasy on ecstasy?

No, sexual ecstasy on mushrooms.

Oh, on mushrooms.

Oh, I see.

Well, first about MDMA.

Well, there is no doubt

that from here to the end of time,

whether it be 18 years

or a thousand years away,

science is going to produce

more and more psychoactive drugs.

There are psychoactive drugs on the shelf now

waiting for human testing

and government approval around the world.

We cannot explore the brain,

we cannot explore neurochemistry

without these drugs being

a natural consequence

of this program of research.

MDMA is a cyclicized amphetamine

like MDA, like mescaline,

which is a naturally occurring

compound of this type.

In the hands of a skilled doctor,

a skilled psychotherapist,

MDMA leads to conflict resolution,

insights into relationships,

this sort of thing.

I'm not entirely convinced

that it's the silver bullet

for these conditions.

Every drug that has made its way

onto the alternative culture scene

has first billed itself as a love drug.

That's an unfailing market ploy

to get a drug to the forefront

of public attention.

Cannabis was sold to us as a love drug.

LSD, psilocybin,

ibogaine, MDMA

is no different.

MDMA does promote

a certain kind of empathy,

not a whole lot of

vigorous sexual activity.

In terms of what dose of psilocybin

leads you into a sexual

rather than a visually acute

or visionarily ecstatified situation,

I would say for a 145 pound person,

probably two to three grams

is this agitated, sexually active,

or if no sex is happening,

maybe dancing and drumming

in other words,

thoroughly aroused, busy, active dose.

As the dose rises,

you know, activity slows

and finally you just want to sit down

and then finally you just want to lay down

and then you're into the other phase.

Behind you there was another question.

Yeah, I was going to say that

John Lilly has an interesting

kind of speculation about the future

possibilities of solid state entities

in his autobiography The Scientist.

But I was really curious

if you have anything to say

or know about the credibility

of the author William Cooper

who wrote a book called

Behold a Pale Horse.

Do you know that book?

This is the flying saucer debunker.

And isn't he the one who said

that he was the CIA guy

for a long time?

Well, this is slightly off the track

or might seem to some people

to be slightly off the track.

I don't know William Cooper's book.

I regard that whole flying saucer thing

as a civil war in a leper colony.

But I do think having been,

like probably most of you,

very interested in flying saucers

from the time I was a kid

and I grew up when it was all happening,

a couple of years ago

I accepted an invitation

for the first time to go to a flying saucer

conference.

If you've never been to one

and you're interested in flying saucers,

go.

You will have more insights

into the phenomenon

in a conference like that

than in ten years of studying it

because what's perfectly clear

is that these people are

self-selected for gullibility.

And it's not their fault.

It's just that the ticket

through the front door

is, you know,

would you believe this?

Would you believe this?

I think probably what happened,

historically speaking,

is that, you know,

in 1947 when the first UFOs were seen,

it was a weird world.

The explosion of the atom bomb,

the work toward the hydrogen bomb,

people didn't know.

Einstein and Truman and all this,

they didn't know

what it really meant.

They thought that it is conceivable

that the solar system is monitored

and it is conceivable

that this is the switch

which turns on the monitor

and brings attention.

I mean, they were in awe

of the atom bomb

and they realized

they were tampering

with cosmic forces.

And then at this moment

of cosmic awe

and realization of tampering,

they begin to get reports

of spacecraft,

entering the skies of Earth

and interacting with human beings.

Well, what they did,

the CIA had just been founded in 48

and so forth and so on.

What they did

is they put a lot of time and effort

into infiltrating all these groups

that claimed knowledge

of what was going on.

And as a survivor of the new left,

I can tell you

when the government gets interested

in infiltrating,

I mean,

there were,

two out of every three members of SDS

was a government informant

at the height of its membership.

So I believe that what happened

was these flying saucer groups

were massively infiltrated

by the government

in the course of its

pursuing its constitutional obligation

to maintain the public welfare.

And by 54 or 55,

the government was put

in a position

that was perfectly convinced

that whatever flying saucers were,

they did not pose a threat

to the integrity of the air defenses

of North America.

And that was their real concern.

But bureaucracies are weird creatures.

They really exist

only to perpetuate themselves.

So at some point

inside these agencies,

they must have had to face the fact

that they had massively infiltrated

a bunch of very flaky people.

And now their choice

was to either end the program,

tell the budget people

that no,

they wouldn't be needing

that 10 million dollars this year,

or keep going with it

because they now had a group of people

self-selected for gullibility.

And that group of people

became the victims

of every chemical experiment,

weird technology,

propaganda,

experiment,

and so forth and so on,

because their friends and relatives

had already written them off

as completely untrustworthy.

Who would believe them

no matter what story they told?

So I really felt

I was among severely damaged people.

And it wasn't their fault.

It's that they had become

part of something

that had become part of something

that had become part of something.

And they never really

had a fighting chance.

Do strange lights

haunt the skies of Earth?

You bet their booties they do.

But the flying saucer cults

are a social phenomenon

and largely unrelated

to whatever this anomaly is.

Yeah?

Dr. Buckminster Fuller

often spoke of the

femoralization of technology.

Do you think there will come a time

when we are going to see

something indistinguishable

from our technology?

And would that be

sort of apotheosis

that you speak about

in your books?

No, I think it would go

the other way,

that we're moving toward a time

when our technology

is indistinguishable from us.

In other words,

I don't want us to all turn into

7,180 AV.

That doesn't seem like a good idea.

But on the other hand,

I could imagine

as a hopeful scenario

a future world

of, let's say,

500 or a billion

healthy, happy, well-fed people

of all races, political persuasions,

gender preferences,

and so forth and so on.

And those people would

essentially live

as our archaic ancestors did,

very little material culture,

very nomadic,

but if you could transport yourself

into the body of one of these people,

you would discover that

when they close their eyes,

there are menus hanging in space.

In other words,

the computer that was

on the back of the thumbnail,

five years later,

that computer moves into being

a kind of an implant,

a black contact lens

that is sewn into your eyelids

at age six,

so that when you close your eyes,

you're actually looking

at an interface.

And the entire database

of the culture

could be placed there.

You see, really,

what computers are doing

is they're making what we call

the collective unconscious

conscious.

All data,

all images

are potentially accessible

through

the network.

And, you know,

I'm still getting used

to the idea of the network myself.

Like, I keep thinking,

oh, I have this timeline,

I could get somebody's chronology

and put it at my website,

and then I remember,

no, no,

all I have to do is point

to their website.

I don't have to copy or move anything.

If there is one list

that's all the world needs,

anybody else who needs that list

can point to it

from their website.

So the speed

at which new structures

can be created

is astonishing.

I mean, almost literally overnight,

you can build a website

and begin to point

at other websites

and bring resources

into yours.

This is a technology

which is going to turn out

to not be what people think it is.

It's going to be a technology

for showing each other

the inside of our heads,

for showing each other our dreams.

You know, one thing I didn't talk about

in the main part of the lecture

is that psychedelics

are catalysts for language.

They speed up and catalyze

the language formation process.

And a culture cannot evolve

any faster

than its language evolves.

And it cannot be

any more glued together

than the bandwidth

that its languages will tolerate.

And so what this technology

that is putting in place

is going to mean

is the way in which

it will dissolve boundaries

is by making us transparent

to each other.

I mean, I can imagine

a child of the future.

We all bring home

our drawings

to stick on refrigerators

and things like that.

In the future,

we won't stick them

on refrigerators.

We will stick them

in our website.

And everything

will go into our website.

And by the time

we're 25 or something,

our website will be the size

of the American Museum

of Natural History.

And you can wander through it.

And as a gesture of intimacy,

you can invite someone else

to wander through it.

Well, that's who you are.

It's your imagination.

And I think, in a sense,

I've said at times

that the cultural enterprise

is an effort to turn ourselves

inside out.

We want to put the body

into the imagination.

And we want the imagination

to replace the laws of physics.

With these technologies,

we can probably do that.

But it'll have to run

on psychedelic design principles

or it's certain to be a mess.

Yeah?

Yes, what could you tell us

about the problems

that some people experience

with the digestibility

of the mushrooms

and how it can lead to pain

and some discomfort

and sometimes to like

a nightmarish type experience?

Well, first of all,

let me say this.

There are several mushrooms

which contain psilocybin

which grow in cow dung.

What I urge people to do

if you're serious about this

is to grow your own.

This is moderately self-serving

because I wrote a book

about how to grow

your own mushrooms.

But there are many such books.

You don't have to buy mine.

You only need it

if you want the best one.

But you see here,

and Stamets' book is excellent.

And if you want to go large scale,

Stamets' book is the one.

But let me say something then.

After the brain,

the stomach is the most heavily

innervated organ in the body.

And anxiety has a way

of cropping up as a stomach ache.

So it's, a lot of people

have anxiety in the first hour

of taking mushrooms.

And they believe that something

in the mushroom is giving them

gastric distress.

It really isn't.

It's more like a case of butterflies

on an empty stomach.

Because you should take mushrooms

on an empty stomach.

You can try a suppository.

You can try another drug

if you want.

But there is,

in this psychedelic business,

something to be said

for simply disciplining

your hind brain.

Also, you can suppress

nausea with cannabis.

So, you know, a mixture

of self-discipline,

pharmacological steering,

so forth and so on.

If you have a severe reaction

to the mushroom,

you probably shouldn't take it.

I mean, after all, it is a fungus.

And as mammals,

we have developed

some pretty strong

allergenic reactions

to fungi, some of us.

And certain reactions

to psilocybin are not

psychedelic reactions,

like enormous sweating

or something like that.

That's more an indication

of an allergy.

If you're going to get

into psychedelics,

one of the things you have to do

is learn your way around.

Psychedelic sophistication

doesn't mean you took

everything there is

in combination with everything

else there is

at high doses

with your friends

at rock concerts.

It means that you figured out

what worked for you

and then really put the pedal

to the metal.

You know?

Yeah?

I recently came across

David Tennyson's work

on forwardly rearranged

monatomic elements.

And you found that these

monatomic heavy metals

conduct active superconductors,

conduct light and force

through our nervous system.

Are you familiar with

his work at all?

No.

You've stumped the star.

I mean, I'm interested

in organic superconductivity

and room temperature

superconductivity.

But I don't know his work,

so I can't comment on it.

You said he's going to be

coming out with a book

in six to nine months

called Ormes,

O-R-M-E-S,

Ormes,

which is orderly rearranged

monatomic elements.

I'm sure it will find its way

to my desk.

Now all these hands.

Oh, he should be the guy,

you tell me.

All right.

How much of our consensus reality

do you think is based on

inexorable physical laws

and things that aren't

of our own creation?

And how much, if any,

is subject to change without notice

simply based on a consensus belief

of what should be

or what is going to be?

Well, I mean,

this is sort of where I'm at.

I mean, as you were

asking the question,

I was, my tendency would be

to say none,

that none of our reality

is based on inexorable physical law.

But I only want

that to be true.

I'm not sure it is true.

Whitehead used to,

he had this thing about

what he called stubborn facts.

And he said,

there are some stubborn facts,

and you can cut your philosophy

any way you want,

but if you don't take account

of the stubborn facts,

you'll have a problem.

A lot of reality

is made of language.

How much?

I'm not sure.

But my hope is

that a great deal

is made of language.

Rupert Sheldrick,

who's a good friend of mine,

and we sort of think

along the same lines,

he believes that there are not

inexorable physical laws,

that there are just

very old habits.

He would think of

the speed of light

as a very old habit.

These physical constants

may be changing.

We don't know.

I mean, take the speed of light.

We've measured it

on one planet since 1906,

and cheerfully extrapolate it

to every corner

of the known universe

with no sense that there might be

a problem there at all.

Yet, you know,

if you're a critic of this,

you can look at the speed of light

as measured from 1906,

and you will notice

that the values

have been slowly going up.

It's apparently going slightly faster

than it was a century ago.

Well, people just dump on that

and say,

no, no, you poor moron,

you don't understand.

It's that the instrumentality

has become more precise,

and so the measurement

may have changed slightly.

Oh, yeah?

Well, it seems to me

in that case,

the points should cluster.

How come the more recent ones

are faster than the earlier ones

consistently?

In other words,

it's not that we're getting measurements

which cluster around a value,

it's that we're getting measurements

which are going out this way,

toward faster.

I think language is the key

to making reality.

I think our language

is a very weak language.

Computer languages

may be more powerful.

You know, VRML

or mathematics

but I believe the world

is made of language.

That's the magical belief,

but then the challenge

to that belief is,

okay, wise guy,

so how come the world

isn't the way you say it is?

Well, that's ungenerous.

I think because

it doesn't work quite like that.

Consensus is set by societies,

by millions of people.

Reality is a phenomenon

of many linguistically operating subsystems.

Maybe if you and I

were stranded on a desert island,

we could get a reality going.

We probably could,

but it would surely be shattered

when somebody showed up

to take us home again.

Over here.

Why were findings the only ones

that used the mushrooms?

And secondly,

is there any written documentation

of this mushroom?

The documentation,

well, there wouldn't be

anything written, of course.

It's earlier than that,

but the documentation,

it is well known

that the Sahara was wetter

in the past.

Even as recently as Roman times,

Pliny called it

the breadbasket of Rome.

And we know that human populations

were out there.

We, in the Tesselli,

in the plateau of southern Algeria,

there are rock paintings,

ruprestris paintings,

that show shamans

with mushrooms

sprouting out of their bodies

and in their hands.

So we have mushroom use,

we have evidence of mushroom use

at the era of the great horned

Paleolithic goddess.

The presence or absence

of monogamy and polygamy

is debatable.

So I, however,

the archaeology of this area

has not been well studied

and won't be soon.

Thanks to Islamic fundamentalism,

Algeria is no place

to do archaeology right now.

Now, to the first part

of your question,

why was it human beings

who ate the mushrooms?

Well, the question is,

why did they eat the mushrooms?

Well, to use the mushrooms

as a doorway to higher intelligence,

you would have had to already come

a certain distance down the path

of higher animal organization.

We were bipedal.

We had a pack signaling repertoire.

We had binocular vision.

And the reason we used the mushrooms

was because we were under

nutritional pressure.

There may have been other animals

under nutritional pressure,

but they may have been more tightly

bound to their original diet,

or they may simply have had

behavioral organization

that the mushroom couldn't

dissolve or break through.

There has been talk among

evolutionary biologists about

if there were no primates

on this planet,

what order of animals

might occupy the conscious niche

or be able to come in there.

And interestingly,

raccoons are candidates.

Raccoons have well positioned eyes.

They have a very complex hand.

And years and years ago,

I used to grow mushrooms

and I grew them by my own method,

naturally.

In jars.

And I would have waste rye

infected with jars.

I mean, jars infected with

mycelium permeated rye.

And I would put it out on the back porch

at night, or I did once.

And I awoke in the middle of the night

to this terrific racket.

And there were raccoons

on the back porch.

They could smell the rye

infested with the psilocybin

containing mycelium.

They could unscrew

the lids and

plunge their mitts

into this stuff.

And as I turned on the lights,

I saw these little bandit

faces with this

mycelial crumbs

on their little

upturned muzzles.

And they didn't,

they wouldn't back off.

They would,

the other thing was they were standing up

on their hind legs.

So they were standing on their hind legs,

holding a jar,

holding the stuff,

and tottering toward me.

So,

I just took

one look and backed

off.

And for the rest of

the evening,

you could tell that they were

approaching the orgiastic

boundary.

Because the carrying on

the sexual squeaking

and squealing and

thumping and pounding

going on in the back yard

was just incredible.

So,

you know,

they might be interesting

test animals

to put through this.

Yeah?

Male Speaker 1 John

Millay based his

passport to Macedonia largely on

the very great Celtic countries,

which you obviously are familiar with.

I wanted to

have your comments

on the numinous nature

of the UFO phenomenon

with regard to the Celtic faith,

the Greek fairy faith,

and the role that this phenomenon,

which I think you referred to

as the other earlier in your talk,

has in the transformation

that you're describing

in the future.

John Millay Yes,

Jacques Vallée was a UFO researcher

and the book that was mentioned,

Passport to Magonia,

he talks on the subject.

He's gone through a lot of changes

about it.

The numinous,

I think what's going on

is that

in a sense

there is leakage

from the future.

This is a broad subject

and it's late in the evening,

so I'll give it to you

in headlines.

But basically,

science takes the position

that nature is without purpose.

In other words,

nature has no goal.

Nature proceeds forward

according to the unfolding

of chance and necessity.

But I don't believe this.

I think nature is an engine

for the conservation

of novelty

and that nature's purpose

is to generate

ever greater novelty.

And that in fact

history

is the dawning

realization that we are about

to descend down

a very steep novelty

sink, as it were,

into immense

amounts of novelty.

And this is why we image

the other in the 20th century

as the extraterrestrial.

Because out of the unconscious

comes this image

of the other

as the extraterrestrial.

I think we are

in the presence

of what I call

the transcendental object

at the end of time.

And that religions call it

the messiah

or the matreya.

Secularists call it

utopia.

Millenarians call it

something else.

Mushroom enthusiasts

something else.

But that we are in the presence

of the transcendental object

back through history.

Especially recent history.

But any person

encountering

this backward moving

shadow of the transcendental

object will attempt

to interpret it in

cultural terms that they

can relate to.

So if they happen to be a French peasant

in the 11th century

they will assume

that it's the Virgin Mary.

If they're a sexual

scientific rationalist

in the 20th century

they will assume

it's a spacecraft

of some sort.

The Celts

and their relationship

to little people

and an invisible world

this is a generally held

belief that they are

exemplifying that is worldwide.

Which is that the dead

are somehow co-present

in the space of the living

except to those

who have the gift

of second sight

or are magically empowered

or shamanically

adept.

The last thought

I should leave you with this

and it's an adumbration

of this question

but it also has deeper implications.

The model that you're usually

given of the psychedelic experience

is a religious model.

That the mysteries

of religion

Hindu, Buddhist or something

are somehow illuminated

by this boundary dissolving

experience.

My model is a little different

a little cooler

and I think a little more

formal and it's this

that consciousness

is an omnidirectional

threat detection response.