Well, the world and its double is how we styled this.
This is simply a high visibility, flashy way of reminding people whose eyes fall upon that text
that the world has a double.
The world is not entirely or completely what it seems to be.
Culture, and by culture I mean any culture, anywhere, anytime, gives you the message that everything is humdrum, everything is normal.
In other words, culture denies experience.
You know, we all have had, and even a population of non-psychedelic people have had, prophetic dreams, intimations, unlikely strings of coincidences, all of these sort of things.
These are experiences which cultures deny.
Cultures put in place, I'm sure you've heard this word, a paradigm.
And then what fits within the cultural paradigm is accentuated, stressed, and what doesn't fit inside the cultural paradigm is denied, marginalized, argued against.
And we live at the end of a thousand year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism in its many guises.
And the basic message of materialism is that the world is what it appears to be, a thing composed of matter and pretty much confined to its surface.
The world is what it appears to be.
Now, this on the face of it is a tremendously naive position because what it says is the animal body that you inhabit, the eyes you look through, the fingers you feel through, are somehow the ultimate instruments of metaphysical conjecture, which is highly improbable.
It seems to me metaphysical conjecture begins with the logic of the situation and then proceeds in whatever direction that logic will carry you.
Well, if logic is true to experience, then we have to make room in any theory for invisible connectedness between people,
anticipation of the future, anticipation of the future that has not yet occurred, shared dreaming, all kinds of possibilities that materialism has denied.
For approximately 500 years, the great era of the triumph of modern science, materialism has had the field all to itself and its argument for its preeminence was the beautiful toys that it could create.
Aircraft, aircraft, railroads, global economies, television, spacecraft, but that is a fool's argument for truth.
I mean, that's after all how a medicine show operates, you know, the juggler is so good, the medicine must be even better.
This is not an entirely rational way to proceed.
And now, at the end of 500 years of the practice of rational, quote unquote, scientific culture, we're literally at the end of our rope.
Reason and science and the practice of unbridled capitalism have not delivered us into an angelic realm.
Quite the contrary, they've delivered 3% of us into an angelic realm, completely overshadowed by guilt about what's happening to the other 97% of us who are eating it.
It's not a pretty picture, modern civilization.
Most people in the world today are quite miserable, actually.
They have very little hope.
Their religions, their traditional value systems are being eroded by Dallas and Hawaii Five-0, which are on the village television every night.
Life spans are being shortened by pesticides, chemicals, all kinds of things in the environment.
And there is very little political light on the horizon.
So, I believe that it's reasonable, looking at this situation, to say that history failed and that the grand dream of Western civilization has, in fact, failed.
And now, we are attempting, with basically a carved wooden oar, to turn a battleship around.
And it's a very frustrating undertaking.
The momentum for catastrophe is enormous in this situation.
Now, what, but it's not a hundred percent certain that catastrophe is what we're headed for.
Because we are not a hundred percent unconscious.
There are people struggling to figure out how to control population, struggling to figure out how to balance the relationship between the masculine and the feminine,
struggling to bring amelioration of hunger and disease to various parts of the world.
So, we are in, essentially, a tragic situation.
A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it, you see.
And part of the Western impulse has been to subjugate all other cultural styles to our own.
And this has taken the form of actually swallowing and digesting Native American culture.
The ethnicity of European culture has been replaced by the mega-culture of Nouveau-Europa, whatever that means.
Cultures are melted down in the belly of the Western scientific beast.
And then, they become structural members in an ever-expanding edifice of Western scientism.
However, the psychedelic experience, as practiced by shamans in many, many parts of the world, is apparently a bite too large to swallow.
Psychedelics arrived on the Western agenda only about a hundred years ago,
when German chemists brought peyote to Berlin and extracted mescaline.
And for the next 50 years, up until about 1945, 55 years make it, very little happened.
Mescaline did not, though it was taken by Havelock Ellis and William James and F. Weir Mitchell.
It did not spawn a craze.
It did not influence large numbers of intellectuals, particularly.
Then, in the 40s, LSD was discovered.
In the 50s, DMT and psilocybin were discovered.
And then, in 1966, all these things were made illegal.
There was no real opportunity for Western science to grapple with these things
before they were decided to be too hot to handle, made not only unavailable to people such as you and I, ordinary people,
but taken off the agenda of scientific research.
In the Middle Ages, the Church forbade dissection of human bodies.
And medical students would visit battlefields and the gallows at night
and steal the bodies of victims of war and executed prisoners in order to learn human physiology.
Where that spirit of scientific courage has gone, I don't know.
But there's very little of it left.
Now people feed that the trough of government grants and enormous corporate research budgets
and the idea of actually pursuing truth or attempting to understand the phenomenon in an unbiased fashion,
divorced from its commercial, social and political dimensions, is unheard of.
On hallucinogens and boundary dissolution.
If you look at thousands of these experiences, is they dissolve boundaries.
They dissolve boundaries between you and your past, you and the part of your unconscious you don't want to look at,
between you and your partner, between you and the feminine if you're masculine and vice versa,
between you and the world.
All the boundaries that we put up to keep ourselves from feeling our circumstance are dissolved.
And boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society.
People get very, people meaning government institutions, become very nervous when people begin to talk to each other.
Yes, the whole name of the Western game is to create boundaries and maintain them.
The church and the state.
The poor and the wealthy, the black and the white, the male and the female, the young and the old, the gay and the straight,
the living and the dead, the foreign and the familiar.
All of these categorical divisions allow a kind of thinking that is completely cockamamie.
After all, reality is in fact a seamless, unspeakable something.
And we understand that to perceive it separately is a necessary adjunct to the act of understanding.
But it is not the end of the program of understanding.
The particulate data has to be recombined in a paradigm, a seamless overview of what is happening.
And the drugs that Western society has traditionally favored have either been drugs which maintain boundaries,
or drugs which promote mindless, repetitious physical activity on the assembly line, in the slave galley,
on the latifundia, the slave driven agricultural project, whatever it is.
In the corporate office.
This is why, you know, every labor contract on this planet, at least in Western civilization,
contains a provision that all workers shall be allowed to use drugs twice a day at designated times.
But the drug shall be caffeine.
Now, the reason caffeine is so welcome in the workplace
is because the last three hours of the workday are utterly unproductive
unless you goose everybody with two cups of coffee,
and then they can go back to the word processor, the widget tightening machine, or whatever they are doing,
and mindlessly and happily carry on.
If it were suggested that there be a pot break twice a day, you know,
you would think that civilization was striking the iceberg or something.
So, and alcohol, like, our society has, is an alcohol, red meat, sugar, and tobacco culture.
And all of these are forms of speed, basically, in the way that we use them.
I mean, yes, you can tranquilize yourself on alcohol,
but you're pushing toward levels where a lifetime of tranquilizing yourself on alcohol
will be a short lifetime if you use it that way.
So, there's a lot of tension in society between the great exploring soul and the assembly line citizen.
The citizen is defined by obligation and by the boundaries that define, you know, the next citizen,
either because it's neighbor or worker or employer or something like that.
And the grand exploring soul is marginalized as an eccentric,
or if necessary, more seriously marginalized, as mad in some way.
I mean, madness, basically, up until the level of physical violence,
means you are behaving in a way which makes me feel uncomfortable.
Therefore, there's something wrong with you.
Yes.
So, now, it's interesting, and this is one of the points that's dear to me.
I mean, they arrive in different orders each time.
But I think of history as a kind of mass psychedelic experience.
And the drug is technology.
And as technology gets more and more perfected as a mirror of the human mind,
the cultural experience becomes more and more hallucinatory.
And for at least the past couple of hundred years, boundary dissolution has been underway at every level of Western civilization.
I mean, you could push it further back.
The Magna Carta, the fact that princes and lords of the realm would actually attempt to force the king's signature on a document defining their privileges.
They are, after all, ordinary human beings.
The king is the divine appointed regent of God in heaven.
So, this was a severe boundary dissolution within the context of the age in which it was taking place.
They were actually saying, you, as Christ's representative on earth, should cede some of this omnipotence to us, mere mortals suspended in the political process.
Well, that leads then to broader demands for human rights.
For the idea that a permanent and large segment of society kept in permanent poverty is unacceptable.
We got rid of debtors' prisons and things like this.
As the collectivity of our humanness becomes an intellectual legacy for all of us,
there is a dissolving of boundaries of race, class, status, language, so forth and so on.
And the whole of the 20th century has seen a massive acceleration of this.
The breakdown of the Soviet Union was, in fact, simply, it was even so described, the lifting of the Iron Curtain.
Meaning a membrane has suddenly disappeared.
And more and more of these membranes are disappearing.
And what is emerging then is a more and more psychedelic experience.
Meaning a sense of acceleration of information flow.
A sense of rising ambiguity about what it all means.
Everything seems to carry both a good facet and a detrimental facet.
The ambiguity of everything is increasing.
The connectedness of everything is increasing.
And I will argue later in the day that this is a general tendency of the time and space in which we are embedded.
And that we ourselves are a reflection of this.
So, where is life carrying us?
What is this all about?
Is it carrying us toward extinction?
So that the rest of nature can heave an enormous sigh of relief
and then get back to the business of nest-building, mating flights,
and oviposturing and whatever it is that they're doing out there?
Or is it carrying us toward some kind of a transition?
If you look back through the history of life, which is a long history.
I mean it reaches back a billion years.
Every advance happens suddenly, unpredictably, and in a very short period of time.
Some of you who stay tuned to the scientific literature may have noticed this series of articles that were around last week
about what they're calling the big bang of biology.
that there was a period of time incredibly brief, perhaps between a million and ten million years,
when all the phyla of life on this planet radiated into existence sometime between 525 and 535 million years ago.
Just it all snapped into existence.
The episode in which life left the sea is a similar highly confined transition event.
People recently have written about what they call punctated or punctuated evolution.
Evolution is not apparently a slow curve of unfoldment.
It is instead a series of equilibrium states punctuated by violent fluctuations in between,
and then a new equilibrium state.
So, history, I believe, is not an aberration any more than leaving the sea could be called an aberration of marine existence.
I mean, obviously it is not marine existence,
and obviously we are not living in the same world as groundhogs and hummingbirds psychologically.
But leaving the sea did not represent an ontological transition.
It represented an extremely dramatic shift of modality.
And this is what history is.
History is characterized by its brevity, for one thing.
I mean, we have packed more change into the last 10,000 years than the billion years which preceded it.
I mean, we, and yet as entities, as animals, meat, we have not changed at all in 10,000 years.
If you were to go back to that era, the people would be exactly like people we see today.
They wouldn't be so racially heterogeneous because the great gene streamings and migrations that characterize history
had not yet taken place, but essentially perfectly modern people.
Well, then history is apparently, if we view it as a process that nature tolerates, if not encourages,
then history is essentially, apparently, important enough to place,
to jeopardize the stability of all the rest of the natural ecosystemic world.
It's as though nature is saying we are willing to place the entire planetary ecology in danger for 50,000 years
in order for the opportunity to be explored of language using, technologically expressing intelligence,
carrying all of life to the next level.
And it's a terrifying enterprise because apparently to carry life to the next level,
tremendous intellectual sophistication is required about the release and control of energy.
The problem is, energy can be used to destroy as well as build.
So, as the human enterprise has moved toward greater and greater power and ability to manipulate the environment,
the stakes in the cosmic game have risen.
And now what we have is approximately a hundred billion dollars sitting in the center of the crap table
and one roll of the dice more and we're going to either win it or lose everything.
Because intelligence, if we fail, will never again reach the kind of levels on this planet that we have reached.
Why? Because we have extracted all the available metals near the surface of the earth.
An evolving species following after us will find the earth strangely depleted of usable materials down to the 1500 foot level.
And so, intelligence coming beyond us will find it just does not have the resources to make the leap to technical civilization.
So, it's beginning to look like a one-shot deal.
And the psychedelics are in there for two reasons.
First of all, because they allow us as individuals to break out of the flat cultural illusion
and to rise up and look at this situation.
So, it's for us a tool to understand our predicament.
But the psychedelics are also what has driven this circumstance to arise in part.
Because what psychedelics do, and I think this isn't too challengeable, is they catalyze imagination.
They drive you to think what you would not think otherwise.
Well, notice that the enterprise of human history is nothing more than the fallout created by strange ideas.
Let's build a pyramid. Let's build a windmill. Let's build a water wheel.
And then empires, philosophies, religions arise in the wake of these situations.
I've argued in the past, and I'm going to try not to repeat it here today, because I think you've all heard it,
but I will just mention it in a sentence or two, that the critical catalyst propelling us out of the slowly evolving hominid line
and caused us to take an orthogonal right-hand turn into culture, language, art, yearning,
probably was the inclusion of psychedelic plants in our diet during that episodic moment when we went from being fruititarian canopy dwellers
to omnivorous pack-hunting creatures of the grassland.
And it was the inclusion of psilocybin in our grassland diet that caused us to discover that there is a mind,
and you can perturb it. I mean, think about, I mean, I don't think you could discover consciousness if you didn't perturb it,
because as Marshall McLuhan said, whoever discovered water, it certainly wasn't a fish.
Well, we are fish swimming in consciousness, and yet we know it's there.
Well, the reason we know it's there is because if you perturb it, then you see it, and you perturb it by perturbing the engine which generates it,
which is the mind-brain system resting behind your eyebrows.
If you swap out the ordinary chemicals that are running that system in an invisible fashion,
then you see it's like dropping ink into a bowl of clear water.
Suddenly, the convection currents operating in the clear water become visible,
because you see the particles of ink tracing out the previously invisible dynamics of the standing water.
The mind is precisely like that, and the psychedelic is like a die marker being dropped into this aqueous system.
And then you say, oh, I see it works like this and like this.
Well, if psychedelics are catalysts for the imagination, and if history is driven by the imagination,
it is driven through the fallout from the imagination, which is technology and culture.
Technology and culture are the consequences, the derivatives of the ratiocination of the mind.
And technology has, like biological life, but on a much faster or accelerated timeframe,
technology has this weird tendency to transcend itself, to bootstrap itself.
You know, if you have a cart, then it implies better wheels, better bearings, better structure,
and then higher speed, more control, more feedback from the machine.
That means we need gas gauges, RPM readouts, so forth and so on.
Technology, strangely enough, created by a biological creature, has itself this self-transcending quality.
But ever-accelerating, this is the important point, because the ever-accelerating accretion of technology
means that history is strangely foreshortened at the future end, because it happens faster and faster.
It's like a process that begins very slowly, but once started has the quality of a cascade,
or, you know, the rate at which falling bodies move, 32 and a half feet per second, per second.
Each second, it accelerates to twice the rate of infall that was occurring in the previous second.
Technology is like this, and we now are in a domain where if we attempt to propagate technological development forward 50 years,
it becomes unmanageable as an intellectual task.
We can talk about the automobile, what it might look like 50 years from now.
It would float, it would go 500 miles an hour, it would be guided by your mind, so forth and so on.
But when you think that every artifact of our world will undergo that kind of transformation,
and that the synergy among these transformed objects will create phenomena and situations that we can't anticipate,
that's the key thing, our inability to anticipate the synergies between our technologies.
I mean, the computer, LSD, spacecraft, holograms, organic superconductivity,
those are just six areas where the integration of those concerns will produce unimaginable consequences.
Yeah, the ultimate boundary dissolution is the dissolution of ego.
I mean, we hope, we straight people hope, that they never meet it except at death.
Of course, they don't realize going to sleep at night is a kind of ego dissolution.
But, the government is expressive of this dominator culture that we're living in.
The ego is a very recent invention, and its hold on reality is very tenuous.
And consequently, it walks around imbued with fear.
I mean, it feels itself to be a mouse in a world of dinosaurs.
That's because it's a very recent development.
I guess I have to go back to this scenario of human development and say, just very briefly,
here's how I think this worked.
I'm not going to run through the whole evolutionary scenario, but this thing about ego.
All primates have what are called dominance hierarchies.
That simply means that the hard-bodied, long-fanged young males kick everybody else around.
They control the females, the children, homosexuals, the elderly, everybody is taking orders from this dominance hierarchy.
And this is true clear back into squirrel monkeys.
It's a generalized feature of primate behavior.
And it's an aspect of our behavior as we sit here.
Women, the feminine is not honored.
The elderly are marginalized.
Homosexuals, that whole issue.
Many of our social and political ills stem from this attitude.
Well, but you see, I believe that when we left the trees and admitted psilocybin into our diet,
that it has the effect of dissolving boundaries and making this maintenance of a dominance hierarchy very, very, very difficult.
First of all, the key on one level to maintaining the dominance hierarchy is monogamous pair bonding.
That's where it begins.
If in a society taking a lot of psilocybin, monogamous pair bonding breaks down because of CNS activation and sexual arousal.
So, in a psilocybin-using culture, there will be a tendency to orgiastic sexual behavior rather than monogamous pair bonding.
What that does is it causes an incredible social cohesion.
Because in an orgiastic society, men cannot trace lines of male paternity.
So, men's attitude toward children is, these children are all ours.
We the group.
It's a glue that we, in our paranoid social style, with everybody having the deed to their property and their 11-foot-high fence, can hardly imagine.
But psilocybin was artificially suppressing this dominator behavior style in the primate, the evolving proto-hominid, now-hominid, now-human being.
When psilocybin was taken out of the diet, the old, old primate program was still there.
It had not been bred out.
The genes were always there.
It's just that for 50,000 or 100,000 years, we medicated ourselves, literally religiously.
We religiously medicated ourselves every new and full moon, perhaps oftener.
These orgies were happening, creating social cohesion, propagating everybody forward.
The problem was, when the psilocybin was taken away, we had been under its influence for perhaps half a million years.
We had evolved language, rudimentary, abstract philosophy, a sense of religion.
We had invented technology in the form of using fire and chipping flint and all that.
The psilocybin goes away and suddenly these skills, these tools, these technologies are in the hands of marauding apes.
Not anymore cohesive, caring human social groups, but marauding territorial apes, driven by the desire to control all weaker members of the social group.
And that's our circumstance.
We have, you know, the tools that would allow us to sculpt paradise, but we have the reflexes and value systems of anthropoid apes of some sort.
So, the split between our conscious hopes, our best foot, and the bottom of the human scale is appalling.
I mean, look at the spread.
It's a spread from, well, from Mother Teresa to serial killers.
I mean, you don't get serial killers in the chipmunk population or the grasshopper population.
I mean, these animals are not so set at variance with their basic nature that these kinds of pathologies can erupt.
We, on the other hand, are half angel, half pack hunting killer ape.
I mean, we're an object fetish society.
I mean, our entire psychology is characterized by a profound discontent.
That's what we're about.
It doesn't matter.
No matter what's going on, after a little while, we get restless and move on.
Other animal species are embedded in a kind of world of endless genetic cycling.
No fox grows bored with hunting, you know.
And yet, our thing is a profound dis-ease.
And I believe it's because, and slowly you forced me to do this whole rap, which I swear I wouldn't do.
I believe it's because the psilocybin led us halfway toward a kind of godhead.
But then it disappeared and we are left in this very peculiar situation.
This is the myth of the fall.
You know, we are half angel, half beast.
And these two natures are united in every one of us.
And when you take psilocybin, you feel generally a great sense of community and ascent to a higher level.
If you completely restrict your intake of intoxicants of any sort, then you get the teetotaler type personality,
which is characterized by incredible smugness, limited intellectual horizons,
and an unbearable aura of self-congratulation that makes it pretty hard for the rest of us to put up with.
Yes, yeah.
See, here is the final piece of this evolutionary key.
Psilocybin, in small amounts, increases visual acuity.
This is not an arguable point.
I mean, you can just give people psilocybin and give them eye tests.
And people with astigmatism see better.
You can, your edge detection ability is greatly increased.
Well, you can see that an animal like our remote ancestors in a hunting environment in the grassland,
if there is an item of diet that will make you a better and more efficient hunter,
the equivalent of chemical binoculars lying around on the grassland,
those animals that avail themselves of this technology will be more successful hunters.
And so it was.
Psilocybin, animals using psilocybin were more successful at raising their offspring to reproductive age.
Well, then at slightly higher doses, you get this CNS arousal,
which in highly sexed animals such as primates, arousal means sexual arousal and erection in the male.
So then there's a, and without the overwhelming influence of Christian ethics to guide their behaviors,
I'm sure these organisms simply flopped in a heap and, you know, sorted it all out later.
So, so that's the middle range of the dosage, low dose success in hunting, medium dose social cohesion achieved through ego dissolution and orgiastic sexuality.
Yet higher doses, five grams and up, hunting is out of the question, sex is out of the question.
You're just nailed to the ground by the campfire and in the course of the evening you discover religion, philosophy, art and, you know, all of that.
So, so here is a unique chemical that at every dose level synergizes activity that leads to greater coherency and self-expression.
The driving of the imagination, yes, in the question back here you said we can't create what we can't conceive of.
This is why, what the psychedelic experience does really, is it stretches the envelope of the imaginable.
I mean, what can be imagined can be created, what cannot be imagined is not part of the play.
So, psilocybin really was a stimulant for the production of intellectual product in the form of songs, rituals, dances, body painting, abstract ideas.
All of these things are what we are most unique.
Well, that's how it seemed to me.
It seemed to me culture is a shabby lie.
Or at least this culture is a shabby lie.
I mean, if you work like a dog, you get 260 channels of bad television and a German automobile.
You know, what kind of perfection is that?
Our secular society, religion is completely devalued and consumer object fetishism is the only kind of worth that we collectively recognize.
I'm sure you've all seen the t-shirt that says,
He, notice he, who dies with the most toys, wins.
That is, in fact, the banner under which we're flying here.
And the level of unhappiness is immense.
I mean, the level of unhappiness among the poor, they've always been miserable.
But we've managed to create something entirely new in human history, an utterly miserable ruling class.
I mean, there seems no excuse for that.
Well, I guess this leads us to a subject worth talking about, which is,
it's very important to talk to the state or the substance.
Or if you don't talk to it, it won't talk to you.
It follows the rules of ordinary etiquette.
And it does not speak to strangers.
But if you will say to it, the simplest thing, like,
Hello?
Then it will say, Hello?
And say, Is someone there?
It says, Yes.
You know, ready and willing.
What's up?
But if you don't speak to it, it won't do that.
That is, to my mind, the strangest property of psilocybin,
is this speaking in English business.
I mean, LSD doesn't do that.
Meth, ayahuasca doesn't do that.
Psilocybin does, for some reason.
This is not my illusion.
Nearly everybody who's spent time with it has commented on this.
On DMT, you see who you hear on the mushrooms.
On the mushrooms, you almost never encounter something that you can see.
You see hallucinations.
But you do not see the author of the data stream that's saying,
Did you know?
I'll bet you did know the standard form of address.
But on DMT, they come bounding out of the woodwork.
The strangest things happen on DMT, the most intense, and you can remember them.
DMT is not like a psychedelic drug in the sense that you're getting into the contents of your hopes,
memories, fears, and dreams.
It's much more like a parallel continuum.
It's much more as though you've broken through to some alien data space.
One of the most puzzling things about DMT is it does not affect your mind.
It simply replaces the world 100% with something completely unexpected.
But your relationship to that unexpected thing is not one of exaggerated fear
or exaggerated acceptance, as in, oh, great, the world has just been replaced by elf machinery.
Your reaction is exactly what it would be if it happened to you without DMT.
You're appalled.
Say, what happened?
Because you don't feel your mind moving.
You just see that the world has been replaced by something that you could not have even conceived of or imagined before.
And these entities, these things which look like dribbling, you know, self-dribbling jeweled basketballs,
somebody, something that the NBA might take an interest in, they, you see them and they present themselves to you.
They use language to condense visible objects out of the air.
Now, I don't know why they're doing that.
I mean, perhaps on one level, I assume that they're trying to teach you to do that.
On another level, they seem to be giving a demonstration of the fact that reality is made of language.
They're saying, you know, if you don't believe reality is made of language, here, I'll make you one.
And then blibble-dee-blibble-dee-blip, and there it is.
And they hand it to you to be passed around in, you know, slack-jawed amazement among the human beings.
This technology that they possess of these objects made of gold and emerald and chalcedony and agate
that are morphing themselves even as you look at them are, you know, technological dream come true.
I mean, the lapis as elf excrescents or something like that.
And why they are there?
I don't know.
And, you know, many, many questions.
Where are they when you're not stoned?
You know, do they have an autonomous existence somewhere?
Or do they spring into existence a microsecond before you encounter them?
Are they rooted in the dynamics of your psyche?
Or are they no more rooted in the dynamics of your psyche than the World Trade Center?
It's not clear.
I mean, I think I mentioned at some point, just briefly, that the archetype of DMT is the circus.
These things are clowns at one level.
They're clowns.
I mean, when you think of the circus, it's a very complex archetype.
The circus is for children.
It's a delight.
But then, you know, and you take a child to a circus and there are three rings and absurd clown antics going on.
But then you lift your eyes up to the top of the tent and there the lady in the tiny spangled costume is hanging by her teeth, working without nets.
It's about Eros and death.
I think my first awareness of Eros was being three or four.
And these women in these tiny costumes spinning around and realizing, you know, if she falls, she dies.
And then away from the center ring and all this action, there are the sideshows, the goat-faced boy, the thing in the bottle, the Siamese twins and fuzzy Charlie.
All of that is also very DMT-like.
It really is the archetype of the circus.
I can remember when I was a kid in this small town in Colorado, every year at the 4th of July, the carnival would come to town for a week and set up.
And we anticipated it throughout the year.
But as soon as the carnival came to town, then you couldn't play outside after 9 o'clock at night because carny people are different, we were told.
And, you know, their means of support, sexual proclivities and choice of intoxicants might have run counter to this Midwestern Catholic mining town I was in.
And so then there's this sense of the disruption, the danger, the drama, the interest, the fun.
And then they go away and life is as if they had never been there at all.
And that's what DMT is like.
I mean, it's a secret of such magnitude that it's inconceivable how it has ever been kept.
Because, you know, in a world where information was fairly weighted, we would spend as much time talking about DMT as we spend talking about, I don't know, the West Bank or something.
And as you see, by studying our newspapers, we, DMT is rarely, if ever, mentioned.
I mean, never would be a good rule of thumb.
We're very, the Western mind is very queasy around these experiences that cast into doubt its cherished illusions about how reality is put together.
And when you get to DMT, you have hit the main vein.
I mean, I hold it in reserve as the ultimate convincer.
I mean, that's for these, there are these people running around, you know, who say,
Oh, you people who are into drugs, give me a good branch whiskey and a little TV.
I think you're deluding yourself.
Say, do you?
Well, have you got five minutes to invest in this proposition, my cheerful friend?
Because if you do, have I got news for you.
It also seems to me, you know, considering the fact that DMT is a naturally occurring neurotransmitter,
that you return to the baseline of consciousness in 15 minutes, that it's utterly harmless.
What's the matter with our critics?
Why are they so phobic of it?
You know, what is it?
Are you tainted forever if you know the position of your enemy?
Why are they so afraid to give it a chance?
Well, I think I can answer my own question.
Quoting a wonderful thing Tim Leary said years ago.
He said, LSD occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it.
Right.
That is the problem, I believe.
That these drugs are causing outbreaks of psychosis among people who won't get near them.
And they are turned into frightened, paranoid order freaks reaching for, you know, extra legal and extra constitutional means to make your life hell.
Obviously, their minds have been severely bent by the absence of this drug.
However, the knowledge of it seemed to practically undo them.
Next, Terence discusses the potential teachings of DMT.
Yeah, I mean, the first teaching is priceless.
It's that the world is beyond your ability to conceive or imagine.
So give up any short-term plan to conceive or imagine.
I think really the worth in these psychedelics is simply that they allow you to triangulate upon reality.
I mean, in other words, if all you've got is awake and asleep, you can't go far with that.
But if you've got awake, asleep, and DMT as points, you can build a much more dimensionally rich model of consciousness.
I think that it has to do with your own intelligence.
Truly stupid people aren't interested in psychedelics because they can't figure out what the point of it is.
It feeds off intelligence.
It's a consciousness-expanding drug.
If you don't have any consciousness, it can't expand it.
And I've met people who say,
Yeah, well, all this stuff and big bugs talk to you and say strange stuff.
You say, yeah, well, you should have paid a little attention.
I mean, it's amazing to me how people don't seem to, like, the less intelligent you are,
the less challenging the psychedelic experience becomes because the less capable of entertaining the implications you are.
Because you just say, well, yeah, a lot of bright lights and there's some talking bugs and spaceships and I don't know.
Well, you know, it's because they, I guess it's because those people are so ingrained in cultural values that they assume it's not real.
They just, they assume it's a trip, whatever that means.
It means you have permission not to take this experience seriously.
It's a trip, but what I've noticed is that based on quantum mechanics' need for an observer as part of any system,
that's big news for our field of study because what it means is hallucinations are as real as anything else.
I mean, a hallucination is not like a Chevrolet, but on the other hand, a Chevrolet is not like a hallucination.
Why should we demand that these things co-map over each other?
A hallucination is a species of reality as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro
or anything else that falls through your life.
The question is, does DMT talk to you the way psilocybin does?
It's interesting that these two compounds, so closely related to each other, both have something to say about language,
but they say it in precisely opposite ways.
Psilocybin, it's a teaching voice that speaks to you in your language.
I had a very interesting experience that was an example of this to me.
When I first started growing mushrooms, I had to do a lot of batch testing, and so I was taking mushrooms a lot.
And I would get into these places with it where it would say,
ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta says, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta says.
It would make these declarative statements, and then it would always put the word says on the end of the sentence.
I thought, you know, weird, but what do you expect of a talking vegetable?
What's weird and what isn't?
So then I heard Wasson's publication called Maria Sabina and her Mushroom Vallada.
It's a set of six tapes of a mushroom session that Maria Sabina did in 1956.
So here is Maria Sabina raving in Mazatec, and it's going along like this.
ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.
So, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.
So, and I look in the interlinear translation.
So means says in Mazatec.
So, she's hearing it in Mazatec.
I'm hearing it in English.
So that's what psilocybin is capable of.
what happens with DMT is it doesn't speak to you in English it speaks to you in
elfish and you understand and under sufficiently hyped up conditions you are
able to reply in other words psilocybin pushes your brain state towards some
kind of spontaneous glossolalia and I think that this probably is mixed up
with the generation of language itself because what happens on on DMT on high
dose DMT is these machine elves these dribbling basketball things they use
this musical sing-song language to make objects which they then show you they're
like machines or animals or crystals or crosses between I don't know consomme
and something else they have these opalescent depths they're neither matter nor
mind neither solid nor liquid but they make these things and set them loose in
this environment and these things themselves are emitting language and
making other things so they make machines which make machines everybody's
chattering squeaking crawling over each other clamoring for your attention and
what they're trying to do is to get you to produce this glossolalia for some
reason which I cannot imagine why when you're stoned and you do the glossolalia it's an
incredibly pleasurable experience but so might be eating an orange or having sex if you
were to do it at that moment you can't tell but you can make this funny pseudo
linguistic stream of syllables that's very very satisfying and you know it has a bit of art in it I think probably we
invented language long before meaning and that it was some very practical person who
got the idea that the music could have words and that before that it was simply
verbal amusement after all they eat most readily at hand musical instrument is the
human voice I think that that language as we practice it this afternoon in this
room is an uncompleted enterprise that like though that language wants to be
visual it is in transition remember it's from the silence of prehistory to the
visual language beyond the eschaton and the overlapping of silence and visual
language gives you audio language the more perfect logos would be beheld this is what
philo judaeus taught and considering that many of these psychedelic compounds involved in the language
phenomena like DMT and harmin and harmaline these all occur as part of human metabolism ordinarily and I think that
that it's possible that we are on the cusp of an evolutionary transformation of
language having to do with an actual change in our physique in our genetic output
because why is it that monoamine oxidase inhibiting compounds like harmaline
specifically 5-methoxy tetrahydroharmaline occurs in the pineal gland and is the
pineal gland has always been thought of as somehow connected to the soul it was the seat of the soul for
Descartes and I think that maybe what history is is the rather muddled situation
that occurs in an animal species while it perfects a true language and that
we have we are not there yet folks because a true language is beheld I think that the
real nub of what we're trying to get at here is that the world is mental in some way that we do
not yet understand but that which we're edging toward understanding and the the world is made of language
I can't say that enough and and so uh whenever we get into these discussions about reality or effects
in space and time we are operating outside this assumption that the world is made of language if the
world is made of language it's very hard to figure out just where the edge of it is
I mean do we really need to believe in the existence of distant galaxies like ngc 245
if in fact the world is being produced in the human cerebellum as a as a phenomenon of language
what exactly is the ontological status of these distant parts of the universe
that register only as the faint tracings on our instruments
then interpreted through the fishy fiat of a bunch of stacked up theories and formulas
I mean did you know that the entire universe of radio telescopic
uh radio telescopes were invented around 1950 they've been used to build up our entire picture of the universe
did you know that if you took all the energy that has fallen on all the radio telescopes on this planet
since the invention of radio telescopy that it would be less energy than is generated by a cigarette ash
falling a distance of two feet
so that's where your data sample is coming from that you've built up this model of exploding
galaxies and colliding quasars and mega this and mega that I mean it's pretty flimsy stuff folks
compared to the meat of the moment in which we find ourselves now magical philosophies
which are uh have uh about fifty to a hundred thousand years under their belt as opposed to science which goes back to the renaissance
magical philosophies have always claimed that the world is made of language that you the word the world is a thing of words
and if you know these words you can take it apart and put it together any old way you wish
our entire western religious tradition begins with the incredibly cryptic statement
in principio et verbum et verbo caro factum est it's fairly obscure even in english
in the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh
what is this making the word into flesh and does it not imply then that eventually the flesh will become word
i as i descend into mental disintegration and madness i become more and more convinced that reality is more
like a novel than a series of integrated tensor equations of the third degree which is what physics
would have us believe the world is like a novel it's a novel in which you are a character and there's
dramatic tension plot resolution tragedy nobility betrayal the whole gamut of emotions and human possibilities
and what we tend to do is always to marginalize first our own experience and then all human experience
so we our model of reality is that the universe is a zillion somethings that direction and a trillion
somethings that direction we are tiny and insignificant our star is typical our galaxy is typical everything is
is utterly humdrum and there's nothing going on here at all well this is an incredibly dreary and
disempowering model of reality i would rather believe that if in fact what the universe is is a novelty
producing and conserving engine and if we define novelty as density of connectedness
then guess what the human neocortex becomes the center of the cosmic drama because the human neocortex is the
most densely ramified and connected material object known to exist in the universe so after a thousand years of human marginalization
suddenly through the injection of science there is permission to believe that the cosmic drama really is about us
that we really do carry the the load in this play that this is a play about the career and preservation of novelty and complexity
of novelty and complexity and thus we are central actors in that drama and hence if something were to
happen to us and our enterprise the universe would be vastly impoverished by that loss well now we're on the brink of decoding the human genome
and we will use computers to do this because we're going to have to keep absolute track of millions of
units of strings of characters but the end result of this i think is that the flesh will be made word
and that we are textualizing our reality and this may be what all these french people are screaming about that we
can't understand the so-called deconstructionists because they keep saying reality it should be dealt with
as a text if you don't treat it as a text you will entirely miss the point of it well i've been thinking
about this for a while and i've first of all my life is very strange because when i hit the mushroom at la
nature era in 1971 interpol was looking for me i had a price on my head i had no money i had blown my college
education i had no job skills i had nothing and that is of course as all folklorists know uh the precondition
for exaltation if you're not poor and humble i mean what's the point you know so i was poor and humble
and then i got crossed up with this mushroom and immediately life became art life became uh freakishly
ordered and plot elements began to unfold and i have in my mind a picture of the curve
of my mission if you want to call it that and weirdly enough reality has not yet departed from the curve
now the curve is getting steeper and steeper and at some point surely reality and the curve will depart
otherwise um decency forbids that i carry that thought further but you do see what i mean i think and all of us
are beginning to take textual control of our lives and be able to write the plot you see if what we're embedded in is a novel
or some work of art like a novel then what you want to do is figure out who in the novel you are
i mean if your name is joe blow is the name of this novel the lives and worlds of joe blow
or do you get to draw a bath for someone on page 230 and never be seen again
now as a character the more conscious you become the more you have free will within the context of the plot
i never understood this and i'm not sure most people understand it like like i grew up in berkeley in the
nineteen you know i was in berkeley from 65 to 70 the golden age i was so unconvinced of my own uniqueness
that i never understood that the great drama that was unfolding around me all i had to do
was join and i never joined i thought it was spectator sport i mean i i marched in the marches
i took acid i got laid i did all of those things but what i mean by i didn't join is i didn't realize
that the grateful dead were a bus ride away and that i could probably walk into that scene and make
a place for myself or the doors or the stones or the beetles you pick it in other words i defined myself
as a spectator rather than an actor and we are all doing that far too much you can get a lot
rowdier than you are you can make a lot more ways there's been too much politesse and too much
parlor etiquette exercised recently by the counterculture it's perfectly all right to mix things
up it's perfectly all right to try and accelerate the plot this will move your character nearer and
nearer to the center of the action and people have asked me then is the goal to make yourself the the
novel about you is the goal to make the novel about yourself i don't think so the goal is to become the
author of the novel then you can write any damn ending you want for your character or any other and
this becoming the author is this psychedelic detachment and suddenly you go from being
a chess man a chessman on the board to the chess master looking at the board it's empowering
it's self-control now people who don't know this are like made of denser stuff
than the rest of us you can just part them like wheat and move through them because they have no sense of
the nature of the game they are still embedded in the old newtonian paradigm and and are completely
powerless to control their own lives that's what happens to you in the newtonian game all the power
flows to i don't know the white house the un madison avenue it's not clear but it certainly doesn't
reside with you more and more i think we need to decondition that's what i mean by following
the plot as written if you never decondition you're you're just a character in somebody else's story
but if you decondition you can begin to move your life the way you want and miracles happen uh miracles
do happen they happen even to ordinary people in the realm of of falling in love because there's something
about where the genes go that is very compelling to the universal logos that's watching over us all so you
know the stable boy can marry the princess if his heart is pure and the winds of the logos are at his
back that's why we love those fairy tales of the stable boy who inherits the kingdom because we sense
that as uh our story the question is how can you bring back the psychedelic experience or what can you
bring it i know of two techniques neither very satisfying both in combination moderately effective
but crude the first is a voice operated tape recorder they sell these for a couple of hundred bucks
uh i've produced some amazing tapes with these i have one voice activated tape where you hear me three uh
clear my throat two hundred times in the course of an evening because each time i would clear my throat
halfway through the throat clearing it's voice activated the tape record so it would catch the last half of
however if you have presence of mind sufficient to speak english this would be a more informative record of your experience
yeah and then the other technique which is less technically dependent is uh if you have an insight at a certain level of the experience
you have to repeat it to yourself at another level of the experience and then another level and by this
incremental bucketing method you can carry almost any insight out into the into the realm of the world
these insights often don't stand up to scrutiny uh i had a really interesting experience just a week ago
i'm sure you've all had most of this experience but i finally had it all it's the experience of having a dream
a very very complicated dream the subject of which is the universal secret which if told would transform
everything it's the i've got it phenomenon and usually what happens is you you wake up and it's gone
gone just before you get consciousness to give and you say my god i understood everything i had it down to a single
statement if i could articulate it the world would never be the same well this happened to me about a week
ago but by some miracle i actually was able to hang on to the statement into consciousness and i and i woke up
and yelled this thing my son was appalled i mean it was 6 30 in the morning and i was able to get it out
i hope you're ready i sat straight up in bed and said a song is a song profound stuff i mean maybe it is
the most profound stuff the profound stuff usually has that an x is an x construct because essentially what
it's telling you is silence would have been an acceptable substitute for this statement
well let me say one more thing here just sort of to wind this up
the metaphor that makes sense for what we're going through because it gets the biology of it
it gets the drama of it it gets the risk of it it gets the fun and the joy of it is the metaphor of birth
we are about to decamp from three-dimensional space and time
yes the earth is the cradle of mankind but you can't live in the cradle forever and we're not in this cradle alone
we are squashing and trampling on hundreds of other species that have as much right to be here as we
are so through technology which means pharmacology art and the engineering sciences we are trying to
find a doorway into a new world for the spirit and it is going to come out of human machine interfacing
pharmacological redesign of the human brain mind system down possibly digitalizing and downloading into the
micro physical realm we don't know i mean it makes your hair stand on end to think of being downloaded into the digital realm
there was once a fish who had a great deal of doubts about this plan to conquer the land
and tried to urge everyone to think again that no good could possibly come of it but in fact the forward thrust of evolution
evolution is toward higher dimensions greater complexity more information greater connectedness and a deeper and deeper
sense of the all-pervasiveness of love and meaning that's what it's really about all these disparate physical elements
come to nothing if they don't add up to more than the sum of their parts and the more than the sum of their parts
is this transcendental element which we call love that is the part of the eschaton that has never left us
that accompanied us across the african grassland and into history i mean granted bloodied and battered
by the experiences of sexism and racism and so forth but never lost as an ideal never lost as a guiding light
and an experience and i really think that when we dissolve all the boundaries this is what we will
discover is an unconditional caring an unconditional affection that flows through all life and all matter
and gives it meaning and you don't have to wait for the end of the world to get this news you can
just short circuit the collective march toward that realization by accelerating your own microcosm of
spirituality through the use of these hallucinogens they are the doorways that the guy in mind has
installed in the historical process to let anybody out anytime they want to provided they have the courage to turn
the knob and walk through the door thank you very very much thank you i don't like the part of what i do
that is a cult of personality i don't like it that a white guy sits at the front of the room
and pontificates and i don't know if you figured out this shuffle but i have and i know that i don't know
anything more than you know really and that it's just a funny circumstance of faith that you sit and
listen and i speak because there are no experts and there is only uh you know the integrity of doing and having
done and really if you get the message you you will be able to transcend the need for any more of this
because it's really a message of self-trust and self-empowerment and then what i'm also trying to create
is a community of shared associations about these weird states so that we don't have to all privately
we think we're losing our marbles you know let those who talk to the elves find each other and band together i
am not um one i am basically a scientist without portfolio because no academic institution would ever
trust me with a portfolio but i i move in the domain of the gurus the channelers the pontificators
and those with secret revealed knowledge from atlantis and lemuria but i have contempt for all of that
whether it's true or not because they got there the wrong way you know you have to come through
uh the rules of evidence and reason reason is not science don't confuse them i'm very much a critic of
science and the scientific method but i don't think reason can be tossed out with that uh bath water
what is being proposed here is that we're on the brink of the discovery of another world a world as
as potentially transforming of our world as the discovery of the western hemisphere transformed european
civilization in the 1500s but the world that we're about to discover is inside the mind it's mental real
estate we who have made consciousness our game by building cities elaborating literatures tossing up
religions and setting armies marching we who have made consciousness our game have barely scratched
the surface of human consciousness and it's not like we haven't had a crack at it i mean these yogans
have been over there digging away for millennia egyptian religion kabbalism alchemy western traditions of
mysticism and i am a connoisseur of all that don't get me wrong but what astonishes me
is how embryonic it all is we are not the tired inheritors of an ancient and sophisticated civilization
and it's twilight which is
you
what they're all telling us, we are the know-nothing, fresh-scrub babes who are the new kids on the block
who haven't got a clue as to what the human enterprise could really be about.
And we are coming now through a very narrow historical neck
where the accumulated stupidity of the last 5,000 years, the dues now have to be paid.
It ain't fair, we didn't do it, we didn't bring the slaves from Africa, we didn't invent oligarchy, we didn't do all these things.
Nobody's interested in our whining about how we didn't do it.
It's in your face and it's clearly a crisis of two things, of consciousness and of conditioning.
These are the two things that the psychedelics attack.
We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war.
But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds.
We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior and it's not easy.
I mean imagine, I don't know how many of you have ever confronted the fact that you were addicted to something.
And some addictions are really serious.
If you've ever been addicted to tobacco or heroin, I'm sure you know what I mean.
Well then imagine a global population addicted to a drug, the use of which is killing us, but we can't, there's no doctor saying you should.
There's no rehab clinic to go to when you're a species.
We are on an absolutely destructive bender that will end with the death of the earth, the impoverishment of its animal and plant population,
and the collapse of our civilization into scarcity, unless we can somehow restructure our psychology and get hold of ourselves.
And psychedelics are the only thing I've ever seen work on an individual level to do that.
You know, in the early 60s, they were curing 75% of chronic alcoholism cases that they treated with LSD.
They were curing with one dose of LSD, one 500 microgram dose.
Well now obviously, LSD is not a magic bullet for alcoholism, that's a preposterous idea.
It's simply that you take LSD and if you're a chronic alcoholic, you review your life and you notice that you're killing yourself.
And then you say, my God, I am killing myself.
If I don't stop what I'm doing, I will be dead.
That's the strongest motivation to character rehabilitation there is.
And that's what we have to carry into the domain of public debate.
I can't believe how constipated American institutions are.
I mean, here we are, under the aegis of a great crusading reformer from Arkansas.
A new order in human affairs has dawned, but they suggest closing an air base out at Sacramento.
And there are editorials as to whether we can survive the shock of this massive change.
Well, I've got news for you.
You better do your change-related calisthenics, if that was heavy lifting.
Because what you've got coming at you is something very, very different.
We are now in a position to actually make something of ourselves.
extend the design process to human destiny and produce something that will redeem
10,000 years of pogroms and migrations and attempted genocides and pointless wars
and stupid religions that make people hate themselves and all the rest of it.
If we're going to redeem that legacy, then we have to do something quite spectacular.
Okay, now, I will talk a little bit about what I've learned from psychedelics.
I feel self-conscious doing it, but on the other hand, wouldn't it be stupid for me to talk about what you've learned from psychedelics?
That would add presumption to the sins already arrayed here.
There are different models about what the psychedelic experience is.
Here's a couple.
Building on Western psychotherapy as elaborated by Freud and Jung, one view of what psychedelics are is
it's the part of your mind that you'd rather not do business with.
It's the memories of childhood neglect or abuse.
It's repressed, kinky fantasies.
It's, in other words, the Freudian idea of the unconscious.
That somehow these are drugs which dissolve the boundary between conscious and unconscious mind
and then you can do accelerated psychotherapy because resistances have been pharmacologically overcome.
That's one model.
It's good as far as it goes.
It just doesn't go far enough.
Then there's another model which I would call the traditional or shamanic model.
And it says the cosmos is a series of levels and these levels are connected by vertical routes
of access which can be thought of as simply flights through space or magical trees or magical ladders.
Anyway, there's an image of ascent.
And ordinary people exist on only one of these levels.
But a shaman is not an ordinary person.
A shaman is a superhuman person who has the power of animal allies behind them.
And they can go up and down in these elevators that move between levels and they can therefore recover lost souls,
see social hanky-panky theft and adultery, see the causes behind that, see the causes behind disease, so forth and so on.
That would be the traditional one.
What I have concluded after 25 years of fiddling with this is that both of those ideas have a certain something to recommend them,
but that they don't go far enough and that we get more to the meat of this if we leave off psychological, the first explanation,
or sociological, the second explanation, and actually go for something a little more formal.
To wit, a mathematical model of what shamanism is.
And what I mean by that is, let's think about what shamans do.
They cure disease, and another way of putting that is they have a remarkable facility for choosing patients who will recover.
They predict weather, they predict weather, they're very important.
They tell where game has gone, the movement of game, and they seem to have a paranormal ability to look into questions,
as I mentioned, who's sleeping with who, who stole the chicken, who, you know, social transgressions are an open book to them.
Well, thinking about this from a mathematician's point of view, an all-encompassing explanation that would explain how all these magical feats are done,
is simply to suppose that the shaman is somehow able to project his consciousness, his or her consciousness, into a higher dimension.
Not metaphorically, as in, Sylvester Stallone has many dimensions.
Not metaphorically, but literally, as in, one dimension, two dimensions, three dimensions, and four.
Because if you could move into the fourth dimension, the dimension orthogonal to Newtonian space-time,
seeing what the weather is going to be next week is as easy as seeing what the weather is now.
Seeing where the game went is as easy as seeing where the game are.
Knowing who stole the chicken is simply defined by looking to see who stole the chicken.
And I have noticed that all of biology, not simply shamanism within the context of human society,
but all of biology is, in a sense, a conquest of dimensionality.
That as we ascend the phylogeny of organic life, what animals are, are a strategy for conquering space-time.
And complex animals do it better than simpler animals.
And we do it better than any complex animal.
And we, 20th century people, do it better than any people in any previous century.
Because we can bind data in so many ways that they couldn't.
Electronically, on film, on tape, so forth and so on.
So, the progress of organic life is deeper and deeper into dimensional conquest.
Well, from that point of view then, the shaman begin to look like the advance guard of a new kind of human being.
A human being that is as advanced over where we are, as we are advanced over people a million years ago.
Because we have, you know, very elaborate strategies for coding the past.
It's a dimensional conquest.
So, that's part of what I've learned about psychedelics.
And I could have left it there, but I never do.
I always want to bring more under the umbrella of whatever metaphor it is that's being pushed.
And what I have discerned is that time is actually speeding up.
That the universe is not what physics tells us it is.
Physics tells us that the universe is a physical system, an entropic system, that was born in immense energy and chaos,
and will run down with a bang, I mean with a whimper, not a bang, run down into heat entropy and dissipation.
The psychedelic data on this is completely different.
The psychedelic data says what that model left out was biology and mind.
Now, biology, you might imagine, is a fairly ephemeral, recent, fragile phenomenon.
It is not.
The average star in this galaxy gutters out after about 700 million years.
Not our star.
We happen to have the good fortune to be around a very stable, slow-burning star.
But there has been biology on this planet at least two billion years.
Three times the average life of a star.
So biology is not some Johnny-come-lately epiphenomena.
Biology is a phenomenon more persistent than the life of the stars themselves.
And biology is not a static thing.
I mean a star evolving now is not greatly different from a star evolving a billion years ago.
Biology doesn't work that way.
Biology constantly changes the context in which evolution occurs.
The way I have downloaded this into a phrase is the universe is, the biological universe at least, is a novelty conserving engine.
Upon simple molecules are built complex molecules.
Upon complex molecules are built complex polymers.
Upon complex polymers comes DNA.
Out of DNA comes the whole machinery of the cell.
Out of cells comes simple aggregate colony animals like hydra and that sort of thing.
Out of that, true animals.
Out of that, ever more complex animals.
Organs of locomotion.
Organs of sight.
Organs of smell.
Complex mental machinery for the coordinating of data in time and space.
This is the whole story of the advancement of life.
And in our species it reaches its culmination and it crosses over into a new domain where change no longer occurs in the atomic and biological machinery of existence.
It begins to take place in this world which we call mental.
It's called epigenetic change.
Change which cannot be traced back to mutation of the arrangements of molecules inside long chain polymers.
But change taking place in syntactical structures that are linguistically based.
And people have probably been using language with considerable facility for probably 50,000 years, possibly more.
In our own time, we have created ever more elaborate languages, ever more elaborate technologies for transforming, storing, and retrieving language.
So that we are actually on the brink of being able to give every single one of you the complete cultural inventory.
The complete database of human beings experience on this planet.
That's what these data highways and networks are all about.
The nervous system is being hardwired.
But what I wanted to draw your attention to about this is it is not only an advance deeper and deeper into novelty,
but it's an advance in which each successive stage occurs more quickly than the stage which preceded it.
So, you know, once you get the big bang, then nothing much happens for a long, long time.
I mean, there's plasma streaming through the universe.
The universe is slowly cooling, but that's the most dramatic complex process in the universe, this cooling.
Then, after a certain point, more complex processes come in.
Complexification begins to build, and as it builds, it begins to happen faster and faster and faster.
And the great puzzle in the biological record is the suddenness of our own emergence, of our emergence, human emergence, out of primate, out of the primate line.
It happened with enormous suddenness.
Lumholtz calls it the most explosive reorganization of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record.
And that's, you know, a great embarrassment to the theory of evolution because this is the organ which generated the theory of evolution.
We're not talking an appendix or an eyebrow here.
We're talking the very organ which generated it.
I think that we are not, that we have taken far too much responsibility for what is happening.
And that what we took to be a staircase we were climbing is actually an up escalator.
And if you will stop climbing, you will notice that it does not impede your upward progress because the ground you're standing on is moving you toward the goal.
And I think that this idea, which may be the proof that I'm bonkers, requires a fairly radical reorganization of consciousness.
Because what I'm saying is the universe was not born in a fiery explosion from which it has been being blasted outward ever since.
The universe is not being pushed like that from behind.
The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal that is as inevitable as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl when you release it up near the rim.
You know, if you do that, the marble will roll down the side of the bowl, down, down, down, and eventually it will come to rest in the lowest energy state, which is the bottom of the bowl.
That's precisely my model of human history.
Now, bear in mind what the competition is peddling.
The competition is peddling the idea that the universe sprang from nothing in a single moment for no reason.
Now, whatever you think about that, notice that it's the limit case for credulity.
Do you understand what I mean?
I mean, if you can believe that, it's hard for me to imagine what you would balk at.
If we were to sit down and say, let's see who can think of the most unlikely thing that could possibly happen, I submit to you, nobody could top the Big Bang.
It is the improbability of improbabilities.
It is the mother of all improbabilities right there.
So, I'm suggesting something different.
I'm suggesting that the universe is pulled toward a complex attractor that exists ahead of us in time,
and that our ever-accelerating speed through the phenomenal world of connectivity and novelty
is based on the fact that we are now very, very close to the attractor.
All Western religions have insisted that God would come tangential to history,
but they all lose their nerve when you ask when, which is the only interesting question about that hypothesis.
I mean, if it's not now, then what the hell difference does it make?
It's just pissing in the wind as far as I can see.
I think that the very real social crisis that is upon us, the crisis of population, of resource depletion,
of atmospheric degradation, of epidemic disease, all these crises indicate that we are now down to the short epochs
of this process of universal ingression into novelty.
And that, in fact, it makes no sense whatsoever to speak of a human future.
There is no human future.
It's inconceivable, given where we are today, that to speak of the human world a thousand years from now, or five hundred years from now.
It is literally, it either doesn't exist, or it's beyond our power of imagining.
It isn't simply going to be non-polluting cars and smaller hi-fi speakers.
I mean, that's an idiot's notion.
Yeah, clearer TV pictures.
It isn't like that at all.
I mentioned this this morning, how when you look at only one line of technological development, automobiles or computers,
it looks like you can rationally anticipate what's going to happen.
But when you realize that there are thousands of these lines of development all transforming themselves,
all moving towards some kind of omega point, then you realize that we're in the grip of what I call a concrescence.
And I maintain that you don't have to believe me on this.
You can see it from here.
You just have to climb a high hill.
There's one.
It's called psilocybin.
There's one.
It's called ayahuasca.
The view from the tops of these hills is of the concrescence.
It lies now closer to us than the Johnson administration, for God's sake, in time.
And, you know, I have an elaborate mathematical theory to back this up,
which you should gratefully learn you are not going to be flayed with this afternoon.
But I think it's going to become more and more important for people to delinearize their view of time,
decondition yourself from the lie of history.
After all, you know, if time were space, history would be a spider web.
So, bear that in mind.
What is concrescence?
Ah, concrescence.
Concrescence is a word that I cribbed from the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead.
And, in fact, much of what I say, Whitehead provides the foundation for.
He, like myself, had the idea that history grows toward what he called a nexus of completion.
And these nexi of completion themselves grow together into what he called the concrescence.
So, a concrescence is a domain of extremely high novelty in comparison to whatever it's embedded in.
So, for instance, you walking in the wilderness, you are a concrescence.
Because you are more complex than the medium you're moving through.
A raisin embedded in a cornmeal muffin is a concrescence.
It is more complex than the muffin matrix in which it finds itself.
So, a concrescence is a local state of unusually high complexity.
And, a concrescence exerts a kind of attraction.
Let's call it the temporal equivalent of gravity.
So that all objects in the universe are drawn through time, not space.
Gravity draws you through time.
Space, gravity draws you through space.
Time draws you toward the concrescence.
This is why the universe is seen to be becoming more and more complex, faster and faster.
The idea being, you see, that each epoch being shorter than the one that preceded it,
this generates an asymptotic curve of approach.
And, it's become a cliché of our culture that time is speeding up.
It actually is speeding up.
It's not that it seems like it's speeding up.
It looks like it's speeding up.
It is speeding up.
We and our entire world are being drawn into confrontation
with something that at this level is lost below the event horizon of rational apprehension.
That's a fancy way of saying you can't know jack shit about it at this point in time.
There will come a moment when it will rise above the horizon of rational apprehension.
But, and I see, I really, I think that history is a set of nested resonances.
This is what I mean when I say nothing is unannounced.
Nothing can take you by surprise if you've really been paying attention.
Because everything is preceded by its harbingers and heralds.
And, we are living in an era now where there is a great deal of apocalyptic expectation, anticipation and hysteria for several reasons.
First of all, because Christianity just is hysterical in all times and places.
Second of all, there's a built-in goose in the calendar because we're approaching a millennial year.
And that always exacerbates this Christian thing outrageously because of the promise made, you know.
Amen, amen, I say to you, this generation shall not pass away before I return to, you know, clean your plow or whatever it is.
So, and there is the physical evidence all around us that we are the witnesses to a planetary crisis that we cannot control or manage.
I mean, there are, it's very hard to believe that we could manage ourselves back into a steady state.
I mean, yeah, the Jews are talking to the Arabs and they're trying to get things straightened out in South Africa.
But, what about the global population curve?
What about the degrading atmosphere?
I mean, you know, you don't necessarily, you're just as dead even if you're not killed by a racist or a fascist.
So, we can get certain problems under control, but it seems certain problems are beyond our control.
Also, there's another level to all this, which is when you take cores from the Greenland ice or make side-ranging radar maps of the Canadian shield,
you discover that it, we are not the only force for disruption and chaos wandering around the universe looking for trouble.
The universe is an incredibly chaotic and unstable place.
Planetesimal impacts on the earth have reset the biological clock at least three times in the last billion years.
What we have been living through for the past 50,000 years is an unusual era of meta-stability.
And it has allowed us to create a global civilization.
but we can't assume
that we have
50,000 years of stability ahead of us
or even 100,000 years
of stability ahead of us
and finally
this curious resistance
to the idea of the end of the world
always amuses me
because maybe the world will end
and maybe it won't end
but have you ever noticed
that the end of your world
is an absolute certainty
you're going to go into the yawning grave
and rather soon
I should suspect
and possibly sooner
than you're prepared for
so quibbling over the end
of other people's world
seems like a philosophical argument
compared to the certainty
of your own finality
and I've been thinking
the question is
out of Stephen Hawking's book
about parallel worlds
and black holes
and stuff
how can these
physical oddities
or anomalies
be related
to what I'm talking about
well
first of all
we don't know
what a black hole is
a black hole
has at the center of it
a singularity
the definition
of singularity
is
you don't know
what it is
this is a fishy way
of making theories
by the way
Stephen Hawking
is a prime example
at one point
in his career
he was
very keen
for what were called
mini black holes
and these were black holes
that were
under a centimeter
in size
and a certain reading
of his theory
required
ten high sixteen
of these things
in the universe
well
when you realize
that there's a singularity
at the center
of each one of them
you say
well hell
what kind of physics
are you doing
if you have a physical theory
that has
ten high sixteen
exceptions
to whatever rules
it lays down
this isn't a theory
this is a sieve
that you're waving around
in the air
however
the black hole
does bear
on this
because
imagine an observer
standing outside
the event horizon
of a black hole
watching an object
approach
the black hole
what you see
and this is similar
to the argument
or the example
I gave a few minutes ago
of the marble
on the edge of the bowl
what you see
is this
let's make it a spacecraft
this spacecraft
that approaches
the event horizon
of the black hole
and then
it's caught
in the
gravitational tidal
forces of the black hole
and it begins to go
faster and faster
around and around
faster and faster
and at a certain point
it disappears
into the singularity
this is from the point of view
of an observer
outside the system
now
now we flash
to the stalwart
captain and crew
on the bridge
of this starship
what happens
from their point of view
what happens
is
as they sink below
the event horizon
of the black hole
and start the descent
toward the singularity
time and space
are dilated
so dramatically
that the singularity
recedes
to an infinite distance
and you fall forever
toward it
well
what I would like
to suggest
based on
well
here's what I'd like
to suggest
this is one way
of thinking
about it
that our planet
is on a collision
course
with
something
which we
actually
at our present
state of knowledge
don't have a word
for
a black hole
is simply
a gravitationally
massive object
so massive
that no light
can leave it
what I'm talking about
is something like that
except that
it isn't so much
gravitationally massive
as temporally
massive
we are being sucked
into the body
of eternity
and I think
it's going to happen
very soon
now
an obvious objection
that someone
would make
to this
it's a
it's a probabilistic
objection
is they would say
don't you find it
rather unusual
that your own
very
minute
and finite
life
should occur
so close
to this
moment
of universal
dramatic
climax
doesn't that
clue you
to the fact
that you might
be slightly deluded
to which I reply
not at all
because
I think of this
event horizon
as a series
of like
ghost
horizons
and
once you
enter into
history
what history
is
is the
outer shell
of the
gravitational
field
of the
attractor
of the
concrescence
in other words
history
is the
disturbance
in nature
which
precedes
the
concrescence
it precedes
it by only
50,000 years
a microsecond
so
a geological
microsecond
before all
life
is melted
down
in the presence
of the singularity
there is
a curious
interface
zone
that is not
the singularity
and not
the absence
of the singularity
it's
the singularity
in the act
of
becoming
and it only
lasts
as I say
a geological
microsecond
50,000 years
but if you
happen to be
born inside
that microsecond
then you
have a very
curious
perspective
on the
phenomenon
indeed
because you
observe it
from inside
the shell
of the
historical
vehicle
here is the
point I want
to make
if you have
a universe
like that
72 billion
years in
duration
it will
undergo
half
of its
evolution
in the
last
30 seconds
of its
existence
can you
imagine
now this
is what
the scientists
do
except they
spin it
around
and that's
why
I can't remember
who wrote it
but the book
called the
first three
minutes
Steven Weinberg's
book
the first three
minutes
a book about
the first three
minutes
in the life
of the universe
where he
leads you
through all
this complex
physics
as matter
is crystallizing
out of
hyperspace
and all
this stuff
all I'm
saying
is
let's put
the complexity
in the more
likely end
of the cycle
let's put it
at the end
when after
billions of
years of
evolution
and all
kinds of
complexity
and that
sort of
thing
everything
comes
together
so
this
kind
of a
cycle
if we
were actually
living in
a universe
like this
could
completely
unfold
itself
according
to its
natural
laws
and yet
provide a
miracle
the miracle
of the
concrescence
that's why
I'm so keen
on boundary
dissolution
the more
boundaries that
have dissolved
the closer
to concrescence
we are
and when you
finally reach it
there are no
boundaries
you are
eternity
you are
all space
and time
you are
alive
and dead
here
and there
before
and
after
the singularity
is a
coincidencia
appositorum
it can
simultaneously
coexist
in states
which are
contradictory
it is
you know
Thomas Aquinas'
vision of
God
it's
something
which
transcends
rational
apprehension
but
it
gives
the universe
meaning
because
all process
then
can be seen
to be
a seeking
and a moving
and an effort
to approximate
connect
with
and attend
to
this
transcendental
object
at the end
of time
one way of
thinking of it
is like
those bar
balls
that they
hang in
discos
that
send out
thousands of
reflections
off everybody
and everything
in the room
well think
of the
transcendental
object
at the
end
of time
as that
bar
ball
and then
those
reflected
twinkling
refractive
lights
are
religions
scientific
theories
gurus
works of
art
poetry
great
orgasms
great
souffles
great
paintings
in other
words
anything
which has
we even
use this
phrase
anything
which has
a spark
of divinity
in it
is in
fact
referent
to the
original
source
of the
sparks
of all
divinity
which is
the
compressed
experience
of life
and mind
after
billions
of billions
of years
of unfolding
itself
within the
confines
of three
dimensional
space
and you
can make
this
vision
your
friend
through
psychedelics
because as
I said
at the
beginning
of this
rave
you can
see it
from here
of course
not if you
have your
face
plunged in
your stock
portfolio
you're not
going to
see it
no
but if you
will go
up on the
mountain
and take
five dry
grams
in silent
darkness
and pray
through the
night
you will
absolutely
guaranteed
come into
a sense
of this
thing
a perturbation
on the
surface
of the
waters
of time
as we
approach
the lip
of this
cascade
into
concrescence
novelty
and completion
and the
psychedelics
raise you
out of the
historical
matrix
and give
you
a sense
of
participation
in this
transcendental
reality
it's the
essence of
religion
it's the
essence of
psychic
balance
it's the
source
of
shamanic
power
and
mental
health
thousands
of these
molecules
are arriving
at the
synaptic
site of
activity
elbowing
aside
the local
population
of the
endogenous
neurotransmitters
getting them
out of the
way
plugging
themselves
into the
receptor
site
and beginning
to lift
the electron
spin
resonance
level
and push
them
in new
directions
and you
can almost
hear it
doing
this
and
then
beyond
the
hypnagogia
there is
the
actual
trip
and it
usually
is
this
means
that
the
world
has
to
fall
it
like
falls
apart
or
explodes
or
settles
down
on you
there is
a sense
of a
rupture
of plane
and then
the
visually
coherent
emotionally
laden
information
laden
high content
hallucinations
occur
and many
people
have taken
psychedelic drugs
and never
gotten past
the
hypnagogia
they don't
know that
there is
something out
there besides
dancing mice
and spinning
geometric
wheels
and stuff
like that
but
beyond that
you cross
over
and that's
the typical
model of a
trip
now
what happens
with all
of these
things
to greater
and lesser
degrees
LSD
psilocybin
mescaline
ayahuasca
is
and I've
never
actually ever
heard an
explanation
for this
for some
reason
the experience
comes in
waves
there's the
first wave
that makes
sense
that's
the drug
taking
hold
but why
then
after 20
minutes
of
unbelievably
outlandish
hallucination
will it
like all
stop
you know
and it's
like a
moment ago
you were
screaming
for mercy
now
you look
around
and you
say
I'm
down
am I
down
I seem
to be
down
you know
and sometimes
you seem
to come
all the
way
turns off
sometimes
and then
about five
minutes later
it comes
again
and you get
another wave
and if you've
taken a really
dedicated hit
of
ayahuasca
for example
you will get
like as many as
five or six
of these waves
throughout the evening
and the first one
is usually
the strongest
if you take
an effective
but not
strong
dose
of ayahuasca
you will get
one pass
and often
and then if you
take slightly
less
you'll get
one pass
and it will
be weak
so if you
take ayahuasca
at all times
pay attention
because you may
be looking
at something
thinking
well this is
not so interesting
I'm sure it's
going to be
much better
in an hour
and you may
actually be looking
at as good
as it's going
to get
that evening
and psilocybin
also comes
in waves
like this
LSD
very dramatically
DMT not
because DMT
is one
enormous
brief
wave
I mean
DMT
sort of
brings all
the issues
together
and
the way
I think
of these
psychedelics
experientially
is as a
series of
concentric
circles
maybe like
the outer
circle
is
mescaline
and the next
circle in
is
LSD
and the next
circle in
is psilocybin
and the next
circle in
is DMT
it's almost
as though
the psychedelic
experience
is
whatever drug
or whatever
substance
you take
it leads
you deeper
and deeper
in the same
direction
and of course
with DMT
you not only
hear the aliens
you see
the aliens
you not only
see the aliens
you become
an alien
it seems to be
the most
radical
of all of
these things
in terms of
the experience
it's also
the most
natural
of all of
these things
it also
is the
safest
it stands
the ordinary
standards of
courage and
risk
on their
head
because
here it is
it's the most
terrifying
the most
spectacular
and
the safest
none of us
including myself
have fully
come to grips
with this
paradox
we would
rather do
less safe
less
scary
drugs
I think
DMT
is
pretty
impressive
in most
situations
next
Terence
responds
to a question
comparing
meditation
and the
use of
hallucinations
well no
I just
I think
they're
completely
different
realms
of human
activity
I can't
I mean
meditation
you don't
hallucinate
you don't
they say
you do
but they
aren't
very
convincing
and plus
the monks
then rush
over and
explain that
you're doing
it wrong
so you know
what's the
deal
I think
if by
meditation
you mean
lying down
and closing
your eyes
or sitting
up and
closing your
eyes a lot
I do
that a lot
and I like
it but I
would never
confuse it
with the
psychedelic
enterprise
pardon me
it's only
my opinion
but I
really don't
I think
that it's
that
all of
these
spiritual
techniques
are not
substitutions
for the
psychedelic
experience
but
trade-offs
you know
I mean
organized religion
is as
concerned
with
controlling
social
groups
as
organized
politics
is
and
the
visionary
or ecstatic
experience
is unsettling
to the
religious
mentality
you know
even among
fundamentalist
Christians
if you're
not one
they all
seem
more or
less
alike
but if
you move
into that
world
you discover
that they
are very
strongly
polarized
in two
directions
those
who are
scripturalists
and those
who are
experientialists
the glossolalia
the speaking
in tongues
the holy
rollers
that sort
of thing
and the
scripturalists
are very
uncomfortable
around
the experientialists
because to
them it looks
like demonic
possession
and they get
really agitated
about that
yeah well
I think
that all
of these
techniques
like
mantra
yantra
tantra
whatever
they work
incredibly
well in
the presence
of psychedelics
leading me
to suppose
that what
these are
are tools
that were
developed
in the
paleolithic
world of
psychedelic
magic
and all
we have
now
are
these
tools
but we
don't have
the original
engine
that drove
them
yes
I
am very
bored
by
spiritual
practice
unless
I've
taken a
psychedelic
and then
you know
mantric
chanting
is
beyond
the power
of mind
to encompass
or describe
sex
isn't bad
either
and
you know
it seems
to be a
general
functional
enhancer
is what
it is
acoustical
driving
is also
a tried
and true
tradition
but see
it's not
about
the exclusivity
of method
but the
combination
of method
I mean
what you
want to
do
is
beat
your
drum
while
sitting
in
yab-yum
while
stoned
on
X
while
at
the
holy
mountain
while
the
astrological
configuration
is
correct
and
then
you know
line it
all up
and then
push it
through
that's
the way
to do
it
I think
Terence
on
creativity
and
hallucinogens
well
it
again
it goes
back
to this
function
of
boundary
dissolution
creativity
if you
analyze
what
do we
mean
when we
say
that
it
basically
means
being able
to
transcend
the
ordinary
you
see it
in a
way
nobody
else
ever
saw
it
whatever
it
is
and
so
that's
creativity
psychedelics
by dissolving
the boundaries
of cultural
expectation
let you
see things
in new
ways
I was
in a
situation
recently
where it
was
evening
and
silhouetted
against the
sky
were flame
cypress
trees
but they
were all
black
and I
was looking
at them
I've seen
flame
cypress
trees
against
twilight
skies
many times
you all
have as
well
and suddenly
it was like
there was
this
shift
and I
didn't
see it
as a
flame
cypress
tree
anymore
I
saw
it
as
black
dust
pouring
out
of a
certain
point
of the
sky
and
cascading
like a
waterfall
and I
was looking
at three
waterfalls
of
microfine
black
powder
pouring
out
of
points
about
sixty
feet
above
the
ground
well
I
didn't
even
mention
it
to
the
person
I
the
other
night
this
was
really
interesting
to me
the
other
night
just
as
I
was
falling
asleep
a
phrase
came
into
my
mind
that
I
liked
but I
didn't
understand
it
in fact
I
didn't
think
it
meant
anything
I
just
thought
it
was
an
interesting
phrase
and
I
thought
about
it
understood
it
and
I
thought
this
is
a
very
interesting
idea
and
I
never
thought
it
before
the
thought
was
if
time
were
space
then
history
is a
cobweb
that
was
all
it
was
but
I
don't
take
these
leaps
very
often
so
I
was
delighted
because
I knew
a moment
would come
when I
could lay
it on
a group
of
people
like
I
have
just
done
so
it's
a
catalyst
for
cognitive
activity
that's
what
the
mushroom
is
dance
drama
song
painting
body
expression
creativity
and simply
the passive
act
of
understanding
this is
what it
does
for us
and this
is
what
we
love
to
do
I
mean
we
are
creatures
of
the
mind
you
know
they
talk
about
virtual
reality
as some
future
technology
that's
going
to
change
everything
we've
been
living
in a
virtual
reality
for the
past
6,000
years
I mean
look at
cities like
New York
and London
and Los Angeles
I mean
every
nature
has
disappeared
everything
you see
is a
human
idea
downloaded
into
material
existence
it's
entirely
virtual
it
doesn't
disappear
at the
punch
of a
dial
but
it
is
as
virtual
as
the
virtual
realities
that
will
eventually
be
made
out
of
light
behind
goggles
culture
the whole
thing
is
that
culture
and
language
tend
to
become
traps
and
yet
they
can
be
the
platforms
for
enormous
freedom
if
you
understand
what
it's
all
about
and
what
it's
all
about
is
you
are
the
center
of
the
mandala
you
are
not
marginalized
in
any
way
and
the
message
that
the
culture
gives
us
is
that
we
are
marginal
it
doesn't
matter
whether
you
if
you've
got
a
hundred
million
dollars
fortune
magazine
will
inform
you
that
so
do
10,000
other
people
on the
north
american
continent
there's
nothing
special
about
you
it's
and
so
we
are
constantly
this is
part
of
the
democratic
legacy
we
are
constantly
told
you're
not
special
isn't
special
anybody
could
do
it
what
the
psychedelic
and
so
then
when
you
look
for
guidance
direction
mentorship
we always
look toward
institutions
well I'll
go to the
university
or I'll
go to the
army or I'll
do something
somebody will
tell me
will give me a
larger purpose
but it's really
yourself
that is
the final
arbiter
and if you keep
yourself as the
final arbiter
you will be
less susceptible
to infection
by cultural
illusion
now the
problem
with this
is that
it makes
you feel
bad
to not
be
infected
by cultural
illusion
because it's
called
alienation
you know
but this
is
I can't
solve
all
problems
the reason
we feel
alienated
is because
the society
is infantile
trivial
and stupid
so
the cost
of sanity
in this
society
is a
certain
level of
alienation
I grapple
with this
because I'm
a parent
and I think
anybody who has
children
you come to
this realization
you know
what will it
be
alienated
cynical
intellectual
or
slack jawed
halfwit
consumer
of the horseshit
being handed
down from
on high
there is not
much choice
in there
you see
and we all
want our
children to be
well adjusted
it's
unfortunately
there's nothing
to be well
adjusted
to
so
that's a real
problem
and I really
believe
that
extra
environmentalism
which is
a nicer
though
longer
word
for alienation
is
defensible
and shouldn't
be thought of
as
pathological
what I noticed
in going
to the Amazon
and Indonesia
and these
places
is
is that
the person
you want
to get
to
is
the shaman
and
but the shaman
is different
from everybody
else
like when you
go into
an Amazonian
tribe
that's way
up river
or something
the people
behave the way
you would
expect
naive
untraveled
people
to behave
they want
to touch
your
gore
text
and
you know
look at
your camera
and
and look
through the
binoculars
and fiddle
with the
can opener
and all
this
no shaman
would ever
stoop
to such
behavior
a shaman
is not
knows
that cultures
are provisional
and is
interested in
you
as a
person
the other
people don't
even
see you
as a person
because you're
huge
white
strange
smelling
and incomprehensible
the shaman
sees you
as a person
and it's because
he is alienated
the reason
shamans
can do
their magic
is because
they are
outside
the belief
system
I really
think
that that's
true
everyone else
believes
you know
that the guy
in the other
village
can send
the mojo
and mess
with you
the shaman
knows
that that's
not quite
how it
works
and so
then he
as it
were
can go
behind
the board
and fix
the cultural
TV that
everybody else
is just
watching
so I
think
alienation
extra
environmentalism
shamanism
whatever you
want to
call it
is simply
individualism
in the
context
of cultures
that don't
value
individualism
and cultures
don't
you know
it said
nature
acts
to preserve
the species
cultures
act
to preserve
the illusions
of the population
they're not
interested in
you
if you're
an Einstein
or a
Jackson Pollock
unless they
can fit
you in
to the
pre-established
systems
of commerce
and canons
of aesthetic
order
and so forth
and so on
and then
that's called
being
civilized
the question
is
what's
with
licking
frogs
I'm not
sure I
got it
right
but
well you
know
you kiss
a lot
of frogs
before you
find a
prince
and you
probably
lick a
lot
more
toads
not
frogs
let's
give
the devil
his due
here
toads
of certain
species
produce
a
relative
of DMT
in large
glands
in their
necks
why this
is
is not
clear
considering
that this
exudate
or this
material
will kill
a dog
If a dog picks up a toad like that in his mouth, within minutes, it's pretty spectacular.
It's reasonable to suppose that then this is just a defense that has been evolved.
Some of you may have seen the dinosaur in Jurassic Park that spits poison in your face.
We're talking something like that.
The toad creates this 5-methoxy DMT in this gland,
and when the glands are squeezed, it comes out on the surface of the toad's skin.
It's a near relative of DMT.
Speaking from my personal battery of many prejudices, I would say I don't care for it.
It complicates my job enormously because people do this stuff,
and they think, A, that it is DMT,
or, B, if they're slightly better informed, that it's just like DMT.
It is, in fact, chemically called 5-methoxy DMT.
However, it is nothing like DMT.
It's as much like DMT as radio is like television,
and that's where the difference lies.
The 5-methoxy DMT does not trigger the most spectacular effect associated with DMT,
which is these three-dimensional crawling hallucinations
that come out of the woodwork and reveal the true nature of reality to you.
When you take 5-methoxy DMT,
you have all of the physical presentation of DMT.
There's a sense of a kind of light anesthesia through the limbs.
There's a sense of falling forward into a void.
There's a sense of losing body boundary.
Now, at that point in DMT,
those symptoms would give way to the trip.
At that point in 5-M-E-O DMT,
those symptoms give way to the beginning of the come-down.
And people who have never taken DMT sometimes rave about 5-M-E-O
and say, you know, this was the most astonishing thing I've ever happened to me.
People who are familiar with DMT
can yawn their way all the way through it
because you're braced for the DMT thing.
I mean, you think, oh my God, it feels just like it.
Here it comes.
It's going to be upon me.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1,
plus 1, plus 2, plus 3, plus 4, plus 5.
It's not coming in.
It doesn't come in.
And so, and then 5-M-E-O is fatal in sheep
as well as dogs.
Spectacularly fatal in sheep.
And so, I guess, if you're a sheep, it's counterindicated.
Doesn't seem to be harmful in human beings.
But with so little data available,
I think maybe we should, you know,
there are old psychedelicists and bold psychedelicists.
But there are no old, bold psychedelicists.
Have I had any contact with the government?
Not exactly, well, up until a week ago,
the answer to this question was yes.
I mean, no.
When I got home from Mestelin the last time,
there was a really funny letter,
which I haven't quite figured out how to respond to.
Dear Mr. McKenna,
I'm an officer of the California State Police,
fascinated with DMT,
and recently read the interview with you
in the San Francisco Chronicle.
I wonder if you would be willing to meet with me
and have coffee so we can discuss this
at your earliest possible convenience.
So, what I did was fairly chicken shit, actually.
I found a copy of Food of the Gods
and I sent it off and I said,
this is my latest book,
or this is a book of mine.
It deals in part with DMT.
Give it a quick read
and if you're still interested in a get-together,
call me.
So, I think,
I don't know exactly how to interpret this.
I've always felt that the reason
the government left me alone
was because I'm an intellectual
and in the United States,
that is the most pathetic,
ineffective form of non-entity
known to exist.
I think that the greatest period
of American creativity in literature
and in other areas, too, arguably,
in the 20th century
was the 20s
and that's because
an expatriate community
conducted a critique of American society
from a foreign vantage point,
in that case, Paris.
And I think that
in spite of the Clinton hiatus,
that the politics of light
have not yet come to settle
on the land of Jefferson
and that we should be prepared
on a moment's notice, basically,
to decamp to Prague
and conduct all this from there.
Also, you know,
Prague was the capital
of European civilization
before the Thirty Years' War,
before the rise of modern science.
It's an Italianate city
untouched by either world war.
It's a beautiful place.
Well,
the world and its double
is how we styled this.
This is simply a high-visibility,
flashy way of reminding people
whose eyes fall upon that text
that the world
were the world
and the world
has had been
over a while.
And also,
you know,
you can see
what we have been
before the world
and what we have been
in the state of the world.