Global Perspectives And Psychedelic Poetics

Global perspectives and psychedelic poetics is what it says in the propaganda,

which I assume is simply permission to rave about whatever comes to mind.

Global perspectives.

I guess what I could say about this, from a psychedelic perspective,

the thing that is different for psychedelic people looking at the global dilemma that we're in

and that continues to deepen around us is that it's, from my point of view,

permission to hope rather than despair,

because I think that processes, institutions that for a thousand years or more

have been building toward some kind of cemetery break,

some kind of definitive, self-revealing moment,

that we now are turning final, as pilots say.

We're now deeply embedded in the pattern.

We can see enough of what's ahead of us to begin to actually feel the texture of the end of human history.

It's no longer an abstraction.

Even the straight people who own the world,

with their long-term and short-term projections,

looking at population growth,

spread of greenhouse gases,

disappearance of the ozone hole,

rising third world expectations,

so forth and so on,

when you propagate all these trends,

it seems very clear

that business as usual is no longer an option.

Nobody's talking about that.

So, we're either in some kind of final, fatal meltdown

of the values of Western civilization revealed now after a thousand or two thousand year run

to essentially be bankrupt,

or we're going to transform ourselves unrecognizably.

There really isn't any middle ground.

The most radical and least likely future of all,

it seems to me,

is a future in which we continue just to stumble forward,

as we have been since the Industrial Revolution.

That's no longer an option.

And so then the question becomes a sort of a Gnostic conundrum.

Is this the final act of some kind of great cosmic tragedy

in which intelligence rises out of the slime,

is shown to be inadequate and sinks back into the slime?

Or is this a tale of difficulty overcome and heroism won?

And are we going to be able to shed the monkey nature

and shed the ego

and actually move up to some kind of shining ideal?

You know, if you think of us as the descendants of the angels,

this is a pretty tatty circumstance we've come to rest in.

On the other hand, if you think of us as the descendants of shithurling apes

screeching through the treetops,

then it's pretty amazing what has been accomplished here.

You know, one of the dilemmas that I feel very strongly,

and I'm just sort of talking off the top of my head here,

because whenever a crowd is small enough,

I sort of feel like I'm in my own living room.

We don't have to have the pretense of knowing lecturer

and, you know, eager-to-be-educated audience.

The real challenge, I think, is trying to decide

what is baggage and what is ballast

that's going to have to be dumped.

Can the future be a celebration of humanness

as we have known it,

meaning in the animal body

with all its, you know, joys and pains,

with all its frailty

and potential for ecstasy,

or is what we call human nature

somehow transcendental?

And did we only rest for a moment in the monkey body

as once the cutting edge of evolution

must have rested in the great reptiles

and at some earlier phase in history

rested in the fish and so on.

Is consciousness something uniquely human?

And must we keep the animal body with us?

Is our destiny to become the gardener caretakers

of a revivified earth?

Or is the earth like a placenta of some sort

that we have literally sucked all the nutrition

and potential out of

because we're on our way

to some grander, higher domain of being?

I don't have the answer to these kinds of questions.

I feel it very poignantly.

It's very poignantly focused

in the psychedelic,

in the experience of psychedelic plants

and psychedelic shamanism

because, you know,

as any of you who have followed my ideas on this know,

I've spent a lot of time

in the Amazon basin

with human populations

that seem to have struck

some kind of dynamic balance

with the earth.

And yet the paradox of that dynamic balance

is that when you take the sacraments,

the hallucinogenic plants

of these people,

you're propelled into worlds

of science fiction-like strangeness,

transcendental dimensions

of titanic implication.

And then, at least I personally,

have come to the realization

that this is how those cultures

have chosen to deal

with the Faustian impulse in human beings.

It's been somehow confined

in the domain of the imagination.

We, meaning we who trace our ancestry

back to Europe,

are part of a different style,

a different strain of human being,

if you will.

We are the idea excretors,

not satisfied to have a canoe,

a net,

five fish hooks,

and a bowl,

but instead we take matter,

we, Western civilization,

Western technology,

and we impress upon matter ideas,

millions of ideas,

cities like Manhattan,

high performance weaponry,

enormous works of art.

All of this is a kind of impulse,

very strong in Western human beings

to bring the ideas out of the domain of mind

and to somehow solidify them in matter.

Permanence.

The cult of the West is permanence.

I always feel that when you can find

the obsessive center of a society,

you probably have put your finger

on its central neurosis as well.

I remember when I spent time in India.

India is rife with talk of Shakti.

Shakti is energy conceived of

in various ways.

It can be sexual energy

or it can actually be electricity

flowing through wires,

it's called Shakti.

And I realized being in India

that the Indian obsession with Shakti

was a consequence of there not being any.

That this was a society

where energy had become

the hardest commodity

to encounter.

And I think in the West,

permanence is the thing,

is our great bugaboo

because we are born into the realization

that everything is slipping through our fingers

at the very moment that it comes into existence.

The hardest psychedelic truth to assimilate,

and you don't have to take psychedelics to assimilate this,

if you just live,

this will be hammered in on you again and again.

And it's not to,

well, it's a cause for exaltation,

it's a cause for despair.

It's that nothing lasts.

Nothing lasts.

You know, not your fortune,

not your misfortune,

not your lovers,

your enemies,

your children,

ultimately not even your own life and body.

Everything fades.

And so the Western response to this

is the attempt to create something permanent.

Civilizations,

enduring ideas,

enduring institutions.

All this is doomed to failure.

And I see this Western obsession

with the cult of permanence

as a consequence of the Western obsession

with ego.

Ego, to my mind,

is the very thing,

if you had to somehow

meld each problem

into the next problem

to try and reduce all problems to one,

what you would eventually come to

is the realization

that ego

is what is destroying us.

Our inability to displace our loyalty

away from the unique locus

of space and time

represented by our own bodies.

You know, community,

communalism,

these are the things

that we fear,

that we repress,

and that we,

at the same time,

struggle to realize.

I mean,

the collapse of communism

on one level

was the collapse

of a repressive,

nightmarish,

paranoid social system.

But the dream

which lay behind that

was a dream

of community,

of unity,

of sisterhood

and brotherhood.

And the great concern now

is that with the collapse

of even a pretense

of that position

that we are further fragmented,

further atomized

into individual competing microbes

of greed and need.

And this is precisely the attitudes

which will push us

ever closer

to species extinction

and to global ruin.

Well,

when you look at

thousands and thousands

of psychedelic experiences,

you,

to my mind,

what you come away with

is the notion that,

you know,

no matter who you are,

Amazonian shaman,

Hasidic rabbi,

nuclear physicist,

the psychedelic

will dissolve boundaries.

It will dissolve

your boundaries

and force you

to realize

the commonality

of the flesh.

You know,

it's a startling thing

to realize

that really

what you represent

is nothing more

than a point of view

and that we each

are such a point of view,

triangulating perception

through what is essentially

simply a nexus

of our past history.

We always are talking

about the past

and the future,

but it's worth noticing

that we all managed

to get here

this morning,

this place,

this time,

and not one of us

has the same past

as any other of us.

This moment,

like any moment,

is not a confluence

of the past,

it is a confluence

of many pasts,

and these many pasts

come into a nexus

of connection

and then move on

to become

many,

many futures.

The reason I'm so interested

in the psychedelic potential

and willing to speak

about it

is because I think

that our,

the myth of our separateness,

which was the glory

of our institutional

accomplishments,

parliamentary democracy,

individual rights,

liberation of various classes

and so forth,

has now turned

somewhat sour.

There has got to be

something more to it

than just turning people

loose to loot the planet

so that everyone

can pile up

more and more stuff,

stuff which doesn't

satisfy anyway.

And I think

in talking about

the future,

what we have to

somehow do

is dematerialize

the future.

And there are

several ways

or many ways

to do this.

People have preached

voluntary simplicity

and some people

are into this.

However,

it's hypocritical

to preach this

in the third world

to people

who have nothing.

You know,

we have everything

so we've seen

the fallacy

of condominiums

and mercedes

so then we preach

this in Bangladesh.

This is a bit

disingenuous.

The dematerializing

of culture.

Somehow,

you see,

what we have to recognize

in the wake

of the collapse

of communism

is that capitalism

as well

is a system

with a fatal flaw

that is set

against human nature.

capitalism assumes

an endlessly

exploitable frontier

of resources.

This we

have got.

Not.

So,

capitalism

is now

essentially,

unless it can be

radically retooled,

an anti-human

philosophy.

It's literally

chewing up

the ground

we're standing

on.

But there is

nothing in

the basic notion

of capitalism

that says

that we have

to be

thing dealers.

This is simply

the style

of capitalism

that we have

fallen into.

Somehow,

we have to

dematerialize

existence.

And I don't know

whether that means

virtual reality.

Some of you

have heard me

say that my

vision of

a perfect future

is,

you know,

25% of the

present world

population

living in

ecological

balance,

living in an

apparently

primitive,

naked,

aboriginal state.

But when you

step into the

minds of those

people and

look behind

their closed

eyelids,

there are

menus

hanging in

bio-tele-

electronic

space.

Culture,

you see,

can be

downloaded

into a chip

installed

behind the

eyelids

so that it

is,

you know,

freely

commandable

as an

experience

in the

imagination.

But if

we insist

on continually

extracting

resources from

the earth

and fashioning

our dreams

out of the

stuff of

earth,

then our

dreams are

destined to

turn to

nightmare.

It can't

be any other

way.

So that's

one thing

about the

future.

The future

needs to be

dematerialized.

And then,

you know,

since people

always accuse

me of being

a harebrained

dreamer,

I've tried to

come up with

something approaching

a practical

suggestion,

question, and I

took this

need to the

feet of the

mushroom gods,

having been

challenged by

somebody at a

talk like this,

they said,

well, you're

always saying

these mushrooms

speak, why

don't you ask

them how to

save the

world?

And I thought

this was kind

of disingenuous,

but the next

time I had

the telephone

to hyperspace

in my hot

hand, I did

make the

inquiry, and

the suggestion

which came

back, I think,

is at least

food for

thought.

The suggestion

was, you want

to save the

world?

You want to

overcome male

dominance, the

momentum of

consumerism, so

forth and so

on?

every woman

should bear

only one

natural child.

This is an

interesting idea,

whether you

take it

seriously as

program or

not.

If every

woman were

to commit

herself to

bearing only

one natural

child, the

population of

the earth

would fall

by 50%

in 40

years without

war or

famine or

epidemic

disease.

If this

program were

continued for

another 40

years, the

population would

fall by half

again.

This means in

80 years, the

population of

the planet

could be

reduced 75%.

Why have we

not heard

anything about

this?

Even for it

to be

denounced, I'm

not saying it

has to be

embraced, but

why isn't it

a tiny

fanatical

minority

advocating

this?

I think

it's because

it's inconceivable

in this

society

to try and

practice

capitalism in

a situation

of retreating

demographics.

It also

would be

a solution

which would

place enormous

power in

the hands

of women.

Women are

often heard

to complain

about their

powerlessness.

Yet here's

a plan

which requires

very little

input from

white guys.

I took

this idea

to demographers

and said

what about

it?

This seems

so simple.

Most people

think there

are no

solutions.

Here's a

very simple

solution.

What about

it?

They said

yes, well

it's more

startling than

you realize

because women

in upper

class, high

tech, western

society, a

woman say

on the upper

east side of

Manhattan or

Malibu or

the Seacliff

district of

San Francisco,

a child born

to that woman

will have

800 to

1,000 times

more negative

impact on the

earth than

a child born

to a woman

in Bangladesh.

If you were

to go to

Bangladesh

and meet

a woman

in the

back streets

of Dhaka

who told

you that

her ambition

in life

was to have

900 children

you'd think

you were

dealing with

some kind

of sociopath

a kind

of typhoid

Mary of

the demographic

scene

and yet

every child

born into

moderately

well-off

yuppie families

in high-tech

societies

is in

that

position

we prefer

not to

think of

it this

way

I think

it's very

interesting

that one

could make

a case

to

women

in western

societies

you could

say

how would

you like

vastly

increased

leisure time

how would

you like

increased

disposable

income

and how

would you

like to

take upon

yourself

a truly

heroic

social

role

this is

what's being

offered

with this

suggestion

to limit

reproduction

to one

natural

child

no more

heroic

no more

politically

correct

action

can be

taken

and

interestingly

the women

you want

to convince

of this

position

are the

women

you are

most likely

to be able

to convince

educated

white

women

with

above

average

incomes

so

that's

a very

practical

suggestion

more likely

to be

implemented

than my

dream

of

lunar

inoculations

with

psilocybin

for the

entire

population

to

dissolve

the

calcareous

ego

formations

that have

sprung up

in the

bloodstream

since

the last

full moon

which I

also think

would be

a fine

idea

global

perspectives

and

psychedelic

poetics

is what

it says

in the

propaganda

which I

assume

is simply

permission

to rave

about

whatever

comes to

mind

global

perspectives

I guess

what

I could

say

about

this

from

a

psychedelic

perspective

the

thing

that

is

different

for

psychedelic

people

looking

at

the

global

dilemma

that

we're

in

and

that

increases

that

continues

to

deepen

around

us

is

that

it's

from

my point

of view

permission

to

hope

rather

than

years or

more

have been

building

toward

some

kind of

symmetry

break

some

kind of

definitive

self-revealing

moment

that we

now are

turning

final

as pilots

say

we're now

deeply embedded

in the

pattern

we can

see

enough

of what's

ahead of

us

to begin

to actually

feel the

texture

of the

end

of human

history

it's no

longer

an

abstraction

even

the

straight

people

who

own

the

world

with

their

long

term

and

short

term

projections

looking

at

population

growth

spread

of

greenhouse

gases

disappearance

of the

ozone

whole

rising

third world

expectations

so forth

and so on

when you

propagate

all these

trends

it seems

very clear

that business

as usual

is no longer

an option

nobody's

talking

about

that

so

we're either

in some

kind of

final

fatal

meltdown

of the

values

of western

civilization

revealed

now

after a

thousand

or two

thousand

year run

to essentially

be

bankrupt

or

we're

going to

transform

ourselves

unrecognizably

there really

isn't any

middle ground

the most

radical

and least

likely

future

of all

it seems

to me

is a future

in which

we continue

just to

stumble forward

as we have been

since the

industrial revolution

that's no longer

an option

and so then

the question

becomes a sort of

a gnostic

conundrum

is this the final act

of some kind of

great cosmic

tragedy

in which

intelligence

rises out of the

slime

is shown to be

inadequate

and sinks back

into the slime

or is this

you know

a tale of

difficulty overcome

and heroism

won

and are we going

to be able

to shed

the monkey

nature

and shed

the ego

and actually

move up

to some kind

of shining

ideal

you know

it's a

if you think

of us

as the descendants

of the angels

this is a pretty

tatty

circumstance

we've come

to rest in

on the other hand

if you think

of us

as the descendants

of shit hurling

apes

screeching

through the

treetops

then it's

pretty amazing

what has been

accomplished

here

you know

one of the

dilemmas

that I feel

very strongly

and I'm just

sort of talking

off the top

of my head

here

because whenever

a crowd

is small enough

I sort of

feel like

I'm in my own

living room

we don't have

to have

the pretense

of knowing

lecturer

and you know

eager to be

educated audience

the real

challenge

I think

is trying

to decide

what is

baggage

and what

is ballast

that's going

to have

to be dumped

can the future

be a celebration

of humanness

as we have

known it

meaning

in the animal

body

with all

its

you know

joys

and pains

with all

its frailty

and

potential

for ecstasy

or is

what we call

human nature

somehow

transcendental

and

did we only

rest

for a moment

in the monkey

body

as once

the cutting edge

of evolution

must have

rested in the

great reptiles

and at some

earlier phase

in history

rested in the

fish

and so on

is consciousness

something uniquely

human

and must we

keep the animal

body with us

is our destiny

to become

the gardener

caretakers

of a

revivified earth

or is the earth

like a placenta

of some sort

that we have

literally

sucked all

the nutrition

and potential

out of

because we're

on our way

to some

grander

higher

domain

of being

I don't

have the answer

to these kinds

of questions

I feel it

very poignantly

it's very

poignantly

focused

in the

psychedelic

in the experience

of psychedelic

plants

and psychedelic

shamanism

because

you know

as any of you

have followed

my ideas

on this

know

I've spent a lot

of time

in the Amazon

basin

with

human populations

that seem

to have struck

some kind

of dynamic

balance

with the earth

and yet

the paradox

of that

dynamic balance

is that

when you take

the sacraments

the hallucinogenic

plants

of these people

you're propelled

into worlds

of

science

fiction

like

strangeness

transcendental

dimensions

of

titanic

implication

and then

at least I

personally

have come

to the realization

that this

is how

those cultures

have chosen

to deal

with

the Faustian

impulse

in human beings

it's been

somehow

confined

in the domain

of the

imagination

we

meaning

we

who trace

our

ancestry

back to

Europe

are part

of a different

style

a different

strain

of human

being

if you will

we are

the idea

excretors

not

satisfied

to have

a canoe

a net

five

fish hooks

and

a bowl

to have

a

little

in the

way

to have

a

to have

a

little

time

to have

a

little

but instead we take matter we Western civilization Western technology and we

impress upon matter ideas millions of ideas cities like Manhattan of high

performance weaponry enormous works of art all of this is a kind of impulse

very strong in Western human beings to bring the ideas out of the domain of

mind and to somehow solidify them in matter permanence the cult of the West is

permanence I always feel that when you can find the obsessive center of a

society you probably have put your finger on its on its central neurosis as

well I remember when I spent time in India India's rife with talk of Shakti

Shakti is energy conceived of in various ways it can be sexual energy or it can

actually be electricity flowing through wires is called Shakti and I realized

being in India that the Indian obsession with Shakti was a consequence of there

not being any that this was a society where energy had become the hardest

commodity to encounter and I think in the West permanence is the thing is our great

bugaboo because we are born into the realization that everything is slipping

through our fingers at the very moment that it comes into existence the hardest

psychedelic truth to assimilate and you don't have to take psychedelics to

assimilate this if you just live this will be hammered in on you again and again

and it's not to well it's a cause for exaltation it's a cause for despair it's that

nothing lasts nothing lasts you know not your fortune not your misfortune not your

lovers your enemies your children ultimately not even your own life and body

everything fades and so the Western response to this is the attempt to create

something permanent civilizations enduring ideas enduring institutions all this is

doomed to failure and I see this Western obsession with the cult of permanence as a

consequence of the Western obsession with ego ego to my mind is the very thing if you

had to somehow meld each problem into the next problem to try and reduce all problems to one what you

would eventually come to is the realization that ego is what is destroying us our inability to displace

our loyalty away from the unique locus of space and time represented by our own bodies you know

community communalism these are the things that we fear that we repress and that we at the

same time struggle to realize I mean the collapse of communism on one level was the

collapse of a repressive nightmarish paranoid social system but the dream which lay

behind that was a dream of community of unity of sisterhood and brotherhood and the great concern now is that with the

collapse of even a pretense of that position that we are further fragmented further atomized into individual

competing microbes of greed and need and this is precisely the attitudes which will push us

ever closer to species extinction and to global ruin well when you look at thousands and thousands of psychedelic

experiences you to my mind what you come away with is the notion that you know no matter who you are

Amazonian shaman Hasidic rabbi nuclear physicist the psychedelic will dissolve boundaries it will dissolve your boundaries and force you to realize the commonality of the flesh you know it's a

startling thing to realize that really what you represent is nothing more than a point of view and that we each are such a

point of view triangulating perception through what is essentially simply a nexus of our past history

we always are talking about the past and the future but it's worth noticing that we all managed to get here this morning this

place this time and not one of us has the same past as any other of us this moment like any moment is not a

confluence of the past it is a confluence of many pasts and these many pasts come into a nexus of connection and then move on to become many many futures

the reason I'm so interested in the psychedelic potential and willing to speak about it is because I think that are the myth of our separateness

which was the glory of our institutional accomplishments

parliamentary democracy individual rights

of liberation of various classes and so forth has now turned somewhat sour

there has got to be something more to it than just turning people loose to loot the planet so that everyone can pile up more and more stuff

stuff stuff which doesn't satisfy anyway and I think in talking about the future what we have to somehow do is dematerialize the future and there are several ways or many ways to do this

people have preached voluntary simplicity and some people are into this however it's hypocritical to preach this in the third world to people who have nothing you know we have everything so we've seen the fallacy of condominiums and mercedes so then we preach this in Bangladesh this is a bit disingenuous

the dematerializing of culture somehow you see what we have to recognize in the wake of the collapse of communism is that capitalism as well is a system with a fatal flaw that is set against human nature

capitalism assumes an endlessly exploitable frontier of resources this we have got not so capitalism is now essentially unless it can be radically retooled an end

anti-human philosophy it's literally chewing up the ground we're standing on but there is nothing in the

um the basic notion of capitalism that says that we have to be thing dealers this is simply the style of capitalism that we have fallen into

somehow we have to dematerialize existence and I don't know whether that means virtual reality

some of you have heard me say that my vision of a perfect future is you know 25 percent of the present world population living in ecological balance living in an apparently primitive naked aboriginal state but when you step into the minds of those people and look behind their closed eyelids there are menus

hanging hanging in bio tele electronic space culture you see can be downloaded into a chip

installed behind the eyelids so that it is you know freely commandable as an experience in the imagination but if we insist on continually extracting resources from the earth and fashioning our dreams out of the stuff of earth

then our dreams are destined to turn to nightmare it can't be any other way so that's one thing about the future the future needs to be de materialized

uh and then you know since people always accuse me of being a harebrained dreamer i've tried to come up with something approaching a practical suggestion and i i i took this need to the future of the future of the future of the future of the future of the future of the future that we have to be

thing about the future the future needs to be dematerialized and then you know

since people always accuse me of being a harebrained dreamer I've tried to come

up with something approaching a practical suggestion and I I took this

need to the feet of the mushroom gods being having been challenged by

somebody at a talk like this they said well you're always saying these mushrooms

speak why don't you ask them how to save the world and I thought this was kind

of disingenuous but the next time I I had the telephone to hyperspace in my hot

hand I did make the inquiry and the suggestion which came back I think is at

least food for thought the suggestion was you want to save the world you want

to overcome male dominance the momentum of consumerism so forth and so on every

woman should bear only one natural child this is an interesting idea whether you

take it seriously as program or not if every woman were to commit herself to

bearing only one natural child the population of the earth would fall by 50

percent in 40 years without war or famine or epidemic disease if this program were

continued for another 40 years the population would fall by half again this

means in 80 years the population of the planet could be reduced 75 percent why have

we not heard anything about this even for it to be denounced I'm not saying it has to be

embraced but why isn't it a tiny fanatical minority advocating this I think it's

because it's inconceivable in this society to try and practice capitalism in a

situation of retreating demographics it also would be a solution which would place

enormous power in the hands of women women are often heard to complain about their

powerlessness yet here's a plan which requires very little input from white guys I took this

idea to demographers and said what about it this seems so simple most people think there

are no solutions here is a very simple solution what about it and they said yes well it's more startling

than you realize because women in upper-class high-tech Western society a woman say on the Upper East Side of

Manhattan or Malibu or the sea cliff district of San Francisco a child born to that woman will have

eight hundred to a thousand times more negative impact on the earth than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh if you were to go to Bangladesh and meet a woman in the back streets of

DACA who told you that her ambition in life was to have 900 children you'd think you were dealing with some kind of sociopath the kind of a kind of typhoid Mary of the demographic scene and yet every child born into moderately well off yuppie families in high tech societies is in that position we prefer not to think of it this way I think it's very interesting

that one could make a case to women in Western societies you could say how would you like vastly increased leisure time how would you like increased disposable income and how would you like increased disposable income and how would you like

and how would you like to take upon yourself a truly heroic social role this is what's being offered with this suggestion to limit reproduction to one natural child no more heroic no more politically correct action can be taken and interestingly the women you want to convince of this position

I'm not to convince educated white women with above average incomes so that's a very practical suggestion more likely to be implemented than my dream of a lunar inoculations with psilocybin for the entire population to dissolve the calcareous ego formations that have sprung up in the bloodstream since the last full

moon which I also think would be a fine idea you see boundary dissolution is what is needed here boundary dissolution of all type our separateness is an illusion there is a kind of human bedrock that's why I think that the world sweep toward democracy is far more than simply a political

trend democracy is not exactly a style of government per se or exclusively democracy is something is a biological institution of some sort because there is no theory there is no abstraction there is no ideology I mean democracy is as close as you can get

any theory theory of organization at all you know I wrote a book which is around and about called the archaic revival and that's why my belief in the archaic revival is what brings me out to events like this I mean I think the term new age and some of these other terms are pretty trivializing and basically designed by the mavens of marketing to draw you in

but there is an impulse throughout the 20th century in Freudianism in abstract expressionism in Dada psychotherapy sexual permissiveness psychedelic experimentation jazz rock and roll these are all facets of an impulse toward the archaic toward the primitive the non-straight the anti bow tie

world created created by the fine ladies and gentlemen of the 19th century with their Christ or ethics and their long dresses and all of that business there is an impulse toward the archaic this is very healthy this is what happens when a society seeks to revivify itself when the medieval world exploded in the face of the italian city states and the new classes that were emerging

they reinvented classicism it was actually the second time classicism had been rediscovered it was also trotted out by the Arabs in the ninth century when they needed a stabilizing metaphor for the umayyad caliphate and those civilizations now in the 20th century we can't go back to ancient Greece and Rome or Babylon

and in a sense the new age I think is an effort to go back to a kind of a minoan slash Egyptian world which never existed except perhaps in the minds of certain menopausal theosophists but but the impulse is the impulse is laudable however screwy the results

uh but I think we have to reach further back that all of history is what our urtext the bible tells us it is it's a confusion a kind of punishment a wandering in the wilderness and that where we really want to be is naked singing in the rainforest

stoned and exalted one with the souls of the ancestors one with the Gaian spirit of the planet and I don't mean to imply that psychedelics are simply act negatively dissolving ego dissolving social constructs dissolving programming and neurosis

that's all true but what is left when all this dissolving has taken place is not simply a tabla rasa a clean slate what is left is

um what we forgot what we have been so long away from which is a connection into the reality of the Gaian mind the great news

that all shamanism can attest to and is built on is the news that there is a sentient minded caring entity

that surrounds and holds the planet in its hands in its heart and beyond comprehending I mean call it Gaia call it God call it the spirit of nature

it doesn't matter what you call it it transcends the rational apprehension of higher primates and yet it is there we know that our own peculiar form of self-reflection

emerged in just a couple of million years out of animal organization well what we don't know is how many other forms of mind

there are possible and how many times in the two billion year history of life on this planet intelligence has been able to shed the dark

chrysalis of matter and launch itself into nearby dimensions in which it finds completion and happiness

uh and I think that this is the great news that informs the shamanic religions that we are not alone and that the other that we can make our way toward

is not you know a galactarian intelligence from beta reticuli that is part machine symbiote part banana slug or something like that that the the coherent minded entity

that we make our way toward is actually a reflection of what is best in our hearts

that we carry in ourselves the seed of this thing and that we are like the the the guy in the story of the prodigal son

we have fallen into history and out of this misfortune out of this experience we can make gold if we return to the world

if we return to the fold of the ancestors if we can somehow take what we've learned from history and fold it back into the experience of being truly human

and this is the challenge and it faces us on the political level of issues such as you know all kinds of community issues such as racism and sexism and classism

these are community issues and then issues between the human community and the planet our inability you see to emotionally connect with the consequences of what we're doing

I mean we as a species present a perfect picture of pathology because what real psychotic behavior is is behavior that one cannot emotionally connect with the consequences of what we're doing

because what real psychotic behavior is is behavior that one cannot emotionally connect with the consequences of what is being done and when you realize that we are literally

uh looting the cradle of future human life that we have decided that we are not simply transient occupiers

of this domain but that it is ours to trash to use up to do with as we wish leaving nothing for the future then you realize the depth of our need for immediate and

immediate and widespread therapeutic indeed pharmacological intervention on our state of mind because we have wandered from anything like real human values

and the reason psychedelics are so threatening in this society is because they immediately throw into high relief the internal contradictions of the dominator style of

of doing business and this is what must happen the momentum toward catastrophe

built up over centuries is immense the only antidote to that that I have seen extrapolating from what I've seen it do to single individuals are the shamanic hallucinogens

because when you cut right to the bone what has to happen is we must change our minds

if we don't change our minds we're going to go down with this self-generated titanic called Western civilization and we have the power to change our minds but it won't come from

hortatory preaching if that would work then we would have turned the bend at the sermon on the mount

but as it is I think we turned the band of sometime in the 20th century either when Albert Hoffman invented LSD

or Gordon Watson found the mushrooms of Oaxaca or Richard Schulte's brought back news of ayahuasca from the Amazon basin you see we have to humble ourselves

we have to give up the titanic ego driven idea that we can do it by ourselves as religions and yogans and all that beady-eyed crowd are into promising the first step on the path of self real self-term

transformation is the admission that you must humble yourself so thoroughly that you need to form a pact with an organism that begins its life in a mound of manure you know it's a true alchemical journey you return to the dross and out of the

that which everyone has rejected literally the compost of being you find the jewel and the jewel can be grown cultivated brought to fruition internalized globalized shared to create a transforming option that does honor to a human experiment that has been going on far too many millennia

for us to fumble the golden opportunity away is there anybody who's burning with their own agenda that oh here's a burning person yes

I had a experience about three years ago now maybe four years ago I was on a hallucinogenic and I had a feeling that I was talking to some people and they were telling me that when we leave this planet we become stars

I'm just wondering what have you got any more on the outer space connection well I mean I think you know I mean it's funny for me to be talking at a place like this because my I am actually a rationalist

it's simply that I my experience has been very very peculiar and I thank God for it because I think most rationalist actually live lives which reinforce their rationalism maybe because they don't poke around enough in the edges of things I mean you know we have orthodox ideology I don't know what it is now free markets democracy and physics or something

and then you press out a little bit to the fringes and you discover that reality is not only not as you supposed it to be but it's not like anybody supposed it to be the maps we have are largely based on conjecture and naive hope the hope that there's nobody hiding in the woods the hope that there's nobody waiting behind me

waiting behind the hill when I first started taking psychedelics it all ran pretty much according to Hoyle LSD it seemed like a tremendous tool for insight into the structure of the personality kind of high-powered turbocharged self-directed psychotherapy you know and which is certainly useful illuminating

the laws of the laws of physics or threaten the foundations of western science and philosophy what has interested me and become the focus of my personal life I guess are these tryptamine palycinogens DMT psilocybin and then ayahuasca which is a simply a strategy for making

think insights insights insights into one's upbringing insights into the structure of philosophy or mathematics or something like that but what is hard to accept are you called them gibberish people I call them self transforming elf machines or tykes or fairies and to my mind this is this is confounding

in the models of the psyche that we inherit from Freud and Jung it begins to look as though that you know the mind is not even in the brain there's some kind of extended landscape of possibility and I I speak as somebody who's been there who's seen this stuff but who doesn't I don't have an agenda

I speak as a career is to get a whole bunch of people to march with me in there to check again because you know well I talk in the book I wrote for Bantam food of the gods about DMT because I think it's in a sense the the case where all the issues are most intensely brought together

I think it's in a small understanding of a cultural and the idea that the brain is in the brain and stimulating and theлуian itself and I think it's something in a way that's kind of doing and aforging neural transmitter and dodgyness in the human brain it also is very fast acting it clears your system very quickly it clears your system very quickly not only clears your system but leaves no trace whatsoever you can't even

that you have done some kind of substance a half hour after you do this stuff nevertheless the

content of the experience itself is absolutely paradigm challenging and the chief reason is

because there are these entities in there and on psilocybin you hear them they speak to you what you

were describing it's almost as though this is some kind of a of a mandala of pharmacological approaches

to the mystery and DMT lands you right in the center of the bullseye I mean 30 seconds after

smoking DMT you confront these things which look like I mean it's very hard to force language into

these dimensions and then bring it back but what they look like to me is self transforming self

dribbling basketballs or something I mean they come bounding forward when you enter into the space

there's a kind of a cheer you know who ray and suddenly you're there and this is not the cumulative

effect of spirulina or hanging out at Findhorn or imbibing any of these ideologies which permit this

kind of thing I mean I come out of you know Jean Genet and existentialism and Sartre I'm very much more

mainstream down dreary Western approach these things do not require belief to sustain their existence you

may doubt you may deny and yet there they are and they and it is not it's not some kind of neutral

panorama like window shopping it's an encounter it's a situation in which you see them they see you and the

the relationship between you and them is very rapidly evolving they seem to have been waiting and the

impression I get is well it's not an impression I get it's what they say they say here you are again how

wonderful it's not exactly in English you understand and they have you know they're not made of matter the

questions you know what is the on toast of these things what is their exact ontological status and as far as I can tell

they're made of language

there they are not composed of DNA sinew tissue and blood they're composed of syntax

they are like

self-articulating

sentences or language with that has no requirement for a speaker it is its own

self-generating system of meaning and in you know the immediate impression you have is if you're a sane

person is you know my god what is this and then is it okay am I number one am I still alive and you

check through you know take a quick inventory breathing normal blood pressure normal heart normal but what you're

seeing is a complete replacement of the ordinary world and these things which are not enough like elves gnomes and fairies it's almost as though you know you would look to folklore to

to

provide evidence for the existence of these things but the elves gnomes and fairies of folklore are a little too

are a little too predictable a little too humanoid a little too disney-esque for what you're dealing with

these things actually appear to be as

alien a form of life as it would be possible for a human being to imagine and still cognize that it's alien intelligence at all

and

they are performing an extraordinary activity in that place which is they possess a language

that can be seen

with the eyes and this is fascinating to me I really think that there's something to be learned here this is what they want you to learn

they they come forward they utter statements which remember you don't hear with your ear but which you see as

condensed sculptural objects which are like Fabergé eggs or beautifully tooled machines of glass shell and crystal except these things are in motion

they're opening up in front of you and they're they're pressing in there's a kind of frantic intensity to this kind of an encounter

it's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon

running backwards at twice normal speed

I mean stuff is just flying all over and they're saying don't

abandon yourself to amazement

don't just go gaga with disbelief

try and

focus

on what we're doing and then if you are able even

moderately to focus on what they're doing what they're doing is they're offering you these objects and they're saying look at this

look at this

you see

boundary dissolution

is what is needed here

boundary dissolution of all type our separateness is

is an illusion there is a kind of human bedrock

that's why I think that the world

sweep toward democracy

is far more than simply a political trend

democracy is not

exactly a style of government

per se or exclusively

democracy is something is a biological

institution of some sort

of some sort because there is no

theory there is no abstraction there is no ideology

I mean democracy is as close as you can get

to anarchy and still have any theory of organization at all

you know I wrote a book which is around and about called the archaic revival

and that's why my belief in the archaic revival is what brings me out to events like this

I mean I think the term new age and some of these other terms are pretty trivializing and basically designed by the mavens of marketing to draw you in

but there is an impulse throughout the 20th century in Freudianism in abstract expressionism in Dada psychotherapy sexual permissiveness psychedelic experimentation jazz rock and roll these are all facets of an impulse toward the archaic toward the primitive the non straight the anti bow tie the wish to blow up the

blow up the stayed world created by the fine ladies and gentlemen of the 19th century with their Christ or ethics and their long dresses and all of that business there is an impulse toward the archaic this is very healthy this is what happens when a society seeks to revivify itself when the medieval world exploded in the face of the Italian city states and the new classes that were

emerging they reinvented classicism it was actually the second time classicism had been rediscovered it was also trotted out by the Arabs in the ninth century when they needed a stabilizing metaphor for the umayyad caliphate and those civilizations now in the 20th century we can't go back to ancient Greece and Rome or Babylon and in a

in a sense the new age I think is an effort to go back to a kind of minoan slash Egyptian world which never existed except perhaps in the minds of certain menopausal theosophists but but the impulse is the impulse is laudable however screwy the results but I think we have to reach further back that all of history

it's a confusion it's a confusion a kind of punishment a wandering in the wilderness and that where we really want to be is naked singing in the rain forest stoned and exalted

one with the souls of the ancestors one with the Gaian spirit of the planet and I don't mean to imply that psychedelics are simply act negatively dissolving ego

dissolving social constructs dissolving programming and neurosis that's all true but what is left when all this dissolving has taken place is not simply a tabla rasa a clean slate what is left is

what we forgot what we have been so long away from which is a connection into the reality of the Gaian mind the great news that all shamanism can attest to and is built on is the news that there is a sentient minded caring entity that surrounds and holds the

the planet in its hands in its heart and beyond comprehending I mean call it Gaia call it God call it the spirit of nature it doesn't matter what you call it it transcends the rational apprehension of higher primates and yet it is there we know that our own peculiar form of self reflection emerged in just a couple of million years out of animal organization

what we don't know what we don't know what we don't know what we don't know is how many other forms of mind there are possible and how many times in the two billion year history of life on this planet

intelligence has been able to shed the dark chrysalis of matter and launch itself into nearby dimensions in which it finds completion and happiness

and I think that this is the great news that informs the shamanic religions that we are not alone and that the other that we can make our way toward is not you know a galactarian intelligence from beta reticuli that is part machine symbiote part banana slug or something like that that the the coherent minded entity that we make our way toward is part machine symbiote part banana slug or something like that that the the coherent

is actually a reflection of what is best in our hearts that we carry in ourselves the seed of this thing and that we are like the the the the guy in the story of the prodigal son

we have fallen into history and out of this misfortune out of this experience we can make gold if we return to the fold of the ancestors

if we can somehow take what we've learned from history and fold it back into the experience of being truly human and this is the challenge and it faces us on the political level

of issues such as you know all kinds of community issues such as racism and sexism and classism these are community issues and then issues between the human community and the planet

our inability you see to emotionally connect with the consequences of what we're doing

I mean we as a species present a perfect picture of pathology because what real psychotic behavior is is behavior that one cannot emotionally connect with the consequences of what is being done and when you realize that we are literally

uh looting the cradle of future human life that we have decided that we are not simply transient occupiers of this domain but that it is ours to trash

to use up to do with as we wish leaving nothing for the future then you realize the depth of our need for immediate and widespread uh therapeutic indeed pharmacological intervention on our state of mind

because we have wandered from anything like real human values and the reason psychedelics are so threatening in this society is because they immediately throw into high relief the internal contradictions of the dominator style of doing business and this is what must happen the momentum toward catastrophe built up over centuries

built up over centuries is immense is immense the only antidote to that that i have seen extrapolating from what i've seen it do to single individuals are the shamanic hallucinogens because when you cut right to the bone what has to happen is we must change our minds if we don't change our minds we're going to go down with this self-generated titanic

titanic called western civilization and we have the power to change our minds but it won't come from hortatory preaching if that would work then we would have turned the bend at the sermon on the mount

but as it is i think we turned the bend uh sometime in the 20th century either when albert hoffman invented lsd or gordon watson found the mushrooms of oaxaca or richard schulte's brought back news of ayahuasca from the amazon basin

from the Amazon basin you see we have to humble ourselves we have to give up the

titanic ego driven idea that we can do it by ourselves as religions and yogans

and all that beady-eyed crowd are into promising the first step on the path of

self real self transformation is the admission that you must humble yourself

so thoroughly that you need to form a pact with an organism that begins its life

in a mound of manure you know it's a true alchemical journey you return to the

dross and out of that which everyone has rejected literally the compost of being

you find the jewel and the jewel can be grown cultivated brought to fruition in

internalized globalized shared to create a transforming option that does honor to a

human experiment that has been going on far too many millennia for us to fumble the

golden opportunity away is there anybody who's burning with their own agenda that

you know here's a burning person yes I had a experience about three years ago now maybe four

years ago right I was on a hallucinogenic and I had a feeling that I was talking to some people

and they're telling me that when we leave this planet we become stars I'm just wondering what

have you got any more on the outer space connection well I mean I think you know I mean

it's funny for me to be talking at a at a place like this because my I am actually a rationalist

it's simply that I my experience has been very very peculiar and I thank God for it because I think most

rationalists actually live lives which reinforce their rationalism maybe because they don't poke around

enough in the edges of things I mean you know we have orthodox ideology I don't know what it is now free

markets democracy and physics or something and then you press out a little bit to the fringes and you

discover that reality is not only not as you supposed it to be but it's not like anybody supposed it to be

be the this the maps we have are largely based on conjecture and naive hope the hope that there's

nobody hiding in the woods the hope that there's nobody waiting behind the hill when I first started

taking psychedelics it all ran pretty much according to Hoyle LSD it seemed like a tremendous tool for insight

into the structure of the personality kind of high-powered turbocharged self-directed psychotherapy you know

and which is certainly useful illuminating but doesn't violate the laws of physics or threaten the foundations

of Western science and philosophy what has interested me and become the focus of my personal life I guess are

these tryptamine palycinogens DMT psilocybin and then ayahuasca which is a simply a strategy for making DMT

orally active and you know one could accept I think insights into one's upbringing insights into the

structure of philosophy or mathematics or something like that but what is hard to accept are you called

them gibberish people I call them self-transforming elf machines or tykes or fairies and to my mind this is

this is confounding this is no mere extension of the models of the psyche that we inherit from Freud and

Jung it begins to look as though that you know the mind is not even in the brain there's some kind of

extended landscape of possibility and I I speak as somebody who's been there who's seen this stuff but

who doesn't I don't have an agenda I'm in a sense I'm sort of chicken shit because the motivation for my public

career is to get a whole bunch of people to march with me in there to check again because you know well I

talk in the book I wrote for Bantam food of the gods about DMT because I think it's in a sense the

the the case where all the issues are most intensely brought together it's a naturally occurring neurotransmitter

endogenous in the human brain it also is very fast acting it clears your system very quickly not only clears

your system but leaves no trace whatsoever you can't even not feel that you have done some kind of substance a

half hour after you do this stuff nevertheless the content of the experience itself is absolutely paradigm

challenging and the chief reason is because there are these entities in there and on psilocybin you hear them

they speak to you what you were describing it's almost as though this is some kind of a of a mandala of

pharmacological approaches to the mystery and DMT lands you right in the center of the bullseye I mean 30 seconds after smoking DMT

you confront these things which look like I mean it's very hard to force language

into these dimensions and then bring it back but what they look like to me is self-transforming self-dribbling

basketballs or something I mean they come bounding forward when you enter into the space there's a kind

of a cheer you know who ray and suddenly you're there and this is not the cumulative effect of spirulina or

hanging out at Findhorn or imbibing any of these ideologies which permit this kind of thing I mean I come out of

of you know Jean Genet and existentialism and Sartre I'm very much more mainstream down dreary western approach

these things do not require belief to sustain their existence you may doubt you may deny and yet there they are and

they unlike it is not it's not some kind of neutral panorama like window shopping it's an encounter it's a situation in which you see them

in which you see them they see you and the relationship between you and them is very rapidly evolving they seem to have been waiting

and the impression I get is well it's not an impression I get it's what they say they say here you are again how

wonderful it's not exactly in English you understand and they have you know they're not made of matter the question is you know what is the

on toasts of these things what is their exact ontological status and as far as I can tell they're made of language

there they are not composed of DNA sinew tissue and blood they're composed of syntax

they are like self articulating sentences or language with that has no requirement for a speaker it is its own self generating system

of meaning and in you know the immediate impression you have is if you're a sane person is you know my god what is this and then is it okay

am I am I number one am I still alive and you check through you know take a quick inventory

breathing normal blood pressure normal heart normal but what you're seeing is a complete replacement of the ordinary world and these things which are not enough like elves

gnomes and fairies it's almost as though you know you would look to folklore to to provide evidence for the existence of these things but the elves gnomes and fairies of folklore are a little too predictable a little too humanoid a little too disney-esque for what you're dealing with these things actually appear to be as alien a form of life as it would be possible for

a human being to imagine and still cognize that it's alien intelligence at all and they are performing an extraordinary activity in that place which is they possess a language that can be seen with the eyes and this is fascinating to me I really think that there's something to be learned here this is what they want you to learn

this is what they want you to learn they come forward they utter statements which remember you don't hear with your ear but which you see as condensed sculptural objects which are like Fabergé eggs or beautifully tooled machines of glass shell and crystal except these things are in motion they're opening up in front of you and they're

and there's a kind of frantic intensity to this kind of an encounter it's like a bug's bunny cartoon running backwards at twice normal speed I mean stuff is just flying all over and they're saying don't abandon yourself to amazement don't just go gaga with disbelief try and focus on what we're doing and then if you are able even moderately to focus on what they're doing

as they're offering you these objects and they're saying look at this look at this as it is passed before you as you look into it you have a very strong and I believe genuine impression that this thing that you're being shown though it's no larger than a Kaiser role

assumptions of this world that in other words if I could condense this thing into my hand right now I wouldn't have to convince you I wouldn't have to preach to you I could just show you say look at this and in the visual confrontation with this thing it's self-evident that this is impossible

matter light they don't behave this way it's as though you have brought back a chunk of another dimension and and then what they're saying about these things is you can do this do what we are doing and then the urgency becomes almost strident they say do what we're doing do it now and you say wow and and and then you feel

or I felt at any rate an upwelling in myself like a calling forth then out of my mouth comes language or at least syntax but without meaning some kind of glossolalia where the modality of language is preserved but the meaning is not and it's a kind of an ecstasy it sounds like gibberish in three dimensional space but in that space it seems to be the

key to unlocking a world made out of syntax and meaning and I you know I come before you with all of this stuff unfinished this is not a teaching or a system or anything it's an eyewitness account of a hyper dimensional automobile accident or something we're not saying what the conclusions are we don't know what the conclusions are but this is big news

and when I first encountered this kind of stuff I was I was a young art historian at the university of california and I assumed that any motif no matter how outre or bizarre you would be able to look at the painting folklore and sculpture of somebody on this planet

and find a trace and it seemed as though this defeated that idea it was almost counter the idea of the collective unconscious because it argued that you Joe anybody Sally somebody can break through on your own an ordinary person

to a place that Verrucchio never saw Michelangelo didn't anticipate it Yates didn't know Blake hadn't a clue Melville wasn't briefed and yet there it is you know and this is to me as an intellectual it was very confusing because I think as intellectuals we always assume that progress will be built on the

on the on the on the on the

shoulders of the giants that have preceded us the idea of something actually 100% brand

new and unexpected is pretty daunting and and here it here it was 30 seconds away simply

by the act of ingesting this natural neurotransmitter well those of you who've been there know exactly

what I'm talking about those of you haven't been there I can't imagine how you can even

sit through this kind of thing because you know it makes the folks from the Pleiades and all that other

stuff out there seem mundane by comparison the other thing is we're not talking about camping out

in cornfields night after freezing night with your eyes glued to the stars in one hope this is a no

fail method for plunging deeper into these spiritual realms than the tantric yogas or the practitioners of

x y or z dare scarcely suppose it's repeatable it's on demand it does not depend upon your state of

moral purity or you know tantric accomplishment it's something that is our birthright as much as

our sexuality our language our eyesight our appreciation of music it's a an innate human thing and you know to

try and return to the premises of your question I tried to formulate theories about what could this be well the

first impression that I had based on a reading of how weird this all was was this must be a parallel continuum

Allah Philip K Dick and like that that just apparently over some kind of neurological energy barrier that's all

all around us all the time these things are there and they are not made of matter so the laws of physics

don't apply and you know like that and then and then I entertained different possibilities and I still entertain

numerous possibilities I haven't got it figured out yet one possibility is that these things are actually

human beings from the future I mean if you take the content of the experience seriously and say I am

apparently in contact with diminutive English-speaking creatures of some sort well then they have got to

be either intelligent beings from another part of the universe or humans from some extraordinarily advanced

future world where human beings are now made of language and are only two and a half feet tall so I would

put it rather far in the future or and I just simply offer this in the spirit of of intellectual completeness

if you ask a shaman or what these things are they don't hesitate they just say oh well those are the

ancestor spirits this is what it's all about is ancestor spirits well it takes a while for the implications of this to sink in

they're talking about dead people that's what an ancestor spirit is they're suggesting that the dearly departed do not

evanesce into sunlight or something cheerfully non-specific like that but that this actually is

is simply one level of cosmic system of some sort where birth and death are transitions from level to

level well this is just exactly the kind of thing that I'm intellectually set up to doubt and to feel a

kind of scorn for because you know people have been running around since time immemorial claiming this sort of thing with an

incredibly underwhelming body of evidence to back them up and yet if you try to approach the problem

scientifically I think you would agree that in terms of likelihood although operating in this realm what

this means I'm not sure but that in terms of likelihood it's more likely that these are human souls in

in another dimension than that we are being contacted by friendly extraterrestrials or even that we share the

earth with an invisible race of syntactical tribal elf legions of some sort but I think this conclusion is

the one that we would tend to resist most strenuously I mean you eat very I think it's the most intellectually

challenging position to take these of the western thinking to claim that we have to reopen the question

of life after death in a serious way not the cheerful round of reincarnation that haunts some of the zanier

offshoots of eastern religion but actually say you know you are going to die and when you die you know you

are going to undergo a metamorphosis of some sort that is not particularly going to be designed to preserve

your humanness what you call your humanness or to set you on a cloud with lyre and gown for the rest of

eternity but that actually the greatest adventure the greatest adventures still lie ahead and these things

uh intimations of immortality are vouchsafed by these plant hallucinogens why this should be why it should

be possible to get a bring a look over the great divide i have no idea i think about these things

constantly my life is mostly questions uh my friend rupert sheldrake who some of you may know his books

he and i have talked about it he thinks that uh that that dot there is a chemistry of dying that in the same

way that there is a chemistry of giving birth there is a chemistry of dying and that dmt parallels and

anticipates this he calls it uh not a hallucinogen but a necroptic substance it actually show anticipates the

death state itself i once had the fortunate opportunity of being able to turn a very prominent tibetan lama

on to dmt a name that you would recognize although not one of the top five but a more wizened older

stranger character and i you know he did it and i said so what about it you know these people these

tibetan buddhists they have a pretty good map of the territory he said it's the lesser lights he said

you can't go further than that without breaking the thread of return he said you know beyond this there's

no returning and so you know in a very real sense it's a look over the edge but then you know even that

doesn't solve all the mysteries i mean what is it about this wish to convey a language

which is seen what's that all about is it that perhaps language has always been a gift from the

other we don't it's a little hard to picture how the kind of language i'm using right now ever got

started uh i mean notice that language is a behavior it's a behavior that's all it is it's something

it's a complex activity having to do with small mouth noises and the neurological processing of same

we must have been essentially as we are before language it's like break dancing or something like

that um you're fully set up to do it and people have been for millennia but until somebody actually

does it it only exists as a formal possibility in the organism and i wonder how many of these things

there are i mean break dancing is an interesting example albeit somewhat trivial but it shows that

after five six seven thousand years of civilization you can come up with a behavior that nobody has ever

seen uh before i've i've spent a lot of time thinking about language and how what a limited tool it is

and yet how our whole world is held together by nothing more than small mouth noises and it's incredible

the entirety of global civilization is held together by small mouth noises and symbolic notations of same

which have an even more rarefied level of abstraction our separateness our notion of self and world of

self and species all rest on the carrying capacity of these small mouth noises one of the things that

has interested me some of you have heard me talk about this is you know i think good psychedelic trips

inspire a lot of homework which usually means reading in curious areas and i discovered that um octopi

cephalopods which in case you're not up on your evolutionary biology these are mollusca they're not even

vertebrates they're related to escargot and banana slugs i mean you can hardly imagine a form of life

more alien to ourselves i mean you know we broke off from the other primates three million years ago

but the invertebrates and the vertebrates separated from each other about 700 million years ago well

uh an interesting thing going on with octopi most people have heard that they can change color

and most people i think assume this means that like certain lizards and certain butterflies they

camouflage themselves against their background that's not what's going on color and texture for octopi are the

medium of language it's you could almost say that an octopus is a naked mind because as the octopus goes

through certain internal changes hunger sexual need whatever color changes accompany these in shifts of

internal state and appear on the surface of the octopus it is almost as though it wears its language

like an overcoat it is clothed in its own meaning well obviously in that kind of situation you have always

been suspended in an ambiance of language unlike ourselves where apparently language was invented one bright

summer day or series of bright summer days and if you have a language such as we have small mouth noises

with culturally assigned meaning in other words if i say where can i get a taxi if i don't say this to a

person who speaks english it means nothing to a ukrainian or a chinese octopi don't have this problem there are not

culturally localized languages there's only a language of the body the genes it's unambiguous you see even

those of us in this room if you were to check uh our internal dictionaries are different

we have only the assumption of one-to-one mapping of meaning i mean if i ask you uh where is the restroom

this is fairly ambiguous unambiguous because it deals with ordinary situations but as soon as as soon as

conversation leaves the main and well-trodden path of discourse ambiguity enters into a tremendous degree

we overlook this as a courtesy to each other i mean you almost never hear one person say to another

now would you explain to me what i just said the reason you don't hear this said very often is because

the thin illusion of communication would break down completely uh if we actually demanded of our

listeners that they repeat back to us the only situation in which that happens on a regular basis

is the pedagogical mode where the teacher teaches and then by test and recitation

determines that the pupil has understood but in polite discourse among adults we consider this an imposition

if not an insult so uh somehow these creatures are elves of language catalysts for the concrescence of

cognition and i don't know if these things can be understood after all we're embedded in the world

created by our own meanings uh cd broad i think it was cd broad wrote a book called the meaning of meaning

the mind and its place in nature uh probably these two should be read back to back just to see how

positivists handle these kinds of problems the meaning of meaning is a real problem but it also tends to be

solipsistic or tautological can we expect brain to give a full accounting of brain can we expect mind to

give a full accounting of mind anybody who's studied logic for 10 minutes can tell you that that's

impossible because it is tautological as it is passed before you as you look into it you have a very

strong and i believe genuine impression that this thing that you're being shown though it's no larger than

a kaiser role is somehow absolutely confounding to the principles and assumptions of this world that in

other words if i could condense this thing into my hand right now i wouldn't have to convince you i

wouldn't have to preach to you i could just show you say look at this and in the visual confrontation with

this thing it's self-evident that this is impossible matter light that they don't behave this way it's as

though you have brought back a chunk of another dimension and and then what they're saying about

these things is uh you can do this do what we are doing and then the urgency becomes almost strident they

say do what we're doing do it now and you say wow and and then you feel or i felt at any rate an upwelling

in myself like a calling forth then out of my mouth comes language or at least syntax but without

meaning some kind of glossolalia where the modality of language is preserved but the meaning is not and it's

a kind of an ecstasy it sounds like gibberish in three-dimensional space but in that space it seems to

be the key to unlocking a world made out of syntax and meaning and i you know i come before you with

all of this stuff unfinished this is not a teaching or a system or in anything it's an eyewitness account

of a hyperdimensional automobile accident or something we're not saying what the conclusions are we don't

know what the conclusions are but this is big news and when i first encountered this kind of stuff i was

in i was a young art historian at the university of california and i assumed that any motif no matter

how altra or bizarre you would be able to look at the painting folklore and sculpture of somebody on

this planet and find a a trace and it didn't it seemed as though this defeated that idea it was almost

counter the idea of the collective unconscious because it argued that you joe anybody sally somebody

can break through on your own an ordinary person to a place that verrucchio never saw michelangelo didn't

anticipate it yates didn't know blake hadn't a clue melville wasn't briefed and yet there it is you know

and this is a to me as an intellectual it was very confusing because i think as intellectuals we always

assume that progress will be built on the on the shoulders of the giants that have preceded us the

idea of something actually 100 percent brand new and unexpected is pretty daunting and and here it here

it was 30 seconds away simply by the act of ingesting this natural neurotransmitter well those of you who've

been there know exactly what i'm talking about those of you haven't been there i can't imagine how you can

even sit through this kind of thing because you know it makes the folks from the pleiades and all that other

stuff out there seem mundane by comparison the other thing is we're not talking about camping out in cornfields

night after freezing night with your eyes glued to the stars in one hope this is a no-fail method

for plunging deeper into these spiritual uh realms than the tantric yogas or the practitioners of x y or z

dare scarcely suppose it's repeatable it's on demand it does not depend upon your state of moral purity or

uh you know tantric accomplishment it's something that is our birthright as much as our sexuality our

language our eyesight our appreciation of music it's an innate human thing and you know to try and return

to the premises of your question i tried to formulate theories about what could this be well the first

impression that i had based on a reading of how weird this all was was this must be a parallel continuum

a la philip k dick and like that that just apparently over some kind of neurological energy barrier

that's all around us all the time these things are there and they are not made of matter so the laws of

physics don't apply and you know like that and then and then i entertained different possibilities and i

still entertain numerous possibilities i haven't got it figured out yet one possibility is that these

things are actually human beings from the future i mean if you take the content of the experience

seriously and say i am apparently in contact with diminutive english-speaking creatures of some sort

well then they have got to be either intelligent beings from another part of the universe or humans

from uh some extraordinarily advanced future world where human beings are now made of language and are

only two and a half feet tall so i would put it rather far in the future or and i just simply offer

this in the spirit of uh of intellectual completeness uh if you ask a shaman or uh what these things are

they don't hesitate they just say oh well those are the ancestor spirits this is what it's all about

is ancestor spirits well it takes a while for the implications of this to sink in they're talking about

dead people that's what an ancestor spirit is they're suggesting that the dearly departed do not evanesce into

sunlight or something cheerfully non-specific like that but that this actually is uh simply one level of a

cosmic system of some sort where birth and death are transitions from level to level well this is just exactly

the kind of thing that i'm intellectually set up to doubt and to feel a kind of scorn for because you know

people have been running around since time immemorial claiming this sort of thing with an incredibly

underwhelming body of evidence to back them up and yet if you try to approach the problem scientifically

i think you would agree that in terms of likelihood although operating in this realm what this means i'm

not sure but that in terms of likelihood it's more likely that these are human souls in another dimension

than that we are being contacted by friendly extraterrestrials or even that we share the earth with an invisible

race of syntactical uh tribal elf uh legions of some sort but i think this conclusion is the one that we

would tend to resist most strenuously i mean you eat very i think it's the most intellectually challenging

position to take these of the western thinking to claim that we have to reopen the question of life

after death in a serious way not the cheerful round of reincarnation that haunts some of the zanier offshoots

of eastern religion but actually say you know you are going to die and when you die you know you are going

to undergo a metamorphosis of some sort that is not particularly going to be designed to preserve your

humanness what you call your humanness or to set you on a cloud with lyre and gown for the rest of eternity

but that actually uh the greatest adventure the greatest adventures still lie ahead and these things uh

intimations of immortality are vouchsafed by these plant hallucinogens why this should be why it should be

possible to get a bring a look over the great divide i have no idea i think about these things

constantly my life is mostly questions uh my friend rupert sheldrake who some of you may know his books

he and i have talked about it he thinks that uh that that dot there is a chemistry of dying

that in the same way that there is a chemistry of giving birth there is a chemistry of dying and that

dmt parallels and anticipates this he calls it uh not a hallucinogen but a necroptic substance it

actually show anticipates the death state itself i once had the fortunate opportunity of being able to

turn a very prominent tibetan lama onto dmt a name that you would recognize although not one of the top

five but a more wizened older stranger character and i you know he did it and i said so what about it

you know these people these tibetan buddhists they have a pretty good map of the territory he said it's

the lesser lights he said you can't go further than that without breaking the thread of return he said

you know beyond this there's no returning and so you know in a very real sense it's a look over the

edge but then you know even that doesn't solve all the mysteries i mean what is it about this wish to

convey a language which is seen what's that all about is it that perhaps language has always been a gift

from the other we don't it's a little hard to picture how the kind of language i'm using right now

ever got started uh i mean notice that language is a behavior it's a behavior that's all it is it's

something it's a complex activity having to do with small mouth noises and the neurological processing of same

we must have been essentially as we are before language it's like break dancing or something like that

you're fully set up to do it and people have been for millennia but until somebody actually does it

it only exists as a formal possibility in the organism and i wonder how many of these things

there are i mean break dancing is an interesting example albeit somewhat trivial but it shows that

after five six seven thousand years of civilization you can come up with a behavior that nobody has ever seen

uh before i've i've spent a lot of time thinking about language and how what a limited tool it is

and yet how our whole world is held together by nothing more than small mouth noises and it's incredible the

entirety of global civilization is held together by small mouth noises and symbolic notations of same

which have an even more rarefied level of abstraction our separateness our notion of self and world of

self and species all rest on the carrying capacity of these small mouth noises one of the things that has

interested me some of you have heard me talk about this is you know i think good psychedelic trips

inspire a lot of homework which usually means reading in curious areas and i discovered that um octopi

cephalopods which in case you're not up on your evolutionary biology these are mollusca they're not even

vertebrates they're related to escargot and banana slugs i mean you can hardly imagine a form of life

more alien to ourselves i mean you know we broke off from the other primates three million years ago but

the invertebrates and the vertebrates separated from each other about 700 million years ago well uh an

interesting thing going on with octopi most people have heard that they can change color and most people

i think assume this means that like certain lizards and certain butterflies they camouflage themselves

against their background that's not what's going on color and texture for octopi are the um medium

of language it's you could almost say that an octopus is a naked mind because uh as the octopus goes

through certain internal changes hunger sexual need whatever uh color changes accompany these in shifts of

internal state and appear on

the surface of the octopus it is almost as though it wears its language like an overcoat it is

clothed in its own meaning well obviously in that kind of situation you have always been suspended

in an ambiance of language unlike ourselves where apparently language was invented one bright summer

day or series of bright summer days and if you have a language such as we have small mouth noises

with culturally assigned meaning in other words if I say where can I get a taxi if I don't say this to

a person who speaks English it means nothing to a Ukrainian or a Chinese octopi don't have this

problem there are not culturally localized languages there's only a language of the body the genes it's

unambiguous you see even those of us in this room if you were to check our internal dictionaries are

different we have only the assumption of one-to-one mapping of meaning I mean if I ask you where is the

restroom this is fairly ambiguous unambiguous because it deals with ordinary situations but as

soon as as soon as conversation leaves the main and well-trodden path of discourse ambiguity enters

into a tremendous degree we overlook this as a courtesy to each other I mean you almost never hear one

person say to another now would you explain to me what I just said the reason you don't hear this said very often is

because the thin illusion of communication would break down completely if we actually demanded of our

listeners that they repeat back to us the only situation in which that happens on a regular basis is the

pedagogical mode where the teacher teaches and then by test and recitation determines that the pupil has

understood but in polite discourse among adults we consider this an imposition if not an insult so somehow

these creatures are elves of language catalysts for the concrescence of cognition and I don't know if these things can be

understood after all we're embedded in the world created by our own meanings CD broad I think it was CD broad wrote a book called the

meaning of meaning of meaning or no it was fh Bradley actually I think broad's book was called the mind and its place in nature

probably these two should be read back to back just to see how positivists handle these kinds of problems the

meaning of meaning is a real problem but it also tends to be solipsistic or tautological can we expect brain to

give a full accounting of brain can we expect mind to give a full accounting of mind anybody who studied logic for 10 minutes can tell you that that's impossible

because it is tautological William Blake used to say nothing is lost nothing is lost and this seems literally to be true it seems as though you know

something once articulated a statement the

reverberations are unto the last syllable of recorded time

Somehow it's all there now when I said these things approached and spoke in English

I didn't mean to make it sound as mundane as it might sound you know

Greek religion was

was characterized by what was called the logos in the Hellenistic period and the logos was an informing voice and all the great thinkers of Hellenistic times

Plato, Socrates, Xenophon, Thucydides, all of these people were in contact with the logos it was the sine qua non of Hellenistic religion and

it was a speaking and informing voice that tells you the right way to live

well we don't know what to make of this and at a certain point in the evolution of the Western mind judging by

the writings of people who were contemporaneous with those times the logos fell silent

there was actually a date

Some of you may know the story of the fishermen

pulling their nets off the Isle of roads and they heard a voice from the sky say that great pan is dead and

And this was at the change of the eon the beginning of the age of Aquarius

It was almost as though there was something in the ancient world that has gone latent

That we can no longer touch or imagine

Gordon Wasson who discovered with his wife Valentina the mushrooms told a very interesting story

In one of his books about how in Mazatec and

the

People who are speakers of Mazatec and when they chant what the mushroom says

They have created a special form for this which goes like this

the buzz the buzz the buzz the buzz

Sir this word sir means says

It's about about about about that says that that that that that says I

Didn't know this at the time. I took mushrooms the second time and in my head

I heard the mushroom speaking in English

But adding the word says

To the end of the sentence so it was almost like you know this thing could speak in Mazatec

It could speak in English, but it always kept its cadence and its structure

the other thing about psilocybin and the DMT thing is that it it

Seems to be a catalyst for glossolalia

This is why I think it must have had something to do with the evolution of language

I mean when you take psilocybin you can fall

Spontaneously into states of glossolalia sometimes on DMT. It's almost impossible

To control it just spontaneously comes out. Yeah

Oh, what is glossolalia glossolalia well here's an example of it then I'll define it

Z ding quap maktiki pittech kveng hwadem molde rufnubuk henget

It's it's language like activity in the absence of meaning and it's a very interesting thing

Neurologically because notice that

Speech ordinary speech is this highly variable stream of data

We are set up to make these small mouth noises as a public speaker

I'm very aware of the fact that one can speak

without tiring almost longer than you can do any other major human motor activity and

But the glossolalia such as I just did it is clearly under the control of rules

but it is not there is no meaning

conventionally conceived of there, but there is syntax and I think probably that language was invented

millennia before meaning and that you could almost call glossol you could almost call language

toneless singing and

That people used to sit around the campfire and amuse each other by making funny noises as a kid

I used to do this and then it was only much much later that anything approaching linguistic

Conventionality was imposed on this and that that's a lower function the other thing. I want to say about this glossolalia thing is

You may say well you're just making it up

When I do that but really the experience I have when I do it is that I stand aside

Then this variable data stream comes out through my mouth

Well now it has to reflect something about me

It's a statement about my internal

situation in that moment and it's

Evolving and changing as rapidly as if I were saying you know I had a migraine headache last night

and I got up about four and took an aspirin and

you know I'm telling you about my situation but the glossolalia must be speaking to something about my situation or it wouldn't be possible to do it at all

Not only is something not real unless it can be said

but the count the contrapositive of that is that once something can be said it becomes almost

almost too real it displaces other possibilities I mean so we're living in a set of constructs some architectural some ideological and

There they can be very oppressive. I mean how do you get rid of the notion of linear time and space?

very easily it's it's the slow work of consensus one of the things that I feel I'm doing very consciously

in these kinds of meetings is

We're trying to launch and replicate means

You you all know this concept a meme is the smallest unit of an idea in the same way that a gene is

the smallest unit of

Organism and so these things DMT elves

Transcendental object at the end of history so far these are means and

and in the same way that genes are copied and

Spread around and that fidelity of copying is the key to genetic success

Fidelity of of meme replication is the key to communication

I mean if I give a speech on something and then you hear it and then you go out and somebody says so what did he say?

And you give a completely cock-eyed account of what has been said well, then the meme has been betrayed

But if you can actually transfer the meme to somebody else's mind and then they can copy it and pass it on then the meme

It's almost as though the ideological

Environment were like a rainforest

Or a coral reef evolution is taking place stupid means

Dumb means have short lifetimes and they disappear you know and

Means of great power are able to thrive in many intellectual and ideological niches and to make many

Marriages of convenience with other memes and so they are stabilized and passed along

Somehow we have to become hip to the fact to the power of language and instead of just willy-nilly

Creating linguistic structures

Sort of ad hoc we need to begin to consciously engineer our

Linguistic intent and then you know so far in the 20th century

This has not been a program with a very happy history because only jerks have gotten a hold of it

Nazis and people with narrow social programs that say you know we're not going to call each other mister and missus or

Hey, you we're going to call everybody's going to call each other comrade

And then this will create the notion of comrade ship which to a certain degree

It does but you know manipulating these things for political ends

I mean the you know the Jews it was okay to put Jews in ovens because the official language for talking about Jews was that they were

untermensch

Subhuman not like

Us whoever we are so once the definition had been changed people said well

It's okay to mistreat Jews you know

They're not even really people and this is this kind of thinking goes on all the time

It's called

Stereotyping and it's always is an easier substitute

It's a it's a cheap substitute for clear thinking

David Brown asked me the question what about life after death and I

I it was somewhat of a sidebar

The Buddhists at the folk level in India do say you cannot attain enlightenment unless your mother is dead

Which is a kind of an odd notion seeming to imply that she had to precede you into hyperspace

when you die

What you do is you literally as appears to happen you dissolve

And where you go is?

Forward and backward into time not like a gas released into time

But along the tracks and trails of the genetic machinery in other words you flow into your children

And you you become let well

Let's make a very simple model and say at the moment of death you become your children and your parents a

a few moments later you become your grandchildren and your grandparents you're

Spreading down it's almost as though the the thing which you were which was this focus of ego and individuality

Then it dies and it's almost as though the mountain begins to slump back into the generalized pool of

Consciousness and being that's why I have somewhat less

Less patience maybe than I should have with the idea of of

channeling and and

Come as you were parties and that sort of thing because it seems to me the key to understanding the idea of reincarnation

And past lives is that you were everybody of course

That's who you are here comes everybody

You know you weren't just that shepherd girl or that Roman Empire

Emperor or that Greek for your everybody and you can find your way into the great genetic telephone system and ring anybody's bell in history

Well, then it would be absurd to claim you were that person

That would be as absurd as claiming that anybody you could call on the telephone is who you are

No, it's that we are everyone and you know the great

turning

object in hyperspace that is the genetic I

Don't know trans-dimensional object casts off glinting reflections of this personality that

Personality and astrology has a role to play here and other things, but the bottom line is

We are all drawn of the same stuff. I think one of the most profound

Insights you can have on psychedelics and I certainly have it is that we are all

interchangeable

You know anybody could do my job and I'm pretty confident. I could do almost anybody's job

We define ourselves

Otherwise, but you know in watching the in watching the rise of my own career

It's just it's a kind of being deputized

Chosen for the job. It's just they said will him he can do it. He has the gift of gab so give him the credit line

but it could have been

Anybody our uniqueness is

Is real on one level but on another level it's fairly illusory?

It's it's sort of a coincidencia positorum you have to hold these two antithetical things in your mind at once in order to

correctly perceive

The proper level of ambiguity that's resident in reality. It ain't simple folks

Yeah

Can I just ask this question do I understand you say that to find our truer self we have to go back to the worm-like stage?

And to reach out for the pharmacological the natural pharmacological that is in the Abaddon Basin and all those plants and things

To find our true inner being, ego, whatever

Well, I don't think we have to go back as far as the worm-like stage. I think what we have to do is

We have to get out of history history as a con game run by frightened men and their obedience stooges

What we had a moment of happiness there was a moment of completion I guess I should explain my position on this

You see there have always been dominance hierarchies in primates as far back as you go clear back to squirrel monkeys

There are what are called male dominance hierarchies

Well, so then in us

This is had was interrupted by

Psilocybin use over a period of probably a couple of hundred thousand years the psilocybin

Forget that it's psychedelic for a moment. Just think of it as an

inoculation against ego and so for

200,000 years or so it was a dietary item which suppressed this normal monkey behavior and

and so then

Females were shared the sexual style was orgiastic

There were no awareness of lines of male paternity and the children belong to the group

This was not quote-unquote

Natural the natural way is for the men to dominate to control the females to the old tooth and claw

But for a couple of hundred thousand years

It was artificially interrupted by the presence of mushroom in the paleolithic human diet

Well then when because of

Climatological factors and other factors that we can discuss in another meeting the mushroom became unavailable

The old monkey's behaviors

Reemerged only about twelve thousand years ago, but in the previous

200,000 years language had been discovered fire

tool making

song a whole bunch of

a bunch of

Forward leaps had been made well then when the psilocybin was withdrawn and the patterns of male dominance

reasserted themselves in an environment where fire and language had been achieved it

Exacerbated it it made it much more nightmarish

Marish it made it much more difficult to step away from and all of history is the unhappy

story of our

essentially our withdrawal and our agony over being unable to reach this connection back into the guy and mind which when we had it

We lived in Eden we were balanced

But but it faded and history was the consequence now in the last 50 years

Information has arrived on our plate lo and behold in the final ticking of the final hour of our dilemma

That actually shows us the way back if we but have the wisdom to understand this and then the fortitude

To apply what we know one more question

You mean motivation to take psychedelics to take action

Well, I think you know that that this psychedelic community is not yet recognized or named itself as a community

We're well behind

Gays and black people and all these other my we're still trying to figure out if we are

A community and if we are a community and we have a domain of action

I think where it lies. It's not that we're all supposed to become dope dealers

It's that we're all supposed to become artists that the transformation of culture through art is the proper understanding of

What you can do with psychedelics besides blow your own mind and I really think you know

What we need to do is put the art pedal to the floor and understand that this is art

We are involved in some kind of enormous piece of performance art called Western Civilization and you know

It's been a C-minus performance so far

And they're just about to reach out with the hook and drag us off stage

Unless we begin pulling rabbits out of the hat pretty furiously art is poised for this

But art is ambivalent because the society is ambivalent

That's why meetings like this where you actually hear it said the sooner the better the clock is ticking. This is not a test

There will not be a retry

You know this is the window of opportunity between the unknown and eternity if not taken

Then the entire enterprise could be lost the whole thing from the cave paintings at Lascaux to Whitney Houston

It could all go down the drain if we don't you know act to preserve it through an act of

human cognition plus courage

William Blake used to say

nothing is lost

Nothing is lost and this seems literally to be true. It seems as though you know

Something once articulated a statement the

Reverberations are unto the last syllable of recorded time

Somehow it's all there now when I said these things approached and spoke in English

I didn't mean to make it sound as mundane as it might sound you know

Greek religion was

Characterized by what was called the logos in the Hellenistic period and the logos was an informing voice and all the great thinkers of

Hellenistic times

Plato

Socrates xenophon Thucydides all of these people

Were in contact with the logos it was the sine qua non of Hellenistic religion and it was a speaking and informing voice that tells you the right way to live

Well, we don't know what to make of this

And at a certain point in the evolution of the Western mind judging by

The writings of people who were contemporaneous with those times the logos fell silent

There was actually a date

Some of you may know the story of the fishermen

Pulling their nets off the Isle of Rhodes

And they heard a voice from the sky say that great pan is dead and

This was at the change of the eon the beginning of the age of Aquarius

It was almost as though there was something in the ancient world that has gone latent

That we can no longer touch or imagine

Gordon Wasson who discovered with his wife Valentina the mushrooms

Told a very interesting story

In one of his books about how in

Mazatekin

the

People who are speakers of Mazatekin when they chant what the mushroom says

They have created a special form for this which goes like this

the buzz the buzz the buzz the buzz the buzz

Sir this word sir means says

It's about about about about says the other data says I

Didn't know this at the time I took mushrooms the second time and in my head

I heard the mushroom speaking in English

But adding the word says

To the end of the sentence so it was almost like you know this thing could speak in Mazatek

It could speak in English, but it always kept its cadence and its structure

the other thing about psilocybin and the DMT thing is that it seems to be a

catalyst for glossolalia this is why I think it must have had something to do

with the evolution of language I mean when you take psilocybin you can fall

spontaneously into states of glossolalia sometimes on DMT it's almost

impossible to control it just spontaneously comes out yeah oh what is

glossolalia glossolalia well here's an example of it then I'll define it

Zidink what maktiki pittetsk thing what a mold a roof no book hang at a fops

it's it's language like activity in the absence of meaning and it's a very

interesting thing neurologically because notice that speech ordinary speech is this

highly variable stream of data we are set up to make these small mouth noises as a

public speaker I'm very aware of the fact that one can speak without tiring almost

longer than you can do any other major human motor activity and but the

glossolalia such as I just did it is clearly under the control of rules but it

is not there is no meaning conventionally conceived of there but there is syntax and

I think probably that language was invented millennia before meaning and that you

could almost call glossol you could almost call language toneless singing and that

people used to sit around the campfire and amuse each other by making funny

noises as a kid I used to do this and then it was only much much later that anything approaching

linguistic conventionality was imposed on this and that that's a lower function the other thing I

want to say about this glossolalia thing is you may say well you're just making it up when I do that but

really the experience I have when I do it is that I stand aside then this variable data stream comes out

through my mouth well now it has to reflect something about me it's a statement about my internal

situation in that moment and it's evolving and changing as rapidly as if I were saying you know

I had a migraine headache last night and I got up about four and took an aspirin and you know I'm telling

you about my situation but the glossolalia must be speaking to something about my situation or it

wouldn't be possible to do it at all not only is something not real unless it can be said but the

the count the contrapositive of that is that once something can be said it becomes almost too real

it displaces other possibilities I mean so we're living in a set of constructs some architectural some

some ideological and there they can be very oppressive I mean how do you get rid of the notion of linear time

and space very easily it's it's the slow work of consensus one of the things that I feel I'm doing very

consciously in these kinds of meetings is we're trying to launch and replicate means you all know this concept

a meme is the smallest unit of an idea in the same way that a gene is the smallest unit of organism and so

So these things, DMT elves, transcendental object at the end of history, so far, these

are memes.

And in the same way that genes are copied and spread around and that fidelity of copying

is the key to genetic success, fidelity of meme replication is the key to communication.

I mean, if I give a speech on something and then you hear it and then you go out and somebody

says, so what did he say?

And you give a completely cockeyed account of what has been said, well, then the meme

has been betrayed.

But if you can actually transfer the meme to somebody else's mind and then they can copy

it and pass it on, then the meme, it's almost as though the ideological environment were

like a rainforest or a coral reef.

Evolution is taking place.

Dumb memes have short lifetimes and they disappear, you know, and memes of great power are able

to thrive in many intellectual and ideological niches and to make many marriages of convenience

with other memes.

And so they are stabilized and passed along.

Now we have to become hip to the fact, to the power of language.

And instead of just willy-nilly creating linguistic structures sort of ad hoc, we need to begin to

consciously engineer our linguistic intent.

And then, you know, so far in the 20th century, this has not been a program with a very happy

history because only jerks have gotten a hold of it.

Nazis and people with narrow social programs that say, you know, we're not going to call

each other Mr. and Mrs. or hey you, we're going to call, everybody's going to call each other

comrade.

And then this will create the notion of comradeship, which to a certain degree it does.

So, you know, manipulating these things for political ends, I mean, you know, the Jews, it was okay to

put Jews in ovens because the official language for talking about Jews was that they were

unter mensch, subhuman, not like us, whoever we are.

So, once the definition had been changed, people said, well, it's okay to mistreat Jews, you know,

they're not even really people.

And this is, this kind of thinking goes on all the time.

It's called stereotyping.

And it always is an easier substitute, it's a, it's a cheap substitute for clear thinking.

David Brown asked me the question, what about life after death?

And I, it was somewhat of a side bar.

The Buddhists at the folk level in India do say you cannot attain enlightenment unless your

mother is dead, which is a kind of an odd notion, seeming to imply that she had to proceed you

into hyperspace.

When you die, what you do is you literally, as appears to happen, you dissolve.

And where you go is forward and backward into time, not like a gas released into time, but

along the tracks and trails of the genetic machinery.

In other words, you flow into your children and you, you become, let, well, let's make

a very simple model and say at the moment of death, you become your children and your parents.

A few moments later, you become your grandchildren and your grandparents.

You're spreading down.

It's almost as though the thing which you were, which was this focus of ego and individuality,

then it dies.

And it's almost as though the mountain begins to slump back into the generalized pool of consciousness

and being.

And that's why I have somewhat less patience maybe than I should have with the idea of channeling

and, and come as you were parties and that sort of thing.

Because it seems to me, the key to understanding the idea of reincarnation and past lives is that

you were everybody.

Of course, that's who you are.

Here comes everybody.

You know, you weren't just that shepherd girl or that Roman Empire, Emperor or that Greek

fellow.

You're everybody and you can find your way into the great genetic telephone system and

ring anybody's bell in history.

Well then it would be absurd to claim you were that person.

That would be as absurd as claiming that anybody you could call on the telephone is who you are.

No, it's that we are everyone and, you know, the great turning object in hyperspace that is

the genetic, I don't know, trans-dimensional object casts off glinting reflections of this

personality, that personality.

And astrology has a role to play here and other things.

But the bottom line is we are all drawn of the same stuff.

I think one of the most profound insights you can have on psychedelics, and I certainly

have it, is that we are all interchangeable.

You know, anybody could do my job and I'm pretty confident I could do almost anybody's job.

We define ourselves otherwise, but, you know, in watching the rise of my own career, it's

just, it's a kind of being deputized, chosen for the job.

It's just they said, well him, he can do it.

He has the gift of gab, so give him the credit line.

But it could have been anybody.

Our uniqueness is real on one level, but on another level, it's fairly illusory.

It's sort of a coincidencia positorum.

You have to hold these two antithetical things in your mind at once in order to correctly

perceive the proper level of ambiguity that's resident in reality.

It ain't simple, folks.

Yeah.

Can I just ask this question?

Do I understand you to say that to find our true self, we have to go back to the worm-like

stage and reach out for the pharmacological, the natural pharmacological that is in the

Abaddon Basin and all those plants and things to find our true inner being, ego, whatever?

Well, I don't think we have to go back as far as the worm-like stage.

I think what we have to do is we have to get out of history.

History is a con game run by frightened men and their obedient stooges.

We had a moment of happiness.

There was a moment of completion.

I guess I should explain my position on this.

You see, there have always been dominance hierarchies in primates.

As far back as you go, clear back to squirrel monkeys, there are what are called male dominance hierarchies.

Well, so then in us, this was interrupted by psilocybin use over a period of probably a couple of hundred thousand years.

The psilocybin forget that it's psychedelic for a moment.

Just think of it as an inoculation against ego.

And so for 200,000 years or so, it was a dietary item which suppressed this normal monkey behavior.

And so then females were shared.

The sexual style was orgiastic.

There were no awareness of lines of male paternity and the children belong to the group.

This was not quote unquote natural.

The natural way is for the men to dominate, to control the females, to the old tooth and claw.

But for a couple of hundred thousand years, it was artificially interrupted by the presence of mushroom in the paleolithic human diet.

Well, then when, because of climatological factors and other factors that we can discuss in another meeting,

the mushroom became unavailable, the old monkey behaviors reemerged only about 12,000 years ago.

But in the previous 200,000 years, language had been discovered, fire, tool making, song,

a whole bunch of forward leaps had been made.

Well, then when the psilocybin was withdrawn and the patterns of male dominance reasserted themselves

in an environment where fire and language had been achieved, it exacerbated it.

It made it much more nightmarish.

It made it much more difficult to step away from.

And all of history is the unhappy story of our, essentially our withdrawal and our agony

over being unable to reach this connection back into the Gaian mind,

which when we had it, we lived in Eden.

We were balanced.

But, but it faded and history was the consequence.

Now in the last 50 years, information has arrived on our plate.

Lo and behold, in the final ticking of the final hour of our dilemma,

that actually shows us the way back.

If we, but have the wisdom to understand this and then the fortitude to apply what we know.

One more question.

You mean motivation to take psychedelics?

To take action.

Well, I think, you know, that the psychedelic community is not yet recognized or named itself as a community.

We're well behind gays and black people and all these other minds.

We're still trying to figure out if we are a community.

And if we are a community and we have a domain of action, I think where it lies,

it's not that we're all supposed to become dope dealers.

It's that we're all supposed to become artists.

That the transformation of culture through art is the proper understanding of what you can do with psychedelics,

besides blow your own mind.

And I really think, you know, what we need to do is put the art pedal to the floor and understand that this is art.

We are involved in some kind of enormous piece of performance art called Western Civilization.

And, you know, it's been a C minus performance so far, and they're just about to reach out with the hook and drag us off stage,

unless we begin pulling rabbits out of the hat pretty furiously.

Art is poised for this, but art is ambivalent because the society is ambivalent.

That's why meetings like this, where you actually hear it said, the sooner the better.

The clock is ticking. This is not a test. There will not be a retry.

You know, this is the window of opportunity between the unknown and eternity.

If not taken, then the entire enterprise could be lost.

The whole thing from the cave paintings at Lascaux to Whitney Houston.

It could all go down the drain if we don't, you know, act to preserve it through an act of human cognition plus courage.

The rainforests themselves may eventually be saved.

Very large conservation organizations are attempting to do that.

But the medical knowledge of how to use these plants is being lost at a tremendous rate.

It will disappear in the next 30 years.

There's no question about that because these people are, the young people are not learning the shamanism.

They're moving into the cities.

And you only have to break that kind of chain in an oral tradition.

You only have to have a one generation break.

And the 50,000 years of accumulated medical information is gone.

So even in today's high tech world, 85% of all drugs sold over the counter can be traced to plants.

So if we're serious about, you know, a cure to aid, new kinds of contraception, new forms of psychoactive drugs,

then this botanical database needs to be preserved.

I think that those of us who are experienced with psilocybin are in a position now to offer answers

to one of the most perplexing questions in the entire field of biology, which is,

how did it happen that over a very brief period of time, less than 2 million years,

the brain size of our species doubled?

And in doubling became the fastest transformation of a major organ ever recorded in the history of the evolution of life.

This is according to Lumsden, who's a very respected evolutionary biologist.

This is a truly perplexing problem for evolution.

It would be perplexing were it to occur anywhere in the animal phylogeny.

But what's of particular embarrassment here is that it occurs in the phylogeny of the animal who invented the theory of evolution.

So, you know, it's particularly embarrassing.

If we can't account for our own evolution, what depth and breadth has the theory when applied to the rest of nature?

And, you know, one notion has been that you're looking for a transitional skeleton or intermediate forms.

This is now been given up.

And by looking at this problem, I have sort of been able to, I think, generate and let's call it an idea, a myth, a fantasy, an explanation for our predicament.

And it goes very briefly something like this.

All primates have what are called dominance hierarchies, male dominance hierarchies.

This goes clear back into very primitive primates like squirrel monkeys.

And it is true of us as we sit here in this room.

We also have dominance hierarchies, male dominance hierarchies.

This is why, you know, what the squawk is in the gender issue is that men have been running everything for a long, long time.

But I maintain that there was a period in the history of the primates when male dominance hierarchies were interrupted.

And they were interrupted by the presence of an unusual element in the food supply.

And this element in the food supply was psilocybin.

And it acted as a kind of inoculation or unconscious vaccination against the formation of ego.

And that at that moment with ego, male dominance, tendency to male dominance chemically suppressed by mushrooms in the diet,

all the qualities that we take to be most human and most ennobling in ourselves emerged.

Language, loyalty, community, courage, love, devotion, self-sacrifice, planning.

All of these things which distinguish us from the rest of animal nature, I maintain occurred under the catalytic influence of an exogenous neurotransmitter in the environment

that was having profound effects on a monkey that was exploring a new environment and a new dietary habit.

And here's the notion.

Our remote ancestors reached a kind of evolutionary climactic stability in the arboreal forests of tropical Africa.

And like most animal species that occupies successfully occupies a niche of some sort,

we would have stayed that way for millions of years at equilibrium,

happily eating fruit and occasionally hurling shit at each other as we conducted ourselves through the forested treetops.

And thought would never have entered into the matter.

However, the plot thickened about three million years ago,

when suddenly and for reasons that are hidden in the heart of the planet itself,

the planet began to dry and the African continent became subject to waves of drought and desiccation.

The tropical rainforests which covered Africa began to retreat and be intercut with grasslands.

And in these grasslands, a very rich flora, I mean a very rich fauna of animal life developed.

New kinds of animals, grass-eating, herding animals, ungulate animals, cows, bison, various forms of antelopes, so forth and so on.

Meanwhile, looking, turning the camera's eye on our remote human ancestors,

things are getting tougher up in the treetops.

Less fruit, less habitat in which to forage.

And whenever an animal gets under dietary pressure, it does what any sensible creature would do.

It begins to experiment with new food.

It begins to test food in the environment.

Now, the reason animals don't ordinarily do this is because foods also contain toxins.

And toxins sometimes are mutagenic.

So the reason butterflies and birds and all kinds of animals specialize in their diets,

it's a strategy to avoid mutation-causing chemicals.

Well, so then what happens if you put an animal population under pressure for food,

and it starts experimenting with new forms of food?

It begins having a higher incidence of mutation.

And that mutation meets the selective forces of natural selection present in the environment.

And lo and behold, you get sudden episodes of evolutionary advance.

And I maintain that this is what happened to us on many levels.

I mean, we are a kind of monkey.

But if you set us next to our nearest relative, there are a lot of things about us that are different.

Our hairlessness, the proportion of our skull to the rest of our body is a fetal ratio compared to other primates.

Well, among the new foods encountered by these now ground-foraging proto-ancestors of ours

were mushrooms growing in the dung of wild cattle in this grassland environment.

Now, the astonishing thing about psilocybin in small doses,

and this was secured by research done by Roland Fisher in the late 50s, early 60s,

is that in very small doses, doses so small that you don't feel buzzed or loaded or anything.

In fact, you don't notice it.

Visual acuity increases.

You can give somebody five milligrams of psilocybin,

and an hour later give them a standard optometric test,

and they will do better than if they hadn't taken the psilocybin.

This is because edge detection is sensitized.

Well, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out if there's a food in the environment

of a hunting and gathering animal that conveys increased visual acuity,

it's the equivalent of chemical binoculars,

then those animals which accept that food as an item in their diet

are going to have greater hunting success than those individuals that do not.

And greater hunting success means greater success at feeding your offspring.

And that means that there would be an outbreeding of the non-psilocybin using members of the population.

In other words, natural selection would then favor those animals using,

admitting the mushroom into their diet.

So that little chink in the armor, that little toehold is sufficient for the long march toward the stars,

which is taking place in our species to begin.

The next step is if you take slightly more psilocybin,

you experience what's called arousal.

And arousal means a kind of general restlessness,

an inability to sit still, a roving and wired kind of attention.

And in highly sexed animals like primates,

it also means sexual arousal and in the male sustained erection.

A second factor promoting outbreeding of the non-psilocybin using members of the population.

In other words, you see, it was promoting what anthropologists straight-facedly call

more successful copulations.

And you don't have to be straight-faced, however.

So this is the second step.

And I believe that the sexual style of these psilocybin aroused early ancestors of ours

was probably orgiastic.

This seems reasonable from looking at human styles on the earth today.

And I suspect that probably an orgiastic religious style based on the worship

of a great horned goddess who was honored at the new and full moon

became a religious style that was set in place for 10 or 15,000 years.

This is what was going on.

Well, now psilocybin on its own,

and even more so in combination with a social style that included orgy,

will have the consequences of dissolving boundaries.

You know, this is what the orgiastic style does.

It erodes the concept of me and still more the concept of my women,

my children, my tools, my territory, my hunting ground.

If you have an orgiastic style, the first important consequence is that men

cannot trace lines of male paternity.

There is no concept for a man of my children.

There is only the concept of our children, the tribe, the group,

and loyalty is transferred in that direction.

The suppression of ego was very real.

In, as I said earlier, in the earlier primate forms,

ego, male dominance, was very strong.

But it was as though this item in the diet was suppressing this previous rigid male hierarchy.

And into the void created by the dissolving of the social glue of these primates,

there flowed a whole bunch of new behaviors.

behaviors such as pair bonding based on loyalty and mutuality of need fulfillment,

cooperation, appropriate role assignment, so forth and so on.

In other words, it got loose.

It began to work.

You see, every time there was a glaciation, and there have been nine in the last million years or so,

every time there is a glaciation, species, including primates, get locked in to islanded areas.

Well then, when the ice melts, these previously islanded populations flow together and exchange genes.

And there were several waves of human migration out of Africa and into the Middle East.

But I maintain, based on the archaeological evidence,

that only the last wave of migration out of Africa,

which began only 20,000 years ago,

were the people, anything other than hunter-gatherers,

always before they were just hunter-gatherers.

But this last time, in the intervening glacial period,

they had learned to domesticate cattle in Africa.

And it was almost as though the human population was finding its way toward the cattle.

And of course, in the dung of the cattle was the mushroom.

So this great horned mother goddess that appears at the dawn of history

of history is a hypostatization of the power of cattle in the human imagination.

Now, these behaviors that were developed out of this encounter with psilocybin

also involved religion at higher doses of psilocybin.

You know, remember, at very low doses, increased visual acuity.

Mid-range doses, orgiastic sexual activity and ego dissolution.

At still higher doses, the revelation of a religious tremendum so bizarre and unnerving

that even today, we, with Husserl and all the rest of it under our belts,

can barely face it.

In other words, a mystery which for all of our sophistication,

the breadth and measure of it can hardly be taken.

And that laid the basis for a sense of religio, a sense of ritual,

a sense of a relationship to a tremendum.

And I don't, I don't want to present this psilocybin intoxication entirely

as if it were simply ameliorating the earlier evolutionary programming

in the primates.

It was doing that, but it was doing something else as well.

Because this mystery at the center of the psilocybin intoxication

is not simply the contents of your unconscious mind or unfulfilled fantasy as Freud thought.

Or it is, in fact, a contact with a Gaian intelligence of some sort.

And if you're a rationalist as I once was on some long forgotten world,

this is an incredibly challenging notion.

that what you're getting into is actually some kind of super mind,

some kind of organism that is, you know,

apparently in the atmosphere, in the water, in the plants, in the land.

It's hard to say where it is or what it is

because it was not designed for human apprehension.

It has its own ding on seish, its own thing in itself.

It's, uh...

It's like a god for any century of human

Description of it except the 20th in which we have enough knowledge about the ecosystem to say well

Maybe it's not as Milton said the god who hung the stars like lamps in heaven

It isn't that god, but it's the god of the oceans and the jungles and the ice caps and the rivers and the glaciers

And the great schools of fish and the deserts, and it's the goddess of the earth

It's the mind of organic life on this planet, and I believe that we were we were its chosen

vessel of

Manifestation in a certain domain and this is what the Edenic myth is about the nostalgia

For paradise that haunts our species is a memory of this time

This golden era that ended as recently, you know as 10,000 years ago. I mean

everything that we call history is a product of the

traumatic

break in our symbiotic relationship to the earth

occasioned by

The the loss of the mushroom religion

which was the or

religion and

You know an obvious question that anyone who's gotten this far would ask is well if it was so wonderful

Why was it lost well?

It was lost

Because the same dynamics which created it which were the progress which was the progressive drying of the African continent

those forces

Accelerated and continued and where there had been Edenic grassland and vast herds and endless supplies of mushrooms

There became desert there became dry land scrub the retreating water holes

fewer and fewer mushrooms the mushroom festivals which had been at the new and full moon

Became fewer in number the mushroom supply dwindled

Special classes of people had to be appointed who would be the mushroom users

Special times of the year had to be appointed when the mushrooms could be taken

Special places in the rain shadow of mountains and near water holes

Became the only places where the mushrooms could be found and at that point

And these these are processes which took millennia to occur at that point there became an anxiety and concern to preserve the mushrooms

so that in abundant times they could be gathered for times when they were scarce and

the

Strategy that would have naturally been hit upon would be to use honey as a

As a preservative in a world without refrigeration

Honey is an antiseptic medium and that caramelizes around

Fruits and like hummingbird tongues and stuff like that you're always hearing Romans eight hummingbird tongues in honey

That's why because it was a preservative problem is

Honey itself has a perverse and mercurial nature and can change into a

Psychoactive drug it can change into mead which is a form of alcohol

It can ferment and become a kind of proto beer well

In the in what I develop in my book food of the gods is the idea that each drug

carries

baggage

That we are generally not aware of each drug promotes certain values and suppresses others

so if psilocybin

suppressed ego male paternity and promoted

sexual

polymorphically perverse behavior then what and

Consequent diminishing of ego then what mead

fermented honey promotes is

Is the classic things always promoted by alcohol in any form one a false sense of verbal facility

In the insidious combination with a lowering of sensitivity to social cueing?

You know you can see this in any singles bar on a crowded Saturday night people drink because it they think it makes them clever and then

Able to ignore social cues from those around them

They boorishly proceed with their agenda which usually involves getting laid or something and

You know I think that there was probably a thousand years in European civilization

When very few people experience sex without being bombed because that was how people

Steal themselves for the experience, you know

You know it was recommended to give distilled alcohol to soldiers on the brink of battle when it was first invented because it fortified them well

well

as the mushrooms faded these

Behaviors that had been previously well established in primates of male dominance and ego returned

So that at the very dawn of human history, you know, let's say

6,000 B.C. Or so you get

In the absence of the psilocybin the disease of ego

Reemerges it's been suppressed for 50,000 years now. It spreads through the population like wildfire and you get urbanization

agriculture agriculture leads to surplus

surplus

Surplus means an end to set to nomadic existence you become sedentary you build grain towers

You fill these towers with grain then you have to defend them against the hungry people from the other tribe

So you get classes?

Somebody has to coordinate the defense of this grain towers suddenly you have generals

hierarchy male dominance

warfare

classism

You name it, you know, and the and the phonetic alphabet and all the rest of it is not far behind

It's the fall into history and we are the unhappy inheritors of this situation

and

our you know one of the things that is so unique about us is our

Fascination with drugs

That of you know, you know that the elephants will break into compounds to get it rotting papayas and butterflies go for sugared rum and this and that

But human beings are incredible

the rainforests themselves may eventually be saved

Very large conservation organizations are attempting to do that

But the medical knowledge of how to use these plants is being lost at a tremendous rate it will disappear in the next 30 years

There's no question about that because these people are the young people are not learning the shamanism

They're moving into the cities and

and

and you only have to break that kind of chain in an oral tradition

You only have to have a one generation break and the

50,000 years of accumulated medical information is gone so

And even in today's high-tech world 85% of all drugs sold over the counter

Can be traced to plants so if we're serious about you know a cure to aid

new kinds of contraception

New forms of psychoactive drugs then the this botanical database needs to be preserved

I think that those of us who are experienced with psilocybin are in a position now to offer

Answers to one of the most perplexing questions in the entire field of biology

Which is how did it happen that over a very brief period of time less than two million years?

the brain size of our species doubled and

and in doubling became the

fastest

Transformation of a major organ ever recorded in the history of the evolution of life

This is according to Lumsden who's a very

Respected evolutionary biologist. This is a truly

Perplexing problem for evolution it would be perplexing

Were it to occur anywhere in the animal phylogeny, but what's of particular

Embarrassment here is that it occurs in the phylogeny of the animal who invented the theory of evolution

so

You know it's it's particularly embarrassing if we can't account for our own evolution

evolution what depth and breadth has the theory when applied to the rest of nature and

you know one notion has been that you're looking for a transitional skeleton or

Intermediate forms this is now been given up and

By looking at this problem. I have sort of

been able to I think

Generate and let's call it an idea a myth the fantasy an

Explanation for our predicament and it goes very briefly something like this

All all primates have what are called dominance hierarchies

male dominance hierarchies this goes clear back into very primitive primates like squirrel monkeys

And it is true of us as we sit here in this room

We also have dominance hierarchies male dominance hierarchies. This is why

you know

What the squawk is in the gender issue is that men have been running everything for a long long time

But I maintain

That there was a period in the history of the primates when male dominance hierarchies

Were interrupted and they were interrupted by the presence of an unusual element in the food supply and

this element in the food supply was psilocybin and

it acted as a kind of inoculation or

unconscious

vaccination against the formation of ego and

And that at that moment with a

Ego male dot tendency to male dominance chemically suppressed

By mushrooms in the diet all the qualities that we take to be most

Human and most ennobling in ourselves

Emerged

Language

Loyalty

Community

Courage

Love

Devotion

Self-sacrifice

Planning

All of these things which distinguish us from the rest of animal nature

I maintain occurred under the catalytic influence of an exogenous

Neurotransmitter in the environment that was having profound

Effects on a monkey that was exploring a new environment and a new dietary habit and here's the notion

Our remote ancestors reached a kind of evolutionary climactic stability in the arboreal

Forests of tropical Africa and like most animal species that occupies successfully occupies a niche of some sort

We would have stayed that way for millions of years at equilibrium

happily eating fruit and occasionally hurling shit at each other as we conducted ourselves through the forested treetops and

Thought would never have entered into the matter

However the plot thickened about three million years ago when suddenly and for reasons that are hidden in the heart of the planet itself

The planet began to dry and the African continent became subject to waves of drought and desiccation

The the tropical rainforests which covered Africa began to retreat and be intercut with grasslands and in these grasslands a very rich flora

I mean a very rich fauna of animal life developed new kinds of animals grass-eating

Herding animals ungulate animals

Ungulate animals cows bison various forms of antelopes so forth and so on

Meanwhile looking turning the cameras eye on our remote human ancestors

Things are getting tougher up in the treetops

Less fruit less habitat in which to forage and

To forage and

Whenever an animal gets under dietary pressure it does what any sensible creature would do

It begins to experiment with new food

It begins to test food in the environment

Now the reason animals don't ordinarily do this

Is because foods also contain toxins

Toxins and toxins

Sometimes are mutagenic

So the reason butterflies and birds and all kinds of animals specialize in their diets

It's a strategy to avoid mutation causing chemicals

Well, so then what happens if you put an animal population under pressure

For food and it starts experimenting with new forms of food

It begins having a higher incidence of mutation

And that mutation meets the selective forces of natural selection present in the environment

And lo and behold you get sudden episodes of evolutionary advance

And I maintain that this is what happened to us on many levels

I mean we are a kind of monkey

But if you set us next to our nearest relative

There are a lot of things about us that are different

Our hairlessness

Our the proportion of our skull to the rest of our body

Is a fetal ratio compared to other primates

Well among the new foods encountered by these now ground foraging proto ancestors of ours

Were mushrooms growing in the dung of wild cattle in this grassland environment

Now the astonishing thing about psilocybin in small doses

And this was secured by research done by roland fisher in the late 50s early 60s

Is that in very small doses doses doses so small that you don't feel buzzed or loaded or anything in fact you don't notice it

Visual acuity increases

You can give somebody five milligrams of psilocybin

And an hour later give them a standard

Optometric test and they will do better than if they hadn't taken the psilocybin

This is because edge detection is sensitized

Well you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out if there's a food in the environment

Of a hunting and gathering animal that conveys increased visual acuity

It's the equivalent of chemical binoculars

Then those animals which accept that food as an item in their diet

Are going to have greater hunting success than those individuals that do not

And greater hunting success means greater success at feeding your offspring

And that means that there would be an outbreeding of the non psilocybin using members of the population

In other words natural selection would then favor those animals using admitting the mushroom into their diet

So that little chink in the armor that little toehold is sufficient for the long march toward the stars which is taking place in our species to begin

The next step is if you take slightly more psilocybin

You experience what's called arousal

And arousal means a kind of general restlessness

An inability to sit still

A roving and wired kind of attention

And in highly sexed animals like primates

It also means sexual arousal and in the male sustained erection

A second factor

Promoting outbreeding of the non psilocybin using members of the population

In other words you see it was promoting what anthropologists straight-facedly call more successful copulations

And you don't have to be straight-faced however

So this is the second step

And I believe that the sexual style of these psilocybin aroused early ancestors of ours was probably orgiastic

This seems reasonable from looking at human styles on the earth today

And I suspect that probably an orgiastic religious style based on the worship of a great horned goddess

Who was honored at the new and full moon?

Became a religious style that was set in place for ten or fifteen thousand years

This is what was going on

Well now psilocybin on its own

And even more so in combination with a social style that included orgy

Will have the consequences of dissolving boundaries

You know this is what the orgiastic style does it erodes the concept of me

And still more the concept of my women

My children my tools my territory my hunting ground

If you have an orgiastic style

The first important consequence is that men cannot trace lines of male paternity

There are there is no concept for a man of my children

There is only the concept of our children

The tribe the group and loyalty is transferred in that direction

The suppression of ego was very real

In as I said earlier in the earlier primate forms

Ego male dominance was very strong

But it was as though this item in the diet

Was suppressing this previous rigid male hierarchy

Male hierarchy and into the void created by the dissolving of the social glue of these primates

There flowed a whole bunch of new behaviors

Behaviors such as

Pair bonding based on loyalty and mutuality of need fulfillment

Cooperation

Appropriate role assignment

So forth and so on

In other words it got loose it began to work

You see every time there was a glaciation

And there have been nine in the last million years or so

Every time there is a glaciation

Species including primates get locked in to islanded areas

Well then when the ice melts

These previously islanded populations flow together and exchange genes

And there were several waves of human migration

Out of Africa and into the Middle East

But I maintain on based on the archaeological evidence

That only the last wave of migration out of Africa

Which began only 20,000 years ago

Were the people anything other than hunter-gatherers

Always before they were just hunter-gatherers

But this last time in the intervening glacial period

They had learned to domesticate cattle in Africa

And it was almost as though the human population

Was finding its way toward the cattle

And of course in the dung of the cattle was the mushroom

So this great horned mother goddess that appears at the dawn of history

Is a hypostatization of the power of cattle in the human imagination

Now these behaviors that were developed out of this encounter with psilocybin

Also involved religion at higher doses of psilocybin

You know remember at very low doses increased visual acuity

Mid-range doses orgiastic sexual activity and ego dissolution

At still higher doses the revelation of a religious tremendum

So bizarre and unnerving that even today

We with Husserl and all the rest of it under our belts

Can barely face it

In other words a mystery which for all of our sophistication

The breadth and measure of it can hardly be taken

And that laid the basis for a sense of religio

A sense of ritual

A sense of a relationship to a tremendum

And I don't I don't want to present this psilocybin intoxication

Entirely as if it were simply ameliorating the earlier evolutionary programming in the primates

It was doing that but it was doing something else as well

Because this mystery at the center of the psilocybin intoxication

Intoxication is not simply the contents of your unconscious mind

Or unfulfilled fantasy as Freud thought

Or it is in fact a contact with a guy in intelligence of some sort

And if you're a rationalist as I once was on some long-forgotten world

It this is an incredibly challenging notion

That what you're getting into is actually some kind of super mind

Some kind of super mind some kind of organism

That is you know apparently in the atmosphere in the water in the plants in the land

It's hard to say where it is or what it is because it was not designed for human apprehension

It has its own ding on seas its own thing in itself

It's like a god for any century of human description of it except the twentieth

In which we have enough knowledge about the ecosystem to say

Well, maybe it's not as Milton said the god who hung the stars like lamps in heaven

It isn't that god

But it's the god of the oceans and the jungles and the ice caps and the rivers and the glaciers and the great schools of fish

And the deserts and it's the goddess of the earth

It's the mind of organic life on this planet

And I believe that we were we were its chosen

Vessel of

Manifestation

In a certain domain

And this is what the Edenic myth is about

The nostalgia for paradise that haunts our species

Is a memory of this time

This golden era that ended as recently you know as 10,000 years ago

I mean everything that we call history

Is a product of the traumatic break

In our symbiotic relationship to the earth

occasioned by

The loss of the mushroom religion

Which was the Ur religion

And you know an obvious question that anyone who's gotten this far would ask is

Well, if it was so wonderful, why was it lost?

Well, it was lost

Because the same dynamics which created it

Which were the progress which was the progressive drying of the African continent

Those forces

Accelerated and continued and where there had been Edenic grassland and vast herds and endless supplies of mushrooms

There became desert

There became dry land scrub retreating water holes

Fewer and fewer mushrooms

The mushroom festivals which had been at the new and full moon

Became fewer in number

The mushroom supply dwindled

Special classes of people had to be appointed who would be the mushroom users

Special times of the year had to be appointed when the mushrooms could be taken

Special places in the rain shadow of mountains and near water holes

Became the only places where the mushrooms could be found

And at that point

And these these are processes which took millennia to occur

At that point there became anxiety and concern to preserve the mushrooms

So that in abundant times they could be gathered for times when they were scarce

And the strategy that would have naturally been hit upon

Would be to use honey as a preservative

In a world without refrigeration

Honey is an antiseptic medium

And that caramelizes around

Fruits and like hummingbird tongues and stuff like that

You're always hearing Romans eight hummingbird tongues in honey

That's why because it was a preservative

Problem is

Honey itself

Has a perverse and mercurial nature

And can change into a psychoactive drug

It can change into mead

Which is a form of alcohol

It can ferment and become a kind of proto-beer

Well in the in what I develop in my book

Food of the Gods is the idea that each drug

Carries baggage that we are generally not aware of

Each drug promotes certain values and suppresses others

So if psilocybin suppressed ego male paternity

And promoted sexual polymorphically perverse behavior

Then what and consequent diminishing of ego

Then what mead fermented honey promotes

Is the classic things always promoted by alcohol in any form

One a false sense of verbal facility

In the insidious combination with a lowering of sensitivity to social cueing

You know you can see this in any singles bar on a crowded Saturday night

People drink because it they think it makes them clever

And then able to ignore social cues from those around them

They boorishly proceed with their agenda

Which usually involves getting laid or something

And you know I think that there was probably a thousand years in European civilization

When very few people experience

sex without being bombed, because that

was how people steeled themselves for the experience.

It was recommended to give distilled alcohol

to soldiers on the brink of battle

when it was first invented, because it fortified them.

Well, as the mushrooms faded, these behaviors that

had been previously well-established in primates

of male dominance and ego returned.

So that at the very dawn of human history,

let's say 6,000 BC or so, you get,

in the absence of the psilocybin, the disease of ego reemerges.

It's been suppressed for 50,000 years.

And now it spreads through the population like wildfire.

And you get urbanization, agriculture.

Agriculture leads to surplus.

Surplus means an end to nomadic existence.

You become sedentary.

You build grain towers.

You fill these towers with grain.

Then you have to defend them against the hungry people

from the other tribe.

So you get classes.

Somebody has to coordinate the defense of this grain tower.

Suddenly you have generals, hierarchy, male dominance,

warfare, classism, sexism, you name it.

And the phonetic alphabet and all the rest of it

is not far behind.

It's the fall into history.

And we are the unhappy inheritors of this situation.

And one of the things that is so unique about us

is our fascination with drugs.

That elephants will break into compounds

to get at rotting papayas.

And butterflies go for sugared rum and this and that.

But human beings are incredible.

And human beings addict to approximately 20 or 30 substances

very tight physiological addictions.

And then there's all our ideological addictions to Marxism,

to capitalism, to the Republican Party, you name it.

And then we have behavioral addictions of all sorts.

Somebody gets up in the morning and throws open their front door.

And if the Times isn't lying rolled at their feet

with a red rubber band around it, they go into shock.

Because an addiction is being interrupted.

The fix, which was supposed to arrive on time, has been delayed.

And now this person stomps back into their house, menace to wife and child,

because the newspaper didn't arrive on time.

So this curious tendency of our species to addict, I think,

is because, you know, if a person is an addictive type,

then people say, well, they probably were abused in childhood.

And this is the consequence of some kind of childhood trauma.

Well, I would submit to you that we exhibit this pathology.

We appear to be the inheritors of some kind of dysfunctional relationship.

And I maintain that it was torn from us at the birth of mind

when we were forced out of the African Eden and into, you know,

a much drier, harsher Middle Eastern climate,

where we then had to toil in the veil of sorrows.

Well, now, what is the point of this?

Or is this just some revisioning of archaeology, some egghead game?

Or what is the point?

Well, the point is that the consequences of this dysfunctional behavior

stemming from ego and the dominance hierarchy in our behavior

has ruined our planet, toxified the air and water,

allowed our population to soar beyond the carrying capacity,

poisoned our lives with propaganda,

and made us each feel guilty, powerless, and doomed.

I mean, this is the major riff being run in the society at large,

is that we're doomed.

We've looted the planet, we've destroyed our children's future,

we have the ethics of rats, and now we're going to go down the tube.

Well, I say, before we despair completely and just toss in the towel,

we need to make one last try at escaping our demonic other,

and that the way to do it is through, and this leads me by a Viconian recurso,

back to the archaic revival.

We need to reach back into time and attempt to understand what happened to us

and how we fell into history and how its institutions have served us badly

and diminished and degraded our humanness,

and then we need to begin a fundamental reconstruction of human institutions

with an eye toward creating a viable, balanced, nature-honoring,

human-honoring set of institutions.

So does this mean I advocate in a world of epidemic diseases

that we return to orgies on every new and full moon?

I don't think so.

It's hardly possible.

But what it does mean is that the tool which lay behind all these changes,

which was the ego-dissolving power of psilocybin,

needs to be looked at very carefully.

We need to examine the possibility that we could re-engineer ourselves

so that we could emotionally connect with the consequences

of what we have been doing to ourselves and the planet.

I mean, when people take psychedelics, this is what they realize.

They lose the hold on their little world.

You know, they're saving money for a Mercedes or breast implants or some damn thing.

You know, then you take one of these things and then you get the big picture.

And then you realize just where that Mercedes lies in, you know,

the long march to the stars.

In other words, we see this in the rainforest cultures today.

They have no high level of material culture.

And yet it's not because they're not interested in beauty or poetry.

It's that they simply live in a much more mental world than we do.

The peculiar obsession of the Western mind is its demonic relationship to matter.

That we don't believe anything is real unless it's made of stuff.

And, you know, any idea, any notion has to somehow be concretized.

This is a kind of neurotic response in my opinion.

I mean, the cultures with those civilizations with no material culture whatsoever

are in a much more dynamic relationship to nature.

It's our obsession with stuff that is pushing us toward Armageddon.

I mean, we seriously propose to bring every man, woman, and child on earth

to the level of the life standard roughly approximating that of the average dweller of this island.

Well, I've got news for you.

There isn't enough metal, glass, plastic, and petroleum in the planet to do that.

And, in fact, it's causing the toxification of our world.

Unfortunately, we live under a social system that is stuff-obsessed.

We must have money in order to get things.

And the number of things around that they're telling you you need

is beyond your ever being able to satisfy yourself.

We have been told that what is within is nothing, you know,

and that all meaning lies in the exterior world.

So only science has meaning.

Only property has meaning.

And, in fact, the felt presence of immediate experience is the only thing you will ever truly possess.

The felt presence of immediate experience.

It's the quality of that that determines whether you're a happy or unhappy person.

And you can be dying of intestinal parasites in some hut in the Amazon.

And if your felt quality of immediate experience is superior,

then you're superior to the guy who's being chauffeured around in an air-conditioned limousine

in some urban center somewhere.

We, our whole cultural delivery system denies this, you know.

So we have the concept of entertainment and of drugs.

I mean, to my mind, television is a far more insidious drug than heroin

and that they're very comparable.

They're cousins.

The difference between heroin and television is that at least on heroin,

you can think your own thoughts.

On television, they don't even give you the option to do that, you know.

You imbibe a manufactured data stream,

the main purpose of which is to introduce you to the cosmetically enhanced surfaces

of certain products, which you don't need.

The average American watches six hours of TV a day.

This means that millions and millions of people are being maintained

in a semi-larval stage.

I mean, we might as well store them in enormous underground banks somewhere.

And someday we may.

I mean, this society is hard enough to manage.

What if all these people unplugged themselves

and began running around making demands

on the political institutions and the infrastructure?

Then we'd really have a problem.

So better they should stay in the suburbs.

People magazine is delivered.

The telly is there.

They trouble no one.

But they do consume.

There is no mundane future.

I mean, if we had the chairman of the World Bank

and those people here,

they draw curves that will stand your hair on end.

They show you that the world population,

the extraction of petroleum,

the rise of poverty,

the poisoning of the atmosphere,

the accumulation of toxins in the food chain.

You draw all these curves

and you discover that sometime between the year 2000 and 2040,

life as we know it becomes absolutely impossible

on the surface of this planet.

That's what the sober, unstoned people say.

So then the rest of us are supposed to come to terms with this in some sense.

And you can either despair and say,

well, then we're just, you know,

the momentum of a thousand years of chuckle-headedness

is just going to slam us into the wall of planetary limitation

at a speed of about 5,000 miles an hour.

Or we have to sort through our toolkit

and find the right wrench

to get this sinking submarine back up to the surface.

Let's disarm Captain Nemo and his friends

and put the people who want to go into the lifeboats

into the lifeboats,

and then these clowns can do any damn thing they want to.

Well, when you sort through the cultural toolkit,

trying to find the magic key,

it is hallucinogenic plants.

As far as I can tell,

I mean, I'm just one guy,

but I read widely, I traveled widely,

I've been around the block,

and my impression is

that this is a tremendous long shot,

but it's the only plan around.

Nobody else has any other plan.

What are you supposed to do?

Wait for the friendly space brothers

to come and pull your chestnuts out of the fire?

I just don't get,

I'm underwhelmed by the evidence

that that's about to occur.

Maybe it's about to occur.

I don't regard myself as having an answer.

I'm more like have a clue.

I sort it through,

just as I assume you are doing,

trying to figure out,

taking seriously what Alan Watts

and Joe Campbell

and all those people,

Jung,

you know,

trying to figure out

what are these people talking about?

Is it just abstract?

Can it ever be reached?

And I sat at the feet

of various rishis,

roshis,

geishis,

and gurus.

I swept up around the ashram

and so forth and so on.

And, you know,

these people just don't have the moxie.

I mean,

maybe they've got something,

but we don't have a thousand years

to unravel this thing.

It is a sinking submarine.

Chatter is now out of bounds.

Plato said,

time is the moving image of eternity.

And I,

my model for these psychedelics

is,

if you push me,

ultimately mathematical.

I mean,

I think that what,

that when we say

we dissolve a boundary,

when we say that the psilocybin

dissolves all boundaries,

another way of putting that

is to say

that we rise

to a higher dimension

where what were boundaries

now have been erased.

And I mean another dimension

in a very mathematical

and formal sense.

And there is a dimension

from which the past,

the present,

and the future

are equally discernible.

And you go into that place.

Shamanism,

one,

a good definition of shamanism,

a psychedelic definition is,

a shaman

is somebody

who has seen the end.

That's all.

And if you've seen the end,

then you come back

and take your place

in the play

with an entirely different attitude.

In the mountains

of the Sierra Mazateca

of central Mexico,

there are Mixtec

and Mazatec Indians,

the only place in the world

where living mushroom cults

with ancient roots

still exist.

The mushrooms

were discovered

in 1953

by Gordon

and Valentina Wasson

because they went

to these villages

and uncovered this thing.

People thought

it had been wiped out

with the Spanish conquest,

but it hadn't.

It had just retreated

into the Oaxacan interior

and been kept alive.

One way that I think

about these aboriginal peoples

is that

they kept the secret

while we descended

into history.

They stayed at home

and kept the old,

old secrets

and we descended

into matter.

We made a kind

of pilgrimage

and we call it

human history.

Now it's over.

Now we have to take

what we've learned

from this demonic pilgrimage

into the domain

of the material

and use it

to save the planet,

to care for the planet.

The only justification

for history

is if we use

what we've learned

to care for life

on the planet

and we may end up

using thermonuclear weapons

to destroy

incoming space junk

that imperils

the ecology

of the planet.

There may be tasks

for which only

high technology

is adequate.

That, you know,

if an asteroid

is going to strike

the earth

you don't want

to be a rainforest

shaman

in that situation.

You want to be

in command

of intercontinental

ballistic missiles

with high lift capability

that can take

a 50 megaton weapon

out there

and blow this thing

to smithereens.

I see our

bodhisattvic obligation

as a biological

obligation

that we are to care

for the earth.

After all,

the earth cared

for us

and we're like

scabies

or something,

you know.

I mean,

it can't be

very much fun

for a planet

to have a species

on it

which is always

extracting petroleum

and spreading plutonium

around

and dumping junk

into the oceans

and the atmosphere.

It just, you know,

my God,

what is this?

It's a raging

viral infection

of some sort

and yet

we may be

the means

to a technology

that would actually

then give us

a destiny,

save history

from just being

madness,

century after

century

of rape

and pogrom

and just,

you know,

the horror

that it is.

I'd like to redeem that.

I'm like

Stephan Dedalus.

I'd like to awaken

from the nightmare.

Marsiliad once

made a wonderful

statement.

He said

he was comparing

our culture

to a dying person

and he said

in the same way

that a dying person

sees their whole history

flash before their eyes,

a dying culture

will frantically

publish everything

in one last

final spasm

of fear.

Every Egyptian text,

every Tibetan text,

every Hopi prophecy,

everything will be

published, published,

published

because they're looking

for answers.

Somewhere it has to be.

Did the Tibetans

know it?

Did the Witoto know it?

Did the Inuit know it?

Who knows it?

We've got to find out.

And eventually

they'll get around

to saying,

well now what about

these psychedelic people?

We've been jailing them

and hounding them

for years.

They claim they have

an answer.

And they'll say,

you know,

get them.

Get them on the line.

We'll talk to anybody

at this point.

Bad times lie ahead.

Things are going

to get worse

before they get better.

But they're going

to get better.

The problem,

as I see it,

with the West

is in a search

for philosophical economy,

of which there's

nothing wrong

with philosophical economy,

but in a frantic search

for philosophical economy,

we did great damage

to our intuition.

And what this gave us

is monotheism.

Monotheism is a very good idea

and not such a good idea

on the second pass

because if you take a page

from Jung,

as I try to do,

you know that the religious

ontology of a culture

reflects its innermost psychology.

And the idea of monotheism,

one God, omnipresent,

omnipotent, unforgiving,

and everywhere

is an image

of the male ego.

That's all it is.

It's an enshrining

of the ideal personality

as defined

by that society.

And yet,

what it creates

is a complete denial

of the messy,

felt, pluralistic,

feminine,

organic,

emotional

side of being.

So one has become

enslaved

to a kind of

platonic abstraction

of which all life

and color

and feeling

has been poured

out of it

and you just have

the patriarchal ego

and this is not

very far behind us.

I mean,

some of us

were probably raised

by people like this.

The idea of male rectitude,

we're all pretty mellow,

even the most uptight

of us compared to

the style of male

presentation of say

a hundred years ago.

You know,

a hundred years ago

women referred

to their husbands

as mister.

Get into it.

You know,

in the 16th century,

medical students

had to steal corpses

off the gallows

and from battlefields

in order to do

dissections

because the church

would not allow

dissection of corpses

to take place.

So medical students

of that era

risked imprisonment

in order to obtain corpses

so that they could find out

how the human body worked.

This is the kind of situation

that we're in.

Constipated patriarchal institutions

are standing directly astride

the forward progress

of the human race.

I mean,

you know,

if you want to boil it down

to a slogan

and I'll just leave you

with this,

we call these substances

consciousness expanding agents.

Well now,

if consciousness

does not play a major part

in the future history

of our species,

then what kind

of a future history

are we talking about?

You know,

are we going to become stupider,

duller,

more animal-like?

I don't think so.

Consciousness is our defining quality

and it must be nourished,

encouraged,

catalyzed,

never more so than now

because we have a planet in peril.

The entire evolutionary enterprise

may rest

on the kinds of decisions

we make

about how we order

and carry out

our priorities

over the next 50 years.

We need all the help

we can get

and these plants

have always been there

to render counsel

and give advice

to evolving human populations

that would humbly

and reverently

seek their input.

That's all.

Thank you very much.

Human beings

addict to approximately

20 or 30 substances

very tight

physiological addictions

and then there's all

our ideological addictions

you know,

to Marxism,

to capitalism,

to the Republican Party,

you name it

and then we have

behavioral addictions

of all sorts.

Somebody gets up

in the morning

and throws open

their front door

and if the Times

isn't lying rolled

at their feet

with a red rubber band

around it

they go into shock

because

an addiction

is being interrupted.

the fix

which was supposed

to arrive on time

has been delayed

and now this person

stomps back

into their house

menace to life

wife and child

because the newspaper

didn't arrive on time.

So this curious tendency

of our species

to addict

I think

is because

you know

if a person

is an addictive type

then people say

well they probably

were abused

in childhood

and this is the consequence

of some kind

of childhood trauma

well I would submit

to you

that we exhibit

this pathology.

We appear to be

the inheritors

of some kind

of dysfunctional

relationship

and I maintain

that it was

torn from us

at the birth

of mind

when we were

forced out

of the African Eden

and into

you know

a much drier

harsher

Middle Eastern

climate

where we then

had to toil

in the veil

of sorrows.

Well now

what is the point

of this

or is this

just some

revisioning

of archaeology

some egghead game

or what is the point

well the point

is

that the consequences

of this dysfunctional

behavior

stemming from

ego

and the dominance

hierarchy

in our behavior

has ruined

our planet

toxified

the air

and water

allowed our

population

to soar

beyond the

carrying capacity

poisoned our

lives with

propaganda

and made us

each feel

guilty

powerless

and doomed

I mean

this is the

major riff

being run

in the society

at large

is that we're

doomed

we've looted

the planet

we've destroyed

our children's

future

we have

the ethics

of rats

and now

we're going

to go down

the tube

well I say

before we

despair

completely

and just

toss in the

towel

we need to

make one

last try

at escaping

our demonic

other

and that the

way to do

it is through

and this

leads me

by a

Viconian

recurso

back to

archaic

revival

we need to

reach back

into time

and attempt

to understand

what happened

to us

and how we

fell into

history

and how its

institutions

have served

us badly

and diminished

and degraded

our humanness

and then we

need to begin

a fundamental

reconstruction

of human

institutions

with an eye

toward creating

a viable

balanced

nature honoring

human honoring

set of

institutions

so does this

mean I

advocate

in a world

of epidemic

diseases

that we return

to orgies

on every new

and full moon

I don't think

so

it's hardly

possible

but what

it does

mean

is

that

the tool

which lay

behind all

these changes

which was

the ego

dissolving

power of

psilocybin

needs to be

looked at

very carefully

we need

to examine

the possibility

that we

could re-engineer

ourselves

so that we

could emotionally

connect

with the

consequences

of what we

have been

doing to

ourselves

and the

planet

I mean

when people

take psychedelics

this is what

they realize

they lose

the hold

on their

little world

you know

they're saving

money for a

mercedes

or breast

implants

or some

damn thing

you know

then you

take one

of these

things

and then

you get

the big

picture

and then

you realize

just where

that mercedes

lies

in you

know

the long

march

to the

stars

in other

words

we see

this in

the

rainforest

cultures

today

they have

no

high level

of material

culture

and yet

it's not

because they're

not interested

in beauty

or poetry

it's that

they simply

live in a

much more

mental

world

than we

do

the peculiar

obsession

of the

western mind

is its

demonic

relationship

to matter

that we

don't believe

anything

is real

unless it's

made

of stuff

and you

know

we

any

idea

any notion

has to

somehow

be

concretized

this is

a kind

of neurotic

response

in my

opinion

I mean

the cultures

with those

civilizations

with no

material

culture

whatsoever

are in

a much

more

dynamic

relationship

to nature

it's our

obsession

with stuff

that is

pushing us

toward

Armageddon

I mean

we seriously

propose to

bring every

man woman

and child

on earth

to the

level

of

the life

standard

roughly

approximating

that of

the average

dweller

of this

island

well I've

got news

for you

there isn't

enough

metal

glass

plastic

and petroleum

in the

planet

to do

that

and in

fact

it's

causing

the

toxification

of our

world

unfortunately

we live

under a

social

system

that

is

stuff

obsessed

we must

have

money

in order

to get

things

and the

number

of

things

around

that

they're

telling you

you need

is

beyond

your

ever

being able

to satisfy

yourself

we have

been told

that

what is

within

is

nothing

you know

and that

all

meaning

lies

in the

exterior

world

so

only

science

has

meaning

only

property

has

meaning

and in

fact

the

felt

presence

of

immediate

experience

is the

only

thing

you

will

ever

truly

possess

the

felt

presence

of

immediate

experience

it's

that

the

quality

of

that

determines

whether

you're

a happy

or unhappy

person

and you

can be

dying

of

intelligence

parasites in some hut in the Amazon and if your felt quality of immediate

experience is superior then you're superior to the guy who's being

chauffeured around in an air-conditioned limousine in some urban center

somewhere we our whole cultural delivery system denies this you know so we have

the concept of entertainment and of drugs I mean to my mind television is a far

more insidious drug than heroin and that they're very comparable their cousins the

difference between heroin and television is that at least on heroin you

can think your own thoughts on television they don't even give you the option to

do that you know you you imbibe a manufactured data stream the main purpose

of which is to introduce you to the cosmetically enhanced surfaces of certain

products which you don't need the average American watches six hours of TV a day

this means that millions and millions of people are being maintained in a semi

larval stage I mean we might as well store them in enormous underground banks

somewhere and someday we may I mean this society is hard enough to manage what if

all these people unplug themselves and began running around making demands on

the political institutions in the infrastructure then we'd really have a

problem so better they should stay in the suburbs people magazine is delivered the

telly is there they trouble no one they but they do consume there is no mundane

future I mean if we had the chairman of the World Bank and those people here they draw curves that will

stand your hair on the end they show you that the world population the extraction of

petroleum the rise of of poverty the poisoning of the atmosphere the accumulation of toxins in the food chain you draw all these curves and you discover that there's a lot of

you discover that sometime between the year 2000 and 2040 life as we know it becomes absolutely impossible on the surface of this planet that's what the sober

unstoned people say so then the rest of us are supposed to come to terms with this in some sense and you can either despair and say well then we're just you know the momentum of a thousand years of chuckle headedness is just going to slam us into the wall of

planetary limitation at a speed of about 5000 miles an hour or we have to sort through our toolkit and find the right wrench to get this sinking submarine back up to the surface

let's disarm captain Nemo and his friends and put the people who want to go into the lifeboats into the lifeboats and then these clowns can do any damn thing they want to well when you sort through the cultural toolkit trying to

find the magic key it is hallucinogenic plants as far as I can tell I mean I'm just one guy but my empire I read widely I travel widely I've been around the block and my impression is that this is a tremendous long shot

but it's the only plan around nobody else has any other plan what are you supposed to do wait for the friendly space brothers to come and pull your chestnuts out of the fire I just don't get I'm underwhelmed by the evidence that that's about to occur maybe it's about to occur

I don't regard myself as having an answer I'm more like have a clue I sorted through just as I assume you are doing trying to figure out taking seriously what Alan Watts and Joe Campbell and all those people young you know trying to figure out what are these people talking about is it just abstract can it ever be reached and I sat at the feet of various

various rishis roshis roshis geishas and gurus I swept up around the ashram and so forth and so on and you know these people just don't have the moxie I mean maybe they've got something but we don't have a thousand years to unravel this thing it is a sinking submarine chatter is now out of bounds Plato said time is the moving image of eternity

is if you push me ultimately mathematical I mean I think that what that when we say we dissolve a boundary when we decide say that the psilocybin dissolves all boundaries another way of putting that is to say that we rise to a higher dimension where what were boundaries now have been erased and I mean another dimension in a very mathematical and formal sense and

there is a dimension from which the past the present and the future are equally discernible and you go into that place shamanism

is one a good definition of shamanism a psychedelic definition is a shaman is somebody who has seen the end that's all and if you've seen the end then you come back and take your place in the play

with an entirely different attitude in the mountains of the Sierra Mazateca of central Mexico there are Mixtec and Mazatec Indians the only place in the world where living mushroom cults with ancient roots still exist

the mushrooms were discovered in 1953 by Gordon and Valentina Wasson because they went to these villages and uncovered this thing people thought it had been wiped out with the Spanish conquest but it hadn't it had just retreated into the Oaxacan interior and been kept alive

one way that I think about these aboriginal peoples is that they kept the secret while we descended into history they stayed at home and kept the old old secrets and we descended into matter we made a kind of pilgrimage and we call it human history now it's over now we have to take what we've learned

from this demonic pilgrimage into the domain of the material and use it to save the planet to care for the planet the only justification for history is if we use what we've learned to care for life on the planet and we may end up you know using thermonuclear weapons to destroy incoming space junk

that imperils the ecology of the planet there may be tasks for which only high technology is adequate that you know if an asteroid is going to strike the earth you don't want to be a rainforest shaman in that situation you want to be in command of intercontinental ballistic missiles with high lift capability that can take a 50 megaton weapon out there and blow this thing to smithereens

I see our bodhisattva obligation as a biological obligation as a biological obligation that we are to care for the earth after all the earth cared for us and we're like a we're like scabies or something you know I mean it can't be very much fun for a planet to have a species on it which is always extracting petroleum and spreading plutonium

around and dumping junk into the oceans and dumping junk into the oceans and the atmosphere just you know my god what is this it's a raging viral infection of some sort

viral infection of some sort and yet we may be the means to a technology that would actually then give us a destiny save history from just being madness century after century of rape and pogrom and just you know the horror that it is I'd like to redeem that I'm like Stefan

I'm like Stefan Daedalus I'd like to awaken from the nightmare

Marsiliad once made a wonderful statement he said he was comparing our culture to a dying person

and he said in the same way that a dying person sees their whole history flash before their eyes a dying culture will frantically publish everything in one last final spasm of fear

fear every Egyptian text every Tibetan text every Hopi prophecy everything will be published published published published

because they're looking for answers somewhere it has to be if the Tibetans know it did the Witoto know it did the Inuit know it who knows it we've got to find out

and eventually they'll get around to saying well now what about these psychedelic people we've been jailing them and hounding them for years they claim they have an answer and they'll say you know

get them get them get them on the line we'll talk to anybody at this point bad times lie ahead things are going to get worse before they get better but they're going to get better

the problem as I see it with the West is in a search for philosophical economy of which there's no nothing wrong with philosophical economy

but in the in a frantic search for philosophical economy we did great damage to our intuition and what this gave us is monotheism

monotheism is a very good idea on the first pass and not such a good idea on the second pass because if you take a page from young as I try to do

you know that the religious ontology of a culture reflects its innermost psychology and the idea of monotheism one God omnipresent omnipotent unforgiving and everywhere is an image of the male ego that's all it is it's an

enshrining of the ideal personality as defined by that society and and yet what it creates is a complete denial of the messy felt pluralistic feminine organic emotional side of being so one has become enslaved to a kind of platonic abstraction of which all life is

which all life and color and feeling has been poured out of it and you just have you know the patriarchal ego and this is not very far behind us I mean some of us were probably raised by by people like this you know the idea of male rectitude we're all pretty mellow even the most uptight of us compared to the style of male presentation of say a hundred years ago

a hundred years ago you know a hundred years ago women referred to their husbands as mister get into it you know in the 16th century medical students had to steal corpses off the gallows and from battlefields in order to do dissections because the church would not allow dissection of corpses to take place so medical students of that era risked

risked imprisonment in order to obtain corpses so that they could find out how the human body work this is the kind of situation that we're in constipated patriarchal institutions are standing directly astride the forward progress of the human race I mean you know if you want to boil it down to a slogan and I'll just leave you with this we call these drugs these drugs and

substances consciousness expanding agents well now if consciousness does not play a major part in the future history of our species then what kind of a future history are we talking about you know are we going to become stupider duller more animal like I don't think so consciousness is our defining quality

and it must be nourished encouraged catalyzed never more so than now because we have a planet in peril the entire evolutionary enterprise may rest

on the kinds of decisions we make about how we order and carry out our priorities over the next 50 years we need all the help we can get and these plants have always been there to render counsel and give advice to

evolving human populations that would humbly and reverently seek their input that's all thank you very much

That's all. Thank you very much.