Opening the Doors of Creativity

I am most pleased and most happy to introduce our very special guest speaker tonight, Mr. Terence McKinney.

It's a pleasure to be here. It's wonderful to see so many familiar faces and so many faces, period.

I've never been to Port Hueneme before. Probably some of you feel the same way.

But I've been doing a lot of traveling recently. I was in New York last weekend at the Open Center and in Prague two weeks before that.

So this is the end of a long season of traveling. I'm not home yet, but at least I'm in my own time zone.

I want to especially thank Andy Voth and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Oxnard for

inviting me to participate. It represents a real commitment to free speech and First Amendment

rights, I think, for an art museum. Art museums have been taking some knocks recently, and so I

think they doubly should be commended for their courage. And I want to explain, as Andy mentioned,

this is a benefit for botanical dimensions, which explains the

difference between the two. And I want to explain, as Andy mentioned, this is a benefit for botanical dimensions,

which explains the difference between the two. And I want to explain, as Andy mentioned,

this is a benefit for botanical dimensions, which explains the difference between the two.

That's a double price over the ticket. All of this money will go to the preservation of medicinal plants

with a history of shamanic usage. That is the special focus

of our botanical garden in Hawaii. And before I start the formal lecture, I'd like

to just say a little bit about that. As you know, the rain forest of the world are being cleared out of

very frightening rate. And perhaps voices are beginning to be heard to halt this destruction

of the natural environment. But whether it's halted or not, the destruction of the knowledge

of native peoples concerning the uses of the plants in the rainforest, this is disappearing

without doubt in the next 30 years, because these people are moving into cities, taking jobs in the

ordinary market economy, and thousands of years of accumulated folk medical knowledge is being lost.

So the real world political work that Kat and I do is associated with botanical dimensions.

We conceived it together many, many years ago. And then about six years ago, Kat took it over, put it on its

official feet, made it a non-profit foundation, and has run it day to day since then with tremendous energy

and efficiency. So I'd like to acknowledge Kat McKenna here, my better half. In fact, my only good half.

And then I wanted to underscore what Andy said, a very special event two weeks from now at the Carnegie Museum.

Roy Tuckman, Roy of Hollywood, bon vivant, counter-cultural figure, informational ferret of our time,

will be recast as an experimental composer of great energy and imagination.

Thank you.

And I hope you'll all turn out for Roy. He's been a wonderful force in my life, and I think in the cultural life of Southern California.

Both Roy and Diane have done a wonderful job in raising the quality of public dialogue in Southern California,

which I think is a precondition for any kind of clear thinking about our future or our political situation.

So, here's to Roy and Diane.

Okay. Well, the theme that unites these lectures is creativity and the techniques by which the artist can refine his or her vision,

expand the vision, communicate the vision.

And...

Before I get into that issue, I thought I would talk just a little bit about my notion of creativity per se.

What is it in and of itself?

And when I think like that, of course, I cast my mind back to nature.

Nature is the great visible engine of creativity.

Against which all other creative efforts are measured.

And creativity in nature has a curious distribution.

It's something which accumulates through time.

If we stand back and look at the universe, we see that at its earliest moments, it was very simple.

It was a plenum.

It was without characters or characteristics.

It was what in Hindu mythology is called the turaya, which is described as attributeless.

And naturally, if something is without attribution, you can't say much about it.

It takes a while for it to undergo a declension into more creative realms.

And these creative realms are distinguished as domains of difference.

The precondition for creativity is, I think, disequilibrium.

What mathematicians now call chaos.

And through the life of the universe, as temperatures have fallen,

more and more complex compound structures have arisen.

And though there's been many a slipping back in this process,

over very large spans of time, we can say that creativity is conserved.

That the universe becomes more creative.

And out of that state of creative fecundity, more creativity is manifest.

So that from that point of view, the universe is almost what we would have to call an art-making machine.

An engine for the production of ever more novel forms of connectedness.

Ever more exotic juxtapositions of disparate elements.

And out of this, I believe, arises implicitly,

a set of principles that we can then apply to the human artist in the human world.

Nature's creativity is obviously the wellspring of human creativity.

We emerge out of nature.

Almost, and this idea, I think, was fairly present close to the surface of the medieval mind.

We emerge out of nature.

Almost as its finest work of art.

The medieval mind spoke of the productions of nature.

This is a phrase you hear as late as the 18th century.

The productions of nature.

And human creativity emerges out of that.

Whether you have a model of the Aristotelian great ladder of being,

or a more modern evolution.

Or an evolutionary view where we actually consolidate emergent properties

and somehow bring them to a focus of self-reflection.

Now, I'm sure that we couldn't carry out a discussion of this sort

without observing that the prototypic figure for the artist,

as well as for the scientist,

is the shaman.

The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history

that unites the doctor, the scientist, and the artist

into a single notion of caregiving and creativity.

And I think that, you know, to whatever degree art,

over the past several centuries, has wandered in the desert,

it is because this shamanic function has been either suppressed or forgotten.

And different images of the artist have been held up at different times.

The artist as artisan,

the artist as handmaiden of a room,

the handmaiden of a ruling class or family,

the artist as designer for the production of integrated objects into a civilization.

This notion of the artist as mystical journeyer,

as one who goes into a world unseen by others,

and then returns to tell them of it,

was pretty much lost in the post-medieval and renaissance conception of art

up until the late 19th century or early 20th century,

where, beginning with the Romantics,

there is a new permission to explore the irrational.

This really is the bridge,

the bridge back to the archaic shamanic function of the artist.

Permission to explore the irrational.

The Romantics did it with their elevation of titanic emotion.

Romantic love, specifically.

The Symbolists, in the mid-19th century,

did it by a re-emphasis

on the emotional content of the image

and a rejection of the previous rationalism.

And that emphasis on the image and on the emotions

set the stage then for what I take to be

the truly shamanic movements in art,

which begin really with Alfred Jarry

in the late 1880s and early 1890s.

Jarry, you may remember,

was the founder of something called

the Ecole du Pathophysique,

the pathophysical college.

Jarry announced pathophysics is the science.

The problem was nobody could understand

what it meant or what it stood for,

including Jarry.

Jarry was tight with L'Entremont,

who, you may recall, said,

I am fascinated with that kind of beauty

that arises when a sewing machine

meets a bicycle on an operating table.

See, this was a true effort

to bend the boundaries of art,

to create new permission,

permission really for the unthinkable.

And this, again,

reinforces the shamanic function.

What do we mean when we say the unthinkable?

We mean the envelope of that

which can be conceived.

And for at least 200 years,

the ostensible mission of the artist

has been to test the conceptual

and imagistic envelope

of what the society is willing to tolerate.

And this has taken many forms.

The deconstruction of imagery

that we get with abstract expressionism,

going back into impressionism

and the pointillists,

or the permission for the irrational imagery

of the unconscious.

Surrealism and German Expressionism

make use of this permission.

Always the idea being

to somehow destroy the idols of the tribe,

dissolve the conceptual boundary

of ordinary expectation.

Well, in order to do this,

it seems to me,

there is a precondition

for the creation of art,

which I call understanding.

And I don't mean this

in an intellectual sense.

I mean it in the sense

that Alfred North Whitehead

intended when he defined understanding

as the apperception of pattern as such.

As such.

There's nothing more to it than that.

You see, if we were to look at this room

and we were to squint our eyes,

and I'm doing this right now

and I see that the room divides itself

into people dressed in red

and people dressed in blue,

this is a pattern.

And it tells me something

about what I'm looking at.

Now I shift my depth of field.

Now I'm looking at where men are sitting

and where women are sitting.

This is a different pattern

and it tells me more

about what I am looking at.

The number of these patterns,

theoretically present

in any construction,

is infinite.

That says to me then

that the depth of understanding

cannot be known.

It cannot be known.

Everything is imminent.

William Blake makes this point, you know,

that you can see infinity

in a grain of sand.

So understanding then

is the precondition

for creativity.

And this understanding

is not so much intellectual

as it is visual.

Visual.

And in thinking about this,

I realized

what an influence upon my own ideas

in this area

Aldous Huxley was.

Not the Huxley that we might

ordinarily associate

with my concerns,

the Huxley of the doors of perception

and heaven and hell,

but the Huxley of a very modest book

that he wrote in the early 50s

called The Art of Seeing.

The Art of Seeing.

And in that book,

he makes the point

that a good art education

begins with a good drawing hand.

That to be able to coordinate

the hand and eye

and to see into nature,

to see into the patterns present as such

is the precondition

for a kind of approach

to the absolute.

Now out of this process

of seeing,

which I'm calling understanding,

the creative process

ushers in novelty.

And many of you have heard me speak of novelty

in another context.

In the context of nature

as a novelty producing engine

of some sort.

And ourselves almost as

the handiwork of nature.

But this same handiwork of nature

which we represent,

we also internalize

and re-express

through the novelty

of the human world.

Well now,

if we take seriously

the shamanic model

as a basis for authentic art,

then certainly

in the modern context,

what we see missing

from the repertoire

of the artist

are shamanic techniques.

And it's for the discussion

of these shamanic techniques

I believe

that I was brought here

this evening.

So I want you to cast your mind back

to a great seminal moment,

germinal moment

in the history of human thought

which was about 25,000 years ago

when the great glaciers

that had covered most

of the Eurasian land mass

began to melt.

And human populations

that had been islanded

from each other

for about 15 millennia

began to re-contact each other

and reconnect.

And out of this comes

what is called

the Magdalenian Revolution

from 18,000 to 22,000 years ago.

And what it is,

is nothing less than

a tremendous explosion

of creativity

and aesthetic self-expression

on the part of the human species.

We find

for the first time

bone and antler technology

takes its place

along with stone technology.

Musical instruments appear

over a wide area.

And cave paintings,

some paintings in areas and recesses

so remote from the surface of the ground

that it takes several hours

to reach them,

are painted and set up

in dramatic tableaus

specifically designed

to bring together

sound, light, and dance

in hierophanies,

extravaganzas of aesthetic output

that invoke

a kind of transcendent other

that human beings

for the first time

are trying to come to grips with

and make some kind

of cultural statement about.

And this pulling into matter,

of the ideas

of human beings,

first, you know,

in the forms of

beadwork

and chipped stone

and carved bone,

within 20,000 years,

ushers into the kinds of

high civilizations

that we see around us

and points us toward

the kind of extraplanetary

mega civilization

that we can feel

operating on our own present

like a kind of great attractor.

Now, this whole

intellectual adventure

in exteriorization

of ideas

is entirely

an aesthetic adventure

until very recently

utility is only

a secondary consideration.

The real notion

is a kind of

seizure

by the tremendum,

by the other,

which then forces us

to take up matter,

clay, bone, flint,

and put it through

a mental process

where we then excrete it

as objects that have

lodged within them ideas.

This seems to be

the special, unique,

transcendental function

of the human animal,

is the production

and condensation

of ideas.

And what made it possible

for the human animal

is language.

If you're seeking

the thumbprint

of the transcendental

on the myriad phenomena

that compose life

on this planet,

to my mind,

the place to look

is human language.

Human language represents

an ontological break

of major magnitude

with anything else going on

on this planet.

I mean, yes,

bees dance

and dolphins squeak

and chimpanzees

do what they do,

but it's a hell of a step

from there to

Wallace Stevens,

let alone William Shakespeare.

Language,

is the unique province

of human beings.

And language

is the unique tool

of the artist.

The artist is

the person

of language.

And I've,

you know,

given a lot of thought

to this because

the work that I've done

with psilocybin mushrooms

and the observations

of psychedelic plant use

in the Amazon

centered around ayahuasca,

lead me to the conclusion

that it is the synergy

and catalysis

of language

that lies behind

not only the emergence

of human consciousness

out of animal organization,

but then its ability

to set a course

for a transcendental dimension

and pursue that course

against all the vicissitudes

of biology and history

over 10 or 15,000 years.

Language has made us

more than a group

of pack hunting monkeys.

It's made us a group

of pack hunting monkeys

with a dream.

Out from that dream

has given us

our glory and our shame,

our weaponry,

our technology,

our art,

our hopes,

our fears.

All of this arises

out of our own ability

to articulate

and to communicate

with each other.

And I use this

in the broadest sense.

I mean, for me,

the glory of the human animal

is cognitive activity,

song, dance, sculpture,

poetry,

all of these cognitive activities.

When we participate in them,

we cross out of the domain

of animal organization

and into the domain

of a genuine relationship

to the transcendent.

As you know, shamans,

in all times and places,

gain their power

through relationships

with helping spirits,

which they sometimes call ancestors,

sometimes call nature spirits.

But somehow,

the acquisition

of a relationship

to a disincarnate intelligence

is the precondition

for authentic shamanism.

Now, nowhere in our world

do we have an institution like that

that we do not consider

pathological,

except in the now

very thinly spread tradition

of the muse

that artists,

alone among human beings,

are given permission

to talk in terms of

my inspiration

or a voice which told me to do this

or a vision

that must be realized

or realized.

The thin line,

the thin thread

of shamanic descent

into our profane world

leads through

the office of the artist.

And so,

if society

is to somehow

take hold of itself

at this penultimate moment,

as we literally waver

on the brink of planetary extinction,

then the artist,

like Ariadne,

following her thread

out of the labyrinth,

is going to have to follow

this shamanic thread

back through time.

And you know,

one of the most disempowering things

that has been done to us

by the male dominant culture

is to brush out

our footprints

into the past.

We don't have a clue

as to how we got here.

Most people can't think further back

than the first Nixon administration,

let alone,

you know,

the arrival of the Vikings,

the fall of Catalhoyuk,

the melting of the glaciers,

so forth and so on.

We have been disempowered

by

a rational tendency

to deny

our irrational roots,

which are a kind of embarrassment

to science,

because science is

the special province

of the ego,

and magic and art

are the special province

of something else.

I could name it, but I won't.

It prefers to be

unnamed, I think.

So,

how seriously then

are we to take

this,

I'll call it an obligation,

to follow the shamanic thread

back into time?

Well,

I think that it is

a matter of saving our own souls,

that this is the real challenge.

You know,

I love to dig at the yogans

by saying nobody ever went into an ashram

with their knees knocking in fear

over the tremendous dimension

they know they were about to enter

through meditation.

Still truer

and more sad,

still more true

and more sad

is the notion that very few of us

pick up our sculpting tools

or our airbrush

with our knees knocking with fear

because we know we are

invoking

and acting with the muse

at our elbow.

And somehow I think the artists

need to recover

this sense of mystery.

One of the most depressing things to me

about the art scene,

and I had a chance to reconnect with this

because I was just in New York,

is

it now has a kind of directionless quality.

You can go into a gallery

and you cannot tell whether it is 1990,

1980, 1970, or 1960

because a kind of eschatological malaise

has settled over art.

All notion

of any forward movement

toward a transcendental ideal

has been put aside

for the exploration

of idiosyncratic vision.

And I grant you

this is a tension

and perhaps in the question period

we can talk about this.

There is a tension

between the individual vision

and the notion of an attractor

or a collective vision.

Which wants to be expressed.

But to my mind

this is the same dichotomous tension

that haunts the individual

in his or her relationship to Tao.

You know we don't want to be lost in ego

but on the other hand

if we completely express the Tao

we have no sense of self.

The ideal seems to be

a kind of coincidencia appositorum.

A kind of literalizing

of a paradox

where what we have

is Tao

but we perceive it as ego.

And in the application of this notion

to the art problem

I would say

what we need is a situation

where schooling

if you want to put it that way

or a tendency toward a coherent vision

expressed by many artists

is spontaneous.

Each artist imagines

that they are pursuing their own vision.

Yet obviously

they are in the grip of an archetype

which is rising through the medium

of the unconscious.

Now the last time we saw this in American art

was in abstract expressionism.

Which was probably in terms of the values

in terms of tension

and the amount of emotional gain

between one artistic moment and another.

The break between abstract expressionism

and what preceded it

was the most radical break in American art

in this century.

Abstract expressionism

actually carried us in

to a confrontation with what

the quantum physicists were telling us.

That the universe is

field upon field

of integrated vibration.

That there is no top level.

There is no bottom level.

That the ordinary structures

of provisional space-time

are simply that.

That if we can rise out

of the human dimension

then we discover these larger

more integrated dimensions

where mind and nature

somehow interpenetrate each other.

A vision like that

a coherent vision

has yet to announce itself

here in the post-history

pre-apocalypse phase of things.

Well, I guess I have a kind of

reactionary side

when I think about the creative endeavor.

I believe that

the psychedelic experience

as encountered by each of you

in the privacy of your own mind

or as encountered by a pre-literate society

somewhere in the world

that that psychedelic experience

is in a way

the Rosetta Stone

not only for

understanding the

encryption

that our own lives represent

each to ourselves

but it's also

a Rosetta Stone

for encoding

the historical experience.

Art is

this endeavor

to leave

the animal domain

behind

to create

another dimension

orthogonal

to the concerns

of ordinary history.

And this orthogonal domain

to my mind

is

glimpsed

most clearly

in the psychedelic experience.

The psychedelic experience

shows you

more art

in an hour and a half

than the human species

has produced

in fifteen or twenty thousand years.

Now,

this is an incredible claim.

This is why I make it.

The energy barrier

which separates us

from this tremendous repository

of transcendental imagery

is very low.

You know,

it's a matter of a little personal commitment

and

the substances

which make the transition possible.

The perturbation

of brain chemistry

is easily done.

What is not so easily done

is the assimilation

of the consequences

of this act.

Ordinarily,

we assume

that consciousness

is channeled

between

tremendously deep walls

that there is no way

to force

a confrontation

with the other

or the transcendent

or the unconscious.

We tend to assume that,

you know,

we're going to have to do

double duty

at the ashram

for three decades

before you're

vouchsafed

even a glimpse

into these places.

This is not true.

Culture,

and this is my message

to artists

and to anybody else

who cares to notice,

culture

is a plot

against

the expansion

of consciousness.

And this plot

prosecutes its

goals

through

a limiting

of language.

Language

is the battleground

over which

the fight

will take place

because

what we cannot

what we cannot say

we cannot communicate

and by say

I mean

dance,

paint,

sing,

meme.

What we cannot say

we cannot communicate.

We can conceive

of things

that we cannot communicate.

But,

and I think

every one of us here

has done that

and that's a thrilling thing.

That is

the deep homework

that the psychedelic

inner astronaut

sees things

which no human being

has ever seen before

and no human being

will ever see

again.

But in fact

this has no meaning

unless

it is possible

to carry it back

into the collectivity.

And

what motivates me

to talk

to groups like this

is the belief

that we do not have

centuries

of gently

unfolding

time

ahead of us

in which to

you know

gently tease apart

the threads

of the human endeavor

and create

a bright new world.

That's not our circumstance.

This is

a fire

in a madhouse.

And

to get a hold

on the situation

I think

we are going

to have

to force

the issue.

Well,

one way

of forcing

the issue

or

a chemical

definition

of forcing

the issue

when you're

talking about

a chemical reaction

is catalysis.

We want

to catalyze

consciousness.

We want

to move

it forward

in order

to make

it faster

toward its goals

whatever those goals

are.

Well,

I believe

that to the present

moment

language

again in the broadest

sense

speech

dance

musical composition

language

has just been allowed

to grow

like topsy.

It's

been a kind

of

every man

for himself

situation.

Now

what we really need

as we

see ourselves

moving

from one

species

among

tens of

thousands

of species

on this planet

over the past

10,000 years

we have

redefined

ourselves

and now

like it or not

we are

the custodians

of the

destiny

of this

planet.

Our decisions

affect

every life

form

on the planet

and yet

we are still

communicating

with each

other

with the

extremely

precise

medium

of small

mouth noises

mediated

by ignorance

and hate.

This

doesn't

seem

like the way

to do

business

as we

approach

the third

millennium.

So

what

I

what

I'm

hopeful

about

is that

we

will

have

a

new

kind

of

humanity

that

will

take

place

but

there

are

still

a lot

of

decisions

to be

made.

How

violent

shall

this

birth

be?

Most

people

are

afraid

of the

unconscious.

This is

why

you know

you can

have a

psychedelic

compound

like DMT

which is

very much

like ordinary

brain chemistry

appears

completely

physiologically

harmless

only

lasts

10 minutes

extremely

powerful

and generally

in this

society you have no

chance of

dying.

This is

because there

has been

a failure

of moral

courage

and the

failure

of moral

courage

is

perhaps

most

evident

in our

own

community

the

community

of

the

artists.

In a

way

it's

the poets

that

have

not

articulated

an

a

a a

a moral

vision.

The moral

vision

must

come

from the

unconscious.

It doesn't

have to

do I

believe

with

you know

these

post

meaning

movements

in art

deconstruction

ism

and this

sort of

thing.

I mean

I'm

basically

putting

it

in

a

게

a

catalogue

of

Sarpe

and

al

find the way then the way cannot be found ideology is extremely alien to art

political ideology i mean and if you will but notice it is political ideology that has been

calling the shots for the last seven or eight hundred years we can transcend politics if we

can put some other program in place you cannot transcend politics into a void and i believe that

a world without ideology could be created if what were put in place of ideology were the notion of

the realization of the good the true and the beautiful you know the three-tiered canon of

the platonic

aesthetic the reconnect the notion of the good the true and the beautiful then use psychedelics

to empower the artists to go into this vast dimension that surrounds human history

on all sides to an infinite depth and return from that world

with

a transcendental images that can lift us to a new cultural level the muse is there the dull maps

that rationalism has given us are nothing more than whistling past the graveyard by the bad

little boys of science you only have to avail yourselves of these shamanic tools to rediscover

a nature

which is not mute, as Sartre said in a kind of culmination of the modern viewpoint.

Nature is not mute.

It is man who is deaf, and the way to open our ears, open our eyes,

and reconnect with the intent of a living world is through the psychedelics.

Now, as you know, biology runs on genes, and genes are the units of meaning of heredity.

But we could make a model of the informational environment that is represented by culture,

and in fact this is done.

A word has been invented, meme, M-E-M-E, meme.

A meme is not the smallest unit.

A meme is not the smallest unit of heredity.

A meme is the smallest unit of meaning of an idea.

Ideas are made of memes.

And I think the art community might function with more efficiency

in the production of visionary aesthetic breakthroughs

if we would think of ourselves as an environment modeled after,

the natural environment, where we as artists are attempting to create memes

which enter an environment of other memes,

that are in competition with each other,

and out of this competition of memes,

ever more appropriate, adapted, and suitable ideas can gather.

Link themselves together into higher and higher organisms now in order for this to happen

There is an obligation upon each one of us to carry our ideas

clearly because in the same way that a gene must be copied correctly to be replicated or it will cause some

pathological mutation a meme must be correctly replicated or it will cause a

Pathological mutation for instance. I would say what the Nazis did to Frederick Nietzsche's

Philosophy was a bad cop a miscopied meme

became a toxic

mutation inside a culture so I

Would suggest to the people in this room tonight that you take a good look around at who's here

artistic people

Psychedelic people look pretty much like everybody else out in

Society, but we have come here tonight

Self-selected for our interest in the empowering

capacity of

Psychedelic plants and the empowering capacity of art

so we represent an affinity group a

population with a potential for

a

mutagenic impact on the ideological structures of the rest of society

So look around

Someone here has what you need and if you can only figure out who it is

You can make a novel connection

To move them into a new level of creativity

well, what is this new level of

creativity

Some of you may be familiar with a theme that was very big in medieval religious art, which was

the apocalypse

of Saint John or of somebody there are a number of these

apocalypses and I think that

many of us may come out of a kind of secular background or have not given this kind of a

a religious idea too much consideration

but my

idiosyncratic conclusion

based simply on trying to be honest about the content of the psychedelic

experience

is that human history

really is on a collision course

with a transcendental

object of some sort

it is not going to be business as usual

into the endless unfolding confines

of the future the very fact

that human history is occurring

on this planet the very fact that a primate

has left the ordinary pattern of primate activity

and gone into the business of running

stock markets and uh... molecular biology labs and art museums

indicates to me

the nearby presence

in another dimension

of a kind of

hyper organizing

or what i call

the transcendental object

and i believe that this transcendental object

is casting an enormous shadow

over the human

historical landscape

so that if you're back

in uh... ancient judea

you have an anticipation

of the messiah

if you are at illusus at the height of the practice of the illusinian mysteries

you have

an anticipation

the dark god

these

anticipations

of an unspeakable

transcendent reality

that are always clothed

in the uh...

in the assumptions of the individual artist in the society in which he or she is working

are in fact

genuine

and that you don't have to give your own yourself over

to fundamentalist

religion

to connect

with the fact

that human history is

an adventure

and this adventure

has a number of startling reverses and sudden plot shifts that are very difficult to anticipate

and that we are coming up

on one of those

the civilization that was created

out of the collapse of the medieval world

has now

shown

its contradictions to be

unbearable

and though no one of us

knows what the shape of the

new civilization will be

somehow

in the singing of the ayahuasca songs in the rainforest

in the

tremendous

hypermetallic transcendental off planetary flash of psilocybin

in the

teaching of the self transforming machine elves that seem to dwell in the DMT

dimension

we see

that the ordinary linear system

linear expectations of history are breaking down and that the truth of the

eminence of the mystery is breaking through all the structures of denial of

the male dominator paradigm that has been in place so long. The way to make

this birth process smooth, the way to bring it to a conclusion that will not

betray the thousands and thousands of generations of people who who suffered

birth and disease and migration and starvation and lonely death so that we

could sit here this evening, the redeeming of the human enterprise all

lies then in denial.

In helping this thing come to birth and each artist is an antenna to the

transcendental other and as we go with our own history into that thing and then

create a unique confluence of our uniqueness and its uniqueness we

collectively create an arrow, an arrow out of history

out of time perhaps even out of matter that will redeem then the idea that man

is good, redeem the idea that man is good. This is the promise of art and its

fulfillment is never more near than the present moment. Thank you very much.

I think we'll take a ten or fifteen minute break and then we'll come

back and you can ask questions and we'll do that for a little while.

Thank you very very much

so now I'm happy to take questions. Here.

cereal

delilty

b

realm, but I never felt not enough sense of personal power to be that antenna that you're saying that ours can be for bringing that to the other, until I became convinced of the existence not only of me within that other realm, but that other realm within me, and perhaps the psychedelic experience prepared me for that second awareness, but perhaps you could comment on how, if possible,

if possible, that second awareness could be more easily accessible in the psychedelic experience.

What do you mean by the second awareness? Say a little more about it.

Of being aware that other realm is something that's also very personal and...

Well, yes, I mean, it seems it's a landscape that begins within the self and seems to extend into the world.

I mean,

we...

I mean,

one of the very puzzling things about the psychedelic experience is that it argues that we are not

atomic individuals running around in some kind of society, but that if you actually drain the

psychic water away, you'll discover that we're all connected at the roots, that it isn't a journey to another world,

it's a journey inward to a world that is already present and there.

The astonishing thing is how alienated we are from our own interior, from the interior world, to the point where we can hardly recognize it.

I mean, the...

I've talked a lot about the alien nature of the psychedelic experience and how it seems

to be mappable over something as radical as the UFO experience.

This is because we truly do not know who we are.

The past 10,000 years have been so disempowering to us.

We are really like the children of a dysfunctional relationship.

We don't...

We don't know where we have come from.

It's very hard for us to emotionally connect with the consequences of what we're doing.

I mean, that really horrifies me that this is a society that loots the future.

I mean, the symbol of that is devouring of children.

We literally, for our own comfort in the present moment, are making it very difficult for future generation,

to contemplate having anything approaching the level of resource availability that we have.

And this kind of situation could not be tolerated if we had not gone through a tremendous series

of traumatic, emotionally disemboweling experiences. You know, the Native Americans

have a litmus test for all activity. Does it serve the children? And so much of what we do

is so anti-future that it's almost as though the fundamentalist position exists to permit

the destruction of the environment. I mean, this was perfectly encapsulated by this clown James

Watt, who was secretary...

...of the Interior and said, we don't need to expand the national parks because Jesus is coming.

I mean, this is a mentality so against the grain of the obvious that it has to be looked upon

as pathological. Another question here in the corner.

Hello, Karen.

How are you?

I've known you for a long time, but you've never met me. I'm one of Roy's night people.

And...

I guess, I don't know, I guess I got to preface this remark in saying that I got about a $50,000

education and three degrees, college degrees, in psychology, but I've never learned anything

like I've learned from listening to Roy's show.

In pursuing those degrees, I decided to learn a little bit about it hands-on, so I went

to work in a middle institution. So it's my misfortune, actually, to be earning my survival

at this time by working in that capacity. I would like to see psychology take a different direction,

and I know that what you're talking about provides a focus and a direction for psychology

to take, which I think would really get close to, I mean, I totally agree with Freud and

Jung, discovering the psychon just about 100 years ago, but they discovered it at night

in Santa Fe. How do we get closer to this in this kind of society? That's the first

part of this question. And the second part of this question, I'm a little bit nervous

speaking in front of all these people, but...

The second part of this question has to do with a study that you spoke of in 72, where

with single-dose administration of LSD alcoholics, we're achieving a 72% success rate, and I

would like to speak a little bit on the pro-psych and anti-psych.

Yes, well, thank you for giving me the opportunity to make the point, because in the present

atmosphere...

Yes.

...of hysteria and misinformation, this is too easily run over. It is important to make

the distinction that what has happened really is that the well of language on this issue

of consciousness alteration, the well of language has been poisoned, where you cannot make any

sense if you use the words that have...

Okay.

...been granted us to use. I mean, let's take the word drug. You know, we have a drug war,

but as I drove into town, I noticed a drug store.

So it's...elt's that we, you know, with that...with that compressed vocabulary, you can't make any

sense at all of what's going on. So I think what we have to do is make an operational

argument about drugs.

drugs and say you know what is it that society finds offensive about drug abuse and then what

does that have to do with psychedelics well my own analysis of this is that what is uh offensive

about drug abuse is a unconscious repetitious and demonstrably destructive pattern of behavior

and whenever you see someone behaving that way everyone feels repulsed and brought down

and in fact severe drug addictions are like this but as a matter of record

this is what psychedelics make absolutely impossible number one the notion of unexamined

behavior how can you have unexamined behavior if you take psychedelics it holds you up into a blast

furnace of self-reflection uh it is certainly it does not promote repetitious drug use i mean uh i

i consider myself a great fan

of psilocybin and if i can screw my courage to the sticking point a couple of times a year i'm doing

all right i i know someone who says dmt is their favorite uh substance and when i asked them when

was the last time you did it they said 1968 and it lasted three minutes this is not a pattern of

drug abuse you see

so um it's a matter of educating the public and i this is probably a good place for me to get a

pitch in i i wrote a book on contract for bantam and hopefully it'll be out next fall and i'm

hoping i want to call it and i'm hoping they'll go along with me why eve was right plants drugs

and history

because

right there in the beginning of the western story in genesis what you get is it's the story of

history's first drug bust it's the story of a woman who follows her own mind and makes a decision

about consciousness alteration and then uh it works i mean she says and and they were naked

and she perceived them as naked in other words she got true information about the situation

but you have yawa there mumbling to himself as he wanders around the garden in an old bathrobe and

he's saying uh if they eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge

they will not be able to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge

will become as we are that was always the issue you see it wasn't a health issue

it wasn't an abuse issue it's about who finds out what's really going on and who doesn't

and this book i wrote for bantam makes very clear that the culture the style of a culture

is almost always and invariably a style of seeing the world through a certain set of drugs

is almost always and invariably a style of seeing the world through a certain set of drugs or a drug for example

uh you know here we're in the middle of a drug uh abuse problem but uh caffeine

has been entirely institutionalized since the industrial revolution it's the only drug that

has been honored in every labor contract that is signed anywhere you have the coffee break

the coffee break is

the workers uh guarantees the workers right to stimulate themselves

and in fact ultimately obligates the workers to stimulate themselves because

the machines and the tasks that they have been given totally reinforce the need for coffee

and the typing pool couldn't exist without coffee similarly alcohol alcohol is tremendous

and in fact ultimately obligates the workers to stimulate themselves because

the machines and the tasks that they have been given totally reinforce the need for information

so while we're all in this world where we're all about alcohol

issues are themselves forms and people are all about violence and social depends suddenly i felt that that was so interviewing 얘기 because

Because, first of all, people didn't bathe enough to make it an appetizing thing to contemplate

unless you were pretty lit.

And terrible, terrible distortions of Western politics and religiosity have taken place

because of drugs.

For example, and this is, to me, one of the most shocking examples imaginable, slavery

died with the fall of the Roman Empire.

Rome had a system of labor called the Latifundia, which was essentially a slave work crew.

And that institution died with the fall of Rome.

During the medieval period, if you were into slavery,

it meant that you were going to die.

It meant that you were going to die.

It meant you had one slave, and this slave was extremely well looked after and cared for

because they were a symbol of munificent opulence on your part

that you could afford such a luxury.

It was like having a Maserati to have a slave.

Well, then, around 1400, before the discovery of America, in the eastern area,

in the northern Atlantic islands of Madera, they began experimenting with the growing

of cane sugar.

And it was fine, except that the sugar has to be boiled at 130 degrees, and no one would

work around that.

They discovered that they had to chain people to the cooking apparatus for the extraction

of sugar.

And they began bringing Africans to do this.

And they not only reinvented slavery for the deliberate production of sugar, which

was utterly unnecessary to the diet of Europe.

I mean, there hadn't been a ton of sugar imported into Europe in the previous thousand

years.

And suddenly, they felt this tremendous need for sugar, and they reinstitutionalized slavery

with the added insult that for the first time...

A particular race was singled out as being somehow made for slavery.

And this is the beginning of black xenophobia on the part of Europeans, the association

with the sugar trade.

By 1800, every pound of sugar being imported into England was being produced by sugar.

And this was the beginning of the black xenophobia on the part of Europeans. The association with the sugar trade. By 1800, every pound of sugar being imported into England was being produced by sugar.

And this was the beginning of the black xenophobia on the part of Europeans, the association with the sugar trade.

This was the beginning of the black xenophobia on the part of Europeans, the association with the sugar trade.

And slavery was going at a rate that had not been seen since the Rome of Caligula.

All in the name of commerce, all in the name of having this essentially trivial kick

from sugar.

So it's really important to educate ourselves as to what constitutes a drug and how drugs

are legislated against and...

suppressed or promoted and advertised entirely according to whether they fit into the agenda

of the reigning model of culture, whatever that may be. Yeah, here. Yes.

Who are the shamans that you would share with us as a model?

Of our times, you mean?

Well, times that we associate with, we're familiar with.

Oh, good.

So within the 20th century, the great art, the great shamanic artists.

Well, you know, it's just an opportunity to list a bunch of prejudices, obviously.

Certainly, the Grateful Dead seem to me to be, you know, nobody's done it longer, better

than they have.

And rock and roll, generally, is an extremely powerful form of shamanic performance.

When I look over the 20th century, James Joyce, for what he did for language, the permission

he gave to make language a living object, Jackson Pollock is a great personal hero of mine.

Here was a boy from Cody, Wyoming, who managed to cut his way to the heart of the New York

art world.

To my mind, he was the abstract expressionist par excellence, and the high waters of American

art have never reached higher than that.

Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, maybe these aren't the answers you expected because these

are such masterpieces.

Yeah.

Such movers of masses of people.

Art doesn't have to operate on that huge scale.

I mean, art can be extremely intimate.

But shamanic art, art that moves us to a sense of the transcendental, there's been

too little of that in this century.

No.

Not since the Surrealists has there been a movement with the stated goal of carrying

people into an unimaginable world.

And I have a lot of respect for the Surrealists, especially Max Ernst.

I think Ernst's career was broad and deep over a long period of time.

The art that excites me now is the art of the moving image.

I'm a little impatient with gallery art because so much of it has become the handmaiden to

the interior decorating business.

And that was never the intent.

The moving image, to my mind, is the connecting theme in the 20th century between art and

dream and psychedelics.

So film...

Yeah.

...is the extremely powerful art form that emerges into its own in the 20th century.

And film seems to me an anticipation of what is possible with psychedelics.

I have great hope now for art produced by the interaction of human beings and computers.

And crude as it is and controversial as it is...

I think virtual reality will eventually have a contribution to make.

But it's long in the future.

The technologists have to perfect the medium, and then the artists have to work with it.

My own favorite artists, which I don't offer as fulfilling that shamanic intent, but they're

simply my favorites, are Vladimir Nabokov.

Yeah.

As a novelist.

This is flawless stuff, emotionally, intellectually complete, and hilariously funny.

William Gibson's accomplishment in creating cyberpunk and envisioning a future so real

that you can taste, this is a tremendous accomplishment.

But I feel about art...

The way I feel about art...

The way I feel about rock and roll, and the way I think most psychedelic people must feel,

which is it's such pale stuff compared to what's out there.

I feel like we are...

If we could open the sluice gates to the dimensions that we explore psychedelically, we would

just be inundated by art.

And as it is, we receive it in thimblefuls.

How can we open ourselves up to this?

Because I really believe that the art unites us, it dissolves the boundaries between us,

it empowers us, it makes us a collectivity.

You notice that the great overweening control structures, the government, for example, never

communicates to us with images that are aesthetically pleasing.

It always communicates with images that convey obligation, which is a downer in anybody's

book.

So somehow we have been the consumers of imagery when we should become the producers

of it.

And all the people in the 20th century who have made that work serve to inspire in that

direction.

I don't know.

There are so many of you.

Is somebody in the back who's...

Oh, way up there.

A statement and then a question.

If it is assumed that the b-carboids are mean THH or nervous, then this is why the

BMT is orally active in the ayahuasca group.

My question is, some forms of ayahuasca BMT .

So is this to say that the plus THH are hallucinogenic?

Yes.

No.

I follow it.

Okay.

The question is, Do I remember it?

The question is, Is it so that the beta carboylene alkaloids inhibit MAO and thus

make DMT active in ayahuasca?

And yes, this is not debatable.

It's now secured by my brother several years ago.

He published on this.

It was always hypothesized that beta-carbolines were MAO inhibitors, but then ultimately they proved it.

Well, so then the questioner went on to ask, if this is so, then what about these cases where beta-carboline alkaloids are reportedly taken without DMT?

And then what does this mean?

Is it hallucinogenic on its own?

And the answer is, harmaline is hallucinogenic by itself, but fairly close to the threshold of toxicity.

So the ordinary strategy in the Amazon is to combine the DMT with the beta-carbolines,

and that makes the DMT highly reactive.

It is not then destroyed in the gut, as would ordinarily be the case, but crosses into the bloodstream and through the blood-brain barrier and reaches the brain.

I think achieving hallucinogenic levels with beta-carbolines without DMT is probably a pretty unpleasant experience, although some of these deep jungle tribes do do it.

You don't want to get the idea.

That just because somebody lives way up a river, that they know what they're doing.

Manuel Cordova Rios, in his second book, The Rio Tigre and Beyond, talks about going on curare collecting and rosewood collecting expeditions to people of the Aguaruna-Jivaro group,

and discovering that they're ayahuasca.

He even says that the ayahuasca were garbage, that they just didn't know how to make it, even though they were bear-ass indian residents, and he showed them how to make it,

and they practically made him a cultural hero.

They said, you know, my god we've been drinking swill for untold millenia.

And you came and fixed us up.

And this is a puzzling thing to us, as outsiders.

we assume they're always going for the gusto but sometimes not you know i mean cultures have

peculiar peculiar adaptations this lady yes you said that we're fouling the nest could we be

evolving you mentioned that we went from matter to object could we actually be going should we

actually be going from object to energy and when you say that art should save us all i would say

well you touch on a very interesting point one that i in my own mind am not clear about

uh is it that we are to transcend

this

world and go into some titanic dimension of energy or spirit that we can scarcely imagine is that what

this birth is is the only way we can grant peace to this planet is to turn ourselves into uh you

know electrons moving in an interbium cube that we bury on the dark side of the moon is it something

like that i'm

opened up to that self-realization and turned to an inner human being as a human being

and i think i'm troubled by that because i would like to keep it all together i would like to see

us as a part of nature but i'm not so uninformed concerning the historical adventure that i don't

know that what is called gnosticism is a very strong strain

its most severe form can be boiled down to the proposition that we are strangers here,

we don't belong here, this is not our world, we come from a place made of light and we

will never rest until we return to it.

Now the problem with that formulation is it sets us up for tremendous discontinuity and

unhappiness until we achieve that return to the realm of light.

It's a kind of Faustian thing, you know?

And yet the other possibility which I as the co-founder of a botanical garden and a lover

of nature inclined to is, isn't there some way that we can make our peace with the earth?

Isn't there some way that we can have our care?

Can we live a life that is bathtub, or a וָնַוּה and eat it?

I'm more and more to my own discomforture conclude that there isn't that the human adventure

is a forward-going adventure, that we do clothes off options.

We never again are going to be a small tribe of hunter gatherers with our flocks on a on

the plains of Africa enjoying our mushrooms and our orgies at every full

moon somehow long long ago that option was cut off shucks but but I think that

it's good to cultivate this poignancy that if we're going to go storm our

tourists at least we should do so with some sense of what has been left behind

and not just turn ourselves into mechanical technocrats somehow the

living spirit has to be brought with us and this is really the high task for

shamanism how can we who have always as Shamans had a relationship to the

spirits of the earth of the waters of the sky if we are setting out for

alpha in Sagittarius or something like that how can we do that and not leave

our soul behind you know that the Arabs have the belief that a man's soul can

move no faster than a camel gallops so if you if you drive in your Mercedes

from Jeddah to Riyadh you have to rest for a while so your soul can catch up

well I don't think we should leave our human soul behind somehow we have to

internalize the entirety of the biological world if we are going to

become a spacefaring species otherwise we are going to get out there and

discover that something vital was left behind

and this is a great tension between ourselves and the earth between our

destiny as an energy using dream compressing space-faring stormtrooper

kind of species I mean that's all male dominance and male mentality talking and

the need to somehow fold that into a nurturing stance a

preserved

stance a stance that recognizes that the conservation of our archaic values is

really our only hope and those two things exist in a dynamic tension this

is maybe the issue that the artistic community can clarify and that must be

clarified before we can make a definitive step into the future right

now we're uncertain stewardship or angel hood which shall it be maybe I'll

take one more question some poor soul over here yes in the back

I would like to say well I don't really think of it as the Nietzsche and

Superman I

don't really think of it as the Nietzsche and Superman I

I don't really think of it as the Nietzsche and Superman I

But something you said, you know that poem by Yeats called Sailing to Byzantium?

And there's this wonderful phrase in there.

I'm not sure I can quote it perfectly, but it goes something like this.

Once out of nature, I would be a thing of gold and gold enameling.

Once out of nature, he means once he's dead.

Once out of nature, I would be a thing of gold and gold enameling.

And then he says something about a nightingale set to sing for the lords and ladies of Byzantium

of what has been and what will be.

But what it is, you see, is the image of the condensation of a quasi-mechanical object.

The soul as object.

As objectification.

And to my mind, this is where the image of the UFO has something to teach us.

The UFO is not an extraterrestrial machine that haunts the skies of the earth.

The UFO is a totality symbol thrown off by our tangential approach to the end of history.

I think...

I think that, yes, the Nietzschean Superman, that whole thing was tried by the Nazis,

and they realized it in its full expression, and it was nightmarish.

What I'm proposing is more...

There's no man in it.

It's the concrescence of the collective soul of humanity that somehow I see history

as an...

As an alchemical task and process.

And the artist, as artificer, it is the task of the artist to complete this alchemical

concrescence.

And it's a kind of irrational thing.

It is irrational.

It's that mind and matter are approaching each other on a trajectory that will bring

them together with no...

With no...

Damage to the quintessential nature of each, and we can't imagine that, because for us,

things are mind or matter.

We can't conceive of a coincidencia appositorum, and yet it's that which we must hold in our

mind if we want to see truth.

I mean, even in quantum physics, they teach you that the universe is composed of what

they call islands of Boolean algebra embedded in an ocean of ordinary algebra.

What they mean is they're having their archaic and eating it too.

They're trying to say that it's both and.

And this...

It is an irrational process.

It isn't a Nietzschean program of realization.

It's a kind of an opening.

Something wants to be born.

The promptings of our...

Religions, with all the irrational and hysterical trappings that attend them, nevertheless,

have a core perception that there is, between man and nature, a kind of compact.

And this compact, it will be redeemed.

I mean, I really think that this is the psychedelic faith.

That we are the prodigal species.

We are the...

We have descended into the inferno of matter to try and recover the pearl of immortality.

The pearl of immortality is the perfected and reconstructed earth.

And somehow, we are to be the critical factor in this equation, or the point species.

We are not acting for ourselves.

We are the energy.

We are the energy-manipulating species that, I believe, carries the hopes of all life.

All nature is watching this drama.

The life of our star is finite.

The life of the planet is finite.

But potentially, self-reflecting understanding may be, in fact, immortal.

And yet, it is breaking out of the trappings of matter.

And this is a process so large, so strange, that I don't think a single mind can encompass

it within a single moment.

It's something that we triangulate over and over again.

And for me, the psychedelic experience is how you do that.

The psychedelic experience is...

The psychedelic experience is literally arising into a higher dimension in the geometric sense.

And from that higher dimension, the psychedelic voyager carries out a transecting of the

lower dimensional object, which is the world.

And in the same way that we can build up an image of a cone out of an infinite number

of ellipsoidal...

Transsections, we can build up a true model of the world by carrying out a number of these

transections from a higher dimension.

And then it shows us how the world really works.

And when you understand how the world really works, I'm beginning to get just a hint of

it.

It works through...

Living.

Live.

And we can do it all through love.

And dream.

And intention to connect.

Through love and dream and intention toward connection.

And these are ultimately irrational values.

And they ultimately must be irrationally embraced because the momentum toward a rational conclusion

is tremendous.

And I'm gonna say it again.

but unfortunately, completely fatal.

And this is the invitation that the artist has always extended

toward a radical break with the momentum of rationalism.

It's simply that now, in this moment of tremendous crisis,

when the artist is at last called upon to perform

and there must be no stitches dropped

because this dance is the dance of transformation of the planet itself.

This is the moment of empowering.

This is what all the shamanism of the past built toward,

this final magical invocation.

James Joyce said, man will be dirigible.

That's simply a way of saying that we will find a way to make our dreams

and the dreams...

of the planet, and the life it carries, one dream.

And the way to do it is to reconnect up to the Gaian mind

through the channels of communication that were always there,

but that have not been really taken up since the late Neolithic.

It's time for us to call home, and you know

how to do it.

It's just a matter of having the courage to do it, to act,

and then to have that empowering act spread back through the psychology of the planet.

I am very optimistic.

I think we are awakening to a new day from a long, long night of the soul,

but it must be done collectively,

gently, lovingly, and with a complete faith that we are an infant held in the arms of nature,

that nature wants this to happen, that we are not an aberration.

We are granted peculiar, but we are not an aberration.

We are a necessary oddness to the completion of the whole, and this is our glory,

and this is what we are.

This is why we've been graced with self-reflection,

and we can redeem that tremendous empowerment by going forward in love and faith

to save the world through art and the pursuit of meaning.

Thank you very, very much.