Global perspectives and psychedelic poetics is what it says in the propaganda,
which I assume is simply permission to rave about whatever comes to mind.
Global perspectives.
I guess what I could say about this, from a psychedelic perspective,
the thing that is different for psychedelic people looking at the global dilemma that we're in
and that continues to deepen around us is that it's, from my point of view,
permission to hope rather than despair,
because I think that processes, institutions that for a thousand years or more
have been building toward some kind of cemetery break,
some kind of definitive, self-revealing moment,
that we now are turning final, as pilots say.
We're now deeply embedded in the pattern.
We can see enough of what's ahead of us to begin to actually feel the texture of the end of human history.
It's no longer an abstraction.
Even the straight people who own the world,
with their long-term and short-term projections,
looking at population growth,
spread of greenhouse gases,
disappearance of the ozone hole,
rising third world expectations,
so forth and so on,
when you propagate all these trends,
it seems very clear
that business as usual is no longer an option.
Nobody's talking about that.
So, we're either in some kind of final, fatal meltdown
of the values of Western civilization revealed now after a thousand or two thousand year run
to essentially be bankrupt,
or we're going to transform ourselves unrecognizably.
There really isn't any middle ground.
The most radical and least likely future of all,
it seems to me,
is a future in which we continue just to stumble forward,
as we have been since the Industrial Revolution.
That's no longer an option.
And so then the question becomes a sort of a Gnostic conundrum.
Is this the final act of some kind of great cosmic tragedy
in which intelligence rises out of the slime,
is shown to be inadequate and sinks back into the slime?
Or is this a tale of difficulty overcome and heroism won?
And are we going to be able to shed the monkey nature
and shed the ego
and actually move up to some kind of shining ideal?
You know, if you think of us as the descendants of the angels,
this is a pretty tatty circumstance we've come to rest in.
On the other hand, if you think of us as the descendants of shithurling apes
screeching through the treetops,
then it's pretty amazing what has been accomplished here.
You know, one of the dilemmas that I feel very strongly,
and I'm just sort of talking off the top of my head here,
because whenever a crowd is small enough,
I sort of feel like I'm in my own living room.
We don't have to have the pretense of knowing lecturer
and, you know, eager-to-be-educated audience.
The real challenge, I think, is trying to decide
what is baggage and what is ballast
that's going to have to be dumped.
Can the future be a celebration of humanness
as we have known it,
meaning in the animal body
with all its, you know, joys and pains,
with all its frailty
and potential for ecstasy,
or is what we call human nature
somehow transcendental?
And did we only rest for a moment in the monkey body
as once the cutting edge of evolution
must have rested in the great reptiles
and at some earlier phase in history
rested in the fish and so on.
Is consciousness something uniquely human?
And must we keep the animal body with us?
Is our destiny to become the gardener caretakers
of a revivified earth?
Or is the earth like a placenta of some sort
that we have literally sucked all the nutrition
and potential out of
because we're on our way
to some grander, higher domain of being?
I don't have the answer to these kinds of questions.
I feel it very poignantly.
It's very poignantly focused
in the psychedelic,
in the experience of psychedelic plants
and psychedelic shamanism
because, you know,
as any of you who have followed my ideas on this know,
I've spent a lot of time
in the Amazon basin
with human populations
that seem to have struck
some kind of dynamic balance
with the earth.
And yet the paradox of that dynamic balance
is that when you take the sacraments,
the hallucinogenic plants
of these people,
you're propelled into worlds
of science fiction-like strangeness,
transcendental dimensions
of titanic implication.
And then, at least I personally,
have come to the realization
that this is how those cultures
have chosen to deal
with the Faustian impulse in human beings.
It's been somehow confined
in the domain of the imagination.
We, meaning we who trace our ancestry
back to Europe,
are part of a different style,
a different strain of human being,
if you will.
We are the idea excretors,
not satisfied to have a canoe,
a net,
five fish hooks,
and a bowl,
but instead we take matter,
we, Western civilization,
Western technology,
and we impress upon matter ideas,
millions of ideas,
cities like Manhattan,
high performance weaponry,
enormous works of art.
All of this is a kind of impulse,
very strong in Western human beings
to bring the ideas out of the domain of mind
and to somehow solidify them in matter.
Permanence.
The cult of the West is permanence.
I always feel that when you can find
the obsessive center of a society,
you probably have put your finger
on its central neurosis as well.
I remember when I spent time in India.
India is rife with talk of Shakti.
Shakti is energy conceived of
in various ways.
It can be sexual energy
or it can actually be electricity
flowing through wires,
it's called Shakti.
And I realized being in India
that the Indian obsession with Shakti
was a consequence of there not being any.
That this was a society
where energy had become
the hardest commodity
to encounter.
And I think in the West,
permanence is the thing,
is our great bugaboo
because we are born into the realization
that everything is slipping through our fingers
at the very moment that it comes into existence.
The hardest psychedelic truth to assimilate,
and you don't have to take psychedelics to assimilate this,
if you just live,
this will be hammered in on you again and again.
And it's not to,
well, it's a cause for exaltation,
it's a cause for despair.
It's that nothing lasts.
Nothing lasts.
You know, not your fortune,
not your misfortune,
not your lovers,
your enemies,
your children,
ultimately not even your own life and body.
Everything fades.
And so the Western response to this
is the attempt to create something permanent.
Civilizations,
enduring ideas,
enduring institutions.
All this is doomed to failure.
And I see this Western obsession
with the cult of permanence
as a consequence of the Western obsession
with ego.
Ego, to my mind,
is the very thing,
if you had to somehow
meld each problem
into the next problem
to try and reduce all problems to one,
what you would eventually come to
is the realization
that ego
is what is destroying us.
Our inability to displace our loyalty
away from the unique locus
of space and time
represented by our own bodies.
You know, community,
communalism,
these are the things
that we fear,
that we repress,
and that we,
at the same time,
struggle to realize.
I mean,
the collapse of communism
on one level
was the collapse
of a repressive,
nightmarish,
paranoid social system.
But the dream
which lay behind that
was a dream
of community,
of unity,
of sisterhood
and brotherhood.
And the great concern now
is that with the collapse
of even a pretense
of that position
that we are further fragmented,
further atomized
into individual competing microbes
of greed and need.
And this is precisely the attitudes
which will push us
ever closer
to species extinction
and to global ruin.
Well,
when you look at
thousands and thousands
of psychedelic experiences,
you,
to my mind,
what you come away with
is the notion that,
you know,
no matter who you are,
Amazonian shaman,
Hasidic rabbi,
nuclear physicist,
the psychedelic
will dissolve boundaries.
It will dissolve
your boundaries
and force you
to realize
the commonality
of the flesh.
You know,
it's a startling thing
to realize
that really
what you represent
is nothing more
than a point of view
and that we each
are such a point of view,
triangulating perception
through what is essentially
simply a nexus
of our past history.
We always are talking
about the past
and the future,
but it's worth noticing
that we all managed
to get here
this morning,
this place,
this time,
and not one of us
has the same past
as any other of us.
This moment,
like any moment,
is not a confluence
of the past,
it is a confluence
of many pasts,
and these many pasts
come into a nexus
of connection
and then move on
to become
many,
many futures.
The reason I'm so interested
in the psychedelic potential
and willing to speak
about it
is because I think
that our,
the myth of our separateness,
which was the glory
of our institutional
accomplishments,
parliamentary democracy,
individual rights,
liberation of various classes
and so forth,
has now turned
somewhat sour.
There has got to be
something more to it
than just turning people
loose to loot the planet
so that everyone
can pile up
more and more stuff,
stuff which doesn't
satisfy anyway.
And I think
in talking about
the future,
what we have to
somehow do
is dematerialize
the future.
And there are
several ways
or many ways
to do this.
People have preached
voluntary simplicity
and some people
are into this.
However,
it's hypocritical
to preach this
in the third world
to people
who have nothing.
You know,
we have everything
so we've seen
the fallacy
of condominiums
and mercedes
so then we preach
this in Bangladesh.
This is a bit
disingenuous.
The dematerializing
of culture.
Somehow,
you see,
what we have to recognize
in the wake
of the collapse
of communism
is that capitalism
as well
is a system
with a fatal flaw
that is set
against human nature.
capitalism assumes
an endlessly
exploitable frontier
of resources.
This we
have got.
Not.
So,
capitalism
is now
essentially,
unless it can be
radically retooled,
an anti-human
philosophy.
It's literally
chewing up
the ground
we're standing
on.
But there is
nothing in
the basic notion
of capitalism
that says
that we have
to be
thing dealers.
This is simply
the style
of capitalism
that we have
fallen into.
Somehow,
we have to
dematerialize
existence.
And I don't know
whether that means
virtual reality.
Some of you
have heard me
say that my
vision of
a perfect future
is,
you know,
25% of the
present world
population
living in
ecological
balance,
living in an
apparently
primitive,
naked,
aboriginal state.
But when you
step into the
minds of those
people and
look behind
their closed
eyelids,
there are
menus
hanging in
bio-tele-
electronic
space.
Culture,
you see,
can be
downloaded
into a chip
installed
behind the
eyelids
so that it
is,
you know,
freely
commandable
as an
experience
in the
imagination.
But if
we insist
on continually
extracting
resources from
the earth
and fashioning
our dreams
out of the
stuff of
earth,
then our
dreams are
destined to
turn to
nightmare.
It can't
be any other
way.
So that's
one thing
about the
future.
The future
needs to be
dematerialized.
And then,
you know,
since people
always accuse
me of being
a harebrained
dreamer,
I've tried to
come up with
something approaching
a practical
suggestion,
question, and I
took this
need to the
feet of the
mushroom gods,
having been
challenged by
somebody at a
talk like this,
they said,
well, you're
always saying
these mushrooms
speak, why
don't you ask
them how to
save the
world?
And I thought
this was kind
of disingenuous,
but the next
time I had
the telephone
to hyperspace
in my hot
hand, I did
make the
inquiry, and
the suggestion
which came
back, I think,
is at least
food for
thought.
The suggestion
was, you want
to save the
world?
You want to
overcome male
dominance, the
momentum of
consumerism, so
forth and so
on?
every woman
should bear
only one
natural child.
This is an
interesting idea,
whether you
take it
seriously as
program or
not.
If every
woman were
to commit
herself to
bearing only
one natural
child, the
population of
the earth
would fall
by 50%
in 40
years without
war or
famine or
epidemic
disease.
If this
program were
continued for
another 40
years, the
population would
fall by half
again.
This means in
80 years, the
population of
the planet
could be
reduced 75%.
Why have we
not heard
anything about
this?
Even for it
to be
denounced, I'm
not saying it
has to be
embraced, but
why isn't it
a tiny
fanatical
minority
advocating
this?
I think
it's because
it's inconceivable
in this
society
to try and
practice
capitalism in
a situation
of retreating
demographics.
It also
would be
a solution
which would
place enormous
power in
the hands
of women.
Women are
often heard
to complain
about their
powerlessness.
Yet here's
a plan
which requires
very little
input from
white guys.
I took
this idea
to demographers
and said
what about
it?
This seems
so simple.
Most people
think there
are no
solutions.
Here's a
very simple
solution.
What about
it?
They said
yes, well
it's more
startling than
you realize
because women
in upper
class, high
tech, western
society, a
woman say
on the upper
east side of
Manhattan or
Malibu or
the Seacliff
district of
San Francisco,
a child born
to that woman
will have
800 to
1,000 times
more negative
impact on the
earth than
a child born
to a woman
in Bangladesh.
If you were
to go to
Bangladesh
and meet
a woman
in the
back streets
of Dhaka
who told
you that
her ambition
in life
was to have
900 children
you'd think
you were
dealing with
some kind
of sociopath
a kind
of typhoid
Mary of
the demographic
scene
and yet
every child
born into
moderately
well-off
yuppie families
in high-tech
societies
is in
that
position
we prefer
not to
think of
it this
way
I think
it's very
interesting
that one
could make
a case
to
women
in western
societies
you could
say
how would
you like
vastly
increased
leisure time
how would
you like
increased
disposable
income
and how
would you
like to
take upon
yourself
a truly
heroic
social
role
this is
what's being
offered
with this
suggestion
to limit
reproduction
to one
natural
child
no more
heroic
no more
politically
correct
action
can be
taken
and
interestingly
the women
you want
to convince
of this
position
are the
women
you are
most likely
to be able
to convince
educated
white
women
with
above
average
incomes
so
that's
a very
practical
suggestion
more likely
to be
implemented
than my
dream
of
lunar
inoculations
with
psilocybin
for the
entire
population
to
dissolve
the
calcareous
ego
formations
that have
sprung up
in the
bloodstream
since
the last
full moon
which I
also think
would be
a fine
idea
global
perspectives
and
psychedelic
poetics
is what
it says
in the
propaganda
which I
assume
is simply
permission
to rave
about
whatever
comes to
mind
global
perspectives
I guess
what
I could
say
about
this
from
a
psychedelic
perspective
the
thing
that
is
different
for
psychedelic
people
looking
at
the
global
dilemma
that
we're
in
and
that
increases
that
continues
to
deepen
around
us
is
that
it's
from
my point
of view
permission
to
hope
rather
than
years or
more
have been
building
toward
some
kind of
symmetry
break
some
kind of
definitive
self-revealing
moment
that we
now are
turning
final
as pilots
say
we're now
deeply embedded
in the
pattern
we can
see
enough
of what's
ahead of
us
to begin
to actually
feel the
texture
of the
end
of human
history
it's no
longer
an
abstraction
even
the
straight
people
who
own
the
world
with
their
long
term
and
short
term
projections
looking
at
population
growth
spread
of
greenhouse
gases
disappearance
of the
ozone
whole
rising
third world
expectations
so forth
and so on
when you
propagate
all these
trends
it seems
very clear
that business
as usual
is no longer
an option
nobody's
talking
about
that
so
we're either
in some
kind of
final
fatal
meltdown
of the
values
of western
civilization
revealed
now
after a
thousand
or two
thousand
year run
to essentially
be
bankrupt
or
we're
going to
transform
ourselves
unrecognizably
there really
isn't any
middle ground
the most
radical
and least
likely
future
of all
it seems
to me
is a future
in which
we continue
just to
stumble forward
as we have been
since the
industrial revolution
that's no longer
an option
and so then
the question
becomes a sort of
a gnostic
conundrum
is this the final act
of some kind of
great cosmic
tragedy
in which
intelligence
rises out of the
slime
is shown to be
inadequate
and sinks back
into the slime
or is this
you know
a tale of
difficulty overcome
and heroism
won
and are we going
to be able
to shed
the monkey
nature
and shed
the ego
and actually
move up
to some kind
of shining
ideal
you know
it's a
if you think
of us
as the descendants
of the angels
this is a pretty
tatty
circumstance
we've come
to rest in
on the other hand
if you think
of us
as the descendants
of shit hurling
apes
screeching
through the
treetops
then it's
pretty amazing
what has been
accomplished
here
you know
one of the
dilemmas
that I feel
very strongly
and I'm just
sort of talking
off the top
of my head
here
because whenever
a crowd
is small enough
I sort of
feel like
I'm in my own
living room
we don't have
to have
the pretense
of knowing
lecturer
and you know
eager to be
educated audience
the real
challenge
I think
is trying
to decide
what is
baggage
and what
is ballast
that's going
to have
to be dumped
can the future
be a celebration
of humanness
as we have
known it
meaning
in the animal
body
with all
its
you know
joys
and pains
with all
its frailty
and
potential
for ecstasy
or is
what we call
human nature
somehow
transcendental
and
did we only
rest
for a moment
in the monkey
body
as once
the cutting edge
of evolution
must have
rested in the
great reptiles
and at some
earlier phase
in history
rested in the
fish
and so on
is consciousness
something uniquely
human
and must we
keep the animal
body with us
is our destiny
to become
the gardener
caretakers
of a
revivified earth
or is the earth
like a placenta
of some sort
that we have
literally
sucked all
the nutrition
and potential
out of
because we're
on our way
to some
grander
higher
domain
of being
I don't
have the answer
to these kinds
of questions
I feel it
very poignantly
it's very
poignantly
focused
in the
psychedelic
in the experience
of psychedelic
plants
and psychedelic
shamanism
because
you know
as any of you
have followed
my ideas
on this
know
I've spent a lot
of time
in the Amazon
basin
with
human populations
that seem
to have struck
some kind
of dynamic
balance
with the earth
and yet
the paradox
of that
dynamic balance
is that
when you take
the sacraments
the hallucinogenic
plants
of these people
you're propelled
into worlds
of
science
fiction
like
strangeness
transcendental
dimensions
of
titanic
implication
and then
at least I
personally
have come
to the realization
that this
is how
those cultures
have chosen
to deal
with
the Faustian
impulse
in human beings
it's been
somehow
confined
in the domain
of the
imagination
we
meaning
we
who trace
our
ancestry
back to
Europe
are part
of a different
style
a different
strain
of human
being
if you will
we are
the idea
excretors
not
satisfied
to have
a canoe
a net
five
fish hooks
and
a bowl
to have
a
little
in the
way
to have
a
to have
a
little
time
to have
a
little
but instead we take matter we Western civilization Western technology and we
impress upon matter ideas millions of ideas cities like Manhattan of high
performance weaponry enormous works of art all of this is a kind of impulse
very strong in Western human beings to bring the ideas out of the domain of
mind and to somehow solidify them in matter permanence the cult of the West is
permanence I always feel that when you can find the obsessive center of a
society you probably have put your finger on its on its central neurosis as
well I remember when I spent time in India India's rife with talk of Shakti
Shakti is energy conceived of in various ways it can be sexual energy or it can
actually be electricity flowing through wires is called Shakti and I realized
being in India that the Indian obsession with Shakti was a consequence of there
not being any that this was a society where energy had become the hardest
commodity to encounter and I think in the West permanence is the thing is our great
bugaboo because we are born into the realization that everything is slipping
through our fingers at the very moment that it comes into existence the hardest
psychedelic truth to assimilate and you don't have to take psychedelics to
assimilate this if you just live this will be hammered in on you again and again
and it's not to well it's a cause for exaltation it's a cause for despair it's that
nothing lasts nothing lasts you know not your fortune not your misfortune not your
lovers your enemies your children ultimately not even your own life and body
everything fades and so the Western response to this is the attempt to create
something permanent civilizations enduring ideas enduring institutions all this is
doomed to failure and I see this Western obsession with the cult of permanence as a
consequence of the Western obsession with ego ego to my mind is the very thing if you
had to somehow meld each problem into the next problem to try and reduce all problems to one what you
would eventually come to is the realization that ego is what is destroying us our inability to displace
our loyalty away from the unique locus of space and time represented by our own bodies you know
community communalism these are the things that we fear that we repress and that we at the
same time struggle to realize I mean the collapse of communism on one level was the
collapse of a repressive nightmarish paranoid social system but the dream which lay
behind that was a dream of community of unity of sisterhood and brotherhood and the great concern now is that with the
collapse of even a pretense of that position that we are further fragmented further atomized into individual
competing microbes of greed and need and this is precisely the attitudes which will push us
ever closer to species extinction and to global ruin well when you look at thousands and thousands of psychedelic
experiences you to my mind what you come away with is the notion that you know no matter who you are
Amazonian shaman Hasidic rabbi nuclear physicist the psychedelic will dissolve boundaries it will dissolve your boundaries and force you to realize the commonality of the flesh you know it's a
startling thing to realize that really what you represent is nothing more than a point of view and that we each are such a
point of view triangulating perception through what is essentially simply a nexus of our past history
we always are talking about the past and the future but it's worth noticing that we all managed to get here this morning this
place this time and not one of us has the same past as any other of us this moment like any moment is not a
confluence of the past it is a confluence of many pasts and these many pasts come into a nexus of connection and then move on to become many many futures
the reason I'm so interested in the psychedelic potential and willing to speak about it is because I think that are the myth of our separateness
which was the glory of our institutional accomplishments
parliamentary democracy individual rights
of liberation of various classes and so forth has now turned somewhat sour
there has got to be something more to it than just turning people loose to loot the planet so that everyone can pile up more and more stuff
stuff stuff which doesn't satisfy anyway and I think in talking about the future what we have to somehow do is dematerialize the future and there are several ways or many ways to do this
people have preached voluntary simplicity and some people are into this however it's hypocritical to preach this in the third world to people who have nothing you know we have everything so we've seen the fallacy of condominiums and mercedes so then we preach this in Bangladesh this is a bit disingenuous
the dematerializing of culture somehow you see what we have to recognize in the wake of the collapse of communism is that capitalism as well is a system with a fatal flaw that is set against human nature
capitalism assumes an endlessly exploitable frontier of resources this we have got not so capitalism is now essentially unless it can be radically retooled an end
anti-human philosophy it's literally chewing up the ground we're standing on but there is nothing in the
um the basic notion of capitalism that says that we have to be thing dealers this is simply the style of capitalism that we have fallen into
somehow we have to dematerialize existence and I don't know whether that means virtual reality
some of you have heard me say that my vision of a perfect future is you know 25 percent of the present world population living in ecological balance living in an apparently primitive naked aboriginal state but when you step into the minds of those people and look behind their closed eyelids there are menus
hanging hanging in bio tele electronic space culture you see can be downloaded into a chip
installed behind the eyelids so that it is you know freely commandable as an experience in the imagination but if we insist on continually extracting resources from the earth and fashioning our dreams out of the stuff of earth
then our dreams are destined to turn to nightmare it can't be any other way so that's one thing about the future the future needs to be de materialized
uh and then you know since people always accuse me of being a harebrained dreamer i've tried to come up with something approaching a practical suggestion and i i i took this need to the future of the future of the future of the future of the future of the future of the future that we have to be
thing about the future the future needs to be dematerialized and then you know
since people always accuse me of being a harebrained dreamer I've tried to come
up with something approaching a practical suggestion and I I took this
need to the feet of the mushroom gods being having been challenged by
somebody at a talk like this they said well you're always saying these mushrooms
speak why don't you ask them how to save the world and I thought this was kind
of disingenuous but the next time I I had the telephone to hyperspace in my hot
hand I did make the inquiry and the suggestion which came back I think is at
least food for thought the suggestion was you want to save the world you want
to overcome male dominance the momentum of consumerism so forth and so on every
woman should bear only one natural child this is an interesting idea whether you
take it seriously as program or not if every woman were to commit herself to
bearing only one natural child the population of the earth would fall by 50
percent in 40 years without war or famine or epidemic disease if this program were
continued for another 40 years the population would fall by half again this
means in 80 years the population of the planet could be reduced 75 percent why have
we not heard anything about this even for it to be denounced I'm not saying it has to be
embraced but why isn't it a tiny fanatical minority advocating this I think it's
because it's inconceivable in this society to try and practice capitalism in a
situation of retreating demographics it also would be a solution which would place
enormous power in the hands of women women are often heard to complain about their
powerlessness yet here's a plan which requires very little input from white guys I took this
idea to demographers and said what about it this seems so simple most people think there
are no solutions here is a very simple solution what about it and they said yes well it's more startling
than you realize because women in upper-class high-tech Western society a woman say on the Upper East Side of
Manhattan or Malibu or the sea cliff district of San Francisco a child born to that woman will have
eight hundred to a thousand times more negative impact on the earth than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh if you were to go to Bangladesh and meet a woman in the back streets of
DACA who told you that her ambition in life was to have 900 children you'd think you were dealing with some kind of sociopath the kind of a kind of typhoid Mary of the demographic scene and yet every child born into moderately well off yuppie families in high tech societies is in that position we prefer not to think of it this way I think it's very interesting
that one could make a case to women in Western societies you could say how would you like vastly increased leisure time how would you like increased disposable income and how would you like increased disposable income and how would you like
and how would you like to take upon yourself a truly heroic social role this is what's being offered with this suggestion to limit reproduction to one natural child no more heroic no more politically correct action can be taken and interestingly the women you want to convince of this position
I'm not to convince educated white women with above average incomes so that's a very practical suggestion more likely to be implemented than my dream of a lunar inoculations with psilocybin for the entire population to dissolve the calcareous ego formations that have sprung up in the bloodstream since the last full
moon which I also think would be a fine idea you see boundary dissolution is what is needed here boundary dissolution of all type our separateness is an illusion there is a kind of human bedrock that's why I think that the world sweep toward democracy is far more than simply a political
trend democracy is not exactly a style of government per se or exclusively democracy is something is a biological institution of some sort because there is no theory there is no abstraction there is no ideology I mean democracy is as close as you can get
any theory theory of organization at all you know I wrote a book which is around and about called the archaic revival and that's why my belief in the archaic revival is what brings me out to events like this I mean I think the term new age and some of these other terms are pretty trivializing and basically designed by the mavens of marketing to draw you in
but there is an impulse throughout the 20th century in Freudianism in abstract expressionism in Dada psychotherapy sexual permissiveness psychedelic experimentation jazz rock and roll these are all facets of an impulse toward the archaic toward the primitive the non-straight the anti bow tie
world created created by the fine ladies and gentlemen of the 19th century with their Christ or ethics and their long dresses and all of that business there is an impulse toward the archaic this is very healthy this is what happens when a society seeks to revivify itself when the medieval world exploded in the face of the italian city states and the new classes that were emerging
they reinvented classicism it was actually the second time classicism had been rediscovered it was also trotted out by the Arabs in the ninth century when they needed a stabilizing metaphor for the umayyad caliphate and those civilizations now in the 20th century we can't go back to ancient Greece and Rome or Babylon
and in a sense the new age I think is an effort to go back to a kind of a minoan slash Egyptian world which never existed except perhaps in the minds of certain menopausal theosophists but but the impulse is the impulse is laudable however screwy the results
uh but I think we have to reach further back that all of history is what our urtext the bible tells us it is it's a confusion a kind of punishment a wandering in the wilderness and that where we really want to be is naked singing in the rainforest
stoned and exalted one with the souls of the ancestors one with the Gaian spirit of the planet and I don't mean to imply that psychedelics are simply act negatively dissolving ego dissolving social constructs dissolving programming and neurosis
that's all true but what is left when all this dissolving has taken place is not simply a tabla rasa a clean slate what is left is
um what we forgot what we have been so long away from which is a connection into the reality of the Gaian mind the great news
that all shamanism can attest to and is built on is the news that there is a sentient minded caring entity
that surrounds and holds the planet in its hands in its heart and beyond comprehending I mean call it Gaia call it God call it the spirit of nature
it doesn't matter what you call it it transcends the rational apprehension of higher primates and yet it is there we know that our own peculiar form of self-reflection
emerged in just a couple of million years out of animal organization well what we don't know is how many other forms of mind
there are possible and how many times in the two billion year history of life on this planet intelligence has been able to shed the dark
chrysalis of matter and launch itself into nearby dimensions in which it finds completion and happiness
uh and I think that this is the great news that informs the shamanic religions that we are not alone and that the other that we can make our way toward
is not you know a galactarian intelligence from beta reticuli that is part machine symbiote part banana slug or something like that that the the coherent minded entity
that we make our way toward is actually a reflection of what is best in our hearts
that we carry in ourselves the seed of this thing and that we are like the the the guy in the story of the prodigal son
we have fallen into history and out of this misfortune out of this experience we can make gold if we return to the world
if we return to the fold of the ancestors if we can somehow take what we've learned from history and fold it back into the experience of being truly human
and this is the challenge and it faces us on the political level of issues such as you know all kinds of community issues such as racism and sexism and classism
these are community issues and then issues between the human community and the planet our inability you see to emotionally connect with the consequences of what we're doing
I mean we as a species present a perfect picture of pathology because what real psychotic behavior is is behavior that one cannot emotionally connect with the consequences of what we're doing
because what real psychotic behavior is is behavior that one cannot emotionally connect with the consequences of what is being done and when you realize that we are literally
uh looting the cradle of future human life that we have decided that we are not simply transient occupiers
of this domain but that it is ours to trash to use up to do with as we wish leaving nothing for the future then you realize the depth of our need for immediate and
immediate and widespread therapeutic indeed pharmacological intervention on our state of mind because we have wandered from anything like real human values
and the reason psychedelics are so threatening in this society is because they immediately throw into high relief the internal contradictions of the dominator style of
of doing business and this is what must happen the momentum toward catastrophe
built up over centuries is immense the only antidote to that that I have seen extrapolating from what I've seen it do to single individuals are the shamanic hallucinogens
because when you cut right to the bone what has to happen is we must change our minds
if we don't change our minds we're going to go down with this self-generated titanic called Western civilization and we have the power to change our minds but it won't come from
hortatory preaching if that would work then we would have turned the bend at the sermon on the mount
but as it is I think we turned the band of sometime in the 20th century either when Albert Hoffman invented LSD
or Gordon Watson found the mushrooms of Oaxaca or Richard Schulte's brought back news of ayahuasca from the Amazon basin you see we have to humble ourselves
we have to give up the titanic ego driven idea that we can do it by ourselves as religions and yogans and all that beady-eyed crowd are into promising the first step on the path of self real self-term
transformation is the admission that you must humble yourself so thoroughly that you need to form a pact with an organism that begins its life in a mound of manure you know it's a true alchemical journey you return to the dross and out of the
that which everyone has rejected literally the compost of being you find the jewel and the jewel can be grown cultivated brought to fruition internalized globalized shared to create a transforming option that does honor to a human experiment that has been going on far too many millennia
for us to fumble the golden opportunity away is there anybody who's burning with their own agenda that oh here's a burning person yes
I had a experience about three years ago now maybe four years ago I was on a hallucinogenic and I had a feeling that I was talking to some people and they were telling me that when we leave this planet we become stars
I'm just wondering what have you got any more on the outer space connection well I mean I think you know I mean it's funny for me to be talking at a place like this because my I am actually a rationalist
it's simply that I my experience has been very very peculiar and I thank God for it because I think most rationalist actually live lives which reinforce their rationalism maybe because they don't poke around enough in the edges of things I mean you know we have orthodox ideology I don't know what it is now free markets democracy and physics or something
and then you press out a little bit to the fringes and you discover that reality is not only not as you supposed it to be but it's not like anybody supposed it to be the maps we have are largely based on conjecture and naive hope the hope that there's nobody hiding in the woods the hope that there's nobody waiting behind me
waiting behind the hill when I first started taking psychedelics it all ran pretty much according to Hoyle LSD it seemed like a tremendous tool for insight into the structure of the personality kind of high-powered turbocharged self-directed psychotherapy you know and which is certainly useful illuminating
the laws of the laws of physics or threaten the foundations of western science and philosophy what has interested me and become the focus of my personal life I guess are these tryptamine palycinogens DMT psilocybin and then ayahuasca which is a simply a strategy for making
think insights insights insights into one's upbringing insights into the structure of philosophy or mathematics or something like that but what is hard to accept are you called them gibberish people I call them self transforming elf machines or tykes or fairies and to my mind this is this is confounding
in the models of the psyche that we inherit from Freud and Jung it begins to look as though that you know the mind is not even in the brain there's some kind of extended landscape of possibility and I I speak as somebody who's been there who's seen this stuff but who doesn't I don't have an agenda
I speak as a career is to get a whole bunch of people to march with me in there to check again because you know well I talk in the book I wrote for Bantam food of the gods about DMT because I think it's in a sense the the case where all the issues are most intensely brought together
I think it's in a small understanding of a cultural and the idea that the brain is in the brain and stimulating and theлуian itself and I think it's something in a way that's kind of doing and aforging neural transmitter and dodgyness in the human brain it also is very fast acting it clears your system very quickly it clears your system very quickly not only clears your system but leaves no trace whatsoever you can't even
that you have done some kind of substance a half hour after you do this stuff nevertheless the
content of the experience itself is absolutely paradigm challenging and the chief reason is
because there are these entities in there and on psilocybin you hear them they speak to you what you
were describing it's almost as though this is some kind of a of a mandala of pharmacological approaches
to the mystery and DMT lands you right in the center of the bullseye I mean 30 seconds after
smoking DMT you confront these things which look like I mean it's very hard to force language into
these dimensions and then bring it back but what they look like to me is self transforming self
dribbling basketballs or something I mean they come bounding forward when you enter into the space
there's a kind of a cheer you know who ray and suddenly you're there and this is not the cumulative
effect of spirulina or hanging out at Findhorn or imbibing any of these ideologies which permit this
kind of thing I mean I come out of you know Jean Genet and existentialism and Sartre I'm very much more
mainstream down dreary Western approach these things do not require belief to sustain their existence you
may doubt you may deny and yet there they are and they and it is not it's not some kind of neutral
panorama like window shopping it's an encounter it's a situation in which you see them they see you and the
the relationship between you and them is very rapidly evolving they seem to have been waiting and the
impression I get is well it's not an impression I get it's what they say they say here you are again how
wonderful it's not exactly in English you understand and they have you know they're not made of matter the
questions you know what is the on toast of these things what is their exact ontological status and as far as I can tell
they're made of language
there they are not composed of DNA sinew tissue and blood they're composed of syntax
they are like
self-articulating
sentences or language with that has no requirement for a speaker it is its own
self-generating system of meaning and in you know the immediate impression you have is if you're a sane
person is you know my god what is this and then is it okay am I number one am I still alive and you
check through you know take a quick inventory breathing normal blood pressure normal heart normal but what you're
seeing is a complete replacement of the ordinary world and these things which are not enough like elves gnomes and fairies it's almost as though you know you would look to folklore to
to
provide evidence for the existence of these things but the elves gnomes and fairies of folklore are a little too
are a little too predictable a little too humanoid a little too disney-esque for what you're dealing with
these things actually appear to be as
alien a form of life as it would be possible for a human being to imagine and still cognize that it's alien intelligence at all
and
they are performing an extraordinary activity in that place which is they possess a language
that can be seen
with the eyes and this is fascinating to me I really think that there's something to be learned here this is what they want you to learn
they they come forward they utter statements which remember you don't hear with your ear but which you see as
condensed sculptural objects which are like Fabergé eggs or beautifully tooled machines of glass shell and crystal except these things are in motion
they're opening up in front of you and they're they're pressing in there's a kind of frantic intensity to this kind of an encounter
it's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon
running backwards at twice normal speed
I mean stuff is just flying all over and they're saying don't
abandon yourself to amazement
don't just go gaga with disbelief
try and
focus
on what we're doing and then if you are able even
moderately to focus on what they're doing what they're doing is they're offering you these objects and they're saying look at this
look at this
you see
boundary dissolution
is what is needed here
boundary dissolution of all type our separateness is
is an illusion there is a kind of human bedrock
that's why I think that the world
sweep toward democracy
is far more than simply a political trend
democracy is not
exactly a style of government
per se or exclusively
democracy is something is a biological
institution of some sort
of some sort because there is no
theory there is no abstraction there is no ideology
I mean democracy is as close as you can get
to anarchy and still have any theory of organization at all
you know I wrote a book which is around and about called the archaic revival
and that's why my belief in the archaic revival is what brings me out to events like this
I mean I think the term new age and some of these other terms are pretty trivializing and basically designed by the mavens of marketing to draw you in
but there is an impulse throughout the 20th century in Freudianism in abstract expressionism in Dada psychotherapy sexual permissiveness psychedelic experimentation jazz rock and roll these are all facets of an impulse toward the archaic toward the primitive the non straight the anti bow tie the wish to blow up the
blow up the stayed world created by the fine ladies and gentlemen of the 19th century with their Christ or ethics and their long dresses and all of that business there is an impulse toward the archaic this is very healthy this is what happens when a society seeks to revivify itself when the medieval world exploded in the face of the Italian city states and the new classes that were
emerging they reinvented classicism it was actually the second time classicism had been rediscovered it was also trotted out by the Arabs in the ninth century when they needed a stabilizing metaphor for the umayyad caliphate and those civilizations now in the 20th century we can't go back to ancient Greece and Rome or Babylon and in a
in a sense the new age I think is an effort to go back to a kind of minoan slash Egyptian world which never existed except perhaps in the minds of certain menopausal theosophists but but the impulse is the impulse is laudable however screwy the results but I think we have to reach further back that all of history
it's a confusion it's a confusion a kind of punishment a wandering in the wilderness and that where we really want to be is naked singing in the rain forest stoned and exalted
one with the souls of the ancestors one with the Gaian spirit of the planet and I don't mean to imply that psychedelics are simply act negatively dissolving ego
dissolving social constructs dissolving programming and neurosis that's all true but what is left when all this dissolving has taken place is not simply a tabla rasa a clean slate what is left is
what we forgot what we have been so long away from which is a connection into the reality of the Gaian mind the great news that all shamanism can attest to and is built on is the news that there is a sentient minded caring entity that surrounds and holds the
the planet in its hands in its heart and beyond comprehending I mean call it Gaia call it God call it the spirit of nature it doesn't matter what you call it it transcends the rational apprehension of higher primates and yet it is there we know that our own peculiar form of self reflection emerged in just a couple of million years out of animal organization
what we don't know what we don't know what we don't know what we don't know is how many other forms of mind there are possible and how many times in the two billion year history of life on this planet
intelligence has been able to shed the dark chrysalis of matter and launch itself into nearby dimensions in which it finds completion and happiness
and I think that this is the great news that informs the shamanic religions that we are not alone and that the other that we can make our way toward is not you know a galactarian intelligence from beta reticuli that is part machine symbiote part banana slug or something like that that the the coherent minded entity that we make our way toward is part machine symbiote part banana slug or something like that that the the coherent
is actually a reflection of what is best in our hearts that we carry in ourselves the seed of this thing and that we are like the the the the guy in the story of the prodigal son
we have fallen into history and out of this misfortune out of this experience we can make gold if we return to the fold of the ancestors
if we can somehow take what we've learned from history and fold it back into the experience of being truly human and this is the challenge and it faces us on the political level
of issues such as you know all kinds of community issues such as racism and sexism and classism these are community issues and then issues between the human community and the planet
our inability you see to emotionally connect with the consequences of what we're doing
I mean we as a species present a perfect picture of pathology because what real psychotic behavior is is behavior that one cannot emotionally connect with the consequences of what is being done and when you realize that we are literally
uh looting the cradle of future human life that we have decided that we are not simply transient occupiers of this domain but that it is ours to trash
to use up to do with as we wish leaving nothing for the future then you realize the depth of our need for immediate and widespread uh therapeutic indeed pharmacological intervention on our state of mind
because we have wandered from anything like real human values and the reason psychedelics are so threatening in this society is because they immediately throw into high relief the internal contradictions of the dominator style of doing business and this is what must happen the momentum toward catastrophe built up over centuries
built up over centuries is immense is immense the only antidote to that that i have seen extrapolating from what i've seen it do to single individuals are the shamanic hallucinogens because when you cut right to the bone what has to happen is we must change our minds if we don't change our minds we're going to go down with this self-generated titanic
titanic called western civilization and we have the power to change our minds but it won't come from hortatory preaching if that would work then we would have turned the bend at the sermon on the mount
but as it is i think we turned the bend uh sometime in the 20th century either when albert hoffman invented lsd or gordon watson found the mushrooms of oaxaca or richard schulte's brought back news of ayahuasca from the amazon basin
from the Amazon basin you see we have to humble ourselves we have to give up the
titanic ego driven idea that we can do it by ourselves as religions and yogans
and all that beady-eyed crowd are into promising the first step on the path of
self real self transformation is the admission that you must humble yourself
so thoroughly that you need to form a pact with an organism that begins its life
in a mound of manure you know it's a true alchemical journey you return to the
dross and out of that which everyone has rejected literally the compost of being
you find the jewel and the jewel can be grown cultivated brought to fruition in
internalized globalized shared to create a transforming option that does honor to a
human experiment that has been going on far too many millennia for us to fumble the
golden opportunity away is there anybody who's burning with their own agenda that
you know here's a burning person yes I had a experience about three years ago now maybe four
years ago right I was on a hallucinogenic and I had a feeling that I was talking to some people
and they're telling me that when we leave this planet we become stars I'm just wondering what
have you got any more on the outer space connection well I mean I think you know I mean
it's funny for me to be talking at a at a place like this because my I am actually a rationalist
it's simply that I my experience has been very very peculiar and I thank God for it because I think most
rationalists actually live lives which reinforce their rationalism maybe because they don't poke around
enough in the edges of things I mean you know we have orthodox ideology I don't know what it is now free
markets democracy and physics or something and then you press out a little bit to the fringes and you
discover that reality is not only not as you supposed it to be but it's not like anybody supposed it to be
be the this the maps we have are largely based on conjecture and naive hope the hope that there's
nobody hiding in the woods the hope that there's nobody waiting behind the hill when I first started
taking psychedelics it all ran pretty much according to Hoyle LSD it seemed like a tremendous tool for insight
into the structure of the personality kind of high-powered turbocharged self-directed psychotherapy you know
and which is certainly useful illuminating but doesn't violate the laws of physics or threaten the foundations
of Western science and philosophy what has interested me and become the focus of my personal life I guess are
these tryptamine palycinogens DMT psilocybin and then ayahuasca which is a simply a strategy for making DMT
orally active and you know one could accept I think insights into one's upbringing insights into the
structure of philosophy or mathematics or something like that but what is hard to accept are you called
them gibberish people I call them self-transforming elf machines or tykes or fairies and to my mind this is
this is confounding this is no mere extension of the models of the psyche that we inherit from Freud and
Jung it begins to look as though that you know the mind is not even in the brain there's some kind of
extended landscape of possibility and I I speak as somebody who's been there who's seen this stuff but
who doesn't I don't have an agenda I'm in a sense I'm sort of chicken shit because the motivation for my public
career is to get a whole bunch of people to march with me in there to check again because you know well I
talk in the book I wrote for Bantam food of the gods about DMT because I think it's in a sense the
the the case where all the issues are most intensely brought together it's a naturally occurring neurotransmitter
endogenous in the human brain it also is very fast acting it clears your system very quickly not only clears
your system but leaves no trace whatsoever you can't even not feel that you have done some kind of substance a
half hour after you do this stuff nevertheless the content of the experience itself is absolutely paradigm
challenging and the chief reason is because there are these entities in there and on psilocybin you hear them
they speak to you what you were describing it's almost as though this is some kind of a of a mandala of
pharmacological approaches to the mystery and DMT lands you right in the center of the bullseye I mean 30 seconds after smoking DMT
you confront these things which look like I mean it's very hard to force language
into these dimensions and then bring it back but what they look like to me is self-transforming self-dribbling
basketballs or something I mean they come bounding forward when you enter into the space there's a kind
of a cheer you know who ray and suddenly you're there and this is not the cumulative effect of spirulina or
hanging out at Findhorn or imbibing any of these ideologies which permit this kind of thing I mean I come out of
of you know Jean Genet and existentialism and Sartre I'm very much more mainstream down dreary western approach
these things do not require belief to sustain their existence you may doubt you may deny and yet there they are and
they unlike it is not it's not some kind of neutral panorama like window shopping it's an encounter it's a situation in which you see them
in which you see them they see you and the relationship between you and them is very rapidly evolving they seem to have been waiting
and the impression I get is well it's not an impression I get it's what they say they say here you are again how
wonderful it's not exactly in English you understand and they have you know they're not made of matter the question is you know what is the
on toasts of these things what is their exact ontological status and as far as I can tell they're made of language
there they are not composed of DNA sinew tissue and blood they're composed of syntax
they are like self articulating sentences or language with that has no requirement for a speaker it is its own self generating system
of meaning and in you know the immediate impression you have is if you're a sane person is you know my god what is this and then is it okay
am I am I number one am I still alive and you check through you know take a quick inventory
breathing normal blood pressure normal heart normal but what you're seeing is a complete replacement of the ordinary world and these things which are not enough like elves
gnomes and fairies it's almost as though you know you would look to folklore to to provide evidence for the existence of these things but the elves gnomes and fairies of folklore are a little too predictable a little too humanoid a little too disney-esque for what you're dealing with these things actually appear to be as alien a form of life as it would be possible for
a human being to imagine and still cognize that it's alien intelligence at all and they are performing an extraordinary activity in that place which is they possess a language that can be seen with the eyes and this is fascinating to me I really think that there's something to be learned here this is what they want you to learn
this is what they want you to learn they come forward they utter statements which remember you don't hear with your ear but which you see as condensed sculptural objects which are like Fabergé eggs or beautifully tooled machines of glass shell and crystal except these things are in motion they're opening up in front of you and they're
and there's a kind of frantic intensity to this kind of an encounter it's like a bug's bunny cartoon running backwards at twice normal speed I mean stuff is just flying all over and they're saying don't abandon yourself to amazement don't just go gaga with disbelief try and focus on what we're doing and then if you are able even moderately to focus on what they're doing
as they're offering you these objects and they're saying look at this look at this as it is passed before you as you look into it you have a very strong and I believe genuine impression that this thing that you're being shown though it's no larger than a Kaiser role
assumptions of this world that in other words if I could condense this thing into my hand right now I wouldn't have to convince you I wouldn't have to preach to you I could just show you say look at this and in the visual confrontation with this thing it's self-evident that this is impossible
matter light they don't behave this way it's as though you have brought back a chunk of another dimension and and then what they're saying about these things is you can do this do what we are doing and then the urgency becomes almost strident they say do what we're doing do it now and you say wow and and and then you feel
or I felt at any rate an upwelling in myself like a calling forth then out of my mouth comes language or at least syntax but without meaning some kind of glossolalia where the modality of language is preserved but the meaning is not and it's a kind of an ecstasy it sounds like gibberish in three dimensional space but in that space it seems to be the
key to unlocking a world made out of syntax and meaning and I you know I come before you with all of this stuff unfinished this is not a teaching or a system or anything it's an eyewitness account of a hyper dimensional automobile accident or something we're not saying what the conclusions are we don't know what the conclusions are but this is big news
and when I first encountered this kind of stuff I was I was a young art historian at the university of california and I assumed that any motif no matter how outre or bizarre you would be able to look at the painting folklore and sculpture of somebody on this planet
and find a trace and it seemed as though this defeated that idea it was almost counter the idea of the collective unconscious because it argued that you Joe anybody Sally somebody can break through on your own an ordinary person
to a place that Verrucchio never saw Michelangelo didn't anticipate it Yates didn't know Blake hadn't a clue Melville wasn't briefed and yet there it is you know and this is to me as an intellectual it was very confusing because I think as intellectuals we always assume that progress will be built on the
on the on the on the on the
shoulders of the giants that have preceded us the idea of something actually 100% brand
new and unexpected is pretty daunting and and here it here it was 30 seconds away simply
by the act of ingesting this natural neurotransmitter well those of you who've been there know exactly
what I'm talking about those of you haven't been there I can't imagine how you can even
sit through this kind of thing because you know it makes the folks from the Pleiades and all that other
stuff out there seem mundane by comparison the other thing is we're not talking about camping out
in cornfields night after freezing night with your eyes glued to the stars in one hope this is a no
fail method for plunging deeper into these spiritual realms than the tantric yogas or the practitioners of
x y or z dare scarcely suppose it's repeatable it's on demand it does not depend upon your state of
moral purity or you know tantric accomplishment it's something that is our birthright as much as
our sexuality our language our eyesight our appreciation of music it's a an innate human thing and you know to
try and return to the premises of your question I tried to formulate theories about what could this be well the
first impression that I had based on a reading of how weird this all was was this must be a parallel continuum
Allah Philip K Dick and like that that just apparently over some kind of neurological energy barrier that's all
all around us all the time these things are there and they are not made of matter so the laws of physics
don't apply and you know like that and then and then I entertained different possibilities and I still entertain
numerous possibilities I haven't got it figured out yet one possibility is that these things are actually
human beings from the future I mean if you take the content of the experience seriously and say I am
apparently in contact with diminutive English-speaking creatures of some sort well then they have got to
be either intelligent beings from another part of the universe or humans from some extraordinarily advanced
future world where human beings are now made of language and are only two and a half feet tall so I would
put it rather far in the future or and I just simply offer this in the spirit of of intellectual completeness
if you ask a shaman or what these things are they don't hesitate they just say oh well those are the
ancestor spirits this is what it's all about is ancestor spirits well it takes a while for the implications of this to sink in
they're talking about dead people that's what an ancestor spirit is they're suggesting that the dearly departed do not
evanesce into sunlight or something cheerfully non-specific like that but that this actually is
is simply one level of cosmic system of some sort where birth and death are transitions from level to
level well this is just exactly the kind of thing that I'm intellectually set up to doubt and to feel a
kind of scorn for because you know people have been running around since time immemorial claiming this sort of thing with an
incredibly underwhelming body of evidence to back them up and yet if you try to approach the problem
scientifically I think you would agree that in terms of likelihood although operating in this realm what
this means I'm not sure but that in terms of likelihood it's more likely that these are human souls in
in another dimension than that we are being contacted by friendly extraterrestrials or even that we share the
earth with an invisible race of syntactical tribal elf legions of some sort but I think this conclusion is
the one that we would tend to resist most strenuously I mean you eat very I think it's the most intellectually
challenging position to take these of the western thinking to claim that we have to reopen the question
of life after death in a serious way not the cheerful round of reincarnation that haunts some of the zanier
offshoots of eastern religion but actually say you know you are going to die and when you die you know you
are going to undergo a metamorphosis of some sort that is not particularly going to be designed to preserve
your humanness what you call your humanness or to set you on a cloud with lyre and gown for the rest of
eternity but that actually the greatest adventure the greatest adventures still lie ahead and these things
uh intimations of immortality are vouchsafed by these plant hallucinogens why this should be why it should
be possible to get a bring a look over the great divide i have no idea i think about these things
constantly my life is mostly questions uh my friend rupert sheldrake who some of you may know his books
he and i have talked about it he thinks that uh that that dot there is a chemistry of dying that in the same
way that there is a chemistry of giving birth there is a chemistry of dying and that dmt parallels and
anticipates this he calls it uh not a hallucinogen but a necroptic substance it actually show anticipates the
death state itself i once had the fortunate opportunity of being able to turn a very prominent tibetan lama
on to dmt a name that you would recognize although not one of the top five but a more wizened older
stranger character and i you know he did it and i said so what about it you know these people these
tibetan buddhists they have a pretty good map of the territory he said it's the lesser lights he said
you can't go further than that without breaking the thread of return he said you know beyond this there's
no returning and so you know in a very real sense it's a look over the edge but then you know even that
doesn't solve all the mysteries i mean what is it about this wish to convey a language
which is seen what's that all about is it that perhaps language has always been a gift from the
other we don't it's a little hard to picture how the kind of language i'm using right now ever got
started uh i mean notice that language is a behavior it's a behavior that's all it is it's something
it's a complex activity having to do with small mouth noises and the neurological processing of same
we must have been essentially as we are before language it's like break dancing or something like
that um you're fully set up to do it and people have been for millennia but until somebody actually
does it it only exists as a formal possibility in the organism and i wonder how many of these things
there are i mean break dancing is an interesting example albeit somewhat trivial but it shows that
after five six seven thousand years of civilization you can come up with a behavior that nobody has ever
seen uh before i've i've spent a lot of time thinking about language and how what a limited tool it is
and yet how our whole world is held together by nothing more than small mouth noises and it's incredible
the entirety of global civilization is held together by small mouth noises and symbolic notations of same
which have an even more rarefied level of abstraction our separateness our notion of self and world of
self and species all rest on the carrying capacity of these small mouth noises one of the things that
has interested me some of you have heard me talk about this is you know i think good psychedelic trips
inspire a lot of homework which usually means reading in curious areas and i discovered that um octopi
cephalopods which in case you're not up on your evolutionary biology these are mollusca they're not even
vertebrates they're related to escargot and banana slugs i mean you can hardly imagine a form of life
more alien to ourselves i mean you know we broke off from the other primates three million years ago
but the invertebrates and the vertebrates separated from each other about 700 million years ago well
uh an interesting thing going on with octopi most people have heard that they can change color
and most people i think assume this means that like certain lizards and certain butterflies they
camouflage themselves against their background that's not what's going on color and texture for octopi are the
medium of language it's you could almost say that an octopus is a naked mind because as the octopus goes
through certain internal changes hunger sexual need whatever color changes accompany these in shifts of
internal state and appear on the surface of the octopus it is almost as though it wears its language
like an overcoat it is clothed in its own meaning well obviously in that kind of situation you have always
been suspended in an ambiance of language unlike ourselves where apparently language was invented one bright
summer day or series of bright summer days and if you have a language such as we have small mouth noises
with culturally assigned meaning in other words if i say where can i get a taxi if i don't say this to a
person who speaks english it means nothing to a ukrainian or a chinese octopi don't have this problem there are not
culturally localized languages there's only a language of the body the genes it's unambiguous you see even
those of us in this room if you were to check uh our internal dictionaries are different
we have only the assumption of one-to-one mapping of meaning i mean if i ask you uh where is the restroom
this is fairly ambiguous unambiguous because it deals with ordinary situations but as soon as as soon as
conversation leaves the main and well-trodden path of discourse ambiguity enters into a tremendous degree
we overlook this as a courtesy to each other i mean you almost never hear one person say to another
now would you explain to me what i just said the reason you don't hear this said very often is because
the thin illusion of communication would break down completely uh if we actually demanded of our
listeners that they repeat back to us the only situation in which that happens on a regular basis
is the pedagogical mode where the teacher teaches and then by test and recitation
determines that the pupil has understood but in polite discourse among adults we consider this an imposition
if not an insult so uh somehow these creatures are elves of language catalysts for the concrescence of
cognition and i don't know if these things can be understood after all we're embedded in the world
created by our own meanings uh cd broad i think it was cd broad wrote a book called the meaning of meaning
the mind and its place in nature uh probably these two should be read back to back just to see how
positivists handle these kinds of problems the meaning of meaning is a real problem but it also tends to be
solipsistic or tautological can we expect brain to give a full accounting of brain can we expect mind to
give a full accounting of mind anybody who's studied logic for 10 minutes can tell you that that's
impossible because it is tautological as it is passed before you as you look into it you have a very
strong and i believe genuine impression that this thing that you're being shown though it's no larger than
a kaiser role is somehow absolutely confounding to the principles and assumptions of this world that in
other words if i could condense this thing into my hand right now i wouldn't have to convince you i
wouldn't have to preach to you i could just show you say look at this and in the visual confrontation with
this thing it's self-evident that this is impossible matter light that they don't behave this way it's as
though you have brought back a chunk of another dimension and and then what they're saying about
these things is uh you can do this do what we are doing and then the urgency becomes almost strident they
say do what we're doing do it now and you say wow and and then you feel or i felt at any rate an upwelling
in myself like a calling forth then out of my mouth comes language or at least syntax but without
meaning some kind of glossolalia where the modality of language is preserved but the meaning is not and it's
a kind of an ecstasy it sounds like gibberish in three-dimensional space but in that space it seems to
be the key to unlocking a world made out of syntax and meaning and i you know i come before you with
all of this stuff unfinished this is not a teaching or a system or in anything it's an eyewitness account
of a hyperdimensional automobile accident or something we're not saying what the conclusions are we don't
know what the conclusions are but this is big news and when i first encountered this kind of stuff i was
in i was a young art historian at the university of california and i assumed that any motif no matter
how altra or bizarre you would be able to look at the painting folklore and sculpture of somebody on
this planet and find a a trace and it didn't it seemed as though this defeated that idea it was almost
counter the idea of the collective unconscious because it argued that you joe anybody sally somebody
can break through on your own an ordinary person to a place that verrucchio never saw michelangelo didn't
anticipate it yates didn't know blake hadn't a clue melville wasn't briefed and yet there it is you know
and this is a to me as an intellectual it was very confusing because i think as intellectuals we always
assume that progress will be built on the on the shoulders of the giants that have preceded us the
idea of something actually 100 percent brand new and unexpected is pretty daunting and and here it here
it was 30 seconds away simply by the act of ingesting this natural neurotransmitter well those of you who've
been there know exactly what i'm talking about those of you haven't been there i can't imagine how you can
even sit through this kind of thing because you know it makes the folks from the pleiades and all that other
stuff out there seem mundane by comparison the other thing is we're not talking about camping out in cornfields
night after freezing night with your eyes glued to the stars in one hope this is a no-fail method
for plunging deeper into these spiritual uh realms than the tantric yogas or the practitioners of x y or z
dare scarcely suppose it's repeatable it's on demand it does not depend upon your state of moral purity or
uh you know tantric accomplishment it's something that is our birthright as much as our sexuality our
language our eyesight our appreciation of music it's an innate human thing and you know to try and return
to the premises of your question i tried to formulate theories about what could this be well the first
impression that i had based on a reading of how weird this all was was this must be a parallel continuum
a la philip k dick and like that that just apparently over some kind of neurological energy barrier
that's all around us all the time these things are there and they are not made of matter so the laws of
physics don't apply and you know like that and then and then i entertained different possibilities and i
still entertain numerous possibilities i haven't got it figured out yet one possibility is that these
things are actually human beings from the future i mean if you take the content of the experience
seriously and say i am apparently in contact with diminutive english-speaking creatures of some sort
well then they have got to be either intelligent beings from another part of the universe or humans
from uh some extraordinarily advanced future world where human beings are now made of language and are
only two and a half feet tall so i would put it rather far in the future or and i just simply offer
this in the spirit of uh of intellectual completeness uh if you ask a shaman or uh what these things are
they don't hesitate they just say oh well those are the ancestor spirits this is what it's all about
is ancestor spirits well it takes a while for the implications of this to sink in they're talking about
dead people that's what an ancestor spirit is they're suggesting that the dearly departed do not evanesce into
sunlight or something cheerfully non-specific like that but that this actually is uh simply one level of a
cosmic system of some sort where birth and death are transitions from level to level well this is just exactly
the kind of thing that i'm intellectually set up to doubt and to feel a kind of scorn for because you know
people have been running around since time immemorial claiming this sort of thing with an incredibly
underwhelming body of evidence to back them up and yet if you try to approach the problem scientifically
i think you would agree that in terms of likelihood although operating in this realm what this means i'm
not sure but that in terms of likelihood it's more likely that these are human souls in another dimension
than that we are being contacted by friendly extraterrestrials or even that we share the earth with an invisible
race of syntactical uh tribal elf uh legions of some sort but i think this conclusion is the one that we
would tend to resist most strenuously i mean you eat very i think it's the most intellectually challenging
position to take these of the western thinking to claim that we have to reopen the question of life
after death in a serious way not the cheerful round of reincarnation that haunts some of the zanier offshoots
of eastern religion but actually say you know you are going to die and when you die you know you are going
to undergo a metamorphosis of some sort that is not particularly going to be designed to preserve your
humanness what you call your humanness or to set you on a cloud with lyre and gown for the rest of eternity
but that actually uh the greatest adventure the greatest adventures still lie ahead and these things uh
intimations of immortality are vouchsafed by these plant hallucinogens why this should be why it should be
possible to get a bring a look over the great divide i have no idea i think about these things
constantly my life is mostly questions uh my friend rupert sheldrake who some of you may know his books
he and i have talked about it he thinks that uh that that dot there is a chemistry of dying
that in the same way that there is a chemistry of giving birth there is a chemistry of dying and that
dmt parallels and anticipates this he calls it uh not a hallucinogen but a necroptic substance it
actually show anticipates the death state itself i once had the fortunate opportunity of being able to
turn a very prominent tibetan lama onto dmt a name that you would recognize although not one of the top
five but a more wizened older stranger character and i you know he did it and i said so what about it
you know these people these tibetan buddhists they have a pretty good map of the territory he said it's
the lesser lights he said you can't go further than that without breaking the thread of return he said
you know beyond this there's no returning and so you know in a very real sense it's a look over the
edge but then you know even that doesn't solve all the mysteries i mean what is it about this wish to
convey a language which is seen what's that all about is it that perhaps language has always been a gift
from the other we don't it's a little hard to picture how the kind of language i'm using right now
ever got started uh i mean notice that language is a behavior it's a behavior that's all it is it's
something it's a complex activity having to do with small mouth noises and the neurological processing of same
we must have been essentially as we are before language it's like break dancing or something like that
you're fully set up to do it and people have been for millennia but until somebody actually does it
it only exists as a formal possibility in the organism and i wonder how many of these things
there are i mean break dancing is an interesting example albeit somewhat trivial but it shows that
after five six seven thousand years of civilization you can come up with a behavior that nobody has ever seen
uh before i've i've spent a lot of time thinking about language and how what a limited tool it is
and yet how our whole world is held together by nothing more than small mouth noises and it's incredible the
entirety of global civilization is held together by small mouth noises and symbolic notations of same
which have an even more rarefied level of abstraction our separateness our notion of self and world of
self and species all rest on the carrying capacity of these small mouth noises one of the things that has
interested me some of you have heard me talk about this is you know i think good psychedelic trips
inspire a lot of homework which usually means reading in curious areas and i discovered that um octopi
cephalopods which in case you're not up on your evolutionary biology these are mollusca they're not even
vertebrates they're related to escargot and banana slugs i mean you can hardly imagine a form of life
more alien to ourselves i mean you know we broke off from the other primates three million years ago but
the invertebrates and the vertebrates separated from each other about 700 million years ago well uh an
interesting thing going on with octopi most people have heard that they can change color and most people
i think assume this means that like certain lizards and certain butterflies they camouflage themselves
against their background that's not what's going on color and texture for octopi are the um medium
of language it's you could almost say that an octopus is a naked mind because uh as the octopus goes
through certain internal changes hunger sexual need whatever uh color changes accompany these in shifts of
internal state and appear on
the surface of the octopus it is almost as though it wears its language like an overcoat it is
clothed in its own meaning well obviously in that kind of situation you have always been suspended
in an ambiance of language unlike ourselves where apparently language was invented one bright summer
day or series of bright summer days and if you have a language such as we have small mouth noises
with culturally assigned meaning in other words if I say where can I get a taxi if I don't say this to
a person who speaks English it means nothing to a Ukrainian or a Chinese octopi don't have this
problem there are not culturally localized languages there's only a language of the body the genes it's
unambiguous you see even those of us in this room if you were to check our internal dictionaries are
different we have only the assumption of one-to-one mapping of meaning I mean if I ask you where is the
restroom this is fairly ambiguous unambiguous because it deals with ordinary situations but as
soon as as soon as conversation leaves the main and well-trodden path of discourse ambiguity enters
into a tremendous degree we overlook this as a courtesy to each other I mean you almost never hear one
person say to another now would you explain to me what I just said the reason you don't hear this said very often is
because the thin illusion of communication would break down completely if we actually demanded of our
listeners that they repeat back to us the only situation in which that happens on a regular basis is the
pedagogical mode where the teacher teaches and then by test and recitation determines that the pupil has
understood but in polite discourse among adults we consider this an imposition if not an insult so somehow
these creatures are elves of language catalysts for the concrescence of cognition and I don't know if these things can be
understood after all we're embedded in the world created by our own meanings CD broad I think it was CD broad wrote a book called the
meaning of meaning of meaning or no it was fh Bradley actually I think broad's book was called the mind and its place in nature
probably these two should be read back to back just to see how positivists handle these kinds of problems the
meaning of meaning is a real problem but it also tends to be solipsistic or tautological can we expect brain to
give a full accounting of brain can we expect mind to give a full accounting of mind anybody who studied logic for 10 minutes can tell you that that's impossible
because it is tautological William Blake used to say nothing is lost nothing is lost and this seems literally to be true it seems as though you know
something once articulated a statement the
reverberations are unto the last syllable of recorded time
Somehow it's all there now when I said these things approached and spoke in English
I didn't mean to make it sound as mundane as it might sound you know
Greek religion was
was characterized by what was called the logos in the Hellenistic period and the logos was an informing voice and all the great thinkers of Hellenistic times
Plato, Socrates, Xenophon, Thucydides, all of these people were in contact with the logos it was the sine qua non of Hellenistic religion and
it was a speaking and informing voice that tells you the right way to live
well we don't know what to make of this and at a certain point in the evolution of the Western mind judging by
the writings of people who were contemporaneous with those times the logos fell silent
there was actually a date
Some of you may know the story of the fishermen
pulling their nets off the Isle of roads and they heard a voice from the sky say that great pan is dead and
And this was at the change of the eon the beginning of the age of Aquarius
It was almost as though there was something in the ancient world that has gone latent
That we can no longer touch or imagine
Gordon Wasson who discovered with his wife Valentina the mushrooms told a very interesting story
In one of his books about how in Mazatec and
the
People who are speakers of Mazatec and when they chant what the mushroom says
They have created a special form for this which goes like this
the buzz the buzz the buzz the buzz
Sir this word sir means says
It's about about about about that says that that that that that says I
Didn't know this at the time. I took mushrooms the second time and in my head
I heard the mushroom speaking in English
But adding the word says
To the end of the sentence so it was almost like you know this thing could speak in Mazatec
It could speak in English, but it always kept its cadence and its structure
the other thing about psilocybin and the DMT thing is that it it
Seems to be a catalyst for glossolalia
This is why I think it must have had something to do with the evolution of language
I mean when you take psilocybin you can fall
Spontaneously into states of glossolalia sometimes on DMT. It's almost impossible
To control it just spontaneously comes out. Yeah
Oh, what is glossolalia glossolalia well here's an example of it then I'll define it
Z ding quap maktiki pittech kveng hwadem molde rufnubuk henget
It's it's language like activity in the absence of meaning and it's a very interesting thing
Neurologically because notice that
Speech ordinary speech is this highly variable stream of data
We are set up to make these small mouth noises as a public speaker
I'm very aware of the fact that one can speak
without tiring almost longer than you can do any other major human motor activity and
But the glossolalia such as I just did it is clearly under the control of rules
but it is not there is no meaning
conventionally conceived of there, but there is syntax and I think probably that language was invented
millennia before meaning and that you could almost call glossol you could almost call language
toneless singing and
That people used to sit around the campfire and amuse each other by making funny noises as a kid
I used to do this and then it was only much much later that anything approaching linguistic
Conventionality was imposed on this and that that's a lower function the other thing. I want to say about this glossolalia thing is
You may say well you're just making it up
When I do that but really the experience I have when I do it is that I stand aside
Then this variable data stream comes out through my mouth
Well now it has to reflect something about me
It's a statement about my internal
situation in that moment and it's
Evolving and changing as rapidly as if I were saying you know I had a migraine headache last night
and I got up about four and took an aspirin and
you know I'm telling you about my situation but the glossolalia must be speaking to something about my situation or it wouldn't be possible to do it at all
Not only is something not real unless it can be said
but the count the contrapositive of that is that once something can be said it becomes almost
almost too real it displaces other possibilities I mean so we're living in a set of constructs some architectural some ideological and
There they can be very oppressive. I mean how do you get rid of the notion of linear time and space?
very easily it's it's the slow work of consensus one of the things that I feel I'm doing very consciously
in these kinds of meetings is
We're trying to launch and replicate means
You you all know this concept a meme is the smallest unit of an idea in the same way that a gene is
the smallest unit of
Organism and so these things DMT elves
Transcendental object at the end of history so far these are means and
and in the same way that genes are copied and
Spread around and that fidelity of copying is the key to genetic success
Fidelity of of meme replication is the key to communication
I mean if I give a speech on something and then you hear it and then you go out and somebody says so what did he say?
And you give a completely cock-eyed account of what has been said well, then the meme has been betrayed
But if you can actually transfer the meme to somebody else's mind and then they can copy it and pass it on then the meme
It's almost as though the ideological
Environment were like a rainforest
Or a coral reef evolution is taking place stupid means
Dumb means have short lifetimes and they disappear you know and
Means of great power are able to thrive in many intellectual and ideological niches and to make many
Marriages of convenience with other memes and so they are stabilized and passed along
Somehow we have to become hip to the fact to the power of language and instead of just willy-nilly
Creating linguistic structures
Sort of ad hoc we need to begin to consciously engineer our
Linguistic intent and then you know so far in the 20th century
This has not been a program with a very happy history because only jerks have gotten a hold of it
Nazis and people with narrow social programs that say you know we're not going to call each other mister and missus or
Hey, you we're going to call everybody's going to call each other comrade
And then this will create the notion of comrade ship which to a certain degree
It does but you know manipulating these things for political ends
I mean the you know the Jews it was okay to put Jews in ovens because the official language for talking about Jews was that they were
untermensch
Subhuman not like
Us whoever we are so once the definition had been changed people said well
It's okay to mistreat Jews you know
They're not even really people and this is this kind of thinking goes on all the time
It's called
Stereotyping and it's always is an easier substitute
It's a it's a cheap substitute for clear thinking
David Brown asked me the question what about life after death and I
I it was somewhat of a sidebar
The Buddhists at the folk level in India do say you cannot attain enlightenment unless your mother is dead
Which is a kind of an odd notion seeming to imply that she had to precede you into hyperspace
when you die
What you do is you literally as appears to happen you dissolve
And where you go is?
Forward and backward into time not like a gas released into time
But along the tracks and trails of the genetic machinery in other words you flow into your children
And you you become let well
Let's make a very simple model and say at the moment of death you become your children and your parents a
a few moments later you become your grandchildren and your grandparents you're
Spreading down it's almost as though the the thing which you were which was this focus of ego and individuality
Then it dies and it's almost as though the mountain begins to slump back into the generalized pool of
Consciousness and being that's why I have somewhat less
Less patience maybe than I should have with the idea of of
channeling and and
Come as you were parties and that sort of thing because it seems to me the key to understanding the idea of reincarnation
And past lives is that you were everybody of course
That's who you are here comes everybody
You know you weren't just that shepherd girl or that Roman Empire
Emperor or that Greek for your everybody and you can find your way into the great genetic telephone system and ring anybody's bell in history
Well, then it would be absurd to claim you were that person
That would be as absurd as claiming that anybody you could call on the telephone is who you are
No, it's that we are everyone and you know the great
turning
object in hyperspace that is the genetic I
Don't know trans-dimensional object casts off glinting reflections of this personality that
Personality and astrology has a role to play here and other things, but the bottom line is
We are all drawn of the same stuff. I think one of the most profound
Insights you can have on psychedelics and I certainly have it is that we are all
interchangeable
You know anybody could do my job and I'm pretty confident. I could do almost anybody's job
We define ourselves
Otherwise, but you know in watching the in watching the rise of my own career
It's just it's a kind of being deputized
Chosen for the job. It's just they said will him he can do it. He has the gift of gab so give him the credit line
but it could have been
Anybody our uniqueness is
Is real on one level but on another level it's fairly illusory?
It's it's sort of a coincidencia positorum you have to hold these two antithetical things in your mind at once in order to
correctly perceive
The proper level of ambiguity that's resident in reality. It ain't simple folks
Yeah
Can I just ask this question do I understand you say that to find our truer self we have to go back to the worm-like stage?
And to reach out for the pharmacological the natural pharmacological that is in the Abaddon Basin and all those plants and things
To find our true inner being, ego, whatever
Well, I don't think we have to go back as far as the worm-like stage. I think what we have to do is
We have to get out of history history as a con game run by frightened men and their obedience stooges
What we had a moment of happiness there was a moment of completion I guess I should explain my position on this
You see there have always been dominance hierarchies in primates as far back as you go clear back to squirrel monkeys
There are what are called male dominance hierarchies
Well, so then in us
This is had was interrupted by
Psilocybin use over a period of probably a couple of hundred thousand years the psilocybin
Forget that it's psychedelic for a moment. Just think of it as an
inoculation against ego and so for
200,000 years or so it was a dietary item which suppressed this normal monkey behavior and
and so then
Females were shared the sexual style was orgiastic
There were no awareness of lines of male paternity and the children belong to the group
This was not quote-unquote
Natural the natural way is for the men to dominate to control the females to the old tooth and claw
But for a couple of hundred thousand years
It was artificially interrupted by the presence of mushroom in the paleolithic human diet
Well then when because of
Climatological factors and other factors that we can discuss in another meeting the mushroom became unavailable
The old monkey's behaviors
Reemerged only about twelve thousand years ago, but in the previous
200,000 years language had been discovered fire
tool making
song a whole bunch of
a bunch of
Forward leaps had been made well then when the psilocybin was withdrawn and the patterns of male dominance
reasserted themselves in an environment where fire and language had been achieved it
Exacerbated it it made it much more nightmarish
Marish it made it much more difficult to step away from and all of history is the unhappy
story of our
essentially our withdrawal and our agony over being unable to reach this connection back into the guy and mind which when we had it
We lived in Eden we were balanced
But but it faded and history was the consequence now in the last 50 years
Information has arrived on our plate lo and behold in the final ticking of the final hour of our dilemma
That actually shows us the way back if we but have the wisdom to understand this and then the fortitude
To apply what we know one more question
You mean motivation to take psychedelics to take action
Well, I think you know that that this psychedelic community is not yet recognized or named itself as a community
We're well behind
Gays and black people and all these other my we're still trying to figure out if we are
A community and if we are a community and we have a domain of action
I think where it lies. It's not that we're all supposed to become dope dealers
It's that we're all supposed to become artists that the transformation of culture through art is the proper understanding of
What you can do with psychedelics besides blow your own mind and I really think you know
What we need to do is put the art pedal to the floor and understand that this is art
We are involved in some kind of enormous piece of performance art called Western Civilization and you know
It's been a C-minus performance so far
And they're just about to reach out with the hook and drag us off stage
Unless we begin pulling rabbits out of the hat pretty furiously art is poised for this
But art is ambivalent because the society is ambivalent
That's why meetings like this where you actually hear it said the sooner the better the clock is ticking. This is not a test
There will not be a retry
You know this is the window of opportunity between the unknown and eternity if not taken
Then the entire enterprise could be lost the whole thing from the cave paintings at Lascaux to Whitney Houston
It could all go down the drain if we don't you know act to preserve it through an act of
human cognition plus courage
William Blake used to say
nothing is lost
Nothing is lost and this seems literally to be true. It seems as though you know
Something once articulated a statement the
Reverberations are unto the last syllable of recorded time
Somehow it's all there now when I said these things approached and spoke in English
I didn't mean to make it sound as mundane as it might sound you know
Greek religion was
Characterized by what was called the logos in the Hellenistic period and the logos was an informing voice and all the great thinkers of
Hellenistic times
Plato
Socrates xenophon Thucydides all of these people
Were in contact with the logos it was the sine qua non of Hellenistic religion and it was a speaking and informing voice that tells you the right way to live
Well, we don't know what to make of this
And at a certain point in the evolution of the Western mind judging by
The writings of people who were contemporaneous with those times the logos fell silent
There was actually a date
Some of you may know the story of the fishermen
Pulling their nets off the Isle of Rhodes
And they heard a voice from the sky say that great pan is dead and
This was at the change of the eon the beginning of the age of Aquarius
It was almost as though there was something in the ancient world that has gone latent
That we can no longer touch or imagine
Gordon Wasson who discovered with his wife Valentina the mushrooms
Told a very interesting story
In one of his books about how in
Mazatekin
the
People who are speakers of Mazatekin when they chant what the mushroom says
They have created a special form for this which goes like this
the buzz the buzz the buzz the buzz the buzz
Sir this word sir means says
It's about about about about says the other data says I
Didn't know this at the time I took mushrooms the second time and in my head
I heard the mushroom speaking in English
But adding the word says
To the end of the sentence so it was almost like you know this thing could speak in Mazatek
It could speak in English, but it always kept its cadence and its structure
the other thing about psilocybin and the DMT thing is that it seems to be a
catalyst for glossolalia this is why I think it must have had something to do
with the evolution of language I mean when you take psilocybin you can fall
spontaneously into states of glossolalia sometimes on DMT it's almost
impossible to control it just spontaneously comes out yeah oh what is
glossolalia glossolalia well here's an example of it then I'll define it
Zidink what maktiki pittetsk thing what a mold a roof no book hang at a fops
it's it's language like activity in the absence of meaning and it's a very
interesting thing neurologically because notice that speech ordinary speech is this
highly variable stream of data we are set up to make these small mouth noises as a
public speaker I'm very aware of the fact that one can speak without tiring almost
longer than you can do any other major human motor activity and but the
glossolalia such as I just did it is clearly under the control of rules but it
is not there is no meaning conventionally conceived of there but there is syntax and
I think probably that language was invented millennia before meaning and that you
could almost call glossol you could almost call language toneless singing and that
people used to sit around the campfire and amuse each other by making funny
noises as a kid I used to do this and then it was only much much later that anything approaching
linguistic conventionality was imposed on this and that that's a lower function the other thing I
want to say about this glossolalia thing is you may say well you're just making it up when I do that but
really the experience I have when I do it is that I stand aside then this variable data stream comes out
through my mouth well now it has to reflect something about me it's a statement about my internal
situation in that moment and it's evolving and changing as rapidly as if I were saying you know
I had a migraine headache last night and I got up about four and took an aspirin and you know I'm telling
you about my situation but the glossolalia must be speaking to something about my situation or it
wouldn't be possible to do it at all not only is something not real unless it can be said but the
the count the contrapositive of that is that once something can be said it becomes almost too real
it displaces other possibilities I mean so we're living in a set of constructs some architectural some
some ideological and there they can be very oppressive I mean how do you get rid of the notion of linear time
and space very easily it's it's the slow work of consensus one of the things that I feel I'm doing very
consciously in these kinds of meetings is we're trying to launch and replicate means you all know this concept
a meme is the smallest unit of an idea in the same way that a gene is the smallest unit of organism and so
So these things, DMT elves, transcendental object at the end of history, so far, these
are memes.
And in the same way that genes are copied and spread around and that fidelity of copying
is the key to genetic success, fidelity of meme replication is the key to communication.
I mean, if I give a speech on something and then you hear it and then you go out and somebody
says, so what did he say?
And you give a completely cockeyed account of what has been said, well, then the meme
has been betrayed.
But if you can actually transfer the meme to somebody else's mind and then they can copy
it and pass it on, then the meme, it's almost as though the ideological environment were
like a rainforest or a coral reef.
Evolution is taking place.
Dumb memes have short lifetimes and they disappear, you know, and memes of great power are able
to thrive in many intellectual and ideological niches and to make many marriages of convenience
with other memes.
And so they are stabilized and passed along.
Now we have to become hip to the fact, to the power of language.
And instead of just willy-nilly creating linguistic structures sort of ad hoc, we need to begin to
consciously engineer our linguistic intent.
And then, you know, so far in the 20th century, this has not been a program with a very happy
history because only jerks have gotten a hold of it.
Nazis and people with narrow social programs that say, you know, we're not going to call
each other Mr. and Mrs. or hey you, we're going to call, everybody's going to call each other
comrade.
And then this will create the notion of comradeship, which to a certain degree it does.
So, you know, manipulating these things for political ends, I mean, you know, the Jews, it was okay to
put Jews in ovens because the official language for talking about Jews was that they were
unter mensch, subhuman, not like us, whoever we are.
So, once the definition had been changed, people said, well, it's okay to mistreat Jews, you know,
they're not even really people.
And this is, this kind of thinking goes on all the time.
It's called stereotyping.
And it always is an easier substitute, it's a, it's a cheap substitute for clear thinking.
David Brown asked me the question, what about life after death?
And I, it was somewhat of a side bar.
The Buddhists at the folk level in India do say you cannot attain enlightenment unless your
mother is dead, which is a kind of an odd notion, seeming to imply that she had to proceed you
into hyperspace.
When you die, what you do is you literally, as appears to happen, you dissolve.
And where you go is forward and backward into time, not like a gas released into time, but
along the tracks and trails of the genetic machinery.
In other words, you flow into your children and you, you become, let, well, let's make
a very simple model and say at the moment of death, you become your children and your parents.
A few moments later, you become your grandchildren and your grandparents.
You're spreading down.
It's almost as though the thing which you were, which was this focus of ego and individuality,
then it dies.
And it's almost as though the mountain begins to slump back into the generalized pool of consciousness
and being.
And that's why I have somewhat less patience maybe than I should have with the idea of channeling
and, and come as you were parties and that sort of thing.
Because it seems to me, the key to understanding the idea of reincarnation and past lives is that
you were everybody.
Of course, that's who you are.
Here comes everybody.
You know, you weren't just that shepherd girl or that Roman Empire, Emperor or that Greek
fellow.
You're everybody and you can find your way into the great genetic telephone system and
ring anybody's bell in history.
Well then it would be absurd to claim you were that person.
That would be as absurd as claiming that anybody you could call on the telephone is who you are.
No, it's that we are everyone and, you know, the great turning object in hyperspace that is
the genetic, I don't know, trans-dimensional object casts off glinting reflections of this
personality, that personality.
And astrology has a role to play here and other things.
But the bottom line is we are all drawn of the same stuff.
I think one of the most profound insights you can have on psychedelics, and I certainly
have it, is that we are all interchangeable.
You know, anybody could do my job and I'm pretty confident I could do almost anybody's job.
We define ourselves otherwise, but, you know, in watching the rise of my own career, it's
just, it's a kind of being deputized, chosen for the job.
It's just they said, well him, he can do it.
He has the gift of gab, so give him the credit line.
But it could have been anybody.
Our uniqueness is real on one level, but on another level, it's fairly illusory.
It's sort of a coincidencia positorum.
You have to hold these two antithetical things in your mind at once in order to correctly
perceive the proper level of ambiguity that's resident in reality.
It ain't simple, folks.
Yeah.
Can I just ask this question?
Do I understand you to say that to find our true self, we have to go back to the worm-like
stage and reach out for the pharmacological, the natural pharmacological that is in the
Abaddon Basin and all those plants and things to find our true inner being, ego, whatever?
Well, I don't think we have to go back as far as the worm-like stage.
I think what we have to do is we have to get out of history.
History is a con game run by frightened men and their obedient stooges.
We had a moment of happiness.
There was a moment of completion.
I guess I should explain my position on this.
You see, there have always been dominance hierarchies in primates.
As far back as you go, clear back to squirrel monkeys, there are what are called male dominance hierarchies.
Well, so then in us, this was interrupted by psilocybin use over a period of probably a couple of hundred thousand years.
The psilocybin forget that it's psychedelic for a moment.
Just think of it as an inoculation against ego.
And so for 200,000 years or so, it was a dietary item which suppressed this normal monkey behavior.
And so then females were shared.
The sexual style was orgiastic.
There were no awareness of lines of male paternity and the children belong to the group.
This was not quote unquote natural.
The natural way is for the men to dominate, to control the females, to the old tooth and claw.
But for a couple of hundred thousand years, it was artificially interrupted by the presence of mushroom in the paleolithic human diet.
Well, then when, because of climatological factors and other factors that we can discuss in another meeting,
the mushroom became unavailable, the old monkey behaviors reemerged only about 12,000 years ago.
But in the previous 200,000 years, language had been discovered, fire, tool making, song,
a whole bunch of forward leaps had been made.
Well, then when the psilocybin was withdrawn and the patterns of male dominance reasserted themselves
in an environment where fire and language had been achieved, it exacerbated it.
It made it much more nightmarish.
It made it much more difficult to step away from.
And all of history is the unhappy story of our, essentially our withdrawal and our agony
over being unable to reach this connection back into the Gaian mind,
which when we had it, we lived in Eden.
We were balanced.
But, but it faded and history was the consequence.
Now in the last 50 years, information has arrived on our plate.
Lo and behold, in the final ticking of the final hour of our dilemma,
that actually shows us the way back.
If we, but have the wisdom to understand this and then the fortitude to apply what we know.
One more question.
You mean motivation to take psychedelics?
To take action.
Well, I think, you know, that the psychedelic community is not yet recognized or named itself as a community.
We're well behind gays and black people and all these other minds.
We're still trying to figure out if we are a community.
And if we are a community and we have a domain of action, I think where it lies,
it's not that we're all supposed to become dope dealers.
It's that we're all supposed to become artists.
That the transformation of culture through art is the proper understanding of what you can do with psychedelics,
besides blow your own mind.
And I really think, you know, what we need to do is put the art pedal to the floor and understand that this is art.
We are involved in some kind of enormous piece of performance art called Western Civilization.
And, you know, it's been a C minus performance so far, and they're just about to reach out with the hook and drag us off stage,
unless we begin pulling rabbits out of the hat pretty furiously.
Art is poised for this, but art is ambivalent because the society is ambivalent.
That's why meetings like this, where you actually hear it said, the sooner the better.
The clock is ticking. This is not a test. There will not be a retry.
You know, this is the window of opportunity between the unknown and eternity.
If not taken, then the entire enterprise could be lost.
The whole thing from the cave paintings at Lascaux to Whitney Houston.
It could all go down the drain if we don't, you know, act to preserve it through an act of human cognition plus courage.
The rainforests themselves may eventually be saved.
Very large conservation organizations are attempting to do that.
But the medical knowledge of how to use these plants is being lost at a tremendous rate.
It will disappear in the next 30 years.
There's no question about that because these people are, the young people are not learning the shamanism.
They're moving into the cities.
And you only have to break that kind of chain in an oral tradition.
You only have to have a one generation break.
And the 50,000 years of accumulated medical information is gone.
So even in today's high tech world, 85% of all drugs sold over the counter can be traced to plants.
So if we're serious about, you know, a cure to aid, new kinds of contraception, new forms of psychoactive drugs,
then this botanical database needs to be preserved.
I think that those of us who are experienced with psilocybin are in a position now to offer answers
to one of the most perplexing questions in the entire field of biology, which is,
how did it happen that over a very brief period of time, less than 2 million years,
the brain size of our species doubled?
And in doubling became the fastest transformation of a major organ ever recorded in the history of the evolution of life.
This is according to Lumsden, who's a very respected evolutionary biologist.
This is a truly perplexing problem for evolution.
It would be perplexing were it to occur anywhere in the animal phylogeny.
But what's of particular embarrassment here is that it occurs in the phylogeny of the animal who invented the theory of evolution.
So, you know, it's particularly embarrassing.
If we can't account for our own evolution, what depth and breadth has the theory when applied to the rest of nature?
And, you know, one notion has been that you're looking for a transitional skeleton or intermediate forms.
This is now been given up.
And by looking at this problem, I have sort of been able to, I think, generate and let's call it an idea, a myth, a fantasy, an explanation for our predicament.
And it goes very briefly something like this.
All primates have what are called dominance hierarchies, male dominance hierarchies.
This goes clear back into very primitive primates like squirrel monkeys.
And it is true of us as we sit here in this room.
We also have dominance hierarchies, male dominance hierarchies.
This is why, you know, what the squawk is in the gender issue is that men have been running everything for a long, long time.
But I maintain that there was a period in the history of the primates when male dominance hierarchies were interrupted.
And they were interrupted by the presence of an unusual element in the food supply.
And this element in the food supply was psilocybin.
And it acted as a kind of inoculation or unconscious vaccination against the formation of ego.
And that at that moment with ego, male dominance, tendency to male dominance chemically suppressed by mushrooms in the diet,
all the qualities that we take to be most human and most ennobling in ourselves emerged.
Language, loyalty, community, courage, love, devotion, self-sacrifice, planning.
All of these things which distinguish us from the rest of animal nature, I maintain occurred under the catalytic influence of an exogenous neurotransmitter in the environment
that was having profound effects on a monkey that was exploring a new environment and a new dietary habit.
And here's the notion.
Our remote ancestors reached a kind of evolutionary climactic stability in the arboreal forests of tropical Africa.
And like most animal species that occupies successfully occupies a niche of some sort,
we would have stayed that way for millions of years at equilibrium,
happily eating fruit and occasionally hurling shit at each other as we conducted ourselves through the forested treetops.
And thought would never have entered into the matter.
However, the plot thickened about three million years ago,
when suddenly and for reasons that are hidden in the heart of the planet itself,
the planet began to dry and the African continent became subject to waves of drought and desiccation.
The tropical rainforests which covered Africa began to retreat and be intercut with grasslands.
And in these grasslands, a very rich flora, I mean a very rich fauna of animal life developed.
New kinds of animals, grass-eating, herding animals, ungulate animals, cows, bison, various forms of antelopes, so forth and so on.
Meanwhile, looking, turning the camera's eye on our remote human ancestors,
things are getting tougher up in the treetops.
Less fruit, less habitat in which to forage.
And whenever an animal gets under dietary pressure, it does what any sensible creature would do.
It begins to experiment with new food.
It begins to test food in the environment.
Now, the reason animals don't ordinarily do this is because foods also contain toxins.
And toxins sometimes are mutagenic.
So the reason butterflies and birds and all kinds of animals specialize in their diets,
it's a strategy to avoid mutation-causing chemicals.
Well, so then what happens if you put an animal population under pressure for food,
and it starts experimenting with new forms of food?
It begins having a higher incidence of mutation.
And that mutation meets the selective forces of natural selection present in the environment.
And lo and behold, you get sudden episodes of evolutionary advance.
And I maintain that this is what happened to us on many levels.
I mean, we are a kind of monkey.
But if you set us next to our nearest relative, there are a lot of things about us that are different.
Our hairlessness, the proportion of our skull to the rest of our body is a fetal ratio compared to other primates.
Well, among the new foods encountered by these now ground-foraging proto-ancestors of ours
were mushrooms growing in the dung of wild cattle in this grassland environment.
Now, the astonishing thing about psilocybin in small doses,
and this was secured by research done by Roland Fisher in the late 50s, early 60s,
is that in very small doses, doses so small that you don't feel buzzed or loaded or anything.
In fact, you don't notice it.
Visual acuity increases.
You can give somebody five milligrams of psilocybin,
and an hour later give them a standard optometric test,
and they will do better than if they hadn't taken the psilocybin.
This is because edge detection is sensitized.
Well, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out if there's a food in the environment
of a hunting and gathering animal that conveys increased visual acuity,
it's the equivalent of chemical binoculars,
then those animals which accept that food as an item in their diet
are going to have greater hunting success than those individuals that do not.
And greater hunting success means greater success at feeding your offspring.
And that means that there would be an outbreeding of the non-psilocybin using members of the population.
In other words, natural selection would then favor those animals using,
admitting the mushroom into their diet.
So that little chink in the armor, that little toehold is sufficient for the long march toward the stars,
which is taking place in our species to begin.
The next step is if you take slightly more psilocybin,
you experience what's called arousal.
And arousal means a kind of general restlessness,
an inability to sit still, a roving and wired kind of attention.
And in highly sexed animals like primates,
it also means sexual arousal and in the male sustained erection.
A second factor promoting outbreeding of the non-psilocybin using members of the population.
In other words, you see, it was promoting what anthropologists straight-facedly call
more successful copulations.
And you don't have to be straight-faced, however.
So this is the second step.
And I believe that the sexual style of these psilocybin aroused early ancestors of ours
was probably orgiastic.
This seems reasonable from looking at human styles on the earth today.
And I suspect that probably an orgiastic religious style based on the worship
of a great horned goddess who was honored at the new and full moon
became a religious style that was set in place for 10 or 15,000 years.
This is what was going on.
Well, now psilocybin on its own,
and even more so in combination with a social style that included orgy,
will have the consequences of dissolving boundaries.
You know, this is what the orgiastic style does.
It erodes the concept of me and still more the concept of my women,
my children, my tools, my territory, my hunting ground.
If you have an orgiastic style, the first important consequence is that men
cannot trace lines of male paternity.
There is no concept for a man of my children.
There is only the concept of our children, the tribe, the group,
and loyalty is transferred in that direction.
The suppression of ego was very real.
In, as I said earlier, in the earlier primate forms,
ego, male dominance, was very strong.
But it was as though this item in the diet was suppressing this previous rigid male hierarchy.
And into the void created by the dissolving of the social glue of these primates,
there flowed a whole bunch of new behaviors.
behaviors such as pair bonding based on loyalty and mutuality of need fulfillment,
cooperation, appropriate role assignment, so forth and so on.
In other words, it got loose.
It began to work.
You see, every time there was a glaciation, and there have been nine in the last million years or so,
every time there is a glaciation, species, including primates, get locked in to islanded areas.
Well then, when the ice melts, these previously islanded populations flow together and exchange genes.
And there were several waves of human migration out of Africa and into the Middle East.
But I maintain, based on the archaeological evidence,
that only the last wave of migration out of Africa,
which began only 20,000 years ago,
were the people, anything other than hunter-gatherers,
always before they were just hunter-gatherers.
But this last time, in the intervening glacial period,
they had learned to domesticate cattle in Africa.
And it was almost as though the human population was finding its way toward the cattle.
And of course, in the dung of the cattle was the mushroom.
So this great horned mother goddess that appears at the dawn of history
of history is a hypostatization of the power of cattle in the human imagination.
Now, these behaviors that were developed out of this encounter with psilocybin
also involved religion at higher doses of psilocybin.
You know, remember, at very low doses, increased visual acuity.
Mid-range doses, orgiastic sexual activity and ego dissolution.
At still higher doses, the revelation of a religious tremendum so bizarre and unnerving
that even today, we, with Husserl and all the rest of it under our belts,
can barely face it.
In other words, a mystery which for all of our sophistication,
the breadth and measure of it can hardly be taken.
And that laid the basis for a sense of religio, a sense of ritual,
a sense of a relationship to a tremendum.
And I don't, I don't want to present this psilocybin intoxication entirely
as if it were simply ameliorating the earlier evolutionary programming
in the primates.
It was doing that, but it was doing something else as well.
Because this mystery at the center of the psilocybin intoxication
is not simply the contents of your unconscious mind or unfulfilled fantasy as Freud thought.
Or it is, in fact, a contact with a Gaian intelligence of some sort.
And if you're a rationalist as I once was on some long forgotten world,
this is an incredibly challenging notion.
that what you're getting into is actually some kind of super mind,
some kind of organism that is, you know,
apparently in the atmosphere, in the water, in the plants, in the land.
It's hard to say where it is or what it is
because it was not designed for human apprehension.
It has its own ding on seish, its own thing in itself.
It's, uh...
It's like a god for any century of human
Description of it except the 20th in which we have enough knowledge about the ecosystem to say well
Maybe it's not as Milton said the god who hung the stars like lamps in heaven
It isn't that god, but it's the god of the oceans and the jungles and the ice caps and the rivers and the glaciers
And the great schools of fish and the deserts, and it's the goddess of the earth
It's the mind of organic life on this planet, and I believe that we were we were its chosen
vessel of
Manifestation in a certain domain and this is what the Edenic myth is about the nostalgia
For paradise that haunts our species is a memory of this time
This golden era that ended as recently, you know as 10,000 years ago. I mean
everything that we call history is a product of the
traumatic
break in our symbiotic relationship to the earth
occasioned by
The the loss of the mushroom religion
which was the or
religion and
You know an obvious question that anyone who's gotten this far would ask is well if it was so wonderful
Why was it lost well?
It was lost
Because the same dynamics which created it which were the progress which was the progressive drying of the African continent
those forces
Accelerated and continued and where there had been Edenic grassland and vast herds and endless supplies of mushrooms
There became desert there became dry land scrub the retreating water holes
fewer and fewer mushrooms the mushroom festivals which had been at the new and full moon
Became fewer in number the mushroom supply dwindled
Special classes of people had to be appointed who would be the mushroom users
Special times of the year had to be appointed when the mushrooms could be taken
Special places in the rain shadow of mountains and near water holes
Became the only places where the mushrooms could be found and at that point
And these these are processes which took millennia to occur at that point there became an anxiety and concern to preserve the mushrooms
so that in abundant times they could be gathered for times when they were scarce and
the
Strategy that would have naturally been hit upon would be to use honey as a
As a preservative in a world without refrigeration
Honey is an antiseptic medium and that caramelizes around
Fruits and like hummingbird tongues and stuff like that you're always hearing Romans eight hummingbird tongues in honey
That's why because it was a preservative problem is
Honey itself has a perverse and mercurial nature and can change into a
Psychoactive drug it can change into mead which is a form of alcohol
It can ferment and become a kind of proto beer well
In the in what I develop in my book food of the gods is the idea that each drug
carries
baggage
That we are generally not aware of each drug promotes certain values and suppresses others
so if psilocybin
suppressed ego male paternity and promoted
sexual
polymorphically perverse behavior then what and
Consequent diminishing of ego then what mead
fermented honey promotes is
Is the classic things always promoted by alcohol in any form one a false sense of verbal facility
In the insidious combination with a lowering of sensitivity to social cueing?
You know you can see this in any singles bar on a crowded Saturday night people drink because it they think it makes them clever and then
Able to ignore social cues from those around them
They boorishly proceed with their agenda which usually involves getting laid or something and
You know I think that there was probably a thousand years in European civilization
When very few people experience sex without being bombed because that was how people
Steal themselves for the experience, you know
You know it was recommended to give distilled alcohol to soldiers on the brink of battle when it was first invented because it fortified them well
well
as the mushrooms faded these
Behaviors that had been previously well established in primates of male dominance and ego returned
So that at the very dawn of human history, you know, let's say
6,000 B.C. Or so you get
In the absence of the psilocybin the disease of ego
Reemerges it's been suppressed for 50,000 years now. It spreads through the population like wildfire and you get urbanization
agriculture agriculture leads to surplus
surplus
Surplus means an end to set to nomadic existence you become sedentary you build grain towers
You fill these towers with grain then you have to defend them against the hungry people from the other tribe
So you get classes?
Somebody has to coordinate the defense of this grain towers suddenly you have generals
hierarchy male dominance
warfare
classism
You name it, you know, and the and the phonetic alphabet and all the rest of it is not far behind
It's the fall into history and we are the unhappy inheritors of this situation
and
our you know one of the things that is so unique about us is our
Fascination with drugs
That of you know, you know that the elephants will break into compounds to get it rotting papayas and butterflies go for sugared rum and this and that
But human beings are incredible
the rainforests themselves may eventually be saved
Very large conservation organizations are attempting to do that
But the medical knowledge of how to use these plants is being lost at a tremendous rate it will disappear in the next 30 years
There's no question about that because these people are the young people are not learning the shamanism
They're moving into the cities and
and
and you only have to break that kind of chain in an oral tradition
You only have to have a one generation break and the
50,000 years of accumulated medical information is gone so
And even in today's high-tech world 85% of all drugs sold over the counter
Can be traced to plants so if we're serious about you know a cure to aid
new kinds of contraception
New forms of psychoactive drugs then the this botanical database needs to be preserved
I think that those of us who are experienced with psilocybin are in a position now to offer
Answers to one of the most perplexing questions in the entire field of biology
Which is how did it happen that over a very brief period of time less than two million years?
the brain size of our species doubled and
and in doubling became the
fastest
Transformation of a major organ ever recorded in the history of the evolution of life
This is according to Lumsden who's a very
Respected evolutionary biologist. This is a truly
Perplexing problem for evolution it would be perplexing
Were it to occur anywhere in the animal phylogeny, but what's of particular
Embarrassment here is that it occurs in the phylogeny of the animal who invented the theory of evolution
so
You know it's it's particularly embarrassing if we can't account for our own evolution
evolution what depth and breadth has the theory when applied to the rest of nature and
you know one notion has been that you're looking for a transitional skeleton or
Intermediate forms this is now been given up and
By looking at this problem. I have sort of
been able to I think
Generate and let's call it an idea a myth the fantasy an
Explanation for our predicament and it goes very briefly something like this
All all primates have what are called dominance hierarchies
male dominance hierarchies this goes clear back into very primitive primates like squirrel monkeys
And it is true of us as we sit here in this room
We also have dominance hierarchies male dominance hierarchies. This is why
you know
What the squawk is in the gender issue is that men have been running everything for a long long time
But I maintain
That there was a period in the history of the primates when male dominance hierarchies
Were interrupted and they were interrupted by the presence of an unusual element in the food supply and
this element in the food supply was psilocybin and
it acted as a kind of inoculation or
unconscious
vaccination against the formation of ego and
And that at that moment with a
Ego male dot tendency to male dominance chemically suppressed
By mushrooms in the diet all the qualities that we take to be most
Human and most ennobling in ourselves
Emerged
Language
Loyalty
Community
Courage
Love
Devotion
Self-sacrifice
Planning
All of these things which distinguish us from the rest of animal nature
I maintain occurred under the catalytic influence of an exogenous
Neurotransmitter in the environment that was having profound
Effects on a monkey that was exploring a new environment and a new dietary habit and here's the notion
Our remote ancestors reached a kind of evolutionary climactic stability in the arboreal
Forests of tropical Africa and like most animal species that occupies successfully occupies a niche of some sort
We would have stayed that way for millions of years at equilibrium
happily eating fruit and occasionally hurling shit at each other as we conducted ourselves through the forested treetops and
Thought would never have entered into the matter
However the plot thickened about three million years ago when suddenly and for reasons that are hidden in the heart of the planet itself
The planet began to dry and the African continent became subject to waves of drought and desiccation
The the tropical rainforests which covered Africa began to retreat and be intercut with grasslands and in these grasslands a very rich flora
I mean a very rich fauna of animal life developed new kinds of animals grass-eating
Herding animals ungulate animals
Ungulate animals cows bison various forms of antelopes so forth and so on
Meanwhile looking turning the cameras eye on our remote human ancestors
Things are getting tougher up in the treetops
Less fruit less habitat in which to forage and
To forage and
Whenever an animal gets under dietary pressure it does what any sensible creature would do
It begins to experiment with new food
It begins to test food in the environment
Now the reason animals don't ordinarily do this
Is because foods also contain toxins
Toxins and toxins
Sometimes are mutagenic
So the reason butterflies and birds and all kinds of animals specialize in their diets
It's a strategy to avoid mutation causing chemicals
Well, so then what happens if you put an animal population under pressure
For food and it starts experimenting with new forms of food
It begins having a higher incidence of mutation
And that mutation meets the selective forces of natural selection present in the environment
And lo and behold you get sudden episodes of evolutionary advance
And I maintain that this is what happened to us on many levels
I mean we are a kind of monkey
But if you set us next to our nearest relative
There are a lot of things about us that are different
Our hairlessness
Our the proportion of our skull to the rest of our body
Is a fetal ratio compared to other primates
Well among the new foods encountered by these now ground foraging proto ancestors of ours
Were mushrooms growing in the dung of wild cattle in this grassland environment
Now the astonishing thing about psilocybin in small doses
And this was secured by research done by roland fisher in the late 50s early 60s
Is that in very small doses doses doses so small that you don't feel buzzed or loaded or anything in fact you don't notice it
Visual acuity increases
You can give somebody five milligrams of psilocybin
And an hour later give them a standard
Optometric test and they will do better than if they hadn't taken the psilocybin
This is because edge detection is sensitized
Well you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out if there's a food in the environment
Of a hunting and gathering animal that conveys increased visual acuity
It's the equivalent of chemical binoculars
Then those animals which accept that food as an item in their diet
Are going to have greater hunting success than those individuals that do not
And greater hunting success means greater success at feeding your offspring
And that means that there would be an outbreeding of the non psilocybin using members of the population
In other words natural selection would then favor those animals using admitting the mushroom into their diet
So that little chink in the armor that little toehold is sufficient for the long march toward the stars which is taking place in our species to begin
The next step is if you take slightly more psilocybin
You experience what's called arousal
And arousal means a kind of general restlessness
An inability to sit still
A roving and wired kind of attention
And in highly sexed animals like primates
It also means sexual arousal and in the male sustained erection
A second factor
Promoting outbreeding of the non psilocybin using members of the population
In other words you see it was promoting what anthropologists straight-facedly call more successful copulations
And you don't have to be straight-faced however
So this is the second step
And I believe that the sexual style of these psilocybin aroused early ancestors of ours was probably orgiastic
This seems reasonable from looking at human styles on the earth today
And I suspect that probably an orgiastic religious style based on the worship of a great horned goddess
Who was honored at the new and full moon?
Became a religious style that was set in place for ten or fifteen thousand years
This is what was going on
Well now psilocybin on its own
And even more so in combination with a social style that included orgy
Will have the consequences of dissolving boundaries
You know this is what the orgiastic style does it erodes the concept of me
And still more the concept of my women
My children my tools my territory my hunting ground
If you have an orgiastic style
The first important consequence is that men cannot trace lines of male paternity
There are there is no concept for a man of my children
There is only the concept of our children
The tribe the group and loyalty is transferred in that direction
The suppression of ego was very real
In as I said earlier in the earlier primate forms
Ego male dominance was very strong
But it was as though this item in the diet
Was suppressing this previous rigid male hierarchy
Male hierarchy and into the void created by the dissolving of the social glue of these primates
There flowed a whole bunch of new behaviors
Behaviors such as
Pair bonding based on loyalty and mutuality of need fulfillment
Cooperation
Appropriate role assignment
So forth and so on
In other words it got loose it began to work
You see every time there was a glaciation
And there have been nine in the last million years or so
Every time there is a glaciation
Species including primates get locked in to islanded areas
Well then when the ice melts
These previously islanded populations flow together and exchange genes
And there were several waves of human migration
Out of Africa and into the Middle East
But I maintain on based on the archaeological evidence
That only the last wave of migration out of Africa
Which began only 20,000 years ago
Were the people anything other than hunter-gatherers
Always before they were just hunter-gatherers
But this last time in the intervening glacial period
They had learned to domesticate cattle in Africa
And it was almost as though the human population
Was finding its way toward the cattle
And of course in the dung of the cattle was the mushroom
So this great horned mother goddess that appears at the dawn of history
Is a hypostatization of the power of cattle in the human imagination
Now these behaviors that were developed out of this encounter with psilocybin
Also involved religion at higher doses of psilocybin
You know remember at very low doses increased visual acuity
Mid-range doses orgiastic sexual activity and ego dissolution
At still higher doses the revelation of a religious tremendum
So bizarre and unnerving that even today
We with Husserl and all the rest of it under our belts
Can barely face it
In other words a mystery which for all of our sophistication
The breadth and measure of it can hardly be taken
And that laid the basis for a sense of religio
A sense of ritual
A sense of a relationship to a tremendum
And I don't I don't want to present this psilocybin intoxication
Entirely as if it were simply ameliorating the earlier evolutionary programming in the primates
It was doing that but it was doing something else as well
Because this mystery at the center of the psilocybin intoxication
Intoxication is not simply the contents of your unconscious mind
Or unfulfilled fantasy as Freud thought
Or it is in fact a contact with a guy in intelligence of some sort
And if you're a rationalist as I once was on some long-forgotten world
It this is an incredibly challenging notion
That what you're getting into is actually some kind of super mind
Some kind of super mind some kind of organism
That is you know apparently in the atmosphere in the water in the plants in the land
It's hard to say where it is or what it is because it was not designed for human apprehension
It has its own ding on seas its own thing in itself
It's like a god for any century of human description of it except the twentieth
In which we have enough knowledge about the ecosystem to say
Well, maybe it's not as Milton said the god who hung the stars like lamps in heaven
It isn't that god
But it's the god of the oceans and the jungles and the ice caps and the rivers and the glaciers and the great schools of fish
And the deserts and it's the goddess of the earth
It's the mind of organic life on this planet
And I believe that we were we were its chosen
Vessel of
Manifestation
In a certain domain
And this is what the Edenic myth is about
The nostalgia for paradise that haunts our species
Is a memory of this time
This golden era that ended as recently you know as 10,000 years ago
I mean everything that we call history
Is a product of the traumatic break
In our symbiotic relationship to the earth
occasioned by
The loss of the mushroom religion
Which was the Ur religion
And you know an obvious question that anyone who's gotten this far would ask is
Well, if it was so wonderful, why was it lost?
Well, it was lost
Because the same dynamics which created it
Which were the progress which was the progressive drying of the African continent
Those forces
Accelerated and continued and where there had been Edenic grassland and vast herds and endless supplies of mushrooms
There became desert
There became dry land scrub retreating water holes
Fewer and fewer mushrooms
The mushroom festivals which had been at the new and full moon
Became fewer in number
The mushroom supply dwindled
Special classes of people had to be appointed who would be the mushroom users
Special times of the year had to be appointed when the mushrooms could be taken
Special places in the rain shadow of mountains and near water holes
Became the only places where the mushrooms could be found
And at that point
And these these are processes which took millennia to occur
At that point there became anxiety and concern to preserve the mushrooms
So that in abundant times they could be gathered for times when they were scarce
And the strategy that would have naturally been hit upon
Would be to use honey as a preservative
In a world without refrigeration
Honey is an antiseptic medium
And that caramelizes around
Fruits and like hummingbird tongues and stuff like that
You're always hearing Romans eight hummingbird tongues in honey
That's why because it was a preservative
Problem is
Honey itself
Has a perverse and mercurial nature
And can change into a psychoactive drug
It can change into mead
Which is a form of alcohol
It can ferment and become a kind of proto-beer
Well in the in what I develop in my book
Food of the Gods is the idea that each drug
Carries baggage that we are generally not aware of
Each drug promotes certain values and suppresses others
So if psilocybin suppressed ego male paternity
And promoted sexual polymorphically perverse behavior
Then what and consequent diminishing of ego
Then what mead fermented honey promotes
Is the classic things always promoted by alcohol in any form
One a false sense of verbal facility
In the insidious combination with a lowering of sensitivity to social cueing
You know you can see this in any singles bar on a crowded Saturday night
People drink because it they think it makes them clever
And then able to ignore social cues from those around them
They boorishly proceed with their agenda
Which usually involves getting laid or something
And you know I think that there was probably a thousand years in European civilization
When very few people experience
sex without being bombed, because that
was how people steeled themselves for the experience.
It was recommended to give distilled alcohol
to soldiers on the brink of battle
when it was first invented, because it fortified them.
Well, as the mushrooms faded, these behaviors that
had been previously well-established in primates
of male dominance and ego returned.
So that at the very dawn of human history,
let's say 6,000 BC or so, you get,
in the absence of the psilocybin, the disease of ego reemerges.
It's been suppressed for 50,000 years.
And now it spreads through the population like wildfire.
And you get urbanization, agriculture.
Agriculture leads to surplus.
Surplus means an end to nomadic existence.
You become sedentary.
You build grain towers.
You fill these towers with grain.
Then you have to defend them against the hungry people
from the other tribe.
So you get classes.
Somebody has to coordinate the defense of this grain tower.
Suddenly you have generals, hierarchy, male dominance,
warfare, classism, sexism, you name it.
And the phonetic alphabet and all the rest of it
is not far behind.
It's the fall into history.
And we are the unhappy inheritors of this situation.
And one of the things that is so unique about us
is our fascination with drugs.
That elephants will break into compounds
to get at rotting papayas.
And butterflies go for sugared rum and this and that.
But human beings are incredible.
And human beings addict to approximately 20 or 30 substances
very tight physiological addictions.
And then there's all our ideological addictions to Marxism,
to capitalism, to the Republican Party, you name it.
And then we have behavioral addictions of all sorts.
Somebody gets up in the morning and throws open their front door.
And if the Times isn't lying rolled at their feet
with a red rubber band around it, they go into shock.
Because an addiction is being interrupted.
The fix, which was supposed to arrive on time, has been delayed.
And now this person stomps back into their house, menace to wife and child,
because the newspaper didn't arrive on time.
So this curious tendency of our species to addict, I think,
is because, you know, if a person is an addictive type,
then people say, well, they probably were abused in childhood.
And this is the consequence of some kind of childhood trauma.
Well, I would submit to you that we exhibit this pathology.
We appear to be the inheritors of some kind of dysfunctional relationship.
And I maintain that it was torn from us at the birth of mind
when we were forced out of the African Eden and into, you know,
a much drier, harsher Middle Eastern climate,
where we then had to toil in the veil of sorrows.
Well, now, what is the point of this?
Or is this just some revisioning of archaeology, some egghead game?
Or what is the point?
Well, the point is that the consequences of this dysfunctional behavior
stemming from ego and the dominance hierarchy in our behavior
has ruined our planet, toxified the air and water,
allowed our population to soar beyond the carrying capacity,
poisoned our lives with propaganda,
and made us each feel guilty, powerless, and doomed.
I mean, this is the major riff being run in the society at large,
is that we're doomed.
We've looted the planet, we've destroyed our children's future,
we have the ethics of rats, and now we're going to go down the tube.
Well, I say, before we despair completely and just toss in the towel,
we need to make one last try at escaping our demonic other,
and that the way to do it is through, and this leads me by a Viconian recurso,
back to the archaic revival.
We need to reach back into time and attempt to understand what happened to us
and how we fell into history and how its institutions have served us badly
and diminished and degraded our humanness,
and then we need to begin a fundamental reconstruction of human institutions
with an eye toward creating a viable, balanced, nature-honoring,
human-honoring set of institutions.
So does this mean I advocate in a world of epidemic diseases
that we return to orgies on every new and full moon?
I don't think so.
It's hardly possible.
But what it does mean is that the tool which lay behind all these changes,
which was the ego-dissolving power of psilocybin,
needs to be looked at very carefully.
We need to examine the possibility that we could re-engineer ourselves
so that we could emotionally connect with the consequences
of what we have been doing to ourselves and the planet.
I mean, when people take psychedelics, this is what they realize.
They lose the hold on their little world.
You know, they're saving money for a Mercedes or breast implants or some damn thing.
You know, then you take one of these things and then you get the big picture.
And then you realize just where that Mercedes lies in, you know,
the long march to the stars.
In other words, we see this in the rainforest cultures today.
They have no high level of material culture.
And yet it's not because they're not interested in beauty or poetry.
It's that they simply live in a much more mental world than we do.
The peculiar obsession of the Western mind is its demonic relationship to matter.
That we don't believe anything is real unless it's made of stuff.
And, you know, any idea, any notion has to somehow be concretized.
This is a kind of neurotic response in my opinion.
I mean, the cultures with those civilizations with no material culture whatsoever
are in a much more dynamic relationship to nature.
It's our obsession with stuff that is pushing us toward Armageddon.
I mean, we seriously propose to bring every man, woman, and child on earth
to the level of the life standard roughly approximating that of the average dweller of this island.
Well, I've got news for you.
There isn't enough metal, glass, plastic, and petroleum in the planet to do that.
And, in fact, it's causing the toxification of our world.
Unfortunately, we live under a social system that is stuff-obsessed.
We must have money in order to get things.
And the number of things around that they're telling you you need
is beyond your ever being able to satisfy yourself.
We have been told that what is within is nothing, you know,
and that all meaning lies in the exterior world.
So only science has meaning.
Only property has meaning.
And, in fact, the felt presence of immediate experience is the only thing you will ever truly possess.
The felt presence of immediate experience.
It's the quality of that that determines whether you're a happy or unhappy person.
And you can be dying of intestinal parasites in some hut in the Amazon.
And if your felt quality of immediate experience is superior,
then you're superior to the guy who's being chauffeured around in an air-conditioned limousine
in some urban center somewhere.
We, our whole cultural delivery system denies this, you know.
So we have the concept of entertainment and of drugs.
I mean, to my mind, television is a far more insidious drug than heroin
and that they're very comparable.
They're cousins.
The difference between heroin and television is that at least on heroin,
you can think your own thoughts.
On television, they don't even give you the option to do that, you know.
You imbibe a manufactured data stream,
the main purpose of which is to introduce you to the cosmetically enhanced surfaces
of certain products, which you don't need.
The average American watches six hours of TV a day.
This means that millions and millions of people are being maintained
in a semi-larval stage.
I mean, we might as well store them in enormous underground banks somewhere.
And someday we may.
I mean, this society is hard enough to manage.
What if all these people unplugged themselves
and began running around making demands
on the political institutions and the infrastructure?
Then we'd really have a problem.
So better they should stay in the suburbs.
People magazine is delivered.
The telly is there.
They trouble no one.
But they do consume.
There is no mundane future.
I mean, if we had the chairman of the World Bank
and those people here,
they draw curves that will stand your hair on end.
They show you that the world population,
the extraction of petroleum,
the rise of poverty,
the poisoning of the atmosphere,
the accumulation of toxins in the food chain.
You draw all these curves
and you discover that sometime between the year 2000 and 2040,
life as we know it becomes absolutely impossible
on the surface of this planet.
That's what the sober, unstoned people say.
So then the rest of us are supposed to come to terms with this in some sense.
And you can either despair and say,
well, then we're just, you know,
the momentum of a thousand years of chuckle-headedness
is just going to slam us into the wall of planetary limitation
at a speed of about 5,000 miles an hour.
Or we have to sort through our toolkit
and find the right wrench
to get this sinking submarine back up to the surface.
Let's disarm Captain Nemo and his friends
and put the people who want to go into the lifeboats
into the lifeboats,
and then these clowns can do any damn thing they want to.
Well, when you sort through the cultural toolkit,
trying to find the magic key,
it is hallucinogenic plants.
As far as I can tell,
I mean, I'm just one guy,
but I read widely, I traveled widely,
I've been around the block,
and my impression is
that this is a tremendous long shot,
but it's the only plan around.
Nobody else has any other plan.
What are you supposed to do?
Wait for the friendly space brothers
to come and pull your chestnuts out of the fire?
I just don't get,
I'm underwhelmed by the evidence
that that's about to occur.
Maybe it's about to occur.
I don't regard myself as having an answer.
I'm more like have a clue.
I sort it through,
just as I assume you are doing,
trying to figure out,
taking seriously what Alan Watts
and Joe Campbell
and all those people,
Jung,
you know,
trying to figure out
what are these people talking about?
Is it just abstract?
Can it ever be reached?
And I sat at the feet
of various rishis,
roshis,
geishis,
and gurus.
I swept up around the ashram
and so forth and so on.
And, you know,
these people just don't have the moxie.
I mean,
maybe they've got something,
but we don't have a thousand years
to unravel this thing.
It is a sinking submarine.
Chatter is now out of bounds.
Plato said,
time is the moving image of eternity.
And I,
my model for these psychedelics
is,
if you push me,
ultimately mathematical.
I mean,
I think that what,
that when we say
we dissolve a boundary,
when we say that the psilocybin
dissolves all boundaries,
another way of putting that
is to say
that we rise
to a higher dimension
where what were boundaries
now have been erased.
And I mean another dimension
in a very mathematical
and formal sense.
And there is a dimension
from which the past,
the present,
and the future
are equally discernible.
And you go into that place.
Shamanism,
one,
a good definition of shamanism,
a psychedelic definition is,
a shaman
is somebody
who has seen the end.
That's all.
And if you've seen the end,
then you come back
and take your place
in the play
with an entirely different attitude.
In the mountains
of the Sierra Mazateca
of central Mexico,
there are Mixtec
and Mazatec Indians,
the only place in the world
where living mushroom cults
with ancient roots
still exist.
The mushrooms
were discovered
in 1953
by Gordon
and Valentina Wasson
because they went
to these villages
and uncovered this thing.
People thought
it had been wiped out
with the Spanish conquest,
but it hadn't.
It had just retreated
into the Oaxacan interior
and been kept alive.
One way that I think
about these aboriginal peoples
is that
they kept the secret
while we descended
into history.
They stayed at home
and kept the old,
old secrets
and we descended
into matter.
We made a kind
of pilgrimage
and we call it
human history.
Now it's over.
Now we have to take
what we've learned
from this demonic pilgrimage
into the domain
of the material
and use it
to save the planet,
to care for the planet.
The only justification
for history
is if we use
what we've learned
to care for life
on the planet
and we may end up
using thermonuclear weapons
to destroy
incoming space junk
that imperils
the ecology
of the planet.
There may be tasks
for which only
high technology
is adequate.
That, you know,
if an asteroid
is going to strike
the earth
you don't want
to be a rainforest
shaman
in that situation.
You want to be
in command
of intercontinental
ballistic missiles
with high lift capability
that can take
a 50 megaton weapon
out there
and blow this thing
to smithereens.
I see our
bodhisattvic obligation
as a biological
obligation
that we are to care
for the earth.
After all,
the earth cared
for us
and we're like
scabies
or something,
you know.
I mean,
it can't be
very much fun
for a planet
to have a species
on it
which is always
extracting petroleum
and spreading plutonium
around
and dumping junk
into the oceans
and the atmosphere.
It just, you know,
my God,
what is this?
It's a raging
viral infection
of some sort
and yet
we may be
the means
to a technology
that would actually
then give us
a destiny,
save history
from just being
madness,
century after
century
of rape
and pogrom
and just,
you know,
the horror
that it is.
I'd like to redeem that.
I'm like
Stephan Dedalus.
I'd like to awaken
from the nightmare.
Marsiliad once
made a wonderful
statement.
He said
he was comparing
our culture
to a dying person
and he said
in the same way
that a dying person
sees their whole history
flash before their eyes,
a dying culture
will frantically
publish everything
in one last
final spasm
of fear.
Every Egyptian text,
every Tibetan text,
every Hopi prophecy,
everything will be
published, published,
published
because they're looking
for answers.
Somewhere it has to be.
Did the Tibetans
know it?
Did the Witoto know it?
Did the Inuit know it?
Who knows it?
We've got to find out.
And eventually
they'll get around
to saying,
well now what about
these psychedelic people?
We've been jailing them
and hounding them
for years.
They claim they have
an answer.
And they'll say,
you know,
get them.
Get them on the line.
We'll talk to anybody
at this point.
Bad times lie ahead.
Things are going
to get worse
before they get better.
But they're going
to get better.
The problem,
as I see it,
with the West
is in a search
for philosophical economy,
of which there's
nothing wrong
with philosophical economy,
but in a frantic search
for philosophical economy,
we did great damage
to our intuition.
And what this gave us
is monotheism.
Monotheism is a very good idea
and not such a good idea
on the second pass
because if you take a page
from Jung,
as I try to do,
you know that the religious
ontology of a culture
reflects its innermost psychology.
And the idea of monotheism,
one God, omnipresent,
omnipotent, unforgiving,
and everywhere
is an image
of the male ego.
That's all it is.
It's an enshrining
of the ideal personality
as defined
by that society.
And yet,
what it creates
is a complete denial
of the messy,
felt, pluralistic,
feminine,
organic,
emotional
side of being.
So one has become
enslaved
to a kind of
platonic abstraction
of which all life
and color
and feeling
has been poured
out of it
and you just have
the patriarchal ego
and this is not
very far behind us.
I mean,
some of us
were probably raised
by people like this.
The idea of male rectitude,
we're all pretty mellow,
even the most uptight
of us compared to
the style of male
presentation of say
a hundred years ago.
You know,
a hundred years ago
women referred
to their husbands
as mister.
Get into it.
You know,
in the 16th century,
medical students
had to steal corpses
off the gallows
and from battlefields
in order to do
dissections
because the church
would not allow
dissection of corpses
to take place.
So medical students
of that era
risked imprisonment
in order to obtain corpses
so that they could find out
how the human body worked.
This is the kind of situation
that we're in.
Constipated patriarchal institutions
are standing directly astride
the forward progress
of the human race.
I mean,
you know,
if you want to boil it down
to a slogan
and I'll just leave you
with this,
we call these substances
consciousness expanding agents.
Well now,
if consciousness
does not play a major part
in the future history
of our species,
then what kind
of a future history
are we talking about?
You know,
are we going to become stupider,
duller,
more animal-like?
I don't think so.
Consciousness is our defining quality
and it must be nourished,
encouraged,
catalyzed,
never more so than now
because we have a planet in peril.
The entire evolutionary enterprise
may rest
on the kinds of decisions
we make
about how we order
and carry out
our priorities
over the next 50 years.
We need all the help
we can get
and these plants
have always been there
to render counsel
and give advice
to evolving human populations
that would humbly
and reverently
seek their input.
That's all.
Thank you very much.
Human beings
addict to approximately
20 or 30 substances
very tight
physiological addictions
and then there's all
our ideological addictions
you know,
to Marxism,
to capitalism,
to the Republican Party,
you name it
and then we have
behavioral addictions
of all sorts.
Somebody gets up
in the morning
and throws open
their front door
and if the Times
isn't lying rolled
at their feet
with a red rubber band
around it
they go into shock
because
an addiction
is being interrupted.
the fix
which was supposed
to arrive on time
has been delayed
and now this person
stomps back
into their house
menace to life
wife and child
because the newspaper
didn't arrive on time.
So this curious tendency
of our species
to addict
I think
is because
you know
if a person
is an addictive type
then people say
well they probably
were abused
in childhood
and this is the consequence
of some kind
of childhood trauma
well I would submit
to you
that we exhibit
this pathology.
We appear to be
the inheritors
of some kind
of dysfunctional
relationship
and I maintain
that it was
torn from us
at the birth
of mind
when we were
forced out
of the African Eden
and into
you know
a much drier
harsher
Middle Eastern
climate
where we then
had to toil
in the veil
of sorrows.
Well now
what is the point
of this
or is this
just some
revisioning
of archaeology
some egghead game
or what is the point
well the point
is
that the consequences
of this dysfunctional
behavior
stemming from
ego
and the dominance
hierarchy
in our behavior
has ruined
our planet
toxified
the air
and water
allowed our
population
to soar
beyond the
carrying capacity
poisoned our
lives with
propaganda
and made us
each feel
guilty
powerless
and doomed
I mean
this is the
major riff
being run
in the society
at large
is that we're
doomed
we've looted
the planet
we've destroyed
our children's
future
we have
the ethics
of rats
and now
we're going
to go down
the tube
well I say
before we
despair
completely
and just
toss in the
towel
we need to
make one
last try
at escaping
our demonic
other
and that the
way to do
it is through
and this
leads me
by a
Viconian
recurso
back to
archaic
revival
we need to
reach back
into time
and attempt
to understand
what happened
to us
and how we
fell into
history
and how its
institutions
have served
us badly
and diminished
and degraded
our humanness
and then we
need to begin
a fundamental
reconstruction
of human
institutions
with an eye
toward creating
a viable
balanced
nature honoring
human honoring
set of
institutions
so does this
mean I
advocate
in a world
of epidemic
diseases
that we return
to orgies
on every new
and full moon
I don't think
so
it's hardly
possible
but what
it does
mean
is
that
the tool
which lay
behind all
these changes
which was
the ego
dissolving
power of
psilocybin
needs to be
looked at
very carefully
we need
to examine
the possibility
that we
could re-engineer
ourselves
so that we
could emotionally
connect
with the
consequences
of what we
have been
doing to
ourselves
and the
planet
I mean
when people
take psychedelics
this is what
they realize
they lose
the hold
on their
little world
you know
they're saving
money for a
mercedes
or breast
implants
or some
damn thing
you know
then you
take one
of these
things
and then
you get
the big
picture
and then
you realize
just where
that mercedes
lies
in you
know
the long
march
to the
stars
in other
words
we see
this in
the
rainforest
cultures
today
they have
no
high level
of material
culture
and yet
it's not
because they're
not interested
in beauty
or poetry
it's that
they simply
live in a
much more
mental
world
than we
do
the peculiar
obsession
of the
western mind
is its
demonic
relationship
to matter
that we
don't believe
anything
is real
unless it's
made
of stuff
and you
know
we
any
idea
any notion
has to
somehow
be
concretized
this is
a kind
of neurotic
response
in my
opinion
I mean
the cultures
with those
civilizations
with no
material
culture
whatsoever
are in
a much
more
dynamic
relationship
to nature
it's our
obsession
with stuff
that is
pushing us
toward
Armageddon
I mean
we seriously
propose to
bring every
man woman
and child
on earth
to the
level
of
the life
standard
roughly
approximating
that of
the average
dweller
of this
island
well I've
got news
for you
there isn't
enough
metal
glass
plastic
and petroleum
in the
planet
to do
that
and in
fact
it's
causing
the
toxification
of our
world
unfortunately
we live
under a
social
system
that
is
stuff
obsessed
we must
have
money
in order
to get
things
and the
number
of
things
around
that
they're
telling you
you need
is
beyond
your
ever
being able
to satisfy
yourself
we have
been told
that
what is
within
is
nothing
you know
and that
all
meaning
lies
in the
exterior
world
so
only
science
has
meaning
only
property
has
meaning
and in
fact
the
felt
presence
of
immediate
experience
is the
only
thing
you
will
ever
truly
possess
the
felt
presence
of
immediate
experience
it's
that
the
quality
of
that
determines
whether
you're
a happy
or unhappy
person
and you
can be
dying
of
intelligence
parasites in some hut in the Amazon and if your felt quality of immediate
experience is superior then you're superior to the guy who's being
chauffeured around in an air-conditioned limousine in some urban center
somewhere we our whole cultural delivery system denies this you know so we have
the concept of entertainment and of drugs I mean to my mind television is a far
more insidious drug than heroin and that they're very comparable their cousins the
difference between heroin and television is that at least on heroin you
can think your own thoughts on television they don't even give you the option to
do that you know you you imbibe a manufactured data stream the main purpose
of which is to introduce you to the cosmetically enhanced surfaces of certain
products which you don't need the average American watches six hours of TV a day
this means that millions and millions of people are being maintained in a semi
larval stage I mean we might as well store them in enormous underground banks
somewhere and someday we may I mean this society is hard enough to manage what if
all these people unplug themselves and began running around making demands on
the political institutions in the infrastructure then we'd really have a
problem so better they should stay in the suburbs people magazine is delivered the
telly is there they trouble no one they but they do consume there is no mundane
future I mean if we had the chairman of the World Bank and those people here they draw curves that will
stand your hair on the end they show you that the world population the extraction of
petroleum the rise of of poverty the poisoning of the atmosphere the accumulation of toxins in the food chain you draw all these curves and you discover that there's a lot of
you discover that sometime between the year 2000 and 2040 life as we know it becomes absolutely impossible on the surface of this planet that's what the sober
unstoned people say so then the rest of us are supposed to come to terms with this in some sense and you can either despair and say well then we're just you know the momentum of a thousand years of chuckle headedness is just going to slam us into the wall of
planetary limitation at a speed of about 5000 miles an hour or we have to sort through our toolkit and find the right wrench to get this sinking submarine back up to the surface
let's disarm captain Nemo and his friends and put the people who want to go into the lifeboats into the lifeboats and then these clowns can do any damn thing they want to well when you sort through the cultural toolkit trying to
find the magic key it is hallucinogenic plants as far as I can tell I mean I'm just one guy but my empire I read widely I travel widely I've been around the block and my impression is that this is a tremendous long shot
but it's the only plan around nobody else has any other plan what are you supposed to do wait for the friendly space brothers to come and pull your chestnuts out of the fire I just don't get I'm underwhelmed by the evidence that that's about to occur maybe it's about to occur
I don't regard myself as having an answer I'm more like have a clue I sorted through just as I assume you are doing trying to figure out taking seriously what Alan Watts and Joe Campbell and all those people young you know trying to figure out what are these people talking about is it just abstract can it ever be reached and I sat at the feet of various
various rishis roshis roshis geishas and gurus I swept up around the ashram and so forth and so on and you know these people just don't have the moxie I mean maybe they've got something but we don't have a thousand years to unravel this thing it is a sinking submarine chatter is now out of bounds Plato said time is the moving image of eternity
is if you push me ultimately mathematical I mean I think that what that when we say we dissolve a boundary when we decide say that the psilocybin dissolves all boundaries another way of putting that is to say that we rise to a higher dimension where what were boundaries now have been erased and I mean another dimension in a very mathematical and formal sense and
there is a dimension from which the past the present and the future are equally discernible and you go into that place shamanism
is one a good definition of shamanism a psychedelic definition is a shaman is somebody who has seen the end that's all and if you've seen the end then you come back and take your place in the play
with an entirely different attitude in the mountains of the Sierra Mazateca of central Mexico there are Mixtec and Mazatec Indians the only place in the world where living mushroom cults with ancient roots still exist
the mushrooms were discovered in 1953 by Gordon and Valentina Wasson because they went to these villages and uncovered this thing people thought it had been wiped out with the Spanish conquest but it hadn't it had just retreated into the Oaxacan interior and been kept alive
one way that I think about these aboriginal peoples is that they kept the secret while we descended into history they stayed at home and kept the old old secrets and we descended into matter we made a kind of pilgrimage and we call it human history now it's over now we have to take what we've learned
from this demonic pilgrimage into the domain of the material and use it to save the planet to care for the planet the only justification for history is if we use what we've learned to care for life on the planet and we may end up you know using thermonuclear weapons to destroy incoming space junk
that imperils the ecology of the planet there may be tasks for which only high technology is adequate that you know if an asteroid is going to strike the earth you don't want to be a rainforest shaman in that situation you want to be in command of intercontinental ballistic missiles with high lift capability that can take a 50 megaton weapon out there and blow this thing to smithereens
I see our bodhisattva obligation as a biological obligation as a biological obligation that we are to care for the earth after all the earth cared for us and we're like a we're like scabies or something you know I mean it can't be very much fun for a planet to have a species on it which is always extracting petroleum and spreading plutonium
around and dumping junk into the oceans and dumping junk into the oceans and the atmosphere just you know my god what is this it's a raging viral infection of some sort
viral infection of some sort and yet we may be the means to a technology that would actually then give us a destiny save history from just being madness century after century of rape and pogrom and just you know the horror that it is I'd like to redeem that I'm like Stefan
I'm like Stefan Daedalus I'd like to awaken from the nightmare
Marsiliad once made a wonderful statement he said he was comparing our culture to a dying person
and he said in the same way that a dying person sees their whole history flash before their eyes a dying culture will frantically publish everything in one last final spasm of fear
fear every Egyptian text every Tibetan text every Hopi prophecy everything will be published published published published
because they're looking for answers somewhere it has to be if the Tibetans know it did the Witoto know it did the Inuit know it who knows it we've got to find out
and eventually they'll get around to saying well now what about these psychedelic people we've been jailing them and hounding them for years they claim they have an answer and they'll say you know
get them get them get them on the line we'll talk to anybody at this point bad times lie ahead things are going to get worse before they get better but they're going to get better
the problem as I see it with the West is in a search for philosophical economy of which there's no nothing wrong with philosophical economy
but in the in a frantic search for philosophical economy we did great damage to our intuition and what this gave us is monotheism
monotheism is a very good idea on the first pass and not such a good idea on the second pass because if you take a page from young as I try to do
you know that the religious ontology of a culture reflects its innermost psychology and the idea of monotheism one God omnipresent omnipotent unforgiving and everywhere is an image of the male ego that's all it is it's an
enshrining of the ideal personality as defined by that society and and yet what it creates is a complete denial of the messy felt pluralistic feminine organic emotional side of being so one has become enslaved to a kind of platonic abstraction of which all life is
which all life and color and feeling has been poured out of it and you just have you know the patriarchal ego and this is not very far behind us I mean some of us were probably raised by by people like this you know the idea of male rectitude we're all pretty mellow even the most uptight of us compared to the style of male presentation of say a hundred years ago
a hundred years ago you know a hundred years ago women referred to their husbands as mister get into it you know in the 16th century medical students had to steal corpses off the gallows and from battlefields in order to do dissections because the church would not allow dissection of corpses to take place so medical students of that era risked
risked imprisonment in order to obtain corpses so that they could find out how the human body work this is the kind of situation that we're in constipated patriarchal institutions are standing directly astride the forward progress of the human race I mean you know if you want to boil it down to a slogan and I'll just leave you with this we call these drugs these drugs and
substances consciousness expanding agents well now if consciousness does not play a major part in the future history of our species then what kind of a future history are we talking about you know are we going to become stupider duller more animal like I don't think so consciousness is our defining quality
and it must be nourished encouraged catalyzed never more so than now because we have a planet in peril the entire evolutionary enterprise may rest
on the kinds of decisions we make about how we order and carry out our priorities over the next 50 years we need all the help we can get and these plants have always been there to render counsel and give advice to
evolving human populations that would humbly and reverently seek their input that's all thank you very much
That's all. Thank you very much.