Gaia's Midlife Crisis

Well, let's see here. I think what we have to do is think in terms of the exhaustion of our own cultural forms. I mean, that's what we're living through, is the global dying created by the exhaustion of our cultural forms and the vitality of the cultural forms that we see in these so-called primitive, I call them pre-literate people.

As Nicole pointed out, they have nothing, but what they seem to have that we cannot seem to get a grip on is a kind of dynamic equilibrium with their environment and peace of mind in the felt experience of the moment.

These are the two things we don't have. As a society, we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As human beings, as individuals, it's very hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.

Tremendous boon, as far as I can see. So I really think that there's a confluence here of themes and possibilities. It has this richly plotted texture that always lets you know that you're in the presence of a higher order of things.

It's that the shamans, whom we admire, who we idealize, are seen to be at the center of this environment, the warm jungle, the tropics, the warm tropics, that we find it necessary to destroy.

So it's a perfect image of us being at war, not only with ourselves, but with nature itself.

And, you know, you've heard all about how the Amazon and the Congo Basin and Eastern Indonesia are all being cleared and lumbered and turned into cattle ranches.

This is a tragedy, obviously. We understand and can perceive the dynamics of that.

But how to make sense of a situation where, as the World Bank and the IMF attempt to halt this kind of destruction, on the other side of the coin, the United States State Department and the DEA and these agencies propose and are planning to carry out the defoliation of the Waijaga Basin.

So there's a schizophrenia here that is not academic.

I mean, are we trying to get the patient well or are we pulling the plugs one by one?

We seem to be acting in both dimensions simultaneously.

And I think it's because we have not, in this culture, awakened to the depth of the crisis that surrounds us.

You know, there's a lot of kind of self-congratulatory back slapping going around these days over the fact that communists everywhere are in hot water and have to admit that they did it wrong.

And this gives a lot of satisfaction to people who feel that that means we did it right.

We didn't do it right.

They did it wrong and now admit they did it wrong.

We do it wrong and have yet to even raise the possibility of turning away from what we are doing.

The internal contradictions of Marxism were based on a false definition of what people are.

People do not respond to central planning, hortatory propaganda and stereotyping.

Neither do people respond to an ethos of self-denial or a view of human beings that denies the fact that we have certain itches which must be scratched.

So, you know, I think that the collapse of Marxism is only the collapse of the outer edge of the societal and civilizing assumptions that we have made.

After all, Marxism is nothing more than the millenarian retread of Christian millenarianism.

And so is modern science, yet another secular retread of Christian millenarianism.

So, our culture is in trouble.

Not trouble.

We are at a terminal crisis.

A bifurcation that can only go one of two ways.

Horror beyond your wildest imagination.

Or breakthrough to dignity, decency, community and caring beyond your wildest imagination.

Now, where do you look for models?

Where do you go?

The answer is so obvious.

You go to nature.

Nature has been playing this game for three billion years on this planet.

We have been playing the game, we, the apostles of Christian scientism, for about two thousand years.

Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it, we could rise out of the rubble that we are making of the planet.

You know, it was the geographer, Carl Sauer, who said, man found the planet, a climaxed primeval forest.

He, and notice the gender here, he will leave the planet, a weedy lot, a weedy lot.

Well, now this is a metaphor where you change climaxed rainforest for weeds, but it's also true.

By clearing land, we promote the kind of plant evolution that stresses very rapid seed production and annular cycles of growth.

In other words, weeds, and this tendency to find perfection and then to leave rubble in our wake has haunted us for the past three or four thousand years of our history.

Now, with the ozone shield disappearing, with acid rain falling on the earth that can melt blocks of marble, with the CO2 levels rising, with the levels of strontium and chlorofluorocarbons,

and you know the litany, we have now one last chance to fish or cut bait.

And the place where nature has provided the models for how to respond to this situation is the climaxed rainforest.

Only the climaxed tropical rainforest has the kind of complexity of signal transfer, movement of nutritional materials, movement of electromagnetic radiation that we find in the modern city.

It is a cliché of modernity that the city is a jungle.

The problem is it isn't jungle enough.

And I think it's the task of the new shamans to take the metaphor of the jungle, which is a metaphor of tremendous wealth,

tremendous variety, a tremendous outpouring of form and of energy and of potential fulfillment of various bifurcation patterns of flow to take that and enrich our own lives with it.

And the way this is done is by empowering the presence of experience.

The main thing that you get with these so-called primitive, preliterate people and with people like Nicole, who have spent time in this situation,

is they are in the moment, they know how to have fun, they know how to work, they know how to live.

And the reason they understand this is because they are focused within the confines of the felt presence of experience.

They do not live by abstraction.

And abstraction is the knife poised at our hearts.

We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the earth in flames, we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.

That's the level of disimpassioning that abstraction has laid upon us.

Well, hopefully this weekend there will be passion.

There will be an effort wherever there is abstraction to drag it down into the felt presence of the moment.

I think basically what we are are a kind of green anarchy, an effort to revivify social forms that have been atrophied in the West,

at least since the destruction of the Lucis, probably in most places thousands of years before that.

This is our last chance.

I have done the best I could in terms of trying to sift through all these options

and as a communicator offer the best way out.

And, you know, I could only do my best.

And so that's what you get.

I can't preach scientism because I don't believe in it.

I can't preach Buddhism because I can't understand it.

The only thing I can preach is the felt presence of immediate experience,

which for me came through the psychedelics, which are not drugs, but plants.

It's a perversion of language to try and derail this thing into talk of drugs.

There are spirits in the natural world that come to us in this way.

And so far as I can tell, this is the only way that they come to us,

that is rapid enough for it to have an impact upon us as a global population.

This weekend will be different because we will be hewing close to the source.

Nicole is a priceless repository of information, more even than she knows.

If I could declare her a national treasure, I would.

Who knows what this woman knows?

Who knows how much human suffering, the alleviation of how much anxiety,

lies in the hands of perhaps half a dozen people of Nicole's caliber

who have paid their dues in these jungles.

This information is flowing through our fingers and disappearing.

In another 30 years, it will be all gone.

Every time I go to the Amazon, I can feel the way in which it's slipping away.

When my brother and I go off looking for these unusual hallucinogens,

often we have the experience where when we finally find the person who claims they know what we're after,

the line goes like this.

Well, I've never taken it, but as a child, I remember seeing my grandfather prepare it,

and I think I can do it.

If it weren't for us standing there asking that it be done,

it would never have even risen into the gentleman's mind as a possibility.

This is the knife edge upon which this knowledge is poised.

If it can be saved, it gives me hope that we can be saved.

If we can't save this kind of knowledge, we cannot save ourselves,

because this kind of knowledge is ourselves.

Culture is a garment which you put on.

Medical systems are pieces of jewelry which you wrap around your throat or neck.

Religious ideals are like objects which you push through pierced nostrils and ear lobes.

If we cannot come to terms with that which allows us to give birth with ease,

to die with dignity, and to live in health,

then what kind of a future do we have?

No future at all.

So this is not a meeting of obscurantists or enthusiasts for some private vista of transcendence.

This is a meeting of political activists,

people who are socially committed to themselves,

to each other, to the larger idea of community,

and who understand that when you talk about Gaia,

it's only an abstraction unless you talk about plants.

The division between the masculine and the feminine is only trivially a difference between men and women.

It is fundamentally a division between plants and animals.

Plants are the enveloping feminine matrix of control and refurbishment.

Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around.

An extremely Yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.

So the Archaic Revival, if it means anything,

it means reconnecting the Gaian mind, which is a vegetable mind,

a feminine, enfolding, boundary-dissolving, planetary mind,

that is not an abstraction, not a stereotype,

not something used to create hortatory propaganda,

but a living, breathing reality,

a reality which is the only thing which stands between us and Armageddon.

History is a kind of horrified realization that something has been lost,

that there is an itch hard to scratch in the civilized context,

that we have out of fear really descended into patterns of domination of each other,

of the environment, of our children, of our social relations with exogamous groups.

We have descended into a dominator pattern that is basically based on clutching, on fear.

And I'm sure most of you have heard me argue that this is the consequence of ceasing basically to do enough halicinogens in the diet.

That, in fact, what human beings were flirting with over many, many tens of millennia,

let's say from 100,000 years ago to 15,000 years ago,

human beings were in a flirtatious situation with a symbiotic relationship with this mind resident in vegetable nature.

Now, you all know that what classic symbiosis is in biology.

It's where, let's take the example of the little fish who lives in the sea anemone and big fish don't bother it.

It gains protection.

The sea anemone gains access to larger prey which come to investigate the little fish.

That kind of symbiosis is genetically locked in.

And if you take the little fish away from the anemone and put it, let us say, in an aquarium without anemones,

it doesn't die.

It doesn't go into an immediate physiological crisis.

No, what happens is it simply has a low body weight and a short lifespan.

In other words, it is under stress.

And I believe, I hope I'm not deluding myself, but I believe that the lost secret of human emergence,

the undefined catalyst that took a very bright monkey and turned that species into a tormented, self-reflecting, poet-dreamer,

that catalyst has to be sought in these tertiary alkaloids in the food chain

that were catalyzing higher states of intellectual activity.

And I've pointed out to you, ad nauseum, I'm sure,

the reciprocal feedback relationship that was working there.

In the case of the mushroom, in the veldt situation in Africa,

it was promoting at low doses visual acuity,

which was feeding back into the hunting and gathering process,

making those animals with this increased visual acuity more adaptively successful,

hence more reproductively successful,

hence they're outbreeding their competitors.

At higher doses, psilocybin actually causes a generalized arousal,

which includes sexual arousal.

Again, it becomes a catalyst for increased reproductive success.

More instances of copulation in a situation like that

lead to more successful births of those into family structures

where the alkaloid has been accepted into the food chain.

Well, this would be only an obscure topic of interest to primatologists

were it not for the fact that it is a crisis in consciousness

which confronts us globally.

Consciousness is the commodity that if we do not have enough of it,

do not produce it fast enough,

then the momentum of the processes we set in motion in our ignorance

is going to sterilize the planet and do us all in.

So we have to have consciousness.

Well, then you look at the smorgasbord of ethnographic possibilities

and you discover this institution of shamanism.

It is the institution of planner,

of visionary,

of manager,

of large system coordinator.

That's what it's about.

You call it magic on one level.

You call it curing.

You call it folk psychiatry

or weather prediction.

Shamans have been involved in all of these things.

But as Nicole made so eloquently the point last night,

to these deep forest people,

it is ordinary.

It is ordinary.

They live in a different cultural dimension than we do.

Dimensions which to us are completely value dark

are to them completely transparent.

And dimensions which to us are extremely rich and complex,

the inner world of the nucleus of the atom, let us say,

are for them totally value dark.

They don't even cognize the possibility of asking the question.

But nevertheless,

the specialization in these various domains

is not something where one is as good as another.

Consciousness is the domain of immediate experience.

How are we going to save this planet?

How are we going to take the lethal cascade

of toxic, technological, and ignorance-producing habits

that are loose on this planet

and channel them toward some kind of a sane and livable world?

Well, the answer is emerging in culture

out of the collectivity of global consciousness.

It is what I call the archaic revival.

It is this very large turnover in the mass mind.

Some people call it a paradigm shift.

It is an effort to recover the sensory ratios,

the feelings,

and the attitudes

of 15,000 to 20,000 years ago

before fear,

before ego,

before male dominance,

before hierarchy,

hoarding,

warfare,

propaganda,

child abuse,

all of these things.

And the answer lies,

as was indicated last night,

in integration into the dynamics of nature.

Well, so far as my analysis gives it to me,

the only way you can abandon yourself

to the dynamics of nature

is to break through the language shell.

You must cut through the aura

of programming

and cultural assumptions

that surround us

from the moment we are able to speak.

The only way this can be done

is by dissolving the boundaries of ego.

Ego is a structure

that is erected

by a neurotic individual

who is a member of a neurotic culture

against the facts of the matter.

And culture,

which we put on like an overcoat,

culture is the collectivized consensus

about what sort of neurotic behaviors

are acceptable.

Now, I don't know,

so,

you see,

what I see going on

in the Amazon

is a very radical,

psycholytic therapy

where they are dissolving,

literally dissolving,

the boundaries of self,

culture,

and ego assumption.

And then what you discover

is not the white light

or what William James called

a blooming,

buzzing confusion,

although in the first few minutes

it can be like that.

But what you really discover

is sentient,

organized,

living,

loving nature.

that nature is a force,

nature is a mind,

a personality,

organized with intentionality,

organized with feeling,

humor,

grace,

and conviction.

Conviction.

And if you can get right

with that conviction,

then that's the secret

of dancing in the waterfall.

That's the secret

of the shaman's

apparent transcendence

of the rules

of mundane statistics.

Because that is what it is.

The shaman doesn't violate physics.

He just,

he or she

simply knows

how to push

the improbable

to its greatest extent.

And in Eastern philosophy,

this is called

the Tao,

you know,

abandonment to the flow,

fitting of the small pattern

into the larger pattern.

Well,

I think these things

are very important

because I think

that psychology,

psychiatry,

psychoanalysis,

it's a good idea,

but it will never

reach any kind

of operational effectiveness

until we look

to these native healers

all over the world

and study their methods.

And their methods

are chemical

and personal.

It's a combination

of care,

attention,

intention,

and chemistry

that allows consciousness

to be made malleable

and then recast

in other forms.

So,

I find myself

this weekend

explaining myself.

That's what I feel

like I'm doing.

Why does someone

who extols

the self-transforming

elf machines

of the DMT space

also claim

to be a conservationist,

also, you know,

have a mathematical

dog and poodle show?

Well,

it's because

all of these things

emerge out

of the concrescence

of consciousness,

its intention

toward its own

transformation.

Nature is the answer.

Not,

it's not enough

to be like

Wordsworth.

It's not enough

to,

this is not,

you know,

Mao Zedong said,

the revolution

is not a dinner party.

And certainly

the ecological revolution

is not a dinner party.

Poetic sensitivity

to the death

of the planet

is not what

we're striving for here.

What we're striving for

is to halt,

overturn,

and back out of

the impending

death of the planet.

It is very clear now

that consciousness

will decide

that the planet,

there are not

rosy futures

of suburban housing

and Ratatouille

to be extended

endlessly

into the future.

We are approaching

a bifurcation

where it is either

going to become

heaven or hell,

one or the other.

And I think

that this

archaic intuition,

which I see

reaching clear back

to the birth

of the 20th century

and the 19th century,

back to people

like Alfred Jarry

and Guillaume Apollonair

and the

paraphysicians,

the surrealists,

the physicists

around Einstein,

Freud,

modern art,

modern dance,

jazz,

all of this stuff

is an effort

to reclaim

the primitive,

to reclaim

the archaic,

to reject

all that

powdered wig

algebra

that comes down

through the French-English-German

tradition

of constipated

male dominance.

And instead,

you know,

intuit,

that's what it is

in Freud and Jung

and the New Age,

intuit our way out.

But now,

the intuition

is rising

to the surface.

We no longer

have to

operate

without

the presence

of the goal

firmly in hand.

The goal

can now

be stated.

What this is all about

is a return

to archaism

with the lessons

learned

in history.

That's where

we were happy.

The fall

was a fall

into a veil

of tears,

into a world

of

limitation

and pain

and suffering

and infectious

disease

and so forth

and so on.

It's

a prodigal journey

into a lower dimension

that can now

be ended

by a collective

cultural decision

to commit

to this

Taoist,

shamanistic,

feminized,

cybernetic,

caring,

aware,

present

kind of being.

is in our

very best

moments.

But we have

to extend

those very

best moments

to fill

whole lifetimes.

You know, think of the number of people who suffered and died that we could sit under this tree this morning.

I mean, in the last million years, nine times the glaciers have ground south from the poles,

freezing the world into ice and confining human populations to subtropical valleys and the warm tropics.

Nine times the interglacial periods have come and human populations have spread out over the earth.

They had, they didn't have radio, they didn't have antibiotics, contraception, statistical analysis or the partial differential equation.

And yet somehow they managed to get us here.

Are we then, as the heirs of that wave front, of the inheritors of a billion-year process,

are we in one generation to turn it into a massive pottage?

I think not. I certainly hope not.

I would like to believe that we could make that leap to conscious awareness that would allow us to take hold.

Now, the problem, it was easy the first ten years that I sat before you,

because what we were doing was getting to know each other,

to verify that we in fact existed,

that I wasn't crazy, you weren't crazy, so forth and so on.

Now, what looms ahead is the mess of politics.

And this, I'm sure you have no stomach for.

I certainly don't.

I'd rather be stoned and rocked in the arms of the goddess.

But as a matter of fact, this dominator thing is not going to be unhooked and put to bed without a struggle.

Everyone is going to have to be counted.

I've talked to you in recent months about memes, memes being the smallest potential units of ideas.

They're like genes.

We are the nucleus of a mutant meme, the meme of plant consciousness, hallucinogenic consciousness, shamanistic consciousness.

We have to refine this meme, replicate it through repetition, and spread it through society.

In the same way that a plant sheds seeds into an ecosystem, the idea will compete.

The idea is a good one.

It's adaptive, it's clever, it's tough, it's invasive, it can make use of many contexts to promote its own existence.

But it can't do any of that if we don't replicate it and get it out.

So I see these kinds of meetings as an opportunity for building community,

as an opportunity for people to look around themselves and connect with the other people who are here.

We cannot be told from the rest of the population unless we self-select and gather together at a single point in space and time.

When we do that, we recognize each other.

When this meeting is concluded, we will merge back into the larger stream of the body politic.

But carrying this meme of the Gaian resurgence, the Gaianic wave that must come.

I mean, people say it's so wonderful that you articulate these feminist ideas and so forth.

I do it because I don't want to be dead.

I do it because I don't want my children to have no world to live in.

There is no choice.

The walls are high and the current is moving very fast.

What we need to do is merely keep our spirits high and learn to sing the song.

My friend Ralph Abraham is a proponent of this school of mathematics called chaotic attractors or dynamics.

And this is the notion that many processes are not pushed from behind by the momentum of casuistry as in the ordinary Newtonian model of process,

but that there are what he calls attractors or basins of attraction.

And these are things which lead processes forward.

For instance, a somewhat trivial example would be if we had a large bowl and a marble.

And every time we released the marble up near the rim of the bowl,

we would notice that it unfailingly rolled to the bottom of the bowl and located itself somewhere near the center of the bottom of the bowl.

We could say that the bottom of the bowl acts as a basin of attraction for the marble.

In other words, the marble finds that its energy state is most at equilibrium when it locates itself in the trough of the bowl.

So there is a way of analyzing processes to see them as though they were led rather than pushed.

And I think it's fruitful to see human history this way.

You see, what we deny as a culture, as a culture of materialist, positivist, reductionists,

is the presence of spirit in the world, in ourselves, or in nature.

And so Western science is very concerned to deny what is called telos.

Telos is a Greek term for purpose.

The same idea as the attractor that I was trying.

If you have a target, if you're driving a car toward a goal, the goal is your telos.

It decides how you will steer the car.

Well, it has been for the past 150 years extremely fashionable in sociology and biology because of Darwin

to deny telos in nature, to say that, you know, any apparent order in nature is made up of the disorder of random mutation

meeting the disorder of natural selective processes.

And these two streams of converging disorder create a kind of apparent or virtual order, which is an illusion.

And when you take this Darwinism and put it into historical theory, theory of human processes in time,

you get the modern position in academic philosophy about history,

which is that it is, and the official phrase is, trendlessly fluctuating.

That's what we're asked to believe we are embedded in, a 10,000-year-old process of trendless fluctuation.

In mathematics, this is called a random walk.

It means you just go over here a few steps, and then you go this way, and then you go back.

You're like a drunk, lurching around in this face space.

And this is the highest vision of human purpose that the reductionist vision can offer.

Well, what the intuition of religion is, especially Western religion,

and I wouldn't even bother to mention it, except that it also is the strong intuition of a lot of psychedelic experience,

that there is some kind of attractor in the historical phase space.

There is something which is drawing everything toward it.

It's like a higher dimensional entity that casts an enormous shadow over the human landscape,

so that, you know, at sitting around campfires 50,000 years ago,

people felt this vague tug toward organization, order, cognitive activity, epigenetic activity.

Epigenetic activity means coding stuff not in your genes, but in dance, gesture, ritual,

and ultimately in clay and on paper and in electronic storage methods.

This proliferation of complexity is a response to and an anticipation of this transcendental object

at the end of historical process.

You see, if it weren't for our presence on this planet,

even modern science at its present primitive state could give a fairly good accounting of what's going on,

that out of complex polymers arose supercomplex polymers, which were self-replicating,

and that was life, and then you have an animal population.

But the fly in the ointment of this rational model of reality is ourselves.

We are clearly imbued with a higher dimension, which we call spirit,

in a way that ordinary matter, when imbued with a higher dimension, is called life.

In other words, we represent a different ontological level in the career of organization,

because we hope, we despair, we plan, we remember, and we misremember.

You know, we lie, we fabricate, we delude ourselves and other people.

All of these things are uniquely human functions.

Well, I think that shamanism, which is the focus of our concern here,

is a kind of anticipating of the whole pattern,

and that this is really the way to think about shamanism when thinking of it as a force

that can steady and complete an individual human life.

The shamanism are not in history in the same way that we are.

By having access to this higher dimension

that they go to in their trance states and their states of intoxication,

they gain a fractal overview on process, on life.

I mean, after all, isn't that what we mean by wisdom?

Is wisdom is understanding how things really work,

how they really work.

Love affairs, the raising of children, the managing of corporations,

the prosecution of wars.

How do these things really work?

Not the deluded and fumbling attempts of the proponents of this or that school,

but a Taoistic insight into the actual appropriate dynamics of everything.

Well, how do you gain that kind of an insight?

The answer is, you must have a superior model.

You must have a superior model.

Now, if you believe, you know, that the world is composed of three levels

and they are held up on the back of a woman

who sits on a giant tortoise who floats in space,

this is a model of the universe.

It can take you a certain distance.

But what model of the universe

can actually offer reassurance in all kinds of situations?

Well, strangely enough,

I think that these models come from the frontiers of mathematics,

that it is not mere coincidence

that the storms of visionary hallucination

that the shaman encounters

are very much like the storms of form and color

that are spewed out of a Cray-3 supercomputer

when it conducts a thousand iterations per second

inside the Julius set or the Mantlebroth set

or one of these other compound complex mathematical objects

that we are beginning to see.

You see, mathematics, up to this point,

has been a computational science

because mathematicians used pencils and blackboards and chalk

to describe their objects.

And consequently, an excruciatingly difficult vocabulary

kept most people from appreciating what mathematics was about.

Now, the computer is to modern mathematics

like the telescope was to 16th century astronomy.

The computer becomes a window

into domains of hyper-complex computability

that previously could barely even be conceived,

but that now, at a rate of millions

approaching billions of iterations per second,

Ralph works on the MMPP machine,

the multiple parallel processing machine

at Goddard Space Flight Center,

it does 800 mega-flops per second,

800 million floating-point decimal calculations per second.

Well, you can dream dreams with a machine like that,

and strangely enough,

at the edge of the super-technology

of the Dominator culture

at Goddard Space Flight Center

with guys, high priests,

standing around in white coats,

when you get it up and running,

what you see is what an ayahuasca shaman sees

on a Saturday night in the Amazon.

You see that you are navigating

through a complex, higher-dimensional phase space

where, by varying the inputs of amplitude and frequency,

in one case, using an electronic box,

in the other case, using the human voice,

you sing your way through a mathematical domain

which is a higher resonance of reality,

and you learn how the world really works,

how things happen.

Well, how the hell do they happen?

Well, on the simplest level,

they happen like this.

They have a beginning,

they have a middle,

and then they die away

as an oscillation,

a damped oscillation.

Now, this simple truth

to which we all nod, assent,

is in fact

the hardest thing,

the hardest swallow there is

for the Dominator ego

and the Dominator personality.

Because what this simple truth says,

things come into being,

they achieve their inflorescence

and they fade away,

is, as Heraclitus put it,

Pantithrae,

all flows.

Nothing lasts.

Nothing is saved.

And this is, you know,

our glory and our agony

that, you know,

the people we love

and the people we hate

are swept away by time.

Empires, dynasties,

continents are swept away by time.

And yet our search for security

is cast in the Dominator culture

as a search for permanence.

You know?

I want to buy a house.

I'd like to get my trust fund

functioning a little better.

I'd like to pay off

X, Y, and Z.

You know,

a search for permanence.

So what you do

when you do that

is you set yourself at war

against the cosmos,

which is a heroic stance

if you're trying to produce

Melvillian opera

out of your life.

You know,

Ahab says in Moby Dick,

he's talking to his first mate,

Starbuck,

who signifies Christian right reason.

And he says,

he's raving about

going after the whale.

And he says,

you know,

we'll chase it over both sides of earth

and round perdition's flame.

And,

and Starbuck says,

to seek revenge on a dumb brute

seems blasphemy.

And he says,

blasphemy, Starbuck,

speak not to me of blasphemy.

I would strike out the sun

if it insulted me.

For could it do that

than could I do the other

since there is ever

a sort of fair play?

Well,

you know,

this is locker room talk.

The notion

that there is

fair play

between

a man

and a nearby star

is

the finest expression

of the dominator ego

I can imagine.

And of course,

you know,

the story

of Moby Dick

can be read

on many levels.

But finally,

it is the story

of the submersion

of the male ego

in the oceans

of the unconscious

born

to its destruction

and transformation

by an encounter

with the maternal matrix

in the form

of the vagina dentata

of the sperm whale

and everything

that it symbolized.

So,

I don't think

we want to go that way.

I don't think

we want to set ourselves

up

as the crusaders

for permanence.

But that means

softening

to the fact

of the flow

and of the impermanence.

Nicole has made

the point

very eloquently

that these people

in the Amazon

have nothing.

The wonderful thing

about the Amazon

is

that

nothing lasts.

Nothing is worth having.

I mean,

a book?

Forget it.

Clothing?

Houses?

Everything is just

swept away

by the incessant

recycling of material.

So all that is permanent

are values,

personality,

strength,

honesty,

decency,

dignity.

These are things

which can be erected

against the flow

and have some

hope of permanence.

So,

I think

shamanism

is permission

to transcend

anxiety

by accepting

the transience

of all form.

And this is

a truth

of the universe

that cannot be ignored.

So once it is

integrated,

then

it's as though

resistance

in the electrical

circuits

that surround

your integration

into the world

begins to fall.

you accept

that the present

moment

is the richest

apex

of being

that on the

downside

back into the

past

it shades off

into memory

and its vagaries.

In the future

it shades off

into

a series

of adumbrations

and anticipations.

I think

that the

shamans

gain

this tremendous

authenticity

that you feel

in their presence

the good ones

because they

have seen

the end.

They have a

model

of how

process happens

and so they

don't push

and they

don't clutch

and then

energy

flows

through them

and our

civilization

has to

learn

this.

You know

I think

I said

at one

point

in this

weekend

only

Gorbachev

is taking

the position

that

we did

it wrong

and that

we need

to deconstruct

and yet

every society

did it

wrong.

We all

did it

wrong.

Capitalism

it's wonderful

that you

can get

a safety pin

at 4am

within a half

mile of

anywhere

in the

United States

and I'm

sure the

Russians

wish they

had it

so good

but is

that the

be all

and the

end all

of cultural

values

that you

can walk

the

fluorescent

lit

aisles

of Kmart

and congratulate

yourself

that whether

it be

gas can

sanitary

napkin

or whatever

it's there

waiting

for you

I don't

think so

I think

that we

have built

in the

termination

of our

world

just as

surely

as the

Marxist

world

built

in a

tripwire

into

its

social

mechanism

it's

just

that we're

going to

have to

pay

the

long

time

to

figure

out

all

the

angles

what

I

find

myself

more

and

more

leaning

to

is

sharing

the

meme

of

the

irrelevance

of

conservative

institutions

history

is not

a process

for which

you ask

permission

history

is just

something

you make

and then

other people

pick up

the pieces

Henry

David Thoreau

understood

this very

well

when he

wrote

his

famous

treatise

on

civil

disobedience

the

growth

of

culture

is

something

that

comes

out

of

the

animal

body

Rousseau

called

it

the

general

will

you

know

man

proposes

and

God

disposes

but

in

the

proposes

but

that's

all

and

now

what

we

are

involved

in

really

is

a

debate

about

human

nature

who

are

we

what

are

we

the

French

cartoonist

Mobius

put it

very well

in his

book

where he

asked

the

question

is

man

good

this

is

what

we're

going

to

find

out

and

my

feeling

is

that

it

isn't

decided

yet

that

it

is

you

know

H.G.

Wells

called

history

a race

between

education

and

disaster

well

you

know

they're

in

the

home

stretch

neck

and

neck

it's

clearly

going

to

be

a

photo

finish

but

there

is

a

responsibility

on

everyone

who

sees

this

to

communicate

it

for a copy

of this

recording

please

call

sound

photosynthesis

at

415-383-6712

or write

post office

box

mill valley

california

copyright

sound

photosynthesis