As summer passed, we journeyed to Prague, Czechoslovakia, to attend the International
Transpersonal Conference, a meeting of philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, writers, ecologists,
and thinkers on global subjects. Throughout the conference, we were able to track down
and interview some of the movers and shakers whose ideas and hopes will shape the new millennium.
Prague was a fitting venue for this meeting. Poised as it is at the center of European
crisis and promise, it is a metaphor for the transformation of the planet and of human
psychology that must take place if we are to provide a sane future for our children.
I'm standing in the center of one of Central Europe's most beautiful and mysterious cities.
This is Prague, Czechoslovakia, and I'm Terence McKenna.
We're here to meet with some of the world's most outstanding thinkers to discuss science,
spirituality, and the mounting global crisis. And it's fitting that we should meet in this,
the capital of ancient Bohemia, for Prague and Bohemia have always stood for intellectual
innovation, chance-taking, and the life of ideas. In the Jugendstil splendor of one
of Prague's most famous concerts we're here to welcome Mr. Tej. Mr. Tej, I'm glad to
be here with you today. Please, take a seat.
Mr. Tej, I'm Terence McKenna. I'm Terence McKenna. I'm Terence McKenna. I'm Terence McKenna.
I'm Terence McKenna. I'm Terence McKenna. I'm Terence McKenna. I'm Terence McKenna.
halls, we encountered Richard Alpert and persuaded him to have lunch with us. Alpert, who now calls
himself Ram Dass, is one of the most enduring figures from the American cultural upheaval of
the 1960s. Alpert, whose career reaches from Harvard University to the plains of the Punjab,
has transformed himself into a spokesman for humanities ignored and downtrodden.
And Ralph Abraham was sitting across the table watching me have this conversation. And when
Dr. Steiger left, Ralph leaned over to me and he said, so you see, Terrence, the mushroom is telling
you that it can reach out and touch you anywhere. And I thought that was amazing.
Yeah. Well, anytime you would like to or feel you'd have the time to guide me through anything
at all, I'd be happy to be your...
Oh, and...
Excuse me, sir. You are not the famous Terrence Mushroom McKenna? That is you, my friend, I am aware of?
It is.
That's him.
It is.
Oh, how wonderful.
It is.
Yes. Pleased to welcome you on our Bohemian Highway. I especially bring you very good
black coffee and espresso. If you may tell me, who is the attractive elderly gentleman
you brought on your side on your companionship here?
This is Mr. Doss.
Oh, the M.S. Doss, yes?
No, the Ralph Abraham.
Oh.
The Ram Doss.
Oh, the C.D. Ram.
The C.D. Ram, yes.
C.D. Ram Doss.
The L.S.D. Doss.
L.S.D. Doss.
Yes, the one, yes.
Oh, wonderful. Take this, it will be making you very Bohemian. And so, this...
I am so happy to be in your fair country.
Oh, my country, very fair and happy to have the L.S.D. experience. You know...
What is your name? What is your name?
My name is Waiter.
Waiter.
How do you do, Waiter? A pleasure.
Yes. See you, Waiter. Okay. See you, Waiter.
See you, Waiter.
Yes, okay.
You don't think there's any...
It would...
It needs the external form of the mushroom.
It would never have happened for me. I only argue from my own experience.
Yes, but you and I were both so thick in crap when it had... You know, that's why we needed it.
Well, but there are a few others out there. We didn't corner the market on being thick in crap.
Yes, but I'm talking about somebody like a Ramana Maharshi or somebody like that.
Oh, well, these people...
You know, I mean, there are people...
Sure.
But the idea is not to come up with something that the best among us can make hay with, but a democratic, something which addresses the species.
The thing that seemed to me so important about the psychedelic experience was that it happened to me.
I wasn't reading John Chrysostom or Meister Eckhart.
Exactly.
Of course those guys...
Right on. It happened to me. It happened to me. Yes.
And so I assume that I am a very ordinary person. Therefore, if it happened to me, it could happen to anyone. And that's really something...
That's the question of all. You know, there's a set of assumptions there. One, that you're a very ordinary person.
And whether the same chemical given to a dozen people would bring about eleven other people like this...
A similar experience.
And I think it would be not... The outcome would be very different.
And that's... I keep getting cast into an evolution of consciousness model about individuals.
Because there's such marked individual differences as to...
Three people come before my guru. One completely goes...
And the other two get a chapati.
And people take psilocybin and they... Some go like that, and they go like that, and some go like that.
Well, don't you think a good metaphor for it would be sexuality?
Yes.
Apparently, there are some people who can kind of take it or leave it.
And others of us, it rears its ugly head with great presence.
Yet, everybody has to come to terms with it.
I notice as I get older, I move from one of these categories to the other.
It leaves so much space in my life. I don't know what to do with my free time.
I hope it never happens to me.
Just clinging.
No, just aspiring to cling.
Actually, I live the life of an ascetic.
It's my aspirations that are pulling me down.
Well, see, the great... The nice thing about this evolutionary argument
is that you can sort of make the snake take its tail in its mouth.
Exactly. It does.
Because the escape is not into some science fiction future.
No.
It's into an archaic recursion of some sort.
We once knew everything we need to know.
So what we are trying to find out is lost knowledge, not new knowledge.
And if you direct people back toward 10,000, 20,000 years ago,
they see a kind of completion.
That an open-ended future is...
It seems to me it's a confusing thing to use time in that way
because it makes the artifacts of that period seem to be valued
as opposed to the artifacts of this period.
It seems to me that I... You call it not science fiction,
but science fiction can also be very compassionate.
It can be very historically relevant.
It doesn't have to be... It's just using a different set of artifacts to work with.
So...
Well, for instance, I see most of what's happened in the 20th century
as being unconsciously driven by this fascination with the archaic.
Fascination with the archaic?
Yes, I mean...
Wow, that was... Of all the things I predicted you'd say, it wasn't that.
Tell me...
Well, for instance, impressionism deconstructs the hard image of realism
and gives you a feeling-toned thing.
Which is very antithetical to Victorian, Edwardian thought.
Then Freud and Jung describe different aspects of the unconscious.
But to do it, Freud has to talk about repressed, primitive sexual imaginings.
Jung talks about folklore, fairy tales, and mythology.
Meanwhile, the Dadaists and the Surrealists are saying we have to break up the linear expectations
of the bourgeois mind.
And then you get Jackson Pollock and those people who say the image itself has to be thrown out.
And then, to my mind, the psychedelic thing in the 60s,
based on rock and roll and a boundary-dissolving psychedelic,
we, almost by a random walk, are finding our way toward shamanism, tribalism, nomadism,
go beyond the isms to find out, tell me, what we're really finding.
We're finding a world made out of mind rather than stuff.
Right, okay, we're finding a world made out of mind.
Every time you describe which mind you find, that's just a limiting condition.
I mean, if we just find the thing of mind-created stuff, live in that, then what happens?
Well, I mean, there is a transcendental dimension beyond language.
It's just hard as hell to talk about it.
But if you live in it and talk from there, then the forms that it will manifest in
become just the forms it manifests in.
It's nothing more or less than that.
So you mean you download the unspeakable into language and let the chips fall where they may?
Well, they don't fall where they may.
They fall in a perfectly harmonious pattern.
Well, that's...
Well, that's them falling where they may.
Where they may, where they will.
Yeah.
Well, so what I'm hearing from you is you have a very strong sense of the pattern.
Strong enough that your limited, necessarily limited personal viewpoint doesn't tend to get in the way.
You can always push the reset to hope button and then you hope, almost on principle.
Trump has said to me, stand halfway between hope and hopelessness.
I thought that was very useful.
And is that...
Eh?
No.
What is it?
It's awe.
It's the ecstasy of total horror and total beauty at the same moment.
That's what I feel again and again.
That's when I'm with somebody dying of AIDS.
My God, my heart's breaking.
It's horrible.
It's a ghastly social ostracization.
This, that, opportunistic illness and everything.
And there's another part of me that's giggling.
And I can hardly handle the multifrenia of it all.
The sense of the perfection of it all and the beauty of the moment and the horrible shit of it.
Well, it all is spun together.
Is that because you feel confident that the self is somehow indestructible?
Or because you don't even ask that question?
You've got to watch the words indestructible because that has a time dimension.
I mean, I think that awareness is.
But for example, do you think this is the stage upon which all acts are performed?
Or that we move up and down many levels?
No, this is one of the stages.
Oh, the infinite number of...
Probably infinite number.
Because I just look into two minds and I see two different ones.
And those are all on just this one.
No, I feel like...
Like I have this friend, Emanuel, you know, this spook that has no body.
And Emanuel's two lines to me were,
Death is absolutely safe, first thing.
That's a very profound statement.
And the next thing he said, it was like taking out the tight shoe.
And then I said to him,
Emanuel, what am I doing here?
Who made this error?
What am I doing on this plane?
He said, you're in school.
Why don't you try taking the curriculum?
And the curriculum is?
Life.
Any life?
It means the exploration of the clinging of mind within the world of projected form.
So the exploring life.
It's the exploring life with the...
It's purposive in the sense of returning back into the dark.
To the Garden of Eden.
It's a return.
There is a return metaphor underlying all of it.
And I'm sure you're asked this all the time.
So am I.
Maybe we give different answers.
Do you think that this can be done without psychedelics fast enough to have an impact on the global situation?
I could conceive that it could be.
You asked do I think.
I don't really have an opinion whether it will or won't.
But I could see it go either way.
Like John Seed said to me, it's too late as far as the rainforest is concerned.
He says the inertia is too great in the whole system.
It's too late.
So I said, okay, John.
I mean, it was the first time somebody said it to me just like that.
He said, it would take a miracle.
I said, oh, that threw me back on whatever that was.
And then he said, but after all, he said, we came up out of the ocean and came onto land.
He said, we have quite a lineage of miracles.
I wouldn't underestimate us.
That was a nice one.
Well, so my question to you is, are psychedelics a miracle?
Psychedelics are a miracle, yes.
They may not be the only miracle.
Are they the miracle we need?
I don't know that.
I think they may have already done what they were to do.
Really?
That's interesting.
I've never heard anybody say that.
I think what is done is so much more powerful than anybody yet recognizes.
See, I see that all is destructive.
All is destruction.
It's just the process of transformation.
The question is whether we keep it together in the process of transformation.
And that's why all I'm interested in doing is becoming a person and helping others become a person
who in the process of the dramatic stuff will keep some equanimity and keep some love and some presence in that process.
But psychedelics may play a role in that.
So you're right.
That comes back to your question.
Well, see, my assumption is...
In trying to think about thousands of psychedelic trips rather than just mine, what they seem to do generically is they seem to dissolve boundaries.
Yes.
And the ego is in the business of creating, maintaining, and defending boundaries.
So I really see the psychedelics as directly intervening in the core process which is running us over the edge,
which is our inability to emotionally...
...to connect with the consequences of what we're doing.
If for a single moment we could feel what we're doing, we would stop.
I understand.
But we do not.
It's interesting because you take images that all of us know of the girl running down the street naked in Cambodia or something like that.
And we say that wasn't strong enough.
It won the Life of the Year Award.
But it wasn't strong enough.
It didn't stop everybody and say, holy shit, what are we doing here?
So what would be strong enough to do that?
And you say, well, psychedelics.
But that's in a one-on-one thing.
I mean, we're talking major game players at this moment.
I mean, put China into your computer.
How do you deal with that?
I mean, either you're spraying it or it's water or it's some other level of consciousness that does it.
There is a certain level of trauma that's possible that can soften the ground.
Not Three Mile Island and not Chernobyl.
I mean, I don't want to create this with my mind.
But I can imagine a certain trauma like in Marin when they ran out of water.
It was interesting.
Suddenly all the ego barriers and everything and neighbors were talking.
We'd never even met each other.
People were taking showers together.
Yeah, exactly.
The process was happening.
I'm sure marriages, babies were conceived.
Everything as a result of that trauma, of that denial.
So a massive, significant trauma.
I just got to tell you one scary image.
There's a saint in India who lived up to about 1930, I think or something.
And one of his devotees said to me, one night he was sort of looking off into the distance.
He said, there'll come a time, he said, when you'll walk five miles.
And he said, you'll sight the light from a fire of another person.
And you'll be so happy to know another person exists.
Quite a prediction.
Isn't that quite a prediction?
It's in there.
It's just in there somewhere.
Interesting.
Yes, well, I agree.
I think that what's going to happen is that...
Gentlemen, everything is fine with the evolution of coffee and consciousness.
No, it's very good with you two.
You have come just at the right time.
Yes, I have.
How did you know?
You tuned into a higher level.
A higher level.
A higher level, very high, yes.
I eat Bohemian mushroom soup today, you know?
We were just talking about that.
Oh, yes.
You like Bohemian mushroom soup?
I like mushroom.
Let me sprinkle liberally some water on your chalice, sir.
Oh, please.
Liberally sprinkle his chalice.
Yes.
For sure.
I am a chalice, so it's fine if you wish to.
Oh, I know you by your true name.
You're Mr. Chalice, sir.
Yes.
Very good.
You also some water in your...
Please.
Thank you very much.
Let me put this here and have fun with the shaman strudel.
Bohemian very good.
Thank you very much.
You call when things are getting dangerous.
I'll call you.
I'll be right back.
Not to worry.
Good, good.
Can I ask you a personal question?
You can ask me anything you'd like, Terence.
It's not a personal question to you.
It's a personal question from me.
How do you like having the projection of special identity constantly laid on you?
It's a sadhana.
It's my practice.
That's a good answer.
Although you didn't say how you liked it.
I like it to the capacity I have to transpose it.
If I can't...
I mean, sometimes these are going very fast.
And to just keep it transposed, then I love it.
I love it.
It's like a fire.
If the minute I start to lose it, it's a fucking drag.
It really is.
Because, I mean, you know, I don't know.
I don't know.
It's a fucking drag.
It really is.
Because, I mean, you know, I was in a situation in Miami where all these women with blue eyes
and curfewed hair were grabbing at the buttons of my jacket.
And I thought, oh, I don't want this.
Whatever this life is, I don't want to be part of this.
This is...
They eat your flesh, finally.
Sure.
And...
But I realized at any time, I can walk away from it.
And it's my...
You know, I'm a free agent.
So do you never get in a situation where you say, gee, I'd like to do X, but Ram Dass would
never do that?
My stock and trade, or my coinage, is in sharing just those predicaments publicly.
See, I've turned it into, right?
You've managed to...
But public confession is the subtlest form of wasterling.
Of wasterling, yes.
It's...
I do it myself.
I say, I'm not a good guy.
Don't follow me.
I'm a bad guy.
Then I leave the stage and say, now I can really be a bad guy.
I don't see my holy pictures.
That's one of my lines in my lecture.
I don't...
I'll tell you, you're all...
I only see the stuff that would disturb me as inside myself.
It has nothing to do with out there.
Out there is just being what it is.
And I'm responding with my own stuff.
And I'm doing it myself.
I'm not a good guy.
I'm a bad guy.
And I leave the stage and say, now I can really be a bad guy.
I go and see my holy pictures.
That's one of my lines in my lecture.
I don't...
I don't see the stuff that would disturb me as inside myself.
It has nothing to do with out there.
Out there is just being what it is.
And I'm responding with my own stuff.
And if my stuff is my enemy, it's going to get too much for me.
And if it isn't, you know, it depends on how much I can consume it, joyfully participate
in it, passionately, all of it.
Well, you've sort of achieved a unique synthesis.
I mean, you're almost a secular holy man, because I don't think people...
I don't care much about what you do.
I don't care much about who you believe or who you light candles to.
Basically, I think I heard you describe yourself once as a kind man, and you've gotten incredible
mileage out of that because there are so few.
It's far out.
Right?
Yeah.
I mean, this is...
Well, when you talked about coming back into the boundarylessness, to me, that's
the whole quality of compassion, has that boundarylessness to it.
It's that your suffering's my suffering and your joy's my suffering.
and you are me and here we are and if you hurt feel i'm responding to your hurt not because i'm
a good guy and you're needful just because here is this is suffering and this is the response to
suffering and we're both part of the same thing and that's the way i like to play it from that's
to me it's like riding a wave it's the joy of just being part of the force of compassion
well when when you look you mentioned in your talk the other night
since some people think the 90s are going to be a second turn of the spiral i observed the
60s as a spear-carrying 14 year old i was down in the masses what were the mistakes that are
avoidable than if there's a second chance they're inevitably going to be avoided the first mistake
was idealism the first mistake and the mistake was thinking that because you had seen it
you could just go like that and everybody else would see it and you could just say it's all love
and then everybody would love i mean that was it was a naivete it was naivete it was not working
on ourselves deeply enough to be without the clinging of mind that made us try to use it it's
it was our lurking righteousness that got in our way can you make a revolution though without an
inner righteousness that's exactly
that's the far-out question of where would the action come from and there's this line in buddhism
says out of emptiness arises compassion and what i experience is that there is a way in which i can
sit down in front of a truck or feed a person or go make love or go surf and there is an appropriateness
in every one of those acts and for me to hear that i've really got to shut up and my my work is to keep shutting up
and i just want to get out of here so that i can sit down and meditate for a moment and just
get a fresh breath and just tell the world about me so you're not going to let it go
um
uh
and the general was outraged about this one monk
and he gets up and he goes to the monastery
and he pushes open the doors of the monastery
and he walks into the courtyard
and there's the monk standing in the middle of the courtyard
and he walks up to him and he says
don't you know who I am?
I could take my sword and run it through your belly
without blinking an eye
and don't you know who I am?
I could have your sword run through my belly
without blinking an eye
that's great
that's the place from which revolutions can heal
rather than just starting the cycle all over again
then this is the place we never found in the 60s
I mean I've always said
we reduced it to revolution
although we had the taste of evolution
we reduced it to revolution
well and the day they came with machine guns
we didn't stand like that monk
everybody said
well
and the day they came with machine guns
oh my god you could get killed playing this game
and I flew to Laos and India for three years
but already we had produced the they
by being so busy being we
true
because so that they even noticed we
the fact that they noticed us
was because we were busy being
we were busy making statements
instead of just being it
so maybe I mean this is just occurring to me
that being in a place like Prague
the real thing we have to do
to learn here
is how to make velvet revolutions
not a confrontation
exactly right
that's why I admire Havel so much
that's why he's way up there in my
because he's a compassionate leader
he's got wisdom not just knowledge
he is tuned
there's a quality of his heart that feels present
and he said in this op-ed article
I just read his letter last month
I've read it too
and you know at one point he said
he said we have to do this
we have to allow the naturalness to come back
the personal stuff
the hearts
I mean he was right there with all of the
do you see
I mean I don't want to put you on the spot
but I don't let me preface it by saying
do you see anybody who could play that role
for the millions of kids in England and the United States
who are now asking where do we go from here
is that good or bad
I guess the situation hasn't demanded the emergence of that being it
of those kinds of kids
it can't be anybody that comes forward and says I'm it
oh no it has to be someone who
but the situation
you're in demand
the formation
I mean you watch this
does the man make the time
out of the time make the man
you know and you can feel how
what took a certain person
to make the man make the man
20 years
like to ride a bicycle
somebody later on
can ride a bicycle like that
because the whole culture rides bicycles
there's some like
process where
the situation emerged where the person has to come forward
and they're just forced out
I mean I go and I look at all the
senators that are running for this or that
and I go to breakfast with them
and I listen
and I tune
and Jerry Brown I hung out with
and I said you know
he's got interesting ideas
but there's a
his heart
my god he's got work to do
this poor guy
he's suffering
and I just keep
I love him
and I want those ideas out
but I want him to work on himself
you know
and so I don't see
do you really care in terms of political terms
whether Jerry Brown makes himself palatable to an electorate
I care because I worked with the Mayan widows in Guatemala
and I feel like I'm representing them
and our government
our administration's policies
are killing them
and their children and their children are killing them
and their husbands
and some way I've got to play my part
as a member of a society
that is imposing so much suffering on so many people
I can't just walk away and say
oh I'm helping the nice Mayans
I've also got to realize I'm an American citizen
that's hurting the Mayans
and I've got to play both games
to change one
one way and to do the other thing
so there's a kind of
not to go egghead here
but a kind of coincidencia positorem
because on one level what you're saying is that
there's a kind of not to go egghead here but a kind of coincidencia positorem because on one level what you're saying is that
it's alright
don't worry
and on another level you clearly are involved in a search for defining your role
your
where you would do some good
optimum judo move
so it isn't enough to just say
the system will take care of itself
but I am part of the system
that is taking care of itself
so it's a sense of acting without acting through self
identified with the actor and not being identified with the fruits of the action that's i mean to me
that my one of my basic texts is the bhagavad-gita and those are the two injunctions and i really
hear those and they're very weird how you do an act when you're not identified with being the
actor and you're not attached to fruits i mean i leave this this funny continuous paradox that
suffering stinks and sufferings grace and i live with both of those all the time well i don't i
think most people do i think most people have made it taken a position oh that suffering is
bad they hate it they want to keep it away that it's grace that it's you know lovely well and
then the great masses of people never really draw the distinction because for them suffering is like
air and water it's life it's like it comes with it it's like burying the many children you bear
that's why i found in the villages in india less suffering than i found around the middle class in
america
certainly less whining well less preoccupation with their with what they don't have
well they have a philosophy of reincarnation that must sustain them there is something else that's
feeding them where we have a philosophy of you know if you don't get it now you never will
we threw out in the councils of nicaea trent and constantinople just the thing that would have
healed but we didn't
it so that the church could have power over well i think it was frederick nietzsche who said there
was only one christian and they crucified him yes exactly oh god that's so good it's such a good
life it comes now have you been waiting for me because i'm the waiter i need to wait we've been
looking everywhere for you sir i'm sorry i've been waiting for the hearing now but that was
somewhere else well that can i help you here a bit sir you can help us here and you can
help us now very good i'll i'll help you here i hope you enjoy my conversation no i mean
do we get a check or is this all on the house no no i am the czech i am the czech this is prague my
sir god is everywhere but czechland is here you know okay i keep one more bottle for you
hold it and i'm not in the here and now in the somewhere else maybe later but see you well my you
know i was asking you what did we do wrong in the 60s one thing that i has occurred to me and i
certainly felt it with my friends was we assumed it would go on forever we had no notion of window
of opportunity yes we just thought we'd blown the doors off the hinges and they would never be put
back on yeah to me the most amazing transformation in my lifetime is not the revolution of the 60s
but the revolution of the 70s where they managed to put the cuckoo clock back together again even
though we'd kicked it all over the day that's what i'm see you keep thinking there was that
opportunity in a close and i think it happened then and all of those 70s and 80s and all that
was this kind of reverberation to this process and that i'm here and you're here and we're about
still here it's the 90s and i got a lot of people that you know i talk now
i don't like to talk about outer space but part of the reason is there was one time i was here in
america and i look at my audiences and they they've never taken dope they've never they've
never read a holy eastern holy books or anything and i just say the same stuff i was saying in
the 60s that i was saying to people with flowers and big pupils and these people in the middle of
you know they're coisted nice people and they're going and i think far out look it happened and i
was looking the other way well that's true and that's how it's happened so i'm sure you've accessed poop
where you're looking for the resonance of a person to come forth that speaks from that consciousness
with the assurance of the truth of it right now that's what i think why all this business of a
christ figure i mean i see what how seductive it is but how we we've gotten very cynical because
we've projected into such a person a purpose instead of just that light forming out of the
needs of the moment to create that light to which because i find if i speak from a true enough for a
moment when i can do it from a true enough place in my heart it it reduces the paranoia the subtle
veils of paranoia in another person they don't i don't do it to them it just falls away because
they test they're testing and they don't get from me anything that says like that and i just watch
them like a flower and that and i think boy
you
i give a lot to just be that instrument you know that's worth well that's a great role that's worth
what's but there's a role for everyone else that's the role for that's the role that's what i said to
the ita i said you know just don't talk about it exemplify it let's be it do it well you know
blake said a wonderful thing he said if i can get it right if the truth can be told so as to be
understood it will be believed
right exactly exactly so all you have to do is i say yes exactly when can you say it's simply enough is it
only reset in silence simply enough or are there words or is the music or is there
there's words there's music there's silence there's gesture because you know it's always going to exceed ones grass see my
mantra is the gandhi line my life is my message that yes as you said that every it's very good that's very good of you you're very good
every level i think i'm at a little lower level because i'm very aware that
i have to struggle to have my luck to say my life is my message i would almost rather say
my message is my message please don't look at my life because i'm a fallible human being and
i'm constantly but you see how that weakens your message you see how that quality has
means that the message doesn't come from the the root the central if you're there's a way in which
it waffles true and that's the thing i i really can't once i saw the possibility of that i said
why waffle what is worth holding on to that's worth waffling about well i once said to leo
seth i'm sure you knew leo i said to him in a meeting uh i said leo you're you're finished
you're complete you're you're finished finished for leo leo and the consequences they don't tell
Completed. You're baked. Me, I'm half-baked.
And I hope that the rest of my life will finish the baking process.
But you're not half-baked. That's what's interesting.
I mean, when you and I talk, you and I hear each other perfectly.
Truth. And so where are we hearing each other from?
I mean, then we each play our game the way we play our game, you know,
and you can play your game saying, I'm half-baked.
That's your strategy if you choose.
It's a mercurial strategy.
Yes, I understand.
But here's to mercurius.
You have somehow been able to survive the gauntlet of American media
in a way that your colleagues and comrade-in-arms didn't seem to.
They either had to step away from their leader role
or they transmuted it into some lesser thing.
So now Allen Ginsberg is poet laureate, Tim Leary keeps the club scene in Los Angeles interesting.
He's the Socrates of the L.A. club scene.
Yes. But you, in a sense, never backed down, never retooled.
You were also not first among equals back in the original thing.
But when all is said and done, I was always the second.
In a way, it's like birds.
If you say, just because you're a bird, you're a bird.
If you're behind the lead bird, you don't have to do much.
You're just kind of riding along on the...
Well, and Ralph tells me to be third is the real good position.
It's like being the young prince.
You won't ever be king.
Actually, it was only until about five years ago.
In the past five years, they've stopped introducing me as Tim Leary's partner.
Right.
Which, I mean, I think that was great.
I see him as one of my first teachers, great teachers.
Uh-huh.
And, uh, but I don't have the fun for me.
He says, I have no model of myself.
I mean, I don't know who I am.
I don't know whether I'm an anachronism from the 60s or I'm just about to happen.
A prophet to be.
Yes, I have no idea, and I don't care.
That's what I saw.
Because either of them, all the things you get in either way are a drag, and they're beautiful, equally.
No, well, I think you're a prophet to be.
I think we all are.
I think we all are, yes.
You know, as Bilbo Baggins once said, the greatest adventure still lies ahead.
I believe that.
I do, too.
I'll believe that when they lower my box.
I'll believe that.
I do, too.
Exactly.
Good.
Exactly.
Well, thanks for coming by.
I'm sure you had many, many demands on you.
Thank you.
It was a pleasure.
Pleasure.
I was afraid of you up until now.
Now I'm delighted to be with you.
No, no.
Don't be afraid of me.
The people who are afraid of me don't know me.
No.
Or they know me better than you ever will.
I know.
Angela Sarian is an anthropologist and workshop leader from California who brings the unique
perspective of her Basque ancestors to the formulation of a new discipline which I would
call neo-shamanic anthropology.
So there you have it, as the king said to Mozart.
Yes.
Yes, as the caterpillar on top of the mushroom said, who are you?
Well, so I looked over your newsletter, and it looks like sort of a neo-shamanism
was the category that you are now defining in your public talks.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I'm doing a lot of that, but mostly universals, what we all have in common, finding those
basic roots, which then take us back to...
What do you mean, take us back to indigenous cultures?
Archetypes.
Uh-huh.
Especially the archetype of the warrior, and the healer, and the teacher, and the
visionary.
Those are the four that the shamanic or indigenous cultures really focus upon.
Well, so you're genuinely in the mainstream of the archaic revival.
I never thought about it that way, Terrance.
Well, actually, I'm sort of saying that you're in the mainstream of the archaic
revival.
You're in the mainstream of the archaic revival.
Yes.
But, possibly, when we talk about shamanism, some of our intellectual
goals, our culture, we think about the church.
It sounds like we're talking that worship should be remembered.
Yes, exactly.
Yes.
you can the Renaissance went through a rebirth of classicism probably without
ever really articulating that that's what was happening but I think this
shamanic or Aboriginal ecological feminine partnership impulse is now
pretty explicit so that's what I mean yeah well I think that I love the title
like archaic revival because at the same time what's coming up is everyone
talking about a new world order and yet in order to understand what constitutes
a new world order we need to take a look at what the current world order is and
so we really have essentially four worlds we have the industrialized first
world and we have the the socialist block which would be the second
world and we have the third world countries which are really the
developing countries like Brazil but the fourth world is really the aboriginal
indigenous cultures that that are within cultures but don't have the same kind of
rights and the first three worlds say that the land belongs to the people but
the fourth world said says that the people belong to the
land they belong to the people and the fourth world says that the people belong to the land they belong to the people and we have
land and so that people belonging to the land is really an archetype it's your archaic revival
but it's getting back to nature and owning those roots brings up that revival which is the shift
that we're going to need to make in order to do the new world orders to get the people back to
the land well it's too bad that there's no place in the world where that aboriginal
position is in a governing position starting for the first time in the last three years
is the establishment of the world indigenous council and this summer in july is the first
time that there will actually be a vote to have a seat on the united nations where
will be representatives from each of the world indigenous peoples and so that's i'm real hopeful
really you mean every amazonian tribe could potentially have a delegate or that they
themselves could could have a council and vote who would be their best representatives as a
bioregional well you know it always the there's some phrase in latin i can't remember what it is
but it means that he who does not expand his borders will have his land taken by somebody
else and this was the theory that drove colonization in south america all of these
countries like peru colombia ecuador venezuela actually encroach on a vast aboriginal core
of that continent which should be self-governing yeah and were it self-governing it would be
self-generating and given up on some of the indigenous nations and so i think that's
something that is certainly a really big challenge and i think it's a really big force
i think it's tremendous for us huge force yeah it's amazing that i really think that
for the last 20 years there's been this whole east west bridging but we're really starting in
the last five years to this north-south kind of bridging and i i really feel that
The northern force would be Europe, Russia, Canada,
but the whole southern force is like Africa, Asia, and the Latin American countries.
So that whole force, those two forces really coming together.
So even though you're a spiritual teacher, you talk global politics like a State Department second string.
I do, I do.
I was thinking about the grandparents of the planet being the old Asian cultures and all the Pacific Rim,
and then the exciting thing that's happening in Europe for the first time in history,
that 11 countries are coming together to form a European coalition,
that it puts the child of the planet, which is like America or the United States,
which is so based on a...
a hero myth or a heroine myth and fierce independence,
that the call in the next 50 years is for Americans to learn about community,
which indigenous societies and the grandparents of the planet,
the old Asian cultures and now the parents of the planet,
really modeling teamwork and collaboration and community,
is that America is going to need to really learn,
about collaboration and community and cooperation.
And in order to do that, then there's going to need to be the going back to what would be the archaic revival,
or that beginning to shift so that there can be a new world order where that fourth world is addressed.
Well, don't you think sort of what's happening is that people have a very strong local sense of place, loyalty.
That's true.
And then they are...
forming a planetary loyalty.
But in a way, all the levels in between are dissolving.
So people don't think of themselves as Americans.
They think of themselves as Northern Californians and earthlings, sort of like that.
But in a way, federal Europe, which is no longer a sure thing, you know, because of these recent developments,
goes against that.
I sort of think maybe McLuhan was right.
And that there is going to be a kind of electronic feudalization where many more small states will emerge.
And the reason detra for the nation-state appears to be slowly disappearing.
And the states, I think the crisis that came to Marxism is coming now for the republic-crat oligarchy in America.
I think you're right.
Thank you.
I think there's a terrific shift of power that's going on that out of maybe the hierarchical types of power to people power.
And I see two major forces contributing to that, which is one, the computer or the electronic,
because it's people-based, individual-based, bringing the power back to the individual.
And also free enterprise, rather than capitalism or communism.
There's that middle road coming in.
So I think that when we take a look cross-culturally at the three kinds of power,
or the power of presence, or the power of communication, or the power of position,
the willingness to take a stand, is that it's going to be very important to see how those shifts of power
really are going back to empowerment of the people.
So what are you looking toward in the future, personally and globally?
I've been doing a lot with taking a look at what's found that's similar in all art globally,
because I feel that what humanity consistently creates in art is really reinforcing deep,
spiritual processes.
And so what I've found is that there are five shapes that are found consistently in all art globally.
And one is the circle, and the other is the cross, like the plus sign, the equidistant cross,
and the triangle, and the square, and the spiral.
And you can see them all here in Prague, everywhere you go.
In Prague, everywhere you look, I mean, in all the decor are those shapes repeated over and over and over again.
So I began to look cross-culturally to see if cultures attributed the same meaning to those shapes,
and found that 92% of all the cultures attribute the same meaning to the circle,
which is the process of individuation, or to the cross, relatedness, and interconnection, and interface,
and the square, stability, and foundation setting, and the...
So does this imply a genetic syntax of form, or something like that?
I think that it's part of the archaic revival in that there would be a cellular, deeply cellular imprinting of some kind.
Well, that's what I mean by genetic.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I really do.
The triangle being the visionary, or searching, seeking, questing process,
or the planning, dreaming process,
and the spiral being the need for variety, or the need for change, or growth and evolution.
So it's been really wonderful.
It's part of a new book that's coming out called Signs of Life,
and showing how those images come up in all of the continents,
and are also found in literature and poetry, and put all that together in one place.
So do you spend much time thinking about the future?
I do, I do.
What's your take on...
I think that it's exciting for me to think that we're being called in the next 50 years to our own creative fire,
that we all have salvation myths, and we all have doomsday myths,
but there's a whole body of myths in mythology that have been totally overlooked
that I think we're being called to, which are creation myths.
And what are the creation myths but stories about how to build new worlds internally and externally.
And I think that for 2,000 years we've done the polarity dance,
and we're moving into a both-and world rather than an either-or world.
And I'm excited about the future, that if we can really move into the wisdom of the plant kingdom,
and if we can move into the deep wisdom of nature as a mirror of our own nature,
and remember our creative fire, I think it will be a wonderful time in history.
I'm so glad I was born at the time I was born,
I was born to be a part of this evolutionary renaissance.
How do you see it happening?
I mean, do you see a breakthrough with technology or an abandonment of technology?
Do you see pharmacological engineering?
Do you see new religions?
Do you see...
In other words, it's easy to hope but very hard to get the details in focus.
Yeah.
I think that...
What I see is that there'll be both the bridging of the natural and the technological...
So a more cellular technology, a more organic infrastructure.
Yes, for sure.
And I think that computers are here to teach us about those organic structures.
I think that's quite true.
We're learning different kinds of systems to really see what are the inherent systems
within nature and within our own nature.
So to the degree that we can mirror nature, we can re-spiritualize, re-humanize technology
and interpersonal relations.
Yeah.
Which will be wonderful.
Well, I come right down the line on that.
Yeah.
I think that the psychedelics are just simply the best catalyst, but anything which works
should be pushed to the limit.
To that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I don't know, I was just thinking that somehow we've got to think about possibilities.
I was thinking about in the Rosicrucian era, which is very close here to Prague, is that
they would often say you can kill...
They would often say you can count the seeds in an apple, but you can't count the apples
in a seed.
And I think we're moving in that era where we really think of the possibilities and the
seeds that we have been planting or the fact that computers are teaching us about instant
feedback or instant response and acknowledgement and that the power of acknowledgement and
feedback.
That's why children are, in many ways, know that instinctively that they're mesmerized
by that they can get a yes or no or go back or fatal error or whatever it might be.
Well, it's a kind of explicit hard wiring of our own unconscious.
Yeah.
No more do we create cultural artifacts that are simply our furniture, but now our thoughts...
Yes.
... are values...
Yes.
embodied in this stuff. Yeah, it's very exciting. Yeah, it really is.
I envision a future world where people are nomadic, aboriginal, physically perfect, living basically naked,
but if you were inside one of these people's minds, you would see that when they close their eyes,
there are menus hanging in space, that the culture has been shrunk down to something rather like a contact lens,
which is in the forefront of their eyelid, and they look into culture by closing their eyes.
And when they open their eyes, nature in her radiance is all around.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, it's great talking to you.
The skyline of modern Prague.
In the 16th century, this city became an alchemical center and figured in one of the most interesting episodes in the evolution of European thought.
Rudolf II ruled from here in a court of great extravagance, and upon the death of the old emperor,
the princes of the Northern League met to choose from among themselves a successor.
Their choice was Frederick the Elector Palatine.
Who held court at Heidelberg.
Frederick was all that a young prince of the Northern League could hope to be.
Surrounded by brilliant courtiers, married to a daughter of the King of England,
he represented the alchemical hopes of Catholic Europe.
And in the fall of 1619, having been recently chosen emperor,
he moved his court from Heidelberg to Prague,
bringing with him some of the most brilliant occult minds of the era.
Johannes Andrei, Count Michael Meyer, the alchemical printer Theodore de Bry.
But the reign of the Winter King and Queen, as this incident is called, was not to last.
But the alchemical fantasies of Frederick the Elector Palatine of Bohemia and his queen were destined to fail.
Well, by the early spring of 1620, a local bishop had raised an army
and had been joined by Habsburg troops who laid siege to Prague.
And that siege, after a number of weeks, succeeded.
Among those taking part in the siege was a young French soldier
who had been wenching and traveling across Europe in the style of the times,
René Descartes,
destined to be the founder of modern scientific material.
I like to think that perhaps Descartes actually encountered
his beckonor, Michael Meyer, prince of alchemists,
in the confused situation that prevailed when Prague fell.
For Meyer was lost in the siege of Prague,
never to be heard from again.
It's instances like this in the history of European thought
that have inspired a group of American thinkers
to form the Bohemian Institute
of Prague,
a think tank, theater group, and video production center
to be established here in Prague
and to celebrate the occult and spiritual heritage
of this great city,
a city which, had its alchemical visions been completed,
modernity would have been a far different affair.
Alchemy is an ancient art,
one of the magical arts
associated with dyeing and the gilding of metals
and tracing its origins back to ancient Egypt.
But its modern culmination is here,
in the city of Prague,
where in the 16th century,
under the patronage of the Emperor Rudolf,
the great alchemists of Europe
gathered and pursued their art.
Including Kepler.
Alchemy is more than a technique
for the conversion of base metals into gold.
It is the culminating metaphor
in the search for a union of spirit and matter.
And whether or not this union was ever achieved
is as mysterious as much of the rest of this ancient city.
But whatever the success of the alchemists,
they provide us with a metaphor
for spiritual transformation
that is extraordinarily applicable
in the modern era.
It was for this reason
that the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung
made alchemical motifs
as important a part of his theory of the unconscious
as the contents of dreams or folklore.
You see, before modern science,
the separation between observer and observed
was more naively understood
than in our own world.
And the alchemist,
staring into the swirling content
of his retorts and his alembics,
was seeing in his own imagination
not the processes of natural chemistry,
but an intermingling of psychological processes
and material processes
in a domain of epistemic confusion
that we have grown distant from.
Nevertheless,
the legacy of our own science
is one of pollution of the earth,
toxification of the oceans.
Something has been lost
from the Western vision of nature
by the exclusion of the notion of spirit.
And it's fitting that in an effort
to recapture that lost something,
we return to Prague,
the center of European occult thinking
and a beacon to all
the future thinking on these matters.
Well, Ken, you've certainly spent
a number of years on these questions.
I'm talking with Dr. Kenneth Ring.
We're in the Prague Botanical Gardens.
Dr. Ring is the author of The Omega Project
and is the world's leading expert
on the near-death experience.
Ken, I know recently
you've been interested in UFOs.
How did you get from UFOs
or from near-death experiences to UFOs?
That seems quite a leap.
Well, on one perhaps mistaken day,
I picked up a copy of Whitley Strieber's book,
Communion,
came out some years ago.
And though I had no interest in,
in fact, an aversion to UFO studies,
I found that some of those effects
that he was talking about,
of those experiences,
seemed very reminiscent
of those that followed NDEs.
And so I wanted to explore the connection.
Why do you think
that these abduction phenomena
never happen to
what I would call smart people?
In other words, it's always some poor soul
who lives in a trailer park
who has this happen.
No, I don't think so.
I think that there are people
who have these experiences
that come from the pretty wide swath
of the social register up and down.
What I found in my studies
is that actually the people
who are prone to these experiences
are folks with a troubled mind,
a troubled background.
They have,
they often report traumatic childhoods.
They report sexual abuse,
stressful childhoods.
They're people who,
even as children,
seem to be susceptible,
not to fantasy,
but to alternate realities.
That's, they're,
not everybody is equally likely
to have this kind of experience.
I don't think these folks
are pathological
or come from some particular
social stratum,
but they have particular kinds
of psychological characteristics
that predispose them
to have these experiences.
How do you relate this phenomenon
to your own field of expertise,
which is the near-death experience?
What I found is the,
if you look at the phenomena themselves,
they seem extremely different
in terms of their feature surfaces.
You look at the near-death experience,
it's a very blissful experience,
it's very beautiful.
People have very many positive things
to say about it.
You look at the abduction experience,
people are traumatized by it,
deeply frightened,
disturbed by it.
They seem at antipodes.
But if you look at the structure
of these experiences,
the structure is the same.
They have the structure
of shamanic journeys,
of initiations.
You're taken from the ordinary world,
you're taken to another world,
you learn things,
you are transformed in that world,
and you bring back
those transformations with you.
What I found was that
the same kind of background
that's typical for people
that report UFO encounters,
not limited to,
but including abductions,
is exactly the same kind of profile
that you find for people
that have had NDEs,
near-death experiences.
Same kind of person
is prone to them.
So I talk about
an encounter-prone personality
who's susceptible or vulnerable
to these kinds of experiences
more than the average person.
But the key thing
that relates these two phenomena,
and perhaps others like them,
are the transformations
that tend to take place
in the lives of people afterward.
People with both kinds of experiences
say afterward,
they're more appreciative of life,
more appreciative of nature,
they have a deeper feeling of self-worth,
they are more compassionate individuals,
or less materialistic,
they're more spiritual,
and not necessarily more religious.
In fact, they may be less religious,
but they're more spiritual,
they're more psychic,
they're more intuitive.
What seems to be the outcome
of these experiences
is however different
the experiences themselves may be
and their content,
the effect is the same.
So,
you go through an ordeal
of either nearly dying
or the shock of a UFO encounter,
and you're changed by that experience.
Like Nietzsche said,
that which doesn't kill me
makes me stronger.
These people are stronger spiritually,
they seem to function at higher levels
of intuitive understanding,
of psychic awareness.
It's an expanding experience for both.
Well, is there...
It's interesting
that the personality profile
is the same,
but in one case
the reaction is positive,
but the other negative.
Do people have near-death experiences
without coming near to death?
Sure.
There are lots of ways.
I think the near-death experience
is misleading
because it implies
there's something unique
that happens at the point
of physical death
or when people enter clinical death,
and that's not true.
There are many different pathways
that lead to essentially
the same experiences
without having to throw yourself
under the tires
of the nearest oncoming truck.
Many different ways
to get into this kind of experience.
So relate it a little bit
to the psychedelic experience.
I'd be happy to.
I think that...
I've talked with a lot of people,
I'm sure you've talked to many more,
who have had high-dose LSD sessions
or other kinds of psychedelic sessions
who have told me, in effect,
well, I never came close to death,
but I know exactly what you mean
when you talk about
a near-death experience
because I've had the same thing.
The out-of-body experience,
the feeling of moving into
a beautiful, radiant, illuminated space,
the sense of being
flooded with total universal knowledge,
of being transformed in the instant
and bringing that transformation back.
To me, it's like the light
or spiritual reality
or whatever this thing may be called
is available all the time.
There are just different access routes to it.
The psychedelic is clearly one aspect,
one route that leads to that destination.
The near-death experience is another.
People following a spiritual path
and deeply committed to it
could have the same kind of revelation,
the same kinds of insights.
So I think that
it's a question of equifinality,
many different pathways
leading to the same destination
and the same transformative effects.
That's what I think is important
about those experiences.
Well, now we've had psychedelic experiences
and near-death experiences,
presumably for millennia.
Is this abduction thing new
or are we just getting the old stuff
repackaged in a funny way?
Well, I think that it's related
to things that have always happened to humankind.
Interaction with the invisible world of spirits.
Your phrase, I think,
was sylphs of the air,
the elementals, the fairies.
Folklore, I think,
is certainly related
to this particular phenomenon.
However, even among folklorists
like Eddie Bullard, for example,
who's the one who's looked into this most closely
from the standpoint
of the UFO abduction phenomenon,
there seem to be aspects of this experience
that make it
unique onto itself,
make it similar
to the folkloric experiences of former times.
And yet it's in a kind of technological gloss.
I think maybe because the alien
is kind of the mythic archetype of our time,
it's not fashionable to see angels
and spirits and demons anymore.
But, you know, the myth of the extraterrestrial
is everywhere you look.
And so I think in a way
this particular kind of archetype
has been clothed in the imagery
and the kind of space-age technology
and talk and so on
that's characteristic of our own time.
So I think there's something unique to it
and something that relates to, you know,
the folkloric experiences of former times too.
Because contact between the invisible world
and the physical world,
that's probably as old as man is old.
But you're...
Essentially it sounds as though
you're fundamentally a psychologist
in that you don't take this at face value.
No.
I don't take these as literal experiences
of an incursion into physical space-time reality
of little beings from other places
that have come to do nasty things to people.
That, oddly enough, it seems odd to me,
seems to be the dominant view
of American ufologists.
I'm not a ufologist.
As you say, I'm a psychologist.
In Europe, I think the interpretation
is quite different.
I don't take these experiences as literal,
but I take them as real
within an alternate reality,
within what Henri Corbin calls an imaginal realm.
They're real enough, you know,
people, for example,
people who have near-death experiences
will say things like,
this experience was more real to me
than you and I sitting here talking about it is real.
It's more real than life itself.
There is a reality to these experiences,
but I think it's a profound mistake
to think it's the same thing
as space-time ordinary sensory world reality.
So what you're saying is that
these are symbolic constructs.
Yes.
There's a symbolic aspect to them.
I think the important thing,
you know,
I think there are two attitudes
toward the UFO question.
It's a mystery,
but there are two types of mysteries.
There are mysteries like in detective stories
that beg for some kind of solution
and you only feel satisfaction
when the solution at the end is revealed
and all the reasons given.
Then there are mysteries
that are meant to be explored.
True mysteries.
Yes.
True mysteries.
And these mysteries beg for exploration,
not for explanation,
if I can put it that way.
And the UFO seems to me,
the UFO phenomenon
is the second category of mysteries.
That's why I personally
and perhaps temperamentally
I'm opposed to the idea
of trying to package it
as though it were something as simple
as other beings,
however amazing that would be in itself,
other beings coming from other places
in the galaxy to invade
or to have some contact in human affairs.
I think the mystery is likely
to be much more profound than that.
And another thing,
if I may say that,
I think hooks together
the near-death experience
with the UFO experience,
whatever its basis may be,
is when people come out
of these experiences
and have worked it through,
they come to have a worldview
that is very similar to one another
and is very similar
to what's being talked about
all the time at this conference,
and that's an ecological worldview.
The heightening of ecological sensitivity,
the increase of concern
with the welfare of the planet
is one thing that unites these two people,
even though they have
these very disparate experiences.
What they say
about what they've learned
from these experiences,
what the meaning of these experiences
for them is,
is that the fate of the Earth
is in our hands
and we'd better wake up
to do something about it very quick.
So I see these experiences
perhaps being orchestrated by,
I think this is similar to your view,
perhaps a planetary mind,
an overmind,
a mind at large,
which is in some sense
the expression of our deepest yearnings
and perhaps our deepest fears
that are feeding back
these kinds of experiences
in the form of
kind of archetypal experiences,
archetypal images,
so as to impress people
who might not otherwise be impressed
to take the kind of action necessary
to correct the direction
in which the Earth is heading.
So it's a kind of confoundment.
It is.
Its purpose is to be inexplicable.
Exactly.
That's exactly how I conclude my book.
I say the point of these experiences
is to be baffled by them,
almost as though they're a kind of a con
that we're not meant to solve,
but we're meant to kind of chew over
until our rational mind cracks
and we begin to think in entirely new ways
and hopefully act in entirely new ways.
So it's a way of keeping us from closure.
Exactly.
It's sort of a deconstruction phenomenon,
you could even say.
It's saying to us,
the world is not so simple
as you might choose to suppose.
Exactly so.
We're going to be talking
with Rupert Sheldrake,
one of Britain's most controversial
natural scientists.
Sheldrake is the proponent
of a theory called
Morphic Resonance.
He believes that the presence of the past
actually impinges on processes
in the present and the future.
In other words,
our world is as it is
because of how it once was.
This is not a genetic theory,
not a theory of natural selection,
but a field theory
which holds that actions
and situations in the past
are able through the mere act
of having happened
to shape future and present events.
Rupert, this immense Baroque building
is the Museum of Natural History in Prague
and I wanted to bring you here
because I thought it would be
an appropriate place
to discuss your ideas
because after all,
a museum is a kind of archive
of morphology.
Exactly.
These stuffed animals and skeletons
are like photographs,
snapshots of forms frozen.
But of course each animal behaves
and moves.
Each animal develops as an embryo
to its adult form
and each one evolves.
So it's triply dynamic.
We have to reconstruct that in our minds.
But the whole thing really is
a reflection, I think,
of the memory behind each species.
Each species is the repository
of an entire process of memory.
Well, now this is the part of your thinking
which goes well beyond orthodox theoretical biology.
Say a bit more about that.
Well, the orthodox view is that
all these amazing forms
and all the behavior and instincts
that the animals expressed
were all coded in the chemical genes.
So a materialist theory.
That's a materialist theory.
I think it goes far beyond that
and involves a memory
a memory of instincts,
a memory of behavior,
a memory of form.
That is not materially based.
Not materially based.
A collective memory
on which each species draws.
So here we are
in the hall of paleontology.
This is sort of the archive
of all these morphogenetic forms
that have persisted through time.
Can you say how your notions
go beyond Darwinian
and Mendelian genetics
and evolutionary theory?
Well, I agree with the conventional theory
that there are genes
that are important in inheritance.
They give each organism
the chemicals it needs.
But as well as that,
you see there's the morphic fields,
the organizing fields of these forms.
And the forms
like we see in these shapes here
are all determined by the fields.
They determine the way organisms develop.
These are all extinct types.
And I would say that the memory
is not only inherent in the species
while they're alive.
Even after they're dead,
even after they're extinct,
the world is still filled with,
as it were, the ghosts of extinct species,
memories of species that no longer exist.
So the memories of evolution
are cumulative.
They build up.
And sometimes we see
in the course of evolution,
extinct forms of shellfish, for example,
come back again after 10, 20 million years.
These are called evolutionary iterations,
evolutionary repeats.
And they're explained in terms of atavism,
the recapturing of ancient memories.
But in a sense, you're saying
that after the species is extinct
but the fossil form lives on,
then it is somehow a catalyst
to this recursion of form.
There's an entire memory
built into nature.
The world is, as it were,
haunted by the ghosts of extinct species.
Each species is influenced by
all the past members of its species,
but behind that,
all the forms that have gone before,
which is why,
in the course of embryonic development,
we see echoes of the embryonic forms
of remote ancestors,
the way that we developed
through a fish-like stage
with gill slits and so on.
But in a case like that,
then how is it possible
for new form to emerge at all?
Well, this is where novelty comes in.
Well, no one can account for novelty
except perhaps yourself.
To say that it's blind chance,
as the conventional view,
tells us very little, almost nothing.
It's really just simply saying
novelty is unintelligible.
There are different ways of thinking of it.
The founders of paleontology,
like Cuvier,
the great fossil pioneers,
the pioneers of this kind of museum,
had thought that they were all reflections
of platonic archetypal forms,
timeless forms.
That wouldn't really explain creativity.
It would simply say they were pre-existing forms
that were merely manifested.
Other people would think of creativity
as going on as evolution proceeds.
So a bird like this didn't exist at one time.
Then, usually by a sudden jump,
it would appear.
And then, through repetition,
would become increasingly habitual,
then become extinct.
And the potential habits,
the memory would persist in nature,
although it wouldn't be expressed.
Well, tell me this.
Do you think that a person holding this point of view
has a license for more optimism
than people who are trying to operate
in the ordinary scientific paradigm?
In other words,
how does this idea reflect back into the dilemma
of the human world
here at the brink of the third millennium?
Well, several ways.
Firstly, this theory leaves the nature of creativity open.
It may be blind chance,
but it could be anything else as well.
You know, there could be a directing intelligence.
All we know is that new things appear.
We don't know how they appear.
Secondly, it tells us that
habit is a very important principle in nature,
and it makes us aware of the importance
of our own habits, personal and cultural.
But thirdly, the theory tells us
that when new things happen,
by morphic resonance,
they can spread around the world
much more quickly
than they might otherwise be able to.
And this could be a ground for optimism.
It means that change can happen faster
than we might otherwise believe.
And change, fast change,
seems to be very necessary
if we're to survive.
So what you're saying is
we don't have to rely on mechanisms
like cultural diffusion
or direct communication.
These new concepts,
new paradigms,
are in the air, as it were.
Yes.
And of course,
we all know about modern telecommunications,
you know, modern mass media.
But morphic resonance means that new attitudes,
new patterns of behavior
can spread much quicker
than one might otherwise have thought.
Well, tell me this, then.
How is the theory of morphic resonance doing?
Is it behaving according to its own
predicted trajectory,
or is it meeting unexpected resistance?
It's meeting expected resistance.
I see.
But the idea certainly seems to be catching on.
I mean, there's a sense in which
this idea of a kind of habit
appeals to people.
You know, people...
It makes sense,
the idea of a collective memory.
The idea that what we learn
is like a kind of remembering
of what others have learned
is intuitively plausible to me
and to many other people.
And I would say the...
Certainly the idea is getting easier to explain
than it was when I first thought of it.
Well, I've heard it said
that it very elegantly and neatly
solves problems which are
uninsoluble by any other means in biology.
Could you just name
a couple of these areas
where it makes clarity out of chaos?
Well, there are many.
One is the development of form in embryos,
the way that a bird like this
could grow from an egg.
And how any organism develops from an egg
is a great mystery.
And the idea of morphogenetic fields,
form-shaping fields,
is the basis of the whole theory.
That's what I started from.
And so it helps to explain
the problem of form.
It helps to explain
the inheritance of instincts as well,
how new patterns of behavior
develop and spread.
So these are two of the areas
that it helps...
So is it the non-material presupposition
that makes it so difficult
for orthodox science
to accept this into its canon?
Yes, it's the idea of
a kind of non-material memory
on which each member of the species draws
and in turn to which it contributes.
It's very like Jung's idea
of the collective unconscious.
This is an idea that's in one form
familiar to people already.
But because modern science is steeped
in a kind of materialistic way of thinking,
the idea that everything has to involve material
and material transfer
is very important for a lot of scientists.
Of course, in the light of modern physics,
it's a very old-fashioned idea.
To get a television program
from the transmitting station
to the receiving set
doesn't involve couriers
carrying cans of videotape.
It goes through as vibrations through a field.
And I think that radio and television
have broken us out in our everyday thinking
from the 19th century materialistic paradigm
because fields and vibratory connections
through fields
are now the stuff of everyday life.
And the idea that all forms of information transfer
have to involve material
is no longer tenable.
But many people's scientific thinking,
including that of many scientists,
is still locked into a kind of 19th century materialism.
Well, probably because the theory of genetics
has been so successful
and it is a theory of material particles,
it sounds as though biology
has been dragging its feet somewhat behind physics
in terms of its acceptance of fields
and its acceptance of field theory.
Well, modern neo-Darwinian theory
is based on the discoveries of geneticists in the 1910s
and following Mendel in the 1850s and 60s.
And it's based on old-style atomistic particulate theory.
The whole basic way of thinking
was formed long before quantum theory came into being.
It takes almost no account
of modern developments in physics.
It takes almost no account of modern cosmology.
The idea that the laws of nature
could evolve along with the cosmos.
It's locked into an earlier form of classical physics.
And I think that what I'm suggesting
is much more in accordance
with the modern spirit of physics.
Whereas most of biology is still an attempt
to reduce the phenomena of life to high school physics,
which is essentially classical physics
of the 19th century time.
Well, essentially you're attempting
to go beyond reductionism, it sounds.
Yes, I think so.
And what are your expectations
for success?
In other words,
are there experimental strategies
which are supporting this point of view?
Or is it largely theory?
Where do you stand with it?
Well, experiments are going on
in the realm of morphic resonance,
principally in the realm of behavior at the moment.
Animal behavior, human behavior.
But the theory applies to crystals
as well as to plants and animals.
And chemical tests
are some of the most potential
and potentially exciting.
I'm doing some work on crystal forms
and crystal phenomena.
The main experiments there in the human realm,
so far they've been very encouraging.
They suggest that people can learn more quickly
what others have already learned.
And that's also the area where
the theory could be most immediately applied.
For example, in education.
Well, the theory seems to imply
that its own correctness depends largely
on its being heard and repeated.
Well, the theory implies
that the more it's heard and repeated,
the easier it will be for people
to grasp the theory,
to understand it.
Yes, that's true.
And so it seems to be.
So it seems to be.
We're in Prague's Museum of Natural History
talking with Jill Purse of London, England.
Jill is an expert in Mongolian overtonal chanting.
So, Jill, tell me something about your work.
What I'm trying to...
I like to think that to re-enchant
means to make magical through chanting.
And what has happened to our society
is we've become disenchanted,
which literally means that we've stopped chanting.
And this has been a gradual process
in what we call the developed Western society.
The more developed our society,
the less we chant and sing.
And chanting is a very powerful way of healing
and a way of tuning ourselves with ourselves,
with our environment, with our family,
with the sacred place, with the sacred time,
keeping us in tune with all our environment and with God.
And we stopped doing that.
We started to stop doing that
when we stopped believing in God,
when we started measuring things in the 17th century.
And we found that it was...
It felt better and we felt we had more control
by measuring than we did by chanting
and by praising God,
by petitioning God,
and by participating with God,
which are the three ways that we've always
made a reciprocal relationship
with he or she
who seem to be in control of our life and destiny.
And when we stopped doing that,
we stopped doing that because we felt that counting
gave us a greater sense of control of our environment
and meant that we ourselves
had a greater chance of survival.
But why this particular central Asian shamanic approach to it?
Well, what's happened now is that we've come back...
What we've found is that science,
since the 17th century,
the development of science and the direction of science
has, quite apart from...
quite far from giving us the control
that we thought it was,
it's led us in an unprecedented way
to be, and only through science,
to be less in control of our environment
than ever anyone has ever been.
We have never been in such a dangerous situation.
We have never been so vulnerable.
And this is entirely because of science.
And so all the control that we thought we were gaining
has actually turned out to be quite the reverse.
And so we are completely out of control.
And so we again have to find out how do we do it.
If science has failed, what other ways may succeed?
What other ways can we again create
a reciprocal relationship with this great and powerful force?
And so we have to look at the old traditions
and do we go back to being good Christians,
good Hindus, good Muslims, good Jews,
or do we try and, if we're a Hindu, become a Muslim,
if we're a Buddhist, become a Christian,
if we're a Christian, become a...
Or do we try and reinvent it all?
The problem really is what song do we sing?
And so what I've tried to do is to find a way of chanting
which is deeply cultural.
It comes from Central Asia, and in particular, Mongolia.
But what I think is so extraordinary about this way of chanting
is that it deals with sound, with the harmonics of sound,
which is a way not of culturally dividing the octave,
which is what all other forms of music have as their central core,
which is that if you divide the octave, this is a cultural affair.
How do you divide it?
How do you do it?
It differs whether you're Indian or whether you're Western.
But what this is based on is based on the harmonic series,
which is simply a way of making our own geometry audible.
It's a way of allowing us to hear, in a sonorous way, our own structure.
And this is a profound recognition.
It's a profound remembering, because we are hearing what we are.
So it's a kind of organic music or organic sound.
Absolutely.
It's the most organic sound,
and we're making audible our biology.
Well, I brought you here to this wonderful Baroque room
because I was hoping that perhaps you would honor us with an example of this,
since I'm sure it's easier to hear than to describe.
Yes.
Do you think you're up for that?
Yes.
Okay, my dear.
Please, have a go at it.
A transplanted Yorkshireman lives in Washington State, USA.
He is a published poet
and a performer of his own poetry and the poetry of others.
His work reflects a special sensitivity to the ecological crisis
and the problem of a burgeoning planetary population.
You mentioned this concept, the ecological imagination.
Yes.
So obviously this is sort of the distillate for you.
Yes.
Some of your thinking.
Yes.
So say something about it.
What is it exactly?
Well, it's an imagination where the image itself
has many different realities constellated within it.
It isn't an image that you're trying to impose on the world.
It's an image that's received after you've remained quiet
and you're willing to pay attention to the miracle of creation as it is.
Now, that miracle may take the form of despair and alienation
as it has over the last 60 years, but you pay attention to it.
You know, we live in a monocultural society
where you plant wheat in one field
and you spray down on either side,
and you get one crop.
And the soil, which comes from the same root as the word soul,
suffers as a result.
You know, in the eastern Palouse of Washington State,
they've lost 25 to 50 feet of topsoil
through intensive mining, almost mining agriculture.
You know, here we are in the botanic gardens in Prague
where plants have been brought from all over the world.
In some ways, it's a wish by humanity to recreate the beauty
and imagination of the rainforest.
Or of an ecology where things fit together exquisitely.
And we have this inside us.
We have this patterning, this understanding
that the world fits together absolutely exquisitely
and we have a possibility of fitting together, too.
So the poet remains silent, looks out at the world,
receives all the images that come in
and tries to say the one word that represents the whole ecology
of everything that is received.
And hopefully will give birth to that world in the word, in the line.
This suggests somehow that the word is made flesh.
Or in your metaphor, the flesh is made word.
Yes, or the word is made ecology.
The word is made ecology.
Well, so this is an aesthetic of nature,
almost Emersonian in its scope.
This is a far cry from futurism
or the glorification of nature.
The technological that a lot of 20th century poetics has been about.
Yes.
Do you see yourself as a part of a conservative impulse in poetry
or a reforming impulse?
How does that work?
No, I don't see it as being conservative.
It may be looked at that way from the areas of art
which say Andy Warhol inhabited
where the whole emphasis was on the latest wave.
The latest wave that was breaking on the shore.
Fashion.
Yes, fashion.
And the whole sea that was behind each wave
as it came upon the shore was ignored.
And so I think what there is now is a resting back,
a swimming out, a diving down into that sea
to reestablish our eldership.
I think much of what's happening in the 20th century
is a reestablishment of eldership.
I mean, here we are in Prague.
Prague has been asleep almost like Rip Van Winkle
for the last 40 years.
Anyway, 40 years, possibly longer.
And it's awaking again.
It's awaking.
And there's so much awaking in the world today.
And I think poetry has always been the art
where you remind people of what life is about
and what is essential to it
and what, as Pericles said,
what is sweet and what is terrible about life,
that you have to know both those things.
And the poet ignores neither.
So hopefully it's not the kind of conservatism
where you're trying to go back to some identity
or some hygienic Rousseauistic past
where everyone can gather under one oak tree
and discuss the problems of the village.
That's never going to happen.
But the poet neither, he does not hide
or she does not hide the beauty of life
and does not hide the alienation.
You know, this century we've had tremendous emphasis
on looking into the cracked mirror of alienation
and saying, look at where we are.
And the wasteland was all about that.
But there's another side to it, too.
You can only do that for so long,
otherwise you have no more impetus to go on.
But there has to be...
Here, let's go up here.
There has to be some kind of healing.
There can only be so much of this existential angst and...
Well, you see, Sartre, he came up to a tree, you said,
and he put his finger on the tree and he said,
life is absurd because I cannot understand that tree,
I cannot become, I cannot get my soul into that tree.
Well, the Zen patriarchs have been talking about this
for 1,500 years.
And you weren't supposed to get your consciousness into the tree.
You were supposed to pay such tremendous attention to the tree
that it came to find you.
Yes, Sartre said nature is mute,
which is to me one of the most amazing statements
any 20th century philosopher has made
in terms of defining
alienation.
I think that would have to be it.
Well, I don't think the French have been very successful
with their philosophers over 350 years.
Well, they are welded to materialism.
Well, so at this conference there's been a lot of talk about hope.
Where do the poets come down?
Are you singing a funeral dirge for a world passing away
or is this the bright birth of the new young prince?
Well, hopefully neither in some ways
because you simply have to speak life as it is.
So at this time we're speaking tremendous change.
We're speaking the stakes are very high.
You can fail in life.
An individual human being can fail in life.
A species can fail in life.
I mean, in some ways we always live out our destiny
no matter what we do.
It just depends what level you want to live out that destiny.
Do you want to live out your destiny on the level of frustration?
Yes, you can do that.
Or do you want to step further and deeper into it?
So poetry always says the stakes are very high
and it relies on the fact that life itself is magnificent.
You speak about the magnificence of life
not in a Pollyannish sense
or in a sense in which you're going to ignore
all the difficulties and terrible beauties of life
but in the sense that it's magnificent because you can fail at it.
And we as a species can fail.
So the hope of the poet is that you can
speak to the magnificence of life
such that people will be reminded
that life is magnificent
and you can fail at it
and the stakes are very, very high.
The stakes are your life.
So that's almost a bardic manifesto.
Do you feel moved to speak some poetry?
Will move from talking about poetry
to speaking poetry?
Yes.
Well, we spoke about the tree earlier
and having the world come and find you.
And...
I'm reminded of a very simple poem.
This is a very powerful poem for me.
It's a teaching story actually
out of the Northwest Indian tradition
where the story is there to tell a young boy or girl
what to do when they're lost in the forest
or to answer the question.
You know, when the young boy or girl asks the question
what do I do when I'm lost in the forest?
The elder tells the story.
It's been rendered into marvelous modern English
by David Waggoner
who has the chair of poetry at the University of Washington.
In the Northwest United States.
And it's a very simple poem called Lost.
And here it says...
It says take the burden off your shoulders basically.
The story only says so.
The young boy or girl says to the elder
what do I do when I'm lost in the forest?
And the elder says stand still.
The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost.
Stand still.
The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost.
Wherever you are is called here.
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger
must ask permission to know it and be known.
Listen.
The forest breathes.
It whispers I have made this place around you.
If you leave it you may come back again saying here.
Saying here.
If you leave it you may come back again saying here.
No two trees are the same to raven.
No two branches are the same to ram.
If what a tree or a branch does is lost on you
then you are surely lost.
If what a tree or a branch does is lost on you
then you are surely lost.
Stand still.
The forest knows where you are.
You must let it find you.
Alexander Shulgin, Sasha to his friends,
is nothing less than the godfather of psychopharmacology,
an expert on the cyclicized phenylethylamines,
that is, psychoactive compounds useful in the emotional recovery of traumatic events.
Shulgin has given his life
to the study of the pharmacology of the psychedelic experience.
In Prague, he told me,
greater frontiers lie ahead.
The next lost continent to be explored by Alexander Shulgin,
the psychoactive tryptamines.
Sasha suggested that I join him
for a stroll among the graves
of the cemetery of the Jewish ghetto of Prague,
Europe's oldest ghetto.
There, walking among the stones,
we reminisced and speculated about the history
and the future of psychopharmacology.
What do you make of your Russian colleagues here?
I'm fascinated by what he's doing
and I'm intrigued by his ability
to get out what he is doing into the West
because the status of a physician in Russia
is not what we have come to respect in the West.
You're talking about Yevgeny Kropensky?
I imagine you don't view ketamine with...
Well, how do you view ketamine?
It's an anesthetic
and it's a dissociative thing
and it puts me out of body.
It's very dissociative.
It puts me out of mind.
Just you're away
and I, frankly, with a full bladder like being here.
And you suddenly realize that someone has a full bladder
and at only one intellectual level you realize it's you.
Yes.
No, it's so subtle.
It seriously disassociated me
that I felt it was a great victory
when I finally realized that this was a drug.
For a long time I couldn't figure out what it was
or who was even asking the question.
They kept calling it vitamin K
which is a fascinating euphemism
for allowing it to have some semblance of a food-addictive
or a dietary supplement.
But I had the interesting pleasure of being
back at a big company in the East.
The day they had bought the rights to distribute ketamine.
And I informed them,
you do realize that ketamine is being made by Park Davis
and shipped off to Mexico
and it's imported in gallon, not gallon, but liter bottles
all with a percentage of preservatives
and comes right back into California in the trunk of the car.
And they were shocked.
They did not know there was any abuse whatsoever.
Never could have conceived of human abuse.
Oh, about 20 years ago
there was a class of compounds called quinucleidines.
And for about three or four years
I just noticed that there was no publishing
in the Russian literature whatsoever
on the area of quinucleidines.
Then all of a sudden the Russian literature
started publishing.
And then we went into a sort of a gap.
And then quinucleidine benzate,
which is one of the most potent of the anticholinergics,
was suddenly revealed that the Russians
were working on it as a chemical warfare agent
and then we were working on it as a defense
against their chemical warfare agent.
Uh-huh.
10, 20 micrograms.
10, 20 micrograms?
Yes.
It makes you really wonky.
It's like atropine.
Delusion, confusion.
Uh-huh.
But they design these fantastic bombs
that they can explode
and send out millions of little hypodermic needles.
And so they don't have to worry about
wind blowing it down, wind or upwind.
So it's essentially a chemical cluster bomb.
Cluster bomb, but with little hypodermic needles.
Yeah, I'm telling you.
So that's probably in the inventory.
It's already in the inventory.
Uh-huh.
Well, someone mentioned to me
that you had expressed interest now
that you felt you had sort of done
the work you wanted to do
with cyclosized phenylethylamines
and that you were going back to looking at tryptamines.
Very much so.
That's the other side of the coin.
It's as rich and unexplored an area
as the phenylethylamines were 20 years ago.
So are you going to illuminate it for us?
Oh, absolutely.
There's a t-butyl, t-butylmethyl,
isopropylmethyl is well known,
but the secondary butylmethyl is not known.
They're all active by smoking.
Uh-huh.
And what, are they, could you,
in a blind test, pick one out from another?
Or are they sort of...
Don't know yet.
I don't know yet.
I doubt it somehow.
I think they're all going to be fast,
impactful and all very much like DMT.
Duration-wise or presentation-wise?
Duration-wise, probably, perhaps a little bit more potent.
A little bit more potent.
Yeah.
DMT is not that, that off-fired potent.
It takes, you know, 10, 20, 50, no more,
50, 100 milligrams.
50 to 70 milligrams.
And some of these we're getting into,
maybe at 30, 20 to 30 milligrams,
but not active or active.
You have to get up to a certain degree of shrubbery
on the nitrogen to get a raw activity.
And how many of these compounds
do you imagine there are that are simple variants?
Casually, you can make 30, 40, 50.
Why do you suppose it is
that this fast-acting,
easily manufactured,
spectacular hallucinogen
is so rarely met in the underground?
I don't know.
I have heard that there is,
it's there in some quantity.
I heard about a seizure in Boston,
I believe it was of ayahuasca,
and they seized it on the basis
that it contained DMT.
Right.
That was the Santo Daime people from Brazil.
But, you know, we live in a society
where people jump out of airplanes
and hang by bungee cords over bridges,
and DMT, which is always described
as an easy synthesis,
is just not there.
It violates one of these economic laws,
Gresham or Graham or somebody.
Something that I've always wanted to ask you,
which is, unlike me,
you seem remarkable
and incredibly resistant
to what I call the implication.
I mean, how can you just do these things
over and over again
and not be nutty as a fruitcake?
So?
Well, are you?
I think so.
Are you?
I think I relaxed it in the event.
But unlike me,
you don't feel the need
to rave about that aspect of it.
Not particularly.
I'd rather quietly stay half in the closet
and continue doing what I'm doing.
But you do,
you've probably seen
more uncharted internal landscape
than half of mankind put together.
I mean, that would not be an immodest claim.
They're a little bit charted now.
Well, a very little bit.
Very little, that's right.
But the seeds are there
to be used by anyone else.
That's the reason for the book,
just to get it all recorded
into a documented form.
But it always puzzles me.
I think Hoffman and Wasson
and certainly to some degree Schultes,
to some degree you,
everybody says,
well, I'm just a humble botanist
or I'm just a hardworking workbench chemist.
Nobody wants to actually say
this must be very, very important
because it's so uniquely
beyond ordinary expectation.
Yes, but the importance
is it's going to take a long time
to realize what you can't build
without the tools
and you have to have the tools
and these are the tools
that allow the building to be done.
I'm not a builder.
I'm a toolmaker.
And that's probably one of the reasons
I have not described
a lot of landscapes
other than something different.
If we could compare it
to the invention of the telescope,
probably within 50 years
of the invention of the telescope,
the major solar system
new paradigms were put in place.
This seems very elusive.
It seems hard for us to go beyond
simply saying it exists,
it's really far out
and then we sort of fall silent.
What do you think about that?
I think the silence is in part imposed upon us
by a very unsympathetic authority body
and maybe it's just as well
that way a lot of work can be done
and sort of recorded for posterity.
And the time the pendulums swing,
they will swing back
and the time will come
when this work will be used,
research will be done with these tools.
Well obviously you believe in it strongly.
What would you say to a critic
who said,
what's so great about this?
Are you and your friends
in any significant way
different from the rest of humanity?
No.
And I don't see why it would be critical
I'm not offending him.
I can see no way in which I'm offending him.
I'm quietly doing my little alchemist thing at home.
But you really must think
that it does make a difference.
I think it does.
I think it will.
It will.
I don't think it does now.
So we really are cursed with being pioneers.
Yeah.
It's not so bad.
It has a nice...
I mean they'll hang your picture
in the main hall years hence
and say,
these were giants.
I would rather have my picture
hanging in the main hall
than me hanging in the main hall.
Well some people manage both.
Both.
And you may end up that way too.
Oh well.
It's a short happy life.
It's kind of neat.
But this is your territory too.
What's your feeling?
Do you feel that that's a fair...
I think that...
I think that I am always
from the very first psychedelic experience
had the uncanny intuition
that yes this has been around for 50,000 years
but it's somehow going to be critically important
in our lifetime
that we will need it for something.
Maybe just to think our way out of the mess
that we're getting into.
But if it's needed we have it.
Yes.
That's the beauty.
The tool is there
for the time when the need is obvious.
And this may be our lifetime.
So essentially what you're doing
is you're placing tools on the shelf.
Screwdrivers for screws
that haven't been invented yet.
Exactly that.
Except it's a good tool.
It's use will depend upon someone
who has that particular view of need.
Well it's...
It's a wonderful thing.
Where do you hope to be
in 10 years or so with all of this?
Probably starting on a third book.
Do you think...
I know you're working on a book about legalization and...
Not actually.
I'm working with a group
who's more or less funded
to make arguments that would be raised...
to address arguments that would be raised
in the legalization process.
What would be the answer of how drugs would be legalized?
How would they be made available?
Should it be in the open supermarket?
Should it be under some sort of governmental control?
And it's a research...
More than that, a policy group...
Studies.
Setting up for that.
I think it's futile in the present state.
In terms of practical impact?
I don't think anyone's going to seriously entertain legalization.
So it's a...
It may be a fuel process,
but it's a fun process.
Because in the process
you begin evaluating your own relationship
with drug law, drug regulation, drug control.
If you were in charge of it,
how do you see it happening?
I mean, are there drugs you would keep legal?
Or do you think it should be...
What I would do if I were running...
I would keep certain laws
that would protect people of innocence.
I would have absolutely no drugs with children
who are of too young an age.
God knows what they're called.
Maybe 16, 18, 21.
Maybe alcohol-mining.
Right.
Absolutely unallowed giving drugs
to anyone without their consent.
But...
Sure.
Informed consent.
Knowledge, education.
I would make absolutely available
at all levels of propaganda,
restrictions,
information that is factual about drugs.
Then I'd open the drug store.
And you people,
would they overuse?
Maybe.
But I think that would very quickly
dampen itself out
to maybe about what we have now.
But you would remove the criminality,
remove the violence,
remove the entire social disruptiveness
that these drug laws have caused.
Would you encourage the government
to see these drugs as a vehicle
for gaining tax revenue?
Or do you think the government
should stay off that?
Probably some tax revenue would be valid
as with other drugs of abuse,
other things of abuse.
Similarly to alcohol and tobacco.
It's a good model
and perhaps it's a valid one.
Well, that's pretty much
what I suggested in my book.
But I agree with you
that it's easy to sit down
and come up with a fine plan
overcoming the political hurdles
of an American...
Too many people have too much
to benefit on the laws
being what they are
and even becoming more intense.
And until you change that motivation,
that reward...
Yes, well, the most cynical
and the most naive people in America
are keeping the drug problem going.
The most cynical by dealing
and importing drugs
and the most naive
through the kind of Christian terror
of...
Look at the monstrous industries
that have been built up with it.
The drug urine screening, shameful.
Right.
But they're multi-billion dollar things.
This kit, that GCMS,
this instrumentation,
these people who make
little wax urine bottles.
It's becoming...
There's no justification
for urine screening
at any time of anyone
under any circumstance
on a random basis.
Well, and the notion
that in a democratic society
people would get into
that kind of thing
is incredible, I think.
It's completely contrary
to the point
of the principles
of our society.
The assumption of innocence.
We blew it
because it's not in the Constitution.
Right.
It should have been in it,
but it wasn't.
Right.
But taking a urine sample
on a random basis
is an assumption of guilt.
Well, but what is
in the Bill of Rights
is life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.
Declaration of Independence.
But that could be used
as a sufficient basis for...
It should be.
That should be part...
It's a form of self-image.
And we should maintain it
as such.
Yeah, well,
the first thing that goes
when society
hits the wall
is democracy.