Mc Green 2-6

Mystic Fire, video and audio, proudly presents Terence McKenna.

History ends in green.

This is tape two of a six-cassette series.

Well, psilocybin once encountered in the diet

acts very quickly to outbreed non-psilocybin-using individuals

because, like many indels,

if there's a small amount of psilocybin in the diet,

visual acuity is measurably increased.

And Roland Fisher did work on this in the early 60s.

Well, you can see that if an animal that is living by predation

and also it's thought by the people who disagree with this theory,

the people who do not think that mushrooms played a major role in human evolution,

believe that the throwing arm is the unique human capability

and that when you see a pitcher get a ball across a plate,

what is it to, how far is it from the pitcher's mound to the plate?

Sixty feet.

That kind of control on an object hurled at that speed,

no other animal can do anything, even approaching that.

And that this hand-eye coordination gave us our leg up, literally,

or our arm up to be able to knock out large animals at a distance.

Well, even if you believe that theory,

you see it too depends on a very close coordination of hand and eye.

Well, if you bring into this a chemical factor in the diet

which increases visual acuity,

animals that are allowing this item in the diet

will very quickly outbreed the non-mushroom users.

And I submit that this happened.

Then further accelerating the tendency toward preferential use of mushrooms

is the fact that at higher doses, but still sub-psychedelic doses,

these same mushrooms will trigger arousal,

general CNS, central nervous system arousal.

But this also includes then sexual arousal and erection in males.

Well, so what does this mean?

It means that it's a party drug at that dose.

It means that there is this impetus to copulation

in a situation in which the better hunters

have been more successful at getting food.

So this increased copulatory activity

and subsequent increased number of births

is happening in an environment with an increased food supply.

So you see, all these factors are converging

to outbreed the non-mushroom-using individuals.

Well, then the final culminating factor in this

is at yet higher doses,

the mushroom ushers into the boundary-dissolving ecstasy

that we call the psychedelic experience

and that in that kind of a social small group situation

would have led, I think, to primitive religious observance,

ritual, group sexuality, food sharing, mate sharing,

so forth and so on.

And I really believe that this lifestyle, if you will,

of nomadic pastoralism,

god-disoriented religion driven by psychedelic indoles in the diet,

that for 50,000 approaching 75,000 years,

this is how people lived.

And they were fully realized people.

I mean, there was tremendous oral poetry,

epic works of art and theater,

a complete realization of human potential

in the dynamic context of this nomadic relationship to nature.

I mean, this was Eden.

This was when we were at peace with our humanness.

Well, then, you know, what happened?

Is there a search for scapegoats?

Who's to blame?

And the answer is nobody is to blame.

The very process which brought this paradise into being,

which was the drying up of the African continent

and the forcing of our proto-human ancestors

onto the veldt and into the bipedal nomadic tribal language-using mode,

the very forces which created that destroyed it

because eventually the great grasslands of the Sahara,

the huge water holes,

the vast herds of game

gave way to encroaching dunes,

shrinking water holes.

The mushroom festivals,

which I imagine at one point were probably lunar festivals,

became then yearly festivals

because of scarcity of the mushroom.

And there became then anxiety about availability of mushrooms

and therefore a certain cultural pressure

to find methods of preserving them.

And this need turned naturally

to the preserving powers of honey.

And so there was a transitional phase

of not fresh mushroom festivals

but preserved mushrooms in honey.

The problem is honey itself

has the capacity to turn into a psychotropic substance.

Through fermentation, it becomes mead.

But the imprinting that takes place in a mead culture.

Mead cultures are cultures of male dominance,

repression of female sexuality,

hierarchy,

warfare, wheel chariots,

the whole shtick.

And so, you know,

there was,

and this all happened over thousands of years,

this very gradual transition.

There was never a conscious moment of tragedy.

But, you see,

what was happening was

a new psychic function

was taking hold in the human animal.

In the situation of the monthly

boundary-dissolving group mushroom festivals,

ego was not allowed to form.

And I really view psilocybin as

almost an inoculation

against the formation of ego.

It is an ego-lytic compound.

So, notions of male dominance,

of possession of property,

children, domesticated animals,

or women,

none of this went on

in this situation

where the boundary-dissolution

was reinforced by frequent mushroom use.

But as soon as

the mushrooms become less available,

this thing begins to grow

in the human personality,

literally like a cancer

or a tumor.

It's a calcareous growth

on the psyche

that if we do not have

this embeddedness

in the vegetable matrix of Gaia,

then anxiety arises,

a lot of it sexual

and related to self-identity.

And I don't have to discuss this with you,

just refer you to Freud

and the whole gang.

Everybody understands

how bent we are.

The question is why?

And I think this is why.

Because we have been

in a permanent state

of neurotic disequilibrium

for 15,000 years.

And every move

to attempt to correct this

has pushed us further away

from the goal

that we want to have.

So now we arrive

at the late 20th century

nuclear arsenals

fully in hand.

We have made,

since the 15th century,

a demonic pact

with matter

that has allowed us

great insight

into the destructive properties

of matter,

made us, you know,

handmaiden

to the devil.

And yet we are still

completely dark

about our own motivations,

how to educate

our children,

how to put in place

a set of values

that don't loot

the future.

And all of these problems

appear to be

getting worse.

So,

you know,

I don't know.

well,

my response to this

is to advocate

the only thing

that I think

will work,

but it's not

a political position,

because a political position

always implies

willingness

to compromise

and negotiate

with the other side.

And there really

is no willingness

to negotiate

on the part

of the psychedelic position,

because it's pretty

non-negotiable.

We're at the end

of a process,

call it 2,000,

5,000,

you know,

choose your date,

but a long process

of denial

of human nature

first,

and then war

against human nature.

And it goes

so deep

into our culture

that we don't

even know

where the

basement level

is.

I mean,

for instance,

to my mind,

monotheism,

which is the

great intellectual

edifice of the

West,

touches the

three major

religions of the

West that have

developed in a

continuous strain

since Abraham.

Monotheism

is the

institutionalized

of this

egocentric

model.

And it has

a certain

philosophical appeal

in one God,

you know,

everything,

all roads

lead to Rome.

You can trace

everything back

to the Ur-Source,

the Ur-Cvella.

But that

anal retentive

appeal in itself

takes place

within a context

of values

of male

dominance,

print-created

linearity,

uniformity,

so forth,

and so on.

And I think

what we have

to get into

is a real

permission

for sloppiness,

for loose-endedness,

for the abandonment

of any myth

of closure,

that there is

no closure.

There are models

and there are

questions,

but all models

are provisional.

And anybody

who says they

have answers

is highly,

highly suspect.

Too many people

claim answers.

What's being

claimed here

is a technique.

And then you

figure out

your own

questions

and your own

answers.

And it's

different for

everybody.

There really is

no ideology

associated with

psychedelics.

I mean,

if you look at

the people

who've been

involved with it,

they've said

completely different

things and

contradictory.

and some

are rationalists

and behaviorists

to this day

and others

are, you know,

spiritual visionaries,

hierarchical,

shamanic types.

The main

thing

is

to reclaim

the experience

as the first

step

toward being

politically

empowered

in order

to act.

In other words,

we're in,

and I

indicated this

last night,

although more

gently,

that we're in

a state of

enforced

infantilism

about the

capacity of

our minds,

that the

culture we are

living in

is an

infantile

culture.

Now,

we look back

at the

Victorians

putting pants

on the

piano legs

and we just

shake our

heads

and say,

you know,

those poor

misguided

people.

Well,

but that's

only four

generations ago.

We have

similar

weirdness

going on

in our

own culture

but about

the mind.

I mean,

we look

askance

at the

mind

the same

way

that a

Victorian

nanny

is

uncomfortable

in the

presence

of

bare

furniture.

We

fear it.

We

don't want

to look

at it

and to

my

mind

many

most

of the

techniques

that come

out of

the

new

age

are

based

on a

guaranteed

lack

of

success.

That's

what they

offer

because the

last thing

anybody wants

is real

change

because real

change

is

uncontrolled

change.

The issue

that hovers

around the

psychedelic

experience,

it was mentioned

last night,

it's strong

in my

life.

I haven't

found any

real solution

other than

hold your

nose and

jump.

But the

issue is

surrender.

This is

something

real.

You don't

find people

going into

the ashram

in the

morning to

meditate

with their

knees

knocking

in fear

because of

how terrifying

and profound

they know

that meditation

is going

to be.

But if

they were

going in

there to

smoke

DMT,

you know,

they would

be fully

riveted on

the modalities

of what

was about

to happen.

I mean,

we can

tell shit

from Shinola.

It's just

that we

don't always

prefer Shinola.

And I'm

not like,

I don't

advocate it,

you know,

people,

like sometimes

there are people

who are

disappointed

because they

say,

well,

how often

do you

do it?

Well,

the answer

is not

very often.

I mean,

if I can

get it in

a couple

or three

times a

year,

I feel

like I'm

hitting it

pretty hard.

And the

more successful

it is,

the less

often you

have to

do it.

I mean,

I know

people who

say DMT

is their

most favorite

drug.

And when

you say,

well,

when was the

last time

you did

it?

They say,

well,

1967.

It only

lasted

four minutes.

They're still

processing it.

And they

are still

processing it.

They're not

just

whistling

Dixie.

I mean,

it is,

to my

mind,

just the

most,

well,

I mentioned

this earlier,

the question,

how do

they keep

the lid

on this

stuff?

And I

suppose here

I'm preaching

to the

converted,

because many

people last

night said

they had an

interest in

this kind

of thing,

but they

don't keep

the lid

on sexuality.

No society

has ever

had it

so under

control

that people

didn't have

sex.

I mean,

they may

have had

sex under

weird conditions

and under,

you know,

ritual strictures

and this and

that,

but we

are like

this salamander

that has

the option

of never

developing

into its

mature

form.

And to

my mind,

that's a

tragedy,

because this

is our

birthright,

and somehow

our inability

to get

a grip

on our

global

problems

has to

do with

this

immaturity

about our

mental state.

The two

I feel

very strongly

are linked

and that

of course

we can't

get

control

of the

world

because we

are children

in some

profound

way.

And we

don't like

being

culture

has

reinforced

a form

of

infantilism

and the

way I

explain it

to

myself

is

it's a

kind of

unwillingness

to go

it alone

on a

certain

level.

I don't

know how

many of

you remember

in Brave

New World

Huxley's

brilliant

dystopia

but there's

a scene

in there

where

Bernard

who is

the guy

who's

out of

it

in the

novel

because

in his

fetal

fluid

they got

an

alcohol

contaminant

and so

he's

different

from

everybody

else

in this

society

and he

occasionally

has

original

thoughts

and he

and his

assigned

girlfriend

for the

evening

or whatever

she is

are in

a helicopter

and they

sweep

out

past

the

crematoria

where they're

recollecting

elements

for

reuse

and he

suspends

the

helicopter

over

the

black

bay

and

she

immediately

becomes

very

agitated

restless

anxious

and pleads

with him

to return

to the

city

and what

it is

is it's

her

anxiety

over being

alone

in the

presence

of

nature

she

literally

can't

take it

and

I

think

there

are

a lot

of

people

in

our

society

and

each

of

us

in

our

own

way

at

different

times

who

have

within

us

this

neurotic

and

infantile

creature

that

can't

face

it

alone

and

that

this

going

it

alone

thing

is

very

important

you know

Plotinus

the great

neoplatonic

philosopher

he spoke

of the

mystical

experience

as the

flight

of the

alone

to the

alone

and

in the

psychedelic

experience

there is

this

issue

of

surrender

because

a lot

of

people

want

to

diddle

with

it

they

want

to

be

able

to

say

they

did

it

but

they

don't

ever

and

yet

the

whole

issue

with

this

stuff

is

to

let

it

lead

to

let

it

show

what

it

wants

to

show

so

somehow

individually

we

have

to

reclaim

our

experience

the

real

message

more

important

even

than

the

psychedelic

experience

the

real

message

that

I

try

to

leave

with

people

in

these

weekends

is

the

primacy

of

direct

experience

that

as

people

the

real

universe

is

you

know

within

your

reach

always

everything

not within

your reach

is basically

unconfirmed

rumor

and

we

insert

ourselves

like

ants

or

honeybees

into

monarchies

of

knowledge

so

we

say

well

what's

going

on

in

the

world

well

turn

on

CNN

you

know

and

then

somehow

we

are

ordered

then

we

say

aha

okay

it's

85 degrees

in

Baghdad

and

the

wind

is

out

of

the

northeast

at

miles

an

hour

and

we

feel

somehow

better

now

because

we're

getting

the

information

but

what

we

have

done

is

sold

out

direct

experience

and all

institutions

require

this

of us

that we

somehow

redefine

ourselves

for the

convenience

of the

institution

and this

redefinition

always

involves

a

narrowing

a

denial

so that

you know

if you want to be

in Marxist

society

if you want to

function in

Marxist

society

you have to

define yourself

as a

Marxist

human

being

well

it turns out

in a

Marxist

society

there are

no

homosexuals

because

that just

happens

in decadent

societies

so

then

you know

if you

happen to

notice

any

tendency

like this

in yourself

you have to

deny

its existence

because

this just

doesn't

happen

in a

Marxist

society

and

similarly

every

society

has

this

in our

society

if you

hear

voices

we have

mental

hospitals

for you

if you

have

vast

visions

of the

future

you know

we have

drugs

that can

help

you

and

make

this

go

away

so

we

so

then

somehow

in

modern

society

the

discovery

of

psychedelics

is

the

discovery

that

all

of

this

cultural

machinery

is

just

wizard

of

oz

stuff

you

remember

the

scene

in

the

wizard

of

oz

where

the

curtain

is

swept

back

and

they

see

the

little

guy

there

and

he

says

booming

out

over

the

loud

speaker

ignore

the

little

man

pulling

the

levers

ignore

the

little

man

pulling

you

know

whether

we

have

nine

wives

or

three

whether

we

tattoo

ourselves

blue

whether

we

eat

insects

or

not

all

of

these

things

are

just

decisions

that we

make

and then

we

congratulate

ourselves

on our

wisdom

and we

live

within

that

and we

hunt

down

and kill

all the

people

who disagree

with us

and

that's

called

having

a

culture

having

a

way

of

life

being

somebody

but

with

you know

I don't

see

history

as a

wrong

turning

I see

it

the

metaphor

that I

like

is

that

of

the

prodigal

son

that

there

was

a

reason

for

this

long

descent

into

matter

this

peregrination

it

goes

into

the

world

pool

or

ascends

the

world

tree

to

go

to the

center

of

the

axis

of

the

cosmos

to

recover

the

pearl

the

pearl

or

the

gift

or

the

lost

soul

and

then

return

with

it

and

this

is

what

history

was

I

purpose

of

recovering

something

that

was

lost

it

wasn't

lost

by

us

it

was

lost

by

the

breathing

the

deistole

of the

planet

just

climax

of

climate

moved

us

into

paradise

and

then

moved

us

out

of

paradise

I

mean

you

know

that

the

story

of

Eden

is

the

story

of

history's

first

story

of

a

whole

lot

of

tension

over

who's

going

to

take

or

not

take

a

certain

plant

which

confers

knowledge

and

Yahweh

wandering

in the

garden

says

to

himself

if

the

man

and

the

woman

eat

of

the

fruit

they

will

become

as

we

are

the

issue

was

co-equality

co-knowledge

with

the

creator

well

where

do

we

how

does

that

work

can

we

always

accept

the

subservient

infantile

position

I mean

is

knowledge

to be

dispensed

by

gods

and

if

not

gods

then

the

institutions

that

appoint

themselves

as

gods

over

us

or

is

it

actually

that

maturity

begins

with

somehow

claiming

this

birthright

and

it

is

a

no

if

a

society

can

survive

the

claiming

of

this

birthright

by

a

large

number

of

people

certainly

in

the

1960s

when

this

was

attempted

everything

everybody

got very

agitated

and then

it was

frozen

out

in

so-called

primitive

or pre-literate

societies

there is

the office

of the

shaman

and

the

shaman

is

deputized

to act

for all

of us

in the

same way

that we

have

airplane

mechanics

to fix

jet

engines

we

have

shamans

to

explore

these

hidden

and

fairly

terrifying

other

dimensions

the

people

who

self-select

themselves

into

a group

like

this

in a

society

like

that

would

be

the

candidates

for

this

kind

of

shamanic

voyaging

well

so then

what is it

finally

all

for

or

is it

for

anything

is it

just

maybe

my

problem

that I

think

it's

for

something

well

it is

and it

isn't

I mean

see

we have

real

problems

we could

perish

from this

planet

in some

kind

radioactive

petroleum

war

or

what

have

you

and

it

wouldn't

change

the

fact

that

shamanism

did

exist

that

these

dimensions

were there

and

were

explored

by

courageous

high-minded

people

for thousands

of years

but

I

think

that

the

scientific

mind

and

maybe

even

the

American

mind

can

bring

something

special

to it

that

somehow

technology

has a

role

to play

and

I

think

maybe

what

this

has

to

do

with

is

I've

talked

a bit

in the

past

a lot

in the

past

about

what I

call

visible

language

visible

language

is

something

that I

encountered

in

psychedelic

states

could

never

have

dreamed

it

up

by

myself

encountered

it

then

had

to

sort

of

reason

backward

from

it

to

what

would

it

be

good

for

well

what

is

it

what

is

visible

language

well

it's

very

simply

it's

language

which

you

look at

rather than

hear

and

don't ask

me

how

this

can

happen

it

obviously

has

something

to do

with

synesthesias

in the

brain

with

swapping

neural

processing

units

and

somehow

shunting

a stream

of data

which would

normally

be

audially

interpreted

instead

it goes

to the

visual

cortex

and

this

occurs

often

in

DMT

intoxication

and it

has a

long

and noble

history

in the

Amazon

in

ayahuasca

shamanism

ayahuasca

as you

probably

know

is a

combinatory

drug

made of

a vine

combined

with the

leaves

of another

plant

and it

makes

DMT

orally

active

normally

DMT

is destroyed

in the

gut

but

you

take

it

in

combo

with

this

other

thing

beta

carbilene

and

then

it's

active

well

in

the

Amazon

these

people

sing

what

they

call

Icaros

magical

songs

and

these

magical

songs

are

given

to

them

by

the

spirits

whatever

those

are

invisible

entities

but

the

magical

songs

are

invariably

criticized

pictorially

and

sculpturally

rather

than

musically

nobody

ever

talks

about

how

these

things

sound

people

only

talk

about

how

they

look

and

I

had

read

about

this

and

heard

about

it

and

went

down

there

and

spent

time

again

curiosity

is

the

only

method

poking

around

finally

got

somebody

who

knew

how

to

brew

this

stuff

to

make

this

happen

and

you

know

I

had

seen

it

before

on

DMT

but

on

DMT

it's

somewhat

out

of

control

it

system

though your entire syntactical engine has sprung out of your chest and is

rattling around on the floor in front of you this concludes side a well first of

all notice language ordinary language what a weird thing it is and yet we do

it with such facility we almost all of us can do it it's a very severe

impairment on your humanness if you are language deficient in any very serious

way blindness is as nothing to being seriously language deficient so forth

and so on so it's really the defining thing for us and yet you know it's it's

almost like a half miracle I mean you can study it there's no problem with

getting vast samples of tape recordings we can analyze it syntactically there

have been many theories of syntax philosophies of syntax and yet what is

it how can we make meaning with such facility when the rest of nature seems

totally unconcerned with this and what is meaning anyway why is it so important to

us we say if there is no meaning if life has no meaning it's not worth living well

how do ants and bees and and scallops stack up on that opinion do they also feel that

meaning is the quintessential aspect of reality and yet we make it we make it out

of ourselves and then we get together with somebody else and we try to make meaning

we say you know you and I could have an affair or you and I could start a business this will

have a lot of meaning for us and you know we'll make money and buy more meaning well whatever it is and

C.B. Broad wrote a book called the meaning of meaning which deals with it in about 400 pages but

whatever it is it's very important to us and it seems to have different modalities for

instance dance can have meaning painting can have meaning spoken or textual words have meaning but

because of biases in ourselves as an organism what seems to have the most meaning is what we can see

our our visual we have a tremendously rich sense of visual input well for some reason under the influence of the

psychedelic drugs and certain exercises and who knows what else it takes to shake you out of your cage but

suddenly syntactical organization which has been invisible in the background of the program of meaning

becomes visible and you actually see the engines of syntax you actually behold the machinery of meaning itself and for some reason this is very satisfying

it's like an ecstasy it's like an affirmation of some sort that is transcendental there is a recognition in it that transcends

the felt

apperception of ordinary meaning you know in other words that you're gazing somehow on the naked face of truth and beauty

well it seems to me that what all this suggests by all this I mean the human capacity for the psychedelic experience

the human facility for switching these linguistic channels from the beheld to the scene what all this must mean is

is that history is nothing more that the transition phase from felt intuition the mute intuition of the animal body to fully expressible three-dimensional meaning and that the descent into matter that technology represents is because you can't do this entirely on the match there has to be a certain augmentation of the

human organism in order to do this it may be pharmacological it may be neurological it may be

it may be nanotechnological and then some part of the other two whatever it is and we are coming up under the underbelly of meaning boring from beneath and that you know we're just about to hit the jackpot and this is what the historical process is and the proliferation of the

of meaning, boring from beneath, and that we're just about to hit the jackpot.

And this is what the historical process is, and the proliferation of media,

of the discovery of perspective 500 years ago, oil painting, airbrushing, digital sound,

all of these techniques are this summoning of the image.

So we are actually moving toward a kind of self-fulfilling process.

It's something that we're defining for ourselves as it approaches,

and it is defining itself for itself as it approaches.

You actually experience this on psychedelics sometimes.

I mean, the way it works for me on mushrooms or sometimes DMT is there is a black space,

and then I hear what I call the elf music, or the Irish band, and it's far away.

And as it comes closer, I like see light, and as it comes closer, it both gets louder and the light fills the stage of awareness,

until finally the sound is subsumed under the visual impression of the thing, and then it's all around you.

And it is, you know, this domain of self-transforming language.

I mean, I call them language elves, but what they may be is nothing more than self-reflexive, compound, complex sentences.

It's hard to tell what they are, because we're not used to having our sentences stand up and embrace us.

But nevertheless, the nature of reality is fractal, and it can't have been lost upon any of you,

that in a fractal universe, text is composed of characters.

The characters of a given alphabet, but reality is also composed of characters.

The characters like you and me, who live out some kind of plot.

Well, when you get characters into a text, in other words, characters made of characters,

then you begin to feel the textual richness and the linguistic richness that seems to be not in the forefront of reality,

but actually to lie behind it.

I mean, the final conclusion, not the final conclusion, that would be preposterous,

but the most recent conclusion that I'm coming to, looking at the psychedelic experience,

is how phenomenally text-like reality is.

I mean, it's more text-like than one should decently say.

We are much, this is much more like a work of art than anything recognizable from my physics class.

I mean, my physics class was about atoms and electrons and momentum and conservation of energy.

My literature class, on the other hand, was all about personality, motivation, history,

precursive active, anticipation of action, willful suspension of disbelief.

These are the things that I see actually going on around me.

And so it's strange as we decondition from the being sold from the top worldview of Time Magazine

and Scientific American and The Wall Street Journal.

What we discover is ourselves active as art in a work of art.

This is what the reclamation of experience seems to give back to us,

is ourselves as very complex objects.

You see, in the institutionalized world, we are defined always in ways that stress our similarity.

We hear about voters, and I'm a voter.

And we hear about women, and many of you are women.

And we hear about yuppies, and we hear about the middle class,

and we hear about those with liquidity in their portfolios.

But everything is presented as a member of a class.

We are always presented to ourselves as members of some class.

And yet we experience ourselves as unique objects.

But there is no reinforcement for that experience of uniqueness.

I mean, you have a lover, and they say, you know, I think you're wonderful and very special.

That's about all the reinforcement for your uniqueness you get.

And your mother also tells you this.

But then you take a psychedelic plant, and you discover, you know, hey, you know, I'm Christopher Columbus.

I'm Magellan.

I could be anybody.

I'm not defined in these narrow ways.

There are doorways in my reality to areas of experience as large as the area of experience that Christopher Columbus or Magellan took as their province.

But it's all this new freedom is achieved by directing attention back at the individual.

So, you know, a lot of the debate and talk that I hear is about saving and restructuring institutions and that sort of thing.

I'm not very much interested in saving and restructuring very many institutions.

I think institutions have done us about all the good we can stand at this point.

And, you know, but then they wave the black flag of anarchy in front of you and say, oh, you're just an apostle of chaos and madness.

Chaos, yes.

Madness, maybe.

But disorder, never.

You know, this surrender issue, when translated out of the realm of the individual and into the realm of the collectivity,

we all, as a society, must also surrender to what is happening to us.

Because I think history is some kind of psychedelic experience.

And it isn't...

There's nobody around who has the right plan.

So it isn't about how we need to locate the people with the right plan and then give them a lot of money and get out of their way.

It doesn't work like that.

The right plan will emerge almost simultaneously in everybody's mind at the same moment.

And in the meantime, we all are going to have this sort of half-baked plan that we can't articulate, that we can't quite bring out.

It's a quality of the time.

I'm going to talk this afternoon more about the quality of the time.

But we can't think any more clearly than we're thinking at the moment when we're thinking at our best.

Part of what history is, is a clarification of the human situation.

And I think you have to press the envelope.

You have to keep your nose against the glass, forcing the definitions into ever-new territory.

But not anxiously.

It's just, it's like a growth process.

We can't evolve any faster than our language evolves.

The language is the thing in which we're embedded.

So the use of technologies like virtual reality, or drugs like psilocybin and DMT,

or practices of various sorts, if they prove effective, to put pressure on the evolution of language.

All spiritual disciplines properly analyzed can be seen to be language courses.

You know, to get you to think a certain way, to get you to carve out of the background of undifferentiated data,

certain things which you previously couldn't see.

Auras, or acupuncture meridians, or, you know, states of disease.

I mean, it can be anything.

But the mind sensitizes itself to phenomena by following language into the forest, into the forest of the unknown.

And most people have no stomach for this kind of thing.

I prefer to stay back in the village and just kill time grinding wheat and drying meat around the fire.

But, you know, you can almost make a kind of a fractal quasi-reductionist argument and say that people are like electrons.

And you don't learn what electrons really are until you get just one of them off by itself somewhere in a magnetic field, in a vacuum.

And then you see what electrons are.

If you have millions of electrons, then you have an electrical current.

And an electrical current operates according to laws and rules and constraints completely different from an electron.

And what we have done very perversely as a society is taken the laws of large numbers,

how a million people act, how ten million people act,

and then we have applied it back to ourselves as individuals.

Said, well, why am I not happy?

You know, seventy percent of everybody does X and I don't and I'm not happy then.

You know, trying to redefine yourself as against a very large body of statistical data.

All of this is dehumanizing.

All of this is bad mental hygiene, usually quickly cleared away by psychedelics.

Because what they show you is, you know, that you are unique.

That you are unique and that the confluence of space and time that you are operating in is unique.

And that any model that is put forward is, number one, provisional.

Provisional means it can be abandoned at any moment.

And then the second and most important thing is any model you can't understand is useless.

So, you know, most of us can't understand most of the models.

I mean, who here would care to walk to the blackboard and begin to describe the first stage of quantum electrodynamics to us?

And yet we all know that our world is supposedly hung on this very well thought out theory that experts are in charge of.

But notice, no pun intended, but notice that if experts are in charge of it, you're not.

It's absolutely useless to you.

You know nothing about it.

Well, so when you start peeling away and saying, well, what do I know?

You know, it turns out it gets into thin soup rather quickly.

This is no cause for despair.

This doesn't mean you should go back to night school and study quantum physics.

That's the wrong conclusion.

It means that all of this stuff that you thought were the high walls of reality are just smoke blown by somebody else.

These constraints are not binding upon you at all.

Somebody said to me once their father had been a professional scientist and he said once,

I never would have seen it if I hadn't known it was there.

And we all are in the habit of seeing all kinds of things because we know that they're there.

And in many cases, they're not there and you just walk through and you discover all kinds of things.

I mean, I am convinced that anybody who has a major psychedelic trip, at some point in that trip,

their eye falls on things no human eye has ever seen before or ever will see again.

You know, it's that big in there.

It's not at all clear that we're mapping a generalizable reality.

It may be that it's just so huge in there that never do we pass through the same matrix twice.

Well, that means you can give up on closure.

You can give up on any theory that will ever give you very much of a more than provisional handle on what's going on.

And I think this is probably a good step to take.

To open ourselves to the freedom that lies beyond culture.

Culture is a kind of prison.

And the only way that we know to get beyond it is to dissolve its boundaries.

Now, you can do that with psychedelics and then you really explore the baseline of being.

Or you can dissolve it with travel.

But then you dissolve your own cultural programming only to discover you fitted yourself into somebody else's cultural programming.

And this, while, you know, definitely educational is like a psychedelic drug I'm not that fond of.

I do a lot of traveling.

But it's not the same thing as replacing space and time with some kind of alternative.

And that comes from, you know, doing the hard work on five grams in silent darkness.

And really what you see, I think, is the morphogenetic field, the invisible world that holds everything together, the knit of it all.

Not the knit of matter and light, but the knit of casuistry, of intentionality, of caring, of hope, of dream, of thought.

And that all is there.

But it's been hidden from us for centuries because of the exorcism of the spirit that took place in order to allow science to do business.

And that, you know, momentous and ill-considered choice then has made us the inheritors of a tradition of existential emptiness, really.

But that has impelled us to go back to the jungles and to recover this thing.

It's all of a piece, you see.

I mean, these people in the Amazon and whatnot were keeping this cultural flame burning.

But these cultures are now all dead.

They are either dead or in a state of advanced, suspended animation.

I mean, the best anyone hopes for when they go to a rainforest culture

is that it be somehow resisting the change all around it.

There's no rainforest culture that is elaborating new forms and thriving on its own terms.

So all the things that were learned, the legacy of the ancestors, is now laid basically at the feet of this high-tech electronic society.

And the question is, you know, can we dream a dream sufficiently noble that we give meaning to the sacrifices that have been made to allow the 20th century to exist?

I mean, my God, the amount of blood shed and, you know, infectious diseases spread around, metals ripped out of the earth,

mountains moved, railroads laid across continents, all of this stuff as the means to reclaiming the human birthright that science hides from us.

It's a very strange enterprise.

I mean, it's hard to put it across because the thing is, it's real, you know?

And we're in the effort or in the habit of thinking that the mind can move unobstructed from one edge of the universe to the other,

that there are no secrets, but actually there are secrets.

At least these are secrets.

And hard to tell.

I mean, I tell them, and you hear them, and we seem to have been allowed a cosmic dispensation.

But why that is, is very hard for me to understand.

I would have thought that this would have been headline news 20,000 years ago, right up until the present.

Instead, you know, it's very tentative.

Apparently, this is very threatening to us.

We are not as eager to sail over the edge collectively as we think we are.

So then it becomes the function of the shaman, the gadfly, the go-between, to carry information back and forth between these worlds.

I'm convinced that if there were no shamanic pipeline, there would be no human life as we know it on this planet.

I mean, that could be climaxed animal life.

There is no need for this higher order linguistic style of self-reflection to come into being.

It's that something is plotted.

Something is working itself out in us.

We are the cells of a much larger body, and like the cells of our own body, it's very hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern, the whole of what is happening.

And yet we can sense that there is a purpose, and there is a pattern.

Well, the way you connect the pattern with the lower level is by dissolving the boundaries of the ego and the self into this larger thing.

And then it's found to be there, reflective on many levels.

It doesn't require a mechanism.

Everything is obvious.

If things don't appear simple to us, I think it's because we haven't thought about it long enough.

Well, so that's sort of a survey of some of this stuff.

Thank you very much.

Please continue to take three.

Thank you very much.