Man And Woman

Monogamy represents a deepening of bonding into a kind of lifelong project that is entirely spiritual.

Not that it doesn't have a physical and an ecstatic and an erotic side,

but it all goes together to create something that should not be expected of adolescence

and should not be preached as the ideal at all stages of life.

And this is pretty much how it's handled in a number of non-literate societies.

Marriage is taken very seriously, but before marriage, a different set of rules obtains.

So that's not a solution for those of us who are already into middle age or beyond.

But it certainly gives indication of how we might think about it in raising our own children.

I want to add something, if I may.

I think the objectification of women, which is not unique,

it's only just marketed and packaged so very expertly in the West,

but the making women commodities really completely messes up the whole deal.

Because if it is just an exchange of commodities, I mean, why stick with one commodity?

And that is not just the Western thing, but it's just a collection of body parts,

like the pin-up girl or boy, which is sort of a way of getting into that.

And I think that it really hinges.

But it's very much the woman who's been the objectified one, Joan.

You know, I mean, the other one was sort of a kind of a blip of reaction in this transitional time.

And I think that's something we have to kind of get through before we can really work that out.

It's very hard to realize the power of woman as commodity in this society until you are away from it.

I remember, well, this happens every time, but I remember particularly in the Amazon,

we had been about three weeks up this river, a group of about six of us, women and men,

and we came to this village, and there was the obligatory meeting with the head man of the village

to let them know that we would be collecting plants in their area and so forth and so on.

And we had been away from Iquitos by now, I guess, a month.

And we came into the maloca, and it was dimly lit, and then he lit a little kind of a candle,

and there was a girly calendar of the most innocuous sort.

I mean, the kind that Sparkplug Company produced in the United States, you know, very mild.

And I was trying to deal with this guy, and I was absolutely riveted.

I could not tear my eyes from it.

And I was even thinking, it came upon me, was it conceivable that without blowing everyone's mind,

especially the fellow members of my party, could I get this away from this guy?

And so, and then I, and then of course, you know, we, other things happened, and time passed.

And then later, I was back in Iquitos, and I came upon this same calendar in a, in a libraria there.

And it had no power whatsoever, because in Iquitos, I was saturated in these images,

just the news vendors on the street, and this is very mild stuff, you know, it's a Latin Catholic country.

But the power of this image is why it's used to sell everything from cigarettes to debenture bonds.

It's, and it is dehumanizing.

It is dehumanizing because it takes us to, literally, to the surface.

Everything is flattened.

This is, again, this flattening of the primacy of experience,

reducing everything to a, a sensation empty of emotional content.

And if you can do it with women, you can do it with anything.

I want to stop on that, because if you take just that away with you,

as I think I said sometimes, either last night or today,

that what my work indicates is something that once you articulate it,

it sounds obvious, but somehow it's been overlooked.

And it's very simply this, that the way that a society structures

that most fundamental of all relations,

the relations between the female and the male half of humanity,

because that's what women and men are,

that that profoundly affects everything.

It doesn't just affect our individual life choices and roles as women and men,

which we, of course, experience, you know, very clearly,

and now we're really aware of it.

But it affects every one of our social institutions,

and that's really the objectification of women.

The domination of women is the template.

It's the model.

Because if you can do that to your female twin,

if you can do that to the person with whom you have the most intimate relationship,

then why not do it to somebody whose difference is not one of sex,

but of color or of hairdo or of politics or religion?

It's the template.

It's the model.

And so what I really want to say to you

is that these issues that we have been so thoroughly socialized

to think of as, quote, just women's issues

are the central core issues

that we'd better start paying attention to.

And I am very definitely making a statement here

that I passionately want to share with you.

Because it's so obvious, you know, if you really think about it,

but we've been so conditioned not to,

and of course the reason that we're so conditioned to think of it that way

is because if once we start thinking of this way,

then we are challenging the very basis,

the very foundation of the dominated system,

and it extends into everything.

And I really want to say this one thing,

and it's about language, because you've spoken about language.

I never used to be aware of anything, I think.

I mean, I think that's really the only way one can describe my former state.

But anyway, but I certainly was not aware.

I was aware of a slight sense of discomfort.

Well, not in slight.

When I went to college,

and everything was the study of man and mankind,

and all of the examples were male-centered,

because the message was very clear.

I was here, but I really had no business being here.

None of this was really directed to me.

But it was so, you know, wafty away,

and I thought I was uncomfortable because I hadn't found the right guy,

or wasn't wearing the right blouse, or, you know,

I mean, I had no consciousness.

But now it's very clear to me that the whole use of male-exclusive language,

the term man instead of human,

the term mankind instead of humankind,

the term he instead of she or he, or we,

that that's a way of really linguistically,

almost short-circuit,

circuiting.

It's really a way of short-circuiting any partnership circuitry

in our head, okay?

And it's tremendously important.

Have you noticed you've been using the word history a lot?

Is it a history?

And I was thinking you can use the word her story also.

Well, I was thinking about that,

because the title of this is the,

you know, of past history.

I was thinking, how about our story?

That's good, yeah.

Because I kind of like to move from prehistory to history,

to our story.

I know that sometimes we play with words,

because we just got married,

and I had the same experience of feeling,

real resistance to being owned and all of that.

And someone said,

Mrs. Charles Brink.

Oh, okay.

And I said,

no, but this is Mr. Linda Brink.

And, you know,

and I think sometimes the reversal thing,

it doesn't seem so,

I mean, it wasn't that it was awesome to be called that,

because I'm proud that he's married to him and his husband.

It was just that,

if you start reversing it that way,

and how absurd it sounds to call him Linda Brink,

it makes it,

then it makes it how absurd it is to call me Charles Brink,

you know,

where it doesn't sound so absurd otherwise.

So I think when we start noticing those things,

just to reverse them.

Yeah.

No, I think that's a very, very good thing.

But this is how we're all beginning to notice these things,

and it's fun.

It's a little uncomfortable,

but it's much more fun than that.

Well, there's a fellow,

Dr. Warren Farrell,

who's doing that.

He talks about walking in someone else's shoes.

He has interesting workshops,

because he has the women line up in rows according to their income,

and then he has the men stand on the chairs and turn around,

so that the men can see.

I think experiencing it really, really makes a difference.

David, do you want to add something?

Oh, okay.

No, you have to get up.

Watch your hands.

Yeah.

Yeah, playing with words keep us on the lot,

because then you can code it,

and so you can say history,

as you said,

as his story,

but mystery,

it's mid-history.

I want to say something about this question that Robin brought up this morning,

about the whole duality of us and them,

us being a partnership model,

and them being the nominators,

and I was really plagued by that in lunch,

and thinking about how to get away from this,

because in our own work together to shift this paradigm in the world,

if we come from a place of duality,

if we come from that place that Eve got to when she ate that apple of good and evil,

we got to that first duality of good and evil,

then in a first place we're shutting ourselves out from the garden of partnership,

and how I think we could get from the duality that's kind of naturally out there

in terms of the partnership and the dominance,

would be to see these people that are actually all of us as people in pain,

and I thought about that again when we were talking about male and female roles,

and seeing men as the dominators,

it's actually a kind of expression of pain,

that men have been so out of touch with themselves,

that they would see women as often,

and such an inability to make contact with themselves,

makes an inability to make contact with another,

and I see the whole pornography thing as kind of a painful for all of us,

an area where we have just fought after contact real desperately,

and not been able to come into contact,

because of not being in contact with our own pain,

and being in a state of normal,

and that there's a kind of sexuality that's been promoted in our culture,

where it just is an obsession,

seems to speak of that kind of pain of living in the mind.

Thank you for sharing that.

David wants, I think, to address this issue of dualism.

He talked to me earlier.

Oh, good.

Yeah, no, no, that's a very logistic perspective.

I think it's a good question for duality,

I think it's so important that it needs to be thought through

in a number of different perspectives.

All I want to share with the two perspectives that occurred to me

after Robin brought it up this morning,

see, I see it as absolutely essential for us to differentiate

what's partnership with, what's domination.

And it is very necessary to go through this us-and-them process,

and the same, there's two levels of meaning.

One is in philosophy, in dialogue.

You've got, in order to reach any progression,

one way of looking at it,

you've got to state the status rather powerfully

in order to get the antithesis stated powerfully,

in order to move beyond that towards the synthesis.

Of course, what we don't want is the synthesis

of the dominator in the partnership,

but that's the philosophical point.

The practical point is this.

If you look at the way a child grows up,

or if you look at how an excluded minority,

like the blacks, which is very familiar,

advances themselves,

in the case of a child,

the child almost always has to go through that period

that comes, it happens at earlier stages,

that becomes particularly inappropriate

during adolescence,

where in order to differentiate itself

from the parent,

it hates that parent,

goes through that period,

I'm not you, I don't want it.

So there's that necessary negativity

where they differentiate him.

Same thing happened with black people,

where there's a lot of white people

that felt awfully uncomfortable with black power.

They thought, oh, there's nothing worse

than Alchemax.

Well, Alchemax,

the whole black power thing,

was serving a very important function

because it was differentiating.

I'm not white.

I have nothing to do with white.

This was a necessary transition stage.

This is just necessary

for child to go through adolescence.

And I feel that there's a certain amount

of duality in the world.

It's absolutely necessary

as a transition

to sort of better state.

But in other words,

I feel that this needs to be articulated

because I feel

it's a very great danger

in saying,

we don't want to have animals.

We want everything to be lovely.

And yet, we do have animals.

And it is the dominator thing

and all that it represents.

Sure, these are people

that must be dealt with

in ways that they are us.

They are ideas,

but they are ideas embodied in people.

They are embodied in others.

And I think that this is something

that we must rest in

and not avoid.

Oh.

I just wanted to further discuss

that question that we talked about,

that asking the questions about duality,

what is the smallest unit of partnership?

And we were talking about that before,

whether it was two or one.

Whether that conqueror

inside me

and that partner inside me,

which is sometimes mind over body,

when my mind says,

go ahead and eat something

that's not good for me,

conquers the health

that I need to have.

I'd just like to hear,

maybe you both talk a little bit

about the idea of partnership

on an individual basis.

Well, I loved when you

earlier came

and posed that question

and said that your intuition

was that the basic partnership

really started, you know,

within us.

And I agree with you

because it's the whole thing

of seeing ourselves

as part of a larger whole

and honoring our body

and honoring our spirit

and honoring the fact

that they're, you know,

they're the same.

They're just different aspects

of the same.

So I see it, you know,

like a prison

where, you know,

you just see different facets

of it in different ways.

And yeah,

the smallest unit,

I think,

is every one of us.

So I thank you for that.

Yes.

Don't you think

that there's been talk

about ego?

Well, it seems to me

ego inflation

is what happens

when within the partnership

of the individual

a dominator model

is applied

because the manifestation

of ego

is the denial

of intuition

which is

a feminine function.

So people

who are strongly

egocentric

are living

in the self-created

hell

of a dominator

society

of one.

Yes,

you wanted to say something.

Besides the obvious reasons

like fear of change

and wanting to

maintain

status quo

or one system,

why do you think

there's this tremendous

reaction

or fear

or backlash

by the fundamentalists

against

the resurgence

of,

I mean,

in their literature

and sermons

and everything

against the resurgence

of

the return

to

the goddess,

the archaic,

the New Age movement,

anything that

snacks

slightly different

than their

traditional

or fundamental

values?

Well,

they are the bearers

of the

patriarchy

standards.

Their lineage

reaches

right back

to

pharaoh

and

they see it

being threatened.

Secularism,

which began

500 years ago,

threatened them

at every step

of the way.

That's why I said

last night,

I consider

this monotheistic

tradition

to be the single

most reactionary

force

in human history.

Their

bailiwick

is threatened.

the energy

that they

put into

destroying

the pagan

world

was

tremendously

ferocious.

It took

them

centuries.

In fact,

they never

completely

succeeded

in dismantling

the previous

world

of pagan

sensibilities.

And

theirs is,

I believe,

not a

natural

position.

Rian said

this morning,

you can do

anything you

want to

partnership.

It keeps

springing up.

It keeps

coming back.

It has a

natural ability

to recreate

itself.

I don't

believe this

is true

of the

dominator

culture.

I believe

that it

is

fragile

and

frightened

and

feels

itself

always

being

eroded

by the

simple

processes

that

reside

in

nature.

So

it is

an

untenable

position.

And

if you

have

an

untenable

position,

you

have

a

siege

mentality.

I

really

want

to

take

that

to

a

very

personal

sense.

I

think

that

it

is

fear

and

most

damaged

people

are

the

ones

that

really

are

the

most

imprisoned

because

we're

all

imprisoned

to

some

extent

still

by the

dominator

model.

But

in

these

people

the

grip

is

so

fierce

and

the

pain

and

the

fear

are

so

great

that

it

because

these

things

happen

on

various

levels.

One

is

the

systems

level.

Societies

are

living

systems.

They

tend

to

maintain

themselves.

That's

just

how

we

know

from

systems

theory.

But

just

on

the

very

individual

motivation

level,

for

example,

a lot

of

these

they

were

chanting

for

death

for

Brennan

and

it

was

all

in

the

name

of

we're

pro-life

and

it

was

wait

a

minute.

I

mean

what

kind

of

distortion

in

these

women?

Well

it's

terror,

it's

fear,

it's

pain

and

they

all

of

these

ways

and

that's

I

think

if

you're

asking

in

terms

of

the

mechanics

of

it

it's

very

complex

but

I

think

on

particular

subject

it's

really

the

call

to

face

the

pain

and

instead

of

looking

out

there

for

the

source

either

be it

God

or

outer

space

it's

you know

in which

so many

of the

patriarchal

religions

head

the gaze

in that

direction

in the

skyward

direction

and

why

your

question

about

mind

and

body

I

think

it

relates

to

what

Rihanna

is

talking

about

right

now

the

call

that's

being

made

and

I

think

the same

with your

work

is to

actually

face

very deeply

what's

going on

within

us

profound

alienation

between

mind

and

body

the

objectification

not just

of the

feminine

but of

eros

the

objectification

of the

body

and

whether

it's

you know

with the

visionary

vegetables

or simply

by attending

to breath

and watching

the content

of our

minds

produce

in the

way that

they do

coming to

really

as you

know

the

oracle

Adelphi

said it

beautifully

knowing

oneself

completely

becoming

completely

aware

hyphened

and deep

into

awareness

so you

know

I really

resonate

with

what you're

talking about

in terms of

coming into

this

partnership

model

mind and

body

and how

we live

this out

in relationship

with each

other

how actually

partnering in the

world

becomes a

context

wherein we

can discover

we get

very

extraordinary

feedback

when we're

off

and why

this

evasive

maneuvers

to stay

in relationship

to stay

in community

to persist

through the

points of

extreme pain

that all

of us

experience

in facing

ourselves

whether it's

on a

psychedelic

substance

or whether

it's

sitting

around

the

zathos

but really

knowing

oneself

profoundly

thank you

I was wondering

why

these

model

fundamentalists

white

south

now they

are not

in

very much

faith

I mean

white

south

are not

generally

mutilated

Arab

men

are not

what

men

are

they

are

they

are

all right

they are

I'd like

to really

reiterate

the issue

of the

selective

deadening

of

empathy

because

I think

that

empathy

this

awareness

that

we're

talking

about

is

so

much

part

of

this

unique

miracle

that

is

our

species

and

the

dominator

model

is

so

fascinating

because

here's

this

gift

we've

been

given

and

institution

after

institution

practice

after

practice

is

then

ingeniously

developed

to

deaden

that

gift

of

empathy

in

us

and

hey

but I

think

that

that's

really

one

of the

things

but you

can't

really

kill

it

off

you

see

no no

you're

right

you're

right

about that

but I

think

the

point

here

is

that

as long

as we

do not

face

our

own

pain

we

will

create

a

lot

for

others

if

wouldn't

that

the

dominary

mentality

would be

like

in a prison

but it

stays

penitentiary

if you

have taken

that

the feeling

of being

incarcerated

where you

had that

much

fear

where there

was all

that much

power

but see

I think

the

incarceration

image

is a very

apt one

I spoke

about

Theodor

Rojak

and he

spoke of

how the

19th century

wave of

feminism

really was

one of

the first

really

historic

frontal

challenges

to the

dominator

system

to what

he called

patriarchy

and he

said that

the reaction

to it

was one

of

terror

you know

but the

greatest

thing

was we

had to

keep

imprisoned

not only

you know

the women

and the

so-called

inferior

people

and the

enemy

but the

woman

that

every

man

as he

put it

keeps

locked

inside

his psyche

and I think

that's a

very apt

image

but of course

women too

can be very

cruel

and I think

it's really

very important

that we

disabuse

ourselves

of this

whole idea

that we're

talking about

you know

women are

terrific

and men

are

you know

forget it

because

the

dominator

model

distorts

both

women

and men

it is

true

that

the

caring

I mean

that's one

of the

ironies

you know

really the

most important

work in the

society

which is the

caring and

the nurturing

work of the

society has been

relegated to the

inferior group

you know

to women

and then we

wonder why

we can't have

social priorities

that are more

caring if those

very people are

excluded

from power

right

I mean

talk about

catch-22

here

so we're back

to the

women's

issues

aren't we

what concerns

me once again

is this new

role of the

feminist man

if you go

back and you

see this

image of

erotic

pan

who was a

consort of

the goddess

who if you

go into

history enough

was often

sacrificed

at the end

of each

year

as part

of this

refeeding

the goddess

back

there was a

blood

sacrifice

since the

man did

not bleed

and if

you look

at some

of the

minoans

frescoes

it's very

easy

they're

beautiful

and I

wish I

had some

of them

the role

of the

man

well I

mean

you see

a fresco

of a

man

with fish

he fishes

all right

I mean

you know

in other

words

it's a

productive

role

you see

the so-called

young prince

which is

really

fascinating

most of

the recovered

minoan

single figures

have been

attributed

to the

goddess

with a

female

priestess

as they

represented

but they

find this

one figure

of a

man

and they

decide

he's

the

young

prince

right

which is

very very

interesting

because

there's

not a

trace

of any

king

in the

minoan

culture

but nonetheless

he is a

beardless

youth

and he

has

flowers

and plumes

and he's

walking

through the

garden

I mean

it's hardly

your

macho

warrior

image

I mean

there are

other things

that men

can do

men

did the

bull

leaping

and that

was very

interesting

because it

was a

partnership

with the

women

if you

look at

the

blue

leaf

fresco

so they

obviously

just did

all kinds

of things

they just

didn't happen

to specialize

in killing

do they

make a

summation

is it

time

already

yes

one more

oh my goodness

yes I think

that we

should just

yes please

I see

technology

as a symbol

of dominance

of society

and I

wanted you

to address

the question

if you could

of what the

interface

and how

we get

to innovate

with society

with technology

I see

a clash

I'm so glad

you brought

that up

because that

makes a

wonderful

place

for something

that I really

felt that I

want to

very much

address

what I'd

like to

suggest

is that

we look

at technology

as

something

that is

really

a human

function

a human

capacity

from day

one

language

is a

technology

of

communication

isn't it

from

the stick

that even

chimpanzees

use

you know

to help

them

dig up

plants

and what

have you

that's a

technology

it's a

tool

our

tool

making

capacity

is really

an extension

of natural

functions

I mean

an airplane

does something

that a bird

does

but we

built it

so I

look at

technology

neither

as the

villain

or as

the savior

I look

at technology

as something

that we

I mean

other species

have some

technology

I think

dolphins

and whales

probably would

if they

had hands

you know

because they

seem to

have a high

intelligence

but they

don't

so we

have this

tremendous

capacity

for making

tools

you know

all the

way to

the most

extraordinary

things

that

we

we're getting today. That, I think, is a wonderful thing, and it can also be a terrible thing.

And we're right back to the issue of technology being used using the template of a partnership

or a dominator model of society. I'd like to suggest to you that the invention of machines,

per se, did not have to result in these dehumanized assembly lines where people themselves became

cogs in the machine. I would like to suggest to you that if this prehistoric shift had

not happened, that maybe the machines would have been used in a very, very different way.

I would like to suggest to you that the great breakthroughs in technology actually came in

what we may call more of a partnership-oriented era. In fact, all the basic technologies on

which civilization is built came out of that era. They weren't as glitzy as what we've

got today, although Mino and Crete had the first paved roads in Europe. It had folks in

it had indoor plumbing. I mean, it got lost again. You know, we don't find it again

until, you know, much later. But, I mean, they were what we would call, well, they compare

very, they're much more high technologies than a lot of the so-called developing worlds today.

Okay? So, let's look at technology in terms of this template. But the dominator system,

I've divided technology, really, and that's a whole new session, okay? By trying to categorize

it in terms of different types of technologies. And one is technologies of domination, of destruction.

And I'd like to suggest to you that technologies of domination and destruction, be it the use

of the greater musculature and the development of this, you know, of the bronze to kill of

the so-called classical warrior or the missile, that that's built into the dominator system.

And that really doesn't have that much to do with technology at all. And so that the issue

for us isn't, let's throw out the baby with the bathwater here. I mean, I don't want to

go back technologically. I mean, I think that we don't want to do that. What we want to do

is to use the most advanced modern technology. And it almost takes us immediately back to the

whole issue of how we use the hallucinogens. Because we're right back there. I mean, you

know very well that there have been experiments, not with some of the synthetic drugs, to use

them for mind control. I mean, that's the ultimate dominator technology, isn't it? I mean, thou

shalt not eat of the tree of knowledge, because I've just given you in your water supply, you

know, the chemical that makes you sort of, you know, completely pliable. Well, but I'm

saying, no, no, no, no, no. I made the distinction between hallucinogens and drugs, you know, and

pharmaceutically produced drugs. And there are experiments with that. But I'm saying that

let's think of technology with those two templates. And I'd really like to leave that as my formation.

Can you say it can't be done with hallucinogens? It's my powerful brainwashed engagement with

LSD. It's my powerful brainwashed engagement with the North. The partnership situation would

be democratic. Yes. And, of course, the other autocratic. And Antarctic. And the financial infrastructure would

be, one would be laissez-faire, private ownership, and the other would be shared, socialized.

Well, there would be degrees. And you might say capitalism and socialism, you know? Maybe

it was simplified, but that's what it gets down to. It's somewhat oversimplified, but certainly

a more equitable, you know, distribution of wealth, wouldn't you say? And an abandonment

of the notion of private property. Oh, great. No more real estate. Let's see, I don't, I don't

They killed a pope for shame. Let's end in tumult. Well, instead of ending in tumult, could

we end just almost on time? Yes. Oh, I thought we just had the sun in. That's nice. Now they've

got a few more moments. Well, it seems we moved around this afternoon. There's a great concern

as to how to realize this in the here and now, one-on-one, which is encouraging because

otherwise it remains an abstraction. Bringing these models forward into the present isn't

easy because the context for over a thousand or more years has been set by the dominator

culture. Nevertheless, what we have going for us is that the partnership way of thinking

thinking is really scripted into the bones of the planet. This is how it's always been

done. This is how nature does it. The Darwinian model of nature that we've inherited from the

nineteenth century is simply another dominator fiction used to reinforce dominator mechanisms.

The fact is that what nature really maximizes is cooperation, integration, and

and mutuality of support and relationship. What we're really trying to do, what becoming

post-historical means, I think, is removing the veil between ourselves and nature that the historical

experience has raised, because the historical experience has been an alienating experience, has

caused our perceptions to rise to the mere surfaces of things, and our feelings to be completely

undercut and invalidated. And what we have to do is feed more deeply into the context of being,

and the situation in which we find ourselves, and to see that we are of it. It's a seamless web.

The dynamics that rule the biological and natural world are the dynamics that are going to work for us.

We didn't fall here out of the sky. We weren't made by a jealous God who set us loose in a kind of reservation.

We are of the staff of this place, and its dynamics can be our dynamics. The problem is one of awareness,

realization, recovery of this perception, sharing it, revivifying it, and realizing it. That's all.

I really have a need to clarify the private property issue, because I really don't equate the partnership model

with the abolition of private property, and I want to really clarify that. I think that it's much more complex than that,

as I speak in the chalice and the blade, that what is going to be emerging, I hope, is a whole new economic model

where we put in central value the caring work that has traditionally, of course, been relegated to women

and to so-called effeminate men. And we have that opportunity now as we move from industrial to post-industrial society,

because we have to redefine what is productive work. And I really wanted to leave it with this idea that I think

we're going into a post-capitalist and post-socialist era. And forgive me, I don't need to have the last word,

but I did want to say that.

Well, I'll have the first word tomorrow.

This is KPFK Los Angeles. We have been listening to the evening of the first day of the seminar,

Man and Woman at the End of History, with Terence McKenna and Rian Eisler.

Rian Eisler is the author of the current book, The Chalice and the Blade, which has been highly recommended by Helen Caldecott

and Dan Ellsberg and Terence McKenna. And Ashley Montague said,

the anthropologist said, it's the most important book since The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.

So that would be the most important book in about 140 years, which, well, that's heavy praise indeed.

The Chalice and the Blade. We will continue with the second day of the seminar next Tuesday night,

Wednesday morning at midnight on Earth Tuesday.

I'd like to thank two subscribers, by the way, Marlon Rojas of Los Angeles and Mick Lydell of Northridge.

And Marlon has not subscribed for a while, but he's back.

And Mick is a starving musician.

I know a Mick who's not a starving musician.

Anyway, he's subscribing for McKenna, Johnny Otis, Alan Watts, Roy, and Reggae.

Terence McKenna. Oh, the tapes and Terence's appearance in Los Angeles, which is now not two months away,

not three months away, not two months away, not a month away.

Ten days, a week from Saturday, Terence is going to be in town.

More about that in a minute.

The tapes of Man and Woman at the End of History.

This is a set, sorry for the squeaky book.

This is a set of five cassettes.

And they are available from the Ojai Foundation Wild Store.

I believe the set of five is $40.

Man and Woman at the End of History.

Their address and phone, if they answer the phone, I guess they do, is Ojai Foundation, Post Office Box 1620, Box 1620,

Ojai, California, 93023.

The Ojai Foundation, Box 1620, Ojai, California, 93023.

And again, the seminar is Man and Woman at the End of History.

The phone number of the Ojai Foundation, area code 805-646-8343, area code 805-646-8343.

The monumental seminar, which we started last week with Terence McKenna and Rhianne Eisler, entitled Man and Woman at the End of History.

We worked our way up.

We did about a third of the seminar last week, and we'll do another big chunk tonight as our Earth Tuesday program.

Man and Woman at the End of History took place at the Ojai Foundation in June.

And the description of the seminar is thus.

This seminar examines how one of the most fundamental human relationships, that between male and female, shapes our relationship to technology and ultimately to culture and nature.

We will look at the forms of relationships between women and men in the shift from a society based on domination to one based on partnership.

This is an exploration of how feminism, technology, and the telling of a new story will contribute to rescuing us from history.

Rianne Eisler is an internationally known scholar, social activist, futurist, and author of The Chalice and the Blade, which I add has been extolled by Terence McKenna, Daniel Ellsberg, Helen Caldecott, and Ashley Montague, among others.

The Chalice and the Blade.

She is co-director of the Center for Partnership Studies and a member of the General Evolution Research Group, a multinational group of scientists concerned with the social relevance of new theories and discoveries.

Terence McKenna has spent 25 years researching philosophy, somnism, and ethno-pharmacology.

He is co-author of The Invisible Landscape and co-founder of Botanical Dimensions, a non-profit refuge for endangered and rare plant species.

So, we will get right to the seminar.

There has been a break, and the gang is gathering at the end of the first break.

KPFK Los Angeles.

Shall we take up where we left off or start somewhere else?

Is it the same thing?

Yes.

Well, as I recall at the close of the morning, what we had come to was talking about the primacy of the shamanic experience and where it fell as a causal factor into the genesis of partnership society and its dissolution into dominator society.

To me, that's tied up with, and I indicated this at the end of the morning, with the issue of the primacy of personal felt experience.

And that this is what, this is the cultural domain over which the turf war is fought between the dominator and the partnership way of thinking about things.

Empowering ourselves through immersion in the felt moment is the partnership way of being.

It is immediate, it is emotional, it is trans-linguistic, and it feeds itself, it nourishes.

The other way of relating to experience is through a set of canonical abstractions that are the unique property of a professional class that speaks a special language that the rest of us don't understand.

And for millennia, at least beginning with classical Greece, this has been how we in the West have done it.

The mistake you see was when the Greeks stopped being fishermen and pulled their boats up on the sand and began to talk philosophy.

That cut them off from the felt presence of immediate experience.

So, partnership is revivifying immediate experience.

Well then, what are the limits of immediate experience?

And this leads, in my mind, directly to the question of the psychedelic plans.

It is possible to go from birth to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience.

But it's also to make that same pilgrimage and never have a sexual experience.

Well, since the center of my ethos is empowering the felt presence of the immediate, to me, those things are abominations.

That withholding of involvement in the parameters of what one can know, but more importantly, what one can feel.

And this is a hard thing to put across in the present milieu because, believe it or not, very few people have had the psychedelic experience.

The shamanically centered, thousand-volt center of the mandala experience.

And it isn't about who has taken drugs and who has not.

I constantly talk to people where, by careful questioning, you can satisfy yourself that, though they've taken ten different kinds of drugs,

multiples of times, they never actually touched the pith essence of the experience.

Because the drugs, the plants are not a sine qua non.

They are necessary but not sufficient.

What is also necessary is a good heart, clear intention, and a setting which reinforces and focuses what is being attempted.

But, to me, the big news...

I wonder if the back will go next.

Last time I didn't mention it and then I swore, you know, I should mention it.

Your world is falling apart all around you and you just keep going.

Anyway, to me, the really big news is that there is this dimension of reality that is accessible to 90% of everyone in some form or another,

but that is secret because of the need in this culture to preserve sort of this flat earth myth.

It isn't a flat earth but a mute nature.

That's the myth that the dominated culture must keep in place.

Sartre actually said this.

He said, nature is mute, therefore the world gives no compass for the formation of human ethics.

This is psychosis, this kind of talk, because nature is not mute.

You need only have ears to hear, and the ears to hear the message of nature are the practices and techniques of ecstatic shamanism,

which is still alive and well in the Amazon, in Indonesia, in Southeast Asia.

It has only been lost to us as we've made this peregrination into a dominant fantasy about nature.

I mean, Rian mentioned this this morning, the conquest of space, smashing the atom,

all of these metaphors of violence and unrestrained domination,

as though somehow nature has to be violated to be understood.

My brother, whom some of you know, I'm sure, is a brilliant neurochemist and biochemist,

said something to me once which has stuck with me.

He said, they build enormous atom smashers and instruments for studying high energy in nature,

but it's perfectly obvious that the most interesting things in nature

go on at voltages considerably below that of a flashlight battery,

in leaves, in organs, in fertilized eggs and sperms and spores.

And these are the subtle processes in nature.

What 2,000 years of pursuing a dominator theory and trying to understand nature has brought us to,

is the potential for nuclear Armageddon and an inability to solve the three body problem.

which means essentially we have remained in an extremely infantile situation with regard to the living state.

And the living state is the precondition of our being.

This is why I think Rupert's work is so important.

He offers a new understanding of the living state and upon that new biology,

that new empowering of life to be perceived as what it is,

I think there will be a new sociology that will empower us to see ourselves as we are and as we can be.

So that's why I think the psychedelic experience is so important because it sets the parameters of possible immediate experience.

And it's been sold back to us in vitiated form by every tin horn guru since the last glaciation.

But what they're selling is, you know, their interpretations, their metaphors, their poetry imposed upon it.

And Rian has brought me close to seeing this, that the real news is that it is within us,

that we need not genuflect to these hierarchies which actually play havoc with the truth that is there to be perceived.

It's not a matter of seeking the answer, it's about facing it, facing it.

And this means nature, which is the goddess, which is the feminine, which is the symbiotic and partnership ground,

out of which humanity comes, men and women.

Who might respond to that?

You're not serious.

You touch, you're like fireworks, I told you that yesterday.

You just illuminate so many things so quickly and then pass from one to the other.

But I will do it in my own non-linear fashion.

I guess since you ended with the goddess, I would like to begin with the goddess.

I had requested that somebody bring a book.

Do we have it here, the tellus and the blade?

And I forgot.

I do.

You have a copy.

Because on the cover is a picture.

And sometimes a picture can speak louder than a thousand words.

This is just one of thousands and thousands and thousands of figurines.

Not all of them look like this.

I want to make that very clear.

But she happens to manifest something that I think is very important in terms of our conversation

and our celebration here.

Because what she, if you look at her, I think you can see her because of the great, you know, contrast with the red.

If you first look at her, you can see, of course, the breasts.

And that, you know, that's female.

But actually the shape is phallic, isn't it?

So she's androgynous, isn't she?

And then the other thing that you see, if you look at her very closely, she has a beak.

She's a bird goddess.

She's part animal.

Of course, the angels are the descendants of the bird goddess.

Does she have leaves too?

Is she part plants?

Not in this picture.

And that's a very interesting thing because, as a matter of fact, there are many incisions on many of the...

and early language, early writing, if you will.

I guess one of my favorites is the cross.

I want to tell you about the cross because we're talking about different meanings of different things,

of different basic symbols, including the symbol of shamanism,

depending on which of these two possibilities for us, these two marbles,

which are abstractions, of course, we orient to.

And it's very interesting because many of the early figures of the goddess had, in size in them, the cross.

But it was in the... very often it was like the X form of the cross.

And what it stood for, of course, was the unity, the various points of the compass.

Because these people were very sophisticated astronomically, as you probably have surmised,

any of you who have looked at Stonehenge reproductions, for example.

But even if you go back way into the Paleolithic 20,000 years ago,

they were already into some really remarkable record-keeping.

Some of it may have been, as a matter of fact, begun with women's menstrual circles, cycles.

I think that arresting fact, that blood, the life-giving blood comes, must have really inspired some women to try to figure out

when would this essentially supernatural event be experienced again.

But I want to stay with the cross.

Then, later on, in Egyptian hieroglyphics, the cross is still, you know, a symbol of light.

But when you move into the Dominator era, which you begin to find,

and you find it way before the Romans and way before the Crucifixion,

you find that the Assyrians had this lovely habit of impaling people on crosses.

You see Tiglath-Peleza, you know, this whole panorama of the whole city practically impaled.

I mean, just brutality.

So the cross became what? It became not a symbol of life and regeneration,

but it became a symbol of brutal death.

And, of course, then comes the early Christianity, Jesus,

preaching a partnership of spirituality, associating freely with women, violating,

even in the official Gospels you find this, of course,

his disciples marveling that he associates with women

and with no one else present like the woman at the will.

You know, I mean, Khomeini's Iran, you could probably get killed for doing that.

And so it was in this very rigidly male dominant,

you know, very hierarchic, violent society that he was, you know, challenging.

And he broke those taboos and he preached partnership.

And, of course, what we do in these hybrid societies,

the women are ignored, basically, and ridiculed and forget it,

but the men are usually crucified and canonized.

And so, well, you kill them, and then you say,

oh, weren't they wonderful, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, you know,

I mean, all of, so that's, you know, so of course, you know,

he gets crucified on a cross.

But early Christianity tries to, again, revive the old symbolism, doesn't it,

of the cross, as a symbol not only of dying on this awful thing,

but the old symbolism of life and regeneration, rebirth, the rebirth.

And, of course, Christianity, obviously, is a very direct descendant of the old religion,

only a very interesting thing happened along the way, folks,

which is that the Great Mother, you know, the Goddess,

but at first she was dropped completely.

And then when the Troubadour movement,

and this was a time of tremendous partnership resurgence,

and we don't have time for it, but it's very, very fascinating,

because the Troubadour courtly love has some relationship to Tantric yoga,

and we won't go into that.

But, I mean, I just want to leave you with that,

because it's really extraordinary, the commonalities we begin to see.

But the Troubadours introduced this thing called neriology,

which the Church authorities say, this is unheard of.

It has never been heard of.

Well, nonsense.

It was a revival of the ancient worship of the Goddess,

and the people danced in the streets of Lyon, you know,

when the Church finally co-opted it and said,

okay, folks, we'll accept it.

But she is now the only mortal figure in the Holy Family.

So we've got this real absurdity of a Holy Family

with a Divine Father and a Divine Son,

and some parvenu, you know, this woman who just happens to come along, right?

So we maintain the dominator character.

And, of course, that went along with what then the Cross again becomes,

the Cross as a symbol of the Crusade, of the Inquisition.

It again really truly becomes a symbol not of life and the love of life and of regeneration,

but of death and the Ku Klux Klan.

with its white cross is a very, very good modern illustration.

And the reason I think I went through this with you is not only because intrinsically

it's so interesting to really reclaim some of our basic and ancient symbols, because

all of these symbols can have so many meanings is what I'm really trying to say, depending

on what prism we use for it, but to really lead into perhaps a look at shamanism from

that perspective, because I have sort of a sense about the shamanic experience that

we're talking about a number of experiences, and I feel sort of a need to say again that

I feel that there are many paths to what, I don't even know that we need to call it the

shamanic experience, because shamanism per se, as you pointed out, is the healer, that is

the healing function, and it may mean not only physical healing, but spiritual healing, which

we are now rediscovering, folks, it's related, you know, the ancients kind of understood

that.

But now we're beginning to understand, you know, with holistic medicine that, you know,

that the two go together, that, you know, nature and spirituality are related.

Perhaps we can speak about it as the ecstatic experience, the experience of gnosis.

And I would say that there are many paths to the experience of gnosis, that the use of nature

that involves not only the use of plants, but the use of even our own breath, which is a

way, you know, through meditation, it involves sexual, you know, tantric yoga has the remnants

of what I think was a view of sex as sacrament, still in it, but of course it's become very

male-centered.

You know, everything is he gets access to Shakti, which is of course, you know, the creative

force, the goddess, through the woman, but somehow she's become this passive agent of

the whole thing.

Go ahead.

I'm sorry.

It's very little.

The guide is very big and has a tiny little woman on it.

And isn't that amazing?

Because you see Shakti, of course, if the whole concept is that you have access, well,

look, I mean, the vulva, the vagina was sacred in the Paleolithic.

You see what we call the inverted triangle, and it's sacred.

And you see that in Indian iconography.

So, yes, I mean, this was, you know, the idea that this is a cunt, you know, our worst

and most contentious swear word would have been such blasphemy, as it should be, again,

to us.

We have to reclaim, really, the spirituality of our sexuality.

But I think the sexual experience can be, not always, you know, I mean, it doesn't mean

that it's going to be very serious in town all the time, either, but it can also be another

avenue that is a natural avenue.

So I would like to perhaps put this in the context of larger paths.

And, of course, we all know about the paths of having that aha experience of the oneness

through fasting, through chanting, through all kinds of hypnotic things.

But there's no question in my mind that the plant experience is one of the quickest

and one of the most powerful avenues.

But the real issue, and I want to really talk about it, I was talking to you earlier,

I want to put it in the modern context, in the 60s, because that's a very important case

history for us, and we must learn.

If we don't want to learn from the past, we really are in deep trouble.

What happened in the 60s, as you know, was that, yes, that the use of hallucinogen was part

of this awakening, you know, the flower children, the counterculture.

But then some really dreadful things happened.

And what happened, of course, was the co-option of the drug culture as, again, the opiate of

the people.

The politics, the true politics, in the sense of transformation, not Republican, Democrat,

or, you know, Reagan, or, you know, whatever.

But the true politics of transformation, from the dominator to the partnership, society,

got completely co-opted, didn't it, through the drug experience.

And historically, the use of opiates, for example, in China, is a very vivid example,

but hashish, you know, you name it, you've got it, has literally been a way to get people

to accept the most miserable, the most virulent, the most brutal of oppression from their overlords.

So I think that it's so important, if we're talking about this as a technology, that it

can be a technology of domination just as easily as it can be a technology of actualization.

And I'm not going to dispute it, but you're saying that some of the natural plants are

less likely to be used that way, that it's mostly the chemical ones, but I'm not a hundred

percent sure, because look at the opiates.

Well, I don't think opium was really a problem, number one, until the British, as a matter

of state policy, manipulated opium production in the Far East, and then secondly, until the

invention of morphine and the family of synthetics.

I mean, opium use, as you mentioned, goes back to Minoan times and probably earlier.

No, we have a remarkable ability to pervert.

And I think it was Ludwig von Bertolanski, one of the founders of General Systems Theory,

who said, people are not machines, but in every situation where they are offered the opportunity

to behave like machines, they will so behave.

We have to be, this maybe brings up something we should talk about because it was requested,

and it seems germane here.

And this is the problem of addiction and habit.

And addiction is merely a special type of habit.

And I think we can agree that habit, in all forms, kills what we want to bring to flower in life.

Because as a habit sets in, attention can go elsewhere.

And then that part of life is somehow unautomatic.

It has become a machine-like function.

So we are now being told that we are in the midst of a tremendous political crisis that goes under the banner of the drug problem.

But the drug problem is an addiction problem.

And the addiction is, in my mind, the addiction of intelligence agencies to vast amounts of untraceable money.

This is the addiction which drives the global drug problem.

But, of course, it is true that there are chemical dependencies.

And this is a very interesting thing about human beings.

Something, and I'll talk about this a bit more tomorrow,

but something about our ability to be omnivorous, to eat all kinds of things,

has lain us open to perhaps manipulation is too strong a word,

but certainly to evolutionarily selective pressures that are not ordinarily present.

Because, you know, most animals eat a few foods.

Many animals eat only one food.

Our ability to be omnivorous has exposed us over the last four or five million years

to a vast number of mutagenic and synergistic compounds

that may have been responsible for such things as the prolongation of adolescence in our species,

the way in which lactation occurs.

A number of physiological factors in our makeup that we take for granted

may be fairly recent acquisitions having to do with our omnivorous diet.

And drugs come into this at some point, too, because, for instance, in the case of psilocybin,

very small amounts of psilocybin in the diet are not detectable at all as a psychological impression,

but tests have shown that very small amounts of psilocybin in the diet confer increased visual acuity.

Well, you don't have to have studied too much evolutionary biology to know that

if you have a population of animals and something in the food chain is increasing the visual acuity of some of them,

those animals are going to have a more successful reproductive strategy than their competitors,

and that trait will be reinforced and strengthened.

So we have been sculpted by nature through our foraging habits,

and Rian stressed the notion of template, and I think that's very important.

Human beings are templated out of nature.

We have been shaped by unusual evolutionary forces.

And when you look at us, we clearly play an unusual evolutionary role.

We are some kind of trigger species for mode shifts that affect the entire planet.

And if you take the notion of Gaia seriously, and don't simply think of Gaia,

if you don't simply replace the old man with the long white beard with a beautiful young woman as an abstraction,

but actually try to, what is Gaia?

Gaia is the set of integrated informational control systems

which regulate and maintain and stabilize all life and all biological processes on this planet.

And the way this is done is through chemical messengers, enzymes, stimulants, depressants, enhancers,

all of these things push and pull on the morphogenetic field in which everything on the planet is bound.

To me, the great miracle on this planet is us.

We are the great unlikelihood.

If this planet were as it was even five million years ago,

Darwinian mechanics properly modified would be sufficient to account for what was present,

natural ecosystems, animals in competitive and adaptive relationships.

But we really are as alien as an alien spacecraft would be.

We are the great imponderable here.

And I think that nature is at play with itself and is calling out of the primates a gene swarm that is in self-reflection of what is otherwise a planetary intent.

And that's why we feel why our hearts are so open to these ineffable emotions about destiny and transformation.

And someone this morning asked about history and what was it good for.

It's the long turn of the spiral.

You know, the prodigal son is somehow in a better position for having made the peregrination, the journey into alienation,

and then returns enriched to the tribal encampment.

I think of European civilization as a prodigal phenomenon,

but a prodigal phenomenon that will be redeemed when we return to the tribal societies we split away from six, seven thousand years ago,

but return now with a tremendous empowering knowledge of how to realize the shamanic dream.

But I don't see this as a product of ego, of decisions made by far-seeing men and women.

It's much more like a dance.

It is a dance to which we respond in our souls, and often we don't understand why we do the things that we do.

But ultimately, as Rian said, it's the unweaving and reweaving of a tapestry into a finer, clearer pattern.

And to return this to the subject of addiction and how it fits in, addiction is falling away from clarity,

falling away from the felt presence of the moment, and everything addicts,

and everything must therefore be viewed with a certain amount of wry suspicion.

I think we didn't get where we were by making unfounded assumptions.

We got to this place by being very careful where we put our attention.

And I think we've done rather well.

There's a kind of denigration of the historical process,

but that's if you come from the school that believes we're fallen angels.

If you come from the school that believes we're risen eight, then we haven't done too badly.

That's right.

That's exactly it.

And culture is an addiction.

That's why I maintain in the question of the psychedelics,

we have to define these things operationally.

And really, the psychedelics are the enzymes which dissolve habitual behavior patterns

and return us to a tabla rasa where then new instructions can be etched in

and new pathways explored.

That's the reason that the psychedelics are so unsettling to the establishment

because they are not part of the quote-unquote drug problem

because they involve very small numbers of people and very small amounts of money,

but very big ideas and very large willingness to question the idols of the tribe.

And that's much more unsettling than a few illicit millionaires.

I'm just interested because you started out by talking about the importance of context

and the importance of the proper, whatever proper means, but in order to have that gnosis experience.

And if we're living in the midst of, because I don't know about whether or not the partnership ever existed in purity.

You were saying it was an ideal and there was probably, my sense of it, because I haven't done that much reading,

but my sense based on what I know about myself and what I've seen around me, the way people are,

there was probably, I think, always a mixture of dominant relationships and partnership relationships

and that you could have a balance that was predominantly partnership and a balance that was predominantly something else.

And it's, I don't know, because I've never seen it, you know, where people were exclusively working in partnership.

But to get back to context, how can you, the co-opting seems such a natural thing because we live in a dominant paradigm,

so that if you're going to do psychedelics and dissolve, say, your own ego and defenses and stuff like that,

what are you going to put in its place without having seen the model?

What kind of context can you construct for yourself so that you're doing that and you can be pretty safely?

And the reason I'm asking is because I've seen people, well-intentioned people,

who intended only to dissolve their ego so that they could be something better, become something very dysfunctional.

And so that's why I'm asking the question and I wonder if you would address that context issue.

Is it to me?

Whoever would like to talk about it, I think it needs to be brought up.

Maybe we both have something to say.

Rian mentioned the sixties as a less than ideal situation as it turned out.

If you look back at the literature of the underground in the sixties,

certain things that we take completely for granted are totally absent.

One of them is any sense of the historical context of hallucinogenic and shamanic ecstasy.

There is no talk of shamanism.

There is a little bit of talk about peyote, but no real awareness that those people in the 1960s thought they were discovering something brand new,

not the oldest religion in the world.

The way we create a context, to address your question, is by creating a community.

We can advance no faster than the envelope of language in which we are embedded.

And the material manifestation of our linguistic sphere is our affinity group, our community.

That's why I think one of the most important things about these kinds of get-togethers

is for you people to see and recognize each other.

Because the awareness of these things is still a very closely held thing.

And you should recognize in each other your affinity group.

You are self-selected by yourselves to be here today.

And in the spirit of the partnership and ignoring the hierarchy,

I abhor all this guru-worship and all this stuff because it's just a bunch of crap.

Nobody knows anything more than anybody else.

Transformation is a community project.

It can't be anything else.

Oh, give him a chance.

But Rian, you might want to say something about that.

Yes, I do want to say, well I agree with you completely,

that the creation of community is essential.

But I would define community more broadly in the sense that it is not enough

that we have our little islands, if you will.

Because in order to survive in the, quote, real world,

we either change that world or we're constantly being pulled into dominator modes

of thinking and of rationalizing what we do and of behaving.

So that's the first point.

I would like to say that there are some very clear strategies

that I think are very, very important.

One of them, it has been until now, generally sort of been thought of

as being perhaps impractical.

It relates to this whole idea of education,

but education on a far deeper level than what we've often talked about it.

And of course it also relates to this whole notion of morphogenetic fields,

of a kind of a telepathic kind of thing that happens with images.

Now, I think that one of the most important tasks that we have before us now,

and we are all creative people, I mean our creativity really,

the dominator model and creativity are antithetical to each other,

so the image of the starving artist is very appropriate, you know, for the dominator model,

very inappropriate, you know, for a society that values, you know, the creativity

that would be more of a partnership society,

is for us to create images that are not just, I think, the age of protest, you know, of being against.

I met a lovely young woman, a 16-year-old young woman,

and she said, when I read The Chalice in the Glade,

I go to a school where the kids are always protesting against everything,

and I suddenly realized that what they're protesting against is the dominator system,

and that what we really have to do is to move beyond that

and to begin to create the images that are appropriate to a partnership society.

So I'm talking in terms of ideas, in terms of visual images, in terms, of course, of media, the arts,

to begin to replace, because if you go into, this is one of the things with the use of, you know,

what is in your imagination?

If your imagination is so overcrowded with dominator images,

are you really going to be able to surface, you know, and have this confirmation?

So I think that's a very practical thing.

Those of you who are in the media, take it very, very seriously, please.

And it's fun, anyway, to work this way.

And I think, if some of you are in the media,

I spent an evening with some of the Hollywood people recently.

Basically, what we were talking about was this idea that now is the time,

because people at a certain point of addiction get to saturation,

and the addiction to violence, and to depersonalized, you know, mechanical sex.

And, you know, I mean, I think we've gotten to the point where people are just sort of like,

oh my God, they're hungry for something else.

This is our moment. This is our opportunity.

So images are extremely important.

And I don't mean, because we live by stories. That's another thing.

People live by stories. We don't, I mean, science tells us stories, too.

And the selfish gene story, which is an upstate, of course, of original sin, you know, I mean, what else is new?

You know, now it isn't us, but it's the, you know, it's the gene somehow, the selfish thing.

You know, we live by these stories.

So it's up to us to bring out new stories.

And the stories can be from science. It's very important that they be from science.

Stories from biology that are showing us that in the body, for example, there's, if you will,

much more partnership, much more cooperation going on than there is hierarchy.

You know, for the organism, you know, the liver and the heart, I mean, they're not just by themselves.

It all sort of interconnects and interrelates.

Because I know the brain is in charge, though. All the oxygen goes to the brain.

Well, the oxygen goes to the brain, but is the brain in charge, or is the brain part of a larger neurological system

that really is a transmitter and also an imager for us?

I mean, I think that there's much more than the brain being, you know, the general in charge here.

That's the picture we've been given, of course, right?

Because it fits with the pyramid model.

But is it the brain, or does the...

I mean, we've been talking about really gnosis, knowledge.

Is that really coming from the brain?

Or is that something else, some other receptor that we have?

Is the brain perhaps a receptor, a transmuter, a converter, a creative agent, rather than a general?

I prefer that image, and I think it's more accurate.

And I think if you talk to people today who are doing the work with the brain,

they'll probably move more towards, you know, the reality of that second image.

And the other thing, I hate to say it to you people, but we do have to talk about economics.

I mean, it's all very well to talk about the, you know, about the mystical experience and about imagery,

but we have to restructure. We have to restructure.

And we have to restructure the whole darn planet, so that it's more of a partnership.

And that doesn't mean that there won't be some people who have more and some people who have less,

but it's absolutely inexcusable with our level of technological development,

including birth control technologies, to have the kind of idiocy.

But you see, the lunacy is part of the dominator system, because it's not by accident

that the most rigidly dominator systems are the ones who are so rabidly against family planning,

who are so rabidly against reproductive freedom for women, who are so rabidly against any other role for women,

any other definition for women, other than basically male-controlled technologies of reproduction.

You know, breeders, breeders preferably of men's sons.

I mean, that doesn't have to be, right?

So, using the most advanced technologies to move into a partnership era is one of the most extraordinary challenges.

And I think that that's really what this is about.

It is not just to sit and contemplate ourselves, but to actually use this in an action mode, too.

And putting out important ideas is very important, too.

That's part of the action.

I just want to go back to the 60s for a minute.

You said that you thought that drugs, the drug culture, got co-opted.

Yes.

That culture got co-opted by drugs.

It seems to me that in the 60s, the certain drugs, again, to not just talk about drugs generically,

but certain drugs have more to do with creating a sense of partnership than anything that I know of,

at least in my lifetime, through my own direct experiences, study, reading, anything.

Direct drug experiences seemed to lead to a very radical change of mentality of a massive group of people.

That's right.

And I think it's a mistake to think that those drugs,

that there was anything wrong or anything really weird happened regarding those particular drugs.

There were new drugs that came in.

Cocaine came in, which is interesting to me because it seemed to change.

It became a very, that seemed very much in that dominant model.

Yes.

But marijuana and the mushrooms, LSD, they seemed very much in the partnership model

and seemed to perpetuate that.

And I'm glad you made that distinction because clearly all of us who lived through the 60s

knew that the use of grass and the use of the hallucinogens, it was a community building.

It was really, to a very large extent, a building of partnership.

And that is not what I meant.

What I meant was that, well, part of it was the cocaine coming in.

But part of it was also LSD, I think.

And it was just the whole idea of shifting from drug as a revelation experience,

as a transformation experience, to one that has a terrific function in the dominator society,

which is the addictive, which is to keep you right there without taking any action.

That is what I meant, and I'm glad you clarified that.

Yes.

I think what reared its ugly head and shot down the 1960s was process.

And the fact that, I don't, I have no problem with LSD per se, but it has one quality which

really flaws it.

And that is that a single chemist in his basement can produce millions and millions of doses.

That immediately raises it to the level of a social menace.

Because when you talk about millions of doses of a deconditioning agent, it means you're going

head-to-head with the tough guys.

And also when you're talking about being a single person, being able to make millions of doses,

then you're talking about multiple millions of dollars.

And immediately the possibility of keeping things from getting out of hand is, I think, really diminished.

The key is plant compounds and substances which have inherent trickle factors in them,

where you can never get too much together at any one time, and nobody can ever get too rich,

and everything.

Then the mystery stays.

This is, the plants are like this, and this keeps them going.

But I wanted to say something more about this context, and sort of not in great detail and

semi-tongue-in-cheek, but to show you how context works and how dominator society both insidiously

invades our conception of things and also might be equally insidiously plotted against.

One of the things that we take utterly for granted, I think, is the calendar.

We live in a calendar of 365 days.

It's a solar calendar.

That means that relative to the fixed stars, the equimoptial and sosticial points are fixed.

And this is a lie, or it perpetuates a misconception.

It perpetuates the conception that things endure, and that flux is an illusion.

The solar calendar has built into it deep propagandistic assumptions in favor of the dominator model.

And to see what I mean, just imagine, however seriously you care to, that we changed the calendar

to a calendar with a day length of 384 days, so that our year was 13 lunations, and had

19 more days in it than the solar year.

If we were to adopt a calendar like this, all holidays and great festivals would do what

is called precessing.

They would move 19 days a year, so that when you were a child, you would recall Christmases

in winter.

If we were to be born 19 days a year,heiten will embed usこれは durante kal etc 7 terrestris

in winter.

I like to know titles.

I like to see who you are doing that.

We've collected it.

But you would recall that in your adolescence, Christmas fell in summer, and so forth.

And every 19 years, the great festivals would return to where they had been relative to the fixed stars.

Well, this may seem fairly abstract and removed from common experience,

but in fact, because this is sort of the great frame in which all the other little frames are suspended,

we operate at a tremendous disadvantage because we are embedded in a patriarchal solar calendar

which reinforces the false notion of permanence and stability.

The I Ching hexagram 49 is the hexagram revolution,

and you might turn to it expecting a treatise on courtly politics or something like that.

But what you actually read there is the news that the magician is a calendar maker.

A strange notion, but precisely addressing what I'm trying to say,

that this is one of the ways in which we might revision our world

to accentuate flux and flow and change and the transience and the coming to be and the falling away

rather than this constipated, death-denying, paternalistic, solar kind of point of view.

So that's one notion of how context might change.

And it's an interesting idea.

It's not illegal to advocate calendrical reform.

It's probably not ever occurred to anyone.

But believe me, in prehistory and in early Chinese history,

tremendous battles were fought, and these were issues of great importance

because the founders of new dynasties understood

that the way to establish their reigns was to sweep away

all previous calendrical conceptions and establish a zero year

and then create, in that context, all the subcontexts of their political agenda.

Well, it's the new order.

And I think that that's so interesting because we are, of course,

well, many of us, and I'm sure many of us here,

are going back to the celebration of some of the most ancient festivals,

the nature festivals, the solstices, the equinoxes, the full moon, the young moon.

These were the most ancient holy days

because they were congruent with the rhythm of nature.

And I think you're quite right.

What the solar calendar does, it sort of nullifies

that whole cyclic spiral quality of life.

But I want to get back for a moment in that context

to the issue of the use of psychedelics

because the use of them as a medium through carefully thought through

and reconstituted, certainly going back to some of its ancient roots,

as we're doing here, you know, with some of the music,

but also adapting it for today and for tomorrow.

That, and also, that really relates to the whole issue of calendar, too.

I mean, to the issue of when.

When are the times of the year when you do this?

Because regardless of anything else,

if we are to engage in this practice on a random and very frequent basis,

we're not going to have a very productive economy.

I mean, it's just a very simple equation, you know,

because it's sort of easy to wash the way then

and to really not be creative.

You know, so it's an issue.

I think we have to address that issue, don't we?

And it goes with the issue of calendar.

It goes with the issue of ritual.

I mean, these things are all interconnected.

Yes, your remarks make me think of something Omar Stewart said,

who was a botanist and anthropologist,

and I don't know how serious he was,

but he felt that the great transition in plant consciousness

came with the invention of agriculture,

that the hunting peoples could take the ecstatic hallucinogens

because you could sleep in the next day.

But once you got into agriculture,

corn became the important plant,

and there was no more getting stoned

because everybody had to get up early

and get out there and hoe the corn.

Oh, of course, we don't have to get up early

and hoe the corn today, but still.

Does that mean we can get stoned?

There is something to it being a holy thing.

No, I agree.

And a sacramental thing.

And that really relates to woolly days

and to this whole notion of it being done within a context

that we have to create.

I mean, we have to do nothing more or less than to create a culture.

But fortunately, we have a lot of the strands to work with.

Yes, a successful psychedelic trip

absolutely kills the desire to do it again very soon.

So it's a self-limiting experience.

Yes, it's a self-limiting experience.

And the way to know whether you're doing it correctly or not

is if what you're doing doesn't make you afraid,

you're not doing it right.

On that note,

we might want to think about the 10-minute stretch and...

Wonderful.

So we thought for this closing session this afternoon

that we would hope to hear from you

and I vow to give shorter answers.

We've made a pact here.

The two of us just go on.

So we want to hear from you.

I just want to make one quick suggestion

to hear it addressed at some point

because I know that some people are curious about this

and that is not everybody may know

that both of you are involved in wonderful relationships,

probably modeled for marital.

And there might be a few words you could say

about just certainly the issue of dominator versus partnership

comes up in marriages and relationships constantly

and how we can take some of these really wonderful ideas

in terms of how we define Gaian consciousness

and bring it down to how we get out of an argument.

That might be just...

How you both deal with it must be terribly illuminating.

Well, I'll start.

I am in a committed long-term relationship.

Many of you know my partner, Kat.

We've been together since 1975.

We met in 1967 in Jerusalem, actually.

But we were on different paths

and didn't really see each other for nine years.

And we have two children,

Finn, a boy, ten,

and Clea, a girl, seven.

And Rian said yesterday

that partnership is preferable because it's fun.

It certainly is fun.

It's also a great challenge.

It is the challenge, I think.

There's a wonderful saying

that addresses the problem of ego

in the dominator situation.

It's Uzbekistani, this saying.

It's that a man may be a fool and not know it,

but not if he's married.

So partnership is a wonderful opportunity

for humility

and for seeing oneself

as others see them.

And, well, it's everything.

I can't say enough about it.

It's the coniunctio.

It's the great challenge.

It drives one to distraction.

It is perhaps the transcendental object

that is most personally experienced

by each of us.

I think it's fair to say

that in our individual lives

where magic is most present

is in the matter of forming partnerships

and bonding.

I mean, you know,

a typical example is

that you can see a woman

across a crowded room

speaking as a man

and something passes between you

and then later you find out

that, well, she's the daughter

of the corporation president

or the university chancellor

and doesn't speak English

and is already married

to a French count

and so forth and so on.

But lo and behold,

circumstances evolve

and she divorces the French count,

she learns to speak English,

she gets an apartment

across the hall

and this falls into place

like magic,

in fact, magic.

And so we can summon this power

to the things we care about most

and what we care about most

is I think falling into this,

the dyad.

I really think that people

come in two pieces

and you sort of have to put

the pieces together

and then you get

a curious beast indeed

that can maybe ride

a longer distance,

I'm not sure.

What's your story?

Well, my story I'd like to share

with my partner, with David.

Do you want to go first, David,

or should I?

Okay, I'll go first.

I'll come on down.

Okay.

I started off

my partnership with David

only 11 years ago

and it was

a miracle

is what it was.

I had a friar at marriage

and that was really a very

terrific learning experience,

I guess one says

about the unpleasant thing.

But it was a classic

dominator relationship

and we were both miserable.

I mean, I was really

getting pretty good

at manipulating, actually.

This is what you have

to get to

if you're in a

dominator relationship.

And it really brings out

the worst in everybody.

You know, the guy

who's supposed to be the,

who never, you know,

I mean, he never apologizes.

He always, you know,

he knows.

I mean, by golly,

you know, his ego.

And, of course, you know,

he knows that this isn't working

and so he's very tense

about the whole thing,

you know,

as he leaves his laundry

for you to pick up

on the floor.

And you hate it

and you begin to hate him.

And so you start manipulating.

And so after a while,

you know,

you're both miserable.

I mean, that's really

the classic pattern,

isn't it?

That, and people stay,

and the whole difference

between dominator relationships,

as far as, you know,

heterosexual long-term relationships

and partnership relationships

is that the bonding

and one is really coercion.

I mean,

well, it used to be,

you know,

the story of Don Jose

killing Carmen.

I mean,

if you dare leave this guy

for somebody else,

he'll kill you.

That's a pretty good motivation

not to go right there.

But a lot of it,

of course,

more recently

has been economic,

you know,

especially for the women.

You know,

they just couldn't get out

of this rotten situation

so they kidded themselves

and everybody else.

So now we're starting

from scratch, right?

And we're all saying,

wait a minute,

this old stuff

has made everybody

literally ill.

And so I was so blessed.

I found David

and David found me

and we met

and he came over for lunch

and he never went home.

Actually,

he did go home

because I had an appointment

with an accountant

that afternoon

and I had told him

that I was going

to go to a movie

that evening

and he said to me,

you really have to go

to that movie?

And I said,

no,

I don't have to go

to that movie.

So he came back

and I have to share

something with you

which is sort of funny.

I was so scared

of getting married again

because getting married,

you know,

especially in my generation,

you carry that

dominator luggage

of wife,

husband,

you know,

and that programming.

So we waited 10 years

and we finally got married

and it was wonderful

because it was

the three of us,

we were married

by a woman

which was really

terrific experience.

I mean,

just the three of us

and she was a gorgeous,

wonderful woman

wearing this beautiful robe,

these colorful robes

and we all cried

and David read me his poetry

and I read him my vows

and it was a sacred moment

for us.

And so,

we do have arguments,

I mean,

in case you're interested

and partnership

doesn't mean perfect either

but we also have

developed some techniques

for working them out

sometimes.

Why don't I tell you

real quickly

of the techniques

that we use

and then let me share

with you

two or three

sort of interesting

stories to me

centering around

how we met

because they seem

to have various morals,

various dimensions

of meaning.

But the technique first,

I really found this

tremendously useful

and it was

Rian's idea

and it was

her reinterpretation

or reworking

of an idea

out of co-counseling

and the idea

is simply this.

Contrary to the image

that people

might like to believe,

we do have

tremendous conflict

because we both

only reach

the place we are

by being,

developing

really strong

egos,

strong,

but more than

strong egos,

strong identities.

I think there's

a difference.

Yeah,

let's say strong

identities.

Strong identities

and...

Good story.

Now this is

important contextually.

This is what

I wasn't going to

get into

because I was

thinking to myself

I'm working

on an article

right now.

Rian has written

her half.

It's called

The Partnership

Society,

Social Vision

and Personal

Practice.

She's done

Social Vision

and you've heard

parts of it.

I'm working right

now on personal

practice and

thinking all this

through and I

thought to myself

shall I share

any of this?

And I thought

I don't have it

thought through

well enough.

But I feel

I should add this

to what I was

going to say

on this conflict

of strong

identities,

not egos.

We're going

through this

period, see,

where there's

been this

traditional

male-dominant

female-submissive

relating of

the sexes.

And in trying

to get out of

it, there's an

awful lot of

role reversal

where the women

are becoming

strong, forceful

and talk a lot.

And the men

are becoming

more submissive

and sitting back

and taking it

and so on.

Now, this is

actually, if you

look it over,

this is a

necessary part

of the

transition, but

the transition

only, because

if that pattern

prevails, then

we're lost, because

all you've got is

the flip side of

the coin once

again.

You've got the

woman, too

dominant, talking,

calling the shots

too much, feeling

guilty about it,

and that makes

her do it even

more.

You've got the

man sitting

there silent and

seizing and

seizing until he

explodes, and

this leads to

actual violence,

physical violence

in some cases,

because the men

are more muscular

and so on.

No, but it

hasn't in my

picture.

No, no, but

I'm looking out

at the general

picture.

So what I see

that we must be

moving towards

is not this

situation where

you've got one

partner or the

other.

It's the dominant

one and the

other one is the

submissive thing.

The tip-off to

what's wrong here

is when it

becomes an

inflexible,

invariant

pattern.

Once you get

into it,

as the bulk

of you already

know, I'm

just trying to

articulate what's

gone through the

heads of a lot

of you in

relationships, you

discover progressively

that there are

certain situations

where one party

should be dominant

because that

particular party

knows a hell of a

lot more about

whatever it is in

that situation

than you do.

And there's other

situations where

you've got the

expertise and

you've got the

contacts and

you're down with

the secret things

to be the

flexibility and

knowing each other

well enough to

know when to

flip it to the

other one and

let the other

one take over

and so on.

But we've got to

move toward this

situation where

you've got not

strong and

weak or weak

and weak.

Another one of

these patterns is

the weak and

the weak.

And that's not

so bad, you

know, where

people actually

admit, you

know, I got

imperfections,

you've got

imperfections.

Let's work

together to

perfect ourselves.

It doesn't

always work, as

a partnership

society model

to me is

strong and

strong, where

you've got two

strong identities

and they work

out this, you

know, according

to the situation

and their

relationship with

nature, with

all of nature

and all of life

is strong too.

Anyway, enough

to that, that's

sort of an

overall thing.

Co-counseling.

Technique.

Oh, co-counseling,

yeah, because

this is something

very practical.

Okay, you've got

these two strong

identities and

they've come to

the, both of

them are very

tempted and

have already

regressed,

already regressed

partly into that

monstrous

situation, the

dominator system

that's got

them.

Now, what we

do, well,

actually it isn't

what we do, it's

almost invariably

Rian says, in

effect, now look,

let's have a

session.

And that's my

cue to get

out of my

defensive, withdrawal,

seething,

rah, type

thing, too.

The routine we

both go through

is, first you

say, you're

forced to say,

oh, what is

it?

I always forget

what it is.

It comes out

of re-evaluation

and co-counseling

and you start off

by saying what's

new and good.

Which really

brings you into

the here and

now.

So you're

forced to say

what's new

and good.

And you may

say, there's

absolutely nothing

new and good.

And the other

party says,

uh-uh, you

must think of

something new

and good.

So then you

think, well,

it's a beautiful

day.

That functions.

Then you have

to think of

what's good

about myself.

And you'd say,

I don't feel

that there's

anything good

about myself.

And once again,

you must think

about coming

good about

yourself.

And then you

say, well,

I can play a

good harmonica.

And then comes

the difficult one

in these quarrel

situations.

What's new and

good about the

other person?

And then you

come up with,

well, I think

you're pretty or

something like

and that

fulfills it.

Then you go

into your

deep session

where you

unload, you

know, and you

just unload

everything.

And the sacred

rule here, the

key to this

whole method

working, the

other party

cannot interrupt.

No defensive

feedback, because

once there is

the slightest

defensive feedback

in this situation,

you're right in

that argument

cycle.

You know, you

said this and I

said this and so

on.

You said each

party unloads and

the other one

can't say a thing

until the windup

is, then your

windup is, isn't

it what we're

looking forward to?

Yeah, the windup

is something I'm

looking forward to.

Oddly enough, by

the time you reach

that point, you

say, well, something

I'm looking forward

to, and usually

you feel much

better and you

can really

legitimately look

forward to

something.

And both parties

do this.

And if you do

this, you'll be

absolutely astounded

at how it will

improve your

relationships and

how much you

will actually be

building, helping

to build the

floor of the

partnership society

in a very

practical way.

How do you

figure out who

starts?

Usually you

know.

Who starts

the unloading?

Usually you

know.

Yeah.

Because it's

the person who's

really ready to

go.

Yeah, it's the

one with the

biggest build-up

that should

start.

Thank you,

David, for

sharing that.

Let me just

share one of

them, which

was centering

around how we

met.

Terrence was

talking about

seeing across

the crowded

room that

phenomenon.

And the

interesting thing

that happened to

me was I had

left my first

wife after a

typically

dominator,

unsatisfactory

type relationship

and so on.

And I was

lonely and

wandering in

Los Angeles and

dating women

and thinking,

gosh, there's

got to be some

simpler way of

going through

this process.

Because I'm a

psychologist and

I've had years

with ETS and

involved in test

development and so

on, so I figure

there ought to be

some simple test

I can develop.

So, actually,

you know, I went

through the

standard way of

thinking, you

know, the list

of 300 questions

and then it

sunk in on me.

So, I boiled

it all down.

Is there a

psychologist here?

Well, maybe

there's somebody

out there who

knows about a

guy named

Webb and

unobtrusive

measures.

I thought, ah,

this is something

for Webb's

unobtrusive

measures.

An unobtrusive

measure is

something seemingly

innocuous that

tells you an

awful lot about

the person

without a lot

of questions.

So, I boiled

it all down to,

without going

into the

reasons, I

had two

questions.

One was, or

the ideal

woman, was

did you love

your father?

And if the

answer was

yes...

But say

why, because

you had a

relationship

where they

were discussed

on both

sides, you

know, ambivalent

towards the

mother from

David.

Now, the

reason why

this was a

profoundly

well-grounded

question was,

in my own

case, I

had an

ambivalent

mother, and

so I had

grown up with

a very leery

sense toward

women.

I was

married first

to a woman

who had had

a very awful

father, and

she grew up

very, very

leery of men,

so that when

we had an

argument, we

both depart,

you know.

The message

from below

was, you

made a

mistake

hooking

up with

that

opposite

sex.

And so I

thought to

myself, I,

because that's

my background,

I must find

a woman who

had a good

relationship and

loved her

father.

Then, when

we get in

an argument,

I'll

withdraw, but

she will

follow.

Simple as

that, but

very, very

good.

Anyway, so

that was one

of my

questions, did

you love

your father?

And the

other one, I

collapsed

literally

everything else

in, who

is your

favorite

composer?

And the

answer had

to be

Mozart.

So, I

met Rian, and

we fell in

love almost

immediately, and

then I

thought, I've

got to try

the test.

I thought to

myself, what

if she

failed?

I'm madly

in love with

her, I

can't bear

to give

her up, but

what if she

fails my

test?

And so, I

held off a

week.

And finally,

she happened

to mention,

just spontaneously,

something about

her father, and

I thought, oh,

here it comes,

I've got to

help.

And I

said, tell

me this.

How'd you feel

about your

father?

And she

says, I

love my

father.

And I

thought, boy,

50%.

And then, about

another week went

by, and I

said, and we

were talking about

classical music, and

I thought, oh,

here it goes.

And I thought to

myself, as I

started to ask

the question, I

said, what if she

says Sibelius, who

happened to be my

least favorite

composer?

And I

said, oh, by

the way, who is

your favorite

composer?

And she

said, Mozart,

of course.

If I had

known that I

was the

existent, I

had not a

clue.

Anyway, that's

not only how we

met, but that's

what locked it

on.

It was a choice

of the heart

completely

legitimized by

science.

I just

comment on

monogamy in

terms of the

dominators, the

partnership.

Want me to

start?

I love you

to start.

Well, you

know, I think

that the issue

really relates

to this whole

question of

coercive versus

voluntary bonding.

The dominator

model is

well, think

of the whole

idea, you

know, of

the first

form of

slavery that

we have

archaeologically

documented

was actually

the enslavement

of women

from conquered

communities.

Even in the

Bible, you

know, it

says these

wonderful

directions,

always supposedly

from Yehovah,

kill all the

women who have

known a man,

kill everybody

as a matter of

fact, but only

those real

children who

have not known

a man, you

keep for

yourself, right?

I mean, this

is supposed to

be God's

command to you.

But anyway, so

it was a very

coercive kind

of situation

if you look

at it, you

know, from

that perspective

as women are

seen as

property.

And a lot

of what we've

seen has been

the coercive

bonding.

But I'm also

convinced that

given the

tremendous bonding

that comes from

mutually satisfying

affection through

sexual relationships,

the sharing of

the peak

experience, and

the friendship,

that is

impossible.

I mean, how

can you have

friendship as a

matter of fact

in a Muslim

dominator marriage

where the women

live in complete

apartheid?

I mean, good

morning, you

know, let's

go and, you

know, do it

for a few

minutes, maybe

you'll give

me a son, and

then goodbye.

I mean, that's

not very conducive

to voluntary

bonding, is it?

So I'm very

convinced that

this whole issue

of monogamy or

not monogamy

really can only

be looked at,

you know, in

terms of these

two situations.

That's not to

say that that

kind of positive

reinforcement, you

know, as

Skinner would

say, you

know, of the

sexual bonding, of

the affection, of

the friendship

that would

motivate you to

want to stick

around, you

know, with that

one person, you

know, quite a

lot, that that

would necessarily

be an exclusive

union.

I don't know

that, but I

think that there's

a lot that in a

partnership kind of

relationship would

really bring people

to want to stick

around with each

other because it's

just more fun and

because there are

advantages to a

partnership for

all kinds of

reasons, you know,

bringing up

children, but again,

if we have more

of a clan

situation where

there are, you

know, more

parents for each

child, so to

speak, that

exclusivity no

longer, you

know, becomes the

issue.

I think it's a very

complex issue and

the issue is

becoming a very

real one today with

the AIDS epidemic

and I want to say

something about

AIDS which may

strike you as

being rather

strange, but if

you think about

it, it's very much

a product of

traumatic trauma,

traumatization, a

tearing of tissue

which is really a

dominator form of

sex and the

rapid spread of

it through the

homosexual community

of course was

largely due to

this and the

fact that it's

spreading like

wildfire in

certain parts of

Africa, it has

to be related to

the genital

mutilation and

the scarring and

the weakness of

the tissue, you

know, that that

builds in as well

as some of the

really brutal kind

of sexual practices.

So it's almost like

nature giving us

some feedback here

that what the

sexual revolution is

about is not

brutal, mechanical,

you know, screw

everybody and

everything inside,

that it's about

something, about

maybe beginning to

reclaim sex of

sacrament a little

bit, and friendship

and bonding, and

that's not a moral

position, it's just

simply a way of

looking at it from

a perspective that

may be more

congruent with what

we all kind of

would enjoy.

So that's my

answer, it's not

an absolute

answer.

Well, naturally,

I think like

everyone who's in

a committed

relationship, I've

given this

considerable

thought, and

it seems to me

what the

tension about

monogamy in

modern society

can be traced

to, or the

sense of

perhaps dissatisfaction

with monogamy

can be traced to

the

distortion and betrayal of adolescence and that the problem begins in adolescence by

repressing adolescent sexuality and this then creates a sense of irrecoverable loss and

this weird sort of haunting feeling that you didn't get it right and so life is not

being fair to you and then a multitude of sexual encounters is looked to as an answer to this

so but I think that monogamy represents a deepening of bonding into a kind of lifelong project that

is entirely spiritual not that it doesn't have a physical and an ecstatic and an erotic

side but it all is goes together to create something that should not be expected of

adolescence and should not be preached as the ideal at all stages of life

you like to do do you like to ask questions

a warlike application of people a tribe or whatever if you look at how they socialize their babies you can see that they seem to be very roughly in the United States and I wonder whether you have seen that in the warlike tribe and perhaps perhaps something different in the Australian

sexual representation

You put your finger on a very, very important, essential element of this system, of how the

dominator system maintains itself, regardless of how it really came about, and we talked

a little about that yesterday, and maybe we'll talk about it more today, what happened subsequently

was that the ways of maintaining the system became institutionalized, they became habitual.

And one of the ways of maintaining the system, which may have started with privations, you

know, with trauma, if you will, with the kind of thing that Reich called, you know, the things

that need to character armory, it may have started from natural reasons, you know, environmental

reasons, but then it became part of child-rearing, and it's not accidental that so many of the

most warlike of these tribal societies that we still see today practice very barbaric forms

of genital mutilation.

Because that's a way of traumatically beginning already, very, very early, you know, be it

genital mutilation of women, I don't know how many of you know that millions of women

in Africa and in many of the Muslim nations have their clitorises cut off.

I mean, we don't like to talk about it, and yet I must talk about it, because we must understand

that these are not just quaint ethnic customs, neither was it the quaint ethnic customs, you

know, the foot binding that performed, you know, and really mutilated the foot of Chinese

women.

These are all practices that become institutionalized in a dominator system of society, and we must

recognize them as such.

But, of course, it was also for males.

The original circumcision of males in many of these cultures is really horribly painful.

So, yes, from these very extreme forms to less extreme forms, and the fact that today,

look, a tremendous partnership trend, as Alice Miller, by the way, any of you know the work

of Alice Miller?

She's fabulous.

And she put her finger on it, because what she talks about is the institutionalization of

dominator ways of child-rearing, and birth, well that's another subject, I mean, what we've

done with birth.

But you see, these are all the ways that we've done it very cleverly to maintain the system,

which is killing us, so it's time to leave them behind.

But the thing that happened is that today, look, we no longer say, spare the rod and spoil

the child.

We call it child abuse.

That is a very powerful partnership trend.

Okay.

You were about to go into what a leadership structure would be like in a partnership society.

All right, I find that so fascinating, because again, it's emerging.

And you know where it's emerging most visibly?

You're going to laugh.

It's in the corporate literature.

Pick up Fortune magazine, and you find these big articles saying, what we need is a new

type of leader.

And what do we need specifically?

Well, we don't need this guy anymore, you know, the model of the manager as the cop,

as the controller.

But they're finally discovering that that inhibits creativity, and productivity thereby.

What do we need?

We need a leader that can inspire other people to work together in teams.

I mean, it's very, very interesting.

I mean, obviously this is preparing the kind of leadership that can provide leadership in

a partnership society.

But I really want to say that these two images from the title of my book, The Chalice and

The Blade, to be most visibly and dramatically conceptualized these two very different styles

of leadership.

You know, The Blade is a leadership through fear.

You will enjoy this, or else.

I mean, you better obey, or you'll be punished.

And The Chalice has, from remote antiquity, been the symbol of spiritual leadership, hasn't

it?

Of regeneration, of creativity, of transformation, of illumination, of bringing forth in us, eliciting

in every one of us, our greatest creativity, our greatest potential.

That is the symbol of that kind of leadership.

Can you talk about the Victorian era, how they raised children, and how that kind of

set the world up for World War I and World War II?

Well, you know, that would take another hour, probably, to really go into it.

But there is a fascinating work by a man called Theodore Rojak, who basically put his finger

on what some of these periods of warfare are really about.

And he talks about World War I, and it was really a resurgence of the masculine, close

masculine.

Okay, I really have to say masculinity and femininity, even what we associate in Jungian

terms with the yin and the yang, are very much products of dominator stereotypes.

And as we unravel and re-weave, we have to leave behind this idea that, you know, the

feminine is passive and cold and dark.

I mean, consider it for a moment.

It doesn't sound very good.

And that, you know, the masculine is the active.

As a matter of fact, you know, in many of the earlier symbology, it's quite the opposite.

So we have to untangle the symbols.

But the point of it is that Rojak points out, as have others, that it was a resurgence

of the masculine ethos and contempt for women, contempt for the feminine.

And so the Victorian era, of course, you know, being a predecessor of that, but it's much

more complicated in the Victorian era, because in the Victorian era, some of the rejection

by women of sex was also a rejection of servitude.

Just as women going into convents in the Middle Ages was a rejection of a form of family organization

where they were really male chattel.

You know, they were sexual and economic property.

So it's very complicated.

I won't go into a lot of detail.

Yes.

Yeah.

Last night, a woman brought up about the condition of women as single parents.

And I was thinking in terms of the partnership shift and changing modes, what would you comment

on the tendency of women to give up almost entirely on having a male partner as parent,

and poor parents, at least in America, male parents, that gave up on the idea of continuing

to nurture their children or starting to nurture them once they separate from their mothers?

See, ours is a period, I think, that you'll agree with me, parents of transition.

It's a period that we would call a period of tremendous systems disequilibrium.

And we know, in terms of our own personal histories, that for patterns that have been very, very rigid

to change, we have to go through a very painful time, very often, as the old patterns begin

to disintegrate, so that they can reform into something new.

And I see a lot of what's happening with the family as fitting into that.

There are both trends towards partnerships and still trends towards, you know, a dominator

society.

I mean, you know, it's a constant tension between the two right now.

But getting specifically to the issue of the single mother, I don't think that it's accidental

that so many of the young men who have come out in this newer generation, who are rejecting

the old male stereotype to varying degrees, came out of single mother homes, single family

homes, single parent homes, because they did not have that, you know, if you cry, your

father's going to beat you kind of thing.

That's just one part of it, you see.

But the real problem, you know, where are the good men?

I mean, that's really one of the issues.

Well, the good men are in every man.

But they have a tremendous struggle coming out at this time.

And, of course, the 80s were a tremendously important period of hammering back in again

the ideal of masculinity as the dominator.

So it was a setback in very, very real ways, not just legal, but on the mythopoetic.

And we live by stories.

Those stories really set us back.

So I think what I'm saying to you is that this is part of the dislocation that we're seeing.

I think that there will be some kind of regrouping as we move with very, very, there will continue

to be family, but it won't be the procreation-oriented, male-headed, so-called patriarchal family.

We're going to be seeing much more partnership families.

And these units will not only be units of women and men.

It will be also of men and men and women and women, of old people.

In other words, family will be redefined more in terms of the clan, of the extended family,

but, again, not the patriarchal clan.

That's as long as we do our work and we make it move in this direction,

because obviously the choice is up to us.

It's not going to happen by chance.

Sharon, do you want to say something on this?

Because I think you're right that the clan motif is what is gaining ground.

I think the nuclear family was such a theater of violence for the male ego to exercise itself.

Every man a king.

This is the banner under which the nuclear family flies.

And certainly the people in the Amazon that I'm most familiar with,

there are extreme dominator societies in the Amazon,

and then there are societies that seem to have a more equitable arrangement.

And it always seems to involve a larger social grouping than the family.

As early as the 1950s, Marshall McLuhan was talking about what he called electronic tribalism.

And this, I think, is coming to be.

The nuclear family, as it is glorified in the 20th century,

is largely an economic unit created out of 17th and 18th century forces.

So it is not written adamantine.

It is not in the genes.

It's a very temporary arrangement.

While the other, the clan arrangement, does have a morphogenetic field of millennia.

And so I agree with that entirely.

You have many more.

Yes.

I was curious, when you were talking about the invasion,

why was it that they didn't look at the partnership model and say,

well that looks better than what we have, let's integrate.

And so I have a feeling there is something very insidious in the dominant model

that makes it blind to the benefit of change.

I think you have answered your own question.

Yes.

Can I say something about that?

Yes, please.

I recently have asked this very same question,

and I have an idea which I will try out on you,

which is I think that the trigger event in this scenario that you are asking about

was the domestication of horses.

And that that happening at that time,

which it's known that it did happen at that time,

changed the relationship of these peripheral nomadic peoples.

And they suddenly saw opportunity, easy pickings.

And so they mounted horses.

It was an extension of the hunting psychology and began to be predatory upon these societies.

Before the domestication of the horse,

it was unthinkable because populations could not be rapidly transported and attacked

and successfully overwhelm sedentary populations.

We're going to talk more about technology,

but that's just one of the early instances where it was definitely technology

that tilted events in favor of the dominator as against the partnership society.

I think that's a very important element,

and I'd like to expand it further to suggest that if we talk technology,

we think of the first technology really after foraging is gathering and hunting.

Because animals forage.

But gatherers and hunters do store.

You know, they have containers and they share,

which is very, very human, of course.

But then you get this bifurcation, don't you,

of people who become primarily agrarian,

although they do domesticate some animals,

and others who become in the more arid, you know, less hospitable areas.

But still sustainable to a certain extent.

They become pastoralists.

And it's occurred to me that there may be something about

the dependence on meat in a pastoral society

where you raise little animals that you kind of like, you know,

because they're so cute and loving,

but you know that you're going to kill them,

that that's the whole purpose of the whole, you know, exercise here,

that that in itself may be part of the process.

And there's so many parts of this process of the character armoring,

of the deadening of empathy.

But I would suggest that maybe in that technology itself there are,

and I'm one, as we discussed yesterday,

I don't see one cause.

I'm not a biological determinist or an environmental determinist

or at least that determinist.

I see a multiplicity of factors.

Because complex systems, you always have a multiplicity of factors.

But I would suggest that that's another factor.

But it doesn't seem like you're very close to those force invaders.

I don't know how they got that.

Well, those are later...

I mean, the...

See, most of the societies about which we have written history are...

In fact, all of the societies about which we have written history,

I could almost say, are already infected by what I think of as the dominator virus,

which is spread by war.

I mean, war really spreads it.

It's like a virus that spreads the dominated system.

And so that, again, is a...

You are the woman who asks all these marvelously three-hour questions.

I love it.

That's a very complex thing.

But I do have to tell you that, for example, in Finnish folklore,

and I happen to know this because I've traveled to Finland several times,

and have...

In fact, my book, The Chalice of the Blade, has been acquired for publication.

It will be published in Finnish.

Well, it's been acquired for publication in Germany, France, Italy, Finland,

and also Brazil by now.

It's been marvelous.

It's been really extraordinary.

But the thing about Finland is that there's earlier folklore there,

indicating very definitely an earlier partnership tradition,

with overlays, then, of the other things.

So it's very complex.

Yes?

When you talk about history and prehistory,

I always think of history as being the period where you have written records.

That's right.

Written history.

And when you link history, therefore, with the dominator theory,

is there some, or the dominator model,

is there some link, do you feel, between the process of writing and the dominator?

No.

Is that merely coincidental, or...?

Well, let me answer that question by giving you some information.

The evidence now is, again, a UCLA archaeologist, Gimbutas, Maria Gimbutas, has...

Well, she has discovered it.

Some of these were Vinka tablets, which were thought to be classical Greek colonies,

and some obscure, you know, scripts.

She has discovered that there is a language, a written, a written language, a symbology,

if you will, of writing, that ambidates Sumerian.

You know, supposedly it started in Sumer about 3,200 years ago.

I could never understand that, because, you know, it was found in a temple,

which was still a temple dedicated to the goddess and the priestesses.

But presumably, the priestesses did the writing to keep mercantile records.

And I could never understand why we, as a species, would do our first writing,

just to figure out how many pots of something we own.

It didn't make sense, you know?

And, of course, what this earlier writing was, was a mythical, poetic, symbolic,

sacred language, which she is trying to decipher.

But the most important example of a historical society,

which still maintains its orientation primarily to the partnership model,

is Minoan Crete.

And, British archaeologist, excuse me, Greek archaeologist,

Nicholas Flayton, who excavated Minoan civilization

on the island of Crete and Santorini and surrounding areas,

very, very extensively for over 50 years,

they're suggesting that the legend of Atlantis,

the legend of this ancient civilization that was far more advanced,

that sank into the sea.

Then, again, it's based on a garbled folk memory of this earlier civilization,

which, if we have time, I can tell you a little about

because it's so extraordinary.

Because, you see, there were, in that time, at the end of Minoan civilization,

which by then had already, was, by then shifted into Mycenaean,

which is the, you know, the hybrid society, which was the huge invaders

and the earlier ones, there were tremendous cataclysmic events,

tremendous volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, enormous tidal waves,

and literally, like in this little island.

What's left of it is little.

Santorini, because about two-thirds of the island,

was literally swallowed by the sea.

And the first one to suggest this theory was Pyrrhodon Marinathos,

who was the head of the Greek archaeological service.

So it's tremendous detective work that we're doing.

And, of course, that's what archaeology is about.

It's really, I think of it as a space journey into our past,

but also into our future, because of the implications.

You know, like, it's like time travel into our past,

but really the importance is for our future.

Yes?

Can you speak about how the choosing of homosexuality for men,

given the history in many different societies,

where the initiation rites were so painful,

that men would choose to be another man's second wife

or would not go through into being initiated into a man

because of the dominator society?

Can you speak?

Can you repeat the question?

Homosexuality.

Why don't you say it to yourself more loudly,

because I don't want to clarify.

I'm just curious about the choices that men have made

into homosexuality because of dominator societies,

and then not being able to express themselves in a feminine way,

having a relationship with the goddess, perhaps.

And also in history, how different tribal societies,

the initiation rites were so painful that oftentimes,

like in Native American societies and in Africa,

in different places, they would choose to be a man's second wife

rather than be initiated into the domineering, controlling,

all-powerful male in the society.

And I just wonder how that relates to homosexuality in society today

and to AIDS.

Well, that's a four-hour question.

But I'm going to try to answer at least part of it.

I think clearly, just as we have completely distorted heterosexual sexuality

into either calling it simple and, you know, something that you only do for one reason, folks,

and that's to impregnate a woman, right?

I mean, not for pleasure, not for bonding, you know,

how that, you know, puts a barrier to communication.

Because, of course, lack of communication is the sine qua non.

It's the stuff of which dominator society is made.

So all of the institutions are designed to prevent it or to equate what we've done.

We see it so much in the modern pornography industry, which is, again, a resurgence, really, of dominator models,

the erotization of dominance, right?

I mean, so heterosexuality has been completely distorted by the dominator model,

and we're trying to reclaim it.

Homosexuality, equally so.

And the example, and you have really, you know, by giving the examples that you did,

have pointed out some of the ways in which people, men, have been pushed into it in some tribes.

But, of course, as Genet, you know, the French writer pointed out,

the classical, if you will, the traditional homosexual relationship is a parody.

It's a caricature, an exaggerated caricature of the male-female dominance subservient,

the sadomasochistic relationship that is supposed to characterize, you know, the male-female relationship.

And what I want to suggest to you is that the misogyny, you know, that is part of the culture,

and it's not only part of the homosexual community, it's, you know, part of the whole dominator system.

All of these things interweave in a complex way to make us do, to make us confuse sex,

which is an act of giving pleasure and taking pleasure, with an act of giving pain and receiving pain.

I mean, it's an amazing thing.

And the thing I want to end with is the Greeks.

Now, you know, classical Greeks was a hybrid society.

There's a chapter in The Chalice and the Blade on the Greeks.

And I've had some very, very interesting feedback from classical scholars, who have said,

wow, you know, I mean, that really, the archaeological data, bringing it together this way,

really explains a lot of what was happening there.

But consider homosexuality in Greece.

Of course, this so-called cradle of democracy, where women lost their votes.

You know, I have to tell you this, I have to digress.

I just haven't.

St. Augustine tells a story which is a wonderful clue.

He says that the way that Athens got its name was that there was this contest

where they were going to either name it after the, you know, Pluto, the god of the underground,

you know, the war god of the underground, or Athena.

Athena, of course, is a direct descendant of the goddess, except she now has become

this insane combination of the goddess of wisdom and war,

which, you know, only the dominated system can do that, but that's okay.

And apparently the women, and there was one more woman, they voted for Athena.

So, in punishment, now listen, in punishment, St. Augustine relates that women lost the right to vote.

And we're told that Athens is the cradle of democracy.

And, of course, that's very interesting, because half the population in Athens were women, right?

And they were literally under house arrest.

I mean, the apartheid was so great, you know, they were segregated into the women's quarters.

And 90% of both men and women were slaves.

So we have this, you know, very free society, right?

Which is sort of a joke, but it's a hybrid society between some of the earlier, you know,

the Noan, very definitely.

I mean, as Clayton points out, you know, the Noan tradition flourished still, you know,

in the beautiful art, and in many of the...

We don't have time for the whole thing.

But the thing that I wanted to tell you was about homosexuality, which is so fascinating.

The accepted norm for homosexuality, and the only way it was tolerated,

was if it was between an older man...

The older man...

There's no...

Yes.

I mean, Terrence mentioned this idea of a northern people mounting on horses

and coming back and dominating the cradle cultures.

Could you talk about the fact that these people were essentially the sons of those that had been exiled

from those cultures in the first place?

Because no one leads the cradle cultures voluntarily.

Somehow they didn't conform, or there was something in their psychology

that they couldn't cooperate, and they were sent away.

And they went into northern areas, they had a hardened, they had a...

So their survival qualities were much more difficult, and that created a different psychology.

And then when they found the vehicle, they came back and essentially destroyed the culture

that had, at some point earlier, rejected them and thrown them out.

And that's always like the return of the prodigal only this kind of a difference.

Well, you know, that's a very interesting theory that you propose.

Unfortunately, I don't have any data.

See, it's very difficult.

I mean, we can hypothesize on what happened and how it happened.

But the hard data just isn't there yet.

The hard data that we have is what happened when they came in.

That we are beginning to acquire.

And I think with time we'll also get more and more clues.

But I think you have been feeling some very interesting theories there.

Yes?

You speak for a second about how to discriminate between group partnering

and partnering that is fostered by the dominant society to gain economic profit.

And I can go back to the...

Again, the Canadian countries worked in work pods years ago.

And I think we looked upon it without any sense of being threatened by it.

The Japanese do the same thing.

And now it's a key element of the industrial complex to duplicate them

because we're threatened by them economically.

Well, again, that's a very interesting question, especially the Japanese phenomenon,

which is such a mix of the really very paternalistic and very dominator

and yet a basic partnership understanding.

And I don't even know how to begin to answer that except to say that

we have to be very careful with the terms that we're trying to reclaim.

I mean, I'm trying to reclaim for us the term partnership.

And you're quite right.

We need to make distinctions between the way that it's been used, you know, conventionally.

And also, well, we want to reclaim terms like family and tradition.

Because these traditions are much, much older, okay?

And they lasted for much, much longer.

So, I mean, this is part of our reclamation work.

Now, the second part of what you're saying, which is the issue of economic competition,

the dominator system artificially creates scarcity.

And that's an area that I explore in some of the later chapters of the Chalice and the Blade.

But I think it's something that we really need to understand very, very clearly.

See, all of these things are tremendous opportunities for work.

Tremendous amount of research.

Once we see that there is what the dynamics are of the dominator system,

then we can begin to also create the alternatives and to come out of it.

So, I would have to leave it, you know, in these very general terms.

Yes, David?

Oh, thank you.

This, this, by the way, I did introduce David.

And that's David.

I just want to talk quickly to your point.

Because I'm both a social psychologist and I'm a refugee from the business world.

No!

And, from the viewpoint of the social psychology to work by a, one of the great geniuses of

this

the consensus, and he found the power of that work. Now that went into a lot of literature

that went to the corporate world, and there were a lot of training groups, and a lot of

consultants made their living for many years going into the corporate world. They were

hired by the hierarchy to go in there and, in a sense, build the illusion in the corporate

world that it would all be, you know, boy, you've got a say in this, you've got a boy

here.

But unfortunately, everybody knew, including the consultants themselves, that it was a sham because when you really got down to the core of it, it was still Mr. Bigg falling the shot and you got fired and fired and no 60-day notice for a plant closing, it just walked.

And overnight, the whole partnership thing could be thrown out. The interesting thing that's happening, you mentioned Japanese, the interesting thing that's happening now is because the Japanese have this system that on one point has a lot of hierarchy, but also there's a lot of this teamwork stuff in a general.

Because that system is now present economically so deeply, at last the corporate world is being forced to be honest and the consultants now can go out there and sell what amounts to the partnership way of thinking in the corporate world with some hope that it may catch on simply because the people up there and the people that invest in all these industries are really scared.

They can see. They can see. They're going down the drain unless they become true. Unless they really make this partnership thing work. That's why it's very, very exciting in the business.

Well, I'll go.

I can see.

To respond just a little further for the sound and to respond to your initial question.

Can you stand up?

To respond to your initial question, I think there might be just a slight, well, not a danger maybe, but a problem in where there would be a difference between the true partnership type of society

society which goes on and is economically sound for itself and doesn't seek to exploit

another party, you know, a bunch of people for that type of economic gain.

And now it might be just a little insidious if a typically male-dominant society, the

domineering society, can bring women into its domination philosophy and incorporate what

used to be a very powerful and good partnership type of society into a domineering society

and just use those, the aspect of the partnership to exploit other people in the same way that

the male-dominant society has done for so long.

It would be not fortunate if that were to happen.

But you've brought up the whole problem of co-option and that's really the danger and

that's why the clarity is so very, very important for us at this time so that we can understand

that it's not enough to give it lip service.

We have to live it.

And you know, it's not easy because every one of us, I mean, people say to me, are you a

liberated woman?

And I, you know, I mean, nobody in my generation that I can think of could even remotely make

such a claim.

We are carrying a tremendous amount of dominator stuff in us and so that, you know, our main

task is, well, it's not our main task.

We have to do everything.

People say, what do we have to do?

The answer is everything.

We certainly have to work on ourselves a great deal in order to do that.

Yes.

Some folks that I see is in schools you see a lot of teachers actually starting to go over

to trying to teach cooperation and trying to preserve and honor children's self-esteem.

And I think that's what's going to be a good thing.

Because that wasn't the model with humiliation and authority in schools and that quickly changes

them.

Now, and I think that's a very important element because the dominator system thrives on this

idea that I'm just groveling.

It's no accident that most of the world religions which are dominator, you know, they have tremendous

partnership elements in them, but they also have this tremendous overlay of dominator stuff

that you literally grovel before the deity.

I mean, I'm this poor worm and, you know, forgive me my sins.

And that's really where I think that the shamanistic experience is such an important element to sort of

really reconnect with our innate worth.

Yes, it's a dignified religion.

But it's interesting what you were saying about our being formed by our past.

We need to recall and define ourselves, I think all of us, as the adult children of male chauvinists,

and perhaps create support groups, and disentangle ourselves.

We need to disentangle ourselves.

Oh my god.

But see, the thing is that we're all trying to disentangle ourselves.

I'm just looking at Sid Kelsheim, who's sitting in the audience, and who sent me a wonderful

manuscript trying to understand, from a different perspective, some of the things that we've been

of the things that we've been talking about when we look at our past and i think this is the real

empowering aspect of of of of this new knowledge this very old knowledge really of our past is

that we can then look at the full history and that's a very important empowering element in us

to to validate those impulses in us is not being radical or new or any of the stuff that we're being

told but it's being very very deeply rooted i think that there are two people way in the

back yes oh robin can you stand robin because it's almost impossible to hear unless you stand

is there any way that we are going to get beyond the dualism in this between the dominator and

partnership the bad guys and the good guys the repudiation of all our ancestors the last three

thousand years as having taken a disaster of courage to try to get us to our destruction

and that we are the only people who are going to be in three thousand years of history

well that whole issue of not throwing out the baby with the bath water

is how i think about it i guess that's sort of a very

i think that the dualism is only a dualism of possibilities it's an issue of free choice

in the ultimate sense i think that as a species we're very flexible and we have

i would say we have these two basic choices we have many many many other choices and these two basic

choices are very very complex uh so i'm not in the least bit suggesting this is i'm not suggesting

that this is an issue of women against men you know i mean i always stress this in my work

that it isn't it's the question of the kind of organization the kind of vision and the kind of

actualization of the vision the kind of structure that we choose i don't think it's an issue of

pointing the finger robin and saying look at the terrible things that you did to us because it's

the terrible things we did to ourselves and we all know that there is this shadow part of us and i

mean if you want to take it you know to that level uh sure there's always the you know that other

possibility we have a choice of being very cruel we have a choice of being very kind but what we're

discovering is that these are not just personal choices that these are choices that are very very

very much related to our social structure social environment and this whole idea of healing ourselves

uh you know trying to heal yourself in a dominated society is so like going up on a down escalator

so that's what we're talking about it's not a question of finger pointing

and of uh you know of saying this is a you know this is bad in fact the the whole attraction of

partnership is that it offers a positive a positive path or rather many positive paths because it is

a pluralistic i think that's really what i want to stress it's a pluralistic path and you you had a uh

yeah um i'm curious if you know of any evidence that would support the notion that the shamanic or

sacramental use of psychedelic plants is in any way related to um whether or not a civilization of

society becomes you know more towards a partnership and more towards a dominant mode well and that is

one of saran's arguments and i would say this that well let me first clarify something what i just

said is that i see many paths and so i see many paths to shamanism and i see the shamanic experience

in as as not an elite experience i see the shamanic experience as something that every one of us

is capable of and demonstrably so and i see many paths to that spiritual mystical

knowing the real knowing of our oneness with one another and with the world

uh now i think that there's absolutely no question that the plants do provide a very powerful avenue

to that and however my sense about the plants providing a powerful avenue as i told parents

and maybe we can talk about that some more is that it has to be also in the context of a number of

social support systems because our imagination having been so filled with dominator images can through

the hallucinogens also go in some pretty horrific uh you know non-healing paths now to specifically

answer your question there's very serious evidence uh because after reading kirsten's work and he

writes as eloquently well not quite as eloquently because i speak like a magician but you write so

eloquently i i was i i said all right maybe i really start looking at it with new eyes which was

such a gift from you and of course i saw on some of the bulgarian artifacts you know you know in the

balkans some mushrooms absolutely no question you know there are these statuaries of these mushrooms

and uh we know that most of the imagery of the art of lutheria is sacred religious

so there was no question but it was an isolated instance it was just one uh i know that no one

used the poppy to probably know and as you will i think confirm the poppy does not necessarily

come for hallucinatory you have to do a lot of treating of it so one could say that maybe you know

that's an indication that they use plants you know for the shamanic experience and your favorite

example i should really let you talk about this oh you're doing well well i'm also very fascinated by

the uh the uh uh uh the early neolithic uh well actually the africans uh those are your emotive

arguments arguments yeah i think well please talk about it because you can talk about the formal

quotient even i can yes well i will talk in detail about this um i'll maybe just say a little bit now

it ties back i enjoyed your exegesis of genesis this morning but the one symbol that you didn't dwell on

or mention was the fact that the issue was an issue about plant use

that uh eve was tossed out of the garden because she ate of the fruit of the tree of life and involved

adam in that the serpent was the minion as you said of the goddess and the serpent said if you eat of this

plant you will become equal to yawa and yawa apparently agreed with this assessment that the plant was a true rival

that the union of the plant and the woman was a worthy rival to his suzerainty in this situation

and the expulsion into history was essentially removal from access to the fruit of the tree of knowledge

and it's very interesting and ties in with what we said last night about monotheism that monotheism

gives permission for this image of the ego which is uh powerful not to be questioned paternalistically

domineering etc um even and perhaps unconsciously in ryan's choice of symbols the chalice

is the symbol of partnership and transformation and unity but it is quite simply a utensil for holding

something which you drink a sacrament it the chalice without the sacrament is simply a vessel so i will talk

probably tomorrow a lot about this and of the scenario of human uh the emergence of human self-reflection in

africa and how it relates to mushrooms and the partnership society and the goddess

is my argument and i'll just say this here against the absence of overwhelmingly convincing physical evidence

is first of all that the truly central mystery of a religion is never portrayed or spoken of it always

is only symbolically indicated and to my mind the coincidence in the ancient middle east of goddesses

with cattle they're always mixed up together well the third and secret term in that trinity is the mushroom

the goddess and the cattle are linked uh in association with the mushroom which is never mentioned

so uh we'll talk more about that but at for instance millard site uh you pronounce it so well yes

actually it's spelled c-a-t-a-l but it's called chateau

chateau the overwhelming motif is of cattle lovingly and beautifully portrayed 16 000 years earlier at altamira

the motif is cattle lovingly and beautifully portrayed in the tasseli frescoes in the central sahara it's

cattle and i think the the cow is the fusion symbol both for the goddess and the mushroom because it is the caring attitude the gentleness the the

giving of milk and of nurturing and all of this that makes the cow and the cow goddess

uh the major symbol carrying this thing uh in the neolithic i write in saying that you're a magician

with words because you do present a very very uh potent argument i would uh still say that i believe

that while i have no doubt that the use of plants so much was lost of the knowledge of plants we were

yesterday talking about how some of the last vestiges of that in the west uh were burnt with the witches

the so-called witches the wise women who were burnt at the stake not at the well the church of course was

going into the medicine business but it was much more complicated than that they were actually healing

people with these old methods and so much of this lore has been lost i have no question that plants that

our evolution and the intimate symbiotic relationship with the plant world uh are is fascinating and yet to

the really recounted story and you are one of the main killers of that story but i would still say

that there are many paths in my estimation through the shamanic experience to the gnosis to the knowledge

and that the ancients used many of these paths that it was not exclusive to the use of the the plant

and i would also really want to stress this point that it is tremendously important i think for us to

understand that when the ancients use the plant and specifically the hallucinatory

revealing you know the plant not as addictive that was one of the questions the plant you know the

the present as the addictive use and the revealing use when they used it for not to escape because

see so much of the dominated system requires escape through addiction so it's tremendous because

it's such a miserable reality who wants to live in it so you know you escape through addiction to alcohol

or to mechanical sex or to bulimia or to anorexia or to opium you know the opiate of the people

or to religion etc so it's very dangerous at this point i think to really not understand that it has

to be very carefully embedded in ritual that is geared to partnership and that that is the key

and i would hope that perhaps you can explore that in in to some measure because i'm convinced that when

the ancients used these incredible plants you know that that certainly we put them into another universe

another reality which was much more real than you know than the experiential one and that they really

sort of uh had very highly developed telepathic and other abilities because they found all these sites

you know that are sacred and so on but we now know have some power too but this was deeply deeply embedded

in in ritual very carefully very deliberately and that if we are to use the plant again

then it has to be done by again very carefully very deliberately and most important very lovingly

yes i think psychoactive drugs exist along a spectrum of effects and to talk deeply about drugs we're going

to have to share everything that we've been educated in the matter which is a kind of blurring of

distinction in order to empower a general condemnation as sociologists or as people looking at how these things affect

culture what you want to pay attention to is the operational effect and the spectrum runs from total addiction

to a total dissolving of all uh behavioral patterns and some compounds reinforce a narrowing of the focus of consciousness

unexamined machine-like activity related to the acquisition of the drug and then at the other end of the spectrum

there are compounds and plants which dissolve uh machine-like unexamined activity dissolve behavior patterns

and which um expand the focus of consciousness tremendously and the truth that is hard to hear

is that human beings have never existed independently of the effects of one group or the other in other words

the myth the idea of a drug-free society is an utter fiction and always has been because we are symbiotic

creatures with the vegetable kingdom or queendom and this symbiotic relationship is most apparent to us as self-reflecting entities

in the subtler effects of what we might very broadly call foods so that when you look back through history

you're looking at opium sugar coffee tobacco hallucinogens and these are all pushing and pulling us along the spectrum

of addiction and constricted consciousness versus dissolving of social programming and reconnection to the larger

natural surrounds and so there are uh dominator drugs and dominator use patterns and there are partnership

drugs and partnership use patterns that reinforce open-endedness and creativity and this sort of thing

but what is not available as an option is the notion of the drug-free society because foods themselves

impinge on the neurological functioning and the level of neurotransmitters and the degree of alertness

and attention and this sort of thing i found myself a couple of weeks ago saying uh a person who does not

take drugs is like a computer that does not use software it doesn't do anything and so then

the question is not a kind of moralistic pontification against drugs but an intelligent awareness of choices and

options based on historical experience well that's all i really want to say about that but that it's

important to make that point because we are going to have to increase the sophistication of our own

understanding of the drug oops problem because part of the articulation and implementation of the partnership

society is going to revolve around this issue of re uh reconnecting with these shamanic tools and re-realizing

how to what a truly uh intense degree we are a symbiotic creature if we are if we do not maintain our

our connections to the vegetable world to that source of gnosis then we wander in alienation and existential

self-doubt i that's why there is as you doubtless picked up this difference between rian and i on this

point she is more in this case the sociologist and i am more uh the biological determinist because i really

think the embedding in nature is far more real and strong and intense than we know because we are of

course the apex of a long a long process of alienation you're talking to me and you're saying and you're

saying that it sounds like i'm saying this is the mechanism by which it happened and therefore um i'm

closing out uh other options and well i am a frank propagandist for this point of view um nobody was

saying it till i was saying it i think it's fine if one person says it uh i'm interested in seeing it

demolished the way to a truth you don't have to be uh you don't have to fear to test truth if it's true

it can withstand any sort of onslaught uh softened yes softened and penetrated by another medium

yeah i love that metaphor i would like to suggest that maybe this afternoon uh when we talk about

technology we can speak of slaps as technologies in uh and and how their use really differs

definitely through the template of the partnership and the dominated society because i think that really

to a very large extent that's we have to address that issue to to really emulsify

where you were starting to get into the dominator drugs versus the partnership drugs

as you're going to get very excited am i right in assuming that at some point this afternoon and

tomorrow you are going to say okay here it is i'm blocking it out and listing one versus another i

think this is an extremely valuable contribution because in my own experience with the whole

application of the dominator partnership model see if you take every area politics economics

child raising and so on you apply this model and all of a sudden by being able to push them to

to that camp or that camp you gain a tremendous clarity and i think that this has moved forward

the whole controversy about the drug scene right here yes when are you going to do that

well if not this afternoon certainly tomorrow but it's on my agenda for sure

i'm interested in what both of you are saying and i'm thinking as i'm sitting here and i really don't

know how to word it that i'm sure there must be and is ancient knowledge about um not eliminating

i'm not limiting the drug possibility but or getting caught up in the dogma of any kind but that

the ability for people to be inducted by those people who carry the vibration in their central nervous

system for instance in perhaps ancient rituals ancient groups where as they hung out as perhaps a group

not necessarily the guru dominating idea but that you could be you know a person that sells shoes but

who carries the vibration which is an induction into the energy field um which would do exactly the same

thing as uh affect idyllic experience and that it is possible um for hanging out with people

in ancient times where they i always think of the serpent in terms of the

the final central nervous system which of course the egyptian fed is coming this way which um and the

master on the feminine marriage which is the partnership so you know i'd be interested in anything

you had to say about that also in a balance with the central shamanism well i think shamanism is the

institution that you're indicating i mean it is we forget

in the modern presentation of shamanism that the really central motif of it is curing which is transferring

energy from one person to another and leading people to higher states of adaptive activity.

It is the exploring of the invisible world which is stressed in psychedelic shamanism

is not simply an academic concern of the shamans.

They are doing this in order to acquire power and the purpose for acquiring the power is

to heal.

That is the end result of the whole thing.

And I think as this archaic revival moves along and as the partnership notion becomes

better understood, the shamanic model as a characterological map for each of us will make more

and more sense because it is an empowering of direct and immediate experience which is

what the dominator thing sucks away from us.

We are turned into citizens who are kind of sociological placeholders who receive their

orders from the organs of media that pass it on from the establishment.

The dominator thing to function must undercut the notion of the uniqueness and the freedom

of the individual.

And shamanizing works in the here and now to empower felt experience.

And so that causes me to think that those sensitivities, those ratios of feeling are what are going to

be engendered in the new people who will live in and perpetuate the post-historical partnership

society.

You know, in my experience of shamanism, there is such a range, an extraordinary range of how

shamanism manifests itself.

And I think one of the best examples is the contrast that Michael Harner drew between the

Hivaro culture or the Shuar culture and the Amawaka, who used the same major psychedelic,

banisteria as his copy, but where the social behaviors of these two groups who live in a relatively

proximate situation is highly contrasted, the Amawaka being much more partnership oriented

and the Hivaro or the Shuar being much more dominator oriented.

And I think that's just one of many, many examples, the Yanamamo are another good example, where

the use of maybe 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 different kinds of cultivated hallucinogens doesn't seem

to abrogate behaviors which are quite dominator based.

So, you know, my question is, it's like drawing an idealistic Musovian picture of the Neolithic.

And it's my usual, and I have some experience in shamanism, personal and direct, in terms

of my, you know, past 20 years in the area, to just say that it's really, I think, as dangerous

to characterize the Neolithic idealistically as it is to characterize the range of behaviors

found in the shamanic cultures idealistically, but rather to look realistically and discerningly

at these particular, at the trends that arise within these great range of cultures that we're

talking about here, and then from the dark mirrors or from these problems that we perceive,

the moral and ethical problems about interrelatedness or the lack thereof, that do occur, for example,

in some shamanic cultures, that we need to, you know, be discerning.

Yes.

Well, when you do field work, the first thing you discover is that all academic categories

are artificial.

What dealing with shamans is about is dealing with individuals, and some of you may know

that you know, F. Bruce Lamb's book, The Rio Tigre and Beyond, where a essentially urban

mestizo shaman involved in rosewood gathering expeditions in extremely remote areas of the

Amazon comes upon extremely unassimilated, uncontacted people and takes ayahuasca with them and discovers

that they don't know what they're doing, they don't know how to make it right, and he makes

it for them and says, you don't do it that way, you do it this way, and it knocks their

socks off.

So this is a case where, that illustrates your point, that if you are romantic about these

things, if you have synthetic notions of what constitutes cultural purity and that sort

of thing, you're going to get into trouble.

Shamanism from the inside is very much an attitude like the very best attitudes that you meet

in scientific research.

It is a desire to know, to find out, to explore, and dogma is sort of the shockwave which trails

along behind it.

But dogma serves a function of social ordering.

When you get in with these guys and women who are doing this stuff, there are no social

rules, because they are extra-environmentals.

That's what shamanism, another possible definition of shamanism, it's the condition of being extra-environmentally

related to your own culture, so that you can set the paradigmatic agenda.

Everyone else is inside the context of the language, but you are creating the context.

And so you have a very, very different relationship.

So yes, I would agree.

Yeah, I mean, I would say what you're talking about, you know, as you characterized it,

is something that Jose once called neo-shamanism.

That is, that we look at a range of cultural and psychological and social behaviors that

are deemed shamanism, and then we extract from that range a type, a type which actually

becomes an archetype or an ideal type to which individuals like us can relate.

But, you know, my problem with that is that once you enter the domain of shamanism, it's

rather like Christ's 40 Days in the Desert when the devil came along or when Mara came along

to Buddha.

There is a point in the journey which is definitely characterized by the experience of temptation

and the possibility of things going awry, so to speak, of things going in ways that are

anti-social and anti-environmental against the grain of compassion or against the grain of

correct relationship with environment is there.

Well, there's no knowledge without risk-taking.

And this is what the New Age doesn't want to hear, that, you know, the belief is current

that it can be packaged or it can be gotten from a guru or something like that.

The fact is, you know, it really comes, I think, in a dimension where there is real risk

and real fear, and that's a tough mountain to climb.

If you've climbed it a hundred times, you still won't want to climb it the hundred and first time.

And I think shamanism throughout history and prehistory and worldwide has always suffered from this.

It's very rare that you meet someone who would prefer to shamanize rather than to talk about it, you know?

And it's the shamanizing that is important, not the talking about it.

I'd like to say something on that.

And it's this that I think that the points that you make are very important, that we can't really talk about the shaman.

Because the image that immediately springs into our minds when we think of the shaman, for example, is male.

Because that's what's been presented to us.

And yet if we look at some of the oldest scenes of what was probably shamanistic dancing in Paleolithic caves,

it is women, some of them pregnant.

And that gives us a clue, which of course is very interesting, of, you know, some of the early perception of the shamanistic experience

as being very much connected with women's mysteries.

The mystery not only of birth, which is an enormous mystery, but also the cyclic, menstrual, lunar cycle.

And that, I think, is really very, very interesting, that when we talk about shaman again,

we sort of disengage ourselves from the stereotypical notion of what is a shaman

and this whole idealization of the shaman, because the hero, I mean, shamanism can also be used

to incite people into a hypnotic trance to go and disembowel other, their neighbors, you know?

And has so been done.

And one could even say that Hitler, in a sense, used some of the shamanic techniques of, you know,

this torchlight, you know, the trappings of...

So it's very, very dangerous, I think, to idealize it.

And again, I am glad that you, again, stressed that we need...

It's very, very important, as I said, that we not idealize these earlier Neolithic cultures

that are now coming to light.

The informative thing about them is not that they were ideal cultures,

because they were not ideal cultures.

The informative thing is that what they seem to tell us is that the early direction

of our cultural evolution in the mainstream seems to have been orienting towards the partnership model more

than towards the dominator model.

And of course, in reality, we're always talking about a matter of degree.

I mean, there is...

I was going to say there's no such thing as a pure dominator of partnership culture.

Some of the examples I gave you come pretty darn close.

But on the other hand, people being human beings, even the most oppressed of beings,

somehow find subtle ways of finding partnership modes,

even within the most horrible dominator structure.

So powerful is that part of us.

But I really want to stress that.

Yes?

As Mr. Terrence, I will confess, I know very little about Mr. Monsley.

I've been busy in other areas.

The more I hear you talk, the more a bell is going off in my mind.

Now, one of my great interests in my particular area of research has been charisma.

The original Max Weber sense.

It happens to be an extremely powerful concept for analyzing all kinds of things.

Creativity, social change, and so on.

The interplay between the charismatic individual bearing the charisma,

and the institutionalization, the bureaucratization of the charisma,

which is an extremely powerful tool in sociology.

Now, my question is...

See, I keep hearing, when you're talking about the shamanic experience and the shaman,

I keep getting the message off.

Ah!

That relates to charisma, the charismatic individual, the visibility.

You were saying something about extra-environmental...

How did you phrase it?

How did you use that thing?

You're able to transcend the web.

You're able to transcend the social web, the environmental web.

Yes, you become an extra-environmental.

Yeah.

And, of course, this is the key, not only to individual creativity,

it's the key to the individual who goes beyond the boundaries, the norms,

any system of society, any system of cognition or of emotion,

can take this to the next step.

And, of course, the point that Rihanna is making is that

that person can also take the next step, which is the wrong one, as Hitler did.

How do you relate, or how do you think the shamanic experience and the shaman

in relation to the idea of charisma and the charismatic?

Do you mean charisma in the generally understood sense of social magnetism,

or do you mean in the more philosophical sense of an empowering from on high

and a descent of spirit into matter?

We should identify what it is and then deal with it after life.

After life?

A healthy drug called food.

Oh, time to eat.

Well, this is rich stuff, and I'm interested to go into it,

and I'm very interested we got to a good place,

because the real question is about this experience,

about how there's something that some people here know what is meant,

and some people don't, and it's very hard to be halfway in between,

because we're talking about something real.

This transcends ideas.

It's an experience accessible in the world,

and it casts the argument Rihanna is making in a whole new light,

and it casts our relationships to each other in a whole new light.

So we will pick up this theme in the afternoon.

What time do we begin?

What time is it?

We conclude at 5.

Oh my God, it's already 1.

Well, 2.

2.

Well, let's start 2.30.

2.30, and then we can run.

We can go to 6.

Okay, well, 2.30 then.

2.30, yeah.

We also need to get to some of the very important questions you raised yesterday,

and we've got quite a lot of questions.

This is KPFK Los Angeles.

We've been listening to the beginning of a seminar at the Ojai Foundation

on Man and Woman at the End of History with Terence McKenna and Rian Eisler.

Rian Eisler, the author of Chalice and the Blade.

The seminar comes in, oops, 5 tapes,

and they're available from the Ojai Foundation.

The 5 tapes are $40 total,

and again, it's Man and Woman at the End of History.

The Ojai Foundation address and phone number is Ojai Foundation,

Box 1620, Ojai, California, 93023.

Ojai Foundation, Box 1620, Ojai, California, 93023.

Five tapes comprising Man and Woman at the End of History, available for $40.

Can you all hear what I'm saying?

Yes.

And how many of you can see what I'm saying?

Before I tell you the story that I came here to tell, I will talk a little bit about the practical side of what we've been discussing in the past couple of days, as it impacts on the life of my partner and myself.

We're going to talk a lot this morning about plants, and it will be about plants as they were used thousands of years ago and in places far distant from here.

But implicit in what I'm saying is very real-world work that we're doing in Hawaii to preserve plants with a history of human and shamanic usage.

Because our focus of interest is the Amazon and shamanism, we've concentrated in that area.

But throughout the world, there are, as you know well, very fragile ecosystems on the brink of disappearing forever.

But even more fragile than these natural ecosystems is the web and legacy of human understanding that has been gathered through the millennia by the native peoples in these areas.

And throughout the warm tropics especially, the impact is very great.

The young men and women are not apprenticing themselves to the elder shamans.

The men go off to work in sawmills, the women become waitresses, they are being sucked into the engine of world capitalism.

And in a single generation, this legacy of plant information that reaches back 20, 50,000 years will in large measure be lost.

We're seeing this in the Amazon, much has already been lost.

So Kat and I and Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard and Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, Ralph Metzner, Frank Barr,

a number of people have gathered together and formed a non-profit foundation whose showcase project is a 19-acre botanical garden,

a botanical garden in Hawaii that preserves these plants and supports native collectors in Peru and other places,

so that this botanical material can be preserved with no real plan for it other than its preservation.

It is there available to psychotherapists, biochemists, homeopathists,

anyone who has a legitimate angle on these things.

So I want to mention that to you this morning because we always are soliciting support,

not only financial support, but donations of time and equipment.

And if you come to the Hawaiian Islands, you could put us into your loop at times when we are there,

and we would be happy to show you around.

The garden is at about 2,200 feet above sea level with 70 inches of rainfall a year,

which at 19 degrees north, which is what it is,

approximately duplicates what's going on in the montane rainforest of the equator at about 8,500 feet,

which is the so-called cloud forest.

So it's a beautiful place.

It's a highly charged place because magical plants from throughout the world are growing there,

and I mention it to show that we don't entirely live in our heads in these matters.

The big island.

The big island of Hawaii.

The big island is larger than all the other Hawaiian Islands combined,

and it has fewer people than any other island.

It's where, if old Hawaii lingers on at all,

it's probably in the desolate districts of the big island.

Well, so that's enough of that.

Now I want to address the concerns that we've been dealing with over the past two days,

and from my perspective,

we sort of designed this weekend with the notion of showcasing Rian's thoughts,

and I think we've done that very well,

and for those of you who haven't had a chance to hear her,

she very kindly has promised to join me this afternoon.

She didn't originally intend that,

but we have a very fertile kind of dialogue going among all the people who have been here

over the past two days,

and so we will return to that.

To put what I'm going to say this morning in context,

I just want to briefly review the basis of her theory.

It is quite simply that the absence of patriarchy does not imply matriarchy.

The natural and most long-running form of human organization is what Rian has named partnership society.

Partnership societies were the norm up until, pick a number, 4,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago,

in any case, eventually falling with the fall of Minoan Crete to Mycenaean invaders around 1000 BC,

and that set us into the era of dominator cultures, which she believes, and I agree with her,

is a temporary, I won't say aberration, a temporary necessary adaptation,

but one that we can now move beyond.

My, Rian's approach is basically to say what happened,

that there was partnership society,

and then she's very insistent that there was a confluence of factors

which caused the shift from the partnership society to the dominated culture.

I, being cast more in the fanatical mode,

prefer to think that there was one major cause,

and that its adumbrations can be explicated by the methods of archaeology,

good logic, and a little visionary imagining.

And so I want to tell you the story this morning.

Remember, I said yesterday, the best idea will win.

And so we're sort of in a contest in the manner of the great Celtic poetry contest of old,

where the person who can dream up the best idea will have the satisfaction of seeing it realized.

And if you want to do that kind of total revisioning of the position of human beings in the world,

I think you have to take, at first, a deconstructionist approach,

and take away everything that impedes the construction of the new point of view.

So I want to take away a number of notions and just get rid of them.

One notion is that nature is a competition of tooth and claw,

and that the swiftest, the fiercest, the meanest will always come out on top.

This is just a notion that was attractive to a Victorian gentleman

who happened to be in charge of a world-screwing empire at the time.

Any modern biologist will tell you that what is being maximized in biological systems

is cooperation, integration, mutual reinforcement, and mutual meeting of need.

Obviously, if an organism can insinuate itself into the energy loop of another organism,

it will have more of its own energy to play with.

And this is the strategy that is operating, especially on the microbial level,

in the earth, around the roots of plants.

You know, there are mycorrhizal relationships, fungi that surround the roots of plants,

mediate and buffer the liquids passing into the plants,

and in turn have a release of nutrients that supports them.

We see symbiosis in all kinds of situations in nature.

What has never been really even suggested, let alone researched,

is that perhaps the unique qualities that attend our own species

are somehow reinforced and stabilized by our own symbiotic relationship,

that we are also symbiotes of some sort to other organisms in nature.

Now, a symbiotic relationship can be broken apart.

The little fish which live in the protection of the tentacles of anemones,

and thereby draw larger fish in for the anemones to feed upon,

can live in the absence of the anemone.

But when they do, they produce smaller individuals

that experience a shorter lifespan,

and the population is generally more limited.

So, when a creature that has evolved a symbiotic relationship

is through catastrophe or design separated from the other member of the pair,

life goes on.

But there is a sense of burden,

a sense of moving against the flow,

a sense of abandonment.

Well, this sense of abandonment being moved against the flow

is a very good description of the psychological set

we inherit at the beginning of our history.

Because, as we discussed a little bit yesterday,

our history begins with us being tossed out of the garden

by Jehovah as narc,

because the woman had exercised her right

to conscious self-exploration and awareness

by eating of the fruit of the tree of life.

It suggests to me that it was the relationship

with the fruit of the tree of life

that made early human beings somehow co-equal

with the dragon god who was the keeper of the garden.

So that the fall into history

is a mythological way of saying

that we were separated very early

from something very dear to us.

It was rent away from us.

And inevitably the image that must come into all our minds

is the image of a child being separated from its mother.

Well, in the present dialogue within the New Age

we've gotten to the point of sharing the notion

that we have become separated from the mother, our Earth.

But it operates at the level of a kind of poetic notion

or a reassuring abstraction.

I mean, how do we reconnect to our mother, the Earth?

By talking about it?

Is it done through agriculture?

Or is that a violation of the mother?

How is it to be done?

Well, what I'm going to say this morning

is sort of a blend of myth, mania, and science

where we take the best from each category

and try to weave together an argument

that would convince a skeptic?

So those of you who have heard me do this before,

bear with me.

It grows in my mind.

I adumbrate detail.

It has to be made tighter and tighter

and ever more convincing.

Because the goal is

if we can change the myths about our origins,

we can change the expectation about our future.

Because the future, the post-historical future

is somehow going to be a revivifying of the myth of origin.

So if we go into it with the wrong myth,

we may get in trouble.

And I think a patriarchal, egocentric,

Apollonian, Solarian myth

that would send us sort of as insect robots

to the stars in spaceships the size of Manhattan

needs, is unbalanced.

Needs a certain leavening.

Okay, so enough with prologue.

Here is the story.

The story begins...

a long time ago and it really it has no beginning because at its inception it's locked in to

the geological and geophysical mechanics of the planet it begins somewhere in the last four

million years with a slow drying trend across the northern hemisphere of the planet affecting

especially the tropical forests of Africa which at this time are unbroken from north to south and over

the next million and a half years Africa grows progressively drier not desert it was not even

desert as recently as Roman times Pliny describes the Sahara Desert as the breadbasket of Rome but over

a million and a half years Africa grew drier and the great tropical forests were replaced by a lush

grassland environment a grassland environment broken by enormous oases of remnant rainforest and in this

remnant rainforest the arboreal primates that lie far back on our family tree began to respond to

environmental pressure and began to shift from a fruit eating large almost entirely fruit and

insect eating diet to a more omnivorous diet because of the limitation of protein they also began to

experiment with descending from the trees to hunt small rodents and small animals that were inhabiting the

grasslands which were rich with evolving cereals of different sorts now while all of this was going

on ungulate animals animals like bison and cattle and buffalo and wildebeest and ibex and antelope were evolving in

great numbers on the African belt so this drying trend was creating the savannas of the world there never before had

been savannah land on this planet but it was coming into being in the interior of Sumatra across the

African belt and in parts of India and this special ecology of ungulate animals was evolving now the primates

who had been living in the trees already had a highly evolved pack signaling system as you know if you've observed howler

monkeys are monkeys or woolly monkeys in the jungle they they have a language of chirps and squeaks and shouts

that is fairly uh uh dense at least in the in the existential moment meaning they're not talking philosophy

they're tending to business

so uh attending this exploration of the surface this leaving of the trees was a tendency toward

bipedalism which reinforced the already existent tendency to binocular vision that had evolved in

the arboreal environment so you see there's a kind of confluence here of factors bipedalism omnivorousness

binocular vision pack a repertoire of pack signals a social mode of existence already very old

and into this situation comes uh the opportunity to evolve in the grasslands into a larger pack hunting group

that is now including meat in its diet and that is uh competing uh with these animals of the belt

there was a very interesting conference held a couple of years ago in which very straight

paleontologists concluded that the great wave of extinction of the giant mammals that went on about

three million years ago uh was actually a human induced phenomenon and this is why uh the woolly mammoth and

dimetrodon and the giant tree sloth and the giant armadillo and these huge huge the irish shell these huge

animals that used to roam the planet no longer exist the human impact was already happening that far back

rian's bailiwick seems to be sort of from the invention of agriculture to the atomic bomb the area that i'm

interested in is has that embedded in it i'm interested in sort of the time from the last glaciation to the

first starship whatever that may be and um okay to make a long story slightly shorter the critical factor

that enters in when you look at the evolution of human beings is a sudden and unexplained doubling in

brain size about 50 000 years ago before that time the human brain had enlarged itself only about 12

percent in the previous two and a half million years but suddenly 50 000 years ago the brain size

doubled at the same time the neanderthal flowering came to an end and they began to fade

the last neanderthal skeleton that we have is 20 000 years old so over a period of 20 000 years these

two species shared the planet the x factor the thing which changes everything is in my opinion the fact

that these pack hunting baboon-like proto-homanoid primates encountered in the process of trailing

behind these large mammalian herds that had evolved in the grassland they encountered the manure of these

creatures and in this manure were the coprophytic psilocybin containing mushrooms specifically

sterfariocubensis and i have observed the habits of baboons in east africa and it is they they are

creatures of the belt they are omnivorous they scramble around and every time they come to a cow pie

they flip it over because they're looking for grubs and bugs which make up a major part of their diet

and they sniff they're great sniffers and food testers well the mushroom in this kind of environment

is an extremely noticeable uh natural object i've seen sterfariocubensis mushrooms the size of dinner

plates in amazonian pasturage standing on stocks 14 inches high and the thing has you know this pearlescent

phallic lunar solar uh it's everything it's the perfect sacramental plant for a partnership society

it is as strongly phallic and solar as it is lunar and feminine uh it's associated with the moon and yet

it has you know this brilliant golden yellow color and it is yet a thing of the ninth and is taken in 19

to enter into the mysteries of the night mother so um looking for support for this idea and i

mentioned this earlier i discovered that in the 1960s roland fisher at the university of maryland

had given psilocybin to graduate students and then given them standard visual acuity tests

and he had discovered that small amounts of psilocybin actually increase uh scoring on a standard visual

acuity test and he was a very straight viennese guy and but he had this health and quality and he said to

me you see my little friend this is as if i needed convincing this is a case where uh intoxication on

a drug actually gives a truer picture of reality than the absence of the drug and it was true it

was empirically so you see better well you don't have to know a lot about evolutionary theory to know

that if there is a food or in the food chain of a population of animals that can confers increased

visual acuity and this animal is a hunting animal then those individuals of the species that have this

enzyme alkaloid steroid whatever you want to call it in their diet are going to have a selective

adaptive advantage and that their reproductive strategy will triumph and so forth and so on

so this was astonishing to me because this is an argument which is very appealing to the straightest

kind of evolutionary biologists and then i began thinking about the ignored role of foods in evolution

and the fact that we are omnivorous through what appears to be a series of chance events

uh which i just discussed uh which i just discussed this omnivorous habit lays us open to tremendous

numbers of mutagens stimulants depressants uh quasi sterilizing agents uh spermicides ovicides uh neurological

enzymes of all sorts and so really this is a great untapped area for evolutionary biology to

look at is it possible that the unexplained extension of adolescence in humans was somehow in effect

synergized by steroids in the diet what about the fact that women uh have a hidden ovulation unlike

other primates there are a lot of questions about our sexuality and uh lactation menstruation

uh all of these enzyme controlled processes that might be very suggestively made by studying the effect of

steroids alkaloids halicinogens and whatnot in the proto-human uh diet i don't know how many of you know but

the birth control pill is made from dioscorea which is yams thousands of acres of mexican land are in these

steroid-rich dioscorean yams from which um i forget the names of the pills is it ortho know them but

whatever they are it's made well uh yam sweet potatoes are a stable of human populations in the tropics

and yet when you look at them chemically there's a gradient from food to powerful reproduction affecting

drugs and if if primitive populations were not aware of this or perhaps were aware of it

then they wouldn't have been using these effects or being subject to these effects so this is a rich area

leave alone the subject of the hallucinogens i mean you could look at stimulants and neurotoxins and

and all these other things i named but of course my special interest was the hallucinogens because what

i was interested in was the emergence of consciousness and this doubling of brain size how could it have

happened so quickly well the scenario that i'm left with is uh that uh once this visual acuity thing

was being reinforced in these pack-hunting primates the next level of discovery and i suppose all these

discoveries i'm going to talk about were made almost simultaneously was that twice the dose that

increases visual acuity makes sexual activity extremely interesting prolonged variegated and unusual

and it's fairly clear that these primate looking at all the other primate species and their social

activity and carrying on i mean we don't call it monkey business

so so here you have this thing impacting so far in two critical areas number one survival you can see

better to hunt your food and flee your enemy number two it's an aphrodisiac and the stimulant this this

will have an even more intense driving effect on the reproductive strategy of those individuals that

are using it quite simply they have sex more often so naturally they have a their reproductive gene pool

is advanced but neither of these things fascinating though they are is to my mind the major stimulus

that put this thing so center stage in calling us out of the monkey body and toward angelhood because after

all uh it's good for monkeys to see better and monkeys do enjoy sex but the way in which we differ from monkeys

is our free command of mental constructs not present in the immediate environment in other words memory

memory is the key to culture i think you have to have memory as a precondition for language because

if you don't have memory what good is language you have nothing to say memory is the precondition for

writing for all forms of epigenetic coding etc so to my mind what's interesting about these these vision

enhancing sexually stimulating alkaloids in the food chain is their impact on consciousness at yet higher

doses at conscious at uh doses four or five times that which affects visual acuity you are suddenly

conveyed into the realm of for want of a better word we would have to call it the holy or the tremendum or

the mystery or the mysterious and at this point suddenly the historical experience of the last 10 000

years falls away and is practically useless we are no better positioned to understand the thing encountered

on high doses of plant hallucinogens than were the people of the late neolithic it remains utterly overwhelmingly

incomprehensible it remains you know a living breathing mystery experienced in the here and now and so as

gordon wasson and others were quick to point out it becomes the compass for the religious quest and the

understanding of that mystery and abiding in that mystery becomes then the compass of the historical and prehistorical

religious uh quest of human beings and uh in this culture this comes as news i guess because

uh for over two thousand years we have been the victims of a dominator culture that left no stone unturned

in trying to stamp out and suppress direct access to the logos which was what these psychedelic sacraments

that haunt prehistory uh were all about what was happening at elusis what was happening at delphi what was

happening in the pagan mystery religions of the proto-hellenic period was all the technological uh groping

toward and accessing of the mystery eden i believe was this world of the african grasslands of 12 to 25 000

years ago when uh in great pinnacles of wind-cut stone that rose above the desert a partnership society based on

human equilibrium in the gender question pastoralism in terms of a lifestyle and access of the goddess

through her gift of the mushroom that was this warfareless edenic paradisical time and it was it

persisted until fairly recently it persisted until four or five thousand six seven thousand bc then the

desertification of the sahara became really serious and those people those neolithic people moved east

and became the neolithic pre-dynastic civilization in the nile valley and then still further in the

tigris euphrates drainage the the tribal people who by a thousand years preceded the civilizations that we

know so much about sumer and so forth and they carried with them a goddess religion that was i am willing to

uh suggest was uh where the central mystery was the mushroom now the the psychological dominance of the ego

is something that came to be in the wake of these disruptive migrations out of the home range of the

lead to a search for all kinds of substitutes uh probably the invention of asceticism uh

the and the rise of a priestly class the shaman in the absence of uh the sacrament that is truly living

becomes a theologian and a dogmatist and begins to put in place precepts and uh prohibitions and suddenly

nature is no longer friendly and supporting suddenly nature must be dealt with through a system of taboos

and and uh sacrificial uh uh efforts to propitiate this sort of thing this is indicative of alienation

even though we find it at very uh primitive levels of society that we might at first brush be willing to

embrace as expressions of a pure lifestyle but i really don't think so i think that uh uh

the notion of sacrifice which has been written about by freud and zimmer and all kinds of people

already indicates an uncertainty about our relationship to this other that previously

you know we were her children we were entirely embedded in her her rhythms her needs her energy flows

and um the reason why i think all this is important other than being a an academic argument among

primatologists and anthropologists is because of what i've called the archaic revival the fact that

we are trying to grow toward a new model of how to be in the world and if you this is not the first time a

society has been slammed to the wall and if you are a student of history you know that when societies

reach great crises points their reflex is inevitably conservative and to pull back

and the form this pulling back takes when the situation is truly desperate is to look back into the

past for a stabilizing model that worked once before the last time this happened uh in a context that

we're probably all familiar with is when the medieval world began to crack the pieces because of uh

those spices that were being brought in from the east they seem to have a real need to put pepper on

their steaks uh there may have been more than spices in those via in those uh genoan cargo boats but anyway at

the end of the medieval world the christological eschatology began to crack apart the jews were turned

loose to be bankers the italian city-states were turned loose to make money and pounds began to spring up the uh

lost platonic corpus uh was translated into european languages and a whole new world came into being

and the feeling of alienation and uncertainty and anxiety was assuaged by looking back into the past

and saying we need a model and the medieval gothic model won't work we will become like rome at its most

grandulous grandulous we will become like greece at its most clear and philosophically brilliant this is

called classicism it was invented in the 1400s you know uh 2000 years after plato taught suddenly it was

decided in europe that a platonic society would be created and we are the inheritors of that society we

live under roman law and greek aesthetics and so forth and so on because people who were sick of

the medieval world decreed that it should be so and the model worked up until the late 19th century

when the greek analytical method met the instrumentalities of the industrial revolution

and we began to get the new science or the big science the science that was not about a country

gentleman making notebook scratchings on the warblings of birds and the flow of streams but where you

actually say my god we can go for it we can understand we can extract the energy from the stars

we can light the fires of heaven in the deserts of our planet this whole faustian kind of science

where suddenly it isn't about understanding it's about power and about calling this power down upon your

enemy so we are now 80 decade eight decades in to this era of mastery of energy and tremendous faustian power

and we need a new model and i think that the new model is such a huge form emerging onto the historical stage

that's that we shouldn't be deluded that uh it's something which has come about since uh

the early 70s or that it was invented in the 60s it reaches at least back to the late 19th century

i mean people like alfred jarry and renee claire and marcel de champ and these people they were enunciating

long before freud and young the presence of the unconscious as a frontier into which the locomotive

of marxist history looked like it was headed with no return ticket in sight and that's actually what

happened in the dreams of 19th century rationalism the utopian schemes of bellamy and marx and all

these people ran smack into the world of the unconscious the world of the shaman the world of

the psychedelic experience of modern art of sexual liberation of the stream of consciousness novel

cubism futurism space flight all of these things and these are well it's interesting to see for

instance how modernism was invented by picasso uh in some tellings of the story but he couldn't do it

until he had studied all these primitive masks from the coast of west africa and this is what everybody

was who was anybody in paris in 1915 was decorating their apartments with were these images of uh the

primitive so we are i think returning to the archaic mode that's at least what is the shining hope

and what opposes it is the momentum of historical society which is linear and cares to extend

itself centuries into the future male dominated technocratic uh uh object worshiping and superficial

in the most unsuperficial sense of the word i mean we have raised banality to uh an archetype

hana rent wrote a book called the banality of evil well you know i agree with the conclusions of the

book but if if evil is banal what is not you know this is a kind of pulling of energy out of the felt moment

so uh marshall mcleughan saw it tim leary saw it bucky saw it probably everybody and their dogs

saw it coming what is happening is a kind of meltdown of print created values and a kind of release into a new

cultural space but it's a cultural space that is new only to us it is easily recognized as the cultural

space in which shamans of great ability and courage have been operating for the past 50 000 years they

can show us the way we can find our own way by following bare example the big news is that orthogonal

that means at right angles to orthogonal to the entire historical process is enough we are called to

higher things and are passing through a series of bootstrapping self-transitions that are synergized by

the psychedelic plants in our environment and whose end state is anticipated in each of us as a microcosm when we

surrender our egos and submerge ourselves in the great raging mystery of being that is all around us

all the time everywhere oh wait let me try and see somebody i don't i can't remember that you look

okay the question is that i mentioned that there is therapeutic work going on with ayahuasca

um it's very uh much underground and hush hush because the legal status of these things has never

been defined let me make that clear they should be but ayahuasca is neither illegal nor legal there has

never been a case involving it in the united states so it's in a kind of limbo and and we should all be

discreet about it and let these therapists do their uh work eventually of course it will be defined uh

if you're interested in more information about that kind of thing why write me but i will say about it

that there's no preconception here of the psychoanalytical theory what i really respect in these

therapists is that they are doing it as closely to the way that it's done in the amazon as they can

and uh really uh often in the amazon the brew is watered or the dough they pull punches on the dosage

because they don't want crazy gringos running amok and blowing their minds so the the search for ayahuasca

can be uh pursued perhaps now in north america with the even greater hope of success than in south america

but we always have to be reference back to the shamanic forms because that's the only guidance we have

i mean they may not know everything about it but they do have a thousand or more years of tradition

that can be our guide now when you actually deal with these ayahuascaros you discover they're not like

priests they are not dogmatic they're open to experimentation too and you can suggest

things and they know that chemicals lie behind this they're not naive but they also know that the

spirit lies within it they are also not naive in the way that we are naive so it's a tremendously fertile

partnership to deal with these shamans they will share their knowledge and we need not come to them as

as inferiors or uninitiated people what they really respect are peers and this is what everybody really

respects this is why i think that the guru chela relationship is so damaging because in the first

place nobody knows enough to be

a guru, and nobody knows so little that they should define themselves as a follower. It

just doesn't work that way. Back up to him.

Well, my political agenda is much more modest than that. I am just interested in keeping

the dialogue going, meeting with groups of people like this, and knowing, because we

have the support of institutions like Ovi, that we can meet and discuss this. There does

seem to be, apparently, this drug issue is going to be a big deal and lies directly in

front of us. And what we're being asked to decide in this presidential election upcoming

is, do we want to go full steam ahead into total fascism in order to solve the drug problem,

or are we willing to think of, God forbid, legalizing some of these things and ceasing to beat upon

each other because of the issue of drugs? I think that the whole thing which is holding

back legalization is the Judeo-Christian uncomfortableness with the notion that somebody might have

fun in a way that you disapprove of. Because drugs like heroin and cocaine are certainly a

social scourge. But on the other hand, so is Valium and alcohol. And to hold your nose at

one and condone the other is just total cultural schizophrenia. So I think what we need to do,

and this may be coming out of necessity, is entirely disconnect the drug issue from morality. The

notion that people who do certain drugs are bad and people who do or do not do certain other

drugs are good, is infantile and preposterous. What needs to be done, I think, is to, first of all,

legalize all plants. That's very simple. Legalize all plants. Okay, then what are we going to do about

these synthetic, addictive, hard drugs like heroin, cocaine, alcohol, so forth? They should be decriminalized.

And if we're going to sell alcohol in this society, if we're going to peddle Valium, then we should

sell all the rest and tax them very highly. And if there's a price to pay in addiction as we go through

the process of educating people, the taxes from these substances will be used to pay for that education

and those addiction centers. Because the cost in destroyed lives and ruined societies will be far less.

Far less. Coca was no problem in South America for centuries. Now the Coca trade is just screwing up everything.

I cannot go to my favorite areas of the Amazon and botanized because missionaries who grow cocaine have given orders

to their Indian slaves to shoot anybody who comes into those areas. This is a totally culturally corrupting force.

And it is money, not drugs, money that is corrupting it. And the major problem is, as I said a couple of days ago,

the addiction on the part of governments and intelligence agencies to funny money. That's what's going on.

The whole Vietnam war was a front for a junk running scheme, a junk running scheme, which made a huge amount of money for

a lot of creeps, which destroyed the political will of the ghettos to seek social justice in America.

That all just fizzled out. They killed Martin Luther King and everybody else and then flooded the ghetto with junk.

The cocaine thing is a direct replay. You know, Ronald Reagan is tiptoeing around whether or not he should be

friends with Mikhail Gorbachev, when look who he is friends with. The utter scum of the earth.

The most outrageous ragtag band of classic gangsters you've ever seen.

The real sub-human filth. They call them authoritarian regimes and make a distinction between them and communism.

And say, well, these authoritarian regimes, at least they're not communist.

Well, I'm telling you, it's just a scam to addict a whole bunch of people to drugs and then get the money to support wars in isolated and forgotten parts of the world.

So, very noticeable in my own area was for years we couldn't get hashish in the Bay Area.

Or when somebody had it, you know, it was a crumb. And suddenly, about seven years ago, there was all the hashish you wanted.

And people were quoting prices on tons and then megatons.

Well, this doesn't mean some hippies broke through.

This means...

You know what it means. It means that the Mujahideen needed money to support a war of national liberation against the Soviet occupation.

And they had no hard currency. All they had was hash. And so, the hash ships were allowed to unload the megatons of hash.

And the money was turned into weapons. The weapons buyers, the weapons dealers from Israel and South Africa and the United States cashed in and made fortunes.

And perhaps it was a just war in Afghanistan.

I love hash. I'm not knocking that. But I'm pointing out that that was their way of supporting the Mujahideen was to just institute this smuggling thing.

And this has been done again and again. And they make no distinction between a harmless drug like hashish and truly horrible, truly horrible drugs such as heroin.

I mean, heroin is really, I think, a dubious drug. I think I've talked to a pretty, white, squeaky clean kind of middle-class yuppie crowd.

But I've known junkies, lots of junkies. And it would stand your hair on end.

And here's a drug which turns human beings into cockroaches, literally, before your very eyes.

And, you know, you don't need that. It's insectoid, programmed, unexamined, machine-like behavior, raised to a degree that's just horrifying.

So, for us, as a psychedelic community, we're going to have to mind our P's and Q's because the issue isn't about us.

The government isn't trying to get rid of drugs because it doesn't want people jumping out of buildings.

It doesn't want people making mega fortunes that it's not getting any tax revenue out of.

So, psychedelics have never been big money-makers.

Nobody is getting rich off psychedelic drugs that I know of.

I mean, maybe a few people are having modest lives lived in fear that at any moment the man will kick down the front door and drag them away in front of their wife and child.

But nobody is getting rich on psychedelic drugs. That's all going on in another domain.

So, our problem is a more serious problem.

It's that the psychedelics are deconditioning agents.

This is the real, I don't want to use the dominator metaphor,

but the real knife poised at the heart of the establishment is the deconditioning potential of psychedelics.

That's what made the 1960s such a tumultuous thing.

The CIA didn't care that people were selling acid.

They cared that LSD was changing people's minds.

And so, the reason I keep speaking and keep talking and hope that you all will keep thinking and speaking and talking

is because we have to build a community that understands itself, that understands its members, that understands where we stand,

because eventually the psychedelics will have to be dealt with as all these other drug issues will have to be dealt with.

So now, for us, is a period of getting to know each other, recognizing who we are, empowering ourselves,

getting our rap straight, knowing where we stand on these various issues that will be thrown at us,

and then, you know, speaking and being exemplars.

I mean, I wish that the people who are so concerned to ban drugs could see this group of people.

I mean, I think we're quite presentable.

I think we're making a contribution to society, and we are good citizens were it not for this one issue,

which then makes us, of course, a hated outlaw minority.

And I invite each of you to look around you, at the people near you, and realize this is your affinity group.

These are the people who can help you, and these are the people who can really blow it for all the rest of us.

So, partnership for us is no abstraction.

It's, as Ben Franklin said, if we don't hang together, we'll all hang separately.

This is the man in the blue.

Yes.

I would take the substance in silence and go into it a little further from that point on.

When I took acid years and years ago, I had wonderful trips.

And I heard that there were people around me jumping in buildings, trying to fly.

Could you get into the process of how you deal with anything that might be uncomfortable?

I mean, what actually happens?

Yeah, I mean, from your experience.

Well, the model is basically the same for all of these things.

You fast for six hours until you have an empty stomach.

It isn't really even fasting, it's simply emptying your stomach.

And then you take it in silent darkness.

I always smoke cannabis.

If that's not your thing, you should have some other means of slightly steering the situation.

It can be singing.

It can be a meditation.

Whatever it is that you need to have a small oar that you can dip into the psychic water,

if you need to shift the public things a little bit, then I don't do anything the first hour.

I just sit there and worry, basically, about what is about to happen.

I don't know whether it's harder for me, but what I always think about is my public image.

Because I say, you know, okay, you're Mr. Big Shot, you're Mr. Psychedelic, and now it's coming at you.

And you're always telling everybody how they can do it, and how to borate the cabbage, and how it's this and it's that.

But you know that you don't know jack shit.

And you also know that now it's just between you and me and him, and it's coming at me.

And so I think about all of this, and then hopefully I get it squared away.

Usually it just comes down to, well, it's too late.

Too late.

And thank God nobody is here to see whatever is about to happen.

And then I just sit, and it comes in a wave.

It comes in waves.

Sometimes it's gentle.

If it's going to be a moderate trip, the waves will begin, just like incoming surf.

But sometimes you realize, you know, you see it coming at you, and you realize that it's a thousand miles wide,

and ten miles high, and there's nowhere to run.

And it's just like the rolling shockwave of an atomic blast.

And you just lay down, and hope.

And many, many times on these psychedelic trips, I find clarity and courage.

Empowering it in each other, giving permission for it in ourselves, and looking toward a future that is endlessly bright with the possibility of human transformation.

It is in our hands.

That's not a metaphor.

It is literally going to belong to those people who most earnestly and courageously define the limits of what is possible for the human mind and body and community.

So you are that.

And I salute you, and I thank you, and I hope to see you all soon, somewhere else.

Good luck.

This is KPFK Los Angeles.

We have been listening to Terence McKenna, and with him, Rhianne Eisler, the author of The Chalice and the Blade, in a June 1988 seminar at the Ojai Foundation in Ojai.

If you didn't hear the whole thing, which we've just concluded, it's on five cassettes, and you can get the five cassettes for $40 from the Wild Store at the Ojai Foundation.

Again, the seminar is entitled, Man and Woman at the End of History, with Terence McKenna and Rhianne Eisler.

And that's available from the Wild Store, box 1620.

Multicolored, highly polished, contorting, filled with intent, never previously seen, and profoundly other.

And yet, isn't it interesting, this is the commonest of all the hallucinogens in nature.

This is the one that is most like what is happening in the metabolism of the ordinary human brain.

So, to me, DMT is a very interesting and profound kind of thing, because it's like a super convincer.

This is for people who think that people who talk about the power of psychedelics are soft-headed, you know?

You can invite any critic to invest five minutes in informing themselves in the facts of the matter.

I mean, they may have an excuse for why they can't spend nine hours with you, but five minutes?

How does the effect of DMT differ from the effect of 5-MeO DMT?

Well, whenever you ask someone a question like this, what you're going to hear is a subjective answer.

The question was, how does 5-MeO, 5-methoxy DMT, differ from DMT?

I've seen people using 5-MeO DMT therapeutically go through what must have been extremely profound inner dynamical fluxes.

My own experience with 5-MeO is it's exactly like DMT, except that you don't hallucinate,

which is like saying it was exactly like an Italian dinner, except there was no Italian dinner.

So what you have with 5-MeO DMT is you have this enormous emotion, this, you know, I think it's called boundary dissolution.

All boundaries dissolve and there is this enormous emotion of relief, of acceptance, of melting into some kind of unspeakable unitary state.

But that's all.

It may be enough.

It may be that if you're graced for the onslaught of the tidal wave of alien hallucinations, you may be sort of, what, what?

You know?

Because this enlarge emotion comes and goes.

It blows through you like a wind.

I am interested in 5-MeO.

There's a fact, and since it's a fact, I think I should share it with you, that you should know about 5-MeO,

which is when you give it to sheep, they drop dead.

And, you know, so I guess the moral of that is, if you're a sheep, you better not do this.

Are we sheep or are we men?

But, you know, staggers is a thing that ranchers, sheep ranchers, have to be aware of,

because they come upon their sheep with their little cloven hooves in the air trembling.

Well, that's from eating Phalaris arundinaceae, which is a range grass that contains 5-MeO-DMT.

And these tryptamines are highly psycho- and physiologically active.

It's thought that it's tryptamines that control heart rate, not psychoactive tryptamines,

but an entire other family of tryptamines that are being secreted in the neurospinal fluid.

So there's a lot about this that isn't understood, and work goes forward, but not on the psychedelic tryptamines.

That is, of course, a no-no.

One of my gripes that I don't know if I got around to in this weekend

is the fact that science prides itself on its open-minded impartiality,

and yet psychedelic research is utterly forbidden.

You can research any horrible thing you want,

how much ethyl-xylene it takes to create tumors in rats and all this horrible stuff,

but there's no human research being done by or on human beings on this planet to speak of

because it's professionally the kiss of death to become involved with this.

To my mind, this is like possessing the telescope and refusing to reform astronomy.

You know, I mean, we come upon these things, they are gifts of knowledge,

and we need to integrate them into our growing paradigm,

or else our paradigm will become just another story.

Back here, yes.

Does the CIA have extensive data on the surgic acid?

The question is, does the CIA have extensive data on the surgic acid?

Well, they had a program in the 50s and 60s called MK Ultra.

They amassed vast amounts of detail and data on these compounds,

but we don't really know what they concluded.

I think that the psychedelics are surprisingly slippery in the hands of the managers of dominator institutions.

You know, when they first had LSD, they thought,

Oh, this is a truth serum.

We'll give this to our agents so that they can extract information from people they meet in foreign locations.

Well, then six months of that theory, they changed their minds and said,

No, what it is, is it's the antidote to a truth serum.

Give this to somebody and they can't tell you what they know.

So we'll make all our agents take it when they're captured,

so nobody can get information from them.

And then they decided, you know, that it was neither and it was a this and it was a that.

I have asked this question, because I'm concerned about it, of the voice in the mushroom.

The question being, what if these things fall into the hands of people who are not well intended?

And I can only tell you what the mushroom said.

It's not entirely satisfying to me as a paranoid rationalist.

But what it said was, this is not your concern.

These things are of the good.

And the good, the light cannot be corrupted by the darkness.

The darkness passes right through it.

It's as though it didn't even exist.

And I think there's truth to that.

People are always asking me, why is it that I'm not dragged away kicking and screaming?

It's because it's utterly unimportant what I'm doing from the point of view of anybody in any position of authority.

We are all labeled flakes.

We are all seriously deluded people.

But as long as we remain less than 5% of the total population, there's no problem.

You know, I mean, democracy is very tolerant.

It tolerates all kinds of cults, belief systems, sexual orientations, and so forth.

As long as we don't threaten the power structure in ways that it can recognize, that's the truth.

As long as we don't threaten the power structure in ways that it can recognize, I don't think there's any problem.

And I ask you not to worry.

Yes.

In Mexico and here, have had peyote.

I don't really understand.

To talk about peyote a little bit?

Well, I mean, this is safe.

Pardon me?

You mean, what are they doing?

What is it all about?

Well, wherever there's hallucinogenic plant use in a traditional culture, there's shamanism.

The shamanism of the American Southwest is a complicated study.

It's not clear how old the use of peyote is.

We might like, without examining the facts, to think that it's millennia old.

But the evidence seems to be that thousands of years ago, the hallucinogen or the empathogen of choice was sephora secundifolia,

which comes closer to being an ordeal poison.

If you're not familiar with the concept of an ordeal poison, there are traditional groups of people in the world whose path of transformation leads them not through hallucinogens,

but through plants that you take them and you think you're going to die.

And you have all the convincing symptoms of the immediate onset of death.

And then you don't die.

And you're so damn relieved that you straighten out your life and behave like a decent person.

And so this is the ordeal poison approach, and it's very highly evolved in Madagascar and Malaysia and places like that.

Sephora secundifolia was a kind of ordeal poison, and apparently in the last thousand years, which isn't that long,

it has been replaced by peyote, probably coming out of the Tarahumara, who carried it then to the Plains Indians generally.

If you're interested in this, a major landmark in ethnobotanical publishing in the last two months was the publication of Omar Stewart,

who's an old botanist, very well thought of guy.

Omar Stewart's life work, The Peyote Religion, has just been published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Beautiful book.

I urge you to take a look at it.

What?

It's called The Peyote Religion by Omar Stewart.

Yes.

I'm interested in, I remember the experience of having this very deep inside,

and then coming back into my life, and feeling that this veil sort of,

that it's been under the same, and having this sort of inspirating,

that it's a very deep inside my life.

And I'm wondering how you talk about that or approach that in your current work and feeling about the devil.

So the question, as I understand it, is how do you hang on to what you learn in these peak experiences?

Or give it up.

What?

Or give it up gracefully.

Well, or give it up gracefully, although I'm more in sympathy with the questioner.

I've always thought of the psychedelic experience as like ocean fishing from a boat.

And the idea is to let down your net and to bring up something useful.

And the nights spent on the empty ocean are beautiful.

But if you return with empty nets, then what have you done for your tribe?

But on the other hand, sometimes you let down your nets and something the size of a freight train goes through.

And you'd best just row for sure.

But there are the intermediate catch.

And I think that this question that you ask is very important.

That this, and I don't really have an answer, I have techniques.

But the goal is always to bring back as much as possible.

Because at the peak of, say, a six or seven gram mushroom trip, you cannot believe what you're seeing.

And you cannot, even in the act of beholding it, you cannot imagine what you're seeing.

I mean, finally, it actually goes off the scale.

And you say, you know, all veils have been ripped away.

All truths revealed.

This is it.

You wanted it.

You've got it.

But then, you know, you have to work your way down from that summit over hours and bring back snapshots of it.

The only thing I can say is it's a matter of repetition and persistence and using every trick you can think of, including voice-operated tape recorders, note-taking.

And when I really have what I think is a slam-bang insight, I repeat it to myself like every 20 minutes for the next few hours as I navigate through successively diminished states of higher consciousness until finally I emerge and I still have understood the mystery of why my little finger exactly fits my nostril.

For no more punchline.

You're out super cool into the draft head of the audience on the screen.

Hoorwest.

One more punchline.

In the back.

Scooam.

What is it? Well, I'm not... Oh, it's a drug.

Well, hush my mouth. To be public humiliated.

How many times in my life will this happen before I finally shuffle off the stage?

Two CB terms.

Oh, it's two CB. Okay, got it.

Well, first of all, to your question about ayahuasca, which requires some explanation for some of the other people here.

Ayahuasca is a fascinating, combinatory, hallucinogenic substance that is made in the Amazon over a very wide area.

And what it is, is it's the monoamine oxidase inhibiting harmine from a very large woody vine combined with the DMT that occurs in Socotria viridis.

So it's interesting immediately because it's a combinatory shamanic hallucinogen.

There are very few of these in the world.

Notice that with peyote, datura, mushrooms, iboga, morning glory seeds, it's one plant and the process is to eat it.

But with ayahuasca, it's two plants.

And the first thing is they must be correctly combined and cooked in certain proportions by a person of good heart and clear intent.

So unlike any of these other things, they bear very intimately upon themselves the stamp of the human being who created them.

And it's a very intense experience because it not only is a full-fledged visionary hallucinogen, but it's also a strong purgative and pneumatic.

So that you are being cleaned from stem to stern while you are watching these visions roll by.

And it's taken in the upper Amazon in a ritual setting on a weekly basis among the mestizo populations there.

And when made right is extremely powerful, lovely experience.

It's interesting to contrast it with the mushrooms because the mushrooms have this eerie, we came from outer space kind of global science fiction overview.

Ayahuasca is entirely of the mother.

It is grounding, it is of the earth, the flowing rivers, the dark banks, the jungle, the people, the small malokas.

It just carries you out into the world of the earth and the people upon it.

But the hallucinations can build so that they have a quality of intensity and concreteness so that you would swear that you would smoke DMT.

It's just that it took you three or four hours of careful manipulation of breath and attention to reach where DMT put you whether you want it or not in about 30 seconds.

But this is perhaps a better way to go at it.

I'm very interested in Ayahuasca and how it has formed culture and civilization in the Amazon.

And it's unusual that you ask the question even because so few people have heard of it.

But it is beginning to be used in psychotherapy in this country in a ritual context very discreetly.

And I think it holds out great promise.

The reports coming out of these small groups of people who take it reverently and ritually are of tremendous healings and reorientations of neurotic personality structures and that sort of thing.

Which is exactly how it works in the context of the Amazonian situation.

Over here.

By the revelations of Philip K. Dick do you mean the incidents that happened to him and that spawned books like Valus and the Divine Invention?

Well, I won't spend too much time on this because I don't know how many people know who Philip K. Dick is.

I think it was Robert Anton Wilson who coined the term chapel perilous.

This is when something happens in your life and it all begins to fit together and make sense.

Too much sense because it's coming from the exterior and it seems to either mean that you're losing your mind

or you are somehow the central focus of a universal conspiracy that is leading you towards some unimaginable breakthrough.

I don't know what that's about. I've experienced it.

Maybe anyone who leads a long and eccentric life has these periods where they seem to have caught the wave

and are being carried toward unimaginable revelations and situations quite beyond their will.

This is what happened to Dick and the explanation for these kinds of things would lead us quite far afield.

I would just say briefly and bravely that I think vortexes of connectedness seem to haunt time like ghosts.

And they're not material objects so they're too subtle for science to pick up.

They're something known to shamans, poets, gamblers, people like that.

And these vortexes of coincidence and connectedness can work either for or against us.

And if you don't have a model that contains the possibility of these things,

then when they come upon you, you will become highly agitated and think you're losing your mind

or you're being contacted by aliens or something like that.

I call it, and I don't think I'm the first, but I call it the cosmic giggle.

And, you know, it comes after you sometimes.

And you just have to be...

I call it, and I don't think I'm the first, but I call it the cosmic giggle.

And, you know, it comes after you sometimes.

And you just have to be able to wrestle with that particular angel when it turns up on your doorstep.

Yes, this lady.

I call it the cosmic giggle as well as enlightening, or enlightening kinds of experiences without us.

And the second part of my question is, is it possible to have, as we run into anyone,

who's so sensitive to substances, be they hallucinogenic substances,

if they were playing food, in some instances, that they can't tolerate or would be way over the mark,

if they were to take such things?

Oh, yes, absolutely.

I mean, you meet people who are extremely delicately poised.

I mean, there are people who, you know...

Well, consciousness can be just synergized into all kinds of tizzies,

by things other than these overt hallucinogens.

I am somewhat thankful that I'm cut from more lumpen stock,

because I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I began to have a hallucinogenic experience,

not in the presence of a hallucinogen.

The states of mind that I'm interested in, that come out of these shamanic plants,

are so radically different from ordinary states of consciousness,

that I wouldn't care to access them, except through the technology of the plants.

And I often get asked this question, are there other ways to do it?

Certainly claims abound, you know, and you meet people who say,

I don't need drugs, I'm seeing little dancing mice when I close my eyes.

Congratulations.

But I've never been entirely convinced, you know,

it's really hard to convince yourself that we're all talking about the same thing.

That's why I perhaps rattle on more than I should.

I've had the unsettling experience of, and I won't use any names,

but meeting someone who had done research on psychedelics for 20 years,

had given it to over 500 people, who had taken it over 150 times.

And I said, we discussed the possibility that they were professional,

so they had always had off-the-shelf chemicals.

And I said, well, you should try fresh mushrooms,

and see if you think there's a difference.

And they debated the 1960s in large measure with their rhetoric about psychedelic drugs.

So I had no idea.

And so we have to keep leaning on each other.

We have to keep comparing notes and make sure we're talking about the same thing.

We're not talking about, I mean, on the way to the mystery,

along the way to the mystery lie the realms of loving everybody,

moving fields of geometric color, past lives, you name it.

But these are just milestones on the way.

When you finally get to the thing, the way you will know that you've arrived

is that you will be struck dumb with wonder.

That you will say, my God, this is impossible.

This is inherently impossible.

This is what impossible was invented to talk about.

This cannot be.

And it's then we're in the ballpark.

You know, then we're in the presence of the true coincidencia applausitorum.

There are all kinds of drugs and techniques and hot water and massage and this and that

and vitamin therapy that moves you all over the map,

makes you feel all kinds of different ways.

And, you know, you see people experience all kinds of personal breakthroughs

under massage and rebirthing and all these things,

but I don't think that's what we're talking about.

I think we're talking about something profoundly other,

that it is very hard to get this thing out into the mainstream,

because literally words fail us.

It is a translinguistic object.

It is the most...

It is...

If a flying saucer were to land in Central Park tomorrow,

it would be not as mysterious and challenging to our conception of ourselves

as this psychological state is, which lies at the center of all this shamanic dancing around and probing.

There is something profoundly bizarre accessible to us here and now.

And it's a complete puzzle to me why there is so little talk about it.

We live in a society completely obsessed with sensation.

You know, people shoot cocaine, jump out of airplanes, go on tiny rafts across the Pacific,

cross the North Pole on a roller skate, whatever it is.

And yet, all in the name of adventure.

Well, you know, by God, if you want adventure, there's adventure out there.

There's adventure that will sink you to your knees with tears of joy streaming down your face.

It isn't far away.

It isn't for people you never heard of, or universities, or you don't need a lot of funding.

You don't have to be a professional.

All of this stuff.

I mean, everybody talks about the mystery within and how it's all right here.

But I don't think people realize how literal all this stuff is.

The world is not only stranger than we suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose.

The weirdest, wildest, most bizarre, unearthly thing you can imagine in your most demented state of fantasy falls far short of the beginnings of the truth.

I don't know.

Sure.

Speak up.

The question is, how do you do it right?

And you talk about shelf life.

I've talked to people recently.

I've said, have you taken five grams of mushroom?

Yeah, I walked around to Dead Show and saw cartoons.

No one has said yes, except for one person.

Yes, I saw voices.

Yes, I saw an alien landscape.

Well, I think the way to do it right, and this is self-serving advice, but nevertheless, if not me, who?

Is to grow it.

To grow your sacrament.

Because then a whole bunch of imponderables are removed.

The bad karma of dealing with some form of criminal syndicalism.

The uncertainty of not knowing what it is you actually have on your hands, how old it is, what conditions of care and attention it was created under.

Plus, the discipline, and now I'm speaking of mushrooms, which is what I know very well, the discipline of growing mushrooms will itself prepare you to take them.

Because if you can grow them, you need to be a lot less concerned about whether or not you can take them than the person who simply buys them and takes them.

Because to grow them you must be clean, conscientious, punctual, attentive, self-disciplined, cheerful, able to face adversity, willing to take chances, full of courage.

These are qualities necessary to grow the mushrooms.

And never leave home.

And of course, never leave home.

Sedentary, permanent life, in love with isolation.

You're perfectly content.

So if you're all those things, and you will not succeed in growing mushrooms unless you are, well then you've already passed through a great initiation.

And anyway, you know, the living world, the satisfaction of working this alchemy.

I call it the changing of rye into mold.

And cynical souls have suggested, yes, and from mold into gold.

But I wouldn't advocate that step.

What you don't use you can give to your friends, but the growing is a real partnership.

You will be amazed at the productivity of this organism.

I mean, what a workhorse.

You give it 112 grams of rye in a jar, and it will produce close to 45 dried grams of mushrooms.

That's a conversion rate of close to 30%.

That's an unheard of level of efficiency in a biological process.

This stuff loves to work with, for human beings.

And it's a tremendous insight into natural processes if you're alienated from all that.

And people say, oh well, it's terribly technical, and this and that.

It isn't technical.

It's no more technical than canning jam.

It's about at that level.

It involves hot water, pressure cookers, gas heat, standing around, that kind of thing.

But it's the reenactment.

It's a real shamanic empowering.

It's a calling forth of the ally before your eyes.

And then you see it, and then you have it, and then you're beholden to no one.

Plus you've empowered yourself by learning that you could do this thing.

Someone who hasn't overheard you.

That was actually the question I wanted to ask more or less, but short of you.

Are there other ways of not growing it yourself that you can properly prepare yourself for them?

I mean, I gather the shamanistic cultures, they have a long experience of proper preparation.

Well, that was the question, how do you obtain it in good karma?

You're asking the question, how do you take it in good karma?

The advice is pretty straightforward and simple.

First of all, obviously, you have to have an intent to use it properly for spiritual growth and self-exploration.

I think that goes without saying in talking to a group like this.

Then the practical and operational question is, how do you do it?

Well, here's how you do it.

You take it on an empty stomach, in silent darkness, in a place where you are comfortable.

Now, people don't like this advice.

It's very simple advice.

And the number of people who will come to me and say,

I remember what you said, but I took it at 9 o'clock in the morning and I wanted to listen to Mozart.

And there were people moving around in the house.

Forget Mozart.

You know, Mozart is great without the adjunct of these things.

Mozart can stand on his own.

My notion of what you're trying to do when you take one of these things is,

you want to see the quintessence of what it is.

You want to see what it is.

So, put darkness behind it so that everything you see is only it.

Put silence behind it so that everything you hear is only it.

And then pay attention and sit still.

And that's all there is to it.

Sit and watch the back of your closed eyelids with the expectation of seeing something.

I mean, you've all meditated.

Well, God, that's the most boring thing on earth.

This is exactly like that.

This is exactly like meditation, except instead of that dark ochre background

that settles in with the little phosphenes floating by,

instead of that is a Niagara of transcendental imagery.

So, I would say that meditation is a great model for it.

You know, sit down, shut up, breathe deeply,

and look with attention at the back of your closed eyelids.

And I guarantee you, it will come.

It will manifest.

I don't know, I feel like everybody should get a chance.

Berta, you haven't asked a question.

Have you seen these lives?

Yes, good question.

One of the mystique of ayahuasca is that there are certain very tightly defined motifs that occur in it.

And these are being swallowed by an enormous serpent, and then somewhat unpredictably, since it's a South American drug,

the presence of black people, and the jaguar motif.

Those three.

The serpent, the jaguar, and the black person.

And the answer is yes, very strongly.

Not only myself, but other people.

This is really interesting to me, because I'm interested in, you know, where are these images?

That's what I've always asked.

That's why I'm so interested in the hallucinations, you see.

People...

You'll hear spiritual teachers say,

Well, hallucination is a distraction, and that's all lower bardo stuff, and you quickly get past hallucination.

Not me.

I'm fascinated by hallucination, because I want to know where it's coming from.

How can it be that in sitting in silent darkness by myself for half an hour, I can see more art than the human race has produced in 15,000 years?

That's not trivial.

You can't dismiss that as an impediment to spiritual progress.

That's a mystery and a miracle.

Where are these images coming from?

If they're coming from us, why don't we recognize them?

Why is the main quality about them something which astonishes?

Where we say, I could never have thought of that.

And yet, you know, you're seeing it.

It's filling your head.

And so I wonder about the images in ayahuasca.

Are they in our bones and our genes?

Or is it a morphogenetic field of the local area?

Where do these things come from?

Naranjo, Bertha referred to him in her question, did experiments with urban Chileans who had never been to the jungle.

They also got jaguars, black people, and giant serpents.

And I've taken ayahuasca in Northern California, and the blackness is the most puzzling to me because the jaguar and the serpent, these are power animals.

But why blackness?

And not blackness as honkies.

Imagine it.

I'm convinced it's blackness as black people experienced it.

I mean, it's this wonderful, it's very alien to an Irish lad like myself.

I mean, it's like going to the Apollo, is what it's like.

It's like being at the Apollo.

It's this tremendously warm, open, funny, smart, savvy thing.

Why?

Why should it be there embedded in that experience over and over again?

I don't know.

Why should the experience of the alien be embedded in the psilocybin experience?

the sense of this thing which can communicate, but which is not human and from another whole order of nature

and with an entirely different conception of time and destiny and history.

Who are these?

What are these channels out there?

It's a very interesting question.

To me it implies, what I talked about this morning, the existence of another dimension,

a dimension so vast that it will completely dissolve the concerns of industrial male-dominated scientific civilization.

We've gone as far as we can with that.

And we're coming back now to really facing the mystery with the things we learned on the peregrination through history.

And we're better equipped than ever before to understand these things.

But nevertheless, as the thing begins to lift the veils, you realize that it is still as mysterious as it ever was.

Sir?

Here.

Good.

In the 60's, MDA was thought to maybe help enhance community.

Can any of these drugs that you're talking about be used as a tool to help accelerate the partnership spirit in family, in community, and in larger groups?

Good question.

Do these natural hallucinogens, can they be used to facilitate the formation of partnerships and partnership societies?

Well, the answer is certainly.

Ayahuasca is a good case in point.

The way ayahuasca is used in the Amazon among the very traditional off-river tribes is it's used to create states of group-mindedness among the elders of the tribe to make social decisions for the group.

In other words, before, when ayahuasca was first encountered, the chemical in it was named telepathine.

This is what these European chemists named it.

Later it was discovered that it was the same compound as had already been isolated from the giant Syrian rue called harmin.

So the rules of nomenclature meant that harmin would be preferred over telepathine, but these states of group-mindedness are very, very real, and they occur on psilocybin in my experience as well.

I didn't talk about it too much this morning in my anthropological graph, but you can imagine the power that a kind of group telepathy would have in ensuring the survival and cohesion of a primitive group experiencing great pressure from the environment.

So, in a sense, that's what these things may be good for.

It's possible to suggest that our ability to use language was something originally synergized out of our animal organization by environmental pressures in the presence of hallucinogens.

There is something about communication, and I think this leads me to a favorite subject of mine.

I think that the ways in which we communicate with each other are still evolving and still can gain energy from being explored with psychedelic compounds.

Some of you, I'm sure, know my notion about what I call visible language, and I referred to it this morning when I said how many could see what I was saying.

Visible language is the notion that language need not be something heard through the ears.

language sufficiently empowered might be beheld with the eyes.

This is what great poets are able to do and great singers of song and tellers of stories.

They're able to use language so creatively that without noticing that anything has happened to you, the listener,

you begin to see what is intended rather than to hear it.

And I take this very seriously because on psilocybin I have actually both beheld the intent of other people and also been able to cause them to behold my intent.

It's what Philo-Judeus called the more perfect logos.

He said the more perfect logos is a logos which goes from being heard by the ear to being seen by the eyes without ever crossing over a quantized moment of transition.

So imagine how much, you know, we always think that telepathy would be a situation in which I would think something and you would hear what I was thinking.

But what if telepathy were, that I would say.

something and we both would

see what I mean

and could just walk around

and look at it. And I think

we unconsciously anticipate

this in the ways in which

we talk about communication

because we say

she spoke very clearly

I see

what you mean

he painted a picture for us

in other words we always

reach into the domain of the

visual metaphor when we

wish to indicate

a higher order of

clarity in speech

and I think

from taking ayahuasca in the Amazon

with these shamans that what we take

to be beautiful

shamanic songs

are for the people who are

intoxicated on the

hallucinogen not songs

at all but works

of visual art

that are seen

that are looked at

we again

the visual metaphor

we talk about

a tapestry of sound

these really are

these icaros

these magical songs

they really are

tapestries of sound

and when you are

when you use

psilocybin

you can experiment

with your own voice

and discover that

a certain sound

is actually

the color violet

and another sound

is you know

chartreuse

shading into

lemon yellow

I mean

in a way

I'm trivializing it

because it's much more

complex than this

but what you discover

is that sound

can be seen

and that thought

can be beheld

I think our brain

the evolution

of our brain

chemistry

hovers

just under the threshold

of this thing

becoming explicit

and it's a hard thing

to talk about

obviously

because we're talking

about speech

and communication

intent

itself

but

again

by looking back

into the past

we can obtain

an image

which maybe

helps us

how did language

as we know it

and as I am using it

at this moment

come to be

must this not

have been something

which was for

thousands and thousands

of years

just under the surface

of our ability

to take hold of it

and cognize

and then

suddenly

it gelled

there was a phase

transition

and people

got the idea

that you could

signify

with sound

that you could

cause an image

of a thing

not present

to come into

the mind

of your hearer

by naming

it

and this is

a tremendous

almost

a miraculous

ability

and you know

people talk

about gorillas

and dolphins

and chimpanzees

and there is

language there

but the miracle

of human language

the things

that we can do

with it

the way

that poetry

can set armies

marching

and the way

messiahs

take control

of the destiny

of whole

millennia

of people

it's all

through

the spoken

word

it's all

through the

power

of images

beheld in the

privacy

of the individual

mind

somehow linked

to little

mouth noises

and these

little mouth

noises

go across

space

and enter

through the

ear of the

hearer

the hearer

consults

his or her

dictionary

and reconstructs

the blueprint

of the intended

thought

and this very

crude process

is what holds

us together

our religions

our governments

our hopes

our fears

so a

transformation

in the

linguistic

domain

would

create

great

cohesion

and I

believe

that the

proper

view

of these

psychedelic

compounds

is as

enzymes

if you're

not entirely

clear on

what an

enzyme is

an enzyme

is an

organic

catalyst

now what

is a

catalyst

a catalyst

is a

compound

which causes

a certain

chemical

reaction

to progress

at a

faster

rate

without

the

catalyst

itself

being

consumed

in other

words

it drives

the chemical

process

and these

hallucinogens

in the

natural

surround

drive

and

catalyze

and synergize

the process

of consciousness

in our

species

and what

it comes

down to

in practical

terms

is the

synergy

of language

emergence

we cannot

move into

the future

any

faster

than the

rate

at which

we

transform

our

language

and

language

transformation

and evolution

has up until

the present

moment

been left

pretty much

to find

its own

way

there has

never been

really

a culture

with a

conscious

intent

of

transforming

its

language

yes

here

I agree

with you

and I

think

there's

another

aspect

of it

that I've

observed

in

communication

and that

is

there's

like

listening to

Buckminster Fuller

is an interesting

process for me

I've listened to him

a lot of times

from my early

childhood

and

sometimes

when I

just

I don't

try to

understand his

words

I switch

into another

mode

I've had

times

when I

could

understand

everything

he said

without

understanding

his words

some of

his words

so I

think

there's

a lot

of

communication

that goes

on in

that

other

place

that I

think

we

has always

been

my

faith

but

if

you

pronounce

a

word

clearly

it

will

be

understood

you know

and

I

don't

know

if

it's

working

for you

or not

but

it's

how

I

learned

all

these

big

words

is

somebody

said

them

to

me

and

I

knew

exactly

what

they

meant

so

I

think

we

that

we

would

all

probably

recognize

so

we

really

need

to

experience

and

experiment

with

empowered

speech

and

what

it

can

do

isn't

it

interesting

that

we

have

millions

and

millions

of

words

for

things

like

leptons

and

quarks

and

ratchets

and

these

kinds

of

things

we

have

about

five

words

for

emotions

we

have

love

hate

disgust

and

then

you

know

a

few

others

but

if

you

will

still

your

mind

for

a

moment

and

direct

your

attention

to

your

heart

you

will

see

that

your

heart

is

as

busy

giving

out

complex

vibrations

as

your

mind

is

the

vibration

the

complex

vibrations

given

out

by

your

mind

you

can

usually

transduce

into

speech

and

start

saying

I

want

I

think

I

know

this

and

that

but

when

you

turn

your

attention

to

your

heart

most

of

us

are

totally

inarticulate

and

even

the

most

articulate

among

us

in

matters

of

the

heart

still

inherit

a

tremendously

impoverished

vocabulary

it's

very

hard

to

say

what

you

really

mean

when

you're

talking

about

your

feelings

because

they're

such

feathery

delicate

creatures

and

the

words

that

convey

them

are

such

sledge

hammers

of

statistical

averaging

and

misunderstanding

this is

another

dimension

out of

the

sixties

come

concepts

which

are

always

ridiculed

by

the

orthodox

concepts

like

the

vibes

and

laying

an

ego

trip

and

but

what

this

is

the

first

halting

steps

toward

creating

a

new

language

about

emotion

and

feeling

and

it's

too

bad

that

it

was

broken

off

or

that

it

didn't

proceed

at

the

rapid

rate

at

the

end

because

we

cannot

really

the way

I see

moving

into

the

future

it

as

we

can

describe

to

each

other

where

it

is

we

want

to

go

this

is

again

like

restating

the

idea

that

the

best

idea

will

win

what

we

need

to

do

is

all

hone

our

ideas

clarify

our

thoughts

rest

of

world

culture

so

it's

always

about

stretching

the

envelope

of

language

seeking

to

say

yet

more

clearly

what

we

mean

to

adumbrate

and refine

and indicate

nuance

with ever

greater

clarity

that

that is

what

communication

is

and

when

it's

done

perfectly

it

becomes

a true

partnership

in

art

one

example

you

used

before

Terrence

is

the

octopus

that

you

were

mentioning

changes

its

body

and

communicates

physically

without

verbal

connection

as a

dancer

I

appreciate

that

and I

thought

maybe

you

could

make

a

comment

this

is

the

part

of

the

evening

where

we

start

requesting

a

favorite

song

the

octopus

blues

briefly

I

talked

about

visible

language

a little

earlier

and

John

reminds

me

of

a

into

all

of

this

which

is

nature

always

provides

models

for what

we

want

to

do

no

matter

how

advanced

or

unadvanced

nature

always

provides

the

model

so

I

had

this

idea

about

visible

language

years

and

years

ago

but

in

the

past

couple

of

years

I

discovered

everybody

seems

to

discover

mind

in

the

water

for

Lily

it

was

dolphins

for

other

people

it

has

been

whales

for

me

it

was

octopi

cephalopods

and

I'll

talk

about

them

a

little

bit

first

of

all

they

have

extremely

well

evolved

eyes

there

have

eyes

as

good

as

human

eyes

and

in

fact

it's

always

held

up

as

a

great

example

of

parallel

evolution

that

these

two

utterly

unrelated

organisms

could

octopus

eye

unless

you're

an

anathomist

so

but

who

would

want

to

but

octopi

are

cephalopods

they're

mollusks

they're

related

to

escargot

and

banana

slugs

the

evolutionary

distance

between

them

and

us

is

tremendous

I mean

their line

and our

line

divided

about

million

years

ago

compared

to

dolphins

are

like

the

boy

and

girl

next

door

compared

to

this

organism

this

is

an

alien

organism

okay

so

it's

been

known

for a

long

time

that

these

octopi

could

change

color

and

it

was

always

thought

that

this

was

simple

camouflage

that

they

change

color

to

match

their

background

but

observation

being

the

key

to

scientific

advance

people

notice

that

generates

polka

dots

and

traveling

bars

and

what

are

called

blushes

and

striping

and

all

of

this

sort

of

thing

so

then

it

was

realized

they

are

communicating

with

each

other

this

is

how

octopi

communicate

they

are

actually

almost

like

creatures

turned

inside

out

because

they

have

a

tremendously

advanced

nervous

system

which

is

on

the

surface

of

their

skin

and

this

nervous

system

controls

these

specialized

cells

called

chromatophores

which

change

color

so

that

what

an

is

how

an

octopus

looks

in

other

words

they

are

their

own

thoughts

they

are

like

a

naked

nervous

system

they

are

pure

linguistic

intent

and

when

you

see

them

they

not

only

are

able

to

change

their

color

but

because

they're

soft

bodied

they

psychedelic

extreme

is

in

the

benthic

octopi

the

very

rare

deep

water

octopi

that

live

below

meters

in

the

deep

ocean

where

no

light

ever

penetrates

and

how

have

they

continued

their

dialogue

into

this

abyssal

darkness

it's

by

evolving

light

organs

all

over

their

of

these

things

they

are

psychedelic

idea

complexes

transforming

themselves

lighting

themselves

sending

traveling

lines

of

lights

and

stripes

and

dots

well

to me

this is a

model

for

the

human

future

of

communication

if you

think

of

the

way

we

seem

to

require

titular

animals

for

instance

the

titular

animal

of

19th

century

industrialism

was

the

horse

realized

as

the

locomotive

which

was

measured

in

thousands

and

thousands

of

horsepower

that

was

very

impressive

to the

19th

century

mentality

the

20th

century

mentality

realizes

its

titular

animal

which

is

I

think

the

hawk

the

soaring

raptor

which

is

definitely

a

dominator

symbol

is

realized

in

high

performance

fighter

aircraft

you

know

that

is

to

be

like

a

gigantic

bird

of

prey

the

titular

model

the

titular

animal

for

the

future

is

I

would

suggest

the

octopi

because

it

is

probing

the

frontiers

of

communication

and

self

reflection

in

fact

the

octopus

may

contain

the

hint

of

what

to

turn

ourselves

inside

out

to

objectify

the

mind

so

that

it

can

be

beheld

and

freely

seen

so

that

we

can

each

see

the

soul

of

the

other

and

then

to

interiorize

the

body

so

that

it

is

a

freely

commanded

object

in

the

imagination

that's

I

think

what

we're

headed

toward

and

it

is

anticipated

by

the

psychedelic

state

and

will

be

hardwired

through

the

feminization

of

cybernetics

and

it

will

release

from us

the

tremendous

pressure

of

limits

that's

what

we

really

feel

is

limits

and

we

sense

that

in

the

imagination

there

are

no

limits

we

just

don't

know

how

you

historical

one

it's

a

cultural

transformation

we

have

to

exteriorize

our

minds

interiorize

our

bodies

and

create

a

psychedelic

cybernetic

partnership

collectivity

that lays

the

basis

for

a

new

self

image

of

what

humanness

can

be

this

is

what

I

experience

in

distinction

to

most

other

animals

in

the

religions

which

we

generate

in

distinction

to

most

other

animals

in

the

great

collective

works

of

art

and

social

dreams

that

we

generate

in

distinction

to

most

other

animals

we

are

called

to

higher

things

and

are

passing

through

a

series

of

bootstrapping

self

transitions

that

is

anticipated

in

each

of

us

as

a

microcosm

when

we

surrender

our

evil