I've been traveling a lot and speaking a lot to different kinds of people, and most recently in Europe, where it was a tremendous kind of bridge-building thing to get everything rhetorically lined up and squared around, to where I could even introduce the subject of psychedelics.
So I see that I've returned to the home congregation here, because, you know, this seems to be the overwhelming focus of this group, which is interesting.
It's even sometimes sort of confining to me, because I would wander maybe in other directions, but every prophet is the captive of his earliest ideological expression.
You know, I mean, Lenin couldn't do much about Leninism once it had passed a certain point.
So, in hearing what people's interests were, and trying to think about it in new ways, you know, the uniting thing in the 20th century, or I think one of the things that sets the 20th century completely apart, really, from previous times,
times, if not ontologically, then by degree, is the focus on the moving image, and the role that this has had in shaping 20th century culture.
And it comes really in three forms.
It comes in the natural and available form of the dream, which always, to some degree, has shaped human culture.
But for Freud and Jung in the early 20th century and their followers, the dream took on a whole new significance that it had never had before.
It was seen as a cryptic messenger from a hidden world.
And as these things seemed to work out, concomitantly, a technology of the moving image was developing, which was film.
And film and film and the dream then become almost the two defining poles of the evolution of the aesthetic of the 20th century over the first half of it, we'll say.
And then, in 1953, because that's when Gordon and Valentina Wasson discovered the mushroom, or earlier, if you want to date it to Hoffman's discoveries in Switzerland, or the German work in the 20s, or later, if you want to date it to the discovery in 56 of DMT by Zara.
But at any rate, at some point, the third triad is introduced, which is the hallucinogenic or psychedelic experience.
And all three of these areas of concern have adumbrations in the primitive, the stress on dreaming, even the magic lantern and prestidigitation feats of Renaissance magic have a relationship to early film.
And, of course, the psychedelic experience is absolutely archaic.
Nevertheless, the coming together of these three concerns in this particular fashion in the 20th century set the stage, I think, for an important part of what I will call, during this weekend, the archaic revival.
And the archaic revival is nothing less than a strategy for cultural survival on a global scale.
And it's a strategy that is taking place in the animal body of mankind.
It's not an intellectual strategy or a rational strategy.
This is what happens whenever a society is slammed to the wall.
It unconsciously reaches back through its history or its mythology for a steadying metaphor.
Now, the last time this happened in the West and worked was at the time of the collapse of the medieval Christian eschatology, at the time of the rise of urbanization and banking and secular society.
The model of the Christian universe was no longer serviceable.
And very suddenly, philosophers, politicians, social planners reached into the past for classic models.
And this was in the 15th and 16th century.
And they created classicism, the revivification of Roman law, Greek architecture, Greek polity.
All of this happened 1,000 to 1,500 years after these things had been completely abandoned.
But then they became the basis for modern secular civilization and our laws are Greco-Roman and our architecture and our aesthetic and so forth and so on.
Well, the way this is happening in the 20th century is, number one, at a much more deep and profound level because it's a global reflex.
The entirety of modern civilization has shot its wad in some sense.
You know, from the perspective of 500 years, a society that cannot put bread on its grocery shelves, such as the Soviet Union,
and a society such as our own that is $3 trillion in debt, the difference is negligible.
I mean, both of these societies are functionally bankrupt.
So, we're living through and have been living through throughout the 20th century an experience of the dissolution of boundary and form.
Everything has been in a state of flux throughout the 20th century.
I mean, it opens with the concept of the Edwardian gentleman and lady firmly in place.
Class structure, class privilege, race privilege, sex privilege, the entire structure of the assumptions of the post-medieval world are in place and functioning.
Now, 90 years later, none of this is in place.
And to my mind, the major factor working to achieve this end has not been the two world wars,
wars, or the exploration of the unconscious by Dada and surrealism, or the breakdown of classical design mores, or any of this stuff.
It's been the psychedelic experience.
The psychedelic experience is a genuine paradigm-shattering phenomenon.
We claim that we want this.
This is what lies behind the love of flying saucers and, you know, the Loch Ness monster and all of this.
We want a paradigm-shattering object, piece of evidence, body of testimony, something like that.
But what we don't realize is we have it.
We have it.
But as somebody over here on this side of the room said, you know, it's a matter of courage.
And this places it in a special, in a special mode.
It's not something where we can just validate it and then, you know, found an institute and appoint experts and expect them to issue a report.
It's something actually at the center of our being.
And my motivation for talking to audiences like this is simply that I cannot conceive of mature human beings going from the cradle to the grave without ever finding out about this.
I mean, it's not like not finding out about sex or something, you know.
It's just too weird.
It's a part of our birthright.
It's not a cultural artifact.
It's not like being able to ride a bicycle or something like that where you can imagine that pygmies or Amazonian Indians go from birth to the grave and they never ride a bicycle and they never miss it.
But this is a little more existentially front and center than that.
I mean, this is, as far as I can tell, the dimension in which we most fully experience ourselves as ourselves.
Well, you know, culture, we have to be very careful about the corrosive effects of culture.
Some of you may know about these, it was reported in Time Magazine a month or two ago, about these forms of salamanders that never, if the conditions of alkalinity in the lakes are at a certain level, they never mature into the adult form.
They actually can reproduce in a juvenile form.
So there can be generations of these salamanders that don't even suspect the existence of an adult form that lies beyond the sexually mature functional adult form.
And this is how I sort of think of what the effect of human culture has been on us.
Starting about 15 or 20,000 years ago, for reasons that we'll discuss tomorrow, ego began to emerge as a factor in human societies.
For the moment, let's just say it had to do with the concern for tracing male lines of paternity.
In other words, once men had it enough together to understand the role that sexuality was playing in childbearing, then there became this concern to trace male lines of descent.
And suddenly, sexuality had to be very carefully controlled, and the concept, my children, my women, my food, my territory, came into being.
Before that, there was a kind of orgiastic polymorphic sexuality that did not promote this kind of boundary formation at the edge of the body's effectiveness.
You know, in other words, the ego was not a concept as rooted as it is in us.
And I think that the shift from this boundaryless, group-oriented consciousness, which was psychedelic, to the egocentric, materialistic consciousness that typifies Western society, clear back to Sumer,
that this is the neurotic wrong-turning, and that when we look back into the causes of it, we can see and argue fairly persuasively that it has to do with an abandonment of this relationship of ecstasy induced by plants.
That there was almost a kind of symbiotic relationship between early human beings and plants, specifically psychedelic plants, and that this relationship is not something airy-fairy or unclear or operationally undefined for its participants.
You get yourself lined up with and arranged correctly in relation to this thing by taking psychoactive plants, and that this is how human societies were regulated over, let's say, a million years.
And there was nothing magical or untoward about it.
It was simply that these evolving primates had a population regulatory mechanism that integrated them into the larger body of nature.
And this is what has been lost in the historical process, so that human culture has become, you know, charitably a random walk, uncharitably a kind of cancerous exponential cascade of unstoppable effects.
Now, the thing is that we are in a position to understand this now, if not actually do something about it.
H.G. Wells said, history is a race between education and catastrophe.
Well, never more so than today, because the world is set on a course of catastrophe.
The emotional constipation and rigidity of the past thousand years that has set us up as territorial apes with thermonuclear arsenals, all of that is just set to, you know, go critical.
Nevertheless, you know, we are minded creatures in the presence of an evolving and rapidly shifting landscape of problems.
And I think that it's a very hopeful sign to look around and notice that the only barrier to the solution of our problems are intellectual barriers, barriers in our own mind.
We have the money, the technology, the mass communications, the scientific expertise, the remote sensing, telemetry.
What we don't have is the will to self-direct all of this technical apparatus toward a rational solution of our problems.
But that means that the solution to our problems lies almost entirely in the human domain.
And the human domain is the area where we observe the highest rate of unpredictable perturbation.
So I don't see the situation as terminal or desperate at all.
The mushrooms take on on the chaos at the end of history is this is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for the stars.
It is chaotic, but it is chaotic, but it is not disordered.
It is more like a birth than anything else.
I mean, there is rending of tissue.
There is a sense of crisis of un unstoppable forward motion.
But it turns out all according to plan, all to good end.
The trick is to somehow attain this vision of the ordered correctness of what is happening when it seems so chaotic.
And then to template it, to strengthen it, each for ourselves.
And then to replicate it and communicate it as a mean, because there is no percentage in paralysis here at the brink.
The only possibility is of some kind of forward escape.
You know, a forward escape is when you attain the goal by simply rushing through the gauntlet.
And I think that this history that is a race between education and catastrophe is going to turn out to be a forward escape.
There will be a moment of complete abandonment to the irrational.
And we will look tomorrow at the time wave.
We will look at Saddam Hussein and his role in all of this.
But he is not the final act.
This is somewhere late in act one, all this malarkey that we're having to put up with.
But opniyant, which in this case means downstream in time, we will sprout all our worth and woof our wings.
But we have a lot of shit to fly through before we get there.
I guess I should say just a little bit about how I got into this.
And I think curiosity is probably the ultimate value in my cosmology.
It's what's gotten me anywhere I've ever been.
It's the only impulse that I trust completely.
And it's alive in most people as children.
But it gets somehow squelched or misdirected or something.
And so when I look back through my own life, I see this psychedelic impulse before there was ever a word or a name for what it was.
And I've tried to think back, as far back as I can.
And I have very early memories, like to the eighth month.
But they don't seem to relate to this.
But I remember in, it must have been, I was born in 46.
It must have been in late 48.
I found a magazine of my father's, which I now must have been the October 1948 issue of Weird Tales.
And I, and it had these illustrations in it.
And one of the illustrations was of a hooded figure gazing into a cradle.
And this, I got this, somehow, as a, as an image of, of the strange, the other, the outre.
And I think this is the other thing that for me was the hook into the psychedelic,
was a kind of deep Irish love of the weird from the very get-go.
So curiosity and a love of the weird, the edgy, the bizarre.
And this led me into, and I guess maybe a certain, a certain degree of obsessive character.
I mean, I'm spending time on this because I'm trying to understand the psychedelic personality generally.
But I did have a tendency to really focus in on whatever I was into.
And I think the first thing was rocks.
And this was, you know, it was, for me, an introduction into the size of time.
Because it wasn't just any rocks that interested me.
It quickly became clear that it was fossils.
And I lived in western Colorado, and I could go out into these dry arroyos
and bring back datable objects, 170 million years old, you know,
and stack them up and look at them.
So then I got this dizzying sense of the depth of time.
And, you know, there were those little museum pamphlets where it shows a billion years,
and then the last million years is up here, and then it goes down here and spreads out.
And then the last 10,000 years.
And then, you know, it was almost like an intellectual ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny,
because the rocks, the inanimate mineral world, soon couldn't confine this restless imagination.
So then it became about insects, butterflies specifically, moths especially,
as an excuse to be alone in the middle of the night around bright lights, you know, with cyanide.
And, you know, I don't know if any of you have ever been touched by this particular obsession,
but because we're insectivores, because our food-getting habits are wired into a brain 50 million years old
in the insect-gathering habit, you know, this is a very deep, almost orgasmic response
that you can touch in the human organism.
And I pursued it again and again in life to the point where I did it as a professional
in the jungles of Indonesia and the Amazon.
And, you know, it's horrifying to tell in Buddhist company.
But when you come upon one of these long-winged, iridescent ornithopterids of the sort that Baron Guy de Rothschild
sent his collectors out for in the late 19th century,
and you come upon one of these things hanging under a leaf, looking for all the world,
like it weighs at least half a pound, and, you know, wrestle it into your net,
it's as close to having a heart attack as I ever want to get.
And then this thing, at some point, I did a lot of reading,
and at some point I discovered that I had defined myself narrowly,
and that I was turning into a scientist.
And I was reading people like Henry James and Aldous Huxley,
and they were sneering at what I was becoming
and talking about a mysterious realm of human thought called the humanities,
which I had no notion of what this was.
I couldn't even figure out what it possibly could be.
Well, then I discovered it meant music, painting, architecture, dance, philosophy, design,
in short, the human world, the human world as opposed to the natural world.
So then, you know, I just turned upon that with a vengeance,
left off the bugs and the minerals,
and it became about Henry James and Fragonard and mannerism and all of this stuff.
But the transition, because I was hitting adolescence at that point,
was rocketry and the pineal joy of launching potentially semi-fatal projectiles
into space at twice the speed of sound,
and, you know, a whole gravity's rainbow cycle
cycle that I was very consciously aware was about the thrill of liftoff.
All this tormenting of mice and cutting up of aluminum chaff
into stuff to be dumped out at the top of the trajectory
was just to satisfy physics teachers and anxious parents and all that.
And the real thing was, you know, this amazing moment of launch
when this potassium perchlorate and sugar fuels
would just propel these things with ear-splitting intensity.
And then, at that point, you know, all this curiosity,
all this edge work led me, because I fancied myself also developing
as a novelist, to read all of Aldous Huxley.
Well, as you know, it moves from a spectrum of these polite novels
of English society, like after, well, Chrome Yellow and Antique Hay,
and through works like After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,
to then the sexual dystopia of Brave New World,
and then finally to The Doors of Perception.
And when I read The Doors of Perception,
I knew then that this was something huge,
because he was claiming, you see,
what was happening to me as an intellectual,
and I think it happens to most people,
is exploration of reality was leading to the conclusion
that it was a no-exit situation.
It was some kind of rational labyrinth
from which there was no exit.
No exit meaning no magic,
no possibility of a miracle,
that, you know, there weren't 25,000-year-old cities
under the sands of Arabia.
There weren't flying saucers underneath the Greenland ice cap.
It didn't work for me.
For me, rationalism was more powerful
than, you know, sort of menopausal fantasy
as it's currently practiced.
And so it was drying up.
The miraculous was just turning into ordinary reality.
And then I discovered psychedelic plants.
And it was like the descent of an angel
into a desert of reason,
because, which, that's an interesting sort of metaphor,
the descent of an angel into the desert of reason,
as you probably know,
when Descartes was 21 years old,
he shipped out in a Habsburgian army
to kick some ass in Eastern Europe
and learn some manly soldiering skills.
And he was in Ulm in southern Germany
in August of 1620,
Ulm later to be the birthplace of Einstein.
And Descartes,
who was completely wet behind the ears,
didn't know anything,
had a dream.
And in the dream, an angel,
this is apropos of the metaphor,
an angel appeared to him
and said,
the mastery of nature
is to be achieved
through measure and number.
So what's interesting about that then
is that he...
...
went on to found modern science which was to be the the very temple of rationalism and reason but
it was based on the revelation of an angelic being who spoke to him from another dimension
well this was the kind of impact that the psychedelic experience had for me it was as
though there was a doorway a literal doorway out of the completely otherwise flawless set of
cultural assumptions that kept me you know a catholic altar boy in a small colorado town in a
western democracy in a context of anti-communism religious fundamentalism consumer capitalism so
forth and so on the whole bag of of tricks and illusions were suddenly exposed for that
and beyond that you see like that traveler sticking their head out through the world system and seeing
a whole different set of rotations and revolutions you see um another dimension
of some sort and then for me the the question became you know of what sort what is this
number one what is it number two how did they manage to keep the lid on it and number three what can you
do with it well uh coincidentally upon all this or let's call it coincidentally society
was just going bananas around somewhat similar issues because i was born in 1946 so that means in 1966 i was 20
years old and somehow fate had conspired to put me in berkeley california so i happened to be at like the ground zero
of the cultural explosion
but i had been following all this stuff for years it just seemed to me a weird parallelism
that my internal growth and obsessions were now
somehow becoming the obsessions of society generally being 20 years old i just thought it was a kind of vindication
you know i knew i'd been right since i was 16 so here was the payoff but then you know it didn't exactly work out like that
it these concerns moved through society like a wave and then other stronger what the i ching calls prepotent systems
of uh of uh arrangement reasserted themselves and instead of a kind of psychedelic utopia there was a kind of anti-psychedelic
dystopia and everything that psychedelics had tended to call into question which were the um you know the
great sins of the 20th century the misuse of propaganda the abuse of imagery uh the distortion
of information i mean these are all uniquely modern uh new sins if you will and i talked last night a little
bit about the connection between dreams the uniquely uh the unique province of 20th century psychological
theory film and the psychedelics all of these things and and i see it also active in art that as
soon as you move beyond impressionism the whole history of art in the 20th century is about the
dissolution deconstruction and re attempt to reconstruct the image so that you know uh movements as
different as analytical cubism and abstract expressionism all are seen to be struggling with
the dissolution and re-emergence of uh of the image well what it means is what all this constellation
of cultural effects is saying is that uh the previously assumed to be uh oh i don't know how to say it
existentially prepotent order of society of linear society is actually an illusion and that it we can move
beyond it we can dissolve it not only we can we cannot not do this uh so then the goal becomes and this is where macluhan is
important to try and raise into consciousness the process that we are undergoing before it is a feat accompli
before we are in the act of looking back then at a historical uh event because i now i'm convinced that the the um
impulse that i feel in myself and that i see in other people toward the psychedelic experience
is is has to do with its potential historical impact even though god knows we're all aware this is how
religion has always been practiced you know yet somehow this million-year-old sociological phenomenon
or geastic group-minded uh shamanism in a context of nomadic pastoralism this phenomenon
was only interrupted 10 or 15 000 years ago and is apparently the uh the state of dynamic equilibrium where we
function at our best where we feel at our most human what has happened to us is a kind of um false bottom
in our social dynamic it's this it's a series of self-reinforcing situations of disease it begins
with what i talked about last night about concern for male paternity but once men wanted to trace the descent
line of the male genes previously uh self-expressive or geastic group-minded sexuality became compartmentalized
into concerns of territoriality ownership so forth and so on but then that wasn't the end of it there then
uh uh uh the rise of hierarchical kingship the amazing you see the problem with um human beings is that we ride
very close to a kind of um bifurcation point in terms of whether our loyalty is transferred to the group
or to the individual and this can be sent either way i mean if there were to be landslides at both
ends of highway one and a food shortage you know we would coalesce marvelously into a survival machine
where we would all place group values higher than our own needs and nobly so this would happen
but in situations of abundance and non-scarcity then the it's like a slime mold without the formality
of coherency we just then dissolve into this sort of every man for himself egocentric uh style and then
you know another bad break along the way that may or may not have been fated may have just been a bad
break is the evolution of the phonetic alphabet which creates a tremendous distancing between cognition
and the objects of linguistic intentionality and this gives permission then for all kinds of forms of
brutalization it actually gives permission for ideology ideology to my mind is the denial of the obvious
and the substitution for something else where you say you know no that's not how people are we have a
marxist model or we have a freudian model or we have you know john stuart mills model who knows but
somebody's model uh so ideology someone said language was uh invented in order that people could lie
and in large measure this is true that we proceed by deception i'll defend this at some point in this
weekend because another word for it is modeling you know we model but we also fall in love with these models
and uh it's the falling in love with the model that then turns it into an agenda where it was it was not
a free-form projection of a flow of facts toward the conclusion but then it becomes instead an agenda
a synthetic creode high walls down which you expect to see a process poured and confined
so okay so in spite of the fact that this phenomena has been around for a long time why then does it appear
so important well it's because this small group group-minded sexually amorphous psychology
the psychology the psychology not the model itself is what we have to recover i think in order to survive
and uh you know i'm i'm i'm not so interested in talking about the odds of making it it's just this is
the only thing that will work and i said last night you know the good news is that the domain in which we
must operate is all within our own minds you know if we can change our minds we can take hold of this process and halt it
i believe that the the presence of these psychedelics in the plant metabolism in the biosphere
allowed a kind of informational symbiosis between human beings with highly evolved information processing capacity
and the biosphere generally and that we have no word for this that we're comfortable with the closest word we
have for it is somehow tied up with the concept of religion religio but for us religion is some kind of abstract
dialogue carried on with a philosophical principle that's not what it is religion originally was the
dimension of the self that directly interfaced nature or the over self and this happened through
the use of psychedelics so the reason the weekend is called history ends in green and what this whole gaian
awareness thing is to my mind is it's not an airy fairy attempt to recast a new image for religious ontology
it's the actual discovery of the minded presence of the planet which has always been here which is real it's an
existential fact like chlorophyll or you know the moons of saturn the planet has a biological mind
of some sort once you enter once you articulate this notion it doesn't seem that unlikely after
all the planet is clearly a boundary defining topology it's had two billion years to how you know
make itself metastable undergo all kinds of autopoiesis we see the evidence of this around us in the form of the
climaxed biome of the planet we see that biology and water chemistry has been very active but what we don't see
is that as active as the chemistry of water or uh or uh electron transfer have also been the invisible
alchemies of you know call it spirit call it mind call it the morphogenetic field whatever it is and that
that that is the frontier of our awareness every society in history has had the erroneous belief
that it just required six more months and five percent more data and then they would have a full picture
of reality but you know the fact of the matter is our society at its present state of sophistication
have we have the only science we have that can be given any serious creditability at all is physics
the the prim the most primitive of all sciences the science of momentum and moving bodies in three
dimensional space when you move on to biology you know essentially what we have are a series of
interlocking fables and a few bright spots of light in certain areas when you move on to psychology what
you have are shouting charlatans you know each claiming domain over their own special area i mean it's like
a medieval fair so uh uh the the the belief that our uh intellectual maps are somehow adequate is just
whistling past the graveyard and the way we have achieved this illusion of good maps is by tossing out
all the disturbing and unintegratable phenomena uh for instance dreams were trivialized and ignored for
centuries uh madness was something that you can find a way like criminality it was not to be looked at
sexuality i don't have to remind you that as recently as 120 years ago people were putting bloomers on
piano legs to preserve youth from impure thoughts i mean you talk about a rejectionist style toward reality i mean
we have just begun to open our eyes to what is around us well so then front and center when we begin to explore
let's take a conservative uh position toward exploring the universe let's explore from the center outward
well that means uh from within the confines of the mind body system before we generalize about
tectonic plates or the motion of the rings of uranus or something like that just start from the body out
well immediately you discover total charactera incognito psychology uh gives us a you know a flickering
model of ordinary consciousness under ordinary circumstances and everything else is up for grabs and
then we discover that you know at the center of human concerns is this uh weird itch about invisible worlds and
higher order entities and sources of hidden knowledge and we discover well people have been at that for a
hundred thousand years and the centerpiece technique which is to trigger these non-ordinary states of
consciousness with all our sophistication we have a no better grip on what this is than people in the late
neolithic they knew more than we did because they'd logged more time on in the real modality i mean we have
models we say you know the drug molecule is translocating to the synapse and displacing ordinary neurotransmitters and
raising therefore the endogenous level of electron spin resonance this is not any kind of explanation about what's going on
this is just the chant the incantation you know but the the people who are logging time in there
they come back with maps of reality that fit very uneasily with our cheerful cartesian
democracy and atomistic causal entropic models and they say no no the universe is an infinite honeycomb
each honeycomb ruled over by different spiritual forces each commanded through different languages magical
techniques gestural repertoire everything is language everything holds information
for man everything is somehow constellated on the presence of observing mind well in the west we thought we got
rid of these kind of cosmogonic myths with the uh the ptolemaic universe you know even before copernicus
but now it turns out that the centrality of mind gets reintroduced not only by the evidence of the psychedelic experience
but for instance um uh the school of of uh scientific uh philosophy of science around ll white and people like that
have pointed out that if you use as your index complexity
then you suddenly discover that human beings have moved back to the very center of the universe
that the most complex physical material in the universe in terms of density of connectedness
is the human cerebral cortex
that if novelty and density of connectedness is what is being conserved then somehow we are central
well so then you know other issues are raised if we are central
then the modern model of history which is i don't know if it's ever been explicitly stated for you but the
modern model of history is that it is trendlessly fluctuating this is the largest structure in which
we find ourselves embedded call it the last ten thousand years and the best guess of the people who
spend the most time looking at it is that it trendlessly fluctuates that means it's like a drunk
on a wandering rock walk you see that processes are channeled toward conclusions uh that in the evolutionary
well leave that aside for a minute in the in the realm of physical chemistry you see that the progressive
cooling of the universe allowed more and more complex chemistry first electrons could settle down into
stable orbits around atomic nuclei then molecular bonds could form at still lower temperatures polymerization could
form and therefore templating type molecules like dna the universe seems to be an engine for the
conservation of complexity until we reach the social sciences where they want to tell us that history is just
dropped into this process willy-nilly is not fractally modeled on anything that precedes it does not
express an internal coherence and is a completely trendless process yet notice that this completely trendless
process is atomically composed of the most complex matter material organization in the universe the human
the human cerebral cortex well i mentioned this because part of what i'm interested in with this weekend
is trying to get a handle on you know what is history what does it mean it began only 1500 generations
ago which if we were fruit flies would be three weeks ago so you know it's it's not something really
basic to human beings but it's a process that got started about 1500 generations ago and it's a clearly
a cumulative runaway process it's going on outside the realm of ordinary genetics ordinary genetic change is
very conservative and slow this is a cancerous type process but in the cultural domain it's an epigenetic
process meaning it's not scripted in the genes but like writing and tv and painting
it goes on outside of the genes well where does it go on well it goes on in the domain of language
and to my mind language is the critical area to focus on in terms of where the psychedelics
genetics are operating and how if if our interest is to trap them doing their elfin work then the place to look
is in the domain of language why well first of all look at what language is it's a weird kind of
ancillary add-on process to the human organism no other monkeys do it in quite the same way and i i don't
argue that there is not linguistic and grammatical activity in monkeys dolphins termites what have you
but it's very different from what goes on in human beings obviously uh for instance you probably know that
the uh the soft palate of the human being drops lower in the fetal form than in any other primate
by by uh 40 percent or something what this the embryological interpretation of this is that the human
animal is hardwired for language and if uh if you notice what it is it's small mouth noises rapidly
modulated small mouth noises and it's a conventionalized it's a highly conventionalized style of behavior
which allows transduction of thought it's a form of telepathy a striving toward a crude telepathy
because if you analyze what's happening in the linguistic act it's that we've all gotten together
and we agree that there are these small mouth noises and we agree that a given set of small
mouth noises means a certain thing and we are we've spent so much time together and so conventionalized
our responses to each other that your dictionary of small mouth noises is theoretically supposed to match
my dictionary of small mouth noises so the words going through the air impinge upon your ear you make a
rapid search of your dictionary and you come up with what you assume is a one-to-one match and we rarely
get together to check out just exactly how good a match it was occasionally someone will ask a question
and we will see that they understood that the match and so the match was good because i see a lot of
transcripts of my talks i know that typists hear the most amazing things and without ever questioning what
they hear they type these these things that when i read them you know they're complete malapropisms
uh but but this is this is what was heard and as the level of discourse rises or the density of the
technical language increases uh it becomes much much shakier i mean i just had the experience of of
lecturing in czechoslovakia in prague to the film academy and you know you can go a long ways on sincerity
but there's a long ways still to go uh just nodding and and smiling doesn't doesn't do it when especially
when the concepts are fine-tuned and it's where they're fine-tuned that they're always interesting
it's in the nuances of it well uh i think probably that this activity was originally stimulated by the use of
psychedelics that uh in fact most of what is human about us has to do with our uh the presence of
psychedelic and mutagenic compounds in our diet when we made the transition from being fruititarian
vegetarian arboreal tree dwellers to becoming um you know nomadic uh pastoralists
if you think about it you can see how this would work quite neatly the reason animals special specialize
their diets is to hold down the amount of exposure to mutagenic chemicals so most animals have highly
specialized diets that's because then they can develop pathways to sequester mutagens or to or to just
avoid the exposure to them initially but if you put pressure on an animal on its original food source
where it's actually facing a situation of possible extinction or dietary transformation it will begin
experimenting expanding its repertoire of foods well this brings exposure to mutagens in a very steep curve
and this means uh consequently more uh expression of mutagenic genes become available for natural selection
and so this is the situation in which you might then see a sudden punctuated movement forward in the adaptive
evolution of adaptive traits of the organism well how this worked in the early human situation was
drying up of the african continent forced proto-human arboreal types onto the grassland
where they began foraging for uh and insects had been part of their diet in the canopy situation
they began foraging it's also thought they began perhaps predating on carrion kills killed by larger
carnivores like lions in any case they began forming a relationship that had them following along behind these
evolving ungulate herds of mammals on the
African belt. And in that situation, they encountered the coprophytic mushrooms, the mushrooms which grow in cow dung
preferentially, and many of these contain psilocybin.
Well, psilocybin once encountered in the diet,
acts very quickly to outbreed non-psilocybin using individuals because,
like many indels, if there's a small amount of psilocybin in the diet, visual acuity is
measurably increased. And
Roland Fisher did work on this in the early 60s.
Well, you can see that if an animal that is living by predation, and
also it's thought by the non, by the people who disagree with this theory, the people who do not think that
mushrooms played a major role in human evolution,
believe that the throwing arm is the unique human
capability, and that when you see a pitcher get a ball across a plate, what is it to, how far is it from the pitcher's mound to the plate?
60 feet. That kind of control on an object hurled at that speed,
no other animal can do anything, even approaching that. And that this hand-eye coordination
gave us our
leg up, literally, or our arm up,
to be able to knock out large animals at a distance.
Well, even if you believe that theory, you see it too depends on a very close
coordination of hand and eye.
Well, if you bring into this a chemical factor in the diet, which increases visual acuity,
animals that are allowing this item in the diet will very quickly outbreed the non-mushroom users.
And I submit that this happened. Then further
accelerating the tendency toward preferential use of mushrooms is the fact that at higher doses
but still sub-psychedelic doses, these same mushrooms will trigger arousal,
general CNS, central nervous system arousal, but this also includes then sexual arousal and erection in males.
Well,
so what does this mean? It means that it's a party drug at that dose.
It means that there is this impetus to
copulation in a situation in which the better hunters
have been more successful at getting food.
So this increased copulatory activity and
subsequent increased number of births is
happening in an environment with an increased food supply.
So you see all these factors are converging to outbreed the non-mushroom using individuals.
Well, then the final culminating factor in this is at yet higher doses
the mushroom
ushers into the boundary dissolving ecstasy that we call the psychedelic experience and
that in that kind of a social small group situation
would have led, I think, to
primitive religious observance,
ritual, group sexuality,
food sharing, mate sharing,
so forth and so on. And I really believe that this
lifestyle, if you will, of nomadic
pastoralism,
nomadic pastoralism,
goddess-oriented religion driven by
psychedelic indoles in the diet,
that for
50,000 approaching
75,000 years, this is how people lived and
they were fully realized people. I mean, there was
tremendous
oral
poetry, epic works of art and theater,
a complete realization
of human potential in the dynamic context of
this nomadic relationship to nature. I mean, this was Eden. This was when we were at peace
with our humanness. Well, then, you know, what happened?
Is there a search for scapegoats?
Who's to blame? And the answer is nobody is to blame. The very process
which brought this paradise into being, which was the drying up of the African continent and the forcing of of our
proto-human ancestors onto the veldt and into the
bipedal
nomadic
nomadic tribal
language-using mode, the very forces which created that
destroyed it, because eventually
the great
grasslands of the Sahara, the huge water holes, the vast herds of game gave way to
encroaching dunes,
shrinking water holes. The mushroom festivals, which I imagine at one point were probably lunar festivals,
became then yearly festivals because of scarcity of the mushroom. And there became then anxiety about availability of mushrooms, and therefore a certain cultural pressure to find methods of preserving them. And there became then anxiety about availability of mushrooms and therefore a certain cultural pressure to find methods of preserving them.
And so there was a transitional phase of not fresh mushroom festivals, but preserved mushrooms in honey. The problem is honey itself has the capacity to turn into a psychotropic substance. Through fermentation, it becomes mead.
But the imprinting that takes place in a mead culture, mead cultures are cultures of male dominance, repression of female sexuality, hierarchy,
warfare,
warfare, wheel chariots, the whole shtick. And so, you know, there was, and this all happened over thousands of years, this very gradual transition. There was never a conscious moment of tragedy.
But, you see, what was happening was a new psychic function was taking hold in the human animal. In the situation of the monthly boundary dissolving group mushroom festivals, ego was not allowed to form.
And I really view psilocybin as almost an inoculation against the formation of ego. It is an ego-lytic compound. So, notions of male dominance, of possession of property, children, domesticated animals, or women,
or women. None of this went on in this situation where the boundary dissolution was reinforced by frequent mushroom use.
But as soon as the mushrooms become less available, this thing begins to grow in the human personality, literally like a cancer or a tumor.
It's a calcareous growth on the psyche that if we do not have this embeddedness in the vegetable matrix of Gaia, then anxiety arises, a lot of it sexual and related to self-identity.
And I don't have to discuss this with you just refer you to Freud and the whole gang. Everybody understands how bent we are. The question is why?
Why? And I think this is why. Because we have been in a permanent state of neurotic disequilibrium for 15,000 years. And every move to attempt to correct this has pushed us further away from the goal that we want to have.
So now we arrive at the late 20th century nuclear arsenals fully in hand. We have made since the 15th century a demonic pact with matter that has allowed us great insight into the destructive properties of matter.
Made us, you know, handmaiden to the devil. And yet we are still completely dark about our own motivations, how to educate our children, how to put in place a set of values that don't loot the future.
And all of these problems appear to be getting worse. So, you know, I don't know. Well, my response to this is to advocate the only thing that I think will work, but it's not a political position.
Because a political position always implies a willingness to compromise and negotiate with the other side. And there really is no willingness to negotiate on the part of the psychedelic position, because it's pretty non-negotiable.
We are at the end of a process, call it 2000, 5000, you know, choose your date, but a long process of denial of human nature first, and then war against human nature.
And it goes so deep into our culture that we don't even know where the basement level is.
I mean, for instance, to my mind, monotheism, which is the great intellectual edifice of the West, touches the three major religions of the West that have developed in a continuous strain since Abraham.
Monotheism is the institutionalizing of this egocentric model.
And it has a certain philosophical appeal in one God, you know, everything, all roads lead to Rome.
You can trace everything back to the Ur-Source, the Ur-Kvella. But that anal retentive appeal in itself takes place within a context of values of male dominance, print-created linearity, uniformity, so forth, and so on.
And I think what we have to get into is real permission for sloppiness, for loose-endedness, for the abandonment of any myth of closure, that there is no closure.
There are models and there are questions, but all models are provisional.
And anybody who says they have answers is highly, highly suspect. Too many people claim answers.
What's being claimed here is a technique. And then you figure out your own questions and your own answers.
And it's different for everybody. There really is no ideology associated with psychedelics.
I mean, if you look at the people who've been involved with it, they've said completely different things and contradictory.
And some are rationalists and behaviorists to this day, and others are, you know, spiritual visionaries, hierarchical, shamanic types.
The main thing is to reclaim the experience as the first step toward being politically empowered in order to act.
In other words, we're in, and I indicated this last night, although more gently, that we're in a state of enforced infantilism about the capacity of our minds.
That the culture we are living in is an infantile culture.
Now, we look back at the Victorians putting pants on the piano legs, and we just shake our heads and say, you know, those poor misguided people.
Well, but that's only four generations ago. We have similar weirdness going on in our own culture, but about the mind.
I mean, we look askance at the mind the same way that a Victorian nanny is uncomfortable in the presence of bare furniture.
We fear it. We fear it. We don't want to look at it. And to my mind, many, most of the techniques that come out of the new age are based on a guaranteed lack of success.
That's what they offer. Because the last thing anybody wants is real change. Because real change is uncontrolled change.
The issue that hovers around the psychedelic experience, it was mentioned last night, it's strong in my life. I haven't found any real solution other than hold your nose and jump.
But the issue is surrender. This is something real. You don't find people going into the ashram in the morning to meditate with their knees knocking in fear because of how terrifying and profound they know that meditation is going to be.
But if they were going in there to smoke DMT, you know, they would be fully riveted on the modalities of what was about to happen.
We can tell shit from Shinola. It's just that we don't always prefer Shinola.
And I'm not like, I don't advocate it, you know, people, like sometimes there are people who are disappointed because they say, well, how often do you do it?
Well, the answer is not very often. I mean, if I can get it in a couple or three times a year, I feel like I'm hitting it pretty hard.
And the more successful it is, the less often you have to do it. I mean, I know people who say DMT is their most favorite drug.
And when you say, well, when was the last time you did it? They say, well, 1967. It only lasted four minutes. They're still processing it.
And they are still processing it. They're not just whistling Dixie. I mean, it is, to my mind, just the most...
Well, I mentioned this earlier, the question, how do they keep the lid on this stuff?
And I suppose here I'm preaching to the converted, because many people last night said they had an interest in this kind of thing.
But they don't keep the lid on sexuality. No society has ever had it so under control that people didn't have sex.
I mean, they may have had sex under weird conditions and under, you know, ritual strictures and this and that.
But we are like this salamander that has the option of never developing into its mature form.
And to my mind, that's a tragedy because this is our birthright and somehow our inability to get a grip on our global problems has to do with this immaturity about our mental state.
The two I feel very strongly are linked. And that, of course, we can't get control of the world because we are children in some profound way.
And we don't like being children. But the culture has reinforced a form of infantilism.
And the way I explain it to myself is, it's a kind of unwillingness to go it alone on a certain level.
I don't know how many of you remember in Brave New World, Huxley's brilliant dystopia.
But there's a scene in there where Bernard, who is the guy who's out of it in the novel,
because in his fetal fluid, they got an alcohol contaminant.
And so he's different from everybody else in this society.
And he occasionally has original thoughts.
And he and his assigned girlfriend for the evening or whatever she is, are in a helicopter.
And they sweep out past the crematoria where they're recollecting elements for reuse.
And he suspends the helicopter over the Black Bay.
And she immediately becomes very agitated, restless, anxious, and pleads with him to return to the city.
And what it is, is it's her anxiety over being alone in the presence of nature.
She literally can't take it.
And I think there are a lot of people in our society, and each of us in our own way at different times,
who have within us this neurotic and infantile creature that can't face it alone.
And that this going it alone thing is very important.
You know, Plotinus, the great Neo-Platonic philosopher, he spoke of the mystical experience as the flight of the alone to the alone.
And in the psychedelic experience, there is this issue of surrender, because a lot of people want to diddle with it.
They want to be able to say they did it, but they don't ever want to face an actual moment where they put it all on the line.
And yet the whole issue with this stuff is to let it lead, to let it show what it wants to show.
So, somehow, individually, we have to reclaim our experience.
The real message, more important even than the psychedelic experience, the real message that I try to leave with people in these weekends,
is the primacy of direct experience.
that as people, the real universe is, you know, within your reach, always.
Everything not within your reach is basically unconfirmed rumor.
And we insert ourselves, like ants or honeybees, into hierarchies of knowledge.
So, we say, well, what's going on in the world?
Well, turn on CNN.
You know?
And then, somehow, we're ordered.
Then we say, aha, okay, it's 85 degrees in Baghdad, and the wind is out of the northeast at 15 miles an hour.
And we feel somehow better now, because we're getting the information.
But what we have done is sold out direct experience.
And all institutions require this of us, that we somehow redefine ourselves for the convenience of the institution.
And this redefinition always involves a narrowing, a denial.
So that, you know, if you want to be in Marxist society, if you want to function in Marxist society,
you have to define yourself as a Marxist human being.
Well, it turns out, in a Marxist society, there are no homosexuals, because that just happens in decadent societies.
So, then, you know, if you happen to notice any tendency like this in yourself, you have to deny its existence,
because this just doesn't happen in a Marxist society.
And similarly, every society has this.
In our society, if you hear voices, we have mental hospitals for you.
If you have vast visions of the future, you know, we have drugs that can help you and make this go away.
So, then, somehow, in modern society, the discovery of psychedelics is the discovery that all of this cultural machinery is just Wizard of Oz stuff.
You remember the scene in The Wizard of Oz where the curtain is swept back, and they see the little guy there, and he says, booming out over the loudspeaker,
ignore the little man pulling the levers! Ignore the little man pulling the levers!
Well, the little man pulling the levers is what sweeps into view with psychedelics, and you discover, aha, culture is provisional.
You know, whether we have nine wives or three, whether we tattoo ourselves blue, whether we eat insects or not,
all of these things are just decisions that we make.
And then we congratulate ourselves on our wisdom, and we live within that, and we hunt down and kill all the people who disagree with us.
And that's called having a culture, having a way of life, being somebody.
But, with, you know, I don't see history as a wrong turning. I see it, the metaphor that I like is that of the prodigal son,
that there was a reason for this long descent into matter, this peregrination. It was a shamanic journey of some sort.
You know, the shaman goes into the world pool or ascends the world tree to go to the center of the axis of the cosmos,
to recover the pearl, the pearl or the gift or the lost soul, and then return with it.
And this is what history was, I think. It was a descent into the hell worlds of matter.
Energy, space, and time, for the purpose of recovering something that was lost.
It wasn't lost by us. It was lost by the breathing, the deistole of the planet.
Just climax of climate moved us into paradise, and then moved us out of paradise.
I mean, you must have noticed that the story of Eden is the story of history's first drug bust.
I mean, it's the story of a whole lot of tension over who's going to take or not take a certain plant which confers knowledge.
And Yahweh wandering in the garden says to himself, if the man and the woman eat of the fruit, they will become as we are.
The issue was co-equality, co-knowledge with the Creator.
Well, where do we stand, you know, in man's existential march? How does that work?
Can we always accept the subservient, infantile position?
I mean, is knowledge to be dispensed by gods, and if not gods, then the institutions that appoint themselves as gods over us?
Or is it actually that maturity begins with somehow claiming this birthright?
And it is a birthright. And I don't know if a society can survive the claiming of this birthright by a large number of people.
Certainly in the 1960s, when this was attempted, everybody got very agitated, and then it was frozen out.
In so-called primitive or pre-literate societies, there is the office of the shaman.
And the shaman is deputized to act for all of us in the same way that we have airplane mechanics to fix jet engines.
We have shamans to explore these hidden and fairly terrifying other dimensions.
The people who self-select themselves into a group like this, in a society like that, would be the candidates for this kind of shamanic voyaging.
Well, so then what is it finally all for? Or is it for anything?
Is it just maybe my problem that I think it's for something?
Well, it is and it isn't. I mean, see, we have real problems. We could perish from this planet in some kind of radioactive petroleum war or what have you.
And it wouldn't change the fact that shamanism did exist, that these dimensions were there and were explored by courageous, high-minded people for thousands of years.
But I think that the scientific mind and maybe even the American mind can bring something special to it, that somehow technology has a role to play.
And I think maybe what this has to do with is I've talked a bit in the past, a lot in the past, about what I call visible language.
Visible language is something that I encountered in psychedelic states.
I could never have dreamed it up by myself, encountered it as an existential fact, then had to sort of reason backward from it to what would it be good for.
Well, what is it? What is visible language? Well, it's very simply, it's language which you look at rather than hear.
And don't ask me how this can happen. It obviously has something to do with synesthesias in the brain, with swapping neural processing units and somehow shunting a stream of data which would normally be audially interpreted.
Instead it goes to the visual cortex. And this occurs often in DMT intoxication.
And it has a long and noble history in the Amazon in ayahuasca shamanism.
Ayahuasca, as you probably know, is a combinatory drug made of a vine combined with the leaves of another plant, and it makes DMT orally active.
Normally DMT is destroyed in the gut, but you take it in combo with this other thing, beta-carboline, and then it's active.
Well, in the Amazon, these people sing what they call Icaros, magical songs.
And these magical songs are given to them by the spirits, whatever those are, invisible entities.
But the magical songs are invariably critical.
emphasized pictorially and sculpturally rather than musically. Nobody ever talks about how these
things sound. People only talk about how they look. And I had read about this and heard about it and
went down there and spent time, again, curiosity is the only method, poking around. Finally got
somebody who knew how to brew this stuff to make this happen. And, you know, I had seen it before on DMT,
but on DMT it's somewhat out of control. It's as though your entire syntactical engine has sprung
out of your chest and is rattling around on the floor in front of you. Well, first of all, notice
language, ordinary language, what a weird thing it is, and yet we do it with such facility.
We almost, all of us can do it. It's a very severe impairment on your humanness if you are language
deficient in any very serious way. Blindness is as nothing to being seriously language deficient,
so forth and so on. So, it's really the defining thing for us. And yet, you know, it's almost like a half
miracle. I mean, you can study it. There's no problem with getting vast samples of tape recordings. We can
analyze it syntactically. There have been many theories of syntax, philosophies of syntax. And yet, what is
it? How can we make meaning with such facility when the rest of nature seems totally unconcerned with
this? And what is meaning, anyway? Why is it so important to us? We say if there is no meaning, if life
has no meaning, it's not worth living. Well, how do ants and bees and scallops stack up on that opinion?
Do they also feel that meaning is the quintessential aspect of reality? And yet, we make it. We make it out
of ourselves. And then, we get together with somebody else, and we try to make meaning. We say, you know,
you and I could have an affair, or you and I could start a business. This will have a lot of meaning for us.
And, you know, we'll make money and buy more meaning. Well, whatever it is, and C.D. Broad wrote a book
called The Meaning of Meaning, which deals with it in about 400 pages. But whatever it is, it's very
important to us. And it seems to have different modalities. For instance, dance can have meaning.
Painting can have meaning. Spoken or textual words have meaning. But because of biases in ourselves as an
organism, what seems to have the most meaning is what we can see. Our visual, we have a tremendously rich
sense of visual input. Well, for some reason, under the influence of these psychedelic drugs,
and certain exercises, and who knows what else it takes to shake you out of your cage. But suddenly,
syntactical organization, which has been invisible in the background of the program of meaning,
becomes visible. And you actually see the engines of syntax. You actually behold the machinery of meaning
meaning itself. And for some reason, this is very satisfying. It's like an ecstasy. It's like an
affirmation of some sort that is transcendental. There is a recognition in it that transcends the felt
a perception of ordinary meaning. You know, in other words, that you're gazing somehow on the naked face
of truth and beauty. Well, it seems to me that what all this suggests, what all this, by all this,
I mean the human capacity for the psychedelic experience, the human facility for switching these
linguistic channels from the beheld to the seen, what all this must mean is that history is nothing more
than the transition phase from felt intuition, the mute intuition of the animal body, to fully expressible,
three-dimensional meaning. And that the descent into matter that technology represents is because you can't do
this entirely on the natch. There has to be a certain augmentation of the human organism in order to do
this. It may be pharmacological, it may be neurological, it may be nanotechnological, and then some part of the
other, too. But whatever it is, is I think we are coming up under the underbelly of meaning, boring from beneath,
and that, you know, we're just about to hit the jackpot. And this is what the historical process is. And the
proliferation of media, of the discovery of perspective 500 years ago, oil painting, airbrushing, digital sound, all of
these techniques are this summoning of the image. So we are actually moving toward a kind of self-fulfilling
process. It's something that we're defining for ourselves as it approaches. And it is defining itself for itself as it
approaches. You actually experience this on psychedelics sometimes. I mean, the way it works for me on mushrooms or
sometimes DMT is, there is a black space. And then I hear the, what I call the elf music, or the Irish band. And it's far away. And as it comes
closer, I like see light. And as it comes closer, it both gets louder and the light fills the stage of awareness, until finally, the sound is
subsumed under the visual impression of the thing. And then it's all around you. And it is, you know, this domain of self-transforming
self-transforming language. I mean, I call them language elves. But what they may be is nothing more than self-reflexive, compound,
complex sentences. It's hard to tell what they are, because we're not used to having our sentences stand up and embrace us.
But nevertheless, the nature of reality is fractal. And it can't have been lost upon any of you that in a fractal universe, text is
composed of characters, the characters of a given alphabet. But reality is also composed of characters, the characters like you
and me, who live out some kind of plot. Well, when you get characters into a text, in other words, characters made of characters,
then you begin to feel the textual richness and the linguistic richness that seems to be not in the forefront of reality, but actually to lie behind it.
I mean, the final conclusion, not the final conclusion, that would be preposterous, but the most recent conclusion that I'm coming to looking at the psychedelic
experience is how phenomenally text-like reality is. I mean, it's more text-like than one should decently say. We are much, this is much more like a work of art
than anything recognizable from my physics class. I mean, my physics class was about atoms and electrons and momentum and conservation of energy.
My literature class, on the other hand, was all about personality, motivation, history, precursive active, anticipation of action, willful suspension of disbelief.
These are the things that I see actually going on around me. And so it's strange as we decondition from the being sold from the top world view of Time Magazine and Scientific American and the Wall Street Journal.
What we discover is ourselves active as art in a work of art. This is what the reclamation of experience seems to give back to us, is ourselves as very complex objects.
You see, in the institutionalized world, we are defined always in ways that stress our similarity. We hear about voters, and I'm a voter. And we hear about women, and many of you are women.
And we hear about yuppies, and we hear about the middle class, and we hear about those with liquidity in their portfolios. But everything is presented as a member of a class.
We are always presented to ourselves as members of some class, and yet we experience ourselves as unique objects. But there is no reinforcement for that experience of uniqueness.
I mean, you have a lover, and they say, you know, I think you're wonderful and very special. That's about all the reinforcement for your uniqueness you get.
And your mother also tells you this. But then you take a psychedelic plant, and you discover, you know, hey, you know, I'm Christopher Columbus. I'm Magellan. I could be anybody.
I'm not defined in these narrow ways. There are doorways in my reality to areas of experience as large as the area of experience that Christopher Columbus or Magellan took as their province.
But it's all this new freedom is achieved by directing attention back at the individual.
So, you know, a lot of the debate and talk that I hear is about saving and restructuring institutions and that sort of thing. I'm not very much interested in saving and restructuring very many institutions.
have done us about all the good we can stand at this point. And, you know, but then they wave the black flag of anarchy in front of you and say, oh, you're just an apostle of chaos and madness.
Chaos, yes, madness, maybe. But disorder, never. You know, this surrender issue, when translated out of the realm of the individual and into the realm of the collectivity, we all, as a society, must also surrender to what is happening to us.
Because I think history is some kind of psychedelic experience. And it isn't, there's nobody around who has the right plan. So it isn't about how we need to locate the people with the right plan and then give them a lot of money and get out of their way.
It doesn't work like that. The right plan will emerge almost simultaneously in everybody's mind at the same moment. And in the meantime, we all are going to have this sort of half-baked plan that we can't articulate, that we can't quite bring out. It's a quality of the time.
It's a quality of the time. I'm going to talk this afternoon more about the quality of the time. But we can't think any more clearly than we're thinking at the moment when we're thinking at our best.
Part of what history is, is a clarification of the human situation. And I think you have to press the envelope. You have to keep your nose against the glass, forcing the definitions into ever new territory.
But not anxiously. It's just looks like a growth process. We can't evolve any faster than our language evolves. The language is the thing in which we're embedded.
So the use of technologies like virtual reality, or drugs like psilocybin and DMT, or practices of various sorts, if they prove effective, to put pressure on the evolution of language.
All spiritual disciplines properly analyzed can be seen to be language courses, to get you to think a certain way, to get you to carve out of the background of undifferentiated data certain things which you previously couldn't see, auras, or acupuncture meridians, or states of disease.
I mean, it can be anything. But the mind sensitizes itself to phenomena by following language into the forest, into the forest of the unknown.
And most people have no stomach for this kind of thing. They prefer to stay back in the village and just kill time grinding wheat and drying meat around the fire.
But, you know, you can almost make a kind of a fractal, quasi-reductionist argument and say that people are like electrons, and you don't learn what electrons really are until you get just one of them off by itself somewhere in a magnetic field, in a vacuum.
And then you see what electrons are. If you have millions of electrons, then you have an electrical current, and an electrical current operates according to laws and rules and constraints, completely different from an electron.
And what we have done very perversely as a society is taken the laws of large numbers, how a million people act, how ten million people act, and then we have applied it back to ourselves as individuals.
I said, well, why am I not happy? You know, 70% of everybody does X, and I don't, and I'm not happy then. You know, trying to redefine yourself as against a very large body of statistical data.
All of this is dehumanizing. All of this is bad mental hygiene, usually quickly cleared away by psychedelics.
Because what they show you is, you know, that you are unique, that you are unique, and that the confluence of space and time that you're operating in is unique.
And that any model that is put forward is, number one, provisional. Provisional means it can be abandoned at any moment.
And then the second and most important thing is, any model you can't understand is useless.
So, you know, most of us can't understand most of the models. I mean, who here would care to walk to the blackboard and begin to describe the first stage of quantum electrodynamics to us?
And yet we all know that our world is supposedly hung on this very well thought out theory that experts are in charge of.
But notice, no pun intended, but notice that if experts are in charge of it, you're not.
It's absolutely useless to you. You know nothing about it.
Well, so when you start peeling away and saying, well, what do I know, you know, it turns out it gets into thin soup rather quickly.
This is no cause for despair. This doesn't mean you should go back to night school and study quantum physics.
That's the wrong conclusion. It means that all of this stuff that you thought were the high walls of reality are just smoke blown by somebody else.
These constraints are not binding upon you at all.
Somebody said to me once their father had been a professional scientist and he said once,
I never would have seen it if I hadn't known it was there.
And we all are in the habit of seeing all kinds of things because we know that they're there.
And in many cases, they're not there.
And you just walk through and you discover all kinds of things.
I mean, I am convinced that anybody who has a major psychedelic trip,
at some point in that trip, their eye falls on things no human eye has ever seen before or ever will see again.
You know, it's that big in there.
It's not at all clear that we're mapping a generalizable reality.
It may be that it's just so huge in there that never do we pass through the same matrix twice.
Well, that means you can give up on closure.
You can give up on any theory that will ever give you very much of a more than provisional handle on what's going on.
And I think this is probably a good step to take,
to open ourselves to the freedom that lies beyond culture.
Culture is a kind of prison.
And the only way that we know to get beyond it is to dissolve its boundaries.
Now, you can do that with psychedelics.
And then you really explore the baseline of being.
Or you can dissolve it with travel.
But then you dissolve your own cultural programming,
only to discover you've fitted yourself into somebody else's cultural programming.
And this, while, you know, definitely educational is like a psychedelic drug I'm not that fond of.
I do a lot of traveling.
But it's not the same thing as replacing space and time with some kind of alternative.
That comes from, you know, doing the hard work on five grams in silent darkness.
And really what you see, I think, is the morphogenetic field,
the invisible world that holds everything together,
the knit of it all.
Not the knit of matter and light,
but the knit of kazooistry, of intentionality,
of caring, of hope, of dream, of thought.
And that all is there.
But it's been hidden from us for centuries
because of the exorcism of the spirit
that took place in order to allow science to do business.
And that, you know, momentous and ill-considered choice
then has made us the inheritors of a tradition of existential emptiness, really.
But that has impelled us to go back to the jungles
and to recover this thing.
It's all of a piece, you see.
I mean, these people in the Amazon and whatnot
were keeping this cultural flame burning.
But these cultures are now all dead.
They are either dead or in a state of advanced suspended animation.
I mean, the best anyone hopes for
when they go to a rainforest culture
is that it be somehow resisting the change all around it.
There's no rainforest culture
that is elaborating new forms
and thriving on its own terms.
So all the things that were learned,
the legacy of the ancestors,
is now laid basically at the feet
of this high-tech electronic society.
And the question is, you know,
can we dream a dream sufficiently noble
that we give meaning to the sacrifices
that have been made to allow the 20th century to exist?
I mean, my God,
the amount of blood shed
and, you know, infectious diseases spread around,
metals ripped out of the earth,
mountains moved,
railroads laid across continents,
all of this stuff
as the means to reclaiming
the human birthright
that science hides from us.
It's a very strange enterprise.
I mean, it's hard to put it across
because the thing is,
it's real, you know,
and we're in the habit of thinking
that the mind can move unobstructed
from one edge of the universe to the other,
that there are no secrets.
But actually there are secrets.
At least these are secrets.
And hard to tell.
I mean, I tell them
and you hear them
and we seem to have been allowed
a cosmic dispensation.
But why that is
is very hard for me to understand.
I would have thought
that this would have been headline news
20,000 years ago
right up until the present.
Instead, you know,
it's very tentative.
Apparently this is very threatening to us.
We are not as eager
to sail over the edge collectively
as we think we are.
So then it becomes
the function of the shaman,
the gadfly,
the go-between
to carry information
back and forth
between these worlds.
I'm convinced
that if there were no shamanic pipeline,
there would be no human life
as we know it on this planet.
I mean, there could be
climaxed animal life.
There was no need
for this higher order
linguistic style
of self-reflection
to come into being.
It's that
something is plotted.
Something is working itself out
in us.
We are
the cells
of a much larger body
and like the cells
of our own body,
it's very hard for us
to glimpse
the whole pattern,
the whole purpose
of what is happening.
And yet we can sense
that there is a purpose
and there is a pattern.
Well,
the way you connect
the pattern
with the lower level
is
by dissolving
the boundaries
of the ego
and the self
into this larger thing.
And then it's found
to be there,
reflective
on many levels.
It's not,
it doesn't require
a mechanism.
Everything is obvious.
If things don't appear
simple
to us,
I think it's because
we haven't thought
about it long enough.
Well,
so that's sort of a
survey
of some of this stuff.
Thank you very much.
So,
there were questions
outstanding
when we parted
this morning.
So why don't we
just take that up
then?
I used to drive
up to Esalen
in the 60s.
I wrote
to a big survey
for thousands
of hippies
who lived in the woods
in various states
of grace.
It seems that they
were actualizing
the new paradigm
of which we spoke.
So,
very well,
yesterday,
there was no hippies,
not one.
I don't think
anybody's living
in the woods
here anymore.
Where have they gone?
What have we done wrong?
The door seems to have
slammed shut
in that paradigm.
Is it our fault?
Well,
I mean,
as somebody
who lived through
all that,
I guess it was
the hardest lesson
that we had to learn
was
how big
a revolution
you can have
and how quickly
they can toss
water on it
and have business
as usual.
Eric Yonch
introduced me
to the term
metastable.
And it certainly
is true
that many,
many things
are metastable.
I mean,
you think
it looks easy
to push it over,
but when you
start pushing
you discover
that the
Leaning Tower
of Pisa
goes 800 feet
underground
or something
and it's not
moving anywhere.
I don't know.
I think that
there's a real
constipation
in the historical
process.
We talk about
how the 20th century
is this century
of tremendous
change
and innovation,
but actually
they've been
remarkably successful
in forestalling
any true
outbreak
of the future.
I mean,
the most science
fiction moment
in the 20th century
or one of the
most science
fiction moments
to date
is probably
1939.
And if you
think about
1939,
if you think
about the
V-2 rockets
raining down
on London
and Germany
and the grip
of a leader
with a genetic
race theory
that he plans
to establish
for a thousand
years,
this is science
fiction style
talk,
rocket bombs
and master
races
and robot
armies
and all that
stuff.
Well,
so then it
was quenched,
fascism
was sort of
quenched,
actually it
infected everybody
who got near it
to the point
that everybody
was a fascist,
but also
everybody went
back to work
realizing very
self-centered
ideals.
In the United
States,
what had
happened was
that paradise
had been
promised the
generation that
would defeat
fascism,
but because
it isn't easy
to deliver
paradise,
it had to
be tacky.
So then you
get Levittown
and the
suburbs and
modular building
and Bauhaus
styles of
design.
This is an
effort to
create a
proletarian
paradise.
The Marxists
talked proletarian
paradise,
but the
American middle
class actually
created it
during the
50s.
Then in the
60s,
what happened
was,
well,
the precondition
for social
upheaval
seemed to be
an extremely
unpopular war
being prosecuted
thousands and
thousands of
miles from
home.
And then
LSD,
which was a
unique phenomenon
because so
much could be
made so
easily.
I mean,
there are few
weapons on
earth,
even gas.
It's hard
to create
enough poison gas to kill a million people. A guy with a small bathroom can
create enough LSD to stone a million people. But I think that what the lesson
I drew from the 60s is that history can't be rushed and that history is not
made by individuals, even righteous individuals. You know what
Shakespeare said, all the world's a stage and its people merely players. They have
their entrances and their exits and each man in his time plays many parts. It is a
work of literature somehow. And the 60s, for all of what it was, it must be that it
was only prelude. And they managed to get the lid back on. But I think at great
detriment to themselves. Because what's the change is like a gas. You know, if you
plug the keyhole, it comes in under the door. If you plug under the door, it comes
in over the transom. There's no end to it. And forestalling it makes it more violent.
I mean, what I would like to see would be a conscious engineering of change where you
actually anticipate social change and try and make it easier. As a perfect example is
the stupid situation now in the Middle East. It's been known since the early
Carter administration that we should put policies in place which de-emphasize our
need for Middle East oil. So for 20 years, they looked at that situation and never did
anything. Now they say they have to fight a world war because of that. Well, it's just
bad management is what it is. But I think that this crisis in the Soviet Union and in the
East bloc countries, which was presented as a crisis of Marxism, is actually a crisis of
centralized institutional control everywhere. And that a lot of America's assumptions will
be swept away. It came first to places like Czechoslovakia and Poland. But do you think that the United Arab Emirates and
Quatar and places like this can be far behind? I mean, these are oligarchic states ruled by single families, dynastic lines. It's the most reactionary form of government you can have.
So what I see happening in the world is fragmentation on a vast scale to be applauded in all cases. This is not a bad thing. This is what McLuhan said would happen. It isn't going to be a world federalist state ruled from Geneva with a spaceport in Antarctica and all that malarkey. It's just going to be, you know, thousands and thousands of local...
and somewhat integrated. Like the European model is interesting because there it's simultaneously falling to pieces and integrating itself at the same time. Integration of currency and economics but preservation of cultural diversity and that sort of thing seems to me to be what's happening.
But nobody has to be what's happening. But nobody has to shout and nobody has to go into the streets. It's much bigger than that.
And as far as the thing in the Middle East is concerned, I think probably, well, I'll talk more about it this afternoon. But it has an inevitability to it that is huge.
The United States is in the process of playing a fairly desperate hand. They could just stand so much of all that disarmament and troop reduction stuff and then they just finally couldn't stand it anymore.
But I think it's good news that nobody is in charge of the historical process because even the best motivated people have the wrong idea.
You know, more faith in the unconscious. It's gotten us this far. God knows. Yeah.
You were talking about syntax and language and being able to go back on the other side and look at it, you know, and Chomsky, I think, wrote some books about what that syntax all looks like.
I was just wondering what you saw when you went on the other side, you know.
Well, Chomsky's idea, which he called transformational grammar, was he eventually, he dreamed of being able to write the rules, not only for all, not only for English, but for all rationally apprehendable languages.
And he felt there were 15 rules of deep structure. I never could really understand the fine print on Chomsky. It seemed pretty tormented to me.
What I discovered most spectacularly in the DMT state is there are these entities there, which I call self-transforming machinos, and they look sort of like self-dribbling jeweled basketballs, and they have a linguistic intentionality.
They want to communicate. The songs that they sing condense as objects in three-dimensional space. I've compared them to the eggs of Fabergé, but that does them, they're much more interesting than that.
They are like crystalline, jeweled, semi-see-through, opaque, movemented things, which look like sculptures, but you can tell while you're looking at them, they're actually sentences.
And the sentences are saying themselves in some weird way. And in the way that a good sentence, a good long sentence has all its clauses operating and its articles rotating smoothly and its gerunds running up and down their tracks and everything, you know, in the same way that a good sentence does that,
these little objects have this same kind of linguistic coherency. Well then what the entities in this space are doing is they're urging me, the percipient, to explore this and to do it, to sing these songs, to make these objects condense.
And I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what this could possibly be about in terms of new ideas about it. The only new idea I've had about it is it's occurred to me with some force over the past year and a half or so that the conclusion that I never looked at carefully because my mind tried to shy away from it was that maybe
maybe these things have something to do with the dead, that if you were to ask a shaman what these entities were, he would just say without hesitation, oh well these are the ancestors, these are the spirits of the ancestors.
There's a hair raising quality to contact these things. They are both very familiar and yet somehow freakishly bizarre and the presence of the familiarity with the bizarre creates a kind of cognitive dissonance that's very, well there's just nothing else that feels quite like that.
I wrote an introduction recently for a reprint of Evans Wentz's book The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries and I discovered when I reread that book that the doctrine of purgatory, which is good church doctrine, it's a realm where souls go to be cleansed for a few millennia.
They're not so sinful that they go to hell, but they go to purgatory for a few thousand years before they enter heaven.
Well, I always assumed that this idea came out of the Roman contact with Gnostic ideas, but I discovered in writing the introduction for the fairy faith that St. Patrick invented the idea of purgatory.
purgatory, and he invented it when he was converting the Irish to Christianity. He did it as a way to Christianize the notion of the, of fae, of fairy land.
And the Celtic pure belief is that the dead go to a realm that is co-present all around us. We can't see them, but the, the, all around us is just jammed with souls in wild states of activity.
And that if you have the eye, you know, a certain talent, you can see these things.
Well, Patrick, in order to have an appeal to these Celtic peasants, made purgatory part of the Christian cosmogonic scheme.
But when you actually smoke DMT, you burst into a space, which seems very much to fit the description of this elfin inhabited space.
Because if you think about what, what is the gnosis of elves, elves are artificers.
They make things in metal and jewels and glass. This is the archetype of the elves, that they are underground craftsmen.
And they are humorous, but their humor is highly unpredictable and sort of not necessarily running in your favor.
They're somewhat cruel and boisterous and, um, and like that.
Well, when you break into this space, you discover, you know, that you're in fairy land.
You're in fairy land as much as Darby O'Gill or any of the rest of these people, whoever made it across.
And the secret of the elves, what they really fabricate, is language.
This is why in, in Irish mythology, if you can get elves on your side, you can make great poetry.
Because they're the keepers of linguistic artifice.
And, uh, and getting elves on your side makes you into a master poet.
Well, it's interesting then that in the Amazon, where there's a tradition of taking DMT, there are these things called hiruki.
And they're actually described as bouncing demons.
And the hiruki, you're supposed to get, they come into being when you're stoned.
And you're supposed to get them into your chest.
You're supposed to invite them into your chest somehow.
Well, then the number of these things you have inside of you determines what kind of a real man you are.
And this is generally a male practice.
Well, I noticed that these DMT tykes, as I call them, they jump in and out of your body, too.
They seem to be trying to teach you something about the body image or their relationship to your self-identity.
And all the time they're saying, you know, make these objects do what we're doing.
Well, then you go down to the Amazon, to the Icaro singing Ayahuasqueros, and they are using voice to make objects.
So, what we're on the track of here is a physiological ability or a pharmacologically driven physiological ability to transduce language as something seen.
Well, now, you see, if you could see what I mean, it would be as though we were the same person.
Seeing what I mean is a much more intimate relationship to my intent than hearing what I mean.
You can hear what I mean and go and look it up in your little dictionary and get it all wrong if your dictionary and mine are different.
But if you see what I mean, we will be in agreement because I see what I mean, too.
So, if meaning were something that one could sculpturally command in three-dimensional space, we would walk around and look at it.
Well, part of what I was doing in Linz in Austria was trying to get these virtual reality people hooked into this as a concept.
Because you see, with the present virtual reality, do you all know what virtual reality is?
Everybody knows what it is. Virtual reality is a technology where you put on a helmet and you have a little and then you think you're in this place, some other place under engineering control.
Well, what you could do is you could slave the parts of English speech to geometric objects.
So that, for instance, every time you use the word and a rotating turquoise dodecahedron appeared over your left shoulder.
Similarly, all the parts of the dictionary could be slaved to physically or to visually beholdable objects.
Well, then, as I would speak, this thing would be happening over my left shoulder, a kind of self-constructing grammatical tinker toy.
Well, I maintain that very quickly people would stop listening and start looking and that they would be getting it.
In fact, they would be getting more than if they were listening because the way in which these syntactically visible parts of speech can be connected and shaded and presented and emphasized and italicized and underlined and brightly colored and set in different fonts and so forth and so on.
In other words, many more dimensions to the intent to communicate can be brought into play.
And I think this is what technology is probably driving for and what the psychedelic experience will inspire is this kind of sculptural linguistic modality where meaning is something that we behold.
Yeah, Nina.
Can we verify the visual type?
Can we respond, you know, to auditory messages?
Well, we have to find out whether there are visual types and audio types or whether there are generalized human biases embedded in cultural conventions.
You know, McLuhan talked about how at the inventing of printing, there was a shift from the eye culture, as he called it, to the ear culture, that before printing, if somebody gave you a piece of manuscript, it was in cannabula.
It was written, it was manuscript, and therefore you had to look at it.
After printing was invented, every E looked like every other E, and so print acquired uniformity.
And uniformity, you don't, when we read, we do not look.
You don't look at the page, you read it, and your eye rips through it.
You don't linger over each letter and try to piece out how it's different from the other Fs on that line and stuff like that.
But in manuscript culture, you do.
Similarly, print created an expectation then of uniformity in the way that the eye expected the letters to always present a uniform appearance.
There began to be the idea of uniformity of social appearances.
Previously, the largest social class had been the guild, but suddenly you get people talking about the ruling class, the middle class, the lower class, white collar, blue collar.
These are linear uniform terms for describing lots of non-linear, non-uniform phenomena.
And then finally, of course, with the machine age, you get the idea of interchangeability of parts.
This is an idea that would never emerge in a, could only emerge in a print culture.
Because in a print culture, the interchangeability of the parts of print becomes an established convention.
So then you say, well, we want to make tractors or hay mowers.
So let's not just make one hay mower, let's make 50 of them and let's make them all at once.
And let's lay out the pieces and then let's assemble them in teams.
And this kind of thinking arises out of the bias of a technology.
McLuhan talked a lot about technological biases.
Isn't this going back to the Chinese ideogram, I think, where they had 50,000 symbols at one time and now they have only about 5,000 newspapers and the average person only knows that much?
Well, yeah, I mean, language is becoming more glyphic. Reality is becoming more iconic.
When you travel in Europe, you're aware that you're skating along on a thin surface of icons that if you're careful will never break through and let you down.
You know, you can read all this international jargon about where the dog can poop and not to smoke and not to open the window and so forth and so on.
Yeah, we need an iconic language and we're tending back toward it.
Now an iconic language like Chinese has also undergone huge amounts of local conventionalization.
So I don't think we're all going to end up learning Chinese unless it's going to return more to its ancient form.
Mayan is an interesting case because Mayan is a rebus language where you use icons not to symbolize things but sounds.
Do you see the difference? So, for instance, in rebus language you would put a picture of an eye, a saw going through wood, an ant running across the ground, and a rose.
And that would be a sign which said, I saw, ant rose. The icons symbolize sounds, they don't symbolize meaning.
This makes it hellishly difficult to reconstruct a lost language that is written this way because the language, what you have are the symbols of sounds and you don't have the sounds anymore.
So how can you reconstruct the language? This is the problem Mayan decipherment has had to grapple with.
When you're talking about visual language, I keep thinking of prelingually deaf people.
They process language in the right hemisphere and their language is visual-spatial and they interpret language in a visual-spatial way and when they try to teach you sign language they keep saying,
think in pictures, stop thinking in words, think in pictures. Have you ever had any contact with deaf people or deaf community?
Not with the community. I've known deaf people and yes, you're right. This thinking in pictures, this is something that happens at a certain point in most psychedelic experiences.
You realize that the quality of our ordinary thought, or at least in my case, it is language. It's a stream of words and then it can become this much richer, fuller, imagistic type thinking.
This is very elusive. I mean, it's so close to the level of human organization that probably there are some people in this room who are doing it right now.
There are art movements like the Pre-Raphaelites or the Romantics that put great stress on this kind of thing, even had exercises to elicit this kind of thinking.
I mean, I think that we're, you know, and McLuhan is trying to get at this by talking about the effects of technology. It's that we haven't realized just how fluid the mental modality is.
You know, Thomas Aquinas, in the Middle Ages, was thought to be a great saint. And he would prove his sainthood by, they would come to him with a Bible or a work of theology, and they would open it in front of him, and let him look at it for a few minutes, and then close it and question him about it.
And he could answer questions. And they thought this was a proof of his sanctity. And all he was doing was silently reading. He was the only man in Europe who could silently read. And everybody else had to sound the words.
Well, we can't quite wrap our mind around that, because for us, this is just something you do. You know, it's not even as hard as riding a bicycle.
Well, how many of these things are there, where we are down between narrow walls of expectation, and just a little tweak of our programming would make a real difference?
One of the things that fascinates me about the psychedelics, that we haven't talked about at all this morning, because it's kind of on a technical bend, is how close the most interesting ones are to ordinary brain chemistry.
It isn't that the strangest, weirdest drugs give the strangest, weirdest experiences. No, the drugs that are most like what you have in your brain at this moment, give the strangest, weirdest experiences.
The ones that are just one tweaked atom away from ordinary consciousness, are the ones that give the profound, world-dissolving experiences.
So, this suggests to me that what we deal with, when we deal with psychedelics, is future chemical states of mind, future ratios of neurotransmitters in the human brain.
Is it that the 5-HT2 and A receptors for serotonin are slowly, over time, centuries, being swapped out for a receptor that will accept a more energetic molecule, like DMT?
We know that DMT occurs in ordinary human metabolism, but we don't know why.
Is it increasing over time? We don't know, because we've only been measuring it 20 or 30 years.
I mean, the place where evolution is going to be visible is in consciousness, because this is where the chemistry is most delicately poised to augment or suppress function.
So, you know, we're very well set up to observe evolution and shift in conscious modalities, and this is no neutral, cooled-out scientific endeavor.
The rate at which we can do this probably determines the rate at which we can save ourselves and the planet from ruin.
Music. You haven't mentioned the function of music in your non-linear communication group instead of globosity.
Well, music is, you know, this very old form of art which appeals to this thing I'm talking about, not quite with the kind of linguistic specificity that maybe we would desire ultimately.
But music is a language of emotion that hovers between the scene and the herd pretty ambiguously.
I mean, for the romantics, you know, they were one of these groups of people who talked about synesthesia.
This is this technical term for the senses moving from one modality to another, tasting colors, feeling music, hearing light.
And a lot of the talk in the 19th century among symbolists and pre-Raphaelites and romantics was about these synesthesias and how to trigger them.
And strangely enough, this led to the first bout of psychedelic, quote unquote, psychedelic drug experimentation.
It was the romantic pursuit of synesthesia through opium that created the first wave of opium addiction in literate English society.
I mean, Coleridge and De Quincey and these people were quite consciously trying to use drugs to create and push the definitions of art out further.
Somebody said architecture is frozen music from which it must follow then that music is unfrozen architecture, liquid architecture.
The architectonic quality of hallucinations when they're driven by music is very striking and the way in which all these things come together.
It has almost a kind of gothic elegance.
The way tone can be used to create impressions of large vaulted space and this sort of thing.
I mean, it's really an unexplored thing.
And I think technology is going to teach us a lot about making that kind of art in particular.
Yeah?
When you talk about being a Czechoslovakian, did you have an opportunity to talk with or studying with the teachings of Václav Havel?
Václav Havel couldn't see me because he had Margaret Thatcher.
It's true.
Frozen architecture.
No, I mean Czechoslovakia is an interesting case because you can see, you know, Prague's reputation before the revolution was that it was the gloomiest city in Europe.
And you can certainly see that it would have been a gloomy city if people had been marching around in uniforms and there had been breadlines and fear and loathing.
With communism gone, people stay up all night and dance in the streets and suddenly it just looks charming and unwashed.
And we just need to get the soot and industrial grime off all this Jugendstile and art deco architecture and it will be just fine.
Bye.
The thing about Czechoslovakia is, you know, if you scratch a check, you find a Celt because the Celts were there a long, long time ago, building fortresses on all the hills, and when you look at the people in large crowds, of which, my God, do they know how to get crowds together.
There are crowds of them everywhere. They have that same Celtic cast that you get at a West Coast Grateful Dead concert, you know. I mean, everybody has brown hair.
Czechoslovakia was exciting because all these places have an opportunity to redefine freedom, to be even more free, you know, to push it further.
And what I was doing there to have a mission, to have a reason to be there, was visiting the National Museum Department of Mycology and leaving off spore prints and growers' guides with people in the department who I thought might like to grow psilocybin mushrooms.
And being good Slavs, they were very open to this, and very excited by the idea of growing mushrooms.
You know, cultures can be divided into mycophilic and mycophobic, and mycophobic cultures are like the English, for whom all mushrooms are toadstools, and you should put it down because you don't know where it's been.
And this is the basic English attitude. Well, then Slavs and Celts, there are hundreds of words in these languages for mushrooms, and possibly without it.
And so, you can imagine that it's a different attitude.
Prague is further west than Vienna. It's the real center of old Europe, and of course, because of the court of Rudolf II, it was the court of all this alchemical, Protestant alchemical, political plotting,
and lots of intrigue. That's why we're called Bohemians, is because that radical style of free thought began in the principalities of Bohemia,
with people deciding nobody should wear clothes, or we should get rid of money, and then everybody would do this, you know, until the local bishop would get an army together and come and kick some sense into everybody.
But over and over in Bohemia, this kind of outbreak of radical free thought was typical.
Yeah.
A couple of years ago, I was fortunate enough to assemble some ayahuasca in the company of the medicine circle.
The first part of it, I was enraptured by these glorious visions.
Then there was a sudden shift to perspective, and I realized suddenly that the visions were all taking place on the side of a snake, a large, giant snake.
The visions were actually being projected on its skin, snakes better writhing and moving.
Later, I found that most of the other people in the circle were having visions of snakes too.
And then recently in Shaman's drama, the later Shaman's drama, there's a series of wonderful ayahuasca paintings, and almost all of them have snakes in them.
What do you make of that, Terence? Is that a common thing with ayahuasca paintings?
Well, it's an interesting question. Why do drugs have identities like this, and do they have them?
Well, the answer is yes, they certainly do.
And it's one of the puzzling pieces of information that I always keep in front of myself when trying to understand these things.
It's irrational that, for instance, no matter who you are, you know, Viennese Jew, Icelandic ski instructor, Irish pub owner, if you take ayahuasca, you will see large snakes, large cats, and dancing black people.
Well, in this order of statistical frequency, with black people being not as common as cats and snakes, cats being not as common as snakes, snakes being the most common.
Well, what's going on here? How can it be that a chemical compound that can be defined down to the quantum mechanical positions of the atoms, nevertheless seems to carry informational content of some sort?
Well, I don't know. But here is one possibility, and maybe there are others.
Maybe this is support for Sheldrake's hypothesis of formative causation, that actually, around the drug, a complex of ideas has accreted itself in some kind of psychological hyperspace.
A pattern has been worn in hyperspace, which is the pattern of how this drug works, and it's really, in some sense, a composite of all the trips of all the people who ever took it.
Well, since for the first 20,000 years, all the people who ever took ayahuasca had snake and jaguar fear as a major source of anxiety, we discover that up front.
But, of course, now why the dancing black people? This becomes less easy to understand.
It wouldn't be the consciousness of the plant.
Well, this is the other possibility, see, that the reason these things are so message-specific is that this is the plant. This is its presentation.
Like, with ayahuasca particularly, its language is visual. I mean, after a strong ayahuasca session, your eyes are bugging out of your head.
It's like a visit to Madison Avenue to buy prints. I mean, you've just looked at so many prints, and looked, and looked, and compared the Bruegel to the Bosch, and the Bosch to the Buffon, all this stuff.
You know, look, look, look, and, but then, for instance, with mushrooms, it's actually verbal. It speaks. It tells you things in plain English, in a conversational mode.
I don't understand. The more I live, the longer I see of all this stuff, the less I feel that I understand of what is going on.
Don't you think there's a consciousness in the plant?
You mean a psychedelic plant like that?
Well, maybe all sorts of plants. I don't know, but it depends on how you know.
Yeah, but why, why would it have one presentational mode over another?
Because it's a particular chemical composite that becomes its own unique life force, or composite of biology, or whatever. But in that, it has its own consciousness.
Well, I guess this is what we're left with, that these are the masks by which we understand these things. What happens with the mushroom is, it always has a presentational personality.
But then when you inquire, you discover that this presentational personality is created for your convenience. And that behind it lurks God knows what. And then when you begin to talk to it about that, that's when the trip turns off to the left and begins to get peculiar.
Because you're inquiring into its inner nature. I mean, with the mushroom, you can actually say, show me more of what you really are. And immediately, the trip will take a turn away from the dancing mice and all that cheerful, hypnagogic riff-raff.
And towards something, you know, woo, say, okay, that's enough of who you really are. You know, reassure me now. So yeah, these things are like personalities, minds. But the question for me is, you know, it's such a strange way to communicate that here is a life form that it can't communicate unless you eat it, unless it's inside you.
And then somehow the more of its being and your being mesh together. And then these images spring into being. But it is in the very act of passing away, being consumed in your metabolism. It's like some kind of act of love or something.
Do you ever ask it what it's like having eaten you or being digested?
What is it like to take a person?
Well, I asked it once what it wanted to be called. And it said, call me Dorothy. And I, Dorothy, and I said, why? And it said, because this seems like Oz to me.
I just report these things. I don't know why it wanted to be called Dorothy.
When you say it turns left when you take that point of inquiry, you know, the trip goes in a different direction. And then you've had enough, or you say, I want comfort. Could you say a little more about that?
You mean how to steer it through these places?
Well, you have the feeling. It's a very complex feeling when you deal with the other. It's your friend, sort of. And it's predictable, sort of. But everything has this vibe about it where you don't want to push too much.
I mean, I've given a lot of thought to trying to think about where have I had this feeling that I have when I meet the DMT elves.
And it's a feeling of exhilaration, but caution, accomplishment, but doubt. And I decided that where I knew this feeling from was years ago in my dissolute youth as a hash trader in the back streets of Bombay.
We would enter into these labyrinth where these guys with shining eyes and deformed limbs would take us back into these warrens of streets. And they would know that we had enough money on our body to ransom them all for five years income.
And we would know that they knew. And yet we would be there to conclude a business deal over a psychedelic substance.
And this feeling of meeting the meme traders. And they would always say, they had this wonderful line calculated to put you completely at your ease. They would say, I am your friend. I am not like all the others.
Oh, great. Wonderful. I feel so much better. And that's what these elves are saying. They're saying, you know, don't listen to him or her. I am your friend. I am not like all the others.
And, you know, you're clearly the new kid in town. I mean, you can barely sit up. And they're able to pick your pocket from ten dimensions you don't even know exist. So you're trying to sort this out in good order.
I wanted to go back to the idea of assimilation, that in order to have this experience and so forth, that it's a process of digestion and assimilation.
And that really is true of giving yourself to that consciousness, whatever you want to call it.
And that's actually true of all the experiences one has. I mean, if you're reading a book, if you really want to get into it, you have to totally digest it.
I mean, it's not literal, obviously. I don't think the pages necessarily, unless you're starving or someone. But anyway, it is everything that you do that has many real influences has to be digested.
Well, maybe this has to do with the notion of boundary dissolution, that to be digested by something is to actually become it. It becomes you.
And, you know, Yates said, we become what we behold. And, yeah, I mean, it's fairly profound when you think about it. I didn't really lean on this thing this morning.
Well, I mentioned it about the diet and the copulation and the religion and the psilocybin. But the notion here is that feminism is actually a state of dietary neuro-regulation in the species, if you want.
And that because the feminine I associate with this state of boundary dissolution or potential state of boundary dissolution, because feminine sexuality is based on the acceptance of penetration and the experience of giving birth is the experience of heavy boundary reorganization and so forth.
And so forth. So the earth actually talked to the human beings through the diet. I mean, it's crude and awful to say it that way. But you see, because the psilocybin was in the diet, because the people were tribal, because there was pressure on hunting success and sexual success and all this, the people were in a state of maximum attention.
directed toward the environment. And coming at them out of the environment was a mind, not an abstract mind, not as we imagine God, an old man with a beard, an abstract principle, all of this, but actually, you know, a friend and a comfort, a feminine thing.
Not remote at all, not the creature of theology, but a creature of experience. And these feminine values were the values of the human group, and they were a kind of objectification, realization of the values in nature itself.
And getting away from that broke this bond that was very real. And this breaking of this bond traumatized us. I mean, you can even use the language of dysfunctional relationships, childhood trauma, abuse, that sort of thing.
That in the infancy of the human species, there is a tremendous traumatic event, the tearing away of the human tribal family from this embeddedness in larger vegetable nature.
And then once that happened, we had to make it up by ourselves. And we, you know, did a botched job of it. I mean, religion just became a way of berating people.
Ethics became control, ethics became control, government became coercion, education became the inculcation of past mistakes, so forth, and so on.
Understandably, because we were, you could almost think of us as an ant society whose queen had been killed, but we don't notice it because it's not part of our species.
We actually were an incipient symbiote to this invisible thing. And it still exists. It still exists in whatever dimensions are its own.
I mean, is it the mushroom? Is it the sum total of organic life on the planet? Is it an extraterrestrial mind somehow here so long that it's as old as the continents?
Whatever it is, it's still there. Well, then what human history and outbreaks of messianic hysteria and the prompting of visionary dreams and all of the stuff that sets us sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night is,
is, is, you know, this thing can reach into the human world, haltingly, hesitatingly, but plaintively, probingly, trying to, trying to bring us back, calling us to some kind of return, trying to reconnect the broken circuit of history.
And this is what is the cause of all the nostalgia for paradise, you know, the belief in a vanished Eden, a lost Atlantis, so forth and so on, and all the utopian yearning, the belief that, you know, the extraterrestrials will come and kiss it and make it well, that we will somehow be rescued from our own folly,
that dead Galilean politicians will walk again among us. All of these ideas that are overthrow of natural law for the purpose of saving us in a drama of cosmic redemption.
Well, it's like a psychological process. It's like somebody digging into their stuff. And, you know, we all start out with the assumption that our childhood was perfectly normal and our parents were fine people, and then you start digging and separating and working and looking and then the picture becomes much more complicated.
And I think the human attitude toward drugs, the fact that we can addict to 40 or 50 substances and do, I mean, yes, other animals form addictions of various sorts, but nothing like this.
I mean, clearly we are in a state of permanent chemical disequilibrium. I mean, we will gnaw door handles, sniff paint thinner, you know, tobacco, heroin, you name it, thousands of alkaloids, bury, you know, dig up stuff the pig wouldn't eat, and then pickle that, and then eat that.
I mean, all this, all this anxiety and disease around the problem of food is that we're looking, we're looking for something.
Well, then every time somebody finds it, then a huge shriek goes up from the body politic that it's illegal what you found, it's unacceptable, you know, this behavior cannot be tolerated.
People who smoke joints of marijuana, the chief of police in Los Angeles wants them shot like dogs in public places in order to keep public order.
Well, what we've got here, folks, is a lot of serious anxiety around states of mind, clearly.
It's a rupture from the synthetic. I mean, it's a rupture from the organic, creating totally synthetic realities.
That's part of what happens when they're separated from the organic.
You mean a rupture into history of this material?
Well, I mean, because they have been separated from psychedelics and from the, it's like being separated from an organic life.
It's the same thing as being separated from nature, from themselves, and then they're open to synthetic realities.
Well, it's an extreme, an extreme case of alienation over like a thousand years. I mean, yes, we're so alienated, we don't even know how alienated we are.
I mean, things built into our language like the subject-object dualism, the assumption of science, you know, that spirit doesn't exist.
This is what they've been busy at for the last 400 years is exercising spirit.
From the late medieval cosmology, we inherit a world entirely animate with spirit and angelic beings running up ladders and performing all kinds of miraculous tasks.
And then with Descartes, you know, you get this grudging admission that, well, maybe the soul touches matter at just one place in the pineal gland of each one of us.
There's this magic trip hammer and there the little angel performs the forbidden transduction.
And so, and then 50 years after Descartes, then they say, well, no, no, that was the naive part of his thinking.
We're going to get rid of that.
And now we understand that spirit was an illusion of the ontologically naive mind and there's only force and momentum.
And then you have permission to commit all kinds of atrocities against nature.
Although the permission to commit these atrocities has been present in the Western tradition for a very, very long time.
I mean, you go back to Gilgamesh and you discover that what's going on in Gilgamesh is that Gilgamesh rejects the goddess and the goddess sends the bull as her emissary to Gilgamesh,
which I take to be a symbol of the mushroom, obviously.
And Gilgamesh rejects the cosmic bull, rejects the goddess, and then he gets his shaman friend Enkidu, who's very reluctant about this enterprise.
And he says, you know what we need to do?
I have a great idea.
Let's go into the wilderness and you'll help me and we'll cut down the tree of life.
And this is what they do.
This is some, you know, cuneiform tablets that are dug out of the ur-level of our civilization.
And what they're plotting and scheming is two clowns want to cut down the tree of life.
So this alienation goes very deep.
That's why the psychedelic experience is illegal and repressed and suspect.
It's because nothing less than the whole kitten caboodle of this civilization hangs in the balance against it.
It is forbidden to know that the dynamics of the mind have such depth and breadth.
We are supposed to live in a narrow canyon of consciousness, walled in between awake and asleep.
And anything else is considered pathological.
And we make a little place for artists as long as they don't get too uppity or obscene.
And otherwise it's all closed off.
Well, you know, breaking into this is, breaking through this, is this recapturing of the birthright that I've been talking about.
Other comments? Yeah.
Every time I eat mushrooms, I go through them.
There's three things that happen to me that invariably happen.
Physical things.
And I wonder what you make of them.
Or if you have them.
I know you have a couple.
One is a tearing.
I always tear, and then I always go through a phase where I start to yawn.
And the yawning, then I start making a sound.
It's like my head becomes an echo chamber.
And it always happens to me.
And I play with that sound a lot.
And then I heard the Gyoto monks.
And I go, that's the sound.
Same sound.
And I've heard you discuss the sound before.
Well, even in the pharmacology textbooks, the yawning gets in for psilocybin.
It makes you yawn, they say.
And it certainly does make you yawn.
The tearing, it also makes your nose run a little bit, about at the 40 minute mark.
The tearing, I associate with the actual moments when the visions are occurring.
It seems as though your eyes produce a lot of water.
And the tone is, yeah, pretty basic to the presentation of these things.
The way it works for me usually is, I take it on an empty stomach in silent darkness.
And at about the hour and 10 minute mark, there's visual streaming.
Nothing much before.
I mean, running nose, restlessness, need to go to the bathroom.
One of the things you don't want to do is, once it begins, I think it's very important to stay still.
And you will get into loops where it would be better to be downstairs.
It would be better to be on the other side of the room.
It would be better.
This is the small, tinny voice of true madness trying to push you off your point.
And you just say, no, no, it wouldn't be better downstairs.
And it wouldn't be better across the room.
And it's better right here.
And then at an hour and 20 minutes, you get visual streaming, which are these.
I've also noticed they occur after orgasm.
They're like purple after image, kind of amorphous jelly bean shaped lights that are passing by.
Not very interesting.
But they indicate the onset of something is happening.
The synapse is coming to the potential for the thing.
And then I usually smoke cannabis to sort of push it over the edge.
And at a certain point, I know that if I now will take a huge hit of cannabis, the whole thing will just come apart over moments.
And then it does, and it usually is, you sort of see it coming, you know, like a sandstorm or something.
I mean, it's 10 miles high and 100 miles wide.
And it just rolls toward you and there's nowhere to run.
And I usually just have a few moments to lie down is what I basically do.
That seems a good strategy at that point.
Lie down.
Ah, a plan.
A lie down.
So then I do that.
And that sort of helps a little.
And it just hits.
And you would swear that, you know, everybody from Vancouver to San Diego just hurled themselves underneath their desk.
Because it's like an asteroid striking the earth or something.
I mean, everything gives way.
You have these images of first there's light, then there's heat, then the instruments which record light and heat themselves
disintegrate and vaporize and begin to move outward.
And it's just, you know, a linguistic zero zone where, you know, language will not operate.
It's like ground zero.
And then this goes on for a long, long time.
And the viewpoint keeps telescoping back until finally the viewpoint is outside the blast zone.
And then you can begin an inward description of it.
Say, you know, oh, it's like this.
It's like that.
It's telling me this.
It's telling me that.
Other times it's this Irish elfin band thing where they come literally tiptoeing through the tulips, you know.
And you hear it far off like the tinkling of bells.
And then it just gets louder and louder and nearer and nearer.
And then you see it and then it's around you.
And it's, you know, like that's like, well, it's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon directed.
So, I'll see you guys have a couple of seconds.
So, I'll see you guys.
I'll see you guys next time.
We'll see you next time.
Bye.
by Tristan Zara or something like that I mean it's quite zany unpredictable the
thing that always impressed me about psychedelics was the way in which it
could convince you that you could never think of this you know and that was the
the stamp of authenticity the fact that it was moving faster than your own
imagination astonishing you making you laugh frightening you leading you on
teasing you it's very strange I mean there's nothing else like it it's like
you know the Arabs used to say of the city of Isfahan in in Iran in the 10th
century that it was half the world because of its vaulted domes and
minarets that if you hadn't seen Isfahan half the world lay before you well it's
literally true of psychedelics I mean half at least of the world lies over yonder
in these strange dimensions and they're not inaccessible you know they're very
accessible you don't have to spend 20 years around the ashram and yet my
goodness we maintain decorum around them and to don't break protocol and behave
ourselves in the presence of it I mean even those of us who are supposed experts
or accounted great explorers of it spend nine times as many as much time talking
about it is doing it you may be sure so you know it's just a kind of a cultural blind
spot seeming to a person like myself very important to someone else
extraordinarily trivial I mean there was even a book published on the drug
problem recently called America's great drug war by tread lock tread well tread well
who's a good guy he wants legalization he's a good guy but there's no entry for
psychedelic drugs no entry for LSD no entry for masculine it's not what they're
talking about not what they're worrying about the even the people who want drugs
legalized do it with this kind of okay you know this attitude we're defeated will
legalized drugs screw it that's it go ruin yourselves now there's no no notion of
hope no notion of a pharmacological engineering of consciousness to any
reasonable end it's just you know if you're not willing to go it alone with
god's grace well then you're just consigned to the road to hell yeah I had some friends that have used
MDMA with ketamine and 2CB I'm sure someone has used it with mushrooms but that's crazy if you'd heard
MDMA with mushrooms let me see if I can remember I can't really remember anybody
specifically doing that all these things get done I always I sort of try to warn
people off of these things and I'm a terrible party pooper because I'm just
such an obsessed person that all I really care about is this very narrow
psychedelic effect there are a lot of weird altered states of consciousness
around many of them you know drug-induced and a whole spectrum of them
alcohol-induced yeah how was that well I felt it right away that my emotion was
just thought sullied sullied I was sullied but I thought I violated relationships I
cultivated relationship with the mushrooms what is this doing here who is this cheap
trollop yeah synergies are and sort of unexplored area because there are so
many of them you all understand synergies are what happens when you rub two drugs
or more together and very weird things happen but they're not very controllable
or repeatable my what I always say to people about choosing drugs and
strategies for bringing drugs into your life and your program of spiritual
development or self-exploration or whatever is the most interesting drugs are
the ones that occur in plants that the occurrence of a drug in a plant shows that
it has a certain affinity to organic life but that doesn't mean that there aren't
hellacious toxins in some plants I mean there's curare there's strychnine there's
cyanide these are plant byproducts as well but nevertheless as a first pass it's
important that a compound occur in a plant well then the next thing is does it
have a history of human usage and the interesting ones almost all do psilocybin used in Mexico for
millennia other parts of the world it's probably for a very long time although the
evidence is less clear mess peyote has a long history of usage in the American
Southwest cannabis is goes back millennia so does opiate use so then do these
things have a history of human usage and even specifically shamanic usage and then
to my mind the really interesting question are do they have an affinity to
ordinary brain chemistry do they because and I mentioned this this morning the
strongest drugs are the ones most like ordinary brain chemistry the most extreme
case being DMT DMT only lasts seven to ten minutes and yet it's the most profound
dislocation of reality that you can undergo well why is it that it is both so
profound and so quickly quenched in the organism it's because in the human brain bio pathways exist which
recognize and degrade this very readily because they are there all the time performing this
function on DMT so it to my mind you know it isn't that you sail out toward the most synthetic or
complex or chelated molecules but that in fact these things are highly suspect that
what we're trying to do is actually tweak consciousness do reverence to the physical
brain but tweak consciousness as little as possible to get the desired effect one of the
really fascinating things about DMT I think is that once someone has smoked it once someone has had
this experience you can have a dream in which it is introduced into the dream as a theme DMT and then
you actually smoke it in the dream and it actually happens in the dream and I don't know of any other
drug that this is true of and it's what it says to me is that even though this is an extremely radical
psychedelic experience apparently the chemistry that is the precondition for it is just under the surface
almost within reach of conscious awareness I mean I've sat down at times and thought about smoking DMT and
tried to invoke it and never succeeded the way I've succeeded in a lucid dream doing that but it shows I think that the chemistry is very close to ordinary
metabolism
yes it's closely related in this in the family of in the chemical families of the
hallucinogens you have the indole family which is a fairly large family and it
includes the lysergemides that are the LSD type drugs the beta carbolines which are MAO inhibitors and occur in
banisteriopsis copy and the aboga alkaloids which are psychedelic aphrodisiacs from West Africa and then the tryptamine group and the tryptamine group is the largest group and it comprises the
largest group and it comprises psilocybin in the mushroom and DMT in the leaves of certain bushes and in the barks of certain South American trees and then it also occurs in other plant genera but not in very high concentration but
five methoxy DMT occurs in toads five methoxy DMT is interesting it's recently had a kind of vogue because people discovered they could collect the exudate from the toad and dry it on their windshield and scrape it off and then smoke it up and or sell it for about $80 a gram. I think that's the
that's a big thing in Florida. It's a big thing in Florida. Now they're out of the pharmacy they're out there licking toads.
Well nobody actually licks toads that's just a slander. What you do is you milk the toad onto the glass of your four wheel drive vehicle windshield and then let it dry in the sun and then scrape it up and collect it in a film canister.
I know people who really like 5-MEO DMT. I don't care for it. I find it weirdly empty. It's not visionary like DMT. DMT is a chaos of hallucination. It is the most hallucinogenic compound there is. I mean it's just hallucinations stacked on top of each other.
I mean in every angle tiny demons are seen to be performing elaborate calisthenic exercises and you know much else is happening. But when you do 5-MEO DMT for me at any rate it was like this feeling yes it feels like DMT yes my heart is racing just like DMT yes yes yes no no nothing happened.
It didn't do the thing. The other piece of information that I feel obligated to pass on to you as a spoil sport is that 5-MEO is fatal in sheep.
They just fall over with their little pointed feet trembling in the air. And you know I guess it's a way to tell whether or not you're a sheep.
But it's a little alarming that a mammalian species so substantial and woolly and so forth falls over dead when exposed to this stuff that you and your friends are furiously smoking up in the dead.
Why? They don't know exactly. It's neurotoxic. These neurotransmitters fall into narrow ranges. Sheep are sensitive to a lot of stuff that's why they're always dropping nerve gas on them and stuff like that because they seem to have a fairly narrow tolerance to neurotoxins.
It's somewhat alarming you know not DMT not 5-MEO DMT not DMT.
How different is it?
Well just the difference of that methoxy group in the five position. But you know this is why sheep get staggers and die because they're eating phalaris species grass species with low amounts of 5-MEO in them.
And they're always getting staggers and getting problems with that. Anything else?
Yeah. Physical side effects from the mushrooms.
Physical side effects from the mushrooms.
Well one of the things you have to understand is that research on psychedelics is illegal and not even encouraged among professionals.
So a lot of what's known is anecdotal. Whenever you talk about the side effects of any drug you have to realize that people are highly variable.
So tolerant and drugs are the area where these differences between people show up dramatically.
Generally psilocybin is thought to be a fairly safe compound. In terms of crude measures of its safety it's very safe.
I mean for instance the way pharmacologists talk about drugs is they talk about what's called the LD50.
This is the horrible concept of if you have a hundred mice how many how much of this drug do you have to give these hundred mice so that 50 die.
The LD50 the lethal dose 50. Well for psilocybin it's huge.
I mean hundreds of milligrams per kilogram of body weight. So that's not a possibility.
That's the cheerful news from the world of reductionist pharmacology.
The problem is that when you get out there the whole religion of taking these things holds that science doesn't know what it's talking about.
So when you get out there and you have the complete and total conviction that you're dying then you have to grapple with this.
And the thing is it's always completely convincing and this is just something that it seems to put one through occasionally.
You don't get much sympathy from straight people. I mean they say well psychedelic drugs isn't that the bit you think you're in heaven then you think you're dying then you think you're God then you think you're dying and I thought that was what is supposed to happen.
Well as we know you try to steer around that if there are episodes of fear the only thing you can do is sit it out and breathe it out and sing it out.
The one thing people shouldn't do is clench up and hunker down and just go into the fetal position and stay.
What you want to do is circulate a huge amount of energy and oxygen through your body by singing.
This is what shamans do when they get into difficult places. They sing their way through it.
And it is ambiguous. It is complicated to go into these places. I don't think anybody voyages repeatedly into these psychedelic spaces without getting into some fairly weird stuff.
What kind of songs do I sing? They're usually based pretty much on the tonality of the situation and getting and finding a tone that I can ride out of the situation.
And they're synesthetic. I mean a tone like you know you're feeling it's doing something to you and you can steer your way through weird stuff with this.
Then usually you become distracted and by the act of making the sound itself.
Because the sound first of all you either have or have the illusion that you have tremendous control over the production of tone.
Your ear gives you a tremendous ability to differentiate these tones and they're appearing in front of you as colors if you're loaded enough.
So this is the modality in which you can experiment with the visible language.
You try to syntactically construct out of tonality and glossolalia some kind of convincing modality.
Most of you have probably heard ayahuasca songs.
They're driving is what they are. They're repetitious and they're driving and you discover in yourself you know the capacity for glossolalia which you can ride.
You can lift the meaning governor off of the language machinery and just let it spin and it's indefensible as art but ecstatic to do you know.
I mean I tend to do glossolalia which are more conversational and I like them because they play with meaning.
So that kind of stuff sort of sounds like.
You can do this alone in the dark.
Yeah, I do this alone in the dark.
And what it is is it's it places an edge for the light to follow and you discover meaning in the absence of context.
I mean you discover like the source of meaning before it is contextually located.
Don't ask me what this kind of these kinds of words mean.
This is what I how I learned to talk hanging out with these semiotics people.
But it's something like that you know and I think people did this for hundreds of thousands of years for each other as a form of performance art long before somebody got the nuts and bolts notion that you could connect an action in the world or as linguistic intent to a sound.
That we just set up for this these small mouth noises and it's tremendously under the influence of psychedelics you know you can make language get up and walk around.
I mean you can literally peel it off the ceiling and set it dancing in your presence.
If any of you have read Robert Graves book The White Goddess, he talks in there about what he calls an Ursprach, a visibly beheld language of primal poetry.
And he thinks our anxiety has to do with the fact that we have lost the true speech.
And that if you speak the true language, the Ursprach, it's a beheld language.
It doesn't require the conventionalization of dictionaries.
You know what you mean and that the loss of this genetic language is what made us so maladaptive and at unease with ourselves.
Are there practices on spiritual love or otherwise that can be in between psychedelic experiences to prepare oneself or strengthen oneself for the experiences?
I don't know. I mean I always go into it with knees knocking and just it's terrifying to me.
I know somebody who says the attitude they take mushrooms with is that each time they pray that they can stand more.
And then some people don't feel that and say that it's easy, that it's psilocybin.
But it isn't all psilocybin. I mean it isn't all dancing bunnies and all that stuff.
Do you have any idea what people have those two types?
Oh, it's very complex. It's almost an x-ray of your horoscope. It's your own expectation.
The time can be wrong. I'm convinced that if the time is wrong, you can be a saint and it will shake your teeth out.
And yet what is the wrong time? How do you find it?
I used to always throw the I Ching going into it.
And if the I Ching said don't do it, I just wouldn't do it.
There's psychic weather. There's low energy. There's personal anxiety.
There's also even, I think, the state of the collectivity.
That, you know, go into it when half the world is on the brink of war.
And, you know, it's complex.
And it's getting more complex in there because of all this knitted together stuff.
So it's delicate. It's like skin diving or sailing or one of these things where you have to carefully judge the initial conditions.
The initial conditions. The initial conditions largely determine the end state.
And then this is what shamanism is, is this ability to judge those conditions and call it right.
Ken.
Yeah, but don't you think that as an ayahuasca diet helps?
Yeah, I think that what Ken's referring to is in the areas where ayahuasca is,
the happening thing, indigenously, the shamans say that the diet is the real precondition for doing it.
And they, and how long you've kept this diet.
And, yeah, I think that shamanism, psychedelically practiced, is the art and science of human physiological transformation.
You know, and that with, with, by manipulating indoles and manipulating growth hormones and all of these things,
a kind of superhuman condition becomes available.
And this is what these people figured out in these climaxed rainforests.
They had nothing else going. They weren't into metallurgy.
They weren't into the purification of chemical elements.
These other directions that we followed were alien to them.
And what they gained was a tremendous facility with natural chemistry and diet using the human body as the primary retort,
the baseline, the alchemical furnace in which all these transformations were going on.
I'm convinced that in its native setting, ayahuasca is a telepathic drug.
I mean, people, small groups of tribal people are taking this thing and making group decisions based on group hallucinations,
based on the collective database of the tribal group.
They're seeing the information from a higher dimensional space.
But this is a kind of telepathy.
It's an impossible connection between this phenomena and reincarnation.
And what?
Reincarnation.
Well, we talked a little bit this morning about the relationship of these ideas to death
and how shamans claim that they're seeing into a world of souls.
I don't know.
I find it...
The thing which really got me is the presence of these English-speaking entities in the trance.
I mean, that I did not expect.
From Jung and from Freud, you expect residual memories, but not these entities, these beings.
And then the question is, where are they?
Who are they?
Well, a conservative...
The possibilities are fairly limited.
They are either dead people, because they are clearly more like people than like animals.
They, after all, speak and communicate and have intentionality in a purely intellectual realm.
So that means they're like people.
But they're not like anybody you've ever seen.
So are they dead people?
That's one possibility.
Or are they extraterrestrials?
Well, that's another possibility.
But the problem is, we've never seen an extraterrestrial.
We've got dead people all over the place.
We know that there are dead people.
But we don't know if anything survives bodily death.
Well, then the other source is, are they from the future?
Are they future people?
We see people now.
So we can extrapolate.
There must be people in the future.
They might be different from us.
Perhaps they could come back.
So those are the fairly uncomfortable and limited choices.
They're either an advanced state of humanity.
They're the souls of the dead.
Or they're some kind of extraterrestrial dwellers in a parallel continuum.
Well, now you're supposed to generate hypotheses conservatively.
That means that the dead lead by a mile, just by logical deduction.
So the strangest hypothesis turns out to be the least, the most likely,
that these are the souls of the dead and that, and it's possible that reincarnation is something
where at a certain point in historical time, we find out about it.
We learn literally the secrets of death.
I mean, this would be big news.
It would be quite a surprise to the forward thrust of scientific rationalism
if what it was going to lead to was a communicate, opening a communication line to the ancestors.
I just wanted to hear about the peyote church because it seems to really fit.
And I had questions about initiation because I think that's really missing in a lot of this material.
I just wanted to share one vision I had in peyote during my ceremony,
and that was there was a feeling inside my body that something was going up and down my spine
or something was moving around.
When I closed my eyes, there was a bird flying around inside my body.
And as I got deeper into it, there was a flock, and then there was a lake, and then there was forests,
and then I started crying because it was just very pristine and beautiful.
And it got wider and wider in there, and other species that are now extinct
started appearing and saying, don't worry, we've all gone inside,
which was really too much for me to take because it was really a sense of what these Indian people have been teaching me
in the past 10 years is that the ancestors do exist. Death is simply taking off masks,
and that they do come and teach, and that they do live inside, and that there is a hazard.
and always will be a way of communicating to the past, our past, since we have time
in this linear way, to ask for information on that. And I'm real interested in just again
asking about initiation in the sense that I feel that a lot of the things that's missing
here is the context of the circle of people who are committed to ceremony which is historically
and otherwise, really the setting that gives us the return to that state you were talking
about earlier, which was that group consensus sense of support and love and sharing the clan,
the tribe and everything. Do you see, for instance, use of psychedelics moving in a ceremonial
or ritual fashion in a way of creating new ways of coming together as people to heal that circle
with shield? Well, where it's most enduring, I think this is how it ends up being done.
People do the work on their own, but then they tend to form into circles. This is how I think
the serious psychedelic voyaging gets done, because the circle gives people permission and courage.
If we had an unbroken cultural tradition, we would be initiated by master shamans. As it is, we've had to sort of reinvent
the whole of the world's oldest religion. And we haven't done that bad a job. I mean, we shouldn't feel
that we have to fault ourselves. The anthropological literature of the world is vast. And if you spend time
with it, you will know more about these things on a certain level than most people in a traditional culture.
It was very interesting being in the Amazon, you would go with the people and they would show you their plants
and then, and it might come up that you would say, did you know that the Conebo, who live 50 miles away
from you, also use this plant and they call it X. And they would just be astonished. Say, how do you know this?
Well, you couldn't explain that you had read it in a Harvard Museum botanical leaflet, but that was how you knew it.
You knew it because you'd done your homework. So what they had was tremendous vertical initiation into one culture.
But what you can bring to this that is very useful and respected is a tremendous general knowledge about this.
Say, well, did you know that in Africa people use the same plant and they do it like this? Or did you know that in Indonesia
similar practices are going on? And so we've reconstructed the shamanism.
But from then spending time with ayahuasqueros in the, in the Amazon and other kinds of shamans in other places,
I really see that it wasn't as formal as we thought.
There are rituals and songs and techniques, but the spirit of shamanism is open minded and open ended.
And these people are really doing this out of curiosity to find out the, the myth, the mythological structures created by any kind of shamanic system,
are largely for the consumption of the client, not the shaman.
The shaman knows that this is all provisional.
And what we found with the shamans in the Amazon was great curiosity, great willingness to try out novel concepts,
to integrate weird ideas into their own cosmology, electromagnetism, viruses, computers.
They loved all these things because they saw them as metaphors that they could integrate into their visions.
The flying saucer is a metaphor like this, very strong in the ayahuasca mythology.
Liz, did you want to say something?
You said earlier today or yesterday sometime, so that's why I have to write things down.
The domain in which we operate lies within our minds.
And I'd like to know how that, I'm always confused about real and not real.
All these realities you've been describing with little elves, et cetera, et cetera.
Is that within your mind?
And is the English because that's the language you're most familiar with?
Well, I think what I meant when I said the domains in which we operate are all within our minds,
is that inside culture it's all whatever we say it is.
In other words, other than that it's day and night, nature doesn't say much to us.
We pursue our activities all inside a construct of culture that comes out of language.
So that's what I meant when I said that it's all within the domain of our minds.
I mean, it's all within the human world and potentially affected by the human mind.
The problem of real and unreal, which is supposed to be a naive problem, is one I have too.
I think that the real world is so strange that it's just almost too freakish to suppose.
You know, I quote all the time J.B.S. Haldane who said,
the world is not only stranger than we suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose.
This is a tremendous liberation once you grab onto it.
It's really true. I mean, how many of you know that?
That it's really true that the world at any moment could come completely and utterly apart.
And have you seen that happen?
You know, that's really what I'm concerned to communicate, is the provisional nature of reality.
It does have a certain momentum and thank God for it.
Because, you know, who could stand it if it were always coming unglued.
But on the other hand, you know, if you're an edge runner, if you keep poking,
there are these things you can do and then it just springs to pieces.
And I don't say it's all lies. It doesn't seem to operate in the domain of truth and lies.
It's just that this is all just such a limited slice to what's possible.
That was very liberating for me to find out.
I remember the first time I smoked DMT and when I came down, they practically had to hog tie me.
And all I could say was, I can't believe it. I cannot believe it. And I couldn't. I still can't.
I mean, the whole impetus for my career is to convince myself that somebody else has seen the same thing
and that they can't believe it either.
Because, you know, it's so weird that it always floats to the top.
It always calms down and turns back into this.
You know, rooms full of people sitting listening.
But beneath that, beneath that is just this really unspeakably bizarre thing.
Not as we're told it should be. In fact, as we're told it isn't.
The one thing they tell you it isn't. It is. It is. It is made of magic.
Anything can happen. I mean, to have elves by the thousands pouring into your apartment.
How can a rational... What is a person to do with that?
You know, because it's that what happens is that in a single moment, in the privacy of your own reality,
it's revealed to you that all of history is a mistake, a delusion, a horrible misunderstanding.
But you're given no evidence. Only the conviction that this is so.
And then you're set down among your fellows. And they don't know what you're talking about.
Can't understand why you've become so agitated and addled.
And I think this is what we all as psychedelic people live with.
And we suspect each other.
We can't be sure that anybody has ever really seen the true naked heart of the stone but ourselves.
And so then it's this tremendous catalyst to language, to try and build metaphors, to try and get the nod of recognition, so that we are satisfied.
It's not really stranger than the real world.
It is the real world.
I mean, in the so-called real world.
I mean, that's...
Well, it's more brightly colored. It's moving faster.
I mean, yeah.
Why is it so brightly colored? Why is it moving faster?
I mean, what I've noticed in my DMT experiences, and when I realized this, it was with a certain amount of horror, was you break into this space.
It's dome-like. It's warm. It's diffusely lit.
There are all these self-transforming machine elves and their toys, which also are singing and condensing and making objects and so forth and so on.
The whole thing is like triggers just wonder, cascades of wonder.
But then I realized after seeing this several times and trying to pay attention and hold my mind steady, that this is someone's idea of a reassuring environment for human beings.
It is, in fact, literally a playpen of some sort.
Well, that means that I'm not seeing who's ever on the other side.
I am emerging into an artificial construct of some sort, entirely their creation.
Well, then it just begins to lift this veil, and there's this howling begins, and you just begin to fall forward into it.
And you realize, you know, it is the Sephiroth and the Shekinah.
It is the howling between the worlds.
But it is approached through an infinite number of veils that reassure, coddle, control, confine.
But you can move toward it as fast as you dare.
But it is entirely transforming and entirely real.
So, it was a great realization for me to understand that there was no limit to how far you could go.
That we all make a certain choice.
Once you discover psychedelics, always before that spiritual progress is, you know, grunt work, suddenly you're standing on ice cubes in terms of spiritual progress and how you make it.
How do you control it?
And the answer is, most people go a certain distance and then give up, get off, stand there and talk about it.
But there's nothing holding any of us back from becoming unrecognizable, not only to our friends and loved ones, but to ourselves.
You know, the stories told of the Taoist guy up on Cold Mountain and he's been up there 25 years and occasionally people see him.
And yes, he's still alive.
Well, any one of us could become that person, could march off into a dimension of magical narcissism so alien to the concerns of other people that we would have to go and live up on the crags and in the mist and eat bird nests or whatever they do up there.
Well, so then that puts a whole different light on the spiritual quest because it means that we're holding it back rather than lashing it forward to ever greater exertion.
And I think that's the proper attitude because the depth of spirit is infinite.
And in its benevolence towards suffering humanity, it has made itself available in infinite amounts.
So then it's for us to somehow come to terms with this.
It's like having a living religion.
It is having a living religion because it's having an infinite source of gnosis, of understanding available.
Somebody?
Yes?
A little bit.
It was recently written about meditation and it has a preview to death.
It says that it conditions you to enter the bar room so you won't shy away from the museum and go into it fully.
Do you see any role of meditation as a preparation for psychedelics or would you just talk about meditation and your opinion on it in general?
Well, it teaches you to sit still, which is a precondition for psychedelics.
I mean, you know, keeping still is one of the hexagrams of the I Ching.
People often ask the question you asked or in slightly different forms.
They say, well, isn't there another way to get there?
Is it so narrow?
Is it so specific to these plants?
And, you know, the truth is, I don't know.
I'm not an expert.
All I know is based on my experience.
In my experience, these things can only be approached this way.
And who would want to approach them any other way?
I mean, we don't want this to become so generalized that by closing your eyes and ripping off a few om tat sats,
you fall into the kind of states I'm talking about.
I mean, that would be extremely unwelcome and nearly pathological.
I don't understand this problem with how you achieve it.
To my mind, obviously you can't do it by yourself.
Obviously you can't do it on the natch because it's a meeting with another entity.
There has to be an other and it has to be objectified even if it's as a plant or a mushroom.
So basically how I read these meditation texts is they teach you about psychological phenomena.
They teach you what you may see when you close your eyes and sit for days and watch.
The thing about meditation in my own experience is that it's just tremendously boring.
However, everything you're doing will be very useful to you when you take a psychedelic.
Then it works.
Then there is this flow of imagery.
I am maybe a very lumpen person, but that's alright because a lot of us are lumpen and I wish to speak for that slice.
There may be supreme aesthetics balanced on such razor's edge of metabolic peculiarity that at every moment they are at one with the mystery.
But that butter is no bread for the rest of us, you know.
We're trying to create a kind of democratic consensus here about this stuff.
And it seems to me the plants were put there for this purpose and they achieve it so easily.
I mean I practiced yoga at times in the past and had some amount of success with triggering exotic psychological states.
But they were very difficult and time consuming.
And then they always told you that wasn't what it was about anyway.
And you were becoming distracted by phenomena.
Well, why bridle then at just chowing down on five grams of mushrooms with the knowledge that, you know, you'll be fine in 12 hours.
So it's really a matter of using the tools.
There are all kinds of altered states, weird states, states of sexual abstinence and states of various kinds of agitation and this and that.
But what I'm interested in is just this very specific set of phenomena.
And I don't really make any claim for it to say, you know, this is the spiritual path.
I don't say that what I say is this is the most interesting thing around.
And but it's very specific.
For instance, I don't like drugs which mess with your mind in the sense of that distort your your value assessing ability.
The drug which comes to mind is ketamine.
Ketamine is an extremely powerful synthetic drug that creates an experience, which if you haven't had ketamine, you don't know what this experience is.
It's that specific to it.
But hell, the house could burn down around you and it would arrive as an unconfirmable rumor on the dark side of your metaphysical imagination with this stuff.
I mean, you would never lift a hair.
It would never enter your mind that there was a problem.
Datura is like this, too.
Datura severely distorts reality.
The day I knew that my experiments with Datura had come to an end was one day in Nepal.
I was talking to a friend of mine in the market about his Datura experiments and how much he'd been taking recently.
And in the course of the conversation, it came out that he thought we were in his apartment.
And I realized, looking at this poor soul, that there had been severe degradation of core information processing and that we had to get back on the wagon or we weren't going to get out of there.
But now, but so then, let me describe for a moment the state of mind on DMT is if you keep your, there is a tendency to give way to absolute astonishment.
But if you can hold that back and pay very close attention to what's going on, you will discover that it didn't do anything to you.
That here you are and suddenly in the midst of a raging universe of hallucination and you are you.
And you are who you were before.
And it has not in any way inflated, repressed, suppressed, distorted or skewed anything.
You're just saying, aha, wow, mmm, I'm really smashed.
The input is reaching overload.
But there must be this core observer who's never overwhelmed.
And this persists with most of the tryptamines.
Now, sometimes it is overwhelmed.
But when it's overwhelmed, it's the last thing to be overwhelmed and the first thing to pop back into existence at the end of the period of overwhelmment.
So sometimes on ayahuasca, you just lose it for a period of time, 20 minutes or something.
But then you reconstruct and you're there like a little cork popping up to the top of the ocean.
You say, oh, here I am.
It's me again.
So this is very important to be able to observe.
With DMT, the reason it's so fascinating is because the input, the content, seems to be almost entirely confined to the visual cortex.
It's something that you look at and it comes toward you and it relates to you.
There is a weird distortion of body image, but it's small potatoes compared to most of what's going on.
And you can maintain this I-thou relationship.
So, you know, my tastes may be narrower than some people.
Some people just like to get, you know, fucked up.
And they go one way and then another and a few reds and a shot of this and a hit of that.
So there's really nothing to be frightened about with the elves?
I mean, it sounds like they could be demons if they want to be.
They could be.
They're demonic.
They've never done anything bad to me.
It's that they're humor.
It's like being trapped in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
I mean, we all know how funny a Bugs Bunny cartoon is, but have you noticed that the humor is all based on explosions, falling anvils, and agony?
And so imagine if you were actually in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, you know?
I mean, it's a parody of that situation.
I don't know the vibe of these creatures is very strange.
They're knowledge holders.
Like, I've often thought that what they were was meme traders because they had the same feeling that I associated with the Indian hashish traders.
They're meme traders.
They are...
When they spread out all this stuff in front of you and are saying,
Look at this.
These marvelous jeweled objects.
These are things they are selling.
They want to trade.
They're asking, What have you got?
You know?
What can you show us?
Your Rolex?
Your fountain pen?
Your political beliefs?
Your sexual orientation?
You know, what do you want to trade?
And so they're sort of like cosmic pack rats.
You know, pack rats will take something, but they always leave something.
Have you ever dealt with pack rats?
Oh, pack rats are fascinating because if one finds you, it will leave an object in trade for whatever it takes.
And the trick is to work it your way, you know?
So you give it a paper clip, it gives you a fountain pen.
And there are stories in the gold country of Colorado and California of people having relationships with pack rats where they were trading at thumbtacks and it was bringing them gold nuggets.
Until, you know, they had enough gold nuggets that they could leave off trading with varmints and get a life.
Yes.
From your experience of other cultures that you have psychedelic, do they always make people kinder and gentler?
Do psychedelics always make people kinder and gentler?
Do they make us kinder and gentler?
Well, that's an interesting question.
I mean, as I get older, I ask it slightly differently of myself.
I ask the question, you know, if this stuff is so great, you know, what is so great about us that we're any different from anybody else?
Or are we just like Holy Rollers and Rolfers and Daoists and Hasidic Jews and everybody else who thinks they've found the final answer?
What is so great about it?
The answer to your question is, I don't think so.
I think of the Yanomami culture.
Certainly from the exterior, this looks like a fairly brutal culture.
The men, it's the only culture where DMT is a regularly abused drug.
And the men blasted up each other's nostrils with these hollow tubes.
And then the name of the game is two guys square off.
And you plant your feet flat on the ground.
And the guy who goes first hits the other guy as hard as he can with the flat of his palm in the chest.
And the game is to knock the person over.
So you absorb this blow and then it's your turn.
And you get up and you do it.
And these two guys, totally loaded, saliva flying to the four winds, will stand and do this until somebody has knocked off their pins.
Well, so then you ask them, what's going on here?
You know, is this like the Super Bowl?
Is this fun for you guys?
And they explain that they have demons that live in their chest.
And they collect these demons on their psychedelic trips.
And the more demons you have, the harder it is to knock you over.
So they're doing this thing.
But they're also lacerating each other with clubs and this sort of thing.
I think that it's fouled up.
I have the faith that if you have psychedelic religious ritual in combination with group sex,
in a small tribal group whose economy is based on nomadic pastoralism,
that then it will be very, very hard for these people to maintain a neurotic lifestyle.
But that if you interfere with any of this, then you'll get anxiety.
And so you have psychedelic cultures.
But the Yanomamo, this is a culture of male dominance and sexual anxiety and, you know, a lot of tweaked stuff.
But I think that the main thing is that the cultural group must take the psychedelic frequently enough that the ego does not form.
And that the specific manifestation of ego that you want to watch out for is concern for male paternity.
That once it's gone that far, it's lost.
And then, because then there's male-male rivalry for women and territory.
Yeah.
I'd like to go back to the Irish elves for a second.
My wife came across an article, she's Irish, and came across an article last year drawing a loose connection between the ancient sweat houses.
And the possibility of seasonal ceremonial use of shrimps.
We sent you that article.
I remember that article.
Yeah.
I was wondering if you followed that up, in light of your having written the introduction to the...
The Celtic faith, or the fairy faith in Celtic countries.
Well, it would be very interesting to prove psilocybin use in ancient Ireland.
That people who have been to places like Ionia, and like that, say they're just overrun with mushrooms.
And yet, it's not explicit in any Celtic source.
There's a lot of psilocybin in Europe.
I mean, I was surprised.
I thought that it occurred rarely, and so you could make the argument that it was possibly there.
But last year, when I did a speaking tour of Germany, and we were from Hamburg clear down to Munich and into Switzerland,
everywhere there were mushrooms.
And we would talk like we're talking here, and then have lunch recess.
And people would come back two hours later with small grocery bags full of these things.
So...
Well...
Go toavez 커.
No stop, you.
At what we know it's hard on these things.
Now.
By that note, we plug the пой an easy dramatic attempt at the back scene of the the Sakia society.
Amen.
But we can also move into this...
And if we build a quick step, we have a Schrione.
Well, I don't understand the peculiar, there must be something we don't quite grok about
why the mushroom image is taboo.
Maybe because it looks like a penis, but that doesn't really sound right to me.
But why is it so rarely portrayed in all these areas where it must have been used?
For instance, in the northwest coast of Oregon and Washington,
there's something like 22 indigenous species of psilocybe,
no anthropological record of mushroom use by the northwest coast Indians,
who were clearly paying attention.
I mean, when you look at their carving and painting, they were paying attention.
Where is the record of the mushroom use?
In ancient Ireland and throughout the Celtic area into Germany and Bohemia,
no visible use of mushrooms.
In the culture of old Europe that Maria Gambutas talks about.
Again, a prohibition of the image.
So this is puzzling, not easy to understand.
I would like to believe that in Africa, 15,000 years ago,
the primary religion of humanity was goddess worshiping pastoralism based on sacramental use of mushrooms.
But again, the physical evidence is just a few petroglyphs, drawings on stone.
And it hasn't been, it isn't a strongly proven case.
So it's not well understood.
It's hard to believe that the Irish weren't mixed up in this somehow.
I mean, it seems so basic to the Irish soul.
How many grams of mushrooms do you recommend taking?
Five dried grams.
And you should weigh it.
You should invest in a little scale and weigh it because people eyeball it
and they inevitably choose much less than is the correct amount.
And if you're taking fresh mushrooms, you should take like 60 grams, you know,
because it dries down by a factor of more than nine to one.
You're referring to cubensis?
Cubensis.
We're always talking about sterferi cubensis because that's the one people cultivate.
Some of the wild ones are stronger, can be taken in smaller amounts.
But I think it's good to take sterferi cubensis because then you know what you're getting.
Because it's, you know, some of these small psilocybes look physically very much like gallerina species
that have irreversible liver destructive toxins in them.
So if you eat a gallerina, you'll have a very bad experience or maybe a very good experience.
But none of us will ever know.
Speaking of mushrooms, how about the Amanita muscaria?
I've heard the poem on that.
Well, this is a very controversial mushroom that occurs worldwide.
You all know this mushroom, the red one with the white dots on top of it,
the toadstool of European mythology.
It's used in Siberia and places like that as an intoxicant.
And Gordon Wasson thought that it was the basis of soma.
But it now looks like it probably isn't the basis of soma and that it's very variable, seasonally variable, geographically variable, genetically variable.
So you never know what you're going to get.
It's very hard to obtain a reliable, desirable intoxication from that mushroom.
It's another one of these.
There are a lot of these things that are sickening and distorting and that after you've gone through a night with them,
you feel reborn because you're so damn glad you lived through it.
But they're not really psychedelic, you know.
Any other questions?
Can I say something before about this idea about the dead ancestors?
Oh, yeah.
What about?
I saw a man recently in some New Age magazine that stated,
just because they're dead doesn't mean they're smart.
That actually had an IQ test that you could give to them.
An IQ test to your ancestors?
Say that well to the entity between channel and form.
Oh, that's great.
We've needed that for a long time.
Just the simple test for grammatical correctness would eliminate.
The other thing I was going to say was that I've had some experience with ketamine,
and I did not find it at all distorted my central observer self,
the way you talked about Dutura.
And I think at the height of a DMT trip,
you wouldn't be able to do much to look at the fire in the house either.
I mean, when you take a psychedelic that powerful, ketamine and DMT,
you make sure you put yourself in a situation
where you don't have to worry about physical surroundings whatsoever.
True.
But the thing that I noticed about ketamine
is the first thing that happens is you stop worrying.
The very first thing,
before there's any manifestation of any symptom whatsoever,
you get this kind of,
oh, what the hell?
And that's the sign that it's beginning,
but it's also the sign that you're not paying attention like you should.
The first couple of times I lived out there,
I was scared that I was dying.
Well, I think it also depends on the dose.
How much did you do?
50 milligrams to 100 milligrams.
Yeah, well see, I didn't do it that many times,
and each time I did it quite a bit.
And it was reality obliterating for sure.
I've noticed that people who get into ketamine tend to dose downward rather than upward,
tend to settle in somewhere around 50.
And this is probably, I shouldn't even be speaking about it,
because I don't know what 50 is like.
I know what 150 is like.
With the DMT, the main thing is, at first you think,
my God, how could anyone ever retain or remember any of this?
But it's really that you have to learn to control your own astonishment.
That it's like having a heart attack of wonder.
And after you've had the experience three or four times,
you just learn to be cool.
You say, you know, I am not going to give way to a bunch of exclamations
about how amazing this is.
And then, and they tell you to do that.
They say, don't start raving about how amazing it is.
Pay attention to what we're doing.
We know that you're blown out.
We know that you're amazed.
Yes, yes.
Now, pay attention to this.
And then they try to convey this linguistic thing,
this visible language.
And I don't understand, you know, what this is all about.
Is this always been what they've tried to convey?
Is the message always the same?
Is there a new urgency about visible language?
Or is it, you know, how much of the message is already present in me?
Is it a message tailored for me?
Like this question of whether or not these things are ancestors.
Then you get into questions like, what ancestors are they?
Like I do not feel when I break into the DMT space, that this is my dead mother or my grandparents.
I feel that it's more, that it's just sort of local spirits.
Yes, who would have thought?
A little white haired old lady.
And then sometimes I think that the reason it's so hair raising is because the chief soul in this weird place is actually your soul.
And that the hair raising aspect is, it's not just any dead person or a dead relative.
It's you dead.
And that's the one thing that causes the whole thing to shimmy and fall apart and go into a tailspin of cognitive dissonance.
When you realize that the entity you're dealing with is yourself beyond the grave, then you just flood out in the amazement, wonder, horror and disbelief department and lose the focus and come down.
Back here.
Yes, small people.
Well, five grams is what I think would destroy most of the resistances of a hundred and forty-five pound person.
A person who weighed ninety pounds could take far less.
But a person who weighed ninety pounds who took five grams should be in no physical danger.
It is, you can play with it, but at higher doses it gets stranger and stranger and stranger and stranger and stranger.
Anything above eight, you're definitely a pioneer as far as I'm concerned.
But it's a good point.
If you weigh ninety pounds, you maybe don't want to chow down on five grams right on the get-go.
But the key is to do more rather than less, because otherwise you can miss the point, you know.
Could you say something about that, because I know I've had numerous trips on different substances where I felt like I took too little and it was almost more horrifying than if I just knocked myself over.
Yeah, well, I think where the trouble comes is in the sub-threshold doses where you're neither fish nor fowl and you're thrashing around in it and you get into these loops of psychological, abrasive psychological self-examination and stuff like that.
And what you want to do is you just want to blast through all that.
It's hard.
Can you sing through that?
Yeah, you can sing through that.
So that's one of the things that you sing through to get through that?
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Singing and cannabis are my techniques, and together I seem to be able to move it around.
You mentioned that you have mushrooms alone in the dark.
What is the effect of being with people who are either observers or participants?
Oh, well, for me, I mean, I'm, you have to understand, I mean, I'm a double Scorpio and a kind of reclusive type anyway.
And the reason I don't particularly like tripping with people is because I just worry.
I'm a worrier.
And if I'm stoned and somebody else is stoned, then I worry.
And I listen to their breathing, and I wonder, and I wonder how they're doing, and I wonder if I should ask how they're doing.
And I just lose all spontaneity and I become completely the victim of my imagined concern for this other person.
And then the other thing that happens is people are the weirdest objects in the universe.
And if you're stoned and you come upon another person stoned, I mean, they can just unleash something you could never have imagined or conceived of.
I remember, I think I learned this lesson the hard way in India, but years ago, once at Sarnath, and it happened many times, but this was typical.
Sarnath is the place where the Buddha taught his first sermon after attaining enlightenment.
He walked from Bodhgaya to Sarnath.
So I took mescaline there with these two women who were friends of mine, and it's all nicely green and sculpted.
And we were sitting there under a tree, and I swear, you know, 500 yards away, there were these two Indian guys walking across my field of vision.
And I was sitting there, and I was loaded, and I was watching the traceries.
And then I looked out across my field of vision, and I saw these two Indian guys stop dead in the center of my field of vision.
And then they said something to each other, and then they turned 90 degrees.
So they were now facing me, and they began walking toward me.
And I was horrified, and I looked down.
I was so horrified that I said, I can't believe this is happening.
I refuse to believe this is happening.
I will just look at the ground in front of me like this.
So I started looking at the ground in front of me, and I looked and looked and looked and looked,
until two pairs of brown feet appeared in my field of vision.
And then I looked up at these guys, and they had caught the vibe.
And they wanted to know what was going on.
And several experiences like this caused me to believe that, you know, you should really bury it deep before you take it into public.
The other thing I've noticed is, you know, if you're stoned in a confined space, there's a certain amount of control of synchronicity.
I mean, there's rustling in the corners, and batting at the windows, and so forth.
But this you can handle.
But if you take it out into public, God, it's just absolutely uncontrollable.
I mean, you could be struck by a meteorite.
You could be abducted by extraterrestrials.
A safe could fall on you.
Anything could happen.
Because the statistical disruption of ordinary probability is so great.
What did you tell those brown feet of people?
What did I say?
Oh, I remember what I said.
I looked up and I said, I cannot be interrogated.
It was good, but it didn't work.
Say, how long have you been in this place?
You're coming from which place?
No, what I found in India was people were telepathic, but it didn't make them like you any better.
It just gave them a fantastic kind of in.
But I think group psychedelic taking is very promising.
And people who can do it, groups that can do it and stick with it over years, log amazing experiences.
But it's very hard because what immediately emerges, if you have a group of people doing this stuff, is it will veer off in some weird direction.
One person will get a quote unquote funny idea.
And then the funny idea, everybody polarizes for and against the funny idea.
And then they have to decide, well, you know, they're losing, so and so is losing their mind.
They're in too deep with this.
Say, no, no, this is the answer.
And we're moving to, and just, you know, and quickly cognitive dissonance builds up.
And it's very, very hard.
I have a correspondent in the Midwest, a group of psychiatrists who over six years took mushrooms once a month together.
And they went through amazing contortions of wife trading and not speaking and speaking and denouncing and embracing.
And just because they were, you know, because it just unleashes this stuff and then it crawls around.
So I prefer to do it by myself and then, you know, get all combed and pinned back together before I present myself to the troops in the morning.
Because, you know, in the height of the thing, you could proclaim anything.
You think it's possible for a group of people who have been fairly experienced with psychedelics to get together wanting to do this very wonderful group telepathic thing and to create what they think, at least to try to anticipate what might be things that would pull it apart, that would unplug one?
It's hard to anticipate.
I mean, I've really found that the way the mushroom works is it reads you perfectly, much better than you can read yourself.
And then it comes at you with the one thing that you are vulnerable to and because it knows you like an open book and can lead you practically any direction that it wants.
But I think group work is interesting and should be pursued and couple work is very interesting and should be pursued.
I'm very conservative.
I mean, my approach to it is I basically turn it on and then I back off and watch.
That's all I ever do.
And I've seen I don't have the magical mentality.
I don't want to get something or take control of someone or a situation for good or ill.
But people who do make great progress in all of these areas, you know, I mean, people who want to design electronic circuits or play Bach on the piano.
But I don't do anything.
I'm interested kind of in the essence of the thing, what it is, the ding on siege, the thing in itself.
And that's why I don't listen to music.
This horrifies some people.
So you don't listen to music.
No, I mean, I have listened to music.
I know what it does to music.
It makes it the best thing in the world.
But without music, it also can do that.
And so I don't, I sit in silent darkness and I maintain that's where, you know, the essence of the thing is.
Then it's not colored by sound or light or expectation.
I'm trying to see beyond the mask, see what this thing is in itself, for itself.
Anybody else?
Anything else?
You mean in terms of in the proximity to the trip?
A lot of people like to fast.
I don't particularly say you should fast.
I just say you should have an empty stomach.
Five hours without eating is good.
You should just be cleaned out, you know, bring a certain amount of attention and respect to it.
And, and it's very, very kind to beginners.
The complexity comes later in this, in the, in the unfolding of the kinks of the personality.
But I think it's very gentle to beginners.
What's the ayahuasca diet you mentioned?
You mean actually what does it consist of?
It's no sugar, no alcohol, no salt, sexual abstinence.
It's basically a diet of manioc and certain fish, and I don't think many greens.
Is that it, Ken?
Bananas, plantinos.
It's probably analyzed nutritionally.
It's probably a serotonin-loaded diet because of the large amount of plantinos in it.
But it's a bland diet.
It's just setting you up to be sensitive, I think, to the uptake of the alkaloids.
That's an MAO-inhibiting.
It's an ayahuasca.
Yes, ayahuasca works through inhibition of MAO.
Good point.
You see, normally DMT would be destroyed in the gut.
But if you inhibit monoamine oxidase somehow, then it passes through the gut and is absorbed
and passes into the blood.
This was not known by Western pharmacology until the mid-1950s.
But it's always been known in the Amazon.
So the strategy, you see, what ayahuasca is, really, is a slow-release DMT trip
where you take a plant that contains DMT and you combine it with an MAO-inhibitor.
And then when you take these together, the DMT slowly releases and you get the equivalent of a DMT flash
but stretched out over about an hour and a half.
And so you can watch it more carefully.
And some people say, you know, that I overstress the visual side of things,
that all kinds of things go on on psychedelic drugs.
Insights, conceptual breakthroughs, weird distortions of body image and this sort of thing.
And this is all true, but to my mind, the visual thing is the most striking because it is so other.
It is so highly organized, so demonstrably the product of intelligence.
I mean, it's not a feeling, some weird feeling, you know, nausea or sub-threshold poisoning or all of these things.
These are feelings, but it's simply the release of understanding and visually, somehow visually processed understanding.
In addition to the other three possibilities, souls of the dead and extraterrestrial and all that,
would you entertain the idea that what we're saying might be simply constructs from the subconscious?
Yes, well, that's the other possibility.
Carl Jung had this wonderful phrase in talking about elves and fairies.
And he said, autonomous psychic components escape from the ego's control and present themselves as independent beings.
Well, that's just a description of a pretty twisted around state of mind.
It's the idea, you know, that you see the self in the mirror, and then you bring the mirror down and shatter it,
and suddenly there are hundreds of selves.
Each fragment of the mirror reflects a self.
This would be a conservative theory of what these things are, except that they don't look very much like the self.
The shock in DMT is, if this is myself, then I don't know who I am.
But, yeah, one thing I've thought of, in an effort to explain it, is that they are fractally parts of the personality.
That an elf is, you know, you put ten elves together and you have a personality, or something like that.
And so these elves are literally autonomous psychic components that have broken free from the control of the ego.
We say we've fallen to pieces, always talking about the psychedelic as a boundary dissolver.
Well, maybe what happens when you smoke DMT is the boundary dissolves so quickly that you can say of the situation,
that's me all over, because you're literally bouncing off the walls and visible to yourself.
The illusion that you are stitched together within a body has been shattered,
and your several or multiple personality components are jumping around the room.
I think the most extreme case of that that I ever saw was once I, I used to smoke, I don't recommend this,
but in my vanished youth I used to smoke DMT, and I smoked the DMT, and it was wild.
It went on for a long, long time, and it was very intense anyway.
And suddenly, right in the middle of this trip, this woman came back from Easter vacation,
came charging up onto the front porch of this house, and threw open the front door,
and ran into my bedroom door, and started beating on my door furiously.
Well, being a double Scorpio, and secretive anyway.
I just was like, had a heart attack, and I jumped off the bed, right out of this DMT flash.
I jumped out, and I landed on my feet in the middle of this room, and something about moving so suddenly,
had like shattered the distinction between the two continua, and I carried it all into the room with me.
And so the room was then filled with elves, and they were hanging off my arms, and spinning me around.
And there was this geometric object in the room, that was spinning and clicking,
and every time it would click, it would hurl a plastic chit across the room,
that had a letter in an alien language written on it.
And these elves were screaming and bouncing off the walls, this machine was spinning in the air,
these chits were ricocheting off the walls, and I was trying to deal with Rosemary in the middle of this.
And, you know, it was just, it was a too muchness.
It was a case of seeing too deeply into it.
And you have, you know, too many of those stacked up, and then you become reluctant.
And this is why I'm very cautious with it.
The notion of having enough chutzpah, or will, or something, to want to try and use this stuff,
I can hardly imagine using it.
I mean, my, every time I encounter it, my wish is to not be destroyed by it.
And the idea of using it for anything is just seems like blasphemy, you know.
And probably is blasphemy, but probably a good way to get cut down to size.
Yeah.
I was, you know, last night you were talking about how certain times harken back to other times.
Right.
According to this formula.
And in the beginning of this weekend, you were talking about the archaic revival,
we're going towards or through.
And I thought you were talking about going back to the time of that city in Turkey,
you know, that 30,000 years.
Cheftal here you are.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Could you say a few words about that?
I mean, is that connected?
Well, no.
That's the basic notion that, that somehow our future lies in our past.
Right.
And shamanism, well, the particular past that I wanted to concentrate on was this period of time
after the melting of the last glacier 20,000 years ago, and for the 10,000 years following
that when there were pastoral populations in Africa and leaving Africa that had developed
this ecological balance and this shamanic doorway to nature.
See, at every, oh, the computer isn't here, but at every glaciation.
Yeah.
I love to see.
My son.
I love to see.
We'll see.
My son.
And he's still in the прочey.
I'm just saying.
Yeah.
Uh, I think it's just a good question.
I think maybe.
I'm just saying.
You're like, we're going to start a great deal.
We refer.
We travel.
I think they're not so good and I've done the best.
human populations were bottled up in Africa during the time when the ice pack was thick.
Nobody was getting out. But only the last time were the people, was pastoralism developed in the intervening period.
So it was 20,000 years ago, those people leaving Africa were herders of domesticated cattle.
And all previous radiations out of Africa had been hunter-gatherers.
Yeah, the Minoan civilization, see, Chautaulyuk ended in 6500 B.C., but what's interesting is this is when you get the earliest Minoan settlements.
And they carry the pottery motifs and building styles of central Anatolia to Crete.
So it appears that what happened was Chautaulyuk was like the last outpost of this goddess culture.
And when these wheeled chariot Indo-European folks came down, the survivors of that actually went to Crete.
And Crete became this weird institutionalized backwater where literally for three millennia,
the fossilized social forms of the previous matrilineal society were kept intact.
While on Asia Minor, on the mainland, it all became about kingship, male lines of descent, and all that.
It wasn't actually until that turning point at the top of the wave in 980 B.C.
And you see that the last vestiges of this goddess culture were crushed in Crete.
And even then, you see the strain of mystical, of deep psychedelic mysticism that enters Greek religion is all imported from Crete.
The northern Thracian strain in Greek religion is rational and airy and oriented toward physical space.
But out of Crete came, you know, rites 3, 4, 5,000 years old.
And it was always said, even up until classical times, that the rites that were celebrated in secret at Eleusis were celebrated openly at Heracleion and Gnosis.
So that's the connection.
And my fantasy about all this is, you see, Çatalhöyük represents such an advanced civilization over anything else existing that,
and it can be traced back a thousand years to Jericho.
The people who built Jericho built a round tower there that was the absolute glory of the engineering world.
The world of 8,000 B.C.
And it was a grain storage tower.
But then these Jericho people, it's hard to trace where they came from.
What I think happened is that when you look at the stratigraphy of the Nile Valley,
you discover that actually there weren't people in the Nile Valley much before 10,500 B.C.
Then suddenly, these people appear who are called Natufayen,
and they build under the overhanging lips of cliffs and have a certain style of fetal burial in a honeypot
and certain other characteristics, Natufayens, and they appear out of nowhere.
Well, anybody who studied them has wanted to connect them to the culture of old Europe that Maria Gimbutas talks about,
simply based on the fact that they were so culturally advanced that the bias of all these scholars is to say,
well, they must have come from the Balkans.
But when you look at them as a cultural horizon, you see, to my mind, that they are unmistakably African.
And that when you go to the Tasseli Plateau in southern Algeria,
you find the same style of building, of living under the lips of caves,
and this same coarse-grained black pottery called Sudanese ware.
The pottery, the animal motifs, the fixation on the vulture, the jackal, and the cow,
these are all African animals that occur at Chattal,
seems to suggest that there was actually a sweep of African civilization
and out of Africa into the Middle East around 10,000 B.C.
And these people built Jericho a thousand years after that
and settled southern Anatolia a thousand years after that.
Well, this is, what this suggests then is that you could go out to the Tasseli Plateau
with sufficient resources and conduct an archaeological survey,
and the ultimate payoff in this fantasy is that you would unearth the archaeological equivalent of Eden.
In other words, you would discover the Urspot from which the Chattal civilization came,
the site of this mushroom-using goddess cattle civilization.
And when you read the accounts of the Tasseli Plateau,
well, there's every reason to think that this strategy would work.
It's a windswept sandstone escarpment.
And Henri Lote, who did the preliminary exploration out there,
said that in these arroyos where the sand has been cleared away by the wind,
there would be Neolithic stone chippings and detritus,
sometimes up to half a meter thick,
indicating, you know, thousands and thousands of years of continuous habitation
when this was all green.
There is an enormous unexcavated tell out there that has never been dated,
that is just carried on the archaeological surveys as presumed pre-Islamic.
It's enormous.
So digging out there might be a very useful thing to do.
It's from that area that we get these 9,000-year-old images
of shamans with mushrooms sprouting out of their bodies,
shamans carrying mushrooms over their heads
and running in long chains
with strange geometric motifs trailing along beside them.
So it would be a kind of recovery.
I think archaeology will play a big role in the archaic revival,
that part of our cultural dilemma
and our political infantilism comes from the fact
that we don't know any history.
So we're easily led.
I mean, we don't even really understand the history of the 20th century.
I mean, you know,
you ask somebody who Joseph Goebbels was
and they think he served in the Nixon cabinet.
I mean, and so hardly to speak of who was Suleiman the Magnificent
and just exactly what was Frederick Barbarossa's role
in European history and so forth and so on.
But recovering this is like waking up, gaining control.
And, you know, I said yesterday,
it's only been 1,500 generations of people
that have walked us into this dilemma.
But the archaic revival is a huge paradigm shift.
You can imagine, remember the example I gave
about the shift from the medieval to the Renaissance,
which really was a giving up of the universal power of the church,
the philosophical certitude of giving your allegiance
to the Holy Father in Rome
and setting out into, you know, the pure existential universe.
I mean, Marcello Ficino said,
man is to be the measure of all things.
Well, this sounds like old hat in 1990,
but in 1480, you know,
this was such a dizzying notion
that it can hardly be imagined.
You know, Giordano Bruno went to the stake,
was burned at the stake for insisting
that the universe was infinite in all directions.
You know, he said, no,
the stars and planets go on to infinity.
And they just said, you know, this is off the wall.
Only a demon could inspire a thought like this.
But the transition that we're asked to make,
that was a transition you see from the certitude of dogma
to secular existentialism.
The transition that we're being asked to make
is somewhat similar, but to my mind,
deeper, more challenging, more profound.
It's the shift from scientific certitude,
scientific certitude,
to a complete embracing of non-closure.
To actually begin,
it's a kind of maturity.
You know, what we're being asked to do
is to grow up and realize that, you know,
there ain't no free lunch.
There aren't always happy endings.
Not every story ends with the German shepherd
running in and licking grandpa's face
and everybody laughing,
and so forth and so on.
You know, hard truths.
And this lack of closure thing,
I mean, I feel it in myself.
And I assume, you know,
that ontogeny recapitulates and so forth.
So that, you know,
the struggle to become a real human being
is the struggle to give up
having it actually make any sense, ultimately.
Where, I think it was, of all people,
Robert Frost who said,
the secret of a happy life
is learning to enjoy people you don't approve of.
Well, you know, there's something.
What that means is you're surrendering to life.
You're just saying, you know,
it's bigger than I am.
I may not like drag queens,
but there they are.
And I should get used to it.
I should make the adjustment.
This kind of thing.
In other words,
recognizing the complexity of the situation.
And science has been like a long,
centuries-long bender
to exercise precisely,
exorcise precisely,
this kind of uncertainty from life.
And, you know,
to reduce it all
to atoms blindly running
under the control
of mathematically describable fields of force,
the problem is
all the higher order phenomena,
sociological, political,
aesthetic,
human organizational,
got shoved off to one side
and just sort of festered there
for a long time
while technology perfected itself,
mass production,
mass media,
information transfer.
But the human dimension lagged.
And now there is this tremendous imbalance
between like the technological descriptive power
of the culture
and its moral and ethical power
to direct itself
toward any kind of rational goal.
Well, when this happens in a society
or even in a personality,
you know,
you can sort of make a Jungian model of this,
you get what's called compensatory phenomena,
or at least that's what it used to be called,
means eruptions of material
from the unconscious
that is organized and constellated
like a message,
like an attention-claiming thing.
In a person,
in a personality,
it ruptures as a symptom.
It may be an attention-getting symptom
to then bring other people
into the caregiving loop
or something like that.
In a society like our own,
a scientific society,
it takes the form of the irrational,
the irrational appearing in strange forms.
A good example of this in the past
is the birth of Christianity
in the center of the late Roman Empire
or the early Middle Roman Empire,
where, you know,
the people who were administering the world
at that time
were Romans educated by Greeks
who were Epicurean atomists,
not Platonists,
not followers of Heraclitus
or Pythagoras
or any of the flashy folks we're into.
They were Democratean atomists,
rationalists,
materialists,
would have been very comfortable
in a modern chemical engineering company.
And they could not conceive
that the irrational
could hold any threat to their world.
Meanwhile,
they had dark-skinned servants
in the kitchens and in the gardens,
Jews,
Greeks,
Phoenicians,
people brought from the Eastern Mediterranean.
And among these people,
specifically the Jews,
this rumor began to tear loose
about a Galilean politician
who had somehow tweaked the Romans
and then risen from the dead.
Well,
any Roman administrator
listening to his illiterate cook
or gardener
babble out this story
would just,
you know,
think,
these folks is getting stranger every day.
But what was actually happening,
you know,
was a message
was being enunciated
which within 50 years
would be hammering
at the gate,
well,
make it 90 years,
would be hammering
at the gates of Rome
with all the power
of an invading army.
In a similar way,
the kinds of eruptions
from the unconscious
that characterized
the 20th century
are trying to serve
a similar function.
The,
well,
I don't know
where you want to put it,
but like,
for instance,
the eruption
of the beast man
in the episodes
of persecution
that happened
in Europe
during the 20th century,
persecution of Jews
and gypsies
and Slavs.
This,
you know,
was tremendously shocking
to the sensibilities
of so-called
civilized people
because people said,
my God,
we thought that ended
with Frederick Barbarossa
or we thought that ended
with Nero.
How can 20th century people,
the neatly clipped
and manicured cities
of prosperous
intellectual Germany,
how could it spawn
a thing like this?
Well,
you know,
the answers are complex
and multi-leveled,
but on a,
from a very broad
perspective,
what is happening
is the unconscious
is erupting
into history,
leaping on
to the stage
of history,
claiming
the undivided
attention of people
in a way
that surrealism,
which was a
limp-wristed
artistic movement
by comparison
to fascism,
never could.
Similarly,
you know,
you get that
under control,
the beast
is supposedly
suppressed
by making
notice a pact
with a greater beast
that a demon
can be summoned
from the heart
of matter
with the purpose
of wasting
the cities
of Germany,
but then it arrives
too late for that,
but then it's good
for the Japanese.
So,
it's this,
it's this
opera
about how evil
begets
greater evil
and people
are reaching
for ever greater
weapons.
then
the intrusion
of the atomic bomb
into history
sort of halts
that cycle.
Everyone stands
back
and goes
for a middle-class
existence
and suddenly
the skies,
the planet,
are filled
with the craft
of meddling
extraterrestrials
who are obligingly
dying in the desert
and turning up
on blocks
of ice
for Eisenhower
to inspect
and all,
you know,
this whole crazy story.
Well,
clearly what this is
is,
you know,
the unconscious
will not go away
in the 20th century.
Now the wheat fields
of England
lay down
in hieroglyphic
patterns
to try and shake
awake
the dreaming primates.
It's as though
the whole of nature,
you know,
is infused
with a linguistic intent
to communicate.
I mean,
I think this is
one of the things
you learn
on psychedelics
that everything
has a story,
everything has a lesson
and it's not
abstract
or remote
or removed.
I mean,
to the degree
that you can
hold your ego aside,
nature can
teach you
almost anything
you want to know.
I mean,
you can learn
hydrology
by staring
into a mud puddle,
you know.
I mean,
it is all happening
right there.
But ego
is a very subtly
interfering factor.
I always think,
you know,
in my own experience
at one time
in the Amazon
when I was at my
most illuminated,
I could walk
into the jungle
and invite
butterflies
to come down
and settle
on my
outstretched hands
like St. Francis
of Assisi,
you know.
And I would do this
and it would bring
tears of joy
and affirmation
to my eyes
and then it would
go on and on
and the tears
of joy
and affirmation
would clear
from my eyes
and in the midst
of this pure
unadulterated ecstasy
a tiny thought
would form
which was
wouldn't it be nice
to show this
to somebody else
so they could see
how great I am.
And so then,
you know,
dismiss the butterflies,
scurry back
to the camp,
gather up
a skeptical
colleague,
bring them back
to the clearing
and march out
into the clearing
with outstretched hands
to just have
nothing happen
except people
just turn away
in just
my god,
you know,
what an embarrassment
you've become
that it's all
going to end
like this.
Better you should
be eaten
by termites.
It's a better story.
So,
you know,
it's weird.
I mean,
Tao is like that.
You can't push it.
You can't use it.
Somebody asked me once
was I worried
that the mushroom
could be used
for evil
somehow.
And actually,
early on,
this occurred to me
and I put it
to the mushroom
and it basically said,
you know,
you can't grasp it.
It isn't even there
if you have
wrong intent.
You can't even
perceive it.
It's very
selective
and it must be
so
because one of the
puzzles
for me
being in the
communication business
is how it spreads,
how the tree
of information
spreads,
where it's tolerated,
where it's repressed,
where it's embraced.
It's very interesting.
You may have noticed
mushrooms get
extraordinary good press
or none at all.
Even in the height
of drug
war hysteria,
the image
of mushrooms
is largely
neutral,
unformed
in any direction,
otherwise viewed
as rather
comical,
harmless,
humorous.
It is somehow
hardwired into
our consciousness,
connected into
an archetype
that we are
inherently friendly
toward as primates.
Probably this has
to do with
this deep
food
programming
that went on
for a long,
long time.
We literally
cannot bite
the hand
that feeds us.
So we have
a kind of
intellectual blind
spot to this.
Nevertheless,
of course,
it is a highly
repressed
Schedule I
drug
viewed in
the same
category
as heroin,
cocaine,
and what have you.
This is because
it has
quote unquote
no
recognized
medical
application.
I don't know.
It depends
on what you
think of
as mental
health.
I would argue
that it's
an enzyme
for the
imagination
without which,
as the sign
says on the
blackboard,
you're not
yourself.
I don't know
who wrote
that up there,
but they
must have
heard an
old tape
of mine.
This was
a graffiti
on a wall
in Cali
in Columbia.
Without
this,
you are
not
yourself.
Elf,
the elf,
the self.
Well,
this is
sort of,
I regard
this as
the freebie
lecture that
you could
sit out
if you
had a
massage
because
it's
just sort
of,
it's
something
which I
discovered
as one
way of
putting it
or dreamed
up as
another.
And it's,
if nothing
else,
it demonstrates
the slippery
nature
of ideas.
And I,
depending on
the audience
I'm talking
to,
I present
it different
ways.
Like,
sometimes I
present it
as God's
truth.
and then
like in
Austria,
this art
thing,
I presented
it as
a work
of
conceptual
art.
So,
yes,
safer,
right?
So,
and it is,
it's a concept,
it's an idea
that small
computers,
such as we're
looking at,
came along
just in
time,
or about
five years
after I
first needed
them.
And,
so I'll
just sort
of talk
about it
a little
bit and
feel my
way into
it.
It's
more fun
to play
with than
to discuss
the
theoretics
of,
but if
you don't,
you know,
if you don't
have some
appreciation
for the
theory,
then it
doesn't make
any sense
at all.
The basic
notion is,
or the way
in which this
idea parts
company from
Ordinary Science
is,
there is
the idea
that there is
something which
has been
overlooked in
the categorizing
of the
forces which
shape and
maintain the
cosmos.
Something has
been overlooked.
And I
call this
something
novelty,
following
Alfred North
Whitehead's
philosophy
as put
forth in
process and
reality.
So,
novelty,
and one
way of
thinking of
it,
if you have
a Tao
talking about
here,
is pretty
much
something like
the Tao,
but we're
going to
call it
novelty.
And it
comes and
goes in
the world
according to
mysterious and
unfathomable
rules.
and it
builds
structure up,
dynastic
families,
corporations,
nation states,
and it
pulls structure
down according
to some
whim or
some unimaginable
algorithm,
or previously
unimaginable
algorithm.
And part
of what got
me started
thinking along
these lines
was simply
trying to
make
mathematical
models of
Tao.
In other
words,
taking the
statements at
the beginning
of the Tao
Te Ching and
taking them as
mathematical
formalisms and
then seeing what
the constraints
were on a
system that
operated along
those lines.
Well,
eventually that
led me to
look at the
I Ching,
which is
sort of the
text par
excellence
relative to
this idea
that time
has qualities
and this
idea of
the ebb and
flow of
novelty
that I was
playing with
I discovered
was a notion
that was very
old in the
East.
It's not
a notion
that's
even tolerated
in Western
thinking
because science
in order to
do its
business
must have
the assumption
that
experiments
are
time
independent
that
whether you
do an
experiment
on a
Tuesday
or a
Saturday
this is
not a
valid
parameter
of the
experiment
however
this idea
is suggesting
something else
it's suggesting
that time
actually does
have
a quality
and that
this quality
so far
introduced as
novelty
and its
opposite
and I used
to call
its opposite
entropy
but at
Rupert
Sheldrake's
urging
I now
call it
habit
so this
is a
kind of
Manichaean
cosmology
in which
habit
and
novelty
are in a
constant
struggle
with each
other
one
gaining
dominance
for a period
of time
and then
the other
gaining
dominance
in an
endless
dynamic
relationship
the result
of which
over long
periods
of time
is
that
novelty
is
conserved
I think
I used
this phrase
last night
in the
introductory
talk
but without
explaining
the ideas
which lay
behind it
but
the idea
is that
from the
psychedelic
point of
view
or
from
this
point
of view
the universe
is perceived
as a
kind of
engine
for
producing
and
distilling
and
maintaining
novelty
and
passing
novelty
on
to yet
higher
states
of
novelty
each
level
of
novelty
somehow
allowing
the
emergence
of
properties
previously
forbidden
at more
constrained
levels
so that
the whole
thing
is a
bootstrapping
process
to
greater
and
greater
novelty
and
self
reflection
well
so that's
the basic
notion
then the
idea
is
following
the
statement
of
the
Tao Te Ching
that the
way that
can be
told of
is not
an
unvarying
way
and
following
the
idea
the
ideas
implicit
in
the
I Ching
that
time
is a
succession
of
irreducible
elements
that
time
in some way is made of irreducible elements, in the same way that matter has been discovered by Western science
to be made of irreducible elements. So somehow time is not simply a plenum, a
featureless, homogeneous surface upon which the
experiments of Newtonian causality can be carried out, but
actually when we look at it at the level, the fine-grained level of experience
within the context of a love affair, or a dynastic families
rise and fall, or something like that, we see then, you know, that it's permeated with
qualities, and in the West these qualities were identified by the Greeks and called fate, and
said, you know, to be is to be faith-laden.
Somehow the fates impinge on our lives and lead us to our destinies.
Science got rid of all this, and then we just had, you know, flying atoms whizzing around in
nothingness, leading to some inevitable
causuistry dictated by mathematics.
Well, okay, I don't want to say too much more about the theoretics of it,
but inevitably the question comes up once we get into the wave,
where did you say you got this wave again?
And the answer is, it arose from a
fairly stoned circumstances, but a fairly dry problem,
meaning, you know, I was seeing a picture of the order of the King-Wen sequence.
Now, background, the King-Wen sequence is a certain arrangement of the 64 hexagrams of the Yi-Ching,
and this particular arrangement is very old, found on on shoulder bones,
thirty-five hundred years old, and so forth. So it was simply asking a formal question.
What are the rules which produce the King-Wen sequence?
It's always called a sequence. It's always revered as one of the oldest of human abstractions.
But what, in fact, is the sequence?
Well, in looking at that, and I won't try to lead it through,
lead you through it tonight, unless in a question-and-answer period some maniac can see it.
But, what it boils down to is that in the King-Wen sequence of the Yi-Ching,
there is embedded a fractal algorithm,
a fractal algorithm very much like the fractal algorithms that have been discovered in just the past seven or eight years by modern mathematics
using high-speed computers.
And, but the interesting thing about this fractal algorithm inside the Yi-Ching,
is that it actually appears to make good on the claim which the Yi-Ching has always been so concerned to make.
Namely, that it was a piece of prophetistic machinery for mapping future time.
In other words, that it was a predictive engine for knowing the future.
So, what I brought out of it, or what I was led to find within it by the promptings of the mushroom genies,
was a certain pattern, a certain pattern, that I was able to mathematically nail to the wall and define.
And then all the computer does here is time scale this pattern, and then I will become the devil's advocate for this thing.
And I will claim to you that this undulating wave on the screen actually describes the career of novelty in time,
in all time, in all places, throughout the history of the universe.
And we will look at big pieces of time, little pieces of time, and you will quickly get the idea that whether this is quote-unquote true or not,
this is some kind of weird heuristic device that has about it the ozone stench of other worlds.
There is a seamless completeness to it that marks it, not as a discovery or an invention, but as an artifact of some other order.
Well, so now let's look at the screen, and if I can come up with a pointer, and even if I can.
And I'll show you how this game is played, if the software will cooperate.
The software is very good, it was written by Peter Meyer.
The idea existed before the software, but before the software, these screens that you're going to see,
it took an entire day to make one of them, and it just left you, you know, red-eyed and tremoring,
and there was the possibility for hundreds of arithmetic errors, and any one of which would throw off the signature.
So, the invention of small computers in 1977 really opened this up for us.
Before, we ran telephone directory size lists of numbers, which we could then look up,
and, you know, go off, and then produce graphs somewhat like this.
Okay. Now, I know it's hard to see, but the main thing you have to see is the line and what it's doing,
and then I'll try and explain everything else and make sense of it.
These are novelty units along this axis, and we've never named them, but you can think of them as eschatons,
or whatever, white-head-ons, but this is the important axis, and this is the time axis.
Now, what's being portrayed on the screen right now is six billion years, six billion years.
In other words, a time span longer than most people require for the life of this planet.
The Earth is thought to have condensed around five and a half billion years ago,
and that very fact is portrayed here, because this, now, here's a convention that you have to internalize,
or nothing from this point on will make sense.
It's very simple, but it's somewhat counter-intuitive.
It's that when the line moves down, novelty is increasing.
When the line moves down, novelty is increasing.
When the line moves up, habit, or entropy, or recidivistic tendencies are increasing.
Okay, well, so then, looking at the life of the universe on a scale of six billion years,
you see why I say it's an engine for the conservation of novelty, because novelty, though there have been
some severe setbacks, like here, generally, novelty has been conserved.
And right now, we're down in here, in this stochastic noise and damped oscillation,
at the very end of the cycle, so close to the zero value, which is the maximum value for novelty,
that, for all practical purposes, at this scale, we can be said to be next to the zero value.
And this is, I maintain, what accounts for the chaotic and highly novel nature of modern history,
or the 20th century.
It's that we are so near the zero value, the maximum value for novelty,
that it's actually, like, there's an anticipatory image,
seepical space that it is.
Well, now, let's see, God willing, we can make this thing zoom in.
Zoom? Yes.
So now we have 750 million years on the screen,
and what was previously stochastic noise, lost near the zero point,
is beginning to emerge instead as a repetitious landscape of deep lunges toward novelty.
So now, how to interpret this?
This is about 400, about 500 million years ago.
So that big downsweep was the emergence of very simple life forms.
But the major career of biology has gone on along this sawtooth,
and this is in good accordance with the fossil record.
This is where the great speciations and extinctions took place,
after the establishment of the Chordata, about 500 million years ago.
Okay, now I'll restart the zoom.
Do you begin to get the idea of how, what you, as the viewer, or the jury, or whatever,
should be asking yourself is, does the wave fit my personal interpretation and understanding of novelty
as we move through time?
Because we are obviously, at this scale, it's pretty much up for grabs.
I mean, because we're talking about such generalized events as the emergence of life and so forth.
But we're going to get down on it.
We're going to enter, at some point, the cognizable domains of known history.
I mean, let's say since the fall of the Roman Empire, or since the fall of Richard Nixon,
you know, depending on how long your memory is.
Okay, let me get this thing going again here.
Here is the last 100 million years.
Now, I stopped the screen here, because there is an event in the last 100 million years,
which this thing would have to successfully predict in order to proceed further as a successful theory.
It's that 65 million years ago, either there was an enormous volcanic eruption on the surface of the Earth,
like nothing anybody has ever seen or imagined, or there was a planetesimal impact on the North Atlantic Ridge,
which seems to be the more probable candidate for what happened.
And this laid down the so-called iridium barrier, and it occurred right here, 65 million years ago.
It's a perfect hit.
In other words, the two cannot be dated precisely enough that we can't say that one is not precisely the other.
So this is our first calibration here, at 65 million years ago.
And actually, there was one earlier, I think 170 million years ago, which it also picks up.
But we've shot beyond that.
So now, and that was the event which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Nothing larger than a chicken walked away from this event on the entire planet right here.
And it gave the permission for the emergence of the mammals.
And the whole phyla of the Earth took a sudden different turn, which was explored along here,
until about 45 million years ago.
And then there was some kind of carrying capacity problem, or who knows what it is.
Because this is really approaching the height of the speciation of the age of mammals,
occurred about 35 million years ago, at the bottom of this trough.
Okay, so what we're looking at here is 100 million years.
And this is the period in which we emerged as a species out of arboreal primates, out of bipedal
proto-hominids on the grasslands of Africa.
We come out of this.
But most of the action for us as a thinking species is on this,
uh, you know, this period here, toward the very end.
This perfect, uh, kind of volcanic-looking cone, which I call history's fractal mountain,
which is sort of the signature of the whole wave, as you'll see as we get into it.
Okay, now let's again start the zoom, five million years.
And let's look at this.
Because now what it's saying is that suddenly, five million and slightly further back,
there's large punctuation in the novelty on the planet.
And we know a lot about this period.
And strangely enough, what we know about this period confirms this model very closely,
because what these things are known to be are glaciations.
which scale, and these low points here correspond very closely with the interglacial periods.
You see, what's happening is populations of human beings and animals are being locked up
when the ice moves south.
Then during the interglacials, these islanded populations are mixing,
and you're getting movement, progressive speciation in the fossil record along, uh,
at the bottom of these gradients.
And, uh, you know, it's a technical matter to match the glaciations in different parts of the world with this,
but the agreement is, uh, is pretty close.
Or, you know, a case can be made.
45,000 years.
And let's look at this.
Okay, this is a period of time where we actually begin to get artifacts,
human artifacts of, of an interesting sort.
And, uh, it's very hard to date the emergence of language, but it's interesting that one school
holds that it occurred about 33,000 years ago, and that we get this very steep
movement into novelty here, right there.
This is probably the heyday of the Neanderthals, because this is where the population numbers of the
Neanderthals seem to be, uh, the highest and found in the largest areas.
But, uh, this is a glacial period, the last glacial period.
And when the, when the inter, when the interglacial arrived about 19,000 years ago,
you get what's called the beginning of the Magdalenian era.
And this is a tremendous explosion of creativity, uh, painting, ochre burials, ritual, musical instruments.
All of these things are appear on this.
And this is, I maintain, where this partnership paradise, this mushroom, pastoral, feminized,
ecologically dynamic and balanced society existed along this gradient here.
Then it broke up around 10,000 years ago, uh, drying and the factors that we discussed,
shattered it. And, uh, there was a carrying capacity problem or something like that.
Here, let's see this in a little more detail.
But we're now closing distance with the cognizable domains of known history.
So, if the theory is going to fail, it should fail as the data accumulates and the dates become more precise.
We're looking at 45,000 years, 22,000 years, 11,000 years, let's look at this.
Um, okay.
Now, uh, what it's saying is that after this carrying capacity problem around 10,000 B.C.
was, there was somehow overcome, and there was a very, very steep descent into novelty,
which reached its culmination around 6300 B.C.
Well, this corresponds very well with the dates for Çatalhöyük in Turkey,
which is this Anatolian town, 9,000 years old, that achieved a level of civilization that was not
similar seen at any other site until, uh, a thousand or more years later.
In other words, until there were civilizations establishing themselves along this gradient.
This was the last bastion of the, of the goddess partnership mushroom symbiosis.
And what destroyed these people, we know Çatalhöyük V was destroyed in 6500 B.C.
by wheeled chariot people from the north.
In other words, this spells the Indo-European bad guys, uh, who, who came from north of the Caspian Sea.
And then you see this tremendous re-establishment of traditional pattern.
Well then, along this gradient here, you know, when I went to school, what we were taught was,
history begins at Sumer.
This was what we were always told, that it went Sumer, Ur, Chaldea, Babylon, Egypt.
And in fact, those great patriarchal river-based civilizations established themselves on a gradient
down here with Egypt, right here at the bottom, establishing a new high-water mark for novelty.
A high-water mark that would not be surpassed, until the Assyrians, these are all kick-ass chariot warfare,
warrior caste, uh, you know, that rigamarole, all that's going along here.
Then there's the great turning point.
I, I mean, here again, you're seeing the signature of the algorithm, and I call it history's fractal mountain.
Notice the moment is portrayed by that much of the screen, and now we can go into this and explore, uh, parts of it.
Let's look at it a little closer.
11,000 years on the screen.
There's history's fractal mountain, 5,000 years.
Let's look at this for a minute.
Okay, this is 5,000 years.
We're still targeted on today.
Uh, and what it's saying is that there was clearly a great moment, a single great moment of shift,
at some point in the past, when a series of conservative tendencies, habitual patterns of activity,
were in a sense overthrown once and for all, and even though there was plenty of
shit to be slogged through from here to here, the plot was inevitable.
Okay, well, so what is that point?
Well, it's about 980 BC, so what was going on then?
This is the shift to, it's essentially that moment when Mycenaean piracy overwhelmed the
goddess religion of Minoan Crete, and the Greeks stopped being fishermen, and pulled their boats
up on the shore and started to talk philosophy, and that set off a cascade of cultural effects
that then reverberate to this day.
It comes down along this gradient, then down here you get the fall of Rome,
then since the fall of Rome you get this series of wildly oscillating cultural effects
until as recently as the European Enlightenment in 1740, when the wave then drops to yet lower levels,
and begins to explore forms of novelty related to the human-machine integration,
and electromagnetic technology, and so forth and so on.
We'll look at this, but I just wanted to call your attention to this, and for another reason,
there's a concept here, which I haven't talked about yet, but which is good to introduce now,
and that is the concept of resonance.
Because this algorithm is fractal, because it is self-nested on many levels,
you encounter the same topological manifold over and over again.
Well, since we're looking at history, it's natural to make the analogical assumption
that these repetitious topologies are somehow related to each other,
so that there's a suggested in this theory a series of natural nested cycles where,
for instance, every 67 years, all the themes of the previous 4,306 years are somehow condensed
and acted out, and it's the interface and interference patterns set up by these times,
these times in the past and in the future, sliding against each other,
that create phenomena like fads, and fashions, and outbreaks of hysteria,
and weird taste things, and ripples in the collective mind.
Okay, so this is the signature of history's fractal mountain.
Greco-Roman civilization and its spectrum of effects are this long cascade down here.
Now let's look at it a little more.
Fourteen hundred and thirty years, and this I wanted you to see,
because this is the period of history that we all know the most about.
And strangely enough, the wave is very willing to make predictions in this region of history.
This is one of those levels of magnification, where the ebb and flow of novelty is predicted
as very radical and highly punctuated.
So, he looks for his crib sheet here.
So when you go through this, and you're trying to understand what's going on,
you're supposed to have novelty occurring at the bottoms of these troughs.
Well, this one, in the 930s, in the 10th century, is the culmination of Islam,
the creation of the Caliphates of Baghdad. And this was the one where Europe gets left out.
All this mathematics and poetry and alchemy is being created down here.
Then there's a series of bounce-offs, recidivist tendencies, until you get over to this one,
which is about 1119. And what this is all about, it's the height of the Gothic Revival and of the Crusades.
The people who are active in the bottom of that thing are people like Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Lombard,
Eleanor of Aquitaine, Thomas of Beckett, Pope Adrian IV, you know, all those folks famous from Masterpiece Theater.
They were all happening right down there.
So, you know, then the next steep descent into novelty is this one here in 1355, 1354-56.
Well, this was the greatest demographic catastrophe that Europe ever experienced.
It was the Black Death. A third of the population of Europe died there.
Okay, well, then this one, this very steep plunge into novelty, the top up here is 1440.
Gutenberg is inventing printing in Mainz, near Frankfurt. And by the time you get to the bottom down here,
it's 1492, the entire Italian Renaissance lies on the gradient of that plunge.
So, you see, what the argument is, and it seems to emerge with more clarity as we have more data,
is that history is actually some kind of process on a vast scale that is under the control of this
particular mathematics sequence of the species. What you get down here is the discovery of the new world, the lost half of the planet,
and that sets off a round of discovery and exploration that keeps things novel for a while.
But then slavery gets re-established, and a whole bunch of bad social habits take root,
and it pushes it clear back up to here. But then this is the beginning of the European Enlightenment,
and it descends very rapidly, with then the American Revolution, the French Revolution,
and the Napoleonic Restoration, all down in the bottom of this trough.
Well, then let's go forward just a little bit more. The 20th century is coming up. Now, there it is.
Now, remember how I called it History's Fractal Mountain, and we looked at it on a scale of 4,000 years?
Well, it was this signature, something very like it, with just slight scaling differences.
Within the 20th century, from 1945 to 2012, we're recapitulating, in some weird way,
all the themes of the previous 4,306-year cycle.
So, for instance, the way this game is played. Now, looking at the 20th century, we're seeing the
resonances of the Egyptian cultural manifestation, and we see that they reached their culmination in
1933 to 36. So, what this is saying is that the quality of this trough is
a millenarian cult based on the deification of a leader figure, coupled with a hysterical obsession
with tasteless architecture.
And we see this set of themes played out both in pharaonic ages. One is the resonance of the other.
You see, of course, of course, that's clearly what was going on.
Well, then, remember I said that the great turning point in human history was when the Mycenaean pirates
squashed the Minoan goddess-loving folks and set off the cultural cascade of Greco-Roman civilization.
Well, in this scheme of things, that moment happens right up here in early 1967.
And, of course, if you lived through that moment, you'd know that...
you know, there was a kind of pagan revival right there, which then got smashed, and then we
rode our way down into this long set of cascades, into then the wild oscillation of the present.
And one of the things that I wanted to talk about a little bit tonight is how we've actually
entered into a new kind of time. It began about three or four years ago, three, two years ago,
depending. What it has to do with is for a long time we were on a descending gradient into ever
greater novelty as we approached this asymptotically increasing novelty. Now we are so close to it that
we have begun to oscillate around a mean. And this explains, you know, the end of the Cold War,
the breakup of the Soviet Union, a number of things. And we are going to live in this kind of time,
unto the culmination of the time wave itself, which occurs in 2012. The time wave is unable to make
predictions past 2012 AD. One of the odd things about this revelation is its self-limiting property,
because as a fractal description of a data field, it only works if you assume that the whole thing
wraps itself around itself and disappears up its own gullet on December 22nd, 2012 AD,
only 22 years in the future. Now there we could talk about how could this be and what does it mean.
What I think it means is that the presence of self-reflecting organisms, people, on this planet,
indicates the nearby presence or the potential imminent emergence of some higher state of
organization. We are not simply the startled witnesses to this emergence of a new level of
organization. Our presence here is the first indication that it's going to happen. It's almost
like you can think of a pond. When the surface of the pond begins to churn, you know, the smart money
knows that something is moving toward the surface and is going to burst through. Well, history, human history,
all this dream exchange and information trading and lying and so forth, that goes on, is the churning of the surface of the pond.
And the smart money should know, you know, that there's a moment moving beneath the surface, that all this
is presaging. And so I think this is that kind of thing, that as we approach the
the hyperdimensional meltdown point or the chronosynclastic infundibulum,
precursive images of it will be thrown off. I think everybody's visions now tend to take the form of
totality symbols. And this is because it's constellating itself into a totality. We are so close now to the
trans-dimensional object, that it invades our dreams, our advertising, our waking fantasy,
our art, our mathematics. Everything is contorted by the attraction of this transcendental object.
Blake talked about this kind of thing. Anyway, now, let's go in a little closer there, because,
well, to humor me basically. 44 years, here's 1967. It's pointing at today, remember. 22 years, 11 years,
five years. Now let's stop it and look at it for a minute, so we can see how we're doing.
This is the last five years.
Well, it's not so much the last five years, it's pointing at today.
It's, that's today. And what we've got is two years, nine months, and 16 days.
It's here, here, and then here, which we haven't gotten to yet. But we've been through all of this,
so let's see how we're doing. Okay, to the day, to the day, this high novelty maxima corresponds to
the business in Tiananmen Square. Not the massacre, which is slightly off the trough and up on this side,
but the day they put a million people into the square peaceably, is right at the bottom of that thing.
Well, okay, so then we know that that ended unhappily. There was a reassertion of traditional patterns,
i.e. shooting students, what could be more traditional than that. So there was a lot of that.
And then, that sort of peaked out. And then there was another try at a novel maxima. And at the bottom
of this one, the Berlin Wall is torn down, right at the bottom of this one. So there's two hits in a row.
Now, there were a series of revolutions, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, and then finally
Romania going over the top, and that they became progressively uglier, progressively more in the
traditional mold, meaning costing more life. And that last, that week between Christmas and New Year's
of last year, when the footage was coming in from the radio station in Romania, it was fairly grim.
Well, that was as we went over the peak of this anti-novel or habitual thing. Then we started a long,
slow meander downward, which was fairly gradual. And a lot of stuff, you know, seemed fairly irrelevant
to us. It was all about the new German order and the SNL scandal. But then, we got to the bottom
of this. It's not quite as deep as this. But wait, I'll move this arrow a little. Yes, there's the 27th
of July. At that point, they're massed on the border and so forth. And then the invasion takes place
just a few days later. Well, what can we say about the prognosis for the future based on what we're
looking at? Well, number one, I think probably everyone would be advised to stay fairly liquid
in their portfolios. Because this crisis is being very carefully managed, but only up to a point. And
at that point, it goes over the lip. And this, the Tiananmen Square massacre point, is the previously most
novel point ever tested in the history of, you know, the cosmos. So, at some point next, late December,
or early next January, we're going to push through that, having been on this long slide down. So now,
there's an absolute prediction. What this is saying is that the big change to watch for
is around the 20th of November. The elections will be over, the week between the end of there,
and you can tell, you can tell, you can feel the momentum, the inevitability of it. I mean,
they'll be very hard pressed to hold it together till then. If we focus in there, let's take a look at that.
See how it ripples? See how at the end, it begins to come apart, you can't even tell where the top of
the peak is, because obviously, they just get it all piled up, these shit loads and shit loads of bombs and
gas and all this stuff. And then it rattles out of their control. And then there's a bifurcation,
a phase split, and down she comes. Let's, yeah, November 20th. Uh-huh. So then I thought that this
was pretty interesting. So then I want to show you something else. I want to completely change our
target date and everything. Let's use the command C. Yes. Okay. What we're looking at now
is 200 years. And these 200 years are from 499 A.D. until 699 A.D. Now, why are we looking at these years?
Do you remember how, in what we were just looking at, I said that we came down, that I said that the
Berlin Wall was here, the Romanian Revolution was here, then the SNL crisis and all that, then Saddam Hussein
invaded Kuwait here, at the bottom of this, and that I expected war to break out at the top of this.
Now we're looking at the historical resonance of what we were just looking at before. We're looking at
a much larger span of time. And what I want to show you is that when we put it close to where Saddam Hussein
invaded Kuwait, that's where he invaded Kuwait, it tells us that the resonant date is 579 A.D.
The accepted date for the birth of Muhammad is 571. So when you move it to 571,
it's only off by that much. So what this means is that this situation in the Middle East, we have chosen
to confront this guy at a period when the resonance which backs up what he is doing is the resonance of
the birth and career of the Prophet himself. Now, when you move it over to the date, the resonance which
corresponds with the 25th of November, it's 599. The Hejira was in 622, down there, and then Muhammad didn't live
much longer after that. But the gains of Islam were all put in place. I mean, this is the great gradient
along which Islam made its map. It corresponds to, in terms of next year, it corresponds to the 30th of
March. The 30th of March corresponds to the Hejira and the subsequent death of Muhammad. So what it means
is that in the way that history is both a plotted and unconscious process, we have managed to stumble in
to a situation where we will probably be sacrificed to the engine of historical inevitability. It's no
moment to confront Islam. I think probably Allah will be very merciful to the armies of the Caliph.
But, you know, then there's a faction which is saying, oh well, so is this the end of the world,
and is this Armageddon, and yak yak? No, of course not. All this is practically a memory by 1996 or 7,
when whole other problems loom. I mean, no, it's just some kind of crazy military adventure cloaked in the
form of a world war two and a half or something. There will be a lot of this stuff if this wave is
correct as we move toward the millennium and beyond it. Because you see what's happened is all these
historical themes, the birth and expansion of Islam, the rise of medieval Europe, the birth of the machine
age, all of this stuff is going to occur in a compressed form between now and 2012 AD. I mean,
this is my notion that the mushroom wants to put forth, that the universe is not going to exist for
billions or even hundreds of millions of years into the future, that actually the historical process
signifies something loose in the informational domain that is very strictly self-limiting. And so,
history doesn't go off millennia into the future. History, because of the way in which it feeds back into
technological development, history is some kind of self-limiting process that transforms the material
the material that it works upon. And the material that it works upon are, you know, human lives, human
destinies. I would never have come to this idea myself. I mean, it's too irrational for me. But when you,
but when you think, you know, you can then, once it's articulated, make a case for it. I mean, after all,
what is the counter case? What's, what do straight people have to offer? Well, what straight people
have to offer is that the universe sprang from nothingness in a single instant, from an object
whose diameter was less than that of a single electron. Well, hell, if you could buy into that, what,
what couldn't you buy into? I mean, it's like the grossest series of imponderabilities and
unlikelihoods that you could string together. You mean, where does this go?
Yeah, you started at six billion years. What if you had started at 20 billion years ago?
Ah, well, the duration of the wave, it has no. Oh, excuse me. The, the wave has no, um, defined physical
duration because it's a mathematical entity. It does have convenient break points at 72 billion years
and, um, 1.5 billion years. And because we know there are things that have gone on that have taken
more than 1.5 billion years, but we don't know of anything that's gone on that's taken more than 72
billion years. We've sort of rested with the assumption that... Do you see the, how the idea
of the resonance works? It works in a very literary fashion, somewhat in the way that James Joyce wrote
Ulysses. You know, Ulysses is the story of a man who seeks to buy kidneys for his breakfast in Dublin,
but in so doing he manages to be Ulysses and to visit all the ports of call that are listed and
mentioned in the Odyssey. In other words, it's allegory, it's internalization of a scheme of
action in one time and place and transferring it to another. But I think that this is how life is really
put together and that this is what psychedelics teach you on one level is one way of putting it is
Rome falls nine times an hour and you just have to be paying attention nine times an hour to see it go
by. And everything else happens nine times an hour and three times a day and once a week and twice a
month and four times a year and eight times a millennium and so forth and so on. And we're stacked up
inside this system of resonances, historical references, ghosts, scattered mirages, images, the memories of the
casuistry of past events. Yeah. So when you say 2012, I understand what you're saying. You're saying then we
no longer resonate with these other times in the past and is that what they mean by the end of ordinary history?
Well, yeah, I sort of fudged. I didn't say what happens in 2012. I don't I don't really know. I imagine it
to be this event that has to do with you know how I said the universe is a machine for the conservation of
novelty but that it conserves and produces novelty at an ever faster and faster rate and that the presence of
human history actually indicates that we have entered into what Whitehead called the short epochs. Meaning
kinds of time that are coherent unto themselves but that may last only a few centuries or only a few
decades you know. I mean the way in which the 20th century is a time unto itself. Well, I see this
speeding up and speeding up until the point where nobody will be unaware of the fact that the whole
space-time continuum is somehow collapsing on itself. It's a fairly literary idea because we're accustomed to
thinking of space-time as just sort of hanging around. We're not accustomed to the idea of it migrating
toward a point, but I think that the whole human species is involved in birthing some kind of alchemical object or some kind of
transcendental
something and that you know the reason our history is haunted by messiahs and prophets and wild-eyed characters
preaching doom and redemption is because in our dreams in our visions
we're picking up like five percent seepage from the transcendental object in hyperspace and it's what gives
history a kind of
the object in hyperspace is picking up the vibrations found that's the thing in the future. Yes and it's giving history
a kind of compass so that we keep correcting our course we don't even we're not even aware this is
what we're doing but we are actually stumbling toward and defining into narrower and narrower areas
this thing that we're after and when we finally grab onto it you know it'll be wonderful.
Is that what the algorithm pointed toward?
Yes the algorithm pointed toward that and when in that when we sought best fit between the curve and the historical data
it seemed to point toward 2012 then what was a good confirmation or a you know a curious coincidence
depending on where you stand is that the whole Mayan calendrical axis
turns out to rotate on the same day the exact same day for some reason the Maya who had a calendar of
five thousand three hundred and six years of thirteen buck tunes thirteen cycles
made the winter solstice of 2012 AD the axis point of their whole calendrical machinery
now the only thing I have in common with the Maya is we both have this affiliation with the mushroom
is it conceivable it's barely conceivable to me that the the message in the mushroom is specific enough
that no matter in what time or place you take it it directs you toward a specific solsticeal event
in a particular annual journey of the planet around the sun then the question becomes you know well
there are a number of questions the least of which is how did they do this and then the major one is why
why do this what does it mean to encode a prophecy into a psychedelic plant and then to have people dig
it out so close to the attractor event that they're really helpless to do anything other than witness it anyway
no this is the stuff of pathology it fills the back wards of our private mental hospitals
but you know soon something's going on you just have to wonder well that's a good question yes
why the each in which is what you're asking how can isn't it a little quirky to hang your whole theory on
mathematical sequence derived from an ancient chinese book of divination i mean how
how dilettante ish can you get you know but the answer is no because what they were trying to do with
the each in was they were trying to create a general topology of categories or a general uh typographic
list of temporal categories and the way they did it was by looking into their minds by stilling overt
physiological functions like breathing and heartbeat and looking into their minds and seeing
phenomena which we might call mental which they might call physical which somebody else might call
quantum mechanical but the ontological status of this phenomena is not ultimately what's important what's
important is that careful observation be carried out on it and that it be correctly categorized and what they saw was
the organizational rules of time itself and what put me on to the idea that this was not so strange
was i noticed a year or so ago i was looking at sand dunes and i noticed that sand dunes look like wind
and this is a fairly trivial observation except for me it wasn't because i'd never thought it before
when we all this always is tugging at the edge of your mind when you look at sand dunes but for me it
wasn't overt okay sand dunes look like wind what does this mean it means that a physical phenomenon
sand dunes takes its form from its interaction against a wave mechanical phenomenon to wit the pressure
fluctuation of wind over time and then i said aha so the sand dune looks like wind because it was made by
wind so then i said well then everything in the world bears the signature of the time wave within it because
everything in the world arose within the context of time so you know it's no more odd that we have within
ourselves the time wave than that pebbles are round from being rolled in the ocean it's just
consequence of what is etched upon you within you and so these taoist yogas or proto- taoist yogans
were looking at the organization of mind and seeing people arises within the larger fractal context of organic
nature which arises within the fractal context of um you know electromagnetic forces or whatever so it's uh
what starts out looking like a miracle that the king when sequence could have a magical wave inside it that would
describe human history ends up looking like a kind of unavoidable and trivial fact writ large over the face of all
existence that all objects in time have internalized within themselves images of the larger process in which they are
uh embedded yeah yes there are sequences other than king lan and there are systems other than this and i think it's a it's a groping
you know we're trying to see pattern and no pattern is wrong but no pattern is all of the pattern at least not yet
not yet uh one of the quotes that i'm fond of using vis-a-vis this and the psychedelic experience
is something that alfred north whitehead said about understanding he said understanding is a perception of
the pattern as such that's all as such so if you look at this room and you look at women and where
they're seated seated you learn something about the people in this room there's a pattern to how the women
are seated if on the other hand you look at the pattern of people who wear glasses that's a different
pattern it also tells you something about the room and there is just pattern upon pattern upon pattern
the people with blue eyes where the jews are sitting where the irish are sitting you know the older people
the younger people there's no limit to the number of patterns that can be extracted from a situation
and each one somehow gives us more control over the situation so what this is is the
pattern to process we know that there's a pattern to process because we have a very simple model like
this in english and in most languages it's that we most of us agree that most things have a beginning a
middle and an end and you know if we're in the beginning we look for the middle if we've passed the
middle we're looking out for the end this means we have a theory of process and in a way when you look
at history's fractal mountain it looks like the single discharge of a nerve all it is is a beginning a
middle and an end and process can William Blake said attend the minute particulars it's all in the details
this is this is what psychedelics teach i think is it's all in the details getting there is half the
fun the experience of life is in the fabric of it you know the the uh actual tactility of the passing
moment yeah what does the pattern look like between now and 2012 between now and 2012 let me see if i'm
still together enough to get such a thing together is it sort of been correlated with astrology oh yeah
different people have looked at it uh let's see specify target date let's say the first month the first day
of uh 1995 let's say of 2000 okay and we're over here we're poised up here see we're about
to make the big descent this will give you an idea this was a good one to look at because this book
gives us the perspective because it's hellish now there's the okay that's january february that's the
the second of
you
January February that's the second of February 1992 that's when all of this
stuff is maximized it's a long way in the future all of 91 C is down along
here where we are now well there's the projected date when the war goes over the
hump we're down here 929 90 but approaching this extremely low
level of novelty which I suspect is you know this huge expansion of the power of
Islam and probably not so much good for America and the American banking
industry but then we have to live through all of this stuff a huge series of
fluctuations well past the turn of the century before finally where we get on
the long slide and you know it's fairly spectacular it's an effort to explain the
sense of time speeding up the sense of the acceleration and into deeper and deeper
connectedness it obviously can't go on for centuries happen in the past but what
what our attention is going to be riveted on for the next little while is this
because this is the deepest level of novelty ever explored to date there's
where we are on the 10th of January having come from clear up here as
recently as the 25th of November
2012 oh well then it all comes together see I mean like in in late 20 I can see here it
shows that what we're progressing through we still have to go through the
medieval period will do that in 96 97 the discovery of the new world occurs up
here in 2005 and then you know the Industrial Revolution 2009 so forth and so on so it's a
very steep compression and then the way it works actually is when you get into these final epochs you
get a 384 day cycle in which everything is recompressed then a six-day cycle and and then you know a cycle that
lasts an hour and a half and one that lasts 135 seconds and so forth and it's the spin dizzy principle it's exactly the
principle that's used to explain the birth of the universe by straight people except
they put it all back in the first half nanosecond of the universe and I want to
put it at the end and the reason mine seems more logical to me is what we're
talking about here is an outlandish singularity well they say the singularity
sprang from empty space seems to me the least likely medium for a complex singularity to emerge
from is a high vacuum more likely that a singularity would emerge from a teeming world of human beings and
machines and psychedelic drugs and jungles and ecosystems and and that in a super rich informational matrix like
that something might suddenly crystallize out that would be absolutely improbable
and and fulfill the the need for an attractor a vector for novelty yeah
well the way the software is set it's set for the dawn line at La Cerrera in the Amazon which is also the dawn line at La Cerrera in the Amazon which is also the dawn line at La Cerrera in the Amazon
which is also the dawn line for New York City when we were doing our most crazed thinking on this subject
the fantasy was that it would take 24 hours for then that it would follow as you call it the dawn line the terminator of the planet so that as the sun rose it all was hypothesized to have something to do with actually the geomagnetic strum or what we call the
heliomagnetic strum of the star and so as the sun rose over a 24-hour period this in implosion would occur it's interesting I don't understand this theory in the sense that it seems to me it should be fairly easy to overthrow it's making such highly punctuated prediction
it seems but and but yet it's a curious thing it's very hard to imagine how anyone could quote unquote figure this out it seems that you would have to find it all at once done somehow if there's no way into it where you could start to figure it out so it it has this curious completedness and as a person who was not even that interested in the I Ching and certainly
less interested in diddling around with graph paper that I should be the John the Baptist of this new dispensation is pretty peculiar I'm not even into long division
when you were when you were when you were balancing out various factors in testing out the theory of fractal time
for instance you've been talking about the spread of Islam and it's the growth of poetry and science and so forth within it but I hear you mention the inquisition
one of the strengths and weaknesses of the theory is that it's pretty non-specific
you know maybe astrology tries to say too much maybe this tries to say too little
but the inquisition happened down well actually it was stretched out over time so it depends on what you're actually talking about
but the great novel century the 15th century the 1400s occurs along this gradient yeah novelty is a kind of morally neutral term
I mean is an invading army raping and pillaging and mixing its genes with the local populace is this come out as a plus or a minus on the novelty scale
I don't know I confess I'm puzzled by this it's a pretty powerful concept I mean I think we do feel in our own lives the ebb and flow of this quality and that when it's you know when you're hot you're hot when you're not you're not that's what that's saying yeah
when you were talking earlier about novelty and sheldrake and novelty versus habit there was the upswings on this graph where I heard you describe this sort of you know conservatism
mm-hmm and the downswings were novelty and new things happening mm-hmm new things like people in this room generally would like at least that's how I was hearing it
oh new things like generally people in this room would like no things that orient themselves towards peace and oh no I don't think so I think a world war here will do just fine to fulfill the novelty requirements of the situation what amazed me about it was when I was sitting up here
uh after the Romanian revolution and looking at this hole here I was saying boy something outlandish is going to have to happen or we're gonna have to toss this sucker right out the door
well then lo and behold you know to with this weird sense of deja vu and startled amazement and yet vindication yet horror and disbelief and so forth it all comes to pass it fulfills an impossible prophecy how many times can it do it check this out we've got to get through this but this thing occurs over a three month period in 1995
from March to May what men are going to go through look like peanuts so there are built-in tests in the wave so that if it's junk we should be able to get rid of it long before we're anywhere near 2012 and yet we're meeting now the first of these difficult tests the first prediction of a steep descent into radical novelty
and you know the armies and you know the armies and you know the armies and chancelleries of the world are just rushing furiously to fulfill the prophecy
well except that that's a kind of a fart at the opera if what you believe is happening is a conservation of novelty
a knitting together and ever deepening and enriching and connecting kind of thing and then they drop the bomb the only way that could redeem it is if you know our real destiny is in another dimension and sort of like that wonderful scene at the end of Dr. Strangelove where they sing the song we'll meet again someday somewhere
I don't think it is nuclear holocaust I think nuclear holocaust is the shadow of the alchemical concrescence and that what it is is you know somehow a way of coaxing the human soul into physical manifestation I mean the flying saucer the extraterrestrial visitant the philosopher's stone
alchemical mercury some way to really realize our dreams I mean I think that that is really the promise of the psychedelic experience the thing you find out at the core of the psychedelic experience that you cannot believe no matter how hard you try because it's so liberating is that you know dreams are real
apparently history there is a way out it isn't the high walls all that it's an illusion there's some tremendous act of intellectual apprehension or courage or something and then you break through you penetrate beyond the mask there is a mask there is a beyond the mask but most people go to the grave without ever even making the effort
yeah
yeah I mean the way I think of it is all phenomena are describable within this wave matrix and when I was at my most illuminating
I could actually see it overlaid over reality I could actually see that people people are knots of novelty in local genetic space the the local space is largely empty and then there are these knots of space time where genetic expression and protein transcription is going on and these are people
and they represent you know
and they represent you know this extreme con crescence of novelty well then if you're in a city or something you see that it is a larger yet more diffuse knot of the same kind of novelty and you know I don't know whether you're losing your mind or assimilating a wave mechanical way of looking at things but this is very it comes close almost to some of the ravings of carlos castan
you know that there's a way of shifting perception and processing information and then you see that you know people are interlocking networks of light they are confluences of casuistry both in space and time as well as in matter and no I was quite into all of this and it sort of sticks with me it's model building yeah
yeah
yeah the relationship between like chaos and novelty but this seems like such a rigid order to me and I don't see a balance and chaos to it you know what I'm saying
well it's rigid on one level and free on another
what's rigid about this is that it says where the novelty will occur
what's open about it is it never says what the novelty will be
so that you know
Saddam Hussein could probably avert a world war by just announcing that he's going on a world ballet tour and that would be so novel
that the wave would be fulfilled and the war of a touring ballet company
he could be assassinated
he could be assassinated although that isn't in his situation that wouldn't exactly be absolutely startling
it would be a fairly it comes out of micro pivot there
I find assassinations very interesting
they're very little wear and tear on innocent people you'll notice
that's why it's so little favored as a way of settling political problems
but I have a German correspondent who is taken this between the teeth and run with it
and he sent me a bunch of assassination printouts on a scale of 30 days
the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Wallenstein, Himmler, a bunch of people
and they're you know it's tantalizing I mean I don't know what to make of this
it's reasonable that large-scale phenomena like history like glaciations would be
under the control of recursive laws algorithmically expressible laws the hard swallow is to think that you've actually figured one out
you know and that this is it and that to the exclusion of all other values these values somehow define it
but I think that thinking of history as a novelty conserving journey of return to the green mind
is a much more helpful existentially than to think of it as a chaotic trendless fluctuation toward self-immolation
you know just a drunken person wandering around in a dynamite storage area which is sort of the other model being peddled
because I believe that there is a purpose that there is some kind of telos working its way out
I don't get all dewy-eyed about it
I don't even know why or what for
but I just know that statistical models of how human reality works are completely inadequate
I mean the way most people experience magic in their lives is through the phenomenon of falling in love
and it's highly statistically improbable the way it works I mean you know you can be the guy who sweeps up in the mail room
and every day you see the boss's daughter alight in her Rolls Royce to be swept into the executive suite or some nonsense like that
and by merely forming the wish to be with this woman you know then coincidences begin to move
promotions occur deaths occur mountains are moved and before you know it you know the princess is delivered
unto your arms for better or worse one might add
I mean you need to be very careful about what you wish for because you usually get it
the rule about wishing seems to be it's a kind of a quantum mechanical process and no jerking is allowed
the key to having your wishes fulfilled is slow steady pressure you know and if you can hold an image for two or three years
it hardly many matters how outlandish it is it will probably be delivered done to you in fairly good order
I'm struck by this idea
the micro micro macrocosm aspect of it
yeah that this goes right down from the level of Planck's constant right up to the size of the universe
and it's saying the same patterns the same processes are recursive and are nested and basically the all rightness of everything
because what it shows is you know this is a fairly chaotic wave it looks stochastic but it's manipulated in such a way that out of its disorder
emerges a very elegant self-reinforcing self-refining order
streamlining itself for further journey into time
well that's enough of that I think
well what else is hanging for anybody this morning
well shamanism we tend to lose sight of the fact that for the people who actually practice shamanism as a day-to-day thing
healing is what it's always all about
and the shamanism making these journeys for his own education or so forth it's always to heal
I don't really see the mushrooms as specifically a cure in the ordinary sense for X Y or Z condition
it's more that in the psychedelic state
this is kind of hard to articulate and sounds like mumbo-jumbo and maybe it is
but I've noticed that in the psychedelic state it's as though within the parameters of the body
the ordinary laws of physics are somewhat in suspension
and there's a great deal to be learned by somebody about touch and light and sound
especially sound I think
sound to me is the key to understanding and going deeper with the psychedelic thing
not only in the healing modality and in that case it's about sound
and directed into the body because we do have extraordinary senses on psilocybin and on these other tryptamines
and I'm not mystical or woolly-eyed about this and I don't make any claims about what senses
but if you sit down with a person or a watermelon for that matter when you're stoned
and sing into it
the quality of the hallucination is such that there is a way of thinking about it where you could say
this is an acoustical hologram of the interior of their body
I don't say that I just say my goodness isn't it strange that I seem to be able to see the inside of the watermelon when I'm doing this
touch
I don't I'm not an aura man under ordinary circumstances
I'm not sensitive to these things that you have to be sensitive to
if you have to be sensitive to something I don't I'm not
that's not for me because I'm basically insensitive
but nevertheless there do seem to be qualities of density to the energy around the body
and I suppose see I'm not really an experimentalist in these areas
like I don't immediately grab somebody and start kneading them and working them over
I tend to just sit and watch
but I do see all these possibilities
sound has such
I mean sound
does pierce
you know non-dense objects
and return an echo
and we may have neurological processing capacity
that we're unaware of or that is ordinarily suppressed
for instance
I am very able
I have quite a good ability to navigate in darkness
I always have been able to do this
it doesn't seem that strange to me
I mean I'm pretty good at it to the point where
there have been times in the Amazon when I've gone for water at night
and literally forgotten to take the flashlight
and gotten there and gotten halfway back before I noticed
that you know
and it's a combination of projective memory
so forth and so on
I noticed in the Amazon when I was quite keyed up
that I had a sense that I've never heard anybody talk about
was a kind of geometric sense that told me the shortest distance between
any two points
in terms of energy expenditure
and it was something which I could see that Aboriginal people would just absolutely have to have
it's a whole thing about following the edges of ridges
and never descending unless you have to
and always keeping to the high ground
and my mind would just tell me this stuff
draw these lines through space
the fact that ayahuasca
which makes possible you know this visual language
that seems to me the evolutionary compass for language and culture
the fact that the compounds which allow that
occur in the ordinary brain
suggest you know that we're just
we could be as much as close as a one gene mutation away
from different styles of neural processing
and you know we don't know to what degree technology
pushes these things around
did the people of manuscript culture have the same
serotonin ratios as we have
how much to what degree is culture
a chemical feedback mechanism operating on us
as a species
I mean we're like fish trying to discover water
these are fairly
fairly subtle issues
but the payoff is
being able to design our way
toward a more humane culture
because what the psychedelics are teaching
on one level I think
is that we are
that our prison and our palace is language
and that today we have just
allowed it to grow like topsy
because it was like an unconscious function
but it no longer need be an unconscious function
after all we are now writing languages like crazy for computers
defining for them what concepts they can and can't think
what forms of logic
what algebras shall and shall not be permitted
we need to also think about
you know
taking control of the design process of language
up to this point
the only people who have gotten onto this principle
have been fascists of one sort or another
either Joseph Goebbels and his crowd
or advertising weasels
or people like that
everyone else has been sort of the victim
of the linguistic agenda
of those cliques
you know it's like the Bob Dylan song
the strong men make the rules
for the wise men and the fools
well if the rules are syntactical rules
then nobody even realizes they've been hijacked and held up
it's just that you know you can't think any other way
so why do you have this itch that you can't seem to ever scratch
well it's because you know it's freedom calling out to you
from the unconscious
I'm not I don't really
talk about all this with any sense of urgency
one of the issues that sometimes comes up
often comes up in these groups is
you know am I saying it's all okay
is it all okay
is there a political agenda
what should be done
and you know
it was Mahatma Gandhi who said
what you do has very little importance
and it's very important that you do it
and I think that's how we have to act
we have to each choose a small area
and then act in that limited area
with all the existential commitment we can muster
but not with anxiety
you know anxiety
the Wipo Yang
the Chinese Taoist alchemist said
worry is preposterous
you don't know enough to worry
you know
do liver cells worry
do skin cells worry
it's just a complete waste of metabolic energy
the better thing is to function well in place
and then to wonder
you know
wonder is sort of worry without
animal anxiety
but it's living in the light of non-closure
that you know we're not going to get this thing wrestled into a box
not positivism
not Islam
not the Kabbalah
no no
all these things are very good tries
nice efforts
we set them on their pedestals
in a long row in the museum of noetic
good tries
but
it isn't in that
it's in the moment
in the recapturing of direct experience
my publisher in New York for this new line of books he's bringing out
has coined the battle cry
take back your mind
and I think that's a pretty good way of putting it
take back your mind
because we have transferred our loyalty
to mythical structures
you know
structures about sexual politics
about what a man is supposed to be
what a woman is supposed to be
what how much money a person is supposed to be
you
to have, how much art they're supposed to produce, how many times a week they're
supposed to get laid. We have all these images that we're supposed to
live up to, very complex, all being sold down to us through a culture whose
motivations are very murky and highly suspect. I mean, culture is not your
friend. You know, all these people who want you to smell good and drive the right
car and have your extra facial hair removed and all that. These are not your
friends, these people. It pays to remember that, you know, that there's a struggle on
for loyalty, that you are much more, you look much better to the institutional
structure if you work hard, consume quietly, choose from the political menu without a
lot of fuss and that sort of thing. But in fact, you know, this kind of business as
usual has led to the sort of lethal crisis we're in. Our real problem, well, it's two
things which are two sides of the same coin. It's ego and an inability to
emotionally connect with the true outline of the situation. Because the true
outline of the situation is fairly horrendous, it's that somewhere around 1945, or you
name it, but that seems all right, we began to loot the future as a strategy for
survival, as some kind of ethical norm was shattered. In the same way that
in late, well, in early mercantile civilization, there was this horrifying
moment when even though slavery had been dead for a thousand years, they realized
that if they brought back this wholesale sale and transport of human beings, they
could make millions in sugar. And it was like the heart of darkness reared up and
they went for it. And our circumstances is somewhat similar. We have embarked on a
similar kind of descent into an ethical dark dimension by looting the future. And
this is going on at a faster and faster rate. I mean, this current situation in the
Middle East, much could be said about it. But, you know, any moral justification seems
preposterous. I mean, what's happening is 8% of the world's people use 35% of the
world's petroleum and are ready to blow everybody off the map to keep it that way.
I mean, this is nothing more than a manifestation of junkie psychology on a mass scale. It's, you know,
we're addicted, they've got it, we're happy to pay for it, but if they won't sell it,
we'll break into their house and take it. Because by God, it will go into our good
right arm. That's the plan. And, you know, it's the culmination of the whole machine,
teenage metaphor. I mean, this is the golem of Metropolis. This is the robot mind run amuck. This
is Frankenstein. This is Brave New World. It's a world where lethal habitual activities can
nevertheless not be controlled. And it's a perfect example of a culture with lockjaw of the
mind. I mean, we're just going to march off the edge of a cliff, apparently. Three days ago,
in the New York Times, the American estimates of casualties in the first 30 days of successfully
invading Kuwait and Baghdad were published. 50,000 American casualties in the first 30 days. If we win,
this is the number of people who died in the Vietnam War over the whole stretch of the war. Well, so then,
if you win, means, you know, standing in the middle of a sea of fire with 550 million enraged Arabs
looking to cut you down. It's a complete misunderstanding. And I mention it not only because it looms large in our future. I mean, I think, you know,
we're arranging the deck chairs of the Titanic sitting here talking about this. It's basically June of 1939, and everyone's planning their summer vacation in the Catskills.
But it's also an example of how these institutions can't save themselves. I mean, everybody knew in 1973 that this moment would come, that policies needed to be put in place, a dollar a barrel tax on oil, some minor, minor thing. But no, it's just a mindset that is self-destructive.
And, you know, the fundamentalists are in anticipation of the end of the world and so forth and so on. There isn't going to be any end of the world. There's no easy way out like that.
Even, and you're hearing this from the prophet of 2012, all of these fantasies, all of these infantile fantasies will be acted out. So, you know, if you want your mini apocalypse, you know, you can have it.
And we can bomb Baghdad and gas Tel Aviv and fire the oil sands and kill millions of people on both sides.
And you know what? It ain't going to bring the guy from Galilee and it ain't going to bring friendly flying saucers from our tourists.
All it's just going to bring is a deeper, bigger mess for the human race to try and clean up.
Anybody who thinks that, you know, you're going to save the world by setting it on fire is going to be sadly disabused.
So, it's a rare moment for the collectivity to try to anchor itself in larger visions.
You know, the reason human society is haunted by messiahs and tin horn visionaries preaching on every corner and people waving little books of different colors is because there is no
there is no full development of the individual. There's this kind of arrested, prolonged adolescence and it's created through institutions.
Institutions are a demonic force in human life because they give permission for us to cease developing and to put our loyalties.
We put our loyalty behind some weird creed that has been worked out usually by a bunch of guys wearing dresses and then they, you know, hand it down to the rest of us.
Anarchy and chaos, you know, anarchy is always just that's, you know, surely not my dear fellow. That's so awful to contemplate.
But what it's coming down to is a real make or break revelation on what is human nature.
You know, the French cartoonist Mobius asks the question in one of his books, is man good?
And he answers it sufficiently seasoned and marinated. Yes.
But, you know, we're actually going to get the chance to answer this question.
Because all barriers to the expression of our will, our vision, our dreams falling away.
And, you know, are we some kind of anti-life sadomasochistic suicidal contradiction?
Or, you know, can we break through the millions of years of primate programming and alpha male hierarchical dominance and so forth to actually uncover the angelic force that we glimpse within ourselves, that we glimpse with the high definition?
I mean, it's really there. If there is a demon in human nature, there is surely equally an angel of equal power.
So then it's just about breaking this free. And I don't think it can happen in the monkey body on the surface of this planet.
Somehow there has to be an act of surrender to our own nature and then concomitant with that, a kind of making of a peace with nature as it is.
And I don't know how to envision the future. In the past year, you know, there's been a lot of flack about virtual reality.
And does this hold any hope? And, you know, if we think of the virtual reality thing as a wave, six months ago I would say it was very up.
Now enough people have done it to be disappointed. And a bunch of people are saying, holy shit, you must be kidding.
This is going to save us? Because it is hokey and crude and mechanistic and, you know, surrounded by a clique of visionary weirdos with a strange light in their eyes that you probably wouldn't want to leave alone with your chickens.
But nevertheless, I count myself one of these people.
But still, there are some interesting ideas. The thing is, there is going to be some kind of fusion of technology, spirit and mind.
I mean, the drugs of the future will be more like computers. The computers of the future will be much more like drugs.
And we're beginning to see this. When you crawl inside a virtual reality rig and discover, you know, that it's taken
two hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment to make you think that you're walking around in an unfurnished office of a third-rate bureaucrat somewhere.
It looks pretty grim. But on the other hand, when Henry Ford built his automobile, the main objection people had as to why it would never catch on was, there are no roads.
You know, and he admitted this was a barrier, but clearly had a grander vision than everybody else he was talking to.
Maybe this is where we should sort of lead the discussion and then leave it, because I think this is the toughest issue for groups like this.
This is where we sort of divide and it's not easy to hold it all together. And that is, you know, is the psychedelic agenda somehow the preservation, nurturing, caring for and completion and even reconstruction and recovery of what we have destroyed and ravaged and mauled to get where we are at this moment?
Or are we stuff of a different nature? And is our destiny to weave webs, you know, that hang between the stars and leave forever behind this small, wet, humble, life-infested place and go and live in the constructs of our imagination forever in silicon and so forth and so on?
And this is, you know, at least in my personality, these things are almost equally balanced. I mean, I feel very torn. I don't like the Gnostic, Manichaean need to say, well, there must be a total split.
That man and nature cannot coexist. Man for the sake of humanity and for the sake of nature must go into our own dimension. That the imagination is our cosmos and we are to inhabit it.
I don't know. I don't know. I'd be interested in what people think. The psychedelics go both ways. There seem to be psychedelics that vote one way, like the mushroom, which has a vast extra planetary, almost galactic scale vision of interrelated intelligences and information transfer between species.
And a scale of time where the coming and going of suns is just something which is going on.
Ayahuasca, on the other hand, like claims you for your humanness, pours you into your body and puts an oar in your hand and sets you out on a black river in the middle of the night to hunt catfish.
You know, and you just feel life, human life, what it is to be born, to die, to have relationships with people, to make and lose fortunes, to have and lose dreams, all of this tremendously emotional stuff.
And then there's a gradient in between. So the psychedelic quest then, or the psychedelic life, becomes ultimately a meditation on what is human nature.
You know, is it these titanic aspirations to the techno, organo, metallo, immortal kind of existence? Or is it some kind of Tao-like, Zen-like acceptance of place and position and destiny?
Or can it be both? You know, I mean, I have fantasies where I see a world, and I don't know how we get there, I mean, don't ask me how we get there, but a world of many, many fewer people.
And people live basically as people lived 25,000 years ago, basically naked, except that everybody has a little thread, like Brahmins have in India, a little thread that goes around your shoulder and around your waist.
And on this thread are, you could get maybe a couple of thousand small beads on this thread.
Well, each one is essentially a menu, an interface into a piece of software which is hidden in hyperspace.
And by just moving this thread around and touching these beads, you navigate into mental dimensions.
I mean, I can imagine the person of the future would look like a rainforest primitive.
But when they close their eyes, there would be menus hanging in space, and you select and navigate and move through these things.
But, you know, then there are issues, different aspects of the same issue of the human split with nature.
You know, what do we do with the human body, the monkey body?
Is it a monkey animal body that drags us down into territoriality and violence?
Or is it somehow, you know, the glory and the purpose?
How do you, where do you put the body in a psychedelic value system?
If we're talking about more and more ephemeralization, depersonalization, decentralization, electronic diffuseness,
well, then where is sexuality in all that?
Still more, where is biology in all that?
It's very, you know, we are the generation of people who actually will take the reins of the human dream in a way that it's never been taken before.
As recently as a single generation ago, there were like insoluble problems of a technological and resource delivery type.
Now, it's basically, I think I began this weekend by saying this, it's all dimension, all problems have become problems of human psychology.
Everything can be done.
It's all about how do you convince people in a democracy to pay for it?
How do you convince people in an, you know, whatever to follow along?
If all problems have achieved a human dimension, the state of the atmosphere, it's a human problem.
You know, the temperature of the ocean, human problem.
Everything has to do with changing and re-engineering the human mind.
Now, the real barrier to doing this, as I see it, is the cultural momentum of the past.
And that's a very nice and sanitized way of saying fundamentalist religion.
Fundamentalist religion goes into a tizzy when you start to, they would say, tamper with human nature.
This is why drugs, abortion, homosexuality, notice that what these things all have in common is they slightly seek to tweak or define human nature.
And, you know, this is extremely unwelcome.
But, you know, if we're all God's chillin', how come we've rigged the earth with dynamite and are, you know, flipping coins to see who gets to set it off?
We have been infected with the idea of original sin, and this is part of what keeps us infantile.
We actually believe, I think, every single one of us at some level, that we are flawed, unfit.
And this is paralyzing, because if we start talking about redesigning human nature, people say, oh, wow, you know, this is what Hitler was talking about.
As soon as you start redefining human nature, you redefine it worse.
The beast returns.
It means, you know, we have no faith whatsoever, and we believe, you know, that the given situation is the best of all possible worlds, is what that's saying.
And I don't believe that. I agree there have been horrendous misapplications of the wish to redesign human nature.
But on the other hand, the style which lets it just develop like an untended weedy lot has produced a fairly weedy lot of leaders with no great apparent commitment to the salvation of the human race either.
What it comes down to is responsibility. Politics without responsibility is fascism. And politics responsibly practiced is, you know, the only other option available.
All this goes back to this theme of the primacy of experience.
Recapturing the primary importance of yourself, first of all, and then your affinity group, the people around you.
McLuhan said that this would happen naturally, and from what I see over the past few years, it seems to me this is so.
That he called it electronic feudalism, and said that the nation-state would dissolve under the impact of electronic media.
His timetable was a little too short. This is really a problem for profits.
But he was perfectly right. I mean, what happened in Tiananmen Square, what happened in Eastern Europe, was entirely the product of information technology.
Just conveying images, just conveying images from the West dissolved the whole myth of Marxism, which relied on, you know, a false view of reality.
The thing is, these images are value-neutral. They're corrosive wherever they move.
The same forces that destroyed the Communist Party in Eastern Europe will destroy the ruling families of the Arabian Peninsula with equal ease.
Because what it is, is it's an anti-oligarchic virus that has gotten loose in the language ocean of the planet.
I mean, the thing that happened in Tiananmen Square, you could feel every government on Earth heave a sigh of relief when they got that under control.
Because the nightmare of every government on Earth is a million peaceable people assembled in the main square of your capital city,
demanding that you pack up for Switzerland.
I mean, that is it. And if it happens, if it happens in Bucharest, you go. If it happens in Tehrania, you go. If it happens in Washington, you go.
Nobody says no to a million people in the streets. That's what the Shah of Iran found out.
I mean, he made a decree that if more than three people gathered in any place, they would be shot dead.
The next day, two and a half million people marched screaming beneath his window for his head.
You look at a scene like that and say, you know, hey, it's time to retrench.
It's time to seriously cut a deal here.
Well, this is a long rambling answer to the question, you know, what is to be done?
How can we make a difference?
And I think the way that it's to be done is by empowering individual discourse and recognizing the power of the individual.
Huge amounts of global civilization are operating on automatic pilot.
You know, you think that if you were to walk into the World Trade Center or the Pentagon or NATO headquarters in Brussels,
that there would be smart people furiously running things.
There are idiots everywhere at every level of organization.
I mean, if you were to attend a cabinet meeting, one guy will be asleep with his face in his plate.
I swear, you know, it makes no difference.
And we, the little people down in the labyrinthine streets of the city looking up at the castle as the great ones come and go,
you know, we believe that they're all about the fine business of humanity.
But, you know, it's just a fiction.
It's an absurdity.
And to the degree that we proclaim it so, the meme spreads and the dream of the oligarchs, the autocrats, the programmers is dissolved.
This is why the psychedelic thing is so controversial, such political dynamite, because ultimately it dissolves the linguistic structures that it finds pre-existing, whatever they are.
I really believe this.
I mean, talking to shamans in the Amazon, ultimately, when you get to know them, they will tell you, you know, you think this is easy?
You think because I am a Witoto?
You think because I wear a gourd on my penis, I am somehow more able to do this than you are?
No, every time I go, I know it may be the last time, because it's so hard.
It's so challenging to who I am.
It always is.
I mean, it's a real edge.
It's not an edge that you go and map, and then the next time it's not an edge.
It's that every time you go, you discover this edge.
It's the great gift, the great challenge, the great miracle of human existence is that within each one of us, there is this dimension, which we can choose to access, which is a constant challenge to our existential modality.
You know, you don't have to mush your way up jungle rivers and rip jewels from the eyes of idols and stuff like that.
You can, on a Saturday evening, in the privacy of your own living room, become your own Magellan.
And you are no less courageous than Magellan.
Maybe Magellan is a bad example, since he didn't make it all the way around.
Your own Columbus.
And this dimension of freedom has always been 95% of what the human experience was about, in terms of risk and thrills.
And religion is not, you know, the mumblings of men wearing dresses.
It just isn't.
Nor is it all of this philosophical mumbo-jumbo that arises out of rational discourse and brain specialization.
It's that, somehow, part of the package of being a living, thinking being is that you get a universe inside of you.
You know, you get a galaxy-sized object inside you that you can access.
And there, there are the mountains, the rivers, the jungles, the dynastic families, the ruins, the planets, the works of art, the poetry, the sciences, the magics of millions upon millions upon millions upon millions of worlds.
And this is, apparently, who we each are.
We're a little bit of eternity sticking into three-dimensional space and, for some reason, occupying time in a monkey body.
But when you turn your eyes, then, inward, you discover the birthright, the existential facts out of which this particular existence emerged.
And, you know, without going dewy-eyed, without lining up with all the religious people, it's more real than religion because it's apparently rooted in biology.
And it's a great secret, a great secret and a great comfort because it means, you know, mystery didn't die with the fall of Arthur or the fall of Atlantis or the fall of anything.
Mystery is alive in the moment, in the here and now. It just simply lies on the other side of a barrier of courage.
And it isn't even that high a barrier. It just is a barrier high enough to keep out the insincere and
the misdirected. But for those who will claim it, in the midst of the historical chaos of the late 20th century,
they become the archaic
pioneers. They become the first people to carry the
ouroboric serpent around to its own tail, and to make a closure. And to the degree that any one of us has this
this connection back to the archaic in our life,
it makes where we have been
make a lot more sense, and it makes where we're going
seem a lot more inviting.
Which it really is, I think.
Well, that's all I have to say. I think we can probably...
It's a little early. Does anybody have anything they want to add? Yeah.
You've been talking about the ego a lot, and its dissolution, and breaking through the boundaries of it.
And it sometimes sounds like ego has a pejorative connotation. On the other hand,
you've just been talking very briefly about the fact that it's up to each of us in our own unique individuation to
claim what what can be claimed, and that even the small individual little ego can
virtually change the world if it has the right place to stand.
It seems like these... So how do you balance these things?
Yeah, I just really, the question is, what is the future of the ego as we know it after, say, post-2012?
Will the ego really be more of a group ego, or a transformation of our ego, or is the ultimate goal to shed our egos completely and become
some form of
individuation which you can't even dream about at this point?
Well, you're right. There's a dynamic tension there. Sometimes when this comes up, I answer it by saying
you know, that you need an ego.
If you didn't have an ego, you wouldn't know whose mouth to put food in when you have dinner with someone at a restaurant.
So ego is necessary to keep straight whose orifices are whose, and and and that's the main function of ego.
But then, you know, there is a deeper level to it.
Somehow, the way I imagine it is that the the ego is...
the correct expression of ego is when there is ego present,
but it is perceived as Tao.
In other words, Tao is this state where you just go along, and somehow get along, and
ego is a state where you're somehow pushing the river, and that's how you get along.
I think the ego of the future would be... will be much less
possessive, and that it's the possessiveness, the projection of the
domain, really, of the ego outside of itself.
Specifically, the control of other people, you know, sexual partners, children, parents.
Uh...
The way I imagined these... this pastoral situation of 12 or 15,000 years ago to work was
people simply had group values
because the children
were group-owned,
and that was made such a tremendous difference in how the society imaged itself.
People lived for
the group, and that the core of the group were the children, and people always put them
first. So,
everyone identified with the children. Everyone was willing to face risk to preserve the core of young... the younger gene pool,
and... and that that was what made the difference. This concern for male paternity is really a poisonous
factor, and
see, the...
when you look at primatology
generally, it's pretty clear that as a group of species,
primates do tend to male dominance.
That even the even the the apes,
and the squirrel monkeys, and the new world primates, in the wild, there's usually an alpha male that's dominant.
So, this symbiosis between human beings, cattle, and psychedelic plants
that allowed the feminine to emerge, was something that was emerging
against the grain of primate organization.
So really, what has happened is we have returned to a more animal kind of existence. We are more like beasts
than the people of 10-15,000 years ago, because they were
using psychedelics to
artificially, you could say, or
pharmacologically, inflate feminine values, and this allowed them to become civilized people.
I mean, I have a somewhat elaborate theory about this, but I think that women are responsible for the emergence of language,
because I think that the division of labor that we know went on very early because of the male's
larger body size and the upper half of the body, that the males tended to specialize toward hunting.
Hunting puts a premium on physical strength and stoicism,
meaning sitting a long time with your mouth shut,
and then you have a limited number of commands.
The women and bladder control is very important, where women fail that test.
So, so then what the women were doing was they were specialized as gatherers
of plants and roots and insects and stuff like that. Well, this is a tremendous pressure
to develop descriptive taxonomy,
because gathering is the art of descriptive taxonomy. You want to know that you want, you know,
the little bulbous root with the yellow flowers that grows down between the shattered granite boulders
near the creek. It's all language, language, language, and the pressure is life and death.
If you eat the wrong plant, you become very sick, or you abort your fetus, or you die.
So those who were well able to describe the objects of the hunting gathering,
of the gathering side of the economy, were quickly outbred those who weren't.
And language may have even been a kind of secret ability of women at some point. You see, psilocybin
synergizes language like bursts of activity, and may have been the thing which set it over.
But what happened in this woman situation with language is a good example of what often happens with cultural innovation.
The women possessed all this knowledge about hunting, about the gathering of plants,
and the magical use and preparation of plants. But at a certain point, the database became so huge
that it underwent a collapse conceptually, and some brilliant woman realized we don't have to know
about 600 plants and all these locations and seasonal variations and all this. We just have to concentrate
on five plants and really learn all about those plants, and then we can dispense with all this stuff.
And this was probably because in the nomadic cycle, they would encounter their own middens from the year
before, and there there would be cereal grains sprouted, and you quickly put it together.
But the specialization represented by agriculture, that was the beginning of the end, as far as I'm concerned.
Because at that point, there was retraction away from nature. It was no longer about letting nature guide you
to gather and find what you needed. It was a kind of paranoid, a kind of rip-off attitude.
It was, you know, let us exploit these five plants. This means tilling the ground. It means the end of
nomadism, because now we're going to settle in one place, and we're going to redirect the flow of water,
and we're going to become agriculturalists. It's an entirely different psychology. Weston Labar said that
psychedelic shamanism died when it became important to get up in the morning and go out and hoe the corn.
And then people replaced the psychedelic gods with the gods of wheat and corn.
The Tammuz, the corn god of ancient Babylon, then appears. And gods of agriculture and male
pate and male dominance go hand in hand. The previous religion, at the edge of the high neolithic,
was this religion of the great horned goddess. And it was a religion of nomadic pastoralism,
orgiastic sexual activity, psychedelic drugs, and tremendous emphasis on cattle.
Cattle were the great bridge to all these concepts. We start out as a baboon-like creature, wandering
behind these herds of ungulate cattle. I've seen baboons do this in Kenya, flipping over cow pies,
looking for carrion beetle grubs as a source of fat and protein. But then,
you know, we went from predation on carrion, the kills of larger animals, to slowly actually domesticating
these things. And the milk, and the blood, and the manure, and the meat, and the mushroom,
would all be seen to be things which came quite naturally from the cow. The cow was like this supreme
feminine symbol. And all over North Africa and the ancient Middle East,
you get this late paleolithic great horned goddess. The cattle religion and the emergence of consciousness
seemed to go hand in hand. One time I was waiting for a load of mushrooms to come on,
and it was very strong. I had sort of miscalculated, and I had gotten too much. And I could see this thing just coming at me, huge force.
And I heard a voice. It was actually the Swiss air stewardess from Federica Fellini's eight and a half.
But it was that voice. And she said,
they say it helps to lay down, cowboy.
And I was amused at the time, or later, when I had time to be amused. I was amused.
But then I realized this mode of address, cowboy, is probably typical of the mushroom, because for most,
95% of its existence, most of what it's dealt with are cowboys and cowgirls, because these are the
people who follow along behind the cows. These are the people who invented astrology from watching the stars.
And many people, myself included, have reported the experience of looking at the stars stoned on psilocybin,
and having the mushroom supply dotted lines between the constellations.
There it is. There it is. There's the map.
Yes, pastoralists, herders, they invented the calendar from watching the horizon. And you know,
what we looked at last night was partially a calendar. It's very interesting. If you look,
if you want a meditation on shamanism, politics, time, and so forth, look at hexagram 49 in the I Ching,
which is revolution. And you might go to this expecting a treatise on political upheaval. And it
says instead, the magician is a calendar maker. He measures the seasons and sets them right.
And it's this idea of reconstruction of time. The message that I get out of the psychedelics is
that we need to reframe the largest frames in our linguistic cosmology. It means reformation of the
calendar, reformation of language, that we cannot evolve any faster than the languages that we are
imprisoned within. We are linguistic creatures somehow. And so we need strategies, catalysts, enzymes,
whatever it is, practices, that force the evolution of language along conscious lines. If we don't do this,
the old styles of thinking, the old concepts are just going to pull us down. Well, to my mind that this
makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction, because psychedelics are the only
force in nature that actually dissolves linguistic structure, lets the mechanics of syntax be visible,
allows the possibility for the introduction, rapid introduction and spread of new concepts,
gives permission for new ways of seeing. And this is what we have to do. We have to change our minds.
We have to change our minds. Well, that's it. Thank you very much. I enjoyed this.