Seeking the Stone

can hardly believe I'm here. I made it past the Camaro raffle. I survived the offer for

reconstructive cosmetic surgery. And I've had my smart drugs for this evening, so glad

to be here. Well, until a few minutes ago, I thought that this was a 45-minute gig, so

you get to see Grace under pressure this evening. Actually, I'm kidding. It doesn't matter how

long it goes. We could never get to the bottom of this stuff, nor would we wish to, I think.

By coincidence, merely, I became 45.

Yesterday. So, sort of a good moment to do some summing up. So, in thinking about this talk and

knowing, as I did, who would be here, I thought that I would sort of orient the theme toward

distilling the psychedelic mind, which is a way of talking about the psychedelic mind,

but also trying to

consider the amount of money you paid for this session, give you the entire schtick in one fell swoop,

so that you would never have to attend a Terence McKenna lecture or workshop again.

You could just move past that, turn the page on that kind of thing in your life.

.

Well, I think it's coming together for me. I don't know whether it's writing these books. It was a

very nice introduction here tonight, and the whammy in it was, after 25 years of being ignored by

straight publishers, or publishers of any sort for that matter, it appears that I'm on the brink of

entering the marketplace, if not the mainstream.

.

So, with your help and word-of-mouth advertising,

maybe I can continue to meet my mortgage obligations.

Okay, let's cut to the chase.

Enough of the obligatory clowning around.

The psychedelic question in the society

just seems to refuse to go away.

It sort of can't be swallowed and can't be spat up.

And so society just sort of runs around

knocking into walls and kicking its feet in the air.

And this has been the situation that we've been in

for at least 30 years now.

And as a person who has spent

a great deal of time and effort

and a great deal of time in the underground,

I've observed with amazement

the persistence of the counter-cultural agenda

to alter consciousness.

And like many of you, I came to it in the 60s

when the basic argument in favor of altered states of consciousness

were almost entirely narcissistic,

deep in self.

And I certainly think that this was a valid place to begin.

But after 30 years of having the psychedelic issue

on the social network,

on the social agenda,

at times hailed as a universal panacea,

at times demonized as a scourge from hell,

but never quite silenced,

never moved out of the public eye,

I've reached a number of conclusions about this.

And I thought it would be interesting tonight,

I guess because of my recent birthday or something,

to sort of try and,

to sort of try and distill all this and sum it up

and put it in front of you in terms of what is psychedelic shamanism?

Why should people like ourselves who live in high density

electronic culture, why should we care about this?

What does it say about our future?

What does it say about us as a group?

And what techniques are there that we each,

on our own, can bring to bear on this question?

So with your help,

hold me to the straight and narrow,

I'd like to make my way through this agenda this evening,

and talk about these various aspects of what,

to my mind, is the most astonishing facet of reality.

I mean, maybe sex is pressing hard in the second position,

but these two things run neck and neck

as aspects of the mystery of what it is to be human.

And believe me, human psychedelic experiences

and human sexual experiences are orders of magnitude

removed from anything going on in the animal realm.

These things are set apart.

They are not separate from the rest of being,

because what we bring to them is mind.

This is what we pour into the sexuality of human beings

that makes it unique.

This is what we pour in to the contemplation

of our own experience.

Mind is a focus that is lacking,

at least its expression in the unique form

that we experience it, is lacking.

It is lacking in the rest of nature.

And I believe that the persistence

of the psychedelic experience within the social agenda

has to do with the fact that it actually addresses

something basic in human beings.

I mean, it may seem like a radical proposition to say,

but it's not.

I don't say that to a white, high-tech,

industrial democracy audience,

because we are the people who have drifted furthest

from this birthright.

And I would like to suggest to you this evening

that much of the civilization that we have created

has been achieved based on a direct denial

of the psychedelic experience,

and all that it implies.

Our humanness, our connection to the rest of nature,

our connection into the feminine,

our place in nature.

Because for the Western mind,

we have no fixed place in nature.

Our place is ours to define.

We are, from the point of view of the cultural machinery

that empowers us,

completely free to become,

to be whatever we want to be.

Now, the problem with that prescription is

that in Western culture,

what that means is permission to express ego,

permission to profligately use and destroy resources,

permission to set aside the political agendas

of outclasses and outgroups.

This untrammeled expression of will

outside the context of nature

has turned us into a kind of Frankenstein's monster at best,

a toxic force in the body of the Gaian world soul at worst.

And I believe that our origin

and our future culmination,

and our present happiness,

all can be secured, understood, illuminated, and expanded

only if we're willing to look at our relationship,

not only to altered states of consciousness,

but to the mind behind nature.

Because that's really what this is all about, to my mind.

What these psychedelics do,

what these psychedelics do,

what these psychedelics are empowering,

or conveying, or revealing,

depending on, you know, how you come at it,

what they are showing us is that we are not alone upon this planet.

We are not alone in the universe of mind.

And I realize this is a soft audience to preach this in,

because there are probably people within the sound of my words

who sincerely believe they were once citizens of Zeta Reticuli.

You know, when the jar is so leaky,

it's hard to know where to put the water.

But I come to this as a show-me kind of guy.

And so, though my conclusions may sound as flaky,

as anybody else's,

it was hard for me to get this flaky.

I didn't embrace it.

I was forced to it.

And this method works, you see.

I mean, there are two ways to get flaky.

You can just get flaky,

which takes no effort at all, you know.

I mean, you just announce you're a walk-in,

start eating wheatgrass juice,

and, you know, tithe to Maitreya.

Or you can get flaky by testing the edges,

by stretching the envelope of being.

And this works for the most hard-headed among us.

The aerospace insurance adjuster mentality

is...

not only who I'm speaking to,

but who I feel I represent.

Because...

No kidding, really.

At age 18,

I was a Marxist,

an existentialist,

I had ambitions in the field of aeronautical engineering,

so forth and so on.

And I discovered,

that you can take that kind of a mentality

out into the theater of real experience,

and you can come back a space bunny

just like everybody else.

So what that means, then,

is that a straight person,

and I speak as someone from the 60s

with apologies to all our gay friends

who later appropriated that word,

because when I say straight,

I mean un-stoned.

A straight person is not a guardian

of truth or probity.

A straight person is simply

a frightened proto-flake.

You see?

I always think,

and most of you have heard me say this,

but when we get off on this subject,

I always think about the wonderful thing Tim Leary said,

years ago.

He said it so many years ago,

that when I told him

how much I admired him for saying it,

he didn't remember that he'd said it.

But the man once said,

wait till I give the wine,

LSD is a drug which causes,

occasionally causes psychotic behavior

in people who have not taken it.

You see?

And I certainly saw this.

I mean, I saw my parents become violently psychotic

from not taking LSD.

And so my point is,

and I make it in a forum like this,

because here we have so much permission for belief.

I mean, you want to believe in,

you know, channeling from beyond the grave?

Fine, no problem.

You want to believe in the healing power

of nematodes, hematodes, hematite,

you name it, we've got it all.

Really, I think that

the spirit of childlike, untrammeled curiosity

is what we're striving for.

Not the anal retentive rational person.

Not the I'll go for anything,

channeling flake.

But an attitude of,

we don't have to look far for miracles

because they're all around us.

Everything is astonishing.

The universe on its surface

is alive with mystery.

Well, how do we make our way toward that?

When we live in a culture,

practice a life,

practice a language,

embody a philosophy, scientific rationalism,

which is entirely designed

to suck wonder out of reality,

to turn everything into shades of gray,

to subvert all hope

that lies outside the realm of

career accomplishment and material possession.

Well, the way that we can overcome this

is through a personal acting out

of what I have been calling now

for several years,

the archaic revival.

And I want to talk about that

a little bit this evening

because I think it,

you know, however much we may kid around

about the new age,

it is an important aspect

of what is going on.

Its triviality is rooted in the side of it

which is ungrounded,

ephemeral,

and self-promoting.

But it springs from a fairly profound

and deep sense

that things are not all right

in this society.

I think that I first encountered

the phrase new age

in the writings of Helen Petrovna Blavatsky.

She wrote in the 20s.

I read her in the 50s.

The new age has been with us

for a long time,

so long that there's nothing new about it.

And in fact,

the reason I call it the archaic revival

is because I think we can understand

this movement

if instead of accentuating

what about it that is new,

novel,

and never before seen,

instead we emphasize

that this is a profoundly

conservative impulse.

A conservative impulse

that would set the hair of George Bush

and his skull and bones buddies

standing on end.

Because when we talk about conservative,

we're not talking about returning

to the era of Eisenhower.

We're talking about returning

to the era of Isis,

Asarte,

the great horned goddess

of the high paleolithic.

In other words,

this program

of material civilization,

exteriorization

of ideas into matter

through first alchemy and magic

and then science and industry.

This process is coming to an end.

One way or another.

We are either going to plant ourselves

and most of the rest of the life

on this planet

by blindly pursuing this cultural model

until we run it right over the edge

into the apocalypse

or from the genes,

from the bones,

from the oceans,

from the forests,

from the glaciers.

There is going to have to come

a turning point,

a change,

a revulsion so profound

that it allows us

by the tens of millions

to change how we think about reality,

to change how we live.

And I have ended up an advocate

for the psychedelic experience

not because I think it's easy,

not because I think it's surefire,

but because I think

it's the only game in town,

the only chance left.

If we had a thousand years,

if we had 500 years,

maybe propaganda,

messages on boxes of cereal,

photographs on cartons of milk,

I don't know,

something might do it.

But we don't have 500 years.

We must come to a screeching halt now

because we are barreling toward

the brink of ruin.

And the only thing

that I have ever seen

that turned anybody around

on the dime

was psychedelics.

You know?

The talking cures

invented by Freud and Jung

at the beginning of this century.

It takes years.

Sometimes it never happens.

The body work that came along behind that

with Wilhelm Reich and others,

Feldenkrais and so forth,

Ida Roth,

all of this brings it

into the theater of the body.

At least now we understand

it's a body-mind system.

It's not a disembodied voice

lying on a couch speaking.

You know?

But it seems so obvious.

What we're trying to do

is perturb the mind.

We want to perturb the mind

so that we can then

see it differently.

So that it may see

and be seen differently.

Well, the mind rests

on a foundation of chemical machinery.

We're not saying the mind

is chemical machinery.

We're saying the mind rests

on a foundation of chemical machinery.

So if you want to perturb the mind,

you don't go to the talking.

You don't go to the deep tissue.

All of this has efficacy.

But it is necessary

but not sufficient by itself.

For there to be a sufficiency of method,

there must be an initial perturbation

of the mind.

And this comes about

through the use

of psychedelic plants.

This is not something

that was discovered post-LSD

in Manhattan by psychiatrists

or in Prague or Berlin or at Esalen.

This is a truth 25,000, 50,000,

100,000 years old.

This is how it's always been done.

Only in the last 6,000 years

on the European continent

and those civilizations

that are the children of Europe

has there been any other approach

to these problems.

Well, and what the other approach,

linear thought,

the phonetic alphabet,

science, mathematical abstraction,

so forth and so on,

what these other approaches

have brought us is

toxicity, pollution,

mutation,

catastrophe,

revolution,

death,

and yes, friends,

even unhappiness.

It hasn't worked.

Western civilization

is now crowing over the fact

that the only opposition it ever had,

which was Marxism,

a pathetic weak sister,

has now collapsed upon itself.

Well, there should be

no congratulation in that,

because the contradictions

which undid Marxism

lie in wait to undo this society as well.

Both societies are materialistic.

Both societies define human beings

and treat them as things.

And the fact of the matter is

Western civilization at this moment

is a loaded gun

pointed at the head of this planet.

And we,

for all our pretensions

to a sensitivity

to the presence of vitamin C

or zinc in our diet

or all the rest of this malarkey,

we are the major

prevaricators

of this situation.

So a certain obligation

rests upon us.

And I think we're meeting

this obligation.

I wouldn't say we're doing a great job

or a terrible job.

I think we're functioning

at approximately a B plus level.

You see, I mean,

human life is so ephemeral.

I mean, a person,

a person who lives 70 or 80 years

is really as ephemeral

as a mayfly or something.

I mean, it's not long enough

to get the full picture.

For instance,

many of you,

by virtue of not having spent

a great deal of time

thinking about it,

probably don't realize

that this psychedelic

plant shamanism option,

this is not something

that Western civilization

has grappled with for centuries

and come to terms with

and found the proper pigeon hole for

and put aside.

Not at all, my friends.

The fact of the matter is

all of this information

about psychedelics

has arrived in Western society

in the last hundred years.

And we have to say hundred years

because we want to include

things like mescaline,

1895-98,

it began to be studied in Germany,

and things like ibogaine,

which was known toward the end

of the last century,

but which has had virtually

zilch impact on American

psychedelic populations.

So we have to say

the psychedelic option

has only been an object

of the Western mind's curiosity

for approximately a hundred years.

But really, 90% of that

occurred in the last 50 years.

As many of you know,

I am a great fan

and spokesman for psilocybin,

for the mushrooms.

The mushrooms that I am so stoked on

were discovered in 1953

by Gordon and Valentina Wasson

in Watla,

discovered in 53,

made absolutely schedule one

illegal in 1966.

15 years was the window

in which Western civilization

had to study this compound

and figure out what it was for.

And they were just beginning

to focus upon it

when it was made illegal.

LSD discovered in 37,

not brought into the scientific literature

until 48,

not generally available

even in the laboratory until 1950.

Made totally illegal in 1966.

16 year window.

Think about the fact

that when LSD was legal,

psychiatrists,

professional researchers

were consistently reporting

cures of chronic alcoholism

with one 500 gamma dose.

One dose.

Cure like a 50%

cure rate without recidivism

for chronic alcoholism.

Spectacular findings

were being reported.

When LSD swept through

the scientific community,

for pharmacologists,

psychotherapists,

psychiatrists,

it had the same kind of

excitement and feeling of breakthrough

that the splitting of the atom had

for the physicists,

for the physics community,

in the late 30s.

Well, science we are told

is this absolutely impartial

godlike body of knowledge

prosecuted by great men

and it will fearlessly send

its questing mind

into any situation

or environment.

This is a mental discipline

so dispassionate

that it sees nothing at all wrong

with strapping monkeys into apparatus

and hurling them into walls

at 70 miles an hour

to study traumatic injuries.

This is a discipline so unflinching

in its pursuit of truth

that it will design tiny television cameras

to be implanted in plastic penises

so that we can see the changes

in the color of the vaginal wall

as it approaches orgasm.

I mean, these guys are unstinting

in their devotion to truth

in any form.

And yet, and yet,

for 30 years,

science has accepted

government's refusal

to allow science to look

at the potential impact

of psychedelic plants and compounds

on human consciousness,

on chronic alcoholism,

on schizophrenia,

on depression,

on autism,

on learning disorders,

on dyslexias,

on memory enhancements,

so forth and so on.

This, to me, is obscene.

The future is mental.

Figure it out.

If the mind does not loom large

in the future history of this species,

then what the hell kind of future

is it going to be?

I mean, this is our crowning glory,

our aesthetic sensitivities,

our ability to create values

that are not simply based on

the next meal,

the next sexual encounter,

the next empowering social move,

but an ability to create social values

based on creating a model

of a viable future environment

for children,

creating a viable present environment

for the less fortunate among us,

creating a social safety net

so that the more maladaptive of us

are not reduced to living under bridges

and in abandoned automobiles.

I mean, these are the things

which set us above the apes.

These are the things which take us

out of the context of organic nature

and make it seem as though,

hey, there actually are

some transcendental values

being maximized here.

There actually is something going on

within the human family

that if it were to be lost,

fumbled away,

compromised or destroyed,

the universe would be a poorer,

truly a poorer place for it.

And I think we take our humanness

too much for granted.

I don't think we realize

how nasty, brutish and short

most of life has been

over the centuries

and how really only

within the confines of the 20th century

has a level of comfort

and food availability

and shelter

and basic creature needs

been met to the point where

most people can begin to lead

the philosophical life

that previously was the privilege

of emperors, kings, great courts.

Now we all indulge in

and challenge ourselves.

We all have the philosopher king's

point of view.

We all have a model of history,

a model of the future.

And we all feel capable of

stepping into the shoes of our leaders

and discharging that responsibility.

Well, in order to do that,

I think we need to overcome

our amnesia

about how we got to this place.

I don't see...

You see, what science would have you believe

and explicitly implies

is that we are an aberration.

Here over here you have nature,

the beautiful rainforests,

the wonderful coral reefs,

the cemetery of the hummingbird,

the sea urchin and the butterfly.

And here you have us,

grimy, tawdry, polluting, ugly,

driven, in equilibrium,

in disequilibrium, in denial.

I don't believe that.

I believe that this kind of thinking

that breaks humanity

away from the rest of nature

is the first of the great disempowering myths

by which the Western mind

has enslaved itself.

And we are not outside of nature.

We are not a runaway toxic process.

We are not a mutation.

We are in fact that part of nature

which has been deputized for a purpose.

We are the energy-gathering aspect

of the Gaian mind.

We are the language-forming capacity

of nature herself.

You may know the concept

of a catalyst in chemistry.

A catalyst is something which

when you stir it into a chemical reaction,

the reaction proceeds more quickly.

But the catalyst itself is not destroyed.

And this is what I think we are.

We are a strategy.

On the part of the Gaian mind

to produce an effect

that would otherwise take much, much longer

to produce.

The main effect

of the presence of human life

on this planet

has been to vastly accelerate

the speed at which nature

is able to creatively express herself.

And I would like to believe

that this fragile, fragile thing

which we call humanness,

which is nothing more than

a set of interlocking ideas

which we share.

Ideas about caring and responsibility

and generations yet unborn

and obligation to the integrity of the earth

and so forth and so on.

I would like to believe

that these things arose in us

in a very, very brief window of opportunity.

As you may or may not know,

there is a lot of talk about

the relationship between the masculine

and the feminine in human beings

and gender issues and so forth and so on.

Well, if you go back

into the primate line,

what you discover is

primates always have dominance hierarchies

occupied by males.

This is the bad news part of the thing.

You see, it isn't that we are a perversion

of the primate program.

At this point, we exemplify it

right down the line.

But clear back to square one,

you get squirrel monkeys.

You get male dominance hierarchies.

Why is this?

And why then is it even an issue for us?

Why don't we just blindly accept it?

I mean, there isn't a woman's liberation movement

among termite societies

or, you know, among reindeer herds.

So why are we so discomforted

by our attitudes toward each other?

Well, I believe it's because

we actually created,

at a certain point in our history,

a kind of paradise.

We actually solved all the problems

which now bedevil us

twenty to fifteen thousand years ago.

And how this happened,

and half of you, I hope, are amazed,

and the other half will groan

because you've heard it so many times before,

what happened is an evolutionary synergy

that occurred on the plains of Africa

sometime over the last hundred thousand years.

It's that as the African continent dried up,

our remote primate ancestors

were forced out of the trees

and onto the African grassland

where they were in an environment

completely different from the kind of environment

that our ancestors had been living in

for millions of years.

Gone were the fruit-filled bowers

of the climaxed canopy of the rainforest.

And instead, what there was

was a grassland

with very little vegetation

and little cover,

a very restricted flora and fauna,

and into that grassland

pour these hungry, displaced,

dispossessed, formerly fruititarian primates.

When a species gets under that kind of pressure,

it must make a choice

between extinction or dietary expansion.

Many, many species

choose extinction.

This is an interesting thing about animal species.

Most animal species eat one or two foods

that they are very tightly focused in on.

The reason for this,

if you're not an evolutionary biologist,

is it's a strategy for avoiding mutation.

You see, all plants produce,

have a tendency to protect themselves from predation

by producing toxins, mutagens, poisons,

is what we're talking about here.

So an animal species will evolve

a preference for just one or two food sources,

and then it can hold its exposure

to mutagenic agents to a minimum.

Now, our species,

when we moved into that African grassland situation,

were plastic enough

malleable enough

that we decided, no, by God,

we're not going to go to extinction

because of the absence of papayas in this situation.

We're going to test other foods.

And we began testing other foods in that environment,

and that immediately swelled

the number of mutant strains

in the human population.

Now, in this grassland environment,

the number of new foods to be tested

was somewhat limited,

and the most spectacular and obvious

of the unfamiliar food sources

in this environment

were the psilocybin mushrooms

seen to be growing in the cow pies

of the many different kinds of

cattle-like ungulate animals

growing up in that environment.

And if you've ever been to the tribes,

and seen the Stropharia cubensis mushroom

in its natural habitat,

you can't miss it.

It's the most spectacular thing going on.

I mean, you walk out into a Colombian pasture

after a few days of mist and rain,

and these mushrooms,

the size of dinner plates,

will be scattered across the environment.

Now, when I was in Kenya in the late 60s,

I observed baboon troops

and their food-gathering behavior,

and what they were into

was running around frantically

looking for cow flops

and then flipping them over,

looking for beetle grubs

or carrion beetles.

You see, they understood that the cow flop

great phrase, huh?

The fecal deposit

of the ungulate animal

was a vector for protein,

insect protein.

This was a likely place to find

carrion beetles, worms, and what have you,

and of course, the mushroom.

Well, when you observe how

primates react

when they're testing a food,

they're very careful

and they're very conscientious.

A baboon will take a suspect

potential food source,

take a leaf,

put it in their mouth,

just hold it there,

no chewing, no nothing,

put it in their mouth,

wait 30 seconds,

chew,

wait,

and then either spit it out

or swallow,

and if swallowed, then begin to eat.

Well, I believe that this encounter

with the psilocybin mushroom

and in the course of

this workshop,

maybe in the question and answer period,

we'll get to this,

but psilocybin has unique properties

which set us up

for a sudden,

enormous evolutionary

kick in the pants.

And we can talk among ourselves

about whether this was just blind coincidence,

good old chance,

and aren't we fortunate for it,

or whether benign extraterrestrials

operating from their

base on zeta reticuli were,

you know, we can save that for you.

We don't have to get rid of it.

Whether it was those

shifty zeta reticulites

or blind chance,

whatever the force was,

the exposure to psilocybin has

three reinforcing consequences

that are of tremendous importance

for understanding

human evolution.

And they are as follows.

Psilocybin in very low doses,

doses so low that if you had taken

this amount,

you would not feel it

or you would be just slightly antsy.

In other words,

very low doses of psilocybin

actually increase visual acuity.

It means it improves your vision

with this stuff.

Well, again,

you don't have to be a rocket scientist

or an evolutionary biologist

to figure out that if there's a plant

in the environment

and you're a hunting animal

and this plant improves vision,

you're going to be a better hunting animal

if you include this plant in your diet.

And this is precisely what happened.

Early human or proto-hominid hunters

accepted psilocybin into their diet.

It made them better hunters.

Being a better hunter means

being more successful at obtaining food.

Being more successful at obtaining food

means more of your children

reach reproductive age themselves.

And so you outbreed

the non-psilocybin-using portion

of the population.

Simple enough, right?

On the next level,

remember I said this was a three-step process

where each step reinforces the other.

At slightly higher doses of psilocybin,

you get what's called CNS arousal,

central nervous system arousal.

Well, now arousal is just what it sounds like.

It's not only restlessness and alertness,

but it's also a kind of horny,

diffuse energy.

It inclineth one's thoughts

to the boudoir,

is what I'm trying to say here.

And so you get what primatologists

and anthropologists charmingly describe

as more frequent instances

of successful copulation.

And so what successful copulation means is,

again, a factor feeding in

to more children of the psilocybin-using,

animals reaching reproductive age themselves.

And then finally and thirdly,

beyond visual acuity,

beyond sexual arousal,

is the full-blown psychedelic tremendum,

the full-blown religious revelation

that goes with the mushroom experience,

a revelation of such depth and breadth

that we, 20,000 years later,

with all our epistemic sophistication

and our parallel processing computers

and all this other malarkey,

are completely in awe of,

completely unable to come to terms with.

Well, this higher dose of psilocybin

was usually experienced in the context

of the middle-range dose of psilocybin,

so it went on in an atmosphere

of group religious ecstasy and orgy.

I mean, that's just how it happened, folks.

Orgy was a part of human sexuality

before the invention of agriculture.

I'm absolutely convinced of it.

You see, the growth of the human intellect

over evolutionary spans of time

is a kind of conquest of dimensionality.

And the conquest of dimensionality

that gave us agriculture

unfortunately gave us male dominance

and patriarchy.

And the reason for this is not far to seek.

A new intellectual horizon of cause and effect

was being explored.

Women, who were the gatherers

in the hunter-gatherer equation,

were realizing for the first time

the causal relationship that exists

between burying a half-eaten meal over here

and coming back a year later

on your annual nomadic peregrination

and discovering food plants,

growing where you buried

your uneaten meal of a year ago.

In other words,

women came to understand the relationship

between the act of planting

and the appearance of usable food plants

sometime later.

At the same time that this was going on,

men were making the connection

between the fact that the sex act

had something to do with the fact

that nine months later,

a woman would bear a child.

And in a way, this was the beginning

of the straight lockstep march into hell.

Because once men had this notion

of male paternity,

male paternity,

it became more important to know

who your children were

than it was to participate

in the orgiastic, group-minded bonding

that had previously occurred.

And once you have the notion

of my child, my child,

then it moves naturally to my woman,

my weapons, my food,

my hunting ground, my everything.

The recognition of male paternity

gave permission for the growth of ego.

And ego, and this was all a continuous thought,

those of you who doubted,

this was all a continuous thought.

Ego is our problem.

And we always had it

when we were squirrel monkeys,

howler monkeys, proboscis,

proboscis monkeys, and all that.

We only lost it

in that very brief window of opportunity,

maybe 20, maybe 30, 40 thousand years long,

when, as we evolved into the grassland,

we included in our diet

essentially a drug which corrected

our primate nature.

A drug which suppressed

the expression of male dominance.

A drug which promoted

an orgiastic sexual style

that promoted group values.

Because you see,

and this is the point to my mind

about psychedelics,

what they do,

not, you know, my trip or your trip,

which we could spend hours trading stories about,

but when you try and talk about

what is the effect of the psychedelic experience,

not one or two of them,

but a hundred thousand of them,

what generalizations can we make?

The generalization that I have found most powerful is

the psychedelic experience dissolves boundaries.

That's what it does.

And boundaries are what chain,

diminish, define,

and degrade us.

And we are always creating them.

And we are always struggling

with dissolving them.

And the ultimate boundary

is this belief

in the sanctity of the ego

versus everything else

in the cosmos.

And I believe that this,

that the ego arose

in a context of language,

culture, religion,

and so forth,

simply because

we evolved in the African grassland

and the climate itself

underwent changes

that eventually placed the mushroom out of reach.

And this is why

the fall into history.

This is what that Genesis story

about the,

that I call history's first drug bust,

this is what it's about.

I mean, isn't it a little peculiar

that the Ur myth of our culture

opens with a drug bust?

It's the story of a woman,

right, those bad women,

a woman who corrupts her roommate

and then they both get kicked out.

They break the lease, essentially,

and they both get kicked out.

And where they get kicked out of

is into history.

And I believe that the Genesis story

definitely told and created

at a time when patriarchy was on a roll

is a memory of this break

with this orgiastic,

goddess-centered,

nomadic,

cattle-oriented,

mushroom-using

form of human pastoralism.

Now, notice in this scenario

that there are no villains, per se,

the planet began to get dry,

and that's what broke up

this arboreal,

papaya-oriented paradise

in the treetops

where everybody was male-dominated

and mindless as a tomato

but having a good time.

The drying of the African continent

broke that party up,

created a mixed ecology

of forest and grassland

into which the primates then evolved

this fascinating relationship

with the cattle, you see.

And much of what I say here

is orthodox evolutionary theory.

It's just the part about psilocybin

that nobody else will touch

with a ten-foot pole.

But moving out into the grassland,

testing foods,

accepting psilocybin into the diet,

and then creating,

based on the interruption

of the natural, natural tendency

toward male dominance,

it was fixed 50,000 years ago.

A pharmacological intervention

on the entire species

created then a situation

of partnership.

The women were

the gatherers.

The men were the hunters.

This had to do with

promotion of different body types

that had already taken,

was already well established

in these primates.

I mean, you get this

throughout the primates.

The large male,

barrel-chested,

the more diminutive female,

and the females more,

largely more social than the male.

The males hunt.

And in the proto-hominid situation,

this was certainly true.

And hunting, as you know,

if you've ever done it,

places a great premium

on stoic waiting.

That's the hunter's job,

is to sit down

and keep your mouth shut

and watch silently

until it's time to make your move

and then move ruthlessly,

without question,

you know, with attention.

Women had a completely different set

of pressures and constraints on them.

As gatherers,

it was very important for women

to be able to communicate

extraordinarily subtle

aspects of the material world

to each other.

So that a woman

needs to be able to say

when she comes into camp

with the apron full of nuts,

I got these

near the waterfall

by the bush

with the small yellow leaves

with the waxy flowers

and the red berries

that has the dry grass underneath it.

In other words,

for a gatherer,

there is tremendous premium put

on being able to describe

your environment.

You must be able to communicate

because a woman

who makes a food find

can only bring back to camp

as much food as she can carry.

But if she can communicate

to her sisters

what is going on,

then no problem.

So language, I believe,

largely evolved

as a prerogative of women.

And this stoicism

and

ability to

tolerate uncomfortable conditions

was evolved by men.

All of this, I think,

would have been fine.

It could have gone on

for millions of years

in this climaxed situation.

The orgies were lunar,

meaning they probably occurred

every two weeks

or at most every 28 days.

That means every 28 days

every member of this society

was completely dissolving

any psychic structures

that may have arisen

in the previous 28 days.

And then everybody was

sitting on each other's bones

in a big heap.

And you can imagine

the boundary-dissolving impact

that something like that

would have.

Why then, if it was so wonderful,

didn't we just stick with it?

Why the descent into,

you know, the hell

of Pee Wee Herman,

and Richard Nixon,

and all of the stuff?

Well, the same culprit

that created that happy story

destroyed that happy scenario.

And that is the continued drying up

of the planet.

And that's what we get

in that Genesis story.

Remember at the end

of the Genesis story,

it says,

and God set an angel

at the eastern gate of Eden

with a flaming sword

so that Adam and his children

could not find their way back

into paradise.

That's the memory

of the Saharan sun

scorching off the African veldt

and forcing those mushroom-using

pastoralists to settle

in the Nile Valley

and set up permanent settlements

and begin thinking about kingship,

large-scale agricultural projects,

and so forth and so on.

And what happened,

it was not as simple

as that may have made it seem,

you see.

This is really the theme

of this book

that I wrote for Bantam,

is the theme that cultures

wear drugs like clothing,

and they're never aware of it.

They just feel naked

without their particular drug.

And the clothing may differ.

You know, one culture feels

fully dressed

in penis sheaths and war paint.

Another culture isn't fully dressed

unless the gown is by Dior.

So there are different styles

of clothing,

and there are different styles

of mental clothing

in the form of drugs.

And these drugs promote

different kinds of cultural values.

And what happened

in this African situation

was a tragedy that in a way

we have seen enacted

in microcosm

in our own society.

It was that at a certain point

everything was perfect.

The monthly orgies,

the suppression of ego,

the group values,

the recent invention of language

was making food gathering

easy for women,

the abundant game

was making hunting easy for men,

so forth.

And so on.

But this drying of the African continent

didn't halt there.

It continued.

And pretty soon

there were problems.

Less game.

Less to be gathered.

And most important for my theory,

fewer mushrooms.

And when there became fewer mushrooms,

then there were two possibilities.

You could have your mushroom

orgies less frequently.

Or you could create

some kind of technology

for preserving the mushrooms

so that when you found

a lot of them

you could save some of them

for dry spells.

Literally for dry spells.

Now the problem with this strategy

is that in a world

without refrigeration

the strategy

which aboriginal people

in Australia,

in the Amazon basin,

the strategy which aboriginal people

tend toward

when they want to preserve

some delicate food

is they invariably go for honey.

Honey.

This is why some of you may know

that the Romans ate

hummingbird's tongues

pickled in honey.

It isn't because honey

was the preferred medium

for pickling hummingbird's tongues.

It was because that's a way

of preserving delicate food.

The problem with honey

is honey itself

can ferment

into a psychoactive compound.

Honey changes into mead.

Mead is a form of crude alcohol.

The impact

on a goddess worshipping

orgiastic,

non-hierarchical,

non-male dominant culture

of switching over

to the use of alcohol

is absolutely devastating.

In the same way

that I told you

what psilocybin did,

improves visual acuity,

promotes sexual activity,

delivers a religious experience,

we can talk about

what alcohol does.

It lowers sensitivity

to social cueing.

At the same time

that it gives an empowered sense

of ego.

In other words,

it makes you into a jerk.

It gives you the courage

to say and do

what if you are a decent person

you would otherwise never say

and never do.

It turns each one of us

into a Clarence Thomas.

This is not what's needed.

Boo.

Yes.

No.

Who knows?

Who is Clarence Thomas?

And time and time again

in human history

these kinds of synergies

have been enacted.

Well,

I want to say more about it.

That isn't the whole story.

That could be the whole story.

I mean there's enough in that

for it to be the whole story.

In other words,

if it's true that the mushroom

you know, suppresses male dominance

if it in fact promotes communal values

and so forth

then what a wonderful thing it must be.

And we can leave it there.

But that's only a small part

of the story.

The real story is

what is so wonderful about it

since it's a mental experience.

What is so wonderful about it

that it could halt

the human tendency

to devolve

into these counterproductive forms

and lifestyles?

Well,

what is so great about it

is that it is nothing less than

half of the intellectual universe.

It is

what I call the connection

to the Gaian mind.

In other words,

to this point,

what I've said is

could be imputed to be

just talk about

a superb psychedelic drug.

And so they're saying,

oh well,

so this guy advocates

the use of a superb psychedelic drug.

Seems reasonable or unreasonable

depending on

where you went to church.

But it's not that paradigm challenging.

But what is paradigm challenging

is the content

of the experience.

The content of the experience

is completely mind-boggling,

completely befuddling.

I don't know what we're going to do

with the content of the experience

because fully gotten out

and fully discussed

and fully realized,

it's not going to leave

one brick upon another

in the cheerfully naive edifice

that our half-baked civilization

has erected as universal truth.

We're not going to...

It's not...

Science is not going to be able

to survive the encounter

with the psychedelic experience

because it is not an encounter

with the Freudian,

you know, the repressed memories

of your miserable and battered childhood

or whatever it is you went through.

And it isn't even an encounter

with the miserable memories

of the battered childhood

of the human species

that we all went through

a la Carl Jung.

That is all there.

But that's in the hallway

where you hang your hat

and the antechamber

where they take your coat.

The main event, folks,

doesn't even have anything to do

with the psychology of human beings.

The main event is another dimension.

A dimension so bizarre,

so titanically peculiar,

so strange,

so unanticipated by our language,

our history, our literature,

that it is literally

like the discovery of another world.

And there's life in that world.

Now, a funny thing

about discovering new worlds

is that you usually,

when you get the new world,

all mapped out,

you usually discover

that there's somebody living there.

And for them,

it's not the new world at all.

And, you know,

you haven't discovered anything.

You've just shown up

in the middle of their scene

with a distorted wrap,

sort of like Christopher Columbus.

And this is what we find

with the psychedelics.

And this is why shamanism

becomes, to my mind,

the bridge to understanding

what this archaic revival

is all about.

The shamanic hallucinogens

are the meat of the thing,

the pith essence,

the center of the mandala.

But the bridge into that

is the effects

that these things have.

The content,

the experiences

that we can language

and tell each other about.

And what we are discovering

through shamanism,

through looking at it,

not through the condescending eyes

of the white man

who is just impressed

by the incredibly droll quaintness

of whatever these brown-skinned people

have dreamed up.

Not that,

but through a realization

that we are sick

and no doctor

can cure us

because we are not

that kind of sick.

It's soul sickness.

I mean it has to be

soul sickness.

When you see stuff

like Chernobyl

or the Kuwaiti oil fields

or the Hanford nuclear

reservation in Washington,

when you realize

what this really means,

then you realize

this is a mad species.

This is a terminally depraved

species.

And what is required

is a return

to a model

that can heal.

And this is what shamanism

has always been about.

And we have not

recognized it

because the part

of the human being

which shamanism addresses,

which is the soul

and the spirit,

we have a 500 year old tradition

that denies

that there are such things.

So for us,

it's absurd shamanism.

It is, you know,

painted rattles,

guys dancing around

in the middle of the night,

blowing perfumed water around

and smoking too much tobacco.

That's shamanism for us

because we cannot see

with the eyes that understand.

When we do,

what we realize is

that half of our mind

has been taken away.

from us.

That yes,

the human body

protrudes into profane space

as 120 to 350 pounds of meat

somewhere in the universe.

But that isn't

the domain of humanness.

The true domain of humanness

is inclusive of that

and much, much more

because the true domain

of humanness

is a domain

that honors the mind

as self

and as landscape.

I mean,

you are a creature

loose in a landscape of meaning

and you are

that landscape of meaning.

And by losing contact with this,

we have become essentially

pathological,

very needy.

This is a typical pattern

in a person

with an abused childhood.

They become very, very needy,

very thing-oriented,

very security-conscious,

very anxious.

This is a picture

of us and our psychology.

And we have,

we are so deep in

to the historical nightmare

that we can't ever remember

any other way

of doing business.

And we know we're messed up.

We know we're unhappy.

But what's to be done?

You know, I mean,

we have a million minor fixes

and people peddling

all of these things.

I mean, you've just been

through the aisles.

You know what I'm talking about.

But somehow,

salvation itself becomes

an impediment to salvation.

I mean, once you see

500 forms of salvation

being sold at prices

you can't afford,

the very notion of salvation

becomes obscene.

You know, it becomes

one more layer

in the obscene layering

that takes meaning out of life

and disempowers us

and turns us into

a subscription customer.

That seems to be

how we always are being forced

to end up.

Well, the only way

out of this, I think,

is to...

It takes courage

because you have to turn

your back on your culture

in the most profound sense there is.

Because there are many ways

to turn your back on your culture.

I mean, if everyone's wearing gray,

you can wear green.

That's one way to turn your back

on a culture.

But another way

is to break its laws.

Now, that's a little more serious

and, you know,

brings in big philosophical issues.

But in fact,

the culture is an enormous arrow

pointing,

go this way.

And you know what lies that way?

Impoverishment,

madness,

degradation and death.

That's where the culture's pointing.

You can see it.

Just look where we're headed.

If everyone on Earth aspires

to the kind of lifestyle

that you people can enjoy

by virtue of having paid the money

to be at a scene like this,

there isn't enough glass, metal and plastic

in the planet

to make that many

celicas and jaguars

and bluebirds and snowbirds

and all the rest of this crap.

So what is needed is

an awakening

and a awakening.

Now, I mentioned earlier in this talk

that in the 50s,

before they interfered with LSD research,

they were curing chronic alcoholism

with a single 500 gamma dose of LSD.

Well now, for heaven's sake,

nobody is suggesting

that LSD is a cure for alcoholism.

That, to me, is absurd.

It's not a cure for alcoholism.

It's a cure for stupidity.

And a person who is killing themselves

by drinking themselves to death

takes 500 mics of LSD

and says,

what a stupid person I am.

I'm killing myself.

And so then they look at their behavior

and they cease that behavior.

And this is what has to be

done on a societal scale.

And it is not as difficult

as we may wish to be assured

by the establishment.

The whole falderal

and hoopty-doo

about the 1960s was

that the crypto-fascist

bullshit agenda

was damn near overthrown

by a bunch of 19 and 20 year olds

on campuses scattered around

the high-tech world.

The male-dominant agenda

is so fragile

that any competitor

is felt as a deadly foe.

And the fact that these ideas

will not die

in spite of the fact that,

you know, they've raised the price

of an ounce of weed from $15

to $500.

They've made the price

of a pinch for growing weed

from a slap on the wrist

to lose everything you ever owned

or dreamed of owning.

And they cannot push it

into extinction.

It's because it's so much older

than their con game.

They've invented their con game

post-Sphinx or something.

And we're talking about

a reality that reaches back

15, 25, 30,000 years.

And it's a reality.

So far, I've only spoken...

I keep trying to get to this subject,

but I won't let myself

for some reason.

So far, I've spoken of it

as boundary dissolving,

promoting group sexual activity,

this and that and the other thing.

But those are like generalizations.

What is really interesting

about the psychedelic experience

is it shows you a mental universe

that you not only never see,

suspected existed,

but that you could not have suspected existed.

I don't think there's another way to it.

I mean, I'm not ready to categorically say

there's no other way to it.

And occasionally,

especially at gatherings like this,

people grab me and assure me

there are other ways to it.

And they say, you know,

if you just...

I want you to meet Babaji.

He's as good as psilocybin.

Oh, really?

I want to meet this man.

Because...

I mean, I...

Let me say a little bit more about this.

I would like to believe

that in principle,

you could get to these places

on the natch.

Only in principle, however,

because if some people say,

well, you know,

these things you describe

on DMT and psilocybin,

I can show you

how to do that naturally.

No, thank you.

Are you kidding?

Thank God I have the drug

as a kind of marker

so that I know

when I'm getting close to that stuff.

If I woke up one morning

in that place

and I couldn't tell myself

I'd taken mushrooms,

I would define myself

as seriously discombobulated

and wait to see what happens.

You know?

And people say,

well, don't you think

you ought to be able

to do it by yourself?

And I love this question

because the answer is

you can't do it by yourself.

That's the entire message

of the last 10,000 years

of human history.

The self is insufficient.

The ego will not suffice.

The only way you're ever

going to get anywhere

is you must humble yourself

to the point where you admit

that you can't do it

unless you have help

from someone whose idea of home

is a cow flop.

If you're willing to humble yourself

to that degree,

then maybe we can get somewhere.

The content of the psychedelic experience

is, I believe,

relating to that

is the sum total

of our humanness.

And I think,

based on experience,

that there is a certain amount

of leakage from the future

backward into the past.

And that many of the phenomena

that are being interpreted

as past lives

and reincarnation

and channeling

and regression this

and clairvoyant that,

all this has to do with

a misunderstanding about

how causality actually works.

That all of the impressions

upon which people are building

these models, channeling,

and spirit guides

and reincarnation and so forth,

the material upon which

these models are being built

is real.

But the models that are being built

are tremendous compressions

of the reality of the situation.

I mean, when someone tells me

that they experienced

a past life regression

and that they were a butcher

in 13th century Florence,

I always think to myself,

but you were a butcher

in 13th century everywhere.

And you were a butcher

in 14th century everywhere.

I mean, once the connection

is opened,

the connection is not particular.

The connection is general.

It is all reality

is who you are.

All reality is where you are.

And where you've been.

And where you will be.

And two things,

two things are operating

in the hidden dimension

of the human mind.

One of them is what I call

the Gaian Mind.

And this is being imaged

in this society

as the rebirth

of a kind of goddess.

People are realizing

on different levels

and at different levels

of sophistication

that the energy of being

can be imaged

as a female entelechy,

an enclosing, nurturing,

caring, forgiving

kind of entelechy.

And this is what

psychedelic shamanism

has always been about.

It's about a connection

to the Gaian Mind.

And this gives you,

obviously,

a tremendous sense

of being embedded

in a larger coherency

than merely the coherency

of your own small life.

And that's very empowering.

But it's not the general

sense of things

that this Gaian Mind imparts

that is really, to me,

the interesting part.

It's that the Gaian Mind

is a real mind.

It has information.

It can tell you things

of the most specific

and personally important sort.

This is, it tells you

where the game has gone.

It tells you

who poisoned the well.

It tells you

who raped so-and-so.

It tells you

why person X

is ill and unable to get well.

In other words,

the Gaian Mind is

the database

that all shamans

seek to connect to

in the act of curing,

in the act of functioning

as doctors for their society.

They get a connection

to the Gaian Mind.

And again, at this point,

I feel like I have to remind you,

I come to this as a skeptic,

as a sneerer.

I mean, I have no time

for this stuff

unless it's real.

It happens to be real.

You have to take psilocybin,

as far as I can tell,

to encounter it,

at least if you have

the kind of lumpen neurophysiology

that I have.

I mean, I've never been with

the etheric crowd, you know.

But this Gaian empowerment

is what allowed these societies

to live without technology,

without modern medicine,

without remote sensing devices,

without any of the

appurtenances of technology

that we take for granted.

And we have lost

this connection.

We can't even imagine it.

If someone were to begin talking

about how the Earth

was speaking to them

and giving them messages

about how to live,

you instinctively can sense

this is something to be

very, very careful with.

You give that rap

to the wrong person

and they'll drop a net over you

and you'll find yourself

stuffing envelopes

for a convalescent home

or something.

Okay, so that's part of it.

The Gaian mind.

And it is this feminine,

nurturing, enfolding thing.

It's the mind of nature itself.

It is really our own mind,

but extending then away from

this possessive notion

of our mind

back into the general concept

of mind.

The mind itself.

And then the other pole

or the other motif

encountered in this situation

is trickier to envision.

I call it the transcendental object

at the end of time.

This, if we were, you know,

fanatically symmetrical model makers,

then we would assign

a kind of masculine value to this.

But I'm not particularly into that.

I just see it as the transcendental object

at the end of time.

But what it is,

is it's a kind of attractor.

And we're not accustomed to thinking

of the historical situation

as being under the influence

of an attractor.

We inherit our belief

that history is being pushed

rather than pulled.

We inherit this idea

from the 19th century

when the theory of evolution

was elaborated.

These 19th century British atheists

who were creating the theory of evolution

were so horrified

by the power of deism,

meaning the belief in God per se,

that they constructed

a theory of evolution

where everything is pushed

from behind.

In Darwinian evolution,

there is no purpose.

A good Darwinist

never lets the word purpose

cross his lips.

A good Darwinist knows

that things just happen randomly

and then natural selection

makes its selection

and then you get whatever you get.

And this is understandable

in the intellectual atmosphere

of the 19th century

that they would want

to get away from that.

The problem is

we have matured now

beyond the simple atheism

of the 19th century

and it is now very reasonable,

sanctioned by mathematics

and dynamics

and so forth and so on,

it is now very reasonable

to speak of an attractor.

And this is...

I'm also a little nervous

to talk about this

because part of what I do

is I popularize.

I tell you things

which you should know yourself

or which you could know yourself

if you would but go to

a decent medical library

and spend the time

to look up all this botanical

and pharmacological data.

So I'm like a clearing house.

But then there's another thing

which I do

which I'm a little more nervous

and touchy about

which is I tell you what I think.

And it's just what I think.

It has exactly that much weight

behind it which is like zip.

You know?

I mean you don't have to believe this.

Why should you?

But based on 25 years

of fiddling with this stuff

and then doing a lot of reading

and head scratching,

I've come to the conclusion

that there is a transcendental object

ahead of us in time.

You can call it God.

You can call it Jesus.

You can call it Her.

You can call it flying saucers

from Zeta Reticuli.

Or the Pleiades.

I want to get all factions here.

Or Zenebel Ganubi,

my favorite stellar origin point.

But whatever you call it,

it's an attractor.

It lies ahead of us

in the future.

And all of human history

is being channeled toward it.

Pulled toward it.

And I see the entire history

of the universe

as the history of a journey

across a landscape of energy

and matter toward union

with this transcendental object.

And I have a theory of history.

Not the mathematical one.

Don't bolt for the door.

No.

This will be a cocktail party version

of the theory of history.

I have a theory of history

which is the universe

is a novelty-producing

and conserving engine

of some sort.

That's what we're inside, folks.

A novelty-making machine.

Now, what do I mean by novelty?

People say,

you mean like little plastic bugs

and puzzles inside plastic capsules.

Is that what you mean by novelty?

No, you idiot.

Of course not.

By novelty,

I mean something that has never been seen before.

Something unique.

The new connection.

I always think of the symbolist poet

L'Entremont

who said,

I am fascinated

by the kind of beauty

that arises when a bicycle

meets a sewing machine

on an operating table.

Now that's novelty, folks.

Because you just don't get that every day.

So, the universe is a novelty-producing engine.

It not only produces novelty

but it then preserves it

and builds upon it.

So, if we now look at

the story which science tells us,

and it's an interesting story, by the way,

if you think I say things

which are highly unlikely,

notice that I do not ask you to believe

that the universe sprang from

a point of matter smaller than a proton

in a single instant.

This is the position of science.

This is the limit case for credibility.

I mean, if you can believe that,

what in the world would you balk at

for crying out loud?

I mean, that is the limit case for credibility.

So, science tells us

that the universe sprang from nothing

in a single instant

and that it was very hot.

Very hot.

So, there were no molecules

such as you and I are made out of.

There were no atoms

such as lead and gold and water

are made out of.

There was only a pure plasma

of electrons.

That was all.

And the physics of that universe

were incredibly simple.

There were the pure plasma physics

unhindered by any other fields of any sort.

Well, the universe then cooled.

And as it cooled,

lo and behold, at a certain point,

electrons were able to fall into stable orbits

around atomic nuclei.

And at that point,

atomic systems formed.

And a whole new kind of chemistry

comes into being.

Further cooling.

Millions of years pass.

Then we get the carbon molecule

cooked out of new stars.

It has a six-valent structure

so that we get organic molecules.

Well, then, quickly,

we get long-chain polymers.

Very quickly, then,

long-chain polymers that can copy themselves.

And that becomes primitive life.

And at that point,

you then get complex life.

And then, sexuality,

meaning gene mixing,

as opposed to the previous thing,

which was vegetated,

like making cuttings from plants.

Well, do you see what's happening?

At each successive stage,

the previous level of complexity

is not only retained,

but used to build upon

toward the next level of complexity.

Well, the wonderful thing about this cosmology is

that instead of human beings

being like mute witnesses

to the grandeur of Jehovah's creation

or some kind of trip like that,

instead, you discover,

aha, human beings are important.

We are more novel

than anything else in nature.

And we, 20th century human beings,

are more novel, more interconnected,

more complex and in possession

of more and different kinds of knowledge

than most, notice most,

of the people who preceded us.

So this growing toward complexity

seems to be what the universe is all about.

Now, it doesn't go on

for hundreds of millions of years

into the future,

because as you can see,

each successive stage

has preceded more quickly

than the stage before it.

So now,

we are in what I call

the short epochs.

We are in periods of time

where more change goes on

in a 10-year period

than went on in a million-year period

near the birth of the universe.

We are living in the complex,

novel end of things.

And that complexity

and that novelty,

which we experience

as tremendous stress in our lives,

ushers into the transcendental object

at the end of time,

not that far in the future.

And we,

as psychedelic people,

have an obligation upon ourselves

to anticipate

and to help realize

this future.

It is upon us.

Every messiah,

every religious ontology,

every manager

of every booth at this exhibit

is reflecting

a distorted scintilla

of the spiritual reality

of the transcendental object

at the end of time.

Every one of us

is a particularized

and distorted image

of this transcendental object

into which we are being dissolved.

Into which global culture

is being dissolved.

So...

Well, so what?

So we can cut into this cycle

at any point.

We can become aware of it.

We can become part of it.

We can deny it.

There is no loss

in the circuit.

There is no blame.

Becoming, then,

what psychedelic means is

it means

claiming this dimension

as your own.

You know, Plato said

time is the moving image

of eternity.

That moving image of eternity

can be beheld

in the silent darkness of the mind

on five grams of psilocybin.

And if you think

the universe is mundane,

if you think there are no more

frontiers to cross,

no more adventures to be had,

I'm telling you,

you can turn your living room

into the bridge of Magellan's ship

on a long Saturday evening

with five grams of psilocybin

in silent darkness.

We are living

in the most empowering age

in human history

because all of the energy

of the ancestors,

not only the human ancestors,

but our animal,

our primate ancestors,

all of that energy

pours into,

is focused into,

this moment.

We are the transition generation.

We have one foot in matter

and one foot in hyperspace.

And we can redeem

the trust

of thousands of years.

All of the horror

of history

can be redeemed

if we don't drop the ball.

Every pogrom,

every

every instance of racial,

sexual,

or minority persecution

can be redeemed

if we give

the human adventure meaning.

And we give it meaning

by discovering

the totality

within ourselves

and then exemplifying it

for each other.

And this dissolves boundaries,

empowers the weak,

uh,

enlightens the strong,

and brings hope to all.

And it can only be done

if we accept

the gifts which nature

has offered us.

Thank you very, very much.