WEBVTT 00:02.030 --> 00:10.030 If we can change our mind, we can take hold of this process and halt it. 00:10.030 --> 00:17.030 We can hear the surf of history pounding on the rugged shores of apocalypse. 00:17.030 --> 00:23.030 The Millennium is an effort to empower shamanic understanding, 00:23.030 --> 00:31.030 to give a rebirth to feminism, to be fully empowered with our planetary heritage. 00:31.030 --> 00:39.920 While making this film, Terence died of cancer. 00:39.920 --> 00:44.920 Before his death, Terence invested a lot of time developing his website, 00:44.920 --> 00:49.920 where many unique aspects of psychedelics and shamanism are covered. 00:49.920 --> 00:53.920 Terence lives on in cyberspace. 00:53.920 --> 01:00.920 Human future will be designed on how conscious we are able to make ourselves. 01:00.920 --> 01:02.920 And if there are plans, 01:02.920 --> 01:04.920 which accelerate consciousness, 01:04.920 --> 01:11.230 then we must locate and utilize these things. 01:11.230 --> 01:18.230 Something could jump out from some unexpected dimension and change everything. 01:18.230 --> 01:31.460 Part of the reason we have a drug problem is because we don't have an intelligent language 01:31.460 --> 01:39.460 to talk about substances, plants, psychedelic states of mind, sedative states of mind, 01:39.460 --> 01:41.460 states of amphetamine excitement. 01:42.460 --> 01:51.460 We can't make sense of the problem and the opportunities offered by substances 01:51.460 --> 01:53.460 unless we clean up our language. 01:53.460 --> 01:56.460 Drugs is a word that's been used by governments 01:56.460 --> 02:02.460 to make it impossible to think creatively about the problem of substances 02:02.460 --> 02:07.460 and abuse and availability and so forth and so on. 02:07.460 --> 02:10.460 It's a kind of a paradox, isn't it? 02:10.460 --> 02:16.460 Drugs mean that which cures us and the greatest social problem of the generation. 02:16.460 --> 02:21.460 So there, right there, you see the schizophrenia involved in thinking about drugs. 02:21.460 --> 02:26.460 Apparently there are good drugs sanctioned by science and medicine 02:26.460 --> 02:31.460 and bad drugs used by brown people in strange rites 02:31.460 --> 02:36.460 and growing in unusual plants in distant parts of the world. 02:36.460 --> 02:39.460 This kind of thinking, because it's naive, 02:39.460 --> 02:46.460 leads, of course, to social problems and bad politics and bad social policy. 02:46.460 --> 02:51.460 From the time I was very young, I was fascinated with the idea 02:51.460 --> 02:55.460 of extremely dramatic changes in consciousness 02:55.460 --> 03:01.460 from which one recovers after a few hours, induced by plants. 03:01.460 --> 03:05.460 And I discovered through the writing of Aldous Huxley and other people 03:05.460 --> 03:08.460 that this was a worldwide religious... 03:09.460 --> 03:14.460 and cultural phenomenon that my own Catholic middle-class upbringing 03:14.460 --> 03:19.460 had completely overlooked and denied. 03:19.460 --> 03:22.460 And I've been fascinated with it ever since. 03:22.460 --> 03:27.460 To my mind, human history is the story of one substance after another 03:27.460 --> 03:32.460 distorting or transforming human values and society. 03:32.460 --> 03:34.460 A perfect example would be sugar. 03:34.460 --> 03:37.460 Most people don't even think of sugar as a drug, 03:37.460 --> 03:39.460 and yet we may think cocaine, 03:39.460 --> 03:44.460 cocaine distorted moral and political values in Latin America, 03:44.460 --> 03:48.460 but sugar brought back slavery. 03:48.460 --> 03:51.460 Slavery actually died with the Roman Empire. 03:51.460 --> 03:56.460 Nobody worked agricultural products with slaves in the Middle Ages. 03:56.460 --> 04:02.460 It wasn't until the early 1400s that the Portuguese began producing sugar, 04:02.460 --> 04:05.460 and they used up Jews and prisoners, 04:05.460 --> 04:08.460 and so then they started buying human beings 04:08.460 --> 04:10.460 from African... from Arab traders. 04:10.460 --> 04:12.460 And the Pope was in on the deal, 04:12.460 --> 04:14.460 and everybody was in on the deal. 04:14.460 --> 04:17.460 I mean, this is drug corruption 04:17.460 --> 04:21.460 of the central institutions of society on a massive scale. 04:21.460 --> 04:24.460 Every society chooses a small number of substances, 04:24.460 --> 04:26.460 no matter how toxic, 04:26.460 --> 04:29.460 and enshrines them in its cultural values, 04:29.460 --> 04:32.460 then demonizes all other substances, 04:32.460 --> 04:37.460 and uses... and then persecutes and launches witch hunts 04:37.460 --> 04:41.460 against those users whenever some political pretext requires 04:41.460 --> 04:44.460 witch hunts and persecutions. 04:44.460 --> 04:48.460 So it's an old game, and it's been played in many places. 04:48.460 --> 04:51.460 Hopefully, part of the advancement of society 04:51.460 --> 04:55.460 toward ideas of universal human rights and that sort of thing, 04:55.460 --> 05:00.460 it certainly must include the idea of the universal human right 05:00.460 --> 05:06.460 to take responsibility for and to alter your own state of consciousness 05:06.460 --> 05:08.460 as you see fit. 05:08.460 --> 05:10.460 I don't think we can even pretend 05:10.460 --> 05:14.460 that we are on the edge of a civilized dialogue 05:14.460 --> 05:19.460 until we grant that people's minds, like their bodies, 05:19.460 --> 05:23.460 must be a domain free from government control. 05:23.460 --> 05:27.460 In American law, we have the notion of life, liberty, 05:27.460 --> 05:29.460 and the pursuit of happiness. 05:29.460 --> 05:32.460 If the pursuit of happiness means anything, 05:32.460 --> 05:35.460 it must mean the right to use and experiment 05:35.460 --> 05:37.460 with substances and plants. 05:37.460 --> 05:40.460 The fact that these things have been illegal 05:40.460 --> 05:42.460 in most countries for 50 years 05:42.460 --> 05:46.460 means there is a huge lag 05:46.460 --> 05:49.460 in understanding the impact of these things on human beings. 05:49.460 --> 05:52.460 How many people have taken MDMA, 05:52.460 --> 05:57.460 and yet MDMA has not been thoroughly studied by science? 05:57.460 --> 05:59.460 How many people have smoked EMT? 05:59.460 --> 06:00.460 Same thing. 06:00.460 --> 06:03.460 In a way, by making these drugs illegal, 06:03.460 --> 06:04.460 we're setting ourselves up 06:04.460 --> 06:07.460 for a potential catastrophe someday 06:07.460 --> 06:11.460 when some side effect is overlooked 06:11.460 --> 06:15.460 because the drugs were not rationally reviewed 06:15.460 --> 06:20.460 with an eye not toward keeping them out of the hands of the public, 06:20.460 --> 06:23.460 but with an eye toward public safety 06:23.460 --> 06:27.460 and educating the public in safe use of these things. 06:27.460 --> 06:30.460 The state should not, in the matter of drugs, 06:30.460 --> 06:33.460 any more than in the matter of sex, 06:33.460 --> 06:38.460 act as the secret agent for the agenda of the church. 06:38.460 --> 06:40.460 And that's what's happening. 06:40.460 --> 06:43.460 People want to stimulate themselves. 06:43.460 --> 06:45.460 They want to explore their consciousness. 06:45.460 --> 06:47.460 They want to sedate themselves. 06:47.460 --> 06:51.460 Who are we to stand in their way 06:51.460 --> 06:53.460 with a moral ideology 06:53.460 --> 06:56.460 and the long, heavy arm of the law 06:56.460 --> 06:58.460 to interfere with that? 06:58.460 --> 07:00.460 It distorts civilized values. 07:00.460 --> 07:02.460 That's the bottom line. 07:02.460 --> 07:07.460 Drug repression distorts civilized values 07:07.460 --> 07:09.460 and political discourse. 07:09.460 --> 07:13.460 Anyone who has actually been around people using psychedelics 07:13.460 --> 07:18.460 know they have tremendous therapeutic potential, 07:18.460 --> 07:22.460 tremendous potential to launch people into confrontations 07:22.460 --> 07:26.460 with aspects of their personality or their history 07:26.460 --> 07:28.460 that they are in denial of. 07:28.460 --> 07:31.460 The people who hold that these psychedelics 07:31.460 --> 07:35.460 substances have no application 07:35.460 --> 07:40.460 have very little actual personal experience with them. 07:40.460 --> 07:43.460 It's the old story of my mind is made up, 07:43.460 --> 07:45.460 don't confuse me with facts. 07:47.460 --> 07:51.460 I think it's a great tragedy of 20th century science 07:51.460 --> 07:54.460 that the original excitement 07:54.460 --> 07:57.460 about exploring consciousness and mental illness 07:57.460 --> 08:00.460 generated by the discovery of LSD 08:00.460 --> 08:04.460 gave way to establishment paranoia 08:04.460 --> 08:09.460 and repression of drug-using populations. 08:09.460 --> 08:12.460 The excitement in psychology 08:12.460 --> 08:14.460 when LSD was first introduced 08:14.460 --> 08:17.460 was like the excitement in the physics community 08:17.460 --> 08:19.460 when the atom was smashed 08:19.460 --> 08:20.460 and everybody thought, 08:20.460 --> 08:23.460 well, now we'll understand mental illness, 08:23.460 --> 08:27.460 schizophrenia, memory, so forth. 08:27.460 --> 08:30.460 And instead, the government lost its nerve. 08:30.460 --> 08:33.460 Because it saw that these substances 08:33.460 --> 08:37.460 have a potential for deprogramming people 08:37.460 --> 08:40.460 to institutional values. 08:40.460 --> 08:43.460 And that was so terrifying 08:43.460 --> 08:46.460 that all the promise for mental illness 08:46.460 --> 08:48.460 and creativity studies and so forth and so on 08:48.460 --> 08:52.460 was sacrificed to institutional paranoia 08:52.460 --> 08:55.460 about the fact that drugs might actually cause people 08:55.460 --> 08:59.460 to wake up to some of the abuses and scams 08:59.460 --> 09:04.460 that were being run by late modernism and capitalism.