Shamans of the Amazon - Bonus Chapter

If we can change our mind, we can take hold of this process and halt it.

We can hear the surf of history pounding on the rugged shores of apocalypse.

The Millennium is an effort to empower shamanic understanding,

to give a rebirth to feminism, to be fully empowered with our planetary heritage.

While making this film, Terence died of cancer.

Before his death, Terence invested a lot of time developing his website,

where many unique aspects of psychedelics and shamanism are covered.

Terence lives on in cyberspace.

Human future will be designed on how conscious we are able to make ourselves.

And if there are plans,

which accelerate consciousness,

then we must locate and utilize these things.

Something could jump out from some unexpected dimension and change everything.

Part of the reason we have a drug problem is because we don't have an intelligent language

to talk about substances, plants, psychedelic states of mind, sedative states of mind,

states of amphetamine excitement.

We can't make sense of the problem and the opportunities offered by substances

unless we clean up our language.

Drugs is a word that's been used by governments

to make it impossible to think creatively about the problem of substances

and abuse and availability and so forth and so on.

It's a kind of a paradox, isn't it?

Drugs mean that which cures us and the greatest social problem of the generation.

So there, right there, you see the schizophrenia involved in thinking about drugs.

Apparently there are good drugs sanctioned by science and medicine

and bad drugs used by brown people in strange rites

and growing in unusual plants in distant parts of the world.

This kind of thinking, because it's naive,

leads, of course, to social problems and bad politics and bad social policy.

From the time I was very young, I was fascinated with the idea

of extremely dramatic changes in consciousness

from which one recovers after a few hours, induced by plants.

And I discovered through the writing of Aldous Huxley and other people

that this was a worldwide religious...

and cultural phenomenon that my own Catholic middle-class upbringing

had completely overlooked and denied.

And I've been fascinated with it ever since.

To my mind, human history is the story of one substance after another

distorting or transforming human values and society.

A perfect example would be sugar.

Most people don't even think of sugar as a drug,

and yet we may think cocaine,

cocaine distorted moral and political values in Latin America,

but sugar brought back slavery.

Slavery actually died with the Roman Empire.

Nobody worked agricultural products with slaves in the Middle Ages.

It wasn't until the early 1400s that the Portuguese began producing sugar,

and they used up Jews and prisoners,

and so then they started buying human beings

from African... from Arab traders.

And the Pope was in on the deal,

and everybody was in on the deal.

I mean, this is drug corruption

of the central institutions of society on a massive scale.

Every society chooses a small number of substances,

no matter how toxic,

and enshrines them in its cultural values,

then demonizes all other substances,

and uses... and then persecutes and launches witch hunts

against those users whenever some political pretext requires

witch hunts and persecutions.

So it's an old game, and it's been played in many places.

Hopefully, part of the advancement of society

toward ideas of universal human rights and that sort of thing,

it certainly must include the idea of the universal human right

to take responsibility for and to alter your own state of consciousness

as you see fit.

I don't think we can even pretend

that we are on the edge of a civilized dialogue

until we grant that people's minds, like their bodies,

must be a domain free from government control.

In American law, we have the notion of life, liberty,

and the pursuit of happiness.

If the pursuit of happiness means anything,

it must mean the right to use and experiment

with substances and plants.

The fact that these things have been illegal

in most countries for 50 years

means there is a huge lag

in understanding the impact of these things on human beings.

How many people have taken MDMA,

and yet MDMA has not been thoroughly studied by science?

How many people have smoked EMT?

Same thing.

In a way, by making these drugs illegal,

we're setting ourselves up

for a potential catastrophe someday

when some side effect is overlooked

because the drugs were not rationally reviewed

with an eye not toward keeping them out of the hands of the public,

but with an eye toward public safety

and educating the public in safe use of these things.

The state should not, in the matter of drugs,

any more than in the matter of sex,

act as the secret agent for the agenda of the church.

And that's what's happening.

People want to stimulate themselves.

They want to explore their consciousness.

They want to sedate themselves.

Who are we to stand in their way

with a moral ideology

and the long, heavy arm of the law

to interfere with that?

It distorts civilized values.

That's the bottom line.

Drug repression distorts civilized values

and political discourse.

Anyone who has actually been around people using psychedelics

know they have tremendous therapeutic potential,

tremendous potential to launch people into confrontations

with aspects of their personality or their history

that they are in denial of.

The people who hold that these psychedelics

substances have no application

have very little actual personal experience with them.

It's the old story of my mind is made up,

don't confuse me with facts.

I think it's a great tragedy of 20th century science

that the original excitement

about exploring consciousness and mental illness

generated by the discovery of LSD

gave way to establishment paranoia

and repression of drug-using populations.

The excitement in psychology

when LSD was first introduced

was like the excitement in the physics community

when the atom was smashed

and everybody thought,

well, now we'll understand mental illness,

schizophrenia, memory, so forth.

And instead, the government lost its nerve.

Because it saw that these substances

have a potential for deprogramming people

to institutional values.

And that was so terrifying

that all the promise for mental illness

and creativity studies and so forth and so on

was sacrificed to institutional paranoia

about the fact that drugs might actually cause people

to wake up to some of the abuses and scams

that were being run by late modernism and capitalism.