Taxonomy of Illusion

So in the 1960s, our speaker, Terrence, was a student, like many of you, at UC Berkeley,

and he left in the middle of things to go on a tour around the world for seven years

that ended in the deepest Amazon basin,

where he had an experience that has determined his life in the 20 years following,

and which is the subject of his latest book, True Hallucinations.

So now in this historic moment, after all this time,

Terrence will ascend the platform of the University of California for the first time.

What I thought I would talk about when I was approached to do this,

the pressure was to say something new, which is a heart-sinking pressure.

To a warhorse of the lecture circuit, I started out thinking I would never repeat myself

and sometimes wonder if I'll ever have a new idea again.

But what I wanted to talk about this evening was illusions,

and I called the lecture The Taxonomy of Illusion,

because I think it's interesting to attempt to classify,

and relate, the various kinds of illusions that stand between us

and that presupposed, naked, radiant truth

that has more or less driven the engines of Western philosophy since Plato.

Of course, the great victory of modernity is to disabuse ourselves of such naive notions,

but...

they die hard, I think.

Ralph mentioned my latest book,

and I didn't... I don't intend to talk about the book particularly,

but in the book I quote

the only piece of poetry in the whole thing,

not written by me.

I now see that I seem to have lost it.

Oh, no, here it comes up.

But it relates to...

It relates to this on many, many levels,

this question of illusion,

and the relationship of the self to the real,

and where the world falls in that equation,

and the limits of knowledge,

and all that other good psychedelic stuff

that needs to be considered.

The quote is From Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov,

and if you don't know this book,

you should.

It is without doubt one of the funniest books

in the English language,

and it takes the form of a very long poem,

and then the commentary upon this poem.

The poem is written by a character

that Nabokov creates named John Shade,

and the part that I wanted to call to your attention

this evening runs like this.

That rare phenomenon,

the iridule,

when beautiful and strange

in a bright sky above a mountain range,

one opal cloudlet in an oval form

reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm

which in a distant valley has been staged,

for we are most artistically caged.

Now, this is a very strange piece of poetry,

this is not like even Wallace Stevens at his most obscure.

In the first place, this word, the iridule,

you won't find this word in any dictionary,

and yet I sensed that this is obviously the word

for this phenomenon.

I know what he's talking about.

I have seen this,

this opal cloudlet in an oval form,

which reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm

in a distant place.

We're here, we're in the realm of mirage,

and nature as mirage,

and nature as mirrored labyrinth.

And then the final point,

and I'll go through all this in the course of talking to you,

but the final line about being, our time is now,

being artistically caged.

This is, I think,

where the psychedelics come in,

because psychedelics allow one to pierce

beyond the veil of cultural illusion,

beyond the linguistic momentum of what has been handed on,

what has been handed on.

And the faith of Tantra and magic and psychedelics

is that the apparent intransigent appearance of the world

can somehow be overcome by an act of magic.

I used to collect Tibetan tankas,

and the texts which go with some of these tankas,

I remember one in particular, which, coming out of, you know,

coming out of the Tibetan,

the translation was, all things being reversed,

the great Hla, the great God, appears instantly.

You see, the precondition for magic

is the reversal of causality somehow.

And as moderns, we have grown

to give great credence, I think, to the idea that the world is,

largely a linguistic structure,

largely created through the participation of the observer.

But we have not been able to take that perception

and turn it into a technology.

Instead, we are still driven by the blind momentum

of atomic structure.

Who was it who said the atoms blindly run?

And then I think it was Whitehead who said,

yes, but within the body,

they blindly run according to the body's plan.

You see, what I think we're dealing with are patterns,

and then the indeterminate dimensions between patterns.

And it's in those indeterminate places,

within the interstices of reality,

that the observer is able to establish him or herself,

and then model back the world.

The reason I wanted to talk about a taxonomy of illusion

was because I thought it was important to relate

the various styles of hyperseeing, non-seeing,

and mis-seeing together.

Because I think that the heuristic consequences

of doing that are to realize just how shifting the sands are

upon which the ontological edifice of Western thinking rests.

I mean, that's always the point, you see,

to deconstruct Western civilization,

because Western civilization,

the toxic consequences are now clear for everyone to see.

So the first, the first category or grand family of illusions,

which we would put into our taxonomic key,

would be social illusions.

And when I, and you know, later we can argue this,

but at this point in the, in the discussion,

illusion is slash delusion.

So the great social illusions, delusions,

and consumerism as my clinical framework,

other than orderly expectations,

and sense of должен of the spatial sense,

that's why we're called Targeting despair.

People resist this citation of trust,

and when they're Probably timestassed aboutN

they call them these Irakles' throughbecue delusions.

Well understood.

are sexism, racism, xenophobia, egoism, classism.

The world is riddled and ruled by these social illusions,

and no one is free of them.

And so they constitute one broad category.

I might just mention as an aside

a book which was very influential on me,

and I never heard anybody else ever mention it,

was a book by Rockcliffe called

Illusions and Delusions of the Supernatural and the Occult.

This was a 19th century book which I, as a kid, got in a Dover reprint.

And it was in a wonderful era where the study of anomalies was still young,

and so this book had everything poured in together,

from mesmerism, ectoplasm, to people who had tumors that they carried around in wheelbarrows,

to birds that did advanced arithmetic, so forth and so on.

And it was a very, very much from the point of view of Victorian rationalism.

And it also mentioned psychedelics.

It was what it really was, was a category of edges.

And,

or a catalogue of edges, I'm sorry.

And it's only then in the subsequent 40, 35 years

that that Wunderkammerer approach to illusion,

and I assume you all know what I mean by that.

I mean, I'm referring to the era before the rise of Linnaean natural science,

when naturalists would simply fill cabinets,

with anomalous, fascinating, and strange objects.

So the tarantulas might be mixed in with the chambered nautiluses,

which might be stirred into the Zuni fetishes,

which might be next to the something else.

Then later, these Wunderkammerers,

these curiosity cabinets, as we would call them in English,

gave way to Linnaean taxonomy.

In the same way, over the past hundred years,

I think the study of illusion and anomaly

has attempted to rationalize itself.

Spatial illusions are an entirely different family

of illusory phenomena.

And we all have encountered at some level, I imagine,

the specially constructed environments that occur

in behavioral,

psychological psychology labs,

that trick you into thinking that the person in the foreground

is smaller than the person in the background,

and so forth and so on.

These kinds of illusions are probably fairly trivial,

except that they address perception.

And when we get to psychedelics as a source of illusion,

this is more important.

Another of the great family of illusions are,

in thinking about them, I call them ontological illusions,

illusions of states of being,

which may or may not, in fact, be reflected in reality.

UFOs, Bigfoot, crop circles,

the entire panoply of poltergeist,

and this sort of thing.

Ontological illusions.

And these are very interesting.

I mean, one could give time to this alone,

because there are persistent ontological illusions

in the human sensorium,

such as angels, elves, demons,

jinns, aphrites, nixies, and sprites, that crowd.

And there are ontological illusions,

such as angels, elves, demons, jinns, aphrites, nixies, and sprites, that crowd.

And there are ontological illusions

that seem somehow tied to the evolving modalities

of the group mind.

UFOs are an obvious example.

I mean, aside from the fact that people

have occasionally seen strange things in the sky,

the UFO archetype really emerges in the late 40s

with the Rainier lights.

And then a whole set,

a whole set of taxonomic features

of this particular brand of illusion coalesce.

The silvery discs, the alien denizens with the cat eyes

and the rubbery flesh,

those same guys who give you

unscheduled proctological examinations

in the middle of the night.

But notice that,

that particular taxonomic feature

has been added recently

through the assiduously careful scientific research

of Streber and company.

So these things are in a,

well, a cattle mutilation is an interesting one,

very confined in time and space.

The crop circle thing similarly.

It's not that,

there aren't crop circles,

but that what we have is essentially a pattern

in an English wheat field,

but then radiating out from that are the illusions

of those who cast their gaze upon it.

Those who proclaim it,

telluric communication or particle beam research

carried on by the air force,

version it was supposed it was supposed that a particular crop circle had been

decoded found to be a lost Sumerian language which when decoded said

basically don't stop here it was essentially a no parking zone for time

machines they were saying you know this entire century just to maintain speed

and you know do not. Psychedelic illusions again this is a related

category but different from these ontological illusions by illusion I mean

that these are confrontations with phenomena and apparently subjective

things that the world is manifesting.ings with phenomena and apparently subjective

ground and an assumed rational observer, where then there is a more than ordinary amount of

ambiguity. I mean, most of reality is illusory. It's just that we do each other the courtesy

of not pointing this out. Actually, you trace a very thin data path through the world, and

most of what we assume without question, we have very little evidence for. I mean, something as

simple as, well, like that Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world. Well, first of all,

very few people have ever seen it. I saw it, and because I saw it from a distance of about 500

miles, it looked quite small. And my own testimony as to whether it was the highest

mountain in the world or not, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

It would be fairly unreliable. And besides, what does that mean anyhow, and how the hell do you

figure it out? I mean, here we have one mountain in the Himalayas and another in Bolivia,

and you're telling me you know which is the higher mountain? It must rest on a whole bunch

of weird and fishy assumptions resting on even shakier data. And that's just the question of

the highest mountain in the world, give or leave.

Leave alone the state of your lover's heart, or your banker's for that matter. What's important

about the psychedelic family of illusions is that they propel the entire issue of illusion

to center stage, because they demonstrate that the assumed bedrock of quote-unquote ordinary

perception is in fact...

No bedrock at all. It's simply a very soft dwell point somewhere in the mysteries of

metabolism. And the consciousness, whatever its relationship to the brain, is spectacularly

affected by the perturbation of the physical brain by endogenously introduced...

pseudo-neurotransmitters of some sort. And to my mind, this is very interesting. Alexander Shulgin

has secured in his work that you can take a molecule that is completely inactive, and by

moving one atom to a different place on the ring, you can change this into an active compound. Now,

it seems to me you could hardly...

have a neater demonstration of the quantum mechanical foundation of consciousness, because you've

moved one atom, and you've moved the mountains of mind 500 miles from where they were resting when

last you looked. It's quite spectacular. And it argues then that mind...

Which, strangely enough, the materialists always claimed this. They just put different

emphasis on the words. Mind is a kind of iridescence upon metabolism. For the materialists,

that was a dismissal, because to them, what iridescence meant was a tertiary phenomenon, not

inimical to the structure of matter, but necessarily perceived only through the intercession of an

observer. See, that's what iridescence is. It's somehow...

A more fragile part of nature than the rocks, the trees, and the waters, because it's a play between

light and mind. Again, a kind of illusion, a mirage. Now, in a very different category of illusion,

and this is one worth considering, because it's the one we tend not to place in this category, and that is the

illusion of materialism. This has broken down completely. The idea that the material world was real sustained

the investigation of nature from Parmenides to the early years of the 20th century. Virtually the entire history of

human engagement in the abstract intellectual modeling of matter, the idea that the material world was real,

matter was assumed to be pretty much as presented in perception. Solid, enduring, having simple location,

meaning it stays where you put it, and when you look there again, it's there, that sort of thing.

Now, one of the best kept dirty secrets of western civilization is that the cause of the

core science, which is physics, the science which was always the envy of all the other sciences

for its mathematical formalism and its incredible predictive ability, because it's not unusual in

physics to predict from theory an experimental result to the third or fourth decimal. This is

spectacular congruence between theory and experiment. You don't get that in the social

sciences, or even in physical, need I mention, even in physical chemistry. However, the investigation

of matter has now been pushed to such extremes that matter has shed its easily recognized,

and familiar face, and has become something much slipperier, much more dependent on the presence of

the observer, much less easily located in space and time, something much more of the nature of

thought than of the familiar conception of matter. This word has not reached even as far as biology,

yet. The biologists are still laboring under the notion of the reality of physical material. If any of you

read this book that was published last year with much to do called Consciousness Explained, actually it

should have been called Consciousness Explained Away, here was an effort to drag out all the old material

of science and explain away consciousness. The problem is, matter itself has taken on the qualities of mind,

and as this realization relativizes the life sciences, I think there is going to be a new interest in the

potential for psychedelics to elucidate the potential for psychedelics to elucidate the potential for psychedelics to elucidate

mental functioning, because what will become respectable, you see, is talk of the observer. This is what has invaded

physics, the most rarefied and formal of all the sciences, had in order to make sense of its enterprise, allow the

observer a kind of primacy with the thing observed. As this seeps into the life sciences and psychology,

hopefully, it will be possible to make sense of the thing observed. If any of you read this book, I think there is going to be a

the phobia of actually involving yourself in your field of study that informs all these reductionist

ratomorphic types in the schools of psychology will be overturned. Well, having flayed that dead horse

sufficiently, another category of illusion that needs to be

addressed, I think, is

How would one call it? Well, basically a

philosophical

illusion or

philosophical slash religious

illusion. This is the idea

that by a direct appeal to intuition, we can somehow gain a

foothold on truth. I think this is as specious as

the notion that we can gain a foothold on truth

through reason or experiment.

This foothold on truth idea may have to be given up.

I'm sure some of you have heard me recall

the situation where Wittgenstein was raving about something

and one of his students said, but is it the truth? And he said, well, it's true enough.

And this really means a great divide has been crossed when you can say that because it means you

understand now that you are no longer a

fairy in a platonic

super world, but that you are actually a monkey with a brain full of mush trying to sort out

you know, what's right in front of you. True enough

is what we should probably rest with.

And

you know,

illusions abound.

One, for instance, I was speaking of these religious

ontologies. I was talking to someone recently who

amazed me because I've always thought of them as a person of great intelligence, but who would never be

acclaimed from the arms of Mother Church.

And we had dinner last week and he said, I realized it finally comes down to

do you believe the universe is being run by the ghost of a Galilean

politician? And he said, you know, put that way, I realized that it wasn't.

Other

religious myths are less easily undone, I think.

Monotheism has an appealing

philosophical neatness, but it leads

apparently to

coliterectomy. So, you know, you want to watch that.

This

search for philosophical neatness may make for strange bedfellows.

And of course, Buddhism. I love the illusion of Buddhism.

It's the illusion that illusion can be transcended.

And

again,

not really doing

genuflection to the animal nature.

It's amazing to me. I mean, if you were to meet a termite

who stated that his or her

goal in life was the perfect modeling of the cosmos, you would think it was quite a comic,

a comic undertaking, and yet how different are we that we should presume

to more than a shadow of

a shadow of the truth. Well then, finally, or I don't know finally, but completing my laundry list here,

linguistic truth or the truth of

language and the illusions that language weaves. Because

someone quite intelligent said

language was invented so that people could lie.

In other words, it gives you that fudge factor of

obfuscation, where someone says,

you know, why did you do that?

Well, the best approach is, I didn't do that.

You know, you thought I did that. What you thought you saw, you didn't see. In other words, I suppose that

lawyers are probably the people who have done the finest work with language, and

behind them

politicians, and the true

potential for language to elevate and to unite

the community was early on betrayed into the production of

illusory ideological goods, which could then be marketed among the people and

to spread confusion.

Psychedelics reflect on this because psychedelics stretch and pull and melt and

and recast the illusion-producing machinery of language.

I mean, I think that if you had to say the one thing

that psychedelics do for everyone,

whether they have a good trip or a bad trip,

because it's up to them to interpret what they make of this,

is it shows you the relativity of your cultural viewpoint.

You know, that it's just your point of view.

You inherited it from a geographical area,

a culture, a set of parents.

It has no relationship whatsoever to anything anchored

in some kind of metaphysical super space.

It's just your cultural point of view.

And travel actually does the same thing.

And I've always felt there was a weird affinity

between psychedelics and travel.

And I suppose,

many people have,

or we wouldn't call it a trip,

and we wouldn't call it a journey.

But travel shows you the relativity of culture.

And what's really happening when you travel, you see,

is you're moving from one language domain to another.

We don't think of it that way,

but that is in fact what is happening.

You can never see the Amazon jungle

if you

keep intact

the bubble of linguistic assumptions

of the place you started out from.

Every place will withhold its secrets from you.

I learned this in the Amazon

because the first time I went,

I had virtually no botany.

And to me, the jungle was green.

That's what it was.

And it was many shades of green,

and it was beautiful,

and it was this and that,

but it was basically green.

The second time I went,

I was with a lot of botanists,

and within days, you know,

you learn the families.

That's how they do it.

With the same taxonomy I'm here applying to illusion

was really developed to describe plants and animals.

So you learn the families,

the plants with square stems,

the plants with the opposed leaves,

the plants with the particular flower structure.

Once you know families, then you have a linguistic wedge in.

But the corrupting or curious thing about language

is that like all tools, it shapes its user

in ways that are not suspected until it's too late.

So for instance, the way in which Western civilization

is totally obsessed with the subject-object relationship,

you know, and it's the basis of our science,

our polity, our relations to commerce,

the concept of product, all of these things

come out of the subject-object relationship,

which is an aspect of language.

So I point all this out because

in talking about my new book,

somebody said that I had gone too far.

And I was amused because it implied from what, you know?

It's not like there is a King's X

where gray beards in white coats tend

the sacred vestal fire.

They're like the fires of reality.

There is no reality.

There are only people who know this

and people who don't know this

and are therefore being manipulated

by the people who do know it.

This is true, or true enough.

And, you know, one of the things

that has amazed me with my own personal career,

because I started out basically shoveling snow

in a cow town in Colorado,

and by fate or who knows what,

come to the present position,

and what I notice as I traverse levels

on a supposed ladder of success,

where you would expect there to be more and more competition

and people and activity,

actually it gets emptier and emptier.

There is nobody minding the store as far as I can tell.

This is why I'm so unsympathetic to conspiracy theory.

We could use a few conspiracies.

Nobody is minding the store.

Everybody is getting rich.

Personally rich.

And so they don't have time to advance the Aryan race

or the Council of Zion or any of this fantasy

and illusion that haunts the world of conspiracy theory.

Rather it seems everything is being left

pretty much to develop on its own,

because people are afraid to grab or touch

the levers and buttons in the control room

of the historical vehicle.

And what that means then,

is that people who can cut through

these many, many illusions,

the illusion of materialism,

the illusion of business as usual,

the illusion of benevolent institutions carefully guiding us

to reasonable destinies.

If you cut through all that,

if you disabuse yourself of all that,

you will empower yourself to eventually be able to stand up

in delicate social and political situations

and just say, bullshit.

That's bullshit.

And this is worth considering doing,

simply because we have an imperiled planet

on our hands.

We have been, for a long, long time,

the victims of illusion.

Western civilization, Stefan Daedalus was right.

History is a nightmare from which one must awaken.

Quite literally.

I mean, we have been blind to what we have been doing.

We are blind at this moment to what we are doing.

If in a single moment the actual nature of our predictions

were to fully make itself felt in the mind of any one of us,

I think it would be paralyzing.

It would be horrifying.

We have waited until the last moment of the last hour.

The house is burning down around us,

and we rouse ourselves from the stupor of materialism,

the stupor of Christianity and scientism,

the stupor of male dominance, sexism and racism.

If we don't rouse ourselves from this stupor,

the momentum toward extinction is now practically irreversible.

You know, the Grateful Dead like to sing that song,

we need a miracle every day.

We certainly do.

And so then that brings me back to my original point.

That outside the then of culture lies an unmapped terra incognito,

as vast as the new world was to the old in the 15th century,

as vast as outer space appears to us now.

The new world outside of culture

is a world that can be conquered through vision and language.

And, you know, many of you have sat through my recitations

of what it's like to smoke DMT.

Many of you I'm sure are familiar with the medieval woodcut

of the guy sticking his head through the cogs and wheels

of the cosmic machinery to observe a new world outside.

The message here is,

and it's more than a message,

it's a message if you just come to events like this

and then go back to studying cost accounting,

it's an experience, if you will,

but avail yourselves of these tools,

the experiences of the discovery of a new world.

A new world as real as any world that we know.

It's not going to come from Time magazine

or the Secretary General of the United Nations

or anybody like that.

It isn't that the world is tired and played out

and that all frontiers have been explored.

Every culture could support that viewpoint

within certain classes and in certain situations.

But, in fact, it has never been true

and it isn't true now.

We are monkeys

and monkeys love a hell of a good fight

and we have a hell of a fight bearing down on us

because we have to clean up the mess.

We're not going to go silently

into the gentle night of extinction.

It's just not going to happen that way.

Creativity,

creativity is going to be unleashed.

Struggle is going to be an unavoidable part

of trying to steer this battleship away

from the cataracts of history

in which we are now caught.

I believe that there is a tremendous obligation

upon the privileged classes

of the high-tech industrial democracies,

and I dare say that includes everyone in this room,

a tremendous obligation

to attempt to deconstruct the bomb

that we have inherited.

That is literally our situation.

The gift from the past,

from the 19th century,

from the 1940s,

from the psychology of Nixon and Johnson and that crowd

is a ticking bomb.

Except that it's a planet.

And it's the greatest challenge to intelligence

that intelligence has ever faced.

And yet it's precisely the kind of challenge

that intelligence should be able to meet.

Because what it requires is

large-scale strategic planning,

implementation of visionary responses.

It is not

it is not incremental.

It's sudden,

complete,

and dramatic.

And I really believe

that there will only be one chance.

You know?

It's, we are circling the runway of post-history.

And the engines are running low.

And there is one approach.

And then, you know, if you miss that approach,

you're into the drink.

Now we can use,

we have the great good fortune

to be approaching the end of a millennium.

Would it be redundant to say

this only happens once in a thousand years?

Yes.

And it's extraordinarily fortunate.

Once I was in England

and I ran into somebody I hadn't seen for 20 years.

And I was amazed.

And I said to Rupert,

how often does one get a chance

to meet someone one hasn't seen for 20 years?

And he said,

well, I dare say,

I suppose every 20 years.

We can use the millennium,

this apparent coincidence of our dilemma

and a calendrical turning point

to create awareness of opportunity.

And we can use the psychedelics

to dissolve boundaries between ourselves,

and other people,

between institutions that govern,

and the governed.

And basically,

we have to insist

on the seriousness of the situation

and the potential for solutions.

And what it means

is a much more radical break

with American society

than we've been willing to contemplate

in the last 20 years.

We went through this thing

with the two-term governor of Arkansas.

And it took a year and a half

to play that all out

and to see what it comes to.

And what it comes to

is Washington is convulsed

over the possibility of closing an air base

near Sacramento.

So how can we even conceive

of this government

making an impact

on the real problems?

It is still government by flim-flam.

And that would be all very well

if we had 500 years

to dig ourselves out of this dilemma.

But if a radical political alternative

is not opened up in this country,

then we are essentially,

I think, going to amuse

and entertain ourselves

into extinction.

The ordinary orthodox system

has failed.

What Bill Clinton exists to prove

at best

is that people of good will

make no difference

in those institutions

because they are compromised

and corrupted

from the very beginning.

It's just the way it is.

Those institutions are set up

for business as usual.

Business as usual at this point

is a death sentence

on the human race.

What has to be done

is a tribalizing of culture,

an ecstaticizing of culture,

a dissolving of hierarchy.

That means self-empowerment

through claiming

the new information technologies,

through deconditioning

from propaganda,

through deconditioning

from the pharma-phobia

that holds everyone

within the pre-programmed molds

that are being handed down

from Madison Avenue in Hollywood.

It means actually realizing

that your life is your own.

Your destiny is your own.

It isn't within the confines

of the culture

because the culture is dissolving.

And to the degree

that the word is put out,

that phenomenon will accelerate.

We are in an extraordinary transition.

Everything that has worked

now doesn't,

meaning global economic systems,

control of the spread

of epidemic disease,

so forth and so on.

All these systems

are breaking down.

And yet the new systems

are not yet in place.

So this is a situation

of extraordinary malleability

and a situation in which

people of great vision

and great ego

can make tremendous impact.

So it's a very dangerous situation.

We saw this

in the 1930s in Germany

and in Europe

where there were all kinds

of potentials,

all kinds of possibilities.

We forget how powerful

a visionary Marxism was

before the rise of fascism.

Movements like Bauhaus

and Dada and Surrealism

all had agendas

which disappeared then

under the rise of fascism.

This must not happen again.

And what it has to do with

is resisting images

that are coming

from the reality studio,

resisting the images

that are coming off the tube,

coming through the newspapers,

and creating a community

based on psychedelics,

sexuality,

sensitivity,

and good sense.

Cultural value

and what good sense will mean

in this situation

is the preservation

of the earth,

the preservation of diversity,

deconditioning from product fetishism,

deconditioning from

energy overconsumption.

All these things we understand,

but we seem to lack

the power to change our minds

or if we have that power,

then the power to change

other people's minds.

And I am into psychedelics

not because I think it's a sure thing,

but because I think it is

the only game in town.

In other words,

it's the only thing I've ever seen

change an individual

on a time scale

similar to the time scale

that we have

if we're going to make a difference.

I've seen over and over again,

I'm sure many of you have,

people go into a psychedelic jerks

and come out halfway decent human beings,

you know,

eight hours later.

If we had 500 years

to steer global society

into safe harbor,

it might be possible to do that,

but we don't.

I mean, I really believe

that we are being asked

to participate

in the birthing

of a new order of being

and that there is reason

for great optimism

and hope

because

it looks like we're just boring in

to solid rock,

but in fact,

there's somebody else boring

through that solid rock

and they have triangulated

our approach

and they are hurrying

to meet us.

I don't think we fell into this situation

because of bad fate

or bad destiny.

This is part of the process.

History is what happens

when an animal species,

an advanced animal,

falls under the influence

of a transformative attractor

of some sort.

History is only about 25,000 years

in duration.

The interesting part

in the last 5,000 years,

what has happened

is that something confounding

has entered the local situation

or was always dormant there

but has stirred to wakefulness

and it is not God,

not the God

that in Milton's wonderful phrase

hung the lamps like stars in heaven.

It isn't that God.

Maybe it's the God of biology,

but whatever it is,

it is to us

as we are to the termite

and what it is doing

is it is casting

an enormous transcendental shadow

back through time

over the epigenetic landscape

of biological becoming

and in our species

for reasons

mysterious to me,

we mirror this thing

and it has swung our compass

away from the forward flow

of genetic theme and variation

and in a course orthogonal

to biology,

a course set

on the transcendental

and it is pulling us

toward it

through the medium

of transforming our languages

through the medium

of the imagination

which is after all

this mysterious mental domain

in which we are whispered to

by angels, demons, gods, ancestors, aliens

and out of that intercourse

culture, self-transforming

shedding its face every hundred years

building on novelty

is ascending toward

a reaching out

toward the unspeakable.

This has been going on

I think

for billions of years.

It has obviously

and incontrovertibly

been going on

since the advent of consciousness

in the human species

and now we're there.

We're in the final domain

of the confrontation

with the secret.

It is impossible to conceive

of history going on

for hundreds of years.

The planet cannot sustain it.

All of these social structures

and institutions

that we have surrounded ourselves with

are obviously lifeboats.

They are not made to last.

They are made to carry us

to a certain point

in the life of

the earth

and we are now there

or we are within

20, 30, 40, 50 years

of confronting

the transcendental object

at the end of time

that drew us out

of the animal body.

History is the proof

and the shockwave

of the eschaton.

This is a hard thing

for secular audiences

to wrap their minds around

because they're familiar

with hearing this

from rattlesnake-handling christers.

But that's simply because

religion has always been

the repository

of the irrational intuition.

It never said

that the irrational intuition

is ipso facto false.

It becomes a travesty

when hung with the trappings

of dogma

derived through the scholarly

revelation of weasels.

But the intuition,

the intuition is pristine

and the intuition of

Islam, Judaism, Christianity

and cults innumerable

is that there is a finiteness

to the historical experience.

And then the more staid

the ontology,

the further into the future

they put it,

so they can continue

trading real estate

for the next little while.

I think that it is now possible

to extrapolate the curves

that describe our degradation

of the planet,

the spread of epidemic diseases,

the ozone hole,

the extraction of metals,

the clearing of the rainforest,

the rise of population,

the spread of toxic compounds,

so forth,

to see,

to convince yourself

even from a rational point of view,

that history is a self-limiting process.

Well, if you're a rationalist,

then you must conclude

we're just headed for extinction.

I would think then

the rational response

to that logical process

would be to get your ass in gear

and try and avert the extinction.

And if you're not a rationalist,

then the conclusion you draw

from all that is

that we are within striking distance

of merging

with the mysterious hyperspatial source

of our intelligence,

and that somehow this is

a planetary birthing,

something as scripted

as the breakup of Pangea

or the movement of glaciers

south from the pole.

It's just part of the process.

Culture exists

to transform mind

out of the domain of matter.

We are rising toward

the rarefaction of ourselves

into the transcendental plasmid body

of alchemical and Buddhist preoccupation.

This is what is calling us

out of matter.

It's what called

the monkeys out of animal organization.

It's what calls technology

out of the restless hands

of the hominids.

And it is what is calling all of us

toward a kind of fusion

with the community,

with the psychedelic totality

of the species,

and with the larger Gaian totality

of the planet.

This is what it all went for.

This is the promise

and the redemption of history.

Without this redemption,

then history becomes

the abortion

that materialists fear it is.

This is why the legitimate path

to the transcendental,

the linking of the individual

with the transcendental

through psychedelics,

now becomes

the most important political work

that can be done

in the light

of the rising awareness

of the end of history.

Thank you very much.

All of you who stayed

the intrepid core.

I'll just go through these.

I've not had any chance

to look at them,

and handwriting is also degraded

here at the end of the world,

so it's a little hard

to sort out some of this.

What role does an individual

psychedelic experience play

in the massive changes

that you're anticipating?

It would seem to me,

well, my model

for the psychedelic experience,

there have been a number of them.

The idea that it mimics madness,

that was one idea.

That it takes you into the Jungian unconscious,

that was one notion.

That it somehow illuminates

the concepts of Indian yoga

or after-death models,

such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

All of these have been tried.

My assumption

has been a mathematical one.

That what psychedelics are about

is that mind,

under the pressure

of evolutionary constraints,

turns itself into a threat detection device.

And that's how we use it

in three-dimensional space,

to anticipate threat

and to meet it.

But that is, as it were,

a lower-order application of mind,

and that in silent darkness,

what happens on psychedelics

is that the mind unfolds

literally into a kind of super space

or a higher dimension

in the mathematical sense.

Because I take seriously

the claims made

in all times and places

for millennia

that shamans can locate lost objects,

predict weather,

see where the game has gone,

and predict the outcome

of disease situations.

In all cases,

what is involved

is a higher-dimensional relationship

to the manifold of history.

So I think that,

you know, you all understand

that a locked box,

if we had a padlocked box here on stage,

a locked box is not locked in hyperspace.

It has a,

a dimension in hyperspace

from which the contents of the locked box

are easily removed,

taken out,

and put back.

In our world,

this looks like magic.

Shamanism is like this.

And so,

to answer the question,

what role does an individual psychedelic experience play

in the massive changes anticipated?

The role is

that the individual gets in on the joke.

At this stage in history,

to be a shaman

is to have seen the end.

And if you've seen the end,

it's like, you know,

taking Anna Karenina

and reading the last five pages.

And then as you make your way

through this bewildering morass of material,

you do have the faith

that it's all going to end up

as you discerned.

So that's the political act.

You see,

terror of the future

is one of the weapons

by which the rationalists

are holding everybody in line.

Terror of the future

can be put out to pasture

through psychedelic shamanism.

Okay.

It seems mushrooms for the masses

is not really what you advocate.

Mushrooms for the masses

doesn't sound like such a terrible idea.

I mean,

I always equivocate by saying,

you know,

if your problem

is maintaining boundaries,

then you probably shouldn't take any psychedelics.

But in a mature civilization,

you know,

you don't define opportunities

based on what will be detrimental

to a small minority.

Mushrooms for the masses

seems to me

a fine idea.

I just don't see

how it can ever come about

because I believe

that the society-shaping effects

of these things

are so powerful

that they will never be tolerated.

Just to go off on a tangent for a moment,

this is why I am an incredibly pessimistic person

about getting pot legalized.

Because as far as I can tell,

the argument now

in favor of legalizing cannabis

is that it ain't no big deal.

So why not legalize it?

The problem is it is a big deal.

You know,

you just have to bake it into some banana bread

and you'll find out what a deal it is.

So,

you know,

and if you read the 19th century accounts

like Fitzhugh Ludlow,

the hashish eater,

people like that,

it's perfectly clear

that it can reach

LSD levels of intensity

if you eat it.

And the question,

you know,

if pot were judged

on its social impact

or, you know,

its lack of addiction,

its lack of detriment to health,

it would have been legal

a long time ago.

But it subtly erodes

commitment to dominator values

in ways that are absolutely intolerable

to dominator institutions.

I mean, they'll let gays in the military

before they'll legalize pot.

That's how threatened they are by pot.

Well, let's see here.

Recently you appeared on talk radio

with L.A. police chief Daryl Gates.

What was the inside story

and do you feel you were heard by him?

Well, yes,

I won't give this too much time.

He did appear with Daryl Gates

on his radio show.

Clearly, they're desperate

to raise ratings.

They'll do almost anything

at this point.

And Daryl Gates was a pussycat,

very easily intimidated by,

I mean, I make no great claims

in this area,

but intelligence.

He completely folded

in the presence of, you know,

academic calm, big words,

citation, that sort of thing.

What is the difference

between your vision

of the end of history

and the Christian belief in a savior?

This is a great question.

My, well, it's complicated.

The way I think

of this transcendental object

at the end of time

is on this level,

for purposes of metaphor,

it's like those mirrored ball bars

that they hang in discos,

you know,

that spins and sends out scintillations

of light all over the walls,

ceiling, and floor of the room.

The transcendental object

at the end of time,

and I like that image

because alchemists used to tell me

to talk about

what they called the scintilla,

which is simply Latin for spark.

So the transcendental object

at the end of time

sends off scintillas,

sparks which are like reflections

of its essence,

but necessarily distorted.

Well, then ranged all around

this transcendental object

and at greater and lesser distances

are all the people

who have ever lived.

And if you are a Buddha,

a Christ, a Mohammed,

a guru, somebody or other,

and you are,

what that means is

that you have been struck

by a scintilla of reflection

from the transcendental object.

And so you, as it were,

have assimilated its essence

into your being,

and now you must act it out.

And I would bet you

that if you could step into the mind

of a Christ on the road to Calvary

or a Buddha preaching at Sarnath,

what you would discover going on

in the personal part of the mind

is the question,

why me?

Why me?

And the answer is,

you just are dumb lucky,

that's all.

You know, you just happen to be standing

in the right place at the right time,

and there is nothing special about you.

You just have a hit of the stuff.

And then the other part of the question,

the problem with all these religions,

and it affects flying saucer cults,

and it affects occult schools of magic,

and everywhere,

is people claim to know too much.

They are not willing to live

in the light of ignorance

and in the absence of closure.

So, you know, my God,

you go to these UFO conferences,

and, you know, you've got the people

talking to the Polybians

in booth one.

Next to them, people are talking

to Commander Zamo

of the Antares system.

And then number three,

something else.

No cognitive dissonance

between these groups.

They all have coffee together

and are dating heavily,

and it doesn't ever seem

to enter anybody's mind

that this is a little odd.

In occult stuff, you know,

you say, what's that?

And they say, well,

that's the 11th amethystine ray

that was brought by the great white fathers

of the 11th lodge

who came from the galactic center

at the fall of Atlantis

and established the...

You say, how the hell

do you know all this stuff?

You know?

I mean, nobody knows anything.

And Christianity,

the anticipation of the end of the world

and the exegesis of revelations

that has been worked out

based on the visions of John of Athos,

you know, it's a good try,

but it's not a paint-by-numbers script

for the unfolding of the world by any means.

When the transcendental object

at the end of time finally reveals

its quintessence among us,

all prophecies will be fulfilled.

All religious ontologies

will find themselves somehow vindicated

and somehow humbled in the same moment

because they were, in fact,

in Wordsworth's wonderful phrase,

intimations of immortality.

But you don't need to rely

on these sanctioned intimations of immortality.

You can have your own

simply by taking five grams

in silent darkness on an empty stomach

after you've unplugged the phones

on a Saturday night in your apartment.

The real research into the nature of the eschaton

is done one-on-one

above five grams.

See here.

I once heard you talk about an experiment

your brother undertook

where he was raving for three weeks,

but you never explained what the experiment involved.

What was it?

Well, what a wonderful opportunity.

True hallucinations.

I never talked about this,

even often to very dear friends of mine.

I mean, there are people who've known me for 20 years

who I never told this story to

because I think it takes as long to tell

as it takes to read this book.

You know, that wonderful scene

in Wells' Time Machine

when he comes back to his gentleman's club

and he says,

gentlemen, this is no tale to be told

over greasy plates.

Well, similarly with this.

So I didn't also want to make it the basis

for my public career

because this is real...

I almost said nutty stuff.

It's...

I generally disbelieve

in violations of physical law

and miracles.

But I did actually,

in the course, I'm 46,

I have seen three or four

in my lifetime.

And each time it's absolutely

astonishing.

Whole worlds of possible questions

are instantly answered.

And I wrote this book

to inspire people

to follow our method.

Which is, our method is

the rational but stoned mind

in confrontation with the obscure.

Seek ye the obscure.

You know?

If a book is not at least 100 years old,

don't read it.

If a country has more than one international airport,

don't visit it.

If a village has more than one outboard motor,

don't stay.

And just keep pushing and pushing and pushing

because out there at the edges

are the edges.

There are edges because nobody goes there.

Because the unsanctioned is hidden there.

You know?

That's where the shamans are.

And the mad people.

And the sexual experimentalists.

And the aesthetic experimentalists.

That really is the method.

Not belief.

Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude

toward reality, I think.

After all, if it's there,

it doesn't require your belief.

And if it's not there,

why should you believe in it?

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

By eliminating money

and the separateness that it causes,

could the world be saved

by sharing the resources and the work

and eliminating all the unnecessary waste of energy

and needless competition and consumption?

Well, I'm not sure how money could be eliminated.

See, I'm a funny person.

I vacillate between...

I have a very strong impulse

toward political action

and save the world

and round up the miscreants

and set things right.

That's part of my thing.

But I also have this incredibly evolved sense

that it's a done deal.

That it's okay.

That the main task is a certain alertness

and attention to one's comrades

and that it will all unfold

through the intercession

of the transcendental object at the end of time.

People say this is a contradiction.

Fine, it's a contradiction.

I mean, what are we doing here anyway?

Is life supposed to be simple?

But I preface that by saying

one time somebody in a group like this

challenged me and said,

you're always talking about the peril of the planet

and one thing and another.

Why don't you ask the mushroom

how to save the planet?

And so then I thought that was kind of a facetious

and challenging thing to propose.

But the next time I found myself

capable of asking the question,

I did.

And the mushroom hesitated

and now I pass this on to you

as pure fungal hearsay

on the networks.

I said to the mushroom,

so how can we save the world?

And it hesitated roughly a third of a second

and said every woman should bear

only one natural child.

I thought about this for a long time

before I ever publicly mentioned it to anyone.

And I realized, you see,

I think that what is destroying us

are two things.

Number one,

an uncontrolled rise in population

that wipes out every good intention,

every social program,

every expansion of agriculture

succumbs to expanded population.

This is destroying us.

The other thing that is destroying us

is that we are not properly utilizing

the intelligence, talent,

and so forth of half of our population.

The female half

of the population.

Now, people say

that we must, you know,

women must be promoted

to professional positions

and power positions

and of course this is true

and I agree,

but what is really holding women back

is that they spend a staggering amount

of their creative life span

raising children.

And

if every woman were to bear

only one natural child,

the population of the planet

would fall by 50%

in 40 years

without wars,

epidemic diseases,

it would just naturally fall in half.

Now, I don't think very many people

have ever considered

this possibility.

We tend to think that our problems

are insoluble.

They are not insoluble.

Furthermore,

it turns out,

and here's news nobody likes to hear,

a woman who,

a child born to a woman

in Santa Cruz

compared to a child born to a woman

in Bangladesh,

that child will use between

800 and a thousand times

more resources

than the Bangladeshi child

in its lifetime.

So, where do we preach population control?

The third world.

Because that's where all the people are.

But that's not the problem.

People are not the problem.

Incredible consumption

by some people

is the problem.

It would be possible

to imagine a world

where governmental institutions

or whoever's running things

could go to women

and say,

how would you like to have

vastly increased leisure time?

How would you like to have

an increased expendable

income?

And how would you like to have

genuine status

as a hero

in the struggle

to save the planet?

If women were to have

only one natural child,

women would very naturally

come into an enormous

empowerment.

No one,

no institution

could deny it to them.

And interestingly enough,

this is not a plan

where men,

who have always been

the planners

and the managers of plans,

play much of a role at all.

Well, I just pass that off

in case you don't want

to put your trust

in the transcendental object

at the end of the world,

then the most politically

conscious thing

apparently from the mushroom's

point of view

that you could do

is encourage

those kinds of policies

and that kind of attitude.

Are there unnatural children?

Oh dear,

still carrying a grudge?

Leave it.

Leave it to Saddam.

No,

that is not true.

That's what I've always put out.

The fact of the matter is

in 1800,

the average American woman

gave birth

times

in the course of her lifetime.

The two-child family

is a genuflection

to the industrial revolution.

No traditional culture

on this planet

ever advocated

the two-child family.

It's a convenience

that allows factories to run

and jobs to be filled

and in fact,

as the father

of two children,

I would argue

that the two-child family,

what happens

is the children mirror

the tension

between the parents

in a way that happens

in no other configuration

of parent-child relationship.

So I would actually argue

that the so-called family values

that these right-wingers

are constantly

dinging us to preserve

are in fact

values created

to support the agenda

of the industrial revolution,

which means global capitalism.

And they have nothing to do

with archaic values,

which are enormous families,

not nuclear families,

but extended families

living communally.

That's the traditional model

and if you're not ready

to go back to that,

then one woman, one child

is as good as anything else

in my humble opinion.

Let's see here.

You mentioned earlier this evening

that psychedelics played a role

in human evolution.

How so?

Thank you for not groaning,

those of you who have heard me

explain this 18 times.

Because it may be my only crack

at getting into the history books,

it seems to me clear,

well, it seems to everybody

who looks at the question clear,

that the theory of evolution

is handed a tremendous dilemma

when it comes to human evolution.

A planet of groundhogs,

hummingbirds, and slime molds

poses no problem

to Darwinian evolution

as modified by molecular genetics.

We pose a problem,

specifically our brain,

and it's doubling in size

in less than two days.

It's very difficult

for the theory of evolution

to explain,

and it's a particular embarrassment

because that's the organ

which generated

the theory of evolution.

So it's like a real rip

in the sail

of the galleon of evolution.

I believe, and everyone believes,

that there must have been

extraordinary selective pressures

of a unique sort

upon our own

early ancestors

to have produced the human brain

in such a short amount of time.

And I think that the answer,

and I don't want to go into it

in detail tonight,

but briefly here's what it is,

and it explains a lot about

our sexuality and our politics

and so forth.

All primates,

clear back to squirrel monkeys

and like that,

have what are called

dominance hierarchies.

We all know what this means.

It means that the hard-muscled,

long-fanged young males

run roughshod over everybody else.

The women, the children,

homosexuals, the old,

everybody gets their marching orders

from the dominant males.

This is true throughout the primates,

and it is true of us

as we sit here this evening.

That's what's screwing up

our politics and making us,

you know, the situation

with women and so forth and so on,

and it can be argued

to other social problems as well.

I believe that psilocybin,

because it dissolves boundaries,

is uniquely positioned

to mitigate against this tendency

toward male dominance

for a number of reasons.

And when our remote ancestors

moved out of the trees

and into the grasslands,

they encountered these mushrooms.

And I think the great undiscussed frontier

of evolutionary theory

is the effect of mutagens

in foods on human evolution.

We, most animals maintain

a very narrow food menu

to avoid contact with mutagens.

We, when we were forced out

of the arboreal camps,

we became omnivores.

We came under nutritional pressure

and for a long time

we were testing all kinds of foods,

and that would have meant

a very high rate of mutation

through that period

and an acceleration

in natural selection.

And I think that psilocybin,

because it improves visual acuity,

would have given a leg up

to predators and hunter-gathering,

proto-hominids.

And so, in a sense,

there was a period of time,

perhaps as short as 100,000 years,

perhaps as long as a million

or more years,

when male dominance

in our species

was suppressed chemically

by psilocybin in the diet.

It was still there,

hard-wired in the genes,

but chemically suppressed

by an orgiastic religious style

that had everybody taking mushrooms

at the new and full moon

and then having sex in a heap, basically.

This made it impossible for men

to trace lines of male paternity.

That's a consequence

of an orgiastic society.

And a kind of paradise evolved,

and it was during that paradisical interlude

that language, theatre,

altruism, metaphysics,

poetry, dance, religion,

all of the functions

that we equate with unique humanness

evolved under the aegis

of a near symbiosis

with psilocybin, mushrooms.

And then,

and this all was happening in Africa,

then through climatic upheaval,

drying of the African continent,

the mushrooms disappeared

and, God forbid,

the old wiring

reasserted itself.

It must have been hell on earth.

It must have been similar

to what we're living through.

It must have been an era

of incredible brutalization

when people stopped caring

for each other,

people stopped having group sex,

they started fighting over women,

fighting over territory,

bashing each other's brains out,

appointing leaders,

developing weapons.

The entire sick set

of pathological institutions

that leads to our dilemma

was evolved

in the wake of the invention

of agriculture

and the abandonment of nomadism

and so forth and so on.

And this is why I think

we're so funny

on the subject of drugs

because we are literally

the children of a drug.

There wouldn't be human beings

on this planet

had there not been

this hominid mushroom interaction

over a very, very long period of time.

The reason we addict so easily

to so many substances

and the reason people destroy their lives

with various addictions

is we have an itch

that we just can't scratch

and we try everything.

And I maintain

that you'll keep itching

and you'll keep scratching

till you come to this very narrow family

of hallucinogens,

the tryptamine hallucinogens.

Then the itch stops

because you are restored

to the archaic dynamic

in which we created

the most noble social system

that we have ever lived under,

the archaic, nomadic, shamanic,

goddess-worshiping world

of the dawn time.

And history is a fall away from that

exactly as these monotheistic religions insist,

the fall into history.

And I see then

this emergent end of the world

post-history millenarian culture

as an attempt to reconnect

with that archaic,

archaic authenticity

that was the birthplace

of intellect, of poetry,

of beauty, of love,

and of altruism.

Okay.

These are great questions.

I wish I had more time.

Here's one.

Please define intelligence.

Strangely enough,

I was thinking about this today

as I can't even remember why,

but I produced a definition

and it's a kind of a cribbing

from Whitehead.

Whitehead defined understanding

in the following way.

He said understanding

is the apperception of pattern

as such.

That's all.

For instance, in this room

there are many patterns.

Where the men are,

where the women are.

Where the over 40s are,

where the under 40s are.

Where the wealthy and the poor are.

Each of these patterns,

if you can see it,

tells you more about the situation.

And presumably there are

an infinite number

of these informative patterns.

So I would define intelligence

as Whitehead defined understanding.

Intelligence is the apperception

of pattern as such.

And the more of pattern,

of the pattern,

and the more patterns

that you perceive,

the more intelligent you are.

Of course, these patterns

must actually be there.

Otherwise you're delusory

and that's a different issue.

And then I'll do,

I'll do one more here.

Aww.

You don't want,

go fast through them.

What do you think about meditation

as a path to other levels

of consciousness

and understanding so-called reality

as illusion?

I think meditation is a fine thing.

I do it.

I'm not sure what its relation

to the psychedelic experience is.

The best,

this is essentially part

of a larger question,

which is can you get there

on the natch?

And, you know,

the short answer is no.

The fair answer is maybe

in exceptional cases.

Cases so exceptional

that the answer is no.

And the perils I submit to you

are much greater

because what is so wonderful

about the psychedelics

is how democratic they are.

You know,

you don't have to

have enslaved yourself

into some beady-eyed weasel

and his set of precepts,

dietary strictures,

and mantric formulas.

It doesn't work like that.

It isn't handed down

through a human lineage.

I asked the mushroom about this.

I said,

can, you know,

what's the deal

with these other paths

to enlightenment?

And you've got to understand,

this is the mushroom speaking.

But it said,

for one human being

to seek enlightenment

from another

is like one grain of sand

to seek enlightenment

from another.

It is preposterous.

And I like that

because I've never met

anybody whose intelligence

seemed so intimidating

that they deserved

to be followed.

And I dare say

you probably haven't either.

If you've been paying attention.

I mean,

how many,

how many philandering zenies

have to parade before us?

How many cog-youps

with a Budweiser welded

to their good right hand

do we have to encounter

before you get the message?

You know,

these guys are just slime balls

at worst

and lost souls at best.

And you're smarter than they are

by an order of magnitude anyway.

So why waste your time?

Now,

if you want to follow,

if you just can't

tear yourself away

from the concept of following,

then,

you know,

how about Plato,

Heraclitus,

Parmenides,

Plotinus,

Proclus,

you know,

dead guys.

They're much safer.

You know,

they're not going to try

and climb into your wallet

or some delicate porcelain.

of your anatomy.

Plus,

they've been use-tested

in the historical arena

and have been found

to be generally

at least harmless

at worst

and in some cases

actually to be recommended.

So I would say,

you know,

the whole message

of psychedelics

is self-empowerment.

Trust yourself.

Seize the tiller

of your destiny.

It is your life.

It is your body.

It is your mind.

And it's your world

to remake

as you choose

to reshape it.

History has failed.

The past is no guide.

The immediate generations

preceding us

have dealt themselves

into bankruptcy.

Their object fetishism,

their immorality

their ideological excesses,

their tendency

to resort to brutality

and the solution

of every problem

has essentially ruled them

out of play.

They are no longer operable.

And psychedelics,

because they do,

in fact,

enhance, accelerate,

and promote consciousness,

must,

it's not a debate,

must loom large

in the future history

of our species.

Because if consciousness

is not a major part

of the human future,

it is not a human future.

Thank you very, very much.