The World And It's Double

Well, the world and its double is how we styled this.

This is simply a high visibility, flashy way of reminding people whose eyes fall upon that text

that the world has a double.

The world is not entirely or completely what it seems to be.

Culture, and by culture I mean any culture, anywhere, anytime, gives you the message that everything is humdrum, everything is normal.

In other words, culture denies experience.

You know, we all have had, and even a population of non-psychedelic people have had, prophetic dreams, intimations, unlikely strings of coincidences, all of these sort of things.

These are experiences which cultures deny.

Cultures put in place, I'm sure you've heard this word, a paradigm.

And then what fits within the cultural paradigm is accentuated, stressed, and what doesn't fit inside the cultural paradigm is denied, marginalized, argued against.

And we live at the end of a thousand year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism in its many guises.

And the basic message of materialism is that the world is what it appears to be, a thing composed of matter and pretty much confined to its surface.

The world is what it appears to be.

Now, this on the face of it is a tremendously naive position because what it says is the animal body that you inhabit, the eyes you look through, the fingers you feel through, are somehow the ultimate instruments of metaphysical conjecture, which is highly improbable.

It seems to me metaphysical conjecture begins with the logic of the situation and then proceeds in whatever direction that logic will carry you.

Well, if logic is true to experience, then we have to make room in any theory for invisible connectedness between people,

anticipation of the future, anticipation of the future that has not yet occurred, shared dreaming, all kinds of possibilities that materialism has denied.

For approximately 500 years, the great era of the triumph of modern science, materialism has had the field all to itself and its argument for its preeminence was the beautiful toys that it could create.

Aircraft, aircraft, railroads, global economies, television, spacecraft, but that is a fool's argument for truth.

I mean, that's after all how a medicine show operates, you know, the juggler is so good, the medicine must be even better.

This is not an entirely rational way to proceed.

And now, at the end of 500 years of the practice of rational, quote unquote, scientific culture, we're literally at the end of our rope.

Reason and science and the practice of unbridled capitalism have not delivered us into an angelic realm.

Quite the contrary, they've delivered 3% of us into an angelic realm, completely overshadowed by guilt about what's happening to the other 97% of us who are eating it.

It's not a pretty picture, modern civilization.

Most people in the world today are quite miserable, actually.

They have very little hope.

Their religions, their traditional value systems are being eroded by Dallas and Hawaii Five-0, which are on the village television every night.

Life spans are being shortened by pesticides, chemicals, all kinds of things in the environment.

And there is very little political light on the horizon.

So, I believe that it's reasonable, looking at this situation, to say that history failed and that the grand dream of Western civilization has, in fact, failed.

And now, we are attempting, with basically a carved wooden oar, to turn a battleship around.

And it's a very frustrating undertaking.

The momentum for catastrophe is enormous in this situation.

Now, what, but it's not a hundred percent certain that catastrophe is what we're headed for.

Because we are not a hundred percent unconscious.

There are people struggling to figure out how to control population, struggling to figure out how to balance the relationship between the masculine and the feminine,

struggling to bring amelioration of hunger and disease to various parts of the world.

So, we are in, essentially, a tragic situation.

A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it, you see.

And part of the Western impulse has been to subjugate all other cultural styles to our own.

And this has taken the form of actually swallowing and digesting Native American culture.

The ethnicity of European culture has been replaced by the mega-culture of Nouveau-Europa, whatever that means.

Cultures are melted down in the belly of the Western scientific beast.

And then, they become structural members in an ever-expanding edifice of Western scientism.

However, the psychedelic experience, as practiced by shamans in many, many parts of the world, is apparently a bite too large to swallow.

Psychedelics arrived on the Western agenda only about a hundred years ago,

when German chemists brought peyote to Berlin and extracted mescaline.

And for the next 50 years, up until about 1945, 55 years make it, very little happened.

Mescaline did not, though it was taken by Havelock Ellis and William James and F. Weir Mitchell.

It did not spawn a craze.

It did not influence large numbers of intellectuals, particularly.

Then, in the 40s, LSD was discovered.

In the 50s, DMT and psilocybin were discovered.

And then, in 1966, all these things were made illegal.

There was no real opportunity for Western science to grapple with these things

before they were decided to be too hot to handle, made not only unavailable to people such as you and I, ordinary people,

but taken off the agenda of scientific research.

In the Middle Ages, the Church forbade dissection of human bodies.

And medical students would visit battlefields and the gallows at night

and steal the bodies of victims of war and executed prisoners in order to learn human physiology.

Where that spirit of scientific courage has gone, I don't know.

But there's very little of it left.

Now people feed that the trough of government grants and enormous corporate research budgets

and the idea of actually pursuing truth or attempting to understand the phenomenon in an unbiased fashion,

divorced from its commercial, social and political dimensions, is unheard of.

On hallucinogens and boundary dissolution.

If you look at thousands of these experiences, is they dissolve boundaries.

They dissolve boundaries between you and your past, you and the part of your unconscious you don't want to look at,

between you and your partner, between you and the feminine if you're masculine and vice versa,

between you and the world.

All the boundaries that we put up to keep ourselves from feeling our circumstance are dissolved.

And boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society.

People get very, people meaning government institutions, become very nervous when people begin to talk to each other.

Yes, the whole name of the Western game is to create boundaries and maintain them.

The church and the state.

The poor and the wealthy, the black and the white, the male and the female, the young and the old, the gay and the straight,

the living and the dead, the foreign and the familiar.

All of these categorical divisions allow a kind of thinking that is completely cockamamie.

After all, reality is in fact a seamless, unspeakable something.

And we understand that to perceive it separately is a necessary adjunct to the act of understanding.

But it is not the end of the program of understanding.

The particulate data has to be recombined in a paradigm, a seamless overview of what is happening.

And the drugs that Western society has traditionally favored have either been drugs which maintain boundaries,

or drugs which promote mindless, repetitious physical activity on the assembly line, in the slave galley,

on the latifundia, the slave driven agricultural project, whatever it is.

In the corporate office.

This is why, you know, every labor contract on this planet, at least in Western civilization,

contains a provision that all workers shall be allowed to use drugs twice a day at designated times.

But the drug shall be caffeine.

Now, the reason caffeine is so welcome in the workplace

is because the last three hours of the workday are utterly unproductive

unless you goose everybody with two cups of coffee,

and then they can go back to the word processor, the widget tightening machine, or whatever they are doing,

and mindlessly and happily carry on.

If it were suggested that there be a pot break twice a day, you know,

you would think that civilization was striking the iceberg or something.

So, and alcohol, like, our society has, is an alcohol, red meat, sugar, and tobacco culture.

And all of these are forms of speed, basically, in the way that we use them.

I mean, yes, you can tranquilize yourself on alcohol,

but you're pushing toward levels where a lifetime of tranquilizing yourself on alcohol

will be a short lifetime if you use it that way.

So, there's a lot of tension in society between the great exploring soul and the assembly line citizen.

The citizen is defined by obligation and by the boundaries that define, you know, the next citizen,

either because it's neighbor or worker or employer or something like that.

And the grand exploring soul is marginalized as an eccentric,

or if necessary, more seriously marginalized, as mad in some way.

I mean, madness, basically, up until the level of physical violence,

means you are behaving in a way which makes me feel uncomfortable.

Therefore, there's something wrong with you.

Yes.

So, now, it's interesting, and this is one of the points that's dear to me.

I mean, they arrive in different orders each time.

But I think of history as a kind of mass psychedelic experience.

And the drug is technology.

And as technology gets more and more perfected as a mirror of the human mind,

the cultural experience becomes more and more hallucinatory.

And for at least the past couple of hundred years, boundary dissolution has been underway at every level of Western civilization.

I mean, you could push it further back.

The Magna Carta, the fact that princes and lords of the realm would actually attempt to force the king's signature on a document defining their privileges.

They are, after all, ordinary human beings.

The king is the divine appointed regent of God in heaven.

So, this was a severe boundary dissolution within the context of the age in which it was taking place.

They were actually saying, you, as Christ's representative on earth, should cede some of this omnipotence to us, mere mortals suspended in the political process.

Well, that leads then to broader demands for human rights.

For the idea that a permanent and large segment of society kept in permanent poverty is unacceptable.

We got rid of debtors' prisons and things like this.

As the collectivity of our humanness becomes an intellectual legacy for all of us,

there is a dissolving of boundaries of race, class, status, language, so forth and so on.

And the whole of the 20th century has seen a massive acceleration of this.

The breakdown of the Soviet Union was, in fact, simply, it was even so described, the lifting of the Iron Curtain.

Meaning a membrane has suddenly disappeared.

And more and more of these membranes are disappearing.

And what is emerging then is a more and more psychedelic experience.

Meaning a sense of acceleration of information flow.

A sense of rising ambiguity about what it all means.

Everything seems to carry both a good facet and a detrimental facet.

The ambiguity of everything is increasing.

The connectedness of everything is increasing.

And I will argue later in the day that this is a general tendency of the time and space in which we are embedded.

And that we ourselves are a reflection of this.

So, where is life carrying us?

What is this all about?

Is it carrying us toward extinction?

So that the rest of nature can heave an enormous sigh of relief

and then get back to the business of nest-building, mating flights,

and oviposturing and whatever it is that they're doing out there?

Or is it carrying us toward some kind of a transition?

If you look back through the history of life, which is a long history.

I mean it reaches back a billion years.

Every advance happens suddenly, unpredictably, and in a very short period of time.

Some of you who stay tuned to the scientific literature may have noticed this series of articles that were around last week

about what they're calling the big bang of biology.

that there was a period of time incredibly brief, perhaps between a million and ten million years,

when all the phyla of life on this planet radiated into existence sometime between 525 and 535 million years ago.

Just it all snapped into existence.

The episode in which life left the sea is a similar highly confined transition event.

People recently have written about what they call punctated or punctuated evolution.

Evolution is not apparently a slow curve of unfoldment.

It is instead a series of equilibrium states punctuated by violent fluctuations in between,

and then a new equilibrium state.

So, history, I believe, is not an aberration any more than leaving the sea could be called an aberration of marine existence.

I mean, obviously it is not marine existence,

and obviously we are not living in the same world as groundhogs and hummingbirds psychologically.

But leaving the sea did not represent an ontological transition.

It represented an extremely dramatic shift of modality.

And this is what history is.

History is characterized by its brevity, for one thing.

I mean, we have packed more change into the last 10,000 years than the billion years which preceded it.

I mean, we, and yet as entities, as animals, meat, we have not changed at all in 10,000 years.

If you were to go back to that era, the people would be exactly like people we see today.

They wouldn't be so racially heterogeneous because the great gene streamings and migrations that characterize history

had not yet taken place, but essentially perfectly modern people.

Well, then history is apparently, if we view it as a process that nature tolerates, if not encourages,

then history is essentially, apparently, important enough to place,

to jeopardize the stability of all the rest of the natural ecosystemic world.

It's as though nature is saying we are willing to place the entire planetary ecology in danger for 50,000 years

in order for the opportunity to be explored of language using, technologically expressing intelligence,

carrying all of life to the next level.

And it's a terrifying enterprise because apparently to carry life to the next level,

tremendous intellectual sophistication is required about the release and control of energy.

The problem is, energy can be used to destroy as well as build.

So, as the human enterprise has moved toward greater and greater power and ability to manipulate the environment,

the stakes in the cosmic game have risen.

And now what we have is approximately a hundred billion dollars sitting in the center of the crap table

and one roll of the dice more and we're going to either win it or lose everything.

Because intelligence, if we fail, will never again reach the kind of levels on this planet that we have reached.

Why? Because we have extracted all the available metals near the surface of the earth.

An evolving species following after us will find the earth strangely depleted of usable materials down to the 1500 foot level.

And so, intelligence coming beyond us will find it just does not have the resources to make the leap to technical civilization.

So, it's beginning to look like a one-shot deal.

And the psychedelics are in there for two reasons.

First of all, because they allow us as individuals to break out of the flat cultural illusion

and to rise up and look at this situation.

So, it's for us a tool to understand our predicament.

But the psychedelics are also what has driven this circumstance to arise in part.

Because what psychedelics do, and I think this isn't too challengeable, is they catalyze imagination.

They drive you to think what you would not think otherwise.

Well, notice that the enterprise of human history is nothing more than the fallout created by strange ideas.

Let's build a pyramid. Let's build a windmill. Let's build a water wheel.

And then empires, philosophies, religions arise in the wake of these situations.

I've argued in the past, and I'm going to try not to repeat it here today, because I think you've all heard it,

but I will just mention it in a sentence or two, that the critical catalyst propelling us out of the slowly evolving hominid line

and caused us to take an orthogonal right-hand turn into culture, language, art, yearning,

probably was the inclusion of psychedelic plants in our diet during that episodic moment when we went from being fruititarian canopy dwellers

to omnivorous pack-hunting creatures of the grassland.

And it was the inclusion of psilocybin in our grassland diet that caused us to discover that there is a mind,

and you can perturb it. I mean, think about, I mean, I don't think you could discover consciousness if you didn't perturb it,

because as Marshall McLuhan said, whoever discovered water, it certainly wasn't a fish.

Well, we are fish swimming in consciousness, and yet we know it's there.

Well, the reason we know it's there is because if you perturb it, then you see it, and you perturb it by perturbing the engine which generates it,

which is the mind-brain system resting behind your eyebrows.

If you swap out the ordinary chemicals that are running that system in an invisible fashion,

then you see it's like dropping ink into a bowl of clear water.

Suddenly, the convection currents operating in the clear water become visible,

because you see the particles of ink tracing out the previously invisible dynamics of the standing water.

The mind is precisely like that, and the psychedelic is like a die marker being dropped into this aqueous system.

And then you say, oh, I see it works like this and like this.

Well, if psychedelics are catalysts for the imagination, and if history is driven by the imagination,

it is driven through the fallout from the imagination, which is technology and culture.

Technology and culture are the consequences, the derivatives of the ratiocination of the mind.

And technology has, like biological life, but on a much faster or accelerated timeframe,

technology has this weird tendency to transcend itself, to bootstrap itself.

You know, if you have a cart, then it implies better wheels, better bearings, better structure,

and then higher speed, more control, more feedback from the machine.

That means we need gas gauges, RPM readouts, so forth and so on.

Technology, strangely enough, created by a biological creature, has itself this self-transcending quality.

But ever-accelerating, this is the important point, because the ever-accelerating accretion of technology

means that history is strangely foreshortened at the future end, because it happens faster and faster.

It's like a process that begins very slowly, but once started has the quality of a cascade,

or, you know, the rate at which falling bodies move, 32 and a half feet per second, per second.

Each second, it accelerates to twice the rate of infall that was occurring in the previous second.

Technology is like this, and we now are in a domain where if we attempt to propagate technological development forward 50 years,

it becomes unmanageable as an intellectual task.

We can talk about the automobile, what it might look like 50 years from now.

It would float, it would go 500 miles an hour, it would be guided by your mind, so forth and so on.

But when you think that every artifact of our world will undergo that kind of transformation,

and that the synergy among these transformed objects will create phenomena and situations that we can't anticipate,

that's the key thing, our inability to anticipate the synergies between our technologies.

I mean, the computer, LSD, spacecraft, holograms, organic superconductivity,

those are just six areas where the integration of those concerns will produce unimaginable consequences.

Yeah, the ultimate boundary dissolution is the dissolution of ego.

I mean, we hope, we straight people hope, that they never meet it except at death.

Of course, they don't realize going to sleep at night is a kind of ego dissolution.

But, the government is expressive of this dominator culture that we're living in.

The ego is a very recent invention, and its hold on reality is very tenuous.

And consequently, it walks around imbued with fear.

I mean, it feels itself to be a mouse in a world of dinosaurs.

That's because it's a very recent development.

I guess I have to go back to this scenario of human development and say, just very briefly,

here's how I think this worked.

I'm not going to run through the whole evolutionary scenario, but this thing about ego.

All primates have what are called dominance hierarchies.

That simply means that the hard-bodied, long-fanged young males kick everybody else around.

They control the females, the children, homosexuals, the elderly, everybody is taking orders from this dominance hierarchy.

And this is true clear back into squirrel monkeys.

It's a generalized feature of primate behavior.

And it's an aspect of our behavior as we sit here.

Women, the feminine is not honored.

The elderly are marginalized.

Homosexuals, that whole issue.

Many of our social and political ills stem from this attitude.

Well, but you see, I believe that when we left the trees and admitted psilocybin into our diet,

that it has the effect of dissolving boundaries and making this maintenance of a dominance hierarchy very, very, very difficult.

First of all, the key on one level to maintaining the dominance hierarchy is monogamous pair bonding.

That's where it begins.

If in a society taking a lot of psilocybin, monogamous pair bonding breaks down because of CNS activation and sexual arousal.

So, in a psilocybin-using culture, there will be a tendency to orgiastic sexual behavior rather than monogamous pair bonding.

What that does is it causes an incredible social cohesion.

Because in an orgiastic society, men cannot trace lines of male paternity.

So, men's attitude toward children is, these children are all ours.

We the group.

It's a glue that we, in our paranoid social style, with everybody having the deed to their property and their 11-foot-high fence, can hardly imagine.

But psilocybin was artificially suppressing this dominator behavior style in the primate, the evolving proto-hominid, now-hominid, now-human being.

When psilocybin was taken out of the diet, the old, old primate program was still there.

It had not been bred out.

The genes were always there.

It's just that for 50,000 or 100,000 years, we medicated ourselves, literally religiously.

We religiously medicated ourselves every new and full moon, perhaps oftener.

These orgies were happening, creating social cohesion, propagating everybody forward.

The problem was, when the psilocybin was taken away, we had been under its influence for perhaps half a million years.

We had evolved language, rudimentary, abstract philosophy, a sense of religion.

We had invented technology in the form of using fire and chipping flint and all that.

The psilocybin goes away and suddenly these skills, these tools, these technologies are in the hands of marauding apes.

Not anymore cohesive, caring human social groups, but marauding territorial apes, driven by the desire to control all weaker members of the social group.

And that's our circumstance.

We have, you know, the tools that would allow us to sculpt paradise, but we have the reflexes and value systems of anthropoid apes of some sort.

So, the split between our conscious hopes, our best foot, and the bottom of the human scale is appalling.

I mean, look at the spread.

It's a spread from, well, from Mother Teresa to serial killers.

I mean, you don't get serial killers in the chipmunk population or the grasshopper population.

I mean, these animals are not so set at variance with their basic nature that these kinds of pathologies can erupt.

We, on the other hand, are half angel, half pack hunting killer ape.

I mean, we're an object fetish society.

I mean, our entire psychology is characterized by a profound discontent.

That's what we're about.

It doesn't matter.

No matter what's going on, after a little while, we get restless and move on.

Other animal species are embedded in a kind of world of endless genetic cycling.

No fox grows bored with hunting, you know.

And yet, our thing is a profound dis-ease.

And I believe it's because, and slowly you forced me to do this whole rap, which I swear I wouldn't do.

I believe it's because the psilocybin led us halfway toward a kind of godhead.

But then it disappeared and we are left in this very peculiar situation.

This is the myth of the fall.

You know, we are half angel, half beast.

And these two natures are united in every one of us.

And when you take psilocybin, you feel generally a great sense of community and ascent to a higher level.

If you completely restrict your intake of intoxicants of any sort, then you get the teetotaler type personality,

which is characterized by incredible smugness, limited intellectual horizons,

and an unbearable aura of self-congratulation that makes it pretty hard for the rest of us to put up with.

Yes, yeah.

See, here is the final piece of this evolutionary key.

Psilocybin, in small amounts, increases visual acuity.

This is not an arguable point.

I mean, you can just give people psilocybin and give them eye tests.

And people with astigmatism see better.

You can, your edge detection ability is greatly increased.

Well, you can see that an animal like our remote ancestors in a hunting environment in the grassland,

if there is an item of diet that will make you a better and more efficient hunter,

the equivalent of chemical binoculars lying around on the grassland,

those animals that avail themselves of this technology will be more successful hunters.

And so it was.

Psilocybin, animals using psilocybin were more successful at raising their offspring to reproductive age.

Well, then at slightly higher doses, you get this CNS arousal,

which in highly sexed animals such as primates, arousal means sexual arousal and erection in the male.

So then there's a, and without the overwhelming influence of Christian ethics to guide their behaviors,

I'm sure these organisms simply flopped in a heap and, you know, sorted it all out later.

So, so that's the middle range of the dosage, low dose success in hunting, medium dose social cohesion achieved through ego dissolution and orgiastic sexuality.

Yet higher doses, five grams and up, hunting is out of the question, sex is out of the question.

You're just nailed to the ground by the campfire and in the course of the evening you discover religion, philosophy, art and, you know, all of that.

So, so here is a unique chemical that at every dose level synergizes activity that leads to greater coherency and self-expression.

The driving of the imagination, yes, in the question back here you said we can't create what we can't conceive of.

This is why, what the psychedelic experience does really, is it stretches the envelope of the imaginable.

I mean, what can be imagined can be created, what cannot be imagined is not part of the play.

So, psilocybin really was a stimulant for the production of intellectual product in the form of songs, rituals, dances, body painting, abstract ideas.

All of these things are what we are most unique.

Well, that's how it seemed to me.

It seemed to me culture is a shabby lie.

Or at least this culture is a shabby lie.

I mean, if you work like a dog, you get 260 channels of bad television and a German automobile.

You know, what kind of perfection is that?

Our secular society, religion is completely devalued and consumer object fetishism is the only kind of worth that we collectively recognize.

I'm sure you've all seen the t-shirt that says,

He, notice he, who dies with the most toys, wins.

That is, in fact, the banner under which we're flying here.

And the level of unhappiness is immense.

I mean, the level of unhappiness among the poor, they've always been miserable.

But we've managed to create something entirely new in human history, an utterly miserable ruling class.

I mean, there seems no excuse for that.

Well, I guess this leads us to a subject worth talking about, which is,

it's very important to talk to the state or the substance.

Or if you don't talk to it, it won't talk to you.

It follows the rules of ordinary etiquette.

And it does not speak to strangers.

But if you will say to it, the simplest thing, like,

Hello?

Then it will say, Hello?

And say, Is someone there?

It says, Yes.

You know, ready and willing.

What's up?

But if you don't speak to it, it won't do that.

That is, to my mind, the strangest property of psilocybin,

is this speaking in English business.

I mean, LSD doesn't do that.

Meth, ayahuasca doesn't do that.

Psilocybin does, for some reason.

This is not my illusion.

Nearly everybody who's spent time with it has commented on this.

On DMT, you see who you hear on the mushrooms.

On the mushrooms, you almost never encounter something that you can see.

You see hallucinations.

But you do not see the author of the data stream that's saying,

Did you know?

I'll bet you did know the standard form of address.

But on DMT, they come bounding out of the woodwork.

The strangest things happen on DMT, the most intense, and you can remember them.

DMT is not like a psychedelic drug in the sense that you're getting into the contents of your hopes,

memories, fears, and dreams.

It's much more like a parallel continuum.

It's much more as though you've broken through to some alien data space.

One of the most puzzling things about DMT is it does not affect your mind.

It simply replaces the world 100% with something completely unexpected.

But your relationship to that unexpected thing is not one of exaggerated fear

or exaggerated acceptance, as in, oh, great, the world has just been replaced by elf machinery.

Your reaction is exactly what it would be if it happened to you without DMT.

You're appalled.

Say, what happened?

Because you don't feel your mind moving.

You just see that the world has been replaced by something that you could not have even conceived of or imagined before.

And these entities, these things which look like dribbling, you know, self-dribbling jeweled basketballs,

somebody, something that the NBA might take an interest in, they, you see them and they present themselves to you.

They use language to condense visible objects out of the air.

Now, I don't know why they're doing that.

I mean, perhaps on one level, I assume that they're trying to teach you to do that.

On another level, they seem to be giving a demonstration of the fact that reality is made of language.

They're saying, you know, if you don't believe reality is made of language, here, I'll make you one.

And then blibble-dee-blibble-dee-blip, and there it is.

And they hand it to you to be passed around in, you know, slack-jawed amazement among the human beings.

This technology that they possess of these objects made of gold and emerald and chalcedony and agate

that are morphing themselves even as you look at them are, you know, technological dream come true.

I mean, the lapis as elf excrescents or something like that.

And why they are there?

I don't know.

And, you know, many, many questions.

Where are they when you're not stoned?

You know, do they have an autonomous existence somewhere?

Or do they spring into existence a microsecond before you encounter them?

Are they rooted in the dynamics of your psyche?

Or are they no more rooted in the dynamics of your psyche than the World Trade Center?

It's not clear.

I mean, I think I mentioned at some point, just briefly, that the archetype of DMT is the circus.

These things are clowns at one level.

They're clowns.

I mean, when you think of the circus, it's a very complex archetype.

The circus is for children.

It's a delight.

But then, you know, and you take a child to a circus and there are three rings and absurd clown antics going on.

But then you lift your eyes up to the top of the tent and there the lady in the tiny spangled costume is hanging by her teeth, working without nets.

It's about Eros and death.

I think my first awareness of Eros was being three or four.

And these women in these tiny costumes spinning around and realizing, you know, if she falls, she dies.

And then away from the center ring and all this action, there are the sideshows, the goat-faced boy, the thing in the bottle, the Siamese twins and fuzzy Charlie.

All of that is also very DMT-like.

It really is the archetype of the circus.

I can remember when I was a kid in this small town in Colorado, every year at the 4th of July, the carnival would come to town for a week and set up.

And we anticipated it throughout the year.

But as soon as the carnival came to town, then you couldn't play outside after 9 o'clock at night because carny people are different, we were told.

And, you know, their means of support, sexual proclivities and choice of intoxicants might have run counter to this Midwestern Catholic mining town I was in.

And so then there's this sense of the disruption, the danger, the drama, the interest, the fun.

And then they go away and life is as if they had never been there at all.

And that's what DMT is like.

I mean, it's a secret of such magnitude that it's inconceivable how it has ever been kept.

Because, you know, in a world where information was fairly weighted, we would spend as much time talking about DMT as we spend talking about, I don't know, the West Bank or something.

And as you see, by studying our newspapers, we, DMT is rarely, if ever, mentioned.

I mean, never would be a good rule of thumb.

We're very, the Western mind is very queasy around these experiences that cast into doubt its cherished illusions about how reality is put together.

And when you get to DMT, you have hit the main vein.

I mean, I hold it in reserve as the ultimate convincer.

I mean, that's for these, there are these people running around, you know, who say,

Oh, you people who are into drugs, give me a good branch whiskey and a little TV.

I think you're deluding yourself.

Say, do you?

Well, have you got five minutes to invest in this proposition, my cheerful friend?

Because if you do, have I got news for you.

It also seems to me, you know, considering the fact that DMT is a naturally occurring neurotransmitter,

that you return to the baseline of consciousness in 15 minutes, that it's utterly harmless.

What's the matter with our critics?

Why are they so phobic of it?

You know, what is it?

Are you tainted forever if you know the position of your enemy?

Why are they so afraid to give it a chance?

Well, I think I can answer my own question.

Quoting a wonderful thing Tim Leary said years ago.

He said, LSD occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it.

Right.

That is the problem, I believe.

That these drugs are causing outbreaks of psychosis among people who won't get near them.

And they are turned into frightened, paranoid order freaks reaching for, you know, extra legal and extra constitutional means to make your life hell.

Obviously, their minds have been severely bent by the absence of this drug.

However, the knowledge of it seemed to practically undo them.

Next, Terence discusses the potential teachings of DMT.

Yeah, I mean, the first teaching is priceless.

It's that the world is beyond your ability to conceive or imagine.

So give up any short-term plan to conceive or imagine.

I think really the worth in these psychedelics is simply that they allow you to triangulate upon reality.

I mean, in other words, if all you've got is awake and asleep, you can't go far with that.

But if you've got awake, asleep, and DMT as points, you can build a much more dimensionally rich model of consciousness.

I think that it has to do with your own intelligence.

Truly stupid people aren't interested in psychedelics because they can't figure out what the point of it is.

It feeds off intelligence.

It's a consciousness-expanding drug.

If you don't have any consciousness, it can't expand it.

And I've met people who say,

Yeah, well, all this stuff and big bugs talk to you and say strange stuff.

You say, yeah, well, you should have paid a little attention.

I mean, it's amazing to me how people don't seem to, like, the less intelligent you are,

the less challenging the psychedelic experience becomes because the less capable of entertaining the implications you are.

Because you just say, well, yeah, a lot of bright lights and there's some talking bugs and spaceships and I don't know.

Well, you know, it's because they, I guess it's because those people are so ingrained in cultural values that they assume it's not real.

They just, they assume it's a trip, whatever that means.

It means you have permission not to take this experience seriously.

It's a trip, but what I've noticed is that based on quantum mechanics' need for an observer as part of any system,

that's big news for our field of study because what it means is hallucinations are as real as anything else.

I mean, a hallucination is not like a Chevrolet, but on the other hand, a Chevrolet is not like a hallucination.

Why should we demand that these things co-map over each other?

A hallucination is a species of reality as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro

or anything else that falls through your life.

The question is, does DMT talk to you the way psilocybin does?

It's interesting that these two compounds, so closely related to each other, both have something to say about language,

but they say it in precisely opposite ways.

Psilocybin, it's a teaching voice that speaks to you in your language.

I had a very interesting experience that was an example of this to me.

When I first started growing mushrooms, I had to do a lot of batch testing, and so I was taking mushrooms a lot.

And I would get into these places with it where it would say,

ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta says, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta says.

It would make these declarative statements, and then it would always put the word says on the end of the sentence.

I thought, you know, weird, but what do you expect of a talking vegetable?

What's weird and what isn't?

So then I heard Wasson's publication called Maria Sabina and her Mushroom Vallada.

It's a set of six tapes of a mushroom session that Maria Sabina did in 1956.

So here is Maria Sabina raving in Mazatec, and it's going along like this.

ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.

So, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.

So, and I look in the interlinear translation.

So means says in Mazatec.

So, she's hearing it in Mazatec.

I'm hearing it in English.

So that's what psilocybin is capable of.

what happens with DMT is it doesn't speak to you in English it speaks to you in

elfish and you understand and under sufficiently hyped up conditions you are

able to reply in other words psilocybin pushes your brain state towards some

kind of spontaneous glossolalia and I think that this probably is mixed up

with the generation of language itself because what happens on on DMT on high

dose DMT is these machine elves these dribbling basketball things they use

this musical sing-song language to make objects which they then show you they're

like machines or animals or crystals or crosses between I don't know consomme

and something else they have these opalescent depths they're neither matter nor

mind neither solid nor liquid but they make these things and set them loose in

this environment and these things themselves are emitting language and

making other things so they make machines which make machines everybody's

chattering squeaking crawling over each other clamoring for your attention and

what they're trying to do is to get you to produce this glossolalia for some

reason which I cannot imagine why when you're stoned and you do the glossolalia it's an

incredibly pleasurable experience but so might be eating an orange or having sex if you

were to do it at that moment you can't tell but you can make this funny pseudo

linguistic stream of syllables that's very very satisfying and you know it has a bit of art in it I think probably we

invented language long before meaning and that it was some very practical person who

got the idea that the music could have words and that before that it was simply

verbal amusement after all they eat most readily at hand musical instrument is the

human voice I think that that language as we practice it this afternoon in this

room is an uncompleted enterprise that like though that language wants to be

visual it is in transition remember it's from the silence of prehistory to the

visual language beyond the eschaton and the overlapping of silence and visual

language gives you audio language the more perfect logos would be beheld this is what

philo judaeus taught and considering that many of these psychedelic compounds involved in the language

phenomena like DMT and harmin and harmaline these all occur as part of human metabolism ordinarily and I think that

that it's possible that we are on the cusp of an evolutionary transformation of

language having to do with an actual change in our physique in our genetic output

because why is it that monoamine oxidase inhibiting compounds like harmaline

specifically 5-methoxy tetrahydroharmaline occurs in the pineal gland and is the

pineal gland has always been thought of as somehow connected to the soul it was the seat of the soul for

Descartes and I think that maybe what history is is the rather muddled situation

that occurs in an animal species while it perfects a true language and that

we have we are not there yet folks because a true language is beheld I think that the

real nub of what we're trying to get at here is that the world is mental in some way that we do

not yet understand but that which we're edging toward understanding and the the world is made of language

I can't say that enough and and so uh whenever we get into these discussions about reality or effects

in space and time we are operating outside this assumption that the world is made of language if the

world is made of language it's very hard to figure out just where the edge of it is

I mean do we really need to believe in the existence of distant galaxies like ngc 245

if in fact the world is being produced in the human cerebellum as a as a phenomenon of language

what exactly is the ontological status of these distant parts of the universe

that register only as the faint tracings on our instruments

then interpreted through the fishy fiat of a bunch of stacked up theories and formulas

I mean did you know that the entire universe of radio telescopic

uh radio telescopes were invented around 1950 they've been used to build up our entire picture of the universe

did you know that if you took all the energy that has fallen on all the radio telescopes on this planet

since the invention of radio telescopy that it would be less energy than is generated by a cigarette ash

falling a distance of two feet

so that's where your data sample is coming from that you've built up this model of exploding

galaxies and colliding quasars and mega this and mega that I mean it's pretty flimsy stuff folks

compared to the meat of the moment in which we find ourselves now magical philosophies

which are uh have uh about fifty to a hundred thousand years under their belt as opposed to science which goes back to the renaissance

magical philosophies have always claimed that the world is made of language that you the word the world is a thing of words

and if you know these words you can take it apart and put it together any old way you wish

our entire western religious tradition begins with the incredibly cryptic statement

in principio et verbum et verbo caro factum est it's fairly obscure even in english

in the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh

what is this making the word into flesh and does it not imply then that eventually the flesh will become word

i as i descend into mental disintegration and madness i become more and more convinced that reality is more

like a novel than a series of integrated tensor equations of the third degree which is what physics

would have us believe the world is like a novel it's a novel in which you are a character and there's

dramatic tension plot resolution tragedy nobility betrayal the whole gamut of emotions and human possibilities

and what we tend to do is always to marginalize first our own experience and then all human experience

so we our model of reality is that the universe is a zillion somethings that direction and a trillion

somethings that direction we are tiny and insignificant our star is typical our galaxy is typical everything is

is utterly humdrum and there's nothing going on here at all well this is an incredibly dreary and

disempowering model of reality i would rather believe that if in fact what the universe is is a novelty

producing and conserving engine and if we define novelty as density of connectedness

then guess what the human neocortex becomes the center of the cosmic drama because the human neocortex is the

most densely ramified and connected material object known to exist in the universe so after a thousand years of human marginalization

suddenly through the injection of science there is permission to believe that the cosmic drama really is about us

that we really do carry the the load in this play that this is a play about the career and preservation of novelty and complexity

of novelty and complexity and thus we are central actors in that drama and hence if something were to

happen to us and our enterprise the universe would be vastly impoverished by that loss well now we're on the brink of decoding the human genome

and we will use computers to do this because we're going to have to keep absolute track of millions of

units of strings of characters but the end result of this i think is that the flesh will be made word

and that we are textualizing our reality and this may be what all these french people are screaming about that we

can't understand the so-called deconstructionists because they keep saying reality it should be dealt with

as a text if you don't treat it as a text you will entirely miss the point of it well i've been thinking

about this for a while and i've first of all my life is very strange because when i hit the mushroom at la

nature era in 1971 interpol was looking for me i had a price on my head i had no money i had blown my college

education i had no job skills i had nothing and that is of course as all folklorists know uh the precondition

for exaltation if you're not poor and humble i mean what's the point you know so i was poor and humble

and then i got crossed up with this mushroom and immediately life became art life became uh freakishly

ordered and plot elements began to unfold and i have in my mind a picture of the curve

of my mission if you want to call it that and weirdly enough reality has not yet departed from the curve

now the curve is getting steeper and steeper and at some point surely reality and the curve will depart

otherwise um decency forbids that i carry that thought further but you do see what i mean i think and all of us

are beginning to take textual control of our lives and be able to write the plot you see if what we're embedded in is a novel

or some work of art like a novel then what you want to do is figure out who in the novel you are

i mean if your name is joe blow is the name of this novel the lives and worlds of joe blow

or do you get to draw a bath for someone on page 230 and never be seen again

now as a character the more conscious you become the more you have free will within the context of the plot

i never understood this and i'm not sure most people understand it like like i grew up in berkeley in the

nineteen you know i was in berkeley from 65 to 70 the golden age i was so unconvinced of my own uniqueness

that i never understood that the great drama that was unfolding around me all i had to do

was join and i never joined i thought it was spectator sport i mean i i marched in the marches

i took acid i got laid i did all of those things but what i mean by i didn't join is i didn't realize

that the grateful dead were a bus ride away and that i could probably walk into that scene and make

a place for myself or the doors or the stones or the beetles you pick it in other words i defined myself

as a spectator rather than an actor and we are all doing that far too much you can get a lot

rowdier than you are you can make a lot more ways there's been too much politesse and too much

parlor etiquette exercised recently by the counterculture it's perfectly all right to mix things

up it's perfectly all right to try and accelerate the plot this will move your character nearer and

nearer to the center of the action and people have asked me then is the goal to make yourself the the

novel about you is the goal to make the novel about yourself i don't think so the goal is to become the

author of the novel then you can write any damn ending you want for your character or any other and

this becoming the author is this psychedelic detachment and suddenly you go from being

a chess man a chessman on the board to the chess master looking at the board it's empowering

it's self-control now people who don't know this are like made of denser stuff

than the rest of us you can just part them like wheat and move through them because they have no sense of

the nature of the game they are still embedded in the old newtonian paradigm and and are completely

powerless to control their own lives that's what happens to you in the newtonian game all the power

flows to i don't know the white house the un madison avenue it's not clear but it certainly doesn't

reside with you more and more i think we need to decondition that's what i mean by following

the plot as written if you never decondition you're you're just a character in somebody else's story

but if you decondition you can begin to move your life the way you want and miracles happen uh miracles

do happen they happen even to ordinary people in the realm of of falling in love because there's something

about where the genes go that is very compelling to the universal logos that's watching over us all so you

know the stable boy can marry the princess if his heart is pure and the winds of the logos are at his

back that's why we love those fairy tales of the stable boy who inherits the kingdom because we sense

that as uh our story the question is how can you bring back the psychedelic experience or what can you

bring it i know of two techniques neither very satisfying both in combination moderately effective

but crude the first is a voice operated tape recorder they sell these for a couple of hundred bucks

uh i've produced some amazing tapes with these i have one voice activated tape where you hear me three uh

clear my throat two hundred times in the course of an evening because each time i would clear my throat

halfway through the throat clearing it's voice activated the tape record so it would catch the last half of

however if you have presence of mind sufficient to speak english this would be a more informative record of your experience

yeah and then the other technique which is less technically dependent is uh if you have an insight at a certain level of the experience

you have to repeat it to yourself at another level of the experience and then another level and by this

incremental bucketing method you can carry almost any insight out into the into the realm of the world

these insights often don't stand up to scrutiny uh i had a really interesting experience just a week ago

i'm sure you've all had most of this experience but i finally had it all it's the experience of having a dream

a very very complicated dream the subject of which is the universal secret which if told would transform

everything it's the i've got it phenomenon and usually what happens is you you wake up and it's gone

gone just before you get consciousness to give and you say my god i understood everything i had it down to a single

statement if i could articulate it the world would never be the same well this happened to me about a week

ago but by some miracle i actually was able to hang on to the statement into consciousness and i and i woke up

and yelled this thing my son was appalled i mean it was 6 30 in the morning and i was able to get it out

i hope you're ready i sat straight up in bed and said a song is a song profound stuff i mean maybe it is

the most profound stuff the profound stuff usually has that an x is an x construct because essentially what

it's telling you is silence would have been an acceptable substitute for this statement

well let me say one more thing here just sort of to wind this up

the metaphor that makes sense for what we're going through because it gets the biology of it

it gets the drama of it it gets the risk of it it gets the fun and the joy of it is the metaphor of birth

we are about to decamp from three-dimensional space and time

yes the earth is the cradle of mankind but you can't live in the cradle forever and we're not in this cradle alone

we are squashing and trampling on hundreds of other species that have as much right to be here as we

are so through technology which means pharmacology art and the engineering sciences we are trying to

find a doorway into a new world for the spirit and it is going to come out of human machine interfacing

pharmacological redesign of the human brain mind system down possibly digitalizing and downloading into the

micro physical realm we don't know i mean it makes your hair stand on end to think of being downloaded into the digital realm

there was once a fish who had a great deal of doubts about this plan to conquer the land

and tried to urge everyone to think again that no good could possibly come of it but in fact the forward thrust of evolution

evolution is toward higher dimensions greater complexity more information greater connectedness and a deeper and deeper

sense of the all-pervasiveness of love and meaning that's what it's really about all these disparate physical elements

come to nothing if they don't add up to more than the sum of their parts and the more than the sum of their parts

is this transcendental element which we call love that is the part of the eschaton that has never left us

that accompanied us across the african grassland and into history i mean granted bloodied and battered

by the experiences of sexism and racism and so forth but never lost as an ideal never lost as a guiding light

and an experience and i really think that when we dissolve all the boundaries this is what we will

discover is an unconditional caring an unconditional affection that flows through all life and all matter

and gives it meaning and you don't have to wait for the end of the world to get this news you can

just short circuit the collective march toward that realization by accelerating your own microcosm of

spirituality through the use of these hallucinogens they are the doorways that the guy in mind has

installed in the historical process to let anybody out anytime they want to provided they have the courage to turn

the knob and walk through the door thank you very very much thank you i don't like the part of what i do

that is a cult of personality i don't like it that a white guy sits at the front of the room

and pontificates and i don't know if you figured out this shuffle but i have and i know that i don't know

anything more than you know really and that it's just a funny circumstance of faith that you sit and

listen and i speak because there are no experts and there is only uh you know the integrity of doing and having

done and really if you get the message you you will be able to transcend the need for any more of this

because it's really a message of self-trust and self-empowerment and then what i'm also trying to create

is a community of shared associations about these weird states so that we don't have to all privately

we think we're losing our marbles you know let those who talk to the elves find each other and band together i

am not um one i am basically a scientist without portfolio because no academic institution would ever

trust me with a portfolio but i i move in the domain of the gurus the channelers the pontificators

and those with secret revealed knowledge from atlantis and lemuria but i have contempt for all of that

whether it's true or not because they got there the wrong way you know you have to come through

uh the rules of evidence and reason reason is not science don't confuse them i'm very much a critic of

science and the scientific method but i don't think reason can be tossed out with that uh bath water

what is being proposed here is that we're on the brink of the discovery of another world a world as

as potentially transforming of our world as the discovery of the western hemisphere transformed european

civilization in the 1500s but the world that we're about to discover is inside the mind it's mental real

estate we who have made consciousness our game by building cities elaborating literatures tossing up

religions and setting armies marching we who have made consciousness our game have barely scratched

the surface of human consciousness and it's not like we haven't had a crack at it i mean these yogans

have been over there digging away for millennia egyptian religion kabbalism alchemy western traditions of

mysticism and i am a connoisseur of all that don't get me wrong but what astonishes me

is how embryonic it all is we are not the tired inheritors of an ancient and sophisticated civilization

and it's twilight which is

you

what they're all telling us, we are the know-nothing, fresh-scrub babes who are the new kids on the block

who haven't got a clue as to what the human enterprise could really be about.

And we are coming now through a very narrow historical neck

where the accumulated stupidity of the last 5,000 years, the dues now have to be paid.

It ain't fair, we didn't do it, we didn't bring the slaves from Africa, we didn't invent oligarchy, we didn't do all these things.

Nobody's interested in our whining about how we didn't do it.

It's in your face and it's clearly a crisis of two things, of consciousness and of conditioning.

These are the two things that the psychedelics attack.

We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war.

But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds.

We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior and it's not easy.

I mean imagine, I don't know how many of you have ever confronted the fact that you were addicted to something.

And some addictions are really serious.

If you've ever been addicted to tobacco or heroin, I'm sure you know what I mean.

Well then imagine a global population addicted to a drug, the use of which is killing us, but we can't, there's no doctor saying you should.

There's no rehab clinic to go to when you're a species.

We are on an absolutely destructive bender that will end with the death of the earth, the impoverishment of its animal and plant population,

and the collapse of our civilization into scarcity, unless we can somehow restructure our psychology and get hold of ourselves.

And psychedelics are the only thing I've ever seen work on an individual level to do that.

You know, in the early 60s, they were curing 75% of chronic alcoholism cases that they treated with LSD.

They were curing with one dose of LSD, one 500 microgram dose.

Well now obviously, LSD is not a magic bullet for alcoholism, that's a preposterous idea.

It's simply that you take LSD and if you're a chronic alcoholic, you review your life and you notice that you're killing yourself.

And then you say, my God, I am killing myself.

If I don't stop what I'm doing, I will be dead.

That's the strongest motivation to character rehabilitation there is.

And that's what we have to carry into the domain of public debate.

I can't believe how constipated American institutions are.

I mean, here we are, under the aegis of a great crusading reformer from Arkansas.

A new order in human affairs has dawned, but they suggest closing an air base out at Sacramento.

And there are editorials as to whether we can survive the shock of this massive change.

Well, I've got news for you.

You better do your change-related calisthenics, if that was heavy lifting.

Because what you've got coming at you is something very, very different.

We are now in a position to actually make something of ourselves.

extend the design process to human destiny and produce something that will redeem

10,000 years of pogroms and migrations and attempted genocides and pointless wars

and stupid religions that make people hate themselves and all the rest of it.

If we're going to redeem that legacy, then we have to do something quite spectacular.

Okay, now, I will talk a little bit about what I've learned from psychedelics.

I feel self-conscious doing it, but on the other hand, wouldn't it be stupid for me to talk about what you've learned from psychedelics?

That would add presumption to the sins already arrayed here.

There are different models about what the psychedelic experience is.

Here's a couple.

Building on Western psychotherapy as elaborated by Freud and Jung, one view of what psychedelics are is

it's the part of your mind that you'd rather not do business with.

It's the memories of childhood neglect or abuse.

It's repressed, kinky fantasies.

It's, in other words, the Freudian idea of the unconscious.

That somehow these are drugs which dissolve the boundary between conscious and unconscious mind

and then you can do accelerated psychotherapy because resistances have been pharmacologically overcome.

That's one model.

It's good as far as it goes.

It just doesn't go far enough.

Then there's another model which I would call the traditional or shamanic model.

And it says the cosmos is a series of levels and these levels are connected by vertical routes

of access which can be thought of as simply flights through space or magical trees or magical ladders.

Anyway, there's an image of ascent.

And ordinary people exist on only one of these levels.

But a shaman is not an ordinary person.

A shaman is a superhuman person who has the power of animal allies behind them.

And they can go up and down in these elevators that move between levels and they can therefore recover lost souls,

see social hanky-panky theft and adultery, see the causes behind that, see the causes behind disease, so forth and so on.

That would be the traditional one.

What I have concluded after 25 years of fiddling with this is that both of those ideas have a certain something to recommend them,

but that they don't go far enough and that we get more to the meat of this if we leave off psychological, the first explanation,

or sociological, the second explanation, and actually go for something a little more formal.

To wit, a mathematical model of what shamanism is.

And what I mean by that is, let's think about what shamans do.

They cure disease, and another way of putting that is they have a remarkable facility for choosing patients who will recover.

They predict weather, they predict weather, they're very important.

They tell where game has gone, the movement of game, and they seem to have a paranormal ability to look into questions,

as I mentioned, who's sleeping with who, who stole the chicken, who, you know, social transgressions are an open book to them.

Well, thinking about this from a mathematician's point of view, an all-encompassing explanation that would explain how all these magical feats are done,

is simply to suppose that the shaman is somehow able to project his consciousness, his or her consciousness, into a higher dimension.

Not metaphorically, as in, Sylvester Stallone has many dimensions.

Not metaphorically, but literally, as in, one dimension, two dimensions, three dimensions, and four.

Because if you could move into the fourth dimension, the dimension orthogonal to Newtonian space-time,

seeing what the weather is going to be next week is as easy as seeing what the weather is now.

Seeing where the game went is as easy as seeing where the game are.

Knowing who stole the chicken is simply defined by looking to see who stole the chicken.

And I have noticed that all of biology, not simply shamanism within the context of human society,

but all of biology is, in a sense, a conquest of dimensionality.

That as we ascend the phylogeny of organic life, what animals are, are a strategy for conquering space-time.

And complex animals do it better than simpler animals.

And we do it better than any complex animal.

And we, 20th century people, do it better than any people in any previous century.

Because we can bind data in so many ways that they couldn't.

Electronically, on film, on tape, so forth and so on.

So, the progress of organic life is deeper and deeper into dimensional conquest.

Well, from that point of view then, the shaman begin to look like the advance guard of a new kind of human being.

A human being that is as advanced over where we are, as we are advanced over people a million years ago.

Because we have, you know, very elaborate strategies for coding the past.

It's a dimensional conquest.

So, that's part of what I've learned about psychedelics.

And I could have left it there, but I never do.

I always want to bring more under the umbrella of whatever metaphor it is that's being pushed.

And what I have discerned is that time is actually speeding up.

That the universe is not what physics tells us it is.

Physics tells us that the universe is a physical system, an entropic system, that was born in immense energy and chaos,

and will run down with a bang, I mean with a whimper, not a bang, run down into heat entropy and dissipation.

The psychedelic data on this is completely different.

The psychedelic data says what that model left out was biology and mind.

Now, biology, you might imagine, is a fairly ephemeral, recent, fragile phenomenon.

It is not.

The average star in this galaxy gutters out after about 700 million years.

Not our star.

We happen to have the good fortune to be around a very stable, slow-burning star.

But there has been biology on this planet at least two billion years.

Three times the average life of a star.

So biology is not some Johnny-come-lately epiphenomena.

Biology is a phenomenon more persistent than the life of the stars themselves.

And biology is not a static thing.

I mean a star evolving now is not greatly different from a star evolving a billion years ago.

Biology doesn't work that way.

Biology constantly changes the context in which evolution occurs.

The way I have downloaded this into a phrase is the universe is, the biological universe at least, is a novelty conserving engine.

Upon simple molecules are built complex molecules.

Upon complex molecules are built complex polymers.

Upon complex polymers comes DNA.

Out of DNA comes the whole machinery of the cell.

Out of cells comes simple aggregate colony animals like hydra and that sort of thing.

Out of that, true animals.

Out of that, ever more complex animals.

Organs of locomotion.

Organs of sight.

Organs of smell.

Complex mental machinery for the coordinating of data in time and space.

This is the whole story of the advancement of life.

And in our species it reaches its culmination and it crosses over into a new domain where change no longer occurs in the atomic and biological machinery of existence.

It begins to take place in this world which we call mental.

It's called epigenetic change.

Change which cannot be traced back to mutation of the arrangements of molecules inside long chain polymers.

But change taking place in syntactical structures that are linguistically based.

And people have probably been using language with considerable facility for probably 50,000 years, possibly more.

In our own time, we have created ever more elaborate languages, ever more elaborate technologies for transforming, storing, and retrieving language.

So that we are actually on the brink of being able to give every single one of you the complete cultural inventory.

The complete database of human beings experience on this planet.

That's what these data highways and networks are all about.

The nervous system is being hardwired.

But what I wanted to draw your attention to about this is it is not only an advance deeper and deeper into novelty,

but it's an advance in which each successive stage occurs more quickly than the stage which preceded it.

So, you know, once you get the big bang, then nothing much happens for a long, long time.

I mean, there's plasma streaming through the universe.

The universe is slowly cooling, but that's the most dramatic complex process in the universe, this cooling.

Then, after a certain point, more complex processes come in.

Complexification begins to build, and as it builds, it begins to happen faster and faster and faster.

And the great puzzle in the biological record is the suddenness of our own emergence, of our emergence, human emergence, out of primate, out of the primate line.

It happened with enormous suddenness.

Lumholtz calls it the most explosive reorganization of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record.

And that's, you know, a great embarrassment to the theory of evolution because this is the organ which generated the theory of evolution.

We're not talking an appendix or an eyebrow here.

We're talking the very organ which generated it.

I think that we are not, that we have taken far too much responsibility for what is happening.

And that what we took to be a staircase we were climbing is actually an up escalator.

And if you will stop climbing, you will notice that it does not impede your upward progress because the ground you're standing on is moving you toward the goal.

And I think that this idea, which may be the proof that I'm bonkers, requires a fairly radical reorganization of consciousness.

Because what I'm saying is the universe was not born in a fiery explosion from which it has been being blasted outward ever since.

The universe is not being pushed like that from behind.

The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal that is as inevitable as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl when you release it up near the rim.

You know, if you do that, the marble will roll down the side of the bowl, down, down, down, and eventually it will come to rest in the lowest energy state, which is the bottom of the bowl.

That's precisely my model of human history.

Now, bear in mind what the competition is peddling.

The competition is peddling the idea that the universe sprang from nothing in a single moment for no reason.

Now, whatever you think about that, notice that it's the limit case for credulity.

Do you understand what I mean?

I mean, if you can believe that, it's hard for me to imagine what you would balk at.

If we were to sit down and say, let's see who can think of the most unlikely thing that could possibly happen, I submit to you, nobody could top the Big Bang.

It is the improbability of improbabilities.

It is the mother of all improbabilities right there.

So, I'm suggesting something different.

I'm suggesting that the universe is pulled toward a complex attractor that exists ahead of us in time,

and that our ever-accelerating speed through the phenomenal world of connectivity and novelty

is based on the fact that we are now very, very close to the attractor.

All Western religions have insisted that God would come tangential to history,

but they all lose their nerve when you ask when, which is the only interesting question about that hypothesis.

I mean, if it's not now, then what the hell difference does it make?

It's just pissing in the wind as far as I can see.

I think that the very real social crisis that is upon us, the crisis of population, of resource depletion,

of atmospheric degradation, of epidemic disease, all these crises indicate that we are now down to the short epochs

of this process of universal ingression into novelty.

And that, in fact, it makes no sense whatsoever to speak of a human future.

There is no human future.

It's inconceivable, given where we are today, that to speak of the human world a thousand years from now, or five hundred years from now.

It is literally, it either doesn't exist, or it's beyond our power of imagining.

It isn't simply going to be non-polluting cars and smaller hi-fi speakers.

I mean, that's an idiot's notion.

Yeah, clearer TV pictures.

It isn't like that at all.

I mentioned this this morning, how when you look at only one line of technological development, automobiles or computers,

it looks like you can rationally anticipate what's going to happen.

But when you realize that there are thousands of these lines of development all transforming themselves,

all moving towards some kind of omega point, then you realize that we're in the grip of what I call a concrescence.

And I maintain that you don't have to believe me on this.

You can see it from here.

You just have to climb a high hill.

There's one.

It's called psilocybin.

There's one.

It's called ayahuasca.

The view from the tops of these hills is of the concrescence.

It lies now closer to us than the Johnson administration, for God's sake, in time.

And, you know, I have an elaborate mathematical theory to back this up,

which you should gratefully learn you are not going to be flayed with this afternoon.

But I think it's going to become more and more important for people to delinearize their view of time,

decondition yourself from the lie of history.

After all, you know, if time were space, history would be a spider web.

So, bear that in mind.

What is concrescence?

Ah, concrescence.

Concrescence is a word that I cribbed from the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead.

And, in fact, much of what I say, Whitehead provides the foundation for.

He, like myself, had the idea that history grows toward what he called a nexus of completion.

And these nexi of completion themselves grow together into what he called the concrescence.

So, a concrescence is a domain of extremely high novelty in comparison to whatever it's embedded in.

So, for instance, you walking in the wilderness, you are a concrescence.

Because you are more complex than the medium you're moving through.

A raisin embedded in a cornmeal muffin is a concrescence.

It is more complex than the muffin matrix in which it finds itself.

So, a concrescence is a local state of unusually high complexity.

And, a concrescence exerts a kind of attraction.

Let's call it the temporal equivalent of gravity.

So that all objects in the universe are drawn through time, not space.

Gravity draws you through time.

Space, gravity draws you through space.

Time draws you toward the concrescence.

This is why the universe is seen to be becoming more and more complex, faster and faster.

The idea being, you see, that each epoch being shorter than the one that preceded it,

this generates an asymptotic curve of approach.

And, it's become a cliché of our culture that time is speeding up.

It actually is speeding up.

It's not that it seems like it's speeding up.

It looks like it's speeding up.

It is speeding up.

We and our entire world are being drawn into confrontation

with something that at this level is lost below the event horizon of rational apprehension.

That's a fancy way of saying you can't know jack shit about it at this point in time.

There will come a moment when it will rise above the horizon of rational apprehension.

But, and I see, I really, I think that history is a set of nested resonances.

This is what I mean when I say nothing is unannounced.

Nothing can take you by surprise if you've really been paying attention.

Because everything is preceded by its harbingers and heralds.

And, we are living in an era now where there is a great deal of apocalyptic expectation, anticipation and hysteria for several reasons.

First of all, because Christianity just is hysterical in all times and places.

Second of all, there's a built-in goose in the calendar because we're approaching a millennial year.

And that always exacerbates this Christian thing outrageously because of the promise made, you know.

Amen, amen, I say to you, this generation shall not pass away before I return to, you know, clean your plow or whatever it is.

So, and there is the physical evidence all around us that we are the witnesses to a planetary crisis that we cannot control or manage.

I mean, there are, it's very hard to believe that we could manage ourselves back into a steady state.

I mean, yeah, the Jews are talking to the Arabs and they're trying to get things straightened out in South Africa.

But, what about the global population curve?

What about the degrading atmosphere?

I mean, you know, you don't necessarily, you're just as dead even if you're not killed by a racist or a fascist.

So, we can get certain problems under control, but it seems certain problems are beyond our control.

Also, there's another level to all this, which is when you take cores from the Greenland ice or make side-ranging radar maps of the Canadian shield,

you discover that it, we are not the only force for disruption and chaos wandering around the universe looking for trouble.

The universe is an incredibly chaotic and unstable place.

Planetesimal impacts on the earth have reset the biological clock at least three times in the last billion years.

What we have been living through for the past 50,000 years is an unusual era of meta-stability.

And it has allowed us to create a global civilization.

but we can't assume

that we have

50,000 years of stability ahead of us

or even 100,000 years

of stability ahead of us

and finally

this curious resistance

to the idea of the end of the world

always amuses me

because maybe the world will end

and maybe it won't end

but have you ever noticed

that the end of your world

is an absolute certainty

you're going to go into the yawning grave

and rather soon

I should suspect

and possibly sooner

than you're prepared for

so quibbling over the end

of other people's world

seems like a philosophical argument

compared to the certainty

of your own finality

and I've been thinking

the question is

out of Stephen Hawking's book

about parallel worlds

and black holes

and stuff

how can these

physical oddities

or anomalies

be related

to what I'm talking about

well

first of all

we don't know

what a black hole is

a black hole

has at the center of it

a singularity

the definition

of singularity

is

you don't know

what it is

this is a fishy way

of making theories

by the way

Stephen Hawking

is a prime example

at one point

in his career

he was

very keen

for what were called

mini black holes

and these were black holes

that were

under a centimeter

in size

and a certain reading

of his theory

required

ten high sixteen

of these things

in the universe

well

when you realize

that there's a singularity

at the center

of each one of them

you say

well hell

what kind of physics

are you doing

if you have a physical theory

that has

ten high sixteen

exceptions

to whatever rules

it lays down

this isn't a theory

this is a sieve

that you're waving around

in the air

however

the black hole

does bear

on this

because

imagine an observer

standing outside

the event horizon

of a black hole

watching an object

approach

the black hole

what you see

and this is similar

to the argument

or the example

I gave a few minutes ago

of the marble

on the edge of the bowl

what you see

is this

let's make it a spacecraft

this spacecraft

that approaches

the event horizon

of the black hole

and then

it's caught

in the

gravitational tidal

forces of the black hole

and it begins to go

faster and faster

around and around

faster and faster

and at a certain point

it disappears

into the singularity

this is from the point of view

of an observer

outside the system

now

now we flash

to the stalwart

captain and crew

on the bridge

of this starship

what happens

from their point of view

what happens

is

as they sink below

the event horizon

of the black hole

and start the descent

toward the singularity

time and space

are dilated

so dramatically

that the singularity

recedes

to an infinite distance

and you fall forever

toward it

well

what I would like

to suggest

based on

well

here's what I'd like

to suggest

this is one way

of thinking

about it

that our planet

is on a collision

course

with

something

which we

actually

at our present

state of knowledge

don't have a word

for

a black hole

is simply

a gravitationally

massive object

so massive

that no light

can leave it

what I'm talking about

is something like that

except that

it isn't so much

gravitationally massive

as temporally

massive

we are being sucked

into the body

of eternity

and I think

it's going to happen

very soon

now

an obvious objection

that someone

would make

to this

it's a

it's a probabilistic

objection

is they would say

don't you find it

rather unusual

that your own

very

minute

and finite

life

should occur

so close

to this

moment

of universal

dramatic

climax

doesn't that

clue you

to the fact

that you might

be slightly deluded

to which I reply

not at all

because

I think of this

event horizon

as a series

of like

ghost

horizons

and

once you

enter into

history

what history

is

is the

outer shell

of the

gravitational

field

of the

attractor

of the

concrescence

in other words

history

is the

disturbance

in nature

which

precedes

the

concrescence

it precedes

it by only

50,000 years

a microsecond

so

a geological

microsecond

before all

life

is melted

down

in the presence

of the singularity

there is

a curious

interface

zone

that is not

the singularity

and not

the absence

of the singularity

it's

the singularity

in the act

of

becoming

and it only

lasts

as I say

a geological

microsecond

50,000 years

but if you

happen to be

born inside

that microsecond

then you

have a very

curious

perspective

on the

phenomenon

indeed

because you

observe it

from inside

the shell

of the

historical

vehicle

here is the

point I want

to make

if you have

a universe

like that

72 billion

years in

duration

it will

undergo

half

of its

evolution

in the

last

30 seconds

of its

existence

can you

imagine

now this

is what

the scientists

do

except they

spin it

around

and that's

why

I can't remember

who wrote it

but the book

called the

first three

minutes

Steven Weinberg's

book

the first three

minutes

a book about

the first three

minutes

in the life

of the universe

where he

leads you

through all

this complex

physics

as matter

is crystallizing

out of

hyperspace

and all

this stuff

all I'm

saying

is

let's put

the complexity

in the more

likely end

of the cycle

let's put it

at the end

when after

billions of

years of

evolution

and all

kinds of

complexity

and that

sort of

thing

everything

comes

together

so

this

kind

of a

cycle

if we

were actually

living in

a universe

like this

could

completely

unfold

itself

according

to its

natural

laws

and yet

provide a

miracle

the miracle

of the

concrescence

that's why

I'm so keen

on boundary

dissolution

the more

boundaries that

have dissolved

the closer

to concrescence

we are

and when you

finally reach it

there are no

boundaries

you are

eternity

you are

all space

and time

you are

alive

and dead

here

and there

before

and

after

the singularity

is a

coincidencia

appositorum

it can

simultaneously

coexist

in states

which are

contradictory

it is

you know

Thomas Aquinas'

vision of

God

it's

something

which

transcends

rational

apprehension

but

it

gives

the universe

meaning

because

all process

then

can be seen

to be

a seeking

and a moving

and an effort

to approximate

connect

with

and attend

to

this

transcendental

object

at the end

of time

one way of

thinking of it

is like

those bar

balls

that they

hang in

discos

that

send out

thousands of

reflections

off everybody

and everything

in the room

well think

of the

transcendental

object

at the

end

of time

as that

bar

ball

and then

those

reflected

twinkling

refractive

lights

are

religions

scientific

theories

gurus

works of

art

poetry

great

orgasms

great

souffles

great

paintings

in other

words

anything

which has

we even

use this

phrase

anything

which has

a spark

of divinity

in it

is in

fact

referent

to the

original

source

of the

sparks

of all

divinity

which is

the

compressed

experience

of life

and mind

after

billions

of billions

of years

of unfolding

itself

within the

confines

of three

dimensional

space

and you

can make

this

vision

your

friend

through

psychedelics

because as

I said

at the

beginning

of this

rave

you can

see it

from here

of course

not if you

have your

face

plunged in

your stock

portfolio

you're not

going to

see it

no

but if you

will go

up on the

mountain

and take

five dry

grams

in silent

darkness

and pray

through the

night

you will

absolutely

guaranteed

come into

a sense

of this

thing

a perturbation

on the

surface

of the

waters

of time

as we

approach

the lip

of this

cascade

into

concrescence

novelty

and completion

and the

psychedelics

raise you

out of the

historical

matrix

and give

you

a sense

of

participation

in this

transcendental

reality

it's the

essence of

religion

it's the

essence of

psychic

balance

it's the

source

of

shamanic

power

and

mental

health

thousands

of these

molecules

are arriving

at the

synaptic

site of

activity

elbowing

aside

the local

population

of the

endogenous

neurotransmitters

getting them

out of the

way

plugging

themselves

into the

receptor

site

and beginning

to lift

the electron

spin

resonance

level

and push

them

in new

directions

and you

can almost

hear it

doing

this

and

then

beyond

the

hypnagogia

there is

the

actual

trip

and it

usually

is

this

means

that

the

world

has

to

fall

it

like

falls

apart

or

explodes

or

settles

down

on you

there is

a sense

of a

rupture

of plane

and then

the

visually

coherent

emotionally

laden

information

laden

high content

hallucinations

occur

and many

people

have taken

psychedelic drugs

and never

gotten past

the

hypnagogia

they don't

know that

there is

something out

there besides

dancing mice

and spinning

geometric

wheels

and stuff

like that

but

beyond that

you cross

over

and that's

the typical

model of a

trip

now

what happens

with all

of these

things

to greater

and lesser

degrees

LSD

psilocybin

mescaline

ayahuasca

is

and I've

never

actually ever

heard an

explanation

for this

for some

reason

the experience

comes in

waves

there's the

first wave

that makes

sense

that's

the drug

taking

hold

but why

then

after 20

minutes

of

unbelievably

outlandish

hallucination

will it

like all

stop

you know

and it's

like a

moment ago

you were

screaming

for mercy

now

you look

around

and you

say

I'm

down

am I

down

I seem

to be

down

you know

and sometimes

you seem

to come

all the

way

turns off

sometimes

and then

about five

minutes later

it comes

again

and you get

another wave

and if you've

taken a really

dedicated hit

of

ayahuasca

for example

you will get

like as many as

five or six

of these waves

throughout the evening

and the first one

is usually

the strongest

if you take

an effective

but not

strong

dose

of ayahuasca

you will get

one pass

and often

and then if you

take slightly

less

you'll get

one pass

and it will

be weak

so if you

take ayahuasca

at all times

pay attention

because you may

be looking

at something

thinking

well this is

not so interesting

I'm sure it's

going to be

much better

in an hour

and you may

actually be looking

at as good

as it's going

to get

that evening

and psilocybin

also comes

in waves

like this

LSD

very dramatically

DMT not

because DMT

is one

enormous

brief

wave

I mean

DMT

sort of

brings all

the issues

together

and

the way

I think

of these

psychedelics

experientially

is as a

series of

concentric

circles

maybe like

the outer

circle

is

mescaline

and the next

circle in

is

LSD

and the next

circle in

is psilocybin

and the next

circle in

is DMT

it's almost

as though

the psychedelic

experience

is

whatever drug

or whatever

substance

you take

it leads

you deeper

and deeper

in the same

direction

and of course

with DMT

you not only

hear the aliens

you see

the aliens

you not only

see the aliens

you become

an alien

it seems to be

the most

radical

of all of

these things

in terms of

the experience

it's also

the most

natural

of all of

these things

it also

is the

safest

it stands

the ordinary

standards of

courage and

risk

on their

head

because

here it is

it's the most

terrifying

the most

spectacular

and

the safest

none of us

including myself

have fully

come to grips

with this

paradox

we would

rather do

less safe

less

scary

drugs

I think

DMT

is

pretty

impressive

in most

situations

next

Terence

responds

to a question

comparing

meditation

and the

use of

hallucinations

well no

I just

I think

they're

completely

different

realms

of human

activity

I can't

I mean

meditation

you don't

hallucinate

you don't

they say

you do

but they

aren't

very

convincing

and plus

the monks

then rush

over and

explain that

you're doing

it wrong

so you know

what's the

deal

I think

if by

meditation

you mean

lying down

and closing

your eyes

or sitting

up and

closing your

eyes a lot

I do

that a lot

and I like

it but I

would never

confuse it

with the

psychedelic

enterprise

pardon me

it's only

my opinion

but I

really don't

I think

that it's

that

all of

these

spiritual

techniques

are not

substitutions

for the

psychedelic

experience

but

trade-offs

you know

I mean

organized religion

is as

concerned

with

controlling

social

groups

as

organized

politics

is

and

the

visionary

or ecstatic

experience

is unsettling

to the

religious

mentality

you know

even among

fundamentalist

Christians

if you're

not one

they all

seem

more or

less

alike

but if

you move

into that

world

you discover

that they

are very

strongly

polarized

in two

directions

those

who are

scripturalists

and those

who are

experientialists

the glossolalia

the speaking

in tongues

the holy

rollers

that sort

of thing

and the

scripturalists

are very

uncomfortable

around

the experientialists

because to

them it looks

like demonic

possession

and they get

really agitated

about that

yeah well

I think

that all

of these

techniques

like

mantra

yantra

tantra

whatever

they work

incredibly

well in

the presence

of psychedelics

leading me

to suppose

that what

these are

are tools

that were

developed

in the

paleolithic

world of

psychedelic

magic

and all

we have

now

are

these

tools

but we

don't have

the original

engine

that drove

them

yes

I

am very

bored

by

spiritual

practice

unless

I've

taken a

psychedelic

and then

you know

mantric

chanting

is

beyond

the power

of mind

to encompass

or describe

sex

isn't bad

either

and

you know

it seems

to be a

general

functional

enhancer

is what

it is

acoustical

driving

is also

a tried

and true

tradition

but see

it's not

about

the exclusivity

of method

but the

combination

of method

I mean

what you

want to

do

is

beat

your

drum

while

sitting

in

yab-yum

while

stoned

on

X

while

at

the

holy

mountain

while

the

astrological

configuration

is

correct

and

then

you know

line it

all up

and then

push it

through

that's

the way

to do

it

I think

Terence

on

creativity

and

hallucinogens

well

it

again

it goes

back

to this

function

of

boundary

dissolution

creativity

if you

analyze

what

do we

mean

when we

say

that

it

basically

means

being able

to

transcend

the

ordinary

you

see it

in a

way

nobody

else

ever

saw

it

whatever

it

is

and

so

that's

creativity

psychedelics

by dissolving

the boundaries

of cultural

expectation

let you

see things

in new

ways

I was

in a

situation

recently

where it

was

evening

and

silhouetted

against the

sky

were flame

cypress

trees

but they

were all

black

and I

was looking

at them

I've seen

flame

cypress

trees

against

twilight

skies

many times

you all

have as

well

and suddenly

it was like

there was

this

shift

and I

didn't

see it

as a

flame

cypress

tree

anymore

I

saw

it

as

black

dust

pouring

out

of a

certain

point

of the

sky

and

cascading

like a

waterfall

and I

was looking

at three

waterfalls

of

microfine

black

powder

pouring

out

of

points

about

sixty

feet

above

the

ground

well

I

didn't

even

mention

it

to

the

person

I

the

other

night

this

was

really

interesting

to me

the

other

night

just

as

I

was

falling

asleep

a

phrase

came

into

my

mind

that

I

liked

but I

didn't

understand

it

in fact

I

didn't

think

it

meant

anything

I

just

thought

it

was

an

interesting

phrase

and

I

thought

about

it

understood

it

and

I

thought

this

is

a

very

interesting

idea

and

I

never

thought

it

before

the

thought

was

if

time

were

space

then

history

is a

cobweb

that

was

all

it

was

but

I

don't

take

these

leaps

very

often

so

I

was

delighted

because

I knew

a moment

would come

when I

could lay

it on

a group

of

people

like

I

have

just

done

so

it's

a

catalyst

for

cognitive

activity

that's

what

the

mushroom

is

dance

drama

song

painting

body

expression

creativity

and simply

the passive

act

of

understanding

this is

what it

does

for us

and this

is

what

we

love

to

do

I

mean

we

are

creatures

of

the

mind

you

know

they

talk

about

virtual

reality

as some

future

technology

that's

going

to

change

everything

we've

been

living

in a

virtual

reality

for the

past

6,000

years

I mean

look at

cities like

New York

and London

and Los Angeles

I mean

every

nature

has

disappeared

everything

you see

is a

human

idea

downloaded

into

material

existence

it's

entirely

virtual

it

doesn't

disappear

at the

punch

of a

dial

but

it

is

as

virtual

as

the

virtual

realities

that

will

eventually

be

made

out

of

light

behind

goggles

culture

the whole

thing

is

that

culture

and

language

tend

to

become

traps

and

yet

they

can

be

the

platforms

for

enormous

freedom

if

you

understand

what

it's

all

about

and

what

it's

all

about

is

you

are

the

center

of

the

mandala

you

are

not

marginalized

in

any

way

and

the

message

that

the

culture

gives

us

is

that

we

are

marginal

it

doesn't

matter

whether

you

if

you've

got

a

hundred

million

dollars

fortune

magazine

will

inform

you

that

so

do

10,000

other

people

on the

north

american

continent

there's

nothing

special

about

you

it's

and

so

we

are

constantly

this is

part

of

the

democratic

legacy

we

are

constantly

told

you're

not

special

isn't

special

anybody

could

do

it

what

the

psychedelic

and

so

then

when

you

look

for

guidance

direction

mentorship

we always

look toward

institutions

well I'll

go to the

university

or I'll

go to the

army or I'll

do something

somebody will

tell me

will give me a

larger purpose

but it's really

yourself

that is

the final

arbiter

and if you keep

yourself as the

final arbiter

you will be

less susceptible

to infection

by cultural

illusion

now the

problem

with this

is that

it makes

you feel

bad

to not

be

infected

by cultural

illusion

because it's

called

alienation

you know

but this

is

I can't

solve

all

problems

the reason

we feel

alienated

is because

the society

is infantile

trivial

and stupid

so

the cost

of sanity

in this

society

is a

certain

level of

alienation

I grapple

with this

because I'm

a parent

and I think

anybody who has

children

you come to

this realization

you know

what will it

be

alienated

cynical

intellectual

or

slack jawed

halfwit

consumer

of the horseshit

being handed

down from

on high

there is not

much choice

in there

you see

and we all

want our

children to be

well adjusted

it's

unfortunately

there's nothing

to be well

adjusted

to

so

that's a real

problem

and I really

believe

that

extra

environmentalism

which is

a nicer

though

longer

word

for alienation

is

defensible

and shouldn't

be thought of

as

pathological

what I noticed

in going

to the Amazon

and Indonesia

and these

places

is

is that

the person

you want

to get

to

is

the shaman

and

but the shaman

is different

from everybody

else

like when you

go into

an Amazonian

tribe

that's way

up river

or something

the people

behave the way

you would

expect

naive

untraveled

people

to behave

they want

to touch

your

gore

text

and

you know

look at

your camera

and

and look

through the

binoculars

and fiddle

with the

can opener

and all

this

no shaman

would ever

stoop

to such

behavior

a shaman

is not

knows

that cultures

are provisional

and is

interested in

you

as a

person

the other

people don't

even

see you

as a person

because you're

huge

white

strange

smelling

and incomprehensible

the shaman

sees you

as a person

and it's because

he is alienated

the reason

shamans

can do

their magic

is because

they are

outside

the belief

system

I really

think

that that's

true

everyone else

believes

you know

that the guy

in the other

village

can send

the mojo

and mess

with you

the shaman

knows

that that's

not quite

how it

works

and so

then he

as it

were

can go

behind

the board

and fix

the cultural

TV that

everybody else

is just

watching

so I

think

alienation

extra

environmentalism

shamanism

whatever you

want to

call it

is simply

individualism

in the

context

of cultures

that don't

value

individualism

and cultures

don't

you know

it said

nature

acts

to preserve

the species

cultures

act

to preserve

the illusions

of the population

they're not

interested in

you

if you're

an Einstein

or a

Jackson Pollock

unless they

can fit

you in

to the

pre-established

systems

of commerce

and canons

of aesthetic

order

and so forth

and so on

and then

that's called

being

civilized

the question

is

what's

with

licking

frogs

I'm not

sure I

got it

right

but

well you

know

you kiss

a lot

of frogs

before you

find a

prince

and you

probably

lick a

lot

more

toads

not

frogs

let's

give

the devil

his due

here

toads

of certain

species

produce

a

relative

of DMT

in large

glands

in their

necks

why this

is

is not

clear

considering

that this

exudate

or this

material

will kill

a dog

If a dog picks up a toad like that in his mouth, within minutes, it's pretty spectacular.

It's reasonable to suppose that then this is just a defense that has been evolved.

Some of you may have seen the dinosaur in Jurassic Park that spits poison in your face.

We're talking something like that.

The toad creates this 5-methoxy DMT in this gland,

and when the glands are squeezed, it comes out on the surface of the toad's skin.

It's a near relative of DMT.

Speaking from my personal battery of many prejudices, I would say I don't care for it.

It complicates my job enormously because people do this stuff,

and they think, A, that it is DMT,

or, B, if they're slightly better informed, that it's just like DMT.

It is, in fact, chemically called 5-methoxy DMT.

However, it is nothing like DMT.

It's as much like DMT as radio is like television,

and that's where the difference lies.

The 5-methoxy DMT does not trigger the most spectacular effect associated with DMT,

which is these three-dimensional crawling hallucinations

that come out of the woodwork and reveal the true nature of reality to you.

When you take 5-methoxy DMT,

you have all of the physical presentation of DMT.

There's a sense of a kind of light anesthesia through the limbs.

There's a sense of falling forward into a void.

There's a sense of losing body boundary.

Now, at that point in DMT,

those symptoms would give way to the trip.

At that point in 5-M-E-O DMT,

those symptoms give way to the beginning of the come-down.

And people who have never taken DMT sometimes rave about 5-M-E-O

and say, you know, this was the most astonishing thing I've ever happened to me.

People who are familiar with DMT

can yawn their way all the way through it

because you're braced for the DMT thing.

I mean, you think, oh my God, it feels just like it.

Here it comes.

It's going to be upon me.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1,

plus 1, plus 2, plus 3, plus 4, plus 5.

It's not coming in.

It doesn't come in.

And so, and then 5-M-E-O is fatal in sheep

as well as dogs.

Spectacularly fatal in sheep.

And so, I guess, if you're a sheep, it's counterindicated.

Doesn't seem to be harmful in human beings.

But with so little data available,

I think maybe we should, you know,

there are old psychedelicists and bold psychedelicists.

But there are no old, bold psychedelicists.

Have I had any contact with the government?

Not exactly, well, up until a week ago,

the answer to this question was yes.

I mean, no.

When I got home from Mestelin the last time,

there was a really funny letter,

which I haven't quite figured out how to respond to.

Dear Mr. McKenna,

I'm an officer of the California State Police,

fascinated with DMT,

and recently read the interview with you

in the San Francisco Chronicle.

I wonder if you would be willing to meet with me

and have coffee so we can discuss this

at your earliest possible convenience.

So, what I did was fairly chicken shit, actually.

I found a copy of Food of the Gods

and I sent it off and I said,

this is my latest book,

or this is a book of mine.

It deals in part with DMT.

Give it a quick read

and if you're still interested in a get-together,

call me.

So, I think,

I don't know exactly how to interpret this.

I've always felt that the reason

the government left me alone

was because I'm an intellectual

and in the United States,

that is the most pathetic,

ineffective form of non-entity

known to exist.

I think that the greatest period

of American creativity in literature

and in other areas, too, arguably,

in the 20th century

was the 20s

and that's because

an expatriate community

conducted a critique of American society

from a foreign vantage point,

in that case, Paris.

And I think that

in spite of the Clinton hiatus,

that the politics of light

have not yet come to settle

on the land of Jefferson

and that we should be prepared

on a moment's notice, basically,

to decamp to Prague

and conduct all this from there.

Also, you know,

Prague was the capital

of European civilization

before the Thirty Years' War,

before the rise of modern science.

It's an Italianate city

untouched by either world war.

It's a beautiful place.

Well,

the world and its double

is how we styled this.

This is simply a high-visibility,

flashy way of reminding people

whose eyes fall upon that text

that the world

were the world

and the world

has had been

over a while.

And also,

you know,

you can see

what we have been

before the world

and what we have been

in the state of the world.