You can start. Can you hear me in the back? We need more volume on the mic. Okay. Can you hear me in the back now? Yeah? Okay.
Okay, I'd like to welcome you here. My name is Andrew Bieth of Earth Trust Foundation, and it's wonderful to have such a large group.
It's good for us, and I'm especially glad that the choir made it tonight.
In fact, it's only the second time in the last year that the choir has gotten here, so I think maybe we ought to start with a hymn, or maybe a her, I don't know.
I'd also like to say welcome to the companion's group who is making this a salon night tonight.
I'd like to ask your indulgence for just a couple of minutes. I'd like to say something about Earth Trust Foundation.
Tonight, for the first time, we are starting a membership at Earth Trust Foundation.
We've always had a lot of projects that we've been working on, but we've never opened it to the public.
We'd like to invite the public more to participate, so what is Earth Trust Foundation, and why would anyone want to be a member?
I started Earth Trust Foundation about six years ago to encourage personal awareness and social responsibility,
social responsibility from a global perspective.
We work in three areas. One is social justice, one is the environment, and one is education.
And the education is about humans' relationship to the planet and all living things, to the trees,
to the animals, and to the living planet.
Social justice, because 40,000 children die every day of malnutrition and preventable diseases.
And it's clear that poverty in the third world and population and consumption in the first world, our world,
is intimately tied to our environmental crisis.
The environment, because the way we live on the planet is causing the extinction of hundreds of species each year now, hundreds of species.
We're still killing dolphins. We're cutting down hundred-year-old trees.
And we feel that we have no more right to cut down ancient trees and kill dolphins than we do to kill human children.
Education, because connecting to the planet, personal healing, personal transformation, we feel is the first step to global transformation.
Personal healing will lead to healing of the environment, and that's why Terrence McKenna's work is so valuable.
So, we don't just talk about these things. We have projects that work on them.
We're working on eight or ten active projects.
Social justice, we help children in Peru, mountain earth children in Peru, in the mountains, the Andes Mountains.
In Honduras and El Salvador, we have small loan programs to village women who have children, and the income-generating activity that they work on
or start with these loans frequently doubles their income and helps them provide for their family.
The environment, we have a project in Papua New Guinea in partnership with Glenn Berry, a former Peace Corps worker,
and he's working on preserving several million acres of ancient forest in Papua New Guinea.
Here, Landis McIntyre, another former Peace Corps worker, is working out of our Malibu office
and trying to save endangered species in Africa and Asia in partnership with the Peace Corps.
The speaker's program is part of our educational series.
The speaker's program that we call Spirit and Nature, of which Terrence tonight is part.
Other programs include an African artist named Akuyo, who is down working in central Los Angeles with kids in gangs and in prisons.
We try to help them understand, find their own identity.
Vigili is out in China right now doing a project around the world for Global Peace, another of our projects.
So we do a lot of things, and these are the reasons why anyone who wants to become part of our growing sense of becoming a community of social and environmental activists would, I think, enjoy participating.
One thing the membership will do, and we have a sign-up sheet here if anybody wants to see it.
There's a further description of the project on the back, but it will give you a 10% discount on these speaker's programs.
We will have private events for members in Malibu where our offices are, and we will keep the members posted about the project work.
So that's what Earth Trust is about, and I hope you consider becoming a member.
Now I'd like Georgianne Cowan to introduce Terrence McKenna.
Georgianne is the person responsible for the program that you're here tonight for, the whole series of Spirit and Nature.
And we have a lot of other speakers, so she'll mention who they are and introduce Terrence.
She's the program director at Earth Trust, and she's also an artist here, so Georgianne.
Welcome tonight. It's very hot in here, isn't it?
Please bear with me. I'm going to read a little bit of this because people keep handing me notes of things to say.
So first I'd like to welcome you to this wonderful event.
Terrence is the second speaker, actually, in our series.
We have eight speakers that are going to be coming and presenting information about spirituality and nature.
We've particularly created this series to address the most compelling issues of our time, namely that of our physical and spiritual survival.
We've invited a group of deeply committed visionaries who eloquently synthesize the philosophies of various spiritual traditions with physics, art, psychology, and ancient wisdom.
These eco-theologians and scholarly philosophers speak simply and urgently of rekindling a sense of the sacred towards all of life,
nurturing the wilderness within each of us and forming a new covenant with the earth as we speed into the 21st century.
We invite you to come to hear these speakers.
On October 23rd, author Mark Gurzon will be presenting a fascinating evening exploring spirit and nature in the second half of life.
On November 13th, Benedictine monk and Zen philosopher Brother David Sanderast will be here.
His presentation is called Belonging to the Universe.
And on December 4th, environmental activist John Seed will present the Council of All Being, which he's created and coordinated with Joanna Macy.
On February 5th, an inspiring eco-philosopher sister Miriam McGillis will present Dreaming the Sacred Community.
On February 28th, Matthew Fox, who was recently silenced by the Vatican for his controversial views on feminism, sexuality, and the priesthood.
His presentation will be entitled Awakening the Cosmic Tree.
And finally, on March 19th, author Charlene Spretnak will present States of Grace.
You can pick up a flyer about all of these events outside in the foyer.
And also, I want to mention that the tapes from tonight's presentation will also be available in the foyer after the talk.
They will be duplicating them on site.
So within a couple of minutes, you can have the tape for tonight.
Terence asked me to mention that November 20th, he'll be back in town at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre.
It'll be a benefit for the botanical dimensions.
And one last thing I wanted to mention about these programs.
All the proceeds from these programs, all net proceeds, go to the programs that Andrew mentioned, both in the developing world, helping women and children in Honduras,
helping preserve the rainforest in New Guinea.
So all the money, essentially, will be going to those programs.
Now to Terence McKenna.
Terence McKenna has become legendary for his investigations into psychedelic mushrooms, virtual reality, UFOs, evolution, the rebirth of the goddess, and the end of history.
His numerous books include the recent Archaic Revival and Food of the Gods, The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, and Trilogues with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham.
Terence McKenna is a scholar and brilliant interdimensional adventurer with an understanding of nature from the depths of the Amazon to the most current scientific breakthroughs.
He is a shamanologist who traverses the worlds of the psyche and the spirit, bringing back startling visions of the revelatory nature of existence.
Simply put, he takes enormous chances, breaks all the rules, and comes back with pearls.
Welcome Terence McKenna, Imagination in the Light of Nature.
Pleasure to be here. I've heard of preaching to the choir, but this is absurd.
Out of deference to where we're meeting, I'll try to curb my anti-clerical tendencies for the next hour, anyway.
Before I get into this, I'd like to thank a number of people associated with Earth Trust.
Andrew, Matthew, George Ann, Elizabeth, they're the people who put this event together.
Jim Essex is handling security tonight, and we appreciate that.
My goodness, a balcony as well. All the usual suspects appear to have been herded into one room.
That was a wonderful introduction from George Ann. I'd love to meet that guy sometime.
I accepted this invitation to speak because I think what the Earth Trust Foundation is doing is not only very important, but I also perceive the potential for a pun in their name.
And I'll talk about that a little this evening.
I think we're living through extraordinary times, even more extraordinary than usual over the past couple of years.
I think you have to be fairly lumpen indeed to not feel the flux, the change that is cascading into the historical process at this time.
Bifurcations, opportunities for choice are opening up all around us, and yet it's a kind of coincidencia positorum.
There's also great risk, great anguish, great uncertainty about where we as a species and as a planet are headed.
And I certainly don't have any final answers.
But I think that we can talk about these things and build a sense of community and a sense of direction that is capable of overcoming some of the paralysis that has characterized the last couple of decades.
Because as we move closer and closer to the millennium, it's becoming clearer and clearer to me, at least, and I would like to try and convince you of the fact that 10,000 years of human history, of the human adventure, are coming to a kind of culmination in our lifetimes.
This is the make or break decade.
This and the decade which will follow it.
The human enterprise has grown from an enterprise confined to one primate species isolated on the grasslands of Africa to an enterprise which now echoes and re-echoes in the life of every organism on the planet.
We have, for better or ill, seized the tiller of planetary development, seized the tiller of human history.
And the question is, whither are we headed?
Where do we want to take the human adventure?
And I think we've been preparing for this culmination for a long, long time.
I see human history as essentially an unconscious but unerring movement toward something.
And the question is, what?
Is it simply that we have been preparing to commit suicide with greater and greater efficiency for 15,000 years?
If you place your faith in secular politicians and the kind of ideas that are being peddled in the ideological marketplace of the mainstream, you could hardly conclude anything else.
But I submit that occluded from our vision and for very good reasons is the raison d'etre of this process, human history.
And that we are now in a position to raise the veil on what that goal might be.
But there will be a number of casualties to this raising of the veil.
Not least among them science, as ordinarily practiced, dominator politics, as ordinarily practiced, and the division of our human community into factions defined by race, religion, and class.
All of these institutions and styles of the past have now become essentially lethal if we expect to evolve deeper into some kind of humane future.
My interest in this or my awareness of these issues has grown over the years through an involvement in shamanism.
Shamanism that was specifically rooted in the kind of experiences that are induced by psychoactive plants.
Now, this is an area that our society is extraordinarily phobic and nervous concerning.
And the reason, I think, is not far to seek.
Because institutions, modern institutions, depend on the transmission of a certain world view,
and then willing acquiescence in the truth of that world view by the populations into which it is being exported.
In other words, a kind of cultural brainwashing is necessary for modern cultures to work at all.
And the consequences of the acceptance of this situation of brainwashing is further acceleration toward catastrophe.
Many people are in anticipation of a kind of apocalypse, a kind of complete breakdown of social institutions and ideals.
And I must say to you, the apocalypse is not something which is coming.
The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet.
And it's only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation
that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.
If you go to Bosnia, or Somalia, or Peru, or much of the third world, then it appears that the apocalypse has already arrived.
And I wonder then, what magnitude of responsibility rests upon those of us who still have the luxury of the time and the clarity
to think about what can be done to save ourselves and in so doing save the planet.
And the conclusion that I've reached, and it's not easily condensed into a bumper sticker, unfortunately,
is that we have to, this is something that I evolved in my own personal life,
which is when you lose the thread, when you become confused, the best strategy is to think back to the last sane moment that you knew,
and then act from there.
And this is an impulse that affects societies as well as human beings.
This year, we celebrate the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the new world, our world.
Now that was a historical event essentially financed by Italian banking families and the spin-offs of their enterprises.
They created a world on the wreckage of the collapse of the medieval Christian eschatology based on classicism.
And that model has survived and functioned fairly well up into the 20th century.
This is a standard impulse within a society to go back to an earlier time and to create new models and new institutions based on an ever more ancient past.
Now our situation is global and extreme.
And so when we reach back into the past for a model, we have to pass over Greece.
We have to pass over dynastic Egypt.
We have to go back to a time before history, before the fall into hierarchical dominance,
before city-states, before slavery, before advanced technology, before agriculture.
And when we go that far back into time, we discover a world that until very recently was completely incomprehensible to us.
A world that it was thought of as primitive, simplistic, childlike, as late as the 1950s.
And for many people unto this moment.
But careful analysis of these aboriginal societies leads to the conclusion that history is a dysfunctional state of some sort.
History is an act of brutish insensitivity, only achievable through an act of self-limitation from the demands and the inspiration of nature.
And I reach these conclusions basically as a rationalist.
I think that, and this is based largely on the content of the psychedelic experiences that I have had and that I have had described to me, not only by aboriginal people, but by people such as yourselves.
Apparently there is a great discovery or insight which our culture is deliberately designed to suppress, distort and ignore.
And this is the discovery that nature is some kind of minded entity.
That nature is not simply, you know, the random flight of atoms through electromagnetic fields.
Nature is not the empty de-spiritualized lumpen matter that we inherit from modern physics.
But it is instead a kind of intelligence, a kind of mind.
And as long as we were embedded in this mind, as long as we were a part of its purposes and processes, harmony existed on this planet between human beings and the rest of nature, between men and women, between adults and children.
And within the human individual.
And the reason that this harmony was able to maintain itself for perhaps 25 times the duration of history is because it honored and balanced all the components that created it.
Now, in my book, Food of the Gods, I put forth an elaborate reconstruction of evolutionary theory based on the idea that psychedelic compounds, specifically psilocybin, were what kept us in this dynamic balance with the mind behind nature.
And I've lectured that often enough to you that I'm going to only indicate it tonight to your great relief, I'm sure.
I've said it often enough that I think we can operate in the light of it as an established possibility or a respectable theory.
But the question that I'd like to talk to you about tonight is, if that were true, then what does it say for the future?
What are we to do?
Where are we to seek hope?
And what kind of obligation devolves upon each of us?
Well, if this is true, that history is a kind of neurosis, a kind of dysfunction based on a broken line of communication into nature, then how can it be repaired?
The personal answer is, to my mind, obvious.
It's an involvement with Aboriginal peoples and their practices and attitudes.
And I'm not talking about drumming here, folks.
I'm talking about availing oneself of the pharmacological and psychobotanical doorways that lead in to a feeling-toned relationship with the natural mind.
This is actually the matrix out of which consciousness was born.
We find our way back to it through the judicious use of psychedelic plans.
And I think I have made that point enough times that I don't have to repeat myself.
What I'd like to talk about tonight is, how do we, a self-defined cultural elite, as much as anybody hanging out in their office in Century City,
how do we, the psychedelically-informed, postmodern, neo-shamanic community, go, move, from being a tolerated and somewhat loathsome fringe population
to a voice in the dialogue here in anticipation of the end of the world that can be heard?
How do we do that?
Well, I think that there are a number of possibilities, and I always enjoy making this point in this town, particularly,
because this is the city of the graven images, not in gold and stone, but in film and light.
This is the meme engine of the Western world.
Those of you who work in media know the power of the word.
As it is said, so shall it be.
And so the tool of the revolutionaries at the end of the millennium is, to my mind, art.
Art which connects people, which transcends the mundane, and which empowers hope.
And, of course, it can have many forms and occur in many media, but it must be true to itself.
It must be true to the thing we were before the descent into history.
And I don't see history entirely as a pathology.
I see it, the story I like, which seems to me to illuminate the situation, is the story of the prodigal son.
We, Western civilization, we are the prodigal son.
We left the confines of the family of nature, and we made a hellish descent into intellectual limitation,
into matter, into model building that was deliberately self-limited.
We exercised the spirit from our model building.
We exercised a caring and enfolding matrix of maternal understanding.
And what we created were models based on atoms flying through the void.
This may have been a necessary precondition to our shedding the theological misconceptions that occurred when male dominance got a hold of the idea of religion.
It becomes a lethal idea if practiced too long.
Models.
That's why I use the word model so frequently, rather than the concept of truth.
I mean, for monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree.
I mean, where is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to model the cosmos?
If a sea urchin or a raccoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe,
the absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident.
But in our own case, we make an exception.
Too bad.
What is happening after 25,000 years or 15,000 years of agriculture is that the processes that seemed eternal,
the processes of tilling the fields, smelting metals, establishing markets, cutting deals, so forth and so on,
have, in our lifetimes, emerged as self-limiting processes.
You know, people think I'm a wild-eyed character because I predict some kind of transcendent transformation of the world within our lives.
We often when we are palpable we seem to be able to focus on how the social sciences are supposed to build a fantasy mission of architecture and one in our lives.
lifetimes. But if you could sit in on the board meetings of the people who own the planet,
they possess data moving across their desks every day, which entirely support my contention
that business as usual has been taken off the menu. You have only to propagate the curves
of population growth, of HIV infection, of ozone depletion, of toxification of the oceans,
so forth and so on. We all know the laundry list. To convince yourself that business as usual
is no longer an option. There is no middle way. There is no Ozzie and Harriet third millennium
scenario. The choices are either a hideous, nightmarish world, a Soylent Green kind of
world, a world where people of privilege defend that privilege with tremendous establishments of
armament and propaganda and the rest of the world slips into poverty, starvation, desperation and
death. This is the kind of world that rationalists fear. And it's also the only kind of world that
they can imagine because they are bankrupt of inspiration and ideas. And so the entire effort
of the establishment has become one of holding down panic, keeping the ball in play, keeping ordinary
people and ordinary populations quiescent through drugs which are not psychedelic, through forms of media
which are not transcendental and inspiring, but which are narcoleptic and deadening. I won't name any names
here. And this is the fiction that we live in. And this is why our situation feels so schizophrenic. And of
course, as we go through this presidential election, the contradictions are heightened almost to the point of
nausea. Because what is under discussion is how, what manner of fine tuning shall be applied to the social
machinery in order to make it possible to hold together the illusion of business as usual. And the answer
is there is no such fine tuning. It's all finished. And instead, what is needed is a radical openness to new ideas of all sorts.
And I believe that once this radical openness to new ideas is given respectability, the boundless creativity
of the human mind will be tapped into and come to our aid. But we have to stop trying to preserve a status quo
which has made us neurotic and self-defeating. Admit that we have wandered long in the wilderness and then begin to talk
about what should be done about it. And I've always felt that the phobia which the powers that be feel toward the
psychedelic experience is essentially a phobia of creativity, a phobia of dissolved boundaries, a phobia of honest
discussion on a level playing field. All cultures are lies of some sort. We recently have lived through the very instructive
example of the self-destruction of the socialist world. The contradictions became unbearable. The fiction of the
glorious forward stride of socialist man toward a worker utopia eventually became insupportable in the face of the
knock on the door in the middle of the night, the endless queues to buy food that wasn't there, so forth and so on. But
before we lapse into some kind of smugness about this, we have to recognize that there are internal
contradictions in our world as well. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations stated the general theory of
capitalism. And the general theory of capitalism is access to cheap labor and extractable
inexpensive natural resources makes possible a manufacturing cycle in which finished objects can
then be peddled to a core population that represents an advanced stage of civilization. Well, now this, however
flawed this theory may have been, it worked as long as those two conditions were met. Cheap labor,
cheap labor, and cheap extractable natural resources. This is now impossible. Every, there is no cheap labor.
And the cost of continued extraction of natural resources is the death of the planet. What we have to do is back away from our obsession with things.
We can no longer define our worth through attachment to things. We have to create a psychology that reinforces inner worth. And you know, I hate to tell you, but strangely enough, this runs counter to democratic values.
Because the notion behind democratic values is the person as physical atom in a social system.
In other words, the notion of democracy is that we are all equal and can be used interchangeably in any social equation. This is the best we could do. The Greeks dreamed this up until we back away from materialism.
And materialism is not necessarily wedded or welded to democratic values. Democracy works in the kind of world we're living in only if it is severed from a capitalist consumer cycle.
The other thing that we have to do is take responsibility for our population.
And I, you know, people are fond of just throwing up their hands and saying that the social momentum, the momentum toward world catastrophe is so great that nothing can be conceived of, short of friendly visitors from Zeta Reticuli bailing us out, that would lead to any kind of sane and rational world.
But have you noticed that if every woman were to bear only one natural child, the population of the earth would fall by 50% in about 40 years without war, epidemic disease, or forced migration?
Now, this is interesting. I don't advocate it. I simply think it's interesting that such a simple solution would have such an enormous impact on problems generally thought to be intractable.
I discussed this idea with demographers, and they pointed out to me, and some of you have heard me say this before, but I think it's worth repeating, a woman on the Upper East Side of New York or in Malibu who has a child, that child will have between 800 and 1,000 times more negative impact on the environment of the earth than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh. Where do we preach birth control? Bangladesh. Why do we do this? Well, I'm not sure. This woman in Malibu or on the Upper East Side is a very likely candidate to be open to this message.
She is, after all, college educated, media sophisticated, and feels, I think, generally a fair responsibility toward the problems that we all confront.
Well, so then, why aren't these kinds of ideas being tried? We could set up a set of social values where we could go to intelligent, educated women in high-tech industrial democracies, and without any shock or jive, say,
how would you like vastly increased leisure time, a vast increase in your disposable income, and the genuine status of hero in the fight to save the planet.
Now, naturally, you can't do this if you have these fundamentalist yahoos running around raving about family values, but hopefully these people are going to be shipped back to whatever syphiletic, bible-pounding rat hole they all came out of in the first place.
So, I was puzzled as I explored this idea, wondering not why it hasn't been tried, but why I've never heard it even discussed, and it came to me, finally, it's because nobody has figured out how you make a buck in a situation of retrieving demographics like that.
But notice what's going on. If you had a situation where the earth's population was dropping by 50% in a 40-year period, it might be difficult for a corporation to make money in that kind of a situation by selling its products,
But the wealth of the living would increase by 50%, because you would every week be inheriting farms and country homes from cousins and aunts and uncles you didn't even know you had.
So, the wealth of the wealth of individuals would increase, but the wealth of corporations would be under severe stress in that kind of a situation.
Well, then that means that these corporations have become a kind of toxic force operating against the best interests of individuals.
Well, the other thing is, and this is sort of a switch in tact, the dematerializing of our lives is, I think, another area where we could make a significant conscious contribution to at least pumping the brakes on the approach toward the passing of a fail-safe point.
And that means exploring such admittedly odious possibilities as virtual reality, where light replaces matter and code replaces computer codes and this sort of thing replace the manipulation of matter by the kinds of crude technologies that we have grown accustomed to.
I can imagine a world where we commit ourselves not to something like Star Wars, but if the technical mentality must have a bone to chew on,
then let's set a global or national technical goal of producing, by the year 2005, say, a technology which results in something which looks like black contact lenses.
Contact lenses which are installed in the eyelid such that when you close your eyes, menus hang in space.
The entire culture could be dematerialized and downloaded into an electronic virtual culture that would nowhere come tangential to the earth and require very limited resource extraction.
If this mattered as much as being able to knock down 700 incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles in a minute and a half, you can bet your boots it would be on your plate by breakfast time.
It is within reach.
It's simply that we are not organizing ourselves to save ourselves.
We are organizing ourselves to deny our dilemma and to continue the fiction of business as usual.
And the only catalyst that I personally, in a lifetime of experience, have encountered that can change us quickly enough to set us moving in these new directions is the psychedelic experience.
If hortatory preaching could do it, then I would think the Deer Park sermon at Sarnoth or the Sermon on the Mount would have been the turning point.
And obviously those were just speed bumps on the way to the apocalypse.
So, what is necessary, you see, is to address the organism, to address experience.
And the way it is done is by dissolving boundaries.
Because the reason we are able to sit here tonight without freaking out completely about the situation that we're in is because we have incredible barriers against a full assimilation of the information that is available to us right now.
I mean, the fact that we can maintain our sanguinity and look at something like the AIDS epidemic means that we are emotionally numb to threats to our very existence.
I mean, the African continent is truly in danger of becoming an empty continent through disease.
I don't want to see an empty tropical world inherited by re-empowered honky men 50 years in the future.
I think that would be an obscene denouement to the AIDS situation.
These sorts of things are intolerable.
We have the technological ability, the financial punch, even at this late date in the mismanaged Republican game, to change the world.
What we seem to lack is the means, the ability, the chutzpah, whatever it is, to change our minds.
We must change our minds, each and every one of us.
This election, they're screaming, change, change.
And when you look at the minuscule differences that you're offered, and people say, my God, you're not going to knock Clinton too, are you?
No, no, I'm for minuscule change in the absence of any other possibility.
But only because I think it will make it easier for us to do the larger business of radically transforming society.
Well, so that's all sort of nuts and bolts stuff.
And I wanted to sort of talk about that for a while.
And then I wanted to change my focus.
Because above and beyond the practical things that we can do collectively and individually,
I think we also have to seriously rethink our first principles.
And that leads me in a more philosophical and theoretical direction.
I can't fail to talk to you about the conclusions that I draw from the psychedelic experience,
because that's been the major influence on my thinking.
When I first began experimenting with these shamanic plants,
I assumed that the available models would suffice for understanding what was going on.
The first available model was, you are perturbing brain chemistry,
and so you are essentially mixing up the test pattern.
That theory could be dispensed with about 30 minutes into the first experience,
because these experiences are not chaotic in the old sense.
They are coherent, architectonic, transformative.
They are not the antithesis, but the quintessence of meaning.
Meaning is enhanced, not obliterated.
So then I moved on to a kind of Freudian expectation.
Aha, these psychedelic plants and compounds must be a kind of instant psychotherapy,
a catalyst for the study of personal neurosis,
a tool for the recovery of traumatic memory, so forth and so on.
All true, but woefully inadequate to the totality of the experience,
much of which seems to lie far outside the parameters of some notion as cheerful as instant psychotherapy.
Okay, so then jacked the metaphor slightly higher.
It must be then that it was not Freud, but Jung who was right.
And so it must be that this is an insight into not only my personality, my past, my trauma,
but a collectivity of myth, of expectation, that is written into the mammalian and primate genes that we carry in our bodies.
And that these vast forms, glimpsed in the psychedelic dimension, are in fact the archetypes of Jung.
They are the overstructure of the mass psyche that arises out of our physical and mental organization,
and around which language crystallizes various cultural interpretations,
in which we then take up residence and cheerfully and unthinkingly live out our lives.
Well, turns out that also is completely, while true, inadequate to the sum total of the experience.
So in the past few years, and probably because I have been associating with mathematicians
and people like Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake a bit,
I've come to what I call the geometric model of the psychedelic experience.
And I certainly don't represent it as the end of the intellectual road,
but it is a provisional model that is the best I can do at the moment.
I think that, and it seems logically compelling to me,
that consciousness as ordinarily experienced is a human ability shaped by evolutionary pressure.
And since evolutionary threat and harm usually comes at us in three-dimensional space,
this is where consciousness has been forced, really, to concentrate and define itself.
Now, at least I'm not making myself clear, let me restate it.
Because of the possibility of being stepped on by woolly mammoths and eaten by saber-toothed tigers,
the primitive evolving mind of human beings concentrated on nearby space and time.
Because that's where threat comes from,
the kind of threat that has to be immediately responded to by running away or fighting or something like that.
But consciousness, if the psychedelics prove anything,
they prove that consciousness is an incredibly plastic and malleable medium.
And so, what happens when you take a compound like psilocybin in silent darkness,
in a situation of no threat and low anxiety and low input from the exterior world,
is that this function, which is essentially in most situations a closed fist,
ready to strike out at something coming from nearby unfolds into something much more beautiful,
much more interesting, and much more true to itself.
In other words, not defined by an exterior context or situation,
but defined by its own mechanics.
And when this happens, what we see is, well, a number of things,
or one thing potentially describable in a number of different ways,
what we see is that time and becoming is not entirely driven by the consequences of the past.
This is the philosophy which reigns in the world of three-dimensional space.
But in higher-dimensional modalities,
it is possible to contact something which I sometimes call the great attractor,
sometimes the transcendental object at the end of time,
and sometimes the big surprise.
In other words, one can discover within oneself something that is not pushing us from behind
into a frightening and unknowable future,
but something which is actually calling to us from the future
and casting a waving and flickering shadow
down into the lower-dimensional slice of ordinary reality.
Now, people such as ourselves largely have been phobic of this concept
because it's been under the control of beady-eyed little priests for centuries and centuries,
and they have used it as an argument for a laundry list of moral do's and don'ts,
which is a complete perversion of what it is.
What it is is the attractor or the omega point
or the transcendental object at the end of time.
It is the lost portion of ourselves.
It's the portion of ourselves that we left behind
when we made the descent into matter and physicality
that being a thing made of meat and bone and nerve entails.
And most people, at least in these secular high-tech democracies,
have so lost touch with this
that they never lay eyes on it again
until they close their eyes for the last time.
The one thing that we have all imbibed too deeply
is the secular belief that death is nothingness.
We are left to fall back on the schemes
of the secular politicians and the managers,
and these are the least worthy among us
to lead us anywhere.
Culture is a kind of diversion,
a kind of entertainment
that takes us away from the real business of being.
And the real business of being
is to cultivate the thing within ourselves
which is most like
this radiant, attractive force
that is drawing all organization into itself.
Well, what is it then
that we must cultivate within ourselves
in order to reflect and do honor
to the attractor at the end of history?
Well, I think that it's love.
That without love,
all this intellectual circumlubration
and all this linguistic diddling
with interior images
is flawed and narcissistic.
Love is not easily comprehended,
perhaps not comprehensible at all.
It is a mystery,
a mystery into which we are being absorbed.
And at the absorption
into the true unfolding of the mystery of love,
life and death,
history and the eschaton,
the aboriginal and the secular
are all melded into one.
This is happening to us.
You know, it's a cliche of modern journalism
to say that time is speeding up.
It's thought of as a metaphor.
It is not a metaphor.
The crisis that we are experiencing
is in part a crisis in ourselves,
but it's also a crisis
of the physics in which we are embedded.
You see, we, to account for history,
I think you have to stand
the standard model of what the universe is
completely on its head.
The standard model that we inherit from physics
has, it opens with something called the Big Bang.
Interestingly, the way science operates
is it says, give us one free miracle
and then we can explain everything.
Well, if science gets one free miracle,
then I think every ideology
ought to be given the same advantage.
So I think that the miracle of the Big Bang
is an unlikelihood so preposterous
that it could almost be seen
as the limit case for credulity.
What I mean by that is,
if you can believe that,
you can believe anything.
I mean, if you believe
that the universe sprang from nothing
in a single instant from another
area considerably smaller than the cross section of a gnats eyebrow then i'd like to talk to you
after the show about purchasing a large bridge across the hudson river that's been in my family
for generations scientists don't like this kind of talk if i get one free miracle then where i would
put it is not in the absolute ultra hyper vacuum of the pre-physical realm before time and space began
its unfoldment that seems to be an extraordinarily unlikely place to have a universe spring from
i think the place to put the free miracle is at the uh in a domain in which there are many kinds of
energy many kinds of motion uh many forms of organization inorganic organic social aesthetic
psychological so forth and so on in other words a world somewhat like our own and so i believe
that we are actually moving toward the culmination of history which all these cockeyed religions
actually promised it's just that they so distorted the vision in order to get their moral laundry list
tagged on to the thing that it became oppressive and unrecognizable but uh you see if there were only
chipmunks and wild cats and cockroaches on this planet then darwinian evolutionary theory as modified by
molecular biology would be completely adequate to explain the situation it is ourselves that overturned that
cheerful model of what is going on we represent a breakout from the rules of organic nature and evolution
that is no mere small exception because whatever this uh breakout that we represent is it has become the
dominant force shaping the planet well what is it it's that history is the shock wave of eschatology
i think of the surface of a pawn and the time before history is the surface of that pawn
that absolute equilibrium calm mirror smooth well then the surface of the pond begins to churn
and ripple and froth why because something enormous is moving beneath the surface something is about to break
the surface history is that agitation of the pond of time all these migrations technologies civilizations martyrs saints kings
fiends all of this language poetry propaganda these hideous paintings with people's eyes rolled back in ecstasy
the architectonic forms the all of this is an anticipation of something
literally unthinkable but something which invades our lives our dreams our psychedelic experiences with
increasing urgency because we are being pulled toward it at a faster and faster rate this is what
uh the psychedelic experience in the modern context reveals because really in my notion the the shaman
is a geometer a hands-on geometer and what the shaman is doing is rising out of the plane of mundane cultural
existence mercy Eliade uses the wonderful phrase rupture of plane to describe the voyage of the shaman up the trunk of yggdrasil the cosmic world ash
well this rising out of the plane of sanctioned mundane existence literally gives a higher perspective
perspective and what that higher perspective shows is the flow of information out of biology into the epigenetic domain of
language song drama mask making and then writing sculpting and then electronic data transfer so forth and so on and then the
flowing forward of these self-reflecting noetic activities into the domain the field as it were of this transcendental object at the end of time
which cannot be at this point in history defined because it is below the event horizon of the historical process
all that we can see of it at this point in time is the rosy glow of its promise dawn is breaking over jerusalem the east
is streaked with red and you know every click of the cosmic clock brings us closer to the process for which
the planet called us into existence this is the revelation of the gaian mind this is the end of the fiction
of civilization and the return to a kind of symbiotic dynamic with a mind whose depth and dimensionality
cannot be known by the primate mind of human beings we are literally moving into the field of a mystery in fact
its hold on us is now so great the channel so straight the walls so steep that there can't be any turning back
this is the process that was served by the chipping of the first flint the raising of the first temple the offering
of the first sacrifice and we now are in a position to understand this to appreciate this process and to
communicate it to other people because without this model i've racked my brain i don't think there
is a way to make sense of what is happening to the world uh many of you have heard me say that i think it's worth
repeating what is happening here is not the death of a species or the death of a planetary ecosystem
what is happening here is the birth of a new cosmic order and if you were to encounter someone giving birth
and you had never seen it or even heard it your impression would be one of emergency
blood is being shed there's moaning and groaning and pain and pleading it's a great leap to be able
to look at this and say aha something wonderful is happening here a new life is about to enter the cosmos
an individual that never existed before is about to take his or her place among us this is what we are
caught in and uh you know in the same way that the amniotic ocean of the womb must have seemed an
environment worth preserving at all cost so too did the naive dimensions of our resource gobbling past but lo and
behold the umniotic ocean grows cloudy the uh the food is no longer being delivered effortlessly through
the umbilical cord in fact the walls are closing in on us and there is a sense of suffocation of
hopelessness of impending catastrophe because we are now in transition we are in the planetary birth canal
of a new order and uh the best advice anybody can be given at this point i think is hang on hannah you
simply must believe because there can be no going back now that ahead of us lies an unimaginable world
characterized by varieties of freedom and opportunity that it would be preposterous for us to attempt to
conceive of at this point except through the thin the glimmering scintillas of anticipation that come to us
from eternity through dream through prophecy through the psychedelic experience and if we trust in what we
know and communicate this empowering vision and act as though it all depended on us and our acts of
collective caring and attention to each other and the earth if we act that way but know that that is a
fiction and that actually we are part of an unfolding process for which life uh was created then i think
instead of hopelessness despair anxiety division fear and loathing there is a replacement with hope
hope a sense of community a sense of transcendental adventure i mean we
consciousness rests in us we don't know what lies out there in the starry galaxy and it's thin soup to
await the coming of the ufo knots or something like that the real empowering adventure lies through
through responsibility to each other love and aesthetic anticipation of the transcendental realm and when
these things are put in place the power of the naysayers and the frightened and the materialists and the
control freaks and the business as usual crowd will be broken they cannot maintain no one is in charge
at this moment uh and this is good news because it means that for the first time in a long time these
processes are beginning to unfold themselves without bearing the imprint of resistance upon them in the end
it's all lost in radiance and if this seems peculiar to you the idea of a transformation of the world and uh and a
transcendence into a realm beyond imagining uh recall that you yourself are scheduled for death very shortly
and so it's built in for you the only twiddle on the dial that i'm offering is that this kind of
transformation lies ahead for everything not the death of the materialists but the resurrection
of the alchemists the rarefaction and transformation of the human mind and body
into some kind of eternal golden vehicle for the roving through and the discovery of a universe wider
grander deeper than anything that we could imagine
and to preserve its power and its transformative essence we have to keep it away from moral prescription
from uh too clear a definition it is not an unsolved problem it is a mystery
and closure kills the heart of the mystery so we have to embrace this uncertainty not uh as a problem to become
to be overcome but as an opportunity for shedding our pasts shedding the monkey shedding the bad habits of
history that have accumulated and moving into a world that is literally beyond our wildest imagining
it can't be any other way business as usual as i said is off the menu and now it's a struggle between
those who would have us lay down quietly in a kind of anesthesia anticipating uh ruin or those who would
have us stand up and claim our birthright and go forward into the shamanic domain of the spirit that
exists when the human soul and the soul of the earth recognize each other and are united in one and this is
coming