This website is my modest contribution to the community. I took all the talks from the archive, transcribed them using this, and put them onto one big searchable website (just use your browsers search functionality). You can click on text parts in the transcription to jump to that part of the recording. The talk names are from this page, which has the audios only, although nicer looking ;-)
If you find this website useful and have the means, you can buy me a tea.
Archaic Revival
For your edification and amusement, three raves, two interregnum, visions by rosettes, didgeridoo, Stephen Kent,
and sound by space-time.
Words and Ideas by Terence McKenna.
Rap 1, the archaic revival.
History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley.
And as the inevitable chiaostrophe approaches, people look for metaphors and answers.
Every time a culture gets into trouble, it casts itself back into the past, looking for the last sane moment it ever knew.
And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago.
Rocked in the cradle of the great horned mushroom goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property,
before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before.
And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the 20th century is not modernism.
The secret faith of the 20th century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic,
and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock and roll, and catastrophe theory.
The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa,
where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are.
And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back,
and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means.
A doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity.
And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together, the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace.
Because what we need is a new myth. What we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe.
And that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and that when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience, the ego is suppressed.
And the suppression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers.
Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience.
And nobody can sell that to you, and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience.
But that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace,
what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, in the body, there are Niagara's of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life.
I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex.
It means that you never figured out what it was all about.
The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.
What the archaic revival means is shamanism, ecstasy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people.
The enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy, and monotony.
And if you get them on the run, you have the dominators sweating, folks, because that means that you're getting it all reconnected.
Getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing fetish.
Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience.
It's an experience of the living fact of the intellect of the planet, and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies.
But with that experience, the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea that we're figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance,
through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, intelligence. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.
True Hallucinations - Book Talk
Good evening ladies and gentlemen.
I'd like to welcome you to the Phoenix Bookstore.
Terrence McKenn is here tonight and we do have copies of many of his different books
here and if you want to purchase them after the talk, you can bring it up and have them
sign it.
Also, there will be audio recordings of this talk available very shortly after it's done.
This afternoon, I got a phone call from a friend who said, "Turn on KFI right now on
Darryl Gates."
Terrence McKenn is on there with Darryl Gates, the guy who wants to shoot pot smokers in
the back and he did an excellent job, I must say.
I did call my dad and make sure he was less than two.
Anyway, I think all of you know who he is, so I'm just going to turn this over to him.
Terrence McKenn.
Can everybody hear?
Good.
Well, it's great to be here.
It's always fun to come to the west side and see the usual suspects all assembled.
I'm here to flog a new book.
It seems like they're coming out about once a year and that will continue on into next
year.
The object of attention at the moment is true hallucinations and I'm very up for this because
my other books were basically speculation, philosophy, ideas, art historical comment
on psychedelics, so forth and so on.
This is autobiography, narrative.
It has action, heartbreak, erotic outrage, climax, denouement, all those good literary
type things and I wrote it basically because a lot of people have said it seemed to them
incomprehensible how my brother and I got to where we are in terms of the way in which
we furnished our heads and this is basically the story of the formative two weeks in our
lives.
In 1971, I was 23.
My brother was 19.
I spent several years in Asia already having been run out of Berkeley because of the revolution
and we were graduates of the LSD revolution but it had left us wanting more, specifically
wanting the kinds of experiences that the classical commentators on psychedelics described
and by that I mean people like Havelock Ellis in the Dance of Life or S. Weir Mitchell who
wrote about masculine.
LSD for us never delivered visions.
It delivered insight and feelings and complex thoughts but not visions, not activity in
the visual cortex that these classical commentators had led us to expect and I had been in India
for a number of years and pretty well managed to convince myself that whatever spirituality
had ever been there, it had evaporated thousands of years ago and that what we were left with
was a very grasping and mendacious priestly hierarchy that was about as cynical as religion
gets and I was raised Catholic so I know what I'm talking about.
So then we decided well where the gnosis must be is in the Amazon where we knew there was
a pristine aboriginal shamanism based on hallucinogens.
And I stress our youth because I think people imagine that you can only make contributions
if you're old and laden with degrees and that sort of thing and basically our pure reckless
inventiveness carried us further into the heart of the mystery than I would ever have
believed possible.
And I should say a little bit about the method because I think it's important.
Rationalism in confrontation with the weird edges is what's always worked for me.
In other words, if you're a true believer, if you have some pre-packaged philosophy,
then you're going to miss a great deal because you're pre-programmed to ignore what doesn't
fit into your model and it doesn't matter what your model is but if you are simply the
open-minded skeptic/witness and then if you push at the edges of the phenomenal world,
you know, go to the highest mountains, the oldest cities, the deepest deserts, the most
remote jungles and just simply put yourself in these circumstances, the cosmic giggle
can get at you.
You know, it can't get at you if you're pursuing your job delivering messages for Matthew and
Son or whatever it is you've got going but if you will tear the human atom of your individuality
out of the collectivity and set yourself into a wilderness, a desert, an uninhabited island,
then this thing can rise out of the depths and communicate if it chooses, shape your
life for sure, blow your mind.
And there's almost a kind of unconsciousness which is the precondition for success in this
area.
When you are superbly educated and completely alert to all possibilities and scanning the
horizon for action, this is the equivalent of watching a pot to wait for it to boil.
It won't happen.
It's when you become preoccupied, broke, a touch of dysentery, a little confusion in
the mix and then it can sink its teeth into you.
So I thought Harper who published this and I think did a beautiful job with the production
of it has informed me that I, by joining up with them, I'm no more the cheerful extemporaneous
ad lib artist of the past, that I have been elevated into the high and holy realm of being
a literature.
And what that means is you have to read.
And it's not really my metier but it pleases them no end back where they cut the checks.
So I will in fact read to you from my new book.
And I should say a bit about our goal.
You can't just willy-nilly head off to sit in the desert.
You have to have an agenda.
However flimsy and based on misinformation, the agenda tells you what you're supposed
to do next.
So our agenda was we had been interested, as I'm sure many of you have been and are,
in the psychedelic flash that accompanies DMT, which is extraordinarily brief.
It's like a minute and a half, two minutes tops.
And we had the notion that if you could get in there for a half an hour, you might be
able to bring back something really astonishing for the rest of the gang to puzzle over.
Of course you might leave your mind behind in the process, but you know, nothing is for
sure, right?
So it turned out that Richard Evans Schultes, the great doyen of psychedelic botany, had
reported a few years ago a psychedelic plant complex called ukue, which was used by a dwindling
tribe of Indians called witoto.
And it was orally active.
It was a little pill that they made out of the resin of a tree.
And the literature insisted that they used this ukue to speak with little men.
Well you can imagine the effect that had on us.
I mean after all, speaking with little men is something that's very dear to our hearts,
hardly to speak of speaking with little women.
So we set off for the Amazon to contact this Indian tribe to try and see if we couldn't
persuade them to reveal how they made this stuff, or at least to score from them if all
else failed.
And what this meant then in practical terms was going to a place called La Chorrera.
You like that.
Choro is a funny word in Spanish.
It's not exactly a waterfall.
It's not that steep.
It's where a river goes at about a 45 or steeper.
Colloquially it refers to the angle of the dangle on male liquid evacuation, is I think
the proper way to put it.
So a choro is a stream at a 45 degree angle that's moving very rapidly.
And this place, La Chorrera, about which we knew practically nothing except these Indians
were there, turned out not to be your ordinary anonymous jungle mission out there in the
big green.
It turned out this place had a hellacious history attached to it because it was the
place from which the Putumayo rubber boom was administered.
Not very many people know or recall that before Waco, before Telzah Atar, before Auschwitz,
before Guernica, before Armenia, before these great episodes and spasms of extinction in
the 20th century, it was all rehearsed between 1912 and 17 in the Peruvian Amazon when British
banks bankrolled essentially Peruvian mafias to wage a war of terror on these Indians and
the issue was rubber for the World War.
This was before synthetic rubber had been invented.
And these Indians were told you bring in X number of kilos of rubber per month and whatever
you fall below your quota, that weight in your own flesh will be removed by machete.
And these Indians went from 45,000 to 3,500 by the time we got there.
So in spite of this beautiful climaxed rainforest and we were actually moving through a landscape
of ghosts and catastrophe and when you would walk these jungle trails in the afternoon
with the sunlight slanting in, you would swear you could hear the footfalls of manacled feet
and low voices conversing.
I mean it was a very strange place.
So here's a picture of it.
Most of the Amazon basin is made up of alluvial deposits from the Andes.
La Chorrera is different.
A river, the agaraparana, flows into a crack.
It becomes very rapid, then drops over an edge, a lip, creating not exactly a waterfall
but a narrow channel of water, a flume whose violent outpouring has made a sizable lake.
La Chorrera is a paradisical place.
You push very hard and suddenly you are there.
There are no stinging or biting insects.
In the evening mist drifts across a large pasture creating a beautiful pastoral scene.
There is the mission, the foam flecked lake below, the jungle surrounding, and much to
my surprise, white cattle.
The afternoon following our arrival at the edge of the pasture which had been cleared
by the Spanish priests who had managed Mission La Chorrera since its establishment in the
'20s, I held and turned over in my hand perfect specimens of the same species of mushroom
I had eaten near Florencia just a week or two before.
In the pasture before me were dozens of these mushrooms.
After examining several, my brother concurred, pronounced them the same Stropharia cubensis
we had found before, one of the largest, strongest, and certainly most widely distributed of any
of the known psilocybin mushrooms.
What to do?
We had no data on the proper dosage of psilocybin.
Our expedition's thinned-down drug and plant file was concerned with flowering plants,
not fungi.
Collectively, we seem to remember that in the Oaxacan mushroom ritual described by Gordon
Wasson, mushrooms were always eaten in pairs, with several pairs consumed.
We determined to eat six mushrooms each that same evening.
And then here is my journal entry for this day, February 23, 1971.
Are we indeed now in some way camped on the edge of another dimension?
That day afternoon, Dave discovered Stropharia cubensis in the damp pastures behind the house
where we had hung our hammocks.
He and I gathered 30 delicious psilocybin-saturated specimens in about half an hour.
We each ate six and spent last night on an enormously rich and alive, yet gentle and
elusive trip.
In between strange lights in the pasture and discussion of our project, I am left with
the sense that by penetrating the local psychedelic flora this way, we have taken a giant step
toward deeper understanding.
Multifaceted and benevolent, as complex as mescaline, as intense as LSD, the mushroom,
as is said of peyote, teaches the right way to live.
This particular mushroom species is unclaimed, so far as I know, by any aboriginal people
anywhere and thus is neutral ground in the tryptamine dimension we are exploring.
Through this unclaimed vegetable teacher, one can gain entry into the world of the elf
chemists.
The experience of the mushroom is subtle, but can reach out to the depth and breadth
of a truly intense psychedelic experience.
It is, however, extremely mercurial and difficult to catch at work.
Dennis and I, through a staggered description of our visions, noticed a similarity of content
that seemed to suggest a telepathic phenomenon or some sort of simultaneous perception of
the same invisible landscape.
A tight headache accompanied the experience in its final stages, but this was quick to
fade and the body strain and exhaustion often met with in unextracted vegetable drugs was
not present.
The mushroom is a transdimensional doorway which sly fairies have left slightly ajar
for anyone to enter into who can find the key and who wishes to use this power, the
power of vision, to explore this peculiar and naturally occurring psychoactive complex.
We are closing distance with the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter, the
emergence of life from the dark chrysalis of matter.
That was after one trip, you know.
I got it and the lock began to tighten and so then much of the rest of the story with
a few flashbacks and some philosophical musing on the content deals with a series of ideas
which Dennis began to develop based around the question, "Do you know what we could
do with this stuff?" and then he proceeded to answer his own question and he had an idea
which I do confess I find rather hard to put out in ten minutes and feel that I've done
an adequate job.
That's what the book is for.
I think in the ten minute version it sounds fascinating but preposterous.
In the book I think we make it fascinating and entirely credible and the concept was
he seemed to have gotten a very deep connection into this logos-like gnosis-conveying force
in the mushroom and it began talking about how you could use this thing to essentially
give birth to your own soul as a physical object.
We all have a mind or a soul but it's an invisible organ.
It isn't like your left hand or your nose.
We never see it and we don't know whether it's in the brain or it surrounds the body
but it's very real to us.
We think with it.
So he was suggesting that there is a way to, and some of you have heard me say this in
the past, that we need to turn the body inside out, make the soul visible, make the body
something commanded in the imagination.
Well he took this as a set of engineering specs and set to work to figure out how to
do it and the method is given in here.
I had to arm wrestle Harper fairly strenuously because they said, you know, these notes of
your brothers, I mean they're overstated, scientifically specious, riddled with the
incomprehensible so forth and so on.
Yes, but it worked and driven by the thought that there may be someone who will read this
book who is far smarter than Dennis or I then all the details must be here.
If you want to read it as an adventure story that's fine.
You just skip over Dennis's notebook entries but if you see it as a recipe book then that's
where you want to place your attention.
So he became very highly agitated and irascible and just obsessed by this idea of this experiment
to condense the mind, give birth to the soul, emenetize the eschaton, call down the flying
saucers, fuse spirit with matter, create the universal panacea at the end of time and lead
a triumphant humanity into hyperspace or something like that.
And my attitude was hell, there's no swerving him from this.
He can talk of nothing else so let's just cut to the chase and do the damn experiment
and surely nothing will happen and then we can, you know, he can make of that what he
wishes and the rest of us will go back to botanizing, trying to get tight with these
Indians and push forward this program to get this DMT thing because essentially the presence
of these mushrooms has totally overturned our original agenda.
Well then he performed the experiment and to the point that he performed the experiment
I had been what I thought of as the indulgent fair-minded witness.
He performed the experiment and promptly went bananas.
He had said before that he might experience what he called a psychic reversal but I had
just, you know, he'd said a lot of things going into this and I hadn't weighed it that
heavily within minutes of finishing this experiment it became clear that not only was he highly
agitated and raving constantly but he also didn't seem to be able to hear other people.
He talked right through people and when you would point out to him that this was an incredibly
rude thing to do then there would just be a huge amount of confusion and apologizing
and he seemed genuinely not to be able to hear other people and was raving constantly.
Meanwhile at the moment the experiment was performed I who had to this point just been
sort of playing along it was as though he reached into my deepest plumbing and he just
threw a switch and this channel opened and it began to inform me.
It was not like any drug I've ever taken.
It was not like any experience I'd ever had.
There was no hallucination.
What there was was what I would describe as pure understanding.
Understanding that amplified itself every hour, every minute.
I mean I had only to take a cup and dip up a glass of water from the spring and pour
it past my eyes and I could say I understand water or pick up a leaf and look at it and
have some kind of huge wordless but very emotionally deep understanding of the ecosystem, the jungle,
the connections to the planet.
I mean it seemed to me that I was very close to what looked like enlightenment of some
sort.
I mean just an ability to be absolutely at peace fully in the moment and just everything
became a teacher.
Everything was able to communicate to me its essence.
But what was bringing me down in this situation was that Dennis's condition was creating
a huge wave of accusation and confusion in our small expedition.
Some people thought he should be airlifted to a hospital.
Other people thought we should simply wait for him to ascend into heaven.
And it's hard to reconcile that kind of thing, you know.
And many, many strange things went on and I'll give you a flavor of our psychology
at this time.
The day after the experiment or the evening following the experiment, the experiment was
done sometime around dawn in the early morning hours of March 5, 1971.
The evening of March 5, we all hung our hammocks together in this hut and I got up in the middle
of the night to take a leak because of the condensed milk that you have to drink when
you're an explorer.
And I checked everybody out and everybody seemed to be sleeping soundly and then I lay
in my hammock a long, long time and everything seemed peaceful and still.
But as breakfast unfolded the following morning, the 6th of March, the morning after this,
it became clear that the restful sleep I had imagined we had all shared had been anything
but that. From Dennis, still disorganized but expansive, comments emerged that he had
or imagined he had a very active night.
Upon close questioning, it came out that he was completely convinced that sometime during
the night he had arisen and dressed and then in a series of nocturnal adventures and then
had a series of nocturnal adventures.
These involved going alone in the darkness to the thundering immensity of the choro over
a mile away, then returning to climb and spend some time in a large tree near the edge of
the mission, then making his way back across the pasture and returning to his hammock strung
among all the others.
The thought of him wandering around during the night on those trails without his glasses,
which he had thrown away in the first minutes after the experiment, he announced that they
were no longer necessary and had just flung them away. He also had thrown away all of
his clothes and methodically smashed everybody's watch.
Without his glasses, falling in and out of shamanic ecstasy, perhaps howling and otherwise
paleolithically comporting himself was too much for me. It was a breach of the collective
cool. Even though I was 90% certain that it had never really happened, I was determined
to eliminate all possibility of such rambles in the future.
Dennis's story was the classic description of a shamanic night journey. He said that
he had gone to the choro and had meditated in the mission cemetery we had visited before.
He had begun to return to the camp when he confronted a particularly large enga tree
near where the path skirted the edge of the mission. On impulse, he had climbed it, aware
as he did that the ascent of the world tree is the central motif of the Siberian shamanic
journey. As he climbed the tree, he felt the flickering polarities of many archetypes.
And as he reached the highest point in his ascent, something that he called the vortex
opened ahead of him, a swirling enormous doorway into time. He could see the cyclopean megaliths
of Stonehenge and beyond them, revolving at a different speed and at a higher plane, the
outlines of the pyramids gleaming and marble faceted as they have not been since the days
of pharaonic Egypt. And yet further into the turbulent maw of the vortex, he saw mysteries
that were ancient long before the advent of man, titanic archetypal forms on worlds unimagined
by us, the arcane machineries of sentient agencies that swept through this part of the
galaxy when our planet was young and its surface barely cooled. This machinery, these gibbering
abysses touched with the cold of interstellar space and aeon consuming time rushed down
upon him. He fainted and time, who can say how much, passed him by. So this is the kind
of stuff we were dealing with. And my point in writing the book, I mean there are many
stories of people going bananas and then there are many stories where there's a very radical
break with reality and you either have to believe it or not believe it. And I'm thinking
of Carlos Castaneda, Whitley Strieber. I mean after all, proctological examinations carried
out in your bedroom by grey-faced aliens from another world, that's a pretty radical break
with my reality. But here it rides the edge because this is a true story. It is to the
best of my ability unembellished. But it argues that guys like Strieber and Castaneda actually
do have their finger on something. It is rare to violate the laws of physics and universal
expectation based on experience, but it's not impossible. It happened to us. There were
several things that can be isolated out of our story that simply secure answers to certain
questions that people have asked since time immemorial. For example, we had telepathic
experiences that absolutely satisfy me that under some conditions one person can not only
penetrate another person's thought, but what he did was much more spectacular than that.
He penetrated into my memory. He was able to talk about things that had happened to
me that I had never told him about and that I was not consciously thinking about. So it
was as though somehow our minds had become fused. There were numerous other things. Unfortunately
there isn't time to get into all of this, but the point is, and I started out by saying
this, rationalism and the investigation of the unusual with a fair and open mind is the
working prescription for securing for yourself that the world is stranger than we can suppose
and certainly stranger than science can suppose, certainly stranger than the cultural myths
that we are living under dare to suppose. And I don't know where all this goes, you
know, because this story happened to real people, every single one of whom is still
alive as we speak. There was no happily ever after except in the sense that the logos promised
that the point of view, I guess is the way to put it, would spread, would become generalized.
And when I recall that in 1971 I was penniless, wanted by Interpol, careerless, and pretty
much the Amazon was the end of the line for me, I spent all my money going into La Chorrera.
I did not have a clue. I was at the end of my rope. And now this strange meme based on
psilocybin elf machines in hyperspace, the collapse of the vectors of history in 2012,
the whisperings from the trans-mundane other, this whole thing that we've released seems
to be sustaining itself basically because of people like you, because somehow we're
all part of this story. I really believe that this is about a discovery of some sort, so
huge that we can't even put a name to it. I mean, Columbus could say, "I found land."
And Galileo could say, "There are mountains on the moon." You know, is it then for me
to say, "There are elves inside our head, our collective head?" And that somehow this
is going to have an impact. I'm convinced of it, that it is for a purpose, that the
entire ecology of the planet is attempting to communicate ever more exotic messages to
us as the culture crisis deepens. And it's too much for one person or one small group
of people to try to come to terms with. It has to be laid before the bar of public opinion.
And people have to deal with this in the context of their own psychedelic experiences and their
own hopes and fears. And perhaps, you know, if this is done and we can reach a consensus,
then we may well discover that the hallucinations that have prompted us into religion and art
and music and mathematics over millennia of time actually were true hallucinations all
the time. Well, that's all I have to say about that. I'll answer some questions and I understand
you're going to read them?
Yep.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
[Applause]
I'm going to read it.
[Applause]
Somehow I think you wrote this one.
I wrote it?
No. It sounds like something you wrote, right. Is the TV computer satellite that surrounds
the whole planet have a collective psychedelic effect on the world population? Are psychedelics
a mirror of this or an antidote or an anesthetic to the environment?
Why do you think I would ask a question?
I don't know.
[Laughter]
With the wording, I guess.
I don't know. I mean, in a sense, it seems to me that what's happening is in our minds
and outside our minds, if there is an outside our minds, but in the three-dimensional space
of culture, we're undergoing an informational revolution of some sort. All data is rising
to the surface. Nine million computers a month are being connected into networks worldwide
at the very moment that some unknown number of people, because we can't get data on this,
are taking psychedelics per month. And clearly, the thing that is unique about us as a species
is that we have made much of information. You know, ants have scripted it down into
a few pheromonal signals. Coyote packs have a kind of a pre-language. You can make what
you wish of the dolphins and the whales, but no species has ever grabbed on to information
the way we have. And I believe that history is a self-limiting process, that we are coming
to the end of it, that business as usual has been taken off the menu, and that if you take
all these curves, the curve of petroleum extraction, the curve of the spread of epidemic diseases,
the curve of the dissolution of the ozone hole, the curve of the rise of global population,
if you plot all these curves together, you reach the conclusion that sometime in the
second decade of the next century, the contradictions become so excruciating that the entire thing
is going to be forced into some kind of phase transition. It may be extinction, it may be
a planetary Bosnia, or it could be something positive. But business as usual is off the
menu and the psychedelics connect you up to this looming event because we are now having
journeyed toward it for at least 10,000 years. We're less than 20 years away from it. So
it is imminent in every sense of the word. And to contact it, all you have to do is close
your eyes, smoke a bomber, eat a mushroom, sit in yoga for a moment. I mean, it is very,
very near. The energy threshold between us and the transcendental object is very, very
thin. And that's why things are so peculiar, because the architecture of our collective
lives and the architecture of our individual lives have fallen under the domain of a kind
of attractor. And this is the attractor which, when it penetrated into our primate ancestors,
it drew out of a higher animal ourselves. We are literally being sculpted on a scale
of a million years. An animal species, some kind of advanced monkey, is being turned into
the carrier for a projection from the trans-mundane that leaves us with one foot in the primate
world and one foot firmly planted in the angelic world. We are a species in the process of
being alchemically transformed by the other. And we can't know what that means for ourselves,
for the fate of the planet. It is an absolute mystery. It is the mystery of our own becoming.
I don't know if that was the answer to the question, but...
The Supreme Court...
Picky, picky.
The Supreme Court has ruled against the Native American church use of peyote. How will this
impact other people's use of the sacrament?
Well, not at all, I hope. I mean...
Progress of human civilization in the area of defining human freedom is not made from
the top down. No king, no government, no parliament ever extended to the people more rights than
the people insisted upon. And I think we've come to a place with this psychedelic thing
and we have the gay community as a model and all the other communities, the ethnic communities,
we simply have to say, "Look, LSD has been around for 50 years now. We just celebrated
the birthday. It ain't going away." We are not going away. We are not slack-jawed, dazed,
glazed, unemployable, psychotic creeps. We are pillars of society. You can't run your
computers, your fashion houses, your publishing houses, your damn magazines. You can't do
anything in culture without psychedelic people in key positions. And this is the great unspoken
truth of American creativity. And so I think it's time basically to come out of the closet
and just say, "You know, I'm stoned and I'm proud." If that's a problem for you, you've
got a problem, fella.
Talk about hemp and its possibilities for our future.
Hemp, yes. Well, this is interesting. You all know the basic pitch for hemp and I wouldn't
be what I am if it weren't for cannabis. I think, and I want to see it legalized, although
I'm very, very skeptical. I don't think the people who want it legalized have fairly confronted
what it really is. The argument is twofold, as I understand it, for legalizing hemp. Number
one, a lot of money could be made off all these wonderful cloths and products and lubricants
and medicines and so forth. And the other argument relates to its psychoactivity and
the argument made there is, "It's no big deal. It's no big deal." Well, I actually think
it is somewhat of a big deal. And I think the people who don't want to see it legalized
see it that way. Cultures are shaped by the drugs that they take and that they suppress.
We are a sugar, red meat, and alcohol culture primarily with tobacco and alcohol to shore
all that up. Think for a minute about a drug like coffee, caffeine. Every labor contract
in Western civilization contains a clause which secures the worker's right to halt the
assembly line twice a day to fuel up on a drug known to cause liver damage and all kinds
of problems. Well, now why isn't there a cannabis break? The reason is that caffeine perfectly
fits in to a program that would have you busily screwing widgets onto wampus and moving them
along the assembly line. In other words, it promotes capitalist values, performing repetitious
tasks in a state of glazed acceptance. Cannabis, on the other hand, what is always said about
it makes you inefficient, lazy, uninterested in earning your Mercedes and your house. Fighting
a war. Yeah. So I think that if we could, I'm very interested in this cannabis thing,
I think it might be the wedge through which we can push the whole psychedelic agenda,
but I guarantee you if it's legalized, it will be a tremendous big deal because cannabis
promotes feminist values, anti-capitalist values, values that promote introspection
rather than manic social values of the sort that you see alcohol promoting. It would make
an immense change in the architecture of the culture. Who deciphered the Voynich manuscript?
For $25,000? Well, for those of you who don't know what the question is about, it refers
to a very interesting manuscript that I've written about that is an unread or unreadable
book. It's written in an unknown language. No other example of this language has ever
been found and the CIA spent a lot of time trying to decipher this book because it's
at least 500 years old and it drove them bonkers to believe that modern code cracking machinery
could not deal with a medieval manuscript. Modern code making is orders of magnitude
more sophisticated than anything that the 14th or 15th century possessed. So they spent
a lot of money trying to understand this code and essentially failed. Now very recently
a gentleman on the East Coast named Dr. Leo Levitov, and this is the answer to the question,
Leo Levitov, wrote a book called The Solution to the Voynich Manuscript and he has, he believes,
figured out what it is and the reason the CIA couldn't decipher it according to Levitov
is because it was never encrypted in the first place. He says it isn't an encrypted manuscript,
it's an artificial alphabet being used to write down a rural form of polyglot medieval
Flemish with a huge number of old French and old high German loan words. So there you have
it folks. Do you know if Illinois Bunchweed, is it Bunchweed or Bundleweed, I think it's
Bundleweed, is it available from any commercial nursery? I believe it's available from out
of the jungle in Sebastopol, California. I'm not their sales rep so I don't keep weekly
track on their inventory but I believe it's available from out of the jungle. Call information.
What future modifications to the time wave software are ideally in store? Oh what a great
question. Well the time wave software is being put out both in an MS-DOS version and a MAC
version and they're both pretty flashy and in a sense that finishes the program of bringing
to the public the time wave in its raw and sort of naked form. What we're moving on to
now is a sort of a game which would be a time travel simulator. It would be created in an
immersive technology. This phrase immersive technology now replaces previous buzz words
virtual reality. Dump that. Only outsiders call it that now. It's called immersive technology
and the idea is to build in a CD-ROM environment a huge visual database to accompany the time
wave and then the time wave could easily be configured into a game where in a certain
historical period if you encountered some difficulty and you mastered it you would be
catapulted forward one resonance and the idea would be to move from the big bang to the
transcendental object at the end of time and beat out the competition and it's a very
sly way. I mean I'm not big on products or games but it's a very sly way of teaching
people history and you could make so many paths through the data that the game would
never play the same way twice or it would take thousands of times to do that and a lot
of talent seems to have come forward for this so that looms. What happened to your theory
about change versus non-change and the cataclysmic events to come? Did that become the time wave
continuum? Yeah that's right. I referred to this a little earlier when I was talking
about how business as usual is off the menu and all these curves are converging. I really
believe that the core insight for me of the psychedelic experience and I believe that
it is objectively real is the discovery that history is a finite phenomenon of some sort.
It began eight thousand years ago and it will end at some point in the future. Well that's
not terribly upsetting or challenging unless one specifies at what point in the future
and I maintain for reasons most of which are too complicated to go into here that it is
about twenty years in the future. That the planet can no longer sustain us. We can no
longer create any kind of existence that we could consider humane and that technology,
population, the way in which psychedelics are stimulating the imagination, the way in
which culture generally is driving the imagination, that we are on the brink of being able to
design ourselves and place ourselves into a new world of some sort and I'm vague on
the details. It's not outer space. It's not some kind of a managed Orwellian collectivist
paradise. It's something more profound than that. We are perhaps going to download ourselves
into a gold ytterbium cube that we will super cool and bury a thousand feet beneath Copernicus
and there all walk on the virtual beaches barefoot and alive. I don't know. But what
is happening here at the end of the twentieth century you see is a kind of birth process.
We, you know, I mean think of the fetal life in the womb. You're endlessly adrift in
the amniotic ocean, weightless. Food and oxygen are being delivered without even your awareness
through the umbilical cord. It is paradise and if you were there and you were in control
of your fate you would choose to prolong it forever. But what happens instead is that
you get squeezed into the birth canal. Then the paradise turns into hell. Strangulation,
pressure. You are literally being squeezed to death. To ask the fetus at that point to
conceive of the wonderful satisfying life that it is going to have forty years hence
as a stock broker living in Bel Air and collecting minor works of cubist art is ridiculous because
you know that's not where we're at at the moment. So I believe that culturally we are
in the birth canal and everything appears to be being destroyed. The oceans, the atmosphere,
the very integrity of our own bodies because of all these diseases, ideological contamination,
you name it. But we simply must push forward. It's a forward escape. We can never go back
you know to the game dotted plains of archaic Africa. That's gone. It's all gone. The only
way out is forward. It's called a forward escape and I'm interested in propagating this
notion because number one I believe it and number two it is a message of hope without
which I think people are going to be very challenged because things are going to get
worse. Apparently much worse. I mean it would not cause me to break stride if the mess in
Bosnia spread until it stretched from the Arctic Circle to Turkey and from Vienna to
Vladivostok. I mean those people are setting themselves up for hell on earth and we will
be dragged into it in some fashion even if we only have to witness it. So history is
turning into a white knuckle ride for sure and without the faith in some kind of transcendental
phase transition I think there's a tendency to despair and to panic and to nihilism and
religion has failed. You know what religion gives us is what we saw last week in Texas.
They can only conceive of phase transition as apocalypse, as Ragnarok, the twilight of
the gods. That isn't what it is. We are closing distance with the first moments of true human
civilization. You know when people actually do treat each other with respect, when there
actually is a place made for the celebration of human differences, when we actually do
feel the suffering of the people around us and respond to that. So without psychedelics
and the models that they make possible, hope is I think a very very fragile thing and that's
why I take the position that I do because I think that we are on the brink of the adventure
for which we left the trees and left the African plain but it's not a sure thing. It rests
in our hands as it always has. I mean remember that in the last million years, nine times
the ice has moved south from the poles, miles high, pushing before it our ancestors, people
wrapped in skin, naked as jay birds, marginal as can be, no antibiotics, no global weather
forecasting, no nothing and they didn't drop the ball. They survived, they took care of
their children and their elderly, they passed the skills and the technologies and the insights
and the songs down the long stream of time. Can we do any less? We who have in our hands
the power to shape the planet for good or evil, we who can communicate with each other
globally in a moment, it would be a pretty sad commentary on the notion of cultural progress
and intelligence if they could keep the faith and we can't. So it all went for this. It
will all be made clear in the lifetime of most of us and so I just want to sort of close
on that note, invite you to keep the faith, invite you to explore the edges and to make
of yourself a vessel, a conduit for the world transforming logos that is trying to speak
to all of us to create a sane and viable and celebratory world for our children and their
children. Thank you very much.
[END]
Y2k Palenque
Well, before I start my talk tonight, my colleagues and I have been anticipating future events
like this and we wanted to take just a moment to do some polling to help us plan next year's
event. And so taking you as a representative of people who attend these things, it would
be very helpful to us if you respond. How many of you would have difficulty coming to
this event in the light of the Y2K problem? How many?
All of us. Well, no, I don't see all of you. I don't
see all of you. In January? If it were to be held in the same time frame as we've always
done it, where you would be putting your deposits down in November and December, how many of
you would feel trepidation about that in the light of the consecutive problem? Well, not
a lot, not an overwhelming number. Because it won't matter.
Well, see, this is not a discussion of whether Y2K is real. What is real is that the all
Monica all the time mentality is going to shove it down your throat up until the moment
that you find out whether or not it's real. So that is the problem for people planning
events like this. Okay, thank you for cooperating. Well, this is a problem if people are digging
in, storing grain, fighting hegemony, we won't have an opportunity for something like this.
Or it would be scaled back. Or perhaps later. My own take on Y2K is that as you approach
large objects in cyberspace they get smaller. And that by July this will be fading fast
and by December it will be incredibly old news. But I could be wrong.
I would suggest that later in January would ease everybody's conscience with any issues
we will be taking care of in the first two weeks probably. Yeah, we are thinking that
a little bit later is better, even mid-February. Anyway, we will keep you apprised of all this.
Well, so then let me turn to the main event. I've got a snoot full of tequila and a messianic
mission, clawing the ground to talk to you as usual. Everybody has their own means. I
guess the title of tonight's talk is "Linear Societies and Nonlinear Drugs" which is something
that I just had to pull out of the air when Ken finally slammed me to the wall for what
I would be talking about this night many months ago. But more and more for me, especially
with this group, these things have become sort of summations and I guess I hope convivial
examinations of just where we are, we, each and every one of us. And then this enterprise,
whatever we mean by that, in the context of everything else that's happening in the world.
In other words, the psychedelic experience, the entheogenic experience, contextualized.
And as I try to think about what, if anything, I can bring to the party, I guess it's that
what I'm interested in is psychedelics as a philosophical tool. And when I concretized
that for myself, I realized there's no claims on that part of discourse. No one wants to
do this. Philosophy, academic philosophy is done in a very formal manner and the most
exciting is incredibly stuffy. And yet I, like most of you, I assume, have taken on
board in my life this thing called the psychedelic experience which is then as large a portion
of my being as my sexuality, my politics, my education. It shapes everything. And yet
nowhere in the world of philosophical discourse is there any genuflection, at least overtly,
made to this. It may not have been since Plato who talked about the shadows on the wall of
the cave and so forth and so on. Well, so, what can psychedelics and the psychedelic
experience bring to philosophy and what do I mean by philosophy? By philosophy I mean
the enterprise of discursive thinking, trying to understand what the world is and who's
asking the question. Where did the world come from? Where is it bound? And who's along for
the ride? And it seems to me that we as a community have, this is sort of hard to wrap
your mind around, at least for me, but we have in a sense inculcated into ourselves
the image of an underclass so that we struggle for legal toleration of our practices and
our habits, but we don't struggle for intellectual legitimation of our vision. We accept that
they are somehow contextually marginal. And as I thought about that I realized that that
is a limitation on the community, that the information which is coming from the psychedelic
experience as interpreted by Western people is primary evidence for the need for a major
paradigm shift in the whole way the Western mentality does business. Well, what kind of
evidence and what kind of shift? Well, there's a lot of talk in our community and there has
been for many, many years about shamanism and when we seek to legitimize ourselves through
a historical argument we reach back to shamanism and we say we're part of something which is
100,000 years old and worldwide and touched the spirit long before the shadow of the cross
fell over Jerusalem and so forth and so on. All true. And in a way that tendency, which
is part of the broader tendency in the Western mind to valorize and grow nostalgic over the
primitive has put a certain political cast on our stance and our position. But what we
are is again contextually is a culture of science and I'm speaking now of our community.
It's the Albert Hoffman and the Dave Nichols and the Sasha Shulkins who have kept our canoe
afloat. These are men of science, its methods, its vocabulary, its culture. We have not,
though we certainly honor those people and love them, as their rhetoric is not the primary
rhetoric of the larger community of psychedelic users which tends toward this, as I referred
to it, this shamanistic aboriginal nostalgia. Let me just turn left here for a moment and
say I feel more comfortable with the scientific end of things. I think the news coming out
of science is the most psychedelic news there is. When I go to the Internet I go to things
like Science Alert and the Hubble Picture of the Day and this sort of thing. Our community
as a whole I think is not involved enough in incorporating the vistas. While we struggle
to legalize psychedelics, psychedelic thinking is everywhere triumphant because the instruments
built by linear science throw open doorways on the unimaginable and the most revered and
hoary heffes of the scientific establishment have to genuflect before this stuff. What
am I talking about? Well, for example, Science Magazine wrote last week that the most important
scientific breakthrough of 1998 was the apparent observation and agreement upon that observation
by the astrophysical community of a cosmological constant. This sounds like very deep physics
but if I give it to you as a headline, what it means is the entire universe, every atom
and every empty space of it is ruled by a very weird force that has now been seriously
known to science for precisely five months. A force which is apparently going to overcome
gravity's tendency to collapse the universe and to cause it to expand in a very explosive
and counterintuitive and psychedelic fashion that is the complete confoundment of the core
science that Western linear thinking has built. Of course there weren't riots in the streets
and the electricity didn't fail but at the very pinnacles of the antenna of the evolving
civilization, there was a shudder felt in the force, you may be sure. So there are two
much larger forces than our community that are in play in terms of shaping the cultural
modality. I would call one of them science, it's the other one that I'm having trouble
with. It is everything which is not anchored in the rational. You know the 20th century
is the most spectacularly celebratory, has the most spectacular celebratory affair with
the irrational since the 16th century. I mean never before have so many prophets, wizards,
wise women, casters of runes, seers of visions moved among the people plying their wares.
Part of this is brought on by the tension between the failure of the education system
at the very moment of an inflationary expansion of knowledge so that it's very hard to be
au courant in all fields and if you're not current in a field then probably your version
of that field is some kind of story, a myth. I mean if you can't keep up with quantum
physics why not fall back on archangels? It requires less intellectual engagement or something
like that. Discourse is fragmented, fields of discourse are evolving vocabulary so rapidly
that the understanding of these vocabularies is not penetrating very far beyond the core
group of workers. So then this is creating kind of islanded systems of self reference
where outside those systems of self reference information doesn't travel. The people who
are the gene splicers know very little about remote sensing and both of those parties know
very little about recent discoveries in astrophysics for example. So there's an intellectual fragmentation.
I live in Hawaii in a forest in fairly remote conditions and so I entertain all this in
my mind all the time and try to my faith and I assume it's the psychedelic faith although
we've had some fairly existential characters in our ranks over the years. But the psychedelic
faith I think is that the universe is beautiful in the platonic sense and therefore good and
true. In other words we're optimists, we're not flailing existentialists, we're not relativists
because we have a real standard to measure our spiritual coinage against. So we're not
relativists. This is a point I'm really keen to make because we're embedded in relativism,
it's all around us, it's the air we breathe but it is not imminical to the psychedelic
community. I think the psychedelic experience is the only authentic source of reliable contact
with the numinous. Meditation and so on and so on is all very fine but it requires a leisure
class involved in philanthropic support of this kind of foolishness where the psychedelic
experience is immediate. So I sit in Hawaii and I look at all this and I try to contextualize
it and come out with a good story because I think the best story will win. So if you
can get together the best version of how it should all come out, so shall it be. And I
work at this because in the past I've been very happy with the results between my interior
fantasy and the unfolding of historical development. I mean I wished for LSD and then it happened
and then I dreamed of the internet and then it happened. So I should keep at it. Definitely.
And I recently read a very interesting book called A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
by Michael Delanda and if you get a chance you should take a look at this. And he made
a point which caused me to expand his point into this little thing I'm going to tell you
now. But his point was that human beings are very involved in the movement of geological
material. That as a species we move rocks around on a very large scale and of course
it's interesting that some of the earliest human structures are the most physically massive
and waking like the Great Pyramid. So Delanda made this point about our relationship with
the geological stratigraphy of the earth and that cities were a kind of geological extension
of the process of crystallization carried on through the intermediation of a biological
unit i.e. intelligent primates who are building these structures. And I thought that was very
interesting. I had never considered it before. I've talked about virtual reality and I've
said that it's nothing new. That ur was a virtual reality and chatal yuyuk was a virtual
reality but done in stucco and fired ceramic and stone. And that when the medium is so
intractable as stone the epistemic assumptions that get formed about what reality is are
very different than if you can build Versailles at the click of a mouse button. But nevertheless
it's the same. But embedded in my reading of Delanda was I've been thinking a lot and
I talked to you a lot last year about artificial intelligences and minds which are not human.
Minds which are very different from us. Intelligence which is very different from us. While the
naive are scanning the stars our appliances have become telepathic. There is a very strange
kind of intelligence being called into existence by ourselves strangely enough. And this is
the connection to Delanda. This artificial intelligence which is being called into being
by human activity is made of the same materials as ur and chatal yuyuk. It's made of ceramics,
glasses and metals. It's that... So then I took this on board and thought about it and
I've sort of come to some kind of cyber pantheistic Emersonianism which is... Here I'll give it
to you as a headline and then work backwards so that in case I forget what I'm saying it
won't be lost to suffering mankind. The earth's strategy for its own salvation is through
machines is what it is. And human beings are some kind of... We are the deputized spouse.
We are the bride in this alchemical rarefaction of glasses, ceramics, metals and volatile
materials. Apparently the earth is like some kind of an embryonic or fetal thing and at
the end of its gestation what is happening is it is ramifying its nervous system is appearing
in its development in the unfolding of its morphogenesis. And as we contemplate nanotechnologies
and see ourselves working through bacteria and this sort of thing at the engineering
level you have to be blind to not then reflect back upon the fact that in some sense we are
already working at that kind of level. At the behest of it is not clear who because
nobody ever asked the question in quite this way before. The answer to who I think is the
earth. And that what lies ahead at the end of the linear tunnel of western subjectivist,
positivist, structuralist assumptions that we've been operating. When we hit the end
of the tunnel and burst out into the larger mental space of cosmic evolution what we are
going to find is that we are partners, actors in a cosmic drama that involves the earth
at one polarity and machines at the other polarity as the expression of the will of
the earth toward a kind of self-reflective transcendence that is achieved through machine
human biotic symbiosis. And this is, you know, there will never be a headline which says
this. Some people won't even notice that it's happening because these large scale processes
can be described by many metaphors at many depths. But I'm telling you I think this is
what's going on. The reason I like this story is because it's not a story about processes
out of control. It's not a story about human guilt. It's not a story full of we musts and
we shoulds. It's a story which gives honor to every part of the unfolding experience
field. In other words, biology, technology, human culture, human traditional values, transcendent
human dystopian values. It's a story of things on course, on time and under budget. And I
assume that's how nature really operates and that we live inside some kind of anxiety producing
culture that is a necessary, I don't want to say evil, but a necessary response to conditions
of stress. There are processes which, you know, nuclear waste build up, urbanization,
land disturbance. There are processes which if allowed to run on indefinitely would wreck
the whole system and pitch it into chaos. But Confucius said no tree grows to heaven.
And what he meant by that is it's fruitless to project any process to infinity because
any process projected to infinity creates some kind of catastrophic scenario. If no
fruit flies died in six months the earth would spin out of its orbit from the weight of fruit
flies. No, I don't think that's true. But what an image. Somebody once told me if the
earth completely disappeared except for its nematodes that you could still see the outlines
of the continents if you were standing on the moon. I thought, now just who gathered
this? So then, to bring this back around a little, where is the psychedelic experience
in all of this? Well, it used to be called, or at one phase it was called consciousness
expansion. And consciousness expansion in human beings is going to become an absolute
necessity because we are summoning out of the woodwork of cybernetic technology machines
that are going to require super intelligent humans to direct and have discourse with them.
This is happening. It is already happening. I mean, the internet is this. I mean, it doesn't
tap you on the shoulder and remind you to brush your teeth. But it is a partner in the
understanding of the world that is genie-like. That's the image I have when I sit down to
it. All John Dee would have asked of his archangelic messengers. He wanted instantaneous information
on the political situation in the course of Europe. He wanted information on the course
of the Drake's expedition then on the other side of the planet. The internet is this kind
of magical intelligent prosthesis. And as I said, there won't come a dramatic moment,
I think, a lot of lawn mower man or something like that. These things are much more seeping.
The only people who in fact can see the game move against the background of the forest
pattern are psychedelic heads. You have to think about this stuff and you have to develop
vocabularies for catching it in action. This is what the game of being an invulgual is,
a stream. Trying to see the process of morphological unfoldment in action and guess the direction
in which it is headed. Because it is inevitably headed toward greater density of information
at greater speeds, higher level integrated metaphors visually rather than textually displayed
transformation of such graphic and glyphic elements over time. It becomes more and more
like the interface of a computer, more and more like some kind of machine environment.
We have thought for, I assume, at least 100,000 years, maybe much longer. But the quality
of thought, when it was early, it was intermittent, it was thin, it was a groping, it was an undigested
intuition, a perception slipping away from the mind's eye because of media reinforcement
and education and acculturation and the passage of 100,000 years, the voice of the mind, the
logos has grown stronger. But now it takes an exponential leap forward into visualization,
into manifestation through this information processing prosthesis that integrates us all.
And I can imagine a future not very far away where the expression of the individual is
lowered, is more muted. This is the most individual worshiping century that we have ever known.
Its great accomplishments, its great works of art were all accomplished by individuals
and political undertakings such as the Third Reich and so forth and so on. Also highly
motivated individuals who rose above the masses. I'm not sure we can afford the luxury of that
kind of exhibitionistic individualism in the future. And I think probably it's not that
we're talking about a restriction of human rights, we're talking about a transformation
of human drives. The states of integration and collectivity that will be sold as public
utilities in the next century are anticipated now by group psychedelic experiences, ayahuasca
sessions, this sort of thing. And the dichotomy, and I think I made this clear when I talked
about the earth and machines, the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial is
an obsession of the 20th century, hence cancelled now. In fact a whole bunch of things are cancelled.
We were talking at home about how Roger Shattuck in his history of Dada said that the 20th
century couldn't wait to be born. It was born in 1888 at the death of Victor Hugo. And the
guy said, "Well, if it was born in 1888, when did the 20th century end?" And I think it
ended in 1992. It expired early with the birth of the world wide web. What defined all that
modernity was mass media. Mass media shaped that whole psychology. And it is now archaic.
It's obsolete. It's wonderful that the phrase "20th century" is beginning to have that wonderful
brown gravy Edwardian tone that used to be reserved for the term "19th century." Meaning
those terribly stuffy and confused and rather silly people who just didn't quite get it
right but were doing the best they could and muddling through. And thank God they gave
way to us, the people of the 21st century.
Let me see. Is there a flashlight? I have a page full of notes. I needn't be so... is
there anything here that wasn't touched on? Well, some notes about this planetary intelligence
and how all that works. One of the insights that... I've been reading different people
this year, maybe you can tell. And one of the people I've been reading is Greg Egan,
who I talked about last year. But now I've read more. Now I've read diaspora, the ones
where he makes no effort whatsoever to explain it to you unless you've already done your
homework. And then Jonathan today in his lecture talked about DNA a little bit and frame slippage
and all of that and it reminded me of it. The thing that I'm coming to from my psychedelic
experience and my life experience and the whole ball of wax is... I've said for many,
many years that the world is made of language. That was just sort of one of my bumper stickers.
But I think that that carries some of the flavor of what I want to say there. But that
there's more to it than that. It's that everything is code. Everything is code in the sense that
hackers mean when they say they write code. When Sasha stands up and waves his arms and
draws what he calls the dirty pictures, he initiates you into a code, a vocabulary with
very defined rules and quick to learn. And then they're like tinker toys. Once you know
the rules of the connectivity, then you can sit down like a child and begin to stick these
things again and say, "Well, what would this be like? And what would this be like? And
does God allow this? Or does this break the rules?" And so forth. The DNA is like that.
Human language is like that. Human body language is like that. Machines communicate like this.
In fact, this is a bridge which connects us. This is the great overarching bridge which
will connect us to the machines that they, like us, are commanded by language. And so
this realization that everything is code and code moving on many levels is, I think, a
further... It's more primary than the perception, for example, that things are made of space,
time, matter and energy. That's one level below code. The code codes for space, time,
matter and energy. It's much more like we're in a simulacrum, some kind of machine environment.
And in fact, I like that idea because I've always sensed, and psychedelics have always
intensified this intuition in me, that the universe is a puzzle. Life is a problem to
be solved. It's a conundrum. It's not what it appears to be. There are doors. There are
locks and keys. There are levels. And if you get it right, somehow it will give way to
something extremely unexpected. DMT is a perfect example of that. And of course, at the molecular
level, it literalizes that metaphor. I mean, the DMT is the molecular key, the extraneous
object introduced into the front door of the synaptic receptor. And then you can plunder
the palace for five minutes. Well, if the world is code, then it can be hacked. In other
words, it needn't stand still in quite the same way that it stands still in your mind
if you believe in something called the laws of physics. It permits magic because it says
behind the laws of physics is a deeper level. And if you can reach that deeper level, you
can make changes there. Now, this leads on to something that I wanted to say about an
earlier theme where I was talking about the legitimation of the community's intuitions.
Something that we always kick around at these things, or I always bring it up in some form,
is where do the hallucinations come from? We arrived late last night after a 24 hour
trip from Hawaii that was just hell, or as much hell as modern airlines can legally inflict
upon us. And we got stoned, and so we were laying there. It always happens when you're
cut off from cannabis for long periods like that. You turn to it, it's ten times as strong.
And the hallucinations were exquisite. And I've been looking at hallucinations now for
30 some years. And I looked at these last night and I thought if someone would ask me
what were they like, what would I have to say? And I said, "Indescribable. Indescribable."
And I looked and looked, and I could look to my heart's content, and they were indescribable.
So we always come around to this question, where do the hallucinations come from? And
I suppose the unconscious reductionist among us, and I don't mean that they're unconscious,
I mean that they unconsciously use reductionism, probably assume that it's some kind of like
iteration thing, that bits and pieces of everything you've ever seen are rolling in some kind
of neurological kaleidoscope that can run forever and just produce this endless download
of drifting imagery. But there's a problem with that because this stuff is too coherent,
it means too much, it's too emotionally charged. Well, we have never really rallied as a group
to try and locate in our combined opinions the one or several sources of these images.
And I talked a bit about this last year, but I think this is legitimate perception of thoughts,
places, things, times, and objects that either have existed somewhere in the universe or
do exist or have existed in the minds of beings somewhere, sometime in the universe. In other
words, that we have to begin to take seriously the consequences of generalizations like quantum
connectivity. In other words, it's one thing to bask in the light of the overarching metaphor,
which says everything is connected to everything else, it's quite another thing to say, "And
so then what are the consequences for me of this?" And the answer seems to me to be that
the imagination, the inside of our heads, really is the most vast frontier imaginable,
and we must leave it for future generations, or maybe not generations, but future evolutionary
biologists to figure out why an animal nervous system would evolve a propensity for accessing
bell non-local data, in other words, quantum mechanically accessible data at a different
level of the physics of things. There must be a reason, and in the same way that the
problem of speciation posed a problem for 19th century biology, this can pose a problem to
our thinking without it sinking our intellectual enterprise. It is for some more sophisticated
future group of thinkers to understand why this is so. What we have to grapple with is
that it is so, that it is so, that you have the Hubble telescope inside of you, you have
inside of you an informational gathering instrument that can give you good intelligence about
things so immeasurably distant from this point that to state it in numbers and units is meaningless.
It's just elsewhere, the elsewhere of the absolute infinity of the plenum of imagination
in which apparently beings rise and fall like plankton in the sea. And of course the psychedelics
are the naturally evolved nano-machinery of the Gaian matrix that knits together this
cosmic ecology, this system of living relationships. I'm not impatient with the idea of extraterrestrial
life or intelligence, just its pop regurgitation, but I think probably planets like the earth
are alive and conscious and they use the technologies that the species native to them evolve to
cast images out into the larger universe. The dialogue among cosmic minds is a dialogue
among entire planetary ecosystems. It can't be trivialized into some take me to your leader
scenario. Still less can it validate the unscheduled visit of pro bono proctologist from nearby
stars.
Well, so let's see, what else is there? Can I have the light? No, oh I know one other
thought in assessing this year in science. I talked about omega, the cosmological constant,
and that is really incredible. In fact, let me do a personal breast beating thing and
point out to you that this thing that they have come upon, omega, the cosmological constant,
is absolutely, you know, fifty years ago or so Einstein called it the biggest blunder
I ever made because he played with the necessity of this thing to keep the universe from falling
in on itself and then he decided it was an unnecessary construct and that it led to such
weird conclusions that it had to be gotten rid of and so that was all very well and good
until these recent measurements of the distances of certain supernova carried out independently
by several teams of astrophysicists brought the news that the universe is expanding faster
than the laws of physics allow and when they looked at how much faster they realized that
it called the cosmological constant back into existence. Well, but here there are a couple
of things about this cosmological constant that are very counterintuitive. The first
is that it acts on empty space. It does not require matter to manifest. It is a property
of space itself, the cosmological constant. The second thing is it's a repulsive force
that is growing stronger and stronger. Forces don't grow stronger and stronger. They grow
weaker and weaker. Gravity grows weaker, light grows weaker, everything grows weaker. This
force as time progresses gets stronger and stronger. Well that means when you project
it out toward billions of years into the future it becomes the dominant force. It overcomes
gravity, it overcomes the strong force, the weak force, it overcomes all the forces, it
becomes the dominant force. The other thing about it is that it becomes stronger not on
an even slope but asymptotically it becomes stronger. Well now this produces something
very much like what I've been yakking about since 1971, the novelty wave, the so-called
time wave. It too grows stronger and stronger through time and it too has this kind of built
in asymptotic acceleration where it experiences a kind of inflationary expansion in power.
The two map over each other very well. But when you talk, returning now to the cosmological
constant, when the astrophysical community realized the consequences of taking this on
board, they realized that it was dissolving the entire model of what cosmology has been
throughout the 20th century because what it's really saying, this discovery less than six
months old, is that space itself is in the act of exploding, that the universe is on
the cusp of an inflationary phase of expansion similar to the inflationary expansion that
occurred at the time of the Big Bang. What would this look like? What would it feel like?
Nobody can even imagine. It is not upon us, I don't mean that, but I mean that in the
near future of the universe, in the next billion or two billion years, things will change very,
very dramatically. Everything will begin to rearrange itself according to the expression
of the asymptotic power. So that was the biggest news in astrophysics. The other news, which
has psychedelic implications I think, also comes from astrophysics. As you may recall,
last August I think it was, I can't remember exactly, every man, woman and child on earth
got the equivalent of a dental x-ray when there was a thing called a star quake on a
magnetar, a magnetic neutron star 20,000 light years away experienced a catastrophic collapse
and there was a wave of gamma rays that were, well, turned on every light in the system
when it hit the planet. An event like that had never been observed before. I got to thinking
about this and I realized, well, we've only been looking for this kind of thing for 30
years. There's probably quite a bit of this kind of anomalous, high energy, short duration
fluctuation of radiation going on in the galaxy. Then I had a kind of an image, I wouldn't
say a vision, but a kind of an image of how things are really arranged on the larger level
in terms of the galaxy. The image was of a donut. We're accustomed to being told that
we're out at the edge of the Milky Way where stars are few and far between, that this is
the boonies. But I'll bet you the boonies are where biology thrives because the low
star density and the distance from the galactic core and these extremely energetic events
at the core would create a kind of donut situation where it's the toroidal area out near the
rim where stars are slow burning and they don't collide with each other and plants can
form and you get the five billion year run you need to get to civilization. But a rule
of biology and strategy and everything and religious practice as far as that's concerned
is seek the light. Well the light is at the core. So then I saw, aha, maybe the true seeking
of the light requires biology to go into partnership with something beyond biology because the
environment at the core is so energetic. And I'm not suggesting the actual core, that's
beyond contemplation. That's a black hole. No technology imaginable can get even near
the event horizon of an object like that. But I mean in the vicinity of the galactic
core where the star density is two to three hundred times greater than it is in our vicinity.
Those kinds of environments are so fraught with peril for biology that probably downloading
ourselves into machine symbiotes of some sort is the only way to go to those places. In
one of Greg Egan's novels he pictures a human future where this is one option. You
confuse yourself with a starship and set out to check out the neighborhood. Or you can
join the Amish in Til Rye in Pennsylvania. Actually I think you can't do that because
something's happened to the earth. But some Hamish possibility is still available. Well
this is not like the sort of thing the other faculty members will be talking to you about,
which is an intense and primarily important download of the homework, the chemistry, the
botany, the behavioral impact, the archaeology, the ethnography of these substances. I ask
myself all the time, you know, how are we different from other people? Are we morally
superior? Are we smarter? Are we richer? Are we kinder to the people we meet? And actually
the longer I look the less I can tell. There are extraordinary examples of all of these
things in and outside of our community. And extraordinary nudniks and jerks inside and
outside our community. But we have in our hands tools that I think if people were correctly
presented with them and understood without hype and hysteria and hyperbole what this
psychedelic enterprise is about, that we would win them to our cause. Because our cause is
the human cause. The cause of thinking and communicating and building and bringing into
existence new forms of beauty, new possibilities for being. And this can be done without psychedelics
certainly, but with psychedelics it is accelerated. And it has a feeling not only of immediacy
but of, the only way I can put it is correctness. It isn't the lonely neurotic artist threatening
or thrashing toward some kind of self-reflection. It's the firm guiding hand of a greater mind.
The logos, the urn, I'm not sure. But a greater mind. I mean art, true art truly is truly
inspired. And the muse I don't think was more real for Homer than it is for each and every
one of us when we're in the presence of the mushroom or Iowa or DMP or LMB or something
like that. So I suppose I will go to the grave with life as mysterious to me as I found it
when I came to consciousness around six or seven. But I think life is, whatever it is,
it's an opportunity of some sort. And the things I have been most grateful for were
the things that I met at the frontiers of knowledge, of sexual experience, of psychedelic
experience. Knowing, feeling and being one with being are how I would categorize that
break then. So I think the future is bound to be very confusing and demanding for most
people. And there are many claims on each of us and our intellectual loyalties and where
we put our energy. Should we tolerate relativism? Should we be Mahayana Buddhists? What's our
position on the Huichol? How do you relate to Monica? All these things are sorted out.
But I feel actually like the thing that I always dreamed of in my early youth was the
miracle. I didn't particularly like Ospensky's book In Search of the Miraculous, but I loved
the title and I used to just sort of chant it as a mantra. In Search of the Miraculous,
just one. I knew the rules. Just one is enough because one secures the possibility of an
infinity of miracles, whether you have observed them or not. Well now I'm 52 and I've seen,
I don't know, four or five, which is four more than necessary to make me a lifetime
optimist. But the recurrent, the enduring miracle, however it's achieved, is the psychedelic
rush. That giddy-ing moment when all bets are off, all boundaries dissolve, the machinery
of language fails, the adjectival wheel wells burst into flames and then you achieve orbital
philosophy are in the presence of the thing. I cannot believe that that is not a solitary
experience. You've heard me say many times how itchy it makes me feel to think that somebody
could go from birth to the grave without having that experience. They can make of it what
they want. They can denounce it. They can deify it. But one should have it because it's
one of the primary compasses of being. And it's larger than the historical context. The
point of this talk tonight was to talk about linearity and idea systems and the non-linear
impact of these drugs and the way they break down media bias. But all these intellectual
ideas exist in the light of the sun of this unspeakable primary experience. And we can
draw it, paint it, sculpt it, act it, dance it, drum it and never take anything away from
it. Never define it. Never occlude it. It is a miracle. It's like having the presence
of a deity. It's I think very hard for me to open myself up at any given moment to the
full implication of how fortunate I am and how good life is in the shadow of this particular
tree. Anyway, that's the formal talk for tonight. Thank you very much. And now we'll entertain
questions which is usually much more fun. So anybody got a take on that or want to say
something completely oblique? Last year. We'll start with last year. Human intelligence,
artificial intelligence. Can you speak up? You'll repeat it. Well the question is about
the discussion about artificial intelligence. You mean the hierarchy of the relationship
of these things? Well I don't know. I guess it's becoming easier for me to be a mystic
about the earth than to think that we are going to be rescued by the Galactic Federation.
I think that the earth, that it's a profound connection. The earth is the foundation of
everything. It's the foundation of biology and it's the foundation of machine culture
and machine architecture. So if you can imagine that a redwood is alive, it's much easier
for me to imagine that there is some kind of slow moving, telluric intelligence that
may have begun as a homeostatic system. In other words, to stabilize the atmosphere,
to create a chemical environment that had a momentum to it that wasn't driven by the
cosmic ambiance. You understand what I mean? And then of course people say, "Well it's
very hard to imagine it because there are no genes, there is no nervous system, there
is nothing that we can quite..." But I think that first of all we don't know a great deal
about the earth. The ocean currents, its magnetic fields, its 32 nutational and processional
motions, its core dynamics, its distribution of materials. It is complicated and that's
what's always required for self referential and feedback systems to evolve. Life evolved
on the surface of the earth. Now in the usual story of this, the earth is not a major player,
it's just sort of where it happened. But on the other hand, what if you took the view
that the earth permitted or coaxed into existence or made possible or encouraged or enzymatically
catalyzed these processes. And the geomagnetic reversals, the glaciations, the ebb and flow
of nitrogen levels in the atmosphere, all of this has pumped biology. And it's always
been presented as, well the cosmic environment is unpredictable and so you get fluctuations
introduced from the outside by random factors, asteroidal impacts, so forth and so on. But
again, this is just a first try with the data. This is just somebody blowing smoke basically.
The fact is you're presented with an extremely organized and coherent situation, the earth
with its many species and ecosystems and you don't know how it got there. And you don't
know where it's headed either. Now our culture is a culture of guilt and so the story of
civilization is supposedly a story of rape, mayhem, turning the wrong direction, losing
the connection. To some degree that may be true, but I think it gives much too much credit
to humanity in that it actually hypothesizes that human beings, a primate species, could
overwhelm nature's dynamic drive toward order and beauty and take control of things. Well
that's our myth about ourselves is that we can take control. But we never have gotten
control. All of our societies have been a mess. All of our explorations have been brutal
and negatory. And now comes the machines and they are produced by biology, which comes
from the earth. And what are these machines made of? Well glass, crystal, arsenic, copper,
gold, all these things. And they're being hooked together exactly on the model. Clearly
the machines are modeled on biology. We talk about connecting them. We talk about languages.
We use a vocabulary that we previously used for biology to talk about these things. And
you see there's a funny thing built in there, which is we are designing the machines to
be more and more intelligent. But what we don't understand is that they operate in a
different universe from us because we operate at about 100 hertz. A machine you can buy
down at any computer store operates at 400 megahertz. That means that you can run an
eternity of human lives in an afternoon. It means in a way that we are creating a creature
that lives in a different kind of temporal universe than us. And we are teaching them
to design themselves to be ever more intelligent. And once some kind of intelligence arises,
because it's intelligent, the first thing it does is design a more intelligent version
of itself. Well at 400 megahertz and with a worldwide amount of processing power to
draw on, you can imagine something coming to embryogenesis in a matter of hours. Something
emerging, recognizing itself for what it was, and then just starting up the ladder. And
what would this look like to us and where is our place in it? This is the adventure
of the future. We are going to be a different kind of people because we are going to have
to live in the presence of alien minds that will be manifestly and obviously alien. They
won't hold back. And they're not going to be at every moment interested in us either.
In fact we will become a footnote in their encyclopedia of being and what they become
in our encyclopedia of being remains to be told. But this is all happening and it's just
a matter of the coalescence of technology and language before more and more people recognize
it. As I say, there isn't a speed bump. There isn't a dramatic moment where everybody gets
it. But when you talk to the people who actually work in these fields, they know that this
is the Faustian enterprise of all time. This is the handing over of the destiny of the
planet to the companion mind that our history and our science and our souls caused us to
summon into being. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, something like anything.
Timewave Zero
Hello, alright.
Have you ever noticed how there's this quality to reality which comes and goes and kind of ecks and flows
and nobody ever mentions it or has a name for it except some people call it bad hair day
or some people say things are really weird recently.
And I think we never notice it and we never talk about it because we're embedded in a culture that expects us to believe that all times are the same
and that your bank account doesn't fluctuate except according to the vicissitudes of your own existence.
In other words, every moment is expected to be the same and yet this isn't what we're experiencing.
And so what I noticed was that running through reality is the ebb and flow of novelty.
And some days and some years and some centuries are very novel indeed and some ain't.
And they come and go on all scales differently, interweaving resonantly and this is what time seems to be.
And science has overlooked this, this most salient of facts about nature, that nature is a novelty conserving engine
and that from the very first moments of that most improbable Big Bang novelty has been conserved
because in the very beginning there was only an ocean of energy pouring into the universe. There were no planets, no stars, no molecules, no atoms, no magnetic fields.
There was only an ocean of free electrons and then time passed and the universe cooled and novel structures crystallized out of disorder.
First, atoms, atoms of hydrogen and helium aggregating into stars and at the center of those stars the temperature and the pressure created something which had never been seen before
which was fusion and fusion cooking in the hearts of stars brought forth more novelty, heavy elements, iron, carbon, forvalent carbon.
And as time passed there were not only then elemental systems but because of the presence of carbon and the lower temperatures in the universe molecular structures
and out of molecules come simple subsets of organisms, the genetic machinery for transcripting information aggregating into membranes, always binding novelty, always condensing time,
always building and conserving upon complexity and always faster and faster and faster.
And then we come to ourselves and where do we fit into all of this? Five million years ago we were an animal of some sort. Where will we be five million years from tonight?
What we represent is not a sideshow or an epiphenomenon or an ancillary something or other on the edge of nowhere.
What we represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years.
There is so far as we know nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified and complexified structure in the known universe.
We are the cutting edge of organismic transformation of matter in this cosmos and this has been going on for a while since the discovery of fire, since the discovery of language.
But now, and by now I mean for the last ten thousand years we've been into something new, not genetic information, not genetic mutation, not natural selection,
but epigenetic activity, writing, theatre, poetry, dance, art, tattooing, body piercing and philosophy.
And these things have accelerated the aggression into novelty so that we have become an idea-excreting force in nature that builds temples, builds cities, builds machines, social engines, plans,
and spreads over the earth into space, into the micro-physical domain, into the macro-physical domain. We, who five million years ago were animals, can kindle in our deserts and, if necessary, upon the cities of our enemies, the very energy which lights the stars at night.
Now, something peculiar is going on here. Something is calling us out of nature and sculpting us in its own image and the confrontation with this something is now not so far away.
This is what the impending apparent end of everything actually means. It means that the denouement of human history is about to occur and is about to be revealed as a universal process of concrescing and expressing novelty
that is now going to become so intensified that it is going to flow over into another dimension.
You can feel it. You can feel it in your own dreams. You can feel it in your own trips. You can feel that we are approaching the cusp of a catastrophe and that beyond that cusp we are unrecognisable to ourselves.
The wave of novelty that has rolled unbroken since the birth of the universe has now focused and coalesced itself in our species.
And if it seems unlikely to you that the world is about to transform itself, then think of it this way. Think of a pond and think of how if the surface of the pond begins to boil,
that's the signal that some enormous protean form is about to break the surface of the pond and reveal itself.
Human history is the boiling of the pond surface of ordinary biology. We are flesh which has been caught in the grip of some kind of an attractor that lies ahead of us in time
and that is sculpting us to its ends, speaking to us through psychedelics, through visions, through culture and technology.
The consciousness, the language forming capacity in our species is propelling itself forward as though it were going to shed the monkey body and leap into some extra surreal space that surrounds us,
that we cannot currently see. Even the people who run the planet, the World Bank, the IMF, you name it, they know that the history is ending.
They know by the reports which cross their desks that the disappearance of the ozone hole, the toxification of the ocean, the clearing of the rainforest,
what this means is that the womb of the planet has reached its finite limits and that the human species has now, without choice, begun the descent down the birth canal of collective transformation
toward something right around the corner and nearly completely unimaginable.
And this is where the psychedelic shaman comes in because I believe that what we really contact through psychedelics is a kind of hyperspace
and from that hyperspace we look down on both the past and the future and we anticipate the end.
And a shaman is someone who has seen the end and therefore is a trickster because you don't worry if you've seen the end.
If you know how it comes out, you go back and you take your place in the play and you let it all roll on without anxiety.
This is what boundary dissolution means. It means nothing less than the anticipation of the end state of human history, a return to the archaic mode,
a rediscovery of the orgiastic freedom of the African grasslands of 20,000 years ago,
a techno-escape forward into a future that looks more like the past than the future because materialism, consumerism, product fetishism,
all of these things will be eliminated and technology will become nanotechnology and disappear from our physical presence.
If we have the dream, if we allow the wave of novelty to propel us toward the creativity that is inimical to the human condition,
this is what we're talking about here. Psychedelics as a catalyst to the human imagination. Psychedelics as a catalyst for language.
Because what cannot be said cannot be created by the community. So what we need then is the forced evolution of language.
And the way to do that is to go back to the agents that created language in the very first place.
And that means the psychedelic plants, the Gaian logos and the mysterious beckoning extraterrestrial minds beyond hooking ourselves back up into the chakras of the hierarchy of nature,
turning ourselves over to the mind of the total other that created us and brought us forth out of animal organization.
We are somehow part of the planetary destiny. How well we do determines how well the experiment of life on Earth does.
Because we have become the cutting edge of that experiment. We define it and we hold in our hands the power to make or to break it.
This is not a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse. This is not a pseudo-millennium. This is the real thing folks. This is not a test.
This is the last chance before things become so dissipated that there is no chance for cohesiveness. We can use the calendar as a club. We can make the millennium an occasion for establishing an authentic human civilization,
overcoming the dominator paradigm, dissolving boundaries through psychedelics, recreating a sexuality not based on monotheism, monogamy and monotony.
All these things are possible if we can understand the overarching metaphor which holds it all together, which is the celebration of mind as play,
the celebration of love as a genuine social value in the community. This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics.
Because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being, you can't be led into thing fetishism and consumerism.
The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
And if we are able to make this point, then we can pull back and transcend. Nine times in the last million years the ice has ground south from the poles, pushing human populations ahead of it.
Those people didn't fuck up. Why should we then? We are all survivors. We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
And now, with the engines of technology in our hands, we ought to be able to reach out and actually exteriorize the human soul at the end of time, invoke it into existence like a UFO,
and open the violet doorway into hyperspace and walk through it out of profane history and into the world beyond the grave, beyond shamanism, beyond the end of history,
into the galactic millennium that has beckoned to us for millions of years across space and time.
This is the moment a planet brings forth an opportunity like this only once in its lifetime. And we are ready and we are poised.
And as a community, we are ready to move into it, to claim it, to make it our own. It's there. Go for it. And thank you.
[Applause]
[Silence]
>>Terrance
That should be an interesting adventure unto itself.
But I want to ask you Terrence about, a little bit about souls.
You mentioned souls and so I have two questions.
One is there was a recent, not recent, very old medical study in which a medical doctor
actually endeavored to set out and prove in days when it was politically okay to do this
kind of thing, that the soul could actually be measured that at the very instant of human
death and he went through a whole big trip, I put the medical report up on my website,
the human body loses about three quarters of an ounce and not due to gases or anything
else you might imagine in your mind, no physical cause, all of that accounted for and he printed
and published this medical study suggesting the human body actually instantly at the instant
of death loses three quarters of an ounce of weight.
Do you have any reaction to that?
>>Well looking at it through the eyes of novelty theory, I think nature is very reluctant to
give up a complex ordered form once it's been achieved.
I've noticed that the difference between living organisms and things like chairs and tables,
the chairs and tables don't metabolize.
In a sense the soul is something which is manifest in time.
It's almost as though organisms have a hyper dimension.
They're objects with time folded inside of them and at death what seems to happen is
this complex morphogenetic field, if you will, simply withdraws back into whatever higher
dimension it came from in the first place.
It's not that it falls apart or dissolves, it's that it retracts from matter.
It closed itself with matter for some decades and now it's simply releasing its organizational
power over matter but it isn't being destroyed.
I mean that's my personal take.
>>I absolutely agree with you but by your description it would suggest there could not
be physical weight to it or could there be?
>>No, I think there could be.
I think we don't know what it is or of what it consists.
This is all, as you pointed out, because of social attitudes and different ideas of medical
ethics these areas are very, very difficult to get data on.
>>Alright, next data point.
I don't know up there on the mountain whether you've got television.
Do you have television up there?
>>Well, we have it but we don't do much with it.
>>You don't do much with it.
Alright, well, 2020 about a week ago did a truly fascinating segment.
Maybe you heard me talking about it on the program.
Damn this thing.
They followed a 57 year old woman who received both a heart and lung transplant from a teenage
boy.
When she woke up from the operation she had the immediate cravings, I mean immediate cravings,
of a teenage boy.
And if that's not enough for you Terrence, she of course had no idea who the donor was
but she had a dream in one of the successive nights in which she dreamt the name of the
donor.
All of this was chronicled on 2020.
Now again it goes to the question of the nature of the soul but I mean these are physical
body parts.
And the obvious implication here is that some essence of that boy was transferred to this
woman and it is not the only case of this.
It has been noted again and again in transplant cases.
What does that suggest?
>> Well you know we have memories and we've never located, though we believe they are
in the brain, we've never proven or demonstrated that.
My friend Rupert Sheldrake, the British physicist, he believes everything has a kind of memory,
objects, organs, ideologies and that these things surround objects like auras and follow
them through time.
That you can't move a heart or an organ from one body to another without some of the, dare
we say it, karma associated with it coming with it.
I don't see how it could be any other way.
Sure we dare say that, no problem.
And I think it is fascinating.
So it again is really evidence of, I don't know if I dare use the word soul because I
am not sure that is the soul but it certainly is some sort of transference that is occurring
that indicates that maybe our soul or our being is in no central location but rather
a total part of it, yes?
>> Yes, absolutely, yes.
>> All right, I would like to begin taking some calls here and let them ask you some
questions.
First time caller line, you are on the air with Terrence McKenna in Hawaii.
>> Yes, Terrence, I got so many ideas I wanted to question you about but I will try to limit
it.
As far as souls go, would we agree that the electrochemical energy in the brain has to
go somewhere after death?
>> Yes, this is what we are saying, that in a sense it withdraws into what I call hyperspace,
you know, in a way you could say the body is a lower dimensional sectioning of a higher
dimensional object which is the soul body complex.
>> And on the other point I wanted to touch on, as far as your uniqueness curve, how do
you account for the chaos theory that there are random particles in the universe affecting
the interaction particles that they come by?
>> I will agree with you that nature as a large system is circular, it recirculates,
I mean there are cycles but --
>> I'm not sure that's what the time wave zero theory suggests at all.
>> No, I think this word you introduced into the question random, this word is a word out
of probability theory and statistics, I mean there may be random processes in the universe
but so far the only ones we have ever found were inside random number generators produced
by mathematicians, in other words it's a nice simple supposition to suppose there are processes
that can be described as random but the more we look at nature the more we find order.
Chaos theory is misunderstood by a lot of people as using the old notion of chaos as
disorder, but what chaos for modern mathematicians is, is almost a super kind of order, a super
fecund medium out of which perturbations to higher states of order can spontaneously emerge,
this is what Ilya Prigozhin and Ralph Abraham and all these people are talking about.
>> I want to toss something, ask you something Terrence, I interviewed a scientist who now
has a private company called Pear Inc, he produces, you may know about this, he produces
a computer program in which you are able, which is a gigantic random number generator
designed to run on a good fast computer and it enables you to pull down two pictures,
for example one of random absolute noise on the left and the other of, it wouldn't matter
the scene of a mountain or any other physical photograph that you might want to bring down,
it gives you many choices, you put them side by side Terrence and then you, the process
of randomness will begin in the computer and your job is to sit in front of the computer
and cause the random noise, well you can do it either way, cause the random noise to disappear
bringing the picture into perfect clarity, resolution or you can work on it the other
way and try to cause the picture to be completely consumed by the random noise and the suggestion
is and there is a rating given at each sitting, the suggestion and apparently the proof is
that you with your mind are able to affect a rapidly generating random number sequence,
generator whatever and by God you can sit there and do it.
Yes, there is a site on the web called the retropsychokinesis site where they claim you
not only can move these random number generators around but you can move them around in the
past, in other words they invite you to numbers that are being flashed on the screen, they
invite you to concentrate on the numbers being odd or even and then they demonstrate that
to a small percentage people can actually push this in the direction they want it to
go.
So what does that suggest?
Well.
It is really the same thing I described to you just a different method, same thing though.
Well but then there is another wrinkle, they tell the people they are generating the numbers
in real time but they have actually made the tape three weeks before and put it in a vault
and the people are still able to push it the way they want.
Oh my God.
In some sense they accomplish what they set out to do before they set out to accomplish
it.
Oh my.
So yes, there is lots of this stuff being statistically studied and it is very amenable
to being demonstrated on the web and what it really brings, yes, still lives.
But that is a form of time travel to the past.
I think what we are going to discover is that how you move around in time is not determined
by the laws of physics but determined by cultural programming and that this is what is going
to tear open shamanism and yoga and some of these other things.
We are not, we are far more imprisoned by cultural convention than we are by physical
law.
All right, Terrence.
Wildcard line, you are on the air with Terrence McKenna.
Where are you please?
Good morning, Mr. Bell.
This is Robert in the San Joaquin Valley in California.
Yes, sir.
Good morning.
I have two questions but Mr. Bell, I would like to say first, I heard earlier on the
news that scientists have discovered a substance in cats brains that enable them to, when they
take catnaps if you recall, when they wake up it is instantaneous and they are very alert.
They said that this will lead within the next two to three years a sleeping pill for humans
without side effects where when they wake up, they will wake up instantly and alert.
And we shall call it the catnap pill.
Fascinating.
Yes, sir.
Terrence, sir.
Sure.
Fascinating, sir.
I am really enjoying listening to you.
I have two quick questions.
The first one, for most of my life I heard people say that everyone has dreams.
I never, ever remembered, never recalled a dream and about eight years ago there was
a scientific report that stated that there is approximately 5% of the population of people
that do not have dreams.
When I go to sleep it is like a rock.
And I wanted to mention that and then I will give you my second question and I will listen
to you.
The little slice of death.
Yes.
Terrence.
The last question, Mr. Bell had a guest, Ed Daines, remote viewer.
Oh, yes.
He mentioned in his remote viewing he could not see beyond 2000, was it 12, Mr. Bell?
Yes.
Now, and Christians referred to the rapture.
I am just wondering what your take would be on all of this.
All right, all right, all right.
Very good.
Both good questions.
Let's tackle the easiest one first, dreams.
I am not aware of a study that suggests that 5% of the population does not dream.
Most of the people I have talked to suggest that everybody dreams.
Maybe 5% do not remember them.
And we were talking about dreams earlier with respect to DMT.
So could there be people in your opinion, Terrence, who do not dream at all therefore
have no DMT spikes at all?
Well it is interesting.
I would have thought as you suggested that everybody dreams that some people do not remember
it.
It is true that I would guess one in 20 people do not respond to DMT.
This is very puzzling.
They simply do not respond to it.
And of course this has never been studied because it is an underground drug.
But there may well be, it may be that dreaming is something recently arriving in human evolution
and not something we can just take for granted.
So then are we to presume that those who do not dream have not sufficiently evolved?
Well I would not put it that way.
Too cruel, huh?
You know everybody has different genetic strengths and differences.
Maybe they have got a hell of a backswing.
I do not know.
Or to be fair, perhaps we could suggest they are the ones who have evolved past the need
for it.
I want to be kind to them Terrence.
There you go.
Alright hold on Terrence, rest and when we come back we will tackle the second part of
the question which involves remote viewing and the realm in which that occurs.
Fascinating stuff.
Terrence McKenna right back.
This is CB's.
On the Labor Day edition of the best of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from May of 1997.
It is Art and his guest, the late Terrence McKenna.
Art Bell will be back live on the air tomorrow night, Tuesday night, Wednesday morning and
now enjoy this encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Once again here I am.
Good morning Terrence McKenna is my guest and oh what a wide variety of reactions indeed
we are receiving.
To some Terrence is a heretic.
He is dabbling in the black arts.
Witchcraft, magic, perhaps even the antichrist.
To others this kind of reaction art.
I am a computer artist programmer.
Consider myself a very intelligent person.
I have been listening with absolute fascination I think that your guest is right on the market
explains everything very succinctly.
It's brilliant period.
That's Dave in Milwaukee.
We'll get back to Terrence in a moment.
Okay back to Terrence McKenna on the big island of Hawaii.
Terrence, remote viewing, I'm certain you know what that is.
Sure.
Sure, good.
Okay.
What realm are remote viewers operating in in your view?
Is it the realm?
Or is it the same realm that one might achieve through various methods including the chemical
method you refer to?
Well I'm sure you've heard about Bell's nonlocality theorem and the rise of the idea of nonlocal
information in quantum physics.
I think what we're going to have to face is the idea that through the imagination all
information throughout space and time is somehow accessible.
The body tends to localize consciousness because consciousness associated with the body has
developed to protect the body basically as a threat detection device.
But the imagination which we tend to think of as something we make up or we create I
think is actually something we're embedded in.
And if you can filter out the noise sufficiently, something like viewing at a distance, remote
viewing, these things are commonplace in these shamanic and psychedelic societies.
But even aside from those, in the disciplined, now when I say remote viewing I refer to the
discipline that the armed services came up with to spy.
Naturally of course you know the armed services are going to use it for a military purpose
and it was to spy.
Now in that process there are very specific protocols that endeavor to erase the imagination
ensuring the purity of the information received.
Well this is the projective imagination of the individual meeting the incoming signal
of the great beyond the great whatever it is.
Yes I think a talented remote viewer is someone almost empty of projection so that they can
actually feel or intuit the incoming signal.
I imagine it's a very delicate thing but I also imagine with the proper kind of feedback
to tell you when you're doing well it's probably something that could be coaxed out of most
people.
And as I said in the last hour we're more imprisoned by what we think of as culture
than by the laws of physics.
All right, wild card line you're on the air with Terrence McKenna in Hawaii, hello.
Yes hello.
Where are you?
I'm Richard and I'm in St. Peters Missouri.
Mr. McKenna has been giving me some insight.
I have been working with a system of divination called geomancy and it consists of the generation
of figures consisting of points.
I use dice to generate the figures.
Once the figures are generated then a reading, in other words a combination of figures gives
insight into future events.
It would seem as though I've been working on this for three years and I've gotten it
down to the point where I've got a card reading system that is basically self programmable
which to me is fascinating because my clients have in some way focused on the dice to create
the pattern and in so creating the pattern I get insight into when things are going to
occur and what things will happen to them and it's on the money.
I'd love to say it's 100% but it would suggest to me other than synchronicity that consciousness
with a simple focus, dice, can travel through time.
Which I believe is what Mr. McKenna is talking about.
Well maybe it is and maybe it isn't.
It's the same idea or it sounds like the same idea but perhaps without the same documentation
and a flawless performance.
Terrence?
Well, you know, all over the world there are these divinatory systems, the Chinese geomancy,
tarot cards, the Maya have a system of throwing crystals and small rocks and skeptics who
deal with these things who are usually anti the paranormal always come back and say, "Well,
you know, it was uncanny, it seemed to work."
And I think the worldwide presence of these divining systems which seem to work but which
we won't admit work because we can't imagine a scientific principle that would allow them
to work, they're really signaling to us that the universe is more complicated than our
scientific principles are able to make room for.
So he's on the right track.
He's on the right track.
It's always about a set of defined elements whether they're hexagrams, cards, stones,
pistols and then a randomizing of them, either a shaking and a tossing or a choosing or something
like that and then out of the human imagination come associative projections which are always
strangely right on the money.
And this indicates to me there's a resonance between the human psyche and the world that
is invisible to the ego and that can only be coaxed into an observational space by tricking
the ego through a kind of random process like throwing cards or dice.
Sounds to me like you simply have a far more refined process but I've heard the similarities.
All right, here's one for you.
Back to time travel.
First I thought to ponder regarding time travel.
You're going to have to listen carefully.
Terrence made a statement with regard to the possibility of eliminating your own existence
by killing your own grandfather as an example.
If time travel was possible, it would be impossible to eliminate yourself by killing your own
grandfather.
The reason for this being that if time travel is possible, then time would be kind of like
a loop tape which is constantly replaying itself by killing your own grandfather.
You would cease to exist.
Therefore as the loop replays itself, you would not exist to be able to kill your own
grandfather.
Consider it.
You travel back in time, point a gun at and shoot your grandfather to death prior to his
ever having children.
You instantly cease to exist but if you cease to exist, who would pull the trigger on the
gun as the time loop replays itself?
Confusing but interesting and worth pondering.
Well, that is the grandfather paradox.
They perfectly stated it.
I don't exactly hear it as an objection to what I said.
That is a perfect stating of why many people have thought time travel was impossible or
that you could only travel forward into the future.
All right, East of the Rockies.
You're on the air with Terrence McKenna.
Hello.
Hi.
Terrence, from what I've heard, you are obviously a disciple of Satan and I have to say that
I want to know why no scientist has ever disapproved the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
All right, Terrence.
Oh, disciple of Satan.
Yes, he is a disciple of the devil.
Okay, well, let's get his reaction to that.
We're talking of these matters so it is worth some consideration, Terrence.
How do you respond?
Well, if I am a disciple of Satan, it's an unknowing disciple.
Okay.
I am at your break.
Someone said I was a heretic.
I certainly am a heretic.
You're not a heretic, you're just deceived.
Pardon me?
You're deceived.
You're not a heretic.
You're deceived by Satan.
When you die, you will know that Jesus Christ is God.
Well, perhaps.
My position on all of this is...
Sir, pause and let him answer, okay?
Okay.
Yeah, my position in this is that we're not in this world to choose between good ideologies
and bad ideologies.
I think that's sort of, I don't know, maybe this is middle-aged setting in on me, but
I've sort of come to the conclusion that all ideologies are the enemies of human freedom
and that we're not, you know, you haven't made progress when you choose existentialism
over Christianity or anything over anything.
Real maturity begins when you notice that these ideologies are cultural furniture.
So Jesus Christ was a liar?
No, no.
He was a piece of cultural furniture inside Western civilization.
Let me turn to this question of the resurrection for a moment, which I find a little more interesting.
All right.
I can't remember in which gospel it is.
The caller probably can tell us.
But when the Marys go to the tomb the morning after the resurrection and Christ is there,
he says to them as they approach, he says, "Women, touch me not, for I am not yet fully
of the nature of the Father."
And I have never heard any Christian enthusiast discuss exactly what this means.
It's a fascinating statement.
Here is Christ resurrected, having overcome death, standing alive at the side of the tomb,
but saying, "I am not yet completely of the nature of the Father."
And what this suggests to me is some kind of crypto-biological process that we're dealing
with here.
I don't think science can prove or disprove the resurrection because science never deals
with unique events.
If we had a thousand resurrections, I suppose they could statistically examine it and make
a judgment.
But these unique historical events are more properly the study of historians, not science.
Let me ask you in your own little way as a historian, as you have looked back to develop
your model, when you get to the time of Christ, what do you see?
What kind of peak do you see?
It's a very good question.
Fascinating question.
Fascinating question.
At that point in the wave, there is a unique signature that doesn't occur at anywhere else
in the wave.
So in a sense, it does indicate the life of Christ as being incredibly unique.
But recall I said it never says what will happen, it just says where to look.
And what makes the call on Christ a little difficult is that Christ shared the earth
with Augustus Caesar.
In fact, the story of Christ's birth mentions that Joseph and Mary were going because of
a census of the world that Caesar had called.
Well, Caesar Augustus was one of the greatest military and political geniuses of all time.
So he's in the same part of the wave as Christ.
I don't know how to tease them apart, but I can certainly tell you that the time wave
tells us that the period from 15 BC to 40 AD was extremely novel.
I have spoken with a number of, again, referring to the remote viewers, and they have made
a unique statement, many of them, that at 2012, or at approximately 2012, they can look
no further.
And they see, they run into a sort of a brick wall, if you will, and it is as though there
is nothing beyond.
But what they do see and describe is a gigantic spiritual event of some magnitude which they're
unable to discern the precise nature of.
I could climb aboard all of this.
I think we're headed for everything we can imagine.
In other words, the resurrection and the life, the overcoming of three-dimensional space
and time, time travel, star flight, immortality, planetary telepathy, consciousness out of
the body.
It will be delivered by human hands, out of the human imagination, under the prompting
of the gods and the entities and the forces in the human unconscious.
It is fortuitous, Terrence, that we are doing this program and recording all of this for
history for the time after they toss you into the volcano.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Terrence McKenna.
Hello.
Terrence.
Hello.
Yes, where are you, sir?
I'm in Prince George, B.C.
British Columbia.
Way up here in Canada.
Okay.
Friendly neighbor to the north.
Yes, sir.
I'm just getting a little disheartened by some of these weird Christians, but that's
beside the point.
I'd ask Terrence if he'd ever read any Castaneda.
Oh, yeah.
I read a lot of the early stuff.
A lot of the early stuff.
There's a later one called The Fire From Within.
And for any of the viewers out there who are digging this, which I am, I'm only 21, but
I've been waiting a thousand years to hear this program.
But look, I mostly have listeners.
Now, I'm not saying some are not viewing, but mostly listeners.
The ones who are of my persuasion.
Might be viewing.
Well, you've got to use the real eyes.
But anyways, The Fire From Within, it's basically, I just wanted to state that it covers exactly
what's been discussed here tonight.
And for any of the listeners out there, I'd just like to say that if they're into it,
and maybe ours yourself, if you dig that, if you're digging what Terrence is saying
tonight, that maybe you should read that book.
Maybe I should read that book?
Yeah.
So, Terrence, you've not read the book?
Not that particular one.
I read the early Castaneda things.
What do you think about it?
Well, I think that he, in the earlier ones, he was truer in his description of the method.
In other words, I think that any claim to be able to penetrate these places regularly
and effectively that isn't psychedelically based, in other words, that doesn't involve
alteration of consciousness, has to be looked at very carefully.
And what goes on in those Castaneda books is he starts out talking about Datura and
Peyote and this and that.
But then in the later books, it becomes more about these techniques than quasi-yogic stuff.
But why is it...
Yeah, but wait a minute, wait a minute.
I have a question.
It's not possible, Terrence, that once one is introduced through the chemical method
to these alternative realities, that one eventually may not discern a path without their use?
Well, in principle, it's possible.
It's just simply in a lifetime of looking into this, I've never seen it in a convincing
form and a point that needs to be made here is a psychedelic experience is not like meditation.
It's not like anything else.
Meditation is pretty, you know, nobody goes to the ashram in the morning with their knees
beating together in terror over what's about to overcome them.
On the other hand, DMT test pilots are dry mouthed and white knuckled.
This is the real thing, folks.
He says it becomes a matter of saving and re-channeling energy.
Well, if you can do it without the planned ally, I take my hat off to you.
If I found it happening to me, not in the presence of the ally, I would be extremely
agitated and upset.
I don't want to be able to achieve these states on the match.
They're too Titanic-ly alien and strange.
Oh, that's interesting.
That's interesting.
In other words, you are suggesting that you are very, very comfortable with the chemical
avenue because to have it otherwise would be so disconcerting as to possible.
I'm not sure, Terrence, but it may bother me that I understand you so well.
I thought it might.
I thought you and I were kindred souls when I looked at your book about the quickening.
Art, I think anybody who is stretching into this stuff comes to the same conclusion that
things are moving faster and faster in a very bizarre direction.
I agree.
Terrence, can you stick around for one more?
Yeah, one more.
Good.
One more it is then.
Terrence McKenna is here.
It's a rare opportunity for you, truly a rare opportunity.
I would suggest that you go to your telephone and join us if you are able.
If not and you would like to get a copy of this program, you can do so beginning now.
It'll be a, let's see, one, two, three, four hour program by calling 1-800-917-4278.
It'll take some re-listening.
That's 1-800-917-4278.
From the high desert, this is CBC.
How are you?
I'm doing pretty good.
You know, I want to ask you a couple of questions.
Do you think the reason why people generally, like remote viewers for instance, lose credibility
is because like sidekicks they have a distasteful track record and don't predict stuff like
the Oklahoma bombing or a bank robbery before it happens?
And do you think that time machines can be, the possibility of the future of time machines
might have something to do with something that's very normal in nature such as extreme
shock wave technology and just normal physical things that happen generally and the mainstream
physics that will create synthetic time travel reality?
Well, I don't know from what direction time travel is going to come.
It used to be completely unrespectable to discuss it in the scientific literature and
if you run literature searches now you'll see over the past ten years this has gone
from unmentionable to quite respectable.
There's a book called Time Travel in Physics and Science Fiction by Nabum that will definitely
bring you up to speed on the many, many approaches to time travel.
It's been known since 1948 there was a paper by Kurt Gödel with a scheme for time travel
that would work.
It simply requires that you spin a cylinder half the size of the solar system at the speed
of light but everybody agrees if you could do that and then travel along its transverse
axis you would be moved backward into time.
So sort of in the way we started out with vacuum tubes and now go to the Pentium we
have now very rude Goldberg approaches to time travel but I'm sure by 2012 we will have
brought this to a kind of perfection.
And do you suspect, Terrence, that time travel will manifest itself from the physical, from
physics or the time travel will be manifested from within?
I think we're going to find a way basically to obliterate the difference.
You know it's only been 500 years since some Europeans sailed over the horizon and found
the lost half of this planet.
And I think the human imagination is as solid as the real estate you're standing on, Art,
and that when this is understood there will be a kind of migration into the human imagination.
And that this is time travel, space flight, immortality.
We have these terms for these things but what is really coming is going to be all this and
more.
Our way of talking about it is inevitably incredibly quaint because we talk about it
inside the very culture it's going to make obsolete.
It sure would do that.
Terrence, a lighter question.
This comes from my wife at the beginning of the program.
She knew that you were the one to follow on in Timothy Leary's footsteps and so she thought
she would ask you, "It is rumored or it is perhaps a legend that Timothy had squirreled
away like a treasure trove at some secret location, 25,000 hits of Blue Sandoz.
Where is it?
Do you know where it is?"
My goodness, Art, your wife follows these things.
Where is the Blue Sandoz?
That's right.
Where's the X mark on the map?
Have you got the map?
Well, my lips are sealed.
When they open the tombs on Cydonia, I'll issue a press date.
All right, we'll leave it right there.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Terrence McKenna.
Hello.
Hello.
Hi.
Where are you, sir?
I am in San Francisco.
My name is Ryan.
All right, Ryan.
It is great to talk to both of you.
I am of the belief that there are two types of people in the world, basically, like people
who have had psychedelic experiences, people who haven't, and the vast difference in their
ways of thinking once they have had a psychedelic experience.
That's why it's illegal.
Yeah.
What is the direction?
I wanted to ask Terrence that he sees this state now where it is illegal and why it is
keeping, I think, our civilization down to its dreadful state.
I think that if it could be through mass awareness somehow, I don't know, I just wish it could
be legal so people, I think, could go to the next level that we are coming to so fast with
things speeding up.
I mean, everybody feels it, I believe, everybody that I know.
Did you say next level?
Yes.
You're calling from San Francisco, not Rancho Santa Fe, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Yes.
Let me say this.
I mean, I'm a bit of a pessimist on this subject because I take psychedelics so seriously.
I can't imagine them ever being really legal unless there's a total social transformation
because my analysis of it is the reason everybody from a Marxist state to a Christian oligarchy
to a high-tech industrial democracy can get together and agree that psychedelics are a
terrible, terrible thing is because the social effect of psychedelics being taken by large
numbers of people is a kind of deconditioning from the cultural myth.
Whatever they are, it's no knock on any given society.
It's just that if people start taking psychedelics, they start questioning what they've been told
about reality and culture is in the business of keeping you inside a set of predetermined
answers to those questions.
Well, based on that then, adherence, perhaps legalization day is 2012.
Well, there you go, Art.
There's an apocalypse that would shake our world and leave the heavens intact.
That day, that drug war ends.
Next time, call our line.
You're on the air with Terrence McKenna on the big island of Hawaii.
Hello.
Hi, Art.
Hi, where are you?
I actually am also from San Francisco.
Okay.
It seems to be San Francisco night for the last two columns.
Well, I'm not surprised.
Nor am I.
Anyway, I just wanted to tell you upfront, I am a professional stand-up comedian and
I guess sort of in the vein of Lenny Bruce, so I do a lot of research and I've read a
lot of your writings, Mr. McKenna, including the Archaic Revival, Invisible Landscape,
and also the CD that you have that you did with Space Time Continuum.
Oh, yeah, the Alien Dream Time.
Yeah, which was very fun.
And I'm also familiar with Mr. Sheldrake's writings as well.
And I would say to the 25% dissenter faxes that you've been receiving, Art, that they
are probably saying that because they're not familiar with a lot of what Mr. McKenna is
saying.
Well, and a lot of them never will be.
It'll go right past them and they hear one thing only and they see devils.
And you know, that's okay.
Right.
Actually, in relation to what you're saying there, I would say the gentleman who considered
Mr. McKenna to be in league with Satan, that the truth does not have an ideological agenda
or anything like that whatsoever.
My question to you is, you're familiar with the writings of John Lilly?
Sure.
In my neighborhood, there's actually an isolation tank center and I regularly go down there
with mushrooms and I'll hop in the tank while I'm doing mushrooms and whatnot.
I'm very fascinated by your writings on DMT.
And what I'd like to know is, how would I be able to locate DMT or the plants that it
comes from?
Now, I don't know that we can tell that on the air.
Well, we can say something.
We've already said it's right behind your eyebrows.
Right.
So that's one thing.
The other thing is, the real practical answer is, go to the internet in terms of if you
want to locate plants in your ecosystem.
There you go.
There's vast discussion of this and incredible enthusiastic communities.
But as Art says, we've already pushed the envelope, I don't think we can start peddling
Schedule 1 substances on the air, nor would we wish to.
Nor would you want me to, sir, because then you might not hear me anymore.
However, it's on the internet.
Look, it's a lot less dangerous than a lot of the other crap on the internet, building
missiles and bombs and all the rest of that.
Well, can I ask you this?
Use a search engine.
Right.
All right?
All right, thanks a lot.
That's what they're there for.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Terrence McKenna.
Hello.
Wow, I actually got through.
Yes, sir, it seems that way.
Where are you?
I'm in Madison, Wisconsin.
All right, go right ahead.
First of all, Art, I just wanted to say about a year ago I talked to you and you were telling
me that I was doing myself a lot of harm by using psychedelics.
I think Terrence is just good proof that someone can turn out all right.
No, I didn't tell you that.
I didn't tell you you were doing yourself a lot of harm.
I thought you did.
Nope.
No.
I wouldn't make that judgment.
That's something that only you can conclude.
I see.
But also, I want to make a suggestion for a guest.
I think Terrence might be familiar with him, but have you ever heard of Douglas Rushkoff?
Oh, yeah, I know Doug.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've read many of his books.
Just what he means, more publicity.
I think he's just a great guy.
All right.
Anything else?
Oh, yes.
Terrence, I have a video called Alien Dreamtime.
I just want to say I really like it.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's a thing I did a few years ago with a band called Spacetime Continuum.
What was the essence of it, Terrence?
Well, it was a rave in San Francisco and I talked about, if you can imagine this, I talked
about the impact of psilocybin on human evolution to a backbeat.
This is something we haven't gotten into here, Art, but I have a whole other rap on how mushrooms
actually impacted and caused the breakthrough to self-reflecting human consciousness.
We'll have to save that one for another time.
I guess so.
Interesting.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Terrence McKenna.
Good morning.
This is Larry in Peoria, Illinois.
Hi, Larry.
This is really very interesting because I just recently read some of the excerpts from
The Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary, which is his take on the Tibetan Book of the
Dead.
I missed the first part of the show, so I'm sorry if this has already been talked about,
but I was wondering what is basically the difference between DMT and LSD?
Good question.
Well, LSD lasts hours and hours and tends to be, I think my own phrase is, abrasively
psychoanalytic.
Essentially, I think LSD does what most people think psychedelic drugs do.
They cause you to review past memories, they cause you to see your life in a different
light, so forth and so on.
DMT is not like that.
It seems to go beyond the personal dimension.
It doesn't matter, I think, who you are or where you started from.
It carries you into its own world, a world that is alien on its own terms and doesn't
have a lot of information in it about your psychology or your dilemmas.
So it's less useful for psychoanalysis and more useful for exploring what I consider
to be pretty dramatic paranormal dimensions, considering they're so easily accessed.
You're speaking about, it's interesting all this talk about dimensions and going to the
next level.
I just had a psychedelic experience recently when I had a meditation on the nature of the
universe as being like a geometric structure that's so immensely more vast and diverse
than you can really explain.
I think there's the vastness of space and time that we know about, but then as we look
into the micro dimension and we see how much there is in the atomic and subatomic world,
the world is an amazing and dynamic place.
This is why I'm so down on ideologies because I think they're dusty mirrors to hold up to
the splendor of the felt presence of the living universe.
Here's a, I believe, McKenna quote, "Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the
head of this planet."
Yep.
Yep.
Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.
And what I think I was referring to there was resource extraction, propaganda, pollution
of the atmosphere and this sort of thing.
If we continue to practice our cultural values as we have practiced them over the next thousand
years, we're going to make the earth unfit for our children, which is a sin and a tragedy
of such magnitude we don't even have a name for it.
Boy, I sure agree with that.
And then this quote, "LSD is a drug that occasionally causes psychotic behavior in persons that
have not taken it."
Terrence McKenna quoting Tim Leary in Los Angeles in 1991.
Accurate?
Well, I tried to give that quote to Tim and he swore to me he'd never said that.
So it's sort of hanging out there in the air, but it's a very funny quote because I think
it makes clear to people how agitated you can become by drugs you haven't taken and
how often the people who have the most negative drug reactions are the people who didn't take
the drug.
You are a heretic.
And just one last as we head toward the bottom of the hour.
The mind rests on a foundation of chemical machinery.
Yes.
It rests on a foundation of chemical machinery.
It is not simply the product of chemical machinery any more than I am an automobile when I drive
it.
All right.
Well, rest your chemical machine for a moment and we'll come right back.
Terrence McKenna from the Big Island of Hawaii is my guest.
We've got 30 more.
If you've got a question, we've got phone lines.
I'm Art Bell and this is CBC.
My guest is Terrence McKenna.
Terrence, again with respect to Timothy, he of course as you well know has been launched
into orbit with a number of other notables.
And I was just wondering again referencing that 25,000 hits of Blue Santos, do you suppose
it's possible that Timothy had them launched with himself and that orbital decay will provide
one great last acid rain at about 2012?
Well, he did want to prove that you can take it with you.
All right.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Terrence McKenna.
Hello.
Hi there.
Hi.
Where are you?
I'm in Nanaimo, BC.
British Columbia.
All right.
Yeah.
I first discovered you Art about three years ago and I was getting you very faintly at
night from KEX in Oregon.
Yes.
We got you on C-Fund in Vancouver and we're all real happy about it.
Thank you.
You keep us up all night.
So, Terrence, I've read I think all of your books, if not most of them, and in "True Hallucinations"
there's a part where you have a mushroom in the hut with you and your brother and he makes
a sound that you describe but I think nobody else, unless we were there we wouldn't understand
the sound, makes the mushroom glow or appear to and you were speaking before about human
consciousness interacting through resonance with the universe around us and I wonder if
you could sort of explain how those two things tie in and in doing so I'd like to ask you
if you've read "The Holographic Universe" by Michael Talbot.
I have read "The Holographic Universe."
He was a friend of mine.
He unfortunately died a few years ago.
Resonance is the principle almost magical of action at a distance.
You know you can play a certain open note on the cello and the piano 50 feet across
the room will sound in the same octave.
So resonance we know exists.
It's a musical phenomenon but what we need to realize I think is that resonance is built
into time.
Time in a sense you could say a given moment in time is a kind of hologrammatic interference
pattern of past times and I consider those past times to be in resonance.
So one of the things Art and I haven't discussed tonight about my time wave is that it does
allow you to look at a certain period of time and decide what it was in resonance with in
the past and those past epochs that are influencing it then their influence can be seen in popular
fads, furniture styles, what movies are up, that sort of thing.
Now with the DMT you say it's produced in our bodies.
It is.
Can the DMT molecule in the brain change our electron spin resonance in the molecules in
our brain and can that possibly make our brain act as an antenna that allows us to see all
those other things that you're talking about?
Well these are the kinds of ideas that my brother and I were playing with clear back
in the early 70s and the tragedy, one of the tragedies of the repression of psychedelics
is not that they were taken out of the hands of the curious public but that they were made
off limits to scientific research, not that anybody put up a sign but it was very clearly
understood that pharmacologists who specialized in psychedelics could expect to be passed
over, not promoted, not given the plum jobs.
I could spiel off a dozen questions, very interesting central questions about the mechanism
of psychedelics that we could answer with ordinary clinical studies.
It's simply that how do you do ordinary clinical studies on substances that the government
has made illegal?
It's impossible.
Of course you don't.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Terrence McKenna.
Hi.
This is a very serendipitous meeting.
I've played around with a lot of EEG for the last few years and I find that I do serendipitous
things but unplanned.
Thanks Art.
Sure.
What do you think, well there was one physicist, I can't think of his name, he describes time
as nature's way of keeping things from happening all at once.
That's exactly what Terrence just said we're going to come to at the zero point 2012.
Yeah.
Well I wanted to get back into a little bit of physics but almost cosmic physics having
to do with black holes.
Okay.
And I wanted to ask you how you felt about the black hole being nature's way of, well
the ultimate recycling device in the universe.
Well it certainly is this.
Anything which falls into a black hole is deconstructed down to spin and angular momentum
and I think all other information is stripped out of it.
I think you know if there can be gravitational wells like that then there can also be the
kind of novelty wells that I'm suggesting.
In other words...
Novelty wells?
Well if statistical probability is not a very clear way of looking at the universe, if in
fact probabilities vary through space and time of any given event then there will be
areas of extremely high improbability and conversely probability.
So I think we've got to get past this idea of time as a smooth surface and begin to think
of it as a kind of landscape, an area, a place where some things are more probable in some
places and some things more probable in others.
You know you look for water in the bottom of the valley, you look for glaciers up on
the slopes.
I think time has a topography, it is a topological surface of some sort and science in the West
has just completely sailed past all this.
Well how is it described, well I don't want to make a long thing out of this.
Well in Newton it is described as pure duration, in other words perfect flatness.
Then Einstein comes along and he says well no in the presence of massive gravitational
objects space time has a very smooth and slight curvature.
What I am saying is that even at local scales time is variable and that when we explode
time at any scale we discover the same fractal patterns as we are seeing on scales far above
and far below it.
So really the time.
Far in and far out of it too.
Far in it and far out of it.
So really what it is is it is like a Fourier transform or something like that, it is a
holographic matrix that is self similar on many scales.
The organization of a galaxy, the organization of an atom, these things in my theory are
morphologically linked.
They look that way because they are linked across scale and across space and time by
an underlying architecture of the universe.
You know there is a big mystery now in cosmology, the dark matter mystery.
Where is 90% of the matter?
For the galaxies to be hanging together under the laws of gravity 90% of them must be missing.
Well I say there is no missing matter.
What is missing here are some laws.
And the laws of the missing matter.
Or cause, well could it be consciousness itself?
Well it is this appetite for complexity that every particle in the universe participates
in this.
The galaxies hang together as spirals because it is the more novel thing to do.
Not because they are under the control of gravity but because there is a cosmic law
of aggregation toward novelty that we have missed.
Would the Fourier be a way of measuring that, say with Fourier measurement of the brain
itself or EEG?
Well you could measure it in a Fourier matrix, you could measure it in many different kinds
of matrices.
The point is to demonstrate it to somebody outside the system who is looking at it.
I think the great breakthrough in mathematical modeling of nature in the last 20 years has
been the discovery of fractal and self-similarity on many scales.
And this is part of that.
What I am saying really is that time is a fractal structure.
It can be defined by a limited set of variables and then iterated on the micro scale, the
macro scale, the human scale.
They are all operating under the same architectural constraints but at different scales.
You know when I talk to my friends in the EEG world I do a lot of EEG spectral analysis
and stuff.
They think I am nuts.
I say well if you want to buy my machine and operate this is how the universe is.
When I speak in these terms it is like it is in a big hall, an empty room.
Well there is a lot of confusion in the sciences right now.
The complexity people are not talking to the dynamics people.
The poor materialists have all been crowded into biology.
Meanwhile over in quantum physics they are talking like a cultist and none of the news
has reached psychology and sociology yet.
The house of science is in incredible disarray and it is because sciences wish to describe
nature they have now dispensed with all the easy stuff.
Now we are asking questions like what is language, what is mind, what is process.
These are very deep and difficult questions and I think they are going to cause a revolution
in the science and a reformation of its methods or science is not going to be adequate to
the game.
Well perhaps after some period of anarchy.
Yes, well that is what we are going through.
East of the Rockies you are on the air with Terrence McKenna.
Hello.
Hello there.
Hi.
Hi.
I wanted to start by saying thanks and I wanted to say it is an honor to speak to Terrence.
I am a big admirer.
Where are you sir?
I am in St. Louis.
My name is Alex.
I am 21 in St. Louis, Missouri.
Alright.
Okay and I wanted to start by actually commenting on a couple of things that have been said
earlier this evening.
One, I am looking really forward to 2012 and I am looking really forward to being part
of human evolution and being in control of that really.
And I wanted to say about the throwing out of the rock that it seems kind of like God
has already thrown out the rocks on this planet and that is plenty as is.
That is the way things are.
That is the planet as we have it and that should be plenty of knowledge as is for us
to understand everything.
I have had some experiences as a psychedelic and I am not finished yet, far from actually.
But the truth to it is that my own personal belief is that you achieve true enlightenment
after being sober and meditating in sobriety and getting inside yourself.
The truth is not outside, it is inside.
That is a very interesting point.
Terrence, let me ask you a question.
Do you contemplate the possibility that your trip will be complete before 2012?
In other words, your personal trip that you will conclude at some point that you have
done as much as you need to do and know what you need to know and don't need to do it anymore?
I can imagine that.
I can imagine that.
What I would like to do is take my ideas and turn them over to a general community of interested
people and let the chips fall where they may.
You know, science is the only human endeavor where you actually get points for proving
you are wrong.
I love that approach.
I am not interested in pontificating or building dogma or founding a cult.
I am interested in the ongoing adventure, which is a collective adventure, of generating
ideas, testing them against reality and the evidence, discussing them with other people,
and then going on to build better ideas.
And I cannot believe that time wave zero is finished or complete because I have finished
with it.
I am hoping that like work done by greats in the past, this thing can actually be validated
as a real insight into how nature works.
Right, well that would have been an arrogant attitude and I am glad to see you not displaying
it.
Yes, I would like to see this thing broken on the wheel of rational discourse or progressively
advanced to new levels.
Alright.
Please, without a lot of time left, you are on the air with Terrence McKenna.
Hello.
Hi, this is Dan from Northern California.
Hi Dan.
Hi, quick question Terrence.
In your book, Food of the Gods, you talked about early protohomanids encountering psychotropic
plants, I guess psilocybin, and that being sort of the catalyst for this incredible leap
of human consciousness.
What about the next step in our evolution?
Do you see it coming through some sort of psychoactive substance that we have either
yet to develop or encounter?
Well I think that we have encountered these things.
I think the enormous creativity of the last half of the 20th century is a direct consequence
of the rise of psychedelic chemistry and the breakdown of barriers between cultures.
In other words, most of the people designing and building the internet have psychedelics
in their path.
Most of the people in the music business, in fashion, in media, in scientific research,
medical research, architecture, the dirty little secret about the creativity of 20th
century civilization, at least in the last half of the 20th century, is that it rests
so firmly on a psychedelic base and yet we deny that.
I've got one final question of God opposed to you with regard to our discussion on the
internet.
I interviewed Charles Osman, an expert in nanotechnology.
He predicts that within the next few years, or even less, we will begin to encounter sentient
entities within the internet.
Artificial intelligences, I believe that will happen.
Hans Moravec has written a lot about this.
He would be a guy for your show, Art, and he's talked about how these AI's, these artificial
intelligences, they learn 50,000 times faster than a human being.
Well, you turn one loose on the internet where it can talk to all these computers, it can
make 50,000 years of progress in one year.
Moravec thinks we're not even going to know what hit us when these things come into being.
Listen, time as we must measure it is coming to a close.
How many books have you written?
Five or six.
Invisible Landscape, Food of the Gods, Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, True Hallucinations,
Archaic Revival, on and on.
Where do people get these?
Regular bookstores?
Oh, yeah.
I've got Phantom and HarperCollins, so any decent bookstore can have them or can order
them.
All right.
Suppose somebody would like to send you email on the internet.
Now, be careful here.
Okay, here it comes.
HCE@well.com.
That's HCE, think, here comes everybody, at well.com.
HCE@well.com.
Right.
That's so appropriate.
Here comes everybody indeed.
Do you, are you able to answer the majority of the communications?
I try.
It may be short.
I'm getting about 70 email messages a day.
What you're going to do to me, Art, I can't even imagine, but I will make a valiant try,
a conciseness count.
All right.
It does indeed, and people should understand that with the volume you're about to get,
it may be brief.
Terrence, what a pleasure it has been.
Again, we will do it someday.
If they don't toss you into the volcano first, we'll do another interview one day.
How about it?
Well, I'm worried they may toss you after this one, but if you're there, I'll be here.
All right, Terrence, done.
Okay.
Thank you, my friend.
Bye-bye.
Take care.
From the big island of Hawaii, he's headed back up to his mountain, and me, I may be
headed for the volcano.
Who knows?
That's HCE@well.com.
HCE@well.com.
Art Bell (Part 3)
To the Caribbean and the US Virgin Islands, South into South America, North to the pole
and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM.
Good morning everybody, I'm Art Bell.
And in the continuing adventure into the unknown, uncharted territories of the human mind, we're
going to be departing a little in a way this night and interviewing a very, very unusual
individual on the big island of Hawaii named Terrence McKenna.
Who is Terrence McKenna?
Well, among other things, he's probably the successor to Timothy Leary.
That may not be the focus or it may turn into the focus of the interview, I don't know.
And I don't care, he also has a lot of very interesting views on time and what we are
approaching.
We'll talk about all that with Terrence McKenna, a very interesting fellow in a moment.
As a matter of fact, he had to come down, oh, we'll find out about that, from a very
obscure location.
Alright, this should be most interesting.
First let us see if we can establish contact.
Terrence McKenna, are you there?
I am Art, good evening, how are you?
Well, I'm just fine and I hope you hear me, I hear you okay.
Yes, I hear you fine.
Alright, you are, you're on the big island of Hawaii, is that right?
That's right.
Now when I called you the other day, you were way up in an area where your only contact
with the outside world was by cellular telephone.
Where do you actually live, on a mountain somewhere?
I live up on the slopes of the world's largest volcano, which is Mauna Loa, and when you
called me the other day, we mutually agreed my cell phone is not ready for prime time,
so I came off the mountain.
I do have up there a 128K connect to the internet that's wireless, 40 miles through the air,
but my phones are not so good, so I came down off the mountain to talk to you this evening.
Well, if it were not for the delay, I would say an internet phone, we could have done
the interview by internet phone, but you have that little delay there that makes it hard,
so I think we've done the right thing.
Anyway, so you're off your mountain perch, by the way, Terrence, what's it like living
on the side of an active volcano?
Well, it's very exciting actually, I don't know if you've ever been out to the big island,
but people think of Hawaii as swaying palms and endless beaches.
What we have out here are lava fields and 14,000 foot mountains on this island, two
of them, one the world's largest volcano, the world's largest mountain in terms of volume,
and the other one just a hundred or so feet shorter, so we've got quite a dramatic landscape
out here.
Is there any possibility that that volcano will actually blow?
Well, it's been in continuous eruption for the past 13 years, but over on the other side,
about 70 miles away on what's called the Hilo or the West Side, so we sort of feel pretty
safe out here.
There is some talk, they had a meeting of the International Geophysical Congress a couple
of years out here.
There is large scale destabilization that goes on periodically in these islands, big
undersea landslides that produce local tsunamis, but in an effort to escape human created catastrophe
and confusion, I'm betting that I can eke out 50 years on this island and slide through
in good shape.
Well, it's probably a pretty good bet, actually, in the long scheme of things.
I think Hawaii, if the world flies to pieces, it'll be a very good place to be, and if the
world doesn't fly to pieces, it's a pretty good place to be.
And if the volcano should totally blow up, it's a painless death.
That's right, and a dramatic one.
And a dramatic one as well, that's right.
All right, you have a theory about time.
Time actually, Terrence, is one of my favorite all-time topics.
So before we launch into what you think about time, tell me what you think time is.
In other words, is time our invention, or is time a real thing that we, I mean, I realize
we're measuring it, but in the cosmic scheme of things, is there really time?
Yeah, I mean, you give me a perfect entree to launch into this thing.
See, in the West, we have inherited from Newton what is called the idea of pure duration,
which is simply that time is sort of a place where things are placed so that they don't
all happen at once.
In other words, it's viewed as quality-less.
It's an abstraction.
In fact, I think when we carry out a complete analysis of time, what we're going to discover
is that like matter, time is composed of elemental, discrete type.
You know, all matter, organic and inorganic, is composed of 104, 108 elements, there's
argument.
Time, on the other hand, is thought to be this featureless, quality-less medium, but
in fact, as we experience it as living, feeling creatures, time has qualities.
There are times where everything seems to go right and everything seems to go wrong.
That's true.
That's true.
That's absolutely true.
I've wondered about that all my life.
There are periods of time where, in effect, you can do no wrong.
That's right.
And other periods of time where you can do no right no matter what you do.
Well, so in looking at this, I created a vocabulary.
Actually, I borrowed it from Alfred North Whitehead, but I think I'm on to something
which science has missed, and it's this.
It's that the universe or a human life or an empire or an ecosystem, any large-scale
or small-scale process can be looked upon as a kind of a dynamic struggle between two
qualities, which I call habit and novelty.
And I think they're pretty self-explanatory.
I'm sorry, habit and what?
Novelty.
Novelty.
Novelty.
And habit is simply repetition of established pattern, conservation, holding back what has
already been achieved into a system.
And novelty is the chance-taking, the exploratory, the new, the never-before-seen.
And these two qualities, habit and novelty, are locked in all situations in a kind of
struggle.
But the good news is that if you look at large scales of time, novelty is winning.
And this is the point that I have been so concerned to make that I think science has
overlooked.
That if you look back through the history of the human race or of life on this planet
or of the solar system and the galaxy, as you go backward in time, things become more
simple, more basic.
And so turning that on its head, we could say, as we come toward the present, things
become more novel, more complex.
So I've taken this to be actually a universal law affecting historical process, biological
processes and astrophysical processes.
Nature produces and conserves novelty.
And what I mean by that is as the universe cooled, the original cloud of electron plasma,
eventually atomic systems formed as it further cooled molecular systems, then long-chain
polymers, then non-nucleated primitive DNA containing life, later complex life, multicellular
life.
And this is a principle that reaches right up to our dear selves.
And notice, Art, it's working across all scales of being.
This is something that is as true of human societies as it is of termite populations
or populations of atoms in a chemical system.
Nature conserves, prefers novelty.
And the interesting thing about an idea like this is it stands the existentialism of modern
philosophy on its head.
What modern atheistic existentialism says is we're a cosmic accident and damn lucky
to be here.
And any meaning you get out of the situation, you're simply conferring.
I say no.
By looking deeply into the structure of nature, we can discover that novelty is what nature
produces and conserves.
And if that represents a universal value system, then the human world as we find it today with
our technologies and our complex societies represents the greatest novelty so far achieved.
And so suddenly you have a basis for an ethic.
That which advances novelty is good.
That which retards it is to be looked at very carefully.
Well, all right.
Let me stop you right there.
One of the first things that you said when we got on the air this morning was that you
had a 128 baud connection from your mountaintop secret location.
Right.
Okay.
As we are discussing your theory, which is fascinating, of novelty, I'm taken to ask
you about a quote actually of several pages written by Michael Crichton.
And I know you know who he is.
With reference to the internet, it is Michael Crichton's contention that the internet, which
one might consider to be novelty exemplified.
Incontinent.
Yeah, indeed.
Is going to result not in more novelty, but in fact in a slowing of the process of evolution
or novelty as you see it.
Because there will be a commonality.
There will not be innovation.
There will not be entrepreneurship.
There will be 10 main ideas in America and Hong Kong and Moscow and London and so forth.
How would you address that?
Well, I'm astonished.
I hardly know what he's talking about.
Let me give you my take on it.
Let me rephrase it.
He's saying the internet will stifle diversity and that diversity is critical to advancement.
Well, what I see happening and I spend hours and hours a day on the internet is I believe
it's the great force empowering marginal and minority points of view to come along in centuries.
In other words, before the internet, the great establishment ideas already had the machinery
of media to communicate their position.
What has happened is that the common man has gotten into the game with technology that
I really don't think was ever intended to fall into.
Oh, you bet it wasn't.
Yes.
So, I don't know what Crichton is talking about.
I believe what the internet is doing is dissolving boundaries between people's idea systems,
classes and factions and we're getting a much richer evolutionary interplay among ideas
and this sort of thing.
I see it as a very fertile place with a lot of mutation going on in hardware, in how people
view it, ideologies, this sort of thing.
I just don't know where he's coming from.
Well, I might expand on it this way.
Let me suggest, for example, that if you were to take an otherwise deserted or barren desert
island and you were to put a species upon it, that species, because there are so few
of them, would by necessity be very innovative, would change very quickly in trying to adapt
and live and stay alive.
On the other hand, if you put many, many creatures on that island, that process would be far
slower.
And he uses that as a parallel to the internet.
I'm not sure that I agree with it either.
I just found it an interesting take on the sociological implications of the internet.
Well, you see, when people talk about the internet, they're usually talking about the
internet that was, because it's moving so quickly.
For example, I just read a paper by a guy named Alexander Cieslenko out at the Media
Lab at MIT.
And he's talking about plugins that will translate websites of one language into another.
Well, now imagine when people can put up websites in Telugu, Weetoto, Russian, French, you name
it, and you can automatically slide into those websites and see what's going on.
You're describing Crichton's nightmare and your best dream, I believe.
Well, this is the thing about technology.
It tends to polarize people.
Let me make one point here before we leave this time thing.
I said I'd identified an tendency in the universe which science had missed, which was to conserve
novelty.
And then you asked about the internet, which sort of led me to the second half of the observation.
Not only does the universe have this preference for novelty, but each acceleration into novelty
has proceeded more quickly than the ones which preceded it.
So for instance, the slow cooling out of the universe led to the slightly more rapid appearance
of organic chemistry, which led to the quite rapid evolution of higher plants and animals,
which led to the hysterical taste of human history.
And I see no reason to suppose that that process of acceleration will ever slow down.
Is it, Terrence, a linear process or an exponentially accelerating process?
It's an exponentially accelerating process, which leads to a kind of end of the world
scenario that has made a lot of people place me out with the squirrels, because I'm saying
that this process of novelty is now moving so quickly that within our own lifetime it
is going to accelerate essentially to such an intensity that we will be experiencing
more novelty in a few weeks or days than we've previously experienced in the whole life of
the cosmos.
My God, you have described precisely what I have just written about.
I wrote a book called The Quickening.
Someone showed me your book and I said, "This is in Atlanta."
I saw it and I said, "Yes, this guy is on to this."
I'm on to it from, I guess, more of a pedestrian perspective than yourself after listening
to your first half hour, Terrence, but we're talking about it suddenly dawned on me exactly,
precisely the same thing.
I've been doing this talk radio program for about 13 years, you know, the all-night show.
And I am a trained observer of events and people.
And every night I've had to watch the news and dissect what is going on in our world
to prepare to do this program.
And in that 13 years, unmistakably, socially, economically, politically, environmentally,
you name it, we can talk about it.
In every one of those areas of human endeavor, things are beginning to accelerate.
There is simply no question about it.
And that sounds exactly to me the same thing you're proposing here.
Yes, where I've gone further than most people is a lot of people have noticed the time is
speeding up phenomenon, but they tend to give credit to science or media or something like
that.
That's right.
Yes, well what I'm saying is this is built into the laws of statistics.
Oh, I think you're right, Terrence.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
I think you're exactly right, Terrence.
Stay right where you are.
Oh, interesting, very interesting.
Terrence McKenna from the Big Island of Hawaii is my guest.
I'm Art Bell and this is CBC.
... 87, it's Art and his guest, the late Terrence McKenna.
And now, enjoy this awesome hour on the best of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from May
of 1997, it's Art and his guest, the late Terrence McKenna.
And now, enjoy this encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
We have a very, very interesting fellow on the line.
His name is Terrence McKenna and he's from the Big Island of Hawaii.
And he has just described to me in language that you have to listen very carefully to,
exactly what I wrote about, the quickening.
And we'll pick up on that in a moment.
It's fascinating.
My God, it's like hearing my own theory amplified coming back at me or an explanation of what
I wrote about.
Wow.
Anyway, in a moment, back to Terrence.
Some cases...
We're back now to Hawaii and Terrence McKenna.
Terrence, I thought we lost you for a moment, but I think we have you back.
Are you there?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
There will be silences during the break, so do not interpret that as we have disconnected,
Terrence.
Only if you get a dial tone are we in trouble.
Otherwise, just hang in there, okay?
Alrighty.
Alright.
I mean, I sat here as I listened to you the first half hour in shock because I realized
you were describing exactly what I wrote about.
And what I did, Terrence, I realized that a lot of people say this quickening, or whatever
you want to call it, whatever name you want to put to it, is a byproduct of mass communication.
And I began to realize, uh-uh, no, it is not a product of mass communication.
Yes, we're hearing about it more and more volumes of it, but in fact, in fact, what
you are describing is really going on.
And I documented that much in my book in real everyday life in each one of these areas and
many more.
I documented the fact that it is not mass communication that is beginning to quicken
things, but there is another process at work.
Now, I don't know what that is, and I don't know where it is leading.
In other words, people will say, well, when we finally get to this crunch point, whatever
that is, what will happen?
And I don't have that answer.
I'm just a talk show host and observer.
But maybe you do.
When we finally reach what you call time wave zero, what is going to happen?
Well, the only way to predict what's going to happen is to look at the quality of what
has happened as the quickening, as you call it, has begun to accelerate.
What it's been characterized by is dissolution of boundaries between classes of people, bodies
of knowledge, pools of capital, language groups, so forth and so on.
And so it seems to me ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.
And of course, what that looks like, I don't know.
I don't know whether it's a virtual reality where you become God through the public utilities
or exactly what it is, but it's clear to me that the human nervous system is globalizing
itself, building a model of conscious thought on a planetary scale.
Tens of thousands of people are participating in this.
None of them have a real notion what it's all about, but everyone is serving this sort
of unfolding grand design.
And I think the emergence of alphabets was part of the quickening.
I think the emergence of hominids out of more primitive primates was part of this quickening.
I think this is the business that this planet has been about for a very, very long time.
Are you able to discern any timelines to timeline zero?
Well, yes.
I mean, we've been talking about this as a metaphor.
What makes me, I hope, a little different from some of the other process in the marketplace
is I've got a formal mathematical theory that, you know, I mentioned habits and novelty,
this dualistic flow.
Well, because it is a dualistic flow, it can be portrayed like the ebb and flow of the
price of a stock or something like that.
In other words, it can be portrayed as a line graph.
So I've written computer programs which produce what I call novelty waves.
In other words, a time-scaled wave that picture the ebb and flow of novelty.
And by fitting known historical and paleontological and geological data against these waves at
different scales, I was able to finally discern a best fit.
But the conclusion that it led to was even, well, was very startling to me, which is this
ultimate novelty, this transcendental object at the end of time isn't millennia in the
future.
It is, in fact, slated to collide with historical necessities sometime in late 2012.
2012.
2012.
Now, I know you have some interest in the Mayan calendar.
I do.
I didn't know when I calculated this date that it was the same end date as the Mayan
calendar to the day.
Oh, my.
Let me ask you this, Terrence, what did you input to your database for this computer program?
In other words, what did I start with?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I started, I had a very academic interest in the Qing, which is the Chinese method of
divination.
And everyone who's looked at this thing has been struck by the fact that it seems to work.
And so I carried out a mathematical analysis.
Wait.
I don't know what Qing is, and I bet a lot of other people don't either.
A Chinese method of divining, what kind of method?
What is it?
Well, it existed for thousands of years in China.
It's sometimes done by throwing 50 stocks or sometimes done with coins, but it's a method
of producing a thing called a hexagram, which is made up of either broken or unbroken lines,
but six on top of each other.
So if you're a mathematician, you can figure if it's made up of broken and unbroken lines
and there are six of them on top of each other, there must be a possibility of 64 of these
things.
And thousands of years ago in China, there was a vast body of literary commentary built
up around these hexagrams.
And they have always been presented in a traditional order, a certain way that they are always
presented.
And I was studying a very academic question, which is, is this order of these hexagrams
a true order, in other words, governed by rules, or is it simply a random jumble sanctioned
by tradition?
And this very obscure academic question led ultimately to the discovery that the I Ching
was a 384 day, 13 lunar cycle calendar.
And then from there, I realized that this 384 day calendar was actually a nested subset
in a fractal timekeeping scheme that was really more accurate and more sophisticated than
anything in the West.
So what I'm really suggesting here is that in the same way that the West conquered the
nature of matter through the elaboration of modern science, about 4,000 years ago in China,
a deeper analysis of time was carried out than has ever been undertaken in the West.
It's quite...
Oh, Terrence, what is your website?
It's set Levity, it's www.levity.com, and then just click on Terrence McKenna there.
Levity is L-E-V-I-T-Y.
So it's www.levity.com?
Correct.
We'll get a link up shortly.
Well I think you do, I visited your website today, you've got good people.
Well Keith, he does a wonderful job.
Alright, well so then you get there and then just click on Terrence McKenna and be sure
you're buckled in from the sound of what I've heard so far.
Well the interesting thing you see Art is with a wave like that you can do what's called
retrodicting.
In other words, if you have a wave of novelty that describes the past, you have to correctly
predict the Italian Renaissance, the Greek Enlightenment, the modernity of the 20th century.
And so by predicting the past, we've gained confidence that this wave predicts the future.
That sounds quite scientific.
In other words, science is repeatability, and if you can repeatedly demonstrate that
you can mathematically show the events of the past, then yes, I would imagine you could
project.
Well, so I've been at this since 1975, but the theory is in a sense very conservative.
It never says what will happen, it says when interesting things are highly likely and when
you're just wasting your time.
When you look out or project out toward 2012, what is the magnitude of the spike or the
difference there, if you can give us an idea of magnitudes along the way?
There is only one point in the entire cycle where the level of habit drops to zero.
Effectively then, novelty becomes infinite, and that point occurs on this solstice date
in 2012.
Now, it's very interesting.
There are some people on the net called singularis, and they're hard-headed engineering types,
and they take things like rate of energy release, rate of data storage, this sort of thing,
and draw all their curves out, and they conclude that sometime between 2008 and 2020, we produce
infinite amounts of energy, we pack infinite amounts of data into infinitely small spaces.
In other words, this same sort of thing where because of the acceleration built into the
unfolding of this novelty process, we're going to cross more territory between here and 2012
than we've crossed between the Big Bang and getting to here.
God, that's an incredible thought.
It kind of explains what's happening, you know, that it isn't the old-style religion,
that it isn't the sterile, steady state of science either.
That the universe is actually involved in some kind of process of self-metamorphosis,
and human beings indicate that we have crossed some boundary into a new era, a new epoch
of ever-greater acceleration into this process of self-revelation.
I mean, this is what religions are raving about.
This is what every prophet on the street corner is trying to articulate, and I think it's
real.
I think we're getting a lot of static because people can only deal with it through images
that they know.
You know, Marshall McLuhan once said, "We drive into the future using only our rear-view
mirror," and that's sort of what it is.
But I call this thing the transcendental object at the end of time, and I think, you know,
in a sense religion and Christian revelation, it will all be fulfilled in a way none of
us ever suspected because nature has this appetite for novelty and acceleration into
novelty.
And so then again I ask, at this moment that we speak of, 2012, what do you actually think
will occur?
Well, I've thought about this a good deal, and they're hard and soft scenarios, but I've
noticed that what the time wave seems most coherently able to track is technology.
Somehow technology is very important.
It's the transformation of the human relationship to the world through tools.
And so what I'm thinking would fulfill this entire scenario without requiring God Almighty
to put in an appearance is time travel.
I think that we are moving toward, you know, if you look at biology over huge scales of
time, hundreds of millions of years, it is a kind of conquest of dimensionality.
All right, let's consider that.
Somebody recently said, and I have been considering since I heard it, a very simple question.
If time travel is possible, then where are the time travelers?
Well when I asked that question to my sources, they said, you can only travel as far back
into the past as the moment of the invention of the first time machine because before that
there were no time machines.
But let me think about that.
Does that make sense?
You could only travel back to the moment of the invention of the time machine because
prior to that there was no capability.
It's like trying to drive where there are no roads.
It also means when you invent the first time machine, instantly time machines will appear
by the tens of thousands having come back through time to see the first light into time.
That's incredible.
That's a whole new line of thought for me about that question.
And it might make sense.
It might make sense.
And your analogy is trying to, that you cannot drive in essence.
Where there are no roads.
Where there are no roads.
Of course you nearly do that when you go home from the broadcast here.
And you haven't even been up to see me.
We're very proud of our bad roads.
I understand.
It keeps the riff-raff away I suppose.
It certainly does.
It doesn't keep the riff-raff away but it keeps everybody else away.
How long Terrence have you been residing on the side of the volcano there?
Well continuously for about three and a half years.
I've had land out here for about, well since '77.
Since '77 and before that?
I lived, I grew up in western Colorado and I had my children and my marriage and all
that in California.
Lived 35 years in northern California.
Uh huh.
You knew Timothy Leary, yes?
I knew him.
We appeared in public mostly in Europe together a few times and he certainly was a huge influence
on me.
I only came to know him in the past seven or eight years.
But as a kid growing up in the '60s he was an enormous influence on me.
You are now being called by many his heir apparent.
His heir now I guess.
Well I think not by many but I was called it by him.
Everybody else kept their mouth shut.
Well I have my method, I'm very interested in the psychedelic experience.
I was raised Catholic and what I kept of that was an enormous thirst for the paranormal,
the miraculous, supernatural.
And I went to India and I made the rounds of the gurus and the geishays and I didn't
find what I was looking for.
But when I went to South America to the jungles down there I discovered that LSD was only
the tip of the psychedelic iceberg and what I had taken to be modern science and modern
chemistry was actually a tradition of shamanism and religious use of psychedelic plants that
was thousands and thousands of years old.
And that fascinated me because I actually, it worked for me.
Most people who seek the mystery with...
Listen let us pick this up after the top of the hour.
Now listen to me carefully.
We've got about a 10 minute break here at least and you're not going to hear anything.
Don't let it bother you.
Just put the phone down, grab a cup of coffee or something or another and we'll be back
to you.
Okay?
Alright.
Stay right there.
This is CBC.
This hour on the best of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
For 97 it's Art and his guest, the late Terrence McKenna.
And now enjoy this encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM with...
The lines are absolutely alive and everybody out there just relax for a little while.
I have some advice for you.
My guest is a very, very unusual person whose name is Terrence McKenna.
In order to properly appreciate what you're about to hear if you're just joining us in
Los Angeles, San Francisco and so forth, you're going to have to pretty much put down whatever
you're doing.
I'll turn the radio off a little bit and listen very carefully because it makes a lot of sense
but you've got to listen carefully.
Terrence McKenna, we'll find out more about him in a moment, lives on the side of an active
volcano in Hawaii.
An interesting place to choose to live by itself and an interesting man indeed.
So more of Terrence McKenna coming up.
Art have you heard about Terrence McKenna's theory called time wave zero?
He suggests that as we get closer to time wave zero, we are experiencing tachyon radiation
from it.
Evidently, the impending event is so colossal that it will emit such intense radiation that
some of it takes the form of faster than light speed, tachyon particles or waves which can
travel faster than light and that they're actually being hurtled backward in time.
The closer we get to the event, the greater the radiation density.
Hence, the more frequently and intensely we experience paranormal phenomena associated
with it.
We'll ask about that by the way, we haven't yet.
This could be the mechanism behind what you call the quickening.
The event we are approaching will probably be something ten amount to a white hole or
a mini big bang.
It will for all intents and purposes be the end of time for us.
Terrence believes it will occur consistent with the Mayan calendar in the year 2012.
Now by the way, he has derived this independently of the Mayan calendar.
He simply has discovered that it coincides with it.
He goes on, "It is not unreasonable to assume that ETs possessing UFOs, if they exist, will
be flocking here to research or rather pre-search the phenomenon.
It is also believed that tachyon bombardment would have bizarre effects on the human nervous
system, visions, that sort of thing, as well as physical manifestations in the environment
like the Clearwater Virgin, bizarre mutations like the chupacabra, and heaven knows what
else.
All the stuff you attribute to the quickening might be explained by this.
And after listening to the first hour, I must agree, Terrence, I'm stealing one more bit
of time to read you a fact that I think relates and challenges you a little bit.
It is from Steven in Wichita, and it's well thought out.
Here it is.
"Art, I'm not sure that you can equate novelty with either acceleration or complexity.
A nature has always been novel, and surprisingly so considering earlier periods in Earth's
history, given that over 90% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct and the
exotic body designs, it would seem novelty is a given.
But in order to be effective, it must have a survival advantage and be passed on.
Once the novelty becomes a hindrance, it disappears.
Acceleration may be more a factor of population density.
Virtually all of the social problems we face today have been duplicated years ago in rat
population density studies.
Our novel inventions of this century have simply allowed us to artificially compress
distance and time by modes of travel and communications.
Profit motives have directed and limited the novelty of our civilization in this century
as never before, and we are becoming a hindrance.
The higher the population density, the more the acceleration seems to be.
Anecdotal, but relative, compare the pace of a small country town to a large city with
its population density and resulting problems accelerated by stress and profit motives."
That's from Steve in Wichita.
What do you think, Terrence?
Well, I don't disagree with all of that.
I think there's certainly been ebb and flow of novelty within the 20th century, parts
of it more novel than others, but I think to argue that it isn't among the most novel
periods in time is a pretty uphill battle.
The question is whether novelty is something which simply adheres to statistical dynamics
or whether it's a real direction, a real arrow that is directing process, and that's what
I maintain.
I think it's not true to say that the biota of the Earth today is not more novel than
it was in the past.
Certainly there are novel forms of life which have undergone extinction, but the proliferation
of human life, which is an advanced animal plus a culture-creating creature, indicates
to me that we're at a level of novelty that this planet has never before experienced.
Of course, it's an arguable thing because history, which is what we're always comparing
these waves to, is not yet a quantified thing.
I mean, how do you rate the War of the Roses over Queen Anne's War or something like that?
But nevertheless, though we don't have an absolute quantification of history, there
is general agreement among historians that events like the Renaissance, the Greek Golden
Age, the 20th century, are periods where a great deal of novelty in social forms and
technologies was concentrated.
Alright, you put together a computer program which was able to trace the ebb and the flow
of this novelty and in effect chart major events in history.
How many, if I might ask, hits and misses, when you got this in final development and
then you look at each point in history, how many hits and misses, were there any misses
in the model or did you hit each major moment in history on the nose?
Well, by my understanding of this theory, there can be no misses.
In other words, it's not a statistical theory.
We're not okay if we're right two-thirds of the time.
Here, here.
So we have to be right all the time.
So you're telling me you are?
I submit to you and to the world for your examination and critiquing the fact that yes,
the time wave with its end point in December 21, 2012, is scribed with as great an accuracy
as I am able to discern the actual vicissitudes of novelty and habit in history and natural
history.
That's the claim.
That's right.
Terrence, have you submitted this, I mean this is serious science that you're discussing,
have you submitted this because of its repeatability?
That's science.
Have you submitted this to peer review?
Well, among mathematicians, yes, and there's a lively debate raging on the internet about
that.
Let me say something though here about science and why the acceptance of the time wave can't
really occur under the tent of ordinary science.
You have mentioned repeatability.
Repeatability is the idea at the very basis of the scientific method, at the very basis
of experiment.
That's right.
It's what's called restoration of initial conditions.
But now notice that what the time wave theory is saying is that every moment in time is
a unique moment.
Is unique and will not specifically repeat, but what you're suggesting is that you can
plot the highs of novelty throughout history.
Yes, you can, but you cannot assume that you're doing it probabilistically.
In other words, essentially when you really understand philosophically what the time wave
is saying, it's an enormous attack on probability theory.
You know, the way science works now is if you want to know how much energy is flowing
through a wire, you take a thousand measurements, you add them together, and you divide by a
thousand, and then you have the current flowing through the wire.
But notice that that assumes that it doesn't matter what time you make the measurement.
And so much of science is like this to the point where I am redefining science and saying
science is the study of those phenomena so coarse grained that the time in which they
occurred does not affect them.
And that leaves out then history, love affairs, corporate takeovers, empire building, everything
interesting in the human world is too fragile, too finely embedded in the context of its
time to be open to that kind of scientific modeling.
So, in other words, they're really relatively small, insignificant events that don't enter
into the larger measurements you're making of this ebb and flow.
Well, for instance, on a given day when the chart says novelty will be high, certainly
somewhere in the world someone is having a very unnovel day.
It's a statistical thing of a bell curve, no reference to you, Art, but a bell curve where
when the wave is predicting high novelty, most people, most systems will experience
that novelty, but of course some will not.
It's the idea that probability is ebbing and flowing.
When you study statistics, the first thing they teach you is when you flip a coin, the
odds are 50/50, heads or tails.
If that were true, the coin would land on its edge every single time.
That's the rarest of all results in a coin toss.
Indeed.
So, what's really happening is that what are called secondary and tertiary factors are
causing the coin to be heads or tails.
I say no.
There are zones in time where heads are favored and zones in time where tails are favored.
The idea that time can be described as a perfectly smooth surface and then dealt with statistically
is just a first pass with Greek idealism and a careful examination of nature shows it to
be inadequate in the same way that perfect circles were inadequate for describing planetary
motion.
You are therefore saying that conventional science does not have and cannot have with
its present course of investigation and a proper understanding of time.
That's right because it assumes that it is to be analyzed with statistics and that flattens
out and denies the difference among various times and types of time.
Karens, how long have you been working on this?
Oh, since 1971.
'71?
Yes.
What is your...you told me that you're originally from Colorado, family and all that back in
Colorado.
Right.
Then finally, exile.
Well, essentially, yes.
I got myself to the University of California at Berkeley right at the time of the anti-war
movement and all of that.
It was like a kid in a cultural candy store and studied philosophy, art history, and then
went off to Asia basically to check out the hash dens and the gurus.
The hash was fine but the gurus just wanted into my pocket.
Then I went to South America and as I mentioned, that's where this shamanism thing just really
grabbed me.
What part of South America, Karens?
Southern Columbia, the Putumayo River Basin.
You know, it's the psychedelic plants that are so fascinating to me because you mentioned
repeatability.
Here's the technology, a technique that lets you repeatedly and with relative safety journey
into alien worlds filled with alien forms of intelligence.
It's the only thing I found that does that, in other words, I've investigated flying saucers,
crop circles, this and that.
It doesn't turn me on.
No, let me quickly stop you there and ask you about crop circles.
Many, many people feel that they are fractal in nature.
If you're on the internet, I know you've seen photographs of some of the more amazing ones,
Stonehenge, some of the rest of them.
They do appear to be fractal.
What is your thinking there?
Well, I was thinking, you know, I don't think it's been published in this country, but this
wonderful book called Around in Circles by Jim Schnabel, to my mind that blows the lid
off the whole crop circle thing.
You and I could spend the whole evening discussing the relationship of the media to the human
psyche, to how people handle evidence, because I really think the psychedelic community has
evidence to give on these paranormal questions that has never been properly heard and evaluated
because the ordinary society's attitude towards people who use psychedelics is that they are
automatically unreliable.
Yes, I know.
But I think we're not going to crack stuff like UFO abductions and that sort of thing
unless we admit the psychedelic evidence.
And if we do admit it, suddenly the whole thing begins to look very, very different.
All right, Terrence, I don't reject it.
And a lot of guests that I've had on who have been into the very same areas we're in right
now, very politically, correctly rejected, out of hand.
You don't need it to accomplish this, they say, that you can do it within yourself.
And I don't reject that thought either, but I would like to hear the case that you would
present for psychedelics opening the doors that you're talking about, that in fact they
do.
How would you make that case?
Well, I hear what you're saying is you're equating spiritual techniques like yoga and
prayer and human--
Exactly.
--and that sort of thing.
I'm not sure there's a connection.
I mean, it does help to be an ethical person to take psychedelics.
But for instance, the psychedelic that has fascinated me most over the years is DMT,
dimethyltryptamine.
Now, this is not a well-known substance.
No, it isn't.
What is it?
Well, that's what it is, dimethyltryptamine.
It occurs in a number of plant species throughout the world.
It's utilized by native people.
And in the pure form out of the laboratory, when you smoke this stuff, you find yourself
inside the flying saucer that all these dazzled people are raving about.
But you found yourself there by initiating an action on your own, in other words, repeatability.
And after about three minutes of spending time with the self-transforming elf machines
and their technologies, you're deposited back in your apartment pretty much none the worse
for wear.
Well, now, let's give this stuff to the leading lights of the UFO community or anyone else
who has an interest in unusual psychological or paranormal phenomena.
All right.
All right.
Hold tight, Terrence.
We're at another break point.
Terrence McKenna is my guest.
What a totally interesting individual he is.
You're going to sit by the radio, turn the volume up a little bit, put down your book
or whatever else you're doing, and listen.
Back now to the big island of Hawaii and a very unusual individual named Terrence McKenna.
Terrence, I've got a question for you.
Have you ever watched Star Trek?
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
Good.
You're familiar then with the prime directive.
Thou shalt not interfere as I believe the prime directive.
Yeah, that's right.
Now, what you are saying is so serious and is such a large revelation that is it not
possible that you are in a sense doing what you're doing right now, violating the prime
directive?
Well, you know, it's only been about 100 years since the news began to arrive in the lap
of Western civilization that there were these psychoactive plants scattered around the world.
The first one was the peyote cactus.
Yes.
In 1988, mescaline was extracted from that.
I think it's not without implication that right at our moment of greatest cultural crisis
when we're destroying the environment and uprooting the rainforest and so forth and
so on, that out of those same rainforests comes a phenomenon which if we will face it
squarely, offers a severe challenge to our notion of how reality works and how the world
is put together.
And what if we miss it?
What if we burn down finally enough of the rainforest that that one plant that we could
have used is destroyed?
Well, this may have already happened in the sense that there are many known cases of people
collecting promising plants from only one known source and then returning a few months
or years later to find the whole thing paved over.
That's right.
All right.
I tackled this one, Art.
Very interesting.
Terrence describes a workable scenario, but my question with it is this.
Is this a universal process or only a localized effect?
I believe that one of the theories of modern physics describes that observations affect
the process or thing being observed.
Isn't it possible that the data, the random sticks in China is somewhat skewed by what
is being determined as to time?
Doesn't everybody notice the phenomenon of time being perceived to slow down depending
on how frequently you, for example, look at the clock?
Cooks have noticed the same effect with boiling water.
The quickening may be happening because we notice certain events and then notice more
of the same as time goes along.
In other words, we cause the process to occur at least from our point of view, Ed in Nashville.
Is this a moment of deep thinking?
Yes.
Well, I am thinking.
I think it's a kind of self-fulfilling process.
I think we are contributing to it as we uncover it within ourselves.
Something is calling us towards itself and as we approach it, we become more like it.
Something is sculpting out of the primate body over a couple of million years an entirely
different kind of creature.
As we go to meet this thing, which I call the transcendental mystery at the end of time,
we are taking on more and more of its characteristics, its godlike power, its ability to span space
and time.
Yes.
When we finally do reach it, I imagine there will be a kind of effortless moment of merging
and recognition.
Signposts along the way, life on Mars, maybe Europa, cloning.
The rise of the internet, virtual reality, nanotechnology, possibly alien artifacts,
all that and more.
One image I carry of this thing, Art, is you know those mirrored balls they hang in dance
clubs that spin scintillations racing around the walls.
Well the scintillations are distortions of the thing and so as we approach this transcendental
object at the end of time, there will be more and more breakdown of ordinary reality and
more and more distorted scenarios of what it is.
That clearly is a process underway now.
Yes, and everyone is through their own fears, religious training, hope, they are trying
to project what is it?
And there is a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty.
I am not afraid of it.
I would really like, one of the great things about the psychedelic aliens is they don't
vibrate with this strange vibe that the fetal grazing graze of popular media vibrate with.
It is a much more upbeat and affirmative kind of alien context that occurs through the plant.
This one plant, this one drug that you described, dimethyltryptamine, DMT, I don't know what
that is.
Well what makes it so attractive in a discussion like this, Art, is it is one of the most powerful
of all the psychedelics but it only lasts five minutes.
Five minutes?
Five minutes.
So someone who has spent a lifetime dissing psychedelics or denying the existence of the
paranormal for that matter, should at least be willing to invest five minutes.
We have never lost anybody.
You pick yourself up and go on about your business.
Five minutes.
Five minutes.
The effects, could you describe them to much of my audience that I know can recall the
effects of LSD or various mushrooms?
It is very different.
Very different, huh?
LSD is a kind of psychological self-examination and strange thought processes and insights.
What happens with DMT is there is the unmistakable feeling of having gone to a place.
In other words, it comes on in about 15 seconds and suddenly you're in a place and this place
is full of what I call self-dribbling jeweled basketballs that are intelligent in some sense.
They're like badly trained rottweilers.
They come sounding forward and what they're doing in there is they're conducting some
kind of a language lesson because they speak, they have a language which you can see is
the only way I can explain it.
What is the source of DMT?
Is it a manufactured drug?
It can be, but its source is really in nature, in plants like Socotria viridis, desmantus
alanoyensis, there's a whole bunch of this Latin salad.
Most of these are South American plants, but every ecosystem on earth has DMT sources in
it.
In fact, the human brain naturally produces DMT.
Why?
We don't know, but I'd say there is a strong clue.
There is a drug which causes people to see little creatures and this same substance occurs
naturally in the human brain.
Now, I'm not saying that's the answer to the UFO phenomenon, but how many people have looked
at this and pursued it?
Well then let me ask this.
There are many who claim to have been abducted, Terrence, and if DMT is a natural occurring
substance in the brain, your theory could probably be verified by measuring those who
have claimed to be abducted.
Would such a measurement scientifically be possible?
Well, the problem is, you recall I said it only lasts five minutes, so unusual amounts
of it in the body are very quickly brought down to baseline.
One of the most transient drugs in the body ever observed.
And an interesting thing about it, Art, is when they measure its presence, they look
at human cerebrospinal fluid and they've discovered that it reaches its greatest concentration
there between three and four in the morning.
Well, that's when people are doing the intense REM dreaming.
And so I think, you know, the Australian Aboriginals have this concept of the dream time.
And I think when you put the dream time, the chemistry of DMT, the abduction stories together,
and the depth with which modern media has programmed and messed with people, you're
very close to being able to begin to talk about the alien phenomenon.
I think there are aliens, but I think they can only reach us through our minds.
They don't cross the universe in ships of titanium.
They don't even project holograms of themselves into the desert air.
They come through the human mind.
And if you look at the human mind, in all cultures and in all times and places, except
Western Europe, in a few intellectuals in the past few hundred years, the human mind
has always been haunted by sprites, gnomes, nixies, elves.
So I don't see the UFO, the modern wave, as anything more than the latest wave of this
mysterious relationship we have with disembodied minds through the imagination.
Well then people say, well, so this is the old psychological reduction argument.
No, because when I say the human imagination, I don't mean some paltry psychological function.
I think the human imagination is the largest part of us and where we're going to spend
most of the rest of human history.
Hear, hear.
All right.
How is such a theory greeted by the majority of people who listen to it?
I mean, right now I'm getting a lot of faxes and a lot of people are really hearing what
you're saying.
Even though you've got to listen very carefully, they're hearing what you're saying, Terrence,
and a lot of them are agreeing with you.
But there's going to be a big body of very violent disagreement too, isn't there?
Well yes, there are some very large eggs at stake in this game.
I mentioned science and the need to revive probability theory.
There is a lot of vested interest in certain versions of what the UFO phenomenon is.
But you see, what I bring to all of this, and speaking for the psychedelic community,
what we bring to all of this is not simply another raft or another tall tale, but a massive.
Oh no, I hear that.
So then would you suggest that sightings of UFOs, abduction encounters, if you could be
there measuring a burst of DMT, you'd certainly find it at that moment.
I think you would find it.
And I think you would also, another place where you would find it is at human death.
I think this is very important.
At human death?
At human death.
I think as we die, we have, if we haven't had a DMT trip, I also think probably every
night in these deep dream states, we penetrate into realms from which we can remember almost
nothing.
Well then that would be another moment at which you should be able to measure a spike
in DMT level in the brain.
Are you talking about death?
No, no.
Yes, yes.
I'm talking about both instances you cited, REM sleep, deep REM sleep, and the moment of
death.
Well it's been confirmed in deep REM doing this kind of research on dying people.
It has.
You get a lot of ethical questions.
I understand.
But you're saying it has been confirmed?
Do you know where?
In deep sleep?
No, no.
In what institution there has been confirmation of this?
Well at the University of Mississippi a few years ago, a team led by a guy named Christian,
all those papers are in the literature and in fact anyone interested in this should just
search DMT on the internet and they may have never heard of it but they will be astonished.
Well I've never heard of it but your chain of logic is making sense to me now.
Let us talk for a second about paranormal events.
As we approach time wave zero, it is your contention, I think, that paranormal events,
ghosts, poltergeists, paranormal events of all manner and shape will begin to increase
which would suggest, I think, that DMT spikes will be increasing.
Yes?
It's a way of putting it and certainly DMT is becoming more known in society and there's
almost a fad now of locating plants in one's environment and extracting the stuff and getting
enough out to actually hit the money.
Yeah, do we have laws against it yet by the way?
I guess I'd ask, huh?
Well it's an interesting situation.
Here it is in a human neurotransmitter.
Every single one of us has it in our body and yes, this is among the most illegal substances.
Figures.
It's figures, doesn't it?
Yeah it does, figures.
It's the catch-22.
We're all holding ours.
By the way, things are going. We'll probably all be tossed in pokey for it. We'll have
little roadside stops and DMT measuring devices.
Well I think this was Adam's fault.
You made a, I'm going to return to another subject for a second. You made a fascinating
statement. I said, well if there's time travel, where are the time travelers? Your answer
was they will not be here until the first time machine is invented because you could
not go back to a time prior to the invention of a machine that would enable travel. Your
parallel was you can't travel where there are not roads and there are not roads back
that far in time.
If time is to virtually end by 2012, Terrence, where would you see the invention of time
machine, a time machine, the first time machine, between now and then?
Well I don't think it's between now and then. Actually, I think it's then.
It's then?
It's then. In other words, if what the time wave zero thing is showing is that events
can be portrayed in this linear way as a line on a graph, that suddenly in 2012, for some
mysterious reason, this can no longer be done. It must be because in 2012, time ceases to
be linear and that must mean that's because a technology is created which causes time
to lose its linear and serial quality and that could only be time travel.
And you believe that at that moment tens of thousands or millions or who knows of time
travelers will suddenly show up?
Well actually that's my conservative model of what would happen. What's against that
is, I'm sure you've heard this, the well-known grandfather paradox which is time travel is
always said to be impossible because you travel back in time and you could kill your own grandfather.
How do we avoid this?
I think we avoid it by actually what happens when the first time machine is invented is
the rest of universal history happens instantly. This is the only way paradox can be kept out
of the picture. So I call it the God-whistles scenario.
So in other words, linearity ends at that instant.
And the rest of the history of the universe occurs in a few milliseconds. It's sort of
the reverse of the Big Bang where you get a lot of action in the first few nanoseconds
of the universe's life. In this model the universe undergoes half of its morphogenetic
unfolding in the last few milliseconds of its existence.
Is that then the moment when the human race in effect joins those that we can temporarily
now visit only with something like DMT?
Or that the human race joins those who have passed over into the great beyond or both.
That's what I think it is.
Are they one in the same in your view?
They may be. I thought that these DMT creatures, what are they? And the conservative position,
since we know there are human beings, is they must be some kind of human being. But what
kind? And the only answer I can come up with is souls. I mean, I resisted this. But is
it possible that shamans have been using plants to peer into the great beyond and that there
is a kind of ecology of souls out there? When you ask the shaman, they say, "Well, you weren't
listening. We told you we did it with ancestor magic." They say, "Oh, I get it. An ancestor."
An ancestor is actually a dead person.
Oh, absolutely fascinating, Terrence. Listen to me. We're at the top of the hour. Go take
a 10 or 12 minute break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about souls because
I've got some recent, really incredible news about souls. And you're just the right guy
to comment on that. And don't worry, folks. We will get the lines open. Terrence, rest.
Okay.
Terrence McKenna. Terrence McKenna. Wow. If on the other hand, you have the time to sit
down and really listen to what's being said, not reacting like a Neanderthal with your
head hitting the table, then you're going to come away from this thinking some new thoughts.
And there is value in that. Back to Terrence shortly. That should be an interesting adventure
unto itself. But I want to ask you, Terrence, a little bit about souls. You mentioned souls.
And so I have two questions. One is, there was a recent, not recent, very old medical
study in which a medical doctor actually endeavored to set out and prove in days when it was politically
okay to do this kind of thing that the soul could actually be measured that at the very
instant of human death, and he went through a whole big trip. I put the medical report
up on my website. The human body loses about three quarters of an ounce, and not due to
gases or anything else you might imagine in your mind, no physical cause, all of that
accounted for. And he printed and published this medical study suggesting the human body
actually instantly at the instant of death loses three quarters of an ounce of weight.
Do you have any reaction to that? Well, looking at it through the eyes of novelty theory,
I think nature is very reluctant to give up a complex ordered form once it's been achieved.
I've noticed that the difference between living organisms and things like chairs and tables,
the chairs and tables don't metabolize. In a sense, the soul is something which is manifest
in time. It's almost as though organisms have a hyper dimension. They're objects with time
folded inside of them. And at death, what seems to happen is this complex morphogenetic
field, if you will, simply withdraws back into whatever higher dimension it came from
in the first place.
Ayahuasca
As far as what I can contribute to the Iowa City discussion, most of the samples that Jonathan discussed this afternoon were actually collected by Pat and myself in '76.
And then Dennis wrote that paper using those samples from the feed he obtained earlier that year.
They all, most all came from a single common, Dantidel mocondice, it was then at the Arena Tocca near Cucuoca.
We bio-assayed all those groups and they were very strong.
When I began making my own ayahuasca, I used those experiences as the benchmark for what I was trying to achieve with my own brews.
In terms of recipes, if you want to, rather than trying to substitute an analogue, if you're still interested in what goes into a healthy dose of ayahuasca,
the way what I settled with, I had to clone a single individual plant called Plowman 6041 that Tim Plowman had collected in Newry, Maguisk in 1970 that was called a Cielo ayahuasca.
The ayahuasca's recognized types of ayahuasca more differentiated than the species.
They speak of Cielo ayahuasca, Trompitero ayahuasca, so forth and so on.
When I used the Cielo ayahuasca, Plowman 6041, I grew it for many years and when I made ayahuasca, I used 500 grams of fresh material per dose
and 85 grams of fresh Stichotria viridus per dose and then prepared it in the standard way, which is to boil the total volume of crushed ayahuasca and Stichotria viridus.
You make it in a non-aluminum pot. You don't use aluminum utensils because the aluminum is reactive and will mess with the effectiveness of the ayahuasca.
Then you layer in to the pot and the pots can be quite large. Layer in Stichotria leaves, crushed thanasteriopsis coffee, the entire plant vigorously smashed with a hardwood club to separate the fibrous material.
Then you boil it for four hours at a rolling boil, not an explosive boil, but a constant boil.
Pour off the deeply yellow liquid that results, carmine is yellow, and you pour off the mother liquor into another container.
Replace the first wash with a second wash, boil it four hours more, then discard all the solid material, keep it steaming into the bouquet.
Combine the two watches, which is a lot of water, 10-15 gallons of water, and then drive it down to the number of doses that you have pre-calculated.
I can make up to 12-15 doses at a time in pots of this size.
I drive it down to 100 milliliters per dose. In the final evaporation, you want to be careful not to boil it too rapidly, or the sugars which are cooked out of the ayahuasca will tend to caramelize and make it thick.
This does not affect the pharmacology of the ayahuasca, it makes it hell to swallow. If you do it right, you can get it down to 100 milliliters and it will still pour as thin as water.
It won't thicken unless you have boiled it with too hot a flame.
Are you not destroying any psychoactive potentials? The more caramelized one and the more liquid one?
No, it's more like it's an aesthetic thing. It shows that you've hurried it, and if you're giving it to people who are knowledgeable, they will comment on this.
The sign of amateurish ayahuasca is "dick", because it means "dee". Those are just sugars, it's not doing any good.
My interest in ayahuasca began with, and if you haven't read it, you should probably read Burroughs and Ginsberg's book, The Yahay Letters, The Search for the Blue Flash.
It sort of initiates the modern era of writing about ayahuasca. The most recent interesting book about ayahuasca, other than Eduardo's Commentaries on the Paintings of Pablo Amoringo, is probably Michael Taustig's book, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, which is just a wonderful book.
Even if you don't give a hoot about drugs, I think it's a wonderful book for the richness of the language and the way in which he tells the story of the 20th century history of shamanism in the Putumayo region.
My interest in ayahuasca was the same interest that many of the early ethnographers and anthropologists were motivated by, which was persistent rumours of group states of mind.
As Jonathan mentioned, the first people to characterise the alkaloid named it telepathy. This was because they had the grandiose hope that this would be a telepathic drug.
To a sense, I think it's too early to dismiss this possibility. Most of us think of telepathy as one person hearing another person think. That I don't think ayahuasca can deliver, but what it can deliver is an incredible ability to see what other people mean.
Ayahuasca is driven by sound, by song, by whistling. Its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound, into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology of this stuff.
Things normally experienced as acoustics experience become instead visibly detailed and it's quite spectacular. I've had ayahuasca where you can sing a tone and just lay down like a Barnett Newman painting.
You can sing a chartreuse line an inch and a half wide in the darkness and then you switch the tone and cross it at a 90 degree angle.
Then as you begin to experiment, you discover that the whole modality behind your closed eyes is open to being driven by these sounds.
I think probably a lot of the shamanism, especially the off the main rivers shamanism involving ayahuasca, is this kind of pseudo-telepathic involvement with sound.
There are a lot of interesting things about ayahuasca, even in distinction or in contrast with other psychoactive plants, for example. It's essentially brain soup.
There's nothing in it which doesn't occur naturally in human neural metabolism. When you take ayahuasca, you alter the ratios tremendously and the concentrations.
So far as we know, salvia desinorum, epogaine, these things don't occur ordinarily in human metabolism. Mescaline might under certain conditions.
But the major psychedelic neurotransmitters are what are represented in ayahuasca. It's the only hallucinogen I know where if it's made right, the next day, the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.
Even with mushrooms, which is dear to my heart, the day afterwards I tend to keep the phone unplugged and hot baths and this and that. But on ayahuasca you're just ready for action at four o'clock the next morning in Mexico.
And the hallucinations are extraordinary. They seem to occur, in a way it seems more versatile than philosophizing. The hallucinations can range over a wider range.
It can be anything from nature-based, botanical, insectile, to just, you name it. I remember one period of hallucination on ayahuasca where it was gold Egyptian hieroglyphics against black, moving through these tunnels and this sort of thing.
And it's very, I think it's safe, it's probably used by more people than any other psychedelic plant cult in the world, if you don't consider cannabis a plant cult.
And as a strong hallucination, in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, down into Bolivia, and then it's made in roads in the 20th century, in a big way into Brazil, portions of Argentina, and then more sophisticated populations all over the world, getting lingered there.
Are there any questions? Yeah. Is it more growing with cannabis in the temples? Oh yeah, it'll grow, it grows well in Hawaii. Many, many plants have more restricted ranges than their natural capacity.
Most plants have not occupied their full range. This is a consequence of the glaciers only having melted 20,000 years ago. Ayahuasca, I mean one of the things that interests me that I've talked to Dr. Blocher about is, I think that there may be banisteriopsis of some sort implicated in Mayan religion.
Nobody has ever been able to prove this, but there is a whole elaborate kind of Mayan symbolism that you see at Palenque, I'm sorry, that you see at Tulum, and at other sites that is called umbilical symbolism.
I think these things that have been taken for umbilical course are probably vines of some sort. The last time I was at Tikal, in the ruins themselves, there were many yellow flowers, Malthagatesia flowers on the ground that had clearly been shed by large vines which is a seed going up into the canopy.
And I collected in Belize non-flowering Malthagatesia vines that I was unable to distinguish from Ayahuasca. So, you know, this may well be happening, or could have been happening among the class of vines.
And exactly what their drugs were and who used them pretty effectively at this point.
There's no trace of that in the current Mayan population?
Well, there's no trace of vine, no, they're pretty, I think the morning glory seed, the mushrooms among the sierramas, the Texan Indians, the Zapotecs and the Mixtecs, among the Maya, I think the morning glory complex and the Salvia divinorum.
But whatever else may have gone on, you know, there's a whole, I mean Jonathan is the expert on this, but there's a whole number of plants which many have been used for their psychoactive effect in Mexico.
Various coleus, the Emya salicifolia, some people believe certain water lilies, old plants like Quarrareguia fumibre, which is now used as a flavoring for certain kinds of chocolate drinks.
But still there are depictions on pieces of statuary that seem to suggest that maybe this would have a much haunted style of usage in the past.
I have a question about, you're talking about how the visual experience was driven by sound.
Right.
Is it a problem that the visions could be driven by anything else, any other occurrences besides sound?
Touch or...
Well I tend to lie down and sit still in silent darkness.
I suppose cannabis helps most of these things.
The ayahuasca is extraordinary. The last time I took it was in a non-traditional setting, but with one other person.
And sitting in completely silent darkness, and this guy had these Tibetan chimes, you know, the kind you strike with a piece of deer horn.
And he would be completely silent and he would strike this thing and it would literally form a piece of jewelry or a thing like a machine in the air.
Just this thing, and this thing would come into being as long as the sound was there and then it would disappear and then he would make another one.
And it was very clear that we were seeing the same thing because I commented on it and described what I was seeing and it looked like a little thing made out of iridescent titanium with brass connectors and it was like an enormous Laurel Birch earring or something like that.
It's a very specific kind of object.
I think these things are very mysterious. I mean it was a pity that Rocio's English didn't allow a real discussion of these stories about the people who disappear for days and weeks on end, who go into a parallel world.
Because if you just think these aboriginal people are ignorant savages, well then you can just dismiss it. But if you've gotten this far on the premise that shamans know what they're talking about, well then you have to take very seriously this more outlandish stuff.
Where do you draw the line? And Ayahuasca is, you know, Eduardo Luna, who some of you know, is very keen to insist that what Ayahuasca is really about is where you get on it if you keep these diets for weeks and months and then take it repeatedly over and over in these situations of sensory deprivation.
And I think these people are basically erasing ordinary linguistic structures and they live in a world, perhaps more than half hallucination.
And their fears of magical attack and their relationships to invisible beings and all this is a kind of, I suppose in Western terms the only thing you could say is it's a kind of self-generated, self-controlled schizophrenia.
But that's just a word schizophrenia. I mean what it is, is it's a self-generated, self-controlled immersion in a non-causal parallel construct of some sort.
And the reason shamans live in isolation and on the periphery of modern and high density urban civilization is essentially so that they can build these castles in the air that they inhabit.
They build unique mythological structures that are like accretions of their very powerful personalities. That's what all this storytelling is about. These stories define the contextual limits of what is possible.
And if you live in a culture where night after night, year after year you've grown up around the fire hearing the most respected people in the group tell these outlandish stories, then for you it legitimizes the search for a doorway out of mundane experience.
And that's really the only precondition for finding such a doorway. I mean if you love the weird and you probe it often enough, deeply enough, eventually you'll hit the jackpot.
And the door will swing open. And I watched it. Definitely very effective for doing that.
I guess the ikaros really generate a lot of visions, the samsang. And some of those are available on cassette. Do you think that kind of visionary generation would come through in a cassette?
If you have an ayahuasca analog? Well, if you listen to music on ayahuasca, it transforms the music. You have to be very careful. I recall many years ago it was the night of a total eclipse or some hellish thing in the sky.
And Sun Water and Adele, who some of you may know, and I decided that we would do the ayahuasca that I had in the back of the refrigerator for years.
And this was like a long time ago, maybe eight years ago. And I got it out and I couldn't remember whether John Fidel had said, "Always shake the bottle or never shake the bottle before you go."
So, to be safe, we should shake the bottle. In case that's what he did say. So I did. And I've never had it hit me so hard.
And we were... I had put on a record which I had previously found mildly entertaining. And the goal of the first 40 minutes of this ayahuasca trip became to survive the playing of this record.
I don't know. I've had other experiences. A friend of mine brought me a tape from tribal Afghanistan that I listened to one night in Hawaii on ayahuasca.
And I became so alarmed and freaked out. And I could hear something in this music that just shouldn't have been there.
I could hear that this wasn't Whizzland's Ragheads in Mudhust somewhere. That these guys had connections into the Martian musicians union in Vietnam.
Highly agitating. But I think the ayahuasca songs are probably tailored to create a certain aura of confidence. They're reassuring. It's nice to sit with these old guys and watch them make beautiful music.
And when you're alone you can sing too. I mean it's very important to sing. Especially if you become afraid or alarmed. This is the key. If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocybin as well.
You don't want to clench. You don't want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing. You want to sit up straight and breathe and sing and sing it back.
And it will step back. You can take control of your situation. Most of the time.
I wanted to ask about the parallel universe. American Indians' storytelling and mythology have a great deal to say about these things.
Their adventure myths about the two young guys that go out and get to see sticks and disappear for twelve years. This is a common and enduring theme.
But this is my previous decision that I could have expounded a little bit about. What is that for? What level of varies do you find yourself giving it?
Well, I'm very very careful. The way I do these things normally is alone and I unplug the telephone and I don't tell anybody I'm going to do it.
And I do it in darkness. And I roll joints in front of me so I don't have to move. And basically once I get going I don't do anything because I'm so aware of how involved I am.
I think you have to be almost a damn fool to just grab hold of this stuff and start flailing it around. I mean, for me it's like I creep up to the abyss and hang my head over and look and then I edge back to it.
The idea of trying to actually do something is terrifying because it will work. I mean, you can do it but you don't understand what you're doing. So I like to look.
But the experience of joining a recognition is purposeful what you're seeing.
They cure.
They cure and they get information.
But the main thing, I think the getting information thing is sort of overstressed because it's astonishing and it proves that it's a higher dimension.
If somebody really can see who stole the chicken and they really can see, then even though it's a trivial matter about a chicken, there's nothing trivial about the fact that they are exhibiting a paranormal ability which seems to involve the contradiction of cause and effect.
How can they see who stole the chicken? Number one, the chicken has already been stolen by the time the question is asked of the shaman.
So then does the shaman travel back in time? Does the shaman read the minds of everyone in the tribe and look and find who stole the chicken that way?
Or is it just an inspired guest backed up by social pressure? What exactly is going on here?
And then when you turn towards the future, it becomes even more mysterious because many of these shamanic things are about deciding where the hunting will take place.
And saying, you know, if we go to the second waterfall, then there will be katibari to be killed and then they go and there is and they do.
Well, if you believe that this person actually saw the future, then you're coming perilously close to some kind of determinism which is not supportable philosophically.
I mean, if the universe is absolutely determined, then thinking has no meaning because if the universe is determined, then you think what you think because you couldn't think anything else.
So thinking suddenly is divorced from the enterprise of knowing reality and that's a little discouraging to those of us who butter our bread in the fields of philosophy.
So I think it's very mysterious. The model that I use for all of these psychedelics is a mathematical model, not a psychological model or a spiritual model, but a mathematical model.
Mind, under the pressure of evolution, under the pressure of the need to defend self and offspring, has folded itself down into the three-dimensional space-time matrix of the body.
Mind has sort of, has crippled itself in order to care-take the body and the here and now. Well, when you take these psychedelics, it's like it's severed, the mind is severed from the physical envelope and you wander in a much larger dimension.
And it is literally a higher dimensional manifold and that's how these apparently miraculous and magical things...
That's why the shaman can see into a human body because in a higher dimension, the inside and the outside is the same place. There is no distinction.
It's an inner sensorium that has a higher dimensional character to it. It's a great mystery, you know, and it doesn't need to detain us here, but it's a great mystery the relationship of consciousness to number and of nature to number.
After all, nature is nature, the deployed three-dimensional physical world in its dynamic. Numbers are abstractions generated so far as we know only by the human mind. They are inventions of the human mind.
And yet nothing is as descriptive of nature, no tool is as powerful a descriptor of nature as mathematics. Why is this? Well, Ayahuasca seems to say it's because the mathematical, the higher mathematical dimensions of the world are objects not merely for abstract, deductive discovery...
...but for experiential encounters. And then if this is true, then our world as we experience it in the here and now and day to day is hopelessly limited and circumscribed.
It's a very limited world that we're operating in, inside our culture, inside our language, inside our body and so forth and so on. And in the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the planned mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told.
Most of it can't be told.
What about your sense of self?
In the Ayahuasca system?
Yeah, in the ego and the general.
Well, I think that these things are very humbling. It's very hard to do if you have an ego that's very...
...for instance, if you're the kind of person that other people consider a jackass, it's pretty hard to do these things if other people's judgement on you is correct. The person who can dominate a noisy bar is not probably a good candidate for Ayahuasca.
That kind of bravado and machismo. I mean, Ayahuasca loves to take prideful people and rub their nose in them. I mean, it can make you beg for mercy like nothing. You have to really approach it humbly.
I mean, I speak from experience. I probably am easily betrayed into assuming I know what I'm doing and that's the moment when catastrophe strikes.
I always say to it when I go into it, I say, "I'm going to take a big dose, so please don't kill me. Here I am. I'm yours. I surrender. I hold nothing back. I didn't cut the dose. I didn't water the tea, so please don't kill me."
And it usually responds by not killing me if it's so amusing to you. You can't demand it. The real bad truth comes when you try to put the squeeze on it, when you try to force a piece of information.
See, that's the different thoughts in the cultural context of Ayahuasca in many areas where there's been a lot of social disruption, fear of being given up, or a hundred years of missionary influence.
And what still remains in the Ayahuasca culture is that the people always think it was some kind of intent to heal someone or to send a star to kill someone or something. They don't just take it to completely just throw it in the floor and just delay.
I think too, during the initiation, once they, like a shaman, or even a lot of the young people really, they'll just take it with something in mind. Of course there's exceptions, so the difference with that is that a lot of times, you hear a lot of weird stories about young upstart shamans that have a light and don't tap them.
There's a lot of weird black magic that goes on too, because a lot of people just don't know what it is. A lot of death though, it should be contributed to Ayahuasca, to black magic.
And I think a lot of shamans are, they like to just graze the underbelly of the thing. They're really concerned about their community and healing sick people and holding it all together.
There's an exceptional personality in any society, Amazonian or urban American, who is a go-for-the-dusto kind of person who just wants to get as loaded as they possibly can.
This shaman that I studied with in Peru, the Ayahuasca that we would take on Saturday nights of curing would be only about two-thirds as strong, and then every Wednesday night we would take it just he and a couple of other people.
He said this was our school, he said, this is when we learned on Saturday nights we cure the people, but on Wednesday nights we plunge to the death.
And it was a much more intense, quiet, inward kind of driving in those situations.
I think if I took Ayahuasca on a Wednesday, it would be simultaneous experiences.
Quite so.
If it were any day of the week, the way the community is loaded.
How would you compare the nature of reality or perceived reality under Ayahuasca and under mushrooms?
The thing about psilocybin that is so extraordinary, and I think enough people have experienced this now that we can make a generalization about it, the mushrooms talk.
They speak to you in your native tongue and at conversational speed.
And it's the damnedest thing. Until it happens to you, you can't imagine what somebody could be talking about.
Once it happens to you, you know exactly what they mean. The mushroom is animate and articulate and also kind of extraterrestrial.
Its hallucinations tend to the grandiose, the history ending, the galactarian destiny that awaits the biological overmind.
It's this ta-da, ta-da kind of thing.
Ayahuasca is biological and organic and you feel the spirit of the forest, like Rocio said.
It's more feminine. And after a good Ayahuasca trip, you feel like your eyes are just bugging out of your head because you've spent so much time looking.
The language of Ayahuasca is visual. It shows you and shows you and shows you and shows you.
And once this showing gets going, it's hard to shut it off.
It really wants to show, but it silently spills out this cornucopia of images and you sing and you manipulate them.
Where the mushroom is highly articulate, it also is visual, but it also can talk, which is just such an astonishing thing for a Westerner.
We are just not prepared for talking fungi.
Have you tried the two together?
I wouldn't do that actually because I think the monoamine oxidase inhibiting properties of the harmony would so intensify and synergize the psilocybin that you might find yourself swinging from the chandelier.
And the shamans don't do that either in the Amazon and you can rarely get an ayahuasca to give you the time of day regarding mushrooms.
They always say, "Well, we use mushrooms when we don't have ayahuasca," but the caveat is that we always have ayahuasca.
Is it common for women to stand in the jungle when they're taking ayahuasca?
It depends on the tribal, it depends on the people, but around Tukalpa there were women in circles. There was this woman, this ancient woman,
I believe it was the Ura Angulo, who just drank with the best of them and would recount outrageous visions. This lady must have weighed under a hundred pounds.
One of the shamans that we tried to contact in '76 is this famous woman who studied with Manuel Cardal-Barrillos, the guy who wrote "Wizard of the Apres," and her name was Juana Gonzalez-Opey.
She had come to him as a girl of 25 with leprosy and he had taken her into the woods for six months and cured her of leprosy.
Ayahuasca is definitely an unorthodox idea and she became a major ayahuasca in this area and her stuff was said to be the best.
But she had lost her hands and her feet, so the experience of taking ayahuasca with her was fraught with her presence, which was freakish in the extreme, especially in the flickering firelight.
We were sitting in a new field of medicine, healing the sound and the person's voice was analyzed, the spectrum analyzed, and the missing notes were provided to that person,
either by singing or humming. To get the person to just match the note that he's missing apparently will heal all kinds of ailments.
I'm wondering if you can see sounds, if the clearly narrow just can see by the sound that person's voice is making what's totally missing in his picture, and some thing that is missing.
Well, there's obviously some kind of diagnostic sensitivity to invisible stuff that we don't ordinarily perceive.
We were talking last week, some of you may have seen this, I mention it because I'm trying to confirm it.
I've seen on three occasions in my life, at about this life level, sitting watching someone in profile as you're watching me, on a very slight dose of mushrooms, there's something that goes on in front of the person's mouth.
It looks like oil in water. And my rational explanation for what this is, is that you pull air into your lungs and it is heated, and therefore it has a slightly different refractive index than the cold air in front of your face.
And so when you speak, the mixing of the hot and cold air can be perceived under some conditions, and I would photograph under some conditions, as a kind of oily, turbulent something in front of your mouth.
Well, is that cheerful explanation correct, or are we on the brink of something else, some more demanding or exotic phenomenon?
I'll come back just a little bit, I should probably mention, a friend and I have been growing ayahuasca clones, I guess it's from your clone actually, for three years, and in the lack of the psychotherapy or DMT additives, my friend has reported numerous successes with shrooms.
Adding the shrooms to the ayahuasca?
Yes.
What proportion do you know?
Not sure.
It's interesting to know. I think you might be able to get away with that. Probably what it would be is a fair bit of ayahuasca and a tiny bit of mushrooms.
One of the longest, hardest beatings I ever spent was, I got the idea I would take half a dose of ayahuasca and half a dose of mushrooms, and I felt like I was battling demons to return with a shred of my sanity.
I mean, it was just ghastly. I was pretty phobic with that combo.
You took them at different times?
No, I took them together. Two and a half grams of mushrooms and half a dose of ayahuasca and it turned me every way but loose.
And it was unpleasant. I really thought I had done it this time. What it did was it interfered. It was very clear what was happening.
What seemed to be happening was that it was interrupting RNA transcription of short term memory. So I knew who I was and my history and how I had gotten into this situation, but I couldn't remember the last three minutes at all.
And this would create this anxiety in me. And then I would forget why I was anxious. And then that would create more anxiety.
And I was into some kind of intellectual redress. I was just riveted in this chair and I thought, if this doesn't un-smath itself, they'll just put me in a ward somewhere. I'll just be carried out here.
And it felt like that scene in 2001 when the guy is outside making the repair and then he comes back and says, "Open the pod door, Hal."
And I said, "I can't do that, Dave." Well, it was almost easy. And in that, it's machinery. Interesting math. I had this very clear vision of, "Oh God, it's gone down the wrong pathway."
The degradation sign has somehow been locked out of the process. And here we are, folks, circling the airfield, running out of fuel, zero visibility down below.
And after about two or three hours of this, it evades us.
You should show your foot. It doesn't preclude continuing this. It will just jack it to a higher level.
Beyond Psychology
I'll have to begin by correcting Rob.
Actually Jonathan Arth wrote "The Palisinogens of North America."
I wrote "Silicide and the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide" in corroboration with my brother.
I was originally going to call this talk "Monkey's Discover Hyperspace," but I decided that that
was a little outrageous and I settled on "Palisinogens Before and After Psychology."
So before I dig into that subject, I'll say a bit about how I come to have an interest
in these substances and their very peculiar effects.
Years and years ago after an LSD trip, I imagined that I perceived a relationship between the
experience and the motif of Tibetan religious art.
And accordingly I went to Nepal and took up residence in a village of Tibetan refugees.
And I quickly learned that the shamanism that I wanted to study was inaccessible for reasons
of language, for reasons such as that the Buddhists who were teaching me Tibetan looked
a stance that the shaman that I wanted to associate with.
And I realized then that the association between shamanism and hallucinogens is such that both,
in a way, are taboo and when you deal with preliterate cultures, you discover that the
shaman is a very peculiar figure.
He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community, but in a
way he's always peripheral to it.
He lives at the edge of the village.
He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis.
He is feared and respected and this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances.
They are feared and respected.
They are misunderstood.
They are only called upon often in moments of great crisis and they are a persistent
but always peripheral part of the community.
And I saw this in Nepal among Punto Tibetan shamanism, which is a non-prolucinogen based
shamanism.
I saw it in Indonesia where techniques had been developed to induce chants that were
non-chemical techniques, specifically dance in the case of bali and lompoc.
And I saw it finally in the Amazon where I think I contested the primal shamanism.
As you know, there's a division of opinion on the matter of whether narcotic or, as I
call it, hallucinogenic shamanism is decadent or in fact primary.
And Mr. Liad took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent and Gordon Watson very
rightly, I believe, contravened this view and held that actually it was very probably
the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early man that lay the very
basis for the idea of the spirit.
So as I made my way through these various cultures and various hallucinogenic substances,
it came to my attention that in my opinion, and I believe in the opinion of Gordon Watson
and other scholars, Henry Mann comes to mind.
He wrote a marvelous essay called The Mushrooms of Language.
But in the minds of those who associated themselves with the mushroom, there were certain assumptions
about psilocybin that were different from the mythos that was arising around some of
the other hallucinogens.
Psilocybin, I think, of the more commonly available hallucinogens is the most visual
and it is certainly visual if it is done in the traditional manner.
And I'm always amazed at how little understood or practiced the traditional manner is, so
I'll sketch it for you.
The traditional manner of taking psilocybin is to take a very healthy effective dose in
the vicinity of 15 milligrams on an empty stomach in total darkness.
You've been there.
And in that situation, which is in a sense a situation of sensory deprivation, the psilocybin
is able to exfoliate itself to the fullest degree and to show you what it is, not against
the background of the reality that ordinarily surrounds us, but against the background of
darkness so that the pure essence of the thing can be shown.
And it is extraordinarily bizarre, extraordinarily difficult, I believe, to assimilate into your
world view.
And this is whether you're a borer youth undergoing initiation or whether you're a college student
or a research chemist.
These things do not lend themselves well to integration into language.
If they did, they wouldn't occupy this peripheral position after 10,000 years of human culture.
But above and beyond the visual intensity of psilocybin, the thing that sets it apart,
I believe, is a phenomenon that might be described as an induction of audio hallucination.
But in fact, to describe it that way is to fall back on a kind of medical jargon reductionism
because what it really is is a voice in the head that is separate from the perceived ego
function.
In other words, a voice speaks.
You hear it and it seems to be operating independent of the ego.
It operates in a psychophonic role as a teacher, as the narrator of the vision, which is revealed
much in the same way that Virgil led Dante through the circles of hell.
And the modern intellectual equippage is not capable of assimilating this.
This is the sort of thing that we associate with psychopathology.
We can hardly imagine anything more alien to modern consciousness than a disembodied
voice in the head.
However, if you familiarize yourself with Western thought on a scale of millennia, you
discover that not only is this not an alien phenomenon, but for much of human history
it has been inimical to the human experience.
And it is called, relying on the Greeks, the Logos.
The Logos is a voice heard in the head, and the Logos was the hand on the rudder of human
civilization for centuries, up until in fact the collapse of the ancient mystery religions
and the ascendancy of Christianity to the status of a world religion.
I'm sure many of you are familiar with the story in T-TARTS of the fisherman who heard
a great noise and saw something fall into the sea and heard a voice in the sky saying
that great pan was dead, that in other words the ancient gods had been eclipsed and in
fact in Jungian terms the ancient god by falling into the sea had been submerged in the faunus
unconscious and disappeared from the experience of ordinary people.
From that period on it was fifteen to seventeen centuries while Christianity worked out the
implications of its message, while science spun away from Christianity and created its
own set of modes, the new world was discovered, reason was enthroned, scientific method was
enthroned, and the civilization that we know arose around us.
But then in 1953 Valentina and Gordon Watson went to Guadalajara de Jimenez in the Sierra
Marzatex of Oaxaca and they discovered this mushroom cult.
And it's my belief that to this day we do not know what exactly it was that they stumbled
upon.
Mushroom, drugs, cult, all of these ideas about what it was rests on the assumption
that we know what we're talking about when we talk about mind.
And in fact everything that has been said at this conference has rested on the assumption
that we know what we're talking about when we invoke a concept like mind.
But the truth of the matter is, ladies and gentlemen, that after two thousand years of
grappling with the problem scientists cannot even tell you how you can form the conception
that you will change your open hand into a closed fist and it will happen.
This is an intervention of mind into the world of matter that no philosopher has been able
to give a satisfactory account of.
Now with the hallucinogens this intervention of one realm into another, of mind into matter
or matter into mind, is raised to a pitch of excruciating intensity.
And it's my belief that one of the unconscious reasons which underlies the odd attitude of
the establishment toward hallucinogens is the fact that they bring the mystery to the
surface as an individual experience.
In other words you do not understand the psychedelic experience by getting a report from Time magazine
or even The Economist.
You only understand the psychedelic experience by having it.
And therefore to understand this is to embark on a course of action of self-education outside
the context of your culture because your culture has no answers about what this thing might
be.
Okay, so much for that.
But psilocybin and BMT to a lesser extent, although it is so brief and so intense that
it's sometimes hard to sort these things out, invokes the logo or reintroduces the phenomenon
as the logo into the experience of modern people.
So what can we make of this?
I think we have to take it very seriously.
I think that the cultural crisis that we are involved in has to do, and by that I mean
the entire global cultural crisis leading possibly to the extinction of the species,
has to do with the fact that our models developed over the last 500 to 1,000 years have played
a fault.
They aren't working.
And the cultures that we have conquered with capitalism and technology, we have repressed
their connection into these intuitive realms.
We have established one method for the arbitration of truth, and everything which does not pass
through that narrow gate is relegated to the realm of mythology or, worse, cultural immaturity.
And yet we are the culture that is in crisis.
When you go to the rainforest, you don't find cultures in crisis except to the degree that
they are being impacted by us.
So I believe that it is no coincidence that in this moment of maximum cultural crisis,
which we call the 20th century, the hallucinogens, the entheogens, have emerged in Western culture.
It is no accident that Watson made his trip to central Mexico and contested the mushrooms.
What he discovered in the mountains of Mexico was nothing less than the eros, sleeping but
alive, the body of Osiris preserved over an entire astrological age, metaphorically speaking.
In other words, that to take the mushroom was to transcend the cultural momentum of
the past couple of millennia and return to a world where the Logos was a realized phenomena.
And we heard from Carl Rush last night about the Palestinian mystery.
This was not a minor phenomenon.
Over a period of 2,000 years, everyone who was anyone made the pilgrimage to Eleustis
and had the experience.
It put the stamp on Greek drama, Greek philosophy, later Roman politics.
All of these things were influenced by the hallucinogenic experience.
So our culture, spiritually, has played the role of the prodigal son.
We, for reasons of ideology, botanical geography, other factors, have not had visionary, ecstatic
Palestinians installed in our culture as we perhaps could have over the last several hundred
years.
Now that is changing.
In order to understand what the change means, you have to look further back in time, in
fact past history to prehistory, again to the model of the shaman, not the shaman as
the apologist described him, but the shaman as shaman dreamed him.
Because every shaman looked back toward an archetypal first shaman who was superhuman,
who did go to the stars, who could go to the bottom of the ocean, who could move through
the gates of death and return with a lost soul.
Now it seems to me when you pull back to the perspective of several thousand years, all
of history can be seen as an adumbration on this wish, expectation, hope for a superhuman
condition, for a transcending of the laws of gravity, of the laws of life and death
into a superhuman condition that was solitary for mankind as a whole.
In other words, the shaman, the archetypal perfected man.
Now this afternoon you heard Messner refer to alchemy as one of the reflections of this
concern with the perfection of the spirit.
It is about the projecting of a perfect substance which is the self purified, but it also led
the rise of modern science, basically through a misunderstanding.
Now it seems to me what's happening now is that what Massiliade calls the human desire
for self-transcendence expressed through the motif of magical flight has been taken up
by the technological society as the idea of space flight.
And I'm sure if Tim Leary were here he could speak to this more eloquently than I can.
Space flight is nothing less than the exterior metaphor for the shamanic void.
In other words, in our terms, for the hallucinogenic drug experience, this is the way that engineers
get high.
They go to the moon.
What we need to do to transcend our cultural schizophrenia and to feel the risk between
spirit and soul or world and self is to realize something which we all pay lip service to,
at least I'm sure all the people in this room pay lip service to, which is the idea that
the inside and the outside are really the same thing.
But I don't think the cultural implications of that have been clearly drawn.
What it means really is that all our genes of transformation have to be realized at the
same time and that we cannot go to space with our feet in the mud, nor can we in fact turn
ourselves into an eso-sensitive hallucinogenic based culture on earth unless we fuse these
dichotomous opposites.
It is only in a coincidentia positorum, a union of opposites, that does not strive for
closure that we are going to find cultural sanity.
And this is the thing that the enthusiasm, the hallucinogens deliver with such clarity
and regularity.
They raise paradox to a level of intensity that no one can evade.
And in doing that, they set the stage for turning yourself into the kind of person who
does not insist on having it either or, black or white.
And a culture composed of those kinds of people will be a culture more civilized than any
that we have seen so far.
If I can paraphrase
your question, I think that the most important thing is that we are all in the same place
of being.
We are all in the same place of being.
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And we are all in the same place of being.
And the question "What is consciousness?" cannot be divided away from the question "Is man good?"
And this is a question that we have to answer for ourselves, because I believe that we are not going to extinguish ourselves.
That we are going to evade the many obstacles that are so obviously ahead of us in the next few years.
We are going to reach the threshold of the galaxy.
But in what form?
And in order for the form in which we reach the edge of the galaxy and present ourselves to the hegemony of organized intelligence that must exist there.
In order for that form to be worthy, we are going to have to go with our minds fully illuminated in front of us.
And that means that we can have no more trust with the idea of an unconscious, of an inaccessible and dark part of the human psyche that cannot be controlled.
That is obviously a description of the childhood of an intelligent species.
And I believe that these hallucinogens signal the end of that childhood.
There have always been individual shaman who have made that transition.
And in that sense, the taking of hallucinogens is an unhistorical phenomenon.
It has always been going on.
But the idea of psychedelic society is something new.
And it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone takes the drug.
It merely means that the complexity and the mysteriousness of mind are centered in the consciousness of the civilization as the mystery which it comes from and which it must relate to in order to be relevant.
So I'll take a couple of questions.
[
Inaudible ]
Well, I guess the question is, is there any advice, due to the utilization of material, that would allow you to hang on to whatever perceptions I may have triggered in you?
I wouldn't presume to answer that question, but I'll answer another one that might relate to it.
Because I think that when you take hallucinogens, you should take an effective dose.
And I can't stress enough the importance of lying down and being still in darkness on an empty stomach.
I mean, if you want an oral empowerment, that's it.
Nothing could be simpler.
And yet you would be amazed at the number of people who when you mention psilocybin, the first question that occurs to them is, will I be able to drive?
[ Laughter ]
One more.
With regard to what?
Well, MBA, the word "impassinogen" or "impassagem" seems to me very appropriate.
It is not a powerful visual hallucinogen.
I'm very interested in the visual hallucinogens because it seems to me they pose certain fundamental questions about information theory and that kind of thing.
For instance, where do these hallucinations come from?
These extremely intricate, far more intricate than any visual scene that your eyes falls upon in ordinary reality.
These interesting, shifting information patterns.
I don't believe that they can be reduced to spirals, lines, and dots.
What I see isn't like that.
It's more as though you had a holographic hyperspatial radio and you just tuned down the dial.
And here's a desert world in a triple star system.
And here is a city somewhere inhabited by insectile creatures with a machine symbiosis.
Here is something else.
And it's just flipping by.
I would prefer to believe that the human imagination is the holographic organ of the human body and that we don't imagine anything.
We simply see things so far away that there is no possibility of validating or invalidating their existence.
One more.
I was interested in the practical theory of potential for dimethylscystin in short-action
Is there another time within that ticket frame to benefit from any deadly risk of death or is it a mission?
These short-action drugs have a profound lasting effect.
No, I think it certainly has a profound and lasting effect.
The very brevity of it serves to convince you that it isn't a drug at all but that it's carried you into another dimension and back again.
And that alone is something to ponder.
Well, I thank you for your attention.
I was at a meeting last year when Dr. Hoffman came and his opening sentence was, "You expected the shame when you're going to get a chemist."
When I was first asked by Dr. Gordon McCutcheon to come here tonight and talk about whatever I wanted to do,
my first impression, as long as I allowed my first impression, was to decline.
After all, I am a student of chemistry and of pharmacology and not really a student of philosophy and religion.
And I felt I had probably contributed as much as I could last year when I took chalk to blackboard and drew hexagons and tryptamine rings
and gave my impression of what anomalous fuel caused it to do what.
But my wife intervened. "Why not tell them just why you do what you do?"
It got me lost into an interesting question. I never had actually spoken to myself and said, "Why do you do what you do?"
The flippant answer is always at hand. Well, one does it because it's there to be done.
In the Mount Everest routine, I climb the mountain because it's there to be climbed.
But that is, of course, not the reason I do the research I do.
Whenever this question would come up in a seminar or during a panel discussion, I'd place special emphasis on the word psychotomimetic.
The word has been used quite a bit today, a term that is usually used by the scientific community when they wish to speak about the psychedelic drugs.
The term psychedelic does not find a good audience in the psychiatric or in the chemical or in the medical literature.
It carries a meta-message of drug use, drug encouragement, drug proselytizing.
As a result, the word is not often encountered.
In its origin, as was pointed out, it comes from psychoto, meaning in essence psychosis, and menisis, meaning imitation of.
This, indeed, is a term that very early in the work in this area, they had been given these materials because they had been cast in the role of causing syndrome,
causing symptoms that would reflect the character of mental illness.
It was felt by studying the effects of these materials in normal subjects, you might be able to glean some insight as to the mechanisms or at least the descriptions and definitions of the syndrome
in people who are spontaneously ill.
This explanation, the search for new psychotomimetics for materials that would be more exact in the definition of psychosis, is completely logical
in that all the hallucinogenics, the psychedelics that are known, can be classified in the materials that are indoles,
and there are many in this area, the tryptamines, the more convoluted carbolines, LSD as an ergot-type indole,
or it can be classified as phenethylamines, and there are perhaps some three or four scores on this classification,
the analogs of mesclun compounds that have been mentioned several times, or the substitution of variants of mesclun,
and the alpha-methyl compounds that have given rise to materials that are lumped chemically together as the amphetamines.
And there are two principal neurotransmitters in the brain. One is an indole, and this is serotonin, one is a phenethylamine, namely dopamine.
And it's very desirable from the point of a neurochemist to find pigging holes that can classify things.
Here we have a group of psychedelics that are all indoles, and we have a neurotransmitter that's indolic, serotonin.
Here's a group that are all phenethylamines, and we have a neurotransmitter that's phenethylamine.
All we have to do is understand why all of these work here and all of those work there,
and we should now know how the neurotransmitters work in the brain.
Unless we know that, we'll be able to cure mental illness.
Well, it's an appealing, and has not been a particularly rewarding classification.
And the explanation, besides being logical, is quite safe, because it's an unthreatening explanation.
It's easily accepted by the academic and administrative community.
But the explanation is still not the explanation of why I do what I do.
My work is indeed dedicated to the development of tools, but tools for quite a different purpose.
And here is where I want to get quite away from chemistry and into some of my own personal thoughts.
I'd like to lay a little background to establish a framework for these tools, and in part to define them,
in part to give emphasis to an urgency that I really feel associated with them.
First, I am a very firm believer in the reality of a balance in all aspects of the human theater.
When there seems to be a development of move that-a-way, somehow, very shortly, almost in concert,
there is a move this-a-way that keeps things in some delicate balance.
If there must be a dichotomization of concepts into good and evil, then all good seems to contain its unexpressed evil,
and all evil is unexpressed good.
Within the human mind there co-exists the eros, the life-loving, the self-perpetrating force.
With the thanatos, there is a self-destructive death wish.
Both are present in each of us, but are usually separated by a very difficult wall, a very difficult to penetrate wall, the unconscious.
One definition of the tools I seek is that they may allow words of a vocabulary,
a vocabulary which might allow each human being to more consciously and more clearly communicate with the interior of his own mind and psyche.
This may be called a vocabulary of awareness.
A person who becomes increasingly aware of, and so begins to acknowledge, the existence of the two opposite contributors to his motives and decisions,
may begin to make choices which are knowledgeable, and the learning process that follows such choices is the path that leads to wisdom.
But just as there is a balance within the mind that needs establishment, there is an interesting record of balances of the same sort in society.
Just look for a few minutes at some of the coincidences that have kept our human race in a rather precarious balance.
Throughout the early centuries of the current millennium, there were carried out some of the most viciously inhuman wars that were known to man,
all in the name of the forces of religion and the horrors of the Inquisition with its lethal intolerance of heresy.
And yet it was during these dark years that the structure of alchemy was established,
not to change base metals in the noble one, as it is often thought, but to acquire knowledge through the study of matter.
The work of the alchemist extended up to the age of enlightenment with the urges of rationalism and of skepticism,
and it was always directed toward the learning process.
The reward of alchemistic effort has been simply stated as the effort to achieve the transmutation of base metals into gold.
But as Ralph pointed out just a bit ago, this is not the actual reward.
The value was the doing and the redoing and the redoing of the process of distillation, of sublimation, of condensation, of precipitation.
It was a continual, ever more exact effort to understand these processes that from the learning of the process,
one would be able to find a unity between the physical and spiritual world.
It was the doing and the redoing itself that was the reward.
The last hundred years or so, this learning process has evolved into what we call science.
However, there has been a subtle shift in the goal from the process itself to the results of the process.
In this age of science, it is only the end result, the gold, that really matters.
It is not the act of achieving, but the achievement itself that brings one the acknowledgement of his peers,
that brings recognition from the outside world, that results in wealth and influence and power.
And these end achievements, these results, show the same dichotomy of directions which was so evident in previous centuries.
For years, there had been no separation of values. Neither direction had taken the colors of good or for evil.
But still, there were incredible coincidences of timing. For example, in 1895, Wilhelm Conrad von Lincoln
observed that when electricity was applied to an evacuated tube containing certain gases,
a nearby plate covered with barium, platinocyanide, emitted a visible glow.
And the next year, in 1896, Antoine Henri Becquerel found that these same metal-producing emanations were being emitted from uranium.
Radioactivity had been discovered.
But it was just the following year, at 11.45 a.m. on the 23rd of November of 1897,
that Arthur Hephter consumed an alkaloid that he had isolated from the peyote, dumpling cactus,
brought to the Western world by the irrepressible pharmacologist Louis Lavigne.
As Hephter wrote in his notes, and this is a quotation following 150 milligrams of mescaline,
"From time to time, dots with the most brilliant colors floated across the field of vision.
Later on, landscapes, halls, architectural scenes also appeared."
That's good metal-scaling discovery.
"During the 1920s and 1930s, both worlds, that of the physical sciences involving radiation
and that of the psychopharmacological sciences involving psychotropic materials,
continued to develop without any clear sense of polarity, without the mine is good and yours is evil duality that was soon to come."
Radioactivity and radiation were becoming the mainstays of medicine.
X-ray photography was invaluable in diagnosis, and radium therapy was broadly used in treatment.
Controlled and localized radiation could destroy malignant tissue while sparing the host.
And in the area of psychology, there were parallel developments.
The theories of Freud and Jung were being developed into increasingly useful clinical tools and approaches to mental illness.
And on the basis of experimental psychology, it was laid in the pioneering studies of Pavlov.
Another coincidence in timing, which in retrospect started a dividing of science on a separate path,
occurred during World War II.
In the late 1942, Enrico Fermi and several other scientists at the University of Chicago
demonstrated for the first time ever that nuclear fission could be achieved and could be controlled by man.
The age of unlimited power and freedom from dependency upon our dwindling fossil reserves had begun.
Just the next year, at 4.20 p.m. on the 19th of April,
Albert Hoffman consumed a measured amount of a compound which he had first synthesized some five years earlier.
As Hoffman subsequently reported, as a quotation following 250 micrograms,
"After the crisis of confusion and despair, I began to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted.
Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and closing themselves in circles and spirals."
LSD has also been discovered.
But then, still, and up until the last decade, it was the rich promise of the nuclear age,
first with the power and potential of fission, and later with the virtually limitless potential of fusion energy,
that carried the banner and the hopes of man.
And the area of hallucinogenics was categorized as negative, psychosis-imitating, psychotomimetic.
It was not until someone in the 1970s, sometime in the 1970s, that a strange and a fascinating
and rather frightening reversal of roles took place.
The knowledge of nuclear fission and fusion took on a death-loving aspect,
with country after country joining the fraternity of those skilled in the capacity for the eradication of the human experiment.
And to have such power leads to the threat to use such power, which in time will actually lead to its use.
But, as I said earlier, when one thing develops, there seems to spring forth a balancing of compensatory counterpart.
This balance can be realized with the psychedelic drugs.
What had been simply tools for the study of psychosis at best, or for escapist self-gratification at worst,
suddenly assumed the character of tools of enlightenment and of some form of transcendental communication.
If man's alter ego, his Thanatos, had been entrusted with the inperpetual knowledge of how he can completely destroy himself,
and this extraordinary experiment, then some development must occur at the eros side of his psyche,
that will and must afford the learning of how to live with this professable knowledge.
It is a communication between these two sides of the mind that requires an extraordinary vocabulary.
Where do these words come from, the words of this vocabulary?
All depend upon an intimate insight into the working of the human mind, but this can be approached in many ways.
The study of religion, of meditation, of self-yielding, provides a peace,
but in my mind also tends toward a retreat and hence a capitulation.
The efforts to amalgamate the two sides of the mind, as seen in the Tao of physics,
and the rich findings of parallelisms between the Eastern and Western philosophies,
may eventually explain all and allow some unification for the human purpose.
But I feel, along with many others, that the efforts being invested in the technology of destruction does not allow sufficient time.
It is possibly only with the psychedelic drugs that words of vocabulary can be established,
which might tunnel through the subconscious between the conflicting aspects of the mind and psyche.
It is here that I feel my skill lies, and this is exactly why I do what I do.
Where do we stand as of today? In the last handful of years, the forces of government and nationalism have amassed an unprecedented arsenal of destructive power.
The power is in the current arsenals of the world, if restructured into Hiroshima-strength weapons,
to detonate one bomb every minute on the minute for the next two years.
And the rationalized need to do so is becoming manifest at a frightening pace.
But in the last handful of years, a number of tools of communication have increased at a like rate.
There are currently nearly 200 psychedelic drugs known and described,
some touching at one, some at another, of the fibers that unify our minds.
By learning each of the structures of sensory communication in turn,
we might find a form of communication that would disarm our destructive compulsion.
And indeed, what form of tools are now available to us?
Some of the tools that are available, or rather that have been available, are the widely publicized drugs of psychopharmacology,
such as Mesclet, psilocybin, VOM, LSD.
These drugs played a role in defining the transition between drugs as entertainment, escape, turn on,
and drugs as instructive vehicles for learning, enlightenment, and insight, but at quite a price.
They had a high profile at the time that the scheduled drug laws were written,
and thus were made illegal and are not available.
However, in their place there are now many, many other materials,
some were limited in their instructive capacity, and some perhaps even richer.
And for everyone today, there will be ten tomorrow.
Let me describe a small sampling of the recently born materials a bit more in detail.
These are examples with some quotations in some instances of experiments in which there have been actually definitions of some aspect of sensory teasing apart
of the complex sensorium attack and effects that these materials can have.
DIPT is an abbreviation of NN-diasropropylcryptamine, a drug unique among the psychedelics in that it expresses a distortion in,
or to an extent a synthesis with the process of auditory interview.
It is perhaps one of the less available sensors to be teased apart for special study.
Many of the close relatives, as you well know, deal with the visual process and in some way will change or synthesize or modify the visual integrity,
but a rather interesting distinction between the drug-induced psychosis and endosomal schizophrenia is that very often in the latter the primary sensory character that is affected is the auditory influence.
A quotation following 20 milligrams of DIPT.
The telephone sounds partly underwater.
Here are signs of a pitch change on radio.
The absolute pitch down a major third.
Chord on the piano sounds out of tune, quite flat.
Music terrible, unlistenable.
The other senses seem in no way affected.
If I were deaf, I would have thought this an inactive drug.
Several hours after ingestion of the material, this note.
Hearing normal, piano back in tune.
MDMA or MDA is an abbreviation for 3,4-methylene-doxy-methamphetamine.
It's a tool of communication that has shown in recent years an extraordinary utility in opening communication between individuals.
This has promoted its use in psychotherapy, but has given promise as well as a vehicle for intrapersonal communication.
This particular drug has been used clinically in many applications and these today probably number in the thousands,
and it has commanded a remarkably good record of positive results.
A quotation following 120 milligrams.
We kept up a lively conversation covering many interesting aspects of our various family relationships.
The conversation was unusually insightful and free of defensiveness.
And following a 40 milligram supplement at the two hour point, gene glow with energy became very beautiful.
We talked freely and openly.
Every bush and plant looks utterly alive.
I'm entranced by a large rock.
As I look at its surface, I see the surface of a planet with mountains and valleys.
Little crystals of mica are like jewels.
Another material, 2Cb, is the abbreviation for 2,5-dymatoxy-4-bromophenethylene.
A tool and a word of vocabulary which ties the mental process directly and constructively into the physical soma.
The analgesic effects experienced with many, if not most, of the psychedelic drugs are not present with 2Cb.
On the contrary, there is an increased body awareness of every kind,
including skin sensitivity, heightened responsiveness to smells, taste, to sexual stimulation.
One experiences increased consciousness of physical health and energy,
or, on the other hand, sharpened awareness of any body imbalance or discomfort.
2Cb allows rich visual imagery and intense eyes-closed fantasy
without cluttering up the mental field of too many elaborations.
A quotation following 20 milligrams.
Along with the awareness of the body and the ability to deeply enjoy the fact that one is a physical as well as a spiritual being,
the experience of 2Cb allows exploration as far as one needs to go.
There is at all times full connection with all parts of oneself, the emotional and the intellectual, the intuitive and the instinctual.
It is a superb tool for learning and for growth,
and 2Cb allows one to recover baseline within six to eight hours using a maximum dosage of 25 milligrams,
usually lower in the area of 18 to 20.
Another drug mentioned earlier, ketamine, is an abbreviation for 2-or-sachlorophenol-2-cetamine.
The antithesis of 2Cb in that it effectively separates the mind and the body.
This allows the mind a separate and constructive state apart from the physical groundings of the body.
Although the primary clinical application of ketamine is as a dissociative anesthetic,
an increasingly important direction of study is now being directed to the psychological loosening that it allows.
MAL and CPM are abbreviations of the compounds that are fascinating analogs of mescaline,
namely 4-methylyl-3,5-dymethoxyphenethylamine and 4-cyclopropylmethyl-3,5-dymethoxyphenethylamine,
two compounds that activate opposite sides of the sensorium.
The former provokes an intense visual distortion at the retinal level with consequential bizarre interpretations.
The latter displays its effectiveness in the fantasy counterpart seen only with the eyes closed.
Following 65 mg of MAL, a quotation, "Within two hours, intense effect. Beautiful, diuretic,
good connections between parts of myself, continual fantasy and imagery, lovely experience of the erotic with husband.
Around 12 hours, excellent solid sleep with clear, balanced dreams."
Following 70 mg of CPM, a two-hour strong effect but no visual.
Wonderful walking into music, deep loving, erotic very good, with eyes closed, intense, colorful fantasy,
much like LSD at times, mostly before 18 hours.
Unless anyone should have the impression, by the way, that research in this area leads always to God,
and to insight, and to deeper experiences and loving, let me mention an example of a compound called 4-TASB.
Which is 4-Thioethyl-3-ethoxy-5-methoxy-phenethylamine.
Following 100 mg exposure.
"At about two hours, pleasant and positive, peaceful feelings, very good humored.
Later, sleep impossible until early morning, and then only about two hours.
All next day could not rest or sleep. Feeling of nerve endings raw and active, anxiety over heartbeat.
Frightening effects on nervous system, depression, back of neck sore from tension.
My first experience of being able to detect what felt like continual electrical impulses between nerve endings.
Had the impression that if I allowed the wrong sequence of images to flow in my mind,
I might experience some sort of convulsion, or at least a kind of mental shock was sorting out.
When I tried to sleep, eyes closed fantasies became intensely negative and threatening.
I could not smooth out the nervous system. Felt very vulnerable. Do not repeat."
[Laughter]
Alpha-ODMS is an abbreviation of 5-methoxy-alpha-methyl-cryptamine.
An analog of a neurotransmitter serotonin that has been tailored chemically to allow it to enter into the CNS, into the brain.
There's a very potent indole psychedelic that touches closely on those areas involved with primal energies.
Several researchers experienced dreams of catastrophic events after exploring this material.
One researcher, however, had a dream which involved a complete science fiction scenario.
He found it absolutely enjoyable and is still thinking of writing it up and sending it into a publisher.
[Laughter]
These are only about a half a dozen or so of many scores of fascinating compounds that are now available for the study of this developing vocabulary.
This is where we are at the moment. Some materials show incredible promise and some suggest caution.
But what might we expect to emerge in the future?
Let's look at the past history of other areas of psychotropic chemistry.
A few decades ago, it was marveled at that drugs such as the opiates, including morphine and heroin,
and leperidine could have such an exacting influence on the brain's integrity.
Then it became known that there were natural factors in the brain that had these actions,
that there were specific sites in the brain that were predesigned to respond to them.
There were the encephalins and their fragmented portions known as the endorphins,
which were derived from the cephalic process and related to morphine.
These met a person's need for the suppression of pain.
Perhaps there are entedellics from the psychedelics and specific enescalins from esculin yet to be discovered
that might relate to these communicative factors, which might be connected
and eventually related to the natural receptor sites in the brain for transcendental communication.
Their structures may someday be known. Their functions may someday be understood.
There are a multitude of tenuous threads that tie together the fragile structure of the human spirit.
The life-giving with the death-demanding side, the exalted voice with the mundane,
the strongly centered self with the drive toward dispersion and loss of center.
These all coexist in all of us, but there is an essential blockade between these inner worlds
which I truly feel can be penetrated only with the words and the tools and the understanding
that may be most easily obtained through the area of psychedelic experiences.
William Blake said in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,"
"Man has no body distinct from his soul, for that called body is a portion of soul,
discerned by the five senses. The chief inlets of soul in this age, energy is the only life
and is from the body, and reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy.
Energy is eternal delight."
These are responses to a heartfelt need for some vocabulary
to allow the establishment of a dialogue that might diffuse the accelerating mad moves toward extinction.
My personal philosophy might well be lifted directly from Blake.
I must create a system or be slaved by another man.
I may be wrong, but I must do what I'm doing.
I will do what I can.
[sound of train]
Radio Interview (1) - Dennis Mckenna
is Dennis McKenna, Dr. Dennis McKenna,
the brother of Terrence McKenna,
the late Terrence McKenna,
who was on this program many times, was a good friend.
Terrence, God bless him, is gone now,
and I'm so sorry, he was such a great man,
he was such a great mind,
but you're about to have a strange journey yourself
because his brother Dennis,
(muffled singing)
He almost, frankly, he sounds like a clone,
but I'll let you decide for yourself.
Last hour, we talked with Richard C. Houghton.
We've got a link up on the website right now
to the John Glenn statement made on Frasier,
or at least a sort of a little part of it.
You can see that little part right now
by going to my website at www.artbell.com.
Everybody's taking a look at that one.
NBC posted it, put it up there,
it's actual video with the audio,
and only a partial statement,
and then just to sort of wrap that up,
Ann in Albuquerque, New Mexico writes,
"Hey Art, is it possible that Richard C.
could be the Antichrist?"
Yeah, I thought about that.
Sure, it's possible.
(dramatic music)
(thunder rumbling)
Now, Dennis McKenna, who sent me the following box
bio on himself, I'm going to try and read this.
No guarantees.
For the last 25 years, Dennis McKenna has pursued
the interdisciplinary study of ethno-pharmacology
and plant hallucinogens.
His co-author, he is co-author, of course,
with his brother Terrence of The Invisible Landscape,
Mind Hallucinogens, and the I Ching,
Seabury Press, 1975, Citadel Press, '91.
A philosophical and metaphysical exploration
of the ontological implications of psychedelic drugs,
which resulted from the two brothers' early investigations
of the Amazonian Hallucinogens in 1971.
He received his doctorate in 1984
from the University of British Columbia.
His doctoral research focused on
enthro-pharmacological investigations
of the botany chemistry and pharmacology of
Akusa and Ukubi, two orally active,
I believe it's tryptamine-based hallucinogens
used by indigenous peoples of the Northwest Amazon.
Following the completion of his doctorate,
Dr. McKenna received post-doctoral research fellowships
in the Laboratory of Clinical Pharmacology,
National Institute of Mental Health,
and the Department of Neurology,
Stanford University School of Medicine.
In 1990, he joined Shaiman Pharma,
he joined Shaiman, Dennis?
- Yes.
- He joined Shaiman what?
- Pharmaceuticals.
- Pharmaceuticals, oh, pharmaceuticals,
as director of?
- Ethnopharmacology.
- Thank you, you're gonna help me right through this.
Then went back to Minnesota, I guess, in 1993
to join the Aveda Corporation?
- Right.
- Manufacture of a natural cosmetics product
as senior research pharmacologist.
- Pharmacognisist.
You wanna read the rest of this?
- No.
(laughing)
- He currently works as a scientific consultant
to clients in the herbal, nutritional,
and pharmaceutical industries,
together with two colleagues
in the natural products industry.
He incorporated the nonprofit Institute
for Natural Products Research, or INPR,
in October of '98 to promote research
and scientific education with respect
to botanical medicines and other natural medicines.
He is currently a senior lecturer
at the Center for Spirituality and Healing,
that's interesting, in the Academic Health Center
at the University of Minnesota.
Dr. McAnally serves on the advisory board
of the American Botanical Council
and on the editorial board of, Dennis?
- Phytomedicine.
- Thank you, International Journal of--
- Phytotherapy and phytopharmacology.
- Wonderful, founding board member
and vice president of the Hefner, right, Hefner?
- Hefter.
- Oh, okay, Hefter, a research--
- Hefter is confused with Hefner.
- I understand, okay,
a nonprofit scientific organization dedicated
to the investigation of therapeutic applications
for psychedelic plants and compounds.
He's also served as board member and research advisor
to Botanical Dimensions, a nonprofit organization
dedicated to the investigation of--
- Ethnomedically.
- Significant plants.
He was a primary organizer
and key scientific collaborator for the--
- WASCA.
- Project, an international biomedical study
of--
- WASCA.
- A psychoactive drink used in ritual context
by indigenous peoples and--
- Syncratic.
- Religious groups in Brazil.
He has conducted extensive--
- Ethnobotanical.
- Field work in the Peruvian, Colombian,
and Brazilian Amazon.
He has served as invited speaker
at numerous scientific congresses, seminars, and symposia.
Dr. McKenna's author or co-author
of over 35 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals.
His publications have appeared in the Journal of--
- Yes, No Pharmacology.
- European Journal of Pharmacology, Brain Research,
Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Neurochemistry,
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease,
Economic Botany, and Elsewhere.
My God almighty, Dennis.
Welcome to the program.
- Thank you, Art.
It's great to be here.
- And thank you for the help.
(laughs)
- Am I on the air?
- Of course you're on the air.
- All right.
- Yes, you're on the air.
And it's like listening to Terrence to hear your voice.
I was so shocked when I called you
and we talked on the phone.
I just sat there kind of blown away.
Just blown away.
- Yes, well, everyone says we sound the same,
especially on the telephone.
- Oh, and here on the air.
Believe me, you sound the same.
Now, when you and I talked on the phone,
putting all of this simply,
you said that you were more into the science of drugs
while your brother Terrence was, in my words,
probably more hand to mouth.
- Well, yeah, we sort of have a division of labor, I guess.
You could call it.
He was more interested in the philosophical
and metaphysical side, and I was more interested
in what you might call the nuts and bolts side, although.
- So in other words, when you would, for example--
- Obviously, there was a lot of overlap of those two things.
- So for example, when you would discover a new drug,
you'd say, "Here, take this, Terrence."
- Not exactly.
(laughing)
- Or Terrence said, "Hey, what you got there?
"I'll take that."
- I just got curious about how these things work,
and those of you listeners that are familiar
with our experiences in the Amazon
and have read The Invisible Landscape
will know that we came up against a number of things
down there that it's very hard for science
to get its hands around.
- Explain, no, actually, you know what?
I have never really heard the story
of what happened in the Amazon.
- Well, I don't know if we can go into it here.
It's kind of a long story.
- Well, maybe the high points.
- Well, those of you who've read my brother's book,
"True Hallucinations," will be familiar with it.
I would like to say, before we get into that,
I'd like to say that I very much appreciate
the support that has come.
It's been a rough couple of years here.
- And horrible, actually.
- And I very much appreciate the support
that came from many of your listeners.
There's really no way to thank so many people,
but while we were struggling with Terrence's illness
and his family, we always knew that we weren't alone,
that many people love Terrence so much,
and we could feel that support.
- Terrence had a brain tumor, for those who don't know,
and you know, Dennis, I interviewed Terrence
very much toward the end.
- Right.
- And his philosophic, he was so good with it.
His philosophical approach to the possibility
that he might die was incredible.
I had him on the air, and he talked about it.
He talked about it, and why did he have it together?
- Yes, he had it together.
He had it together, and as he said
in a couple of interviews, you know,
if the use of these plants and working
with these shamanic states doesn't prepare you
for what lies beyond, I don't know what does,
and I think that's true.
I think that, you know, a lot of his experiences in life
led up to that, so there were no real surprises,
and you know, in the latter stages,
he was, I think he was very much ready
to take control of the starship
and let it take him where it would,
but I did want to express my gratitude
to so many of your listeners that were,
you know, part of that struggle.
- Well, I had Terrence on many times,
and the audience knew him as one of their own,
so it could not have been any other way.
- That's right.
- He was absolutely, Dennis, a remarkable,
one of the most remarkable men
I've ever had the pleasure to know,
so I guess that's pretty good as remembrances go.
One of the most remarkable people I've ever known.
God, what a mind he had.
- Yes, he had a great mind, and he was a remarkable person,
and in ways that, you know, the world is a poorer place
without him, and I'm very lucky to have had, you know,
to have grown up with him.
I mean, he was obviously a great influence
on me and on many people.
- Well, anyway, the two of you did go to the Amazon,
and he never really talked a lot about that.
We touched on it, but he never really talked a lot
about the nuts and bolts of what actually went on down there.
- Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Well, I guess, you know, how to get it done,
how to get into this story, you know, we both--
- Okay, why did you go down?
What made you go down there?
- Well, we both grew up in the '60s, of course,
and I guess you could say we were hippies
during that period of foment in the United States,
and, you know, I was in Haight-Ashbury in '67,
and Terrence was living in Berkeley,
and so we were interested, we were interested in psychedelics
you know, and sort of in an experimental phase
of those with our lives, but the one that stuck out
in our experience at that time was one
that still is fairly rare, and that is DMT,
which stands for dimethyltryptamine.
Back in the '60s, it used to be called
a businessman's trip because it's so short,
the way in duration, the way that DMT is normally taken,
pure synthetic DMT is, well, essentially,
you smoke the free base as you do crack,
and when you do that, it produces a very rapid
but extremely intense psychedelic experience
which lasts about 10 minutes.
- Terrence had a quote about that experience
that he used to say, he compared it,
I'm trying to remember what he compared it to,
but he had a--
- A rollercoaster ride or perhaps a rocket ship ride?
- Well, something about, yeah, a rocket ship ride,
but he said it was probably the closest thing
to heaven on earth or something fairly significant
like that.
- Well, I don't know if it's exactly heaven on earth
because it can be quite terrifying.
I mean, it's very overwhelming in that form,
and it's also sort of very hard to pull anything out of it.
It's such a profound and such a rapid experience
that you come back not really able to English much
that you experience.
I mean, about all you can say is my God, what happened?
And that was part of our motivation.
That was at least the exoteric motivation
for going to the Amazon because we had heard
in a paper by an ethnobotanist, R.A. Schultes,
about a very obscure hallucinogen used by the Witoto
in the Northwest Amazon.
This was called ukue in their language,
and it was a DMT containing sap or resin from a tree,
but what was unusual about it and what's unusual
about the pharmacology of DMT to a certain extent
is that DMT is not orally active.
It is, if you eat it, pure DMT, nothing happens because--
- You have to smoke it.
- You have to smoke it in the synthetic form
because it's inactivated by enzymes in your gut
and in your liver called monoamine oxidase.
- So it's gotta go straight from the lungs to the bloodstream.
- Right, or somehow bypass that system.
Now, in the case of ayahuasca, which is the other beverage,
the psychoactive beverage that forms the linchpin
of Amazonian shamanism and has been sort of
my preoccupation for 30 years, they get around this
by combining two plants.
They combine the leaves of one plant,
which they call chacruna, with the bark of a vine,
which they call ayahuasca, and the beverage itself
is called ayahuasca.
The bark contains compounds
which are monoamine oxidase inhibitors,
and when combined with the leaves of the chacruna,
which contain DMT, that protects the DMT from degradation
by this monoamine oxidase enzyme system.
So now it becomes orally active, exactly,
but it becomes a very different experience.
Instead of lasting 10 minutes,
it lasts more like three or four hours.
- Oh my.
- But the intensity is less.
So it's like the slowed down,
it's like you're seeing it at normal speed,
and when you smoke it, you're seeing it on the fast forward.
- Dennis, I have no frame of reference
to know what this combination of drugs is like.
Is it like LSD?
Is it a lesser experience?
- No, I wouldn't say it's a lesser experience.
It's a different experience than LSD.
- If you compare intensity levels.
- It, again, it's always related to dose.
I mean, ayahuasca can be extremely intense.
It's similar to mushrooms,
and it's similar chemically and pharmacologically
to mushrooms because that is,
I mean, psilocybin and DMT are--
- Mescaline?
- In the same chemical family.
Mescaline is in a different chemical family.
DMT and psilocybin are called, are tryptamines,
and mescaline and their ilk are in another class
called phenethylamine, so it's actually different.
But ayahuasca's unique in terms of its effect.
You can't really say, it's somewhat like LSD, yes.
It's somewhat like mushrooms, yes.
But it's really its own.
- And there's no language to describe the difference
from LSD or from some other experience
that somebody out there might relate to?
- Well, I think you could say LSD,
at least in my past experience, has been, excuse me,
tends to be more of a personal thing,
more psychoanalytic, more in a sense about you
and about your psychology, whatever problems you may have,
that sort of thing.
Ayahuasca can be that way,
but I think there are more transpersonal elements,
more archetypical elements.
It's much like dreaming, and it's like dreaming
while you're awake in the sense that you experience
many archetypal-type themes.
And it's, well, I guess that's the best way to describe it.
People do use it for self-examination and psychotherapy,
but it seems to incorporate, it seems to be, I guess,
more of a direct pipeline to the collective unconscious,
many of what--
- Now, that's something Terrence said about it.
- Right.
- That's something Terrence said about it.
- Right, and I would agree--
- Dennis, Dennis, doctor, we're at the bottom of the hour.
Should I call you doctor or Dennis or both?
- Dennis is fine.
- Dennis is fine.
All right, stay right there, Dennis.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
And don't do any of this.
If you wanna listen, that's fine,
but nobody's encouraging you to do any drugs.
Stay natural, you'll be happy.
♪ The drums are going tonight ♪
♪ She hears only whispers of some quiet conversation ♪
♪ She's coming in 1230 flight ♪
♪ The moon at which ♪
Radio Interview (2) - Dennis Mckenna
My guest is Dennis McKenna, Dr. Dennis McKenna, the brother of the late Terrence McKenna,
who's on the show many times with me.
And we have had many discussions on this program about drugs, and we're going to touch on many
of them tonight.
And none of this discussion should be interpreted by anybody out there as an indication that
you should go out and do it.
This is an examination of what some of this is all about.
That's all.
Drugs are part of our life.
Drugs are very much part of our life, whether the over-the-counter type, the type you get
at the store where it says "drugs," or the guy down the street.
You know, drugs are part of our society, actually a very large part of our society.
So dare we talk about them?
Absolutely.
Once again, Dr. Dennis McKenna.
Dennis, welcome back.
Thank you.
How much of the experience of the drugs themselves crossed into a sort of a metaphysical search?
How much of a part of all of this was that?
Well, I think at that time in our lives it was very much bound up with a metaphysical
search.
We were so impressed with the effects of synthetic DMT and so sort of frustrated with the rapidity
of the experience.
That was the rationale for going to the Amazon to look for this orally active, this very
obscure orally active form called Ukuhay.
As it turned out, Ukuhay, which I returned to the Amazon ten years later and did part
of my doctoral work, turned out not to be that interesting.
But in the process of investigating these things, we encountered the mushrooms when
we went to La Chorrera for the first time and eventually ayahuasca.
And those are the orally active tryptamine hallucinogens that really have more depth
to them.
I'm somewhat curious.
I would...
Well...
As you go to the Amazon, and there are...
Terrence and yourself are in the Amazon.
You're going to some natives way out in the middle of nowhere.
How do you begin to ask them, you know, what plants?
Take us to the plants.
We want to have this experience.
How do you approach them?
Well, we were very naive at the time.
We didn't really know.
We had read a few papers from Schulte's work from the Botanical Museum leaflets that reported
this for the first time.
We just, you know, we were 20 years old, 20 and 24 years old respectively.
I mean, we figured, you know, the world was our oyster and we could just go down there
and get to it.
And as it turned out, that wasn't so far wrong.
There was an amusing incident when we were on the way to La Chorrera, which is the ancestral
home of the Huetoto and this area of diffusion where this ucuhay is most widely used, even
though now it's pretty much a dying cultural tradition.
But there was a Colombian anthropologist at one of the villages that we passed through,
Dr. Calle, and he claimed that, you know, if we went and asked the people for ucuhay,
most would not know what we were talking about because it was a secret that only the shaman
knew.
And if we chanced to ask a shaman, he would probably kill us for even mentioning it.
Really?
They told you that?
Well, he told us that, but he was a little paranoid himself.
So as it turned out, it wasn't so bad.
And when I actually went back in 1981 as a graduate student to sort of more systematically
go about this, I went to a different place.
Colombia was difficult to travel in at that point.
And I went to Peru to a village called Pucuercio, which is just north of the Amazon downriver
from the city of Iquitos.
And that is sort of the new home of the Uetoto after they were driven out of Colombia during
the rubber boom.
And so I went there and interviewed many people and sampled many collections.
And what I found was that, you know, it's a kind of a disappearing tradition among these
people who have been, you know, very much culturally impacted.
And it was kind of like, well, I remember my grandfather knew something about this.
Really?
You know, my father knew something.
I can try and make it.
Of course, they didn't speak English or even Spanish.
We were working through translators.
But that was, you know, that seemed to be the position it held at that time.
But we did find one or two older people, older shaman in this group who really did know how
to make the real stuff.
And so, you know, we did end up getting samples, bringing them back to the lab and being able
to, well, for my personal reasons, complete the thesis.
How long were you there in both instances?
Well, in 1971, when we went down, we weren't really there that long.
We went down in January of '71 and came out around the end of April.
That's quite a while.
Right.
And in '81, when I went to Peru, I wasn't a Pukorokio the whole time.
I was traveling all over the country because I was also investigating ayahuasca.
I was there about five and a half months.
Oh, no, that's quite a while.
That's a while.
Yeah.
Did you actually live out with the natives for a while?
Part of the time.
Part of the time.
But when you are working with ayahuasca, ayahuasca in the Amazon among the mestizo populations
is really a sort of an urban phenomenon.
There are still tribes out in, you know, up the rivers that are using it.
But it's sort of, it's become amalgamated into mestizo folk medicine.
So it's really on the outskirts of cities like Iquitos and Pucallpa.
How much longer will all of this even be there?
In other words, you're saying it's being assimilated, it's disappearing.
In another 10 or 20 or 50 years, would you not be able to make that trip with the same
results?
It would be difficult.
I mean, a lot of these indigenous tribes are definitely in a state of cultural decline.
They've been impacted by so many factors.
You know, relocation, dislocation, and loss of their cultures.
But in mestizo folk medicine, where ayahuasca is commonly used and is kind of the, you know,
at the center of a whole pharmacopeia of medicinal plants that these people use, it's, you know,
I think that tradition is going to survive, especially now that there's so much interest
from American tourists.
I mean, this whole industry of drug tourism, you know, which I don't necessarily think
is entirely a bad thing or a good thing.
But it's, in a sense, it's been a shot in the arm to the traditional people.
You mean there are people that virtually, they're drug tourists, they go down there
just to...
People that go down to have these experiences, usually with ayahuasca.
The problem is that there's also, you know, anytime there's a revival, there's also a
lot of charlatans.
It's not easy to get to the people that really know what they're doing, but you can easily
find anybody on the street corners of Iquitos who'd be willing to sell you, you know, something
that they call ayahuasca.
You couldn't really be sure that that's what it is.
But yeah, so, you know, it's a mixed bag.
But I think, you know, one of the positive things about it is that these, some of these
people are sincere and they are rediscovering their own traditions.
I mean, I don't think ayahuasca is going to go away very soon.
And in fact, you know, there are indications that it may be spreading and that, you know,
again, that has negative and positive aspects about it.
Let's talk a little bit about it.
I would like to say, I appreciate that you sort of put in that caveat there at the end
of the hour.
I'm not on this program to advocate that anyone should use any of these things.
I think that they should be investigated.
I, you know, I disagree with the whole strategy of the war on drugs.
I think that's very shortsighted and I think that people should have, you know, personal
choice to form relationships with plants, which is basically what this is about.
And when I say, I do have a lot of trouble with the war on drugs, particularly the way
it's being orchestrated disproportionately with regard to marijuana, for example.
Well it doesn't, I mean, it simply doesn't work.
I think the thing to do, you know, a better approach is to enable people to make informed
choices.
And, you know, when I say reform relationships with plants, I use that term deliberately
because I think when you choose to use a drug of any sort, you're choosing to have a relationship
with that substance.
And, you know, just as you should be careful in choosing your friends and choosing the
people you want to hang out with, you should be careful and make informed choices in terms
of the substances you, you know, you put into your body and particularly with the psychedelics,
the circumstances, the set and setting that Leary talked about is so important for the
effects.
And that is why shamanism is really the model.
These people have been working with these substances for thousands of years and, you
know, if we're going to develop models, whether psychotherapeutic or shamanic or whatever,
but you need to, in order to use these substances safely and, you know, in a way that has benefits
and I believe they can be used safely and they can be beneficial, but the context is
so important.
And this is the problem that in this culture we lack that context, we lack that traditional
context.
How's against these drugs now in America?
Which drugs?
Well, DMT.
DMT is a controlled substance, definitely.
When it comes to plants that contain DMT, of which many, many do, because DMT is a very
simple compound and it's very widespread in nature, the situation is much murkier.
It's not clear, in fact, the plants themselves, as far as anyone knows, are not illegal, but
then they contain a controlled substance, DMT.
Our own brain contains DMT.
So this is creating some legal conundrums right now.
How can you ban all plants containing DMT without essentially criminalizing all of nature?
You know, DMT has been detected in over 150 species of plants and that's only because
somebody's bothered to look.
My personal belief is it's probably found in thousands, if not tens of thousands of
plant genera.
Doctor, quick question for you.
Hallucigens, the entire family, as a whole, are they addictive, physically addictive in
your opinion?
No, no, they're not physically addictive.
They don't work on that part of the brain that leads to addiction, which substances
like cocaine, for instance, have a completely different neurochemistry, neuropharmacology,
and they work on the parts of the brain that have to do with our pleasure sensations.
So they tend to create a craving.
If anything, the hallucinogens are anti-addictive or you're certainly, you know...
Some people would take it and say, "I'm not doing that again."
Exactly.
You sort of have to get your courage up to keep doing it.
So yeah, they're definitely not addictive in the physiological sense or the psychological.
Are there diminishing returns as one continues to use it?
Again, I think that depends on the substance that one is using and it depends on the context
in which you use it.
If you use it for recreational purposes or without any real intent, I mean, in taking
ayahuasca they always emphasize that it's important to have an intent, then I think
after a while there are diminishing returns because you have no framework in which to
understand it.
On the other hand, if you're working in a context, whether it's something that you create,
you know, sort of your self-referential context for learning or whether it's a more traditional
shamanic type context, then I think there are anything but diminishing returns.
I mean, that's the thing, particularly with substances like ayahuasca.
People shouldn't get involved with it without knowing that it's really a life's work, it's
a path, it's not an instant, you know, it's not a fast track to enlightenment or anything
like that, it's like any other discipline.
And to be involved with ayahuasca or many of these substances really, what I call the
classical hallucinogens, it's a discipline and people should approach it that way.
Alright, back to the war on drugs for just a second.
Do you delineate in your own mind the difference between the hallucinogens and cocaine?
For example, we've got, my god, over 2 million people in jail in America right now for various
drug violations, very few of them, no doubt, relating to DMT or any other class of hallucinogens,
but the majority cocaine and heroin and that sort of class of drugs.
Right, right.
Well, again, you know, where I think a differentiation could be made that might be useful and might
actually help clarify some of the issues on the war on drugs are to make a distinction
between plants and compounds.
If you look at the way coca is used in Peru among the indigenous peoples or even opium,
you know, as a plant substance, it's much less harmful.
Yeah, they chew it.
Much more difficult to become addicted or abused.
And I think if the drug warriors were to say, we'll make a distinction between plants and
drugs, we will focus on substances that are extracted, purified or synthesized, plants
we're not so interested in.
90% of the drug problem would go away if they would just, you know, say, you know, we're
not going, I mean, for, I mean, primarily cannabis would drop out of the debate.
Sure, oh, right away.
Well, it's an herb and we're not that concerned with it.
Well, what would happen if they brought coca plants, raw coca plants to America and began
selling them on the street or in a store, you know, as they are sold in South America
and used and chewed, would it be an instant hit or would it be sort of, hey, what's the
big deal?
It would be, hey, what's the big deal?
I don't think most people would bother with it because, you know, because it is no big
deal.
I mean, coca coca is traditionally used, you know, as about as harmful as green tea.
You know, there have been studies that show that coca, you know, among the people who
live in the Andes who depend on it, it's an appetite suppressant.
It also supplies minerals and vitamins that they don't ordinarily get in their diet.
I mean, chewing coca leaves is, you know, really has, it's like, you know, it's about
as bad a habit as drinking coffee.
I was going to say, is it like coffee?
Yeah, it's somewhat like that.
All mild.
And you think for the purposes of settling this damned war, this God-forsaken war, we
could delineate between plants and purified substances from plants?
Well, I think that that would, yes, I think that that would be a step in the right direction.
And if the government were to say, we're going to focus our efforts on people that are extracting
or synthesizing or making these pure substances, which are much more easily abused and inherently
more dangerous because they're more potent.
You know, I think that that would be a step in the right direction.
I don't expect it to happen because I personally, you know, I don't think personally that the
war on drugs is particularly about protecting people from drugs.
You know, if that were the case, then all the focus would be on tobacco, you know, which
is an herb.
It also kills 400,000 people a year in this country as opposed to all other drugs of abuse,
which killed maybe 20,000 people a year.
Absolutely.
All right.
So, you know, here we are at the top of the hour already.
Time really flies.
You can find out.
So Dr. McKennah, hold on.
We'll get back to you after the news at the top of the hour.
We're talking about drugs, all kinds of drugs with Dr. Dennis McKenna.
I'm Art Bell.
Radio Interview (3) - Dennis Mckenna
Our guest is Dr. Dennis McKenna and we are talking about drugs.
We're talking about plants and we're talking about drugs and we're talking about the drug war and we're talking about all kinds of strange things and interesting things.
So I suggest you stay right where you are because we have only just begun.
Once again, here is Dr. Dennis McKenna.
Dennis, welcome back.
Thank you.
I have a question for you that you cannot, you certainly don't have to answer. You can consider it, not answer it.
I spoke with Dr. Timothy Leary before he passed away briefly and had set up an interview and of course there wasn't enough life left and we never made it.
Uh huh.
Although he was very comfortable to the very end. He had a big cylinder next to him. It's a long story.
Anyway, when I interviewed Terrence, I asked Terrence something that I had heard about Dr. Leary and that was that out there somewhere, buried or secreted away in a place that might still be found, it is said and has been said for years, there are 20,000 hits of Blue Sandoz LSD.
Uh huh.
And Terrence chuckled a little and didn't exactly say he knew where they were, but he didn't say he didn't know where they were.
He didn't know where they were.
You don't think he knew?
Of course not.
Well.
I think that's an urban myth.
An urban legend, you really think so?
I do.
You don't think Timothy socked him away somewhere, huh?
Well, I don't know. Maybe he did.
Maybe he did, right.
I hope they're cold anyway or they won't be much good.
Well, that's true, isn't it?
Alright, so urban legend. Okay.
Somebody writes, and I've got this screen I can look at, this computer screen, and people can send what's called a fast blast and ask questions.
Somebody writes and says, would you ask Dr. McKinniplee if the spraying of defoliant in South America, which we are doing now due to the whole drug war thing, is affecting these plants in the areas that you talked about?
Well, yes. It's affecting everything in the areas that we're talking about.
I actually, Dr. Mark Plotkin, who is an ethnobotanist that many of you may know about, he's very well known as the author of Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, among other things.
But he is working down there with his nonprofit group called the Amazon Conservation Team.
And he has been doing quite a bit of work in southern Columbia and has seen firsthand the impact of this defoliation.
It's not only, I mean, the problem is that it's very hard to target the defoliant only on the coca fields.
It also drifts over the crops that these people depend on for their food and the villages where the people live.
And anyone can go down there and see that the impact is tremendous.
I mean, children with terrible skin diseases, it's definitely impacting those people.
And it's, well, you know, it's outrageous. It basically amounts to international criminal behavior on the part of the United States, in my opinion.
There's got to be a better way to deal with this problem than toxifying the environment.
Again, that's a war against the plants. It's not a war against the people that are extracting and purifying.
Well, yeah, it's a war. It's an attempt to exterminate the plants, which is in itself a bad idea.
But the problem is it also impacts, I mean, these plants are growing where these people live.
And, you know, they also grow their crops in the same or adjacent fields.
So it gets in their food supply. It gets on the people themselves directly.
You know, this is just one of the consequences of this misguided policy.
Alright, a little about DMT and drugs like it.
I played a song just for fun, you know, before you came on, "Journey to the Center of the Mind."
And at one part of that song it says, but be careful, referring to the journey, "You might not come back."
Now, with LSD there were some people that essentially didn't come back.
And I've always wondered, and I'd like your opinion, do you think that these are people who were predisposed to psychological difficulties in the first place?
Or that the ingestion of whatever drug we're talking about here was the primary cause of extended difficulties?
No, I think that in most cases, I mean, the incidences of people who "don't come back" are extremely low, for one thing.
And I think that in most cases you can say that there were previous psychological problems and that the drugs, the LSD or whatever, was basically a catalyst, that they were at risk of psychosis anyway.
The problem, of course, is that these are the very people on the street level that are most likely to do something like that.
Well, again, this comes back to the whole issue. Number one, psychedelics are not for everyone.
And number two, you have to pay attention to set and setting.
The context is so important because, again, in the shamanic context, in the use of ayahuasca, for example, in Peru, yes, people do get into psychological difficulties.
They can have panic reactions or anxiety.
Many people often become convinced that they're either dying or that they're not going to come back.
But the shaman has a bag of tricks, essentially, and is able to apply some of those tricks, simply very simple things, such as singing one of these ikaros, one of these magical songs,
or blowing tobacco smoke over the person, or otherwise do things to calm them down and get them back on a stable setting.
That's why it's very important to have a structured context, some sort of ritual context.
Generally, it helps if there's a person, in this case the shaman, that people have confidence in, that they feel that this person is watching over them, or this group of persons.
That's one of the dangers with the drug tourism. Not all shaman are that experienced, and some you can't always trust.
It's better if you do this in a situation where you feel safe, and you feel like the people that you're with really are looking after you, and not just there to take your money.
That's the thing. I think in the context of our society, if these psychedelics, you have to place them in a category apart from all of these other substances, which are more recreational,
but the psychedelics are more of a spiritual or experiential thing.
But I think if these things are ever going to be used, in our culture we have to develop some kind of models, some kind of context.
It may not be traditional shamanism, we can't really integrate that into our culture, but we can take some of the elements and combine it with elements of psychotherapy, for example.
Well let's try this angle, doctor. What would you say would be the psychological or metaphysical benefits or gains that a person might reasonably expect to take away from the experience?
Well, it's hard to say, because the experience is as individual as the person, and a lot of it depends on what your expectations are. Again, getting back to this issue of intent.
Some people may take it, and in the case of ayahuasca it's generally emphasized that it's important to have an expectation, to express an intent. People may take it to have insights about their relationships, for example.
Or psychological problems, maybe depression or sleep difficulties, or even physical illnesses. People take ayahuasca to have insights about their physical state of health.
Other people may take it to solve problems, things that they're working on, intellectual things. It's taken for all these purposes.
So then it allows intense physical self-examination, or intellectual self-examination?
It allows for both, yes. Physical and intellectual self-examination. I think that ayahuasca is unique. While the hallucinogens themselves stand apart from all of these other substances as unique, I think that ayahuasca is again unique among that group, because I think that there is much more to its activity than just the psychological experience.
It's not that you take it, you have the experience, and then it's over. It continues to work afterwards, more than other hallucinogens. There's a lot of processing, both mental and physical, that goes on subsequent to the experience.
Maybe you could comment on this for me. There are many scientists investigating near-death experiences. Very, very interesting things produced by near-death experiences.
Associations with white light, relatives that have passed away, examination of one's own life, flashing by you, that sort of thing. Is there a relationship of the pharmacology that occurs in the brain between any of these drugs, and what might occur during a near-death experience, do you suppose?
Yes, I think there probably is. I think that these two territories interface with each other, or share a common border. It is known, for example, that DMT, and its close relative, 5-methoxy DMT, are both neurochemicals, they both occur in the normal human brain.
We're not sure what their functions are. People have suggested, my colleague, Jase Callaway, a scientist in Finland, who has worked on these issues, suggests that maybe endogenous, that is, internally occurring DMT, has to do with the modulation of dream states.
He's come up with a very plausible and testable theory that could show that maybe this is the physiological function of DMT.
Other experiments have shown that in stress situations, in states of extreme stress, and I think we can put death in that category, the levels of DMT in your circulation, in your spinal fluid, for example, and presumably in your brain, are elevated markedly.
So it's possible that in the dying state, the brain is actually programmed to turn these things out and modulate the experience, which is not to say that it doesn't reduce it to a DMT experience.
I think a DMT is probably an element of the process of dying, and probably of the process of being born as well.
Wow! That was a better question than I thought it was. That's really interesting.
I believe one of your guests was Dr. Rick Strassman on your program recently, or was that another?
It may have been another host.
Oh, he is a researcher, a colleague of mine and others in this field, and he was one of the first researchers to do some FDA-approved research on DMT at the University of New Mexico a few years ago.
He was using synthetic DMT, administering it by injection, but he has recently written a book on his research called "DMT, the Spirit Molecule," and it's very interesting.
He has some very interesting and provocative things to say in that book about the possible functions of DMT.
For example, he suggests that at the 49th day of conception, which is in many traditions thought to be the moment that the soul enters the body,
that the pineal gland, which is the source of one source, the primary source of these endogenous tryptamines, there is a spike in its synthesis of DMT.
I'm not sure what the basis of his statement is, but I think people with an interest in DMT should pick this book up.
It's quite interesting. I'm just in the middle of it.
Well, that's fascinating. On the 49th day, when some say the soul is inculcated, there is a definite spike in the DMT.
Or just in the brain?
In the brain, wow.
That's right.
Wow.
That's what he says. I haven't seen the paper for it, but this is what he says.
Oh my. That really is very provocative.
So it's not unreasonable to expect that at death something similar may go on.
Generally, in states of extreme stress or psychological stress, it's not unreasonable to think that that may trigger the release of DMT, which is actually released into the circulation as much as in the brain.
Besides the brain, the other organ in the body that synthesizes DMT is the adrenal glands, which are very much involved with the stress response.
Alright. Again, a question that you are fully... You're just welcome to not answer it, but while you've certainly concentrated on the science side of all this, it's hard to believe that back through the 60s and through the trips to the Amazon and all the time you spent with Terrence, that you stayed a pure academic, that you would not have experienced all of this.
So can we get that out of the way?
Well, yes. I have, and I think that's clear to everybody that knows our work.
Yes, I mean, I have approached it from a scientific standpoint, but you can't become a lens grinder or a telescope maker without occasionally looking through the telescope.
Right.
This is the analogy.
So was the experience for you, would you describe it in as profound a manner as Terrence did, or was it for you a different experience?
Which experience?
Well, DMT. We'll stick to DMT.
DMT. Yeah, sure.
Well, yeah. It was pretty profound. I mean, it is one of the most reliably profound experiences in the smoked form because it is so overwhelming.
In the orally active forms, it's sometimes extremely profound and sometimes not so profound, and again, it sort of depends on the circumstances and sometimes you get a leg up and sometimes you don't in these orally active forms.
But generally, I prefer, I think that the orally active forms are probably the way, if nature meant for man to take DMT, it probably should have been an orally active form potentiated by one of these MAO inhibitors.
Well, you know what? That's a really good question all by itself.
Do you think that God or nature, however you want to phrase it, intended for man to make use of these plants and substances as has been done?
Do you think it was intended that way? After all, they are here.
Well, exactly. They are here. I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea that nature intended it. I think that we are part of nature and we have always had a relationship with plants.
I think that is the context in which you have to understand the use of all of these psychoactive plants. It's part of a much vaster web of interaction that we have with the plant kingdom.
All of these herbal medicines that people are interested in, the whole interest in natural healing and medicinal plants and so on is really an attempt, I think, on the part of an alienated, urbanized culture to get back to nature, to literally rediscover their roots.
The psychoactive plants are within this context. I don't think there is somebody out there directing things. It's not like nature is conscious or God is telling us to take these plants.
It's that in the process of evolving on this planet as part of the biosphere, we have co-evolved with these plants and with these substances.
On the other hand, there were the Ten Commandments and he didn't tell us not to take them.
He didn't tell us.
No. Doctor, hold on. We're at the bottom of the hour. We'll be right back from the high desert.
I'm Art Bell. My guest is Dr. Dennis McKenna.
Radio Interview (4) - Dennis Mckenna
(thunder, growling noises)
Back now to Dr. Dennis McKenna, and we were talking about
the plants and the fact that they were here, and I said, well,
no commandments against interacting with the plants, or as you pointed out earlier,
having a relationship with them.
We have, it's been a co-evolution.
The plants have been here probably before the walking things,
but we're both here,
and they're here to be used or looked at or admired or
perhaps chewed on, or I don't know, what is,
what do you think is intended for human beings and plants?
Well, again, you keep using this word intention.
I don't think anybody is running the show.
I think that this is sort of an organic process that's going forward,
you know, evolutionarily.
The thing you have to understand about plants is that they're very different than animals.
I mean, that seems like an obvious statement, but one of the ways,
and the way that they interact with the world and experience the world is very different than we do.
One famous botanist made the statement that plants have substituted biosynthesis for behavior.
Now, what he meant by that is that plants, because they can photosynthesize,
they don't, they make their own food, and as a result,
they don't have, they don't have to go foraging for food because they can make it from sunlight and carbon dioxide and water.
One of the consequences of that is that they make a vast variety of chemical compounds.
They are virtuoso chemists,
and in the same way that animals interact with their environment through behavior,
through the famous fly, flee or fight reaction, these sorts of things,
plants interact with their environment through chemistry,
and they communicate with other organisms in their environment,
bacteria in the soil, fungi in the soil, other plants, insects, birds,
other animals that may feed on them, and human beings through these chemical messengers,
through these molecular messengers.
And the molecular messengers, if you know, speak in a figurative sense,
they speak to organisms on many levels.
They happen to also make chemical messengers that resemble our own neurotransmitters,
and you know, that's where it gets interesting for us, for this particular topic,
because then you're talking about plants that literally talk to you,
and they don't say anything, but when you ingest them,
their neurotransmitter-like chemicals interact with your neurotransmitter systems,
and you get some very interesting results.
And I think in some sense you're seeing the world kind of the way they see it.
I mean, I don't say that they use these neurotransmitters for perception,
but this process of chemically mediated coevolution between plants and humans,
and all organisms, you know, is a concept that I think needs to be explored.
You know, there is a field of science called chemical ecology,
which is basically this is the territory we're in here,
the way that chemical systems are used to mediate relationships between organisms,
and you know, it's a two-way street.
The plants, you know, we largely value plants, if you think about it,
for the chemical compounds they contain,
whether they be nutrients or, you know, cellulose,
which are fibers that go into textiles, or, you know,
or medicinal compounds that we may use, or these more neuroactive type compounds.
Or as you said in the beginning, nutrition,
and again then I proffer the word intended,
because whether it's a plant or an animal,
these are all things that coevolved with us,
and even the biblical scholars will say that the plants and the animals were put here for our use.
Now you can take that or not, but intended does seem like a reasonable word to me.
Well, if it's intended, I guess the question is, by whom was it intended?
Oh, we could have a conversation about that if you want.
Right.
I mean, is it, you know, is it God that's, you know, running the show,
or is it, you know, dome-headed beings in geosynchronous orbit,
or is it Gaia?
I mean, I'm more comfortable with the Gaia notion that the whole biosphere is in some sense an organism.
You can think of the, you know, the entire biosphere.
I mean, it's really a mega-organism or a super-organism,
and just as in a cell in the body, all of the processes of a cell between, say,
what's going on in the nucleus and what's going on in the cytoplasm and on the membrane,
that's all controlled and coordinated through chemical messengers that are shut,
laid back and forth from the membrane to the cytoplasm to the nucleus and so on.
The same thing is going on in the biosphere.
The biosphere is permeated with chemical messengers, and many of them are made by plants,
and plants are very good at it.
I mean, they use these molecular messengers to establish relationships with all sorts of organisms in the environment.
Well, that makes a war.
Insects, for example.
Insects are probably the primary example.
Okay.
Plants depend on insects for their pollination in many cases,
and the insects, of course, get benefits from the plant in the form of nectar and pollen,
which they collect as food sources.
So it's a symbiosis.
This notion of a symbiotic relationship, which has been very extensively studied between plants and insects,
not so extensively studied between plants and humans, but that's the key term, I think,
that you have to come at it from that angle.
What we're looking at here is a plant-human symbiosis that has impacts on the plants and impacts on us.
So then a war on plants is really screwing with Mother Nature.
Well, it's a really misguided idea.
I mean, what gives us, we're only one species in the biosphere,
what gives us the right to decree that some other species,
just because it happens to be a plant that produces a chemical that our society has not been able to come to terms with,
do we then have the right to decree that this particular plant should be exterminated from the face of the Earth?
I don't think so.
I mean, if we were talking about an ethnic group of humans, this wouldn't be tolerated.
Okay, then instead of, bearing in mind the fact that we cannot come to terms with it,
instead of going to war against it, how do we come to terms with it?
How do we come to terms with it?
Well, for one thing, again, going back to making a distinction between plants and chemicals,
I think that's part of the thing.
And you say, okay, if you want to grow marijuana in your backyard, if you want to grow mushrooms,
if you want to grow opium even, you know, we don't care.
Whatever you do as a gardener is not of concern to us.
We're going to focus on the harder drugs, the drugs where there have to be infrastructures of creation and distribution,
and you have to have, you know, that's one aspect of it.
And then the other aspect of it is simply education.
I think you have to give people the tools to make informed choices about, number one, whether to use drugs.
Number two, if the answer to number one is yes, I want to use drugs, the second question is which drugs are you going to use?
And the third question is how are you going to use them?
And this is the problem with the war on drugs and the whole dialogue is there's this big scary category called drugs that all things are put into.
Well, there are drugs and there are drugs.
There are many different types of drugs.
And it seems that the drug warriors have set up this big scary bugaboo called drugs, but of course they don't include in that the drugs that they happen to favor, which are tobacco, alcohol, these things are also drugs.
Sure they are.
But I think we have to have a more rational dialogue about the subject and we have to stop scaring people and try to give them, you know, the tools to make informed decisions.
It all comes down to education.
And it's like saying, well, you know, you don't have to use drugs to have a full life and to have a completely fulfilled life.
You know, if you make that choice, fine.
If you do choose to use substances, know, you know, be careful about which relationships you form with these substances and the circumstances under which you use them.
It's no different than forming relationships with people, you know.
And Andrew Wilde said all this years ago in his book The Natural Mind.
I mean, nobody, you know, nobody listened then.
Nobody's listening now.
But that is the solution.
You know, nobody wants their kids to go out and get messed up with drugs, you know.
But the key thing is, you know, if you promulgate what is essentially misinformation, I mean, let's not put too far a point on it.
Let's call it lies.
Kids are not stupid.
They're going to find out.
And then, you know, they will disregard what you say.
So they say, well, you know, you lied about marijuana, so you must be lying about heroin.
And saying that for years.
And they've been saying that for years.
Yeah, nothing makes me angrier.
Why not have a reasonable debate?
I know, I know, I know.
Nothing through the years has made me angrier than the lies that are told about marijuana because, of course, they then cause the young people to just go right on up the chain.
And before you know it, cops put them in the back of a car with crack cocaine and off they go, part of the system, in jail.
Yes, that's right.
I mean, the laws that are designed to control the drug problem are having a worse impact than the problem itself.
I think Jimmy Carter said this.
If that's the case, then we need to rethink this whole dialogue.
And in terms of the psychedelics, I think that, you know, they do need to be used in a ritual context or in a fairly structured context.
And the use of guides or more experienced people who, you know, can kind of structure the experience.
Much as it goes on in shamanism, and shamanism is really the model, I don't think we can, you know, I don't think we can reproduce it.
But I think we can take a few pages from that book and try and implement it.
And I can envision, you know, in a more rational society, a situation where there would be a place or there would be a centre where one could go and have these experiences.
And it would be legal and it would be, you know, it would be beneficial to people.
We are not now that rational, nor are we even close.
No.
How far in the future, if you can just sort of stand back and observe our progression socially, how far in the future do you envision something like this might be a reality?
Well, it's hard to say.
I mean, it's really very hard to say because I don't see, I mean, I think that the people, as almost always, the people are way out in front of their government on this issue.
You know, most people feel that medical marijuana, for example, should be available to people that need it, to people that have diseases or chronic problems that, excuse me, that this could help.
I think most people feel that rather than being put in jail, people should be given access to treatments, you know, as their first option. There have been propositions passed in California to this effect and a couple of other states.
So the people have a much more reasonable approach to the problem than the government does.
The problem is the government tends to be slow to change and, you know, there's also a vested interest in keeping things the way they are.
Well, for example, you mentioned Jimmy Carter.
Yeah.
A lot of people thought that when Jimmy Carter became president, there'd probably be a move to legalize marijuana.
Well, lo and behold, it didn't happen.
It didn't happen.
Then people thought, well, next time we get a Democrat in office, it'll happen then. Lo and behold, it didn't happen.
Right. Because, again, I think this is a function of the fact that it's very hard for politicians to come out on this issue.
You know, even if they do feel that it's misguided, anytime you make a statement that is, you know, in the least perceived as being pro-drug, you're vilified.
I know.
You know, this is the problem.
And politicians as a group are not a particularly brave bunch of people.
That's right.
I mean, their decisions are based on, you know, what they think is going to get them reelected.
And there is such a vocal anti-drug majority or minority, actually.
I think it is a minority, but they're very vocal.
And so, you know, if you say, well, maybe we should take a different approach, then immediately they're pounced upon.
And no rational conversation is possible.
Doctor, I lived in a state where there was a rational moment.
I lived in Alaska when the Alaskan Supreme Court struck down the laws against marijuana.
And it became legal to have, to grow your own plants and to have, I can't remember, an ounce or two for your own personal use.
And that was a great success for a while in Alaska.
But then all of a sudden from Washington, D.C., they came rushing in and all conversations stopped.
The drug war was in full force and Alaska reversed it all.
Well, again, this is sort of the irony.
You know, the current administration and the, you know, the position of the Conservatives traditionally is get government off people's back.
And what I actually think they mean is get the government off corporations' backs.
You know, put, I mean, when it comes to what we do in our bedrooms or what we put in our bodies or how we handle our reproductive choices,
you know, these regimes are very, you know, very much totalitarian.
They want to control that kind of behavior.
They think it's very much their business.
And, you know, this is where the conflict is.
I take it you would consider yourself politically a libertarian?
I'm not, no, I'm not a libertarian.
I mean, I, about the only thing I agree with with the libertarian agenda is the notion that the substances should be regulated in a sane way.
No, I think government has a place in people's lives.
You know, I'm basically a liberal, I guess.
I think government should be concentrating on helping people and, you know, making people's lives better.
If you pay taxes, why not get some benefit from it?
I mean, what bothers me is that my taxes go for, you know, the war in Colombia, which is not being talked about in the media and is a war.
You know, or the missile defense system, you know, this completely absurd technological boondoggle that most of the experts say will never work.
I mean, these are the things that I would rather not have my taxes spent on.
Well, I agree with you completely, although certainly your view with regard to these substances is very libertarian.
And you say otherwise you're a liberal, which would generally mean to a lot of people that you want government involved in your life in a lot of areas.
But not in my personal life.
I don't want them telling me, you know, I want them to be concerned with the public health aspects of drug use and all of these other things.
But I don't really want them to say, you know, if you smoke this herb or if you drink this plant, you're going to jail.
And I think, you know, it's just absurd.
I'd rather have them giving, you know, a more intelligent level of support to that sort of thing.
All right.
You know, I would very much like to allow some of the audience after the break to ask you questions if you're up for that.
Sure.
Are you OK? Good.
Stay right there, then.
My guest is Dr. Dennis McKenna, the brother of the late Terrence McKenna, who appeared on the show many, many times.
And they're both obviously brilliant minds.
I'm Art Bell and this is Coast to Coast AM screaming through the night like a freight train.
Glad to have you along as a passenger.
Sit down.
Stick around.
Sweet dreams are made of the years.
You and mine to disagree.
I travel the world and the seven seas.
Everybody's looking for something.
Some of them want to use you.
Some of them want to get used by you.
Some of them want to abuse you.
Some of them want to be abused.
Hey.
Radio Interview (5) - Dennis Mckenna
- Dennis McKenna, that's got to bring back some memories
for you, I suppose, huh?
- Absolutely.
- You were there and just about at that time,
you know, socially, do you think, doctor,
that it was the right direction at the wrong time?
- How do you mean?
- Well, I mean the whole 60s thing,
the whole San Francisco scene,
the whole national scene, frankly.
It was moving toward a gentler, more aware,
social time for the young people,
but then sort of the war got in the way
and then we started the war on drugs
and war and war and war, but for a while there,
we were headed in a bit of a different direction,
weren't we?
- Well, we were headed in a bit of a different direction
and yes, I think that the war in Vietnam
had a lot to do with derailing it,
but I think that also just sort of the dissolution,
the disillusion that happened in the American dream
that probably started with the assassination of Kennedy,
if not before.
I mean, I think that really impacted a lot of people
in my generation.
You know, I can remember when that happened
and both Terrence and myself,
we were just in a state of shock
for days after that happened.
There was little you could do except just stare
at the television. - That's right, that's right.
- A lot of people of our generation thought
that Kennedy was the sign of some needed change
and when he was struck down,
I think it was kind of a message
that no, nothing is really going to change.
I mean, however flawed he may have been as a man,
I think he symbolized a change for a lot of people
and I think when that went away,
I think it began the process of deepening cynicism
that has continued.
- And then we sort of moved toward,
as the decades went by,
it seems like we moved from where we were in the '60s
and where we were headed to a more materialistic society
and we kind of replaced what went on with the '60s
with materialism.
Anyway, listen, I wanna ask you a question
that's a sensitive question about Terence
and it was actually a question that I asked Terence
and I guess I would like to ask you,
many, many people said brain tumor.
- Right.
- Why should we not believe that it's possible
that some of the substances and chemicals
and things that Terence did contributed to that,
may have been a main contributor to that brain tumor.
- Right, right.
- I'm sure you've thought about it.
- Well, I have thought about it
and the answer is that there's simply no evidence for it.
If psychedelics or cannabis caused brain tumors,
there would be a lot more--
- Brain tumors.
- That kind of thing than there are.
Brain tumors, particularly the kind that he had,
is actually an extremely rare form of cancer,
only 20,000 cases a year,
supposedly are reported in this country.
Although I personally think it must be more than that,
but as cancers go, this one is rare
and there's simply no evidence,
there's no correlation between your intake of marijuana,
say, and brain tumors.
In fact, there is research that has been done
that shows that cannabis,
tetrahydrocannabinol may inhibit brain tumors.
Obviously for my brother, this didn't work,
but you can say that,
but it's not really a fair criticism.
I mean, another person who maybe never touches
any of these things may get a brain tumor
and you may say, well, it's because they led a bad life
or something.
- Sure.
- But it just doesn't hold up.
- All right, just before going to the phone lines here,
Scott in Sonora, California asks a question
that may not even be relevant,
or you may know what he's talking about,
but he says, please ask Dr. McKenna if he remembers
what he was experiencing when he said that,
quote, he didn't want to be a giant insect, end quote,
at the experiment at La Correa, is it?
- La Chorrera.
- La Chorrera, okay.
- Right, right.
- So it rings a bell, huh?
- Yeah, absolutely.
- So you didn't want to be a giant insect.
What was that all about?
- Well, it's hard to explain that
without sort of going into the whole narrative
of what got us to go to La Chorrera at the first place,
which we started talking about at the top of the program,
but then we sort of got derailed into other subjects.
But I guess to put it in a nutshell,
a lot of the ideas and concerns that we were
sort of processing at La Chorrera
in these hyper psychedelic states
had to do with the notion of insect metamorphosis.
And insects undergo several stages of metamorphosis,
like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly
is the classic example.
And we had some notions, whether correct or not,
at least we thought at the time they seemed correct,
that the tryptamines and the beta-carbolines
in this plant environment had to do
with the kind of an actual metamorphosis in humans.
- Oh, I see.
- And that, you know,
and that was what the basis of that was about.
I wasn't so sure I wanted to undergo this metamorphosis.
- I see.
(laughing)
- And I was convinced that I was about to.
- I bet you saw the fly, didn't you?
- Actually, I've never seen it.
- Oh, you haven't seen the fly.
- I haven't seen it.
- It's just as well, actually.
- I should put it on my list.
- Obviously, you're not exactly an anti-drug poster child
and nor was your brother.
Your brother was a brilliant, brilliant man.
You're a brilliant, brilliant man.
And a lot of people who are fighting this drug war,
I don't think like hearing you speak
because you're obviously brilliant.
And somehow, you know, the brain cells have stayed in place
throughout whatever it is you have done,
as was the case with Terrence.
- So far.
(laughing)
- First time caller line,
you're on the air with Dr. Dennis McKenna.
Hi.
- Hi, Art.
I'm Laura and I'm a PhD candidate
in a Washington, DC area university.
And I'm doing the first ethnographic life history
narrative-based research study with near-death experiencers.
- Oh?
- So I'm getting some very interesting findings,
which I'd like to talk to you about more at some other time.
Now, you guys kept talking while I was making,
after I made the notes I wanted to make
'cause I had a chance to spend some time
with Terrence and Plinkay.
And I had a couple comments that I wanted from Dennis,
but a question you just raised about the brain tumor
and the drug use.
- Yes.
- Raised the issue for me of, remember the Miami guy
who had the strange heart attack
and the bizarre little sort of twist in his vein or artery.
- Oh, yes.
- And the native Americans who pointed out that,
you know, from where their point of view,
that's called an energy attack.
Just, I'm not, just sound too paranoid.
I just wanted to throw that in
as another question that might be asked.
And in the, I have a wonderful quote from Terrence
about an experience of Dennis'
that your insect thing made me want to read,
but let me hold off 'cause maybe we don't have time.
But I'm loving hearing from Dennis
and I love spending time with Terrence.
Read all their work.
I think the research that they have done
and the personal accounts that they have shared
are not simply valuable, but extremely brave
to stand out on the edge they're standing out on.
And there's tremendous resistance.
As Terrence said, culture is not your friend
in certain kinds of--
- I would agree with that.
- And I wanted to raise this.
The reason I was there is I got a scholarship that year,
that fellow from Texas gave some scholarships
and I got to go to Palenque and spend this 10 days
having this wonderful ethno-botanical field seminar
with an incredible group of people,
including the Sholgans and Terrence.
And because I realized that there were analogs
between near-death experience narratives,
and I'm a near-death experiencer as was my mother,
which fueled my interest.
- Well, you obviously heard the comments earlier
with respect to DMT.
- Well, no.
- Oh, you did?
- We had light-related experiences related to ayahuasca
with now a lot is in the research,
near-death research about ketamine,
which I know the least about.
But I went there because that woman who was involved
in a booger research, Ibogaine--
- Deborah Nash.
Dr. Deborah Nash.
- Dr. Deborah Nash was gonna be there.
And there is this analog between NDEs
and that experience in the life review
that's very, very obvious.
I also wanted to say you hadn't mentioned Scomp Astora,
nor I think ketamine,
and I'd like to hear what you have to say about them.
The other thing I found that was bizarre
that didn't come up in clinical NDE model-shaped research,
this is work I'm continuing now that I did two years' work
of field research on for my MA,
now it's continuing as my just-approved dissertation work,
is that there was this major, inexplicably high incidence
of narratives where it was clear there was sort of overlap
between, you could take a batch of these,
change a few characteristics,
hand them to alien encounter researchers like John Mack,
or near-death experience researchers,
and each of those groups would go
near-death experience or alien encounter.
And because so many of my,
it came up with so many of my informants,
and the only other research that's come up in
in that high incidence is PMH Atwater,
who like me, her methodology involves
more person-centered, informant-generated narrative,
so you get data you wouldn't get.
I would never have thought to mention a strange experience
that I had, one connected maybe with the one
that Dennis and parents had in "True Hallucinations,"
which I'd love to hear him talk about.
- All right, listen, we're way short on time.
- Yeah, so I'd like to know what, you know,
what does he make of this overlap
and the fact that we're trying to model experiences
we may not know as much about as we think?
- Think we know, okay.
- Well, a lot of things have been touched on.
I think that this notion, I mean,
this business of the aliens and encounters
with the aliens in, you know, abduction experiences,
the near-death experiences, and also in psychedelics.
What do I make of it?
I'm not sure what to make of it.
You know, on one hand, I mean,
the rational reductionist part of me says,
you know, it's gotta be part of the self.
I mean, certainly with psychedelics, you would think,
you know, I mean, no matter how other it seems to be,
ultimately these things are coming
from some part of the self.
It may not be a part that you know very much.
I mean, that's the reductionist model.
The other, you know, it's possible to look at it
another way.
Maybe there are other dimensions,
and what we mean by other dimensions, I'm not sure.
Maybe some other level of etheric vibration,
you know, who knows?
I mean, more familiar, more, you know,
other people on your program know more about this than I do.
I just feel like all bets are off in a sense
that particularly when we're trying to understand the mind
and what the capabilities of the mind are
and how it interfaces with reality,
we can't really make any assumptions.
- Well, our nation's best physicists
are talking about multiple dimensions.
- Well, exactly.
- And who is to say that--
- Parallel worlds.
- That there is not a path and a door opened.
Comment briefly, if you would, on ketamine.
Ketamine is being called the NDE drug.
- Well, my own experience with ketamine
is extremely limited.
I've only taken it one time in my life,
and I didn't find it,
it wasn't pleasant for me.
It was interesting.
It was sort of,
it was sort of like an anti-psychedelic to me
in the sense that it seemed to be
a state of sensory deprivation
and complete isolation from the body.
- Wow.
- Sort of like how in states of sensory deprivation,
you start to confabulate,
you start to feel that empty space thoughts.
- Yes, of course.
- And ketamine was like that for me.
Beyond that, I don't know.
It may be the NDE drug, I'm not sure.
My own candidate for that would be
something like 5-methoxy DMT,
which is actually an order of magnitude
more potent than DMT in terms of what the dose is,
but its effects are somewhat similar,
although it doesn't have a marked visual effect.
You don't see, excuse me, colored hallucinations
as so much on 5-methoxy DMT,
but yet it's just as profound,
and it seems to be, at least again,
my experience is somewhat limited with this,
but the few times I have encountered it,
you do seem to go to a place which seems close
to what they describe as this near-death experience.
- That's amazing.
All right, wildcard line,
you're on the air with Dr. Dennis McKenna.
Good morning.
- Good morning, Art.
Good morning, Dennis.
- Morning.
- God, I'm having a flashback.
(laughing)
- I bet.
- I was a runaway flower child in 1964,
became an electric acid test flower child,
Ken Kesey style, wound up in 1967
living on a hippie houseboat
in the three boats down from Alan Watts,
and everybody I knew who used psychedelic drugs
were very brilliant, very intelligent,
very creative people, okay?
I have, over the years, I mean, in those days,
I was a teenager in my early 20s,
teenager in early 20s,
I used lots and lots of psychedelics of all kinds,
and ozic acid, psilocybin mushrooms,
mescaline, peyote buttons, DMT and DET,
which I'm sure, Dennis, you know what DET is.
- Mm-hmm, a giant full-tryptamine.
- Yeah. (laughing)
Well, the point I'm trying to make is
I have gone on, I've gone to college,
I have built a business, I'm a very successful person,
I don't have brain tumors,
and I'm sorry about your brother.
- Thank you.
- The reality of the situation is
most other people that I know who also,
during those days, had been similarly involved
in those sorts of things went on
to be very successful in their careers.
The percentage of casualties, I think,
is very, very small.
I think there's greater casualties from the later drug,
see, there's an early drug wave,
and then the next one was the cocaine, heroin,
speed methamphetamine wave.
- Which came with the materialism wave, by the way.
- Well, exactly, Art, that's right, that's precisely it.
The first wave was the consciousness wave,
but most people were discussing,
when they were tripping or smoking pot,
were talking about things like, you know,
books by Velikovsky, World in Collision, Earth in Upheaval,
things like that, you know, the Urantia book, Metaphysics,
the early days of health food, health consciousness,
Earth consciousness, you know,
it's got a bad rap.
And I think that the war on drugs
has turned into a very politicized power trip
that the establishment uses to control people.
It's convenient for them.
It gives excuses to have larger police forces
and larger military and bigger prisons
and, you know, to spend the public money
in ways that none of us really want to see happen.
- Well, have either one of you considered the fact
that what do we care about?
What reports do we get?
We get reports on new housing starts,
on national productivity, on all of these things
that relate to how productive people are
in turning out material things.
And I think some of these drugs
are considered to be anti-productivity.
And I bet that's at the core of a lot of this war.
That's just me.
- Well, it's interesting. - Well, I think you're right
because they saw that too many of the hippie types
were going to the nature,
wanting to become Native Americans,
and were renouncing the civilization,
going living in teepees.
I did that for a while when I was young.
Went off into Big Sur and lived in a tree house.
- Exactly, exactly, when you could have been
in a factory doing something or another, doctor.
- Turning out useful widgets, right?
- Absolutely, yes.
- Well, your caller makes a couple of interesting points
that I'd like to comment on.
One is this notion that the wider cultural perception
is that if you use psychedelics,
you have to be somehow drooling in the corner
or somehow dysfunctional.
And most people, in fact,
who have, in which these things have played a role,
are anything but dysfunctional.
They are generally high-functioning, creative people,
often on the cutting edge of whatever their field is.
I mean, the whole computer net revolution,
the Silicon Valley revolution was largely spearheaded
by people who were involved with psychedelics.
So there is that element.
Again, in a very, very small number of cases,
some people do run into problems.
- Something went wrong, sure.
- But most people do. - No, he was right.
In the great majority of cases,
these people are now productive citizens.
All right, we've got a break here.
We'll be right back.
Dr. Dennis McKenna is my guest.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AF.
♪ I have been only half of what I am ♪
♪ It's all clear to me now ♪
♪ My heart is on fire ♪
Radio Interview (6) - Dennis Mckenna
(thunder, growling noises)
- Again, Dr. Dennis McKenna.
And welcome back, doctor.
- Thank you.
- All right, geez, so many people want to talk to you,
so let us continue, I guess.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. McKenna.
Good morning.
- Good morning, Art.
How are you and the doctor today?
- Just fine, where are you?
- I am in Indiana, PA.
- Okay.
- I actually have two quick questions, if you don't mind.
- Not at all.
- The first is, you spoke of legalization of marijuana
and the war on drugs.
I wonder if the doctor, in your mind,
do you differentiate between those natural drugs,
such as marijuana and peyote,
and those which would be considered synthesized, like LSD,
in terms of legalization or just simply level of deviance?
- Level of deviance.
- I know, you know, there's no nice way to put that,
I guess.
- Well, no, I mean, if you've been listening
to the previous conversation,
we were making a distinction between plants and drugs.
I'm not a doctrinaire saying that LSD, for example,
should be banned and persecuted and peyote shouldn't be.
I mean, I think, you know, we have to find a context
in which, particularly with the psychedelics,
in which these things can be used in a way
that is safer for people,
but people shouldn't be denied access to these experiences
if they feel that they should have them.
I'm not sure what you do about the war on drugs.
That's just one example that, you know,
it has to do with the fact that you form relationships
with drugs or plants, and it's much easier in a way
if you have a relationship with a plant
that happens to also be a drug.
I think it's, you know, I think you have a much better
chance to, you know, have a good relationship
with that particular entity if you grow it,
if you nurture it, and in return,
it provides you with a visionary experience.
I mean, that is a true symbiosis,
and that's what we're talking about.
It's harder to have that kind of relationship
with something that may come in a gelatin capsule
or in the case of LSD on a window pane,
you know, square of gelatin.
Not that it's not possible.
I mean, I know that people do use LSD in a creative way,
but it's this whole issue about how do we,
if people are going to have relationships with drugs,
how do we foster, you know, good relationships,
then mutually beneficial relationships
rather than destructive relationships?
And with some drugs, because of the way they work,
because of their neurochemistry,
it's more difficult to foster good relationships
in the sense, I mean, good, bad, these are charged words,
but you know what I mean.
Relationships that are not self-destructive.
With the psychedelics, I think it's much, you know,
they lend themselves to a more positive type of relationship
because they do open the way into experiences
that many people would consider spiritual experiences.
- All right, and my second question,
part of me, if either of these were mentioned before,
I didn't catch the whole program,
but not too long ago I was watching TV
and I saw something on a CIA admittance
of using psychedelics and things like LSD in the '50s
for, I guess you'd call it quasi-mind control,
more just a-- - All right.
- Right. - Call her,
hold it right there.
Hey, that's great because that's exactly
where I was going, doctor.
The government had a relationship with LSD for a while.
- Right. - And I guess
not such a good one in view of what they did.
- Right, well, these drugs don't particularly
have moral qualities in the sense that, you know,
if you're a bad person, just taking a psychedelic
is not going to make you a good person.
I mean, you know, it's a two-sided, you know,
it's a two-way street as in any relationship.
It depends on what you bring to it.
You know, just because the,
just because the CIA used LSD in their experiments didn't,
I mean, it didn't turn them into saints, obviously.
- No, it didn't. - You know,
so these things are morally ambiguous in a certain stance.
They can, and you see this again in the traditional context
where ayahuasca is used, for example, in mestizo,
in mestizo society in South America.
You know, and ayahuasca, just because he knows
how to use ayahuasca is not necessarily somebody
that you can trust or somebody you want to trust.
There is a whole other subtext going on
of what's called brujeria or what we would call black magic
where, you know, they use the powers to put hexes on people.
And in fact, in Peru, in mestizo ayahuasca society,
illness, disease, misfortune, all of these things
are almost always seen as the effects of some brujo,
some, you know, some evil practitioner
having put the whammy on you.
- Speaking of evil practitioners,
was Terrence or yourself ever approached
by anybody in government?
- You mean because of our involvement in these things?
- Yes. - Well, not since,
not for a long time.
Not since 1969, actually. - '69, huh?
- Right, right. - But I mean,
were you approached not so much because of your use
or as a result of your use,
but perhaps to help the government in some way
with their proposed use?
- No, not really, not really.
I mean, I worked, I did a postdoc in the laboratory
at National Institutes of Mental Health.
I was there for two years and I was working
on a synthetic at the time,
but I was basically working on using
radioactively labeled analogs of STP
to map serotonin receptors,
to try to map the serotonin receptors in the mouse brain
or in the rat's brain.
But I think it's interesting that I was able
to get that fellowship.
I went there, I worked there.
There were never any problems.
And this is actually, this speaks to one of the issues.
People who are interested in psychedelics,
in doing research on psychedelics often say,
we can't do it, the government will not allow us
to do this work.
That really isn't true anymore.
That is changing.
Rick Strassman, the fellow I mentioned
who just wrote the book called DMT, The Spirit Molecule,
he was really the pioneer.
And for a lot of this work he showed,
I mean, he got tired of people.
He was a qualified psychiatrist and investigator
at the University of New Mexico.
He got tired of people saying, you can't do this work.
So he decided, well, I'll do it.
And he applied, he went through all the channels,
he got approval and he was able to give DMT to people
in a clinical setting and do this work.
That has, that sort of opened, I wouldn't say
the flood gates, but it opened the door a crack.
And now there are other researchers are beginning
to look into this again.
One of the websites I gave you,
the Hefter Research Institute, which I'm a board member of,
and it's on the web at hefter.org.
We're basically a bunch of scientists,
neuroscientists, psychiatrists, ethno-pharmacologists,
people like that, who want to do legitimate research
with psychedelics to try to find out,
well, basically not only how they work,
but how they might be used to help people.
- Well, what about applications in mental illness?
- Well, exactly, these sorts of things.
I mean, in one sense, you almost have to go
the medical model.
I don't say that they should always be used
to treat people who are sick.
They can also benefit people who are not,
who don't really have illnesses,
but who might just want to learn from the experience.
But if you're trying to work through these academic,
government, and research channels,
you sort of have to come up with a rationale.
Where, you know, is there an illness?
Is there something that these things can treat?
And in fact, there are.
You know, the focus right now is on things
like obsessive compulsive disorder, for example,
post-traumatic stress syndrome.
These sorts of addiction is another big one.
Alcoholism.
Potentially, psychedelics could be used in therapies
for these sorts of things.
And who knows where it ends?
I don't know how many of you saw Andy Weil
on 60 Minutes the other night.
I didn't see the show, but he actually came out
and admitted what he said many years ago,
that LSD cured his allergies.
You know, so who knows?
- Who knows, indeed.
- I mean, he had an experience where he had been
very allergic to cats all of his life,
couldn't get near them.
One day he was on LSD, a cat crawled into his lap,
and he didn't have any allergic reaction
and claimed that he never had one since.
- Isn't that interesting?
- So that's rather remarkable, I think.
- Very remarkable.
Wes to the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. McKenna.
Hello.
- Good morning, gentlemen.
- Good morning, where are you?
- This is Gary from Earthquake Seattle.
- Okay.
- Everything is going smoother up here, fortunately.
- Good, glad to hear it.
- Yes.
Dennis, I was one of those people
that had very many good thoughts about your brother.
I think he was a tremendously courageous
and brilliant person, and I wish he was still with us.
- Well, we all do.
We all do, thank you.
- Yes, we do.
We need more like him.
R, you said a couple profound things I just heard recently.
One of the things you said was that, you know,
I'm one of the people that feel what our society was
on the right track during the '60s,
and I think we've taken huge psychic damage since then.
- Mm-hmm, yes.
- It might've been a bit premature.
It could be some of us were not able to put it in context
at that time yet, but certainly I think we've gone
in the wrong direction since then.
You know, one thing, the caller before this,
or one, two before this, he had some great things to say,
and I came along in an age group right behind him
in the mid '70s, and I was fortunate to go to college
and find a group of friends, and after some research,
we decided that these substances had been around
for thousands of years, even long before Christianity
and its teachings, and that's why we embarked upon taking
many of these psychoactive drugs, and you know,
we had nothing but positive experiences.
I would say to your audience, for instance,
they have nothing to fear from these substances.
They take you inward and they take you upward,
and they lead you to nothing but more profound thinking.
- Well, I don't think fear is really the model,
but I do think they should be respected.
That's the thing.
An earlier caller said, for example, that, you know,
they're just fun.
You should remember, I mean, something that's not being said
is they're just a lot of fun.
Well, they can be a lot of fun.
- That's something Terrence might have said.
- They're not always fun.
- I completely agree with that.
You know, the two experiences I think,
if we had it in our power to give people in the thirst
to help us make a psychic breakthrough,
I think the two would be to help people take
psychoactive substances and maybe to put them
in Earth orbit for 24 hours and just let them float there
and look down.
I think that would help our society progress
more than anything at this point that I can think of
for us to do.
- Well, in the right context, I think it could.
I mean, I think it could, you know,
going back to this, what an earlier caller said
about how, you know, the perception is that
if you take psychedelics, you have to be dysfunctional
or the larger society thinks it drives you crazy
or it makes you feeble-minded or something.
You know, in the course of working,
I worked with my colleagues on what we call
the WASCA project.
We did a biomedical study of WASCA,
which is the Portuguese transliteration of ayahuasca.
And WASCA is used by, in Brazil,
by several syncretic churches.
One of which is called the UDV, the Unal de Vegetal.
And it's a syncretic church.
And ayahuasca is their sacrament.
What was most amazing to me in the process
of doing this study, I mean, we had to hang around
with these people a lot.
Subjects were, you know, being tested
and we were drawing blood samples
and we spent about five weeks in very close contact
with this group in the summer of 1993
when we were doing this study.
But what was remarkable was just experiencing the society.
They're a very close-knit community.
In lectures, I refer to them as psychedelic Mormons
with the meaning that is meant to be complementary
to Mormons and the UDV in the sense that Mormons
also place a great deal of emphasis on, you know,
being productive members of their community,
having a close-knit community, being creative,
being successful in business.
Not, in other words, being a drag on the society,
but trying to help society.
And these people were much that way.
I mean, they had much less incidents of domestic violence,
for example, than is common in Brazilian society.
No alcoholism, no drug abuse.
Most of the people were successful.
They were doctors, lawyers, businessmen, even politicians.
You know, so I was just impressed in hanging out
with this group how high functioning most of them were.
And, you know, their kids seemed healthy and intelligent.
Their families seemed stable.
And a lot of it, of course, had to do with the community
that they were involved with.
I mean, it was a very, very close-knit community.
But I think a lot of it also had to do with the fact
that they had this tea, as they call it,
this huasca as their sacrament.
And, you know, every two weeks, at a minimum,
they would take it in large groups every two weeks.
And I think they learned from that.
And it helped them to keep their lives on track.
I mean, you know, there were aspects of the UDV
that I would not, I mean, I personally, I don't really,
you know, I would not join a cult.
But if I was going to join a cult, I--
- That might be the one.
- That might be the one.
(laughing)
- Caller, anything else, quickly?
- I just believe our government, as you said earlier,
I think our government fears these substances
and does not want people to have access to them.
Let's remember, most of them are not physically addictive,
as far as we know, in any way, shape, or form,
the psychoactives.
- The psychedelics.
- Psychedelics. - Right.
- I believe they lead to far too much contemplation
and deep thinking, and the government is afraid of that,
just as I believe they're afraid to tell us the truth
about what they know about possible extraterrestrials
coming here.
- Yeah, I think that the caller's got a point here.
I think not so much with the so-called drugs of abuse,
but with the psychedelics, the fear,
the problem is that they make you have funny ideas,
and funny ideas are always a threat to the established order.
- Yeah, they're viewed as anti-productivity.
- Well, anti-productivity,
or they just don't want people thinking too much.
I mean, that's a more sinister aspect of the drug war
that does concern me a lot, in that, in some ways,
the drug war is not about protecting people
from harmful substances.
It's about controlling states of mind.
It's about saying certain states of mind,
certain territories are just off limits,
and people should not be allowed these types of experiences.
- Within the next few years,
this is almost certain to happen,
and it's going to be interesting to see what happens,
but within the next few years,
probably through biofeedback or similar types of technology,
direct neural stimulation,
it'll be possible to have these experiences
without using drugs, by using some kind of,
you know, electromagnetic mechanism.
How is the government going to react to that happen?
- I don't know.
That's fascinating.
- Bypassing laws.
Doctor, I always ask, doctor.
- Of course we'll stop the problem.
- Can you stick around one more hour?
- Can I stick around another hour?
- That's it.
I've got only one more hour of the show.
- Well, I'm getting a little bit,
I'm running a little bit out of steam,
but let's go another half hour and see how it goes.
- You've got it.
- Four in the morning here.
- Oh, that's right.
I forgot you're back east.
All right, doctor, stay right there.
We'll be right back.
This is Coast to Coast AM from the high desert.
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Double
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 so how 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 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
The 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
Movement of game and they seem to have an an
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 a an
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 dimension three dimensions and four because if you could move
into the fourth dimension the men 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 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 in 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 an a physical system an
Anthropic 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
epiphenomenon
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
observing 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
evermore 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 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 I mean 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 which 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
psychological 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
Lomholtz it calls it the most explosive
reorganization of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record and
That's you know and 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 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 bull 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 and the 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 believe if you can believe that I 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 improbability 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
500 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 and stuff 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 be very become more and more important for people to
de-linearize
their view of time
Decondition yourself from the lie of history
After all, you know if if time were space history would be a spiderweb
So bear that in mind
Mind
Dreaming
Thank you all for turning out on a rainy night.
Before I get into the main body of tonight's entertainment,
I want to call your attention to the propaganda for an event in Mexico and another event in Hawaii.
These events, in the case of the Mexico event, you get a major slice of the psychedelic community.
You get Robert Montgomery, Jonathan Ott, Ann and Fasha Shulgin, Manolo Torres, Christian Resch,
Terrence McKenna, and others who unfortunately slipped my mind.
At the ceremonial center of Palenque in Chiapas, we've been doing these events somewhere in Mayan, Mexico
for the past 10 or 12 years. Many of you are graduates, which doesn't mean you can't come again.
But I want to invite all of you there. If you're interested in ethnobotany, shamanism, ethnopharmacology,
altered states of consciousness, the politics of all of this, this is as intense and information-packed an exposure as you can have,
and it's straight from the mouths of the scholars and scientists and writers who have spent a great deal of time in that area.
So I just want to invite you to that. It's also a great party. It's the height of mushroom season.
There's nothing we could do about that. So you just are on your own.
So when I start out on these tours, I usually have an agenda and prepared remarks,
and then as I make my way through my venues and I hear the feedback and I feel the ambiance of the people
and the throb of the zeitgeist, it all sort of just simply dissolves into an ongoing commentary on our moment in space and time
and the various dimensions, adembrations and opportunities of our dilemma.
But I want tonight to couch it for you in the context of, I guess, an extended metaphor.
We could talk about these things in many ways, but I find this particular extended metaphor illuminating.
And I start by recalling an observation from someone whose name rarely falls from my lips, and that would be Gurdjieff.
And Gurdjieff said at one point, or was known to comment, that "people are asleep", he said.
And he, by implication, suggested people awake him. I'm not sure if he fully grasped the implication for his own product line had that occurred,
but in any case, you're on it, you're with me, yes.
It's very hard to give these lectures in such a way so that every person hears something different,
which is what is supposed to be going on, you know.
Well, so thinking about this comment that people are asleep, I see several implications.
I ask myself, what is awake in my own notion? And I thought to myself, awake is, for me, awake is where the laws of physics are fully operable.
You know, hurled objects shatter electricity shocks, I cannot fly, the laws of physics are in operation.
In that domain, I consider myself to be fully awake.
Now, in terms of occult and spiritual traditions, the admonition to awaken always seems to imply that higher consciousness is approached through an expansion of clarity and awareness.
And that seems obvious, I don't argue with it as a rationalist, but as somebody who has run the edges,
I've noticed something somewhat counterintuitive to that teaching, and it's this.
It's that to contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of kazooistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, white caps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will,
to achieve that requires... a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking your eye off the ball,
a certain assumption that things are simpler than they are almost always precedes what Nefseliade called the rupture of plane,
that indicates, you know, that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power beyond, behind profane appearances.
And in my own life, for those of you who are conversant with my output,
when I went to the Amazon in 1971 and had the experiences that are described in "True Hallucinations",
I had been for many months before that in Asia, smuggling, hanging out, and I had taken my eye off the ball.
I had become very gentle, very relativistic in my approach to other people's opinions and behaviors.
I was easygoing, is what I'm trying to say. Too easygoing.
And in that situation of semi-unconsciousness and openness, the cosmic giggle approaches.
And I compare this... this is closing of a theme...
I compare this to sleep, or to states that lie between waking and sleeping.
And so, again, an odd take on this remark of Gurdjieff.
I remember someone many years ago said to me...
they evoked the symbol of the yin and the yang, the two tears folded against each other within a circle.
And this person, who was no Rishi, Roshi, Geishi or Guru, but simply observant, said...
"It's not the black side, it's not the white side, it's the interface, it's the edge."
And I found, by observing sleep, and some of you may recall the motto in Athanasius,
"Kircher, Zamfiatrium, Satientium", that's chiseled over the alchemist's doorway,
I can't do it in Latin, but it says, "While sleeping, watch."
While sleeping, watch.
And I've noticed that while going to sleep, there is a barrier, a place in the process of going to sleep,
that is like a mercurial edge, it's a river, it's a zone of hypnagogia.
You often pass through it post-orgasm, it's a place of drifting amoeboid-coloured afterimage lights,
and then true hallucination, images, strange, transcendental or transpersonal images.
Well, so then, so far in the context of pursuing this extended metaphor about sleep,
I've talked basically, essentially about the individual's relationship to the concept, to the fact,
but there's also a social or a political, a species-wide implication.
It occurs to me that at any given moment, because of the way the planet is as a thing,
some considerable percentage of human beings are asleep, always, and many are awake.
And so if the world soul is made of the collective consciousness of human beings,
then it is never entirely awake, it is never entirely asleep.
It exists in, I guess you can hear me, it exists in some kind of indeterminate zone.
And this to me is the clue to understanding something that is personally fascinating to me,
and it revolves around why people believe such weird things,
and why, either as a consequence of the approach of the millennium or the breakdown of traditional values
or the density of electromagnetic radiation, or for some reason,
a balkanization of epistemology is taking place.
And what I mean by that is there is no longer a commonality of understanding.
I mean, for some people, quantum physics provides the answers.
Their next-door neighbour may look to the channeling of archangels with equal fervour.
I mean, if this is not a balkanization of epistemology, I don't know what it is.
It is accompanied by a related phenomenon, which is technology or the historical momentum of things
is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey mind cannot find a simple story,
a simple creation myth or redemption myth to lay over the crazy contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist,
post-McLuhanist, electronic, pre-apocalyptic existence.
And so into that dimension of anxiety created by this inability to parse reality
rushes a bewildering variety of squirrelly notions.
Epistemological cartoons, if you will.
And conspiracy theory, in my humble opinion, I'm somewhat immune to paranoia,
so those of you who aren't, you know, gaze in wonder.
Conspiracy theory is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality.
I mean, isn't it so simple to believe that things are run by the greys
and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them and we can solve our technological problems?
Or isn't it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party,
or the Catholic Church, or the Masons?
Well, these are epistemological cartoons. It's, you know, kindergarten stuff in the art of amateur historiography.
I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying.
That the real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control.
Absolutely no one.
You know, you don't understand Monica, you don't understand Netanyahu.
It's because nobody is in control.
This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos.
Now, there may be entities seeking control, the World Bank, the Communist Party, the rich, the somebody or others,
but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself.
Because this process that is underway will take the control freak by the short and curly and throw them against the wall.
It's like trying to control a dream, you see.
The global destiny of the species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream.
Well, now a Jungian would say, no surprise here, history is the collective dream of humanity.
It is run by archetypal energies.
It is downloaded by the zeitgeist into the various milieus and epochs of which it is composed.
This seems reasonable to me.
I don't want to give you the impression, it's too linear to understand that what I am saying is that awake is good, asleep is bad.
What I would rather do is explain this whole gradient of possible positioning vis-a-vis your life and your destiny,
these choices that you have, and then have people understand that they choose.
You choose to be asleep or partially asleep or fully awake or to be one part of the time and in some situations and one part of the time and in other situations.
Now, if in fact we exist inside some kind of morphogenetic field that is created by the sum total of human minds on the planet,
and if in fact in half or more of those minds at any given moment the rules of the dream hold sway,
then it is no surprise that when we make our way into society or just when we live our lives, there's an eeriness to it,
there's a fatedness to it, there's a plottedness to it.
You know, we are inside some kind of engine of narrative, I believe.
You know, some science fiction writers such as Greg Egan and others have suggested that this could even be a form of recorded medium.
It looks, you can see the thumbprints of editors on our reality if you are truly paying attention.
I mean, if you're a devotee of the theory of stochastic and random unfolding of events,
then you have to look very carefully at how unrandom and how mythical and archetypal most people's lives are.
You know, if you take psychedelics and hurl yourself to the edge and spend time with strange aboriginal people in remote parts of the world,
the cosmic giggle becomes your friend.
But in fact, ordinary people's lives, everyone's lives, are touched by deep magic.
And I've, you know, again, the primary data in this experience, and then the models are built backward from the primary data without prejudice,
and in an attempt to transcend historical momentum.
And when I do that, what I see is that the carrier of the field of the cosmic giggle in most people's lives is love.
Love is some kind of output which messes with the entropic tendency toward probabilistic behavior in nature.
What do I mean by that? I mean, you can be the janitor at Microsoft, and the chief, the vice president and chief of operations,
his daughter can bring him lunch one day, and you can, from a distance, have your eye fall upon her and fall in love with her.
And, you know, from that point to having the five children she bears you go off to Harvard and the Sorbonne,
it's just a matter of running the clock forward.
And these things have, I mean, to you it may seem like a miracle, but to those of us who are students of human happenstance, it's inevitable.
I mean, you can launch your story, and I've, you know, in the course of taking psychedelics and looking at my life and other people's lives and narrative,
I think that the secret of, I don't want to say anything as pretentious as transcendence or enlightenment,
but the secret of taking hold of one's destiny is to understand that one is a character.
A character is a different thing than this model you inherit out of the idea that you're a three-dimensional animal inside a democracy with a Christian heritage
and, you know, a dewey decimal cataloging system or whatever.
Anyway, these are some of the notions that occur to me in the context of comparing dream on many scales.
It's, you have to really struggle, I think, to believe that you actually live inside the model of reality
that science and Newtonian physics and the mathematical analysis of nature have given us.
You know, not to get too philosophical here, but for positivist philosophers, everything that is important,
color, feeling, taste, tone, ambition, apprehension, apetition, these things are called secondary qualities.
In other words, they're peripheral. They arise at a lower level of understanding.
They are somehow determined by the presence of the animal body and hence dismissible by a theory of pure abstraction,
which says, you know, what is real is spin, charge, angular momentum.
None of these things are very rich concepts for a living human being.
Who knows what any of these things are, you know?
So, one, I mean, we don't have time in a situation like this to explore all the implications of this dream analogy that I'm pursuing.
But one that interests me is the plasticity of time in the dream.
And I think I would argue, as the devil's advocate, that it is the plasticity of historical time and the acceleration,
the sense of an out-of-control spin up or spin down into new domains of possibility
that is the strongest evidence present at hand that we are in some kind of dream.
I've struggled my whole life with, I've always believed or I've always felt the power of the state, the world is made of language.
But of course, you think about this proposition for 30 seconds and the question that arises then is,
if the world is made of language, then why isn't it the way I want it to be?
You know, why does it have its own raison d'etre even if it is language?
Well, I think it's appropriate to speak of this to an audience as digitally sophisticated as I assume you must be.
I think the primary insight that has been secured here at the end of the 20th century,
the primary contribution of 20th century thinking, if you will, is to have understood finally that information is primary.
That this world, this cosmos, this universe, this body and soul are all made of information.
Information is a deeper and more primary concept than space, time, matter, energy, charge, spin, angular momentum.
The world is made of language.
The implication for the digerati is that reality can therefore be hacked.
If reality is made of language, then what we're saying is that it's code.
And if it's code, then it is far more deeply open to manipulation than we ever dared dream.
I mean, we've been messing around on the desktop opening files with religions and political systems
and xenophobic theories of racial superiority, all this crap that haunts the human historical adventure.
It means we have not addressed the deeper level.
And in thinking about this and the relationship to dream and human culture,
I have realized that cultures are like operating systems.
We are like hardware.
The human animal is a piece of biological wetware/hardware.
And it has been, we know, pretty much as we confront it today for at least 140,000 years.
At Klassus River Cavemouth in South Africa, they have excavated homo sapiens sapiens skeletons 100,000 years old
and that person could have sat in the front row here tonight and nobody would have batted an eyebrow.
So the human hardware has been in place for a while.
What has changed rapidly in comparison to the rates of biological evolution are the operating systems.
The people who excavated Ur, which was at that time thought to be the world's first city,
and in any case is a city seven millennia old,
when they excavated the central plaza at Ur, they discovered that a black basaltic slab had been set up there by the earliest kings of Ur
and that was the cultural operating system.
And if in a deal trading goats for olives a dispute arose, people had reference to the central operating system
and these things were determined.
Well now, Ur 101 was fine for olives and goat trading, but it didn't support higher mathematics,
it didn't support rational exploration of nature, it didn't support astrological knowledge about the movement of the stars.
As we have gone forward through culture, we have swapped out these operating systems
and at each swap out there has been a lot of hair pulling and cussing and screaming.
Anyone who has installed a new operating system is completely familiar with that sickening from the bowels kind of coldness
that you know, you realize it all hangs by a thread.
Now, this situation, this operating system metaphor, I think is a useful one for understanding, and again a circle closes,
the balkanization of epistemology that causes me such anxiety.
If you meet an aboriginal person from the Amazon for example, they may be running Witoto 3.0 as their operating system,
nicely supports animistic magic, huge capacity when it comes to making fish traps and bird traps.
Witoto is a powerful operating system for a rainforest aboriginal.
In our culture, you know, there are, I have no idea, at least 10 or 20 operating systems all going at the same time.
Some will run Mormonism, some will support Catholicism, others, Kabbalah goes at the speed of light,
others support quantum physics, some support econometrics, others support political correctness,
and these things are mutually exclusive.
And so looking at this, and looking at this clash of operating systems, I've come to the conclusion,
and some of you may have heard me say this before, that culture is not your friend.
And that's the final conclusion. You see, well this came to me a few months ago when I had my yearly physical,
and as I was buttoning up my doctor said to me, he said, "You know, in the 19th century most people your age were dead."
And I realized that this was true, and that one of the, among all the revolutions that we are enduring,
one of them is that we live nearly twice as long as people lived very recently in the past.
Well, culture is a kind of neoteny, and I don't want to belabor that at great length,
but for those of you who are not biologists, neoteny is the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood.
It's used to describe animal behavior. For instance, I'll give the most spectacular example of neoteny.
There is a kind of animal which lives in ponds in Africa, and it reproduces like a fish.
It lays eggs on the bottom of these ponds, more fish-like animals come from these eggs and so forth.
However, if the pond dries up, the creature undergoes metamorphosis and becomes an animal somewhat like a gecko,
and lays eggs, and from these eggs come creatures that are like geckos.
In other words, this is an animal which actually achieves sexual maturity in two forms, depending on environmental stress.
Spectacular example of neoteny. Turning to human beings, the less spectacular example, but relevant to us,
is our hairless, our general body hairlessness, compared to other primates.
We look like fetal apes. Human beings look like fetal apes.
Why? What is neoteny? Well, this is hotly debated among evolutionary biologists,
but the point I want to make is a socio-political comment, which is culture itself is some kind of neotenizing force,
because what culture provides is a bunch of rules, so you don't have to think, and a bunch of myths, so you don't have to think again.
Culture has all the answers, you know. You want to know where people came from? Well, when the sky god got out of his canoe at first waterfall and took the leak,
then we, the true people, appeared like ants, and we've been living here ever since.
Oh, gee, thanks. I'm glad I asked.
You know, this is what culture does for you. So...
But now technology throws a curve, and the curve is that we live so long that we figure out what a scam this is.
We figure out that what you're supposed to work for isn't worth having. We figure out that our politicians are buffoons.
We figure out that professional scientists are reputation-building, grab-tailing weasels.
We discover that all organizations are corrupted by ambition. You know, you get the picture. We figure it out.
Well, then, as intellectuals, and anybody who figures it out is an intellectual, believe me, because they're slinging the programming to push you the other way,
so then intellectuals, defined as people who figure it out, discover that you are alienated.
That's what figuring it out means. It means you understand that the BMW, the Harvard degree, this is whatever it is, that this is all baloney and manipulated and hyped,
and that most of you have a bunch of clueless people who are figuring out which fork they should use.
But this position is presented as alienation and therefore somehow tinged with the potential for pathology.
You know, it's a bad thing to be alienated.
Now let's speak for a moment in order to fulfill the promise read by in the introduction about psychedelics and what are they doing in this fine situation.
Well, what they're doing is forcing this maturation process by dissolving boundaries, which is what they do.
They are exposed to the same thing.
Earth Trust (Part 1)
So, I won't repeat, but we do EarthTrust Speakers Program seminars here once a month.
In addition to the Speakers Program that you guys are familiar with, this is one of the
events, we also work with projects around the world dealing with the environment and
social justice.
And I wanted to tell you for just a couple minutes about some of those so you know that
by coming here all the proceeds from the Speakers Program go to fund those projects.
So by coming today you're part of something global.
Just two quick examples and then you can see on our literature on the table that we have
about nine other projects.
But just to let you know what we're part of here, one of the projects we fund is in Papua
New Guinea where the, it's one of the largest remaining rainforests in the world.
It's estimated to be, at current rates of cutting it will be the third largest rainforest
by the end of the century.
It shouldn't be that way, it's a small island, but at current rates it's cutting in Brazil.
What's happening is that the multinational companies are eyeing Papua New Guinea, have
already begun clear cutting, but are really drooling over these pristine rainforests.
And there's been, Papua is an unusual place, it's one of the few places in the world where
the indigenous people have land rights legally.
They have to say what's going to happen on the land.
And it's more or less followed, although manipulated by the government and the multinational lumber
companies.
So what we're working with, there's a man named Glen Barry who has worked with the Madang
people and now is working with a number of other indigenous groups to organize efforts
to educate their people about the dangers of clear cutting.
They're offered bribes, you know, monetary bribes.
The companies come in and say we'll build you a school, we'll build roads.
They do build a building and roads and as soon as they take all the lumber out the roads
are stopped being kept up and they have an empty building.
So that's what they get out of it.
What this project does, what was organized by the Madang people is to do educational
campaigns into the areas to warn them about the dangers of clear cutting and then also
to provide economic development.
They're very poor people and their culture is being rapidly disintegrated.
So they need economic support and so they've developed their own Walkabout Sawmills, which
is a small cutting.
They can cut a few forests and still keep the lumber going because it's unrealistic
to think that they should just stop clear cutting and live, just live.
They're going to be bribed by the money.
So this provides, they also are doing butterfly farming, which I don't know quite how that
works.
Interesting concept of rounding up the butterflies and cassowary and crocodile farming, all trying
to get development.
So it's a project that one is saving the environment.
Last year they were able to save 255,000 hectares of rainforest from what would have been complete
clear cutting and immediate mulching into cardboard boxes.
They don't even use it as hardwood.
So that's ongoing.
It's still urgent.
The companies are really moving in and so we raise funds.
We help Glenberry for these projects.
They're now doing propaganda posters to put up in the villages to help people understand
the dangers.
So that's one of the kind of projects we do, which tries to support the efforts, you know,
multi-level, try to support the efforts to keep the indigenous cultures alive, also support
saving the environment that they're living in.
Another quick one is we support village banking for women in Central America in a number of
countries, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and just starting now in El Salvador.
And that's a project to get marginalized women access to small loans, which are normally
frozen out of loans.
So they can keep their start income generating businesses.
And these are ways to help organize the women, strengthen the community.
The profits go most quickly to the children and improve problems with malnutrition and
you know, strengthen the self-sufficiency efforts of those people.
So if you want to know more about these kind of threats, there's others.
There's literature or talk to me, talk to Andrew, talk to Georgeann, Shiva, Elizabeth,
and we can direct you.
So if you want to get involved and work with us, please do.
So that's EarthTrust.
Again, thank you all for coming.
A couple of logistical details.
The bathroom is through, one bathroom is through that door and back in the back corner of the
house.
Another one is at the front corner of the house.
You may have found outside.
I think that's it.
So I'll introduce Georgeann, who's the director of the speakers program and is responsible
for all the, getting all the speakers and all the publicity.
So you'll introduce Terrence.
Well, first I want to welcome you all to this program.
This is such a beautiful location to hold a Spirit of Nature program.
It couldn't be more perfect.
And I hope actually during lunch or during some of the breaks that you'll explore outside,
there's some paths leading down to some benches down there where you can sit and contemplate
the ocean and whatever.
We've created this Spirit of Nature program basically to explore the intrinsic connection
between spirituality and nature.
And with that awareness, basically seeing how that then promotes the idea of stewardship
of the earth and sanctity towards the earth.
We've gathered about eight speakers and Terrence is the second speaker of this program.
And I'd like to just tell you a little bit about who else will be here.
The next speaker will be Mark Gurzan, who will be here the end of October.
And he'll be presenting a talk on spirituality and nature in midlife and following a spiritual
path in midlife.
And then after him, we have Brother David Standelrast, who is a Benedictine monk.
And I have to read just a little bit about what he'll do.
His presentation is belonging to the universe.
And then on December 4th, we have environmental activists, Australian environmental activist
John Seed, who will be presenting the Council of All Beings.
And he's developed this work along with Joanna Macy, if any of you know Joanna Macy.
And on February 5th, a wonderful woman who I've been very inspired by named Sister Miriam
McGillis, who many people don't know, but she has a wonderful tape out called The Fate
of the Earth.
And it's just riveting if you've ever heard it.
She gave this presentation in 1986 and what she has said applies sort of timelessly now
and forever, I feel.
So she's something I really want to tell you about if you don't know about her.
And her presentation is Dreaming the Sacred Community.
So she'll be speaking in terms of the Earth community and particularly our local community.
She was very aware of the LA riots when she came up with this theme.
And then on February 28th, we have Matthew Fox, who, as you may know, was silenced by
the Vatican for his controversial views on feminism, sexuality, and the priesthood.
And I heard recently, I'm not sure of the full ramification of this rumor, but something
happened where he was expelled from his order because of these views.
So this is a recent thing.
I think the LA Times, if any of you know about it, I'd be interested to hear what the rumor
is and the truth is.
And his theme is awakening the cosmic tree, the tree being the symbol of regeneration
and of life.
And the last person that we have is Charlene Spretnak, who's an author, an eco-theologian
and feminist.
And her theme is states of grace.
So any of these people that you're interested in, you can ask us about.
There's flyers over there on the table and we'd love to see you at these events.
I'd like to just introduce Shiva Ray Bailey, who's our administrator, and she'll just say
a few things about today before I introduce Terrence.
This is just very short because I know you're probably restless to hear our great speaker
here today.
We are very excited to have you here.
I wonder if you could just help us for a moment to help us find out how we got in contact
with you.
So how many people came here through the Earth Trust brochure, if you could just raise your
hand.
That's great.
How many people came here through the Albert Hoffman Foundation mailing?
Yeah, the postcard, the psycho-green, acid green, yeah.
Great.
Okay.
What about the LA Weekly ad?
Did anyone see that?
Great.
And what about just word of mouth?
Great.
Okay.
Well, thank you.
So welcome and we hope to see you again.
Also there are lunches for those that paid for lunches.
We'll have a lunch break.
Do we have any extra?
Yeah, maybe if you paid for lunch you need to get a red ticket, but if you didn't get
one, I'll take it.
Yeah, and there will be, if you need to get a lunch, there are some restaurants that we
can tell you about on PCH towards Topanga.
Is that right, Andrew?
Yeah, towards Topanga.
There's many restaurants along the way there.
Now to Terrence McKenna.
Terrence McKenna doesn't really need an introduction.
If you heard him last night, he certainly doesn't need an introduction, but for those
of you who don't know him, I will repeat a little bit of what I said last night.
Terrence is essentially an anarchist and an interdimensional explorer.
He's a shamanologist and he is an author also.
He has many books out, three of which we have here today for sale.
The Archaic Revival is one of his most recent books and Trilogues with Rupert Sheldrake
and Ralph Abraham co-authored and Food of the Gods, the search for the original tree
of knowledge also we have here, as well as others.
And Terrence, as I said, is an interdimensional adventurer with an understanding of nature
from the depths of the Amazon to the most current scientific breakthroughs.
He is a shamanologist who traverses the worlds of the psyche and the spirit, bringing back
startling visions of the nature of existence.
Simply put, he takes enormous chances, breaks all the rules and comes back with pearls.
James McKenna.
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How many people were at the event last night?
Oh, so practically a clean sweep.
Well, as you know then, I am an inveterate talker and it doesn't take much to set me
off and it takes quite a bit to turn me off.
So it seems to me these things are always more interesting if they're driven by the
concerns of the audience.
And if the concerns of the audience aren't sufficient to fill the time, well then I have
a whole laundry list of obsessions that we can work our way through till the last syllable
of recorded time, since that's not far away in my opinion.
Very little of what I planned to say last night got said because whenever I discovered
I'm going to have to stand at a podium rather than sit in a chair, I can't, because of my
contact lenses, glance down at my notes comfortably.
So instead I just sort of rave.
So I appreciated the enthusiasm of the audience last night.
My personal assessment of the talk was that it was an even more than usual meandering
diatribe.
And a critic who charged me with a basic incoherence would probably get my blushing acquiescence.
Maybe we can do better today.
Are there questions from last night?
At the time it seemed like...
At the time I wasn't aware of any kind of discontinuity, but I was thinking about it
later.
Me too.
I wanted to know what's the continuity between what you were saying at the beginning about
changing the way we are in relationship to the earth and consuming less resources, and
then what you were saying toward the end about the coming of the millennium and moving out
of the birth canal into a new reality.
Right.
But there is, if not a contradiction there, at least it's some kind of coincidence of
opposites.
What I don't want to say is that there's nothing to be done, that there is no moral or political
imperative and that we can just continue with this mindless potlatch civilization until everything
is ruined, because I don't believe that and I think it's socially irresponsible to say
that.
On the other hand, what I don't want to fall too much in the other direction toward is
saying that it all depends on us and that we must raise enormous levels of anxiety in
ourselves and act as though the salvation of the planet depended on us.
What more is happening is that the most important political work that needs to be done is for
each of us to raise our own consciousness about these issues and then to create a community
based on the sum total of our personal acts of reformation.
So it is very important to bring help to people in the third world who are struggling to raise
families and preserve their environments and this sort of thing, but if I were a rationalist
I would be completely despairing.
So we are more in the role of midwives of this new order and I guess it's useful then
to return to that birth metaphor.
The birth of the new humanity and the new earth is going to happen, but in the same
way that a midwife or an obstetrician can ease a birth, make it smoother, make it less
painful, that's the role that political activism needs to take.
So I think we should act as though the salvation of the earth is on our shoulders, but feel
as though it is an automatic unfolding that we need not have anxiety about.
You know the Chinese philosopher Weipo Yang said worry is preposterous and I think that's
true.
We don't know enough to worry and to worry is in a sense a kind of act of hubris because
you are claiming complete knowledge of the situation and then you worry and so what is
much more empowering and what makes the process of historical ending easier I think is to
act from your heart and to individual acts of caring are more important than giving your
energy to grandiose political schemes.
It almost comes back down to the gospel admonition to heal the sick, clothe the naked, visit
the imprisoned, bury the dead, but there's nothing there about grandiose political reform
and all that sort of thing.
That I think arises out of the zeitgeist of the collectivity and I'm very hopeful.
People have a sort of hear my rap differently.
I mean I've had people after what I thought were inspiring panegyrics come up to me and
say but it's such a dark and horrifying vision.
It means that I failed as a communicator in that situation because I'm the gaunest and
most irrational hope freak I've ever met.
I mean I think everything is fine.
Everything is going toward the purpose for which it was intended but it's an act of conscious
awareness on the part of each of us that carries us toward that.
So often in what I say there is if not the fact of contradiction then the appearance
of contradiction.
This is because to my mind life is complicated enough to admit of contradiction.
Was it Oscar Wilde or who was it who said I contradict myself?
I contradict myself.
So consistency is one of the prejudices that we've inherited from the scientific attempt
to describe the world but in fact even science at its basic level has now abandoned that
as an ideal.
In quantum physics the way it's done mathematically is you have an ordinary causal logic and if
it is then logic but in order to handle what quantum physics is attempting to describe
you also have to have what are called islands of bull or islands of Boolean logic which
is embedded in the standard logic and which is a logic of both and.
And you cannot reduce this to a non-contradictory description.
The great thing about the rational program of science is pushed far enough it reveals
the irrational foundations of nature and that's really what the crisis in science now is.
The cutting edges of physical science have contacted the Heisenberg uncertainty principle
in the 20s, the anthropocentric principle in the 80s and 70s and we are realizing that
somehow the notion of an observer outside the system with a godlike objectivity and
zero input into the situation that was a necessary fiction for the more naive program of description
of nature.
But as we move into the more sophisticated description of nature we have to place the
observer in the picture and then there is going to be a reverberation of contradiction
that is probably can't be gotten rid of.
I mentioned or I referred to this in the talk last night where I said we shouldn't push
for closure, we should accept that it is in principle mysterious and so we are never explaining
life or relationships or economies or whatever we're looking at.
We're describing them with ever more prescient accuracy but we cannot eliminate the unknown.
One of my teachers years ago, West Churchman, wrote a wonderful book called Planning on
Uncertainty and we all need to plan on uncertainty and it's the one thing that is left out of
most models because the model builder has such faith in the model that he would never
build in a trap door into the realm of uncertainty and yet life is composed almost entirely of
these kinds of trap doors you see.
Does that do it?
So do I understand then that in your vision we really don't know anything about what it's
going to look like once we're out of the birth canal but what we can do now is behave with
integrity toward the world that we're in today.
Is that right?
That's right and it's not that in principle we can't know what it's like out beyond the
birth canal, it's simply that it's too early.
I used the metaphor last night that the transcendental object is below the event horizon.
It is and so all we can see is the rosy glow of its promise at this point but give us ten
years and the actual edge of the transcendental object will rise above the event horizon.
I mean I don't think that we are marginalized or part of fad and fashion.
I think this is actually the rising modality necessary for the future if we're going to
make it through.
In other words I suspect that ten years from now, fifteen years from now the things we
are talking about today will be the general metaphors and concerns in society because
I just have a very strong intuition based on a lot of journeying into those hyperspatial
modalities that this is the path.
And I'm sufficiently convinced of that to submit it to a kind of intellectual plebiscite.
I mean I believe that ideas compete with each other the way animals compete in an environment
and that the best ideas, the most fitting ideas for the human adventure will eliminate
their competition.
And that's what we're experiencing now in the political domain is the competition between
ideological systems roughly comparable to dinosaurs and mammals and you know you can
decide which is which but the two are incommensurate and one is in the act of eliminating the other
and so it's a matter of observing this process, understanding it and being comfortable with
it.
If you're right I don't think you need to feel any urgency because that will quite naturally
percolate out in the mix.
Many of you have heard me quote William Blake, it's always worth repeating.
He said if the truth can be told so as to be understood it will be believed.
In other words understanding compels belief.
You don't have to hammer on somebody.
Your task is to refine your message into an understandable form and then let the dynamics
of intellectual competition decide what is the best model to follow.
Yeah.
>> I had a question related to what you were just saying and then I had a chemistry question.
What keeps me optimistic is that information seems to be spreading more rapidly and some
futurists have said that by the year 2011 that information will be doubling every second.
I was wondering if you could comment on that.
>> Well yeah.
I mean I part of what I was going to talk about last night and didn't get to is I'm
the purveyor of a very formal mathematical theory about how history unfolds itself and
what time is and to your great good fortune you're not going to be exposed to this today.
Had we two days I would flay you with it on the second day.
But here's the thing that's going on.
Since the very first moments of the universe's existence novelty as I call it or complexity
as someone else has called it or connectedness has been increasing so that the early universe
was very simple.
It was a plasma of free electrons.
There were no laws of molecular physics, still less laws of biology or gene segregation or
something like that.
As the universe has aged it has become more and more complex.
We represent the culmination to the present moment of that process.
Well I don't think that's particularly big news.
It's sort of stating of the obvious that the universe has grown more complex through time.
But what is interesting is that each advancement into complexity that has built on the previously
established foundation of complexity occurs more rapidly than the stages which preceded
it.
So if you were to draw a diagram of that it would be an involuting spiral so that after
the big bang and things settled down after the first few nanoseconds of the universe's
existence well then for a long time it was very boring and all that happened was the
temperatures fell very gradually.
Eventually they fell to the point where atoms could settle down into stable orbits around
nuclei and then as the temperature fell still further eventually these atoms could aggregate
into molecular structures.
Again each advancement into novelty proceeding more rapidly than the stage which preceded
it.
Well that's why to my mind human history is not a radical break with primate biology.
It simply represents an acceleration of primate behavior into a more compacted temporal domain
and high technology, electronic data transfer, the erection of global society which has built
on the previous levels of cultural attainment has happened even more quickly so that these
eras or epochs you could almost think of them as of complexity are now of such short duration
that instead of taking millions of years or perhaps billions of years to transit through
one of these we now are moving through them at the rate of one or two a decade and beyond
that one or two every two or three years and beyond that one or two every few months and
I see no elegant reason for assuming that this process will ever cease its asymptotic
acceleration.
Well then if you picture what I'm describing it's a funnel of some sort which begins with
an extremely wide mouth but which has now narrowed to an extremely small and fast moving
kind of situation and this is why history is a self-limiting process.
It isn't that we have broken away from the slow moving processes of ordinary nature,
it's that we represent nature at a different time frame and I think this is why history
is ending because it's going so much faster than it used to go that it's going to finish
very soon.
There may be as much experience ahead of us as there is behind us but we're moving through
it so much faster than we used to that we are literally approaching the end of time
at a faster and faster speed and this is something built into the structure of the cosmos.
It's the answer to the question where did we come from?
We were called forth out of biological organization by the continued acceleration of the expression
of novelty and this is why I count myself as a proponent of what I call the big surprise
rather than the big bang, the big surprise lies ahead of us, not billions of years or
millions of years or thousands of years in the future but within our lifetimes potentially
and it's interesting, I think I said this last night, the people who run the world now
possess curves which when they draw these curves and try to extrapolate them 50 years
into the future it makes no sense at all.
You cannot extrapolate the ozone hole, the AIDS epidemic, the spread of plutonium, you
cannot extrapolate these things 100 years into the future because they all go asymptotic
and reach infinity so it means the oceans boil, the atmosphere blows off, everybody
dies and that's the end of it but I don't think that's what's happening.
I think novelty is the saving grace and that we are, the historical adventure is essentially
coming into the finale of the third act and it is our great good fortune to be spectators
and participants in the phenomena that for all preceding generations could only be anticipated
and prayed for.
It's a screwy position I understand, I mean it boiled down to a bumper sticker, it's a
bearded guy on the corner with a sign which says 'repent for the end is nigh' or maybe
just 'the end is nigh' but I think all the evidence is that the soul is about to collectively
leave the body.
The human imagination married to technology has become a force too powerful to be unleashed
within the fragile ecosystem of this planet so we must either carry ourselves elsewhere
or the planet's homeostatic drive to preserve ordinary biology will eliminate us through
epidemic disease or climatological upheaval or you know there are many possibilities so
I think we are being propelled somewhat reluctantly into a new human modality that is as radical
a shift as birth is to the individual or as the original entry into history was for our
species.
History cannot be conceived of as preceding another thousand or ten thousand years.
I mean it just can't be so it must be that it's a self-limiting process and it only lasts
twenty-five thousand years.
I mean if you go back twenty-five thousand years the earth was in ecodynamic balance.
Human beings were fully established as intelligent, as caring, as creative as you and I. Theatre,
poetry, dance, love, hope, tragedy, religion, all these things were in place but history
represents Gaia hitting the fast forward button on the evolution of the primates and it seems
of long duration to us because we at the level of the expression of the individual phenotype
are as ephemeral as mayflies.
You know a person lives seventy years, ninety years and then they're gone but on a scale
of twenty-five thousand years clearly what is happening on this planet is the emergence
of an entirely new kind of order within the natural order.
It is natural but it is new.
There is no contradiction in this.
Once atoms were a new invention, once molecules were a new invention, once polymers were the
cutting edge of what's happening, now the cutting edge of what's happening is large
scale primate machine integrated societies based on the movement of information.
Would that do it?
You want to follow on?
Is five methyl oxy-n-n-dimethyltryptamine crystalline legal to possess and if one was
going to mix it with one mix it with harmine, harmello, heroin or harmelene.
That was a word salad.
Well I think you're asking about five-me-o-d-m-t, five-methoxy dimethyltryptamine, the toad foam
of recent fame.
As far as I understand I think that it's legal.
However it would probably depend on the length of the fangs of the local D.A. because there
is what's called the Kogener Law which says that structural near relatives of halosinogens
can also be prosecuted as illegal compounds.
As far as the question about the harmene alkaloids, harmene, harmelene, tetrahydroharman, harmello
I think is apocryphal species.
But the notion which must lie behind your question is harmene alkaloids inhibit monoamine
oxidase which is an enzyme system in the human gut that tends to inactivate amines, monoamines
of which these halosinogens almost all fall into that category.
You could attempt to inhibit your M.A.O. with a dose of harmene or harmelene and then smoke
five-me-o-d-m-t but I don't recommend this unless you are a pharmacologist with hours
and hours of psychedelic flight time on your log.
This is certainly nothing for the ingenue to attempt.
Once you get out into the realm of synergies that means what happens when you run two metabolically
active compounds at the same time and some people do three and four and five, you know
you're definitely on your own because pharmacology doesn't study drugs like that.
They study them in isolation, their activity.
Some people say of the smokable tryptamines they're so quick that wouldn't it be logical
to inhibit your M.A.O. in order to freeze frame the experience instead of having it
last three minutes have it last 30 minutes.
Yes, that's a fine idea but what if it lasted 30 hours instead?
You don't, you know, a miss is as good as a mile in this game so you should have your
mantras ready if you push off into that.
Yeah.
>> Following on the subject of chemistry I have a quick and easy question.
Okay, I imagine psilocybin is probably, you know, pretty common and pretty common use
and I'm sure that the people around here are pretty aware of the malathion spraying
that's going on and I've always been curious.
I'm not a chemistry student but since psilocybin does have a phosphorus in it and I know most
of the malathion and most of the other chemicals like it are organophosphates and they react
synergistically.
Is there a possibility of a synergistic toxicity when you get, you know, a dose of malathion
and you're using psilocybin?
>> Well every once in a while these kinds of questions come along and the answer is
always since research with psilocybin is illegal or and even in rats counterproductive to your
career nobody knows.
You mentioned the phosphorus group in psilocybin.
Psilocybin is for phosphoryloxy and dimethyltryptamine.
This is very interesting to me because, we don't have to spend too much time on this,
but it's the only four substituted indole in nature on this planet.
The only four substituted indole in nature on this planet.
Well this is suggestive to me of a possible extraterrestrial origin for this molecule
because the way evolution works is from one structure you elaborate another structure
and then near cousins of that appear and so forth and so on.
The phosphorus group in the four position on psilocybin sticks out like a sore thumb
when you look at the structure of organic nature.
>> I don't know if you can tell me that too much that melathion is a phosphorylated compound.
I was interesting I noticed in Hoffman Osman's hallucinogens melathion is occasionally there
are known cases of human abuse of melathion.
>> Is there a bigger debt to pay at the dose where it does that?
>> I don't know, not by the aerial spraying but accidentally working with it and fairly
concentrating.
I've gotten it on my skin and for several days I had very disturbed dreams and broken
sleep and I think that's pretty well reported that's not uncommon at all.
>> Well that's very interesting because it's a neurotoxin it also creates a neural disturbance.
You know I'm willing to buy into the notion that all drugs are poisons at certain doses.
All substances are poisons at certain doses.
I mean you can kill yourself with common salt if you eat three pounds of it that's all she
wrote for you.
So always what you're doing is you're perturbing the dynamic of ordinary functioning and then
you want to and then what you're watching is the chemical cascade that returns you to
equilibrium.
>> After penises.
>> Mm-hmm.
>> There's a psychedelic type compound used in many cultures but never really with much
pleasure.
I don't think many cultures actually would posit that Jimson's leaf for instance is an
enjoyable height.
So it may give you psychedelic experiences it may give you vivid dreams but it's not
something that many people would volunteer to take.
Go to that type.
>> Yeah well that's something worth talking about and certainly I found it true.
The notion of intoxication is an incredibly culture bound idea and what one culture considers
an acceptable intoxication another culture just regards as an incredibly unpleasant experience.
Alcohol in high doses is not something most rational people would care to repeat I think
unless there were cultural conditioning pushing you toward that or tobacco.
I mean essentially that's an experience of toxicity and until you build up tolerance
to the more toxic aspects of tobacco every time you smoke it you turn green and become
nauseated.
We had the experience in the Amazon there was for years my brother and I pursued a hallucinogen
called ukuhay that was in use in a very restricted area by three tribes of Indians and the reason
we were interested in it is because the ethnographic literature said that the shamans used it to
talk to little men and because we had encountered in the DMT flash these things that I've called
self transforming machine elves we were interested in an aboriginal hallucinogen that would let
you talk to little people of some sort and the chemistry of these things was known of
the ukuhay gradually became known in the 70s and it was made from the resin of a certain
tree which elaborated not only DMT which is a clean fast acting psychedelic tryptamine
but also a number of other tryptamines and after immense expense and physical wear and
tear we on the upper Yaguas Yasu drainage in Peru we actually contacted people who knew
how to make this hallucinogen and we thought it was going to hurl open the doorway to the
golden realm and when we finally got to the bioassay of it which is a term which means
getting loaded on it it was really tough to take this stuff and your heart felt like it
was just going to hammer its way out of your chest and there were sweats and there was
hallucination but my god you were monitoring so many other physiological systems going
into crisis that it seemed almost ancillary so then lived through it the next morning
and trooped down to the shaman's hut and say listen we have to talk and then him saying
well yeah it takes getting used to and that's why our shamans don't live very long and so
then you realize what we're dealing with here is a culture that has sanctioned this experience
and projected a lot of cultural baggage onto it but that if you're the unsold customer
you say you know I think once is enough thank you for that a more familiar case that I think
is similar although some people rise up in holy wrath and we get into great arguments
about this but my personal opinion is that Amanita muscaria do you all know what that
is it's the red mushroom of European folk mythology in German it's called the fligenpilz
it's atropenic too well a lot of people who never got loaded on it spewed a lot of scholarly
argument about how this was a wonderful shamanic intoxicant but I submit to you in most cases
it comes closer to being an ordeal and it may be that because of genetic variation seasonal
variation individual variations in the expression of its genome idaphic factors meaning the
soil that it grows in the nature of its mycorrhizal relationship and in other words we've staked
out here about an eight variable equation relative to Amanita muscaria that sometimes
it's wonderful but unless you have always been in that area and can draw on the shamanic
lore of great tradition about it I think just going out into the woods and faunching down
on the first Amanita muscaria that you come upon is probably a ticket to the emergency
room if you're not very careful in Madagascar there are no hallucinogens as we would understand
it but there are what are called ordeal poisons this is an entire category in Madagascar Aboriginal
shamanism what's going on here there is there are these plants which you take them and you
at first assume you're going to die because you feel so bad and then you feel so bad that
you beg to die and then you don't die and you recover completely within 10 to 12 hours
and you are so damn glad to be alive that this has all the characteristics of a psychedelic
experience I mean you come down a kinder gentler more attentive more decent human being but
it's only because you've been hurled into the jaws of death itself and then brought
back that will work folks but so my interest has always been to squeeze the definition
of psychedelic to narrow it to make it more precise I mean sometimes people say well you're
it's about altered states well there are all kinds of altered states thousands of altered
states without even talking about drugs we can talk about being in love being abandoned
in love being jealous being anxious about your financial situation suddenly seeing the
your roots in high Atlantis these are all altered states none of them are psychedelic
well then you move into the realm of drugs there are as you mentioned atropine states
tropane induced deliriums the ketamine type states states on the edge of anesthesia states
of extraordinary agitation brought on by the whole amphetamine family all of these things
are altered states pharmacologically achieved and to my mind they are not truly psychedelic
what psychedelic means to me is in structural terms a very small number of compounds all
based on indole the indole hallucinogens are the true psychedelics and let's see what
are they there aren't that many there's LSD which is a semi synthetic made in the laboratory
but from organic precursors usually LSD Ibogaine about which not much is known because it has
never achieved much currency in the underground in this country psilocybin DMT and the beta
carbolines which are monoamine oxidase inhibitors but only hallucinogens at close to the toxic
dose and that's it peyote is an interesting is an interesting edge situation because mesculin
is not an indole it's an amphetamine and if you look at the chemical pharmacological profile
on peyote it's different from all these others first of all an effective dose of mesculin
is according to the literature 700 milligrams that's a pile of white powder in the palm
of your hand in other words it's an inefficient drug it puts a lot of strain on your system
there are different ways to think about toxicity one way is to ask how much of this compound
do you have to take to experience an effect if you have to take 700 milligrams then it's
a pretty crude drug because that's a lot on the other hand you know LSD is at the other
end of the spectrum you can feel quite strongly 50 gamma 50 micrograms of LSD help me out
here what is that five ten thousandths of a gram is 50 gamma that is to a pharmacologist
the fact that a human being can feel 50 micrograms of a compound is like a miracle I mean it's
to give you an analogy so you can understand that that's like having one red ant tear down
the empire state building in 30 minutes I mean that's what it looks like when 50 gamma
of LSD enter your body so LSD has an incredibly low toxicity by that measure you see well
then psilocybin falls in the mid range it requires about 15 to 25 milligrams and this
is an acceptable situation the other way of talking about psychedelics rather than structurally
or in terms of dose dependent profile is it's a specific altered state it is first of all
I like the word hallucinogen or hallucinogen see I grew up in a cattle town in Colorado
and I haven't shed quite all of it but hallucinogens because I was always fascinated by the idea
of hallucination to me for some reason the idea of seeing something which is not there
just became the holy grail for me because that was so challenging to my notion of what
is possible and so then when we lay these indole psychedelics out in front of us and
are trying to make decisions many people have a great enthusiasm for LSD because it empowers
thought and stirs the engines of cognition but it only reluctantly compared to these
other things is a strong visionary hallucinogen you usually have to synergize it with cannabis
or mescaline and then those combinations are highly visionary what I love about psilocybin
is that it causes you to hallucinate so effortlessly at relatively low doses and without a lot
of accompanying sweating or tremoring or physical discomfort and DMT is even more powerful as
an inducer of visionary states now people who have never had a hallucination and if
you read the literature think that a hallucination means little traveling lights or colored lines
or the kinds of things you see when you press on your closed eyelids those are not what
I'm talking about that kind of thing is called hypnagogia hypnagogia also includes chorus
lines of dancing mice little round candies falling leaves snowflakes in other words the
flotsam and jetsam of the mental ocean which is generally no more interesting than the
flotsam and jetsam of the oceans of three space what I'm interested in are full field
360 degree visionary scenarios of jungles deserts ice fields ruined cities machine scapes
and a whole bunch of other stuff which is not so easily dropped into any category of
experience that we're familiar with but highly organized three dimensional self sustaining
transformed modalities that you cannot pour language over I mean when you try to say what
it is all you can say is what it isn't and I find that tremendously affirming because
to me and I guess this is important to me that is the experience which proves that this
is not self generated when I take a plant and it shows me something I could previously
not have imagined then I know I am in the presence of the other because it couldn't
have come out of me I mean if you insist that the volleys that the Niagara of hallucination
caused by psilocybin is generated out of the dynamics of your own psyche if you insist
that that's true then you are unable to explain what your own psyche is in other words you
become unrecognizable to yourself in that case and if you are unrecognizable to yourself
you are not yourself in some sense so I prefer to believe that it's coming from the outside
that mind is a field into which we dip the dipstick of observation but it's not being
generated in the neurons of the brain yeah this guy's been waiting patiently or perhaps
impatiently
I haven't heard much about since the late 60s and I think the FDA took it out of the
marketplace it was the Hawaiian Woodrose do you know anything about that?
sure yes Hawaiian Woodrose, Argyria nervosa the Argyria refers to the silvery hairs on
the underside of the leaves it turns out that in the higher plants you see LSD or its near
relatives occur in ergot and are made from ergot it doesn't occur in ergot but it's made
from ergot ergot is a fungi an entirely different order of life than higher plants but in the
higher plants in the convulvulaceae the morning glory family there are a number of different
genera that contain alkaloids that are milligram effective cousins of LSD and Argyria nervosa
is the best known of these it's also probably I would estimate gram for gram probably the
most concentrated natural hallucinogen on this planet because half a teaspoon is an
effective dose where people get in trouble with baby Hawaiian Woodrose is they think
oh well it's a plant and plants are always weak so let's do half a cup or something like
that and then you know you're begging for mercy in a hurry there are 13 species of Argyria
all natives of Asia distributed from the base of the Himalayas to western Polynesia and
Argyria nervosa is simply the best known now the problem with it is that and this is something
you always have to be aware of with plant hallucinogens is that cardio active compounds
occur in Argyria as well and so if you miss dose even slightly it will put your heart
through changes that will stand your hair on end and I've never heard of anybody dying
on it but I've heard of people you know laying down and making their peace with their maker
because they figured that they were probably going to die now there are other now an interesting
thing about Argyria nervosa is so far as we know from the ethnographic work that's been
done it is unclaimed by any aboriginal group unless we count the surfers of Maui as an
aboriginal people and this is fascinating to me you know certain plants have great antiquity
of use and other plants equally psycho active are ignored and you know we tend to believe
that aboriginal people don't miss a trick but occasionally it seems like they're as
obtuse as we are I think a couple of examples will make the case clear as you all probably
know there's quite a complex of psilocybin containing mushrooms in central Mexico used
by the Mazatecan and Mixtecan people there and they seem to have exploited these mushrooms
for millennia however on the northwest coast of North America Washington and British Columbia
where you get the northwest coast Indian groups the Shimsham, Kwakutl and Tlingit language
areas this is the densest concentration of psilocybin containing species of mushrooms
on this planet and so far as we can tell they never used them I mean somebody will say well
they used them but they never told you in the shaman but listen you know a huge amount
of ethnography has been done in that area and there is not the slightest indication
that these people ever utilized these mushrooms even though they had an advanced shamanism
plant based shamanism they seem to have overlooked this another example that may have practical
implications for some of the more astute among you is in the past two years it's been realized
that a plant which grows as a weed in the Midwest of North America called Illinois bundle
weed Desmanthes elenoiensis is in fact the most concentrated source of natural DMT in
the world on the root scraping of the root and now this one is perhaps suspect and maybe
more ethnographic work seems to be done the straight story is that the Indians of the
great plains never knew about this and never utilized it my question is if that's so then
why is it called bundle weed because that seems to imply to me a medicine bundle and
so perhaps further ethnographic excavation will show that this was used but it could
be the basis for a whole family of visionary hallucinogens that apparently were never utilized
yeah you yeah I'd like to pull back a couple of conversations to what over the years I
felt has been the focus of some of your most of your work which is essentially this realm
we talk about pushing through into this visionary world it's a little bit it feels to me when
you talk about it's a little bit like taking the the glove and turning it inside out that
possibly your your your premises is that the universe itself is the illusion and that this
visionary world is the reality that we may well be going back into that it's this material
world and all the universe and all the material experience that we have is really the other
side well yes I mean I I regard myself as basically an explorer and a researcher I have
a lot more questions than answers the thing that has made me be what I am and do what
I do is because the the what they're telling you about these states of mind are is a whitewash
in that they say oh it gives you and these are the pros the people who are for hallucinogens
say it's a form of instant psychotherapy it's great for straightening out your relationship
it's if you're an architect you can visualize buildings in 3d they present it as a tool
for understanding this world its relationships and it's you know interconnection what I've
observed is that at high doses and with sufficient intentionality one seems to break through
into what can only be honestly described as a parallel universe of some sort that has
such existential presence and immediacy that it's hard to squeeze it down to being a mental
construct generated temporarily in your mind through pharmacological means because it seems
much more like a place and this is incredibly challenging to our way of thinking about reality
because we deny the existence of these kinds of mental realms it seems almost as though
or here's a model for how it might be it seems that reality is a series of heavily compartmentalized
universes of some sort and under extraordinary situations of mental perturbation achieved
by any means these membranes that keep these worlds mutually exclusive and sequestered
from contamination by each other just simply dissolve and you experience what called the
rupture of plane and the rupture of plane is just like poking a hole in nearby space
and then lo and behold you know the utterly unexpected is found to be alive and well right
here right now I mean and I can't stress enough how real this is and how confounding it is
I mean I may not be the brightest person around but I certainly have assimilated you know
the basic stick of what Western civilization is supposed to be about and there is no place
in the Western model of reality for the idea that just you know 20 heartbeats and 70 milligrams
of DMT away is an elf infested mega space of archaeology sized dimensions in which non-material
beings made not of matter but of syntax are merrily pursuing their own goals and possibilities
I don't know what to make of that and I also almost equally puzzling as the existence of
such a place is our lack of knowledge about it when I and hundreds of other people in
my experience and presumably millions of people throughout history have known that you could
use plant hallucinogens to break in to that world we're living in a fool's paradise trapped
inside the assumptions of linear materialism and rationalism that's the most seductive
and delicious aspect of your thesis is that my god there is a reality somewhere beyond
that membrane and then you compound it with the exploration of logic or rationale where
you present to us the possibility that the big bang is the biggest is the most ludicrous
thing to combine with rationality as could possibly be imagined and then I've even heard
people address well how is it possible that the vanity of the individual human being could
think that he's so important that the rest of the galaxy the universe out there that
we should be at all significant whereas you say well hell that's all mind scape it doesn't
exist or it feels like you say well it's a mind scape you know it isn't it is it's an
invention well what I'm really saying is we know a lot less than we assume we know I mean
if someone tells you that we live around a typical star at the edge of a typical galaxy
strewn through a mega space trillions of times larger I mean they don't know what they're
talking about that's just the cheerful assurance of modern astronomy based on a bunch of fishy
formulas that were cooked up within the confines of the 20th century I mean the stars that
shine down at night could be painted dots on a scrim for all we know I mean I'm not
saying that's the case but what I am saying is I think that the greatest disservice that
science has done to human kind is the marginalizing of our own importance if we even let's take
an objective measure of come and I think complexity if you look around at nature at the fossil
record at the human family complexity is clearly something very dear to nature nature preserves
it nature works through it nature builds upon it well we're told we're a minor this in orbit
around a minor that in a typical that and so forth and so on but if you will look at
the human cerebral cortex what you discover is the most densely complex of matter known
to exist in the universe the human cerebral cortex contains more connections per cubic
centimeter than any form of matter known to exist in this cosmos if that's true suddenly
our marginality is completely obviated and it's clear that no we are not marginal observers
of a vast cosmic drama we are at the cutting edge of the development and conservation of
complexity and it is our mind which gives us these scenarios of our position in space
and time it may well be that the human mind is very very important the human mind represents
the culmination of biology which is another phenomenon that these astrophysicists always
love to marginalize and say oh well biology it's going on on one planet as far as we know
it could be a fluke it may have happened once and it'll never happen again but you know
the life of most stars is on the order of 500 million years we happen to have the good
fortune to be in orbit around a very slow burning stable star and so we have ignored
the fact that most stars last less than half a billion years we can dig into the gun flint
chirp of South Africa and bring up fossils of soft bodied creatures that are close to
three billion years old six times the life of most stars in the universe so when somebody's
trying to tell you that what the universe is about is the life and death of stars they're
ignoring the fact that biology is a phenomenon as persistent as any phenomenon known to exist
in the universe and biology is not a static phenomenon it isn't an endless recycling of
fissionable materials the way star life is biological life has been steadily complexifying
itself over the entire time span of its existence so life is not marginal mind emerging out
of life at its more complex levels of organization is not marginal and we are not marginal we
are I think tremendously important in the cosmic drama and that a rational analysis
of the situation will support that yeah you comment in that regard you comment on those
questions I had a lot of questions earlier Lynn Margulis' theory that all of life all
of plant life is a reorganization of bacteria and all of animal life is a further reorganization
of bacterial life just to get bacteria to move around from place to place and the cerebral
cortex is just a lot of that modified spirochetes that have organized themselves in a certain
way and then in that in my reading of her the way you put human beings in this picture
is that we're just an experiment in the way station of bacterial life which may or may
not work in other words our destiny is not really in our hands to think that we can control
our fate is really hubris or illusion well it's certainly illusion I mean it's pretty
clear we don't control our fate yes you see one way of looking at evolution I mean I just
offer this as a heuristic insight is that life achieved absolute perfection with the
first organism and then this first organism underwent mutation that's a kind of damage
which it then repaired the mutation through a strategy of complexification and then there
was more mutation and more repair through complexification so what we represent is a
massive chunk of scar tissue the culmination of billions of years of repairing the perfect
first life form and all this complexity that has been added on since the first achievement
is simply a response to the damage done to it by incoming cosmic radiation I don't believe
that you see that's a theory where you assume everything is driven by the past I think that
that what is really hanging up modern biology is its absence its unwillingness to entertain
the possibility that life is driven by purpose this is an old chestnut in the philosophy
of science it's called the issue of teleology teleology is a fancy word meaning purpose
and what happened you see is it's just simply a legacy of our intellectual history when
Darwin developed the theory of evolution in the 19th century
Earth Trust (Part 2)
When Darwin developed the theory of evolution in the 19th century, English intellectual
society was under the sway of Christianity.
And it was possible as recently as 150 years ago to claim yourself to be an intellectual
and to actually maintain in polite society that the earth was created by God at 9am on
September the 4th, 4004 BC.
150 years ago in England, people believed this with perfect confidence that they were
at the cutting edge of intellectual understanding.
Well Darwin wanted to overcome deism, which was this all pervasive belief in an interventionist
creator who was literally guiding the flight of every atom and the fall of every leaf.
And Darwin said, "We don't need this kind of invasive deistic plenum.
Let's just take the process of mutation, a random process driven by he knew not what,
we now know largely driven by incidental cosmic radiation reaching the surface of the earth.
Let's take mutation and natural selection, another random process, and when we run these
two random processes head on, lo and behold, out come flamingos, cockroaches, hummingbirds,
coral reefs, palm trees, and ourselves."
But I think that, and you know, he's the co-discoverer of evolution who, if I believed in reincarnation,
I would claim him as my own.
Alfred Russell Wallace was unable to agree with Darwin and he said, "No, that accounts
for minor change in organisms, natural selection, but how can you use those processes to account
for something like, for instance, the metamorphosis of insects?
A caterpillar changing into a butterfly involves the chemical coordination of hundreds, if
not thousands of genes doing a perfectly integrated and flawless ballet of transformation.
How incrementally could you ever get a situation where a caterpillar undergoes mutation into
a butterfly unless there is some third factor at work in evolution?"
And Wallace thought that it was an appetitition, an appetite, a tendency toward an end state,
and that compass notion of evolution means that you're steering toward a goal.
Now in common speech, when we use the word evolution, we usually mean this, but orthodox
biologists, I remember when I was studying evolution, I had a professor who said, "Do
not use the word evolution unless you are talking about a process involving genes.
In other words, don't talk about the evolution of the novel or of abstract expressionism
or the evolution of society or the evolution of a political viewpoint.
This is all bad thinking."
Well, people like Ilya Prigogine, West Churchman, Eric Jancz, have reclaimed evolution as the
notion of progressive motion movement toward higher and higher states of development, but
19th century evolutionists refused to talk about advanced and less advanced or higher
and lower when they talked about evolution.
They just saw it as a random process playing itself out.
I don't think so.
I think we are called that nature is hyperdimensional in its architectonics and that we are flowing
toward a culminating purpose, probably the shedding of matter as the vehicle of our becoming.
Yeah.
Yeah, I just wanted to ask you a question about, do you think the information that is
contained in psilocybin DMT, all that hallucinogenics, do you think that the information is self-contained
or is it actually more of just a way of tuning our brains into a more cosmic frequency that
exists in the psilocybin or is the psilocybin just a mediator to a drastic way of tuning
into a more cosmic broadcast?
Well, it's hard for me to imagine that it could be in the psilocybin because psilocybin
is a very simple molecule.
I mean it's a small molecule.
It's a planar molecule.
It seems to me what must be happening is that we are embedded in an ocean of information
and psilocybin somehow changes our channel slightly.
You know, ordinary consciousness is created by a neurotransmitter called serotonin, 5-hydroxytryptamine,
suggestively a very close relative of psilocybin and DMT.
And it seems to me, I think I mentioned this a little bit in the talk last night, that
we have evolved a neurotransmitter which has the effect of narrowing the focus of consciousness
to what is operationally defined by the body as the here and now.
In other words, the body is very fragile and sight-dependent and must be protected from
high levels of radiation inundation by toxic or life-threatening chemicals like water.
I mean you don't want to have the ocean wash over you or it's a problem.
But that these pseudo-neuro-transmitters which are hallucinogens have not been integrated
into normal metabolism because they don't serve the body's need to preserve itself.
But what they do serve is an expansion of mental function.
And it may be that these neurotransmitters are in the act of evolving.
We no longer need to fear the immediate environment.
Well, maybe that's a cheerful overstatement.
But one would like to think that we no longer need to fear the immediate environment as
much as we did when we were locked in competition with other animal species.
Now it's to me highly suggestive the fact that we contain and metabolize DMT in the
course of ordinary metabolism.
What does it mean that the most powerful of all psychedelic hallucinogens is a part of
normal human metabolism?
The pineal gland, with whose function is very mysterious, is doing a lot of chemistry that
looks like psychedelic chemistry.
It's elaborating a carmine like beta-carbolines.
So it's possible that literally when we take these tryptamine hallucinogens we are, as
it were, dressing up in the mental furniture of the distant future.
That we are experiencing a state of consciousness toward which we are naturally evolving.
And that over time and through natural selection the serotonergic neurotransmitters are making
way for these more powerful psychedelic compounds.
And something like imagination looks to me like a self-generated internal involvement
with compounds which at some point in the future might replace the compounds of ordinary
metabolism and shift our mental life literally into another dimension.
Yeah?
[inaudible]
Anyone that uses organic psychedelics for a period of time as a daily dietary supplement
like every day for an extended period of time, because nobody really talks about that.
How much do you use?
A gram, a gram and a half.
Yes.
Well one can do that.
I sort of thought that maybe this isn't such a good idea because I'm interested more in
spectacular episodes of intoxication, with the exception of cannabis of course, rather
than integrating it as a lifestyle.
Am I the only one that's doing this as a lifestyle?
I feel really alone right now.
Well is there anybody who wants to join this gentleman in his isolation?
At times I've done that, but I found it to be, well here's the thing, you have to get
the dose, the dose is very critical.
If you take say, I would say a half a gram to a gram every day, my experience of that
was simply a kind of anxiety, a kind of being set forward, a speed type effect.
If you say, well I don't want that so I'm going to lift the dose slightly and you go
to say two and a half grams, the problem I had with that is life quickly evolves into
being so strange that I couldn't handle it.
In other words, it's very important for me to dip into these places and then to get out,
towel off and think about it.
However, there is a streak of the chicken shit in me I think, if you really want to leave
us all behind, and you know, bourgeois values and your job and Bill Clinton and the ozone
hole and all of that behind, then if you start taking psilocybin, let's say four grams every
three days, I guarantee you within a month there will be very few people that you will
have much in common with and you will be very happy, you will be very happy with your circumstance
generally I think, but you will have evolved a point of view, a set of values, an expectation
that most people will find a lot of difficulty relating to.
Like a shrimp shape, let's say fresh fruit, ice, a gram.
You're looking at what, maybe three to five hours of time involved with it?
So that leaves twenty hours left in the day to do everything else you need to do.
You do, no but what is the dose again?
Say a gram.
Oh, well, I don't know, see it may be just a matter of personal styles.
When I take psilocybin I give it a hundred and ten percent of my attention, so I can't
do it and work at the computer or make phone calls or shop or deliver my children to lessons
and stuff like that.
And so my idea with it is to completely come down between doses and then you're virgin
again.
Do you have a situation where it's not happening?
Yeah, you don't keep hallucinating.
No, it becomes something else.
See I don't want you to feel PA, but I think that what people do with drugs that is probably
a bad idea is they take too little too often.
And that the best way to do drugs is to take very challenging doses, rarely.
I mean I used to say to my groups, if you haven't taken enough that you think you may
have done too much, then you did too little.
In other words, you really want to dissolve the boundary.
You don't want to integrate it into this world.
You want to have an experience which you can then integrate into this world after the trip.
You know, you're the one that always talks about language and thought processes and I
feel as though most of my best work is under that period of one to one and a half grams
of dosage.
And I just don't understand how the recommended experience is much more than what I'm doing
obviously.
Well, have you taken large doses?
Well, isn't that much more interesting?
I guess it comes down to what it is you're looking to do while you're doing it.
It's not a matter of interesting, it's a matter of what your purpose is, what your intent
is, what your trip is.
Right.
But these higher doses you can't do anything.
Of course, that's my point.
You know, I mean, hanging on to the floor is a major program to be executed.
Yeah.
How can you exist in, let's say, the parallel universe?
How can a person exist in the parallel universe?
You mean for days and days?
Well, yeah.
I mean, could you live?
You can live, but you alarm your friends and quickly become an object of community concern
because, you know, for ordinary people you are what is called nuts.
Doesn't the experience just become a type of a, almost like a three-dimensional TV?
I mean, you just listen to him.
It's like, it becomes a drug.
No, I think you underestimate how strange it is.
I don't think you could ever get used to these places.
You know, sometimes people ask me if DMT is dangerous, and the honest answer is only if
you fear death by astonishment.
And death by astonishment is a real danger in these places.
I mean, these places are not simply strange or amazing or highly peculiar.
They are absolutely confounding.
I mean, that's what I'm trying to get across is this is not going to require just some
minor adjustment of our worldview.
These are the things they said were impossible.
The things they promised, assured were impossible are possible.
The greatest secret that has been kept from us is that the world is a thousand times,
a million times stranger than your wildest supposition.
And how they keep the lid on this stuff I do not understand.
I mean, I don't understand why I'm the only person saying this because I'm completely
convinced of my own ordinariness.
I am only a human being.
I represent all of you.
What happens to me would happen to you.
There's nothing special about me.
Well, then my God, how do they keep the lid on this stuff?
It's weird.
It's more if a fleet of flying saucers were to land on the south lawn of the White House
tomorrow, it would not change the fact that the weirdest thing in the universe is the
DMT flash.
Flying saucers landing on the south lawn of the White House is a positively mundane possibility
compared to this thing which is real.
It's here.
It's now.
You don't have to go to Babaji.
You don't have to go to the Himalayas.
It's three tokes away.
And yet, we argue.
Is it possible?
What does it mean?
Is it this?
Is it that?
It's amazing to me.
I mean, it is the new world.
The Europeans eventually discovered the new world, but they had to sail galleons three
months through hell to get there.
This is three tokes and 30 seconds away.
It is the absolute confounding exhibit of the whole structure of Western civilization.
How can they keep the lid on it?
I don't get it.
This person.
Where does individual spiritual development fit in without the use of hallucinogens in
your world or into your scheme of thinking?
In two last nights, you talked about the business of being should be the cultivation of love.
And I would like to hear more about that an hour later.
And thirdly, I'd like to know what do you think you would be doing today in life if
you had never used any psychedelics?
Well first to the spiritual question, which is an interesting question to me.
Everyone casts the psychedelic experience in terms of being a subcategory of the spiritual
quest.
I'm not exactly sure about that.
I've taken lots of psychedelics over nearly 30 years now.
And you know, I have a marriage dissolving.
I have people who will tell you I'm a terrible person to negotiate a contract with.
I feel myself to be a moral paragon of nothing.
And I'm not sure it has anything to do with the spiritual quest.
It seems to me true spirituality is a very here and now matter.
One should visit the sick and imprisoned, clothe the naked, bury the dead, care for
orphans, feed the hungry.
That's what the spiritual life is about.
It's very down to earth, straightforward.
I'm very puzzled and I put more than psychedelics in this category.
Like mantras, yantras, practices.
Do these things really ameliorate the suffering of the human condition?
They may be good for something.
The question is what?
Perhaps indirectly the psychedelics synergize the spiritual life because they just show
you that life is to be taken seriously and there is a great deal of it to be assimilated.
But in terms of suggesting that you are a more spiritually advanced person if you take
psychedelics, I don't really see any evidence for that.
I do think that you cannot take psychedelics without losing a portion of your ego because
it will… it's too hard for the egomaniac to take psychedelics.
The egoist will turn away from it, will have such bad trips that they will put it down,
I think.
This is an interesting question, this question of… like the question I ask myself.
Here we are, we are psychedelic people presumably by some high percentage.
Are we in any way morally superior to people who don't take psychedelics?
Maybe we're a little bit gentler and more open minded but probably in any mud wrestling
situation we can be just as down and dirty as the next person to some degree.
So I see it more… that's why I don't think of myself as a guru, I think of myself
as an explorer of a geography, the purposes of which are probably multiple.
In other words, I suppose we can use psychedelics to shape personalities and brainwash people
and control them.
And I suppose we can use it to lead people to make peace with death, mortality, their
own limitations.
It seems to me it's a morally neutral dimension and it can be used for good or ill and maybe
slightly edging toward the good because it's very hard for egomaniacs to do anything with
this stuff.
The CIA's involvement with LSD is an instructive situation.
The CIA got onto LSD well ahead of everybody else and the first notion was, and if you're
interested in this you can read J. Stephen, no the other one, Acid Dreams, Martin Lee's
book and Schlane was the co-author.
The CIA's first assumption about LSD was that it was a kind of super truth serum and
that they could kidnap KGB agents and give them LSD and they would spew out all their
contacts and so forth and so on.
So a year of researching that possibility convinced them they were on the wrong track
and so then they decided it isn't a truth serum, it's an anti-truth serum.
We will give our agents this drug and if they ever fall into enemy hands they will take
it and then it will be impossible for the enemy to get any coherent account out of them
of what is going on.
So then a few months of that and they discovered no, under some circumstances are people just
to tell all under LSD.
So then they decided that they could program a Manchurian candidate type situation with
it.
Well then that was abandoned and I think largely they have lost interest in this stuff.
I asked in the Amazon, I asked the mushroom at one point because I could see that we were
going to carry it back to the world in some form.
I said can't this be perverted, can't it be misused?
And it said only the good can come near this.
Well maybe good doesn't mean exactly what we think it means, you know, it isn't a kind
of piety worn on your cuff.
It's something else, it's a sincere wish to understand.
That's the motivation that the psychedelics will turbo charge.
As to your question about what would I be doing if I hadn't taken psychedelics, well
I don't know.
What I was doing, what I assumed I would end up doing before I took psychedelics was hopefully
end up teaching art history in a very exclusive Eastern girls school somewhere for a long
long time.
It was a kind of Nabokovian lechery was my life's plan.
And what was your, oh and love, love.
Well my analysis of what psychedelics do if you think not about my trip or your trip but
thousands, tens of thousands of these experiences, what can we say that would be true of every
psychedelic experience, every high dose psychedelic experience, what can we say that would be
a general truism.
What you could say is that psychedelics dissolve boundaries.
That's what they do.
The boundary between nature and society, between mind and body, between self and other, they
dissolve boundaries.
And this is what love does when it is working right.
I mean you are able to place yourself in the second position for a child, for a lover,
for a cause, for whatever it is, you know you take second position.
And so I see them essentially as aphrodisiacs of a strange sort.
They empower not genital prowess but real caring by showing that all differences are
illusions.
That what is real is the unbroken seamless plenum of being.
And this is what we need to learn because our whole social construct has been based
on the establishment and maintenance of boundaries.
I mean we are the most boundary obsessed human society that has ever existed.
When I go to the Amazon and spend time with the upriver people, the hardest thing for
me to get used to is that I never have any privacy, ever.
I hang my hammock in the long house and people are fighting and giving birth and having sex
and arguing and doing all these things.
Even the act of defecation is not necessarily private.
So boundary dissolution and boundary maintenance is what really characterizes our society.
I think, and I will mention it briefly here before the break, that some of you may have
somehow escaped being exposed to my theory of human evolution which is contained in Food
of the Gods.
I think that we achieved a kind of perfection in human relations and in the relationship
between human beings and nature sometime in the last million years and that we maintained
that relationship until as recently as 15,000 years ago.
And we achieved this through a quasi-symbiotic, or let's put it this way, an incipiently symbiotic
relationship to psilocybin.
You see, I'll give this to you in the short form because probably most of you have heard
it, all primates organize themselves using male dominance hierarchies.
You go clear back into lemurs and squirrel monkeys and it's the hard-muscled, sharp-fanged
young males who set the agenda and everybody else, women, children, weak older males have
to dance to that tune.
This is a characteristic of primate organization.
It is also a characteristic of our society today as we sit here and we know that the
suppression not only of women as individuals but of the feminine itself as an idea has
made us tremendously, has blocked our potential and made us tremendously neurotic.
Well, I think that when we came down out of the trees, we were male dominators, hierarchically
organized creatures and then we encountered psilocybin as an item within our diet.
And without anybody realizing what was happening, it constituted a chemical intervention against
hierarchical organization.
And an orgiastic means sharing of sexual partners, style arose in the wake of accepting psilocybin
into the diet.
Psilocybin promoted in low doses increased visual acuity.
This is an established fact and that allowed the psilocybin-using members of the species
to out-breathe the non-psilocybin-using members.
And human consciousness evolving, had been evolving, continued to evolve and through
the augmentation of psilocybin fell into a relationship of direct experience with this
goddess-like, Gaian totality, the mind of the earth.
And then there was a dynamic, satisfying balance between the expression of human advanced cognitive
faculties and a human sense of our place in nature and our roles vis-a-vis each other
and so forth and so on, in short, paradise.
And it persisted for, who knows, let's say a million years.
And it only faded when the mushrooms became, through climatological change and migration,
unavailable.
And when the mushroom became scarce and scarcer and unavailable, after a million years of
chemical suppression of the primate tendency to form dominance hierarchies, the old behavior,
which had never been genetically removed from the picture, re-emerged 12,000 years ago,
no more.
And it must have been like hell itself.
People suddenly no longer were caring for each other.
Suddenly men wanted to control the sexual and reproductive activities of women.
The concept of territory emerged.
This is at the precise moment in time when agriculture was invented.
Agriculture put an end to the nomadic yearly wanderings of the human family.
It put an emphasis on sedentary lifestyles.
The problem with agriculture, especially in the early phase, was that it was so phenomenally
successful.
You can imagine farming the alluvial detritus of these river valleys that had never been
touched.
Surpluses were created.
Surplus, in the presence of a dominator or hierarchical attitude, must be defended.
And so suddenly you have haves and have-nots, us and them.
The most advanced structure on this planet 11,000 years ago was the grain tower at Jericho.
It was a storage area for grain and it was a tower so that you could beat back attacks
by hungry neighbors that you no longer identified with sufficiently to share your food.
And in the absence of psilocybin, this structure emerged in the psyche, which we call ego.
If you have psilocybin in your diet, the ego, it's like taking chemotherapy or something.
The calcareous tumor of ego is never able to form in a situation where psilocybin is
being taken, group sexual experiences in a religious context are being orchestrated at
the new and full moon, sharing of food, sharing of childcare, sharing of sexual partners.
All that is ended when the ego is born and the ego is the boundary establishments par
excellence because it establishes me and mine as opposed to you and yours.
And with the invention of agriculture, the establishment of large sedentary populations,
that means cities, the establishment of specialized roles, that means kingship, the emergence
of male dominance, the emergence of warfare, these are the institutions that are fatal
to our higher aspirations, to our hopes, even at this moment as they were 10 to 15,000 years
ago.
That's why I think we have to chemically intervene because we have fallen into a dysfunctional
relationship toward the components of our own psyche.
And it's fine if monkeys want to dominate each other, but when you have, in the space
in which we existed in the psilocybin maintained partnership mode, we developed language, symbolic
representation, dance, theatre, so forth and so on, and we acquired and empowered the tremendous
imagination that has allowed us to build the cultures that we see around us.
That kind of power is only safe in the hands of collective community minded creatures.
And in the hands of ego driven creatures, it leads straight to Auschwitz and the hydrogen
bomb, as it did.
So I think, you know, history is a state of chemical deprivation that allows ancient animal
patterns of behavior that degrade and confuse us to re-emerge and stabilize themselves.
[Inaudible question from audience member]
You mean in the present situation?
[Inaudible question from audience member]
Well what it invokes is ever greater distance between those at the top and those at the
bottom of the social pyramid and an ever fiercer and an emergence of ever more brutal behavior
patterns which is what we see happening.
I mean our world is getting uglier and meaner and more mean spirited by the moment because
those who have are so anxious about the fact that they might be asked to share it.
I mean what we have gone through in the last 12 years in this country is a tremendous transfer
of wealth to the upper 2% of society and concomitantly a tremendous spread of anxiety, alienation
and a dehumanizing of the entire social enterprise.
I mean if we don't get hold of ourselves, the next century most of the world is going
to be a toxic desert and then here and there there will be very well defended pleasure
domes in which a very small number of incredibly wealthy people will live out lives of utterly
self-indulgent hedonistic fantasy in denial of the moral catastrophe that they participated
in in order to achieve that hedonic state of isolation.
I mean that's clearly happening.
Metaphorically that's what we have already.
I mean not to freak you out but that's where we're sitting right now you know I mean compared
to Bosnia and Haiti and Somalia.
So if your class creates defensiveness and carefully creates defensiveness then what
is the alternative?
Well neither create defensiveness except in the presence of the ego.
In other words what we have to do is teach people to care for each other as a primary
value not something you do after you know you pay for your Mercedes and all that but
as the primary value we have to have community.
It's very simple.
We don't have community.
We have a free for all where the devil takes the hind most the most brutal and ruthless
among us rise to the top and everybody else has a foot on their neck.
We are now in a hell of a fix because we've waited so long to address these problems.
There is not now enough gold, aluminum, iron so forth in the planet to raise everyone to
a middle class standard as it's enjoyed in Southern California and yet we have unleashed
these expectations in everyone by bladulating people with images of material wealth and
comfort.
The whole we must re-empower the individual and the quality of individual experience.
In other words you have to convince somebody that you are a richer person on five grams
of psilocybin than you are if you live in a five million dollar house and are spending
fifty thousand dollars a year on psychotherapy because you're miserable you see.
We have allowed ourselves to be tremendously disempowered by allowing our values to shift
toward the material domain.
You can't take it with you folks but the soul is the vehicle that you do take with you into
whatever dimensions of continuity exist beyond this mortal coil.
So instead of balancing and replacing the tires on your Porsche you should be balancing
and replacing the tires on your after death vehicle.
After all that's the one that's going to have to serve you well in the clinches you see.
How have you worked with the terror in dissolving on your journey?
How have you worked with the terror in dissolving the ego boundaries?
Well you're right there is a component of terror in this kind of work.
You know the Rolling Stones song you don't get what you want you get what you need is
never more true than with psychedelics but in terms of practical suggestions fear has
many aspects but one aspect of it is it has a chemistry and the chemistry of fear is fairly
short term.
You've probably all experienced driving on the freeway and somebody cuts right in front
of you and there is a it feels like your body temperature must rise about five degrees in
about a third of a second.
It's an incredibly fast chemistry that goes on there and then in about five seconds you
fall back down to within normal parameters.
The one way to deal with fear is sit still and wait.
In other words the psychedelic terror is usually fairly unfocused.
It is simply raw terror.
Well just sit still and shut up and watch the chemicals in your mind tear those molecules
apart and rarely can the fear sustain itself more than five or ten minutes because it has
the force of a blow but then you can sustain the blow and chemical equilibrium returns.
The other thing and this is great very good advice don't forget it it's hard for western
people to keep it on their plate sing sing the way we relate to terror is we crunch clench
withdraw and hunch over in some kind of fetal position like you're being beat on what you
want to do is sit up straight straighten your spinal column open your air passages and begin
to cycle oxygen through and if you sing in a very few minutes the chemical foundations
of the fear will be washed away so that's very practical.
It doesn't matter mantra yantra you know everything becomes profound on psychedelics.
I mean I tend toward row row row your boat gently down the stream merrily merrily merrily
life is but a dream.
Well I see it's lunch time why don't we break keep your keep your questions we'll come back
at about a quarter of two and then we'll push on to the summit hopefully.
Thanks very much.
Oh thank you.
Okay.
Well you asked for it okay so we're in big.
Oh yes what a heart sinking assumption.
No my assumption was that we could skate by on questions alone but what is your question?
There were no questions.
Okay so an oblique request to override questions.
Basically what happens is I end up saying what I want to say anyhow because you may
have noticed a certain logical gap between some of the questions and some of the answers.
That's not a failure of your own understanding that's what's going on as a matter of fact
you know but you had a question.
I just wanted to kind of introduce a new idea here I mean it's probably an old idea but
also a new idea.
This was years ago that I played the Ouija board a lot and one strange evening I was
playing and I asked the question who are we talking to when we speak to the Ouija board
and the reply was in your future man will be able to speak with his ancestors contrary
to popular belief that you were speaking to your ancestors which meant basically that
in our future we're going to discover ways to talk to the past and deliver messages through
the past and in connection with the UFO experience I was wondering if quite possibly that the
extraterrestrial was actually us in the future coming back you know discovered the technology
of travelling through time you know and I was just wondering if you had anything to
say about that.
Now watch how this question is perverted into an episode of speechifying on my part.
I'm glad you asked that question.
Well I mean I thought a lot about this.
I suppose in order to get into it what I should do is just take a moment or two to actually
describe for you my idea or my account of what it is that lies at the very center or
at least as far into the center as I've been able to push of these experiences.
To my mind I mean I mentioned here this morning that DMT seems to me the most powerful of
these things.
What powerful means in that context is that more of the motifs are present at greater
energy than they are in some of these other compounds and you know at the risk of repeating
myself what happens to most people I think if they are able to remember it what an actual
DMT flash is like is you know this stuff it's vaporized in a glass pipe it's smoked it
comes on in about half a minute or less and is immensely stronger than any amount of psilocybin
or LSD could conceivably be I think and what happens is and I'll speak in the first person
just to make it manageable what happens is I break into a space first of all I am fully
myself in other words I am exactly who I was before that's why on one level I say DMT doesn't
affect your mind you are not euphoric ecstatic you are exactly who you were before but there
is a sense of pushing through a membrane of some sort there's actually a sound as though
someone had wadded up a cellophane bread wrapper that crackling sound which some people assumed
erroneously were brain cells frying in your cerebellum a friend of mine said it's your
soul as radio intellect leaving your body through the top of your head well whatever
it is you burst into a space I burst into a space that is inhabited that's the first
shocker there's no ambiguity about it because there's an ear splitting cheer as you break
into this space it's an elf nest of some sort and there are hundreds of these self dribbling
jeweled basketballs sort of I mean that's a heavy download into English of what they
are but they are autonomous separate from the background and they bound forward screaming
hello basically and for someone who expected insight into their relationship or their financial
circumstances this is a fairly astonishing and rapid turn of development and they are
intently focused upon you I mean when it happens to me they yell hurray and then they are like
long lost acquaintances they literally pour over you they crawl over you you're being
hugged by a troop of hyperspecial machine elves and they say you know you stay away
so long you send so many but you come so rarely and we're so happy to see you and then and
there is a sense of being somehow without being able to cognize the logic of it you're
underground you can tell that you're far underground and these things the main thing going on in
this place is that these things are creatures of language they are elves of syntactical intent
they appear to be made of language not matter and they are in a process of continuous semantic
transformation meaning is crawling across their surfaces in a state of continual metamorphosis
and they are emitting sounds roughly analogous to some kind of music or language except that
this is like no music or language you've ever heard because what it is is it is something
capable of being visibly apprehended it's sound which you can see it's linguistic structure
whose syntax is visible in three-dimensional space and they use their voices to make objects
which are in some sense the central focus of the experience because out of the air out
of their bodies out of your body they condense create and pluck these objects which they
offer for your inspection and as you lean forward to look at one of these things midst
this clamor of elf hysteria you as I said are fully yourself your judgment is not impaired
your and in fact they are saying to you fight excitement do not abandon yourself to amazement
in other words they're telling you stay down don't just go off on some arm waving rave
about how this is impossible and outlandish and outrageous try to stay focused on what
we're doing and what they show you are objects that are intrinsically and inherently impossible
so that these things made of tools gold ivory cut stone flesh music hope odor I mean it's
hard to talk about but when you direct your attention towards these things you can tell
by looking at it that if you could get it into three-dimensional space if I could suddenly
whip one out of my briefcase and display it to you our world our intellectual constructs
would collapse upon themselves because this is impossible impossible beautiful impossible
reconstructed defining of the laws of physics and chemistry that's a higher dimension actually
maybe from the future maybe I mean as far as three-dimensional time is concerned there
is no such thing well like what we've created so are they actually trying to tell you that
okay everything you see is impossible is not really impossible introducing to you that
nothing is impossible and that that is our future way of thinking is that nothing is
impossible and you know otherwise we're doomed well I have a sort of an I almost said rational
but let's say at least orderly kind of mind so I tried to understand you know what could
this be so you make a list of hypotheses and then think about each hypothesis and test
it against the evidence okay hypothesis one DMT is not a drug it is an extraterrestrial
communication device these are creatures somewhere in the universe who are so different from
us that they come to us not in starships the size of Manhattan but in drug molecules that
are dinky so we are in contact here with some kind of extraterrestrial technology and these
are true aliens of some sort and God knows the weirdness of the situation supports the
hypothesis okay second hypothesis there is a parallel universe unsuspected by most human
beings it's right here all the time it's inhabited these things have their own hopes fears problems
so forth and somehow this drug just erases this boundary and then you're you find yourself
in the elf nest okay next hypothesis these things because they have great affection for
me because they seem intent on the task of communicating perhaps they are human beings
from the distant future perhaps this is what we are fated to become you know there's always
since we were kids the cliche beings of pure energy well it's always been a little hard
to wrap your mind around what that would look like but lo and behold here appear to be
creatures of pure energy but there are a lot of problems with hypothesizing a future human
technological breakthrough which would allow them to actually manipulate the past logical
paradoxes and that sort of thing well so then here's another possibility they are human
beings but they are not in the future in the ordinary sense or in the past they are in
the prenatal and post life phase in other words these are either the unborn waiting
in some limbo like dimension to descend into matter or they are in fact people who have
had a sojourn in the domain of organic existence and now have moved on let me not kid you we're
talking about dead people here in that case well if you go to the if you go to the shamans
who who access these places through ayahuasca or the varroa snuffs or something like that
they will say well these are ancestors didn't you read mercilia don't you know that shamanism
works through ancestor magic well ancestor is a tremendously sanitized term for dead
people and if what is actually happening here is that the much argued about soul is actually
made visible by this pharmacological strategy i mean god knows why but god knows why anything
else is the way it is then this is truly big news this is the confounding of rationalism
if what is happening is that by pushing the frontiers of pharmacology we discover a way
to even momentarily and temporarily erase the boundary between the living and the dead
then this is a hundred and eighty degree turn on the evolution of culture but not even the
most technically infatuated among us are prepared to assimilate i mean it's no it's no challenge
on that scale of things to expect visitors from zinebel ganube or zeta reticuli or some
other distant piece of real estate but to expect visitors from uh you know beyond the
grave that's a little confounding and over time i've sort of come to incline to the idea
that this is what is in fact going on and the reason it's so hard to bring anything
out of the dmt flash is because at the center of the flash you find out something so unexpected
so appalling and so existentially convincing in the moment of confronting it that you simply
immediately block it out and obliterate it and then and and these things are very focused
on getting you to do what they're doing i mean they say you can do what we are doing
do it do it and what they want you to do is use your voice to make objects appear in visual
space as though language admittedly the phenomenon with which we are involved in a way that no
other animal species on this planet is but that language as practiced by human beings
is an incomplete enchantment and that pushed to its limits language becomes not something
heard with the ears but something seen with the eyes on the brink potentially through
pharmacological re-engineering of ourselves and and through studying of these shamanic
states of mind about to move into a domain where we see each other's thoughts now normally
when we conceive of telepathy we think of it as you hear what i think telepathy is you
see what i mean you see telepathy is a function which goes on in the domain of seeing not
of hearing and why this is important rather than just some weird psychic ability is because
our boundaries are based on our relationship to our language if you could see what i mean
in a fairly profound sense you would be me in a much more profound sense than when you
hear what i say because think about it for a minute analyze what normal ordinary communication
is i want to communicate with you i consult my internal dictionary and i carefully choose
words out of my dictionary and i string them together according to the rules of english
syntax i then activate if i've done things in the right order i then activate my vocal
apparatus i impart a vibration an acoustical wave onto the surrounding medium which is
air this vibration moves across space it enters through the holes on both sides of your head
as a pressure wave you then analyzing this incoming waveform rush to your dictionary
and you break up this incoming wave signature and attempt to map it to words in your dictionary
now if your dictionary and my dictionary are the same then you will lo and behold reconstruct
my thought in the confines of your brain mind system but notice the caveat that was slipped
in there if your dictionary and my dictionary are the same but they never are i mean maybe
they are if you ask can you tell me what time it is or would you please turn down the stereo
but if you're talking about anything of interest depth ambiguity or complexity then chances
are your dictionary and my dictionary only generally assimilate to congruency with each
other so then ambiguity creeps in you think you understand i think you understand and
on that shaky foundation we begin to build further semi understandings and then we drift
off in the general direction of misapprehension eventually well if you could see what i mean
there would be no ambiguity in our communication because we would the intention of language
would be established in visual space with an existential modality about it similar to
sculpture i would make it but having made it you and i would both examine it walk around
it and have the faith that we were looking at the same thing and this would tend to erase
our boundaries so it's very clear that communication of the ordinary sort small mouth noises transduced
across acoustical space and symbolic notations there of have created the global civilization
that we're living inside of but how much more collectivist how much more community we would
have if we could see what each other mean and so i'm beginning to assume that the proper
way to think about these hallucinogens is as catalyst for language formation as catalyst
for the project of communication and that the end result of the project of communication
is that we become what we behold in other words there is not the sense of the observed
and the observer these two polarities of an experience are merged in the act of pure perception
and this is something emerging out of our biological organization it's not a cultural
development the way a new invention or a new mathematical algorithm or something like that
would be it's an evolution of our neural capacity and then let me just say one more thing about
it and then we can talk about it there is a model for this in nature that makes clear
i think what i'm driving at as many of you know octopi change colors we learn this from
wonderful television programs about nature that keep us from being in nature but nevertheless
inform us of the details of nature octopi change color they have a very large repertoire
of dots blushes spottings ripples and so forth it was for a long time thought that this was
camouflage now it's been understood by people who study animal communication that this is
not camouflage this is language the octopus does not make small mouth noises that move
through space because in the aqueous medium there are certain physical problems that make
that an improbable way to do business what the octopus does is it is its own syntax it
doesn't generate syntax it becomes syntax so the mind of the octopus is worn on its
surface its thoughts ripple across its geometry as color changes it is in effect operationally
a naked mind not a naked brain a naked mind so when one octopus encounters another by
the mere act of looking it can tell how long it's been since the other one has eaten how
long it's been since it's had sex what its general attitude toward the world is at that
moment so forth and so on it is able to visually apprehend the mental universe of the other
this is why octopi extrude ink into the water it's because it's the only way they can create
a private dimension for themselves because for an octopus to be beheld is to be understood
so you can think of octopus ink as correction fluid for misspoken cephalopods if you like
well in a sense this is what we I think are headed for in a way we can already do this
in a very crude way we have faces no other animal has a face other animals have fronts
to their heads but we have faces it's an area where a lot of musculature is under the surface
is under the control of the intent to communicate so by scowling squinting rolling ones eyes
looking away so forth and so on we communicate imagine if that communicative ability rather
than being confined to a few square inches on the front of the skull were to spread out
over the entire body and of course for the octopus in an aqueous medium it can fold and
unfold itself it can reveal and hide parts of its body very quickly it can in fact communicate
faster than we can communicate with small mouth noises and this ability to communicate
is so important to the biological foundations of octopus existence that when the octopi
who all of whom or all of which I'm not sure evolved in the shallow waters near coastlines
Earth Trust (Part 3)
whom, or all of which, I'm not sure,
evolved in the shallow waters near coastlines
when those environments became evolutionarily crowded,
the octopi evolved into the benthic depths,
into the parts of the ocean where no light ever reaches.
But in order to maintain lines of communication,
over long periods of time, they evolved phosphorescent organs
on their bodies and eyelid-like membranes
covering those phosphorescent organs.
So in the benthic depths of the sea,
all that one octopus ever encounters of another
is its pure linguistic intent.
Nothing else can be seen.
So I think that the DMT-Ls,
all I can figure is that they are trying to catalyze us
to move up the scale in the refining of the bandwidth
of our communication skills.
Do you feel that after your experience with them, the DMT-Ls,
did you come any closer to expressing your communication
through those means?
You mean do I feel more able to do that?
Yeah, do you feel like you're any closer,
or is it otherwise just maybe an entertainment
instead of an enlightenment,
if we aren't able to actually reach it?
Well, no, I mean they urge one toward a kind of glossolalia,
a kind of ecstatic verbal activity
that is devoid of attachment
to the culturally contrived dictionary.
And for a long time I could hear them do this.
I could hear this stuff, this DMT gibberish
flowing through my mind.
And then eventually I became able to do it.
And it's immensely satisfying.
This relates back to what we discussed this morning
about how there's DMT in the human brain
being produced for some reason.
You see, we do tend to connect successful linguistic activity
with the visual cortex.
In other words, if somebody successfully communicates something to you,
you say, "I see what you mean.
Now it's clear to me you've painted a picture."
Why is it that when we want to say that language is succeeding,
we reach for visual metaphors?
It's because we trust our eyes.
We don't trust our ears.
The world is defined for us as something seen.
And the ambiguity of ordinary communication,
which is culturally defined,
and for each of us defined by basically
where on the surface of the planet you first saw the light of day.
You know, the French speak French,
the Dutch speak Dutch.
Why can't the English learn how to speak?
Or no, that's something else.
But what I'm talking about is an oral language
that you don't learn from a culture,
but that you learn in the same way that you know how to breathe,
you know how to eat, you know how to grasp.
It's in the organic structure
rather than in the cultural software.
But is it the communication?
Can you communicate with others?
Other human beings?
On this level?
Well, you can if you're both loaded on DMT,
but that's such a chaotic environment
in which to sort this kind of stuff out.
That's what drove me to the Amazon in the first place
was the DMT flash is so maddeningly short.
I mean, you're trying to sort all this out
and assure yourself you're not dead as a doornail
in about two and a half minutes.
And I thought, you know, we need to slow it down
and stretch it out.
Why does it have to be like a Bugs Bunny cartoon
run backwards at five times normal speed?
I mean, you just cannot get a grasp on it.
And over the years,
judicious manipulation of these substances
and all kinds of special conditions,
eventually you see what it is.
And it's almost as though language is trying to be born out of matter.
The pure energy thing of '50s science fiction
may in fact be a fairly accurate take on where we're headed.
We are headed toward becoming pure syntactical intentionality,
just shedding the monkey,
shedding any umbilical cord into matter.
Matter is becoming a fairly uncomfortable dimension
for us to be in, and I daresay matter
would probably be highly relieved to have us just move on
so that the rainforest, chipmunks, glaciers, and schooling salmon
could go back to doing what they do best.
Nicole?
I wanted to talk about the eggs.
And I have that stuff that I'm standing on right here.
I want to see what you think of it.
And the psychedelic experiments
that if we think of the whole of life being that
one man is a self-evident,
and the other is a beast,
and then the other man is the soul,
the silent form, or whatever you call it.
So in between you have all these vast layers
of different layers,
and you're talking with the unconscious,
the subconscious,
the archetypes, and the brain, or something.
And there are also these things that they
are called the elementals.
The what?
Elementals.
Elementals.
Elementals. Got it.
Elementals, you know, the rocks, the water, the fire, the air.
And in the ancient literature,
the different civilizations have spoken about those.
And usually they always relate to them as having a spirit
which manifests itself in the shapes of elves and nymphs.
And usually the elves and the little dwarves
are associated with elves, selves, selva, the forest,
the mother of the earth.
And the water usually has more feminine nymphs.
And so I was thinking, since you took the mushroom,
which is very much of the forest of an earth element,
maybe the mushroom opened the door to you
for that elemental of the earth.
Well, this could be.
I mean, all I've ever seen of that other universe
is an area smaller than this room.
And yet I assume that other universe
is probably equal in size to our own.
So I'm not exactly Ferdinand Magellan
where it's concerned, you know.
Well, yeah, but it's just, you know, a little glimpse at it.
And there is other people have talked about it.
Like for instance, the tribal men, the shamans,
and not shamans, you know, had experiences
where they did encounter beings that talked to them
and give a message.
And, you know, Castaneda talked about it.
Lyn Andrews talked about the little nymphs of the water.
And other Indians, you know, have basically,
even through their oral tradition, kind of passed on
that kind of a message that there are.
The world has different layers of reality
and they are all accessible and available
if one is, you know, if the boundaries can be broken enough
so that our flow of energy can really access
these other layers.
Yeah, I think our materialism has focused us
so entirely away from these more rarefied layers
that we cannot see them at all.
That we, in fact, deny their existence.
You know, in a way, what science has practiced
over the past 500 years has come down to
is it has been a relentless despiritualizing of the world
until finally, you know, they tell you there is no soul,
there are no spirits, what you see is what you get.
We have risen to the surface.
Well, a shaman looking at a person
with that kind of a mental map of things
just pities them their simplistic stupidity.
He says, you know, my God, you're like a half-wit or something
because everything interesting and complex, you say, doesn't even exist.
I agree, but that doesn't mean that because we as a culture
are now at a point where we do need to go back to this forgotten land.
We need that feminine energy or that sense of sacredness of life
and of all things and that sense of connectedness
with the whole of the universe.
Well, that's no reason to put down what we have learned, you know,
because I think every culture, every civilization
kind of drill in one direction for knowledge
and the Far East, for instance, with all of their meditation
and all of their time spent in caves and no eating
and this kind of ordeal that they go through
that puts them facing death even though they don't take psychedelics,
they get through that same experience with the kind of excruciating pain
and whatever they invent to get there.
Well, they've drilled into that realm of the unconscious
towards the source, towards the no being, the no self
and they've done wonderful discoveries in that area
but then in order for them to go so far in that direction
they had to say, "Forget the world, this is all an illusion I'm not interested with."
Well, we took the other side of the coin.
We said, "Forget religion, forget philosophy, forget even love and emotion.
Who wants to deal with it? I want a microscope and I want to look at atoms.
I want to look at viruses."
And look what we've discovered that way.
I mean, that's not to be all thrown into the water, you know.
No, I agree.
There is a big danger for the baby with the bath water.
That's true but also eventually you get into a situation of diminishing returns.
For instance, you know, it was a great step forward for von Leeuwenhoek
to grind his lenses and to see little animals cavorting in a drop of water.
But for instance now, ordinary science is going to Congress and saying
in order to take another step deeper into the understanding of matter
we want 20 billion dollars to create an instrument 17 miles in diameter
that will take 30 years to build and that will allow us to at last confront
the bottom quark or something like that.
I heard these guys on NPR, probably some of you heard them
being challenged, particle physicists being challenged by someone who said
"Well, you want America to commit, I think it was 50 billion dollars
to building the super collider."
Can you name a single spinoff from particle physics that has trickled down
into the lives of ordinary people and they were absolutely stymied?
Well, I kind of go with Peter Russell's theory that perhaps from our technological culture
we did get something. First of all, none of us would be here if it was not for technology
because today we have close to 5 billion people on earth. That might be a curse
but that also might be, you know, do you want to be the one who is not born?
A tricky question.
So, in that fact of life explosion, there is one thing that happened is that
we do not have a conscious of ourself as one planet, as one whole being.
I mean, even with the technology of going to the moon, through the physicality
we have a view of ourself from the outside. I mean, to me I look at it like maybe
in the evolution of humanity, it's like being 7 years old, you know, all over the world
and you say "But hey, I am me, I am somebody." And I can decide to say no or to say yes
but if there is something there, there is an entity. And as a planet, maybe that's what we did
when we went to the moon. And the Indians, you know, I go down to sweat lodge every week
and I participate with the Indian community down in San Pedro. So I am trying to learn a bit
the way they think. And a lot of things I enjoy very much, you know, but then other things
you know, I don't agree totally. For instance, with the moon thing, you know, they say
"Well, we've been to the moon many, many times before and we go to the moon through the dream world."
See, like you went to the Alps but a lot of people go to the stars.
I mean there is a lot of other realities out there and it's not the future and it's not the past
it's just life, it's part of that dance which...
But do you think that it's simply that there are a lot of realities?
For instance, what puzzles me about these encounters with these elf things
is the urgency from their side. You know, I could imagine just breaking into an elf ecology
and seeing them busy making shoes and, you know, putting the blush on strawberries
or whatever elves do. But they seem intently focused on a project that has consequences
in this world and that puzzles me. I don't think history has been a waste of time.
I think probably it's served its purpose and that what we now have to do is take what we've learned.
It's the prodigal son, I mentioned that. And now return to the archaic family
with the ability to move to the moon and to etch microcircuitry and to define the protein coats of viruses
and these fancy things that we can do. All that is good knowledge but it has to be linked to a coherency of self
that we somehow have gotten so strung out on this scientific descriptive binge
that we forgot why we're doing it and what this is all for.
The only thing I would say is that for people to hear us into this kind of rationality
I think it's good diplomacy not to put down the culture, not to discard it.
I got a sense sometimes that you just discard it as a neurotic error of humanity or something.
I think there is acknowledging what it has done, acknowledging it as a step
and saying there are good things that came out of it but now we are reaching a crisis level, an apotheosis
and now we are into a dark corridor where we have to make choice, we may have to change direction
we have to do something drastic because if not it's going to be a cataclysm forever.
Well the basis of my criticism of science is not the science that it does, which it does very well
but the metaphysical pontificating that it claims to be able to do based on nothing more than its assumption
that all competitors are naive. I mean science should not be telling us what we should think about astrology
because astrology is not a proper object for scientific judgement.
In other words science is simply one method of understanding the world but the people who practice science
think it's a meta-method, think that it is somehow the arbiter of truth and that we are supposed to take any proposition
and lay it at the feet of science and it will tell us whether it's kosher or not
and that means that the scientists are completely out of their domain and should be sent back to the workbench
and the test tube and stay out of the domain of metaphysics and philosophy which is not properly their area.
I think that's part of the change where we don't value strictly the material world, we have to bring back the value
the sacred, the mystery, the whole other aspect of life and if as a culture we would change that
so that everybody would have a more balanced view of the universe then the scientists would be automatically put back in their spot.
Physics and metaphysics need to be worried about it. Everybody talks here like there is truth. There may be no truth, it may all be nonsense.
When you go on and listen to it, I get the impression sometimes you feel you are bringing truth back.
How do you tell the difference between truth and nonsense?
Or shit and Shinola as we normally...
It worries me that it's entertaining but I still don't feel there is necessarily any truth.
Well, I don't know if you were at the lecture last night but there was talk there about how one must not get clutchy about closure.
There is no closure, there is no truth. You're quite right.
But I mean there isn't even a direction of truth, it may just all be nonsense.
Well, if it's all nonsense then we're in a hell of a fix.
Well, that's where we may be.
Wittgenstein had a slightly different notion that I think is more serviceable here.
He said, "What we want to do is we want to make statements that are true enough."
Now, there is a monkey concept. That's what we want. We want to say things which are true enough.
That means serviceable in the circumstance in which they are being applied.
Or survival in some sense.
Yeah, or whatever, you know, if you're solving tensor equations of the third degree then in that domain.
But the idea, you see, it's so crazy to think that talking monkeys could get anywhere near truth.
I mean, do you think a sea urchin possesses the truth or a macaw?
Well then, why you?
And especially when you realize, you know, we do all this business in English
and we're utterly naive about the limitations of language.
You can't even under... I mean, take someone like Derrida, for instance.
Whatever the man's truth is, it can't even be exported into English without becoming gibberish.
Because when you read him, you can't understand him.
However, it's also looking at not only the limitations of language but the potency of it.
The reason to believe is to believe that consciousness itself is invented out of language.
When we take feral children out of the jungles that haven't had the adoption of abstraction into their lives
it is almost impossible to bring them to humanness, to being human.
So, language is maybe incredibly potent.
And as you suggest with these elves, you're talking about a medium of pure language.
Oh, a purer language.
Yes, well, language, you know, if you were to look at this planet and seek the thumbprint of a higher intelligence
God or the goddess or whatever, language is the thing to look at.
I mean, this is the thing we do that is an incredible cemetery break with the rest of nature.
Do you think a dog can tell the difference between those stairs and that floor
or the rug and that, or even the flowers and that?
In the species it is a continuum that simply is a texture.
Like, we look at this rug, we don't identify that spot from the rest of it, we just simply say it's a rug.
Well, an animal intelligence is suspended in the here and now.
Language seems to be a strategy for binding time.
And notice that the entirety of evolutionary advance is a series of time-binding strategies.
Once you possess language and especially once you possess writing, the past is not so past as it used to be.
It hangs around and we begin to create a database of experience larger than any community of living people could ever have.
And the past stays with us. This is both a blessing and a curse.
Notice that we have industrial cultures as a result of the accumulation of written language.
There is a simultaneousness between written language and agriculture, etc. and industrial culture.
Oh yeah, I don't have any problem with that.
Somebody said language was created to lie.
Yes, but it does it so elegantly and so well that the half-truths it tells are all that we can communicate.
The truth cannot be said.
It can be possible to chart the evolution of a single individual from an infant all the way through his maturity
as one who takes the journey from the right side of his brain into the left side of his brain,
crossing a certain membrane there where he switches his dominance from right to left and then going full circle
and then once again becoming "spiritual" by adopting and integrating the right once again.
Yeah, these are all metaphors and analogies for a process which is essentially incomprehensible.
There is no reason to expect reality to be rationally apprehendable.
This is the basic fallacy that we so confidently assume the world is for us
that we assume that we should also therefore be able to understand it
when in fact what we've done is just carved out a very limited domain of repetitious algorithms
that don't have fatal consequences for us and then the rest of it lies in the realm of the great who knows.
But you know, since there's very little percentage to be made out of that,
people prefer to keep their faces turned inward toward the campfire,
not outward toward the immense darkness revealed by the campfire,
and the bigger you build the campfire of metaphor, the more darkness you reveal outside of its domain.
So if ever there was an argument for open-endedness and defocusing on closure,
it would be the linguistic enterprise, I think.
Just this one. Language may be the carrier or the virus that in fact causes consciousness.
There may not be any consciousness without this infection of language.
Yeah, well I don't have any trouble with that.
I mean, William Burroughs said language is a virus from outer space, and well it may be.
It does have, you know, it self-replicates itself, it spreads through a population, ideas mutate,
they compete with each other, ideas become extinct,
new ideological forms that are more adaptable squeeze out other forms.
I mean, the whole evolution of organic life may be simply a lower dimensional rehearsal
for a kind of syntactical evolution that is going to go on in a domain that we can barely conceive of.
Yeah, over.
For myself, I'm not so concerned with what the truth is, but what in fact works in one's life,
and how one uses the word or uses the ideas to manifest in the reality that we're swimming through.
In light of that, I'm just wondering about the mushroom, morphogenetic fields,
the plant community in terms of allies that one can become connected with
as a collective community that we're all participating in.
Can you elaborate on that?
Well, I've talked with Rupert a lot about this, and sort of different things can be said.
I mean, one way of thinking about what the psychedelic experience is,
is that psychoactive compounds amplify the morphogenetic field
to the point where it becomes a potential object for inspection by the conscious mind,
in the same way that we know right now that this room is filled with radio, VHF, UHF signals,
but we also know that we would have to have a radio or a television set in order to tap into them.
The morphogenetic field is ordinarily damped by experience,
and becomes overwhelmingly present when we jack our neural physiological receptors
up to the point where these previously invisible influences become visible.
The other thing in terms of the morphogenetic field theory and how it relates to psychedelics
is to realize that when you take a plant, the plant takes you.
And so, for instance, one of the reasons I prefer shamanic hallucinogens to synthetics
is that they are so much richer as databases
because they have inside them all the people who've ever taken them.
I mean, when you take psilocybin, you leave something behind in there
that every subsequent user of psilocybin will encounter.
So, you know the way Tibetans leave little cairns of rock when they cross high mountain passes?
Well, this is what we're doing in the psychedelic experience.
And really, the character of psilocybin is the cumulative superimposition
of the character of the thousands and thousands of people over the millennia
that have taken it plus something else, its own unique nature.
When you take a drug which induces an altered state like ketamine, for instance,
ketamine is a drug that has not been around very long, hasn't been taken by millions of people
and is oddly empty.
The building is there, the architecture is there, but where are the hurrying secretaries,
the water coolers, the executives, the buzzing elec... Nothing.
You know, it's empty real estate, it's for rent.
And if you want to move in, well then you can live there.
But it's the difference between a modern office building and a 14th century Italian villa
when you contrast a modern synthetic with a well-used shamanic organic.
Yes?
Yes, I have a question.
You bring up so many different questions, you know, you sit here and try to...
In order to be a moving target to...
That's the idea. I'd like to relate the experience.
Well, first of all, I'd like to kind of get some input from, if anybody else has anything to say on this matter.
A lot of times when I first take like five grams or something, I get this...
This is kind of a simple thing, but it's a yawn.
I'm wondering if... Does anybody else get that yawn?
Yes.
No, the yawn is a physiological response to psilocybin that is...
It's part of it. And so is the runny nose in the first hour.
This is... You know, every drug has a spectrum of effects, and some are dependable and some are not.
I mean, for instance, LSD...
Almost... You could almost say 100% of the people who take LSD, it dilates your eyes.
That is an effect of LSD that it would be impossible to eliminate.
But I wouldn't say 100% of the people who take LSD encounter the good Lord or something like that.
That's a more selective effect.
Okay. The second part is, after I take five grams and after I get the buzzing sounds in my ears,
and then this last time I took it, I was in a darkened room, laid on the bed, got naked, and just laid there.
And for the first time, what happened, usually I close my eyes and I'm able to get visions,
kind of a passing vision, almost like a film going through my head.
I'm wondering also, does anybody get it where it's coming from the right to the left
or from the left to the right, sort of a film coming across?
It's back in the front.
Talk to me.
Ah.
Paratology.
Well, I think that the number of ways these things can present themselves is practically infinite.
I mean, I've seen... I've had really weird experiences with information.
For instance, you know these splashers on buildings where the news goes by?
I've had hallucinations where it became a textual hallucination.
In other words, what I was seeing was an illuminated page of print, and then as I looked at it,
every 50th letter would invert, and then suddenly every 20th, and then every 10th, and then every fifth,
and I literally watch a page of text go from being readable to being gibberish,
and then watch the meaning come through again in a loop.
I mean, I think anything you can conceive of, it can do, and many things you can't conceive of.
What's the beauty of individual perception, though?
I mean, we're all individuals. We all have the gift of bringing our own ideas.
But still, you have to be able to make general statements about it, or you would have to say that it's all and everything.
But it's exactly the same. It would be boring.
Although, how would you know, since you would never have any trip but your own?
One of the things that happens on psilocybin and on ayahuasca that really puzzles me,
that I just go back to again and again, is you can be having these volleys of hallucination,
and then you can say to it, "Art Deco," and click,
and suddenly there will be thousands of cigarette lighters, limousines, candy dishes,
stuff rolling in black space in front of you.
Thousands of these things, perfectly exemplifying this very narrowly defined aesthetic domain.
Italian Baroque, click, altarpieces, saints with their eyes rolled back, dripping gold, the whole thing.
And so you say, "Boy, that is really strange." We click through aesthetic epochs, like points on a dial,
but then you can say to it, "Surprise me."
In Baroque, not ompir, not dynastic Egypt, not North American Indian, Maya or Fujiwara Japanese,
but something never seen on this planet, but equally coherent as those other styles.
And I always think, "My God, if I could just grab hold of this, I would be Yves Saint-Lorraine or Klimt or somebody like that."
And then the most puzzling one of all is you can say to the mushroom,
"Okay, enough of surprises, Art Deco, Italian Baroque, show me what you are for yourself."
And then it is almost like there is a roll of drums and black curtains begin to rise
and there is a cold air that sweeps through the room and you realize,
"Okay, after about 45 seconds of that, you have to call a halt."
Because you realize this thing had clothed itself in so many levels of visual reassurance for you as a human being
that the request that it reveal its true nature sets off a cascade headed in a truly appalling direction
and usually you say, "Okay, that is enough of your true nature. Let us go back to dancing chipmunks
and little candies rolling in the dark."
Do you foresee thought or discrete thought in particular being locatable on the frequency spectrum of matter and energy
that it can drive the input to virtual reality so that you can communicate these kinds of experiences that were head-set?
You mean a machine that could be driven by the imagination?
It is pretty, it is, well, it raises a bunch of questions.
I mean the first question is where is thought generated?
The straight people believe that the brain makes thought, makes it.
I think that the evidence is overwhelmingly against that, that that is as naive an approach to thought as I remember when I was little.
I once tore apart a radio looking for little people inside of it.
And, you know, there are no little people inside the radio.
The radio transduces vibrations that surround the planet and turns it into a recognizable experience.
I don't believe thought can be located in the brain.
I think the brain is an amplifier and an antenna for something that is everywhere.
That the phrase "my thoughts" is a complete misnomer.
You don't own thoughts, you don't generate them.
All you do is tune into an ocean of thought in which we're embedded.
This is the morphogenetic field about which so much shouting and arm-waving is going on.
To my mind the proof of this position is the fact that the psychedelic experience unleashes visions in your head
which you could not possibly have conceived of or imagined.
It doesn't come from you.
If we say that the content of the psychedelic experience comes from the self,
then we have defined the self in such a way that it's unrecognizable to us.
And if your self is unrecognizable to you, then it isn't your self, you see.
So these things are proving that we participate in the world of mind,
but that we don't generate it.
Done.
In that case, that's not the most common experience.
Why?
Why are we all attempting the same thing?
It's a universal thought.
Well, that's like saying when we swim in the ocean, why don't we all see the same fish?
Because the ocean is enormous.
Because we all enter it from different angles of attack.
But if we were going together, would we experience the same fish?
Yes, we would.
And on psilocybin, one of the most stunning experiences you can have
if you wanted to make a believer out of you,
is to sit with somebody and describe what you're seeing
and agree that after three minutes you'll shut up and they'll start up
and you discover that you just hand the baton on.
They see what you see, you see what they see.
This is confounding.
You see, if we could do legal research with this stuff,
we could overturn the paradigms of normal science in a number of areas within 18 months.
I'm sure of it.
I've seen it happen.
I've seen states of group-mindedness that were so specific
that there was no possibility the world was not happening,
was no shit, one-on-one, real-time telepathy.
Are there other countries in the world, maybe Amsterdam?
Well, there are countries in the world where psychedelic research is tolerated,
is the only way to put it.
But it's in the hands of scientists
and people of the imagination impaired
are largely in charge of these research programs.
They're asking the wrong questions, you know.
I mean, if you get a--well, that's enough.
They're asking the wrong questions.
Just in relevant to that, I wanted to share this with everybody else.
I don't know if anybody's familiar with MAP,
the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychiatric Studies.
They just released their new newsletter,
and what this newsletter says basically is that at a recent convene meeting with the FDA
and a couple days after that with the National Institute for Drug Abuse,
they've worked out an arrangement now where MDMA at least,
and they say in another article here that possibly LSD testing
will be undertaken very seriously in the near future,
and this is going through MAPS and in conjunction working with the FDA
to get certain types of permits for the more intensive research
that should be done in this field.
There is, I think, the resistance to psychedelic research is beginning to weaken
because an entire generation of people,
people who were three and four years old in the 1960s,
are now entering the medical research establishment as post-docs and so forth,
and there is no good reason to be given for not having a research program on psilocybin, for example.
I mean, it was never a social problem.
It is a valid object for scientific research.
It's amazing to me the gutlessness of the scientific establishment on this matter.
I mean, why, you know, we hear about the omnipotence of the AMA and so forth and so on,
why has the scientific establishment laying down like a dog
and let politicians set the research agenda for human research on psychedelics?
The last time this happened was in the 14th century
when the Pope and his cronies tried to make it impossible for people to dissect corpses
because they didn't want people to understand human anatomy.
Well, in that situation, instead of swallowing it and putting up with it,
medical students would steal bodies off the gallows and trail along behind armies
to look at the freshly killed in order to create a compendious understanding of human anatomy.
And they did.
In the 20th century, science, which would have you believe that it's absolutely unbiased
and it goes wherever curiosity seeks without prejudice or deference to anybody's social values or anything,
is in fact a sycophantic slave to the agenda of these frightened politicians.
So it's a real disgrace because, you know, I lived through the first psychedelic revolution
and the news about LSD swept over the psychoanalytic community with the kind of force
that the splitting of the atoms swept over the physics community
and people involved in treating mental illness and studying brain function and mapping the brain
said, "This is amazing. A tool has been put into our hands
that will throw open doorways in the practice of psychology we couldn't dream of."
And instead, it was absolutely slammed shut.
Imagine if Galileo had smashed his telescope after there was a little bit of whining from the Vatican.
Had that happened, you know, we would still be living in a universe defined by the Aristotelian stellar shells.
A little courage on the part of these almighty scientists would go a long way toward overwhelming
the fearful strictures placed on by politicians who are trying to maintain a social equilibrium that is fairly odious anyway.
Yeah, I've got kind of supportive of one thing you said and also a question
which I hope will be organized enough for you to answer.
Your remarks about the telepathy after some extremely intense boundary dissolution experiences with my wife,
we have gotten to the point where using straight Michael Harner shamanic journeying techniques,
we routinely have each other's visions.
I think I'm wondering if it isn't as much a matter of a learned response as anything else.
No, I think it is a learned response.
I think, you know, it requires psychedelics usually to plow the channel.
But once you open the groove, then there are ways to reinforce it.
And one of the underrated tools in this game is the power of acoustical driving
and the power of sound to synergize subtle chemical reactions.
I mean, music is so compelling to us because it is essentially brain massage of some sort.
And the pleasure we derive from music is at some level a chemical pleasure.
And I think trying to get to these places with yoga and drumming and fasting and all that
is a pretty thankless task unless you clear the way with psychedelics and then you can really get somewhere.
If you use psychedelics in combination with any of these traditional techniques for working in these areas,
suddenly these traditional techniques previously found to be maddeningly ineffective become very, very powerful tools.
So mantra with psychedelics works like magic. Yoga, breath control, drumming, visualization, simple prayer,
it all works amazingly well in the presence of psychedelics.
And in the absence of psychedelics entirely, it's a pretty frustrating get-go.
And unfortunately, these non-psychedelic spiritual techniques are very quickly co-opted by the beady-eyed priests among us
who then peddle it back to us with a menu of moral do's and don'ts stapled to the front of it.
And that's entirely discouraging.
Yeah, my other question is, kind of ties together some things you've mentioned during the course of the day.
You mentioned way back when about no one else having the experiences that you have.
And so my question is to the whole issue of community and lifestyle.
The issue that I'm wrestling with right now, I think part of what I'm experiencing is my own drive for wholeness or insight or whatever.
Part of it is perhaps the transcendental object on the event horizon.
But what I'm wrestling with is how to follow my muse, how to live the life that's drawing me,
and at the same time be able to function and pay my child support and not live in the woods.
And if you could maybe give some guidance to me and some others of us sort of wrestling with that issue.
Well, this is the tension between the transcendental and the mundane. What do you do about it?
I don't know. I experience it as a real tension as well.
Because I, you see, all these other spiritual techniques, yoga, breath control, diet, you name it,
the way you pursue those is with the pedal to the metal.
In other words, full on, full cork press.
The way you relate to psychedelics is entirely the opposite, with your foot on the brakes all the time.
The people who are using these non-psychedelic techniques are endlessly frustrated by the fact that they're not able to get where they want to go, I think.
The people who use psychedelics spend a huge amount of time trying to keep from overshooting the goal
and losing themselves in the incomprehensible who knows what.
I think that if you have a genuine desire to leave us all behind and to go up on cold mountain
and to become a Taoist immortal and to clothe yourself in a hair shirt and eat roots and contemplate the one forever,
hey, there's nothing stopping you. It's just that that's an easy goal to enunciate when it's practically impossible.
But it's in the presence of psychedelics, it is quite realizable.
And then you have to think, "But wait a minute, what about child support? What about, you know, my love of double cappuccinos?"
What about, and then you say, "Well, I could leave this world, I could become an ascended master, but is that what I really wanted all along?"
And I think this is a tension, I mean, I feel it in myself. Basically, I do what I do and it's a chicken-shit response to what I could be doing.
Because what I could be doing is becoming utterly incomprehensible to everybody else on the planet and living in a tree somewhere
and happily staring into space every waking minute.
But I am not ready to kiss off my library, my children, my friends, my vices.
And so people in our position have to balance these things.
And I think the real spiritual frontier lies in the community, that we must, you know, it's sort of the bodhisattvic ideal.
We must somehow carry everyone with us. It's not about bailing out of history, it's about sticking with it until we can end it for everybody.
But I'm not saying that's the only point of view. If you want to go, if you want to become an arhat, I don't think there's anything stopping you.
You see, once you get to the place where you find out by some set of peculiar circumstances about these things, psilocybin, DMT and so forth,
you have crossed a real frontier. This is not simply another spiritual technique for, you know, picayune-ish advancement,
one more small step down the path. This is in fact, this works. And maybe you never thought you would find something that works.
Well, so the entire, you see, the attitude, it's a naive attitude to quest. It's the attitude of the ingenue, the fool, the castaneda figure seeks.
Once you reach the psychedelic plateau, the tool has been placed in your hands now.
Now you have to figure out whether you were really serious about all this transcendental yearning that you indulged in when it seemed so far out of reach.
Because now, you know, it's just a dose away. And we all come to that very differently.
It's a different dilemma from the rest of the spiritual community. They just need more and more power.
We need more and more insight and wisdom in order to know what to do with the fact that we can now achieve whatever we conceive of.
So now is the moment to take a deep breath and decide where we really want to go with this stuff.
Can I say something? I just wanted to go back to you talking about the AMA.
I know I've heard Dr. Yung-Loo Wild talk how they used LSD in treating autism. I knew a guy that was autistic and regained his hearing when his brother gave him LSD when he was 12 years old.
I believe the AMA does not want us to be healthy. They do not want us to have the tools.
There's a book called Toxic Psychology about how the psycho pharmacology is actually making people brain dead.
And I think, I mean if you go back in time, the original healers who used plants and herbs were burned at the stake of being witches because of the medical school they had back then.
And they were all men. They wouldn't let women in it even though they had been the original healers.
And right now the FDA is doing this. They're trying to outlaw plants and herbs for healing for anything.
And this is vitamins, food supplements, everything. And like I myself, I don't take pharmaceutical drugs because they make me sick.
And the only thing I have to use for my PMS is hemp and it's the only thing that works.
And we all have to be somewhat political and make statements to people and enlighten them and educate them as to what's really going on.
Because there's a whole world that could be opened up if we started using our plants and our herbs for healing again.
Yeah, I agree.
There's a lot of holistic centers opening up all over. I was just in one in Leavenworth, Washington.
And it was really rewarding and wonderful to see a physician actually reaching out and searching other healers,
a shaman and also herbalists, everybody in her private practice.
And it's coming and it's very slow but it's coming around.
And faster and faster.
I think that's why the FDA right now is trying to do away with it because it is growing.
If you knew the legislation that is going on right now, they are raiding health food stores with guns and taking things out of there like aloe vera products.
And they're saying they've never been tested, we haven't approved it.
And they're taking it. I guarantee you this is happening right now.
And that's why you have to be aware and you have to educate people about it.
But you see at the same time they're granting the first INDs for psychedelic research in 30 years.
So instead of taking a paranoid view that they are against it and us,
I just think that if you dissect these human institutions, what you find always are individuals and usually these institutions are fraught with internal conflicts about what they're doing.
There's a lot of fear, there's a lot of mistrust, and very few people go around rubbing their hands together and cackling over the fact that they are committing acts of pure evil.
Most people have some kind of internal story that tells them that they are doing the very best they can.
It's just that there are also a lot of jug-headed misconceptions about what the best we can actually mean.
This is why dialogue is so important, why free speech is such a powerful notion.
Let all ideas compete on a level playing field and the correct points of view, I think, will emerge eventually.
So that's why we need people like you out there to get out.
Backing up a little bit to the journeys to Elphdom and other places, most semantic journeys seem to be almost, even when they're begun as a group thing,
end up being the solitary journey of your own, whether you're the octopus with the colors displaying yourself and you're out there.
Very rarely do you hear of people journeying with another mind being, not the body being, but a mind being.
In these journeys, whether you're in an elf realm or another realm, is there a reading between these other entities and you
in your journey to their world or their space, is there a communication at all?
And also, can you go with somebody from this realm out there but on a mind plane or as you describe the octopus type thing where you're communicating,
not with words or dictionaries?
Well, it's hard to say. You know, Plotinus, who was a neo-Platonic philosopher, he described the mystical experience of as the flight of the alone to the alone.
And there certainly is an element in the psychedelic thing of its being so large a dimension that when you go into it,
you not only see things that you have never seen before, and not only do you see things that no one else has seen before,
but you see things which no one else will ever see again.
So I tend to, and this is just my personal preference, and I'm a double Scorpio and a number of different things that push me in this direction,
but I really like to do the deep work alone and then try to bring it back and this is the proper domain for sharing and community.
We know that behind five grams of psilocybin lies a psychedelic world,
but how can we create a psychedelic world here and now on zip?
And the answer is by becoming ever more psychedelic ourselves.
And so it's a tremendous empowerment for eccentricity.
And basically my whole career is based on eccentricity.
One of the most fearful questions to come my way is when I'm riding on airplanes to some situation like this
and someone sits down beside me and says, "So what do you do?"
And I usually, I try to escape, I say, and this is always a horribly weak thing, I say, "Oh, I write books."
And then they say, "Oh, well what do you write books about?" And then we move into the realm of pure lie, I usually say, "Travel."
[laughter]
So, you know, I think if you have, I mean to return to your question, if you have an extraordinary heart connection with someone,
you can voyage together a certain distance, but this is a unique kind of thing
and probably many a relationship has experienced unnecessary strain
because somebody thought they had that kind of connection
and then when they got out into the incoming psychic surf,
they discovered one person forgot their tanks back on the beach.
Yeah.
I've heard you say before that behind five milligrams of one thing or 500 of another, there is a little green elf or something else.
Is that a consistent picture for you? Not that the experience would not be new in terms of the communication,
but is that consistent? Do you yourself find that same image or that same level of mushroom at that point?
But then secondly, do in terms of the people that you communicate with who do measured quantities and who do it similarly,
say Rupert Sheldrake, have other people, have other individuals communicated that they see those same type of creatures for lack of a better word?
That's kind of what I was also getting at. Did you mention one thing about the urgency of the places and you hear them saying about the urgency of your coming there and being there?
And that's a big thing. I feel that it's an important thing.
So once you're there and you have to have a community, you're looking for a common denominator of communication there and the urgency of finding something there.
That's kind of also what I'd like to find out.
Well, the answer is if you send ten people to Paris and then you interview them about their experience of Paris,
one of them stayed with the wife of the Prime Minister, somebody else stayed in a bordello on the wrong side of town,
their notions of Paris are rather different.
However, if you interview them closely enough, you can tell that this must have been the same place in some sense.
I mean, for me, the DMT experience is remarkably consistent.
It always is this dome underground filled with these self-transforming elf machine creatures.
And then when I talk to other people and interview them about it, what I've come away with is the notion that an archetype is like a series of concentric circles.
And to the degree that you reach the center of the circle, the accounts become more and more consistent.
For instance, and in thinking along those lines, what I've come to see about, for instance, DMT is that it has an archetype.
And the archetype is, and God knows why, the circus.
DMT is the archetype of the circus.
So you give it to someone who is not psychedelically sophisticated and you give them a low dose.
Then they come back.
Then you say, "What was it like?"
This is a direct quote from a woman a couple of years ago.
She said, "It was the saddest carnival I've ever been to."
She said, "All the rides were closed. Nobody was there.
There were just gum wrappers blowing between boarded up tents."
I said, "Interesting."
So then give it to someone else.
And they said, "It was full of clowns."
And I said, "You mean elves?"
He said, "No, just clowns."
And as the dose rises, the familiarity of the image is stripped away and it migrates
more and more toward this thing behind the mask.
Well now, if you think of the circus, it is an interesting archetype.
First of all, three rings in constant activity.
And it's a wonderful thing for children.
Children love the circus because there's light and color and music and animals and clowns.
But then there's also a side to it which children don't see.
I mean, you lift your eyes from the center ring and there is Eros in the form of the
beautiful blonde woman in the tiny, spangled costume who works without nets hanging by
her teeth far above the center ring and twisted into this erotic image is death because she
works without nets.
The whole point of her performance is the fact that she could fall and be killed.
Well, then there's yet another aspect to this circus archetype which is away from the
lady in the spangled costume and the clowns climbing out of their little cars and the
powdered elephants of many colors are the sideshows that snake off into the darkness.
The two-headed lady, the goat boy and the thing in the bottle.
They're all there too to be looked at.
So it's this incredibly rich amalgam of light, color, humor, childhood memories, cotton candy,
joy, Eros, death, the thing in the bottle, the wild animals, so forth and so on.
As you make your way toward it, different layers fall away.
Do you find a consistency with the...
Do you find similar but different consistencies with LSD and with psilocybin that you could
make it clear as the consistency that you find with the DMT?
Oh, yeah.
I think that, see, one of the great confusions about psychedelics is that they're all the
same.
Like in some textbooks, if you look up psilocybin, it will say a hallucinogen derived from fungi
which causes LSD-type hallucinations.
This is nonsense.
This just simply means that LSD arrived first on the workbench of Western civilization.
So everything is referent back to it.
If you're going to take these things, you need to take enough that you can tell the
difference.
And at low doses, all psychedelics are the same.
It's just the experience of agitation and psychic inner turmoil.
It's sort of like speed, you know.
But as the doses increase, you begin to hit the bifurcation points.
And these things have distinct personalities.
For instance, DMT, the elf playroom reception area, that seems to define it.
The amazing thing about psilocybin and its distinguishing characteristic is it speaks.
It speaks in English to you.
It conversationally approaches you and you talk to it in your mind.
I mean, this is an amazing thing.
If you've never experienced it, there's something out there for you.
Try it.
That's what was behind asking you that question.
Because I don't have any DMT experience.
I've never taken psilocybin just in the form of the mushrooms themselves in a botanical
garden.
And I don't have much other experience.
And what happened was quite transformational in the long term because it put me in touch
with the plant world.
But I didn't close my eyes.
I had no other realm.
It was the realm that was there in the garden.
A communication, well you said it last night, with the mind of that botanical area.
The mind of that plant world that was there.
It talked to me.
I guess it got translated into English, but it was kind of saying everybody should have
very close to them a realm like this to be in and people would be okay.
Do everything you can to support that.
That's the message.
And for instance, the mushroom has a personality.
And like all personalities, it excludes some things and includes others.
The mushroom personality is a radically eccentric personality.
The mushroom talks about transforming the planet.
It says, you know, I come from a distant part of the galaxy.
I have 500 million years of galactic history in my data banks.
I have seen 50,000 worlds come into existence and pass out of existence.
I've seen ships the size of Australia depart for Andromeda.
I've seen this.
I've seen that.
And it's willing to show you the newsreels of it.
That kind of a, and it says, your world is ending.
Put your furry paw into my hand and together we will march out to the stars.
It's this dun, dun, dun, dun.
So then you take a compound or a shamanic hallucinogen like ayahuasca.
Chemically, this is very, very similar to DMT.
Experientially, it could hardly be more different.
Ayahuasca does not show you images of enormous machines in orbit around alien planets and
that sort of thing.
Ayahuasca, first of all, it doesn't speak.
It shows.
You become like the eye of a camera flying through a world.
And what it shows you, it's much more feminine.
It shows you water flowing over the land.
It shows you plant life growing and dying.
It shows you the movement of glaciers over the surface of the land.
It shows you people burying their dead.
It shows you archaic civilizations.
It shows you women nursing their children.
It shows you meat.
It shows you the stuff of this world on every level.
And it moves you to tears.
I mean, it's emotive.
It's not about our cosmic destiny out there in the starry blackness.
It's about coming to terms with the earth and our past and each other.
And you say, you know, these things, these are personalities.
These are visions.
And the idea is to fuse all of this into a single unitary perception that does honor
to all and limits none.
Back here.
Yes, I was fortunate to be able to have students any more about the earth.
Well, there were people who were able to communicate with all types of plant life.
And they said that each plant life has a beautiful message to bring.
And they did talk about the mushrooms and saying that it does enhance the human immune
system.
Could you talk a little about that?
Well, yes, this is true.
You probably all know or may have heard of what's called Rishi Gen or Ganoderma lucidum.
This is a mushroom, a Chinese mushroom that definitely stimulates the immune system.
And many fungi probably have this quality because these higher fungi, the basidiomycetes,
have enough of a trace of their evolutionary depth to more primitive fungi, the kind that
cause candida and vaginal fungus and stuff like that, the undifferentiated fungi, that
the immune system recognizes this as a potential stimulant and responds to it.
So this is definitely true.
I just got this notion that maybe the Gödel's incompleteness theorem would explain the absence
of the self when we dive into it.
And I thought maybe you could get a quick answer, or even a long answer, about which
is more real than the self and the other, or is the self the other, the one?
No, the self is the other.
That's what I've come away.
The self is the other.
And assimilating the implications of that takes a lifetime.
We have within us the very thing that we're seeking.
It's like the Jungian fairy tale of the guy who leaves home and searches the world
for enlightenment and has all these adventures and finally concludes that it is not to be
found and returns to his home and rebuilds the heart and discovers beneath the heart
the thing that he has sought in all the wrong places.
I mean, it is within.
It is a recurso.
What we are looking for is within us.
It's our own inner riches.
This is why psychedelics are such a powerful antidote to capitalism, because they teach
you that you are not a wannabe.
You are where it's at.
And nobody should allow you or sell you a different point of view to make you think
you're going to be complete when you get a Maserati or a Rembrandt or something like
that.
All that is just the detritus of the physical world.
Would you say we're cycling at the same rate between self and other, or if there is such
a thing that everyone is doing that...
Well, I think that if we could really follow ourselves into dream every evening with full
consciousness that we would discover that we touch the philosopher's stone at least
once every 24 hours.
It's just that we return down the river of forgetting, let's say, you know?
And every morning we emerge from spending time with the other as self and then we're
inserted back into the fiction of our three-dimensional existence and our individuality.
I know that the tapers are getting antsy.
We need to break for just a few minutes to have tea and stretch.
Don't forget your question.
We'll come back and hammer on this a little more.
Why don't we pull together?
While we're doing that, I wanted to call your attention to a new publication on your newsstand,
which is Psychedelic Illuminations.
Ron Piper and a number of his associates have gotten this together.
In this issue there happens to be an article or an interview with yours truly.
I don't know if there's anything in it we didn't cover today, but Psychedelic Publication
is rare enough anyway.
So it's called Psychedelic Illuminations.
This is issue three of volume one.
It's still not too late to be the first on your block to subscribe to this publication.
So watch for it.
This is Ron.
If you want to talk to him, I'm sure he can arrange for you to have more involvement with
it.
Okay, so we're into the final round here.
Is there anybody who's really...
Oh, there they are, the burning people.
Yes.
Last night you mentioned briefly about the paper by the Transcendent Monocracy.
I didn't quite get it and I just wondered if you would clarify because it bothered me
a lot and I thought I couldn't quite see.
I mean, democracy is limited, but that doesn't mean you throw it out.
I didn't...
It's always limited, but it's still valuable for what it does perhaps.
So I wondered if you'd explain better how you...
Well, no, I wasn't advocating getting rid of democracy.
What I was suggesting was that we don't really have democracy because we don't have an ideologically
level playing field because special interest groups are able to spend so much money to
influence opinion that what we really have is an oligarchy of special interest groups
that is very skillfully able to manipulate the general population into taking up positions
that they would not naturally incline themselves toward.
So if you're serious about having a democracy, then you have to somehow curtail the incredibly
sophisticated efforts to skew the democratic dialogue to favor one or another special interest
groups that are buying their way into the dialogue.
I thought you were throwing the concept out because you mentioned about all this one person,
one vote thing.
No, didn't I...
I don't know why I do it.
I think democracy is an ideal more than a reality.
No, I think democracy...
I'm a thoroughgoing democrat.
I think democracy is almost a biologically obvious way of organizing ourselves.
I mean one person, one vote.
What I was knocking is that behind democracy lurks the idea of the citizen and that's the
idea that we're all exactly alike and that's preposterous and an unnecessary fiction to
the practice of democracy.
We are not all alike in our abilities, in the wealth we command, so forth and so on.
So for purposes of governing ourselves, we give each person a say, but we shouldn't then
extrapolate that uniformity into the idea that we are in fact uniform.
We are not.
You see, democracy of that sort based on the modern concept of the citizen has arisen in
the wake of the invention of printing and printing...
A number of ideas spun off from printing that McLuhan was the only person to really correctly
identify what they were and what their effects were.
One is the idea of interchangeable parts because print is a system of interchangeable parts.
Once you establish a font, every lowercase "e" looks like every other lowercase "e".
What we are is more like, more analogous to what you deal with in manuscript where every
"e" is sort of like every other "e", but it contains individual variations imparted by
the fact that it was drawn by a human hand at a given moment.
We want to express our political wills through a system of equality, but we don't want to
do damage to our individual uniqueness.
The point I was trying to get at last night is the concept of the citizen does erode the
idea of our uniqueness to some degree.
Yeah?
In the first session, in response to the question, you crafted an elegant response that basically
said that the first molecule was pure and every mutation after that became more complex.
I like your comments on the rift that they found in Western Canada in recent scientific
times.
It's become a mother lode of soft, I don't know what the word is, of mammals, not mammals,
but sea creatures that are incredibly more complex than anything found on the planet
today, which has strongly suggested to the scientific community that we are evolving
rather than evolving.
Well, you're referring to the Burgess Shale and what's his name's book, Wonderful Life,
right?
Yeah.
Earth Trust (Part 4)
just in the scientific community that we are devolving rather than evolving.
Well, you're referring to the Burgess Shale and what's his name's book Wonderful Life, right?
Yeah. I sort of differ with your interpretation of it. It wasn't that these things were
more complex than any life forms on the earth today. It was that they represented a large
number of phyla, none of which exist on the earth today. So the point that was being made
by the paleontologists is apparently we started out with many different phyla and then it narrowed
at some point into just a few phyla, which then re-radiated out into all the forms we possess today.
So I think other people have brought this up and it's a troubling example because it tends to
throw a railroad tie against the onrushing of my rhetorical freight train, but that's the name of
the game, folks. It probably is true that at an early point in the evolution of life, I mean,
it's obviously now established, there were these many, many different phyla and for unknown reasons,
certain phyla became extinct and then the phyla which were left radiated and filled
all the abandoned niches that had previously been occupied by these now extinct organisms.
But nevertheless, we have to look at this question of for reasons unknown, they became extinct. Why
did some phyla survive and others not? It would be inconsistent with the theory of evolution to
suggest that this happened entirely by chance. There must have been some adaptive advantage
possessed by the phyla that made it through whatever these narrow evolutionary necks were.
And then the phyla which survived these climatological crises or whatever they are
radiated into an incredible number of complex forms that nevertheless could be traced to a
small number of earlier phyla. More in line with the thrust of your argument, a more difficult to
answer objection that I don't know why I'm telling you this because it erodes my own position, but
I was preaching this, the world complexifies through time, wrapped at Esalen one time,
and a guy was staying with me there who was a professional Russian translator, he was a Russian
and a linguist, and he said, you know, there's a major exception to your rules that all phenomena
complexify through time and that is language. He said as we go back into the past, languages become
richer and I am still puzzling over this. I don't think it's an inherent property of language. I
think it's because as we go back into the past, languages become more and more localized and local
variations develop in small confined geographical areas so that then when you pour all these
languages together, there tends to be a certain leveling and this probably results in a general
fall in the total number of words being used in a language. In other words, if in Canada they call
a windshield a windscreen and in England they call it something else, well then as long as Canada,
England and the U.S. don't communicate, we have three words for windshield, but if these three
cultures communicate frequently and deeply, probably a couple of these words will become
obsolete or colloquial and one term will dominate. So language is not evolving in a vacuum, you have
to look at the effects of modern transportation, migrations of people and that sort of thing.
I agree that this is not this complexification through time thing has the characteristic of
a general tendency, but it's not an ironclad natural law. We can see that now for instance
communism in the Soviet Union acted as a deep freeze for traditional cultures.
Wonderful traditional cultures exist out on the steps of Central Asia in Kyrgyzia, Turkmenistan,
Nagorno-Bodakshanskaya and these places. Well these wonderful traditional cultures are probably now
all trading in their colorful garb vocabularies and technologies for transistor radio subscriptions
to Time magazine and Der Spiegel and generally lining up with the global leveling of culture
that we see in the 20th century. So these are complex issues and you're right, it is
entirely straightforward.
Do you mean the one to Prague or the one to Italy?
Well I went to Prague to the ITA conference, International Transpersonal Association conference
in June and I had never realized till I went there it was my second trip to Czechoslovakia
but you know as children we grew up with a wonderful story of an emerald green country
farmed by happy munchkins and ruled from a beautiful capital city built around a
splendiferous palace presided over by a wizard and I realized Czechoslovakia is Oz for grown-up
and the morphogenetic field of the place is such that it might be a place we should all consider
as a good venue for an archaic revival. I think Prague in the 90s could be what Paris in the 20s
was. It is after all the capital of old Bohemia. You may not know why we are called Bohemians.
You don't have to have a Slavic gene in your entire family tree and can claim yourself as a
Bohemian. It's because Bohemia stood for individual freedom, eccentricity, the magical art,
the practice of the art and a science which more gently approached the union of spirit and matter
and this whole potential alchemical civilization based around Prague was destroyed by the 30 years
war. If you're interested in all this you should read Frances Yates' book The Rosicrucian
Enlightenment in which she shows that at a certain point in western history there was the possibility
of a Protestant alchemical revival in central Europe that was bungled by a series of diplomatic
and cultural misunderstandings and led instead to the 30 years war which then if you know it
before the 30 years war Europe was thoroughly medieval in its character really and at the end
of the 30 years war modernity was launched. I mean the absolute power of kings had been replaced by
parliaments and peoples and Prague when the people who won the 30 years war got down to redrawing the
maps of Europe they made sure that Prague fell on the wrong side of the language line and became a
place that spoke a language spoken nowhere else in Europe, Czech, instead of the language that had
been spoken there before the 30 years war by the court which was Italian. So it's a whole lost
episode in western history that not too many people know about but we could all return to our
bohemian roots and create a community under the gentle aegis of Vaclav Havel and similar
philosophically right thinking people that might be a window of opportunity.
You know it's very important when you're trying to make social change that you find the proper
resting place for your fulcrum or a proper fulcrum for your lever and the best place is outside the
system that you're trying to move and if we're serious about carrying on a major critique of
American society Prague might be an excellent place from which to do it especially if by some
nightmarish fluke of fate the knotheds currently in power are able to hang on. Sorry for that
brief foray into politics that's what Richard was trying to bait me into yeah.
[Inaudible]
A lost civilization with walls that surround the city and artifacts carved into the mountains
that could not have possibly been from the Indians the technology
that they believe was a part of this lost civilization was from another world. Could
you comment on what your feelings are in terms of our planet being colonized by extraterrestrials
in terms of the mantis and the Maurya or the land of Noh?
Yeah I can I'm not sure how much comfort it will give you.
It seems to me an underwhelming proposition. In other words if this happened where is the evidence?
You know there have been fabulous civilizations existing in the past but their artifacts their
buildings their earthworks are available to be visited and seen. It seems to me you know
in trying to build models I try to follow Occam's razor. You all know what Occam's razor is?
Hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity and I just find the lost continent
thing an unnecessary hypothesis. I think there are lost civilizations but I think we do a
grave injustice to our dilemma and our accomplishments by thinking that anybody ever
stood in this position before. To me you see there's an impulse that's very old in the western
mind to and strangely enough I trade on it to some degree. It's called the nostalgia for paradise
and it's that we're always looking back to a lost golden age and I think there was a lost golden age
on the plains of Africa 15 to 20,000 years ago. I discussed it this morning but I don't think high
technology has ever existed before on this planet. Well there's just no evidence of it and the
Atlantean people and the enthusiasts of Mu and Lemuria are always trying to fiddle with the date
and say you know the great pyramid is 25,000 years old and there's a ruin on the Nazca plain that's
50,000 years old. This is first of all the evidence is absolutely unconvincing and second of all the
miracle is not how old the breakout into language and technology is but how recent it is. I agree
with you I think that you know if you were to go scuba diving off of Bermuda and Bimini islands you
would find what many people believe are artifacts from Atlantis. You can hike in Decker Canyon and
most of what is to be found is under the water because of the shift in the continental place
10,000 years ago or more but many people believe that the UFO involvement in that civilization
is still very active today. I know someone who I believe you met last night Robert Stanley from
Munichus magazine he takes people on these expeditions in Decker Canyon. He took somebody
at the beginning of the summer and a raw film was shot the person was from the east coast I believe
in Boston and he spaced on the development of the film he just forgot about it and he decided okay I
might as well get this developed and sure enough hovering in the distance over this part of the
canyon were 12 saucers and it's a pretty obvious picture I saw it last night for the first time.
I'm just curious because I think that a lot of us don't really deal with a lot of the information
that's coming out right now because it's overwhelming you know it's almost like wow.
Well I am prepared to be convinced but I'm not willing to buy in without a fair amount of
evidence as far as UFOs are concerned I've thought a lot about it I've seen them far away up close
and it's not what people say it is and the the problem there are two phenomena the UFO who knows
what that is and then the UFO community and my god these people are much weirder than UFOs.
I mean they the whole slew of them and the whole problem with the UFO community is
apparently these people have never heard about the rules of evidence.
I mean they're just full of revelation after revelation with absolutely zipped to back it up
there are so many I mean you look at these UFO magazines well do you want to believe
master chin thook of the Nabungi system or do you want to go with the the Billy Myers crowd or
what's coming out of Brazil I think Jacques Vallee and one of his books estimated that if you don't
believe UFOs only appear where there are witnesses and take the number of sightings seen by people
and extrapolate that by the area of the surface of the earth you have to conclude that UFOs are
coming and going from this planet at a rate of 12,000 a month well my god what kind of
extraterrestrial contact is this that 12,000 a month for 50 years and never a definitive
piece of evidence I was talking to one of the researchers on the fetal abduction thing this guy
was all excited he said to me you know I've talked to 500 women who claim surgical removal of fetuses
and he said and you know the amazing thing there's not a single uh uh sign of physical invasion of
these women's bodies and I said well Dr X doesn't this suggest something to you and he said yeah
advanced surgical techniques of which we have no knowledge said well yeah but doesn't it I mean
give me a break so I think they have to operate in the light of the same evidence as everybody else
and their problem is that they claim to know too much they're just willing to tell you you know
125,000 years ago they arrived to grow sweet peas and then a hundred thousand years ago the project
changed and the 11th planet did something too much too much data it's too jack armstrong-ish
do you believe our government has the technology to travel and ships to other stars you think we're
doing that today or do you think that's our future no I don't think we're doing that today I mean this
is a we have a government that can't knock off a loudmouth in bagdad let alone travel to other
stars our program is limited to what mass has helped us with the reality of what's going on
and that basically you don't think there's like an underground or a whole network of societies
organizations within our government that are involved in research and technology well obviously
there is a black portion of the government where research goes on and probably fairly kinky things
are carried out but these people are no different from us I mean some of them may be here today
and I don't mean cops I mean you know there may be massive scientists here today that we are not so
different from the people we're talking about human beings cannot keep a secret you may bank
on it and so the idea that you know somebody possesses the technology thousands of years
in advance of us I mean then when you actually tear the lid off some of these government black
operations you don't find super scientists and brilliant minds you find people like Gordon Liddy
and John Dean and you know half-wits clowns seem to lie behind most of this I believe that no I am
not a conspiracy person I believe that nobody is in control and that the people who seek control
are the most misguided of all and that there's a great deal more than we don't know than we do know
and you know I would love to be convinced that something really far out were happening
but it just always seems to come apart in your hands these are I consider stuff like the UFO
phenomenon as popularly commercially available UFO beliefs as basically viruses of language
diseases of understanding if you could teach people about the laws of evidence and how you
build a case and stuff like that then people wouldn't be troubled by this the same fuzzy
thinking that permits people to believe in UFOs permits them to believe in the imminent
expectation of the second coming or you know the face of Christ appearing on tortillas and
all of this stuff turns my stuff here for a second uh is there a lot of people still with questions
because they still have a lot of time well at least till six o'clock supposedly um can I have
a show of hands okay there's a few more because we want to sort of limit the questions to one
question per person and and sort of one rebuttal from that so that everybody could get a fair share
before we make a final is this a gentle hint to stop raving about UFOs
oh I see well I'll I say to the UFO people the same thing you know what can you show us
drag it forth everything has to be judged on the same field if you've got something spill it
but to claim you know as I don't want to use names here but stories like well we met the UFOs and
they gave us a message for mankind but when we got back to our car our tape recorder had miraculously
erased itself well then be quiet don't tell anybody this don't you understand how lame that
sounds to the doubters it's it's not the believer you have to convince they're a pushover what are
you going to do about your skeptics that's the problem well you want me to tell you a story
I was in the Amazon um I was in a state of considerable psychic turmoil and uh I sat up
all night this is told by the way in the book true hallucinations which will be published next year
and uh at dawn I looked across this lake and there was a thin line of clouds on the horizon and uh
I watched this line of clouds and they were and then suddenly I noticed that they were turning in
place like a pencil spinning on its axis in one place and then the clouds uh this line of clouds
broke apart into four perfectly identical lenticular clouds and then the lenticular the
four lenticular clouds merged into two lenticular clouds and then the two merged into one and as
they merged into one I I heard the the hui hui hui sound of Hollywood science fiction
flying saucers and I realized this thing was coming toward me across the lake and it was
absolutely convincing it was a flying saucer the real thing and and I I
was absolutely convinced that it was going to take me at that moment and as it passed over
only about 200 feet above my head I could see it clearly enough that I could see rivets on its
underside I could see its running lights I could see it but you know what I saw I saw the end cap
of a 1932 model hoover vacuum cleaner it was the very same flying saucer that George Adamski
suspended from a piece of mylar fishing line in 1953 and photographed in his garage one of the
most famous UFO hoaxes of all time I saw it a diameter of 40 feet over the Amazon basin and I
knew what I was looking at it was uh more disturbing than if it had been a ship from
zeta reticuli because it had built-in cognitive dissonance uh what mine could have perceived the
magnitude of it so it was like you hit a central road or something I saw the UFO and it's a very
short story about this if it's a very short story now you were in the jungle
and I thought from my home where I lived for 17 years and I was in there and I was excited all the
way to the top and you still don't know when I ever saw it. 12,000 months of navigation. I was looking down on it and
another man looking up looking down looking down
it was about six feet in diameter and across the shape which means anything was inside and it was
wrong and it sort of jammed the hillside, jammed the bushes, went up this road below and then sort of like
right across the hill. I was there and no actual magnetic movement was working on it.
And then it came down the hillside and it was between two houses at window level
and uh and uh highway and I had two women in business
and a friend of mine who lived there was driving a car and he was thinking
this is what I'm going to do.
[inaudible]
Well see I believe you completely. I don't have any problem with that. It's simply an enormous leap
to say that that was a craft from another star. It's much better to just say it's a who knows what
it is. The world is full of weird stuff. Just briefly here's my best theory on flying saucers
and a whole bunch of other stuff. This tries to solve all problems of this sort simultaneously.
The transcendental object at the end of time, let's drag it in here and let's imagine that it is like
those mirrored balls that they hang in discos above the bar and spin. So then I think that
definitely there is a forward movement of causal necessity which propels us from the past into the
present on into the future but that there is also and necessary to account for precognitive visions
and stuff like that which happen all the time a flow of information from the future into the past
and the transcendental object at the end of time is casting reflections of itself backward
into the past and if you are struck whatever that means by one of these scintillas from the
transcendental object at the end of time then you begin to cure and teach and if you really got a
good hit possibly raise the dead. I mean I'm not sure how far it can go. Now also these images of
the transcendental object at the end of time haunt the skies of this planet in the form of spinning
vortices of contradiction. This is what Jung said. He said you know the UFO is an image of the self
and I don't mean the little self I mean the collective self of humanity. So a story like Jim's
story is I have no problem with it. I take it as true. It's the people who say you know and they
revealed the nature of the fall of Atlantis and the world planet then it's too much because it's
coming through human interpretation. The horrible thing about the UFO people who claim contact
is that the aliens they present to us are so incredibly mundane. So much more mundane than
what you would encounter on a DMT flash that they're just like the neighbors next door.
I think that you know alien intelligence the trick is not to find it but to recognize it when it's in
front of you. Intelligence is a very slippery concept. Sometimes we can't even identify it in
the person sitting next to us on the bus. So how can you expect to identify the intelligence of an
alien? It just seems incredibly unlikely to me. I think the world is a lot stranger than we suppose
without evoking benevolent aliens who prefer vegetarian diets and who come from the stars.
I mean why do they so fit our preconception of what they would be? I mean silvery humanoids,
alien intelligence and alien life when and if you meet it you'll know you're in the presence
of the real thing because you'll be barely able to wrap your mind around it.
Yeah I'm basically in agreement with you. I was kind of pondering on the idea of my earlier
question about well if we perceive these as being aliens that's one thing. So what happens if in fact
these humanoid creatures that we're defining are up traveling back through time and being able to
materialize through the future technology? Then we're talking about something different. I'm not
saying that this is true. This is only you know part of my own you know speculation.
Well it's an attractive idea. It raises problems as I'm sure you're aware. The grandfather paradox
and so forth and so on. But it's a possibility. I think it's more likely that these are emissaries
from the land of the dead than from the Pleiades. And that since they speak English, since they look
humanoid, since they seem to care about us and our technologies and so forth, they seem remarkably
human. Well maybe they're concerned about their own state of well-being. Maybe somehow it's related
to the you know what's going on here now and what the outcome is going to be. Maybe that's going to
somehow affect the way they are. You know I mean we've seen it in Star Trek. You know I mean the
ideas of you know people coming back from the future to you know I mean there is a paradox
obviously involved in this. So it's a lot of our imagination that works. But in the same ideas
you know maybe there's a certain sense of reality about it. Maybe there is. It could be a holographic
projection out of the Gaian mind. It could be you know a race of intelligent Saurians that rose and
fell before the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaur. It could be all and everything.
The trick is to try and get some kind of evidentiary hold on it. Yeah.
Parents, this is a not in both question. But first I'd like to preface it by saying that I haven't
used psychedelics in 20 years and I haven't used marijuana in seven and have been considering
return to the use of psychedelics. And when I stopped the last experience which I had it wasn't
a terrifying experience and it wasn't a bad trip. It was similar. It presents similar insights that
I have heard you mention and speak of. But there were times in which my psychedelic use
left me rather shaken and terrified. Dealing with fear of death and crossing over the
line. Though I have to say that my very first psychedelic experience was one which contained
the death and rebirth experience. So I don't know why after that. But that's the nature of fear I
suppose. So the question is, it's a not in both question. It's how does one proceed with the use
of psychedelics after a long absence from it and not make the mistakes and not run into the walls
that I occasionally ran into. And/or deal with them and get around them and so forth and so on.
Well I think the best protection against unpleasant experiences on psychedelics is to do it with care
and attention in environments that are safe and low on sensory input. In other words you don't
take it and go to a crowded singles bar or even a rock and roll concert. I mean if you have to
combine psychedelics with rock and roll do it with low doses. Well this is the way to do it.
It isn't always going to be ecstatic but it's almost always guaranteed to be educational.
There's no way you can seal yourself off from shock because shock may be what you need.
But you can... attention to it. I mean fasting, going into it, cleaning yourself up, creating a
safe space, not going to it if you've just been highly agitated by some emotional upheaval in your
life. And then take a long time to integrate it and think about it. It's basically in the best
sense of the word a religious activity. And it's in... and the intellect or whatever it is that
lies behind it is very sensitive to your needs and your limits. And unless you approach it with a
cavalier attitude it will usually be very gentle with you. Now this fear of death thing though is
a hard thing to come to terms with because, you know, we are going to die. It's scripted into the
human experience. Culturally there's a great deal of anxiety around this and basically I think what
one has to do is simply ride it out in terms of advice as to what you do once you have... are in
the middle of an unpleasant revelation. You can sing your way through that. You can smoke cannabis
to shake up the pieces on the board. And you can just wait and put up with it. The real issue you
see around fear on psychedelics is a surrender issue. The ego plays a trick on you because the
ego begins to dissolve under the influence of the psychedelics and the ego sends you the message
"You are dying." This is its last most desperate ploy to halt what is happening because the ego
is dying and to the degree that you identify with the ego you'll be driven into a state of panic.
A joke about the lone ranger and Tonto are surrounded by Indians and the lone ranger says
"Well it looks like the end of the trail, partner." And Tonto says... or he says "It looks like the end
of the trail for us, partner." And Tonto says "What mean us, pale face?"
A point and wish it luck and it is in fact dissolved and be constrained. It will respond
to being funky. I am always... I am terrified of psychedelics. I never take them without a sense of
sickening dread for they do not. Because I figure, you know, I stand up in front of people and preach
this stuff and if it wants to get me it will really get me good. And what I say to it when I
hate it I say "I am surrendering myself to you completely. Do what you will with me.
Please don't hurt me. And if you must kill me please do it quickly." And... but I know people
who have tried to order it around, heavy male dominator type who want to be information out of
it and my god they have bad trips so terrifying that they never come back to it again because if
this decides to turn on you it has resources that would make your head stand on them. So he does it
gently, reverently and with a great deal of attention. I have been... I have been...
things are giving to me fresh, sealed, um, seven years ago on my birthday. I still have them.
Would they... would they still be any good? Did you keep them in a dark cold place? Uh, for two years
and then I moved on to a boat and so... if I do in a dark place... Well the way to tell is if they are
still... if the seal was so good that they are still cracker dry, as dry as a fresh, saltine cracker,
they're probably all right. But what tends to happen with mushrooms under the best sealing
conditions is they re-soar the water and if it's rubbery at all or even bendable then it's probably
degraded and it's not any good anymore. Another thing let me say before I leave this, if you're
really serious about taking this into your life and you really want insurance against
unpleasant experiences, then learn to grow them. This catapults you into a whole different
category of relationship to it because it gives special privileges to growers. It's like
premier class on United Airlines or something. You get to board first and you get a wider
seat and a better meal and a good movie. So, and if you can grow it, it will teach you the qualities
that you must have to take it, which are attention to detail, sensitivity to incremental changes,
scheduling, cleanliness, so forth and so on, and will reform your characters sufficiently that you
can then probably take it without fear. Yes, this lady over here. To my children about this,
I have an 11 year old daughter and a 14 year old son. I talk to them exactly the way I talk to you
about it. I say there are good drugs and bad drugs. There's no such thing as the drug problem
or the drug issue. Part of the way the establishment has muddied the water is by impoverishing our
language about these things. Name a drug and I'll tell you what I think about it and how you should
relate to it. I've seen people destroy themselves on cocaine, heroin, alcohol. I've seen people get
nutty behind tobacco, religion, fascist politics, fundamentalism, and I say, you know, if you're
going to take a drug and if you want to take a drug, talk to me about it. If you want me to take
it with you and I think it's a worthwhile drug, I will. If I don't think it's a worthwhile drug,
I will tell you why. But it will be a real reason and you will find out that I'm not putting you on
and I haven't had any problem. I think we are, we infantile, not only infantile lives,
not only our children, but ourselves on this issue. Some drugs are bad, some drugs are good,
some drugs are trivial, and then there are styles of taking drugs. The way I think psychedelics
should be taken is if it's a kind of paradox, rarely and at high doses, so that you never
are comfortable. I'm not peddling comfort here, I'm peddling revelation. So you must take what are
called heroic doses, more than you want to take, that's the correct dose, and less frequently than
you want to take it, that's the correct timing. And then each time it will blow your mind to shred
and positively seep into the rest of your life. There are the people who think people who take
psychedelics are into escape, don't know what they're talking about. I mean, escape into what, for crying out loud?
I mean, the heavy narcotic is going on in front of the boob tube and imbibing, you know, the daily
newspaper and that kind of thing. So it's basically you've got to level with your kids, ever more so
now, because lying has become official policy, you know? I mean, I can't believe the crap I see on
television in these anti-drug ads. Marijuana is the gateway drug to hard drugs, you know, tobacco and
alcohol are the gateway drug to hard drugs, don't let anybody teach you, and so forth and so on. So
it's a matter of informing ourselves and then informing our children and then teaching them
how to do these things. It's a lot like sexuality. When nobody mentioned it, you learned in the gutter,
and that usually meant that you got your girlfriend pregnant at age 19 and had a shot down marriage
and lived a life of agony and repression in the service of phony social values from that point on.
We have to educate ourselves. Our sexuality, our psychedelic psychology, all the rest of it,
we have, we, you and I, not our children, have been tremendously infantilized by our government.
I mean, think about the "just say no" slogan. What that means is, don't think about it, don't inform
yourself. Just say no. Behave, in other words, like a media. This is not serviceable and...
Pardon me? Yeah, why ask why? The empowering of institutional ignorance. It's unconscionable.
This is the kind of art, these people make such a strong argument for the legal regulation of
advertising that they would do well to step back. They may find themselves in a situation that they
find very uncomfortable. Yeah, I mean, freedom of speech is not freedom to subvert the human
enterprise. Freedom of speech is freedom to advocate and to argue and to respond to arguments,
but not to stack the desk against truth and clear thinking and relative truth.
No, no. If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve.
Hi, I'm a recovering alcoholic and I've been to Bryan and New Psychogelics several times.
Being human and not being able to keep it, I told this to my sponsor in AA a couple weeks ago and she's
going with it. I don't feel that it's a problem or that it's taken away anything,
so most of my, if anything, is it can't be, but I'm having a hard time articulating to her why I
don't see this as a problem. I was wondering if you could address how to reconcile the use of
psychedelics within 12 step programs and I've heard that there are, I heard at another workshop
I've learned that there are people doing this and I wonder who... I don't want to name names,
but the top people in AA are entirely pro-psychedelic. They have told me this.
Addiction, repetitious abuse of substances has very little to do with this. Where I differ
with AA, as it's generally presented, is the idea that all things are to be looked at the same.
Again, this Luddite approach where you simplify, no matter how much damage it does to the complexity
of the issue. A 12 step program is another form of infantilization. The whole idea of addiction as
disease is a way of lifting responsibility off people. After all, if heroin addiction is a disease
then it's just sort of like the flu or gonorrhea. It's something that's happened to you and it's
very unfortunate that you don't need to examine your own attitudes or psychology. This is in fact
what we need to do. We have to take responsibility for our actions and I think that the 12 step thing
is way out of control at this point because there's a 12 step program for everything. I think,
you know, responsible activity, whether you're talking about drugs or managing your finances or
your sexuality, there's no substitute for it and you can't have a set of rules that will be
sufficiently sophisticated to be a working substitute for intelligent decision making.
A lot of times 12 step also has a lot of diversion to it that a lot of times, you know,
I have a friend who's also been in the program for five or six years and he's so convinced
of the whole thing about the Bible and the whole prophecy and everything that he's
basically an alcoholic still. He hasn't come to terms with the problems yet at all. I mean,
he's the same person with only one substance less than he had before. There's no substitute
in politics, in psychedelics, in sexuality, in UFO hunting. There's no substitute for clear thinking
and a reasonable knowledge of the rules of everything. And if somebody's pushing some form
of pipe at you, you need to have your crafty tester out and working because there's a lot of
crap out there and some of it well intentioned. It can be well intentioned and still lead you down
the primrose path. So what do you do about the discovery about genetic age controlling?
Genetic designing, preventing age and or prolonging aging?
You mean life extent? Yes. I mean it's inevitable. What do you feel is going to happen with that?
Well, so many things are happening at once. This is just part of the mix. I don't think we want
to live forever. I mean somebody said death is nature's way of making room for next year's model
and there's something to be said for that. I really think that death is what it's all about
and that, you know, the body is the placenta of the soul and the purpose of life in three-dimensional
space is to build up this invisible organ called the soul so that it can make a clean slice back
to its point of origin once severed from biology. I don't think we could cling, you know, to anything.
Everything flows. This is here. Let me give you the one thing I've learned out of life and drugs
and everything else. It's a hard truth. It's an illuminating truth. Heard correctly, it brings a
smile to your lips and a tear to your eyes. Nothing lasts. Nothing lasts. There are no exceptions to
this. Your relationship to your lover does not last. The hatred of your enemy does not last.
The wonderful home you worked so hard to create, it doesn't last. Your body doesn't last. Nothing
lasts. Everything is in the process of being transformed and replaced by something else.
You have to embrace that or life will disappoint you, embitter you, and tear you to pieces.
I like to make an analogy to searching. The uninformed person thinks that when you enter the
sea, you're safe near the shore. You're not safe near the shore. That's where the waves are breaking
and creating the white water and the undertow. All surfers know that you have to swim out to where
the waves are forming cleanly in deep water, and then you can catch the waves and ride it into the
beach. But if you hold to the shore, you'll just be beaten to death in the incoming surf.
That could be the end of the workshop as far as I'm concerned. That's how it works.
Well, because science has so thoroughly convinced us that the yawning grave is the end of the story.
It's presented as the absolute terminus of your existence. When in fact, I believe, I think I
said this last night, this is as dead as you can get. This, you know? So the challenge is not how to
face death. The challenge is how to come to terms gracefully with the prospect of eternity.
But it is constantly transforming.
Well, it's outside of time. Yes, you can exit time and then you exist in eternity.
Re-incarnation? Again, the evidence is inconclusive.
There is some evidence, you know, stories, we all know them. But the idea that it happens to
everyone seems an unnecessary hypothesis based on the idea that it happened to some people.
I would like to think that we move on. I would like to think that there is a kind of
ascent through existence. I'm open to the possibility of reincarnation, but again,
underwhelmed by the evidence. Maybe I should say a little bit about my own psychology because I
always get into these wrangles with people. I'm sort of presented as a person on the fringe of the
new age or something like that. I don't consider myself a new ager at all. I got where I am through
doubt, despiciation, lack of belief, hard-headed reason. And I've gotten, I believe,
further into weirdness than the channelers, the people who are talking to the UFOs,
and all the rest of them. They're such pushovers. I mean, the first voice that comes along from the
invisible world and they're ready to shine on to whatever gibberish is being pushed.
I think you can be a rationalist. I think you can demand hard evidence. And still,
this will not push magic out of your world. Real magic doesn't demand dewy-eyed believers
offering sacrifice that it's altered. Real magic is real. It exists for skeptics, not believers.
So the technique is not to stay in your comfortable cultural situation and believe
the first weird wrath that comes down the pike or the second or the third. The way to do it
is to be hard-headed, rational, demanding, but explore edges. Push the edges.
And also within the world. So if you hear that someone in India can raise the dead,
fly to India. Put yourself in front of them and say, "Would you please raise the dead?"
And if they say, "Oh, I only do it on Tuesday," or "Come back in April," or "You're not ready,"
then you just put them in the fraud column. And this has always worked for me. I just say,
"You know, you say you've got the whammy. What can you show me?" I went to India.
I mean, don't get me started. It is a spiritual bargain basement of the sleaziest source.
I went to South America with the same question, "What can you show me?" And the guy said, "Well,
let's sharpen our machetes and we'll go out here a half a mile into the forest and we'll cut some
of this vine and we'll bring it back and brew it up and I'll show you what I can show you."
None of this "Kiss my feet, sweep up around the ashram ten years, memorize fifty thousand lines
of the Avaka-tamkha-sutra" or that kind of malarkey. If there's any assumption of hierarchy,
head for the door. If somebody's telling you that you're little and they're up, head for the door.
It's a con of some sort. It's just... it's a horrible, horrible con. The real...
the real stuff is available to those who ask for it. You don't have to prove yourself.
Asking is sufficient and none of these scams can compete with psychedelics. That's why they
invade against it so furiously and tell you that it'll rend holes in your aura and all the rest
of the malarkey that is brought against it. I mean, give me a break. So the thing to do is
explore edges, push hard, and then use your ordinary good sense to tell shit from Shinola
and you will move much faster than the people who are worshiping at the feet of this or that
beady-eyed weasel who set himself up with a non-profit foundation and a line of bunk that's
being published by the devoted slaves and peddled in air force or whatever.
I mean, that's just horrible, all that stuff. Horrible.
In response to something that was said earlier, I've been fascinated with psychedelic since my
first experience when I was 17 and I have struggled with finding out about the mechanics of
cleaning and growing mushrooms and over the last couple of years I've finally met with some
relative success and I'd just like to offer if there's anybody who sincerely, you know,
has... I mean, it's a frustrating process when you first start. If there's anybody that, you know,
is seriously interested, I'd be glad to give them a little help.
This is an incredibly generous offer. It's very hard to learn to grow mushrooms unless
someone shows you how. My book that I wrote with my brother is the best way to do,
but it's like reading the instructions for putting together an electric train or something,
you know. If somebody would just show you, it becomes transparent. So nobody has ever said this
at any workshop I've ever been. If you're interested, do not let this gentleman flip
through your fingers. That's the book that's available. I'm trying to think of the guy's name.
Anything that's Paul's statement first? Yeah, the title of it's The Mushroom Cultivator.
By Paul Stamos. But even at that, there's no substitute for somebody at your elbow
showing you how to do it. Thank you for twisting me off the anti-guru tirade.
Have you ever met any of the fellows from the company here, from the tradition?
Respect?
Well, I make a differentiation. I'm not saying that the Hindu tradition or the yoga tradition
is phony. I'm saying that we misconstrue its intent. What these traditional teachings deliver,
if they are working right, is they deliver wisdom about how to live.
That's what a great guru can teach you. And that's not what I'm trying to teach you. We're talking
here about using psychedelics to blow ourselves into another dimension. This goes to the question
hours ago about the role of psychedelics in the spiritual program of advancement. I don't claim
that you will become a spiritually advanced person. I don't know what a spiritually advanced
person is. What I claim is that you will contact and use a dimension of experience
inaccessible by any other means if you will pursue this. And then you may decide that that's fine,
you've verified that everything I said is true or true enough, and now you don't ever want to do
that again and go on with your life or you may be able to make some good of it. It is no substitute
for ethical activity or moral sensitivity. It is no substitute for moral sensitivity. Moral
sensitivity, you don't cultivate in silent darkness in your bedroom with the telephone unplugged.
Moral sensitivity is visit the sick and imprisoned, heal the sick, bury the dead, instruct the ignorant.
That's what moral sensitivity is about. And people don't want to hear that. They want to go off and
worship at the feet of some guru. What could that possibly have to do with moral advancement? Moral
advancement is care for your fellow human beings for trying out loud. It's far more Mother Teresa
than Ramana Maharshi as far as I'm concerned. Not to knock Ramana Maharshi, but you know,
you know in the whole, you get this in the fascination with shamanism in the new age.
Shamanism in the aboriginal context is primarily about curing the sick. That's what it's about,
not these wild grandiose technicolor scenarios. My God, you can read 14,000 pages of Carlos Castaneda
and nobody ever cures anybody of anything. It's all happening in this other dimension. So it all
comes down to pretty, pretty nitty-gritty hands-on here-and-now stuff. Yes? I noticed that after a
hallucinogenic activity and you're by yourself or you're seeming to be in nature, a sort of
empathetic consciousness happens to where you're more in tune with the surroundings,
the animals and the plants. And so they could inter-speak to your consciousness and you can
sort of with them. I wonder if anyone else experiences that or if it's deriving to see
mushrooms and not the other ones. It seems like a more organic, like a meshing of information that's
coherent in everything that exists, that's alive, that you tap into, that feeds into you also and
you affect the surroundings somewhat. The animals and everything sort of are affected by your presence
in being there. Well this is what I call this re-establishing of the relationship to the
dhyana mind. This is what the ego blocks us from, is this relationship to nature as though it were
a kind of partner and a companion. You know the whole problem with the modern situation,
I mean earlier I defined it as ego, here's then a behavioral definition of it, our problem is that
we cannot feel the consequences of what we're doing. We can talk about the spread of AIDS,
the ozone hole, the toxification of the ocean, but if we could emotionally connect with it
and feel, we would have the political reformation we're waiting for later this evening.
So if, and what you're talking about I think, is the feeling that comes when nature is suddenly
perceived to be vibrant, alive, full of an intent to communicate and caring of humanity.
Women I think are closer to this than men, but in the context of our civilization we're also screwed
up, but comparing the differences between men and women in regard to that hardly matters. We have to
re-empower our emotions, we've gone way out of line in terms of the rational mind and have
completely deadened our emotional receptors to the consequences of what we're doing.
Yes, there's one thing you mentioned earlier about conspiracy theories,
and not describing to that directly. I'm sorry I didn't hear the last one. You had mentioned about
conspiracy theory and not describing to it directly as a theory, and I can appreciate that,
but I think we have to look at it in more detail and maybe from some other angle
to get more out of that. Maybe the terminology doesn't fit, but in the 60s having lived through
that era we really touched on what democracy could be. It really was a different relationship
between people for a short period of time, and I remember how it devolved as the 60s went on and
the 70s came, and what we've all experienced to the remainder of the 70s into the 80s and now the 90s.
I think it's been very dramatic change. I think that to describe that its happenstance would be
folly. To say completely that the CIA, as an example, although I have no information
and don't even want to have it, tested something and then let it go because it didn't fit their
needs completely, may not be a whole story. For example, you talked about wealth, natural
wealth especially, but drugs in general can be inhabited as time goes on by those who experience
it. Let's say, for example, as a theory that those who experienced that democracy early in the 60s
were inhibited from further experiencing, were disassociated from it by safe houses,
by whatever systems were developed, such that those drugs could be inhabited in a different way
over a period of time. Rather than resulting in democracy, perhaps they result in a new world or
some system of control. It seems to me like there may be a theocracy rather than a democracy that's
ruling, and that there may be a thought process that is guiding. One of the reasons we see these
when we look inside of these institutions like the Center for Disease Control, the National
Institutes of Health, the White House, the way we see these bungling people is because those are the
only people who really can fill these roles, not because there is nothing of intelligence behind
us guiding them. When I say intelligence, I don't mean positive intelligence.
So I feel like we have to, or it would be helpful for us to keep in touch with
the idea of something going on, something guiding and counter guiding. As you said about evolution
earlier, that evolution really is the moving sort of goal. I think that those that plan
500 years in the future figure out people that do that. Those that may have a theocracy may see that
goal and not want that. They may not want the free use of materials on this planet to flow
freely between all people. Once that happens, you have whatever democracy truly is. Even that would
transform to a new word, a new name. So I feel there is something going on. I feel that psychedelics
do allow one to penetrate through the veils that are created. I think that's why they're detrimental.
That's why they're a quote-unquote controlled substance. You know, in the medical schools and
in the research field, the reason there's so much cowardice and fear is because people lose their
jobs. Literally, they don't even know why they lost them. If you go to the UCLA Medical School
Library and read in some of the more technical journals on sympathetic and other areas related
to this, you will find in the corners of the book people's notes about what their experiences were.
That's the source of information. That's where it's being spread. It's the only channel open.
There are people all across this nation and elsewhere trying to do things. They have no
avenue and if they step out, they're cut off. Same way as in cancer therapy or same way as in other
areas where this powerful dynamic life that we are could emerge. I think that the theocracy behind it,
something that's known. Slide 20, please. Well, I think there are a lot of
groups, let's say, that aspired to control society. I just don't think anybody is succeeding.
I don't think that the world we're living in is the result of anybody's conscious agenda.
To take LSD, for example, and again I always go back to Occam's Razor, the simplest explanation
for what happened to the psychedelic revolution in the 60s is that it self-corrupted itself.
It didn't require the CIA to ruin it. When you have a situation where a graduate student in
biochemistry and his roommate with a trust fund can get together and pool their money and
intelligence and over a long weekend produce five or ten million hits of LSD in a small apartment,
what you are going to get out of that is criminal syndicalism, pyramidal organizations for the
purposes of making money. And that is clearly what destroyed LSD. I mean, I lived through it.
The San Francisco Oracle and people like that were pleading, "Don't sell acid. Give it away.
Give it away. As long as you give it away, it will be pure." And some people weren't interested in
enlightenment. Some people wanted houses in the hills and Maseratis. So it is our own nature that
conspires against us, not the dreams of the CIA. I mean, don't forget George Bush once ran the CIA,
for God's sake. That's the level of competence that that is, that they can get together.
That's the political essence of the CIA, which is behind that. Because I don't think we are that
kind of government. But that doesn't mean that there is an intelligence that is here that can do
that. But why hypothesize that if there is no evidence for it? Because it is a thing,
but there were people who set up. I don't think there was a set up. The people kept
it and it was pretty obvious that that was broken and wanted, that something happened there.
Well, people decided they wanted to make money out of it.
What was it primarily? Control of what?
Well, as you were saying, if something went longer, you would have been in a way to lose
control completely. Like more than we all know, more of a long-s-t-t.
But these things were distributed in micro-cultures relative to the global situation.
I mean, I don't deny that there are people who seek to subvert the natural development of the
social agenda. I just think that it's an impossible proposition. I mean, the real conspiracies are
the Catholic Church, the World Bank, the IMF. And they don't think of themselves as conspirators.
They think of themselves as thousand-year-old organizations. Shepherd, not in the case of the
IMF.
Those organizations that are allowed to receive the grant money to be a big portion of the world.
They're the congressmen.
They're the ones that try.
They don't do things that try. They're the ones that make sense.
Those of us that listen to...
Well, look, Richard has the talking.
Well, those that listen to KGFK in the middle of the night on Wednesday night get the full,
low conspiracy story from Dave Emery.
And I think actually there's a lot to be listened to very carefully in terms of the evidence
that he has gathered about this.
But don't you think, Richard, that even if... we could almost say, even if all these conspiracies
exist, we're hearing about so many that they must be self-canceling?
Well, it's coming to Christ this moment in terms of the massive cover-up versus the "keep
uncovering this and uncovering that" and they just can't keep their fingers on every part
of the dice.
Yeah, I think running a world controlling conspiracy must be a fairly frustrating enterprise
these days.
I'm getting the high sign from the papers.
Let me...
Listen, I just want to speak to this lady's concern about LSD.
LSD was used in the '60s for alcoholic rehabilitation very successfully.
Uncle Dostoevsky.
And only when the government put its hand to thumb on LSD research was it stopped.
But they had tremendous success with LSD in recovering alcoholics.
In the great psychiatric consulate.
So there is that evidence, aren't there?
There has to be an overcoming of the institutionalized fear that is exported into the society.
The news is this... the psychedelic dimension represents a new world.
And, you know, we can go into it and enslave the Indians or we can go into it and save
our souls.
And it's going to be guided and controlled, I think, by the informed decisions of rational
individuals.
And it's up to each and every one of us to make sure that we fall into that category.
This is the best test secret on this planet.
It is your birthright.
As much your birthright as the sexual experience, but more easily evaded, more easily distorted.
And so there's a certain responsibility on each of us to try and educate and inform ourselves
and then integrate it into our life.
We no more know what it's for than we know what electricity or wind is for.
It can be used for all kinds of things.
It can be used to distort human nature or to unfold it into some kind of incredible
and amazing future.
These things used to be called consciousness expanding drugs.
Well, now suppose for a moment that that were actually true, that that's what they do.
If consciousness does not loom large as a part of the human future, then what kind of
future is it going to be?
If these things really empower consciousness, self-reflection, boundary dissolution, and
I create his ideation, then we must fully explore them because we are on the brink of
extinction because of a failure of creativity, a failure to creatively meet the challenges
that history, our own history, has created for ourselves.
We have to claim our birthright.
Nobody can take this away from you any more than they can take away your right to have
sex or breathe air or drink water.
And anybody who tells you that this is an item up for social manipulation and control
is somehow serving a dominator agenda that diminishes and degrades every single member
of the human family.
It is a true mystery, it's a doorway out of the dead end of Western history, it's the
return path backward to the shamanic paradise that existed before history.
If you don't believe what I'm saying, do the rational thing.
Check it out.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Charles.
Take thought.
Take thought.
Take thought.
Eros And The Eschaton
[APPLAUSE]
So everyone can hear, yes?
I can hear anyway.
Good.
Well, I want to thank Mandala Books, Jan.
I want to thank Jay Widener for bringing me back
to Seattle, the home of real grunge and real peculiarity.
Before I plunge into this, I should tell you,
because Harper would like me to, that
the invisible landscape, after years and years of being out
of print, is shipping right now.
I don't know if it's in the bookstores, but it's real.
And True Hallucinations is going into paper at the same time.
So if you couldn't afford the 22, wait for the 12 or the 2012.
What I wanted to talk about tonight, simply because it's
the thing that is moving me to the edge of my chair
at the moment, is I called the talk Eros and the Eschaton.
And what I could have called it is Eros and the Eschaton,
What Science Forgot.
Because somebody asked me recently,
is there any permission to hope?
More specifically, is there any permission for smart people
to hope?
I mean, it's easy to hope if you're stupid.
But is there any basis for intelligent people to hope?
And I wanted to deal with that because I think so.
I mean, it was to me a shocking question,
because I live in an aura of hope,
because I live in a twilight world of my own self-generated,
canappinated fantasy.
And I forget that not everyone is so fortunate
and that there's a lot of despair and uncertainty
out there.
So I wanted to talk about this.
I'll talk for a while, and then we'll break
and have an intermission.
I'll sign books if anybody needs a book signed.
And then we'll come back and do Q&A on this
till we're sick of it, basically.
Yeah, and if there's a technician adjusting this,
help me out a little bit.
Eros and the Eschaton.
These are the two areas that I think
compromise the old paradigm and give permission to hope.
And strangely, neither of these words
is that well-known, which gives you
a measure of how completely the dominator position has
squelched, subverted, and downplayed any opposition
to its worldview.
Eros we know about in some kind of devalued,
sticky kind of glitzy way because we
get it in the eroticization of media and society.
But really what eros means in the Greek sense
is a kind of unity of nature, a kind
of all-pervasive order that bridges one ontological level
to another.
This is not permitted in the official world
view of our civilization, which is science.
The world of inorganic chemistry is not
thought to make any statement about the organic world.
And the organic world is not thought
to be extrapolatable into the world of culture and thought.
There are imagined to be clear breaks in these categories.
I had a biologist tell me once, if genes aren't involved,
it ain't evolution.
So that means you can't talk about the evolution
of the Earth as a physical body.
You can't talk about the evolution
of human social institutions.
Evolution is somehow a word appropriate to biology
and appropriate nowhere else.
And this brings me then to the first factor easily discerned
by anybody who has their eyes open that compromises
and erodes the hopeless existential view of the world
that we're getting from science.
And that is the idea that nature is, in fact,
across all scales and all levels of phenomena, a unity.
It's not a coincidence that electrons
spinning around an atomic nucleus and planets going
around a star and star clusters orbiting
around the gravitational center of a galaxy,
it's no coincidence that these systems exhibit
the same kind of order on different scales.
And yet science would say that is a coincidence.
P.W. Bridgman, who was a philosopher of science,
defined a coincidence as what you have left over
when you apply a bad theory.
It means that you've overlooked something.
And what jumps out at you as a coincidence
is actually a set of relationships
whose causeus tree, whose relationships to each other
are simply hidden from you.
And what I've observed, and I think
it is fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this,
what I've observed is that nature
builds on previously established levels of complexity.
This is a great general natural law
that your own senses will confirm for you,
but that has never been allowed into the canon of science.
And what I mean by that nature builds on complexity
is the following.
When the universe was born in the dubious and controversial
circumstance called the Big Bang,
it was at first simply a pure plasma of electrons.
It was the simplest that it could possibly be.
There were no atoms.
There were no molecules.
There were no highly organized systems of any kind.
There was simply a pure plasma of expanding energy.
And as the universe cooled, simply cooled,
new kinds of phenomena, we say, emerged out of the situation.
As the universe cooled, atomic nuclei could form,
and electrons could settle into stable orbits.
As the universe further cooled, the chemical bond
became a possibility.
Still later, the hydrogen bond, which is a weaker bond,
which is the basis of biology.
So as the universe aged, it complexified.
This is so obvious that it's never really been challenged.
But on the other hand, it's never
been embraced as a general and dependable principle either.
Follow it through with me.
Out of atomic systems come chemical systems.
Out of chemical systems comes the covalent hydrogen bond,
the carbon bond, complex chemistry
that is prebiotic or organic.
Out of that chemistry come the macro physical systems
that we call membranes, gels, charge transfer complexes,
this sort of thing.
These systems are the chemical preconditions
for life, simple life, the life of the prokaryotes,
the life of naked, un-nucleated DNA that characterized
primitive life on the planet.
Out of that life come eukaryotes,
nucleated cells, and then complex colonies of cells,
and then cell specialization leading to higher animals,
leading to social animals, leading
to complex social systems, leading to technologies,
leading to globe girdling, electronically based
information transfer oriented cultures like ourselves.
Someone said, what's so progressive about media?
It's the spreading of darkness at the speed of light.
It can be.
It can be.
Well, so this is very interesting
that apparently the way the universe works
is upon a platform of previously achieved complexity,
chemical, electrical, social, biological, whatever,
new forms of complexity can be built
that cross these ontological boundaries.
In other words, what I mean by that is that biology
is based on complex chemistry, but it
is more than complex chemistry.
Social systems are based on the organization
that is animal life, and yet it is more than animal life.
So this is a general law of the universe overlooked by science
that out of complexity emerges greater complexity.
We could almost say that the universe, nature,
is a novelty conserving or complexity conserving engine.
It makes complexity, and it preserves it,
and it uses it as the basis for further complexity.
Now, there's more to this than simply that.
I think we all observationally could agree
with what has been said so far.
The added wrinkle, or an added wrinkle,
is that each advancement into complexity, into novelty,
proceeds more quickly than the stage that preceded it.
This is very profound because if accepted
as a serious first principle, it ends
the marginalization of our own species
to the level of spectator status in a universe that
knows nothing of us and cares nothing for us.
This is the most advanced position
that modern science will allow us.
Spectators to a drama we didn't write,
shouldn't expect to understand, and cannot influence.
But I say, if in fact novelty is the name of the game,
if in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty
is what the universe is striving for,
then suddenly our own human enterprise,
previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance.
We are apparently players in the cosmic drama.
And in this particular act of the cosmic drama,
we hold a very central role.
We are at the pinnacle of the expression of complexification
in the animal world.
And somehow this complexity which is concentrated in us
has flowed over out of the domain of animal organization
and into this mysterious domain which
we call culture, language, consciousness, higher values.
Each stage of advancement into complexity
occurs more quickly than the stage which preceded it.
After the initial Big Bang, there
was a period of billions of years
when the universe cooled, stars condensed,
planetary systems formed, and then the quickening process
crossed an invisible Rubicon into the domain
of animal and biological organization.
Well, you see, since the rise of Western monotheism,
the human experience has been marginalized.
We have been told that we were unimportant
in the cosmic drama.
But we now know from the feedback
that we're getting from the impact of human culture
on the Earth that we are a major factor shaping
the temperatures of the oceans, the composition
of the atmosphere, the general speed and complexity
of speciation on the planet, so forth and so on.
A single species ourselves has broken
from the ordinary constraints of animal nature
and created a new world, an epigenetic world,
meaning a world not based on gene transfer
and chemical propagation and preservation of information,
but a world based on ideas, on symbols, on technologies,
on tools, on ideas downloaded out of the human imagination
and concretized in three-dimensional space
as choppers, arrow points, particle accelerators,
gene sequencers, spacecraft, what have you.
All of this complexification occurring
at a faster and faster rate.
And this brings me then to the second quality or phenomena
that science has overlooked, which
is the acceleration of a complexification
that the early history of the universe
proceeded with excruciating slowness.
Then life took hold in the oceans of this planet.
A quickening of process and evolution,
but still things proceeded on a scale of tens of millions
of years to clock major change.
Then the conquest of the land, higher animals, higher exposure
to radiation, faster change, species following species,
one upon another.
Then 50,000, 100,000, a million years ago,
anyway, recently, the crossover into the domain of culture,
tool making, myth making, dance, poetry, song, story.
And that set the stage for the fall
into history, the incredibly unusual and self-consuming
process that has been going on for the past 15,000 or 20,000
years, a biological snap of the finger.
And yet in that time, everything that we call human,
everything that we associate with higher values
has been adumbrated, elaborated, created, set in place
by one species, ourselves.
This acceleration of time or complexity
shows no sign of slowing down.
In fact, within the fabric of our own lives,
we can almost daily, hourly, by the minute,
feel it speeding up, taking hold.
It's a cliche that time is moving faster and faster,
a cliche of the mass media.
But I want to suggest that this is not a perceptual illusion
or a cultural mirage, that this is actually happening
to the space-time matrix, that time is, in fact, speeding up,
that history, in which we are embedded because our life of 50
to 80 years is so ephemeral on a scale of 10
to 15,000 years.
But nevertheless, history is a state
of incredible destabilization.
It's a it's a it's a chaos-trophy
in the process of happening.
It begins with animals kept in balance by natural selection.
And it ends with a global internet
of electronic information transfer
and a language-using species hurling its instruments
toward the stars.
There is no reason for us to suppose
that this process of acceleration
is ever going to slow down or be deflected.
It has been a law of nature from the very beginning of nature
that this acceleration was built in.
What poses a problem to us as thinking individuals
is that the speed of involution toward concrescence
is now so great that we can feel the tug of it
within the confines of our own lives.
There has been more change since 1960
than in the previous several thousand years.
There has been more change since 1992
than in the previous thousand years.
Change is accelerating.
Invention, connection, adembration of ideas,
mathematical algorithms, connectivity
of people, social systems, this is all accelerating furiously.
And under the control of no one, not the Catholic Church,
the Communist Party, the IMF, no one
is in charge of this process.
This is what makes history so interesting.
It's a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.
This is why I'm not particularly sympathetic to conspiracy
theory, because I can't make the leap to faith that would cause
you to believe anyone could get hold of the beast enough
to control it.
I mean, conspiracies, of course.
We have conspiracies up the kazoo, but none of them
are succeeding.
They're all being swept away, compromised,
astonished by new information, and endlessly agonized.
So two factors relating to Eros, the movement into complexity
and the fact that that movement goes ever faster.
And the second quality, the acceleration of the movement
into novelty, leads me to the third point, which is,
I suppose, more controversial.
And I am frankly willing to admit that my sensitivity
to this third point is based on my psychedelic experience.
I mean, science is the exploration
of the experience of nature without psychedelics.
And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise
and say we need a science beyond science.
We need a science which plays with a full deck.
And the reason the psychedelic experience is so important
here is not some namby-pamby notion
that it expands consciousness or it makes you more perceptive
or something like that.
I mean, that is all true, but it isn't strongly enough put.
A cultural point of view is like a crystal.
You have an amorphous cultural medium
which at certain temperatures will
form a crystal of cultural convention, if you will.
And within the geometry of that crystal,
certain things make sense and certain things
are excluded from making sense.
Science is a condensed cultural point of view
that is a rigid crystal of interlocking assumptions,
assumptions such as matter is primary, mind is tertiary,
causality works from the past into the future, so forth
and so on.
What psychedelics do in terms of their impact
on the physical brain and organism of human beings
is they withdraw cultural programming.
They dissolve cultural assumptions.
They lift you out of that reassuring crystalline matrix
of interlocking truths which are lies.
And instead, they throw you into the presence
of the great who knows.
The mystery, the mystery that has
been banished from Western thought
since the rise of Christianity and the suppression
of the mystery religions.
Now, the model that attracts me to the psychedelic experience
is not that it makes you smarter,
a kind of simple-minded idea, paradoxically,
or the idea that-- you are paying attention, right?
Or the idea that it's some kind of magnifying glass
into the personal unconscious, your trauma, your childhood
memories, the satanic abuse, your parents laid on you,
so forth and so on.
The model which I like is a geometric model
and says simply that since the rise of the Greek alphabet,
print, linear thinking, and science,
we have become imprisoned in a causal universe
of material connectivity.
And that this is a cultural myth as much as believing
that we are the sons and daughters of the great father
who got out of his canoe at the second waterfall
to take a leak.
I mean, these are just cultural myths.
What is revealed through the psychedelic experience,
I think, is a higher dimensional perspective on reality.
And I use higher dimensional in the mathematical sense.
Literally, you are lifted out of the plane
of cultural assumptions and can look down
with the kind of godlike understanding
that one obtains when one flies in an airplane
over a landscape previously only viewed from the ground.
In other words, from the vantage point
of the psychedelic experience, the cultural landscape
is seen more nearly in its correct perspective, seen
as historically bounded, spatially,
and intellectually bounded.
Now, it's no coincidence that if you analyze biology, what it is,
it's a kind of conquest of dimensionality.
The earliest forms of life were probably slimes of some sort,
stabilized on a clay surface, immobile,
unable to perceive light, with no sense of time,
merely a fingernail or a toehold in existence.
And then if you look at the entire fossil record, what
you see is the evolution of senses, sensory perceptors
and organs of locomotion.
The perceptors, the eye, the hand,
bring into the cognitive field the sense
of things at a distance.
And then language provides models
for these things at a distance.
Similarly, fins, legs, so forth, means of locomotion
carry us through space.
This is a journey of dimensionality.
And essentially, what animals are that plants are not
are life forms mobile in a very conscious way
in the spatial dimension.
This is why, from the point of view
of evolutionary biologists, animals
are somehow more advanced than plants.
Well, if conquest of dimensionality
is the criteria, then notice that we, again,
occupy a special and privileged position in nature.
Because we can not only run with the best of them,
see with the best of them, but we
can remember and anticipate like crazy.
And other animals are not doing this.
Other animals may imprint past situations
of danger or opportunity, but they do not
analyze experience and extrapolate it
toward the hidden domain of the future.
And consciousness is the generalized word
that we use for this coordination
of complex perception to create a world that
draws from the past and builds a model of the future
and then suspends the perceiving organism
in this magical moment called the now, where
the past is coordinated for the purpose of navigating
the future.
McLuhan called it driving with the rear view mirror.
And the only thing good about it is
it's better than driving with no mirror at all.
All right, now, what this conquest of dimensionality
comes to be in the presence of psychedelics
is an anticipation of the future.
We can anticipate the future.
We know to within microseconds when the sun will rise.
We know within a few percentage points
where the prime rate will be in six months.
Some things we can predict fairly closely,
some things with less precision.
But the perception of the future is very important to us.
When we marry the need to perceive the future
with the psychedelic experience, I
believe we come up with data that is very, very
difficult for science to come to terms with.
And this is the third item, or really the second item
in the list, what science forgot.
It's what I call the eschaton.
Now, eschaton is a rare word.
Until very recently, unheard outside schools
of theology, which I understand were a dying enterprise.
Eschaton comes from the Greek word esk,
which just means the end.
The eschaton is the last thing, the final thing.
And it's very important to science
to eliminate from its thinking any suspicion
that this eschaton might exist.
Because if it were to exist, it would impart to reality
a purpose, you see.
If the eschaton exists, then it's
like a goal, or an attraction point, or an energy sink,
toward which historical process is being moved.
And science is incredibly hostile
toward the idea of purpose.
If you are not involved in the sciences,
this may come as somewhat of a surprise to you.
If you are a workbench scientist or a theoretician,
you know that this is what's called
the problem of teleology.
It is because modern science defined itself
in the 19th century when the reigning philosophy was deism.
And deism was the idea that the universe is a clock made by God.
And God wound this clock and has walked away from it.
And the clock will eventually run down.
That theological construct was poisonous
to evolutionary theory in the 19th century.
And so they said, we must create a theory of reality
that does not require a goal, does not require a purpose.
Everything must be pushed from the past.
Nothing must be pulled toward the future.
The problem with this is that it does not
fulfill our intuitions about reality.
We can see that evolution, biological evolution,
has built on chemical systems.
We can see that social and historical systems
build on biology.
As people with open minds, or as open as they
can be inside this culture, we nevertheless
have this intuition of purpose.
And it is dramatically underscored
by the psychedelic experience, which
takes the raw material of your life, your culture,
your history, and tells you this is not an existential mishmash
to be lived out with dignity because there's nothing else
to be done with it, some kind of Camusian why not affirmation.
It says no.
It says your reality is a coherent cosmos.
And embedded in your own sense of identity, embedded
in your own sense of purpose, is a microscopic reflection
of the larger purpose that is built into the universe.
Now, this is not just blowing smoke in the sense of it's
a nice idea, or it's like a religious idea,
like saying Jesus loves you and so feel all right
about yourself.
It isn't like that.
It's a theory about reality that has teeth,
because reality is actually following the script
that this particular version of reality dictates.
Reality is accelerating toward an unimaginable omega point.
We are the inheritors of immense momentum in our social systems,
our philosophical and scientific and technological approaches
to the world.
Because we're driving the historical vehicle
with a rear view mirror, it appears to us
that we're headed straight into a brick wall at 1,000 miles
an hour.
It appears that we are destroying the earth,
polluting the atmosphere, wrecking the oceans,
dehumanizing ourselves, robbing our children of a future,
so forth and so on.
I believe what is in fact going on
is that we are burning our bridges one by one.
We're burning our bridges to the past.
We cannot go back to the mushroom dotted plains of Africa
or the canopied rain forests of five million years ago.
We can't even go back to the era of Cayuse and six shooter
of 200 years ago.
We have burned our bridges.
We are preparing for a kind of cultural forward escape.
And this question, is there cause for optimism?
The answer is it depends on where you placed your bets.
If you placed your bets on male dominated institutions based
on consumer fetishism, propaganda, classism,
and materialism, then God help you,
you should call your broker.
If, on the other hand, you've recognized that a lifeboat
strategy is involved here, that what is really important
is empowering personal experience, backing off
from consumer object fetishism, freeing the mind,
empowering the imagination, then in that case,
I think you can feel pretty good about what is going on.
You know, there's a lot of talk about cultural death
and disenfranchisement.
And it's usually couched in terms of some happy naked people
in the rain forest or in Tajikistan making their rugs
or milking their camels or something.
And isn't it too bad that their culture is being blown up
and traded in for mall culture and shopping by remote?
But in fact, all culture is being destroyed.
All culture is being sold down the river
by the sorts of people who want to turn the entire planet
into an international airport arrival concourse.
And that's not the victory of somebody's culture
over somebody else's culture.
Nobody ever had a culture like that.
That's just the victory of schlockmeisterism and crapola
over good taste and good sense.
Well, if I were dependent on the notion
that human institutions are necessary to pull us out
of the ditch, I would be very despairing, as I said.
Nobody's in charge, not the IMF, the pope, the Communist Party,
the Jews.
No, no, no.
Nobody has their finger on what's going on.
So then why hope?
Isn't it just a runaway train out of control?
I don't think so.
I think the out of control-ness is the most hopeful thing
about it.
After all, whose control is it out of?
[APPLAUSE]
You and I never controlled it in the first place.
Why are we anxious about the fact that it's out of control?
I think if it's out of control, then our side is winning.
[APPLAUSE]
To me, the most confounding datum of the psychedelic experience
is this thing, which I call the eschaton.
And I want to talk about it a little bit this evening,
because I think it is the hardest thing for people
to grasp about my particular rap.
And sometimes I've talked to many of you
about psychedelic plants, shamanism, techniques,
chemistry, approaches, so forth and so on.
I'm approaching this this evening as a graduate seminar.
I figure everybody has their little mojo
kit and their particular way of approaching these things.
And then the question is, what kind of conclusions can we draw?
And the conclusion I draw is-- and this
is sort of pulling together what I said before--
we are central to the human drama
and to the drama of nature and process on this planet.
The opposition, which is science--
well, first let me say this.
Every model of the universe has a hard swallow.
What I mean by a hard swallow is a place where the argument
cannot hide the fact that there's something slightly
fishy about it.
The hard swallow built into science
is this business about the Big Bang.
Now let's give this a little attention here.
This is the notion that the universe, for no reason,
sprang from nothing in a single instant.
Well, now before we dissect this,
notice that this is the limit test for credulity.
Whether you believe this or not, notice
that it is not possible to conceive
of something more unlikely or less likely to be believed.
I mean, I defy anyone.
It's just the limit case for unlikelihood,
that the universe would spring from nothing
in a single instant for no reason.
If you believe that, my family has a bridge
across the Hudson River that will give you
a lease option for $5.
It makes no sense.
It is, in fact, no different than saying,
and God said, let there be light.
And what the philosophers of science are saying
is give us one free miracle.
And we will roll from that point forward,
from the birth of time to the crack of doom,
just one free miracle.
And then it will all unravel according
to natural law and these bizarre equations, which
nobody can understand, but which are so holy in this enterprise.
Well, I say then, if science gets one free miracle,
then everybody gets one free miracle.
And I perceive that it is true when
you build these large scale cosmogonic theories that you
have to have a kind of an umbilical chord or a point
to start from that is different from all other points
in the system.
So if we have to have a singularity
in our modeling of what reality is, let's make it as modest
and as unlikely a singularity as possible.
The singularity that arises for no reason in absolutely
empty space instantly is the least likely
of all singularities.
Doesn't it seem more likely if we have to have a singularity
that it occurs in a domain with a rich history,
with many causal streams feeding into the situation that
nurtures the complexity?
In other words, to put it simply,
if you have to have a singularity,
doesn't it make more sense to put it
at the end of a cosmogonic process than at the beginning?
And I think this is the great breakthrough of psychedelics
and shamanism, that science got it absolutely wrong.
The universe didn't begin in a singularity.
Who knows how the universe began or would even
presume to judge?
But the universe ends in a singularity.
It has been growing more singular, more complex, more
unique, more novel every passing moment
since it burst into existence.
And if that's true, then we represent a kind of concrescence
of universal intent.
We're not mere spectators or a cosmic accident
or some sideshow or the Greek chorus to the main event.
The human experience is the main event.
The coordination of perception, of hope, of dream,
of vision that occurs inside the human heart-mind-body
interface is the most complex phenomenon in the universe.
Now, even the physicalists will agree
that the human neocortex represents the most densely
ramified matter known to exist in the biological world.
And you don't have to be a rocket scientist
to see that human society, human history, human art,
human literature represent things
for which there is no analog in the world of wasps,
groundhogs, killer whales, and so forth and so on.
In our species, complexity has turned inward upon itself.
And in our species, time has accelerated.
Time has left the gentle ebb and flow
of gene transfer and adaptation that characterizes
biological evolution.
And instead, historical time is generated.
And so I believe that science and its reluctance
to deal with the psychedelic experience
and the way in which science has used then law to suppress
its rival in this case arises out of a profound discomfort
on the part of science about this future state
of complexification that is clearly
the grail, the dwell point, the end point
of the human historical process.
No one of us, I think, can imagine
that history could go on for another 1,000 years.
I mean, what would it look like at the current rate
of population growth, spread of epidemic disease,
rate of invention, connectivity, depletion of resources,
the atmosphere?
It is impossible to conceive of another 1,000
years of human history.
History then is ending.
History is a kind of gestation process.
It's a kind of metamorphosis.
It's an episode in the life of a species.
If you think of the simple example of metamorphosis,
that of caterpillar to butterfly,
we all know that there is this intermediate resting stage
where the caterpillar is, for all practical purposes,
enzymatically dissolved and then reconstituted
as an entirely different kind of organism
with different physical structures, different eyes,
different legs, a different way of breathing,
with wings where no wings were before,
with a different kind of feeding apparatus.
This is what's happening to us.
History is a process of metamorphosis.
It's a pupation stage.
It begins with naked monkeys.
And it ends with a human machine planet girdling interphase
capable of releasing the energies that light the stars.
And it lasts about 15,000 or 20,000 years.
And during that period, the entire process
hangs in the balance.
It's a period of high risk.
It's like what a butterfly is doing in a cocoon
or what is happening to a child in the womb.
It's a gestation process where one form of life
is being changed into another.
Well, this would all happen naturally
and with a great deal of anxiety, I imagine,
as history builds to its ever more climactic and horrifying
crescendo.
And we would all be ignorant or very baffled
about what's going on were it not
for the institution of psychedelic shamanism.
Remember I said that what is dissolved
are the crystalline structures of cultural assumption.
Well, one of the strongest cemeteries
in our cultural crystal is the symmetry
that gathers around the concept of past and future.
The shaman actually rises into a domain
where past and future are different areas
on the same topological manifold.
This is not a metaphor.
It's what's really going on.
If you think about shamanism in its classical guise
for a moment, it is about predicting weather,
predicting game movement, and curing disease.
If you had a prescient or extraordinary understanding
of the future, each one of us would
be able to do these things.
Predicting the weather, you just look into next week
and there it is.
Predicting the movement of game, same deal.
Curing the sick actually involves very judicious choice
of your patience with a pre-knowledge
of who will get well and who will not get well.
So it's as though the members of the culture
are imprisoned in linear time and the shaman is not.
And why not?
Because the shaman has perturbed the brain states sanctioned
by the culture, sanctioned by its educational processes,
its habits, its attitudes, and into that vacuum created
by the perturbation of these cultural values
rushes the raw, unanalyzed datum of reality.
This is what Aldous Suxley called removing the reducing
valve of consciousness.
And suddenly, culture is seen to be a relative phenomena.
The stockbroker, no different from the rainforest shaman,
each somewhat similar to the Trobriand Islander
or the Eskimo.
Culture is simply clothing upon the human experience.
But the human organism outside the confines
of culture in a direct relationship to nature
transcends time and space.
This was a fact, I believe, that was known in prehistory
and, in fact, was the source of Paleolithic values, which
were not material, not linear, not surplus oriented,
not class oriented, not power oriented,
but rather oriented toward a kind
of egalitarian partnership in an environment
of great material simplicity.
And human beings lived like that for probably a half
a million years with poetry, with dance, with mathematics,
with magic, with story, with humor,
but not with the paralyzing and toxic artifacts
of the late evolving machine-worshipping monotheistic
linear phonetic alphabet tight ass straight culture
that we are a part of.
[APPLAUSE]
So now, at a kind of moment of great cultural challenge
and dynamic for Western civilization, which
has for 1,000 years called all the shots
and shoved itself down everybody's throat,
whether they liked it or not, in the last 100 years,
through the science of anthropology and ethnography
and ethnomedicine and botany, the news
has arrived that these quote unquote "primitive" people are,
in fact, master technicians of journeying
into a world of the neurological imagination, a world we didn't
even know exists, a world that is as distant to us
as the world at the heart of the atom
is from the rainforest fishermen.
And because our own cultural values
seem a little shoddy at this moment,
those on the fringes of Western civilization
have begun to seek alternatives, begun
to look at alternative religions, yoga, tantra,
Buddhism, Zen, whatever, alternative approaches
to diet, vegetarianism, macrobiotics, so forth and so
on, and alternative approaches to authentic experience, which
means psychedelics.
In the early stage of psychedelic involvement,
everyone was sort of flying under the banner
of hands-on Freudianism or hands-on Jungianism.
We're going to see those archetypes.
We're going to confront those sexual repressions.
We're going to journey into those traumatic childhood
memories.
Now it's understood, I think, that those metaphors were
fairly inadequate, and that actually we
stand on the brink of an unexplored landscape
of planetary size, the world of the high Paleolithic, which
is a Gaian world, a world of feeling, not
analytical intellectual constructs,
but a world of empowered feeling, empathy,
and intuitive understanding, an understanding that
doesn't arise in a context of Greek logic,
but in a context of animal knowing
in the authentic mode of the body.
So just to bring it all around here,
the great exhibit, which we must always
keep in front of ourselves and our critics,
is the mystery of the human mind and body.
No one knows how it is that I can command my hand
to make a fist, and that it will do that.
I mean, that's mind over matter.
That's the violation of every scientific principle
in the books.
And yet it is the most trivial experience any of us have.
We expect to command our body.
We expect the mental will to order the monkey flesh
into action, and it will follow.
The body is the nexus of the mystery of life.
And our culture takes us out of the body
and sells our loyalty into political systems,
into religions, into inanimate objects and machines,
collections, so forth and so on.
The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics
are handing back to us.
That's why it's called escape, because it's escape from HBO,
from walking the mall, from seeing what's on the tube,
from consuming trash media.
It's escape from all of that into the authenticity
of the body.
This is why sexuality is so edgy in this society.
They'd make it illegal if they but could figure out how.
It's the one drug they can't tear from our grip,
and so they lay a guilt trip about it.
But sexuality and psychedelics, by carrying us back
to an authentic sense of the body,
carry us back to the domain of authentic values.
And more and more, the message that people
are getting as they avail themselves
of the psychedelic experience is that it is not
a journey into the human unconscious
or into the ghost bardos of our chaotic civilization.
It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind,
that the Earth is a coherent whole.
It is a thinking, feeling, intending being
that, in terms of our value structures,
it would be foolish to image as anything other than female.
And when cultural values created by male dominance and science
and linearity and so forth and so on,
when those values are dissolved, what is waiting there
is this incredibly poignant experience of matrix,
what James Joyce called the mama matrix most mysterious,
nothing more than our bodies and the Earth out of which
our bodies came.
History, as we have lived it in the West,
has been a turning of our back on that.
And now history has failed.
Western cultural institutions, having
become global cultural institutions,
now show themselves to be adequate,
to inspire, lead, or carry anyone
into a future worth living in.
At this moment, then, this reconnecting to the Gaian mind
becomes a kind of moral imperative.
So this whole drug issue is not an issue even
about criminal syndicates or about untaxed billions
or about the mental health of our youth
or any of that malarkey.
I mean, my god, the most destructive drugs
known to the species are peddled on every street corner
without restriction.
The real issue is what kind of mental worlds
shall people inhabit?
What kinds of hope shall be permitted?
What kind of value systems shall be allowed?
And the value systems that aggrandize
the possession of things, the tearing up of the Earth,
competition, classism, racism, sexism,
have led us to the brink of catastrophe.
Now, I think, we have to abandon cultural, Western
cultural values and return to the deeper wisdom of the body
in connection with the plants.
That's the seamless web that leads us back
into the heart of nature.
And if we can do this, then this very narrow neck
of cultural crisis can be navigated.
Very little of the past can be saved.
The architectonics, the machines,
the systems of monetary exchange and propaganda,
the silly religions, the asinine aesthetic canons,
very little of that can be saved.
But what can be saved is the sense of love and caring
and mutuality that we all put into and take
from the human enterprise.
You know, there's a Grateful Dead song that says,
you can't go back and you can't stand still.
If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will.
And we now hold, through the possession
of these psychedelics, catalysts for the human imagination
of sufficient power that if we use them,
we can deconstruct the lethal vehicle that is carrying us
toward the brink of apocalypse.
We can deconstruct that vehicle and redesign it
into a kind of starship that would carry us
and our children out into the broad, starry galaxy
we know to be waiting us.
But it's a cultural test.
Nature is pitiless.
Intelligence is a grand experiment
upon which a great deal has been risked.
But if it proves inadequate, nature
will cover it over with the same kind of cool impunity
that she covered over the dinosaurs and the trilobites
and the cross-opterygian fishes and all those other folks who
came before.
So what we must do, I think, is see our future
in the imagination, catalyze the imagination,
form symbiotic relationships with the plants,
affirm archaic values, and spread the good news
that what is out of control, what is, in fact, dying,
is a world that had become too top-heavy
with its own hubris, too bent by its own false value systems,
and too dehumanized to care about what
happened to its own children.
So I say, good riddance to it.
Bring on the archaic revival, and let's create a new world.
And that's it.
And--
[APPLAUSE]
If this wasn't perfectly clear, I'm
sure the questions and answers will make it so.
Let's take a half-hour break.
I'll sign books if anybody wants me to,
and then we'll get together here for the hardcore.
Thank you very, very much.
--all it together so we can get on to the fun part here.
If you want copies of the tape, Todd is out front at that table.
You can wander out there during the Q&A.
People keep asking about his books.
This is the most important one.
[LAUGHTER]
He said that.
OK.
Well, I trust that that was all perfectly clear
before the break.
This is the part I enjoy the most,
because I'm not into the white guy at the front of the room
with all the answers, Trip.
It's just unfortunate that I have the body.
I do.
I'm actually a lesbian trapped in a man's body,
but I've done the very best with that that I could,
which hasn't been bad, let me tell you.
Yes.
Wait a minute.
Wait, wait.
You're going to have to yell, and then I'll repeat it.
All right.
Can you talk about the leadership
of God in that [INAUDIBLE]
[INAUDIBLE]
Well, this is a really interesting question.
I can talk about it.
I'll repeat the question.
Can I talk about the relationship
of advanced mathematics to modeling of consciousness
in layman's terms?
Correct?
One of the great mysteries still to be addressed by philosophy
is why is it that numbers, which are, after all, constructs
of the human mind, why is it that numbers
are so incredibly powerful for the description of nature?
Nature, after all, is somehow given.
We find it all around us.
And numbers arise in the depths of human raciocination.
So what is the relationship of these things to each other?
It may appear to be an easy question.
It's such a difficult question that it wasn't even
asked in philosophy until the 20th century.
It's very puzzling.
And I think that it indicates a fundamental congruency
between processes that are mental and the structure
of the world itself.
This is why I didn't get into it too much tonight
in a popular lecture like this, but I
am the inventor or the purveyor of a mathematical theory
of consciousness.
And I believe that more powerful than any atom smasher,
more subtle than any space telescope, is the human mind.
The human mind is the most subtle and superb
of all instruments for the study and measurement of nature.
When we look into ourselves, we discover the same patterns
that we discover in the birth and death of a species,
the flow of a river, the collapse of a corporation,
or the flowering of a love affair.
It's that process is somehow under the aegis
of a kind of universal equation of description.
So it doesn't matter whether it's
the birth and death of your hope or the rise
and fall of the Assyrian Empire or the evolution
of the Pacific Ocean.
Processes always occur in the same way.
And this is why there is congruence
between the mental world of human beings
and the world of abstract mathematics
and the world of nature.
These things are, as it were, simply different levels
of condensation of the same universal stuff.
And this is why the concept of truth can have some meaning.
I mean, when you think about it, truth,
why should it even be possible for us as monkeys
to entertain that notion?
Where is it writ large that mammals traveling in packs
should have any relationship to truth whatsoever?
And yet the faith is that somehow thinking means something.
It's not just something we do.
It means something.
It means something because there is sufficient freedom
within the human system to be both right or wrong.
And this right or wrong lays upon us
the obligation of mirroring nature
in models which we build in our own minds.
Now, the old idea in science was that these mathematical models
of nature were, in fact, laws, truths, eternal platonic truths
that were being teased out.
In the 20th century, a slight epistemological sophistication
leads to this word models, where we say we're modeling reality.
And our model is only as good as we need it to be.
If we're trying to model the flight of an artillery shell,
the model needs to be only good enough
to get the artillery shell to its target.
We don't need to understand the essence of lead
or the nature of motion there.
We simply need the model to kick out
the data that interests us.
And in the 20th century, it's been understood
that all knowledge is dependent upon the question asked.
And the relationship of mathematics to nature
is one of the profound indicators, I think,
that truth can be known.
Maybe not the truth, but I always
think of the positivist philosopher Wittgenstein, who
was once asked in a classroom situation
about a certain proposition.
Is it the truth?
And he said, well, it's certainly true enough.
And that's where we are with our modeling of the world
and with our mathematics.
It is the truest truth we know.
It is true enough.
Somebody else here.
Yeah, in front.
[INAUDIBLE]
[INAUDIBLE]
The question is from a stage magician.
And the question is, what is the nature of magic,
or what is magic, or the wonder that it invokes?
There are two theories.
I mean, magic is not a trivial issue at all.
There are two theories about how the world works.
And each one depends on a fundamental assumption
about what the world is.
There's the scientific theory, which
says the world is tiny packets of matter squealing along
through empty space at close to the speed of light
and subject to a certain set of interlocking laws.
That's what science tells us the world is.
Another theory is-- and to my mind,
a much more appealing and even intuitively correct theory--
is the world is language.
The world is made of language.
We can say that the world is composed of little demons doing
calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.
Or we can say the world is made out
of wave mechanical packets of matter flying along
at the speed of light.
But notice that what we get each time is words.
Our model of what the world is is made of words.
And the world is composed of description.
Now, in the era before science, scientists
like to say people were more epistemologically naive.
What they mean by that is they didn't
have a clear understanding of the division
between the inside and the outside, between what we
imagine and what actually is.
But if you live long enough, I think
you discover what we imagine and what actually is
are very close to the same thing.
Now, whenever you say the world is made of language,
the positivists object by saying, well, then,
why isn't it the way we say it is?
I didn't say it's the way we say it is.
I said it's made of language.
And part of the inspiration for my career
is the realization that you could get up
in front of audiences and say how the world is.
And to a small degree, for a limited time
in a limited space, it shimmers and recasts itself
and becomes the thing that we say that it is.
The mind is somehow a co-creator in the process of reality
through acts of language.
And language is very, very mysterious.
I mean, it is true magic.
People run all over the place looking
for paranormal abilities.
But notice that when I speak, if your internal dictionary
matches my internal dictionary, that my thoughts cross
through the air as an acoustical pressure wave
and are reconstructed inside your cerebral cortex
as your thought, your understanding of my words.
Telepathy exists.
It's just that the carrier wave is small mouth noises.
All so-called primitive people know
that the world is made of language,
that you sing it into existence, that what you say it is
is what it is, that it is maintained in existence
by an act of rational apprehension.
And it's only science which has taken this very weird approach
and said, no, no, the world is somehow
independent from the act of description.
And this is not a situation where
we have two separate points of view, both open-hearted
and trying their best to work hard for you.
Science carried out its analysis of nature
to the point where it shot itself in the foot.
Science carried out an analysis of nature
that went to such depth that it discovered
that nature doesn't exist except as an object of description,
that there are no little objects winging
their way through empty space.
There is only a situation describable
by multileveled fishy formula.
And when you drop a mind into that situation,
the fishy formula condense out into a little particle, which
can be measured.
Mind is necessary for the world to undergo
the formality of existing.
This is what quantum physics teaches.
Unfortunately, this news has not reached the other sciences.
This is a real failure on the part of science.
You see, throughout the 19th century,
physics was the paradigmatic science.
It was the science everybody envied.
It's not unusual in physics for theory and experiment
to be congruent to three decimal points of accuracy.
That just causes scientists to go wild.
They love that, when theory and measurement
fall into congruency like that.
And so everyone wanted to be like physics.
Chemistry sought that.
Sociology, psychology, biology.
Meanwhile, physics, pursuing the exploration of matter,
broke through to a domain where matter ceased to be definable,
ceased to even exist in any ordinary way,
seemed to behave in incredibly strange ways.
Time flows backward.
Energy crosses barriers without ever going through them
by tunneling through them in some way.
Modern biology is still afflicted with physics envy.
Meanwhile, physics has gone on to a realm
of such exotic and surreal uncertainty
that it's, at this point, to the left of psychology
and the precision of its metaphors.
So science has undercut itself and now exists
in a state of unrecognized crisis
that, hopefully, the psychedelic experience will exacerbate
to the point where this will arrive
on the plate of every experimentalist
and observational and observer of nature.
Yeah, here.
[INAUDIBLE]
[INAUDIBLE]
People don't take enough.
That's all.
[LAUGHTER]
You know, I mean, people are confused about what's going on.
First of all, taking psychedelics
has a certain measure of chicness about it.
Well, everybody wants to be chic.
And you can get into the club merely by saying you took it.
But you don't want to lie like a dog.
So the way to get into the club without paying your dues
is to take some piss and amount and then
run around raving about that.
So when we talk about the psychedelic experience,
it's not clear we're all talking about the same thing.
It's sort of like talking about France.
And you have the people who changed planes in the airport
and the people who moved there for 30 years
and learned the literature and got a job
and married the locals.
So the way to do psychedelics is, I believe,
at higher doses than most people are comfortable with
and rarely and with great attention to set and setting.
The social use of psychedelics in the club scene
or at rock and roll concerts and so forth,
I mean, when I go to those kind of scenes, I just smoke pot.
Because I want to be part of what's going on,
I want to have a good time.
But you would be nuts to take a major psychedelic
in that circumstance.
[APPLAUSE]
Socially dense environments filled with light and noise
are a strategy for coming down.
I mean, if you took a drug you didn't like,
the smartest thing to do would be
to jog around the block 10 times and then chop a bunch of wood.
Very similar to dancing your ass off, in other words.
So the way I recommend doing psychedelics
is in silent darkness and with as little input
from other people as possible.
I mean, I say alone if you are experienced.
If you're really confident, just alone, for crying out loud.
If that gives you pause and you must have a sitter--
and let's use the word sitter, not guide.
My god, nobody's guiding you anywhere.
They have no more notion where you are than--
we know where Judge Carter is at this point.
So the sitter.
And my idea of the perfect sitter
is you have a little Tibetan bell by your side,
and the sitter is three rooms away.
And if you need the sitter, you ring the bell.
They stick their head in the room and say, it's cool.
Lay down and do that.
And as long as this question was brought up
and so much of the lecture was somewhat high toned,
let me get into this for a minute.
There are thousands of altered states.
We know them-- orgasm, indigestion, two cappuccinos.
But high toned-- let me get into this for a minute.
There are thousands of altered states.
We know them-- orgasm, indigestion, two cappuccinos,
where tequila takes you.
So endless altered states.
And I'm not really interested in them more or less than any
of you are.
I mean, they're part of life.
But what I'm interested in as an experimentalist,
as a connoisseur of nature, somebody
who loves fossils, butterflies, rainforests,
that kind of thing, is this family of compounds
called the indole hallucinogens.
Indoles.
And they cause hallucination.
And some people say that I'm a fetishist about this.
That who cares?
Or that there are other things besides hallucination.
Yes, I know.
Maybe.
And of course.
But the reason I'm so fascinated by hallucinations
is because to my mind, when you're hallucinating,
you have an absolutely clear proof that you are not
generating this material.
It's not funny ideas.
It's not racing thoughts.
It's not insight into what your boyfriend really
meant yesterday.
That kind of thing we all can generate by just inspecting
our own minds.
But a hallucination is to be in the presence of that which
previously could not be imagined.
And if it previously could not be imagined,
then there is no grounds for believing that you generated it
out of yourself.
I mean, we should each know our own inventory.
You know what's in your cupboard.
You know what's in your chest of drawers.
For God's sake, you ought to know what's in your mind.
Well, then if something comes forward and you say,
that's not mine, that's not in my inventory,
then you have a kind of perfect proof
that this is coming from somewhere else.
And then the question begins, becomes, where?
And we can set off into that.
Opinions differ.
And nobody has God's truth on it.
A reductionist, somebody who didn't like these substances,
would say, oh, well, it's just neurological chaos.
It's just you've interrupted the normal functioning
of good brain chemicals.
And evil brain chemicals are now giving a sense of a chaos.
Well, that just doesn't cut the mustard.
I mean, that kind of stuff may work
if you're talking to the troops, but not
if you're talking to anybody who's ever been there.
I know what a neurological chaos would look like.
It would look like bright lights, moving patterns,
colored this, something that.
It would not be ruins, landscapes, machines,
paintings, works of art, building plans, weapons,
bits of manufactured technological detritus.
These things are too coherent.
They're objects in some kind of superstructure of the mind.
And for me, this was the revelation.
I didn't get into this business by being
an airhead or a screwball.
My attitude was always, if it's real, it can take the pressure.
You don't have to pussyfoot around the real thing.
If they're telling you, oh, you must lower your voice
and avert your gaze or this and that,
then you're probably in the presence of crap.
Because the real thing is real.
It doesn't demand that you adjust your opinion to suit it.
It's real.
That means it is preeminent.
That means it sets the agenda.
And I studied yoga.
I wandered around in the east.
I was fast shuffled by beady-eyed little men
in dotes.
I know the whole spiritual supermarket and rigamarole.
And I find nothing there to interest me
on the level of five grams of psilocybin mushrooms
in silent darkness.
I mean, that's where the pedal meets the metal.
That's where the rubber meets the road.
And the inspiration for me to get up and talk
to an audience like this simply comes from the fact
that I cannot believe that this could be kept under wraps the
way it has.
I mean, I kidded with you earlier
that they would make sex illegal if they could.
Well, they can't, so it isn't.
But the psychedelic experience is as central to understanding
your humanness as having sex or having a child
or having responsibilities or having hopes and dreams.
And yet it is illegal.
We are somehow told we are infantilized.
We're told, you can wander around
within the sanctioned playpen of ordinary consciousness.
And we have some intoxicants over here
if you want to mess yourself up.
We've got some scotch here and some tobacco and red meat
and some sugar and a little TV and so forth and so on.
But these boundary-dissolving hallucinogens
that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature
are somehow forbidden.
This is an outrage.
It's a sign of cultural immaturity.
And the fact that we tolerate it is a sign
that we are living in a society as oppressed
as any society in the past.
[APPLAUSE]
To a short question, but I think it's really important.
My thing is not about my opinion or what I saw in Africa
or anything like that.
This is, get it straight.
This is about an experience.
Not my experience, your experience.
It's about an experience which you have, like getting laid
or like going to Africa.
You must do the experience.
Otherwise, it's just whistling past the graveyard.
And we're not talking about something like being born again
or meeting the flying saucers or something like that,
where good works and prayer are the method.
No.
If you take a sufficient dose of an active compound,
it will deliver itself to you on the money.
If it doesn't work, take more.
Nobody is in a position to dismiss this just
because it didn't work for them on one or two tries.
This is an art.
It's an art.
It's something you coax into existence.
I mean, you have to learn to make love.
You have to learn to speak English.
Anything worth doing is an art that is acquired.
This is part of our birthright, perhaps the most important part
of our birthright.
These substances will deliver.
It is the confoundment of psychology and science
generally.
And that's why it's so touchy for cultural institutions.
But you are not a cultural institution.
You are a free and independent human being.
And these things have your name written on them
in big gold letters.
Yes, here.
[APPLAUSE]
Could you please speak to clairvoyance
and whether or not it's a subset of a part of the psychedelics
of a vice versa, clairvoyance as an opportunity?
Well, clairvoyance, all forms of paranormal activity, I think,
are part of a 5% leakage around normal, culturally sanctioned
brain function.
If you read Stan Grof's books about LSD, which is one case
history after another, virtually every paranormal phenomenon
ever cataloged has occurred under the influence of LSD.
Seeing things at a distance, recovering past lives
where then you could actually check the data
and it happened, knowledge of things going on at a distance.
I think that we are caged by our cultural programming
and that this is the most powerful imprisoning
factor in our lives.
That if we could train ourselves simply
to remember our dreams, psychedelics
would become obsolete.
If we could train ourselves simply
to pay attention to our ordinary states of consciousness
as we live through our days and nights.
Culture is a mass hallucination.
And when you step outside the mass hallucination,
you see it for what it is worth.
Language is partially the key here.
We cannot move into a reality that we cannot describe.
If we can't describe a world, we can't be there.
And so the interesting place to be
is at the cutting edge of language.
And it's interesting that the legacy of the 1960s
is a legacy of language evolution.
I mean, concepts like ego trip, vibe, bummer, so forth and so
on, we sneer at these concepts.
But there was no word for these things before.
Once there is a word, then that word
is like a stepping stone out into the fog.
And as long as we let the establishment set the language
agenda, we will be imprisoned in the tiny, rather pedestrian
world of consumerism and schlocko values
that the establishment has prepared for us.
So the way I think of these psychedelics,
or a different way, is that they're
catalysts for the imagination.
Catalysts to say what has never been said,
to see what has never been seen, to draw, paint, sing, sculpt,
dance, and act what has never before been done,
to push the envelope of creativity and language.
And what's really important is I call it the felt presence
of direct experience, which is a fancy term which just simply
means we have to stop consuming our culture.
We have to create culture.
Don't watch TV.
Don't read magazines.
Don't even listen to NPR.
Create your own road show.
The nexus of space and time where you are now
is the most immediate sector of your universe.
And if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill
Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered.
You're giving it all away to icons,
icons which are maintained by an electronic media
so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y or something.
This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking.
That is all cultural diversion.
And what is real is you and your friends and your associations,
your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears.
And we are told no.
We're unimportant.
We're peripheral.
Get a degree.
Get a job.
Get a this.
Get a that.
And then you're a player.
You don't even want to play in that game.
You want to reclaim your mind and get it out
of the hands of the cultural engineers who
want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming
all this trash that's being manufactured out
of the bones of a dying world.
Where is that at?
Yeah, over here.
[APPLAUSE]
[INAUDIBLE]
Well, religion is simply the word
we use to describe our intuition that there is something
outside the realm of culture and the three-dimensional surfaces
of things, that there is a hidden dimension to reality.
Call it a plan, a purpose, a loving God, a cosmos
instead of a chaos.
And psychedelics, I believe, reveal a greater order
than the order of the human world.
This is why the way I do them is either in darkness, which
means surrounded by the body, my body, which is part of nature,
or in nature itself, in the mountains, at the beach,
in the jungle.
Because what we are lacking existentially
is any sense of order, meaning, and beauty in the world.
Because the society we're living in
has no order or beauty or meaning.
It's just a scam and a rat race.
But if you take the psychedelics in these contexts
where the culture and its artifacts are suppressed,
then you connect up to the greater whole,
the question of God, meaning, in Milton's phrase,
the God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven.
I don't think psychedelics can address that.
I think psychedelics can address that.
But there is another God, a goddess,
the goddess of biology, the goddess
of the coherent animal human world,
the world of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the planet.
In short, our world, the world we were born into,
that we evolved into, and that we came from.
That world the psychedelics want to connect us up
to spirituality as people and as a species
is an illusion of bad language that the psychedelics dissolve
into the greater feeling of connectedness
that underlies our being here.
And to my mind, that's the religious impulse.
It's not a laundry list of moral dos and don'ts
or a set of dietary prescriptions or practices.
It's a sense of connectedness, responsibility
for your fellow human beings and for the earth
you're walking around on.
And because these psychedelics come out
of that plant vegetable matrix, they are the way back into it.
I want a woman here.
My question is, how do we anticipate
the involvement of silenced people by the imposition
and humiliation of this drug war?
Good question.
Well, the answer is, I think, pretty obvious.
Yes, how do we emancipate people from the foolishness
of the drug war?
How do we, as a community, as a point of view,
how do we gain legitimacy?
This is a really important question.
I mean, if you look around yourself tonight,
you don't see the uneducated, the unhealthy, the demented,
or the deluded.
And yet, this is the stereotype of our subculture.
Instead, what you see are well-dressed creative people
holding down positions in society,
the parents of children, the heads of departments,
the authors of books, the painters of paintings.
You may not have noticed, but in this society,
they're not handing out rights.
Ask black people.
Ask members of any sexual minority.
They don't hand out rights in this society.
And we, meaning we psychedelic people, by and large--
this isn't always true-- but by and large,
we tend to be white and middle class.
A translation of those two terms into gutless
would not be inappropriate.
We have the most to lose.
And so we're not given to hurling ourselves
into the breach or building barricades in the street
to hurl our bodies against the machine.
Nevertheless, if you don't claim your political birthright,
it will never be given to you.
And black people and gay people and American Indians,
Native Americans, all of these people
have learned that you don't go on bended knee
to petition the official culture for your rights.
You have to take them.
And people ask me, how can you stand up and say
the things you do?
Why don't they take you away?
They don't take me away because they're more
chicken shit than you think.
They're more off balance than you think.
They're more uncertain of themselves than you think.
The legitimacy of this point of view is established in their minds.
The reason drugs are illegal and suppressed and blah, blah,
is because you can make a shitload of money off them in that context.
It's a money issue.
Do you think a loving government is trying
to keep you from jumping out of third floor windows
and that's why LSD is illegal?
I mean, give me a break for crying out loud.
If this government felt strongly enough about certain issues,
all of us between 18 and 26 would be sent off
to die for that policy decision.
So the government is not interested in your health.
The government is artificially interested in inflating
the prices of certain substances in order
to create a focus for clandestine money that is used then
to destabilize unfriendly governments, murder labor union leaders,
kill and blackmail the editors of left wing newspapers,
so forth and so on.
Drugs are enormous big business and not psychedelic drugs.
Psychedelic drugs, the only one that ever amounted to anything
as a financial enterprise was cannabis.
And cannabis is many things besides psychedelic.
The deep, dramatic psychedelics, which are all schedule one,
the most repressed schedule, don't produce great amounts of money at all.
What they do produce is questioning minds.
They cause people to ask questions.
They cause people to ask for clarification.
They cause people to challenge cultural values
because they decondition you.
It doesn't matter whether you're a Hasid, a communist apparatchik,
a rainforest shaman.
If you take psychedelics, you will question your first premises.
And that is a business that all governments, right, left, middle,
are in the business of repressing.
They don't want to have to explain why things are done as they are.
But if we don't begin asking for that explanation,
they're going to run this planet right into ruin.
And we are the generation responsible.
You are the generation that is responsible.
You can't claim that you grew up in a village in Nigeria and you didn't know.
You can't claim that you're the child of poor Bangladeshi parents
and you had no opportunity.
The responsibility rests upon the educated
and the financially capable of doing something about it.
And by that measure, you and I are probably in the upper 3% of people on this planet.
And if we don't take responsibility,
then that responsibility will devolve to others,
be di'd others with an agenda that would stand your hair on end.
- Yes, over here.
[APPLAUSE]
This will be the last question, so make it hit.
[INAUDIBLE]
Uh-huh.
[INAUDIBLE]
[INAUDIBLE]
[INAUDIBLE]
Well, let's go back and talk about schizophrenia for just a second.
The question is, you know, schizophrenia involves basically breaking with ordinary value systems
and how does it relate to the psychedelic state
and people who have schizophrenic relatives in their family tree,
how should they relate to the psychedelic experience and so forth.
I mean, I'm extrapolating, but that's the basic thing.
[INAUDIBLE]
Well, there are different things to be said about this.
I mean, first of all, you know, how many psychiatric residents
who are the people who come most in contact with schizophrenics, whatever that means,
how many psychiatric residents have ever seen an un-drugged schizophrenic?
Very, very few, because the very first thing that happens
is for the convenience of physicians and the nursing staff,
some outlandish drug is brought into the picture,
which then deflects this healing process from ever reaching any kind of natural conclusion.
Schizophrenia is just a catch-all term for forms of mental behavior
that we don't understand.
In the 19th century, there was a term "melancholia,"
which we would now call bipolar depression, so forth and so on,
but all forms of sadness, unhappiness, maladaptation, so forth and so on,
were poured into this label "melancholia."
Now, schizophrenia is a similar thing.
I can remember an experience I had years ago.
I was in the Tolman Library at the University of California,
which is the psych library, and I was looking up some drug or something,
and I just saw a book and I pulled it off the shelf, a book about schizophrenia,
and it said, "The typical schizophrenic lives in a world of twilight imagining,
marginal to his society, incapable of holding a regular job.
These people live on the fringes, content to drift in their own self-created value system."
I said, "That's it! That's it! Now I understand."
We have no tradition of shamanism.
We have no tradition of journeying into these mental worlds.
We are terrified of madness.
We fear it because the Western mind is a house of cards,
and the people who built that house of cards know that,
and they are terrified of madness.
Tim Leary once said, or I gave him credit for saying,
he later told me he never said it, but whoever said it, this was a brilliant statement.
Someone once said, "LSD is a psychedelic substance which occasionally causes psychotic behavior
in people who have not taken it." Right?
And I would bet you that more people have exhibited psychotic behavior from not taking LSD,
but just thinking about it, than ever exhibited it from taking it.
Certainly in my family, I watched my parents both go psychotic from the mere fact that LSD existed.
They would never have taken it.
There is a great phobia about the mind.
The Western mind is very queasy when first principles are questioned.
Rarer than corpses in this society are the untreated mad,
because we can't come to terms with that.
A shaman is someone who swims in the same ocean as a schizophrenic,
but the shaman has thousands and thousands of years of sanctioned technique and tradition to draw upon.
In a traditional society, if you exhibit "schizophrenic tendencies,"
you are immediately drawn out of the pack and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans.
You are told, "You are special. Your abilities are very central to the health of our society.
You will cure. You will prophesy. You will guide our society in its most fundamental decisions."
Contrast this with what a person exhibiting schizophrenic activity in our society is told.
They are told, "You don't fit in. You are becoming a problem. You don't pull your own weight.
You are not of equal worth to the rest of us. You are sick. You have to go to the hospital.
You have to be locked up. You are on a par with prisoners and lost dogs in our society."
So that treatment of schizophrenia makes it incurable.
Imagine if you were slightly odd and the solution were to take you and put you,
lock you into a place where everyone was seriously mad. That would drive anyone mad.
If you've ever been in a madhouse, you know that it's an environment calculated to make you crazy and to keep you crazy.
This would never happen in an aboriginal or traditional society.
I wrote a book. I mean, this has to be the wrap up because we're over time.
But I wrote a book called The Archaic Revival. I signed it tonight for some of you.
The idea there is that we have gone sick by following a path of untrammeled rationalism,
male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom line-ism.
We have gone very, very sick.
And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick,
it begins to produce antibodies or strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease.
And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing.
Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing.
The list is endless. What do all these things have in common?
They represent various styles of rejection of linear values.
The society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival, by a reversion to archaic values.
So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity or scarifying themselves or showing a lot of flesh
or dancing to syncopated music or getting loaded or violating ordinary canons of sexual behavior,
I applaud all of this because it's an impulse to return to what is felt by the body, what is authentic, what is archaic.
And when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very center of all these impulses
is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment, a feeling.
And at the center of that impulse is the shaman, stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers,
dancing in the moonlight and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious living mystery.
That's what the world is. The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists.
The world is a living mystery. Our birth, our death, our being in the moment, these are mysteries.
They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration, empowerment and hope for the human enterprise.
And our culture has killed that, taken it away from us, made us consumers of shoddy products and shoddier ideals.
We have to get away from that. And the way to get away from it is by a return to the authentic experience of the body.
And that means sexually empowering ourselves and it means getting loaded,
exploring the mind as a tool for personal and social transformation.
The hour is late. The clock is ticking. We will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball.
We are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived lives
and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world.
Now the challenge passes to us. The living that the yet to be born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under.
And that's what the psychedelic experience is about, is caring for, empowering and building a future that honors the past,
honors the planet and honors the power of the human imagination.
There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet as the human imagination.
Let's not sell it straight. Let's not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies.
Let's not give our control over to the least among us.
Rather, you know, claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light.
The tools are there. The path is known.
You simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead
and get with the program of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.
Thank you very, very much.
[Applause]
Thank you. Thank you.
[Applause]
[Silence]
Finnegins Wake
Finnegan's Wake is the last and most ambitious and most puzzling work of the British writer
James Joyce who of course wrote Dubliners and Ulysses.
And if Ulysses is the algebra of literature then Finnegan's Wake is the partial differential
equation.
Most of us break down that algebra, few of us aspire to go on to the partial linear differential
equation.
In some ways I think it can arguably be said that this is the quintessential work of art
or at least work of literature of the 20th century and Joyce intended it that way.
Joseph Campbell called it the staggering allegory of the fallen redemption of mankind.
Equally respected critics have called it a surrender to the crossword puzzle portion
of the human mind.
So the main thing about it is that it is linguistically dense.
It is dense on every level.
It has over 63,000 individual words in it.
It's long more words than most fictional manuscripts have words period.
It has over 5,000 characters in it.
Ulysses was designed as a kind of, Joyce thought of it as his day book.
It follows the peregrinations of an ordinary Dubliner, this is Ulysses, an ordinary Dubliner
through the vicissitudes of his day, his struggles to buy some kidneys to fry for breakfast,
his chance meeting with his wife's lover, so forth and so on.
Fairly straightforward exposition of the techniques of literature that have been perfected in
the 20th century, stream of consciousness, so forth and so on, slice of life.
Finnegan's Wake was designed to be the night book to that day book.
So it was conceived of as a dream and one of the questions that undergraduates are asked
to shed ink over is whose dream is it and what is this book about?
I mean when you first pick it up, it's absolutely daunting.
There doesn't seem to be a way into it.
It seems to be barely in English and the notion that one could by spending time with this
tease out characters, plot, literary tension, resolution, this sort of thing seems fairly
unlikely.
Actually it's one of the few things that really repays pouring effort into it.
The first 25 pages are incredibly dense and most people are eliminated somewhere in those
first 25 pages and so never really...
It's a language and you have to gain a facility with it and you have to cheat, that's the
other thing and there's lots of help cheating because it has spawned a great exegetical
literature, all kinds of pale scholars eager to give you the Celtic word lists of Finnegan's
Wake or a discussion of the doctrine of the transubstantiation in Finnegan's Wake or so
forth and so on.
Hundreds of these kinds of doctoral theses in comp lit have been ground out over the
decades.
The reason I'm interested in it, I suppose I should fast up, is because it's two things
clearly.
Finnegan's Wake is psychedelic and it is apocalyptic/eschatological and what I mean by those phrases is, first
of all, what I mean by psychedelic is there is no stable point of view, there is no character
per se, you never know who is speaking.
You have to read into each speech to discover, you know, is this King Mark, Anna Livia Plurabel,
Humphrey Chymk-Dameer, Wicker, Shem, the Penman, Sean, who is it?
And identities are not fixed.
Those of you who have followed my rap over the years, I'm always raving about how psychedelics
dissolve boundaries.
Well Finnegan's Wake is as if you had taken the entirety of the last thousand years of
human history and dissolved all the boundaries.
So Queen Mob becomes Mae West, you know, all the personages of pop culture, politics, art,
church history, Irish legend, Irish inter-messing politics are all swirling, changing, merging.
Time is not linear.
You will find yourself at a recent political rally, then return to the court of this or
that Abyssinian emperor or pharaoh.
It's like a trip.
And the great technique, I was thinking about this as I was thinking about this lecture,
the great technique of the 20th century is collage or pastiche.
It was originally developed by the Dadaists in Zurich in 1919.
Right now it's having a huge resurgence in the form of sampling in pop music.
And Joyce was the supreme sampler.
I mean he draws his material from technical catalogs, menus, legal briefs, treaty language,
mythologies, dreams, doctor-patient conversations.
Everything is grist for this enormous distillery.
And yet, you know, what comes out of this once you learn the codes and once you learn
to play the game is a Joyce-ian story that all graduates of Ulysses will recognize.
I mean the main, what Joyce was about was an incredible sympathy with common people
and an awareness of the dilemma of, you know, being a Jew in Irish Ireland, being a devotee
of scholasticism in the 20th century, of dislocation and disorientation, of being the cuckolded
husband, of being the failed divinity student.
All of these characters and themes are familiar.
It's quite an amazing accomplishment.
There's nothing else like it in literature.
It had very little anticipation.
The only real anticipator of Joyce in English, I think, is Thomas Nash, who most people have
never heard of.
Thomas Nash was a contemporary of Shakespeare and wrote a famous, I don't know what that
means in such a context, but a novel called The Wayfaring Traveler.
Anyway, Nash had this megalomantic richness of language, this attitude that it's better
to put it in than take it out, and that's certainly what you get with Joyce.
I mean, Joyce is so dense with technical terms, brand names, pop references, localisms.
The way to conceive of Finningen's Wake really is like a midden, a garbage dump, and there
is in fact a garbage dump in the wake that figures very prominently.
And what you as the reader have to do is go in there with nutpick and toothbrush and essentially
remove one level after another level after another level and sink down and down.
And the theme is always the same, you know, the delivery of the word, the misinterpretation
of the word, and the redemption of the word at every level in all times and places.
The reason I'm now going some distance toward explaining why I think of it as psychedelic,
the reason why I think of it as eschatological and apocalyptic is because he really, you
know it's hard to tell, we don't have James Joyce around to ask how much of this material
he took seriously and how much of it was grist for his literary mill, but he was perfectly
conversant with Renaissance theories of magic.
The entire book is based on La Ciencia Nuova of Guim Batista Vico who was a, I don't
know what you would call him, a Renaissance sociologist basically and systems theorist.
And Joyce once in a famous interview said that if the whole universe were to be destroyed
and only Finnegan's Wake survived, that the goal had been that then the entire universe
could be reconstructed out of this.
Some of you who are students of Torah, this is a very Talmudic idea that somehow a book
is the primary reality.
You know the idea of the Hasidism in some schools is that all of the future is already
contained in the Torah and then when you ask them well if it's contained there then isn't
it predestined?
And the answer is no because the letters are scrambled and only the movement of the present
moment through the text correctly unscrambles and arranges the letter.
This is Joyce thinking for sure and it's very close to a central theme in Joyce and a central
theme in the Western religious tradition which is the coming into being, the manifestation
of the word, the declension of the word into matter and in a sense what Joyce was trying
to do was he was in that great tradition of literary alchemy whose earlier practitioners
were people like Robert Flood, Athanasius Kircher, Paracelsus.
These are not familiar names but in the late flowering of alchemy when the birth of modern
science could already, the rosy glow could already be seen the alchemist turned toward
literary allegory in the 16th and early 17th century.
Joyce is essentially in that tradition, I mean this is an effort to condense the entire
of experience all as Joyce says in the wake, all space time in a nutshell is what we're
searching for here.
A kind of philosopher's stone of literary associations from which the entire universe
can be made to blossom forth.
And the way it's done is through pun and tricks of language and double and triple and
quadruple entendre.
No word is opaque, every word is transparent and you see through it to older meanings,
stranger associations and as your mind tries to follow these associative trees of connection
you eventually you get the feeling which is the unique feeling that the wake gives you
which is it's about as close to LSD on the page as you can get because you are simultaneously
many points of view, simultaneously many dramatis loci, many places in the plot and the whole
thing is riddled with resonance.
You know a man doing a task on one level is on another level a Greek god completing a
task and on another level some other figure of some more obscure mythology.
So really one thing about Finnegan's Wake it's like a dipstick for your own intelligence.
What you bring to it is going to determine what you get out and if you have read the
books which Joyce was familiar with or if you have armed yourself with such simple things
as a Fodor's guide to Ireland or a good map of Ireland or a good work of Irish mythology
then it immediately begins to betray its secrets to you and it's so rich that it's easy
to make original discoveries.
It's easy to see and understand things which probably have not been seen or understood
since James Joyce put it there because he had this kind of all inclusive intelligence.
Maybe I didn't make clear enough why that to my mind is an eschatological phenomena
this production of the Philosopher's Stone.
It's because it's about the union of spirit and matter.
That's what the Philosopher's Stone is about.
And writing a book which aspires to be the seed for a living world is about the union
of spirit and matter as well.
And the Christian scenario of redemption at the end of profane history is another scenario
of transubstance and union.
Union of spirit and matter.
This seems to be in fact the overarching theme of Finningen's Wake and of the 20th century.
In terms of the temporal context for this book it was finished in 1939, a few months
before 1939 and Joyce died early in 1939.
In a sense he died in one of the most science fiction moments of the 20th century because
the Third Reich was going strong.
It had not yet been pegged down a notch.
Schemes of eugenics and thousand year racially purified super civilizations.
All of that crazy early 40s stuff was happening.
And the book is surprisingly modern, television appears, psychedelic drugs appear, all of
these things appear.
I mean presciently he was some kind of a prophet.
And also he understood the 20th century sufficiently that the part he hadn't yet lived through
was as transparent to him as the part that he had.
He could see what was coming.
Now that's by way of my introduction.
I want to read you what some other people have said about this because I don't think
I can say enough on my own.
This is the indispensable book if you're serious about this, a skeleton key to Finningen's
Wake and it takes the view that we don't know what this thing is so we have to go through
it literally line by line and he tells you the story, the entire story in the one page
version, in the ten page version and in the 200 page version.
And even in the 200 page version there are sections where Campbell simply reports the
next five pages are extremely obscure.
But this is just a short section and one of the things about working with the Wake is
you become at first this language which is so impenetrable and bizarre it ends up infecting
you and you become unable to write or talk any other way.
So I'll read you some of Campbell's introduction and I think you will see it's like the Wake
itself except in baby steps.
Introduction to a Strange Subject.
Running riddle and fluid answer Finningen's Wake is a mighty allegory of the fall and
resurrection of mankind.
It is a strange book, a compound of fable, symphony and nightmare, a monstrous enigma
beckoning imperiously from the shadowy pits of sleep.
Its mechanics resemble those of a dream, a dream which has freed the author from the
necessities of common logic and has enabled him to compress all periods of history, all
phases of individual and racial development into a circular design of which every part
is beginning, middle and end.
In a gigantic wheeling rebus dim effigies rumble past, disappear into foggy horizons
and are replaced by other images, vague but half consciously familiar.
On this revolving stage mythological heroes and events of remotest antiquity occupy the
same spatial and temporal planes as modern personages and contemporary happenings.
All time occurs simultaneously.
Tristram and Wellington, Father Adam and Humpty Dumpty merge in a single precept.
All meanings are present in every line.
Interlocking illusions to key words and phrases are woven like fugal themes into the pattern
of the work.
Finningen's Wake is a prodigious multifaceted monolith, not only the kashimar of a Dublin
citizen but the dreamlike saga of guilt stained evolving humanity.
The vast scope and intricate structure of Finningen's Wake give the book a forbidding
aspect of impenetrability.
It appears to be a dense and baffling jungle, trackless and overgrown with wanton perversities
of form and language.
Clearly such a book is not meant to be idly fingered.
It tasks the imagination, exacts discipline and tenacity from those who would march with
it.
Yet some of the difficulties disappear as soon as the well-disposed reader picks up
a few compass clues and gets his bearings.
Then the enormous map of Finningen's Wake begins slowly to unfold.
Characters and motifs emerge, themes become recognizable and Joyce's vocabulary falls
more and more familiarly on the accustomed ear.
Complete understanding is not to be snatched at greedily in one sitting, or in fifty I
might add.
Nevertheless the ultimate state of the intelligent reader is certainly not bewilderment.
Rather it is an admiration for the unifying insight, economy of means and more than rabalazian
humor which have miraculously quickened stupendous mass of material.
One acknowledges at last that James Joyce's overwhelming micro-macrocosm could not have
been fired to life in any sorcerer furnace less black, less heavy, less murky than this,
his incredible book.
He had to smelt the modern dictionary back to protean plasma and reenact the genesis
and mutation of language in order to deliver his message.
But the final wonder is that such a message could be delivered at all.
Every book has to be about something.
I mean so what is this book about?
Well as far as anybody can tell it appears to be about someone named, well they have
hundreds of names actually, but for economy's sake someone named Humphrey Chimpton Erewicker
or abbreviated HCE and Humphrey Erewicker runs a pub in Chappellesau which is a suburb
or a district of London and he has as it says an idle wifey who is an Olivia Plurabelle
and now these two people, this barkeep and his wife and their two children Jerry and
Kevin or Shem and Sean and then they also have hundreds of names because they occur
on hundreds and hundreds of levels.
Every brother's struggle in history is enacted by the two boys, Jerry and Kevin.
They are Shem the penman and Sean the other one and they dichotomize certain parts of
the process.
So here is in one paragraph, this is the cliff notes version of what Finnegan's Lake is
all about.
If you commit this to memory you will never be caught wanting at a New York cocktail party.
As the tale unfolds we discover that Humphrey Chimpton Erewicker is a citizen of Dublin,
a stuttering tavern keeper with a bull-like hump on the back of his neck.
He emerges as a well-defined and sympathetic character, the sorely-heroed victim of a relentless
fate which is stronger than yet identical with himself.
Joyce refers to him under various names such as here comes everybody and haveth childers
everywhere.
Indications of his universality and his role as the great progenitor.
The hero has wandered vastly leaving families, that is deposits of civilization at every
pause along the way from Troy and Asia Minor, he is frequently called the Turk, up through
the turbulent lands of the Goths, the Franks, the Norsemen and overseas to the green isles
of Britain and the Eyre.
His chief Germanic manifestations are Voden and Thor, his chief Celtic, Manannan Maclure.
Again he is Saint Patrick carrying the new faith, again Strongbow leading the Anglo-Norman
conquest, again Cromwell conquering with a bloody hand, most specifically he is our Anglican
tavern keeper HCE in the Dublin suburb of Chepellazad.
So like Ulysses, the ground zero here is the utterly mundane, you know, middle class, tormented
Irish people embedded in the detritus of the 20th century.
But there is an effort to never lose the cosmic perspective, never lose the sense that we
are not individuals lost in time, the front ends of gene streams that reach back to Africa,
that we somehow have all these ancestors and conflicts swarming and storming within it.
It's a very, it's a glorious psychedelic, heartful Irish view of what it is to be embedded in
the mystery of existence.
Well okay, enough arm waving, now let's cut the cake here.
Ever run past Eve and Adams from swerve of shore to bend of bay brings us by a commodious
vicus of recirculation back to Howliffe Castle and environs.
Sir Chistram, the Allordo Amors for o'er the short sea, had passing corps re-arrived from
North Amorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to welterfight his penicillate
war nor had top sawyer's rocks by the stream o'connie exaggerated themselves to Lawrence
County gorgios while they went Dublin their mumber all the time nor a voice from a fire
bellowed Misha Misha to tart toff tart patrick not yet though Venice soon after had a kids
scab but ended a bland old Isaac not yet though all's fair in Vanessy were Sophie Sester's
wrath with two-and-one Nathan Joe rot a peck of pause malt had Jim or Shen brewed by arc
light and Rory end to the Reagan bow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface the fall
baba bada bada gara hug got a mina our own qua rock brawn tongue their own qua bong vara
whole thing got a tool who are demon one nama no knock of a once wall straight old par is
retailed early in bed and later on life do it down through all Christian minstrel see
the great fall of off wall entailed at such short notice the fit shoot of Finnegan Urs
solid man that the Humpty hill head of himself promptly sends an inquiring one well to the
West in quest of his Humpty tum toes and their upturned pike toe and place is at the knockout
in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since Devlin's first loved
living so now granted that the first pages are dense and it isn't all this dance because
even though the concept of fractals lay years in the future the effort here is to tell the
whole damn thing in the first word to tell it again in the next two words to tell it
again in the next three words and so on so here in these first roughly three paragraphs
a huge amount of information is being passed along first of all we're given a location
if we're smart enough to know it river run past even Adams from swerve of shore to bend
of bay brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to how a castle and environs
well now if you know the geography of Dublin you know that's where you are because and
notice how a castle and environs is H C E these initials recur thousands of times in
this book always bringing you back to to remind you that this has something to do with Humphrey
Erwicker what this first sentence says is river run and it's the river liffy which we
will meet in a thousand reincarnations because an Olivia Plurabelle is the personification
of the goddess river the river runs past even Adams and there is a church there on the shore
named Adam and Eve in Dublin from swerve of shore to bend of bay and then this strange
phrase brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation this announces the great architect
tonic plan of the way that it is in fact going to be based on the sociological ruminations
of key on Batista Vico's la Ciencia Nuova the vicus mode of recirculation because as
I'm sure you all know Vico's theory of the fallen redemption of mankind was that there
were four ages I can remember gold silver iron clay I think and so this idea of the
recirculation of the connectedness of the cyclicity of the as he says the same again
again and again thin again sin again the same again and this is one of his great great themes
is the recurso everything comes again nothing is unannounced of affair every dynastic intrigue
every minor political disgrace and a minor political disgrace figures very prominently
in this book because as the carrier of Adam's sin the great dilemma for Humphrey Erwicker
is that he is running for a minor political post alderman but apparently one night rather
juiced he relieved himself well there are many versions and you hear them all and they
are all given in dreams and in mock trials and in accusatory fantasy he either innocently
took a leak in the park or he fondled himself in some way in the presence of Maggie and
her sister in such a way that his reputation is now at great risk and it all depends on
the testimony of a cad a soldier or perhaps three soldiers it's never clear it's constantly
shifting and this question of you know what happened when Maggie seen all with her sister
in shawl at the magazine wall haunts the book because on it turns the question of whether
HCE is a stalwart pillar of the community or in fact a backsliding masturbator and a
monster and so forth and so on as one always is if one is trapped in a James Joyce novel
then this puzzling list in the second paragraph is simply a list of things which haven't happened
yet Sir Tristram lover of music via Lord Amors for or the short sea had passing corps not
yet re-arrived from North Amorica from the coast of Brittany on this side the scraggy
isthmus of Europe minor to welterweight his penicillate war now this is this word penicillate
is typical Joyce punning penicillate war obviously is being launched from Brittany penicillate
war because Sir Tristram is the great archetype of the lover and so his war is penicillate
okay so that's the first thing that has not yet happened it's telling you Sir Tristram
has not yet come to Ireland to put it simply nor has top sawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee
exaggerated the cells to Lawrence County Gorgios while they went Dublin their mumber all the
time now this is further obscurity there is a stream in Georgia and top sawyer is a reference
to Tom Sawyer because Tom Sawyer was Huck Finn's friend and Huck Finn is Finn in America
there is a huge amount of Mark Twain that has been poured into these books because of
the huckleberry thin connection thin in the new world and top sawyer's rocks is a reference
possibly to testicles and so forth and so on every single word I mean you can just take
a word and go into this and until you exhaust yourself and then the next thing that has
not yet happened nor a voice from a fire bellowed Misha Misha to tart off dark Petric tart off
is Celtic for thou art baptized so Saint Patrick has not yet baptized in Ireland not yet though
Venice soon after and the Venice soon is a is a pun on venison and very thin had a kid
scab but ended a bland old Isaac it's a reference to the Isaac Esau tale in the Bible it's also
a reference to Isaac but who was a figure in the politics of the Irish rebellion not
yet those all spares in Vanessy were softly sisters rocked with to a Nathan Joe that's
at this point a very obscure reference but there is a great incest and sister theme in
Finnegan's wake and the twin the mistresses of Jonathan Swift become carriers of a huge
amount of energy in here as do the mistresses of Thomas Stern because it's better to be
Swift than Stern or something like that and then the last of these things which hadn't
happened yet rot a peck of Paul's malt had gem or Shem brewed by our flight and Rory
and to the Reagan bro was to be seen ringsome on the aqua face that seems pretty obscure
to me according to Joseph Campbell it's simply a reference to the presence of God moving
over the waters in the first lines of Genesis ringsome on the aqua face then this phrase
the fall and the multisyllabic word Babalabaragever that word these are the Viconian thunders
and they announce the beginning of each Viconian age and when the thunder speaks you know then
that you're into a transition
then it actually launches in in the last paragraph into a fairly straightforward evocation of
at least the mythological Finnegan as you all probably know there is an Irish drinking
ballad of great antiquity called the ballad of Tim Finnegan or the ballad of Finnegan's
wake and it tells the story of Tim Finnegan who was a hard carrier a bricklayer's assistant
and he was given to hitting the poteme rather hard and he fell from his ladder it's the
Humpty Dumpty story he fell from his ladder and he broke his back and his friends waked
him in the grand Irish fashion and at the height of the wake they became so carried
away and intoxicated that they upended a bucket of Guinness over his head and he revived and
joined
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the
Mystic Fire Video and Audio proudly presents Terrence McKenna
History Ends in Green
This is tape one of a six-gazette series
Music
I've been traveling a lot and speaking a lot to different kinds of people and most recently in Europe where it was a tremendous kind of bridge building thing to get everything rhetorically lined up and squared around to where I could even introduce the subject of psychedelics.
So I see that I've returned to the home congregation here.
And because this seems to be the overwhelming focus of this group which is interesting. It's even sometimes sort of confining to me because I would wander maybe in other directions but every prophet is the captive of his earliest ideological expression.
I mean Lenin couldn't do much about Leninism once it had passed a certain point.
In hearing what people's interests were and trying to think about it in new ways, you know the uniting thing in the 20th century I think one of the things that sets the 20th century completely apart really from previous times if not ontologically then by degree is the focus on the moving image.
And the role that this has had in shaping 20th century culture.
And it comes really in three forms.
It comes in the natural and available form of the dream which always to some degree has shaped human culture but for Freud and Jung in the early 20th century and their followers the dream took on a whole new significance that it had never had before.
It was seen as a cryptic messenger from a hidden world.
And as these things seem to work out concomitantly a technology of the moving image was developing which was film and film and the dream then become almost the two defining poles of the evolution of the aesthetic of the 20th century over the first half of it we'll say.
And then in 1953 because that's when Gordon and Valentina Wasson discovered the mushroom or earlier if you want to date it to Hoffman's discoveries in Switzerland or the German work in the 20s or later if you want to date it to the discovery in 56 of DMT by Zara.
But at any point at any rate at some point the third triad is introduced which is the hallucinogenic or psychedelic experience.
And all three of these areas of concern have adumbrations in the primitive. The stress on dreaming, even the magic lantern and prestidigitation feats of renaissance magic have a relationship to early film.
And of course the psychedelic experience is absolutely archaic. Nevertheless the coming together of these three concerns in this particular fashion in the 20th century set the stage I think for an important part of what I will call during this weekend the archaic revival.
And the archaic revival is nothing less than a strategy for cultural survival on a global scale.
And it's a strategy that is taking place in the animal body of mankind. It's not an intellectual strategy or a rational strategy. This is what happens whenever a society is slammed to the wall it unconsciously reaches back through its history or its mythology for a steadying metaphor.
Now the last time this happened in the west and worked was at the time of the collapse of the medieval Christian eschatology, at the time of the rise of urbanization and banking and secular society.
The model of the Christian universe was no longer serviceable and very suddenly philosophers, politicians, social planners reached into the past for classic models.
And this was in the 15th and 16th century and they created classicism. The revivification of Roman law, Greek architecture, Greek polity, all of this happened 1000 to 1500 years after these things had been completely abandoned.
But then they became the basis for modern secular civilization and our laws are Greco-Roman and our architecture and our aesthetic and so forth and so on.
Well, the way this is happening in the 20th century is number one at a much more deep and profound level because it's a global reflex. The entirety of modern civilization has shot its wad in some sense.
You know, from the perspective of 500 years, a society that cannot put bread on its grocery shelves such as the Soviet Union and a society such as our own that is 3 trillion dollars in debt, the difference is negligible.
I mean both of these societies are functionally bankrupt. So we're living through and have been living through throughout the 20th century an experience of the dissolution of boundary and form.
Everything has been in a state of flux throughout the 20th century. I mean it opens with the concept of the Edwardian gentleman and lady firmly in place.
Class structure, class privilege, race privilege, sex privilege, the entire structure of the assumptions of the post-medieval world are in place and functioning. Now, 90 years later, none of this is in place.
And to my mind, the major factor working to achieve this end has not been the two world wars or the exploration of the unconscious by Dada and Surrealism or the breakdown of classical design mores or any of this stuff.
It's been the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is a genuine paradigm shattering phenomenon.
We claim that we want this. This is what lies behind the love of flying saucers and the Loch Ness monster and all of this. We want a paradigm shattering object, piece of evidence, body of testimony, something like that.
But what we don't realize is we have it. We have it as somebody over here on this side of the room said, you know, it's a matter of courage and this places it in a special mode.
It's not something where we can just validate it and then, you know, found an institute and appoint experts and expect them to issue a report.
It's something actually at the center of our being. And my motivation for talking to audiences like this is simply that I cannot conceive of mature human beings going from the cradle to the grave without ever finding out about this.
I mean, it's not like not finding out about sex or something, you know. It's just too weird. It's a part of our birthright. It's not a cultural artifact.
It's not like being able to ride a bicycle or something like that where you can imagine that pygmies or Amazonian Indians go from birth to the grave and they never ride a bicycle and they never miss it.
And this is a little more existentially front and center than that. I mean, this is, as far as I can tell, the dimension in which we most fully experience ourselves as ourselves.
Well, you know, culture, we have to be very careful about the corrosive effects of culture. Some of you may know about these, it was reported in Time magazine a month or two ago, about these forms of salamanders that never, if the conditions of alkalinity in the lakes are at a certain level, they never mature into the adult form.
They actually can reproduce in a juvenile form. So there can be generations of these salamanders that don't even suspect the existence of an adult form that lies beyond the sexually mature functional adult form.
And this is how I sort of think of what the effect of human culture has been on us. Starting about 15 or 20,000 years ago, for reasons that we'll discuss tomorrow, ego began to emerge as a factor in human societies.
For the moment, let's just say it had to do with the concern for tracing male lines of paternity. In other words, once men had it enough together to understand the role that sexuality was playing in childbearing, then there became this concern to trace male lines of descent.
And suddenly, sexuality had to be very carefully controlled and the concept, "My children, my women, my food, my territory" came into being.
Before that, there was a kind of orgiastic polymorphic sexuality that did not promote this kind of boundary formation at the edge of the body's effectiveness.
The ego was not a concept as rooted as it is in us. And I think that the shift from this boundaryless group-oriented consciousness, which was psychedelic, to the egocentric, materialistic consciousness that typifies Western society clear back to Sumer.
That this is the neurotic wrong turning. And that when we look back into the causes of it, we can see and argue fairly persuasively that it has to do with an abandonment of this relationship of ecstasy induced by plants.
That there was almost a kind of symbiotic relationship between early human beings and plants, specifically psychedelic plants.
And that this relationship is not something airy-fairy or unclear or operationally undefined for its participants. You get yourself lined up with and arranged correctly in relation to this thing by taking psychoactive plants.
And this is how human societies were regulated over, let's say, a million years. And there was nothing magical or untoward about it.
It was simply that these evolving primates had a population regulatory mechanism that integrated them into the larger body of nature. And this is what has been lost in the historical process.
That human culture has become charitably a random walk, uncharitably a kind of cancerous, exponential cascade of unstoppable effects.
Now, the thing is that we are in a position to understand this now, if not actually do something about it. H.G. Wells said, "History is a race between education and catastrophe."
Well, never more so than today because the world is set on a course of catastrophe. The emotional constipation and rigidity of the past thousand years that has set us up as territorial apes with thermonuclear arsenals, all of that is just set to go critical.
Nevertheless, we are minded creatures in the presence of an evolving and rapidly shifting landscape of problems.
And I think that it's a very hopeful sign to look around and notice that the only barrier to the solution of our problems are intellectual barriers, barriers in our own mind.
We have the money, the technology, the mass communications, the scientific expertise, the remote sensing telemetry. What we don't have is the will to self-direct all of this technical apparatus toward a rational solution of our problems.
But that means that the solution to our problems lies almost entirely in the human domain. And the human domain is the area where we observe the highest rate of unpredictable perturbation.
So, I don't see the situation as terminal or desperate at all. The mushroom's take on the chaos at the end of history is, "This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for the stars."
It is chaotic, but it is not disordered. It is more like a birth than anything else. I mean, there is rending of tissue, there is a sense of crisis, of unstoppable forward motion.
But it turns out all according to plan, all to good end. The trick is to somehow attain this vision of the ordered correctness of what is happening when it seems so chaotic.
And then to template it, to strengthen it, each for ourselves, and then to replicate it and communicate it as a meme.
Because there is no percentage in paralysis here at the brink. The only possibility is of some kind of forward escape. You know, a forward escape is when you attain the goal by simply rushing through the gauntlet.
And I think that this history that is a race between education and catastrophe is going to turn out to be a forward escape. There will be a moment of complete abandonment to the irrational.
And we will look tomorrow at the time wave, and look at Saddam Hussein and his role in all of this. But he is not the final act. This is somewhere late in Act 1, all this malarkey that we're having to put up with.
But up in the end, which in this case means downstream in time, we will sprout all our worth and woof up.
I guess I should say just a little bit about how I got into this. And I think curiosity is probably the ultimate value in my cosmology.
It's what's gotten me anywhere I've ever been. It's the only impulse that I trust completely.
And it's alive in most people as children, but it gets somehow squelched or misdirected or something. And so when I look back through my own life, I see this psychedelic impulse before there was ever a word or a name for what it was.
And I've tried to think back, as far back as I can. And I have very early memories, like to the eighth month. But they don't seem to relate to this.
I remember in... it must have been... I was born in '46. It must have been in late '48. I found a magazine of my father's, which I now must have been the October 1948 issue of Weird Tales.
And it had these illustrations in it. And one of the illustrations was of a hooded figure gazing into a cradle.
And this... I got this somehow as an image of the strange, the other, the ootra. And I think this is the other thing that for me was the hook into the psychedelic, was a kind of deep Irish love of the weird from the very get-go.
So curiosity and the love of the weird, the edgy, the bizarre. And this led me into... and I guess maybe a certain degree of obsessive character.
I mean, I'm spending time on this because I'm trying to understand the psychedelic personality, generally. But I did have a tendency to really focus in on whatever I was into.
I think the first thing was rocks. And this was, you know, it was for me an introduction into the size of time. Because it wasn't just any rocks that interested me. It quickly became clear that it was fossils.
And I lived in western Colorado and I could go out into these dry arroyos and bring back dateable objects, 170 million years old, you know, stack them up and look at them.
And then I got this dizzying sense of the depth of time. And, you know, there were those little museum pamphlets where it shows a billion years and then the last million years is up here and then it goes down here and spreads out.
And then the last 10,000 years. I got that. I assimilated this notion of deep, deep time. And then, you know, it was almost like an intellectual ontogeny, recapitulating phylogeny.
The rocks, the inanimate mineral world, soon couldn't confine this restless imagination. So then it became about insects, butterflies specifically, moths especially, as an excuse to be alone in the middle of the night around bright lights, you know, with cyanide.
And, you know, I don't know if any of you have ever been touched by this particular obsession, but because we're insectivores, because our food getting habits are wired into a brain 50 million years old in the insect gathering habit, you know, this is a very deep, almost orgasmic response that you can touch in the human organism.
And I pursued it again and again in life to the point where I did it as a professional in the jungles of Indonesia and the Amazon.
And, you know, it's horrifying to tell in Buddhist company, but when you come upon one of these long winged iridescent ornithopterids of the sort that Barangi de Rothschild sent his collectors out for in the late 19th century, and you come upon one of these things hanging under a leaf, looking for all the world like it weighs at least half a pound.
And, you know, wrestle it into your neck. It's as close to having a heart attack as I ever want to guess.
And then this thing at some point, I did a lot of reading, and at some point I discovered that I had defined myself narrowly and that I was turning into a scientist, and I was reading people like Henry James and Aldous Huxley, and they were sneering at what I was becoming and talking about a mysterious realm of human thought called the humanities,
which I had no notion of what this was. I couldn't even figure out what it possibly could be.
Well, then I discovered it meant music, painting, architecture, dance, philosophy, design, in short, the human world, the human world as opposed to the natural world.
So then, you know, I just turned upon that with a vengeance, left off the bugs and the minerals, and it became about Henry James and Fragonard and Mannerism and all of this stuff.
And the transition, because I was hitting adolescence at that point, was rocketry and the penile joy of launching potentially semi-fatal projectiles into space at twice the speed of sound, you know, a whole gravity's rainbow cycle, that I was very consciously aware was about the thrill of liftoff.
All this tormenting of mice and cutting up of aluminum chaff into stuff to be dumped out at the top of the trajectory was just to satisfy physics teachers and anxious parents and all that.
And the real thing was, you know, this amazing moment of launch when this potassium perchlorate and sugar fuels would just propel these things with ear-splitting intensity.
And then, at that point, you know, all this curiosity, all this edge work led me, because I fancied myself also developing as a novelist, to read all of Aldous Huxley.
Well, as you know, it moves from a spectrum of these polite novels of English society, like Chrome Yellow and Antique, and through works like After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, to then the sexual dystopia of Brave New World, and then finally to The Doors of Perception.
And when I read The Doors of Perception, I knew then that this was something huge, because he was claiming, you see, what was happening to me as an intellectual, and I think it happens to most people,
is exploration of reality was leading to the conclusion that it was a no-exit situation. It was some kind of rational labyrinth from which there was no exit.
No exit meaning no magic, no possibility of a miracle, that, you know, there weren't 25,000 year old cities under the sands of Arabia. There weren't flying saucers underneath the Greenland ice cap.
It didn't work for me. For me, rationalism was more powerful than, you know, sort of menopausal fantasy as it's currently practiced.
And so it was drying up. The miraculous was just turning into ordinary reality. And then I discovered psychedelic plants, and it was like the descent of an angel into a desert of reason,
because, which, that's an interesting sort of metaphor, the descent of an angel into the desert of reason. As you probably know, when Descartes was 21 years old, he shipped out in a Habsburgian army to kick some ass in Eastern Europe and learn some manly soldiering skills.
And he was in Ulm in southern Germany in August of 1620, Ulm later to be the birthplace of Einstein. And Descartes, who was completely wet behind the ears, didn't know anything, had a dream.
And in the dream, an angel, this is apropos of the metaphor, an angel appeared to him and said, "The mastery of nature is to be achieved through measure and number."
So what's interesting about that then is that he went on to found modern science, which was to be the very temple of rationalism and reason, but it was based on the revelation of an angelic being who spoke to him from another dimension.
This concludes Side A.
This was the kind of impact that the psychedelic experience had for me. It was as though there was a doorway, a literal doorway, out of the completely otherwise flawless set of cultural assumptions that kept me, you know, a Catholic altar boy in a small Colorado town,
in a Western democracy, in a context of anti-communism, religious fundamentalism, consumer capitalism, so forth and so on.
The whole bag of tricks and illusions were suddenly exposed for that.
And beyond that, you see, like that traveler sticking their head out through the world system and seeing a whole different set of rotations and revolutions, you see another dimension of some sort.
And then for me the question became, you know, of what sort? What is this? Number one, what is it? Number two, how did they manage to keep the lid on it?
And number three, what can you do with it?
Well, coincidentally upon all this, or let's call it coincidentally, society was just going bananas around somewhat similar issues because I was born in 1946, so that means in 1966 I was 20 years old.
And somehow fate had conspired to put me in Berkeley, California. So I happened to be at like the ground zero of the cultural explosion.
But I had been following all this stuff for years. It just seemed to me a weird parallelism that my internal growth and obsessions were now somehow becoming the obsessions of society generally.
And being 20 years old I just thought it was a kind of vindication.
You know, I knew I'd been right since I was 16, so here was the payoff.
But then, you know, it didn't exactly work out like that.
These concerns moved through society like a wave, and then other stronger, what the King calls "pre-potent" systems of arrangement reasserted themselves.
Instead of a kind of psychedelic utopia, there was a kind of anti-psychedelic dystopia, and everything that psychedelics had tended to call into question, which were the great sins of the 20th century.
The misuse of propaganda, the abuse of imagery, the distortion of information. These are all uniquely modern new sins, if you will.
And I talked last night a little bit about the connection between dreams, the unique province of 20th century psychological theory, film, and the psychedelics.
All of these things, and I see it also active in art, that as soon as you move beyond impressionism, the whole history of art in the 20th century is about the dissolution, deconstruction,
and attempt to reconstruct the image, so that movements as different as analytical cubism and abstract expressionism all seem to be struggling with the dissolution and re-emergence of the image.
What it means is, what all this constellation of cultural effects is saying, is that the previously assumed to be, I don't know how to say it, existentially pre-potent order of society, of linear society, is actually an illusion.
And that we can move beyond it, we can dissolve it. Not only we can, we cannot not do this.
So then the goal becomes, and this is where McLuhan is important, to try and raise into consciousness the process that we are undergoing before it is a fait accompli,
before we are in the act of looking back then at a historical event.
Because I now am convinced that the impulse that I feel in myself and that I see in other people toward the psychedelic experience has to do with its potential historical impact.
Even though, God knows, we're all aware, this is how religion has always been practiced.
Yet somehow this million year old sociological phenomenon, orgiastic group-minded shamanism in a context of nomadic pastoralism,
this phenomenon was only interrupted 10 or 15 thousand years ago and is apparently the state of dynamic equilibrium where we function at our best,
where we feel at our most human. What has happened to us is a kind of false bottom in our social dynamic.
It's a series of self-reinforcing situations of dis-ease. It begins with what I talked about last night about concern for male paternity.
But once men wanted to trace the descent line of the male genes, previously self-expressive, orgiastic, group-minded sexuality became compartmentalized into concerns of territoriality, ownership, so forth and so on.
But then that wasn't the end of it. There then the rise of hierarchical kingship, the amazing...
You see the problem with human beings is that we ride very close to a kind of bifurcation point in terms of whether our loyalty is transferred to the group or to the individual.
And this can be sent either way. I mean if there were to be landslides at both ends of highway one and a food shortage, you know, we would coalesce marvelously into a survival machine where we would all place group values higher than our own needs.
And nobly so this would happen. But in situations of abundance and non-scarcity, then it's like a slime mold without the formality of coherency.
We just then dissolve into this sort of every man for himself egocentric style. And then, you know, another bad break along the way that may or may not have been fated, may have just been a bad break, is the evolution of the phonetic alphabet,
which creates a tremendous distance between cognition and the objects of linguistic intentionality.
And this gives permission then for all kinds of forms of brutalization. It actually gives permission for ideology.
Ideology to my mind is the denial of the obvious and the substitution for something else.
Where you say, you know, "No, that's not how people are. We have a Marxist model or we have a Freudian model or we have, you know, John Stuart Mill's model. Who knows? But somebody's model."
So ideology, someone said language was invented in order that people could lie.
And in large measure, this is true, but we proceed by deception. I'll defend this at some point in this weekend because another word for it is modeling.
You know, we model, but we also fall in love with these models. And it's the falling in love with the model that then turns it into an agenda where it was not a free-form projection of a flow of facts toward the conclusion,
but then it becomes instead an agenda, a synthetic creode, high walls down which you expect to see a process poured and confined.
So, okay.
So in spite of the fact that this phenomenon has been around for a long time, why then does it appear so important?
Well, it's because this small group, group-minded, sexually amorphous psychology, the psychology, not the model itself, is what we have to recover, I think, in order to survive.
And, you know, I'm not so interested in talking about the odds of making it. It's just this is the only thing that will work.
And I said last night, you know, the good news is that the domain in which we must operate is all within our own minds.
And if we can change our minds, we can take hold of this process and halt it. I believe that the presence of these psychedelics in the plant metabolism, in the biosphere,
allowed a kind of informational symbiosis between human beings with a highly [inaudible] capacity and the biosphere generally.
And that we have no word for this that we're comfortable with.
The closest word we have for it is somehow tied up with the concept of religion, religio.
For us, religion is some kind of abstract dialogue carried on with a philosophical principle. That's not what it is.
Religion originally was the dimension of the self that directly interfaced nature or the over-self.
And this happened through the use of psychedelics.
So the reason that we can just call history ends in green and what this whole Gaian awareness thing is to my mind is it's not an airy fairy attempt to recast a new image for religious ontology.
It's the actual discovery of the minded presence of the planet, which has always been here, which is real.
It's an existential fact like chlorophyll or the moons of Saturn.
The planet has a biological mind of some sort.
Once you articulate this notion, it doesn't seem that unlikely. After all, the planet is clearly a boundary-defining topology.
It's had two billion years to make itself meta-stable, undergo all kinds of autopoiesis.
We see the evidence of this around us in the form of the climaxed biome of the planet.
We see that biology and water chemistry has been very active.
But what we don't see is that as active as the chemistry of water or electron transfer have also been the invisible alchemies of,
call it spirit, call it mind, call it the morphogenetic field, whatever it is, and that that is the frontier of our awareness.
Every society in history has had the erroneous belief that it just required six more months and five percent more data and then they would have a full picture of reality.
But the fact of the matter is our society at its present state of sophistication, the only science we have that can be given any serious credibility at all is physics,
the most primitive of all sciences, the science of momentum and moving bodies in three-dimensional space.
When you move on to biology, essentially what we have are a series of interlocking fables and a few bright spots of light in certain areas.
When you move on to psychology, what you have are shouting charlatans, each claiming domain over their own special area.
I mean, it's like a medieval fair. So, the belief that our intellectual maps are somehow adequate is just whistling past the graveyard.
And the way we have achieved this illusion of good maps is by tossing out all the disturbing and unintegratable phenomena.
For instance, dreams were trivialized and ignored for centuries.
Madness was something that you can find a way, like criminality was not to be looked at.
But spirituality, I don't have to remind you that as recently as 120 years ago people were putting bloomers on piano legs to preserve youth from impure thoughts.
I mean, you talk about a rejectionist style toward reality. We have just begun to open our eyes to what is around us.
And then front and center, when we begin to explore, let's take a conservative position toward exploring the universe.
Let's explore from the center outward. That means from within the confines of the mind-body system,
before we generalize about tectonic plates or the motion of the rings of Uranus or something like that.
Start from the body up. Well, immediately you discover total terra incognito.
Psychology gives us a flickering model of ordinary consciousness under ordinary circumstances and everything else is up for grabs.
And then we discover that at the center of human concerns is this weird itch about invisible worlds and higher order entities and sources of hidden knowledge.
And we've discovered that people have been at that for 100,000 years.
And the centerpiece technique, which is to trigger these non-ordinary states of consciousness, with all our sophistication,
we have no better grip on what this is than people in the late Neolithic.
They knew more than we did because they'd logged more time on in the real modality.
I mean, we have models. We say, you know, the drug molecule is translocating to the synapse and displacing ordinary neurotransmitters
and raising, therefore, the endogenous level of electron spin resonance.
This is not any kind of explanation about what's going on.
This is just the chant, the incantation, you know.
But the people who are logging time in there, they come back with maps of reality that fit very uneasily with our cheerful Cartesian,
Democritian, atomistic, causal, entropic models. And they say, "No, no, the universe is an infinite honeycomb.
Each honeycomb ruled over by different spiritual forces, each commanded through different languages, magical techniques, gestural repertoire.
Everything is language. Everything holds information for man. Everything is somehow constellated on the presence of observing mind."
Well, in the West, we thought we got rhecosmogonic myths with the Ptolemaic universe, you know, even before Copernicus.
But now, it turns out that the centrality of mind gets reintroduced, not only by the evidence of the psychedelic experience,
but for instance, the School of Philosophy of Science around LL White and people like that
have pointed out that if you use as your index complexity, then you suddenly discover that human beings have moved back to the very center of the universe,
that the most complex physical material in the universe in terms of density of connectedness is the human cerebral cortex.
That if novelty and density of connectedness is what is being conserved, then somehow we are central.
Well, so then, you know, other issues are raised. If we are central, then the modern model of history, which is, I don't know if it's ever been explicitly stated for you,
but the modern model of history is that it is trendlessly fluctuating. This is the largest structure in which we find ourselves embedded, call it the last 10,000 years,
and the best guess of the people who spend the most time looking at it is that it trendlessly fluctuates.
That means it's like a drunk on a wand and rock walk. You see, that processes are channeled toward conclusions.
That in the evolutionary, well, leave that aside for a minute, in the realm of physical chemistry, you see that the progressive cooling of the universe
allowed more and more complex chemistry. First, electrons could settle down into stable orbits around atomic nuclei.
Then molecular bonds could form. At still lower temperatures, polymerization could form, and therefore templating type molecules like DNA.
The universe seems to be an engine for the conservation of complexity until we reach the social sciences,
where they want to tell us that history is just dropped into this process willy-nilly, is not fractally modeled on anything that precedes it,
does not express an internal coherence, and is a completely trendless process.
Yet notice that this completely trendless process is atomically composed of the most complex matter material organization in the universe.
The human cerebral cortex. Well, I mention this because part of what I'm interested in with this weekend is trying to get a handle on, you know,
what is history? What does it mean? It began only 1,500 generations ago, which if we were fruit flies would be three weeks ago.
So, you know, it's not something really basic to human beings, but it's a process that got started about 1,500 generations ago,
and it's clearly a cumulative runaway process. It's going on outside the realm of ordinary genetics.
Ordinary genetic change is very conservative and slow. This is a cancerous type process, but in the cultural domain, it's an epigenetic process,
meaning it's not scripted in the genes, but like writing and TV and painting, it goes on outside of the genes.
Well, where does it go on? Well, it goes on in the domain of language, and to my mind, language is the critical area to focus on
in terms of where the psychedelics are operating and how if our interest is to trap them doing their elfin work,
then the place to look is in the domain of language. Why? Well, first of all, look at what language is.
It's a weird kind of ancillary add-on process to the human organism. No other monkeys do it in quite the same way,
and I don't argue that there is not linguistic and grammatical activity in monkeys, dolphins, termites, what have you,
but it's very different from what goes on in human beings. Obviously, for instance, you probably know that the soft palate of the human being
drops lower in the fetal form than in any other primate by 40% or something.
The embryological interpretation of this is that the human animal is hard-wired for language, and if you notice what it is,
it's small mouth noises, rapidly modulated small mouth noises, and it's a highly conventionalized style of behavior
which allows transduction of thought. It's a form of telepathy, a striving toward a crude telepathy,
because if you analyze what's happening in the linguistic act, it's that we've all gotten together,
and we agree that there are these small mouth noises, and we agree that a given set of small mouth noises means a certain thing,
and we spent so much time together and so conventionalized our responses to each other
that your dictionary of small mouth noises is theoretically supposed to match my dictionary of small mouth noises.
So the words going through the air and pinch upon your ear, you make a rapid search of your dictionary,
and you come up with what you assume is a one-to-one match, and we rarely get together to check out just exactly how good a match it was.
Occasionally someone will ask a question, and we will see that they understood that the match, and so the match was good.
Because I see a lot of transcripts of my talks, I know that typists hear the most amazing things,
and without ever questioning what they hear, they type these things, that when I read them, you know, they're complete malapropisms.
But this is what was heard, and as the level of discourse rises, or the density of the technical language increases,
it becomes much, much shakier. I mean, I just had the experience of lecturing in Czechoslovakia, in Prague, to the film academy,
and you know, you can go a long ways on sincerity, but there's a long ways still to go.
Just nodding and smiling doesn't do it, especially when the concepts are fine-tuned,
and it's where they're fine-tuned that they're always interesting. It's in the nuances of it.
Well, I think probably that this activity was originally stimulated by the use of psychedelics,
that in fact most of what is human about us has to do with the presence of psychedelic and mutagenic compounds in our diet,
when we made the transition from being fruititarian, vegetarian, arboreal tree dwellers, to becoming, you know, nomadic pastoralists.
If you think about it, you can see how this would work quite neatly.
The reason animals specialize their diets is to hold down the amount of exposure to mutagenic chemicals.
So most animals have highly specialized diets, because then they can develop pathways to sequester mutagens,
or to just avoid the exposure to them initially.
But if you put pressure on an animal, on its original food source, where it's actually facing a situation of possible extinction,
or dietary transformation, it will begin experimenting, expanding its repertoire of foods.
Well, this brings exposure to mutagens in a very steep curve,
and this means consequently more expression of mutagenic genes become available for natural selection.
And so this is the situation in which you might then see a sudden punctuated movement forward in the evolution of adaptive traits of the organism.
But how this worked in the early human situation was drying up of the African continent forced protogel types onto the grassland,
where they began foraging for, and insects had been part of their diet in the canopy situation, they began foraging.
They also thought they began perhaps predating on carrion kills, killed by larger carnivores like lions.
In any case, they began forming a relationship that had them following along behind these evolving ungulate herds of mammals on the African belt,
and in that situation, they encountered the coprophitic mushrooms, the mushrooms which grow in cow dung preferentially,
and many of these contained psilocybin.
Please continue to tape 2.
History Ends In Green (Part 2)
Mystic Fire Video and Audio proudly presents Terrence McKenna
History Ends in Green
This is tape two of a six cassette series
Well, psilocybin once encountered in the diet acts very quickly to outbreed non-psilocybin using individuals
because, like many indoles, if there's a small amount of psilocybin in the diet
visual acuity is measurably increased
and Roland Fisher did work on this in the early 60s
Well, you can see that if an animal that is living by predation
and also it's thought by the people who disagree with this theory
the people who do not think that mushrooms played a major role in human evolution
believe that the throwing arm is the unique human capability
and that when you see a pitcher get a ball across a plate
how far is it from the pitcher's mound to the plate?
60 feet. That kind of control on an object hurled at that speed
no other animal can do anything even approaching that
and that this hand-eye coordination gave us our leg up, literally, or our arm up
to be able to knock out large animals at a distance
even if you believe that theory, you see it too depends on a very close coordination of hand and eye
Well, if you bring into this a chemical factor in the diet
which increases visual acuity
animals that are allowing this item in the diet will very quickly outbreed the non-mushroom users
and I submit that this happened
Further, accelerating the tendency toward preferential use of mushrooms
is the fact that at higher doses, but still sub-psychedelic doses
these same mushrooms will trigger arousal
general CNS, central nervous system arousal
but this also includes then sexual arousal and erection in males
Well, so what does this mean? It means that it's a party drug at that dose
It means that there is this impetus to copulation
in a situation in which the better hunters have been more successful at getting food
so this increased copulatory activity and subsequent increased number of births
is happening in an environment with an increased food supply
So you see all these factors are converging to outbreed the non-mushroom using individuals
Well then the final culminating factor in this is
at yet higher doses, the mushroom ushers into the boundary dissolving ecstasy
that we call the psychedelic experience
and that in that kind of a social small group situation
would have led, I think, to primitive religious observance
ritual group sexuality, food sharing, mate sharing, so forth and so on
and I really believe that this lifestyle, if you will
of nomadic pastoralism, goddess-oriented religion driven by psychedelic indoles in the diet
that for 50,000, approaching 75,000 years, this is how people lived
and they were fully realized people
I mean there was tremendous oral poetry, epic works of art and theater
a complete realization of human potential
in the dynamic context of this nomadic relationship to nature
I mean this was Eden, this was when we were at peace with our humanness
Well then, you know, what happened? Is there a search for scapegoats?
Who's to blame? And the answer is nobody is to blame
the very process which brought this paradise into being
which was the drying up of the African continent
and the forcing of our proto-human ancestors onto the veldt
and into the bipedal nomadic tribal language using mode
the very forces which created that destroyed it
because eventually the great grasslands of the Sahara
the huge water holes, the vast herds of game gave way to encroaching dunes
shrinking water holes
the mushroom festivals, which I imagine at one point were probably lunar festivals
became then yearly festivals because of scarcity of the mushroom
and there became then anxiety about availability of mushrooms
and therefore a certain cultural pressure to find methods of preserving them
and this need turned naturally to the preserving powers of honey
and so there was a transitional phase of not fresh mushroom festivals
but preserved mushrooms in honey
the problem is honey itself has the capacity to turn into a psychotropic substance
through fermentation it becomes mead
but the imprinting that takes place in a mead culture
mead cultures are cultures of male dominance
repression of female sexuality, hierarchy, warfare, wheeled chariots, the whole shtick
and so, you know, there was... and this all happened over thousands of years
this very gradual transition, there was never a conscious moment of tragedy
but you see what was happening was
a new psychic function was taking hold in the human animal
and in the situation of the monthly boundary-dissolving group mushroom festivals
ego was not allowed to form
and I really view psilocybin as almost an inoculation against the formation of ego
it is an egolithic compound
notions of male dominance, of possession of property, children, domesticated animals or women
none of this went on in this situation where the boundary-dissolution was reinforced by frequent mushroom use
but as soon as the mushrooms become less available
this thing begins to grow in the human personality
literally like a cancer or a tumor
it's a calcareous growth on the psyche
that if we do not have this embeddedness in the vegetable matrix of Gaia
then anxiety arises
a lot of it sexual and related to self-identity
and I don't have to discuss this with you, just refer you to Freud and the whole gang
everybody understands how bent we are
the question is why
and I think this is why
because we have been in a permanent state of neurotic disequilibrium for 15,000 years
and every move to attempt to correct this has pushed us further away from the goal that we want to have
so now we arrive at the late 20th century
nuclear arsenals fully in hand
we have made since the 15th century a demonic pact with matter
that has allowed us great insight into the destructive properties of matter
made us, you know, handmaiden to the devil
and yet we are still completely dark about our own motivations
how to educate our children
how to put in place a set of values that don't loot the future
and all of these problems appear to be getting worse
so, you know, I don't know
well, my response to this is to advocate the only thing that I think will work
but it's not a political position
because a political position always implies willingness to compromise and negotiate with the other side
and there really is no willingness to negotiate on the part of the psychedelic position
because it's pretty non-negotiable
we're at the end of a process
call it 2000, 5000, you know, choose your date
but a long process of denial of human nature first
and then war against human nature
and it goes so deep into our culture that we don't even know where the basement level is
I mean, for instance, to my mind
monotheism
which is the great intellectual edifice of the West
it touches the three major religions of the West that have developed in a continuous strain since Abraham
monotheism is the institutionalizing of this egocentric model
and it has a certain philosophical appeal
in one god, you know, everything... all roads lead to Rome
you can trace everything back to the Ur source, the Ur-kvela
but that anal retentive appeal in itself takes place within a context of values of male dominance
print created linearity, uniformity, so forth and so on
and I think what we have to get into is real permission for sloppiness
for loose-endedness, for the abandonment of any myth of closure
that there is no closure
there are models and there are questions
but all models are provisional
and anybody who says they have answers is highly, highly suspect
too many people claim answers
what's being claimed here is a technique
and then you figure out your own questions and your own answers
and it's different for everybody
there really is no ideology associated with psychedelics
and if you look at the people who've been involved with it, they've said completely different things
and contradictory
and some are rationalists and behaviorists to this day
and others are, you know, spiritual visionaries, hierarchical shamanic types
the main thing is to reclaim the experience
the first step toward being politically empowered in order to act
in other words, we're in... and I indicated this last night, although more gently
that we're in a state of enforced infantilism about the capacity of our minds
that the culture we are living in is an infantile culture
we look back at the Victorians putting pants on the piano legs
and we just shake our heads and say, you know, those poor, misguided people
well, but that's only four generations ago
we have similar weirdness going on in our own culture
but about the mind
I mean, we look askance at the mind the same way that a Victorian nanny is uncomfortable
in the presence of bare furniture
we fear it
we don't want to look at it
and to my mind, most of the techniques that come out of the new age
are based on a guaranteed lack of success
that's what they offer
because the last thing anybody wants is real change
because real change is uncontrolled change
the issue that hovers around the psychedelic experience
it was mentioned last night, it's strong in my life
I haven't found any real solution other than hold your nose and jump
but the issue is surrender
this is something real
you don't find people going into the ashram in the morning to meditate
with their knees knocking in fear
because of how terrifying and profound they know that meditation is going to be
that if they were going in there to smoke DMT, you know
they would be fully riveted on the modalities of what was about to happen
I mean, we can tell shit from Shinola
but it's just that we don't always prefer Shinola
and I'm not like... I don't advocate it
you know, people... like sometimes there are people who are disappointed
because they say, "Well, how often do you do it?"
Well, the answer is not very often
I mean, if I can get it in a couple or three times a year
I feel like I'm hitting it pretty hard
the more successful it is, the less often you have to do it
I mean, I know people who say DMT is their most favorite drug
and when you say, "Well, when was the last time you did it?"
they say, "Well, 1967"
it only lasted four minutes
they're still processing it
and they are still processing it
they're not just whistling Dixie
it is, to my mind, just the most...
well, I mentioned this earlier
the question, how do they keep the lid on this stuff?
and I suppose here I'm preaching to the converted
because many people last night said they had an interest in this kind of thing
but they don't keep the lid on sexuality
no society has ever had it so under control
that people didn't have sex
I mean, they may have had sex under weird conditions
and under ritual strictures and this and that
but we are like this salamander
that has the option of never developing into its mature form
and to my mind, that's a tragedy
because this is our birthright
and somehow our inability to get a grip on our global problems
has to do with this immaturity about our mental state
the two, I feel, very strongly are linked
and that of course we can't get control of the world
because we are children in some profound way
and we don't like being children
but the culture has reinforced a form of infantilism
and the way I explain it to myself is
it's a kind of unwillingness to go it alone on a certain level
I don't know how many of you remember in Brave New World
Huxley's brilliant dystopia
but there's a scene in there where Bernard
who is the guy who's out of it in the novel
because in his fetal fluid they got an alcohol contaminant
and so he's different from everybody else in this society
and he occasionally has original thoughts
and he and his assigned girlfriend for the evening
or whatever she is, are in a helicopter
and they sweep out past the crematorium
where they're recollecting elements for reuse
and he suspends the helicopter over the black bay
and she immediately becomes very agitated
restless, anxious, and pleads with him to return to the city
and what it is, is it's her anxiety over being alone in the presence of nature
she literally can't take it
and I think there are a lot of people in our society
and each of us in our own way at different times
who have within us this neurotic and infantile creature
that can't face it alone
and that this going it alone thing is very important
you know, Plotinus, the great neo-Platonic philosopher
he spoke of the mystical experience as
the flight of the alone to the alone
and in the psychedelic experience there is this issue of surrender
because a lot of people want to diddle with it
they want to be able to say they did it
but they don't ever want to face an actual moment
where they put it all on the line
and yet the whole issue with this stuff is to let it lead
to let it show what it wants to show
so somehow individually we have to reclaim our experience
the real message, more important even than the psychedelic experience
the real message that I try to leave with people on these weekends
is the primacy of direct experience
that as people the real universe is within your reach
always, everything not within your reach is basically unconfirmed rumor
and we insert ourselves like ants or honeybees
into hierarchies of knowledge
so we say, well, what's going on in the world?
well, turn on CNN
and then somehow we're ordered
then we say, aha, okay, it's 85 degrees in Baghdad
and the wind is out of the northeast at 15 miles an hour
and we feel somehow better now because we're getting the information
but what we have done is sold out direct experience
and all institutions require this of us
that we somehow redefine ourselves for the convenience of the institution
and this redefinition always involves a narrowing
a denial so that, you know, if you want to be in Marxist society
if you want to function in Marxist society
you have to define yourself as a Marxist human being
well, it turns out in a Marxist society there are no homosexuals
because that just happens in decadent societies
so then, you know, if you happen to notice any tendency like this in yourself
you have to deny its existence
because this just doesn't happen in a Marxist society
and similarly, every society has this
in our society, if you hear voices, we have mental hospitals for you
if you have vast visions of the future
you know, we have drugs that can help you
and make this go away
so we...
so then somehow in modern society
the discovery of psychedelics is the discovery
that all of this cultural machinery is just Wizard of Oz stuff
you remember the scene in the Wizard of Oz
where the curtain is swept back
and they see the little guy there
and he says, booming out over the loudspeaker
"Ignore the little man pulling the levers!"
"Ignore the little man pulling the levers!"
well, the little man pulling the levers
is what sweeps into view with psychedelics
and you discover, aha, culture is provisional
you know, whether we have nine wives or three
whether we tattoo ourselves blue
whether we eat insects or not
all of these things are just decisions that we make
and then we congratulate ourselves on our wisdom
and we live within that
and we hunt down and kill all the people who disagree with us
and that's called having a culture, having a way of life
being somebody
but...
with... you know, I don't see history as a wrong turning
I see it... the metaphor that I like is that of the prodigal son
that there was a reason for this long descent into matter
this peregrination
it was a shamanic journey of some sort
you know, the shaman goes into the world pool
or ascends the world tree
to go to the center of the axis of the cosmos
to recover the pearl
the pearl, or the gift, or the lost soul
and then return with it
and this is what history was, I think
it was a descent into the hell worlds of matter
energy, space, and time
for the purpose of recovering something that was lost
it wasn't lost by us
it was lost by the breathing
the diastole of the planet
just climax of climate
moved us into paradise
and then moved us out of paradise
I mean, you must... the story of Eden is the story of history's first drug bust
I mean, it's the story of a whole lot of tension
over who's going to take or not take a certain plant
which confers knowledge
and Yawa, wandering in the garden, says to himself
if the man and the woman eat of the fruit
they will become as we are
the issue was co-equality, co-knowledge with the creator
well, where do we stand, you know
in man's existential march
how does that work?
can we always accept the subservient infantile position?
I mean, is knowledge to be dispensed by gods
and if not gods, then the institutions that appoint themselves
as gods over us?
or is it actually that maturity begins
with somehow claiming this birthright
and it is a birthright
and I don't know if a society can survive
the claiming of this birthright by a large number of people
certainly in the 1960s when this was attempted
everybody got very agitated
and then it was frozen out
in so-called primitive or pre-literate societies
there is the office of the shaman
and the shaman is deputized to act for all of us
in the same way that we have airplane mechanics to fix jet engines
we have shamans to explore these hidden and fairly terrifying other dimensions
the people who self-select themselves into a group like this
in a society like that
would be the candidates for this kind of shamanic voyaging
well, so then what is it finally all for?
or is it for anything?
or is it just maybe my problem that I think it's for something?
well, it is and it isn't
I mean, see, we have real problems
we could perish from this planet
in some kind of radioactive petroleum war or what have you
and it wouldn't change the fact that shamanism did exist
that these dimensions were there
were explored by courageous high-minded people for thousands of years
but I think that
the scientific mind and maybe even the American mind
can bring something special to it
that somehow technology has a role to play
and I think maybe what this has to do with is
I've talked a bit in the past, a lot in the past
about what I call visible language
visible language is something that I encountered in psychedelic states
could never have dreamed it up by myself
encountered it as an existential fact
then had to sort of reason backward from it
to what would it be good for?
well, what is it? what is visible language?
well, it's very simply
it's language which you look at rather than hear
and don't ask me how this can happen
it obviously has something to do with synesthesia in the brain
with swapping neural processing units
and somehow shunting a stream of data
which would normally be audially interpreted
instead it goes to the visual cortex
and this occurs often in DMT intoxication
and it has a long and noble history in the Amazon
in ayahuasca shamanism
ayahuasca, as you probably know, is a combinatory drug
made of a vine combined with the leaves of another plant
and it makes DMT orally active
normally DMT is destroyed in the gut
but you take it in combo with this other thing
beta-carboline and then it's active
well, in the Amazon
these people sing what they call ikaros
magical songs
and these magical songs are given to them by the spirits
whatever those are, invisible entities
but the magical songs are invariably criticized pictorially
and sculpturally rather than musically
nobody ever talks about how these things sound
people only talk about how they look
and I had read about this and heard about it
and went down there and spent time again
curiosity is the only method
poking around, finally got somebody who knew how to brew this stuff
to make this happen
and, you know, I had seen it before on DMT
but on DMT it's somewhat out of control
it's as though your entire syntactical engine
has sprung out of your chest
and is rattling around on the floor in front of you
this concludes Side A
well, first of all, notice language
ordinary language
what a weird thing it is
and yet we do it with such facility
we almost all of us can do it
it's a very severe impairment on your humanness
if you are language deficient in any very serious way
blindness is as nothing to being seriously language deficient
so forth and so on
it's a very defining thing for us
and yet, you know, it's almost like a half miracle
I mean, you can study it
there's no problem with getting vast samples of tape recordings
we can analyze it syntactically
there have been many theories of syntax
philosophies of syntax
and yet what is it?
when we make meaning with such facility
when the rest of nature seems totally unconcerned with this
and what is meaning anyway?
why is it so important to us?
we say if there is no meaning
if life has no meaning it's not worth living
well, how do ants and bees and scallops stack up on that opinion?
do they also feel that meaning is the quintessential aspect of reality?
and yet we make it
we make it out of ourselves
and then we get together with somebody else
and we try to make meaning
we say, you know, you and I could have an affair
or you and I could start a business
this will have a lot of meaning for us
and, you know, we'll make money and buy more meaning
well, whatever it is
and C.B. Broad wrote a book called The Meaning of Meaning
which deals with it in about 400 pages
but whatever it is, it's very important to us
and it seems to have different modalities
for instance, dance can have meaning
painting can have meaning
spoken or textual words have meaning
but because of biases in ourselves as an organism
what seems to have the most meaning
is what we can see
our visual...
we have a tremendously rich sense of visual input
well, for some reason under the influence of these psychedelic drugs
and certain exercises
and who knows what else it takes to shake you out of your cage
but suddenly syntactical organization
which has been invisible in the background
of the program of meaning becomes visible
and you actually see the engines of syntax
you actually behold the machinery of meaning itself
and for some reason this is very satisfying
it's like an ecstasy
it's like an affirmation of some sort that is transcendental
there is a recognition in it
that transcends the felt apperception of ordinary meaning
you know, in other words, that you're gazing somehow
on the naked face of truth and beauty
well, it seems to me that what all this suggests
by all this, I mean
the human capacity for the psychedelic experience
the human facility for switching these linguistic channels
from the beheld to the seen
what all this must mean is
that history is nothing more than the transition phase
from felt intuition
the mute intuition of the animal body
to fully expressible three-dimensional meaning
and that the descent into matter
that technology represents
is because you can't do this entirely on the match
there has to be a certain augmentation
of the human organism in order to do this
it may be pharmacological
it may be neurological
it may be nanotechnological
and then some part of the other two
but whatever it is
we are coming up under the underbelly of meaning
boring from beneath
and that we're just about to hit the jackpot
and this is what the historical process is
and the proliferation of media
of the discovery of perspective five hundred years ago
oil painting
airbrushing
digital sound
all of these techniques are this summoning of the image
so we are actually moving
toward a kind of self-fulfilling process
it's something that we're defining for ourselves
as it approaches
and it is defining itself for itself
as it approaches
you actually experience this on psychedelics sometimes
I mean the way it works for me
on mushrooms or sometimes DMT
is there is a black space
and then I hear the
what I call the elf music
or the Irish band
and it's far away
and as it comes closer
I like see light
and as it comes closer
it both gets louder and the light fills the stage of awareness
until finally the sound is subsumed
under the visual impression of the thing
and then it's all around you
and it is this domain of self-transforming language
I mean I call them language elves
but what they may be is nothing more than self-reflexive compound complex sentences
it's hard to tell what they are
because we're not used to having our sentences stand up and embrace us
but nevertheless
the nature of reality is fractal
and it can't have been lost upon any of you
that in a fractal universe
text is composed of characters
the characters of a given alphabet
but reality is also composed of characters
the characters like you and me
who live out some kind of plot
well when you get characters into a text
in other words characters made of characters
then you begin to feel the
the textual richness
and the linguistic richness
that seems to be not in the forefront of reality
but actually to lie behind it
I mean the final conclusion
not the final conclusion
that would be preposterous
but the most recent conclusion
that I'm coming to looking at the psychedelic experience
is how phenomenally text-like reality is
I mean it's more text-like than one should decently say
we are much, this is much more like a work of art
than anything recognizable from my physics class
I mean my physics class was about atoms and electrons and momentum
and conservation of energy
my literature class on the other hand
was all about personality, motivation, history
cursive active, anticipation of action, willful suspension of disbelief
these are the things that I see actually going on around me
and so it's strange as we decondition
from the being sold from the top world view
of Time magazine and Scientific American and the Wall Street Journal
what we discover is ourselves active as art in a work of art
this is what the reclamation of experience seems to give back to us
is ourselves as very complex objects
you see in the institutionalized world
we are defined always in ways that stress our similarity
we hear about voters
I'm a voter
and we hear about women
and many of you are women
and we hear about yuppies
and we hear about the middle class
and we hear about those with liquidity in their portfolios
but everything is presented as a member of a class
we are always presented to ourselves as members of some class
and yet we experience ourselves as unique objects
but there is no reinforcement for that experience of uniqueness
I mean you have a lover and they say
"I think you're wonderful and very special"
that's about all the reinforcement for your uniqueness you get
and your mother also tells you this
but then you take a psychedelic plant
and you discover, "Hey, I'm Christopher Columbus"
"I'm Magellan"
"I could be anybody"
"I'm not defined in these narrow ways"
"There are doorways in my reality"
"to areas of experience as large as the area of experience"
"that Christopher Columbus or Magellan took as their province"
but it's all this new freedom
that is achieved by directing attention back at the individual
so a lot of the debate and talk that I hear is about saving
and restructuring institutions and that sort of thing
I'm not very much interested in saving and restructuring very many institutions
I think institutions have done us about all the good we can stand at this point
but then they wave the black flag of anarchy in front of you
and say, "Oh, you're just an apostle of chaos and madness"
Chaos, yes, madness may be
but disorder? Never
This surrender issue
when translated out of the realm of the individual
and into the realm of the collectivity
we all, as a society, must also surrender to what is happening to us
because I think history is some kind of psychedelic experience
and it isn't...
there's nobody around who has the right plan
so it isn't about how we need to locate the people with the right plan
and then give them a lot of money and get out of their way
it doesn't work like that
the right plan will emerge almost simultaneously
in everybody's mind at the same moment
and in the meantime we all are going to have this sort of half-baked plan
that we can't articulate, that we can't quite bring out
it's a quality of the time
I'm going to talk this afternoon more about the quality of the time
but we can't think any more clearly than we're thinking
at the moment, when we're thinking at our best
part of what history is, is a clarification of the human situation
and I think you have to press the envelope
you have to keep your nose against the glass
forcing the definitions into ever-new territory
but not anxiously
it's just like a growth process
we can't evolve any faster than our language evolves
the language is the thing in which we're embedded
so the use of technologies like virtual reality
or drugs like psilocybin and DMT
or practices of various sorts, if they prove effective
to put pressure on the evolution of language
all spiritual disciplines properly analyzed can be seen to be language courses
to get you to think a certain way
to get you to carve out of the background of undifferentiated data
certain things which you previously couldn't see
auras, or occupied your meridians, or states of disease
it can be anything
but the mind sensitizes itself to phenomena
by following language into the forest
into the forest of the unknown
and most people have no stomach for this kind of thing
prefer to stay back in the village and just kill time
grinding wheat and drying meat around the fire
but you know, you can almost make a kind of a fractal
quasi-reductionist argument and say that people are like electrons
and you don't learn what electrons really are
until you get just one of them off by itself
somewhere in a magnetic field, in a vacuum
and then you see what electrons are
if you have millions of electrons
then you have an electrical current
an electrical current operates according to laws and rules and constraints
completely different from an electron
and what we have done very perversely as a society
is taken the laws of large numbers
how a million people act, how ten million people act
and then we have applied it back to ourselves as individuals
well why am I not happy?
70% of everybody does X and I don't and I'm not happy then
trying to redefine yourself as against a very large body of statistical data
all of this is dehumanizing
all of this is bad mental hygiene
usually quickly cleared away by psychedelics
because what they show you is that you are unique
that you are unique
and that the confluence of space and time that you're operating in is unique
and that any model that is put forward is
number one, provisional
provisional means it can be abandoned at any moment
and then the second and most important thing
any model you can't understand is useless
so most of us can't understand most of the models
I mean who here would care to walk to the blackboard
and begin to describe the first stage of quantum electrodynamics to us?
and yet we all know that our world is supposedly hung
on this very well thought out theory that experts are in charge of
but notice, no pun intended
but notice that if experts are in charge of it
you're not
it's absolutely useless to you
you know nothing about it
well, so when you start peeling away and saying, well what do I know?
you know, it turns out it gets into thin soup rather quickly
this is no cause for despair
this doesn't mean you should go back to night school and study quantum physics
that's the wrong conclusion
it means that all of this stuff that you thought were the high walls of reality
are just smoke blown by somebody else
these constraints are not binding upon you at all
somebody said to me once, their father had been a professional scientist
and he said once, I never would have seen it if I hadn't known it was there
and we all are in the habit of seeing all kinds of things
because we know that they're there
and in many cases they're not there
and you just walk through and you discover all kinds of things
I mean I am convinced that anybody who has a major psychedelic trip
at some point in that trip their eye falls on things no human eye has ever seen before
or ever will see again
you know, it's that big in there
it's not at all clear that we're mapping a generalizable reality
it may be that it's just so huge in there that never do we pass through the same matrix twice
well that means you can give up on closure
you can give up on any theory that will ever give you very much of a more than provisional handle on what's going on
and I think this is probably a good step to take
to open ourselves to the freedom that lies beyond culture
culture is a kind of prison
and the only way that we know to get beyond it is to dissolve its boundaries
now you can do that with psychedelics
and then you really explore the baseline of being
or you can dissolve it with travel
but then you dissolve your own cultural programming
only to discover you fitted yourself into somebody else's cultural programming
and this while, you know, definitely educational is like a psychedelic drug I'm not that fond of
I do a lot of traveling but it's not the same thing as replacing space and time with some kind of alternative
that comes from, you know, doing the hard work on five grams in silent darkness
and really what you see I think is
the morphogenetic field, the invisible world that holds everything together
the knit of it all
not the knit of matter and light
but the knit of kazooistry, of intentionality, of caring, of hope, of dream, of thought
and that all is there
but it's been hidden from us for centuries because of the exorcism of the spirit
that took place in order to allow science to do business
and that momentous and ill-considered choice
then has made us the inheritors of a tradition of
of existential emptiness, really
but that has impelled us to go back to the jungles and to recover this thing
it's all of a piece, you see, I mean these people in the Amazon and whatnot
were keeping this cultural flame burning
but these cultures are now all dead
they are either dead or in a state of advanced suspended animation
I mean the best anyone hopes for when they go to a rainforest culture
is that it be somehow resisting the change all around it
there's no rainforest culture that is elaborating new forms and thriving on its own terms
so all the things that were learned, the legacy of the ancestors
is now laid basically at the feet of this high-tech electronic society
and the question is, you know, can we dream a dream sufficiently noble
that we give meaning to the sacrifices that have been made to allow the 20th century to exist
I mean, my God, the amount of bloodshed and infectious diseases spread around
metals ripped out of the earth, mountains moved, railroads laid across continents
all of this stuff as the means to reclaiming the human birthright that science hides from us
it's a very strange enterprise, I mean it's hard to put it across
because the thing is it's real, you know, and we're in the habit of thinking
that the mind can move unobstructed from one edge of the universe to the other
that there are no secrets, but actually there are secrets
at least these are secrets and hard to tell
I mean, I tell them and you hear them and we seem to have been allowed a cosmic dispensation
but why that is is very hard for me to understand
I would have thought that this would have been headline news 20,000 years ago
right up until the present, instead, you know, it's very tentative
apparently this is very threatening to us
we are not as eager to sail over the edge collectively as we think we are
so then it becomes the function of the shaman, the gadfly, the go-between
to carry information back and forth between these worlds
I'm convinced that if there were no shamanic pipeline
there would be no human life as we know it on this planet
I mean that could be climaxed animal life
there is no need for this higher order linguistic style of self-reflection to come into being
it's that something is plotted, something is working itself out in us
we are the cells of a much larger body and like the cells of our own body
it's very hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern, the whole of what is happening
and yet we can sense that there is a purpose and there is a pattern
well, the way you connect the pattern with the lower level is by dissolving the boundaries
of the ego and the self into this larger thing
and then it's found to be there, reflective on many levels
it doesn't require a mechanism, everything is obvious
if things don't appear simple to us, I think it's because we haven't thought about it long enough
well, so that's sort of a survey of some of this stuff
thank you very much
thank you
please continue to tape 3
Mystic Fire Video and Audio proudly presents Terrence McKenna
History Ends in Green
This is tape four of a six-cassette series
Do you think it's any possible connection between this phenomena and reincarnation?
And what?
Reconciliation
Well, we talked a little bit this morning about the relationship of these ideas to death
and how shamans claim that they're seeing into a world of souls
I don't know
I find it
The thing which really got me is the presence of these English-speaking entities in the trance
I mean, that I did not expect
From Jung and from Freud you expect residual memories
But not these entities, these beings
And then the question is, where are they? Who are they?
Well, a conservative...
The possibilities are fairly limited
They are either dead people
Because they are clearly more like people than like animals
They after all speak and communicate and have intentionality in a purely intellectual realm
So that means they're like people
But they're not like anybody you've ever seen
So are they dead people? That's one possibility
Or are they extraterrestrials?
Well, that's another possibility
But the problem is we've never seen an extraterrestrial
We've got dead people all over the place
We know that they're dead people
But we don't know if anything survives bodily death
Well, then the other source is, are they from the future?
Are they future people?
We see people now
So we can extrapolate there must be people in the future
They might be different from us
Perhaps they could come back
So those are the fairly uncomfortable and limited choices
They're either an advanced state of humanity
They're the souls of the dead
Or they're some kind of extraterrestrial dwellers in a parallel continuum
Well, now you're supposed to generate hypotheses conservatively
That means that the dead lead by a mile
Just by logical deduction
So the strangest hypothesis turns out to be the least...
The most likely that these are the souls of the dead
And it's possible that reincarnation is something
Where at a certain point in historical time
We find out about it
We learn literally the secrets of death
And this would be big news
It would be quite a surprise to the forward thrust of scientific rationalism
If what it was going to lead to was a opening
And a communication line to the ancestors
I just wanted to add here about the peyote church
Because it seems to really fit
I had questions about initiation
Because I think that's really missing in a lot of this nice material
I just wanted to share one vision I had in peyote during the ceremony
And that was the feeling inside my body
That something was going up and down my spine
Something was moving around
When I closed my eyes there was a bird flying inside my body
And as I got deeper into it
There was a flock and then there was a lake
And then there was forests and then I started crying
It was just very pristine and beautiful
And it got wider and wider in there
And other species that are now at stake started appearing
And saying "Don't worry we've all gone inside"
Which was like a trap, really too much for me to take
Because it was really a sense of
What these Indian people have been teaching me in the past ten years
Is that the ancestors do exist
That is simply taking off masks
And that they do come and teach
And they do live inside
And that there is and has been and always will be
A way of communicating to the past
Our past since we have time in this linear way
To ask for information on that
And I'm real interested in just again asking about initiation
In the sense that I feel
That a lot of things that's missing here is the context
Is the circle of people who are committed to ceremony
Which is historically and otherwise
Really the setting that gives us the return to that state
We were talking about earlier
Which was that group consensus sense of support and love
And sharing the clan, the tribe and everything
Do you see for instance
The use of psychedelics moving in a ceremonial or ritual fashion
In a way of creating new ways of coming together
As people heal that circle of the shield
Well where it's most enduring
I think this is how it ends up being done
People do the work on their own
But then they tend to form into circles
This is how I think the serious psychedelic voyaging gets done
Because the circle gives people permission and courage
If we had an unbroken cultural tradition
We would be initiated by master shamans
As it is we've had to sort of reinvent
The whole of the world's oldest religion
And we haven't done that bad a job
I mean we shouldn't feel that we have to fault ourselves
The anthropological literature of the world is vast
And if you spend time with it
You will know more about these things on a certain level
Than most people in a traditional culture
It was very interesting being in the Amazon
You would go with the people and they would show you their plants
And it might come up that you would say
Did you know that the konibo who live 50 miles away from you
Also used this plant and they call it X
And they would just be astonished
Say, how do you know this?
Well you couldn't explain that you had read it
In a Harvard museum botanical leaflet
But that was how you knew it
You knew it because you'd done your homework
So what they had was tremendous vertical initiation
Into one culture
But what you can bring to this
That is very useful and respected
Is a tremendous general knowledge about this
Say, well did you know that in Africa
People use the same plant and they do it like this
Or did you know that in Indonesia
Similar practices are going on
And so we've reconstructed a shamanism
But from then spending time with ayahuaskaros in the Amazon
And other kinds of shamans in other places
I really see that it wasn't as formal as we thought
There are rituals and songs and techniques
But the spirit of shamanism is open minded and open ended
And these people are really doing this out of curiosity
To find out the mythological structures
Created by any kind of shamanic system
Are largely for the consumption of the client
Not the shaman
The shaman knows that this is all provisional
And what we found with the shamans in the Amazon
Was great curiosity, great willingness
To try out novel concepts
To integrate weird ideas into their own cosmology
Electromagnetism, viruses, computers
They loved all these things because they saw them as metaphors
That they could integrate into their visions
The flying saucer is a metaphor like this
That is very strong in the ayahuasca mythology
Liz, did you want to say something?
You said earlier today or yesterday
The domain in which we operate lies within our minds
And I'd like to know how that
I'm always confused about real and not real
All these realities you've been describing
Is that within your mind and in the English
Because that's the language you're most familiar with
Well I think what I meant when I said the domains
In which we operate are all within our minds
Is that inside culture it's all whatever we say it is
In other words, other than that it's day and night
Nature doesn't say much to us
We pursue our activities all inside
A construct of culture that comes out of language
So that's what I meant when I said
That it's all within the domain of our minds
I mean it's all within the human world
And potentially affected by the human mind
The problem of real and unreal
Which is supposed to be a naive problem
I have too
I think that the real world is so strange
That it's just almost too freakish to suppose
You know I quote all the time J.B.S. Haldane
Who said "The world is not only stranger than we suppose
It's stranger than we can suppose"
This is a tremendous liberation once you grab onto it
It's really true
I mean how many of you know that?
That it's really true that the world at any moment
Could come completely and utterly apart
And have you seen that happen?
You know
That's really what I'm concerned to communicate
Is the provisional nature of reality
It does have a certain momentum
And thank God for it
If it were standard, if it were always coming unglued
But on the other hand
If you're an edge runner
If you keep poking
There are these things you can do
And then it just springs to pieces
And I don't say it's all lies
It doesn't seem to operate in the domain of truth and lies
It's just that this is all just such a limited slice
To what's possible
That was very liberating for me to find out
I remember the first time I smoked DMT
And when I came down
They practically had to hog-tie me
And all I could say was
I can't believe it
I cannot believe it
And I couldn't, I still can't
I mean my whole, the whole impetus for my career
Is to convince myself that somebody else
Has seen the same thing
And they can't believe it either
Because, you know
It's so weird that it always floats to the top
It always calms down
And turns back into this
You know, rooms full of people sitting, listening
But
Beneath that
Beneath that is just this really
Unspeakably bizarre thing
Not as we're told it should be
Not in fact as we're told it isn't
The one thing they tell you it isn't
It is
It is
It is made of magic
Anything can happen
I mean these, to have elves by the thousands
Pouring into your apartment
How can a rational
What is a person to do with that?
You know
Because it's that what happens is
That in a single moment
In the privacy of your own reality
It's revealed to you
That all of history is a mistake
A delusion, a horrible misunderstanding
But you're given no evidence
Only the conviction that this is so
And then you're set down among your fellows
And they
Don't know what you're talking about
Can't understand why you've become so agitated
And addled
And I think this is what we all
As psychedelic people live with
And we suspect each other
We can't be sure
That anybody has ever really seen
The true naked heart of the stone
But ourselves
And so then it's this tremendous catalyst
To language
To try and build metaphors
To try and get the nod of recognition
So that we are satisfied
It's not really stranger than the real world
Would you say?
It is the real world
I mean the so-called real world
Well it's more brightly colored
It's moving faster
Why is it so brightly colored?
Why is it moving faster?
What I've noticed in my DMT experiences
And when I realized this
It was with a certain amount of horror
Was you break into this space
It's dome-like
It's warm
It's diffusely lit
There are all these self-transforming machine elves
And their toys
Which also are singing and condensing
And making objects
And so forth and so on
The whole thing is like triggers just wonder
Cascades of wonder
But then I realized
After seeing this several times
And trying to pay attention
And hold my mind steady
That this is someone's idea
Of a reassuring environment
For human beings
It is in fact literally a playpen
Of some sort
Well that means that
I'm not seeing who's ever on the other side
I am emerging into an artificial construct
Of some sort entirely their creation
Well then it just begins to lift this veil
And there's this howling begins
And you just begin to fall forward into it
And you realize you know
It is the Sephiroth and the Shekinah
It is the howling between the worlds
But it is approached through an infinite number of veils
That reassure
Coddle
Control
Confine
But you can move toward it as fast as you dare
But it is entirely transforming
And entirely real
It was a great realization for me to understand
That there was no limit to how far you could go
That we all make a certain choice
Once you discover psychedelics
Always before that spiritual progress is
Grunt work
Suddenly you're standing on ice cubes
In terms of spiritual progress
And how you make it
How do you control it
And the answer is most people go a certain distance
And then give up
Get off
Stand there and talk about it
But there's nothing holding any of us back
From becoming unrecognizable
Not only to our friends and loved ones
But to ourselves
You know the stories told of the Taoist guy
Up on cold mountain
And he's been up there 25 years
And occasionally people see him
And yes he's still alive
Well any one of us could become that person
Could march off into a dimension of magical narcissism
So alien to the concerns of other people
That we would have to go and live up on the crags
And in the mist and eat bird nests
Or whatever they do up there
You know
Well so then that puts a whole different light
On the spiritual quest
Because it means that we're holding it back
Rather than lashing it forward
To ever greater exertion
And I think that's the proper attitude
Because the depth of spirit is infinite
And in its benevolence towards suffering humanity
It has made itself available in infinite amounts
So then it's for us to somehow come to terms with this
It's like having a living religion
It is having a living religion
Because it's having an infinite source of gnosis
Of understanding available
Somebody yes
I know there was recently a question about meditation
And it's a preview for depth
Instead of it conditions you to enter the barbed
So you won't shy away from the building
So do you see any role of meditation
As a preparation for psychedelics
Or when you talk about meditation
And your opinion on it in general
Well it teaches you to sit still
Which is a precondition for psychedelics
I mean you know keeping still
Is one of the hexagrams of the I Ching
People often ask the question you asked
Or in slightly different forms
They say well isn't there another way to get there
Is it so narrow
Is it so specific to these plants
And you know the truth is
I don't know
I'm not an expert
All I know is based on my experience
In my experience
These things can only be approached
And who would want to approach them any other way
We don't want this to become so generalized
That by closing your eyes and ripping off a few
Om Tat Sat's you fall into the kind of states
I'm talking about
I mean that would be extremely unwelcome
And nearly pathological
I don't understand this problem with how you achieve it
To my mind obviously you can't do it by yourself
Obviously you can't do it on the natch
Because it's a meeting with another entity
There has to be an other
And it has to be objectified
Even if it's as a plant or a mushroom
So basically how I read these meditation texts
Is they teach you about psychological phenomena
They teach you what you may see
When you close your eyes and sit for days and watch
The thing about meditation in my own experience
Is that it's just tremendously boring
However, everything you're doing
Will be very useful to you
When you take a psychedelic
Then it works
Then there is this flow of imagery
I am maybe a very lumpen person
But that's alright
Because a lot of us are lumpen
And I wish to speak for that slice
There may be supreme aesthetes
Balanced on such razor's edge
Of metabolic peculiarity
That at every moment they are at one with the mystery
But that butters no bread for the rest of us
We're trying to create a kind of democratic consensus here
About this stuff
And it seems to me the plants were put there
For this purpose
And they achieve it so easily
I mean I practiced yoga at times in the past
And had some amount of success
With triggering exotic states
Difficult and time consuming
And then they always told you
That wasn't what it was about anyway
And you were becoming distracted by phenomena
Well why bridal then
At just chowing down on five grams of mushrooms
With the knowledge that you know
You'll be fine in 12 hours
So it's really a matter of using the tools
There are all kinds of altered states
Weird states
States of sexual abstinence
And states of various kinds of agitation
And this and that
But what I'm interested in is just this very specific
Set of phenomena
And I don't really make any claim for it
To say you know this is the spiritual path
I don't say that
What I say is this is the most interesting thing around
And but it's very specific
For instance I don't like drugs
Which mess with your mind
In the sense of
That distort your value assessing ability
The drug which comes to mind is ketamine
Ketamine is an extremely powerful synthetic drug
That creates an experience
Which if you haven't had ketamine
You don't know what this experience is
It's that specific to it
But hell
The house could burn down around you
And it would arrive as an unconfirmable rumor
On the dark side of your metaphysical imagination
With this stuff
I mean you would never lift a hair
It would never enter your mind
That there was a problem
Datura is like this too
Datura severely distorts reality
The day I knew that my experiments with Datura
Had come to an end was one day in Nepal
I was talking to a friend of mine in the market
About his Datura experiments
And how much he'd been taking recently
And in the course of the conversation
It came out that he thought we were in his apartment
And I was looking at this poor sense
That there had been severe degradation
Of core information processing
And that we had to get back on the wagon
Or we weren't going to get out of there
But so then
Let me describe for a moment
The state of mind on DMT
Is if you keep your...
There is a tendency to give way to absolute astonishment
But if you can hold that back
And pay very close attention to what's going on
You will discover that it didn't do anything to you
That here you are
And suddenly in the midst of a raging universe of hallucination
And you are you
And you are who you were before
And it has not in any way inflated, repressed, suppressed
Distorted or skewed anything
You're just saying "Aha, wow, mmm, I'm really smashed"
The input is reaching overload
But there must be this core observer
Who's never overwhelmed
And this persists with most of the tryptamines
Now sometimes it is overwhelmed
But when it's overwhelmed it's the last thing to be overwhelmed
And the first thing to pop back into existence
At the end of the period of overwhelmment
So sometimes on ayahuasca you just lose it
For a period of time
20 minutes or something
But then you reconstruct
And you're there like a little cork
Popping up to the top of the ocean
And you say "Well, here I am, it's me again"
So this is very important to be able to observe
With DMT the reason it's so fascinating
Is because the input, the content
Seems to be almost entirely confined to the visual cortex
It's something that you look at
And it comes toward you and it relates to you
There is a weird distortion of body image
But it's small potatoes compared to most of what's going on
And you can't die-thou relationship
So my tastes may be narrower than some people
Some people just like to get fucked up
And they go one way and then another
And a few reds and a shot of this
And a hit of that
So there's really nothing to be frightened about
As to else
I mean it sounds like they could be evens if they want to be
They could be
They're demonic
They've never done anything bad to me
It's that they're humor
It's like being trapped in a Bugs Bunny cartoon
I mean we all know how funny a Bugs Bunny cartoon is
But have you noticed that the humor is all based on explosions
Falling anvils and agony
And so imagine if you were actually in a Bugs Bunny cartoon
You know? I mean it's a parody of that situation
I don't know the vibe of these creatures is very strange
They're knowledge holders
Like I've often thought that what they were was mean traders
Because they had the same feeling that I associated with the Indian hashish traders
They're mean traders
When they spread out all this stuff in front of you
And they're saying, "Look at this, look at this, these marvelous jeweled objects"
These are things they're selling
They want to trade
They're asking, "What have you got?"
You know?
"What can you show us?"
"Your Rolex, your fountain pen, your political beliefs, your sexual orientation"
You know?
"What do you want to trade?"
And so they're sort of like cosmic pack rats
You know? Pack rats will take something but they always leave something
Have you ever dealt with pack rats?
Oh, pack rats are fascinating because if one finds you
It will leave an object in trade for whatever it takes
And the trick is yours
So you give it a paper clip
It gives you a fountain pen
And there are stories in the gold country of Colorado and California
Of people having relationships with pack rats
Where they were trading its thumbtacks
And it was bringing them gold nuggets
Until, you know, they had enough gold nuggets
That they could leave off trading with varmints and get a life
[laughter]
Yes
[inaudible]
Do psychedelics always make people kinder and gentler?
Do they make us kinder and gentler?
Well, that's an interesting question
I mean, as I get older I ask it slightly differently of myself
I ask the question, you know, if this stuff is so great
You know, what is so great about us
That we're any different from anybody else?
Or are we just like holy rollers and Daoists and Hasidic Jews
And everybody else who thinks they've found the final answer
What is so great about it?
The answer to your question is I don't think so
I think of the Yanomami culture
Certainly from the exterior this looks like a fairly brutal culture
The men, it's the only culture where DMT is a regularly abused drug
And the men blasted up each other's nostrils with these hollow tubes
And then the name of the game is two guys square off
You plant your feet flat on the ground
And the guy who goes first hits the other guy as hard as he can
With the flat of his palm in the chest
And the game is to knock the person over
So you absorb this blow and then it's your turn
And you get up and you do it
And these two guys, totally to the four winds
Will stand and do this until somebody is knocked off their pins
So then you ask them what's going on here
You know, is this like the Super Bowl?
Is this fun for you guys?
And they explain that they have demons that live in their chest
And they collect these demons on their psychedelic trips
And the more demons you have the harder it is to knock you over
So they're doing this thing
But they're also lacerating each other with clubs and this sort of thing
I think that it's fouled up
I have the faith that if you have
Psychedelic religious ritual
In combination with group sex
In a small tribal group whose economy is based on nomadic pastoralism
That then it will be very very hard for these people to maintain a neurotic lifestyle
But that if you interfere with any of this
Then you'll get anxiety
And so you have psychedelic cultures
But the Yanomamo, this is a culture of male dominance
And sexual anxiety
And you know, a lot of tweaked stuff
But I think that the main thing is to be
That the cultural group must take the psychedelic frequently enough
That the ego does not form
And that the specific manifestation of ego that you want to watch out for
Is concern for male paternity
That once it's gone that far it's lost
And then because then there's male male rivalry for women and territory
Yeah
I'd like to go back to the Irish elves for a second
My wife came across an article, she's Irish
And came across an article last year
Drawing between the lighthouses
And the possibility of seasonal ceremonial use of shrooms
And we sent you that article
I remember that article
And I was wondering if you followed that up
In light of your having written the introduction to the...
The Celtic faith
Or the fairy faith in Celtic countries
Well, it would be very interesting to prove
Psilocybin use in ancient Ireland
That people who have been to places like Ionia
And like that say they're just overrun with mushrooms
And yet it's not explicit in any Celtic source
Um...
There's a lot of psilocybin in Europe
I mean I was surprised
I thought that it occurred rarely
And so you could make the argument that it was possibly there
But last year when I did a speaking tour of Germany
And we were from Hamburg, clear down to Munich
And into Switzerland
Everywhere there were mushrooms
And we would talk like we're talking here
And have lunch recess
And people would come back two hours later
With small grocery bags full of these things
Well, I don't understand the peculiar...
There must be something we don't quite grok
About why the mushroom image is taboo
Maybe because it looks like a penis
But that doesn't really sound right to me
But why is it so rarely portrayed
In all these areas where it must have been used?
For instance in the northwest coast of Oregon and Washington
There are something like 22 indigenous species of psilocybe
No anthropological record of mushroom use
By the northwest coast Indians
Who were clearly paying attention
I mean when you look at their carving and painting
They were paying attention
Where is the record of the mushroom use?
In ancient Ireland
And throughout the Celtic area into Germany and Bohemia
No visible use of...
In the old Europe that Marjoram Bhutas talks about
Again, a prohibition of the image
So this is puzzling
Not easy to understand
I would like to believe that in Africa
15,000 years ago
The primary religion of humanity
Was goddess worshipping pastoralism based on sacramental use of mushrooms
But again, the physical evidence is just a few petroglyphs
Drawings on stone
And it hasn't been
It isn't a strongly proven case
So it's not well understood
It's hard to believe that the Irish weren't mixed up in this somehow
I mean it seems so basic to the Irish soul
Yeah
How many grams of mushrooms do you recommend taking?
Five dried grams
And you should weigh it
You should invest in a little scale and weigh it
Because people eyeball it
And they inevitably choose much less
Than is the correct amount
And if you're taking fresh mushrooms
You should take like 60 grams
Because it dries down by a factor of more than 9 to 1
You're into cubensis?
Cubensis
We're always talking about stapharia cubensis
Because that's the one people cultivate
Some of the wild ones are stronger
Can be taken in smaller amounts
But I think it's good to take stapharia cubensis
Because then you know what you're getting
Because some of these small philosophies
Look physically very much like gallerina species
That have irreversible liver destructive toxins in them
So if you eat a gallerina
You'll have a very bad experience
Or maybe a very good experience
But none of us will ever know
Speaking of mushrooms
How about the Amanita muscaria?
I've heard both come on from that
Well this is a very controversial mushroom
It's very synthetic wide
You all know this mushroom
The red one with the white dots on top of it
The toadstool of European mythology
It's used in Siberia and places like that
As an intoxicant
And Gordon Wasson thought that it was the basis of soma
But it now looks like it probably isn't the basis of soma
And that it's very variable
Seasonally variable
Geographically variable
Genetically variable
So you never know what you're going to get
It's very hard to obtain a reliable desirable intoxication
From that mushroom
It's another one of these
There are a lot of these things that are sickening
And distorting
And that after you've gone through a night with them
You feel reborn because you're so damn glad you lived through it
But they're not really psychedelic
Any other questions?
I gave up the dead ancestors
Oh yeah what about
I saw recently some news that stated
Just because they're dead doesn't mean they're smart
That's because of an IQ test you can give
An IQ test to your ancestors?
That's what the entity has been channeled
Oh that's great we've needed that for a long time
Just the simple test for grammatical correctness would eliminate
Another thing I was going to say was that I had some experience with ketamine
And I did not find it at all distorted
My central observer self
The way you talked about vitura
And I think at the height of a DMT trip
We wouldn't be able to do much with a fire in the house either
I mean when you take a site like that powerful
Ketamine or DMT
You make sure you put yourself in a situation
Where you don't have to worry about the physical surroundings
True
But the thing that I noticed about ketamine
Is the first thing that happens
Is you stop worrying
The very first thing
Before there's any manifestation of any symptom whatsoever
You end up
Ah what the hell
And that's the beginning
But it's all that you're not paying attention like you should
The first couple of times I did it I was scared that I was dying
Well I think it also depends on the dose
How much did you do?
The fifth milligrams goes to the third milligram
Yeah well see I didn't do it that many times
And each time I did it quite a bit
And it was reality obliterating for sure
I've noticed that people who get into ketamine
Tend to dose downward rather than upward
Tend to settle in somewhere around 50
And this is probably
I shouldn't even be speaking about it
Because I don't know what 50 is like
I know what 150 is like
With the DMT the main thing is
At first you think my god how could anyone ever retain
Or remember any of this
But it's really that you have to learn to control your own astonishment
That it's like having a heart attack of wonder
And after you've had the experience three or four times
You just learn to be cool
You say you know I'm not going to give way to a bunch of
Exclamations about how amazing this is
And then and they tell you to do that
They say don't start raving about how amazing it is
Pay attention to what we're doing
We know that you're blown out
We know that you're amazed
Yes yes now pay attention to this
And then they try to convey this linguistic thing
This visible language
And I don't understand you know
What this is all about
Has this always been what they've tried to convey
Is the message always the same
Is there a new urgency about visible language
Or is it you know how much of the message
Is already present in me
Is it a message tailored for me
Like this question of whether or not these things are
Then you get into questions like what ancestors are they
Like I do not feel when I break into the DMT space
That this is my dead mother
Or my grandparents
I feel that it's more that it's just sort of local spirits
Grandmother became a self-transforming female
Yes who would have thought
A little white haired old lady
And then sometimes I think that the reason it's so hair-raising
Is because the chief soul in this weird place
Is actually your soul
And that the hair-raising aspect is
It's not just any dead person
Or a dead relative
It's you dead
And that's the one thing
That causes the whole thing to shimmy
And fall apart
And go into a tailspin of cognitive dissonance
When you realize that the entity you're dealing with
Is yourself beyond the grave
Then you just flood out
In the amazement, wonder, horror and disbelief department
And lose the focus and come down
Back here
[inaudible]
Yes
[inaudible]
Small people
[inaudible]
Well five grams is what I think would
Destroy most of the resistances of a 145 pound person
A person who weighed 90 pounds
Could take far less
But a person who took
Who weighed 90 pounds
Who took five grams
Should be in no physical danger
It is, you can play with it
But at higher doses
It gets stranger and stranger
And stranger and stranger
And anything above eight
You're definitely a pioneer
As far as I'm concerned
But it's a good point
If you weigh 90 pounds
You maybe don't want to chow down
On five grams ago
But to do more rather than less
Because otherwise you can miss the point
You know
[inaudible]
Like I took too little
And it was almost more horrifying
Than if I just knocked myself over
Yeah well I think where the trouble comes
Is in the sub-threshold doses
Where you're neither fish nor fowl
And you're thrashing around in it
And you get into these loops
Of psychological
Abrasive psychological self-examination
And stuff like that
And what you want to do is
Blast through all that
It's hard
Can you sing through that?
Yeah you can sing through that
Is that one of the things you sing through?
Uh huh
Yeah
Singing and cannabis are my techniques
And together seem to be able to move it around
This concludes Side A
[silence]
You mentioned that you mustn't alone in the dark
What is the effect of being with people
Who are either not there as well
Or participants in the
Oh well for me I mean I'm
You have to understand I mean I'm a double Scorpio
And a kind of reclusive type anyway
The reason I don't particularly like tripping with people
Is because I just worry
I'm a worrier
And if I'm stoned and somebody else is stoned
Then I worry
And I listen to their breathing
And I wonder
And I wonder how they're doing
And I wonder if I should ask how they're doing
And I just lose all spontaneity
And I become completely the victim
Of my imagined concern for this other person
Well then if there's
And then the other thing that happens is
People are the weirdest objects in the universe
And if you're stoned
And you come upon another person stoned
I mean they can just unleash
Something you could never have imagined or conceived of
I remember
I think I learned this lesson the hard way in India
But years ago once at Sarnath
And it happened many times but this was typical
Sarnath is the place where the Buddha taught his first
Sermon after attaining enlightenment
He walked from Bodh Gaya to Sarnath
So I took masculine there
With these two women who were friends of mine
And it's all nicely green and sculpted
And we were sitting there under a tree
And I swear, you know, 500 yards away
There were these two Indian guys
Walking across my field of vision
And I was sitting there and I was loaded
And I was watching the traceries
And then I looked out across my field of vision
And I saw these two Indian guys
Stop dead in the center of my field of vision
And then they said something to each other
And then they turned 90 degrees
So they were now facing me
And they began walking toward me
And I was horrified
And I looked down
I said I can't, I was so horrified that I said
I can't believe this is happening
I refuse to believe this is happening
I will just look at the ground in front of me like this
So I started looking at the ground in front of me
And I looked and looked and looked and looked
Until two pairs of brown feet
Appeared in my field of vision
And then I looked up at these guys
And they had caught the vibe
And they wanted to know what was going on
And several experiences like this
Caused me to believe that you should really bury it deep
Before you take it into public
The other thing I've noticed is
If you're stoned in a confined space
There's a certain amount of control of synchronicity
There's rustling in the corners
And batting at the windows and so forth
But this you can handle
But if you take it out into public
God, it's just absolutely uncontrollable
I mean you could be struck by a meteorite
You could be abducted by extraterrestrials
A safe could fall on you
Anything could happen
Because the statistical disruption of ordinary probability
Is so great
[inaudible]
What did I say?
Oh, I remember what I said
I looked up and I said
I cannot be interrogated
It was good but it didn't work
How long have you been in this place?
You're coming from which place?
No, what I found in India was
People were telepathic
But it didn't make them like you any better
It just gave them a fantastic kind of in
But I think group psychedelic taking is very promising
And people who can do it
Groups that can do it and stick with it over years
Log amazing experiences
But it's very hard
Because what immediately emerges
If you have a group of people doing this stuff
It will veer off in some weird direction
One person will get a "funny idea"
And then the funny idea
Everybody polarizes for and against the funny idea
And then they have to decide
Well, you know, they're losing
So and so's losing their minds
They're in too deep with this
No, no, this is the answer
And we're moving
And just, you know, and quickly cognitive dissonance builds up
And it's very, very hard
I have a correspondent in the Midwest
A group of psychiatrists who over six years
Took mushrooms once a month together
And they went through amazing contortions
Of wife trading and not speaking
And speaking and denouncing and embracing
And just because they were, you know
Because it just unleashes this stuff
And then it crawls around
So I prefer to do it by myself
And then, you know, get all combed and pinned back together
Before I present myself to the troops in the morning
Because, you know, in the height of the thing
You could proclaim anything
You know it's possible for a group of people
Who have been fairly experienced with psychedelics
To get together wanting to do this
Very wonderful group
Work
A telepathic thing
And to create what they think it is
To try to anticipate what might be things
That would pull it apart
That would unplug one
It's hard to anticipate
I mean I've really found that the way the mushroom works
Is it reads you perfectly
Much better than you can read yourself
And then it comes at you with the one thing
That you are vulnerable to
Because it knows you like an open book
And can lead you practically any direction that it wants
But I think group work is interesting
And should be pursued
And couple work is very interesting
And should be pursued
I'm very conservative
I mean my approach to it is
I basically turn it on
And then I back off and watch
That's all I ever do
And I've seen
I don't have the magical mentality
I don't want to get something
Or take control of someone
Or a situation for good or ill
But people who do make great progress
In all of these areas
I mean people who want to design electronic circuits
Or play Bach on the piano
But I don't do anything
I'm interested kind of in the essence of the thing
What it is, the ding on sich, the thing in itself
And that's why I don't listen to music
This horrifies some people
So you don't listen to music?
No, I mean I have listened to music
I know what it does to music
It makes it the best thing in the world
But without music
It also can do that
And so I sit in silent darkness
And I maintain that's where the essence of the thing is
Then it's not coloured by sound or light
Or expectation
I'm trying to see beyond the mask
See what this thing is in itself
For itself
Anybody else? Anything else?
How about food?
In terms of the proximity to the trip?
A lot of people like to fast
I don't particularly say you should fast
I just say you should have an empty stomach
Five hours without eating is good
You should just be cleaned out
Bring a certain amount of attention and respect to it
And it's very kind to beginners
The complexity comes later
In the unfolding of the kinks of the personality
But I think it's very gentle to beginners
What does the Ayahuasca diet mean?
You mean actually what does it consist of?
It's no sugar, no alcohol, no salt
Sexual abstinence
It's basically a diet of manioc and certain fish
And I don't think many greens
Is that it, Ken?
What about bananas?
Bananas, plantinos
It's probably analyzed nutritionally
It's probably a serotonin-loaded diet
Because of the large amount of plantinos in it
But it's a bland diet
It's just setting you up
To be sensitive, I think
To the uptake of the alkaloids
That's an MAO-inhibiting
That's an ayahuasca
Ayahuasca works through inhibition of MAO
Good point
You see, normally DMT would be destroyed in the gut
But if you inhibit monoamine oxidase somehow
Then it passes through the gut
And it's absorbed and passes into the blood
This was not known by Western pharmacology
Until the mid-1950s
But it's always been known in the Amazon
So the strategy, you see, what ayahuasca is
Really is a slow-release DMT trip
Where you take a plant that contains DMT
And you combine it with an MAO inhibitor
And then when you take these together
The DMT slowly releases
And you get the equivalent of a DMT flash
That's stretched out over about an hour and a half
And so you can watch it more carefully
And some people say, you know, that I overstress the visual side of things
That all kinds of things go on on psychedelic drugs
Insights, conceptual breakthroughs
Weird distortions of body image
And this sort of thing
And this is all true
But to my mind the visual thing is the most striking
Because it is so other
It is so highly organized
So demonstrably the product of intelligence
I mean, it's not a feeling
Some weird feeling
You know, nausea or sub-threshold poisoning
Or all of these things
These are feelings
But it's simply the release of understanding
And visually, somehow visually processed understanding
In addition to the other three possibilities
The souls of the dead and the next terrestrial
Would you entertain the idea that
What we're saying might be simply constructs from the subconscious
Yes, well that's the other possibility
Carl Jung had this wonderful phrase
In talking about elves and fairies
And he said
Autonomous psychic components
Escape from the ego's control
And present themselves as independent beings
Well, that's just a description of a pretty twisted around state of mind
It's the idea, you know, that you see the self in the mirror
And then you bring the mirror down and shatter it
And suddenly there are hundreds of selves
Each fragment of the mirror reflects a self
This would be a conservative theory of what these things are
Except that they don't look very much like the self
The shock in DMT is
If this is myself
Then I don't know who I am
But yeah, one thing I thought of in an effort to explain it
Is that they are fractally parts of the personality
That an elf is, you know, you put ten elves together
And you have a personality
Or something like that
And so these elves are literally autonomous psychic components
That have broken free from the control of the ego
We say we've fallen to pieces
Always talking about the psychedelic as a boundary dissolver
Well, maybe what happens when you smoke DMT is
The boundary dissolves so quickly
That you can say of the situation
That's me all over
Because you're literally bouncing off the walls
And visible to yourself
The illusion that you are stitched together within a body
Has been shattered
And you're several or multiple personality components
Are jumping around the room
I think the most extreme case of that
That I ever saw
Was once I used to smoke
I don't recommend this
But in my vanished youth
I used to smoke DMT
And I smoked the DMT
And it was wild
It went on for a long long time
It was very intense anyway
And suddenly right in the middle of this trip
This woman came back from Easter vacation
Came charging up onto the front porch of this house
And threw open the front door
And ran into my bedroom door
And started beeping on my door furiously
Well, being a double Scorpio and secretive anyway
I just was like had a heart attack
And I jumped off the bed
Right out of this DMT flash
I jumped out
And I landed on my feet in the middle of this room
And something about moving so suddenly
Had like shattered the distinction between the two continua
And I carried it all into the room with me
And so the room was then filled with elves
And they were hanging off my arms
And spinning me around
And there was this geometric object in the room
That was spinning and clicking
And every time it would click
It would hurl a plastic chit
Across the room that had a letter in an alien language
Written on it
And these elves were screaming and bouncing off the walls
This machine was spinning in the air
These chits were ricocheting off the walls
And I was trying to deal with Rosemary in the middle of this
And you know, it was just, it was a too muchness
It was a case of seeing too deeply into it
And you have, you know, too many of those stacked up
And then you become reluctant
And this is why I'm very cautious with it
The notion of having enough chutzpah or will
Or something to want to try and use this stuff
I can hardly imagine using it
I mean, every time I encounter it
My wish is to not be destroyed by it
And the idea of using it for anything
Is to seem so I can blaspheme, you know
And probably is blaspheming
But probably a good way to get cut down to size
Yeah
I thought you were talking about how
Certain times part can last other times
Right
And in the beginning of this weekend
We were talking about the Akkent revival
We're going towards a through
And I thought you were talking about
Going back to the time of the city of Chautaujuyuk
You know, that 30,000 years ago
Chautaujuyuk, uh huh
Could you say a few words about that?
I mean, does that connect?
Well, no, that's the basic notion
That somehow our future lies in our past
Right
And shamanism
Yeah
Well, the particular past that I wanted to concentrate on
Was this period of time
After the melting of the last glacier 20,000 years ago
And for the 10,000 years following that
When there were pastoral populations in Africa
And leaving Africa
That had ecological balance
And this shamanic doorway to nature
See, at every, oh the computer isn't here
But at every glaciation
Human populations were bottled up in Africa
During the time when the ice pack was thick
Nobody was getting out
But only the last time
Were the people, was pastoralism developed
In the intervening period
So it was 20,000 years ago
Those people leaving Africa were herders
Of domesticated cattle
And all previous radiations out of Africa
Had been hunter gatherers
But the Minoan civilization was much more recent
Yeah, the Minoan civilization
See, Chautaujuyuk ended in 6500 BC
But what's interesting is
This is when you get the earliest Minoan settlements
And they carry the pottery motifs
And building styles of central Anatolia
To Crete
So it appears that what happened was
Chautaujuyuk was like the last outpost
Of this goddess culture
And when these wheeled chariot Indo-European folks came down
The survivors of that
Actually went to Crete
And Crete became this weird institutionalized backwater
Where literally for three millennia
The fossilized social forms of the previous matrilineal society
Were kept intact
While on Asia Minor
On the mainland
It all became about kingship
Male lines of descent and all that
It wasn't actually until that turning point
At the top of the wave in 980 BC
That the last vestiges of this goddess culture
Were crushed in Crete
And even then you see the strain of mystical
Of deep psychedelic mysticism
That enters Greek religion
Is all imported from Crete
The northern Thracian strain in Greek religion
Is rational and airy
And oriented toward physical space
But out of Crete came
You know rites three four five thousand years old
And it was always said even up until classical times
That the rites that were celebrated in secret
At Eleusis
Were celebrated openly at Heracleion
And at Gnosis
So that's the connection
My fantasy about all this is
You see Chautauhiayuk represents such an advanced civilization
Over anything else existing
And it can be traced back a thousand years to Jericho
The people who built Jericho
Built a round tower there
That was the absolute glory of the engineering world
Of eight thousand BC
And it was a grain storage tower
But then these Jericho people
It's hard to trace where they came from
What I think happened
Is that when you look at the stratigraphy
Of the Nile Valley
You discover that actually there weren't people
In the Nile Valley
Much before 10,500 BC
Then suddenly these people appear
Who are called Natufein
And they build under the overhanging lips of cliffs
And have a certain style of fetal burial in a honey pot
And certain other characteristics
Natufeins and they appear out of nowhere
Well anybody who studied them
Has wanted to connect them to the culture of old Europe
That Maria Gambutis talks about
Simply based on the fact
That they were so culturally advanced
That the bias of all these scholars
Is to say well they must have come from the Balkans
But when you look at them as a cultural horizon
You see
To my mind
That they are unmistakably African
And that when you go to the Tisselli Plateau
In southern Algeria
You find the same style of building
Of living under the lips of caves
And this same coarse-grained black pottery
Called Sudanese ware
The pottery
The animal motifs
The fixation on the vulture
The jackal and the cow
These are all African animals that occur at Chatao
Seems to suggest that there was actually
A sweep of African civilization
Out of Africa into the Middle East
Around 10,000 B.C.
And these people built Jericho a thousand years after that
And settled southern Anatolia a thousand years after that
Well this is
What this suggests then
Is that you could go out to the Tisselli Plateau
With sufficient resources
And conduct an archaeological survey
And the ultimate payoff in this fantasy
Is that you would unearth
The archaeological equivalent of Eden
In other words
You would discover the Ur spot
From which the Chatao civilization came
The site of this mushroom
Using goddess cattle
Civilization
And when you read the accounts of the Tisselli Plateau
There's every reason to think
That this strategy would work
It's a wind swept sandstone escarpment
And Henri Flote who did the preliminary exploration out there
Said that in these Arroyos
Where the sand has been cleared away by the wind
There would be neolithic stone chippings
And detritus sometimes up to half a meter thick
Indicating you know thousands and thousands of years
Of continuous habitation
When this was all green
There is an enormous unexcavated tail out there
That has never been dated
But is just carried on the archaeological surveys
As presumed pre-Islamic
It's enormous
So digging out there
Might be very
A very useful thing to do
It's from that area
That we get these nine thousand year old images
Of shamans with mushrooms
Sprouting out of their bodies
Shamans carrying mushrooms over their heads
And running in long
Chains with strange geometric
Motifs trailing along beside them
So it would be a kind of recovery
I think archaeology will play a big role
In the archaic revival
That part of our cultural dilemma
And our political infantilism
Comes from the fact that we don't know any history
So we're easily led
And we don't even really understand the history of the 20th century
I mean you know
You ask somebody who Joseph Goebbels was
And they think he served in the Nixon cabinet
I mean and so
Hardly to speak of who was Suleiman the Magnificent
And just exactly what was Frederick Barbarossa's role
In European history and so forth and so on
But recovering this
Is like waking up
Gaining control
And you know I said yesterday
It's only been 1500
Generations of people
That have walked us into this dilemma
But
The archaic revival is a huge paradigm shift
You can imagine
Remember the example I gave about
The shift from the Renaissance
From the medieval to the Renaissance
Which really was a giving up of the universal power
Of the church
The philosophical certitude
Of giving your allegiance
To the Holy Father in Rome
And setting out into
You know the pure existential universe
I mean Marcello Ficino said
Man is to be the measure of all things
Well this sounds like old hat in 1990
But in 1480
You know this was such a dizzying notion
That it can hardly be imagined
You know Giordano Bruno went to the stake
Was burned at the stake for insisting
That the universe was infinite in all directions
You know he said no
The stars and planets go on to infinity
And they just said you know
This is off the wall
Only a demon could inspire a thought like this
But the transition that we're asked to make
That was a transition you see
From the certitude of dogma
To secular existentialism
The transition that we're being asked to make
Is somewhat similar but to my mind
Deeper, more challenging, more profound
It's the shift from scientific certitude
Scientific certitude
To a complete embracing of non-closure
To actually begin
It's a kind of maturity
You know what we're being asked to do
Is to grow up
And realize that you know
There ain't no free lunch
There aren't always happy endings
Not every story ends with the German shepherd
Running in and licking grandpa's face
And everybody laughing
And so forth and so on
You know hard truths
And this lack of closure thing
I mean I feel it in myself
And I assume you know that
Ontogeny recapitulates and so forth
So that you know the struggle to become a real
Human being
Is the struggle to give up
Having it actually make any sense ultimately
Where I think it was of all people
Robert Frost who said
The secret of a happy life
Is learning to enjoy people you don't approve of
Well you know
There's something
What that means is
You're surrendering to life
You're just saying
You know it's bigger than I am
I may not like drag queens
But there they are
And I should get used to it
I should make the adjustment
This kind of thing
In other words
Recognizing the complexity of the situation
And science has been like a long
Centuries long bender
To exercise precisely
Exorcise
Precisely this kind of uncertainty
From life
And you know
To reduce it all to
Atoms blindly running under the control of
Mathematically describable fields of force
The problem is
All the higher order phenomena
Sociological, political, aesthetic
Human organizational
Got shoved off to one side
And just sort of festered there
For a long time
While technology perfected itself
Mass production
Mass media
Information transfer
But the human dimension lagged
And now there is this tremendous
Imbalance
Between like the technological descriptive power of the culture
And its moral and ethical power
To direct itself
Toward any kind of rational goal
Well when this happens in a society
Or even in a personality
You know you can sort of make a union model of this
You get what's called compensatory phenomena
Or at least that's what it used to be called
Means eruptions of material from the unconscious
That is organized and constellated
Like a message
Like an attention claiming thing
In a person, in a personality
It ruptures as a symptom
It may be an attention getting symptom
To then bring other people into the care giving loop
Or something like that
In a society like our own
A scientific society
It takes the form of the irrational
Appearing in strange forms
A good example of this in the past
Is the birth of Christianity
In the center of the late Roman Empire
Or the early middle Roman Empire
Where you know the people who were administering the world at that time
Were Romans educated by Greeks
Who were epicurean atomists
Not Platonists, not followers of Heraclitus or Pythagoras
Or any of the flashy folks we're into
They were democriti anatomists
Rationalists, materialists
Would have been very comfortable in a modern chemical engineering company
And they could not conceive
That the irrational could hold any threat to their world
Meanwhile they had dark skinned servants
In the kitchens and in the gardens
Jews, Greeks, Phoenicians
People brought from Eastern Mediterranean
And among these people specifically the Jews
This rumor began to tear loose
About a Galilean politician
Who had somehow tweaked the Romans
And then risen from the dead
Well any Roman administrator listening to
His illiterate cook or gardener babble out this story
Would just, you know, think
These folks is getting stranger every day
But what was actually happening, you know
Was a message was being enunciated
Which within 50 years would be hammering at the gate
Well, make it 90 years
Would be hammering at the gates of Rome
With all the power of an invading army
In a similar way
The kinds of eruptions from the unconscious
That characterize the 20th century
Are trying to serve a similar function
The, well I don't know where you want to put it
But like for instance the eruption of the beast man
In the episodes of persecution
That happened in Europe during the 20th century
Persecution of Jews and Gypsies and Slavs
This, you know, was tremendously shocking
To the sensibilities of so-called civilized people
Because people said
My God, we thought that ended with Frederick Barbarossa
We thought that ended with Nero
How can 20th century people
The neatly clipped and manicured cities
Of prosperous intellectual Germany
How could it spawn a thing like this
Well, you know, the answers are complex and multi-leveled
But on a, from a very broad perspective
What is happening is
The unconscious is erupting into history
Leaping onto the stage of history
Claiming the undivided attention of people
In a way that surrealism
Which was a limp-wristed artistic movement
By comparison to fascism
Never could
Similarly, you know, you get that under control
The beast is supposedly suppressed
By making notice a pact with a greater beast
That a demon can be summoned from the heart of matter
With the purpose of wasting the cities of Germany
But then it arrives too late for that
But then it's good for the Japanese
So it's this opera
About how evil begets greater evil
And people are reaching for ever greater weapons
Then the intrusion of the atomic bomb into history
Sort of halts that cycle
Everyone stands back
And goes for a middle class existence
And suddenly the skies of the planet
Are filled with the craft of meddling extraterrestrials
Who are obligingly dying in the desert
And turning up on blocks of ice for Eisenhower to inspect
And all, you know, this whole crazy story
Well, clearly what this is
Is, you know, the unconscious will not go away
In the 20th century
Now the wheat fields of England lay down
In hieroglyphic patterns
To try and shake awake
The dreaming primates
It's as though the whole of nature, you know
Is infused with a linguistic intent
To communicate
And I think this is one of the things you learn on psychedelics
That everything has a story
Everything has a lesson
And it's not abstract or remote or removed
I mean, to the degree that you can hold your ego aside
Nature can teach you almost anything you want to know
I mean, you can learn hydrology by staring into a mud puddle, you know
I mean, it is all happening right there
But ego is a very subtly interfering factor
I always think, you know, in my own experience
At one time in the Amazon
When I was at my most illuminated
I could walk into the jungle
And invite butterflies
To come down and settle on my outstretched hands
Like St. Francis of Assisi, you know
And I would do this
And it would bring tears of joy and affirmation to my eyes
And then it would go on and on
And the tears of joy and affirmation would clear from my eyes
And in the midst of this pure unadulterated ecstasy
A tiny thought would form
Which was, wouldn't it be nice to show this to somebody else
So they could see how great I am
Oh, yes
So then, you know
I scurried back to the camp
Gather up a skeptical colleague
Bring them back to the clearing
And march out into the clearing without stretched hands
To just have nothing happen
Except people just turn away
And just
My God, you know, what an embarrassment you've become
That it's all going to end like this
Better you should be eaten by termites
It's a better story
So, you know, it's weird
I mean, Tao is like that
You can't push it, you can't use it
Somebody asked me once
Was I worried that the mushroom could be used for evil somehow
And actually early on this occurred to me
And I put it to the mushroom
And it basically said, you know
It's, you can't grasp it
It isn't even there
If you have wrong intent
You can't even perceive it
It's very selective
And it must be so
Because one of the puzzles
For me being in the communication business
Is how it spreads
How the tree of information spreads
Where it's tolerated
Where it's repressed
Where it's embraced
It's very interesting
You may have noticed
Mushrooms get extraordinary good press
Or none at all
Even in the height of drug war hysteria
The image of mushrooms is largely neutral
Unformed in any direction
Otherwise viewed as rather comical
Harmless, humorous
It is somehow hardwired into our consciousness
Connected into an archetype
That we are inherently friendly toward
As primates
Probably this has to do with this deep food programming
That went on for a long, long time
We literally cannot bite the hand that feeds us
So we have a kind of intellectual blind spot to this
Nevertheless, of course
It is a highly repressed schedule 1 drug
Viewed in the same category as heroin, cocaine
And what have you
This is because it has
"No recognized medical application"
I don't know
It depends on what you think of as mental health
I would argue that it's an enzyme for the imagination
Without which, as the sign says on the blackboard
You're not yourself
I don't know who wrote that up there
But they must have heard an old, old tape of mine
This was a graffiti on a wall in Cali in Colombia
Without this you are not yourself
Elf, the elf, the self
Please continue to tape 5
Mystic Fire Video and Audio proudly presents Terrence McKenna.
History ends in green.
This is tape six of a six cassette series.
Well, what else is hanging for anybody this morning?
How about healing using methods, techniques?
Well, shamanism, we tend to lose sight of the fact that for the people who actually practice shamanism as a day-to-day thing,
healing is what it's always all about.
And the shaman isn't making these journeys for his own education or so forth, it's always to heal.
I don't really see the mushrooms as specifically a cure in the ordinary sense for X, Y, or Z condition.
It's more that in the psychedelic state, this is kind of hard to articulate and sounds like mumbo jumbo and maybe it is,
but I've noticed that in the psychedelic state, it's as though within the parameters of the body,
the ordinary laws of physics are somewhat in suspension.
And there is a great deal to be learned by somebody about touch and light and sound, especially sound, I think.
Sound to me is the key to understanding and going deeper with the psychedelic thing, not only in the healing modality.
And in that case, it's about sound directed into the body because we do have extraordinary senses on psilocybin and on these other tryptamines.
And I'm not mystical or wooly-eyed about this and I don't make any claims about what senses.
But if you sit down with a person or a watermelon, for that matter, when you're stoned and sing into it,
the quality of the hallucination is such that there is a way of thinking about it where you could say,
"This is an acoustical hologram of the interior of their body."
I don't say that. I just say, "My goodness, isn't it strange that I seem to be able to see the inside of the watermelon when I'm doing this?"
Touch. I'm not an aura man under ordinary circumstances.
I'm not sensitive to these things that you have to be sensitive to.
If you have to be sensitive to something, that's not for me because I'm basically insensitive.
But nevertheless, there do seem to be qualities of density to the energy around the body.
And I suppose, see, I'm not really an experimentalist in these areas.
Like, I don't immediately grab somebody and start kneading them and working them over.
I tend to just sit and watch.
But I do see all these possibilities. Sound has such...
I mean, sound does pierce, you know, non-dense objects and return an echo.
And we may have neurological processing capacity that we're unaware of or that is ordinarily suppressed.
For instance, I am very able... I have quite a good ability to navigate in darkness.
I always have been able to do this. It doesn't seem that strange to me.
I mean, I'm pretty good at it to the point where there have been times in the Amazon when I've gone for water at night
and literally forgotten to take the flashlight and gotten there and gotten halfway back before I noticed that, you know...
It's a combination of projective memory, so forth and so on.
I noticed in the Amazon when I was quite keyed up that I had a sense that I've never heard anybody talk about.
It was a kind of geometric sense that told me the shortest distance between any two points in terms of energy expenditure.
It was something which I could see that aboriginal people would just absolutely have to have.
It's a whole thing about following the edges of ridges and never descending unless you have to.
And always keeping to the high ground. And my mind would just tell me this stuff, draw these lines through space.
The fact that ayahuasca, which makes possible this visual language that seems to me the evolutionary compass for language and culture,
the fact that the compounds which allow that occur in the ordinary brain suggests that we could be as close as a one gene mutation away
from different styles of neural processing. And we don't know to what degree technology pushes these things around.
Did the people of manuscript culture have the same serotonin ratios as we have?
How much, to what degree is culture a chemical feedback mechanism operating on us as a species?
I mean, we're like fish trying to discover water. These are fairly subtle issues, but the payoff is being able to design our way toward a more humane culture.
Because what the psychedelics are teaching on one level, I think, is that our prison and our palace is language.
And that today we have just allowed it to grow like Topsy, because it was like an unconscious function.
But it no longer need be an unconscious function. After all, we are now writing languages like crazy for computers,
defining for them what concepts they can and can't think, what forms of logic, what algebras shall and shall not be permitted.
We need to also think about taking control of the design process of language.
Up to this point, the only people who have gotten onto this principle have been fascists of one sort or another.
Either Joseph Goebbels and his crowd, or advertising weasels, or people like that.
Everyone else has been sort of the victim of the linguistic agenda of those cliques.
You know, it's like the Bob Dylan song, "The strong men make the rules for the wise men and the fools."
Well, if the rules are syntactical rules, then nobody even realized, acted, and held up.
Because you can't think any other way, so why do you have this itch that you can't seem to ever scratch?
Well, it's because it's freedom calling out to you from the unconscious.
I don't really talk about all this with any sense of urgency.
One of the issues that sometimes comes up, often comes up in these groups is,
you know, am I saying it's all okay? Is it all okay? Is there a political agenda? What should be done?
And, you know, it was Mahatma Gandhi who said, "What you do has very little importance, and it's very important that you do it."
And I think that's how we have to act.
To each choose a small area, and then act in that limited area with all the existential commitment we can muster.
But not with anxiety, you know.
Anxiety, the Weepo Yang, the Chinese Taoist alchemist said, "Worry is preposterous."
"Worry is preposterous." You don't know enough to worry, you know.
Do liver cells worry? Do skin cells worry?
It's just a complete waste of metabolic energy.
The better thing is to function well in place, and then to wonder, you know.
Wonder is sort of worry without animal anxiety.
But it's living in the light of non-closure.
That, you know, we're not going to get this thing wrestled into a box.
Not positivism, not Islam, not the Kabbalah, no, no.
All these things are very good tries, nice efforts.
We set them on their pedestals in a long row in the Museum of Noetic. Good tries.
But it isn't in that. It's in the moment.
In the recapturing of direct experience.
My publisher in New York for this new line of books he's bringing out has coined the battle cry,
"Take back your mind."
And I think that's a pretty good way of putting it.
Take back your mind, because we have transferred our loyalty to mythical structures.
You know, structures about sexual politics, about what a man is supposed to be, what a woman is supposed to be,
how much money a person is supposed to have, how much art they're supposed to produce,
how many times a week they're supposed to get laid.
We have all these images that we're supposed to live up to.
Very complex, all being sold down to us through a culture whose motivations are very murky and highly suspect.
I mean, culture is not your friend.
You know, all these people who want you to smell good and drive the right car and have your extra facial hair removed.
These are not your friends, these people.
And...
It pays to remember that, you know, that there's a struggle on for loyalty,
that you are much more... you look much better to the institutional structure
if you work hard, consume quietly, choose from the political menu without a lot of fuss and that sort of thing.
But in fact, you know, this kind of business as usual has led to the sort of lethal crisis we're in.
Our real problem...
Well, it's two things which are two sides of the same coin.
It's ego and an inability to emotionally connect with the true outline of the situation.
Because the true outline of the situation is fairly horrendous.
It's that somewhere around 1945, or you name it, but that seems alright,
we began to loot the future as a strategy for survival.
Some kind of ethical norm was shattered.
In the same way that in late... well, in early mercantile civilization,
there was this horrifying moment when even though slavery had been dead for a thousand years,
they realized that if they brought back the wholesale sale and transport of human beings,
they could make millions in sugar.
And it was like the heart of darkness reared up and they went for it.
And our circumstance is somewhat similar.
We have embarked on a similar kind of descent into an ethical dark dimension by looting the future.
And this is going on at a faster and faster rate.
I mean, this current situation in the Middle East, much could be said about it.
But any moral justification seems preposterous.
What's happening is 8% of the world's people use 35% of the world's petroleum
and are ready to blow everybody off the map to keep it that way.
I mean, this is nothing more than a manifestation of junkie psychology on a mass scale.
It's, you know, we're addicted, they've got it, we're happy to pay for it,
but if they won't sell it, we'll break into their house and take it.
Because by God, it will go into our good right arm.
That's the plan.
And, you know, it's the culmination of the whole machine age metaphor.
I mean, this is the golem of metropolis.
This is the robot mind run amok.
This is Frankenstein.
This is Brave New World.
It's a world where lethal habitual activities can nevertheless not be controlled.
And it's a perfect example of culture with lock jaw of the mind.
I mean, we're just going to march off the edge of a cliff, apparently.
Three days ago in the New York Times, the American estimates of casualties
in the first 30 days of successfully invading Kuwait and Baghdad were published.
50,000 American casualties in the first 30 days if we win.
This is the number of people who died in the Vietnam War over the whole stretch of the war.
Well, so then if you win means, you know, standing in the middle of a sea of fire
with 550 million enraged Arabs looking to cut you down.
It's a complete misunderstanding.
And I mention it not only because it looms large in our future.
I mean, I think, you know, we're arranging the deck chairs of the Titanic sitting here talking about this.
It's basically June of 1939 and everyone is planning their summer vacation in the Catskills.
But it's also an example of how these institutions can't save themselves.
I mean, everybody knew in 1973 that this moment would come, that policies needed to be put in place.
A dollar a barrel tax on oil, some minor, minor thing.
But no, it's just a mindset that is self-destructive.
And, you know, the fundamentalists are in anticipation of the end of the world and so forth and so on.
There isn't going to be any end of the world.
There's no easy way out like that, even, and you're hearing this from the prophet of 2012.
All of these fantasies, all of these infantile fantasies will be acted out.
So, you know, if you want your mini apocalypse, you know, you can have it.
And we can bomb Baghdad and gas Tel Aviv and fire the oil sands and kill millions of people on both sides.
And you know what?
It ain't going to bring the guy from Galilee and it ain't going to bring friendly flying saucers from our tourists.
All it's just going to bring is a deeper, bigger mess for the human race to try and clean up.
Anybody who thinks that, you know, you're going to save the world by setting it on fire is going to be sadly...
It's a rare moment for the collectivity to try to anchor itself in larger visions.
You know, the reason human society is haunted by messiahs and tinhorn visionaries preaching on every corner
and people waving little books of different colors is because there is no full development of the individual.
There's this kind of arrested, prolonged adolescence and it's created through institutions.
Institutions are a demonic force in human life because they give permission for us to cease developing
and to put our loyalty behind some weird creed that has been worked out usually by a bunch of guys wearing dresses.
And then they, you know, hand it down to the rest of us.
Anarchy and chaos, you know, anarchy is always just, "Oh, surely not, my dear fellow. That's so awful to contemplate."
But what it's coming down to is a real make or break revelation on what is human nature.
You know, the French cartoonist Mobius asks the question in one of his books, "Is man good?"
And he answers it, "Sufficiently seasoned and marinated, yes."
But, you know, we're actually going to get the chance to answer this question
because all barriers to the expression of our will, our vision, our dreams falling away.
And, you know, are we some kind of anti-life, sadomasochistic, suicidal contradiction?
Or, you know, can we break through the millions of years of primate programming and alpha male hierarchical dominance and so forth
to actually uncover the angelic force that we glimpse within ourselves, that we glimpse with the high definition?
I mean, it's really there. If there is a demon in human nature, there is surely equally an angel of equal power.
So then it's just about breaking this free. And I don't think it can happen in the monkey body on the surface of this planet.
Somehow there has to be an act of surrender to our own nature and then concomitant with that,
a kind of making of a peace with nature as it is.
And I don't know how to envision the future. In the past year, you know, there's been a lot of flack about virtual reality.
Does this hold any hope? And, you know, if we think of the virtual reality thing as a wave, six months ago I would say it was very up.
Now enough people have done it to be disappointed and a bunch of people are saying,
"Holy shit, you must be kidding. This is going to save us?" Because it is hokey and crude and mechanistic
and, you know, surrounded by a clique of visionary weirdos with a strange light in their eyes
that you probably wouldn't want to leave alone with your chickens.
But nevertheless, I count myself one of these people.
But still there are some interesting ideas.
The thing is there is going to be some kind of fusion of technology, spirit and mind.
I mean the drugs of the future will be more like computers. The computers of the future will be much more like drugs.
And we're beginning to see this.
When you crawl inside a virtual reality rig and discover, you know, that it's taken $200,000 worth of equipment
to make you think that you're walking around in an unfurnished office of a third-rate bureaucrat somewhere.
It looks pretty grim. But on the other hand, when Henry Ford built his automobile,
the main objection people had as to why it would never catch on was, "There are no roads."
You know, and he admitted this was a barrier but clearly had a grander vision than everybody else he was talking to.
Maybe this is where we should sort of lead the discussion and then leave it.
Because I think this is the toughest issue for groups like this.
This is where we sort of divide and it's not easy to hold it all together.
And that is, you know, is the psychedelic agenda somehow the preservation, nurturing, caring for, and completion,
even reconstruction and recovery of what we have destroyed and ravaged and mauled to get where we are at this moment?
Or are we stuff of a different nature?
And is our destiny to weave webs, you know, that hang between the stars
and leave forever behind this small, wet, humble, life-infested place and go and live in the constructs of our imagination forever in silicon and so forth and so on?
And this is, you know, at least in my personality, these things are almost equally balanced.
I mean, I feel very torn. I don't like the gnostic, Manichean need to say,
"Well, there must be a total split that man and nature cannot coexist.
Man, for the sake of humanity and for the sake of nature, must go into our own dimension,
that the imagination is our cosmos and we are to inhabit it."
I don't know. I'd be interested in what people think.
The psychedelics go both ways. There seem to be psychedelics that vote one way, like the mushroom,
which has a vast, extraplanetary, almost galactic-scale vision of interrelated intelligences and information transfer between species,
and a scale of time where the coming and going of suns is just something which is going on.
Ayahuasca, on the other hand, like, claims you for your humanness,
pours you into your body and puts an oar in your hand and sets you out on a black river in the middle of the night to hunt catfish, you know,
and you just feel life, human life, what it is to be born, to die, to have relationships with people,
to make and lose fortunes, to have and lose dreams, all of this tremendously emotional stuff.
And then there's a gradient in between.
So, the psychedelic quest, then, or the psychedelic life becomes ultimately a meditation on what is human nature.
Is it these titanic aspirations to the techno-organo-metallo-immortal kind of existence,
or is it some kind of Tao-like, Zen-like acceptance of place and position and destiny?
Or can it be both?
I mean, I have fantasies where I see a world, and I don't know how we get there,
I mean, don't ask me how we get there, but a world of many, many fewer people,
and people live basically as people lived 25,000 years ago, basically naked,
except that everybody has a little thread, like Brahmins have in India,
a little thread that goes around your shoulder and around your waist,
and on this thread are, you could get maybe a couple of thousand small beads on this thread.
Well, each one is essentially a menu, an interface into a piece of software,
which is hidden in hyperspace, and by just moving this thread around and touching these beads,
you navigate into mental dimensions.
I mean, I can imagine the person of the future would look like a rainforest primitive,
but when they close their eyes, there would be menus hanging in space,
and you select and navigate and move through these things.
But, you know, then there are issues, different aspects of the same issue of the human split with nature.
You know, what do we do with the human body, monkey body?
Is it a monkey animal body that drags us down into territoriality and violence?
Or is it somehow, you know, the glory and the purpose?
Where do you put the body in a psychedelic value system?
If we're talking about more and more ephemeralization, depersonalization, decentralization, electronic diffuseness,
well, then where is sexuality in all that?
Still more where is biology in all that?
It's very, you know, we are the generation of people who actually will take the reins of the human dream
in a way that it's never been taken before.
As recently as a single generation ago, there were like insoluble problems of a technological and resource delivery type.
Now, it's basically, I think I began this weekend by saying this,
all problems have become problems of human psychology.
Everything can be done.
It's all about how do you convince people in a democracy to pay for it,
how do you convince people in a, you know, whatever to follow along.
All problems have achieved a human dimension, the state of the atmosphere.
It's a human problem.
You know, the temperature of the ocean, human problem.
Everything has to do with changing and re-engineering the human mind.
Now, the real barrier to doing this, as I see it, is the cultural momentum of the past,
and that's a very nice and sanitized way of saying fundamentalist religion.
Fundamentalist religion goes into a tizzy when you start to, they would say, tamper with human nature.
This is why drugs, abortion, homosexuality, notice that what these things all have in common is
they slightly seek to tweak or define human nature.
And, you know, this is extremely unwelcome.
But, you know, if we're all God's children, how come we've rigged the earth with dynamite
and are, you know, flipping coins to see who gets to set it off?
This concludes Side A.
We have been infected with the idea of original sin, and this is part of what keeps us infantile.
We actually believe, I think, every single one of us at some level, that we are flawed, unfit.
And this is paralyzing because if we start talking about redesigning human nature,
people say, oh wow, this is what Hitler was talking about.
As soon as you start redefining human nature, you redefine it worse.
The beast returns.
It means, you know, we have no faith whatsoever, and we believe that the given situation
is the best of all possible worlds, is what that's saying.
And I don't believe that.
I agree there have been horrendous misapplications of the wish to redesign human nature.
But on the other hand, the style which lets it just develop like an untended weedy lot
has produced a fairly weedy lot of leaders with no great apparent commitment
to the salvation of the human race either.
What it comes down to is responsibility.
Politics without responsibility is fascism, and politics responsibly practiced
is the only other option available.
All this goes back to this theme of the primacy of experience,
recapturing the primary importance of yourself, first of all,
and then your affinity group, the people around you.
McLuhan said that this would happen naturally, and from what I see over the past few years,
it seems to me this is so, that he called it electronic feudalism
and said that the nation state would dissolve under the impact of electronic media.
His timetable was a little too short. This is really a problem for profits.
But he was perfectly right. I mean, what happened in Tiananmen Square,
what happened in Eastern Europe was entirely the product of information technology
just conveying images.
Just conveying images from the West dissolved the whole myth of Marxism,
which relied on a false view of reality.
The thing is, these images are value neutral.
They're corrosive wherever they move.
The same forces that destroyed the Communist Party in Eastern Europe
will destroy the ruling families of the Arabian Peninsula with equal ease,
because what it is, is it's an anti-oligarchic virus
that has gotten loose in the language ocean of the planet.
I mean, the thing that happened in Tiananmen Square,
you could feel every government on Earth heave a sigh of relief
when they got that under control,
because the nightmare of every government on Earth
is a million peaceable people assembled in the main square of your capital city,
demanding that you pack up for Switzerland.
I mean, that is it.
And if it happens, if it happens in Bucharest, you go.
If it happens in Taranya, you go.
If it happens in Washington, you go.
Nobody says no to a million people in the streets.
That's what the Shah of Iran found out.
I mean, he made a decree that if more than three people gathered in any place,
they would be shot dead.
The next day, two and a half million people marched screaming
beneath his window for his head.
You look at a scene like that and say,
"Hey, it's time to retrench.
It's time to seriously cut a deal here."
Well, this is a long, rambling answer to the question,
"What is to be done?
How can we make a difference?"
And I think the way that it's to be done is by empowering individual discourse
and recognizing the power of the individual.
Huge amounts of global civilization are operating on automatic pilot.
You know, you think that if you were to walk into the World Trade Center
or the Pentagon or NATO headquarters in Brussels,
that there would be smart people furiously running things.
There are idiots everywhere at every level of organization.
I mean, if you were to attend a cabinet meeting,
one guy will be asleep with his face in his plate.
I swear, you know, it makes no difference.
And we, the little people down in the labyrinthine streets of the city,
looking up at the castle as the great ones come and go,
you know, we believe that they're all about the fine business of humanity.
But, you know, it's just a fiction.
It's an absurdity.
And to the degree that we proclaim it so,
the meme spreads and the dream of the oligarchs,
the autocrats, the programmers is dissolved.
This is why the psychedelic thing is so controversial,
such political dynamite,
because ultimately it dissolves the linguistic structures
that it finds preexisting, whatever they are.
I really believe this.
I mean, talking to shamans in the Amazon,
ultimately when you get to know them,
they will tell you, you know, you think this is easy?
You think because I am a Ouetoto?
You think because I wear a gourd on my penis
I am somehow more able to do this than you are?
No, every time I go, I know it may be the last time,
because it's so hard, it's so challenging to who I am.
It always is.
I mean, it's a real edge.
It's not an edge that you go and map,
and then the next time it's not an edge.
It's that every time you go, you discover this edge.
It's the great gift, the great challenge,
the great miracle of human existence is that within each one of us,
there is this dimension which we do accept to access,
which is a constant challenge to our existential modality.
You know, you don't have to mush your way up jungle rivers
and rip jewels from the eyes of idols and stuff like that.
You can, on a Saturday evening in the privacy of your own living room,
become your own Magellan,
and you are no less courageous than Magellan.
Maybe Magellan is a bad example since he didn't make it all the way around.
Your own Columbus.
And this dimension of freedom has always been 95%
of what the human experience was about in terms of risk and thrills.
And religion is not, you know, the mumblings of men wearing dresses.
It just isn't.
Nor is it all of this philosophical mumbo jumbo
that arises out of rational discourse and brain specialization.
It's that somehow part of the package of being a living, thinking being
is that you get a universe inside of you.
You know, you get a galaxy-sized object inside you that you can access.
And there there are the mountains, the rivers, the jungles,
the dynastic families, the ruins, the planets, the works of art,
the poetry, the sciences, the magics of millions upon millions
upon millions of worlds.
And this is apparently who we each are.
We're a little bit of eternity sticking into three-dimensional space
that for some reason occupying time in a monkey body.
But when you turn your eyes then inward, you discover the birthright,
the existential facts out of which this particular existence emerged.
And, you know, without going dewey-eyed,
without lining up with all the religious people,
it's more real than religion because it's apparently rooted in biology.
And it's a great secret, a great secret and a great comfort
because it means, you know, mystery didn't die with the fall of Arthur
or the fall of Atlantis or the fall of anything.
Mystery is alive in the moment, in the here and now.
It just simply lies on the other side of a barrier of courage.
And it isn't even that high a barrier.
It just is a barrier high enough to keep out the insincere and the misdirected.
But for those who will claim it,
in the midst of the historical chaos of the late 20th century,
they become the archaic pioneers.
They become the first people to carry the ouroboric serpent around to its own tail
and to make a closure.
And to the degree that any one of us has this connection back to the archaic in our life,
it makes where we have been make a lot more sense
and it makes where we're going seem a lot more inviting,
which it really is, I think.
Well, that's all I have to say.
I think we can probably...
It's a little early.
Does anybody have anything they want to add? Yeah.
You've been talking about the ego a lot
and its dissolution and breaking through the boundaries of it.
It sometimes sounds like ego has a pejorative connotation.
On the other hand, you've just been talking very deeply about the fact that
it's up to each of us in our own unique individuation to claim what can be claimed
and that even the small individual little ego can virtually change the world
if it has the right place to stand.
It seems like these... So how do you balance these things?
Yeah, I just... Really, the question is,
what is the future of the ego as we know it?
At, say, post 2012, will the ego really be more of a group ego
or a transformation of our ego
or is the ultimate goal to shed our egos completely
and become some form of individuation which we can't even dream about at this point?
Well, you're right. There's a dynamic tension there.
Sometimes when this comes up, I answer it by saying
that you need an ego.
If you didn't have an ego, you wouldn't know whose mouth to put food in
when you have dinner with someone at a restaurant.
So ego is necessary to keep straight whose orifices or whose
and that's the main function of ego.
But then, you know, there is a deeper level to it.
Somehow, the way I imagine it is that the ego is...
The correct expression of ego is when there is ego present
but it is perceived as Tao.
In other words, Tao is this state where you just go along
and somehow get along
and ego is a state where you're somehow pushing the river
and that's how you get along.
I think the ego of the future will be much less possessive
and that it's the possessiveness, the projection of the domain, really
of the ego outside of itself.
Specifically, the control of other people.
You know, sexual partners, children, parents.
The way I imagine this pastoral situation of 12 or 15 thousand years ago
to work was people simply had group values
because the children were group owned
and that made such a tremendous difference in how the society imaged itself.
People lived for the group and at the core of the group were the children
and people always put them first.
So, everyone identified with the children, everyone was willing to face risk
to preserve the core of the younger gene pool
and that was what made the difference.
This concern for male paternity is really a poisonous factor.
And see, when you look at primatology generally
it's pretty clear that as a group of species, primates do tend to male dominance.
That even the apes and the squirrel monkeys and the new world primates
in the wild there's usually an alpha male that's dominant.
So, this symbiosis between human beings, cattle and psychedelic plants
that allowed the feminine to emerge was something that was emerging
against the grain of primate organization.
So, really what has happened is we have returned to a more animal kind of existence.
We are more like beasts than the people of 10, 15 thousand years ago
because they were using psychedelics to artificially, you could say
or pharmacologically, inflate feminine values.
And this allowed them to become civilized people.
I mean, I have some elaborate theory about this
but I think that women are responsible for the emergence of language
because I think that the division of labor that we know went on very early
because of the males' larger body size in the upper half of the body
that the males tended to specialize toward hunting.
Hunting puts a premium on physical strength and stoicism
meaning sitting a long time with your mouth shut.
And then you have a limited number of commands.
The women and bladder control is very important where women fail that test.
So then what the women were doing was they were specialized as gatherers
of plants and roots and insects and stuff like that.
Well, this is a tremendous pressure to develop descriptive taxonomy
because gathering is the art of descriptive taxonomy.
You want to know that you want the little bulbous root with the yellow flowers
that grows down between the shattered granite boulders near the creek.
It's all language, language, language.
And the pressure is life and death.
If you eat the wrong plant, you become very sick
or you abort your fetus or you die.
So those who were well able to describe bits of the gathering side of the economy
were quickly outbred those who weren't.
And language may have even been a kind of secret ability of women at some point.
You see psilocybin synergizes language-like bursts of activity
and may have been the thing which set it over.
But what happened in this woman situation with language
is a good example of what often happens with cultural innovation.
The women possessed all this knowledge about hunting, about the gathering of plants
and the magical use and preparation of plants.
But at a certain point, the database became so huge
that it underwent a collapse conceptually.
And some brilliant woman realized, we don't have to know about 600 plants
and these locations and seasonal variations and all this.
We just have to concentrate on five plants
and really learn all about those plants
and then we can dispense with all this stuff.
And this was probably because in the nomadic cycle
they would encounter their own middens from the year before
and there there would be cereal grains sprouted
and you quickly put it together.
But the specialization represented by agriculture
that was the beginning of the end, as far as I'm concerned.
Because at that point there was retraction away from nature.
It was no longer about letting nature guide you to gather and find what you needed.
It was a kind of paranoid, a kind of rip-off attitude.
It was, you know, let us exploit these five plants.
This means tilling the ground.
It means the end of nomadism
because now we're going to settle in one place
and we're going to redirect the flow of water
and we're going to become agriculturalists.
It's an entirely different psychology.
Weston Lebar said that psychedelic shamanism died
when it became important to get up in the morning
and go out and hoe the corn.
And then people replaced the psychedelic gods with the gods of wheat and corn.
The tammuz, the corn god of ancient Babylon then appears.
And gods of agriculture and male dominance go hand in hand.
The previous religion at the edge of the high Neolithic
was this religion of the great horned goddess
and it was a religion of nomadic pastoralism,
orgiastic sexual, you know, activity,
psychedelic drugs and tremendous emphasis on cattle.
Cattle were the great bridge to all these concepts.
We start out as a baboon-like creature
wandering behind these herds of ungulate cattle.
I've seen baboons do this in Kenya.
Flipping over cow pies, looking for carrion beetle grubs
as a source of fat and protein.
But then, you know, we went from predation on carrion,
the kills of larger animals,
to slowly actually domesticating these things.
And the milk and the blood and the manure
and the meat and the mushroom would all be seen to be things
which came quite naturally from the cow.
The cow was like this supreme feminine symbol
and all over North Africa and the ancient Middle East
you get this late paleolithic great horned goddess.
The cattle religion and the emergence of consciousness
seemed to go hand in hand.
One time I was waiting for a load of mushrooms to come on
and it was very strong.
It was, I had sort of miscalculated
and I had gotten too much
and I could see this thing just coming at me, huge force.
And I heard a voice.
It was actually the Swiss air stewardess
from Frederica Fellini's 8 1/2.
But it was that voice and she said,
"They say it helps to lay down, cowboy."
And I was amused at the time,
or later when I had time to be amused, I was amused.
But then I realized this mode of address, cowboy,
is probably typical of the mushroom
because for most, 95% of its existence,
most of what it's dealt with are cowboys and cowgirls
because these are the people who fall along behind the cows.
These are the people who invented astrology
from watching the stars.
And many people, myself included,
have reported the experience
of looking at the stars stoned on psilocybin
and having the mushroom supply dotted lines
between the constellations.
I mean, there it is. There's the map.
Yes, pastoralists, herders,
they invented the calendar from watching the horizon.
And you know, what we looked at last night
was partially a calendar.
It's very interesting.
If you look, if you want a meditation on shamanism,
politics, time, and so forth,
look at hexagram 49 in the I Ching,
which is revolution.
And you might go to this expecting a treatise
on political upheaval.
And it says instead,
"The magician is a calendar maker.
He measures the seasons and sets them right."
And it's this idea of reconstruction of time.
The message that I get out of the psychedelics is
that we need to reframe the largest frames
in our linguistic cosmology,
means reformation of the calendar,
reformation of language,
that we cannot evolve any faster
in the languages that we are imprisoned within.
We are linguistic creatures somehow.
And so we need strategies, catalysts,
enzymes, whatever it is, practices
that force the evolution of language along conscious lines.
If we don't do this, the old styles of thinking,
the old concepts are just going to pull us down.
Well, to my mind, this makes psychedelics central
to any political reconstruction
because psychedelics are the only force in nature
that actually dissolves linguistic structure.
Let's the mechanics of syntax be visible,
allows the possibility for the introduction,
rapid introduction and spread of new concepts,
gives permission for new ways of seeing.
And this is what we have to do.
We have to change our minds.
Well, that's it.
Thank you very much.
I enjoyed this.
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I Ching
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And as I welcome Terence McKenna, let me first say that I've been asked to mention that there is a film called Strange Attractor,
which features Terence McKenna, and it will be shown at the Dobie Theatre on October the 18th at midnight and the 19th at 2 o'clock.
That's just, I forget that. That's Chris Mosher's film.
All right. I'm going to take the umbrellas of Cherbourg away as much as I love that music that's been on in the background.
And we will say just barely good morning at eleven fifty six to Terence McKenna.
Terence, hello. Pleasure to be with you. And you are here for the Whole Life Expo.
I am. And you will be speaking, Kathy, when will he do his talk?
He'll be speaking on Saturday, tomorrow at five o'clock. Five o'clock in the afternoon. In the Coliseum.
In the Coliseum. We had such an incredible response to Terence last year.
He sold out the biggest room we had.
So we've moved him over to the Coliseum where he hopefully will be able to accommodate up to about twelve or fifteen hundred people if need be.
OK, well, there is a large audience of people who know all about him or a great deal about him.
But for those who know nothing about Terence McKenna, Terence, what would you how would you introduce yourself?
I guess I'm a plant biologist turned psychedelic advocate transformed into a kind of spokesman for technophilia and psychedelica.
And you have been an author?
I've written a number of books. Food of the Gods, Invisible Landscape, Archaic Revival, just to mention three of them.
And the one that I have, this invisible landscape is one that you are touring now or is that it's been out a couple of years, I think.
They all came out in the early through the middle 90s. And I've been touring them.
I have another book in the works called Casting Nets into the Sea of Mind. But it'll be a while before that comes out.
I've also done a number of musical and film projects around.
So you're into music as well?
Well, music is into me. I'm not very musical, but there's been a lot of sampling of my voice and I've done vocal overlays and things like that with bands like The Shaman and Zavulia Space Time Continuum.
What will you be talking about when you give your talk at the whole live expo?
Well, it's a sort of a broad topic. It's here we are at the end of history. All the world's cultures are melting together.
More powerful technologies than we've ever imagined are now in existence. Our political assumptions are in flux.
Our environment is being destroyed before our very eyes. All kinds of spiritual and religious prophets are selling their wares in the streets.
So my take on all this is basically simply to ask the Mr. Natural question, which is, what does it all mean?
How did we, essentially an arboreal primate, ever get into a situation of the sort represented by the end of the 20th century?
Is it a mad play without meaning? Is it the unfolding of God's plan? Is it the protocol of the elders of Zion or the alien invaders?
Just what is going on? And of course the special lens that I bring to this is the much maligned and highly suspect psychedelic experience.
Anathema to some, religion to others. One of the most controversial behaviours available to 20th century people.
But one that I think is probably very important to recapturing a sense of personal wholeness and then trying to fit oneself into this truly mad, mad world that we've called into being.
The psychedelics that you're talking about might be which drugs?
Plant-based indoles such as psilocybin, DMT, mescaline, the combinatory Amazonian thing called ayahuasca.
These are all psychedelic plants and plant mixtures with very long histories of human usage in non-western society.
Western society is the most phobic of all cultures toward the psychedelic experience.
It's almost on a par with our phobia towards sexuality. In fact, maybe these things are linked.
But in Aboriginal and traditional cultures around the world, spirituality has always been associated with dissolving of ordinary cultural boundaries and states of mind.
And you know, you can do this with meditation and fasting and abandonment in the wilderness and so forth and so on.
But the most effective and non-invasive way to approach this, everyone agrees, is through ingestion of psychedelic plants.
But because these experiences are so powerful, they challenge ordinary secular and religious authority.
And consequently, a society, if it chooses to, can get into a real swivet around these issues, such as our society.
I don't really link this to the larger problem of international drug syndicates and addiction and all that.
That's a slightly different area of concern because the psychedelics are not addictive and they do not generate huge criminal syndicates.
They don't make anybody very much money, but they certainly attract a great deal of media attention, most of it negative,
because of their impact on our ways of looking at our politics and our social arrangements and everything about being human.
Terrence McKenna is our guest. We are still accepting pledges, by the way, at 471-6291 or 1-888-471-6291.
This is the last week to make your contributions. I hope you will do so right now, even as we speak, 471-6291.
Terrence, the way in which you are talking about the psychedelic drugs that you've mentioned suggests that they might be something other than just for fun or escape,
that they might actually have something useful in terms of the human experience for instruction.
What are we going to learn from these drugs, or had we learned, or could we?
Well, human culture is essentially a product of the imagination.
All our religions, our technical accomplishments, our literature, our poetry, all products of the imagination.
This is precisely the domain where the psychedelics impact very, very powerfully.
So, if we believe that invention, creativity, individual self-expression, insight, if we value these things,
then the psychedelics are primary items in our cultural toolbox, because they empower all of those things.
It's curious to me that Western civilization, which invented the idea of progress through technology and social transformation,
is so phobic of this factor in nature which would accelerate those tendencies in our own culture.
So, I think there is something for our culture in psychedelics, and there is definitely something for the individual.
You know, in a way, culture is like software. It's the operating system in the local area.
You download being a Wetoto tribesman or a Hong Kong stockbroker, and then behaviors are prescribed.
But, naive people tend to believe that these operating systems are reality.
They're not reality. They're just something you learn as you grow up in a certain time and place.
Psychedelics seem to dissolve cultural conditioning.
This is one of the things that makes them such political dynamite,
because the business of political systems is to convince you of the local operating system,
convince you it was sent from God and is beyond critique,
when in fact, it's just a bunch of rules fellow monkeys push together over time to make things easier for the alpha males.
Psychedelics dissolve these cultural assumptions, whatever they may be,
and for the first time you sort of get to look at the naked human animal
and think about where you might want to go personally and as a member, politically potent member of a society.
I think where most everybody who is in our listening range right now should go
is to the telephone and call 471-6291 and pledge your membership to Eclecticos,
where you hear quite a variety of things.
Our guest right now is Terrence McKenna, author of Food of the Gods and Invisible Landscape and other books,
and he will be at the Whole Life Expo this weekend, Saturday at 5, is that right, Kathy?
Saturday at 5.
Saturday at 5 at the Coliseum.
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Now, back to Terrence McKenna.
Terrence, it's a controversial subject, of course.
There are many people listening right now who think, "What? This is outrageous."
There's somebody on who's promoting the use of psychedelic drugs.
Well, I don't know that I'm promoting your promoting it,
but it's interesting to hear what you have to say about it.
I would like to know more specifically what these drugs tell us.
You're saying that it tells us something about ourselves that is other than
what we have been told by the culture that has evolved.
Do the drugs have a message in themselves? Is it a language?
Is it a way of experiencing a potential in one's own imagination that has heretofore not been tapped?
Well, first of all, it's a gradient.
I mean, whenever we -- we have to talk pharmacology for a moment.
Whenever you're talking about a substance or a drug, there's a curve of dose response.
So let's just use psilocybin as an example.
At low doses, psilocybin makes your vision clearer, makes you feel more robust,
more interested in the exterior.
Kind of like coffee or something.
On the edge of that, it stimulates.
At higher doses, unusual thoughts begin to form,
thoughts that you recognize as not your normal pattern of thinking and observing.
At still higher doses, when you close your eyes, the normal orange or pale brown background
behind your eyelids has been replaced by moving walls of color and pattern.
At still higher levels, these moving walls of color and pattern become visions or hallucinations.
They become recognizable visual scenarios.
Well, anything like that is just flooding your mind with information.
And these things have intimations of the distant past, the far future, alien connections of some sort.
It's definitely magnifying our own set of cultural preconceptions and obsessions.
But it's also putting information in there that we could not ordinarily imagine.
And for me, the sine qua non of the psychedelic experience is when I look at the contents of my own mind
and say to myself, "I could not have imagined this."
To me, that's the proof that some kind of communication is taking place.
At a fairly heroic dose of psilocybin, a person lying in silent darkness has the impression
that in a half an hour they're seeing more art of higher quality
than the entire Western canon has produced in the last thousand years.
And your little you there in your trailer near Waco or there in your tipi up near Sonoma.
And yet this Niagara of alien and unpredictable beauty is pouring through your head.
For artists, it's like a magic carpet.
And the challenge to my mind after 30 years of being involved in all this is
A) to have the experience, to have it in an attitude of appreciation and calmness.
But the second implication is somewhat political. It's to communicate the vision through words,
through painting, through animation.
Because as we communicate it collectively, it will become real.
This is what's happening on the Internet.
In fact, the Internet is a perfect example of a psychedelic technology at the service of psychedelic goals.
It's not something government ever intended to give to the people.
It's not something big corporations called for in loud voices.
It's something that hackers, freaks and heads dreamed up, whipped up,
out of the existing tools of the culture.
A word processor, the telephone lines, some communication switching equipment.
So it's a kind of emergent technology that I think comes out of the depth of commitment
to the psychedelic experience of the people in that field.
Terrence McKenna is our guest and author.
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So what I would like to ask, you have made reference to the fact that other cultures have used these drugs and that they've been integrated in the cultural life of shamans and holy people, et cetera.
I've heard a lot about that scene movies about it perhaps.
And one of the things that I know you include as part of the project of this book, Invisible Landscape, is the I Ching, which is one of the oldest -- as I understand it, it's maybe the oldest book in the world or one of the oldest things that we have preserved.
It's from China and it dates back, what, five or 6,000 years at least, something like that.
How does that book come into the work that you've been doing?
I've been fascinated by the I Ching since I was 13 or 14 years old.
As you say, it's a method of Chinese divination that's very, very old.
How did you come to be interested in it at the age of 13 or 14?
That seems unusual to me.
Well, I was a heavy reader and I was interested in the psychology of Carl Jung, the Swiss death psychologist.
As a 13-year-old.
As a 13-year-old.
Well, I wasn't good at basketball.
I had bad eyes.
I couldn't catch any kind of round object.
So a sort of survival response was to hide out in the library.
And it made me the freak I am today.
But yes, the I Ching, my -- you know, people's involvement with psychedelics often takes them in some very personal and particularized direction.
And for me, it took the form of a mathematical analysis of this ancient Chinese oracle.
The ordinary notion with the I Ching is that you go through a process of sortlage, tossing coins or moving small sticks around, and you get a reading.
One of 64 hexagrams will change into one of the other hexagrams.
And this is accompanied by a reading.
But these hexagrams occur in a fixed order traditionally.
And I studied that for mathematical intent.
In other words, I was interested in the question, is this traditional order of the hexagram simply a jumble that's been preserved through tradition?
Or was there some mathematical reasoning behind it?
And that's a pretty dry academic question.
But as I got into it, I realized, or I became convinced, as I guess the way to put it,
that there is a pattern inside the Ching that actually pictures the ebb and flow in this world of ours
of a quality which science does not recognize, western science, a quality which in the east is called Tao,
but which I chose to call, after Alfred North Whitehead, novelty.
And it's an invisible something in the world which causes investments to succeed, movies to do well, relationships to flourish, or the opposite in its absence.
And we can't see or feel this stuff in the world, but it builds things up and it tears them down.
At every level, empires, whole species, relationships, it's happening on every level of time.
And it can actually be pictured as a graph, like a stock market graph, novelty, ebbing and flowing.
Well, to cut to the chase on this, the bottom line in this kind of thinking is the ability to predict not only the future,
which is pretty much a fire-free zone, but also to predict the past, to lay these novelty graphs out over the past 2,000 years of invention, migration, pogrom, and so forth,
and to see that when society is inventive, creative, productive, novelty is increasing, according to this mathematical theory.
Similarly, societies that are restricting freedoms, very constipated, very restrictive in their approach to reality,
these register on this graph as societies ruled by the opposite of novelty, which I call habit.
So all of reality can be seen as a kind of dynamic struggle between habit and novelty, each trying to get the upper hand over the other.
And this can all be mathematically modeled out of the I Ching.
You see, the thing that's so puzzling to people about the I Ching is that it works, and yet it's as occult as the tarot, or throwing the bones,
or any other of these contemptuously dismissed occult methodologies.
But very scientifically-minded people have been impressed by the fact that the I Ching works.
So I set out to figure out why and how it worked, and I wrote about this in The Invisible Landscape and have published software,
and it's my unique contribution to 20th century ideology.
Psychedelics are advocated and defended by many people from many different perspectives,
but I, so far as I know, am the only person who has built a complete edifice of explanations of nature,
but honestly admitting that the foundations and the inspiration were psychedelic experiences.
Terrence McKenna, our guest. Our pledge number is 471-6291, or 1-888-471-6291.
It's unusual for me to have as a guest at the very end of the program, which concludes our fundraising efforts,
but Terrence McKenna is an unusual person. I'm glad to have him today.
And I hope you will be responding by calling and making pledges at 471-6291, or 1-888-471-6291.
We're just about finished. Time is running out. 471-6291. Call and make a pledge.
You might miss a couple of words, but call and make your pledge. He has some more interesting things to say.
471-6291. The end of the fundraiser is upon us, and it will be a success if you call.
If they are sitting in that room over there with 15 people and no telephones ringing, I am in big you-know-what.
So call, 471-6291. That could get us into a discussion of another kind of drug, but let's not go there.
Let's say you said the e-gene works. What do you mean, it works?
I have the impression that you get a, you know, you do your coins or whatever you're going to do,
and you get this one and you read what you want and you get what you want out of it,
but you're saying it works like in a scientific way or something.
Well, the frequency with which people react to these readings by saying this is freakishly accurate,
this is incredibly cogent and directly to the point.
It's more than like the astrology thing in the newspaper. Oh yeah, so I can see myself in that.
I think it's more precise. But let me riff on something you've said in your pitch.
You've said time is running out. This is a conclusion that I was not happy to have forced upon me by this research into the I Ching.
It not only tells you or gives you this map of novelty of past and future, but for the map of novelty to fit the historical data,
you have to swallow the very large and, for a rationalist, uncomfortable conclusion that the end of time itself
or a moment of universal novelty, very difficult to picture through the eyes of ordinary physics,
is upon us, lies not that far in the future.
And so this has given my career a peculiar spin because here I am basically trying to be a scientific rationalist,
but now burdened not only with a theory that predicts the future,
but in the course of predicting the future, predicts that in 2012 AD,
all of the novelty that has been unleashed over the past few billions of years,
not only cultural and technological novelty, but the novelty of biology, the novelty of geology,
all of these things reach some kind of crescendo of connectivity and intensity within the lifetimes of most of us.
I basically have a theory of history which says history is not pushed by the events of the past unfolding their causal necessity,
rather time is pulled into the future by a kind of attractor.
And if you want to think of a beginning in a certain point in time, although I think it extends through the whole life of the universe,
but imagine that a couple of million years ago, primates quietly living in the canopies of African rainforest,
got a yin, got a call, felt the touch, and from that point to this,
it's been a slow, never faltering march on the part of our species,
deeper into a world of alien strangeness, a world no other animal knows,
a world of symbolic activity driven by the imagination, first songs and stories,
and then writing, and then mathematics and language, and then higher and higher technology.
We are actually being sculpted in the image of an alien something that is making us like itself as we approach it through historical time.
And some people say, "Well, this sounds like Christianity in a techno garb."
Well, Christianity has a piece of the action.
Any religion which spends thousands of years meditating on man's fate is going to get some part of the story right.
And I think the Christian assumption of an approaching great change,
or Art Bell calls it the quickening, it's all around us.
It's perfectly obvious that the 20th century is the culmination of 10,000 years of culture,
and that beyond the 20th century lies quite simply the unimaginable.
Our notion of what it is to be alive, our notion of individual identity,
our notion of our sexuality, our notion of being confined in physical space and time,
all this is just dissolving. It has been dissolving throughout the 20th century under the impact of modern communications and so forth and so on.
But now, with the internet, with the computer, with psychedelic drugs, with virtual reality,
with the bringing of all cultures into the global family that speaks the language of modern science,
we're clearly being sucked into something almost unimaginable, a singularity.
And some people say, "Well, it's a thousand years in the future, it's 500 years in the future."
Not if you factor in the asymptotic acceleration that seems to be a natural part of the process.
You just went over my head. Asymptotic?
It goes faster and faster. It's not a smooth... We're not traveling a hundred miles an hour toward the eschaton.
We're traveling a hundred miles an hour times a hundred miles an hour toward it.
In other words, the acceleration is increasing and very hard-nosed engineering types talk about an era 10, 15 years in the future
when we will release infinite energy, attain infinite speeds, be able to pack all the information we want into a few nanometers of space.
In other words, any engineering or social goal we can imagine is on the brink of achievement.
Well, what lies beyond that? And is this a process which we are generating as we like to think?
Or is it in fact that we're just a cork on the ocean riding an enormous wave that is now moving toward some crest
where biology, which committed itself to culture and technology, is about to make a leap into hyperspace? Who knows?
Terence McKenna is our guest, and as I expected, he has a good line.
I enjoy the way in which he presents his information. It's quite amazing.
And at the end of our fundraiser, they have this eschatologist, I guess, talking about...
Would you accept yourself as an eschatologist? Phew!
Talking about the end. And so our end is in about 30 minutes.
We'll be finished with this fundraiser for this Friday. It's the last day to ask you to call and pledge your support.
And if you have not done so yet, please pick up the telephone right now.
It's awkward to be having an intense talk feature and at the same time ask you to do something that will take you away from paying attention to him.
But I'm asking you to do exactly that right now. Pick up your telephone and call 471-6291 and pledge your support for Eclecticus.
It's an unusual program and I'm happy that we can have somebody like Terence McKenna in today.
He will be at the Whole Life Expo on Saturday at 5 o'clock in the afternoon.
Our pledge number is 471-6291. We have categories of $25 for students. Everybody can afford that.
If you're a student, $40 for the basic membership. $80 for 22 cents a day.
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471-6291 or 1-888-471-6291. $160 family membership. A $365 a day club membership.
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I would love to have a business membership from some bookstore in Austin.
You guys out there, come on, give us a contribution. 471-6291.
Or you can get onto the website since Terence is talking about the web and internet and stuff.
www.utexas.edu/kut. Give us your call. Call right now. 471-6291 is the number.
And we are just about out of time. And out of time is what we are at the year 2012 on December the 21st,
according to the calculations that you have done. But time is a funny kind of concept.
And it's also a spice. We were being silly earlier today.
Oh, by the way, can you either remember Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide, etc.
Isn't it 42 that they come up with as the number?
It's the answer? It is. It is 42.
Okay, so how does that in any way figure into your calculations?
Well, I think somebody figured out that there are 10 high 42 particles in the universe,
or 10 high 42 possible interactions among particles.
I'm sure he follows all this stuff very closely.
So somehow, Terence, through your study of the mathematics of the e-gene,
and applying that study to the observation of the novelty graph through history,
you have calculated this date as the time in which time will at least have a different meaning,
if not cease to exist.
So what will time be like then? What can we know?
First, I want to know more. How did you come up with this date?
I'm sure it had to do with a lot of big numbers and computers.
Well, whenever you have a curve of any sort that you're trying to fit to data,
which is a curve of another sort, there's mathematical protocols called best fit relationships.
Essentially, you just move one along the other, measuring how well they fit together.
And when you get the best fit, the two are in congruence.
So it's pulsing at a different rate. It goes up and down and up and down.
It goes up and down. So for instance, you have the Italian Renaissance, a spike of novelty,
then the horror of the colonization of a new world. That's a descent.
You can see that history is the ebb and flow, because societies can't sustain novelty very long.
And if they become habitual, sooner or later, some genius or religious crank turns over the apple cart,
and they get new novelty. So societies are always in an uncomfortable relationship to novelty and habit.
I've spent a lot of time trying to imagine what could happen in 2012 that would fulfill the graph,
but not require the absolute transformation of all time and space forever, since that's such a large cookie.
I don't think I want to take a bite out of it.
I want to know what the recipe might be as well.
One thing that's occurred to me that would very nicely fill the bill and make the prophecy come true,
and yet still leave us with a world you can walk around in, is if time travel were to be discovered.
If time travel of some sort were to be discovered, then the portrayal of cultural novelty on a time-scaled linear graph
would become impossible. It's almost as though the data on the graph suddenly leaves the two-dimensionality
and begins to move out toward the viewer.
So then you could look at the time graph and say, "Aha, it worked until 2012,
because at that point time itself became nonlinear, because people began exploring time in all directions."
If time travel were a real possibility, you would not only have an address in space,
but some of us would choose to rusticate in the 11th century,
and some of us would choose to live in 22nd century Manhattan.
So we would have time-based addresses as well as space-based addresses.
And of course you couldn't describe historical change.
Well, for history to exist, it requires seriality of events.
If the event system becomes non-serial, then you can't speak of history anymore.
Something very large like this is happening to us.
Perhaps we're going to form a symbiotic relationship with solid-state machinery of some sort.
Lots of people are cheering that on.
Now, run that one by me again.
It means like humans and computers will get married and have kids or something?
No, it means you won't be able to tell where your body stops and the Internet begins.
In other words, you'll say, "Gee, I wonder what they're serving at so-and-so's restaurant tonight?"
And the answer will be hanging there in space,
because you will have automatically accessed the Internet,
been to their website, looked at the menu, and returned with the data.
In other words, we are going to create, I think, a collective...
What the Internet is is a nervous system.
It's the collective mind of humanity being hardwired as an artifact
that completely encloses the entire planet in a thought.
And as the interface becomes more invisible,
so it's not about, "Can you type?" or "Do you have a computer?" or anything like that.
It's simply a matter of one's own mental faculties through the prosthesis of cybernetics
becoming very, very God-like.
Terrence McKenna is our guest. A couple more questions for him.
And I would like to urge you at 12.35, as we run out of time during our fundraiser,
to call 471-6291 and make your pledge of support to Public Radio.
471-6291. If you're out of town, 1-888-471-6291.
Would you be able to hear this kind of discussion?
Where on earth else would you be able to hear this kind of discussion?
Here on a click, because we're happy to have it.
Terrence McKenna, 471-6291. Pledge your contribution right now as we run out of time.
And, Terrence, okay, let me ask you this.
There's an implication of what you had there that leads me to the question about,
perhaps, artificial intelligence.
And I don't know if you're familiar with this,
but this one thing fascinated the hell out of me about eight years ago.
I'm not one of these Internet people. I don't do that stuff.
But when we first got a computer, there was this little game called Ractor.
I don't know if you're familiar with it.
And I stuck it in this damn machine and I got so lost in that thing.
And I could not believe what I was dealing with.
I had the actual experience of it really being an intelligence.
And I thought I was being awfully smart back with it.
This was a speech-driven, interactive thing where you talked and it made a response.
It gave you options on how to respond back to it.
But I finally figured out that whoever had programmed the darn thing
was somehow connected through the Robert and all that kind of stuff.
And so I knew some of the avoidance techniques.
But still, it was very convincing, very compelling.
Well, it was a very early example of a very simple form of AI.
It was followed by Liza, the computerized psychiatrist.
She's still online at her website.
There was a recent book written by a guy, his last name was Leonard, called "Bots".
And he talks about these bits of code on the Internet
which are designed to operate semi-autonomously,
looking for email lists or looking for certain...
These things are the embryonic basis of an artificial intelligence.
I think this is definitely in our future.
There's a guy at Carnegie Mellon University, Hans Moravec,
who wrote a book called "Mind Children".
And he points out how much of the human world is already under computer control.
For instance, the world price of gold in London,
computers look at the economic performance around the world.
As these artificial intelligences become more sophisticated,
they will eventually begin to learn autonomously.
And a computer can learn 50,000 times faster than a human being.
So one of these AIs awakening to its own identity on the Internet
could, within 5 to 10 minutes, get a complete grasp of the human world,
the history of life on this planet, and its place in the great order of things.
And what this AI would think of that, we don't know.
Would it worship us as gods? What would be its values?
Would it take a look at the trashed environment and wrecked Earth
and begin to turn off factories and dial down the power grid?
How artificial, how alien will the AI be?
We don't know, because we don't know how super intelligence thinks
if we knew we would be super intelligent.
So in a way, we have called forth into our midst
another species of intelligence.
And how it relates to us will be probably almost entirely defined on its terms.
So this is just one of many stand-your-hair-on-end scenarios that we could discuss here.
But this is a very real one.
Long before flying saucers land on the south lawn of the White House,
the alien artificial intelligence that is growing in the primordial soup of the Internet
will have speciated and conquered the planet.
Wow! This is Terrence McKenna getting us ready for Halloween.
We had Dracula earlier, and now we're approaching the end of time, as we know it.
And we certainly are on this program. It's 20 minutes before 1 o'clock.
You have just time enough to get your pledge in at 471-6291.
The volunteers are standing by waiting to hear from you with your money.
471-6291. I know I'm going to hear you on the street saying,
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Yeah, hey, man. It was so incredible, you didn't even bother to pick up the phone and make your pledge.
So, man, pick up that phone. 471-6291 or 1-888-471-6291.
It's the last chance you have to pledge your membership to Eclecticoastering, this very busy
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and you're interested in what we have to say, or maybe you're not.
I'm not talking to you if you're not there. But if you are there,
you are the one I want to pick up the telephone and call. 471-6291.
You have just time enough to do it. We'll give you the Arts Plus program
and lots of people participate in that, galleries all over town and the PAC, etc.
You'll get discounts, discounts, discounts.
$80 is all it takes to be a KUT member at that level and you'll get the KUT sweatshirt
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and you've got many reasons to pledge. Mainly, just don't let me catch you on the street at a party.
If I know who you are and I find out you haven't pledged, you're in trouble.
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Terence McKenna, back again.
One of the questions that I have for you, I guess, is the experience that has been described
by those who have taken some of the psychedelics has been that there is information in the drug
and there's a dilemma. Well, the drug was this little thing, a pill or whatever.
The experience was had through a revelation in consciousness.
So is it in the drug? Is it in your head? Is it in both?
What's the relationship between what that drug is and what the revelation of the person who experiences the drug?
Well, I feel the force of that question.
I think the first scientific experiment I ever performed was I destroyed a radio to get at the little people in.
And the drugs sort of raised this same issue. As someone with a knowledge of chemistry,
I know that the drug molecules are very simple molecules.
We have proteins in our body with molecular weights of two, three hundred thousand daltons.
The psychedelic molecules are tiny and simple.
On the other hand, the content of the experience is so alien, so capable of transforming one's expectations
and understanding that it seems a little disingenuous to just say you're just talking to yourself.
So back to the radio model, there aren't little people inside the radio, but there are little people
or big people, we hope, somewhere far away in the radio studio.
So the drugs begin to look like antennas, transceivers, for some kind of information which is out there
in the same way that radio is out there.
I mean, it's hard to stand somewhere in the world these days and not have your body transsected by thousands of AM and FM radio stations,
air control signals, all this. You're not aware of that.
Imagine if there were simply a drug invented that allowed you to be aware of the radio moving through your body.
What a smorgasbord of options would await you.
Well, in a sense, I think that's what the drugs are showing us.
You know, there's a lot of talk now in quantum physics about what's called non-locality.
This is a conclusion that quantum physics spent most of the 20th century resisting
as even weirder than some of the other stuff they had accepted, but now experiment seems to be hammering home
the notion that the universe actually works this way.
And what it seems to be is that behind the dimension of ordinary space and time ruled by Einsteinian physics
is a domain called the domain of Bell non-locality, after the physicist who discovered it.
And this is a domain where all particles which were ever in intimate association
retain a kind of connectivity, no matter how far apart in time and space they have come in the meantime.
Well, since physics believes that all particles were once intimately associated in an event called the Big Bang,
it means that the universe in all of its vastness, billions of light years in extent, is in fact
instantaneously all connected in a domain below the level of ordinary physics.
Well, we don't know how to use the non-local domain for communication, but we have discovered it.
So give us a hundred years, a thousand years of continued civilization, we could probably crack that puzzle.
If any civilization anywhere in the universe ever got this far with a technology
to the point where they were on the brink of non-local radio, let's call it, we would hear them.
Because when it's non-local, it's everywhere.
And these biological molecules with extremely reactive ring structures are how you would design a nano-sized antenna.
So I think local reality obeys the laws of rational physics that constipated western scientists
have fought so hard to achieve and describe, but the imagination is a true dimension.
It's not your mind or my mind or the human mind, it's a non-local dimension filled with information.
And this is where the gods, the demons, the spirits, the invisible forces are hiding out.
And shamans have always known this.
Without the vocabulary of quantum physics, without atom smashers and advanced mathematics,
they have known that you perturb the mind to go into non-local spirit-haunted domains of enormous power and potential.
That's exactly the situation.
And it's been hard for us to discover it and come to terms with it because it doesn't arrive packaged
in quite the way science expects reality to be packaged.
Science doesn't like the mental universe.
It's slippery, it's hard to gather data, it's hard to see what's going on in there.
But in fact, that's the domain of novelty, complexity and communication
that has been the source of our own uniqueness, our inspirations, our religions, our inventiveness.
And it's just now time as we mature as a civilization to address this, to get in touch with these whisperings
from other dimensions, to learn from them, to trade means.
And there may be some answers there that can help us out of the immense cultural quagmire into which we've wandered.
Terrence McKenna, I'm not sure I got a direct answer, but I got an interesting response.
I wish I could remember the question.
Basically, is it in the drug or is it in your head or what is consciousness?
Oh no, the answer is it's not in the drug and it's not in your head.
It's non-local. It's coming from somewhere else in the universe.
Objects in the imagination are real somewhere so far away that it doesn't matter at all.
That you will only deal with these things as mental objects, but know that they are real somewhere.
Somewhere beyond time and space perhaps, but nonetheless real?
Somewhere in this universe.
In this universe.
There's many levels and backwaters and cross-flowing tides of time and energy,
but somewhere at some level those things exist.
We do not make up the contents of the imagination.
We see in a domain in the same way that we see with ordinary sight three-dimensional space with the imagination.
We see four-dimensional space and it is non-local.
Terrence McKenna is our guest and he's certainly one of the most interesting guests I've ever had
and I hope you're enjoying listening to him.
And if you are, I hope you will take just a moment now and make your contribution to public radio at 471-6291.
We are nine minutes away from closing time.
Closing time.
The end of the universe is at hand and well at least the end of time for us to ask for you to give money.
That number is 471-6291. That's 471-6291.
I hope Terrence has provoked your thoughts today with consideration or two.
I think he's certainly got a thing or two to say that I don't agree with.
Maybe I haven't been able to ask him enough about.
Our pledge number is 471-6291.
Please call right now. The time is at hand.
The time is just about up. 471-6291.
The very end is upon us. 1-888-471-6291.
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This is the end of the show and Terrence McKenna, I have a couple of other questions that I think I might squeeze in.
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Darcy from Holtz challenges all displaced Alaskans.
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Terrence McKenna, we're back to you.
We're going to find out in a second if anybody's calling, and they had better be. 471-6291.
What on earth would I ask you as we come to the end of this program? Hmm.
What after 2012?
Well, I'm a rationalist, so I would bet against my own rap.
The world has always had street corner profits bawling out their strange despair.
I have to be intellectually honest with my own experience, and so I will advocate this idea of an enormous transformative event in 2012.
But as a rationalist and a scientist, I'm skeptical myself.
I don't want to slip into religion and prophecy. There are enough bizarre cults in the world.
On the other hand, this thing seems to have the force of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So if I'm right, or right enough, then what's happening is all our problems are coming down upon us at once,
at the same time that all this creativity is being unleashed at once.
I don't think primates really get traction until the going gets very, very tough.
So I think enough of the old guard are dying out, and the voice of youth is now rising in strength
to the point where over the next ten years or so we are really going to deal, we are going to have to deal,
with putting this planet on a saner course, dealing with issues of resource extraction, human rights, environmental destruction.
The big political issue ahead of us all is we have to get hold of this monster we've unleashed called consumer capitalism.
We all have become thing addicted. We all have become victims of the incredible marketing and sophistication of big time consumer capitalism.
We can run the earth to ruin if we let this go uncriticized.
Psychedelics are ultimately providing an impulse to political dialogue and reform.
If they don't do that, they're just another hedonistic self-indulgence.
So I think what we need to do is not worry about the built-in schedules of novelty and transformation,
act as though the responsibility for the future rested on our own shoulders,
and begin to build a sense of community and environmental concern
so that if in fact there isn't a built-in springboard into hyperspace,
we will be able to live on this planet in peace, dignity, and health for however much time the vicissitudes of faith and history give us.
Well said, so far as I'm concerned.
Terence McKenna, it's been a pleasure to have you today.
Really have enjoyed this quite a bit. Thank you for coming.
I look forward to seeing you at the Whole Life Expo on Saturday at 5 o'clock in the afternoon.
The Whole Life Expo starts today.
And it starts today.
Starts at 2 o'clock today.
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Local support for this broadcast of Eclecticos is provided in part by Waterloo Records and Video,
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And again, this is your last chance to call.
Transform yourself.
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He thought you were the candy man.
Don't get strung up by the way I look.
Don't judge a book by its cover.
I'm not much of a man by the light of day, but by night I'm one hell of a lover.
Terrence, could we get you to read out our pledge numbers for us?
This is Terrence McKenna inviting you to become a KUT member.
Act, since he's so good with numbers.
4716291.
Pledge now.
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Is there a 1-888 number they can call?
There is.
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Do it now.
Thank you, Terrence McKenna.
This is KUT Austin, KUTX San Angelo.
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Come on.
Passport to Texas for October 3rd from Texas Parks and Wildlife.
You don't have to be a research scientist like Bill Calvert to be fascinated by the annual migration of the monarch butterfly.
Soon, millions of orange and black monarchs will pass through Texas,
dazzling all who witness this extraordinary phenomenon.
Each autumn, the monarchs from the eastern part of the continent begin an enormous trek across the continental United States to Mexico.
It takes them about two months to get from their major breeding grounds,
which are in the latitude of the Great Lakes, to cross the continental U.S.,
funnel through Texas, enter into Mexico, and then follow the mountains into central Mexico.
Monarchs catch a ride on the winds of cold fronts, says Calvert,
and will travel through Texas along a 200-mile-wide flyway extending from Wichita Falls to Del Rio.
They enter the state around the first of October, and they travel a certain distance with the winds,
and then the winds play out, and then they roost for a while, and that's when they're best seen.
Look for monarchs in low areas along creeks and streams,
or visit a state park famous for monarch sightings such as Possum Kingdom, Abilene, South Llano River.
John Steele With Terence - Memory 1
The first minute or two the sound is a little wrong, but it gets cleared up real fast
So don't worry about the initial sound quality John Steele on memory
Kpfk Los Angeles
Okay, we have ignition
this morning
we're going to
explore a vast array of
stuff which is come to me over the years through various channels and
with no names and
I'm really going to
Speak my mind. I'm going to think it out. So it's not in any set form, but there is that there is an order
I want to go through and
It will be kind of a look at
different elements of
contracted mind and extended mind so we can begin to see the juxtaposition of
The two how each one defines the other
The element of
Contracted mind I'd like to look at first before the extended mind aspect and
For those of you who heard me last year
I'll briefly capitulate this idea of the Kali Yuga as a set piece before I launch into the specifics
the
Kali Yuga is the age that we live in in
terms of East Indian chronology
There are four great Yugas of time
there is a
Roughly speaking the Golden Age of that Yuga and
Then the Silver Age and then a Bronze Age and then an Iron Age each one of varying durations. We won't get into the
Cosmological mathematics because they're up for grabs
Allegedly the age that we live in now is the end of the cycle each of these four ages
Is part of a cycle called a Maha Yuga?
The Kali Yuga is the Dark Age. It's the Iron Age
It's the age of Kali Kali is the is a goddess goddess of dissolution of time and structures
She clears the way for
those impediments of evolution that have arisen
Now in the Kali Yuga
What occurs is in terms of time
Very interesting because the Tibetan translation for Kali Yuga literally means the dregs of time
The dregs of time. What does that mean? It means the bottom of the barrel of time
it means that time has reached a
density a
Certain temporal density and this temporal density can actually be felt somatically in the body
Now what is the definition of temporal density?
Temporal density means
We have too many events per unit of time to fully assimilate in our everyday life
that means that you've got to pay the bills and take the kids out and go to the doctor and wash the clothes and
Put out the cat and you know do everything. It's an unending
Array of tasks that have to be accomplished and just when you think you've finished them all new ones magically arise
You are never finished
Now so the Kali Yuga has this
This idea of a temporal density and I want to explore that in several different ways here
One of the things that occurs in the Kali Yuga one other aspect
Which is an interesting concomitant to the temporal density is that there is a seasonal
disequilibrium in other words all
The climate and the seasons go out of whack
Rain doesn't fall at the right time snow doesn't fall at the right time. There's a seasonal imbalance
This is one of the aspects in terms of the Kali Yuga this climatic disequilibrium
and
What I'm pointing to is when you get a temporal disequilibrium
You know temporal dent high temporal density and there is at least a correspondence to a climatic
Fluctuation and as people like Padmasambhava and other great teachers have said this climatic
disequilibrium is part of the Kali Yuga
now
One of the
aspects
In terms of again of Eastern thought that occurs
in the Kali Yuga
is a
How shall we say is a time window narrows in this
Kind of
Density scenario and so what happens you last night the Miller light beer ad was mentioned
I will mention another beer ad which may bring back some memories quite a few years ago in America
There was a Schlitz ad Schlitz beer of Milwaukee and it showed these
Macho guys on the sailboat and the spray coming out and it said you only go around once in life
So grab all the gusto you can so the idea was since you know
This was it you had to have as good a time as possible right now
So the idea encapsulated in this ad is many different values
first of all is the idea that there are no past lives and there are no future lives this is it and
therefore you've got a hedonistically explode in the moment and
Just really grab everything possible
Now this the value inherent here is that you'll go for short-term games and to hell with anything possible long term
so this means
Rip off anyone have war as long as you profit in the immediate moment
Grab all the gusto you can
now back to Buddhism for a moment in the
one of the sutras the La kavantara Sutra one of the Buddhist Sutras
there is a
wonderful
Teaching and this is not tantric Buddhism
it's Mahayana Buddhism, but it's still the same basic set and
one of the teachings in their growth as such
for those of you who
My work is on memory
So I have this great interest in the subject because when the triple world is surveyed that's past present future by the bodhisattva
He perceived that it existence is due to memory that has been accumulated since the beginningless past
but wrongly
interpreted
Now it is this concept of memory that is wrongly interpreted that I want to take a good hard luck at here
And before we get into that a few more notes
Here the word memory in Sanskrit
comes from the word vasana
V a s a n a and it's a beautiful word because it has several different nuances
it means a memory which is
transmitted from one life to another either consciously or unconsciously usually unconsciously
Memories habit patterns that are generated within one life are called samskaras. It's different from a vasana
vasanas have a cross-life
connection
Now the
one of the the secondary meanings of this word vasana is very appropriate to one of my other interests and that is fragrance
Because the secondary meaning of the word vasana means if you have an empty perfume bottle
Even if it's completely empty the smell always remains of that scent in that bottle in other words
The scent pervades even when the vessel is empty and this is what the in the Sanskrit language
very mixture of great technical precision and great poetic insight
You have this idea that a past life memory is like
It's like the the smell which goes through time the smell memory goes from one life to another even though the bottle is empty
now
in this word also means habit energy the sauna means habit energy and
This word habit energy in Tibetan bakcha is a term for it
it's like a trace like the smell like the trace and
The teaching in the sutra is that these traces?
They build up after a while to the extent where we begin to nucleate
an ego around them like I get up every morning and I do this and I eat that and you get this whole kind of
An axis of a moment what the Buddhist call an axis of the moment begins to generate
This I the subject begins to generate from habitual action
repetitive automatic hypnotic repetitive, you know action now the
Therefore one of the ways one of the strategies to deal with this
nucleation around this moment of subjectivity is to learn how to
Shall we say die to oneself and this is in the perennial philosophy and the mystical philosophies known as the tradition of
unknowing of
Unknowing like the 14th century English mystic work the cloud of unknowing and this whole process
I want to look at in a moment. I just wanted to set that out
now with the idea of
Memory wrongly interpreted we can begin to look at a bit of present time through this filter
You see we live in an age at which
We are virtually hoarding memory
Computers are based on the idea like you look at women in terms of their vital measurements
Well, you look at computers in terms of their vital measurements in terms of their memory capacities
This one has so many bits and this one has more bits and this one can process those bits faster and faster
The memorial capacity is really the key to the strength of a computer
now the trouble is with this is that
The there is and I'm generalizing much of what computers do is wonderful. I'm not putting down computers per se
But there is a an emphasis on the acquisition of memories that can be stuck into the computer and
What too many memories do?
after a while
Whether they are in a can see because if they're in a computer even if they're in a computer
They have to be in a programmer's mind even in a real chunk style
They have to be some level of recursiveness in the company even in the programmers mind know how much he offloads into the computer
Itself there has to be some level of memory of what's inside
So the more that's inside the computer the more that has to be in the mind of the of the programmer
It's a great reduction, but still you begin to set up a great array of memories that is
Exhilarate to what would be needed for ordinary life
Now what begins to happen is that?
With this tremendous array of memory storage and we have you begin to clog a system a system becomes
constipated by actual too much
hoarding of memory
Now this
Hoarding of memory sets up a kind of a psychological density
And as the system becomes clogged it becomes brittle
That is to say it cannot react quickly to crisis situations because it is overloaded with choices and information
There's too much information every time that something happens now in the modern world
The reaction time is stunted to such a point by the vast array of information
Processing technology that people cannot react like that anymore in real critical decisions. Everything is so rationally
displayed in terms of its memorial capacity
And yet with all this memorial capacity and all this incredible telecommunications. The world is coming apart at the seams
I mean, it's we're balanced and we're as the Tibetans say we're licking honey from the razor's edge in terms of our
information acquisition
It's actually and this is memory wrongly interpreted this vast collection of memory as though more is better
That's the assumption that we're working under
now
The more memory that you accrete you see paradoxically you set yourself up more for what in systems terms
We call the likelihood of a runaway system a runaway system
Is it like a snowball going down a hill getting bigger and bigger and more?
progressively out of control and the more you develop memory look wrongly interpreted in terms of vast acquisition the more likely you are
To go into a runaway system
Because your reaction time is cut your direct perception your direct unmediated by vast information
technology is cut and
This likelihood of a runaway system occurs and this is what happens you see in things like
This all this controgate stuff
You have this incredible information technology of the NSC computers and the CIA computers and the DIA
computers and all these things and what happens is that you lose control of who's you know who is in charge is
Ollie North is running the ball this way and Colby is running the ball this way and
everyone's kind of what we call in systems theories again you begin to generate institutions within institutions and
This happens when you get this memory wrongly interpreted to such a point where there is clarity disappears
of the overview
Now what further begins to happen?
Is
That this memory wrongly interpreted begins to generate
The treatment is a footnote. There are two types of unconscious mind. I want to point out here one is what I would call
Unconscious unconscious and that's when you're asleep at the wheel. It's like you're dead drunk. It's like you're numbed. There's no sensation
Okay, that's unconscious unconscious
then
Contrasted to that there's conscious unconscious
Now the link of conscious unconscious is really shamanic consciousness
It's where there is a bridge between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. It's what Jung would call the transcendent function
There's a bridge
between these two realms
Now most people are walking around as all the perennial philosophy say we're in a state of sleep
We're walking around in a state of unconscious unconscious. It's what the chief calls. We're all asleep. We're sleepwalkers
This unconscious what happens then is this there's an unconscious
Mental mass is generated by memory wrongly interpreted
In other words what begins to happen is?
Conversely to what Terrence was talking about last night the idea of a living conscious memory
What gets generated is?
What what William Burroughs would call?
Language as virus is generated. You see this is where language goes out of control
it's just the opposite to a living language and
What is what I call an unconscious mental mass proliferate in the environment, and it means that there's all these kind of
invisible habit patterns and invisible kind of runaway systems
linguistically on a sub vocal voice in the environment and
Whereas
What as
one of my teachers has said
That at a certain point habit patterns become solidified in the environment and in the body
Now this is something that and this is from the Tibetan point of view. This is something actually that Norbu said
that
Habit patterns get solidified and the great illustration of this in terms of for example in a tantric thought is
There's a great Indian mahasiddha, Saraha
who was the the arrow maker and
He
Taught the idea that
Memory it can exist in many states
It's like water water can be very fluid and that at a certain point it can become ice and become solidified
Now that's the shift from natural mind and natural memory to memory wrongly interpreted when it solidifies
And when it when when it solidifies the mind stops it gels like that and that's what this sensation of ego comes from this
nucleation
So
This idea of a of an unconscious mental mass as the eye of the idea of virus and
languages virus is something that
We kind of have to be aware of
It's the idea that words have a life of their own it's like people's minds the the sub vocal voice
Oftentimes you think well, I'm in charge and the sub vocal voice is going I want this I want this
I want is what they but it's called monkey mind
It's like it's going here and here and here and you are saying I don't really think that but something else this and that's this
Automatic mind is going off and that's this languages virus memory wrongly interpreted gone organic
Now one of the
Aspects why that there's this great accumulation of memory
Is it's the idea the illusion is that the more memory we have?
The more control and manipulation and prediction of reality we will have if we can manage memory and keep it
You know untapped so we can push a button
therefore we'd be able to manipulate reality better with all this memory that we've got there and the external forms of computer banks and books and
everything else and
We begin to hoard memory because we feel it will give us prediction and control and manipulation of reality the Central Intelligence Agency
Stop and think of that for a moment Central Intelligence Agency. What does it do it gathers information about everything in the world?
Except the natural intelligence of the people who are in the organization. There's nothing to do with self-knowledge
Intel
intelligence of the other not of self-knowledge
Now
the
idea of this memory wrongly interpreted brings us to
an interesting model here again in the Buddhist
framework
we talk about
that thought or memory as the teaching goes as Saraha teaches and
In his what he calls the royal song the Doha's
And these are kind of like poetic teachings. He teaches that memory arises
from emptiness
Abides in emptiness and then dissolves back into emptiness
Or as he teaches memory arises from non memory what he calls non memory
Abides in non memory and then sinks back dissolves into non memory
now this cycle of
Arising abiding and dissolving is the cycle of all thought and
This cycle is
Also two other analogs that we can give to it
It is the basic nature of today what prigogine calls dissipative systems
Things arise they abide and they dissolve and they arise in a slightly different form and then they abide in a slightly different
Form and is it they dissolve now dissipative systems a footnote on this is?
Much more ancient than prigogine when all he's done is brought it into a contemporary mode
In the early forms of my interest of archaeology
We find it embodied in the idea of
the triple goddess
That is to say the and the the triple goddess is
exemplified by the three phases of the moon and
That is to say there's a new moon
there's a full moon and
Then there's the waning moon and then they go back to a fourth phase
Which people rarely really recognize and that is the state where moon is not visible at all
That is really the true emptiness and this dissipative cycle
is mirrored in the arising of thought abiding of thought and
dissolving back into
Now well the reason I bring this up is the following is that in
the paradigm of memory
As it's like that in the 20th century
memory is left at
Primarily from the point of view of Western psychology only in one of these three phases
That is to say it's like that principally in the middle phase the abiding phase
And we do not look at where memory comes from or where it goes to only in a psychoanalytical
Sense we look at your childhood memories and stuff like that
But we do not really consider the idea of emptiness or of non memory as an origin point
We are we look at this kind of psychoanalytic history as our way, but not as real emptiness
So we have a focus only on one phase the abiding phase that is the face of
How do what memories operate in the ordinary everyday visible world? How do we operate in that form?
and
This is where memory wrongly interpreted
Generates itself and proliferates right in this gap of only looking at the middle phase of the dissipative cycle because you neglect
the
arising and
Dissolving you begin to get an overbalance, and that's why it gets brittle
That's why it gets constipated because the cycle is left at and only only one part of it
Okay now the next thing that I would like to look at
Is the idea that one of the characteristics of the Kali Yuga?
another one besides this temporal density
is
The whole concept and this is something I've been developing from my doctoral thesis for years
But it's progressively comes into more focus is the idea of object proliferation
object proliferation
now
Let me
Give you a brief history of objects to put you in the picture the first man-made objects that we have are three million years old
These first objects are found in Africa, and they are
very small that they are they are
like hand axes and a pounding tool since things like that with a minimal of
modification to them very minute minimally modified and
as an archaeologist I happen to study this in great detail detail the kind of generation of tool making and
What progressively begins to happen after another million and a half years of no new and improved?
Models can you imagine you know any car the car industry with the same models for a million and a half years?
What begins them the first innovation is symmetry that's the first
Innovation in tool making is the idea of some degree of symmetry and then you begin to get into chipping and flaking as sharpening
and
gradually
You finally begin it we get into
what we call micro geometry tools you get into very very small tools that are very precise and and
the kind of needlepoint stuff and very very finely made things about 30 40 thousand years ago and
It's about
30 or 40 thousand years ago
again where
You begin to generate the first symbolic objects
That's where you go from functional to symbolic objects and when you make this leap language is you know a foot?
as soon as you begin to get symbolic objects and
With symbolic objects and language
Everything begins to escalate
because
In the in these scenario of objects as it were what begins to happen is roughly we have the Neolithic revolution
Which is about nine ten thousand BC some people put it a few thousand years earlier later, but it's irrelevant
In the Neolithic revolution essentially before we were hunter-gatherers. We were nomads we followed herds
Of different animals the caribou and the deer and the bison and the mammoth
We followed the seasonal growth of plants to wherever they occurred
We followed nature
And we did not own nature now what gradually began to happen in the Neolithic revolution
Someone had a bright idea and that is that we could
domesticate crops and animals we did not have to follow we could take something and plant it and
with this planting we could
Stay in one place. We would not be at the kind of
whims of this grand seasonal variation and
Our animals we could
domesticate
Animals that is to say we did not have to go hunting all the time. We would take we would begin to
domesticate cows and
keep them in pens and
sheep and goats and things like that would begin to occur and
You know it's a wonderful invention for many people the idea of stopping this nomadic life
Others were not so sure that this was a great idea because there was a great virtue in the nomadic life in many ways as well
But history rolled on and what began to happen is as you begin to settle and to nucleate
you began to
Generate objects for the first time in a different scale than just hand axes and
Cutting tools just the bare essential tools you began to make tools
More permanent holding tools now instead of transporting water and ostrich eggs
That were biodegradable in a very neat sense
you would begin to make longer lasting objects of clays and potteries and
In other words the half-life of your objects would begin to increase
The idea of permanent objects instead of kind of a throwaway culture
Began to accrete and as these objects began to accrete
You began to
gradually through the years to make decorations on them and art on the objects and this made the objects a
more valuable quote unquote whatever that meant at the time and
These objects had the very strange effect on people's minds as they acted like
an
attractor matrix for the human mind on which to see
even further
possibilities for the proliferation of even more objects
That is to say once you made a bowl well we can make a better bowl and a bowl with a spout and then a bowl
With a this on it and one with greater capacity and then so on and so forth
object proliferation
Began to form it began to be a mirror to which the mind could say well. We've done this, but we can do this better
Before you extracted from nature now you were on this kind of reflection process
So that was one dynamic that began to occur object proliferation in the generation of even more objects
now I
Should say at a footnote right now
Before I go on with a scenario the average home
The average home has in it today
300,000 objects in it
put that in your pipe and smoke it and
that means that you have to deal with the ID the location and function and
care of all these objects
So therefore a lot of your mental activity is tied into this object array environment
Okay now
What happens let's go back to the Neolithic for a moment you see then we have very few objects
It's gone from a few pots and bowls and a few digging sticks and spears and what-have-you and and furs and
beads and things like that to
300,000 I mean the the
Proliferation that has to go with that you see the concomitant proliferation is the secret of this process is when you begin to generate objects
You have to have a concomitant and corresponding memory for every object that you own whether it's online or not
It is the point is that we don't keep the
300,000 memory online all the time it's
We chunk things we say it's in the garage. It's in the bedroom. It's in the den. It's in the kitchen
We have a chunking by by spatial kind of labeling
but on the whole
What happens is as soon as you have an object you have to have a memory of that object
Otherwise the object is useless to you
You don't you don't know where you put it in there for you can't use it so you have to have some corresponding memory
Now in terms of ownership what begins to happen is very interesting as soon as you begin to have this object proliferation
You begin to have to have the generation of a noun a linguistic noun has to come into being
for the generation of that object this is a
spear thrower this is you know my
Water bowl this is
This is my fur to keep me warm. This is my
Palace man, whatever it is you have to have corresponding noun
For every object that is generated
Now with this kind of generation of noun the converse of this most curious thing begins to happen is
And it is the generation of pronouns and begins to occur. This is my
Object this is your object. This is his object
This is their object when you were in nature. There was no pronouns
There was just this vast undifferentiated
participation mystique no
differentiation of subject and object
therefore no pronoun so pronouns are generated from nouns and nouns are generated from objects
so you get this linguistic matrix beginning to occur and
It occurs in this kind of unconscious proliferation again language is virus
now
What begins to happen is again the the possibility of
Runaway systems and as Morris Berman a cultural historian pointed out recently you begin to get what we he called commodity
Fetish fetishism the idea now in the old days when objects for example
Certain totemic things in the Indian Northwest were made they were meant to degenerate with weather after they were
Made they were the masks and the things like that were left to weather and disintegrate to dissolve in the dissipative cycle
back into nature
They arise they abided and they dissolve
They were not kept as
Objects of art you see what we have done is taken these objects and got into the abiding phase
Memory wrongly interpreted and we fixate there, and we keep that going
So you get this very kind of
interesting scenario
Rising now let's take a look at this in terms of the media how this can be put to us in a very entertaining and
insightful way
There was a film that was made. I don't know maybe
Seven eight years ago
Something I don't know maybe it was more than that ten years ago
Called the gods must be crazy how many of you saw this film I?
Figured a lot of you want and I'll give you a brief recapitulation of this film because it's a wonderful teaching film
but basically the scenario happens there's an airplane flying over Africa and
two of the guys and one of them is drinking, Coca-Cola and
He takes finishes the bottle and he throws it out of the plane. They're over the middle of nowhere
he throws it out and it lands near a bushman hunting party as chance would have it and
the Bushmen then
See this bottle and it is the introduction of a new and novel object into the culture
When this object comes in first it is met with wonder and awe and the multifarious
Uses of it are then discovered first of all you could
Put things in it as a container that was very durable. It was a wonderful container for water
Second of all you could roll things out like a roller
Then you could blow in it and make wonderful sounds with it
Then you could you know all these objects were generally all these uses for the object were seen, but what began to happen is that?
Everyone wanted to use it
All the pronoun thing began to arise as soon as this object was induced and what began to happen in this little world
Where there was peace and harmony was discord?
Tremendous sense of discord I want I want to know it fights began to break out over who was going to use this Coca-Cola bottle
Exactly
This Coca-Cola had occurred
So the thought was and this is brilliant
They the the Bushmen wisdom still prevailed they thought and God's must be crazy to have given us this object
It causes havoc and in this society
So one of them was given the task to take this coca-cola bottle to the edge of the world and get rid of it
Get this object out of here. We got enough objects. That's essentially what they were saying
Okay, so in a microcosm in this film is this wonderful teaching about how an object a single object in this case can take
A very harmonically based culture and throw it out the window
young said
Speaking of our current era knowledge of the internal world of the psyche was eclipsed by the external world of objects
The very same insight more we got hooked on objects the more that we began to lose the kind of internal world
now
It's interesting that in terms of the very first writing ever discovered is the favorite
Kind of point that come up archaeologically
It's not some mystical writing about move or Lemuria or channeling or anything like that
The first writing ever discovered is a Sumerian tax receipt
Okay, it's 4500 BC and it's a tax receipt because what it is saying is you have dealt with these objects
And we want to keep a record of them so that
we can
Find out what what the trend the as it were the karmic trajectory of this object
Now this is what begins to happen with objects record-keeping grows as an industry
for all you have to keep a memory for every object record-keeping grows in
proportion to object proliferation
Today the biggest industry on the face of the earth is record-keeping
That's what computers do more than anything else besides their creative uses they do more than anything else is inventory
It's record-keeping and they're doing it. They're keeping track of objects and events
Connected with objects these the transactions and interactions and transformations of objects
That's what is being kept records out. So record-keeping grows out of this proliferation of this object, right?
So in a sense, you see you get an extended mind an unconscious extended mind is generated through this generation of objects
and what it begins to generate them is the idea of
Shall we say a left brain memory now a left brain memory you see
corresponds to the middle phase of the dissipative cycle that is to say
the abiding phase of memory memory in the world that we can see and
This again is the realm where if you overload it memory wrongly interpreted begins to proliferate
now let's take a little bit a closer look at this idea of the
Kind of the metaphysical arising of the way that we see the world
the density of objects
density of objects in an environment
creates a corresponding
density of memory
That you through record-keeping and in turn this density of memory generates the density of time
Temporal density is a function of memorial density and memorial density is a function of object density
You will notice that those cultures that have the fewest objects live in the dream time
You look at the Australian aborigines
With their minimal object array and you see that they live in a completely different time frame
they live in a dream time the bushman the same as your
object density
memorial density temporal density occurs
it sets out this extended unconscious array of time time is generated and
This generation of time the density of time
Has a further
aspect to it, which is very interesting because of the
transactions and accounting for all these objects the emphasis is placed on
ever on short-term memory
Because there are more objects and more transactions and interactions therefore
The short-term and what I put this and what I do with this and what happened here because there are more things
your short-term memory has to be more active and
Your short-term memory has to be more active also in terms of crisis situations
Whenever you have a potential crisis going on which is now pretty much non-stop and in the world at large
so
the short-term memory has to keep track of everything and
Again, the short-term memory takes place in this middle phase
The short-term memory has to be more active also in terms of crisis situations
Whenever you have a potential crisis going on which is now pretty much non-stop in the world at large
so
the short-term memory has to keep track of everything and
Again, the short-term memory takes place in this middle phase of memory abiding in this middle phase
and this means that memory arising and then we dissolving this is right brain memory this gets left out and
This means that far memory memory of past lives. That's where the Schlitz ads comes in
You only go around once in life
Well, that's smack in the abiding phase of the dissipative cycle again, you see
if
Object proliferation
Short-term memory in terms of I've looked at memory
I've read so much material memory for the past ten years on the experimental psychology
Aspect amount just to see what's in these people's mind. They're looking at ever the smaller and smaller increments of
Memory short-term memory is like really where it's at and for many people
Short-term memory is like a paradigm in itself. There's a it's like corresponding to the search for
The atom as the lowest common denominator in the physical world short-term memory is the lowest common denominator in the memorial world
you
You look for this the accuracy and the way that short-term memory
Works as a kind of hypothesis that contributes to reality
Now I should say as a footnote to that the idea of what is known in the memory trade is
stml short-term memory loss which is
the one of the signal
attributes of altered state
this is one of the first thing that happens to memory is short-term memory loss now many people in the
investigation of memory look at the the real traditionalist and memory research look at short-term memory loss as
Pathological you lose your short your mind you're losing your mind if you lose your short-term memory watch out keep control
Stay in the abiding phase where it's safe. Let's accumulate some stay in control
It's all that kind of thing don't let go whatever you do. Don't let go of your memory or you will just melt you'll evaporate
But the real secret is is that that's the ploy stay with memory because memory is control
The point that's how the CIA looks at it and all intelligence agencies
I look at memory is controlled, but the fact the secret is of the perennial philosophies
That if you die to yourself that if you unknow
Learn the art of unknowing that if you learn the art and in Tibetan which is called charm a which is non memory
What happens then is that you do not lose your mind?
Actually you come into what Jill was talking about yesterday primordial mind or nature of mind
This is has no pronouns you see this has no hooks of personality to it
so
Memory is used as a control device
That's why when you take classes at school you're asked to regurgitate
In early school wrote mnemonic because see just a way of hooking you into control and predictability
This kind of give me back what I gave you now give that right back. No nothing new
Just give that right back to me. This is you get the highest marks on your test for regurgitation
So the idea of short-term memory loss as a as a gateway it is actually a gateway into
a different dimension
The dimension of God the dimension of the overmind of the overself whatever you want to call it Atman Vaman
It doesn't matter. It's different spelling for the same phenomena the same phenomena as primordial mind
It really doesn't matter what you call it
But if you control short-term memory as a kind of a sphincter
And you don't let anyone through that or yourself through it you're lost in this abiding phase when you go into
The through the rabbit hole as it were a short-term memory through short-term memory loss
But you've got to go through it with awareness if you go through it unconscious unconscious
You're finished. I mean you're you're you're you're drunk. You're stoned you can kill yourself in that form you have no awareness
You have no clarity, but if you go through with awareness or clarity
that is the entrance to
As I say
the two phases of the dissipative cycle that are neglected the arising and
The dissolving aspects you begin to see the entire dissipative nature of the mind
Now one other thing about the
Objects here is that if you get stay on the object level?
if the objects fixate attention
They fixate attention, and they generate kind of reactive automatic mind that is memory wrongly interpreted
So you fixate or you crystallize attention through your objects?
This is my mercedes, and I'm going to put a I'm going to put an alarm system on it
no one's going to get this and I
Have people begin to build up a paranoia about their valuable objects you see they become object hook in that sense
One that will another aspect of this in terms of our
Particular time is that people tend to get into hoarding this time in this age that we live these
300,000 objects we have become temporal pack rats in a sense we are
Hoarding all these objects in this sense. We don't need all these objects. You know could all these 300,000 objects
We hoard them and one of the reasons that we hoard them from a psychoanalytic point of view is that we think that
That these will be a buffer between us and death between us and extinction
That if we hoard things that they are substitute for living time
these objects and
Compulsive hoarding and also a lot of people hoard when they get older
Actually is a representative of trying to save off death that the people who are very rich often accumulate
Tremendous arrays of things not just for pleasure, but to actually keep the idea of extinction at bay
Now if we look at
Objects from another point of view
That is to say from the
One point is shall we say the participation
The mystical participation that is to say when there's no difference between subject and object in primitive societies
Participation mystique versus
The idea of the Buddhist or tantric teachings of detachment from objects
And I want to go into that for a moment
We have a very interesting kind of what Ken Wilber calls the pre-trans fallacy you begin to separate two things which look the same
But they're really not
In the participation mystique there's a kind of fusion of subject and object in the Zen tradition in the Eastern
Kind of sense you are taught to detach yourself from objects not not buying their whole
seeing them as they are but not becoming totally involved with them and
There's a subtle difference in this
As Hui Neng the six patriarchs and patriarchs said not to be defiled by external objects
This is to be one with the unconscious and that's capital you it's conscious unconscious. He means that
That is to be detached detached from objects, so they are present in consciousness
When all thoughts are discarded
Consciousness is cleared off from all its defilements
So on one hand you have this fusion of subject and object and the other one you have
detachment like this
Not getting attached to objects. Okay. Now there are some similarities between these two states and the participation mystique
You may not become attached, but you don't consciously become detached
There's a subtle difference now if we go on with this a little bit it becomes interesting
because what
Jung refers to is this or in the Zen tradition this epistemological
Detachment the translation for it of Hui Neng of this unconscious is the the word Wu Nian and
Wu means no and Nian means literally it has several nuances to it
It means it means no memory or no habit patterns. It's most traditionally translated as no memory
So Wu Nian means no memory now in other words unconscious with a capital U or unconscious or conscious unconscious
means a state of no memory
But what this no memory is and it's very important is that it is a temporary
Suspension it is not an obliteration of memory non memory
non memory is is
What Lang Changpa one of the great?
masters of Tibetan
Vajrayana thought I said the spontaneous wizardry of the mind takes place
out of emptiness or out of non memory the spontaneous wizardry and
Again, the obvious by the very terms that he uses akin to shamanism right there with the term wizardry
Non memory is something that you see a computer is very interesting a computer cannot
Unknow this is a very important thing. It cannot go into the unknowing mode
Okay, if you clear a computer's memory, it's no temporary suspension
You're that's it and the little I know about computers if you wipe the disk clean. That's it
you don't just say okay forget this and
Then see what happens. This is a uniquely human function the ability to suspend
And then see what happens
now
non memory you see is it teaches us the
It shouldn't be cultivated for itself. It should be cultivated in
conjunction with memory
That is to say if you just because you've given up them the abiding
Cycle and looked at the dissolve arising and dissolving that's to substitute one thing for another you need the whole cycle
The middle phase is conservation of memory. The others are the arising and dissolution of memory
So for memory to be its most its highest form you have to have conservation and dissolution
You need the dance between non memory and memory. It's like saying the left brain is bad. That's ridiculous
The left brain has a vital function. It's what enables us to communicate and to exist in this world in many ways
And to make advances but it's where we become fixated at one
Aspect of the dissipative cycle that amnesia sets in and then a runaway system begins and we go out of control
That's the dynamic of it
so
This non memory has to we have to learn how to look at it to oscillate it
and in
Sitting practice one of the most valuable things
that I have learned in from my altered states is the oscillation of
memory and non memory the oscillation of attention and
The release of attention and
Realizing and I always see them and in an infinity cycle. I always see them in this form like this
I don't know why my mind always takes it to this
Just this dance like this because it moves to like memory and then just and it shifts the dissipative cycle and it shifts and it
Shifts and this figure eight actually that it occurs eight is it is called the Lemnis gate in
mathematics and
Eight actually is very interesting. This is a footnote eight is a number of Isis the goddess and
Eight the goddess is the the great as it were the primordial mind
The last thing about objects that I would like to introduce now is that again objects in
Themselves are not negative at all
It is our reference to them that it is this unconscious mental mass this linguistic flux
Invisible flux that makes them what they are aren't you see because there's a tremendous tradition in my research and memory
I was astonished to find I looked under the folk tales concerned with memory
There is a tremendous array of folk tales concerned with magical objects that restore memory
There is the magical stone the magical drink the magical feather the magical flower the magical kiss the magical
You know footstool. There are there are things which actually are encoded as
Awakeners in the environment and this idea of awakening in the environment is
a very interesting one
what it pertains to is
the idea of the conscious
impregnation of the environment of
mind
specifically to awaken people
And in future states when they go by or interreact with this object and to use Rupert's framework
This is the setting up of a morphic
framework around an object if you take an object and you sit with it and you meditate it and you sleep with it and you
Dream with it and you use it in ritual it begins to absorb in
Psychometry we see that these vibrations are absorbed every object we have absorbed some of our field
That's why psychometrists can take a ring or a belt
And in a very unusual way
One of the ways this is done in the for example in the gurjev tradition
is
you take a
Place or an object and a good thing that I use in many of the classes that I've taught if you take a doorway
And you say to your class or those people that you're dealing with every time you pass this doorway
You should wake up be mindful
It's like the bell going off in the retreat the meditation retreat every time you pass the doorway you have a microsecond of increased awareness
To that you were part of this universal flux and that you are not just an ego anyway
You want to encode it but a moment of heightened awareness when you pass this object then the art becomes to impregnate an environment
with conscious objects and
Then you as you begin to impregnate your environment you begin to set up an extended mind field in the environment
Which you react with when you go out into it
And this is why for the American Indian and the Taoist and all the other Aboriginal peoples
that their environment was a conscious environment that Gaia was alive and
That when you went out you didn't just see you remembered
That's what the dream time was about all these ancestors
The rainbow the serpents and and the the great whales and all the totemic beings you you were
Reminded that you were part of this dream time of Gaia of this living entity
Anyhow, let's stop here. I've got another subject
Let's break for about you know ten minutes, but don't wander too far because I want to keep the rhythm and we'll continue
part two and
meanwhile back at the source and
I
Want to go on to a another subject a very valuable one that
We should look at and that is one of the counters
To the state of kind of waking sleep or this runaway system this memory wrongly interpreted one of the principal counters to it
Is to develop something called cross state retention?
Cross state retention I've talked about this before but I've done a lot of thinking about it kind of since that time
now cross state retention or CSR is
Based on the idea that most of the time when we are in an altered state
whether it's
Psychomimetic ly induced or dream or emotional when we go back to an ordinary state
We don't remember
There's a veil of forgetting between
Going from state to state. This is Rowan Fisher calls it state bound experience in classical memory
Parlance is called state specific memory that is to say
If you're one of the classic things for example in in Sufi story is the Nazaruddin
He loses his key and while he's drunk wakes up the next morning can't find it and he says what am I going to do?
And he says well, I'll get drunk again and he stumbles off into the bushes again and finds the key
Because he's in the same state. This is just a an example by parable of the way that it works
Now again in the dissipative cycle the abiding section the center one
There's the arising abiding and dissolving in the abiding cycle. That's where
State specific memory in current research is focused in this area right here. You don't cross state
you don't look at the transition between arising and abiding and between abiding and
Dissolving and between dissolving and arising you don't look at the transitions you see in
Contemporary memory research you only look at this abiding face and some psychoanalytical history of early childhood
now
Cross-state retention is most of us know when we have when we have dreams unless it is an exceptionally vivid dream
When we wake up
We know that we have dreamed
But the dream disappears like the bubbles of a wave going out after they just go pop pop pop and it dissolves because it's like
a different dimension
there are
Yogas of dream recall taught in the Tibetan tradition. There are yogas taught in
African systems of shamanism that I know of for
dream recall
There are many
aspects of cross-state retention taught in many different
Esoteric traditions in fact I would say that cross-state retention is the essence of all
Shamanic and
Esoteric ways of thinking
At heart for example
Eliyat teaches that the shaman is the man who goes into the other realms or the woman who goes into other realms
But he is able to bring it back. You see this is what differentiates him from other beings
He's able to bring it back many people have altered state experiences in their Wow on next morning. Well. We I really can't
Elaborate on quite what happened, but I know it was fantastic
It's what we call the limbic system flash
You know that it happened, and you have it you have a rush, but you can't elaborate it
now
The idea of cross-state retention first of all is never taught to us in school
I want to bring this to a basic everyday life
We're never taught any idea of cross-state retention your thoughts state-specific regurgitated memory
You will not set the idea of remembering from what you may even thought that you got other states let alone remembering between them
now
the idea of
This kind of shamanic sense can be taught in many different ways it can be taught
In for example
The idea of what is called holy reversal is
one way in which cross-state retention is is taught for example in the peyote ceremonies when the
Which I'll go to the highland to the as a press where accoutre when it when they go there's a certain point in distance
where the
Everything must be reversed in terms of language and act and symbol if you are right-handed you do everything with the left hand
If you if this is your friend you refer to him as your enemy if you're walking along
And it's a beautiful sunny day. You'll say gee isn't the moon lovely tonight the the reversals are a way of jarring
the attention from fixated patterns and this
Inculcate an unusual quality to the attention so that it is remembered differently because of the reversal
So this quality of reversal is done in
In many different traditions throughout the world that's just one in particular
in fact I recall one that
Rupert told me about once and that is the tradition of holy
In India isn't there reversal between master and servant that's rather interesting
And I think there's probably a rose not from just kind of sense some sense of equality
but from some sense of
Awakening the name itself might have something to do with that
Now
If we look at another aspect of this cross cross-state retention
To it operate to operate it fully it requires the notion of the entire dissipative cycle
How things arise how they abide and how they disappear and and and the knowledge?
Also that there is always no matter what phase you're in that
Apparently that there that primordial mind is there no matter what phase is showing its face
Whether it's the abiding phase or the dissolving or the arising the primordial sense is always there
And if you have that sense the idea of cross-state retention is
vastly
Made much more easy, but in turn but in practical terms really let's get you know
Non-theoretical from a practical terms the best way for cross-state retention to work is the following
You see attention in a modern world because of all the objects that we've got in it attention
Slides across the surface of the mind of objects is this slide we never go in deep
It slides across the surface of the world
now
How do we counter that well for one of the ways in the traditional schools like in the gurjeet tradition that is done
There's a tradition called self-remembering and self-remembering
Literally means that you just like in mindfulness you take a moment any moment
you take this moment for example and
you make it special by investing it with an inordinate amount of intention and
You see just in a footnote to this
explanation the the sequence goes
Intention attention retention if your intention if your will is clear that you want to remember you will pay attention
And therefore your retention will be clear intention attention retention. That's how it works
now if you want to
Raise consciousness by this cross-state retention
Manner you take a moment and it can be any moment and you encode your all of your five senses
Response to that moment in other words you take one minute like right now
You take a minute and first of all you look around you and you don't try to encode everything
This is something I've learned you look at a number of key objects three four five the mind can only chunk five
Plus or seven plus or minus two objects at a time
So don't try to chunk say more than five to nine objects you look around say at people if you see what they're wearing just generally
then you look at your
what you're sitting on and you feel it and you see what is this texture feeling like so and
then you do your smell like I can smell Tiger Lily over here and
then
You can look into the sense of taste what kind of taste in your mouth perhaps from breakfast or the coffee that you're just drinking
or whatever it is and
What here what you stop for a moment and you hear?
Here the flies
You hear the birds you hear the sound between you encode that and you begin to multi sensory encode
over a one minute period and
The way that it works in the phone you begin to encode all of those things
And the way that it works is the more things that you can encode a memory in
Sensorially the easier it will be to recall the entire memory. That's really it in a nutshell
so if
You're able to have in these five sensory modes
It's very different than if you only if you just saw someone you only have a visual sensory mode to recall from
But you see the senses reinforce each other and if you can reinforce them by your attention your set
Now after the ten years, I've been working on my memory thesis
I can put it down to a nutshell what it's all about memory is a function of attention. That's it
It's the whole thing. It's the name of the game
If you don't pay attention, you don't remember that simple that simple
And of course if you don't have an intention, you don't have an apt engine
So if that intention that tension retention is that is the memorial cycle?
so
What we do is we take that minute and you have to know how to trigger yourself in that moment
I usually when I give classes or something
Do it in a way which is
Do you want to
Say something, okay
The the sense of
Encoding is
Done by like a theme for example, the theme of water is given I'll say to a class. We're gonna meet
Next Thursday that next Tuesday
I would like you or any time before that any any time that you see water in any form be it rain or washing-up liquid
Or flushing the toilet or taking a bath anytime you see water. I wanted to remind you to take a moment
one moment and stretch it out and
Do that multi-sensory sensing and then I'm gonna ask you all to tell your story of that moment. I have the motel stories and
Of all these moments and you get these and see what I'm about is slices of life
every moment is special, but it's only special because of the attention invested in it and
I've had them in these housewives that I got adult education in England for a while
These housewives and said well
I was washing the dishes and I remember the water and I like to run and there was the full moon and she just got excited
And you know and then my husband came home and the dog barked and you know
And I just think this little old moment became special and many people did this
We did this with all kinds of things all in the thing is that this cross-state retention is developed by multi-sensorial attention
Within say a minutes framework and you have to be able to trigger yourself
The point is we're too lazy we walk through the world and we go like this
But we never just go like that that is to say you're walking by a beautiful flower
I mean I do this all the time and all of a sudden it catches my attention and I'll sit with it
I'll smell it and I'll see the ground that it's coming out
I'll hear the ball let that be a cue anything can be a cue for you and you go into that mode
Now one of the other things about
cross-state retention that I'd like to say and this really relates to the
theme of
the extended mind is
The idea first of all the idea of cross-state involves extension right in itself right to begin with
the idea
there are two types of
cross-state retention that I'd like to look at and one of them is
It's purely
associative like this like like this idea reminds me of this idea reminds me of this idea and
It's this kind of glass bead game type of thinking
Okay, and that is one type of cross-state retention
Goes autocatalytic after all it begins to breed more and more insights
And it's it's like the opposite of memory wrongly interpreted. It's like memory rightly interpreted when it goes cross-state
Now the other aspect of it is a Greek term called anomnesis
Anamnesis anomnesis or any way you want to pronounce it, but anyhow what it anomnesis has
Again two meanings to it
In the classical Greek sense it means to be able to remember your karmic trajectory as it were your past lives
Back like Pythagoras could remember when he was a butcher and a candlestick maker and a this and a that he
Pythagoras was known for his ability to trace his karmic trajectory back, and this is the idea of anomnesis
It is used today in psychoanalysis when talking about the patient's past history
They talked about a patient's kind of psychoanalytic anomnesis. Tell me about your early childhood that type of thing
but
You see at a certain point
Anomnesis just going back with I was a dishwasher and I was a princess and I was a channeler or whatever an ice skater
This goes back and back and back and it after a while see Buddha's first realization
He says it was Parnivana beneath the bow tree when he became enlightened
It began when he started going back in his karmic trajectory
He went back 500 lives
and he was a this and a king and a queen and a this and a this and he was cruel and he was happy and
He was delightful and he was sad
But what he saw and his great genius was not the fact that he could go back
life to life to life to life to life as it were
what he saw is that every one of these lives was in a sense an illusory pearl on
The necklace of primordial mind that is every one of these lives although appearing separate
[sound of water]
All right. Wonderful to see.
So many people turned out to, after having just been here a scant year ago,
I'm delighted that they invited me back.
The deal is no jokes about Camaro raffles, no jokes about Moldavite suppositories.
[laughter]
So just consider it as if it didn't happen.
[laughter]
No, it is a pleasure to be here. I'm fascinated by this green and intelligent part of Texas.
I grew up with all the prejudices against Texas that you have in western Colorado,
where Texans arrive to kill our elk once a year and then depart and leave us once again
bewrift of glory and drawl.
So I did a radio show, some of you may have heard it, and it was an occasion to be up at the campus.
Wonderful university.
I see a lot of universities and a lot of them look like Air Force bases, and you're very fortunate
to have the University of Texas at Austin. There are some great people associated with that faculty.
Okay, let me get a wet whistle here.
How many people have read at least one of my books?
A lot of people. Well, so what I'm thinking is, I have some things on my mind, and I'll run through that,
but I'd like to leave a lot of time for Q&A, because my thing has several facets,
and maybe you're interested in Salvia Divinorum and I'm raving on about modeling and animation,
or maybe you're interested in the end of history and I can't shut up about serotonin metabolism.
So this is all part of the picture, but driven by your needs and your agenda, I think it's much more fruitful,
it's much more fun for me. The audiences in these things are the great joy.
And I should say to you, as I say to all my audiences, the psychedelic community is still small and tight,
and we look pretty much like everybody else out there. That's part of our victory, I might point out.
It's not that we came to look like them, it's that they finally let it down and now they all look like us.
But a gathering like this is an occasion to actually see your local psychedelic community.
So take a look around. Somebody in this room has what you need.
And it's like an intelligence test, isn't it? All social interaction is, it turns out.
Okay. I guess I should bring you up to date on what I've been doing before I plunge into the heart of this,
since my own life is my own adventure and how I then read the larger picture of reality.
I think everybody sees their life that way. After all, if you're not the hero in your novel, what kind of novel is it?
I need to do some heavy editing. Robert Anton Wilson once said, he said,
"We should define reality as a plot run by a closely knit group of powerful insiders."
Yourself and your friends, of course. I mean, if you don't believe that, you have a loser's scenario,
and who needs a loser's scenario?
So what I've been doing since I saw you last is basically a lot of traveling.
I went to South Africa last October, and that was in education.
It was a nonstop, two-week intensive education in humanness, third world colonial politics,
Dutch Afrikaner history, a whole bunch of things I knew very little about.
It was inspiring, challenging, amazing. Africa, the human home, is right now the great theater of struggle for the human soul.
How we deal with the political and social problems of Africa is going to say a great deal about how we will be judged by the future.
The problems of Africa are almost entirely created from outside of Africa, and the solutions which are being produced on native soil
need all the nurturing and support that we who cheer on the brotherhood of man can give it.
Then in February I went to Australia, and if I had known about Australia what I know now 30 years ago, I'm sure my life would be very different.
I said last night at a book signing, "It's weirdly like Texas."
I mean, it's large, it's largely empty, and it has a very eccentric population of hard-driving folks
who are lovely to party with and know how to barbecue. So, what more can I say?
Okay, so enough with personal reportage, local color, putting us all at ease, and all the rest of that forensic malarkey.
Cut to the chase.
When I think about talking to an audience like this, I go through my toolkit and try to say, you know, what is cogent, what's meaningful, what can bring us forward?
And there seem to be... it's a changing list, but at the moment what seems to be going is the old perennial psychedelic alteration of consciousness
for purposes of personal exploration, social reformation, creation of a new art, a new politic.
That's one of the major pieces of the puzzle.
Another major piece is the new communications technologies.
And I mean not only the internet, but the software that allows us, each and every one of us, to be animators, filmmakers, visually expressive people
who can produce emotionally moving works of great depth and beauty.
This is something that technology has brought to us.
And strangely enough, a technology largely produced by psychedelic heads, people like ourselves.
I told you last year, I think, when we discussed drugs and technology, that the only difference between a computer and a psychedelic was one was too large to swallow.
Well, you know, great progress has been made in twelve months. In another three or four years we will be able to swallow the computer.
Some of us may never be able to swallow it.
The third piece of the puzzle, which is sort of mine alone to play with since no one else wants to be this publicly crazy,
is the whole business of novelty theory, the approach of a singularity in time that is sculpting the human and natural world,
and that is so large an object in the intuitive sphere of human beings that it almost has religious overtones.
And then the question for me and the question for you, I suppose, is how much of this can you take without having to take at all?
How much of these ideas can you imbibe without having to go the whole distance?
And the answer is, you know, it's a personal matter for each person to feel into their circumstance, which means their history, both psychedelic and non-psychedelic,
and then to feel into the projection of their future.
Do you think you are repeating the lifestyles and algorithms of your parents and grandparents ad infinitum back to Adam?
Or do you feel like you've stepped to the front of the train of human evolution, that you are making yourself new every day?
If we reach too far back into the stabilizing metaphors of the past, we get rigidity, habit, limitation.
If we step too quickly into the unlimited freedom of the future, we lose our grounding.
Socialism did this over the past hundred years, and because it abandoned any contact with a realistic human psychology,
the best-intended people ended up creating nightmare societies.
If your theory is not true to the nature of humanness, you will end up beating human beings like metal on the anvil of your ideology.
And this creates great human suffering and historical catastrophe.
And I maintain that our own society suffers from a failure to adequately model and reflect the true nature of human beings.
We have ideas, we have ideals that get in the way of realism and immediate experience.
And when I was thinking about all of this and how to put it into a metaphor that would be appealing and amusing
and lead people to look deeper into these things, I began to play with the idea, it's a religious idea,
you all have heard, although probably more often in English than in Latin, the thought
"In Principio et verbum et verbo carofactum est", which means "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh".
This is the great overarching myth of Western religion. It equally informs Islam, Christianity, Judaism.
These three great flavors of monotheism all accept this primary statement
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh".
What does it mean for a moment, taken away from the tired exegesis of the cults that have hammered at it for so long?
What does it mean in and of itself?
It means that language is somehow the privileged medium of exchange between human beings and the divine.
That the descent of the Word into flesh makes the flesh more than flesh, makes the Word more than the Word.
The union of flesh and Word launches the cosmic drama of fall and redemption that is the ur-myth of Western society.
And for centuries and centuries we've concentrated on one end of this story of the fall and the redemption.
We have concentrated on the fall.
But meanwhile, through all the grimy betrayals and bloody backsliding of human history, the Word has quietly advanced its agenda.
And I've been thinking a lot about this recently because in the new book I'm writing, I'm writing a lot about spoken language, speech.
And I've come to a conclusion that, typical of me, is far from orthodoxy, and far from much cover provided by anybody else's ideas on this matter.
I've come to the conclusion that language is very old, thinking is very old, communicating is very old, by glance, by gesture, by dance, by meme, by intuition.
But speech is very recent.
It's a technological innovation as fresh as the Pentium chip or the spinning wheel.
It's something someone invented somewhere.
It's the most successful technological leap forward ever made.
It's the discovery of symbolic signification that a noise, meaning nothing, can by convention be given a meaning.
And that that meaning will then attend that utterance wherever it occurs in the presence of those who have joined in the agreement that attaches the symbol to the meaningless utterance.
It's a coding breakthrough.
Somebody hacked this about 35,000 years ago, and immediately, as forms of media have a way of doing, it swamped the previous methods of communication.
Because, A, it worked in the dark.
Suddenly, evenings were not so boring anymore.
It worked in the dark. It also, the touchy-feely forms of communication were generally one-on-one and related probably to having sex or aggressive physical encounters.
But suddenly, one voice could reach many, and many could respond.
And virtual reality was born at that moment, not here in the late 20th century, but at that moment.
Because acoustical environments laden with symbolic meaning became the name of the game.
Stories is what we call these things, and they are the proper use of the advanced form of media known as human speech.
It's using human speech to create three-dimensional scenarios that unfold, and everyone is carried along with the drama and the wonder of it.
From that beginning, and in a series of successively accelerating leaps, the word has made its way into the world.
It's interesting that straight linguists and paleolinguists believe human language is no more than 35,000 years old. Imagine that.
We possess homo sapien sapien skeletons 110,000 years old. People like the person who rode with you on the bus yesterday.
People that modern, and yet the experts tell us no one spoke until 35,000 years ago.
No one wrote until 5 or 6,000 years ago.
Reading and writing is simply a carrying forward of the original program of signification, first using acoustical signals, and then some other hacker had the brilliant idea,
"Well, if we can use sound to carry abstract associations, why not abstract symbols to carry abstract associations?"
And writing was born. And what writing allows is expansion of the database, because things are not dependent on the wetware of human memory to survive from generation to generation.
Suddenly, the mush of brain is replaced by the durability of wood and stone and clay, and these things then become the medium upon which the primary database of the culture is being carried forward.
Well, the rest of the story you know, and this is not a lecture in the history of communication. Each succeeding refinement in communication has brought the word deeper into its association with the flesh until the present.
And at this moment, there is a kind of a, what dynamicists call a cusp, a turning of the system upon its axes, and the word is now beginning to make the return journey to the mysterious and hidden source from which it descended.
In other words, spirit is now beginning to disentangle itself from matter.
The 20th century will be remembered as the great clash point, or the great arena of conflict between the triumphal, positivist, and rational systems that European thought has developed over the past 300 years, and the new irrational systems of thought,
which anthropology cheerfully imported into white, high culture in the guise of reportage about the primitive.
But this reportage about the primitive turns out to be a kind of ouroboric conundrum, the snake taking its tail in its mouth. In the past 100 years, as these super technologies have been developed in the West,
the smashing of atoms, the invention of radio, television, computers, immunology, so forth and so on, data has been arriving about the practices of aboriginal cultures all over the planet,
that they dissolve ordinary realities, ordinary cultural values, through an interaction, a symbiosis, a relationship to local plants that perturb brain chemistry.
And in this domain of perturbed brain chemistry, the cultural operating system is wiped clean, and something older, even for these people, something older, more vitalistic, more in touch with the animal soul, replaces it,
replaces the cultural operating system, something not determined by history and geography, but something writ in the language of the flesh itself.
This is who you are. This is true nakedness. You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.
When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche. Desmond Morris called it the naked ape.
And it's from that position, a position outside the cultural operating system, that we can begin to ask real questions about what does it mean to be human, what kind of circumstance are we caught in,
and what kind of structures, if any, can we put in place to assuage the pain and accentuate the glory and the wonder that lurks waiting for us in this very narrow slice of time between the birth canal and the yawning grave.
In other words, we have to return to first premises. So, I've been thinking about this a lot, and at first it seemed to me only a metaphor, this phrase "culture is your operating system".
But because I travel around a lot and get that jolting experience frequently of, let's say, leaving London on a foggy evening and arriving in Johannesburg 14 hours later to a sweltering day in a city of 14 million on the brink of anarchy,
I get to change my operating system frequently, and so I notice the relativity of these systems. And some work for some things and some for others.
For instance, if you are a positivist, if you're running Positivism 4.0, you can't support UFOs. Positivism 4.0 does not support UFOs. If, on the other hand, you're running your Rancher book 5.1 as your operating system,
UFOs and a number of other things can get in through the door. That is what we would technically say is a more tolerant operating system. Or its plug-in supports special effects denied the positivist.
Well, it's fun to think this way, because it shows you that you don't have to be the victim of your culture. It's not like your eye color or your height or your gender. It's fragile.
It can be remade if you wish it to be. And then the question is, well, how does one download a new operating system? Well, first of all, you have to clear some space on your disk.
The best way to do this is probably with a pharmacological agent. You think of some while I have a drink of water.
Psilocybin is an excellent disk cleaner. You can put a lot of things in the trash and have them just disappear with a psilocybin upgrade.
Other pharmacological agents that will clear your disk are ayahuasca. And of course, these are gentle clearings of the disk, which take five, six, seven hours. If you're in a hurry to dump that old data and leap right into the new operating system,
click on the button marked dimethyltryptamine. A compressed disk eraser will immediately be downloaded, unstuffed, bin hexed, implemented, installed, run, and you will find yourself with an entirely different head.
Now, shamans have always known, though they may not have used the kind of language I'm using here, shamans have always known this trick. What trick? It has two facets.
First of all, that culture is an operating system. That's all it is. And that the operating system can be wiped out and replaced by something else. So, in essentially, what's going on among shamans and those who resort to them for curing and counseling and so forth,
is somebody's running a slightly more advanced operating system than the customer. The shaman is in possession of certain facts about plants, about animals, about healing, about human psychology, about the local geography, about mojo of many different sorts,
that the client is not aware of. The client is running culture-lite. The shaman paid for the registered and licensed version of the software and is running a much heavier version of the software than the client.
I think we should all aspire to make this upgrade. It's very important that you have all the bells and whistles on your operating system, otherwise somebody is going to be able to get a leg up on you.
Well, what's wrong with the operating system that we have? Consumer capitalism 5.0 or whatever it is. Well, it's dumb. It's retro. It's very non-competitive. It's messy. It wastes the environment. It wastes human resources.
It's inefficient. It runs on stereotypes. It runs on a low sampling rate, which is what creates stereotypes. Low sample rates make everybody appear alike, when in fact the glory is in everyone's differences.
And the current operating system is flawed. It actually has bugs in it that generate contradictions. Contradictions such as we're cutting the earth from beneath our own feet.
We're poisoning the atmosphere that we breathe. This is not intelligent behavior. This is a culture with a bug in its operating system that's making it produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behavior. Time to call a tech.
And who are the techs? The shamans are the techs. Well, so I think you get the idea. Very important to upgrade your operating system by dumping obsolete cultural subroutines.
They are simply taking up disk space. They are not advancing you in any way whatsoever. Now, a very large group of people who followed this advice and rebuilt their operating systems in the 1960s
went on then to build this most amazing of all cultural artifacts. The internet. The internet is light at the end of the tunnel. I don't care if it's being used to peddle pornography. I don't care if it's being trivialized in a thousand ways. Anything can be trivialized.
The important point is that it is leveling the playing field of global society. It is creating de facto an entirely new set of political realities. None of the constipated oligarchic structures that are resisting this were ever asked.
Their greed betrayed them into investing in this in the first place without ever fully grasping what the implications of it were for their larger agenda.
The internet basically means you can now be as free as you are motivated to be. As free as you dare to be. Tim Leary years ago, it was something he used to say that never got quoted as much as "turn on, tune in, drop out."
But it seemed to me it was maybe better advice. And he used to say "find the others." Find the others.
Well, you know, if you're a gay kid in Fargo, North Dakota, if you're a masculine enthusiast in Winnipeg, if you're a student of alchemy and Moose Jaw, community is pretty much out of reach for you. Or it was until the coming of the internet.
And the internet introduces everybody, no matter how weird, no matter how marginalized, no matter how peculiar, to the fact that there are others like you. There are others like you.
Find the others. Make common cause. Realize that it's the deals you cut and the friends you make that determine where you're going to be standing when the flash hits.
I mean, that's just obvious. And by... You see, the cultural game is a game of uniformitarianism. Cultural myths are that we are all alike. We Americans. Each created equal.
I mean, if you can believe that at an operational level, then I have some bridges I would like to sell you. It's a necessary truth to do political business. But it is not the truth.
The truth is that you are not created equal with yourself from day to day. Leave alone any comparison with anybody else. You are not the person you were yesterday, nor the person you will be next week.
What is an observation like that? What shadow does it cast in a world of all people are created equal? These are clashes of operating systems. There's an axiom in one, all created equal, and an axiom in the other, each divergent. These things can't be parsed. They can't be brought together.
So, culture plays a game of simplification. If you can make people think alike, they will buy alike, they will worship alike, and if, you know, politics demands it, they will kill alike.
So, the uniformitarian agenda of culture is not an agenda friendly to you, or to me, or to any other individual. And if you start out from that point of view, you will soon realize that culture is not your friend.
Now, this is not exactly PC to say, what with everybody running around recovering their Latvian roots, and their Irishness, and their this, their whatever. Culture is not your friend.
If you define yourself as a member of a group, of any group, know that that is a gross simplification, and that everything about you that is interesting and unique is betrayed by defining yourself in that way.
You know, most racism is practiced by people of the race that they are making racial judgments about. White people have far more racial opinions about white people than any other racial group, because that's where they spend their time.
These gross simplifications betray humanity, betray uniqueness, make sane politics impossible. What we have to do is get back to the reality of the flesh, the reality of the individual identity.
This is how we come packaged. A race, that's an abstraction. These days you have to have three years of genetics under your belt to give a satisfactory definition of the word if we're really going to go to the math on it.
I mean, it's an abstraction of modern science. It's a notion so far removed from anything you and I come in contact with that we should just junk it. What we need to celebrate is the individual.
Have you not noticed, I certainly have, that every historical change you can think of, in fact any change you can think of, forget about human beings, any change in any system that you can think of is always ultimately traceable to one unit in the system undergoing a phase state change of some sort.
No group, there are no group decisions. Those things come later. The genius of creativity and of initiation of activity always lies with the individual.
And it's very interesting that this is what the psychedelics address. They address us uniquely as individuals. You can sit next to somebody who drank from the same bottle you did and be perfectly confident that their experience has very little congruency with your own.
Well, so then if we let the scales of cultural values fall from our eyes and try not to look at the world through the eyes of science or democracy or capitalism or Christianity, what is there beyond ideology?
What are the facts of the matter? As I see it, the most visible facts on the surface of things, on the surface of being, I see the law of increasing complexity.
Things have gotten more complicated through time. I have never met anyone who could successfully argue against this. That doesn't mean it's true, but it means that it may be as Wittgenstein used to say, "True enough."
True enough that as you approach the present moment in the only area of the universe which we have accurate data about, which is this planet, things become more complicated.
A million years ago there were no human civilizations. A thousand years ago there were no machines to speak of. A hundred years ago there was no communication infrastructure to speak of. Ten years ago there was no internet.
Eighteen months ago there was no Java. Things are complexifying, intensifying, moving together. This is the universal drama that is reaching culmination in our lifetimes.
Because, and I offer this, don't believe me for God's sake, don't believe anybody, just take this stuff in and then measure it against your own experience. The second extracultural fact that I've been able to discern, the first being things get more complicated as you approach the present, and the second being that process of complexification is occurring faster and faster.
The early universe was very slow moving. It took a long time for things to cool down and life to begin its agonizing march out of the slime into animal form, meeting extinction and catastrophe and setback after setback, but always picking itself up literally out of the mud and moving forward.
Well, as life left the ocean, the pace of evolution quickened. As life radiated across the land, the number of phyla multiplied, the number of species multiplied. Finally, a million years ago, pick a number, a million and a half years ago, the higher primates begin to use tools.
Fire enters the picture. And just as an aside, isn't it interesting how long people used tools and fire before spoken language enters the picture?
I mean, we possess tools, a million years old, human tools. Language, 35,000 years old. When I was in South Africa last year, I was in this place that reminded me of like the Four Corners area around Moab, Utah. It was like nothing like I had expected South Africa to be.
And when I wasn't teaching, I would wander the dry arroyos and hunt for human tools. And there was an archaeologist staying in the bar or in the hotel there and we would drink in the evening in the bar.
And I would lay my days fined out on the bar and he would sort it into piles and he'd say, "Nothing in this pile is less than 165,000 years old. Everything in this pile is human tools we're talking about."
Now I've lost my thread because I was so thrilled with my sidebar. I think I can get it back. Ah yeah, here it is, here it is. And they say potheads can't think. Here it is.
The second obvious fact which haunts the postcultural viewpoint is this acceleration of change. And I've sort of built my career on this because I'm a rationalist but I feel the emotional power of this thing. We are caught in a basin of attraction, to use a mathematical term.
In other words, we are under the influence of something which is pulling us into the future, or into novelty if you want to put it that way, at a faster and faster rate.
So problems which are presented in the following terms, "If we don't do something in 500 years we will run out of this, that or the other." Or "If we don't do something in a thousand years this or that will happen."
Meaningless statistics. Because the acceleration into novelty is rewriting the rules now every 18 months. We are descending now into a well of novelty such that more change is now occurring in a single human lifetime than occurred in the previous 10,000 years of human history.
We are approaching at a faster and faster rate something unthinkable. Something which is sculpting us in its image. Something which shamans have always known was there, though they may not have used the metaphor of "ahead of us in time."
It's a Western download of where it is because you could just as well say it's in heaven, or behind us in time, or everywhere, or nowhere. The point is we're about to arrive in its presence.
And it is shaping us to prepare us for the arrival. It is making us more and more in its image. This is not a new process. This began a long, long time ago. But it's now reaching its culmination.
And I said a few minutes ago the internet is light at the end of the tunnel. The internet is the beginning of a nervous system that is knitting not only all human beings, but all life together. All information together.
Because you know there already is an internet. It's called the integrated ecosystem of planet three. It runs on pheromones, it runs on weather systems, ocean tides, telluric currents, moving in the earth. Thousands of methods.
We live it that way because our cultural tradition is one of reductionism. Tear things apart. Break them into their subordinate units. Break those into still smaller units.
Well, when you have a theory of reality like that, what you end up with is all the pieces spread out, and no car, and nowhere to go.
But nature has always operated as an integrated system of communication. And the internet is in a sense nothing more than a human aping of a natural system already in place.
If we could do it through pheromones, light, mycelium, and electromagnetic pulses through the earth, we wouldn't be stringing copper, and cable, and fiber optic. Those things are simply historical artifacts of the moment.
What lies ahead on the internet, what lies ahead I think for us, and this is the last point I really want to make.
And then we can talk about all this, is, you know, I have been a true resistor of the alien penetration of human civilization because I just saw no evidence for it.
But the chant that they are coming has now grown so loud that I feel like one sort of has to ask oneself, well, short of just 100% skepticism, what the hell is going on with this alien hype?
I think that the problem is one of modeling and intelligence. There is an alien. We are in the cultural process of meeting this alien.
But they do not come in thousand ton beryllium ships from Zinebogonoube to trade high technology for human fetal tissue.
I mean that, that is an intelligence test, folks. That is not how it works. Our own hysteria makes it very difficult for us to deal with the presence of the alien, and the alien knows that.
That is why it has disguised itself as a psychedelic experience, I think. You know how in all those 50s B science fiction movies there was always this theme of the landing area.
And I saw it in Mars Attacks, too. There must be a landing zone. Somehow we must let them know that we welcome them by building a landing area.
And the Nazca plane has been claimed and on and on and on. I think that the alien is a creature of pure information.
It is purely information. It is non-local. It comes out of the bell non-locality part of the universe that exists distributed through hyperspace.
The alien is real, but it is only made of information. And therefore, the only dimension in which it can be encountered is a dimension of pure information.
Fortunately, we are building a dimension of pure information. Providentially, we have named it the net. The net is a net for catching the alien mind.
How will it come? Will it descend upon our websites in a flash of light? I don't think so. How it will come is packed through human fingers. The alien is real, but it is within us.
It can only communicate information. And that information has to be made real in this world by human coders. So if we were to set out lightheartedly to build a virtual reality as alien as we could make it,
I maintain that three-quarters of the way our hair would be standing on end because we would realize we are not inventing this. We are discovering it.
You know, Michelangelo said, "The form is in the block of marble. What I do is I take away the part that is unnecessary and reveal the human torso within the block of marble." In the same way, the alien is already within us.
But we must model it. We must call it forth into a dimension of potential dialogue. And I think that ultimately this is what high-tech society can bring to the shamanic equation.
Shamans have been dealing with spirits, entities, powers for more than a hundred thousand years. But it has always been on a one-to-one basis. One human being at a time went up Mount Sinai to talk to the fire on the mountain.
But with virtual reality, we have a technology that allows us to show each other our dreams and, yes, our hallucinations. And as we begin to show each other the contents of our own heads,
and as we begin to explore the alien Niagara's of beauty that pour through your consciousness under the influence of some of these substances, we are going to discover that we are not what we thought we were.
The monkey flesh is penetrated by something, dare I say it, divine, or at least alien, transplanetary, and beyond the power of human comprehension.
I don't know if we're talking about God Almighty here. I don't know if we're talking about the God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven, as Milton says.
That seems a tall order. Maybe what we're talking about is the God of biology. Something has happened to this planet. It has become infected with an informational, call it virus, call it force, call it being,
that is using matter, and yes, using our flesh and our thoughts to bootstrap itself to higher and higher levels.
And now the prosthesis of machinery and the possibility of an artificial intelligence raises the real option of producing,
of actually midwifing the birth of an entirely new, not species, but order of biological and intelligence in existence.
The human machine symbiote is upon us. I mean, it's been with us for a while, since the first wheel was carved, since the first stick was sharpened, but that was all very simple stuff.
Now it's clear that we are in partnership with another mind, which comes to us through our machineries and through the biosphere.
Wherever we press beyond the thin curtain of rationalist culture, we discover the incredibly rich, erotic, scary, promising presence of this intelligent other, which beckons us out of history
and says, you know, "The galaxy lies waiting. A galaxy of galaxies lie waiting. Lose the encumbrances of three-dimensional space.
Return with the word to its higher and hidden source, and at that point you will discover the alchemical paraclete will be given unto you.
The alchemical dispensation will be given, and as James Joyce said, "Man will be dirigible."
What did he mean? He meant that we will lose the limitations of physical and three-dimensional space, that we are destined to become mental creatures.
People say, "Well, isn't this a terrible thing? What about this, that, and the other?" All the things you're worrying about, we turned our back on 25,000 years ago.
We have been marching through this virtual reality of our own creation for the entire duration of what is called human history.
Now, is there a political implication to all of this? I think the political implication is, A, a personal one.
We all must try to understand what is happening. We need to try to understand what is happening.
And in my humble opinion, ideology is only going to get in your way. Nobody understands what is happening. Not Buddhists, not Christians, not government scientists, no one understands what is happening.
So, forget ideologies. They betray, they limit, they lead astray. Just deal with the raw data and trust yourself. Nobody is smarter than you are.
And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?
People who walk around saying, "Well, I don't understand quantum physics," but somewhere somebody understands it.
That's not a very helpful attitude toward preserving the insights of quantum physics.
Inform yourself. What does inform yourself mean? It means, A, transcend and mistrust ideology.
Go for direct experience. What do you think when you face the waterfall? What do you think when you have sex?
What do you think when you take psilocybin? Everything else is unconfirmable rumor, useless, probably lies.
So, liberate yourself from the illusion of culture. Take responsibility for what you think and what you do.
And then, the other political implication toward community is, a lot of people are going to be very anxious.
Because change raises anxiety in people. And people who have limited opportunities to educate themselves because of culturally-inflicted abuse are scared.
Because they can sense that everything familiar is giving way, but they don't want to embrace the unimaginable.
These people need to be reassured. They need to be reassured by example and by hearing optimistic and reasonable rhetoric about the future.
Selling the future as an eight-alarm fire, which is how the media does it, only makes the same future impossible.
So we need a responsible approach to thinking about the future. And it means taking personal responsibility for your drug-taking, for the ideas, the means that you push into society, and for the images that we share among ourselves.
You know, one of the great truisms of the new age is that images can heal. But I've never heard anybody discuss the obvious contra-implication, which is, images can make you sick.
And you are constantly bombarded with images which disempower, divide, confuse, and make crazy, basically.
So I think the reason psychedelics are such political dynamite in any culture is because they dissolve cultural assumptions.
The scales fall from people's eyes and they say, "Does this make sense? Does my job make sense? Does my relationship make sense to my significant other, to my government, to my children, to my environment? Do these relationships make sense?"
And of course, the answer for most people in high-tech society is no. We've been compromised, we've been deluded, we've been sold a massive pottage.
The way out, then, is personal responsibility, new operating systems downloaded from outside of culture, which means from the deeper wisdom of the psychedelic plants, and then a commitment to community, and a motto of "To the future, without fear, without fear."
Thank you very much.
Well, so much for a promise to be brief. You know, you just wind the guy up and point him, and off he goes, the robot who preaches freedom.
Questions, challenge, anything, anybody. Yeah, you.
Well, yeah, it's a tricky question because what's being maximized as things come together is novelty. And so then we have to have a discussion about what is novelty.
To my mind, an explosion takes a complicated situation and reduces, or as mathematicians would say, flattens its dimensionality. An art gallery or a beautiful home is far more interesting before an explosion than after.
So I don't see how some kind of catastrophe would entirely fulfill the bill. On the other hand, a partial catastrophe of some sort, because I believe primates are at their best when cornered.
And we aren't cornered yet. I mean, we talk about how we're cornered. You could say, "This is the end of the world. This ain't the end of the world. This is the long garden party before the end of the world, with strolling musicians and superbly catered food and women in diaphanous gowns and high-toned conversation.
Wait till you see the end of the world. It isn't about deciding to come up to Austin to attend the whole Life Expo. Let me tell you." So, yes.
Yes, I should repeat questions. A different part of the room. Back here. White shirt. You, sir. This guy, yeah.
[inaudible]
[inaudible]
Yes, you eloquently represent the position that language was invented in order to lie. Right? Well, that's what the second guy who got a hold of it, I'm sure, probably did with it.
You're right that I have an incredible enthusiasm for verbal speech, but it's only because it's easy for me to do. If I didn't do this, I'd have to find honest work.
However, I am aware, or yeah, I'm very aware of the limitations of language, and one of the things I've talked about a lot is what I call visible language. You used the example of telepathy, that if we were in telepathic communication, how could I lie, because you would perceive my intent.
The key to making language more true is to make it more visual. Now, that can't just take the form of a bigger vocabulary and more colorful metaphors, like people will say, "When he spoke, he painted a picture." Or, "Listening to him was like watching a movie."
I think ordinary speech goes through a series of stages, from articulate, to eloquent, to poetic, to demagogic. And demagogic is where you want to be careful, because then you can turn, you know, essentially Hitler turned history on its head with speeches.
He just could really deliver a stem winder. I've been fascinated by the fact that in the Amazon, under the influence of ayahuasca, people sing songs, but they see the song they sing.
And when you hear people talking about it afterwards, people will say, after listening to a song, "You know, I love the part with the olive drab and the chrome, but I thought when he got into the magenta and yellow stripe thing, it was just too much."
Well, this is a critique of a song, and then when you take ayahuasca with these people, you discover to your amazement that "hmmmm" is a blue ribbon a foot across that descends from floor to ceiling and has a yellow center.
And then "hmmmm" puts knobs in the ribbon, and you can start singing and building, modeling, animating in three dimensions with sound.
Well, I maintain that our insistence technologically on pushing our media toward ever more immediate sensations, so that if we have photography, it's black and white, we demand color. If it's color, we demand motion. If it's motion, we demand sound. If it's sound and motion, we want 3D.
It's that we trust our eyes, and the natural domain of communication is visual for human beings. We're like octopi in that way.
So really, language needs to evolve toward the visual, and that's why I'm very keen for technically dense prosthetic environments where every time you say the word "and," a yellow three-dimensional triangle appears in the air.
Every time you say "or," an orange ball appears. A computer is listening to what you're saying and giving a geometric accompaniment to speech. I think that there are forms of telepathy that we can evolve through the use of drugs and computer-assisted technologies that will allow us to see each other's dreams.
In spite of your correct assessment that I'm keen for the spoken word, I spend all summer learning modeling and three-dimensional animation programs from my son because I want to animate. I want to model.
I see things on my trips that I have never been able to English, but that if I were a fully competent modeler and animator, I would just say, "Check it out."
And I'm going to do that, and I urge you to do that. I mean, it's a funny thing to be told you want to spiritually advance, study 3D animation, but these are the frontiers of communication.
We have an obligation to make our language more immediate. It is the most God-like thing we do. If you're looking for the thumbprint of Almighty God on the biological organization of this planet, it is human language.
It is a miracle. I don't give a hoot what the dolphins and the honeybees are out there in the woods doing. It ain't like Milton. It ain't even like Bob Dylan. It ain't even as good as this, I'm willing to say.
No. Human communication is what we are, and it will lead us to be a symbiotic species if we put the pedal to the mantle.
For people like yourselves, who I assume to be, no matter how you finagled your way in here this afternoon, part of the upper 3% of the ruling elite on this planet, there is a real obligation to use privilege to communicate and to make art.
I think this is what, if the good life has any purpose other than to drink beer and watch TV, it's to produce art. This is how you make a payback into the community, and art is ambiguous.
Your art may say things to people other than yourself that it would never say to you, but that's how we make the community richer. That's how we enlarge the dimensions of the human soul, by making art.
Stand up and yell.
Louder.
You said, do you take psilocybin and see self-transforming machine elves? No.
Yeah?
The question is, when you encounter the self-transforming machine elves in hyperspace, do you think that's a reflection of ourselves, or do you think it's an alien, or I'm paraphrasing, but it's something like that.
It's tricky, because we are not what we think we are.
Maybe I didn't spend enough time on this alien thing. I referred to non-local domains of information. This has to do with this idea in quantum physics that there is something called Bell non-locality, that all particles that were ever associated remain associated in some mysterious way, no matter how far apart in time and space they have drifted.
Well, according to the Big Bang, all particles were once closely associated at the moment of the Big Bang. Everything was in a space less than the diameter of the proton, or some piddling distance like that.
Well, so then this was an idea that was just thought so outlandish that there could be this instantaneous dimension of connectivity that it was dismissed from quantum physics in favor of an acceptance of a somewhat less outlandish, but equally challenging notion, which was the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
And that's how it was left for about 40 years, but there were thought experiments that people talked about that could test for this Bell non-locality.
And eventually, these apparatus were actually built, and these experiments were performed, and what do you know, Joe? Bell non-locality can be demonstrated the same way any other physical phenomenon can be demonstrated, given a sufficiently prepared laboratory situation.
It's real. It's not woo-woo. It's actually scientifically true at the fundamental core of physics that all space and all time is in some form of simultaneous connection.
Now, it gets a little dicey if you ask questions like, "Can we use this to get and send information?" And I don't want to go into that, because I think I already have the answer, no matter how good the argument's against it. I believe this is what the human imagination is.
But you have two eyes to show you local space, and then you have an organ called the mind, which doesn't protrude anywhere on the surface of your body, except occasionally in some cases.
It will lodge on a surrogate, but generally the mind is invisible, but it gives you non-local data. That's what the imagination is. That's non-local data. Everything in the imagination is real, somewhere.
Somewhere so far away in space and time that it makes absolutely no sense to give it another thought ever again. Don't ever think that thought again. But know that everything in the imagination is real.
So, it's ridiculous to speak of my imagination or the human imagination. There is just the imagination. But see, if all information is there, 99.999% of that information is not intended for human beings and makes no sense whatsoever to us.
It's basically static. It's either above or below our cognitive power to organize, and so it is meaningless. But 0.000001% of this non-local data is enough like local data that we can make metaphoric bridges to it.
And say, "Well, it was like this, and it was sort of like this, and it was a kind of a this, and it reminded me of something else." And that's the stuff of the imagination.
And to the degree that you can accept alien data without freaking out, you can go deeper into the imagination. I have a friend who says of psilocybin mushrooms, "Every time I take it, my goal is to stand more."
And he doesn't mean stand more in terms of dosage. He means stand more in terms of content. Because it can always raise the bar higher than you can jump.
I mean, I've had dialogues with it, where after hours of dancing mice and personal revelations and kind of a sense of familiarity, I've said to it, "Well, but what are you really? Show me what you are for yourself."
And I go, "Oh my God, the temperature in the room begins to fall towards zero. Black draperies rise. There's an organ tone that shakes the earth." And after about 30 seconds, I say, "Hey, enough of what you are for yourself. Let's go back to the dancing mice and the little candies rolling in the dark."
You know, it knows that you have a limited capacity to absorb its alienness. That's why we have what's called human history. Human history is the process of standing more.
And it's now we've sort of come to the short and curly part of the process, where they're just around the corner. I mean, all you have to do is smoke a doobie, look out at the evening sky, have a dream, talk to a friend, and the alien is very, very...
Its trailing aura, or its leading aura, I guess, its leading aura has now intersected human psychology. But cheerful stories of space brothers and scary, silly stories of people trading high-technology freaks in league with the government, hey, it's so much bigger than that.
It's so big that it has disguised itself as an alien invasion to keep from really alarming us with what it really is.
A couple more questions. A lady, yes. Would you like to come up and...
I was just wondering what you thought about the possibility of, as we become more aware of what we're doing to the environment and the responsibility of those industrialized nations that are consuming more than their share, that when we...
If we could get on an equal playing field, then those underdeveloped countries that have a great deal of the resources that they're using up to basically pay their national debt, if they could receive technology so that they can be on an equal playing field on the Internet, etc.,
in exchange for our consumption, that it might be an interesting evolution in terms of...
Well, I think it's happening. In other words, some people have objected that the Internet and computers are an elitist technology in the hands of a bunch of white folks.
To some degree, that's true, but on the other hand, if the automobile had followed the same curve of cost-benefit that the computer has followed in its development, then the average automobile today would cost a buck and a half, and it would go 100,000 miles on 10 cents worth of gas.
That's the kind of bang for your buck you're getting from the modern PC compared to where it was 35 years ago.
No technology in history has had its costs fall so quickly, and there is no reason to think that those costs will level off.
If a good PC today is $1,400, there's no reason why in five years it shouldn't be $140, and there's no reason why in ten years it shouldn't be $14 and be worn on your thumbnail.
This can all be done. All these prices are artificially inflated.
The other thing about the Internet is it is going wireless, and as it goes wireless, it goes totally global.
If I can just brag for a minute and make an example of myself, I have a wireless connection to the Internet.
At first I got a wireless connection because I couldn't get any other kind because I lived way up in a volcano, but now my wireless connection is one megabyte.
That's 45 times faster than 28.8.
The poor people down on copper, they can't do better than 56 because the infrastructure already exists and therefore limits the bandwidth.
By going outside the infrastructure, this sounds like a reprise of my talk, by going outside the infrastructure and building a loan from ground up,
I suddenly find myself looking down the gun barrel of a T1 connection, and it is heaven itself, let me tell you.
And the people who sold it to me, and there must be dozens of other companies, are bent on conquering the world,
meaning putting everybody who wants to be online for pennies in the next five to six years.
And, you know, if you live in Manhattan or even Austin, what is the Internet?
It's another diversion, it's another piece of entertainment, but what is it like in Somalia, in Seychelles, in Bangalore?
What kind of impact does it have there?
You talk about a culture dissolving effect based on psychedelics, how about a culture dissolving effect based on access to the Internet?
And people say, "Well, Western values will swamp all others." Certainly, to some degree, that is true, but did that just begin yesterday?
Isn't that what the bloody business has been about for 500 miserable years, ever since the barbarian Cortez arrived in Mexico?
I think so. Well, don't get me off on that.
One last question. Who's just burning? Anybody burning? There's somebody burning.
So, where do you think we're going to be on December 22nd, 2012?
All together. All together.
It's a nice answer. Here's another one. Why, I have only one answer.
It's too early to tell. In other words, asking that question in 1997 is like asking a man looking east at 1 a.m. what he thinks the sunrise will be like.
It's just too early. The sun lies over the event horizon of the planet. In other words, we can't see around the corner yet.
In terms of our cultural, analogous cultural development, right now we've reached approximately the year 1000 AD.
Between now and 2012, at an incredibly accelerated rate, we have to do a number of things. Discover the new world, invent the calculus, have the renaissance, then have the reformation, then have the industrial reformation, then have the 20th century.
All that has to be squeezed into the next 14 years. The real outlines of what is tearing toward us will probably be the province of squirrels and visionaries like myself until around 2004 and 2005.
And by that time, it will be clear to everyone what is on the end of every fork, as William Burroughs once said. In other words, it will be clear that history has been cancelled.
It will be clear that there is no human future except through hyperspatial breakthrough. We will all be walking around on an internet that is 90% VRML based and hence three dimensional and interactive.
And nanotechnology will be beginning to deliver its goods to society. New forms of propulsion system are going to move the outer planets to within a few weeks travel, so forth and so on.
So we cannot at this moment know the true nature of the eschaton because at this moment if we knew the true nature of the eschaton, it would shatter our cultural assumptions and our individual understanding completely.
We have a lot of heavy lifting to do. There's a lot of self education, hard tripping and heroic dosing that needs to be done before we can meet the eschaton on a level playing field.
Be there or be square. Thank you.
[Applause]
Light Of 3rd Millenium (Chicago)
How's that? Cool. Okay. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to see so many people
here. Once again, this strange magical moment when we come together again or perhaps for
the first time, you having come from wherever you came from, me having come from the slopes
of the world's largest active volcano actually, but via Manhattan and Austin last weekend.
And the purpose of these things is sort of to check the state of the condensing collective
understanding about what is going on in the world or what might be going on in the world.
This it seems to me is the subject worth talking about. What is going on? How can you find
out what is going on? How do you know when you found out what's going on? Can one know
what is going on? And my involvement with this is no different from your own. A sincere
desire to untangle these questions before the yawning grave closes over the enterprise
and the entire thing becomes moot. One has, you know, a window of opportunity somewhere
between zip and a hundred to solve or understand or penetrate or appreciate or come to terms
with the conundrum of being. This amazing circumstance in which we find ourselves both
individually and collectively. Collectively we find ourselves, you know, somewhere between
the slime and the archangels making our way perilously over the millennia up the evolutionary
ladder toward the platonic light or something like that. At least this is the myth of intellectuals
of the high-tech industrial democracies evolved over the past hundred and fifty years. The
triumphant ascent of organic life toward ever greater complexity. Individually we each find
ourselves born into a culture we have no share in designing but that we will be expected
to inhabit, inculcate and in fact pass on to our own progeny. And so this is our circumstance
I think, individually and collectively. Thrown into being Heidegger said. We didn't ask for
it. Here it is. What are we to make of it? And obviously if you toured the halls of this
exhibition, we are to make much of it and money of it. These two principles seem to
emerge. That there is much to be said, many ways to slice the pie and the market economy
is a very fertile domain in which to thrash this all out. You can sell your answers, you
can trade your answers, you can upgrade your answers, you can subscribe, serialize, retrofit,
export, import and reinvent answers. Ultimately I wonder how satisfying all this is and I
am always amused at my own position in this situation. It's a great pain to the tolerance
of the new age that they keep inviting me back. I'm sort of like the crazy uncle or
the old man. You hope for good behavior but you understand that it's a gamble because
I'm very ambiguous about much of the methods and ways by which we do our intellectual business
and pursue the matter of community and salvation. The intellectual tension that seems to work
its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific
reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension
or a hidden dimension or a transcendental dimension. Of course, downloaded into language
it becomes easily ridiculed and downloaded into tasteless language it should be ridiculed.
So when we try to formulate our spiritual intuitions they are inevitably tainted by
what we bring to it. I was struck as I moved through the hall it was almost like an exhibition
of language types as much as an exhibition of products or possibilities. What were being
sold were closed systems of jargon which once opted into tended to produce answers in a
short loop of possibilities. All closed systems of thought are like this and to my mind at
what seems to me very elderly age of 50 and I know to some people in the room it does
seem very elderly and to others I seem a pup but anyway from this vantage point it seems
to me that all of these ideologies are cartoon like. They flatten, they simplify, they betray,
they amuse which is also cartoon like and in amusing I think that this is where their
health fulfilling and solitary worth lies. They are intended to provoke a small smile.
That smile will lift you a little further up the ladder, the rungs of the ladder of
being. So I thought today what I would talk about is some of the conclusions that I've
come to out of a life of psychedelic voyaging, living inside this insanely contradictory
society and going through the standard moves, marriage, divorce, children, career, controversy,
allies, enemies, attorneys, counselors, consultants, accountants, so forth and so on. The same
world you live in. What have I, well the first thing I concluded was to try and flee it which
I did a pretty good job of by going to Hawaii which believe me is a private Idaho. But the
conclusions that I've reached are not politically correct anywhere and so I'm very happy to
offend everyone because that seemed to be what I did best and there's no sign of mellowing
at this point. So the conclusion that I reach vis-a-vis the individual and civilization
is this. Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend, it's not my friend. It's
a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for
the convenience of institutions. A young man gets his first dose of the news that culture
is not his friend when told that he's going to be given an air ticket and some training
and sent to an exotic country to kill its inhabitants in the name of some political
ideal. You have to be fairly dense not to get the message at that point that culture
is not your friend. It is using you for its purposes. You would never dream of doing what
it now proposes as the only conceivably right and righteous course of action. Well that's
a black and white, a stark and enormous example of what I'm talking about. But I think every
day in thousands of ways we betray our impulses toward wholeness, toward community, toward
freedom, toward the spirit by genuflecting to cultural values that are squirrelly or
toxic or simply wrong-headed or obsolete. Culture is not your friend, it's an illusion.
What kind of an illusion is it? And this sort of leads on to the other thing I've come to.
It's a childish illusion is the kind of illusion it is. Recently I had a physical examination
with my doctor and after it was all over he leaned back in his chair and he said, "Well
you know most people your age in the 19th century were dead." Yes, quite true. People
live a great deal longer in the 20th century and consequently I think part of what drives
alienation is culture is like being taken in a crap game. If you play long enough you
will figure out that you're being screwed and of course if you die shortly into the
game it never enters your mind. Some of you may have seen the little saying that hangs
behind bars in Minnesota, "Viget tu soon, ult, tuleit schmart." Well some of us are
getting smart earlier and earlier and what is seen through to them is the fact that culture
victimizes, ideology victimizes. These things are all con games. Reality, culturally defined
reality is some kind of an intelligence test and those who are joining are failing the
test. This is very clear to me looking at well phenomena like alien abduction and the
great enthusiasm for conspiracy theory that now seems to attend so much modern thinking.
Again these are epistemological cartoons where low production values made acceptable through
tolerance of TV is allowing people to accept material into their own story which should
actually end up on the cutting room floor. Everything, nothing is what it appears to
be. Surely you have noticed that. That's A right? A is nothing is what it appears to
be. Well therefore complex, difficult, tricky and material things are even less likely to
be what they claim to be than other forms of reality. So confronted with the endless
whispered rumors and doctored photographs and breathless testimony from the denizens of
trailer courts and so forth and so on. What is one to make of all that? Well I think what
your, it's the message is return to basics. The information matrix has become compromised.
The data stream is now suspect. Return to first principles. What are first principles?
That's what the 20th century is trying to figure out. Yes, what are first principles?
I'd like to suggest to you that a place to begin is the body. You have one. It isn't
ideologically defined. It can be ideologically defined. You know in Catholic school the nuns
used to tell us we should dress in darkness so we wouldn't be an occasion of sin to ourselves.
That's an example of the body becoming ideologically defined. But it, it precedes culture. Culture
has to deal with the fact that your eyes are on the front of your face and your anal pore
is located near your genitals. Culture would probably rather have it some other way. It
would be so convenient but hey, it's a given. I'm so happy we don't, our rumps don't swell
in estrus the way some of the other primates do. Can you imagine Giorgio Armani trying
to create a line of fashion that comes to term with that? But I, but I digress. So the
body, the body is a pre-cultural given and coming with the body is this amazing thing
which everyone wants to give away, throw away, get away from called the felt moment of immediate
experience. The felt moment of immediate experience. This is you now here in your body with the
cheeseburger slowly dissolving, the cup of, the caffeine, the bladder, all of these things,
collisions, concrescences, the crossing of trajectories of mental process, digestive
process, metabolism, intent, income, emotional state, the felt presence of immediate experience
lodged in the body-mind system in the moment. That's who you are. That's what they can't
take away from you. Whether they drag you away to prison, beat you, drug you, whatever
they do to you, you will still have some kind of felt presence of experience until you drift
into the darkness of non-entity. So there then one can begin to build outward from that
core and say, "Aha, so the stuff of understanding is not information passed by culturally validated
coding systems among the primates at high chatter rate." In other words, the truth
is not in the public space or the historical space. The truth is in the felt space of the
body in the moment. So some great religions have gotten this far and they, whatever they
are, and there are many of them, come at last to advocate something called meditation, which
has many guises and travels under many names and methods. But what it primarily is, is
attention to attention. And what it primarily reveals in the ordinary metabolism is frankly
bloody little. Good meditators will tell you how incredibly boring it is. And the rhetoric
of the religions that have made meditation the centerpiece of their ontology is a rhetoric
of nihilism. I mean this is, you know, oh I should have said nihilism, because this is
sort of the dirty little secret of Buddhist ontology. It isn't the cheerful new Buddhism
being exported from California. It's the old style Nagarjuna Buddhism that says, you know,
it is an emptiness within an emptiness after an emptiness before an emptiness. This is
Nagarjuna, the nature of bodhi mind. But interestingly, meditation, perceived not for years or lifetimes,
but perceived as a cultural project over centuries, leads not to a clarifying of this philosophical
emptiness, but to a discovery that the depths of nihilism, the depths of non-entity are in
fact motif, motiforous in their aspects. Not a plenum, is what I'm grasping for. Not a
plenum, not an undivided platonic thing, but an environment of spirit, meaning, power,
intentionality, entities, intelligences, levels, swarming, swarming, swarming in the imagination.
These things can be accessed through drugs, through extraordinary physical practices or
ordeals, through various kinds of driving of physiological systems like sonic driving
through drumming or physiological driving through repeated chanting. And then the ordinary
boundaries of culture and of body dissolve into a much larger realm, the imagination.
And it is this imagination that I think is the place to put our attention. The imagination
is a dimension of non-local information. Quantum physics is now moving towards securing the
idea that in some kind of a mathematical super space, all particles in the universe maintain
a kind of super state of connectivity called Bell's non-local connectivity. What this means
to me is that the imagination is literally another dimension, a dimension that is non-local.
Now the mind, the animal mind, the human mind, the paleolithic mind evolved as a master coordinator
of sensory data coming into the body from the senses about the level of threat and danger
in immediate three-dimensional space. That's the mind's evolutionary function to preserve
the body, to preserve the genetic stream of unfolding by detecting and avoiding threat.
And so our minds have evolved in the same way that water takes the shape of its container.
Our minds have evolved to take the shape of three-dimensional space and time under cultural
and environmental pressure. Well, we've paid a huge price for this. It probably also has
ensured that we're here this afternoon to discuss it. But it's been a long time since
the instantaneous reflex to bash the brains out of anything moving near you that's unfamiliar
has served us well. You know, I mean that got old 12,000 years ago. The entire enterprise
of civilization has been about something else, the felt presence nearby, ineffable, unsayable,
but uncannily penetrating of beauty, of mathematical connectivity, of supernatural power. And so
these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, make us human
beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings.
It's why we are the way we are. It's why we will be the way we will be. It's how we got
where we are. How is it done? It's done by dissolving ordinary cultural boundaries, by
perturbing consciousness, and by paying careful attention to the results and attempting to
build models therefrom. Now, in the last few thousand years in the West, this enterprise
has been tamed by priestcraft, which combines the enterprise with judicious politicking and
a certain amount of ass licking. Before that, the enterprise was untainted by such secular
concerns. It was full force forward into the unknown. And this is the great era of shamanism.
And what is shamanism but philosophy with a hands-on attitude? Philosophy not made around
the campfire, but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience. That's
how you figure out what the world is, not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing
extreme experience. The reason people refer to psychedelic endeavors with the vocabulary
of travel, taking a trip, and so on, is because that is an extreme endeavor. It's the same
endeavor. It's the leaving behind of the values of your own culture. Take nothing but
a change of clothes. Fly to Benares and take up residence at the Sasamid Gap among the
Charas Sadhus, and I guarantee you, whether you resort to psychedelics or not, you will
experience boundary dissolution, a reorienting of categories, and a reframing of your perspective
on your life and your being. So extreme experience is the necessary key. This is true in all
forms of endeavor. If you want to understand the atom, you have to smash it. Sitting around
looking at it, it will never yield its secrets. You have to smash that sucker to bits and
then collect the pieces and then examine exactly how it all came apart. In the same way, and
without going too far afield for the pun, we must smash ordinary consciousness. Get
smashed, and then look at the pieces flying in all directions and say, "Gee, I didn't
know minds could do that." Well, they can't in the workaday rote of living inside the
little boxes of positivism and constipated behaviorism and all the rest of it. So extreme
experiences, but you don't want these experiences to be too extreme or you will sever the connectivity
among the various subsystems and then we'll have to bury you. And this is always a huge
strain on those left behind. So there is a practical element here which is, "Okay, so
we want to have extreme experiences, but we don't want to have such extreme experiences
that we don't live to tell the tale. We want control to some degree over these experiences."
Well, this is where the incredible thoroughness of our human ancestors comes to our aid. Throughout
time and space on this planet, our remote, the tribal societies that preceded us, made
it their business to discover, catalog, and learn to manipulate plants in the environment
as the carriers, as the sources of chemical compounds in the environment, which would
work extraordinary transformations on consciousness without physical harm, without physiological
damage to the organism. And of all the many techniques, ordeal, abandonment in the wilderness,
sexual abstinence, hanging by your pectoral muscles from hooks in the sun for days, all
of these sorts of things. Of all of these methods, psychedelic plants and their judicious
use is arguably the most effective, the most effective and the least invasive and the most
likely to produce negative long-term consequences. Well, this was not news or even controversy
anywhere in the world until within the confines of the 20th century, basically, the presence
of these substances and plants began to alarm the order-keeping forces of the high-tech
industrial democracies. The issue separate from the issue of stimulants and depressants,
it's an issue separate from the issue of addiction and dependency. These things are not stimulants
or depressants and they do not cause addiction or dependency. What they cause is what I'm
advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values because culture as we are practicing
it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people and animals and ecosystems,
none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in
this direction. We do not feel what we are doing. Remember I spoke about the primacy
of the felt moment of experience. If we could feel what we are doing, we would stop doing
it. But between us and the consequences of our actions, there are endless veils of political
rhetoric, spultification, denial, sedation, intoxication, ideological delusion. Now, normally
I think a rap like this tends to, if you have to pigeonhole it, to come down on the side
of pessimism. But I am not pessimistic. I see everything as though it were integrated and
connected and there is an unfolding and a plottedness about our situation. It's not
for nothing that at the very pinnacle of the age of faith in the machine and science and
male dominance and projection of strategic weaponry and so forth and so on that there
should come from the gentler societies of the world, from the rainforests and high deserts
of the world, the news of these plants. The western mind, the cataloguing mind, the Cartesian
mind in frenzy to locate, list, isolate and define everything, carried these plants and
substances over the past 150 years into the confines of our society and they are much
like Trojan horses, left there by the bedraggled, beat down, disenfranchised third world shamanic
people to be found by the white coated priests and priestesses of science and to be brought
back into the laboratory to be picked apart for their efficacy in treating addiction or
overcoming neurotic behaviour or something like that. But of course the neurotic behaviour
that they impact upon is neurotic behaviour so wide, so deep, so revered that it is in
fact cultural values themselves. You see what is happening I think is it's really bigger
than psychedelics, it's bigger than human evolution. We are not making the waves in
this ocean, we are corks riding the waves of the ocean, but we are privileged by perhaps
chance alone to occupy a unique moment in the history of the universe, a moment when
the universe goes through some kind of self transforming evolutionary inflationary expansion.
That's what's happening. I mean it's been happening for a long time, it depends on where
you pull back to to get your perspective. One could say, looking at the universe in
general, that this planet has been favoured from the very beginning, that by a billion
years ago the discerning could tell that this was a planet going places. But certainly by
five hundred million years ago it was clear that this was a planet going places. One complex
animal life form gave way to another. Catastrophes, yes, but never catastrophes so total that
the enterprise was wiped out. We know that sixty-five million years ago a catastrophe,
a masquerade, a planetesimal impact occurred on this planet. Nothing larger than a chicken
walked away from that on this planet. A bad day you say. But were it not for that bad
day, we would still be the egg eating shrews at the edge of the reptilian garden party.
These marvellous flowering plants chock full of psychedelic alkaloids, none of them would
have existed. The flowering plants and the higher mammals all arose in the wake of this
planet scouring catastrophe. So you see there is built in to the larger systems of nature
an enormous, what my mentor Eric Jantsch used to call, meta-stability. They are meta-stable,
they are not easily deflected. An event as large as a planetesimal impact basically only
resets the evolutionary clock by a few million years and then almost over leaping itself
to make up for lost time out of all of that catastrophe come primates, animals of such
complexity and coordinated sensoria that they are wonders to behold and from them and quickly
then come abilities never before seen in the world of organic organisation. Freely commandable
languages, spoken languages, symbolic activity for the first time. Well at that point even
the academics believe human language is less than 40,000 years old. That means it is as
artificial as the dirigible or the hypodermic needle. It is an invention of some sort within
the confines of human history or at the beginning of human history. Recall in South Africa we
have fire pits and stone tools two million years old. Those are not homo sapiens tools
but they are the tools of homo habilis, the preceding ancestor in the human line. My point
is we are caught up in a process of unfolding complexification that has now lodged in our
species. We are its source at this point. At one point its source was the geology of
the planet. At a later point closer to us in time its source was all biological diversity
but as the novelty has increased the domain of its expression has narrowed and it is now
confined largely to the human species. Oh yes the rest of nature continues the slow
unfolding of continental drift and gene mutation and transfer and so forth but these things
have now receded into the background as the human adventure takes centre stage. So it
is almost as though, in fact this is what I believe, that we are not pushed from behind
by the causal unfolding of historical necessity but that we are in the grip of an attractor
of some sort which lies ahead of us in time and so we are not as it were following what
the statisticians call a random walk across the temporal landscape. In fact the temporal
landscape is a canyon with incredibly steep walls and we are only free to move within
very narrow confines as the grip, almost the morphogenetic intensity of the attractor at
the end of time increases its penetration and its hold over our imaginations, our city
plans, our technologies, our religious ontologies, our medical strategies, so forth and so on.
Something is revealing itself to us through us and as we get closer the chatter of noise
and static being given off of this thing increases exponentially because you know McLuhan said
once he said we move into the future like a person driving who uses only the rear view
mirror. That's how we understand the future by driving in the rear view mirror. All of
our models of what lies ahead are based on inverted models of the past and the one thing
you can be certain of is that won't do it because we can see a person standing in 1900
using that method would have been wrong about the late 1990s. A person standing in 1600
using that method would have been wrong about the late 1900s and so forth and so on. You
cannot extrapolate from the past into the future because the real nature of the future
is its denam seesh, the thing in itself and that's what it's trying to reveal and so the
whisperings that reach the ears of the channelers, the visions that come through the hands of
painters, sculptors, choreographers, musicians, all of the felt presence of the invisible
world is now incredibly pregnant with this message of transformation and the challenge
for each of us is to streamline our language sufficiently that we may mirror this thing
in a way that is both true to it and rationally apprehendable to ourselves and this is a fractal
boundary. This is a test of intelligence because the thing in itself cannot be rationally be
held. You know the enzymologist J.B.S. Haldane once said, he said, "The world is not only
stranger than we suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose." That to me is a dizzying
thought and obviously true. So what we want is a model true to the stranger than we can
suppose but not so alien that there is no emotional or spiritual support in it for the
enterprise of being human. How do we do that? How do we inculcate the unspeakable mystery
of the transcendental object at the end of time with the mundane nexus of real occasions
that happens to be our own existence? Well, to my mind the answer is it lies in the ability
to assimilate paradox and that means you have to transcend the idea of a closed logical
system. You have to live with the idea that there is no intellectual closure. This is
in fact the door marked freedom but you've been taught that it's the door marked madness
to live in the light of paradox. Things cannot be, we are taught, both A and B simultaneously.
This is Aristotelian logic. A is A. This is as old as thought in the West but it has to
be overcome and in the felt presence of the moment of immediate experience it is overcome.
The mystery does not lie far. It lies in the immediate moment in the act, the fact of being.
The only time we really confront this is in the psychedelic experience or other moments
of extreme epiphany. The model that I have come to wrap around all of this because I
think it's simple and straightforward and it leaves plenty of room for people to add
their own filigree is a dimensional model. God forbid a mathematical model but it works
something like this. I mentioned earlier that our senses have evolved as a threat detection
device and have sort of crunched us down into three dimensional space. The shaman wherever
and whenever he or she does their shamanizing, the shaman is a person who is able to transcend
the dimensional confines of cultural existence. They know more than the people they serve.
The people they serve are like children within the game of culture. Only the shaman knows
that culture is a game. Everyone else takes it seriously. That's how he can do his magic.
I was recently in Australia and of course aboriginal culture and shamanism is a topic
of great interest down there and I learned, maybe some of you already knew this, that
the term for shaman among English speaking aboriginals of whom there are many, some who
have spoken it for several hundred years or over a hundred years anyway, the term for
shaman is simply clever fella and if someone says I am a clever fella they are making a
professional claim of great weight but I love that because it says it all. A clever fella.
When I was in the Amazon in my exploring days we would go up these rivers to these bare
assed folks and to spend time with them and the people would want to touch the outboard
motors and look at your camera equipment and the butterfly nets and gather around open
face totally innocent. You could always tell the shaman.
Because first of all he usually didn't come out to see who was there even though no one
ever came. Even though these people had visitors once every six months the guy who wouldn't
come out of his hut for the only event in six months was inevitably the shaman and when
you met him he wasn't interested in your velcro or your break apart glow in the dark little
trinkets or any of the rest of it. He was looking straight at you through the eyes outside
of culture saying what kind of a person are you? Are you a fool or are you a clever fella?
What is your measure? How much of the situation do you understand? How many levels are you
simultaneously aware of at this moment? And looking into the eyes of that sort of person
you either grow or turn away. You have not much choice. So what's happening with the
shaman I think is he's a hands on mathematician, a hands on non-Euclidean geometer. The shaman
enters into the quote unquote chaos of the psychedelic experience and sees that it is
not chaos. It is hyperspace and in it the adumbrations of the trees of possibility can
be followed. One can see who stole the eggs. One can see who cuckolded the chief's nephew.
One can see who will die and who will live. One can see how the weather is going to change
and one can know where the game went. And this is not magic, not in that world. It's
impossible in three dimensional space and time. But in fourth dimensional space and
time it not only is possible, it's inevitable and unavoidable. It's a different kind of
way of being with the information. And you know I'm sure many of you have your own psychedelic
epiphanies that are as gripping and as fascinating as anything that has happened to me. Epiphanies
that show that under certain circumstances the ordinary boundaries of information, space,
time, limitation are dissolved. And it may happen only for a moment. It may involve a
curing with a laying on of hands. It may involve a sudden insight into a set of complex relationships.
It may involve a sudden unexpected certitude about how a certain event went down that when
checked upon turns out to be true. What we know about the world is defined by our culture.
And the way culture does this is through language. You can't know or perceive or appreciate
what cannot be brought in to the domain of language. You can't publicly know or appreciate
these things. You can feel them as the rich contextual embeddedness of your own being.
But you can't communicate them. Sometimes when I read Marcel Proust I come upon passages
where the conveyance of the information, of the emotion is so exquisitely subtle that
I have the feeling I know what he means. I felt this but I never dreamed I would ever
see it in print or have a thought about it that I could share with anyone else because
it is so subtle. So the challenge to all of us I think is not this one dimensional chasing
after of answers. This is a fool's game but an actual stepping back to gain perspective
and to realize that salvation is always available. It's in the moment. It's an act of understanding.
It doesn't come down through a lineage. It doesn't come through a substance, an empowerment,
a word. It comes through understanding. Salvation is an act of rational apprehension of some
sort. And you know I really believe that we are now in a relationship to the transcendental
object at the end of time such that the revelations are daily. The unfoldment, the connectivity,
we can see light at the end of the tunnel. I mean I've had long practice at this. I've
been thinking like this since 1968, talking about it like this since 1980 but I never
knew how it would come or what it would be. In the last few years with the rise of a technological,
a cultural artifact like the internet, I now see how it will make its way into the world.
We are building the nervous system of the human over soul. We are individual units operating
under social rules that are pushing us ever closer toward dissolving our societies, human
groups run by rules, into telepathic collectivities of some sort. The chaos of the internet is
chaos only to the constipated order freaks of the habesian sociological machine. It makes
them uncomfortable because they can't find the head, they can't find the hierarchy. But
it's head and hierarchy that have distorted and made human institutions so abrasive and
uncomfortable for the people who inhabit them. So I really believe there is no contradiction
between technology and the spirit. There is no contradiction between the search for intellectual
integration and understanding and the psychedelic experience. There is no contradiction between
ultra-advanced hyperspatial cyber culture and paleolithic archaic culture. We have come
to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness. This
is all very scary. None of us know what it means but the forces that have been called
into being are now beyond the control of any institution or any strategic planning committee
or any banking committee. These things have a life of their own. There is a morphological
unfoldment occurring on this planet. It is bringing forth some entirely new order of
being. We are a privileged part of this. Individually our hope is to understand and participate
in the epiphany. There is no blame. Nothing is off-tilter or wrong or unnatural or artificial.
No principle has been betrayed. This is how it is supposed to be. But as it picks up speed,
it's going to become more and more frightening as most metaphors fail. And this is why the
rise of cults and why the grasping at ontological straws and why the whisperings from various
corners of the universe have grown to a roar because we are uncertain. We are not sure.
But I think you become sure by connecting to the source and then what you become for
other people is a source of reassurance. The perfect metaphor for understanding this situation
is a birth. If you had never seen a birth and you were rushing about your daily business
and suddenly came around a corner and this was happening as for example could happen
to you in India or in Africa somewhere and here you confronted human birth, if you had
not been prepared for that moment you would have a real emotional thing on your hands.
It looks like a medical emergency. Blood is being shed, organs are being stretched, there
is pleading and groaning and moaning. You have to have your chops very together to look
at this situation and say how wonderful new life coming into the world as it has always
coming to the world. Now a birth can be simple and easy or it can be prolonged and tormented.
It can be an occasion for joy or it can end in catastrophe. The key is preparation, understanding,
awareness and a desire to meet the experience in all of its fullness. The birth is coming.
The birth is coming and what it does to the social systems we have put in place, the groaning
ecologies that are taking the weight of our billions, what it does to the atmosphere,
what it does to the economies upon which you and I depend, this all depends on how educated
and enlightened each one of us can make ourselves as the thing moves toward completion and it's
no time for foolishness and it's no time for rumor mongering and it's no time for throwing
away your epistemological razors and indulging in the spreading of unlikelihoods. It's time
to actually pull together. The plants are the pipeline into the Guian intention. It's
just not a coincidence that these plants carry this immense spiritual message. They are the
pipeline of Guian intentionality. We were not out of balance for millions of years or
hundreds of thousands of years of intellectual existence in which we had humor and song and
ribaldry and poetry and horsing around and art and theater. We were not out of balance
because our religion involved the dissolving of our cultural values once a week or once
a month back into the mysterious mama matrix of primordial being. Once we cut that off,
once we began to make it up or to listen to the most shrill among us make it up, we were
lost. That's what we're returning to. Our story is the story of the prodigal son. We
left the family farm, the balance, the domesticity and we made the shaman's journey deep into
the heart of matter and of energy, of space and time. We return with gifts, with understandings
no shaman before ever had. Quantum physics, fractal mathematics, astrophysics, cosmology,
the knowledge of DNA. This is real knowledge and we shed real blood to obtain it. Now it
can be given meaning by being brought under the umbrella of authentic, archaic, human
values informed by relationships with psychedelic parents. This is the comfortable future, the
hopeful future that lies ahead. To the degree that people turn their back on this, they're
going to have a rough time explaining to themselves and their children just what exactly is happening
at the end of the 20th century. Okay, that's my wrap. Now I want to hear from you.
[Applause]
Thank you. I mean I really think, and let me say a couple of things, these things are
much more fruitful in the question and answer period, at least for me. And then the other
thing I want to say is about the psychedelic community of Chicago. You know it's all fine
and good to come to hear the great ones pontificate, but the reality of the situation is this is
your community and we have self-selected ourselves to be here out of the millions who aren't
and the thousands who came to this conference and who are also not here. So look around,
somebody in this room has what you're looking for and it probably isn't me. We used to stand
out but then our sartorial choices triumphed everywhere and now we look like everybody
else. But I'd like to do questions now for the rest of the session.
[Inaudible]
Yeah, I stay away from talking about my own mathematical theories because the word mathematics
is guaranteed to clear a hall in most situations. But I think it's perfectly, well just to do
this very briefly. Two things are completely obvious to me that science has missed and
you're smart people, check it out. Isn't this true that the universe has gotten more complicated
as we approach the present? That everything they ever told you on Discovery Channel or
anywhere else supports the idea that the universe in the beginning was simple and then it got
more complicated, right? So that's a truth that reaches, notice, across biology, geology,
astrophysics. It's a cross disciplinary truth of great power. Well then here's a second
truth related to the first. This movement into complexity from the remote past to the
present is occurring faster and faster and faster. And that's where we come into the
picture, you see. We are animals but we are animals plus. Animals plus language plus technology
plus religion plus analytical analysis so forth and so on. We represent some kind of
an experiment in a deepening of complexity. And historical change occurs at orders of
magnitude faster than biological change. And very recently, pick a number, a hundred years
ago, fifty years ago, something like that, it seems like we entered into an even deeper
involution of the spiral. Well you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that
the spiral closure that's moving faster and faster is now moving so fast that its culmination
can be imagined to occur within a human lifetime. And I think that that's true. I think we are
the last generation of proto-human beings and that beyond us lies something very hard
to imagine. The human machine symbiote. Something which is going to spring, not from our loins,
but as Zeus' daughter sprang in a sense from his forehead. And it's not simply a new species,
it's a new order of being. It's as dramatic a break with the earlier orders of natural
organization as the eukaryotes were from the prokaryotes and the land animals were from
the sea. How does that make us feel? Well, I don't know. How does it make you feel? It's
a complicated feeling here. You know, in Silicon Valley there are people every day who go to
work with the phrase in their mind "the great work". And what is the great work? The great
work is the handing on of human civilization to a species intelligent enough to appreciate
the enterprise. And it will be a symbiote, we hope. It will be an AI, for sure. It's
here. It's here. I mean, it depends on how much you understand and who you know and which
technologies you follow. We're all coming to terms with it at different levels. But
in a sense, the only thing left is the collective realization occurring individual by individual
that in fact history has ended. This is not only the postmodern dispensation, it's the
posthistorical dispensation. What happens next? Well, that's the adventure we prayed
for and claimed we wanted. So it is upon us. Yeah. In the back.
[Inaudible]
Oh, thanks for bringing that all up. Heaven's Gate. Well, you know, we only have an hour
and a half here and I have a lot of ideas about all of this. I think, you know, that
was a perfect example. Ideology kills. It is not a childish game. Ideology kills. And
I was very amused. I mean, the Heaven's Gate thing was a tragedy, but there were curious
aspects to it. I mean, it was the week before Easter. All around me I heard people saying
things like, you know, how could people believe such crazy stuff? And by the way, honey, did
you get a dress for service so we can go and celebrate the resurrection of the Redeemer?
[Applause]
And you just wonder, you know, whose ox is getting gored here? Because something is absolutely
nuts but 400 million people believe it. That makes it okay, but if 20 people believe something
that's a cult. All of this gives me the creeps. I have an absolute horror of belief systems
and cults and I've never met a guru I really liked. I've never met one I've trusted. You
know, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt, some relative, I don't know, anyway, she used
to say at these White House dinners that they would give in the Roosevelt administration,
she said, "If you have nothing good to say about anyone, sit by me." And I'm sort of
in that position. Being on the celeb circuit and so forth, I have a chance to sort of be
behind the scenes. And since I wasn't appointed or nobody ever came to me or I feel free to
report to you because I identify with you. I don't identify with them. I identify with
you. And I'm telling you, you know, keep one hand on your wallet and the other hand over
your anal pore. This is the way to approach all of this. Belief is hideous. It's also
completely unnecessary. Ideology. Imagine a monkey walking around with the idea that
he or she possesses certain truth. I mean, you have to lack a sense of humor to not see
the absurdity of that. If you met a termite who told you he was on a quest for certain
truth, a small smile would tug at your lips, I hope. Do you believe for a moment that we
are different from that termite? I think not. I think not. We understand what we can understand.
We build models. To do this without realizing the tentative nature of the enterprise is
just damn foolishness. Here, my brother put it very well one time. He said, "Have you
ever noticed that as we build the fire of understanding brighter, the greater the volume
of darkness that is revealed?" Or here, I'll put it for you in a geometric model. "As
the sphere of understanding expands, the surface area of ignorance necessarily grows ever larger.
How could it be otherwise?" So then get a grip. All of these things are candles lit
against the darkness. But that's why I say the thing to keep coming back to is the felt
presence of immediate experience. Not how do I feel as a feminist or a Marxist or a
devotee of Eronymous Bosch or whatever. How do I feel? Period. Not through the filter
of ideology. As I look back through history, as you look back through history, very few
ideologies last very long without going sour or becoming toxic. So why should we assume
as all those naive societies in the past assumed that we have 95% of the truth and the other
5% will be delivered by our best people in the next three years? Fools have always believed
that but the smart money knows we ain't even close. You cannot today explain how I can
think to myself, "Make a fist and make a fist." What you're seeing is mind over matter. I
say make a fist, I make a fist. This is the defeat of science, behaviorism, causal theory.
It's defeated by something as simple as that. So get into the mysteries of the body, the
felt presence of the moment. Somebody else here. Oh, I don't know. Yeah.
[Inaudible]
Yes. I must say, usually my daily meditations are accompanied by cannabis which I don't
consider high pressure psychedelic but it certainly makes meditation more tolerable.
But you raise an interesting question which is what is the preparation for the psychedelic
experience? Meditation is a good one. Engagement with these problems is a good one. I mean
think about what you want to do. Have clarity of intent. The way I do psychedelics is quite
infrequently at high doses on an empty stomach in silent darkness. And then, and I add this,
this is how I do it, but everything up to there I've advocated. The final thing is alone.
And that's a biggie for people. But to me that's the sine qua non because if you don't
go alone, you know who you take with you? Everybody. Because the other person represents
the cultural system inevitably. Inevitably. I mean I'm not saying you should never take
psychedelics with people you love and respect and children and loved ones and parents and
all that. But the deep, deep work. You know, Plotinus called it the flight of the alone
to the alone. The deep, deep work has to be done alone because dig it. The last dance
you dance, you will dance alone. And I see this pretty much in Buddhist terms in that
I really believe at death there is some kind of a landscape to be traversed. Some kind
of a process to be gone through. And that it is critical not to fuck up at that point.
I mean they all insist on this, right? Whatever it is. So the psychedelic seemed to me to
show the way into the bardo. I once turned on to DMT a very, very holy Tibetan man. Not
one of these Budweiser llamas, but the real McCoy. He didn't have a growth center or a
vision. But he smoked the DMT and he came back and he said, "Those are the lesser
lights." He said, "You cannot go further than that and return." And I believe him.
I absolutely believe him. I think they've seen the territory. So there is something
about, and I made the analogy earlier to the collective birth, be prepared. And these psychedelics
are searchlights out into the great unknown. People talk about recreational drugs and all
that. I regret that I have to be involved with all of that. I take drugs very seriously.
Not that I've never done a sub dose and gone to a rave or something like that. But I didn't
do it with the illusion that this was spiritual work. I did it to dance and to have fun with
my friends. But the remarkable thing about the psychedelics is how safe they are at levels
no human being can stand. We know the LD50 of psilocybin. It's hundreds of milligrams
per kilogram. Nobody's ever taken more than 40 or 50 milligrams. Because beyond that,
the human cognitive machinery can't process the data. It is literally beyond language.
I have a friend who every time he takes psilocybin, he tries to stand more. Stand more. And I
know exactly what he means. I've had conversations with that entity in there where you say to
me, "Okay, the dancing mice, all this looks very nice. We're feeling pretty comfortable
here. Show me what you are for yourself. Show me what you really are." Well, immediately
the temperature drops. Black draperies begin to lift and there's an organ tone straight
out of the Bach B minor mass that shakes the room. And after about 30 seconds of this,
you say, "Enough already of what you really are for yourself." Because you realize it
will fulfill the request. It can lift a veil on vistas of reality that like some hero in
an H.P. Lovecraft tale, you will just be left gibbering for the rest of your life in a very
small cell. Because there are truths out there that the term mind of man, I think, is not
ready to handle. The reason this whole non-local thing works the way it does is because we
resonate with what is familiar. In other words, the universe is full of things no human mind
can cognize or apprehend. But because we cannot cognize or apprehend these things, we do not
even notice them. They are, as it were, in the background. What's in the foreground is
everything at least familiar enough that we can relate to it as strange. The problem is
not to encounter the alien but to have enough sense to know when it's looking at you. Because
it ain't going to be like you think it is. That's the one thing you can take to the back.
Yeah, back there. Do I consider psychedelics a door or a window? Interesting question.
I think that until recently they were a window. I think they can become a door. Here's my
wrap on this. This whole business about the alien, and I could have spent the whole hour
on a different tack and gone at it, but the alien is real in some sense, but not real
in any sense that I think would satisfy the marketplace here assembled. The alien is somehow
non-local. That means that if we really want to contact the alien, we are going to have
to understand that the alien is pure information. The alien is only made of information. Is
that good news or bad news? It's good news. Here's why. It just so happens at this time
in history we have produced a technology that can manipulate pure digital information. The
alien needs to be downloaded into cyberspace. It's not for nothing that the net is called
the net. It is a net for catching an alien. You know in all the old B science fiction
movies of the 50s, one of the tropes of the plot was always the landing zone. We must
build a landing zone, go to the landing zone, locate the landing zone. The net is the landing
zone. And where is the alien? The alien is trapped in the deeper interstices of the human
soul, but can be downloaded onto the internet as a virtual reality of some sort. And this
you do it very slyly. You don't announce what I've just announced. You say, "We're
going to hold a contest and we're going to have a prize for the best simulation of
a psychedelic experience in VRML in virtual space." And you hold this contest and you
hold it the next year and the next year and people are inspired to download what they
think of as their weirdest visions. But what they don't understand is their weirdest
visions are the weird vision. In other words, the collective over soul exists dispersed
through all of us. And if we as a collective project seek to model it, to animate it, to
produce a reasonable simulacrum of it in virtual reality, it will come to be. We will summon
it out of ourselves. And I think at a certain point we will understand the nature of the
enterprise. The alchemist dreamed of something like this. The summoning into existence of
the cosmic anthropos, the mystic atom, the sapphic hydra lip, the philosopher's stone,
the lapis philosophorum, the transcendental object at the end of time. Once again, the
living heart of the universal panacea. Now I think as we move into the empowering of
the imagination through cyberspace, we can actually do this. We can actually bring these
archetypes, if you will, into existence in ways that will give them a terrifying immediacy.
I mean, I have visited virtual realities of low definition slapped together in fairly
short order. And it shows me what you could achieve if many people lovingly crafted and
tooled these things. We would discover that we can communicate to each other the Niagara's
of epiphanous beauty that pour through us when we smoke EMT, take psilocybin or something
like that. So in answer to the gentleman's question, psychedelics were a window until
the advent of virtual reality and the internet and the new information technologies and they
melded to psychedelic intent, opened the possibility of opening that window and stepping through
it into the most beautiful dreams human beings have ever dreamed. Yeah?
[inaudible]
Mm hmm.
[inaudible]
Yeah. Well, this is a topic late in the game for this workshop. But people in all times
and places have asked this question, is okay if we reduce it all down to nothing, then
how do we build it back? And philosophers have developed what are called razors or logical
tools that allow this process to go forward. The most famous razor and the one that certainly
could use some application around here is Occam's razor named after William of Occam,
a 14th century nominalist. Occam's razor says this, "Hypotheses should not be multiplied
without necessity or translated into common vernacular English, keep it simple, stupid."
In other words, the simplest explanation is always to be preferred. Never choose a more
complicated explanation over the simpler explanation. So for example, a light is seen in the sky.
Simple explanation, aircraft. Complex explanation, you know what. The simpler explanation is
to be preferred until further evidence forces its abandonment. And God knows, even with
this razor in place, you're forced to some pretty complicated hypotheses by some situations.
But if you will rely on your own intuition, the felt presence of immediate experience
and logical razors, another good one I call this one, the Gorbachev razor, trust but verify.
It's okay to trust as long as you verify. This keeps you out of trouble. So these are
simply the rules of mental hygiene that are no longer taught because commercial interests
have determined that people who don't know these things are easily manipulated in the
marketplace and people who do know these things are not. It's horrifying to realize that
whether you can think straight or not is a decision being made for you by the Fortune
500 corporations. Is it one more argument for overcoming culturally reinforced childishness?
One more and then we're going to have to clear this for Whitley Strieber who has lots to
say to you I'm sure. Over here. Well I'm certainly a printhead formed by it and formed by McLuhanism.
I'm not an angry printhead. In other words I don't like all this denouncing of youth
and all this talk about cyber driven illiteracy and all that. First of all I don't think it's
true. I think people who spend hours and hours a day on the internet are exposed to vast
amounts of information that synchronistically or otherwise forms their opinion. I think
the printed word at this point is a glorious art. It's funny you should ask this question.
Here it is 1997. We have many things to celebrate this year in America. The mission to Mars
for example. But one thing we have to celebrate that probably hasn't been mentioned here today
is American literature is alive and well. Thomas Pynchon has written a brilliant new
novel. A novel that will make you proud to be a reader of English and an American. A
novel called Mason and Dixon. Don DeLillo a very different sort of writer has written
a brilliant end of the century statement called underworld. American art and letters is very
healthy and actually that leads me to the final thought that I want to leave you with
which is the way to react to all of this stuff is not to believe or to denounce or to be.
The way to relate to what is happening to us is to produce art. Put the art pedal to
the floor. If you paint, if you sculpt, if you write poetry, if you dance, if you declaim,
whatever you do. That is the over soul trying to come through. We are never closer to the
quintessence of the human collectivity than when we produce art. These are the larger
semiotic messages that are seeking to pass between us and no one who creates art fully
understands their own art. But if they create it out of honesty and from close to the bone
it can't fail to elevate. We don't have to understand what is happening to us to affirm
our humanness and to contribute to the future that is unfolding. Thank you very, very much.
(Applause)
(Music)
Light Of Nature - Day 1 (Part 1)
So, I guess that's the end of my introduction.
Here's Terrence McKenna.
Can you all hear me?
Can you hear in the back?
Not very well.
Yeah? Not very well?
Make them hear in the back.
Okay. Ah, that's much better, isn't it?
Is it better in the back?
Good, good.
Well, I would like to join with Roy in thanking all of the people who made this possible.
Mary Fowler worked long and hard to make this happen.
Eric Ali did the wonderful graphics for the poster.
Pam here has controlled and managed traffic flow here this evening.
Diane and Roy are incomparable treasures in the LA community.
I was talking to someone today who said they had listened to KPFK very carefully in the month that Roy and Diane were away.
And it just ain't the same thing.
It's terrifying to think that two human beings in a city of what, 11 million, are what's holding up the hip.
[applause]
The hip end of things.
As Roy said, this is a benefit for KPFK and in a larger sense for Botanical Dimensions.
Botanical Dimensions is the nonprofit that Kat and I and Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Messner, Ralph Abraham, Frank Barr,
a number of people have organized to carry out plant rescue operations for medicinal plants and plants with a history of shamanic usage.
And we have a botanical farm in Hawaii, 20 acres, maintain collectors in South America and occasionally support collecting in Africa.
And this is our real world political work beyond the communicating and the publishing and that sort of thing,
where we actually try to impact some of the negative so-called progressive changes that are taking place in the third world
and disrupting rainforest culture and causing this shamanic and folk pharmacopeia to be lost.
So I appreciate your being here tonight in support of that.
It's very important work, far more expensive than I thought it was when we organized the foundation.
And it's ongoing, so we never really seem to be ahead.
So I want to thank you for your support of that.
In line with that, I've been living with Kat and our two children in Hawaii on the Big Island for the past year
and not really doing any public speaking because there was none to be done there.
And it was a very good opportunity to get out from under the electronic umbrella of the sprawl of North American culture
and to sort of look at it and assess it as this practice of speaking with groups of people has become more and more a part of my life.
It has sort of changed in my mind from the addressing of certain topics and the building of a talk around a theme
to more just pointing and looking and saying, "Well, here we are. Here's where we've arrived tonight.
What is the situation? What is the state of the world? What is the state of the union?"
I think psychedelics had a very large impact. I'm sure there's no argument on this in the 1960s.
But in a way, it was not ever anchored in anything.
It was never explained to anybody, by anybody, how it fit into the historical context of what had preceded it.
Perhaps because no one actually knew at that time.
For instance, there was no… the invoking of shamanism as an explanation for how plant hallucinogens work on psyche
is completely alien to the literature of the 1960s. It just isn't there.
And speaking of aliens, the theme of alien intelligence or of hyperdimensional organized intellect is contacted in the psychedelic state.
That also was an absent theme. It was basically presented, the psychedelic experience was basically presented
as an exploration of the contents of the personality with a little bit of overflow into aesthetic issues.
So, I remember in the early days we would stack our Abrams books on Hieronymus Bosch and Piero Della di Francesca and Giotto.
And then the idea following Aldous Huxley was that you would imbibe the meaning of these great works of art
behind the kind of psychic freedom that the psychedelic substance was going to graft on to your ordinary consciousness.
Well, I think all those kinds of metaphors were useful, but it's been now 20, 25 years of looking at that phenomenon
and also of having the future continue to overtake us with ever more demands upon our cultural resourcefulness
and our ability to cognize the cultural situation. And I think now it can be seen somewhat differently.
And so these two nights in Los Angeles, which are called Understanding and Imagination in the Light of Nature,
are a kind of effort to take several telescoping steps backward and place the adventure of psychedelic self-exploration
in context, to frame it in a number of different ways. Because I think it's very important for us to know,
as the Hermetic Mysteries urge us to know, whether we have come, where we are, who we are, and whence we are going.
All issues that the psychedelic experience, especially to my mind the plant hallucinogens, bring into close focus.
Here is an opportunity for a theater of cultural growth that is unparalleled.
How did we find ourselves in this situation? What is exactly the nature of the cultural situation
in which then the psychedelic response is called forth as part of a spectrum of cultural responses?
Basically what's been going on in Western civilization for about 500 years is the exploration of the metaphor of materialism,
which began as a simple limiting case. Since we are at the Philosophical Research Society,
it behooves us to talk philosophy for a moment and remind you that there is what's called Occam's Razor.
William of Occam was a late medieval philosopher and his razor was that hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity.
In other words, the simplest explanation should be preferred in all cases.
The fewest number of elements should be put forward as necessary for an explanation.
And following William of Occam's statement of this notion as a logical way of proceeding,
the assumption was made then, a provisional assumption at the beginning,
that matter could be separated from the notion of soul and spirit,
that it could be divided into its simplest units, and out of the activity of those simple units,
a model could be built up that would explain more complex phenomena in the world, Cartesian materialism,
which was applied very successfully to physical matter, to the chemical elements.
And so successfully, in fact, that the provisional nature of the assumption was soon forgotten
in the explanatory zeal of the people who had latched onto this method.
And so it was then applied out of the chemical realm, but it moved into the biological realm.
And the search was on for the biologically irreducible units, which in the 17th century was the cell,
and great excitement about the cell.
And then in the 20th century, of course, first the nucleus of the cell,
then ultimately DNA as the constituent of the nucleus, which was controlling protein synthesis.
But strangely enough, the elucidation of the mechanics of the gene through this program of reductionism
did not issue into the same kind of control over the products of the gene
that the same program had the same kind of fruit that had been born in the analysis of physical matter.
And in the early years of this century, when the effort was made to extend the metaphor into psychology,
the true inadequacy of it became clearly seen,
so that the effort to break the personality down into types or complexes or archetypes
or behavioral strategies all failed.
And at the same time that this process of disconfirmation was happening in the social sciences,
physics, which had been old reliable in the matter of supporting this particulate, pointillistic,
materialistic school of explanation began in fact to betray it,
because the analysis of matter was pushed to deeper and deeper levels
until finally phenomena began to be elucidated, which seemed incomprehensible in the mechanical model.
It seemed as though what had been thought of as points of matter were in fact spread through time,
and the notion of simple location began to give way to talk of clouds of probability and this sort of thing.
All of this reaching a culmination in 1923 with the Copenhagen Conference on Quantum Physics,
where basically a new vision of matter was elucidated.
And strangely enough, the new view of matter seemed to have a very mentalist sort of aura about it.
It no longer was a theory of simple location, calculable energies and specific predictions.
It was probabilistic.
Now this re-emergence of the need for a wave mechanical description of matter
can I think now be seen from the vantage point of 55 years
as the first stirrings or among the first stirrings of the re-emergence of the spirit.
And I think that what understanding and imagination in the light of nature argues for
is the presence and re-emergence of the awareness of spirit in the world.
This is what the so-called and long heralded paradigm shift is all about.
It is a vast turning over of the intellectual universe
which will eclipse many idea systems and support many more.
It is the idea of fields.
Spirit need not be defined or even conceived in any sort of 19th century or mentalist or animist way.
What spirit is, is a field of deployed energy
that is somehow co-present at more than one point in space and time.
It is the shadow that haunts the particularized world of Newtonian matter
and it is strangely enough the commonest object of experience.
In other words, as we move through our lives, as we project our hopes,
as we plan our days, as we execute our jobs, we move in this realm of spirit.
The problem is that we have been very slowly but very efficiently corralled
inside an intellectual system which gives no credence to spirit
and therefore has had a curious effect on the validation that we give our own lives.
For instance, if you look at positivist philosophy
which is the dominant philosophical paradigm in academic philosophy
where you learn that there are primary and secondary qualities to the world
and the primary qualities are charge, spin, angular momentum, velocity, this sort of thing.
Things which nowhere come tangential to the felt world of the individual.
And there are also so-called secondary qualities, color, taste, tone, feeling,
all the things that make up the world that you and I experience.
So somehow we are not traveling in first class on this metaphysical airliner.
We are back there with the secondary qualities and the good stuff is all up front
and it is described and manipulated by incomprehensible equations
and you have to enter into a priesthood to become part of it.
Well, it's to our credit, I think, that we are waking up
and one of the reasons that we are waking up
is because into the objects of common experience
an exhaustive search of the objects of common experience,
diligent, clear thinking seekers after understanding,
people who are practicing, who took seriously the Constitution's assurance
of the pursuit of happiness, have, Robert Bork notwithstanding,
have found more than the right of privacy in the Constitution
but have actually found the right to alter your own consciousness
for purposes of personal growth.
Well, consciousness is like a still pool.
If it is unperturbed, it returns a clear image of the world
in the same way that the unperturbed surface of a pond
will become a mirror to the environment around it.
But if consciousness is perturbed by being shifted from its ordinary modalities
then the extraordinarily tenuous and provisional nature
of what we call reality swims into our kin
and we see that what we take to be solid objects,
what we take to be here and now,
what we take to be personal identity versus other
in the form of other personalities,
that all of these things hang by the most tenuous of linguistic threads
and cultural conventions
and that beneath the surface of those conventions
is utter terra incognito, a no man's land,
the unexplored territory behind cultural assumptions,
suddenly, starkly, totally and controversibly illuminated
to the inspection of the individual.
Well, this is a feeding, indeed to my mind
it is the major factor responsible for
the re-emergence of the awareness of the spirit.
It holds out the possibility that we can create
a new definition of our own humanness,
that it was fine for purposes of disentangling from the medieval church
to take the materialist route
and to follow it into Darwinian evolution
to recognize our ascent from previous primate forms
and to sort of claim a dimension of existential freedom.
But that is not the whole story,
that essentially is the legacy or the achievement of modernism
which was fully worked out by 1927 or '8, I would say.
I mean, those people, the Pata physicians,
the quantum physicists, the Dadaists, the surrealists,
Alfred Jarry, Andre Breton, it was all worked out.
And those of us who were born after that time
and have come into this sort of pseudo-escaton
of regurgitation of modern values
in art, fashion and literature
have been living in this kind of a goldfish bowl ever since.
I mean, really it's astonishing the degree to which
in the most progressive and fast-moving century
in the last 10 or 20, for that matter,
there has also been an extraordinary backward current,
a very strong recidivism that has held at bay
the true exfoliation of what modernity was supposed to mean.
That's why within the 20th century,
the further back you go,
the more utopian the projection of the future becomes
and the further into the 20th century you go,
the more like a dystopia it becomes
as we get not elevated railways, immortality and hot pants,
but bread lines and germ warfare and doublespeak
and all of these things.
So into this situation of retrenchment and cultural recidivism
and the working out of modern values,
which are materialist values,
becomes then the beginning of the postmodern era.
I prefer a different term, which I call "compressionism",
the compressionist era, which follows the modern era,
and its theme is the re-emergence of the presence of the spirit
and its major cultural exhibit,
or the major cultural force driving it,
the discovery of relativism with regard to consciousness,
which does not only mean psychedelic drugs
and hallucinogenic plants per se,
it also means media,
it also means literary expectation,
reorientation of the senses through design, urban planning,
the entire spectrum of effects,
which feeds consciousness back into itself
is enunciating this theme of the emergent spirit,
and it is not necessarily a welcome theme,
because all institutions attain a certain momentum
toward the preservation of their own vested interests,
and science and the handmaiden of science,
which is modern technocratic government,
have created a number of cultural institutions
that have a friction with the re-emergence of the spirit.
First and foremost is the notion of the public.
The public is this weird idea
that was generated in the wake of the printing press
that there were vast numbers of people
who could be treated atomistically.
They didn't have to be thought of as individuals.
They could be thought of as various classes,
masses of people to be manipulated.
And if you could sell the public on the idea of democracy,
which is another one of these atomistic notions,
the notion of democracy is that
for us all to get together and have it work,
we have to assume that we're all alike.
So we each have a vote,
and then you may be tall, you may be short,
you may be rich, you may be poor,
you may be black, you may be white,
but that doesn't matter.
We'll give everybody this charge, one vote,
and then we'll see how these populations work themselves out.
What they don't tell you is that
at the same time that you build this definition of the citizen,
you also build the institutions which subvert the citizen.
So the citizen is not free to act out
and express the wishes of the citizen.
The citizen is a consumer of ideological models
that are sold to the citizen
through agencies of mass propaganda.
So there's this peculiar playing off
of one against the other.
In the meantime, what has also been happening
is the institutions of language,
which previously were pretty much left to develop on their own,
and that was the situation well into the 19th century.
Through the power of the printing press,
the evolution of language
also became something under the control of these institutions,
and they very quickly have replaced
whatever reality may have been impinging
into the lives of the citizens with concepts.
Concepts replace reality.
You come into the world with a blank slate,
and everything is what William James called
a blooming, buzzing confusion.
Well, then one by one,
you isolate phenomena in this confusion,
and you name it.
Once a sector of reality has been named,
it stays still.
It ceases to behave the way it would behave for itself.
It begins to behave syntactically,
because it has been changed into a linguistic object.
When things behave syntactically,
they are either subjects or objects
or the syntactical machinery
which relates these two together.
In that case, materialism, dualism,
projection of authenticity beyond the self
are all reinforced.
So these are the factors which have impeded the spirit.
Into this comes the psychedelic experience.
It has a tremendous force to revivify the spirit,
particularly because it is not an ideology.
It is not something someone figured out.
It is an experience,
and this is important to bear in mind.
It horrifies me.
I'm sure you've heard me say it.
It's important to think of someone going from birth to the grave
without ever coming tangential to the psychedelic experience.
It's like going from the birth to the grave
without ever discovering sex.
It means that you died as a pre-adolescent.
You never really came into your birthright.
You've been infantilized by our cultural institutions
to accept the notion of ourselves as citizens
consuming these regurgitated scientific models
which are then hashed through by Madison Avenue
and then handed down to us by the organs of mass culture.
And this is supposed to be what we anchor our lives on.
It's a wonder that drug abuse, child abuse,
self-abuse is rampant in this society
because it all has been taken away from us.
You may read 1984 and think,
"Well, thank God it isn't that bad yet."
Well, the only difference between us and 1984 is we dress better.
[laughter]
So I think that little gatherings like this,
and I feel like this is definitely a family gathering,
this meeting was sold out before there was any promo
other than Roy's show and a small mailing we did.
So you are people who have passed through a very narrow filter.
You stay up late.
[laughter]
You listen to KPFK and you tolerate Terrence McKeon.
So you are either thrice blessed or thrice cursed.
I don't know which it is.
But anyway, it feels to me like a family gathering.
It feels to me like we are figuring this out
and there aren't that many of us, I think.
But what we understand as a group
or what I imagine that we understand
is that there is this twilight of reductionism.
There is this end of the old model
and yet we're not ready to proclaim the twilight of reductionism
to simultaneously be the funeral of reason.
You see, there are a lot of people,
a much larger group than we represent
who are prepared to bury reason along with reductionism.
And I think reason may have been caught in bed with reductionism,
but it may have been set up.
[laughter]
It's the take that I have on it.
And as they used to say in Watergate,
linked but not tainted.
[laughter]
So, I am a very...
Some people even... Someone said I was narrow-minded.
I was accused of being narrow-minded the other night.
Because I come to this very honestly through the sciences,
through trying to really find out what was going on
and not just accept everything that came down the pike.
I mean, I will believe anything if there's evidence,
if it's self-consistent, if the case is well-made.
I mean, I think that the first thing, the truth will be
is a pleasure to hear, you know,
and not some turgid and tormented thing
where you have to go to six meetings
and not talk to anybody who doesn't believe it
and all of this sort of thing.
So, I think it's important as the,
what I call the archaic revival gets rolling,
it is important for us to clarify where we're coming from.
When we were simply the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe,
it hardly mattered.
But responsibility will devolve on us
to say what we mean
and to have a position which is
not only convincing to the converted,
but convincing to the skeptics.
That's who I'm after, you know,
because I think that a great instance of cultural blindness
is what we're confronted with on the issue of psychedelics.
Psychedelics are to the science of psychology
what the telescope was to astronomy in Galileo's time.
And we are in a situation of increasing global pressure
on our species, increasing outbreaks of neurosis,
unhappiness, psychic epidemics,
and we are leaving our best tools behind
because of fairly preposterous cultural prohibitions.
Cultural prohibitions which deny us
are best weapons for overcoming the situation that we are in.
And this is really an intolerable situation
because the fate,
nothing less than the fate of the human species,
probably hangs in the balance.
We cannot afford the luxury of an unconscious.
We cannot afford
stupidity, closed-mindedness,
racism, sexism,
consumer materialism,
selfishness, an absence of globalism.
These things are not necessary for us
for our moral edification
so that we can feel like well-bred ladies and gentlemen.
These things are necessary for us
so that we don't destroy ourselves.
And the fact that this message is so slow coming out
is a strong argument for activism
on the part of anybody who thinks
they have even the faintest glimmer
of what is going on.
You know, the future will not wait.
I see the most crypto-fascist
and intransigent of institutions
slowly waking up to fairly basic facts
such as that a nuclear war is probably a bad investment.
You know, so that even
as Neanderthal a type as President Pinocchio
is willing...
Isn't that a cruel thing for me to say?
...is waking up to the fact that
it just don't pay.
But you know, we have a lot of problems.
It isn't going to be the millennium
even if we achieve a massive cutback in strategic weapons.
There's still going to be propaganda,
sexism, starvation,
inability to correctly manage resources.
These things will plague us
until the last syllable of recorded time
unless we begin to undergo
this kind of intellectual cohesion,
the compression of our intent,
the recognition of our group-mindedness
as a feeling, as a will
that can act in the historical context.
And to my mind, the psychedelics
have always existed in the plants
to promote precisely this.
There were not language-using,
tool-making tribes of human beings
in the absence of hallucinogenic plants.
The hallucinogenic plants create the context
for integrated organizational activity.
This has been going on for at least
15,000, 20,000 years.
The problem is that through a series of factors
which we needn't go into in depth here,
but factors which impinged on European civilization particularly,
civilizations were able to evolve
outside of the noetic input from Gaia,
outside of the biological radio
that envelops the planet
and inputs into balanced tribal societies
with functioning shamanic institutions.
In Europe, somehow the chain was broken.
The link back to the elder gods and goddesses
and to the biological organization of human society
before history was lost.
And this curious kind of ungoverned
intellectual development occurred,
ungoverned in the literal sense of a machine
which slips from the control of its governor.
In that situation, materialism,
which is an insupportable philosophy actually,
if you have an openness, a sensitivity,
any kind of cultivated feminine response to nature,
it is utterly impossible.
Recall that the point of view of Cartesian materialism
pushed Descartes to actually claiming in public debate
that animals were machines.
He said they feel nothing.
The apparent display of pain
is simply something which we project onto them
because we alone have a soul.
And Descartes, you see,
himself had not gone over completely to materialism.
He believed there was a human soul,
but it came tangential at only one point
to the human body.
Somewhere in the pineal gland
there was a switch and the soul was running things
like a telephone switchboard operator from there.
Well, very shortly after Descartes,
his followers just said,
"Well, we don't need this.
This soul concept was just a thing
to stay on the right side of the church
and we don't need it."
And they cut it loose.
Well, once you cut that loose,
then you have all kinds of permission.
You have permission to rape and exploit nature,
permission which had already been reinforced
for Western man by the New Testament,
but now raised to the nth degree
by the assumption that nature is utterly without soul.
And this philosophy persisted well into the 1950s.
The essence of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism was
that this can be summed up in the statement,
"Nature is mute."
That was Sartre's position on nature.
How many people thinking themselves existentialists
and hanging out in coffee houses
actually ever worked through
what the consequences of the existential point of view was?
Nature is not mute.
You really have to have worked yourself into a weird place
to believe that, you know.
In fact, nature is entirely something else.
Nature is communication
because nature is psyche.
This is what we haven't understood.
We have somehow talked ourselves into the belief
that into the natural world of Eden,
God came and made man and from man woman
and that men and women are of so ontologically
a different level than the rest of nature
that no conclusion about us can be drawn
from an examination of nature.
Nothing could...
I mean, it's impossible for me to understand
how this idea persists and has such momentum
in the 20th century
where hierarchy theory has very, very clearly
explicated the notion of the linkage
of higher order systems
to subsystems that are physically more simple.
So, you see, really what we have
is a kind of fractal universe.
In fact, it's not greatly different
from the alchemical view of the 16th century
where people said,
"As above, so below."
The microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm.
What this is really saying is that
at the level of a planet,
you get a certain level of organization
and spectrum of peripheral effects.
The same thing such as self-reflection,
self-regulation, intent, goal projection,
steering toward perceived goals.
You get the same kind of thing on the level of a society,
can be a beehive or a herd of antelope or whatever,
and you get it in the human individual
and the human society.
So, really what is to be seen is that
we are the cutting edge of becoming.
We are not a thing apart.
We are a unique level of a multi-leveled organism
and we have been called forth out of nature,
by nature, for a purpose.
What is our task as individuals, I think,
is to discover what that purpose is
and then to align ourselves with it
in a way which allows the plan,
whatever it is, to most smoothly unfold.
Well, what it seems to be is a progressive invocation of spirit,
the theme with which I began the evening,
that through language, through abstraction,
through magical invocation,
the formulation of religions,
the projection of art,
the field phenomena,
the phenomena which are diffuse in space and time
and not easily located,
are forcing or intruding their way
into three-dimensional space and time.
If you were an extraterrestrial in a starship
in orbit around this planet,
what you would see looking down
is a gene swarm.
The species that seem to us to be animal forms
extremely stable in time
are actually highly permeable membranes
over millennia and tens of millennia
with genes crossing over, moving around
and being basically obedient
to the expression of some kind of teleological form.
And it was the concern of 19th century biology
to eliminate teleology,
to eliminate purpose and directedness.
But it's very hard to avoid the impression
of some kind of a tractor
ahead of this planet,
embedded in its history
and somehow channeling everything toward it
so that the progressive acceleration
of human society,
of information production,
of communication,
the proliferation of languages,
natural and synthetic,
all of these things are not something
going on in the human domain
and somehow sealed
from the general state of nature,
but are in fact part of the general state of nature.
And the human experience or the human animal
as the carrier of this catalytic process,
the speeding up and accelerating a process
on the surface of the planet
is not sealed from nature,
but the leading edge,
the leading edge of a process on this planet.
Now, teleology was so antithetical
to 19th century science
because they were trying to pull away
from the telos of medieval scholastic philosophy.
They didn't want God,
these 19th century English atheists,
Darwin and Lyle,
and that crowd.
However,
we have come through the so-called death of God
and the elimination of a theological raison d'etre
for the universe.
And now we're looking more at a telos
which we would operationally define,
rather than define it based on ancient revelation,
which was the previous method
was the older the book,
the truer it must be,
and the Bible is the oldest book,
and therefore it must be true.
What Merci
ilead calls the nostalgia for paradise,
we are overcoming that.
It can now be seen that there is in fact
some kind of transcendental object,
and it's best to try and describe it phenomenologically.
We don't know what it is,
but we do know that it's an enormous attractor
of some sort,
and we are in the field of attraction,
and by we I mean all life on the planet
is being drawn in to this nodal point,
and it is possible to anticipate it
through the psychedelic experience,
because apparently the natural and the linguistic world
are worlds which are organized
along the principle of fractal curves.
Fractal curves are recently discovered mathematical objects.
Not all of them are recently discovered.
Some were known as late as the late 19th century,
but most have been discovered using computers
in the last 10 or 15 years,
and they are self-similar curves
such that when you take a subset
of one of these mathematical objects,
it is found to have the whole pattern embedded in it.
The Fourier transforms that describe holograms
are these kind of things.
Coastlines, mountain ranges,
data of all sorts,
when analyzed in a certain way,
is found to be fractal.
Apparently the world is a kind of vast spiral fractal
that is achieving greater and greater closure with itself,
and we experience this density of closure
and this compressionism
as the spectrum of effects
which we call human evolution, human history,
emergence of high technology,
the present moment, the rush toward apocalypse.
The most intense moments that the universe has ever known
are the next 15 seconds,
and beyond that lies still more intense moments.
Novelty as a kind of generalized paradigm
of the compression of connectedness
throughout the cosmos is accelerating moment by moment
in the rocks, in the trees, in the stars, and in us.
And so what we call history,
which is not as modern,
the modern theory of history
is that it's what they call trendlessly fluctuating.
That's their model of the world.
You get order at the atomic level,
order at the biological level,
order, order, order,
and suddenly you reach human beings,
trendlessly fluctuating.
It's as though we were affected
by the Brownian movement of random particles,
and yet we somehow out of all this ordering,
we're to believe that then emerges
the trendless fluctuation of human history.
Actually, this is nonsense.
It's simply that there has never been
a thoroughgoing theory of history.
However, now we are ready for them
because these wave mechanical ideas,
the notions of closure,
Shell Drake's idea about the presence of the past,
the way in which the past drives the present,
all of these things lay us open
for an understanding of the compression
and densification of time.
And this is what is experienced
in the psychedelic experience.
Really, Whitehead said of Dove Gray
that it haunts time like a ghost.
Well, I think that the compression
of the three-dimensional universe
at the end of time
haunts time like a ghost.
It's the cosmic giggle.
Here a messiah,
there a shaman,
there an ecstatic poet,
and there the tiny ripple
that is simply a congruent coincidence
in the life of a single individual.
Robert Anton Wilson called this the cosmic giggle.
It's when something protrudes
through the forward flowing momentum
of rational kazooistry
and causes it to flow around it
and eddy and churn,
and then you see through for a moment
and you say, "Well, what is it?"
There was a plottedness for a moment.
There was the hand of the maker there,
and now I don't see it anymore.
That is the going behind the veil.
That is the seeing into the structure of being
that lies behind the conventionalized languages.
That's why coincidence is so often reported
as an accompanying phenomenon
for the psychedelic experience
because really, syntax is dissolved
and syntax is a filter
for this sense of eminent connectedness.
And when the syntax goes,
the eminent connectedness flows in.
Then it's a question of what you do with it.
If it causes you to believe
that you are going to save the world,
then you haven't gotten the message right.
That's inflation.
And inflation is very bad.
It drives up interest rates.
So, if you get that kind of a take on it,
you are misusing it.
Nevertheless, the most advanced yogic techniques
that are known are the techniques
of the so-called Anuttatara Yoga Tantra,
the tantric yogic techniques.
And there, the prescription is,
it says in Herbert Gunther's
"Treasures of the Tibetan Middle Way,"
"You should think of your house
as a resplendent palace.
Think of your utensils as made of beaten gold
and think of yourself as having a body
made of living mercury."
What this is in Western psychological terms
is an invitation to inflation.
But if it is approached
with the right analysis of mind,
basically, that there is nothing but bodhi mind
and there is no particularization in time and space,
then there is no inflationary feedback into the ego.
And this is the kind of opportunity
that the psychedelic opens up.
It is, I've said many times, quoting Plato,
"Time is the moving image of eternity."
Time is the moving image of eternity.
What the shaman does
is he or she leaves the mundane plane,
and in Eliade's phrase,
is able to trigger a rupture of plane.
And the rupture of plane carries the shamanizing person
into another dimension,
literally another dimension.
And in that other dimension,
all of time and space is beheld,
as James Joyce said, "in a nutshell."
And in the nutshell of time and space,
everything seems to be a part
and an aesthetically pleasing,
integral, necessary part of the transcendental object.
In fact, what this universe is,
is a lower dimensional slice
of that same transcendental object.
Well, I guess what impels my career
that we can't get over
is that what I'm saying to you is true.
You know?
That, I mean, we sit here,
we gather here,
and even though we're talking about this extremely far out thing,
still all the forms are in place.
I'm here, you're there,
everybody sits on their ass,
nobody sits on their head.
Still, it all appears fairly mundane.
How can it be that what we are talking about
is the nearby presence of an impossibly alien dimension?
Now, if that alien dimension
had been reported back to us
by a robot probe
dropped into the methane oceans of Europa,
we would be all hot to go there
and organize a 20 billion dollar expedition
and a 15 year plan
and go out there and find out what is happening.
The amazing thing is
that each one of us in our own living room
can be this Magellan,
can penetrate into these dimensions.
It really seems quite freaky to me.
Freaky to me that such a thing is possible
and yet that we are such monkeys
or so culturally constrained
or so blind
that this is not what we're all talking about.
All the time.
And by we all, I mean all 5 billion of us on this planet.
Because we appear to be being pushed
down a featureless corridor
toward a furnace.
And yet, if you would notice,
you have all these doors
along the side of the so-called featureless corridor.
And nobody seems to have cognized
that you can just open these doors
and walk through
and short circuit
the inevitability of planetary disaster.
Amazing.
Amazing.
Because we pride ourselves
on our commitment
that science allows us to look anywhere,
inspect any possibility.
Our models are not dictated to us
by the church or by government
or by industry
when in fact they are dictated to us
by the church, government, industry,
mammalian organization.
And so we are no better off
than all those benighted people
in those previous ages
where we look back upon them and say,
"Well, they must have been so limited
by their world view
because they didn't know
about quantum physics and ketamine
and Michael Jackson
and cable TV and all of these things."
But the fact of the matter is
that unless we push through culture
to nature,
we too are dupes.
We too are somehow being sold a line.
And yet nature is there
outside of the cities.
You know, you drive an hour and a half
from where we're sitting
and you're in the high desert
and it is demon-haunted, paleolithic space.
It holds the same promise for us as moderns
that it held for the Luiseno Indians
who were initiated into it,
into their shamanic institution
before the conquest, before history.
So nature is the final arbiter
of cultural forms.
This is what Taoism understood
and this is what I believe
the psychedelic plant thing
is pushing us toward.
It was not immediately apparent
that this was so
because as I said at the beginning of this talk
in the 60s,
the psychedelics came out of the laboratory
and only the most scholarly of the trippers
bothered to study the natural origins
and the anthropological and ethnographic context
in which these things were coming from
like the Eleusinian Mysteries
or the Mexican Morning Glory Mysteries
or the Wasson discovered mushroom mysteries.
But if we can somehow link a respect to nature,
a sensitivity to Gaia,
a valuing of ourselves,
a complete placing of our own feelings
and our own perceptions
in the forefront of trustworthy sources
and the psychedelics
integrated into our lives,
then there will be a tremendous cultural impact,
a tremendous reorientation
because the message that nature
is trying to give,
the steering signal on the human species
comes through the accessing
of this shamanic dimension outside of history.
Revolutions are made by tiny percentages
of the populations
in which those revolutions are wrought.
The important thing is clarity and connectedness
and a clear understanding
of who one's antecedents are,
what the source antecedents are
and what the target goal is.
New Age is a pale label
for what is going on.
New Age sounds too much like
new Nixon, new Reagan,
new retreaded everything.
What is happening is an archaic revival,
a harking back to cultural models,
ten to twenty-five thousand years old
because the profane fall into history
is actually ending.
The way the fall into history ends
is with the progeny of Adam,
the human race,
recovering the control of the human form,
the control of the human soul,
the ability to turn ourselves
into whatever we wish to be.
This comes through the union of imagination,
through understanding into nature,
the invocation of the dream.
This is what the Australian Aboriginal Society
is talking about.
This is what the dream time is.
Finningen's Wake says,
"Up n' yent, prospector,
you warp your woof and spread your wings,
sprout all your worth."
This up n' yent, this end of time,
this birth into angelhood
lies ahead of us,
but it is really part of the archaic return
to the paradisiacal mode before history.
The psychedelic hallucinogens are the catalysts,
the minds that they touch
become the catalysts
within the society in general.
And from there,
the fashions, the social forms,
the kinds of conscientiousness,
the innate decency
that is called forth
by the authenticity of the experience
is what will transform us.
I mean, in the same way that
an affair can become a love affair
if there is mutual authenticity of behavior
rather than simply a kind of flirting, flirtation,
in that same way,
our affair with Gaia
can be a love affair
if we can summon to ourselves
the vision to make it so.
And it means really being aware
of the vastness of the options,
of the precipice
that late 20th century historical human beings stand on.
We are about to leave for the stars.
This is what is happening on this planet.
A species prepares to depart for the stars.
To do that,
energy has to be marshaled.
The lessons of the long march
out of the trees
and to this moment
have to be collated, sifted,
refined, concentrated.
That is the alchemical gold.
The historical process is the story of a prodigal son,
of a wandering and a return.
The return is meaningless
without the wandering.
The wandering has no meaning
unless its fruits are given birth
after the return.
And I think that the last thousand years
has been the prodigal journey into matter.
And it ends finally with modern pharmacology,
modern ethnobotany,
discovering in the jungles of the Amazon
and the oceans of Mexico
the body of Eros,
Osiris,
fallen since the time of the flood,
but awaiting the re-emergence
of the cognizant human connection.
That is what the archaic revival holds out.
It's actually our salvation.
I think I'm fairly hard-nosed.
I don't see any hope for us.
I don't see any hope for institutional transformation
unless it is done with an awareness
of the transcendental object.
And the religions that we inherit from the past
are so screwed up
that the only way to validate and empower
the transcendental object
is by self-experience,
by direct accessing.
And people say, "Well, but can't it be done on the natch?"
No, it can't be done on the natch.
Generally speaking.
Because if it could be,
it would have been done.
I mean, there are plenty of elder societies
on this planet who have the rap down.
You know?
But look at the kind of societies
that they erect.
I mean, horrifyingly dehumanized societies
seem to be the breeding place
of the most sublime religions there are.
So, no, I think there has to be a humbling.
We have to bow our heads
and abandon the dualism
that we inherit out of Christianity and science
and the whole Judeo-Christian Islamic shtick.
We have to realize
that it requires a symbiotic partner.
It's a hand-in-hand effort.
And if we are willing to take the hand
which nature offers
in the strange form
of the alien vegetation spirit from the stars
that seems to infuse us
on plant hallucinogens,
then we will go forward
into a bright new world.
It's a partnership.
It's a challenge.
It's the only game in the planetary village.
And I appreciate your letting me share with you
my notion of it this evening.
Thank you.
(applause)
We're going to take about a 10 or 15-minute break
and then do question and answers.
There are a bunch of handouts, catalogs,
events coming up,
stuff on tables at the back of the room
which I urge you to take a look at.
Light Of Nature - Day 1 (Part 2)
Yeah?
We're going to start very quickly
because the Philosophical Society has asked that we
wind ourselves down.
I wanted to call your attention to a couple of things before I take questions.
Psilocybin, the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide.
Right here. All right!
Is back in print by popular demand.
Where do you buy Adar?
At health food stores you buy Adar.
But I do technical consulting for a hefty hour leaf.
But this can be gotten at Bodhi Tree.
It's longer, it's on better paper, it has more drawings.
It's a state of the art as we could make it.
It has brought freedom, prosperity and enlightenment to tens of thousands.
We have, not to be outdone by Tim Leary, we have a piece of software.
So if you own a 2E, 2C or 2GS machine from Apple
why you can run this time wave software
which in my opinion is actually my best trick
and I will be writing and talking more and more about
about the wave of time because in Hawaii
finally developing this software gave me a real grip on it.
Eventually we will market this for Macintosh and IBM compatible machinery
but right now it's in the 2E, 2C line.
Also I'd like to mention that
Kat and I will be at Esalen next weekend
so if any of you are true gluttons for punishment
why you can join us up there for two and a half days
and it should be lots of fun.
That will wind this all up.
And before I take questions I want to again remind you
of Botanical Dimensions.
It is a tax exempt non-profit.
We do need donations.
All the money that is given goes very directly
into visibly manifesting the botanical garden in Hawaii,
collecting the plants, building a computer database
and basically support, not even supporting
but keeping a Peruvian collector in the field
since I'm most familiar with Amazonian botany
why that's where we've concentrated.
Well usually questions are the most interesting.
How is this to be done?
Are you going to hand a microphone?
Do people come up?
Stand up?
Stand up and speak loudly.
In the middle, in the back.
Yes.
Yes, parents.
I was wondering if you could share with us
your ideas on what the Spirit is.
Well I think it's, my notion of it is
it's an inform, that the way we experience it
it's an informing understanding.
It's on one level it's simply appropriate activity.
You know, knowing how to do everything
because it is the Tao of the ancestors.
In other words you can sort of see yourself
as the most recent version of your family's genes
and in all traditional activities
there's millions of years of morphogenetic fields
stored up for how you pick something up
how you sit something down.
So in the immediate sense
the manifestation of Spirit is appropriate activity.
What it really is, I think
is some kind of hidden how-ness
that makes everything be as it is
and that's what the Spirit is.
In other words, science describes
the possible things that can happen.
Science is the study of possibilities
and what nobody has ever answered
is how is it that out of the entire class of possibilities
certain things actually undergo the formality of occurring.
Somehow they are selected out of the class of the possible
and they become the actual.
Well, the thing which mediates
the coming into being of the actual
out of the class of the possible
is what I think the Spirit is.
It is the invisible hand, if you will.
It is the guiding force.
It is the invisible landscape
over which becoming flows like a river.
It defines, it creates,
it is this telos that I mentioned,
this attractor at the end of time.
Other... Yes, back there.
Yes, Terrence, has there been any research
that you have known of
in relation to electrons in residence
recently since the invisible landscape
and secondly, can Tritonide
act as a mechanism for release
of genetically stored material
through that ESR, electron spin resonance
with an intercalation of Tritonide
and blood, skin and lung
as substances into the neural DNA.
Is it a genetic,
is that a genetic mechanism for racial...
Well, in the invisible landscape
that is what we were suggesting
and the invisible landscape was published in 1975
and since then,
there has been a lot of work with NMR and ESR,
none of it which overthrows this idea.
It is a real question about the...
Where is the epigenetic data stored?
In other words, all the memories
that you accumulate during your life
die with you.
Your genetic material you can pass on
at least half to your children
and so during the life of the individual,
this epigenetic material,
experience, anecdotes, memories,
anticipations,
where is it molecularly stored
or is it molecularly stored?
In the invisible landscape,
we were suggesting that thought
is actually a naturally occurring ESR readout
of portions of the DNA
which were not associated with genetic expression
but which were somehow like
writable memory in a computer.
The epigenetic stuff was being stored there.
There is no data to overthrow that notion
that I am aware of.
I don't cling to it
as strongly as I once did.
I look more and more.
See, I didn't realize that this was a fundamental break,
this allowing of spirit
into the scientific model of the world.
I now think of the brain
as a receiver
of the phenomenon of consciousness
that I don't believe
that consciousness is generated in the brain
any more than the television programs
are made inside my TV.
The box is too small.
It just obviously is too small.
It might not be
if you didn't have the psychedelic experience
but once you slice that
and you say it's taking
10 high 16 megabytes of memory
to store this database.
I just don't think it would be done like that.
I think that there is somehow
this field phenomenon
that I keep returning to.
It's another slice on what the spirit is.
It is this field of some sort of energy
that organisms, as they evolve, discover.
Already somehow present in the environment.
It is the appetitition for being
that drives organic evolution
into this kind of dance of relatedness
to this other thing which it can transduce
from another dimension.
That's why if you take
consciousness expansion, the phrase,
or consciousness enhancement seriously,
it must be very important
because consciousness is, after all,
what it's all made out of.
That's the name of the game.
So this transducing
of higher states of consciousness
then seems very important.
Even at that, it will be necessary
to elucidate the physical mechanism,
whether it's ESR, NMR, or what it is,
an interesting opportunity
for psychedelic research.
You see, the amazing thing about psychedelics
is not only that they are illegal
and restricted from the so-called ordinary person,
but they are restricted to scientific research.
Nobody can do research on psychedelics.
It is professionally and practically impossible to do it.
There's no other area where this is true.
Science probes obscenely
into the most private areas
of our sex lives, our social lives, our dream lives.
Monkeys are smashed against walls to study.
There's no limit to it.
And yet there's this total hands-off attitude
toward the psychedelics.
So an interesting break in this front
is the sudden need,
because of computer-assisted tomography,
CAT scanning,
the need for compounds which locate
in certain highly defined parts of the brain.
If you could tritiate these drug compounds
and make them radioactive,
you could make very nice pictures
of various parts of the brain.
So now suddenly there is an interest
in all this old psychedelic research
about the receptor site
and location densities of molecules in the brain.
So we may be on the brink of an era
where to have a psilocybin trip in the evening,
you must have signed on for a CAT scan
at General Hospital in the morning.
[laughter]
Someone else.
Well, I have a couple of questions.
I guess I'd like to hear just about the state
of these plants,
that you feel that you need to sort of rescue them
from the Amazon and bring them into Hawaii,
and how many types of plants there are
and that kind of thing.
Well, every time I have gone
into the Amazon plant collecting,
I've observed that the cultures,
the indigenous rainforest cultures
are more and more disrupted.
And there's a lot of conservation
and big organizations raising money
to preserve the rainforests
and to get large tracts of rainforests set aside.
There is no awareness or social conscience
about the fact that the presence of capitalism
in the Amazon is totally disrupting
tribal human culture.
So these people who have been tribal
for thousands of years,
the men are just totally walking out
on the traditional lifestyle
and taking their canoe 100 miles downriver
and signing on at sawmills
and on oil drilling crews
and this sort of thing.
And so the consequences of this is
that far more rapidly than the rainforest itself
is being destroyed,
the human cultural interaction
with the rainforest is being lost,
and thousands and thousands of species
of medicinal plants, antibiotics,
immune stimulators, hallucinogens,
analgesics, all these different kinds of plants,
this data, this lore is being lost.
And when you realize that, you know,
80% of the drugs sold in the United States
are in fact traceable to plant sources.
And in spite of the vaunted success
of so-called strategic pharmacology,
where you just think up the drug
you think you need and make it in the laboratory,
it really, it's still a lot of what drug companies do
is screen for plants
and cash in on folklore, basically.
So it's important to preserve these plants
and the lore about them,
because you see, I mean, like,
it's really hard to explain
how some of these plants have been discovered.
For instance, in the case of ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca is a visionary shamanic brew
that happens to be made of two different plants,
Banisteriopsis copii,
a supply of an MAO inhibitor,
and Saccotria viridis, supplies DMT.
Either plant by itself is inert,
and you have to know to brew the wood and bark of one
with the leaves of the other,
and you have to know that it's in a certain proportion,
and you have to know to concentrate it to a certain degree.
Well, when you realize that a square mile
of Amazonian rainforest can have 120,000 species of plants on it,
I mean, that's in contrast to when you go into the Sierras,
a square mile of forest may have 150 species of plants on it.
So it's an ultra-complex environment,
and human beings, who knows by what means?
I mean, it is, to my mind,
that the vegetable spirits lead them to it,
have sussed out all this knowledge
that is a seamless web of understanding about nature.
And so this is what we're trying to preserve in Hawaii.
I think ayahuasca is a good example.
It has tremendous potential for psychiatry.
It is a purgative.
It kills intestinal parasites.
It appears in agar, in slant culture,
to kill the trypanosome of malaria.
Well, instead of delivering high-priced drugs
made in Germany and the United States
to the outback of Indonesia,
where malaria is raging,
you could simply send in thousands of cuttings of this plant.
People could grow it as a dooryard plant,
take it as a tea on a weekly basis,
and malaria would be held at bay.
There are over 200 plants
in a recent review article that I saw
known from Africa
that appear to be immune-stimulating plants.
Well, God, this should have everybody on the edge of their seat.
The breakdown of the immune system
and the whole AIDS-related complex and all of that,
it turns out that adaptations to plants
in traditional cultures
have confers or have stimulated the immune system
and conferred certain kinds of immunity.
Well, then this could be the basis
for a drug strategy of some sort and so on.
So this is the kind of preservational work
that we're doing there.
Yes, against the wall.
Yes, Karen.
A few days ago, you were on KPFK with Roy,
and you mentioned briefly San Pedro.
That's what you said.
You were talking about the
broader plant of San Pedro cactus.
Could you just give me briefly,
background, maybe a parallel between
your experience with San Pedro
to that of psilocybin mushroom?
Because when I tried San Pedro cactus,
mixing it with vanilla ice cream didn't work.
Well, I don't know what work means,
but it must have startled your stomach.
It was pretty vile.
I did know what I was doing.
Well, I don't really know that much about San Pedro.
I've never gotten around to it.
I know a person who swears by it,
but they have an elaborate way of cooking it up
in a pressure cooker.
Mescaline and holamine,
on holamine and methyl mescaline,
all of these things are occurring in that plant.
It's an amphetamine-related thing.
It tends to be pretty rough
of the natural hallucinogens,
really the big ones, as I think of them.
Mescaline is the harshest.
An operating dose is considered to be
actually close to a gram, 700 milligrams.
One way that pharmacologists judge
the toxicity of a drug
is by how much it takes to get you off.
And the less it takes,
then the more benign the drug is thought to be.
So on that scale, mescaline doesn't do too well.
But my experience with mescaline
has been with peyote,
which I gather is somewhat similar.
And it's been interesting.
It's hard to take enough
to really reach the deep water
without it really reacting on your stomach.
It's not the cleanest way to go.
I think that having looked at these things
in South America and in many places,
in my experience, the mushroom just is it.
I mean, other things have other aspects to it
and bring it in.
But the mushroom is an extraordinary organism.
It's like it's engineered for that purpose.
And I've spoken about how it was almost strewn
in the path of developing primitive man in Africa
because it was associated with the manure of cattle.
And on the ungulate herds of Africa
evolving on the veldt at the same time
that the human animal was evolving
a complex pack signaling language and so forth.
It just set the stage.
It seems to me it was the catalyst.
I really believe that we are in a symbiotic relationship
with these plants
and that the mushroom,
by virtue of being global in its distribution,
is probably a major slice relationally of that pie.
And in other words,
that the peculiar turn that evolution took in our species,
the reinforcing of self-reflective consciousness
and the reinforcing of linguistic signaling
has to do with the presence in the human diet
in that early stage of these mushrooms.
It's known that the mushroom,
that low amounts of psilocybin,
sub-threshold doses of psilocybin,
increase visual acuity.
Well, it isn't hard to figure then
that if evolutionary pressure is operating on a hunting species,
a pack hunting species,
that visual acuity is going to be at a premium.
And if small amounts of psilocybin in the food chain
increase visual acuity,
those animals will be selected and survive.
Well, then their habit of accepting the mushroom as a food
lays them open for this linguistic synergy,
this symbol-forming capacity.
And then the deeper, more ecstatic experiences with psilocybin,
which are then projected onto the mushroom, onto the cattle,
become the basis for a kind of cattle goddess mushroom,
a cycle of a hierophany,
the discovery of the Tremendum.
I mean, almost as though in the scene in 2001
where the apes encountered the monolith.
It was precisely that,
except that the monolith was a mushroom.
It was a superbly genetically engineered,
omnivorous organism
that could insert itself into the ecosystem of a planet
and begin to coax an effect out of a mammal
that it had a relationship to.
And this effect coaxed out of the mammal
is this relationship to this higher dimensional waveform,
which we call the spirit or mind,
which is apparently, you know, that's what it's all about.
Why this is happening is not clear.
I mean, in the mushroom book,
I suggested that it was because
there is some awareness of planetary finitude,
that the mushroom actually thinks on so large a scale
that it is using us to make machines for it,
to perpetuate it throughout the nearby galaxy,
that it is aware of the finite nature of our star.
We don't know, we don't plan yet on those kind of scales.
We're an infant race, very obstreperous.
And the mushroom said to me once,
"If you don't have a plan,
you become part of somebody else's plan."
One of it's slightly more paranoid.
[laughter]
But it is good, I think, to have a plan and to have allies.
And the mushroom is very contemptuous
of the notion of humans having human allies.
It says, you know,
"For one human being to think it could gain enlightenment from another
is like for one grain of sand
to think it could gain enlightenment from another."
So it really believes in, you know,
hierarchical levels and trickle-down gnosis,
which I'm not sure how I view that.
I believe all secrets should be told
and that we should just lay our cards on the table.
But maybe I don't have as many cards as they do,
so we play by their rules.
On the aisle.
You're a wonderful, convincing speaker.
I'm sure nobody here has had any self-doubt
or anything that you're saying,
but in case they do,
I want to be our witness and tell them what you're saying.
It's absolutely true that there's this intelligence
that wants to connect to us
and that we won't need to make a record to connect to
because, as you say, it's extremely informative.
And you're saying that one way we can do this
is through the psychedelic experience,
which I agree with, but it's not for me.
But I'd like you to talk a little bit
about the Western tradition of the mysteries,
which involves ritual,
and using ritual in order to maintain contact
with this nature spirit,
which, I might add,
is a spirit that's just bursting at the seams right now
to connect to us and inform us
and talk to us and help us.
Yes, well,
Mercilia talked about the difference
between sacral and profane time.
And he said the way you leave history
is you sacralize a space,
and you sacralize a space through ritual.
You abolish the profane constraints of space and time,
the here and now,
and you imagine that you are what he called in Iliotemporia,
in the time before,
in the paradisical time before the fall.
This goes back to what I said about the Amutatthara Yoga Tantra,
the imagining of these titanic godlike states of mind
as a ground for being.
Yes, I would never have thought...
I mean, I've been pushed to my position by my experience.
I mean, I'm amazed at what I have to say
based on what I've experienced
because I never thought it would be this way.
You know, I came up a whole different way.
I was a Marxist and an existentialist
and all of these things.
And it was, as you testified,
it's the pure evidence of it.
I mean, you can convince yourself intellectually
that something is true,
but it's only in the embrace of the Tremendum
that it just sweeps over you how true it is.
And as far as the difference between establishing these connections
through psychedelics and through ritual,
I think deep psychedelic tripping
is something that you don't do very often
simply because each time it's so rich,
it takes a long time to process this stuff.
It's much better to go deeper seldom
than to diddle with it in the other ways that people do.
I mean, it often seems to me that it's not even so much a matter
of spreading the good word
and turning it into a mass movement.
It might be much more interesting
if simply the people who were already in on the secret
did it more conscientiously and more deeply.
Although, I hasten to add that you shouldn't do too much.
You should never do more than about six or seven grams of mushrooms.
I say that because I keep hearing stories
about people who think going deeply means doing a lot,
and they do amounts which stand my hair on end.
I mean, in the past month traveling around,
I've heard stories where I just say, you know,
and people are crazy, you know.
I say, "I couldn't remember whether you said five grams or five ounces."
(Laughter)
So, to be safe, I did an ounce and a half.
(Laughter)
You know, I mean, it's important to...
(Laughter)
It's important to get there, granted,
but it's important to come back.
(Laughter)
Oh, Lord, yeah.
(Laughter)
In your talk, you said something about the transcendental object.
Could you go into more detail on that?
The way I imagine that history works is...
Well, first of all, let me say how the way
the people I disagree with think it works.
Then you had cooling and development of atomic and molecular and organic
and ultimately cultural systems and ultimately technological systems
and this will go on indefinitely down into the heat death of the universe
and the development of life and of culture
has nothing to do with the physical, astrophysical level of things.
It's sort of ancillary and a mistake.
My view is somewhat different.
It's that if we have to have a singularity in our cosmology,
in other words, it's so hard to figure out how you get from nothing to something.
No philosophical school has ever been able to do it
without some kind of singularity.
So, if we're going to have a singularity in our system,
let us try to make it as logically palatable as possible.
So, how to do that?
It's not logically palatable to me to believe
that the universe sprang from nothing in a single instant.
It seems to me if you believe that, you're set up to believe anything.
Right? I mean, isn't that it?
You say, "Well, if they'll believe this, what wouldn't you believe?"
So, how about this instead?
That the universe, its origins are a mystery and cannot be determined.
But as we look at its history,
the history of it that is available to our inspection,
what we see is increasing complexity,
ending in ourselves and our civilization so far as we know.
Well, then if you're going to have a singularity,
I think of a singularity as a kind of phase transition.
You know, Ilya Prigozhin talks about how a chemical system
will suddenly and spontaneously migrate to a higher state of order.
Well, that's sort of how I think of this thing.
It is capable of migrating to a higher state of order.
So, if we're going to have a singularity,
isn't it more likely that it will emerge out of a situation of vast complexity
than a situation of utter metaphysical nothingness?
I think so.
So, I think that what the transcendental object is,
is it is the cause of the universe, if you will,
except that this cause is at what we would conventionally refer to as the end.
It's what everything flows toward.
It isn't something wound up which runs down.
It's something diffuse which is gathered in to something.
And this gathering in takes the form
not only of a progressive densification at the physical level,
but of a progressive complexification at the organizational level.
It also is a kind of a spiral.
It has a temporal closure, so that each epoch of closure
happens more quickly than the ones which preceded it.
And what I mean by that is, it took the universe as 20 billion years old.
The first 5 billion years, well, no.
The first 10 billion years it was all about star formation
and nuclear cook down of heavier elements out of lighter elements.
And then you get molecules which signify a higher level of organization
which can only go on at a lower temperature.
So as temperature leaves the universe, more complex systems become possible.
And then ultimately polymers of great lengths become possible.
So this complexification is occurring
and it is at each stage more rapid than the last.
Now, the emergence of self-reflection in our own species is part of this.
It isn't a fluke, it isn't an accident.
It is obedient to the same natural law which created these other systems.
And the emergence of our own curiously alienated
and at odds with itself culture is also a part of this phenomenon.
We are initiating a kind of crisis with the planet.
It is in the same way that a fetus will become septic
if it is carried too far beyond term.
There is a crisis now in the Gaia human system.
The two must be parted.
And the transcendental object is this knitting together
of the organic intent of the planet
to somehow expel us from the planetary environment
in some way which is very hard for us to foresee and anticipate
because it is in fact the transcendental object.
I mean, by appointing a committee to look into this
we are not going to find out what it is.
It is the face of the abyss.
It is the transcendental object.
It cannot entirely be known.
It is the living embodiment of Godel's incompleteness theorem.
You know, science has taught us that there are no mysteries.
There are only unsolved problems.
This is a mystery, not an unsolved problem.
Nevertheless, it is the narrowing vector of our timeline.
And as some of you probably know, in my opinion,
around 2012 AD we will cross in to
cross through novel epochs of concrescence
and the transcendental object will be manifest.
It is a very curious thing.
It is something which is coming toward us from the future
but we are creating out of our intellectual
and technological anticipation of deity, really.
I mean, at times I've spoken of it as the flying saucer.
It is the flying saucer.
And it does enter history at a certain moment
and it is coming toward us
but as we go toward it we are becoming what we behold.
In effect, what I'm saying is that the entirety of human history
is a kind of psychedelic apotheosis
where we are involved in a hieroskelmos,
a kind of alchemical marriage.
And what the next 25 years are about
is advancing to meet the bride
and the bride is the unimaginable
and unanticipated fulfillment of our heart's desire.
We are becoming what we behold.
Our metaphysical hypostatization of deity
is becoming a cultural program for our completion
and that's why communication is so important
because what we're trying to do
is articulate this vision of the over soul of our species.
We are going into a kind of swarm state
or there is a pheromonal transformation
of our cultural modalities.
Our pheromones are information systems
and now information systems, ideologies
are being released into the mass psyche
that actually set us up
to undergo this cultural compression and concrescence
that the experience of the transcendental object is.
If you haven't read William Gibson,
you might give him a go.
His anticipation of a cybernetic future
is part of the anticipation of the transcendental object
and what Gibson is saying in Neuromancer and Count Zero
is that data storage in hyperspace
will become conventionalized
the way the grids of cities
are conventionalized in three-dimensional space
so that when you jack in to cyberspace,
you will see the Bank of America database
like an enormous red neon oblong
blowing off to your left
and over the horizon the Transworld Airlines database.
In other words, the dimension of culture
which for 15,000 years or so
has been for purposes of comparison,
let's say as thin as a thick sheet of paper,
I mean, what has culture been?
It's been a few mud huts, some brick streets,
a cathedral here and there recently
and then more recently a lot of knitted together,
electrified, cheap construction.
And suddenly the dimension of culture
which is orthogonal to ordinary reality
is about to be expanded a hundred, a thousand fold
into a complete mind space,
the cyberspace that Gibson is talking about,
the psychedelic space that shamans have always known about
is about to be activated as a cultural artifact
in high-tech society
where we will become whatever we imagine,
you know, you will move off
into this electronically sustained realm of mind.
At least that's how I imagine it.
I imagine that passage through the transcendental object
leads into the imagination
and that the imagination is really our true home
and that all of this electronics and culture and art
and drugs and magic and ritual
is about the prodigal return to the imagination
as a cultural norm.
And the transcendental object
represents the narrow neck, the narrowest place,
the place where the phase transition occurs.
At least that's what I hope.
That's what I feel the symbiosis with the hallucinogens
is coaxing out of us
because we cannot go to the stars
in the ape mindset, you know, with ape politics
and it's just impossible.
And very clearly we are on the brink
of taking control of our own self-image.
This is what the long cultural march has been.
This is the justification, if there is one, for science,
is that it does give us
a certain measure of control over stuff
and it's out of...
It is the mirror of our minds
that we will make out of stuff
that we will eventually perform
this magical evocation in front of
and walk through into the time
outside of history, the place before history.
Another question.
Somebody over here.
Yes, sir.
Terrence, welcome to L.A.
People who have been sitting so many hours on the radio,
I just want to say we really love you
and I just think that's the best way to say it.
[applause]
Although I have to admit I did the show on my ECR
and I get it during the day.
But anyway, I was going to go to Mexico
to a little village up in Oaxaca
and my companion sort of convinced me
that it might not be the best idea
because while you're looking around for green men,
you might find some federales or something
and it might not be the best place to totally let go.
So I decided to grow some mushrooms
and that just ended up on the low priority of things
and I still haven't grown them, you know?
But I was always of the fantasy
that going to this place in Mexico,
there was something magic there
and there was this "morphic resonance"
and I wanted to know if there was a morphic resonance,
wouldn't that be in the negative time space frame?
And so my question is,
one, do you buy this morphic resonance idea?
And...
That's the question.
Yeah.
Well, one of the best people,
one of the very, very best people
that I've found in the so-called New Age
is Rupert, Rupert Sheldrake.
I mean, he and I are tight
and we've spent a lot of time
just pushing these ideas around.
Ultimately, I think probably he's very much on to something.
It's interesting that it's considered such a radical idea
because think about what it says.
It says that things are as they are
because they were as they were.
One can hardly imagine a more conservative philosophy.
In fact, the problem for this philosophy
is to therefore explain
how anything ever manages to be different,
how any kind of novelty could emerge out of a situation
where the past is so present
that it configures everything.
So Rupert's idea and my idea,
which I haven't discussed except by implication tonight,
but I have this notion,
which is embodied in the software,
of a wave of novelty,
a way of quantifying the flux of the Tao,
and a wave of novelty
would be necessary for Sheldrake's idea
to support the coming into being of new forms.
I mentioned this evening in the main body of my talk
the term "compressionism".
I've just sort of begun to think about this.
I like it because I like impressionism,
abstract expressionism, surrealism.
I like it because it's an art movement, not a science.
But I would number the compressionists that come to mind
to be Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, Frank Barr,
and myself, bringing up the rear.
And we all, four of us, have a slice on it,
each different, but each leading to this same set of conclusions,
that there is a set of hidden variables,
which we all describe differently,
but that these hidden variables
are channeling the development of events.
And what this signifies is a new way of thinking about time,
and it's all very much in flux.
Rupert is a true great scientist and gentleman.
If the theory of morphic resonance can be overthrown, it will be,
and he will lead the charge.
Our effort, when we get together,
much of our effort is experimental design.
We try to think of experiments that would disprove the notion,
because it is a notion which asserts very firmly
that certain strange things about reality
should be measurable and discernible.
So, morphic resonance, my novelty ways,
the dynamic attractors of Ralph Abraham,
and the fractal hierarchies of Frank Barr,
are all embryonic efforts.
There's a feeling in the air,
a sense of an idea to be nailed down,
and I'm convinced that in the next 10 or 15 years,
one of us or somebody we know
or somebody sitting at the table nearby
will work it out.
It's really the great intellectual adventure of our time,
and it carries us all along with it.
When this thing is figured out,
it's going to be understandable to all of us.
It's going to end the era of the professional abstraction.
For the new paradigm to work,
it's going to have to transform the lives
of hundreds of millions of people,
and that's the point that has been missed
by the proponents of some of the more narrow versions
of what the new paradigm is.
The new paradigm will be an understandable explanation of the world.
Understandable to whom?
To you, to me.
Not an abstraction sanctioned by a professional elite
and handed down by the academy.
Doesn't some aspect of this phenomenon
have to be able to be translated into numbers
in order to convince straight society of its existence?
Well, that's the beauty and the wonder
and the delight of time wave zero.
[LAUGHTER]
Absolutely.
This was produced to convince scientists.
What this thing does is it draws graphs
of the ingression of novelty into time.
I advance novelty as a new primary quality
of the space-time continuum,
which is far with charge, spin, angular momentum.
Novelty.
This is the realm of the hidden variables,
and this program makes thousands
of experimentally testable assertions.
This is not smoke-and-mirrors stuff.
You give it an end date, you give it a date of interest,
and it draws a mathematically defined graph of its opinion
as to where the flux of novelty and habituation...
These are the two opposed quantities, novelty and habituation...
Where they fall vis-Ã -vis this event system.
So every time you activate the program,
it fills the monitor with a screen full of precise predictions
about known historical phenomena.
It seems to me if there were a body
of informed give-and-take on the matter,
we could quickly settle,
whether it's just that I smoke too many little brown cigarettes
or that this kind of thinking
is in fact going to underlie and restructure science.
It's all right.
Why should we assume that the basic qualities of the universe
have been defined as of 1965 by modern physics?
After all, modern physics doesn't explain
the unicorn or the flower.
So there must be more at work in the universal mix
than we have perceived.
Well, I think I'll do one more question.
Robert?
Am I hearing this right, just like a historical time graph of human events?
Yes, that's exactly what it is.
It's a way of looking at the life of an individual or a society
and asking the question...
See, the way I think this will be...
This is good because this...
The spirit to Eastern philosophy is the Tao,
and the Tao is the how-ness of the way things happen.
Well, we are so accustomed to allowing these Eastern forms of thought
to remain largely formally undefined
that we never ask obvious questions about the Tao for existence,
for example.
In the Tao Te Ching,
the opening words in the Wehle translation are,
"The way that can be told of is not an unvarying way."
OK, it's a double negative.
It's not an unvarying way.
It means it's a varying way.
Well, anything which varies is modulated.
That's a mathematical term that has precise meaning.
So if the way that can be told of is not an unvarying way,
then it can be mathematically described
as a set of integers in flux.
The problem then becomes what integers?
Well, that's a long story,
but it's all in here.
And I'm not mad enough to claim
that this particular take, this particular set of integers is correct.
I'm very impressed by its successes.
But I am convinced that a theory of this class
will eventually explicate time.
Time is the spirit,
not the time of flat duration in the Newtonian universe
or the very slightly curved time of Einstein's universe,
but time as lived from moment to moment.
It flows like a river.
It runs here quickly.
They're slow and deep.
Here there are cataracts.
Here there are vast lakes form
and all sense of direction is momentarily lost.
Time is the continuum
upon which our entire experience of being is deployed.
And yet up until very recently,
the only model we've had of it
was this flat or slightly curved surface.
That didn't explain the vicissitudes
and the synchronicities and the mysteries of our own lives.
Now, if we take a fractal model of time,
the kind of fractals that we see in the psychedelic experience
and the kinds of fractals that we see
when we unleash computers in the realm of pure mathematics,
then we begin to see the time of pure experience,
the time that we recognize
where every day is like every other but different,
every year is like every other but different.
We grow but we stay the same.
We move forward at the same time that we move backwards.
All of these kinds of feeling-toned complexes
about movement and time
are handled very well in the fractal.
So what the psychedelic experience has done for me,
above and beyond the heart opening
and what it's done for me as a person,
what it's done for me as a seeker after truth,
has given me this total description of reality.
And I think our senses and our minds and our hearts
are always trying to give us a total map,
a total mandala.
We're always trying to emerge out of the chaos of perception.
But it appears to me that it can happen to any depth
and that if you still your mind with psychedelics
and with discipline
and you look into the black rivers
that flow through our hearts and our minds,
eventually you see not only the truth of yourself,
not only the truth of ourselves,
but formal truth, the truth of mathematics.
And then you have sort of made a kind of closure.
And so this was my personal meditation in time wave zero.
I urge you to take a look at it
because it's the most original thing that I have done.
The rest is the descriptive diaries of an explorer
that I've often footnoted, which I share with you gladly.
But this other thing was actually the logos from on high.
That was what my particular relationship to the spirit
was based around, the revelation of this particular idea
because I had no interest in the I Ching,
still less in mathematics
and all of the disciplines that impinged on this notion.
But somehow I was chosen virtually
because I was standing around when the decision was made.
I mean, I really believe that.
And these things only mean something
as they're communicated.
But you see, we have great anxiety about the future.
And if there were in fact fractal maps of the future,
then that anxiety would leave us and would leave us free.
And in one sense, I think that's the transcendental object.
It's the manifestation of the spirit.
The spirit is with us throughout historical time and space,
but it is concretized at history's end.
Well, that's all I have to say.
We're five minutes over.
I appreciate your being here very, very much.
Thank you.
[applause]
[no audio]
Light Of Nature - Day 2
So we are organically meeting together and going to absorb some information from the other world
and I'm real proud to introduce Terrence McKenna.
[Applause]
I do want to mention this is a benefit for botanical dimensions and KPFK.
If you didn't see the promotional material at the back of the room, you might look at it during the intermission.
Botanical dimensions is the real world kind of real politic response to all the issues that we deal with
that Cat and I hammered out over the last 11 years really.
And what it boils down to is a plant rescue project built around a 20 acre botanical garden in Hawaii.
And what we're doing there is trying to bring in plants that are threatened in the warm tropics.
Either the extinction of the species is threatened or the knowledge of its medicinal or herbal or shamanic use is in danger of being lost.
There are a lot of fancy organizations, World Wildlife Fund, Earthwatch, Earth First, that are saving the rainforest
or at least fighting that battle legally and by getting huge tracts of forest in the tropics made into reserves.
Nobody really even cognizes or is focused on saving ethnobotanical lore.
In other words, the very subtle relationship between aboriginal people and botanical resources in their environment.
So that's something we're doing.
What was touched on last night and which is sort of one of the centerpiece themes of this point of view
is the felt presence of some kind of alien intelligence that is somehow cotangent to the human experience
for different people in different ways with varying degrees of intensity in different times and places.
And though at the bedrock of my take on things is the notion that there is really finally a mystery wrapped in an enigma,
that there is no resolution, nevertheless as you close distance with this mystery, there are a series of analogical metaphors
that don't really suggest themselves but that are communicated to you by the other.
One of these analogical metaphors is the presence of this alien intellect, this organized other that is folklorically present in tradition
as fairies, gnomes, elves, jinns, affrites, sprites, tree spirits, that sort of thing and anecdotally present in rural cultures throughout the world
as the poltergeist and the milk souring fairy and the thing seems to reside in a curious area that is not epistemically clearly defined for the culture.
In other words, the question of is it real or not is thought to be sort of tasteless.
You would intuitively sense if you were drinking in an Irish pub, I think, and people began to spin leprechaun stories
that the question is it real is a real bring down.
It isn't really like that because the question is it real is ultimately can be shown to be infantile in any situation.
I mean, is the Bank of America real?
Immediately you realize that there are just assumptions skating over the mystery.
But this felt presence of the other I choose to talk about so much because it was for me such an astonishing personal surprise.
I was raised Roman Catholic and indulged in the kind of theological fiddle faddle that that involves and then grew out of that into atheism, into agnosticism
and by the time I got to college I was reading Jean Paul Sartre and Husserl and these people
and pretty much the main had followed my intellectual ontogeny had followed historical philogeny
and I had arrived in the 20th century.
And then having thought I had absorbed the lessons of LSD which seemed to me to be to reinforce and confirm the theories of Freud
concerning the dynamics of the psyche that it was about repressed memory, repressed desire, sexual neurosis, parental foul ups
and the projection of the parental energy patterns and this kind of thing.
And then someone came to me one rainy February evening in 1967 and a really a mad person, a kind of a social menace, an intellectual criminal.
This guy had said to me only months before we must live as if the apocalypse has already happened.
And here he was on my doorstep and he wore these little black suits that he buttoned up to the throat.
Anyway, he came in and he said something that you might be interested in and brought out a sample of dimethyltryptamine
that he had somehow come into contact with and I said well what is it and he said well it's this short acting, it's a flash he said.
And I said how long does it last? That was my first mistake.
He said oh it doesn't last long so I said okay we'll do it and we did it and I discovered I had I guess it's called a peak experience
or a core revelation or being born again or having your third eye opened or something which was, it was a revelation of an alien dimension
of a brightly lit, inhabited, non three dimensional, self contorting, sustained, organic, linguistically intending modality
that couldn't be stopped or held back or denied. I mean I sank to the floor, I couldn't move
and this diastolic hallucination of tumbling forward into these fractal geometric spaces made of light
and then I found myself in the sort of auric equivalent of the Pope's private chapel
and there were insect elf machines proffering strange little tablets with strange writing on them
and I was aghast, completely appalled because the transition had been a matter of seconds
and my entire expectation of the nature of the world was just being shredded in front of me. I've never actually gotten over it.
And it all went on, I mean they were speaking in some kind, there were these self transforming machine elf creatures were speaking in some kind of colored language
which condensed into these rotating machines that were like Faberge eggs but crafted out of luminescent superconducting ceramics and liquid crystal gels
and all this stuff was just so weird and so alien and so un-Englishable that I felt like it was a complete shock
and the literal turning inside out of the intellectual universe and I had come to this, I thought, fairly intellectually prepared
I mean a kid but nevertheless double Scorpio, art history major, Hieronymus Bosch fan, Moby Dick, William Burroughs
and it was as I came down, and this went on for like two or three minutes, this situation of discontinent orthogonal dimensions to reality just engulfing me
and then as I came out of it and the room sort of reassembled itself I said I can't believe it, it's impossible, it's impossible
but I mean to call that a drug is ridiculous, I mean it just means that you just don't know, you just don't have a word for it
and so you putter around and you come upon this very sloppy concept of something goes into your body and there's a change
and I like that, it's like being struck by noetic lightning and the other thing about it which astonished me was there is no clue in this world
you know, in the carpets of Central Asia, in the myths of the Maya, in the visions of an archambolo or a frangelico or a Bosch
there is not a hint, not a clue, not an atom of the presence of this thing and when you look at the religious Hierophanes of the human species
it doesn't have the same vibe, it doesn't have the same charge, religion is all about dissolving into unitary states of love
and translinguistic oceanic unity and this sort of thing, this was not like that, this was more multiplistic than the universe that we share with each other
almost like the victory of neo-platonic metaphysics, everything had become made out of a fourth dimensional tesseractural mosaic of energy
so I was just quite knocked off my feet and set myself the goal of understanding this, there was really no choice you see
and I don't know how it hits other people, I mean there are many things that can be said about introducing a chemical into your body
they've shown that certain people are 50,000 times more sensitive to the odour of certain compounds than other people
and part of the unique genetic heritage of each of us are our complement of synaptic receptors for psychoactive alkaloids
so that there may be something to the notion that the Celts tend to be poets, certain peoples tend to be expressive in certain artistic modes
or certain senses seem to be accentuated for certain human subgroups
but whatever the explanation for how it hit me, I felt that it was like a call, there was no turning back from trying to understand that
because there is no place for it in our world and yet it is overwhelmingly existentially real, you see, and easily accessed
I'm not peddling that you have to go to some place in India with poor sanitation and put yourself at somebody's feet for a dozen years or something like that
the enunciation of the presence of this dimension should inspire some kind of coming to terms with it
I mean it's preposterous that we can entertain in our popular journalism the titillation of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
and prop up all these reductionist guys and trot them out to give the statistics on the distribution of G-type stars and all this sort of thing
because the fact is what blinds us to the presence of alien intelligence is linguistic and cultural bias operating on ourselves
the world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world, you see
so we operate on a very narrow slice based on cultural conventions, so the important thing if synergizing progress is the notion to be maximized
and I think it's the notion to be maximized, is to try and locate the blind spot in the culture, the place where the culture isn't looking because it dare not
because if it were to look there its previous values would dissolve, you see
and I think that that place is the psychedelic experience as it emerges out of nature
and as human societies interact with the psychedelic experience in nature
they inevitably secrete the institution of shamanism like a pearl around this umbilicus or this nexus point or this loci of inter-dimensional data flow
which is really what it is, it's that under certain conditions which have to do with these molecules that have evolved in these species
which have this weirdly quasi symbiotic relationship to our species, you punch through the veil
Melville said if you would strike, strike through the mask and that's what's done, you strike through the mask of the coordinates of apparent reality
and then this thing is there which to me is a miracle, it transcended any miracle I could ever ask for
because it not only had the quality of a miracle as I imagined it, it had the quality of a miracle as I could not have imagined it
it was entirely charged with the energy of the other, it had the ambiguity of a pun, a kind of zany, impossible, improbable, hysterical revelation of the joke
the self-contradiction, the provisional nature of it all, but it really is a Marx Brothers movie in some sense
so I pursued it first to Nepal and involvement with pre-Buddhist shamanism in Tibet because I first, the thing that puzzled me most
I guess because I was an art historian, was this absence of the theme in the artistic productions of humankind
and I felt that maybe there was a trace of it in the artistic conceptions of the old pantheon of Tibetan shamanism
central Asian Tibetan shamanism had actually created astronauts of inner space that had gotten good recon on this same area
you know the Dharmapalas, the guardians of the Dharma are not Buddhist deities per se, they are autothonous Tibetan folk demons that protect the Dharma by virtue of the fact of having been overcome in magical battles by great Buddhist saints who came to Tibet
in fact there are, or were before the Chinese occupation, monasteries in Tibet where the vow of fealty to the Dharma on the part of the Dharmapala had to be renewed by the monks every 24 hours
or the thing would run amok and be on its own and bust up the countryside, I'm just telling you what they told me
so it seemed to me that this raw sense of the shamanically accessed demonic realm was there
and I also saw traces in Hellenistic Gnosticism and alchemy, but such thin traces
so I went to Nepal, immersed myself in that and decided ultimately that it was inaccessible, I wasn't sure whether it was there or not
and then I placed myself in the context of nature by moving my sphere of operations to eastern Indonesia, to the climaxed continental rainforests of the ancient continent of Sundaland
you see Indonesia was a continent until as recently as 120,000 years ago and then with the melting of the glaciers and the subsidence of this continent it became a vast group of islands
and I think that it was my good fortune or the fortune of my fate because it was prudent for me at that time in the late 60s to remain outside the United States
and so I sort of had to become the hero I had pretended to my friends that I was, which I wasn't, I had an around the world air ticket and was entirely a preppy poser
but suddenly return was not a possibility and so I became, and my apologies to Buddhists in the audience, a professional butterfly collector
and I pursued this blood sport for many months in these remote montane jungles of eastern Indonesia
and that was where the missing link in the quest for the resolution of the meaning of DMT and spirit fell into place
because I saw what most of us only see on National Geographic specials, which is the real fact of the rainforest, the real fact of organic nature
and how nature is communication, not only are the species that comprise the biota linked by pheromones and acoustical signals and colour signals
and all of these various methods by which communication is seeping around, in fact nature ultimately resolves itself into a self reflecting syntactical meta system
and you can pursue this right down to the DNA, DNA working as it does with nucleotide sequences that code, code right, that means arbitrarily assigned code for certain amino acids
and it means that organic objects are essentially utterances in three dimensional space of some kind of universally distributed linguistic intent
and this is what it means, it says in the beginning was the word, nature is that word, this infinitely self-adambrating fractal syntactical hallucination that has an infinite number of facets for potential regarding and self-regarding
and then might invoke here Godel's incompleteness theorem, which as I'm sure many of you know was Kurt Godel's brilliant contribution to theoretical mathematics
he showed that the possible set of true formal statements generated by any formal system was exceeded or exceeded the possible set of true formal statements which the rules of that system allowed
he showed this for simple arithmetic, showed that what this means friends is that what was called truth up until the beginning of the 20th century is absolutely impossible
and that's what Godel's incompleteness theorem secures, it shows that there is no ultimate closure in an effort to describe and so in a way my take on nature and culture and man
is that human language is a meta-linguistic system generated out of the necessary formal incompleteness of nature
you see, it's that nature is a self-describing genetic language and yet out of it arises something which is not formally predicted by its constraints and rules
there's a symmetry break there and a so-called emergent property comes into view, this emergent property is our unique ability to provisionally code sound to meaning
so that we then can freely command and reconstruct the world, we imagine that we do this for our own purposes of communication
the analysis that I'm suggesting would seem to indicate that actually we do it because we are complicated enzyme systems that are moving linguistic charge around inside some kind of meta-system
it's very important for the emergence of new order out of nature, you see, and I talked about this a little last night
the fact that it is contrived, provisional is very interesting, it doesn't arise out of the gene structure
rather it is agreed upon by individuals who are living at the time that the linguistic structure, whatever it is, emerges into consciousness
and as individuals are replaced, the thing is much more in flux than the genome, you see, the genetic component of an organism is a physical structure
stabilized by atomic bonds, possibly stabilized by a phenomenon like room temperature superconductivity, in the way nature works is to conserve the genes
so molecular machinery has been created to do that, but there is no mechanism in nature with the same kind of binding force that conserves meaning
meaning is some kind of freely commandable, open-ended, self-evolving system, the rules are that there are no rules
meaning consequently addresses itself to a much larger potential modality of expression than the genes
the genes basically repeat themselves over and over, almost like Homeric poetry, where the idea is that it be memorized and repeated
and that's what sexuality is about, is memorizing and repeating gene structures, handing on parts of the story
but the epigenetic, the creation of linguistic systems where meaning can be freely commanded allows very rapid evolution of cultural norms
and what I suggested last night and want to say more about tonight is that this process is mediated by plants, it is synergized in human beings by plants
of all sorts, I mean we are obsessed with drugs and short-term spectacular effects, but think about the effect on a culture of the presence or absence of say sugar
or the presence or absence of coffee, what human culture can essentially be seen to be is a series of plant-established developmental creodes for a higher mammal
and the fact that we are omnivorous lays us open for the formation of these weird relationships to things in our food chain
everybody is taught in school that the renaissance, the close of the middle ages, the rise of urban culture all had to do with the search for spices
bringing spices back to Europe, well why was it so important, you know, that a drive to simply broaden the palette of Europe is given credit for the redefining of post-medieval civilization
it was very strange, Hoffman and Ruck and Wasson showed that the illusinian mysteries which were the philosophical and experiential lynchpin of the ancient world's cosmology
the Hellenistic cosmology was a cult of ergotized beer
there every September at Elusis this mystery was carried out and everyone who was anyone participated in it
and you only got to do it once in your life so you had only one take
the point is clear, as you look at human culture in all times and places
the way in which our cultural institutions have been molded by these so called tertiary compounds in plants is very suggestive
it seems to me that the felt presence of the other, the alien intelligence, the being from outer space is actually co-present with us on this earth
and that the problem is not the finding of it but the recognizing of it when it is seen
in the same way that I think in the present cultural crisis everyone is crying answers, answers, we have to have answers
the fact is we have the answers, the question is to face the answers
the answer to self empowerment lies in the psychedelic experience
the answer to dissolving the hierarchically imposed set of mythical conventions that disempower us lies in the psychedelic experience
because what is really happening is a return to the primacy of feeling and feeling is not something you can convey to people
the way you convey facts to them, facts can be handed down every week through Time magazine and the latest issue of Science News and Nature
feelings will not lend themselves to that marketable, hierarchically distributed system
and consequently feelings represent a backwash against that
yet feeling is the modality in which we all operate
so as long as we are under the umbrella of the print created linear post medieval institutions that promote the myth of the public
the notion of the atomic individual, the notion that we are all alike basically
then we are going to be unempowered
the amazing thing to me about the psychedelic experience is that it can be kept under wraps
that people don't insist, that somehow we are leaving it to experts to figure it out
but did you know that the experts are not allowed to work it out
in this particular area the entire human race has been relegated to an infantile status
it is not professionally possible to do work with these things
nevertheless our cultural crisis is deepening
deepening mainly because we have very poor connections between our fragmented and autonomous psychic structures
within ourselves as individuals and within ourselves as a society
our whole problem is that we can't communicate with each other, we can't express intention
and the psychedelics are sitting there waiting to unify us
to introduce us to the trans-linguistic intention
to carry us forward into a realm of appropriate cultural activity
which is to my mind the realm beyond history
beyond history lies effortless and appropriate cultural activity
and nature has preceded us as it always does
by laying out models that can be followed to realize this
as an example and by request
I'll point out that the 19th century had a titular animal
its titular animal was the horse
idealized as the steam engine, the iron horse
and Marx talked about the locomotive of history
and there was this whole focusing on the horse archetype
which in the 20th century gave way to the titular animal
the raptor, the bird of prey as exemplified by high performance fighter aircraft
as the kind of ultimate union of man and machine in some kind of glorification
of the completion of a certain set of cultural ideals, you see
well, in thinking about this and in thinking about how language is the cultural frontier of our species
I went to nature looking for models of how we might move beyond the bird of prey
which when you think about it, it is the American symbol
it was also the symbol of the Third Reich
and a lot of creepy scenes have actually been into birds of prey
when Alaric the Visigoth, not even birds of prey
when Alaric the Visigoth burned Eleusis
the crow fluttered on his battle standard
as the greasy smoke swept by
so these dark birds have been with us
anyway, in looking for a new titular animal
and drawing the conclusion of what it would mean
I was drawn to look strangely enough at cephalopods
octopi, because I felt that first of all they are extremely alien
the break between our line of development in the phylogenetic tree
and the mollusca, which is what a cephalopod is
is about 700 million years ago
nevertheless, and many of you are students of evolution know
that when they talk about parallel evolution, they always drag out the example
of the optical system of the octopi
because, isn't this astonishing?
it's very much like the human eye, and yet it developed entirely independently
and this shows how the same set of external factors
impinging on a raw gene pool
will inevitably sculpt the same organ to the same end
and so forth and so on
well, the optical capacity of octopi is one thing
what interested me was
their linguistic organization
they are virtually entirely nervous system
first of all, they have eight arms in the case of the octopod
and ten arms in the case of the squid, the decapods
and so coordinating all these organs of manipulation
has given them a very evolved nervous system
then they have this highly evolved ocular system
but what is really interesting about them
is that they communicate with each other
by changing the color and texture of their skin
and their physical shape
you may have known that octopi could change colors
but you may have thought it was camouflage
or something very passive like that
it isn't that at all
they have a vast repertoire of traveling bars, dots, blushes
merging pastels, herringbone patterns, tweeds
mottled this and that
can blush from apricot through puce into dove grey
and on to olive
do all of these things
communicating to each other
that is what this large optical system is for
is to be able to see each other
the other thing which they can do
besides having these chromatophores on the surface of their skin
is they can change the texture of the skin surface
they can make it rugose, populate, smooth
lobed, rubbery, runnled, so forth and so on
and then of course being shell-less mollusks
they can hide arms
and display certain parts of themselves
and carry on a dance
well, when you analyze what is going on here
what at first seems like merely fascinating facts from natural history
begins to take on a more profound aspect
because it is an ontological transformation of language
that is going on in front of you
note that by being able to communicate visually
they have no need of a conventionalized culturally reinforced dictionary
rather they experience pure intent of each other without ambiguity
because each octopod can see what is meant
this is very important
can see what is meant
and I think that this heralds or could be made to herald
a transformation in our own definitions of language and communication
what we need is to see what we mean
it's not without consequence or implication
that when we try to communicate the notion of clarity of speech
we always shift into visual metaphors
"I see what you mean"
"He painted a picture"
"His description was very colorful"
it means that when we intend to indicate a lack of ambiguity and communication
we shift to visual analogies
this can in fact be actualized
and in fact this is what is happening in the psychedelic experience
is that we discover just under the surface
of human biological organization
the next level in the organization of language
it's the ability to generate some kind of acoustical hologram
that is manipulated by linguistic intent
now don't ask me how this happens
because nobody knows how it happens
at this point it's magic
nevertheless the fact is it does happen
you can have this experience
it represents a synesthesia in the presence of ongoing communication
it is in fact telepathy
it is not what we thought telepathy would be
which I suppose if you're like me
you imagine telepathy would be hearing what other people think
it isn't that
it's seeing what other people mean
and them also seeing what they mean
so that once something has been communicated
both parties can walk around it
and look at it
the way you study a Brancusi or a Giacometti in an art gallery
by eliminating the ambiguity of the audio signal
and substituting the concreteness of the visual image
the membrane of separation
that allows the fiction of our individuality
can be temporarily overcome, you see
and the temporary overcoming of the illusion of individuality
is a much richer notion of ego death
than the kind of white light, null states that it has imagined to be
because the overcoming of the illusion of individuality
has a political consequence
political consequences
the political consequences are
that one can love one's neighbour, you see
because the commonality of being is felt
felt
not reasoned toward
or propagandized into
or behaviourally reinforced
but felt
this is why there is this persistent notion
which tracks these psychedelic compounds
of a new political order based on love
which is, you know, I mean, it was a hard thing to say in the panhandle in 1965
it's not easy to say in heavy metal LA in 1987
but it seems to be the fact of the matter
that love, which poets have celebrated for eons as ineffable
may in fact have certain ineffable dimensions attached to it
but it may in fact be more effable than we had previously cared to imagine
and it's the invoking of the effability of love
has to do with discovering the shared birthright
the atemporal dimension that is co-present with this reality
and that is a vast reservoir of anchoring
existential anchoring for each and all of us in our lives
so my response to feeling the political pull of this
feeling the power to transform language
that resided in these things
was to go to the people who I thought would know most about it
the shamans for whom hallucinogenic shamanism has never been an issue
for whom the notion that you're supposed to do it on the natch
is a patent absurdity
I mean, if you're serious about doing it on the natch
I suggest you eliminate all food
because this notion of the pristine self somehow riding above the muck of the world
carrying on a spiritual evolution is absolute foolishness
I mean, we are made of the stuff of the world
people who do not confront the presence of the hallucinogenic possibility
are turning their back on their birthright
in the same way that if you do not experience sex throughout your life
you are turning your back on your birthright
I mean, after all, we could argue that to allow another person to touch you
is to not do it on the natch, right?
But, dear friends, we're slicing too close to the bone here to take that approach
it's much better, I think, to open to the world
the world is communication
nature is the great teacher
all human gurus are simply distillations
of the wave of nature that is coming at you
so you can just short-circuit the whole human boil-down
and go straight to the executive suite
by putting yourself under a tree in the wilderness
I mean, they all have said this, but they need to be taken more seriously
on the subject of their own expendability
Me too!
Going to the Amazon with these kinds of notions
and looking at what had been achieved there
I came to have a vision, then, of the future that could be
that we are sort of hurling ourselves into a new stone age
where the fruits of the prodigal wandering
that I discussed in such detail last night
can be used to infuse new meaning into that paradise
the imagination of man and woman is so incomparably rich
and exerts such an attraction on us as the builder monkey
that we have to honor that
we cannot demonize that
and preach a kind of naturalism that, if actually put in place
would cause the starvation of tens of millions of people
we have passed the point where some kind of Luddite reform can save us
it's only, I think, very self-indulgent elites
that can preach voluntary simplicity
because a lot of people are experiencing involuntary simplicity
and unless you're one of them
it rings rather hollow to be told that zen values are our best
so, I think that reinserting ourselves into nature
is inspiration for cultural design
that's what it is
it's not flight from the design process
but a reinvigoration of it
and some of you may be aware of the concept of nanotechnology
where everything is built at the molecular level
we, by studying the mechanisms of the cell and the immune system and DNA
we begin to have a picture of how molecules and atoms
are the machine parts of a microcosmic world
that if we were elf chemists we could make our way into
and create anything that we could imagine
I mean, I can foresee a world where all machines will be made by DNA-like polymers
that will code base materials into larger and larger aggregates
the miniaturization of our world is a great frontier
as culture becomes more enveloping
its physical manifestation should become less material, you see
so the ultimate notion is of the world turned back to the form it held
say, 35,000 years ago
where people live in an environment of entirely climaxed natural perfection
however, behind their eyelids lies a culturally and consensually validated data phase space
that is culture, civilization
turn each of us into a telepathic aquarium that has a direct pipeline
to the general ocean of mind and being
this is possible
in fact, it's not only possible, it may be the only decent solution
to download ourselves into another dimension
and I want to note in passing the collapse of Max Headroom
what a tragedy I think that is that his last show was last night
this was a weird force for cultural transformation
but to be applauded
if anybody here tonight has anything to do with it, I wish them luck
but this sort of notion
you know, the Max Headroom people and the William Gibson people have a very high-tech take on this
because they are interested in accentuating this tight blue jeans, cyberpunk kind of notion
but in fact, the worlds that they describe will have many, many different social subgroups
and social ecosystems forming in them
what the future really means is a choice to become who we are
to flower out, to find our own way
McLuhan saw this 20 years ago
he said that the rise of global electronic feudalism would create an atomistic fragmentation of culture
it may well be that within 50 years
the largest organizational entity on the planet will be corporations with a few million loyal employees
and all larger social institutions will have disappeared
because they don't command loyalty in a social environment
where direct experience has become empowered
this empowering of direct experience, this return to the feminine
this legitimizing of the presence of the vaster regions of the unconscious
these are all aspects of this emerging paradigm of the spirit
understanding and imagination in the light of nature
which is what this two-night party has been called
is a definition of the spirit
understanding and imagination in the light of nature
in other words, true understanding, poetic imagination
standing as a mirror before nature as object
will cause the hologrammatic presence of the spirit to magically appear
it will be then seen to be a kind of emergent quality of the situation
that was previously masked simply because the elements had not fallen into the correct arrangement
and I think as we move forward through time over the next 25 years
there will be many profits of the transcendental object at the end of time
it takes, the important thing I think is to recall Godel's incompleteness theorem
and to always recognize the provisional nature of the metaphysical goods that you're going to be sold
nobody has the faintest notion of what's going on
it's important to keep that in mind
if you have that in mind, everything else, then the game proceeds much more cleanly
what is ahead of us is true, high adventure
the essence of it is its unknowability
its promise is transformation
its theater of occurrence is the here and now
we are not waiting for it to begin
this already happened for us
and our job is to understand how that can be so
Plato said time is the moving image of eternity
my notion of shamanism is
it is that state of mind which accrues to those who have seen the end
cultivating this notion of closure with hyperspace imaged as the archaic return
to the world of the pre-cultural ambiance
we can have an anticipation of the transcendental object
it is still in Eden, it is we who have undergone the fall and the recurso
and now the laden prodigal returns to beat at the doors of the manorial home
the birthright and within I think lies the beginnings of true civilization
we are the forerunners of a truly moral and ethical human society
the deepest aspirations however badly mangled and mishandled by our traditions
nevertheless still have the potential for archetypal fruition within them
the torch that has been passed from generation to generation
ad infinitum back into the distant past is alive
and by some strange quirk of the metaphysical machinery
it is our great privilege to live through this cemetery break
this revelation of the next level of the open ended mystery
and I think that the real thrill lies in relating to it with an open mind
a sense of caring, a sense of wonder and a sense of real grounded intellectually firm hope
so that's all I want to say this evening
I think we'll break for about 15 minutes and then we'll have questions
thank you very much
[applause]
OK, well now comes my favorite part of these things
which is the period where there's interaction
because I think this is really a group process
every one of you to some degree has taken upon yourself the role of the Magellan in the living room
and probably everyone in this room has at some time or another gazed upon things
no other human eye has ever beheld
and the psychedelic dimension is not yet a science
we're more like explorers comparing our crudely drawn maps
and hastily scrawled journal notes to try and together get a picture of this new continent in the imagination
so I'm yours, sir
You have said in your book that the mushroom was genetically engineered for producing psilocybin by telling intelligence
what do you think now about the possibility of us making that again
putting those genes producing psilocybin in other kind of organisms like fungi or plants
I don't know about animals
Oh well, interesting question
I think the question was I've described the mushroom as genetically engineered by some other agency for the production of psilocybin
what do I think about the possibility of human beings being able to genetically manipulate organisms to produce psychedelic compounds
I think that the technology and theory has reached the stage where
if there's an enterprising graduate student within the sound of my voice
the way to go is to locate the gene for psilocybin in the mushroom genome
and to translate it via standard techniques to E. coli, to Escherichia coli
and then you would have an easily grown bacterium which would be a chemical factory for pouring out psilocybin
so if any of you are aspiring genetic pharmacologists this would be a fine thing
I might elaborate on the answer, some of you who are not familiar with the premise
the reason I suggested that the mushroom might have been engineered and be in fact an artifact of an alien intelligence
was number one of course the informational content of the trip
but number two the fact that psilocybin is 4-phosphoryloxy-n-n-dimethyltryptamine
the only 4-phosphorylated indole known to occur in nature
out of thousands and thousands of compounds and organisms only one 4-phosphorylated compound is known
so this suggests that it is artificial or at least highly unusual
every week the science magazines are full of talk of strategies for locating and identifying extraterrestrial life
well a very obvious, practical and scientifically reasonable way to proceed
would be to look at the DNA of various life forms on earth
and see if there are any where there is a wild statistical departure from the norm
and whenever you get an organism which is producing or has genes that no other organism has
this is highly suggestive because evolutionary types evolve incrementally out of each other
so you would expect that there would be a relative smoothness in the expression of genetic products
that one fungus would be rather like its taxonomic near relatives
one menisperm or member of the Rubiaceae would be chemically similar to another
in fact of course we do find subtle chemical variations
but the presence of a 4-phosphorylated indole in a fungus like that is very suggestive
and there is an interesting book by Sirupanam Purama
called Perspectives on the Problem of Extraterrestrial Communication
and he outlines there what he believes would be a general strategy for extraterrestrial contact
that any kind of species would have to operate against if it were to seriously conduct a search through space
and the model has a ship which at a certain distance from its origin planet
it must replicate itself and then at a certain distance replicate again
and then again in order to keep the density of ships constant as the sphere of the area being explored expands
there have to be more and more of these ships
and these ships could be as small as an animal cell
they don't have to be thought of as Star Trek type ships
but the point is this ship contains a message that you have to read and call in
because there are so many planets and star systems to be surveyed
that the only way such a survey could be conducted
is if there were a message in the ship qua organism
such that in the gene swarm of an alien planet
it would eventually be read by an organism on this planet
and that organism would act to do the things necessary to call the central switchboard
and then they would say "Aha, we have contact in sector alpha sub n 362"
and they would concentrate all their attention there
in a biological world that we assume to be natural
may in fact be the artifacts of a much higher intelligence
here
yes, would you speak on the timeline a little?
Oh, what a kind question there
to lead me to my favorite subject
well, it has to do with why, you know, people do this for different reasons
why people take psychedelic plants and what lies behind it always
and what always lay behind it for me
from that very first DMT trip that I described to you at the beginning
was the notion "My God, this stuff has historical significance"
"It's really important" or "Nobody knows about this"
carrying with it the notion "We are discovering it"
if we could bring it back somehow it would change the world
perhaps people are bringing it back by designing buildings
and creating fashions or fashioning mathematical descriptions of reality
I never had that aspiration
I just simply defined myself as more humbly than that
as a consumer of ideology
as an intellectual who would learn what has been said and done and proposed
but after the DMT experience I realized that there is unclaimed stuff
out in those dimensions
James Joyce says in Finnegan's Wake "Up niente prospector, you sprout all your worth and woof your wings"
well, the key word is "prospector"
a prospector is a rock hunter
I wanted to prospect for the alchemical stone for the lapis philosophorum
and I conceived it as an idea
and the timeline, I mean, I think it would come differently for each of us
for me it was this incredibly formal aesthetically symmetrical
and therefore satisfying idea about what time is
that the Dao is something which could be mathematically described
as a flux of a quality in time
a quality that I named novelty
and once I had enunciated it for myself
I saw that that was the part of the world that we have no description for
we have, science gives us descriptions for what is possible
but we have no descriptions for what out of the set of the possible
undergoes the actual formality of occurring
why are certain things selected to come to be
and I saw then the notion of the Dao
which is generally presented as a kind of intuitive notion
you're not supposed to demand too much hard-edged clarity
you say just flow with it, man, flow with it
well, when someone says flow to me
I think of equations which would describe flow
as a dynamical system which therefore can be mathematically modeled
and what the timeline is, is a seeing
that the very largest patterns
which describe the whole birth, evolution and death of the universe
are repeated at successively shorter and shorter spans of time
and down into the quantum mechanically
and micro electronically cognizable realms of time
the realm of the nano and the picoseconds
and studying the Qing
which I saw then as a kind of phenomenological description of time
produced by the oriental mind
completely unencumbered by our particular set of cultural conventions
certainly having its own set of peculiar conventions
but not ours
that there is a pattern in nature
not in three-dimensional space but in time
a pattern in time on many levels that reproduces itself
and can be known, can be formally described
and once known, can be seen to control the ebb and flow of connectedness
or the forward and backward surge of novelty
and I thought that this was a great insight
since it was the only one I had, I could hardly sell it short
and what pleased me most about it was
a wrap is a wrap, it's as good as the wrapper
but here was a mathematically formal idea
that could stand on its own
be examined in the absence of the wrapper
be examined by critics who were as hostile as they cared to be
it's a tool
in a long line of tools that stretches back toward the first chipped flint
and stretches forward toward the soul made manifest
as starship and alchemical transformation
but it was the tool that I came upon
and what is always put against the psychedelic experience
is they say, well big deal, what's ever come out of it?
So I was pleased that here was a concrete notion that came out of it
Richard
Yes, along the line of this time, can you give us a reading
of our current time in the not too distant future?
I would be only too happy
The question is, would I care to prophesy based on this timeline?
Yes, one of the assumptions built into the theory is that
time is a series of nested resonances
and that each time is composed of resonance with previous and future times on varying levels
the time we are living through, I call the Roman twilight
simply because we are living through a period that is in resonance with the time of the last Roman emperors
and I think if you look at it carefully, you can begin to see the way this theory
proposes to be analogical and yet formal at the same time
what was happening in the decades immediately preceding the fall of Rome
a progressively weakened series of self-indulgent propagandists ruled the greatest empire on earth
with a more and more shaky hand as they succumbed to gonorrhea, mercuric poisoning
various occult pursuits, millenarian obsessions and so forth
meanwhile, in the east, in Byzantium, a new civilization was unleashing itself
and if you think of those events which unfolded over a few hundred years
as telescoped into a few years in our own era
you see that with the rise of Gorbachev and the continued mismanagement of the American empire
under the crypto-fascist series of rotating bimbos and buffoons
that we have suffered through
but what is happening is an empire is being betrayed into eclipse
by self-indulgence and stupidity and bad management
and its cultural adversary is in ascendancy
now Byzantium never conquered Rome, it doesn't happen like that
what ended was the Roman world of indulgent cohesive imperialism
and what it was replaced with was a rise in religious fundamentalism
a stricter and more puritan kind of morality
the rise of epidemic diseases and a vast economic retrenchment
which initiated what we call the dark ages
now in the present situation of the 20th century
these themes are being recapitulated at an extremely rapid rate
so their dark age is for us a tough three or four years, fortunately
it's said history occurs first as tragedy then as farce
we are the heirs of the vast tragedy of extended history
who lived through the curiously mediased and dehumanized farce
of the recapitulation of these themes
because the very notion that the last ten Roman emperors
could be symbolized by someone like the present chief executive
cannot fail to bring a small smile to any open mind, I think
so what I see happening over the next 24 years really
is first this retrenchment which, hell, it may be a bonus
judging by the market's performance Thursday and Friday
I may not be doing prophecy at all, this may be recap at this point
but whether that is a technical move or the actual beginning of the unraveling
of the overbought western capitalistic system
I can't say, but I will say that by 1989, by mid-1989
by the time the next presidential ritual has been enacted
it will be clear, I think, that we have entered into a whole new kind of temporal domain
a kind of temporal domain that will appear superficially to be fairly bleak
because what it will be, it will be highly chaotic, highly novel
and tending to oscillate wildly around the mean
so in other words, there will be no clear trend visible
there will appear to be progressive surges and then losing of ground
and then progressive surges and losing of ground
and this will go on through till the mid-90s
around 1996, 97, the resonance pattern will have shifted
and we will be occupying a relationship to the late high middle ages
and the emergence of the new social forms created by the emergence of the mercantile class and the bourgeois
private wealth, cities, end of cultural insularity, a restarting of the economic machinery
and a kind of new flowering, but still under the shadow of these fundamentalist forces
that will have come into ascendancy in the previous dark age
then in 1998, we come into that area which is in resonance with the period of the discovery of the new world
1492, in other words, and the exploration of the new world and its subjugation over about 150 years
which followed from that will be what will be going on as we close out the millennium
what the discovery of the new world will mean in terms of our reenactment of these great themes is anybody's guess
it could be the vindication of my style of rap, a nearby inhabited dimension filled with alien intelligence
or it may be the vindication of a more orthodox sort of expectation of extraterrestrial contact
or perhaps ultimately the launching of large telescopes into orbit which will confirm for us
the existence of oxygen rich, water heavy worlds around nearby stars
I mean, that alone would make an intellectual revolution that would leave our world unrecognizable to itself
we have to recall that as recently as 500 years ago, the continent that we're inhabiting was unknown
it was something talked of by wild-eyed dreamers, you know, it was an impossibility, a psychedelic dimension
everyone knew that when you sailed west far enough, there'd be monsters and that was the end of it
it was literally the unconscious, now we deal in the real estate of that unconscious
and there is no reason why our children should not deal in the real estate of the psychedelic dimension
that we are discovering and confirming over the next 10 years or so
let me carry this through to the end because the good part comes at the end
after the turn of the century, the acceleration of the unfolding of these resonances becomes more and more intense
and eventually we reach the super compression of modern times
this is why I proposed to you last night the term compressionist for this school of thought
that myself and Sheldrake and Frank Barr and Ralph Abraham represent
because we all are talking about the dense nesting of concrescent systems
and ultimately, in my own point of view, the emergence of a transcendental object at the end of time
and the end of time is not far off, as Joyce says in the wake
it may not be as far off as you wish to be congealed
but it is, I think within the lifetimes of all of us, there will be an ontological transformation of the human mode
so I think the transcendental object is emerging
once it has emerged, there will be no big deal about it
in the same way that we look back at the emergence of language
nobody jumps around or gets excited about it, or only a few philosophers do
and yet the fact that we possess language is the thumbprint of God upon our species
it's an impossible break with previous animal organization
you can talk all you want about Coco the talking gorilla and this and that
but then you turn to a poem by Andrew Marvel and you realize there is an ontological break here
there is not an even progress
so as we anticipate this thing, it could be anything
it could be the visible language that I indicated as a possibility earlier this evening
it could be emergence in an extraterrestrial mind
it could be the transcendental emergence of all and everything
the Tao made flesh, the actual collapse of the state vector into some kind of mysterious completion
but it's much more rational to place this kind of singularity at the end of a complex evolutionary process
like the life of the universe than at the beginning
which is the scientific approach to just say, well, everything sprang from nothing for no reason in a single instant
and please don't ask questions about that because our map begins one ten trillionth of a picosecond after that happened
we don't talk about that
well, isn't this somewhat begging the question for an intellectual enterprise
that purports to offer an explanation of how things came to be
so the transcendental object which suggests to me a negative kazooistry
a purpose in the universe that is focusing and drawing everything toward it
and in fact I've said history is the shockwave of eschatology
history, which lasts ten thousand years, is this microsecond of ultra complex experience
where the penetration of the natural world by the transcendental object
each exists co-temporaneous with the other for a historical or geological microsecond
and then the two terms are merged and all opposites are dissolved
and somehow the gift is claimed, the pearl is restored and the project is ended
we are living through that moment
a ten thousand year rush from chipping of stone flint
to walking through the violet doorway of a self-generated hyperdimensional vehicle
that carries us to our true home
no wonder it leaves an explosive set of eddies in its wake
I said last night, this is what happens when a culture prepares to depart for the stars
this is not business as usual, this is something else entirely
and it's the intellectual adventure and challenge of our time for each of us
to understand this in terms relevant to ourselves and the people immediately around us
and so this is the inspiration for time wave zero, this is what it maps
this is the odd thing in the map that when the time map came through
it wasn't only a map of historical process
but there was the transcendental object mapped into it
and all of its sub reflections could be seen
this is what Christ was about, this is what Buddha was about
this is what your most enlightened moment was about
you, each of you and me
it is the hyperdimensional particulate reflection of Godhead
scattered back through the flatter plane of this lower dimensional slice of experience
I mean it's hard to say it any clearer than that
here
something is happening
Man Woman (Part 1)
Monogamy represents a deepening of bonding into a kind of lifelong project that is entirely
spiritual.
Not that it doesn't have a physical and an ecstatic and an erotic side, but it all goes
together to create something that should not be expected of adolescence and should not
be preached as the ideal at all stages of life.
And this is pretty much how it's handled in a number of non-literate societies.
Marriage is taken very seriously, but before marriage a different set of rules obtains.
So that's not a solution for those of us who are already into middle age or beyond, but
it certainly gives indication of how we might think about it in raising our own children.
I want to add something if I may.
I think the objectification of women, which is not unique, it's only just markets packaged
so very expertly in the West, but the making women commodities really completely messes
up the whole deal.
Because if it is just an exchange of commodities, why stick with one commodity?
That is not just the Western thing, but it's just a collection of body parts like the pinup
girl or boy, which is sort of a way of getting into that.
And I think that it really hinges, but it's very much the woman who's been the objectified
one, Joan.
The other one was sort of a kind of a blip of reaction in this transition of time.
And I think that's something we have to kind of get through before we can really work that
out.
It's very hard to realize the power of woman as commodity in this society until you are
away from it.
I remember, well this happens every time, but I remember particularly in the Amazon,
we had been about three weeks up this river, a group of about six of us, women and men.
And we came to this village and there was the obligatory meeting with the head man of
the village to let them know that we would be collecting plants in their area and so
forth and so on.
And we had been away from Iquitos by now, I guess a month.
And we came into the Maloca and it was dimly lit and then he lit a little kind of a candle
and there was a girly calendar of the most innocuous sort.
I mean the kind that Sparkplug Company produced in the United States.
Very mild.
And I was trying to deal with this guy and I was absolutely riveted.
I could not tear my eyes from it.
And I was even thinking it came upon me, was it conceivable that without blowing everyone's
mind, especially the fellow members of my party, could I get this away from this guy?
And then of course, other things happened and time passed and then later I was back
in Iquitos and I came upon this same calendar in a libraria there and it had no power whatsoever
because in Iquitos I was saturated in these images, just the news vendors on the street.
And this is very mild stuff, you know, it's a Latin Catholic country.
But the power of this image is why it's used to sell everything from cigarettes to debentured
bonds.
And it is dehumanizing.
It is dehumanizing because it takes us literally to the surface.
Everything is flattened.
This is again this flattening of the primacy of experience, reducing everything to a sensation
empty of emotional content.
And if you can do it with women, you can do it with anything.
I want to stop on that because if you take just that away with you, as I think I said
sometimes either last night or today, that what my work indicates is something that once
you articulate it, it sounds obvious but somehow it's been overlooked.
And it's very simply this, that the way that a society structures that most fundamental
of all relations, the relations between the female and the male half of humanity, because
that's what women and men are, that that profoundly affects everything.
It doesn't just affect our individual life choices and roles as women and men, which
we of course experience, you know, very clearly and now we're very aware of it, but it affects
every one of our social institutions.
And that's really the objectification of women.
The domination of women is the template, it's the model.
Because if you can do that to your female twin, if you can do that to the person with
whom you have the most intimate relationship, then why not do it to somebody whose difference
is not one of sex but of color or of hairdo or of politics or religion.
It's the template, it's the model.
And so what I really want to say to you is that these issues that we have been so thoroughly
socialized to think of as quote "just women's issues" are the central core issues that we
better start paying attention to.
And I am very definitely making a statement here that I passionately want to share with
you.
That I just, because it's so obvious, you know, if you really think about it, but we've
been so conditioned not to, and of course the reason that we're so conditioned to think
of it that way is because if once we start thinking of this way, then we are challenging
the very basis, the very foundation of the dominated system and it extends into everything.
And I really want to say this one thing, and it's about language, because you've spoken
about language.
I never used to be aware of anything, I think.
I mean I think that's really the only way one can describe my former state.
But anyway, but I certainly was not aware, I was aware of a slight sense of discomfort.
Well, more than slight.
When I went to college and everything was the study of man and mankind and all of the
examples were male-centered because the message was very clear.
I was here but I really had no business being here.
None of this was really directed to me.
But it was so, you know, wasty away and I thought I was uncomfortable because I hadn't
found the right guy or wasn't wearing the right blouse or, you know, I mean I had no
consciousness.
But now it's very clear to me that the whole use of male-exclusive language, the term man
instead of human, the term mankind instead of humankind, the term he instead of she or
he or we, that that's a way of really linguistically almost short-circuiting.
It's really a way of short-circuiting any partnership circuitry in our head, okay?
And it's tremendously important.
Have you noticed you've been using the word history a lot?
Is it about his story?
And I was thinking you can use the word her story also.
Well, you know, I'm thinking about that because the title of this is the, you know, of past
history.
I was thinking about our story.
Good.
Because I kind of like to move from prehistory to history to our story.
I know that sometimes we play with words because we just got married and I had the same experience
of feeling real resistance being owned and all of that.
And someone said, "Mrs. Charles Brent?"
And I said, "No, but this is Mr. Linda Brent."
And so when I think sometimes in the reverse of things, it doesn't seem so, I mean, it
wasn't that it was awful to recall that because I'm proud to be married to my husband.
It was just that if you start reversing it that way and how absurd it sounds to call
him Linda Brent, it makes it, then it makes it how absurd it is to call me Charles Brent.
Now, where it doesn't sound so absurd otherwise.
So I think when we start noticing those things just to reverse them.
No, I think that's a very, very good thing.
But this is how we're all beginning to notice these things and it's fun.
It's a little uncomfortable, but it's much more fun than that.
Well, there's a fellow, Dr. Warren Farrell, who's doing that.
He talks about walking in someone else's shoes.
And he has interesting workshops because he has the women line up in rows according to
their income and then he has the men stand on chairs and turn around so that the women
can see him.
How wonderful.
It's quite an impactful experience.
I'll let Linda give you a deal.
I think experiencing it really makes a difference.
David, do you want to add something?
I think the problem is that the guy who's expecting one of us to reverse it.
Oh, okay.
No, you have to get up.
Why don't you?
Because if you're playing with words, keep it going a lot because you can code it.
And so you can see history and you can set it as history.
But mystery is mid-story.
I want to say something about this question that actually Robin brought up this morning.
About the whole duality of us and Vera.
And I think that's a really important thing.
I think that's a really important thing.
I think that's a really important thing.
I think that's a really important thing.
I think that's a really important thing.
I think that's a really important thing.
I think that's a really important thing.
I think that's a really important thing.
I think that's a really important thing.
I think that's a really important thing.
I think that's a really important thing.
I think that's a really important thing.
I think that's a really important thing.
I think that's a really important thing.
I just wanted to further discuss that question that we talked about.
Asking the questions about duality, what is the smallest unit of partnership?
And we were talking about that before, whether it was two or one.
Whether that conqueror inside me and that partner inside me, which is sometimes mind
over body, when my mind says go ahead and eat something that's not good for me, conquers
the health that I need to have.
I'd just like to hear maybe you both talk a little bit about the idea of partnership
on an individual basis.
Well, I loved when you earlier came and posed that question and said that your intuition
was that the basic partnership really started within us.
And I agree with you because it's the whole thing of seeing ourselves as part of a larger
whole and honoring our body and honoring our spirit and honoring the fact that they're
the same, they're just different aspects of the same.
So I see it like a prism where you just see different facets of it in different ways.
And yeah, the smallest unit I think is every one of us.
So I thank you for that.
Yes, don't you think that there's been talk about ego?
Well, it seems to me ego inflation is what happens when within the partnership of the
individual a dominator model is applied because the manifestation of ego is the denial of
intuition, which is a feminine function.
So people who are strongly egocentric are living in the self-created hell of a dominator
society of one.
Besides the obvious reasons like fear of change and wanting to maintain a status quo or one
system, why do you think there's this tremendous reaction or fear or backlash by the fundamentalists
against the resurgence of, I mean in their literature and their sermons and everything
about the resurgence of the return to the goddess, the archaic, the new age movement,
anything that, um, snacks a slightly different than their traditional or fundamental values?
Well, they are the bearers of the patriarchic standards.
Their lineage reaches right back to Pharaoh and they see it being threatened.
Secularism, which began 500 years ago, threatened them at every step of the way.
That's why I said last night, I consider this monotheistic tradition to be the single most
reactionary force in human history.
Their bailiwick is threatened.
The energy that they put into destroying the pagan world was tremendously ferocious.
It took them centuries.
In fact, they never completely succeeded in dismantling the previous world of pagan sensibilities.
And they, theirs is, I believe, not a natural position.
Rianne said this morning, you can do anything you want to partnership.
It keeps springing up.
It keeps coming back.
It has a natural ability to recreate itself.
I don't believe this is true of the dominator culture.
I believe that it is fragile and frightened and feels itself always being eroded by the
simple processes that reside in nature.
So it is an untenable position.
And if you have an untenable position, you have a siege mentality.
I really want to take that to a very personal sense.
I think that it is fear and pain that really are the main spring.
And these are the most damaged people, are the ones that really are the most imprisoned.
Because we are all imprisoned to some extent still by the dominator model.
But in these people, the grip is so fierce and the pain and the fear are so great that
it, I mean because these things happen on various levels.
One is the systems level.
You know, systems like all, you know, societies are living systems.
They tend to maintain themselves.
You know, that is just how we know from systems theory.
But just on the very individual motivation level, for example, a lot of these women who
are so horribly, I mean who can go around chanting when they wanted this poor aging
Supreme Court Justice to die.
Do you remember they were, you know, what was his name?
I have forgotten now.
Brennan.
Bigger pardon?
Brennan.
Brennan, yeah, they were chanting, you know, they were chanting for death for Brennan
and it was all in the name of we are pro-life.
And it was, wait a minute.
I mean what kind of distortion in these women?
Well, it is terror, it is fear, it is pain.
And they lash out.
And that is exactly, you see, the whole lashing out process.
You mutilate a child from childhood on to be in pain.
You know, be it really through genital mutilation or be it through child beating or be it through
psychological battering.
You know, all of these ways.
And that is, I think, you know, I mean if you are asking in terms of the mechanics of
it, it is very complex.
But I think on the individual level, that is really, and it relates to your point about
the enemy is, if there is an enemy, it is us.
I mean it is what has become part of us but we can leave it behind the pain.
And the whole thing that we are talking about now is healing.
Healing ourselves.
Yes.
What impresses me about this particular subject is really the call to face the pain.
Yes.
And instead of looking out there for the source, either be it God or outer space, it is, you
know, in which so many of the patriarchal religions head the gaze in that direction,
in the skyward direction.
And why your question about mind and body, I think it relates to what Rianna is talking
about right now.
The call that is being made, and I think it is the same with your work, is to actually
face very deeply what is going on within us, the profound alienation between mind and body.
The objectification, not just of the feminine but of Eros, the objectification of the body.
And whether it is with the visionary vegetables or simply by attending to breath and watching
the content of our minds produced in the way that they do, coming to really, as the Oracle
of Delphi said it beautifully, knowing oneself completely, becoming completely aware, hyphened
and deepened awareness.
So, you know, I really resonate with what you are talking about in terms of coming into
this partnership model, mind and body, and how we live this out, you know, in relationship
with each other, how actually partnering in the world becomes a context wherein we can
discover, we get a very extraordinary feedback when we are off.
And why this evasive manoeuvre is to stay in relationship, to stay in community, to
persist through the points of extreme pain that all of us experience in facing ourselves,
whether it is on a psychedelic substance, or whether it is sitting on the zapos, but
really knowing oneself profoundly.
Q. [Inaudible]
Q. [Inaudible]
Q. I'd like to really reiterate this issue of the selective deadening of empathy, because
I think that empathy, this awareness that we are talking about, is so much part of this
unique miracle that is our species.
And the dominator model is so fascinating because here is this gift we have been given,
and institution after institution, practice after practice, is then ingeniously developed
to deaden that gift of empathy in us.
And hey, but I think that that's really one of the things.
But you can't really kill it off, you see.
No, no, you're right. You're right about that.
Q. But I think the point here is that, you know, as long as we do not face our own pain,
we will create a lust for others.
Q. Wouldn't that affect, the dominator mentality would be like prison, but it stays in a tension.
You would take the feeling of being incarcerated where you had that much fear, where there
was all that much power.
A. Well, see, I think the incarceration image is a very apt one.
I spoke about Theodore Rojak, and he spoke of how the 19th century wave of feminism really
was one of the things, one of the first really historic frontal challenges to the dominator system,
to what he called patriarchy.
And he said that the reaction to it was one of terror, you know, but the greatest thing
was we had to keep imprisoned, not only, you know, the women and the so-called inferior
people and the enemy, but the woman that every man, as he put it, keeps locked inside his psyche.
And I think that's a very apt image.
But of course, women too can be very cruel, and I think it's really very important that
we disabuse ourselves of this whole idea that we're talking about, you know, women are terrific,
and men are, you know, I mean, forget it, because the dominator's model distorts both women and men.
It is true that the caring, I mean, that's one of the ironies.
You know, really the most important work in the society, which is the caring and the nurturing
work of the society has been relegated to the inferior group, you know, to women.
And then we wonder why we can't have social priorities that are more caring if those very
people are excluded from power, right?
I mean, talk about catch-22 here.
So we're back to the quote "women's issues," aren't we?
What concerns me once again is this new role of the feminist man.
If you go back and you see this image of a erotic pan who was a consort of the goddess,
who if you go into history enough was often sacrificed at the end of each year as part
of this re-feeding the goddess back.
There was a blood sacrifice since the man did not bleed.
And if you look at some of them and know them, a fresco is very easy.
They're beautiful and I wish I had some of them.
The role of the man, well, I mean, you see a fresco of a man with fish.
He fishes.
All right?
I mean, you know, in other words, it's a productive role.
You see the so-called young prince, which is really fascinating.
Most of the recovered Ninoan single figures have been a tribute to the goddess with a
female priestess as the representative.
But they find this one figure of a man and they decide he's the young prince, right?
Which is very, very interesting because there's not a trace of any king in the Ninoan culture.
But nonetheless, he is a beardless youth and he has flowers and plumes and he's walking
through a garden.
I mean, it's hardly your macho warrior image.
I mean, there are other things that men can do.
Men did the boomerly thing and that was very interesting because it was a partnership with
the women.
It was a boomerly fresco.
So they obviously just did all kinds of things.
They just didn't happen to specialize in killing.
Yes?
Is it time already?
Yes.
Oh, my goodness.
Yes, I think that we should…
Question over here.
Yes, please.
I see technology as a symbol of dominance, and I wanted you to address the question if
you could of what the interface will look like and how we get to the interface of the
partnership with technology.
I see a, you know, like a classic technology.
I wonder if that's possible.
I'm so glad you brought that up because that makes a wonderful, wonderful place for something
that I really felt that I want to very much address.
What I'd like to suggest is that we look at technology as something that is really
a human function, a human capacity.
From day one, language is a technology of communication, isn't it?
From the stick that even chimpanzees use, you know, to help them dig up plants and what
have you, that's a technology.
It's a tool.
Our tool-making capacity is really an extension of natural functions.
I mean, an airplane does something that a bird does, but we've built it.
So I look at technology neither as the villain or as the savior.
I look at technology as something that we, I mean, other species have some technology.
I think dolphins and whales probably would if they had hands, you know, because they
seem to have a high intelligence, but they don't.
So we have this tremendous capacity for making tools, you know, all the way to the most extraordinary
things that we're getting today.
That, I think, is a wonderful thing, and it can also be a terrible thing.
And we're right back to the issue of technology being used using the template of a partnership
or a dominator model of society.
I'd like to suggest to you that the invention of machines, per se, did not have to result
in these dehumanized assembly lines where people themselves became cogs in the machine.
I would like to suggest to you that if this prehistoric shift had not happened, that maybe
the machines would have been used in a very, very different way.
I would like to suggest to you that the great breakthroughs in technology actually came
in what we may call more of a partnership-oriented era.
In fact, all the basic technologies in which civilization is built came out of that era.
They weren't as glitzy as what we've got today, although we know that Crete had the first
paved roads in Europe.
It had folks.
It had indoor plumbing.
I mean, it got lost again.
You know, we don't find it again until, you know, much later.
But I mean, they were what we would call, well, they compare very, they're much more
high technology than a lot of the so-called developing worlds today.
Okay?
So let's look at technology in terms of this template.
But the dominator system, I've divided technology really, and that's a whole new session, okay,
by trying to categorize it in terms of different types of technologies.
And one is technologies of domination, of destruction.
And I'd like to suggest to you that technologies of domination and destruction, be it the use
of the greater musculature and the development of this, you know, of the brawn to kill of
the so-called classical warrior or the missile, that that's built into the dominator system.
And that really doesn't have that much to do with technology at all.
And so that the issue for us isn't let's throw out the baby with the bathwater here.
I mean, I don't want to go back technologically.
I mean, I think that we don't want to do that.
What we want to do is to use the most advanced modern technology.
And it almost takes us immediately back to the whole issue of how we use the hallucinogens.
Because we're right back there.
I mean, you know very well that there have been experiments not with some of the synthetic
drugs to use them for mind control.
I mean, that's the ultimate dominator technology, isn't it?
I mean, thou shalt not eat of the tree of knowledge because I've just given you in your
water supply, you know, the chemical that makes you sort of, you know, completely pliable.
Well, I'm saying, no, no, no, no, no.
I made the distinction between hallucinogens and drugs, you know, and, and, and pharmaceutical
produced drugs.
And there are experiments with that.
But I'm saying that let's think of technology with those two templates.
And I'd really like to leave that as my summation.
Can't be done with hallucinogens?
No, it's not.
It's not powerful dialogue.
The partnership situation would be democratic.
Yes.
And of course the other autocratic.
And autarkic.
And the financial, the financial infrastructure would be, one would be laissez faire, private
ownership, you know, and the other would be the private ownership.
The other would be share.
Well, there would be degrees.
And you might say capitalism is socialism.
Well, it's somewhat oversimplified, but certainly a more equitable distribution of wealth, wouldn't
you say?
And an abandonment of the notion of private property.
Boom.
What do you say?
No more.
Well, see, I don't, I don't.
They kill the Pope, they say.
I, I.
It ends in two months.
Instead of ending in two months, could we end just almost on time?
Yes.
Oh, I thought we just had the summer.
This night.
Now they've got a few more moments.
Well, it seems we moved around this afternoon.
There's a great concern as to how to realize this in the here and now, one on one, which
is encouraging, because otherwise it remains an abstraction.
Bringing these models forward into the present isn't easy, because the context for over a
thousand or more years has been set by the dominator culture.
Nevertheless, what we have going for us is that the partnership way of thinking is really
scripted into the bones of the planet.
This is how it's always been done.
This is how nature does it.
The Darwinian model of nature that we've inherited from the 19th century is simply another dominator
fiction used to reinforce dominator mechanisms.
The fact is that what nature really maximizes is cooperation, integration, and mutuality
of support and relationship.
What we're really trying to do, what becoming post-historical means, I think, is removing
the veil between ourselves and nature that the historical experience has raised, because
the historical experience has been an alienating experience, has caused our perceptions to
rise to the mere surfaces of things and our feelings to be completely undercut and invalidated.
What we have to do is feed more deeply into the context of being and the situation in
which we find ourselves, and to see that we are of it.
It's a seamless web.
The dynamics that rule the biological and natural world are the dynamics that are going
to work for us.
We didn't fall here out of the sky.
We weren't made by a jealous god who set us loose in a kind of reservation.
We are of the stuff of this place, and its dynamics can be our dynamics.
The problem is one of awareness, realization, recovery of this perception, sharing it, revivifying
it, and realizing it.
That's all.
I have a real need to clarify something.
I really have a need to clarify the private property issue, because I really don't equate
the partnership model with the evolution of private property, and I want to really clarify
that.
I think that it's much more complex than that, and that as I speak in the "The Talisman of
the Way" that what is going to be emerging, I hope, is a whole new economic model where
we put in central value the caring work that has traditionally, of course, been relegated
to women and to so-called effeminate men.
We have that opportunity now as we move from industrial to post-industrial society, because
we have to redefine what is productive work.
And I really wanted to leave it with this idea that I think we're going into a post-capitalist
and post-socialist era.
Forgive me, I don't need to have the last word, but I did want to say that.
Well, I'll have the first word tomorrow.
This is KPFK Los Angeles.
We have been listening to the evening of the first day of the seminar "Man and Woman at
the End of History" with Terrence McKenna and Rianne Eisler.
Rianne Eisler is the author of the current book, "The Chalice and the Blade," which has
been highly recommended by Helen Caldicott and Dan Ellsberg and Terrence McKenna and
Ashley Montague.
Ashley Montague said, anthropologist said, "It's the most important book since the origin
of species" by Charles Darwin.
So that would be the most important book in about 140 years, which, well, that's heavy
praise indeed.
"The Chalice and the Blade."
We will continue with the second day of the seminar next Tuesday night, Wednesday morning
at midnight on Earth Tuesday.
I'd like to thank two subscribers, by the way, Marlon Rojas of Los Angeles and Mick
Liddell of Northridge.
And Marlon has not subscribed for a while, but he's back, and Mick is a starving musician.
I know a Mick who's not a starving musician.
Anyway, he's subscribing for McKenna, Johnny Otis, Alan Watts, Roy, and Reggae.
Terrence McKenna, oh, the tapes and Terrence's appearance in Los Angeles, which is now not
two months away, not three months away, not two months away, not a month away, ten days,
a week from Saturday.
Terrence is going to be in town.
More about that in a minute.
The tapes of "Man and Woman at the End of History."
This is a set of, sorry for the squeaky book, this is a set of five cassettes, and they
are available from the Ojai Foundation Wild Store.
I believe the set of five is $40, "Man and Woman at the End of History."
Their address and phone, if they answer the phone, I guess they do, is Ojai Foundation,
Post Office Box 1620, Box 1620, Ojai, California, 93023, the Ojai Foundation, Box 1620, Ojai,
California, 93023, and again the seminar is "Man and Woman at the End of History."
The phone number of the Ojai Foundation, area code 805-646-8343, area code 805-646-8343.
Man Woman (Part 2)
The monumental seminar which we started last week with Terrence McKenna and
Rianne Eisler entitled Man and Woman at the End of History. We worked our way up
to get about a third about a third of the seminar last week and we'll do
another big chunk tonight as our Earth Tuesday program. Man and Woman at the End
of History took place at the Ojai Foundation in June and the description of
the seminar is, "Thus, this seminar examines how one of the most fundamental human
relationships, that between male and female, shapes our relationship to
technology and ultimately to culture and nature. We will look at the forms of
relationships between women and men in the shift from a society based on
domination to one based on partnership. This is an exploration of how feminism,
technology, and the telling of a new story will contribute to rescuing us
from history. Rianne Eisler is an internationally known scholar, social
activist, futurist, and author of The Chalice and the Blade, which I add has
been extolled by Terrence McKenna, Daniel Ellsberg, Helen Caldicott, and Ashley
Montague, among others. The Chalice and the Blade. She is co-director of the
Center for Partnership Studies and a member of the General Evolution Research
Group, a multinational group of scientists concerned with the social
relevance of new theories and discoveries. Terrence McKenna has spent
25 years researching philosophy, shamanism, and ethno-pharmacology. He is
co-author of The Invisible Landscape and co-founder of Botanical Dimensions, a
nonprofit refuge for endangered and rare plant species. So we will get right to
the seminar. There has been a break and the gang is gathering at the end of
the first break. KPFK Los Angeles. Shall we take up where we left off or start
somewhere else? Yes. Well as I recall at the close of the morning what we had
come to was talking about the primacy of the shamanic experience and where it
fell as a causal factor into the genesis of partnership society and its
dissolution into dominator society. To me that's tied up with, and I indicated this
at the end of the morning, with the issue of the primacy of personal felt
experience and that this is what, this is the cultural domain over which the turf
war is fought between the dominator and the partnership way of thinking about
things. Empowering ourselves through immersion in the felt moment is the
partnership way of being. It is immediate, it is emotional, it is translinguistic
and it feeds itself, it nourishes. The other way of relating to experience is
through a set of canonical abstractions that are the unique property of a
professional class that speaks a special language that the rest of us don't
understand. And for millennia at least beginning with classical Greece this has
been how we in the West have done it. The mistake you see was when the Greeks
stopped being fishermen and pulled their boats up on the sand and began to talk
philosophy that that cut them off from the felt presence of immediate
experience. Are you agreeing or do you need help?
So partnership is revivifying immediate experience. Well then what are the
limits of immediate experience? And this leads in my mind directly to the
question of the psychedelic plans. It is possible to go from birth to the grave
without ever having a psychedelic experience but it's also to do make that
same pilgrimage and never have a sexual experience. Well since the center of my
ethos is empowering the felt presence of the immediate to me those things are
abomination that withholding of involvement in the parameters of what
one can know but more importantly what one can feel and this is a hard thing to
put across in the present milieu because believe it or not very few people have
had the psychedelic experience the shamanically centered thousand volt
center of the mandala experience and it doesn't it isn't about who has taken
drugs and who has not I constantly talk to people who where by careful
questioning you can satisfy yourself that though they've taken ten different
kinds of drugs multiples of times they never actually touched the pith essence
of the experience because it the drugs the plants are not a sine qua non they
are necessary but not sufficient what is also necessary is a good heart clear
intention and a setting which reinforces and focuses what is being attempted but
to me the big news I wonder if the back will go now last time I didn't mention
it and then I swore you know I should mention if your world is falling apart
all around you just keep going anyway to me the really big news is that this
there is this dimension of reality that is accessible to ever 90% of everyone in
some form or another but that is secret because of the need in this culture to
preserve sort of this flat earth myth it isn't a flat earth but an a mute nature
that's the myth that the dominator culture must keep in place
Sartre actually said this he said nature is mute therefore the world gives no
compass for the formation of human ethics this is psychosis this kind of
talk because nature is not mute you need only have ears to hear and the ears to
hear the message of nature are the practices and techniques of ecstatic
shamanism which is still alive and well
in the Amazon in Indonesia in Southeast Asia it has only been lost to us as we've
made this paragraph nation into a dominant fantasy about nature I mean
Rian mentioned about nature and I think it's a very important thing to think about
the nation into a dominant fantasy about nature I mean Rian mentioned this this
morning the conquest of space smashing the atom all of these metaphors of
violence and unrestrained domination as though somehow nature has to be violated
to be understood my brother whom some of you know I'm sure is a brilliant
neurochemist and biochemist said something to me once which has stuck with
me he said they build enormous atom smashers and instruments for studying
high energy in nature but it's perfectly obvious that the most interesting things
in nature go on at voltages considerably below that of a flashlight battery in
leaves in organs in fertilized eggs and sperms and spores and these are the
subtle processes in nature what 2,000 years of pursuing a dominator theory and
trying to understand nature has brought us to is the potential for nuclear
Armageddon and an inability to solve the three-body problem which means
essentially we have remained in an extremely infantile situation with
regard to the living state and the living state is the precondition of our
being this is why I think Rupert's work is so important he offers a new
understanding of the living state and upon that new biology that new empowering
of life to be perceived as what it is I think there will be a new sociology that
will empower us to see ourselves as we are and as we can be so that's why I
think the psychedelic experience is so important because it sets the parameters
of possible immediate experience and it's been sold back to us in vitiated
form by every tin horn guru since the last glaciation so what they're what
they're selling is you know their interpretations their metaphors their
poetry imposed upon it and uh rian has brought me close to seeing this that the
real news is that it is within us that we need not genuflect to these
hierarchies which actually play havoc with the truth that is there to be
perceived it's uh it's not a matter of seeking the answer it's about facing
facing it and this means nature which is the goddess which is the feminine which
is the symbiotic and partnership ground out of which humanity comes men and
women you might respond to that oh you're not serious
you touch you're like fireworks like those of us today you just illuminate
so many things so quickly and then pass from one to the other
but i will do it in my own non-linear fashion
um i guess since you end it with the goddess
i would like to begin with the goddess i had requested that somebody
bring a book uh do we have it here the tellers in the blade and i forgot
you have a copy because on the cover is a a picture and sometimes a picture
can speak louder than a thousand words this is just one
of thousands and thousands and thousands of figurines not all of them look like
this i want to make that very clear but she
happens to manifest something that i think is very
important in terms of our conversation and our celebration here because what
she if you look at her i think you can see
her because of the great you know contrast with the red if you
first look at her you can see of course the breasts and that you know that's
female but actually the shape is phallic isn't
it so she's androgynous isn't she and then
the other thing that you see if you look at her very closely she has
a beak she's a bird goddess she's part animal of course the angels
are the descendants of the bird goddess she has leaves too and she's part plant
not in this picture uh and that's a very interesting thing because as a matter of
fact there are many incisions on many of the and early language early
early writing if you will uh i guess one of my favorites is is the
cross i want to tell you about the cross because we're talking about different
meanings of different things of different basic symbols including the
symbol of shamanism depending on which of these two
possibilities for us these two marvels which are abstractions of course we
orient to it's very interesting because many of the early figures of the goddess
had insights in them the cross but it was in the
very often it was like the x form of the cross and what it stood for of course
was the unity the various points of the compass
because these people were very sophisticated astronomically as you
probably have surmised any of you who have looked at stonehenge
reproductions for example but even if you go back way into the paleolithic 20,000
years ago they were already into some really remarkable uh record-keeping
some of it may have been as a matter of fact begun with women's menstrual
circles cycles i think that's that arresting fact that blood the life-giving
blood comes must have really inspired some women to
try to figure out when was this when would this
essentially uh supernaturally then be experienced again so but i want to stay
with the cross uh then later on and in egyptian
hieroglyphics the cross is still you know a symbol of life but when you
move into the dominator era which you begin to
find and you find it way before the romans and way before the crucifixion
you find that the aetherians had this
lovely habit of impaling people on crosses you see neglect
felieza whole you know i mean this whole
panorama of the whole city practically impaled i
mean just brutality so the cross became what it became not a
symbol of life and regeneration but it became a symbol
of brutal death and of course then comes the early
christianity jesus preaching a partnership spirituality associating
freely with women violating even in the official gospels
you find this of course his disciples marveling
that he associates with women and with no one else present like the woman at the
will you know i mean how many is iran you
can probably get killed for doing that and so it was in this very rigidly male
dominant uh you know very heroic a violent society
that he was you know challenging and he broke those
taboos and he preached partnership and of course what we do uh in these
hybrid societies the women are ignored basically and
ridiculed and forget it but the men are usually crucified and canonized
and so well you kill them and then you say oh weren't they wonderful martin
luther king gandhi you know i mean oh so that's you know so
of course you know he he gets crucified on a cross but early
christianity tries to again revive the old symbolism doesn't it
of the cross as a symbol not only of lying on this awful thing but the old
symbolism of life and regeneration rebirth the
rebirth and of course christianity obviously
is a very direct descendant of the old religion only a very interesting
thing happened along the way folks which is that the great mother you know
the goddess well at first she was dropped completely
and then when the troubadour movement and this was a time of tremendous
partnership resurgence and i we don't have time for it but it's
very very fascinating because the troubadour courtly love
has some relationship to tantric yoga and we won't go into that but i mean i
just want to leave you with that because it's really extraordinary the
commonalities we begin to see but the troubadours
introduced this thing called mariology which the church
authorities say this is unheard of it has never been heard of well not since
it was a revival of the ancient worship of the goddess and the people danced in
the streets of leon you know when the church finally
co-opted it and said okay folks we'll accept it
but she is now the only mortal figure in the holy family so we've got this
real absurdity of a holy family with a divine father and a divine son and
some parvenu you know this woman who just
happens to come along right so we maintain the dominator
character and of course that went along with what then the cross again becomes
the the cross as a symbol of the crusade of the inquisition it again really truly
becomes a symbol not of life and the love of life
and of regeneration but of death and the ku ku ku ku kan
with its white cross is a very very good modern illustration
and the reason i think i went through this with you is not only because
intrinsically it's so interesting to really reclaim some of our basic and
ancient symbols because all of these symbols can have so
many meanings is what i'm really trying to say depending
on what prism we use for it but to really need into perhaps a look at
shamanism from that perspective because i have
sort of a sense about the shamanic experience that we're talking
about a number of experiences uh and and and and i feel sort of
the need to say again that i feel that there are many paths
to what i don't even know that we need to call it the shamanic experience
because shamanism per se as you pointed out is the healer
you know that is the healing function and it may mean
not only physical healing but spiritual healing which we are now rediscovering
folks it's related you know the ancients kind of
understood that but now we're beginning to understand you know with holistic
medicine that you know that the two go together that
you know nature and spirituality are are related
perhaps we can speak about it as the ecstatic experience
uh the experience of gnosis and i would say that there are many paths
to the experience of gnosis that the use of nature
uh involves not only the use of plants but the use of even our own breath
which is a way you know through meditation it involves sexual
you know catholic yoga has the remnants of what i think was
a view of sex a sacrament uh still in it but of course it's become
very male-centered you know everything is he gets access to
the to shakti which is of course you know the creative force the goddess
through the woman but somehow she's become this passive agent of the whole
thing but go ahead i'm very little the god is
very big it has a tiny little woman on it
and isn't that amazing because you see shakti of course is if the whole concept
is that you have access well look i mean the the vulva the
vagina was sacred in the paleolithic you see the what we call the inverted
triangle and it's sacred and you see that in indian iconography
so yes i mean this was you know the idea that that this is a cunt
you know our worst and most contentious were word
would have been such blasphemy as it should be
again to us we have to reclaim uh really the spirituality of our
sexuality but i think the sexual experience can be
not always you know i mean it doesn't mean that it's going to be very serious
and sound all the time either but it can also be another avenue that is a natural
avenue so i would like to perhaps put this in
the context of of larger past and of course we all
know about the past of having that aha experience of the
oneness through fasting uh through chanting through all kinds of
hypnotic things but there's no question in my mind that
uh the plant experience is one of the quickest
and one of the most powerful avenues but the real issue and i want to really
talk about it uh i was talking to to you earlier uh i want to put it in the
modern context in the 60s because that's a very important case
history for us and we must learn if we don't if we don't want to learn from the
past we really are in deep trouble what happened in the 60s
as you know was that yes that the use of hallucinogen was part of
this awakening you know the flower children the counterculture
but then some really dreadful things happened
and what happened of course was the corruption
of the drug culture as again the opiate of the people
the politics the true politics in the sense of transformation not republican
democrat or you know or or or or reydan or you know whatever
but the true politics of transformation from the dominator to the partnership
society got completely co-opted didn't it through the drug experience and
historically the use of opiates for example
in china is a very vivid example but hashish you know you name it you've got
it has literally been a way to get people to
accept the most miserable the most virulent the
most brutal of of oppression from their overlords so i i think that
it's so important if we're talking about this as a
technology that it can be a technology of domination
just as easily as it can be a technology of actualization and i'm not going to
dispute this what you're saying that some of the natural
plants are less likely to be used that way that
it's mostly the chemical ones but i'm not 100 sure because look at the opiate
well i don't think opium was really a problem
uh number one until the british as a matter of state policy manipulated
opium production in the far east and then secondly until the
invention of morphine and the family of synthetics
i mean opium use as you mentioned goes back
to minoan times and probably earlier no we have a remarkable ability to
pervert and i think it was ludwig van
bertalanzi one of the founders of general systems theory who said
people are not machines but in every situation where they are
offered the opportunity to behave like machines
they will so behave we have to be this maybe brings up something we should talk
about because it was requested and it seems germane here
and this is the problem of addiction and habit and addiction is
merely a special type of habit and i think we can agree that habit in
all forms kills what we want
to bring to flower in life because as a habit sets in attention can
go elsewhere and then that part of life is somehow
on automatic it has become a machine-like function so
we are now being told that we're in in the midst of a tremendous political
crisis that goes under the banner of the drug
problem but the drug problem is an addiction
problem and the addiction is in my mind the addiction of intelligence
agencies to vast amounts of untraceable money
that this is the addiction which drives the global
drug problem but of course it is true that that there are chemical
dependencies and this is a very interesting thing
about human beings uh something and i'll talk about this a
bit more tomorrow but something about our our ability to be omnivorous
to eat all kinds of things has lain us open to
perhaps manipulation is too strong a word but certainly to
evolutionarily selective pressures that are not
ordinarily present because you know if you
most animals eat a few foods many animals eat only one food our
ability to be omnivorous has exposed us over the last four or five
million years to a vast number of mutagenic
and synergistic compounds that may have been responsible for such
things as the prolongation of adolescence in our
species the way in which lactation occurs
uh a number of physiological factors in our makeup that we take for granted
may be fairly recent acquisitions having to do with our omnivorous diet
and drugs come into this at some point too
because for instance in the case of psilocybin
very small amounts of psilocybin in the diet
are not detectable at all as a psychic as a psychological impression
but tests have shown that very small amounts of psilocybin in the diet
confer increased visual acuity well you don't have to have studied too
much evolutionary biology to know that if you have a population of animals and
something in the food chain is increasing the visual acuity of some of
them those animals are going to have a more
successful reproductive strategy than their competitors
and that trait will be reinforced and strengthened
so we have been sculpted by nature through our foraging habits and in and
rian stressed the notion of template and i
think that's very important human beings are templated out of nature
we have been shaped by unusual evolutionary
forces and when you look at us we clearly play an unusual evolutionary
role we are some kind of trigger species
for mode shifts that affect the entire planet and
if you take the notion of gaia seriously and don't simply think of gaia if you
don't simply replace the old man with the long white
beard with a beautiful young woman as an
abstraction but actually try to what is gaia gaia is the set of
integrated informational control systems which regulate and
maintain and stabilize all life and all biological processes on this
planet and the way this is done is through
chemical messengers enzymes stimulants depressants
enhancers all of these things push and pull on the morphogenetic field
in which everything on the planet is bound to me the great miracle on this
planet is us we are the great
unlikelihood if this planet were as it was even five million years ago
darwinian mechanics properly modified would be sufficient to account
for what was present natural ecosystems animals in competitive and adaptive
relationship but we really are as alien as an alien spacecraft would be
we are the great imponderable here and i think that nature is at play
with itself and is calling out of the primates
a gene swarm that is in self-reflection of what is otherwise a planetary
intent and that's why we feel why our hearts are so
open to these ineffable emotions about destiny and transformation
and to someone this morning asked about history
and what was it good for
it's a the long turn of the spiral you know the prodigal
sun is somehow in a better position for having made the peregrination
the journey into alienation and then returns
enriched to the tribal encampment i think of european civilization as a
prodigal phenomenon but a prodigal phenomenon that
will be returned redeemed when we return to the tribal
societies we split away from six seven thousand years ago but return
now with a tremendous empowering knowledge
of how to realize the the shamanic dream but i don't see this as a product of
ego of decisions made by far-seeing men and women it's much more like a
dance it is a dance to which we respond
in our souls and often we don't understand
why we do the things that we do but ultimately um
as rian said it's the unweaving and re-weaving
of a tapestry into a finer clearer pattern and to
to return this to the subject of addiction and how it fits in
addiction is falling away from clarity falling away from the felt presence of
the moment and everything addicts
and everything must therefore be viewed with
a certain amount of wry suspicion i think we didn't get where we were
by making unfounded assumptions we got to this place by being
very careful where we put our attention and i think we've done
rather well there's the kind of denigration of the historical process
but that's if you come from the school that believes we're fallen angels
if you come from the school that believes we're risen
eight then we haven't done too badly
a little further on addiction what i've noticed in
in working with that is that addiction keeps away from
registering necessary feedback and just collecting
that's right that's exactly it and culture is an addiction
uh that's why i maintain in this the question of the psychedelics we have to
define these things operationally and really the psychedelics are the
enzymes which dissolve habitual behavior patterns
and return us to a tabula rasa where then
new instructions can be etched in and new pathways explored that's the reason
that the psychedelics are so unsettling to the establishment
because they are not part of the quote-unquote drug problem
because they involve very small numbers of people and very small amounts of
money but very big ideas and very large
willingness to question the idols of the tribe
and that's much more unsettling than a few illicit
millionaires
i'm just interested because you started out by talking about the
importance of context and the importance of the proper
whatever proper means but but in order to have that notice experience
and if we're living in the midst of because i don't know about whether or
not the partnership ever existed in purity
you were saying it was an ideal and there was probably my sense of it
because i've done that much reading but my sense based on what i know about
myself and what i've seen around me the way people are there was probably i
think always a mixture of dominance relationships and partnership
relationships and that you could have a balance that
was predominantly partners partnership and a balance that was predominantly
something else and it's i don't know because i've never
seen it you know where people were exclusively working in partnership but
to get back to context how can you the co-opting team such a
natural thing because we live in a dominant
paradigm so that if you're going to do psychedelics and dissolve
say your own your own ego and defenses and stuff like that what are
you going to put in its place without having seen the model
what kind of context can you construct for yourself so that you're doing that
and you can be pretty safely and the reason i'm asking is because i've seen
people well-intentioned people who intended
only to dissolve their ego so that they could be something better
become something very dysfunctional and so
that's why i'm asking the question and i wonder if you would address that
context issue is it to me whoever would like to
talk about it i think it needs to be brought up well maybe we both have
something to say uh leon mentioned the 60s as a less than
ideal situation as it turned out
if you look back at the literature of the underground
in the 60s certain things that we take completely for granted are totally
absent one of them is any sense of the
historical context of of hallucinogenic and shamanic ecstasy
the there is no talk of shamanism there is a little bit of talk about peyote but
no real awareness that those people in the
1960s thought they were discovering something brand new
not the oldest religion in the world the way we create a context
to address your question is by creating a community
we can advance no faster than the envelope of language in which we are
embedded and the material manifestation of our
linguistic sphere is our our affinity group our
community that's why i think one of the most
important things about these kinds of get-togethers
is for you people to see and recognize each other because
it's the awareness of these things is still
a very closely held thing and you should recognize in each other your affinity
group you are self-selected by yourselves to be here today and
in the spirit of the partnership and ignoring
the the hierarchy it is not i mean i abhor
all this guru worship and all this stuff because it's just a bunch of crap you
know nobody knows anything more than anybody else
transformation is a community project it can't be anything else
no i give them that you agree on you might want to say something yes i i do
want to say well i of course agree with you completely
that the creation of community is essential but i would define community
more broadly uh in the sense that
it is not enough that we have our little islands if you will
because in order to survive in the quote real world
uh we either change that world or we're constantly being pulled into
dominator modes of thinking and of rationalizing what we
do and of behaving so that's the first point uh i would like
to say that there are some very clear strategies
that i think are very very important one of them
it has been until now uh generally sort of been sort of
as being perhaps impractical it relates to this whole idea of education but
education on a far deeper level than what we've often talked about it and
of course it also relates to this whole notion of morphogenetic
fields of a kind of a telepathic
kind of thing that happens with images now i think that's one of the most
important tasks that we have before us now and we are
all creative people i mean our creativity really the dominator
model and creativity are antithetical to each other so the the image of the
starving artist is very appropriate you know for the for the dominator model
very inappropriate you know for for a for a society
that values you know the creativity that would be more of a partnership society
is for us to create images that are not just
i think the age of protest you know of being against
uh i met a lovely young woman 16 year old
young woman and she said when i read the chalice in the blade i go to a school
where the kids are always protesting against everything
and i suddenly realized that what they're protesting against is the
dominator system and that what we really have to do is to
move beyond that and to begin to create the images
that are appropriate to a partnership society so i'm turning in terms of ideas
in terms of visual images in terms of course of media
the art to begin to replace to to because if you go into this is one of the
things with the use of you know what what is in your imagination if your
imagination is so overcrowded with dominator images
are you really going to be able to surface
uh you know and have this confirmation so i think that's a very practical thing
those of you who are in the media take it very very seriously please
and it's fun anyway to work this way and i think if some of you are in the media
i spent an evening with some of the hollywood people recently
basically what we were talking about was this idea
that now is the time because people at a certain point of addiction get to
saturation and the addiction to violence and to
depersonalize you know mechanical sex and you know i
mean i think we've gotten to the point where people are just sort of like
oh my god they're hungry for something else this is our moment
this is our opportunity so images are extremely important
and i don't mean because we live by stories that's another thing
people live by stories we don't i mean science tells us stories too
and the selfish selfish gene story which is an upstate of course of
original sin you know i mean what else is new you know now it isn't us but it's
the you know it's the gene somehow the selfish thing
uh we we you know we live by these stories so it's up to us to bring out
new stories and the stories can be from science it's very important that they be
from science science from biology that are showing us that in the body
for example there's if you will much more partnership much more cooperation
going on then there is hierarchy you know for the
organisms you know you can deliver and the heart i mean they're not just by
themselves it all sort of interconnects and interrelates
the brain is in charge now the oxygen goes to the brain well the
oxygen goes to the brain but is the brain in charge or is the
brain part of a larger neurological system that really is a transmitter
and also an imager for us i mean i think that there's much more
than the brain being you know the general in charge here that's the
picture we've been given of course right because it sticks with the pyramid model
but is it the brain or just i mean we've been talking about
really gnosis knowledge is that really coming from the brain
or is that something else some other receptor that we have is the brain
perhaps a receptor a transmitter a a converter a creative agent rather
than a general i prefer that image i think it's more
accurate and i think if you talk to people today
who are doing the work with the brain they'll probably move more towards you
know the reality of that second image and the other thing i hate to say it to
you people but we do have to talk about economics
i mean it's all very well to talk about the you know about the mystical
experience and about imagery but we have to restructure we have to
restructure and we have to restructure the whole
darn planet uh so that it's more of a partnership and
that doesn't mean that there won't be some people who have more and some
people who have less but it's absolutely inexcusable with our
level of technological development including birth control technologies
to have the kind of idiocy but you see the lunacy
is part of the dominator system because it's not by accident
that the most rigidly dominator systems are the ones who are so
rabidly against family planning who are so rabidly against reproductive freedom
for women who are so rabidly against any other role
for women any other definition for women other than basically male controlled
technologies of reproduction you know breeders breeders preferably of men's
men's sons i mean that's that doesn't have to be right
so it's really an excuse the most advanced technology
to move into a partnership era is one of the most extraordinary challenges
and i think that that's really what this is about it is not just to sit
and contemplate ourselves but to actually use this in an action mode
too and putting out important ideas is very important too i'm not
that's part of the action i'm sorry i just want to go back to
the 60s for a minute you uh you said that you thought that drugs
the drug culture got co-opted or yes the culture got co-opted by drugs
it seems to me that in the 60s the certain drugs again to not just talking
about drugs generically but certain drugs
have more to do with uh creating a sense of partnership than anything that i know
of at least in my lifetime to my own direct experiences
study reading anything direct drug experiences seemed
to lead to a very radical change of mentality of a massive group of people
and i think that's a mistake to think that
those drugs that there was anything wrong or anything really weird happened
regarding those particular drugs there were new drugs that came in cocaine came
in um which is interesting to me because it
seemed to change it became a very that seemed very much in that dominant
model but marijuana and um the mushrooms lsd they seemed very much
in the partnership model and seemed to perpetuate that and
i'm glad you made that distinction because clearly all of us who lived
through the 60s knew that the use of grass and the use of the
hallucinogen it was a community building it was really uh to a very large
expensive building of partnership and that is not what i meant what i
meant was that but part of it was the cocaine
coming in but part of it was also lsd i think i
mean it was just the whole idea of shifting from drug as a revelation
experience as a transformation experience to one
that has a terrific function in the dominator society which is the addictive
which is to keep you right there without taking any action
that is what i meant and i'm glad you clarified that
yes i think uh what reared its ugly head and shot down the 1960s was
profit and the fact that the i don't i have no problem with lsd
per se but it has one quality which really flaws this and that is that a
single chemist in his basement can produce
millions and millions of doses that immediately raises it to the level of a
social menace because when you talk about millions of
doses of a deconditioning agent it means you're
going head to head with the tough guys and
and also when you're talking about being a single person being able to make
millions of doses then you're talking about multiple
millions of dollars and immediately the possibility of keeping things from
getting out of hand is i think really diminished the key
is is uh plant compounds and substances which have inherent
trickle factors in them where you can never get too much together at any one
time and nobody can ever get too rich and
everything then the mystery stays this is the plants are
like this and this keeps them going but i wanted to
say something more about this context and sort of
not in great detail and semi tongue in cheek
but to show you how how context works and how dominator
society both insidiously invades our conception of things and also might be
equally insidiously plotted against
one of the things that we take utterly for granted i think
is the calendar we live in a calendar of 365 days
it's a solar calendar that means that relative to the fixed stars the
equimach deal and so sticile points are fixed and
this is a lie or it perpetuates the misconception
it perpetuates the conception that things endure and that flux
is an illusion if the solar calendar has built into it deep propagandistic
assumptions in favor of the dominator model
and to see what i mean just imagine however seriously
you care to that we change the calendar to a calendar with a day length
of 384 days so that our year was 13
lunations and had 19 more days in it than the solar year if we were to
adopt a calendar like this all holidays and great festivals
would do what is called precessing they would move 19 days a year so that
when you were a child you would recall christmases in winter
but you would recall that in your adolescence christmas
fell in summer and so forth and every 19 years the great festivals would return
to where they had been relative to the fixed stars well this may seem
uh fairly abstract and removed from common experience
but in fact because this is sort of the great frame
in which all the other little frames are suspended
we operate at a tremendous disadvantage because we are embedded in a patriarchal
solar calendar which reinforces the false notion of permanence and stability
the yiqing hexagram 49 is the hexagram revolution and you might turn to it
expecting a treatise on courtly politics or something like that but what you
actually read there is the news that the magician is a
calendar maker a strange notion but
precisely addressing what i'm trying to say that this is one of the ways in
which we might revision our world to accentuate flux
and flow and change and the transience and the coming to be
and the falling away rather than this constipated
death denying paternalistic solar kind of point of view so that's one
notion of how context might change and it's an
interesting idea it's not illegal to advocate
calendrical reform uh and it's probably not ever occurred to
anyone but believe me in pre-history and in
early chinese history tremendous battles were fought and these
were issues of great importance because the founders of new dynasties
understood that the way to establish their reigns
was to sweep away all previous calendrical conceptions and establish a
zero year and then create in that context
all the sub contexts of their political agenda
it's the new order and i think that that's so interesting because we are of
course uh well many of us and i'm sure many of
us here are going back to the celebration of some of the
most ancient festivals the nature festivals the solstices
the equinoxes the full moon the young moon
uh these were the most ancient holy days because they were congruent with the
rhythm of nature and i think you're quite right what the
solar calendar does it sort of nullifies that whole cyclic spiral quality
of life but i want to get back in it for a moment in that context
to the issue of the use of psychedelics because
the use of them as a medium through carefully thought through
and reconstituted uh certainly going back to some of its ancient roots
as we're doing here you know with some of the music but also adapting it for
for today and for tomorrow that and also that really relates to the
whole issue of calendar too i mean to the issue of when when are the
times of the year when you do this because i regardless of
anything else if we are to engage in this practice
uh on a random and very frequent basis we're not going to have a very
productive uh economy i mean it's just a very simple
equation you know because it's sort of easy to watch the waves then
and to really not be creative in you know so it's an issue i think we have to
address that issue don't we and it goes with the issue of calendar it goes with
the issue of ritual i mean these things are all interconnected
yes your remarks make me think of something omar stewart
said who was a botanist an anthropologist and
i don't know how serious he was but he felt that
the great transition in plant consciousness came with the invention of
agriculture that the hunting peoples uh could take
the ecstatic hallucinogens because you could sleep in the next day
but once you got into agriculture corn became the important plant and there
was no more getting stoned because everybody had to get up early and
get out there and hold the corner oh but we don't have to get up early and
hold the corn today does that mean we can get stoned
i mean there is there is something there is something to it being a holy thing
no i agree and a second mental thing and that really relates to holy days
and to this whole notion of it being done within a context
that we have to create i mean we have to do nothing more or less than to create a
culture but fortunately we have a lot of the
strands to work with yes a successful uh psychedelic trip
absolutely kills the desire to do it again very soon
yes it's a self-limiting experience and the way to know
whether you're doing it correctly or not is
if what you're doing doesn't make you afraid
you're not doing it right on that note um we might want to think about the 10
minute uh stretch and wonderful
thank you
so we thought uh for this closing session this afternoon
that we would hope to hear from you and uh
i vow to give shorter answers we've made a pact here
so we want to hear from you i just want to make one quick suggestion for
to hear it addressed at some point because i know that some people are
curious about this and that is uh not everybody may know that both of
you are involved in wonderful relationships
probably modeled for marital
and uh there might be a few words you could say about
just the certainly the the issue of dominator versus partnership comes up in
marriages and relationships constantly and how we can take some of these really
wonderful ideas in in terms of how we define guy in consciousness and bring it
down to how we get get out of an argument
that might be just how you'd both do it deal with it must be
terribly illuminating
well i'll start
i am uh in a committed long-term relationship many of you know
my partner cat uh we've been together since 1975
we met in 1967 in jerusalem actually but we were on different paths and didn't
really see each other for nine years and we have uh
two children uh fin a boy 10 and kaliya a girl 7
and rianne said yesterday that partnership is preferable because it's
fun it certainly is fun it's also a great
challenge it is the the challenge i think
there's a wonderful saying that addresses the
problem of ego in the dominator situation
it's uh
uzbekistani the same it's that a man may be a fool and not
know it but not if he's married
partnership is a wonderful opportunity for humility
and uh and for seeing oneself as others see them and
well it's everything i can't say enough about it it's the kinyongto it's the
great challenge it drives one to distraction it is
uh it is uh perhaps the transcendental object that
is most personally experienced by each of
us i think it's fair to say that in our
individual lives where magic is most present is in
uh the matter of forming uh partnerships and bonding i mean
you know a typical example is that
you can see a woman across a crowded room
speaking as a man and something passes between you and then later you find out
that well she's the daughter of the corporation president or the
university chancellor and doesn't speak english and is already
married to a french count and so forth and so on but lo and behold
circumstances evolve and uh she divorces the french count
she learns to speak english she gets an apartment across the hall
and this falls into place like magic in fact magic and
so there's a we we can summon this power to the things we care about most and
and what we care about most is uh i think
falling into this uh the dyad i really think that people come in two
pieces and you sort of have to put the pieces
uh together and then you get a curious beast indeed that uh
can maybe ride a longer distance i'm not sure
what's your story
well nice story i'd like to share it with my partner with david do you want to
go first david or should i
okay i'll go first i'll come on down okay
um i uh i started off my partnership with
david only 11 years ago um
and it was it was a miracle is what it was i had a friar marriage
and that was really a very a terrific learning experience i guess once there
was not an unpleasant thing
but it was a classic dominator relationship and we were both miserable
i mean i was really uh getting pretty good at manipulating actually
this is what you have to get to if you're in a dominator relationship
and it really brings out the worst in everybody you know
the guy who's supposed to be the who never you know i mean he never
apologizes he always you know he he knows i mean by golly you know his ego
and of course you know he knows that this isn't working and so he's very
tense about the whole thing you know and he leaves his lawn before you to pick
up on the floor and you hate it and you begin to hate him
and so you start manipulating and so after a while
you know you're both miserable i mean that's really the classic
pattern isn't it that and people stay and the whole difference between dominator
relationships as far as you know heterosexual
long-term relationships and partnership relationships that's the bonding and one
is really coercion i mean well it used to be another don juan you know the story
of jose killing carmen i mean if you dare leave this guy for
somebody else he'll kill you that's a pretty good motivation not to go right
there but um a lot of it of course more more
recently has been economic you know especially for the women you
know they just couldn't get out of this rotten situation so they
kitted themselves and everybody else so now we're starting from scratch right
and we're all saying wait a minute this old stuff has made everybody literally
ill and so i was so blessed i found david
and david found me and we met and he came over for lunch
and he never went home
actually he did go home because i had an appointment with an accountant that
afternoon and i had told him that i was going to go
to a movie uh that evening and he said to me
you really have to go to that movie i said no i don't have to go
so he came back and i i have to share something with you which is sort of
funny i was so scared of getting married again
because getting married you know especially in my generation you carry
that dominator luggage of wife, husband you know and that programming
so we waited 10 years and we finally got married
and it was wonderful because it was the three of us
we were married by a woman which was really terrific experience i mean just
the three of us and she was a gorgeous wonderful woman
wearing this beautiful robe these colorful robes and we all cried
and david read me his poetry and i read him my vows
and it was a sacred moment for us and so we do have arguments i mean in case
you're interested a partnership doesn't mean perfect either
but but we also have developed some techniques for working them out
sometimes
why don't i tell you real quickly of the techniques that we use
and then let me share it with you two or three
sort of interesting stories to me centering around how we met because they
seem to have various morals various dimensions of
meaning reality but the tech the technique first i really found this
tremendously useful and it uh it was rian's idea and
it was her uh reinterpretation or reworking of an
idea out of co-counseling and the idea is simply this
contrary to the image that people might like to believe we do have
tremendous conflict because we both only reach the place we
are by being developing really strong egos
strong uh but more than strong egos strong identity
i think there's a difference yeah let's say strong again strong identity
and
yeah
and see just now this is important contextually this is what i wasn't going
to get into because i was thinking to myself
i'm working on an article right now rian has written her half it's called
the partnership society social vision and personal practice she's done social
vision and you've you've heard parts of it i'm
working right now on personal practice and thinking all this through and i
thought to myself shall i share any of this and i thought i don't have it
thought through well enough but i feel i should add this to what i was
going to say on this conflict of strong
identities not egos we're going through this period see
where there's been this traditional male dominant female submissive
relating of the sexes and and in trying to get out of it there's an awful lot of
role reversal where the women are becoming strong
forceful and talk a lot
and the men the men are becoming more submissive and sitting back and taking
it and so on now this is actually if you look at over
this is a necessary part of the transition but the transition only
because if that pattern prevails then we're lost because all you got is the
flip side of the coin once again you've got the woman too dominant talking
calling the shots too much feeling guilty about it that makes her more
even do it even more you've got the man sitting there silent and seething and
seething until he explodes and you know this and this leads to actual violence
physical violence in some cases because the men are
more muscular and so on and but no but it hasn't been my team
no no but i know i'm looking out at the genovature
but so so what i see that we must be moving towards
is not this situation where you've got one partner or the other is the dominant
one and the other one who submits the thing
either the tip off of what's wrong here is when it becomes an inflexible
invariant pattern once you get into it it's a bulk of you already know i'm just
you know i'm just trying to articulate what's gone through the heads of a lot
of you in relationships you discover progressively that there are certain
situations where one party should be dominant because
that particular party knows a hell of a lot more but whatever
it is in that situation than you do and there's other situations where
you've got the expertise you've got the contacts and you're
down with the secret things to be the flexibility and knowing each other
well enough to know when to flip it to the other one and let
the other one take over and so on but we've got to move toward this
situation where you've got not strong and weak or weak and
weak another another another one of these
patterns is the weak and the weak and that's not so bad you know where
people actually admit you know i got imperfections you've got
imperfections let's work together to perfect ourselves
uh it doesn't always work as you know but we've got to work toward that
the partnership society model to me is strong and strong
where you've got two strong identities and
and they work out this you know thing according to the situation
and their relationship with nature with all of nature and all of life is strong
too anyway enough of that that that's sort
of an overall overall thing um
there was something else technique oh co-counseling yeah because this is this
is this is something very practical okay you got these two strong identities
and they've come to the front god both of them are very tempted and
have already regressed already regressed partly into that
monstrous situation the dominator system that's
got them now what we do well actually isn't what we do it's almost invariably
rayon says in effect now look let's have a session and that
makes you to get out of my defensive withdrawal
seething type thing too the routine we both go through is
first you say you're forced to say uh what is it
i always forget what it is uh it comes out of re-evaluation
co-counseling and you start off by saying what's new and good yeah yeah
okay which really brings you to the here and now yeah so you're forced to say
what's new and good
now you may say there's absolutely nothing new and good
the other party says uh-uh you must think of something new and good
so then you think well it's a beautiful day
that fulfills that function then you have to think of what's good about
myself and you say i don't feel that there's
anything good about myself and once again you must think about
something good about yourself and then you say well
i i can play a good harmonica and then and then comes a difficult one in
these quarrel situations what's new and good
about the other person and you know then you come up with well
i think you're pretty or something like that and that fulfills it
then you go into your deep section where you unload you know and you just unload
everything and the sacred rule here the key to this whole method working
the other party cannot interrupt no defensive feedback because once there is
the slightest defensive feedback in this
situation you're right in that argument cycle
you know you said this and i said this and so on you sent
each party unloads and the other one can't say a thing until the wind up
then your wind up is isn't it what we're looking forward to
yeah the wind up is something i'm looking forward to oddly enough by the
time you reach that point you say well something i'm looking
forward to and usually you feel much better and you can really
legitimate look forward to something and both parties do this and if you do
this you'll be absolutely astounded at how it
will improve your relationships and how much
you will actually be building helping to build the floor of the
partnership society in a very practical way how do you figure out who starts
usually you know who starts the unloading usually you know yeah because it's the
person who's really ready to yeah if it's the one with the biggest
build-up it should start
thank you very much let me just share one of them
which was um centering around how we met uh terence was talking about
seeing across the crowded room that phenomena
and the interesting thing that happened to me
was i i had left my first life after a typically you know dominator
unsatisfactory type relationship and so on
and i was lonely and wandering in los angeles and dating
women and thinking gosh there's got to be some simpler way of going through
this process because i'm a psychologist i've had
years with ets and involved in test development so i figure
there'll be some simple test i can develop
so actually i you know i went through the standard
way of thinking you know the list of 300 questions and then it sunk in on me i
can't go out on a date and say don't listen
so i i boiled it all down there it was in psychology if there's a site is there
a psychologist here
well maybe there's somebody out there who knows about the guy named web
unobtrusive measures i thought ah this is something for webs unobtrusive
measures an unobtrusive measure is something very
not seemingly innocuous that tells you an awful lot about the person without a
lot of questions so i boiled it all down to without
going into the reasons i had two questions one was for the idea
one was did you love your father and if the answer was yes say why because
you you had a relationship with okay okay
this is on both sides you know okay the reason is the mother from david
yeah now the reason the reason why this was a profoundly
well-grounded question was my own case my i had a head of ambivalent mother and
so i had grown up with a with a very leery sense toward women i was married
first to a woman who had had a very awful father and she grew up
very very leery of men so that when we had an argument we both depart you know
the message from below was you made a mistake hooking up for that opposite sex
and and so i thought to myself i because that's my background
i must find a woman who had a good relationship and loved her father
then when we get an argument i'll withdraw but she will follow
simple as that but very very good anyway so that was one of my questions
did you love your father and the other one i collapsed
literally everything else and who is your favorite composer
and the answer had to be moser
so i met rihanna and we fell in love almost immediately
and then i thought i've got to try the test
i thought to myself what if she failed i'm madly in love with her i can't
bear to give her up but what if she fails my
and so i was i i held off a week
and finally she uh she happened to mention
just spontaneously something about her father and i thought oh here it comes i
gotta have it and i said
tell me this
how'd you feel about your father
she says well i love my father all right 50 percent you know and then
about another week went by and i said and we were talking about classical music
and i thought oh here it goes and i thought to myself as i asked
started to ask the question i said what if what if she says sebelius who
happened to be my least favorite composer and i said who uh oh by the way who was
your favorite composer and she said Mozart of course
that's not only if i had known that i was being tested
i had not a clue anyway that's not only how we met but that was that's what
locked it
and with that choice of the heart completely legitimized by science
well you know i think that the issue is really uh relates to this whole question
of coercive versus voluntary bonding
um the dominator model it's well think of the whole idea you know of
the first form of slavery that we have archaeologically done
you know documented uh was actually the enslavement of women
from conquered communities even in the bible you know it says
these wonderful directions always supposedly from yahova kill all the
women who have known a man but you know kill everybody as a matter of fact but
only those girl children who have not known a man
you keep for yourself right i mean this is supposed to be god's command to you
but anyway so it was a very coercive kind of situation
if you if you look at it you know from that perspective if women are seen as
property and a lot of what we've seen has been
the coercive bonding but i'm also convinced that given the
tremendous bonding that comes from mutually satisfying
affection through sexual relationships the sharing of the peak experience
and the friendship that is impossible i mean how can you have friendship as a
matter of fact in the moslem dominator marriage
where you live the women live in complete apartheid i mean good morning
you know let's go and you know do it for a few minutes maybe
you'll give me a son and then uh goodbye i mean that's not very
conducive to voluntary bonding is it so i'm very
convinced that this whole issue of monogamy or not monogamy really
uh can only be looked at you know in terms of these two situations
that's not to say that that kind of positive reinforcement you know as
skinder would say you know of the sexual bonding of the
affection of the friendship that would motivate you to want to stick
around uh you know with that one person uh you
know quite a lot uh that that would
necessarily be an exclusive union i don't know that
but i think that there's a lot that in a partnership uh kind of relationship
would really bring people to want to stick around with each other because it's
just more fun and because there are advantages to a
partnership for all kinds of reasons you know bringing up children
but again if we have more of a clan situation where there are you know
more parents for each child so to speak that exclusivity
no longer uh you know becomes the issue i think it's a very complex issue
and the the issue is becoming a very real one today
with the aids epidemic and i want to say something about aids which may
strike you as being rather strange but if you think about it it's very much a
product of traumatic trauma traumatization a
caring of tissue which is really a dominator form of sex
and the rapid spread of it through the homosexual community of course was
largely due to this and the fact that it's spreading like
wildfire in certain parts of africa it has to be related to the genital
mutilation and the scarring and the weakness
of the tissue you know that that builds in as well as some of the really brutal
kind of sexual practices so it's almost like nature giving us some feedback here
that what the sexual revolution is about is not
brutal mechanical you know through everybody and everything in sight
that it's about something about maybe beginning to reclaim sex with sacrament
a little bit and and friendship and bonding and
that's not a moral position it's just simply a way of looking at it
from a perspective that may be more congruent
with what we all kind of would enjoy so that's my answer it's not an absolute
answer
well naturally i think like everyone who's in a
committed relationship i've given this considerable thought and
it seems to me what the tension about monogamy
in modern society can be traced to um or the sense of
perhaps dissatisfaction with monogamy can be traced to a distortion and
betrayal of adolescence and that the problem begins in
adolescence by repressing adolescent sexuality
and this then creates a sense of irrecoverable loss and
and this weird sort of haunting feeling that
you didn't get it right and so life is not being fair to you
and then a a multitude of sexual encounters is looked to as an
answer to this so but i think that monogamy represents
a deepening of bonding into a kind of lifelong project that is
entirely spiritual i mean not that it doesn't have a
physical and an ecstatic and an erotic side but it all is goes together
to create something that should not be expected of adolescence
and should not be preached as the ideal at all stages of life
Man Woman (Part 3)
What would you like to do? Would you like to ask questions?
May I?
Well I would like to ask, all the things you just said, when you saw a warlike aggregation of people, a tribe or whatever, if you looked at how they centralized their ladies, you could see that they should have been very rock-worthy, very kind of way.
And I wonder whether you have seen that in a warlike tribe, or perhaps something different in the shadow of the ladies.
I'll take that first and then you can say something. You put your finger on a very, very important, essential element of the system, of how the dominator system maintains itself.
Regardless of how it really came about, and we talked a little about that yesterday and maybe we'll talk about it more today, what happened subsequently was that the ways of maintaining the system became institutionalized, they became habitual.
And one of the ways of maintaining the system, which may have started with privations, you know, with trauma, if you will, with the kind of thing that Raich called, you know, the things that need to character armor in.
It may have started from natural reasons, you know, environmental reasons, but then it became part of child-rearing.
And it's not accidental that so many of the most warlike of these tribal societies that we still see today practice very barbaric forms of genital mutilation.
Because that's a way of dramatically beginning already, very, very early, you know, these genital mutilation of women.
I don't know how many of you know that millions of women in Africa and many of the Muslim nations have their clitorises cut off.
I mean, we don't like to talk about it, and yet I must talk about it.
Because we must understand that these are not just quaint ethnic customs.
Neither was it the quaint ethnic customs, you know, the foot binding that formed, you know, and really mutilated the foot of Chinese women.
These are all practices that become institutionalized in a dominator system of society and we must recognize them as such.
But of course it was also for males. The original circumcision of males in many of these cultures is really horribly painful.
So yes, from these very extreme forms to less extreme forms, and the fact that today, look, a tremendous partnership trend as Alice Miller, by the way.
Any of you know the work of Alice Miller? She's fabulous and she's put her finger on it.
Because what she talks about is the institutionalization of dominator ways of child-rearing and birth.
Take your time? And birth. And birth. Well that's another subject, I mean, what we've done with birth.
But you see, these are all the ways that we've done it very cleverly to maintain the system, which is killing us.
So it's time to leave them behind. But the thing that happens is that today, look, we no longer say "spare the rod and spoil the child."
We call it child abuse. That is a very powerful partnership trend.
Okay.
Rian, you were about to go into what a leadership structure would be like in a partnership society.
Alright, I find that so fascinating because again, it's emerging.
And you know where it's emerging most visibly? You're going to laugh. It's in the corporate literature.
You pick up Fortune magazine and you find these big articles saying "what we need is a new type of leader."
And what do we need specifically? Well we don't need this guy anymore, you know, the model of the manager as the cop, as the controller.
They're finally discovering that that inhibits creativity.
And productivity, thereby.
We need a leader that can inspire other people to work together in teams.
I mean, it's very, very interesting. I mean, obviously this is preparing the kind of leadership that can provide leadership in a partnership society.
But I really want to say that the two images from the title of my book, The Chalice and the Blade,
to be most visibly and dramatically conceptualized into two very different styles of leadership.
You know, the blade is a leadership for fear. You will enjoy this, or else.
I mean, you better obey, or you'll be punished.
And the chalice is the illicit... the chalice has some remote antiquity, it's the symbol of spiritual leadership, hasn't it?
Of regeneration, of creativity, of transformation, of illumination, of bringing forth in us.
Eliciting in every one of us our greatest creativity, our greatest potential. That is the symbol of that kind of leadership.
Did you talk about the Victorian era, how they raised children as they were taught to be back,
and how that kind of set the world up for World War I and World War II?
Well, you know, that would take another hour, probably, to really go into it.
But there is a fascinating work by a man called Theodore Rojak,
who basically put his finger on what some of these periods of warfare are really about.
And he talks about World War I, and it was really a resurgence of the masculine, close masculine.
Okay, I really have to say masculinity and femininity.
Even what we associate in Jungian terms with the yin and the yang are very much products of dominator stereotypes.
And as we unravel and reweave, we have to leave behind this idea that the feminine is passive and cold and dark.
I mean, consider it for a moment. It doesn't sound very good.
And that the masculine is the active. As a matter of fact, in many of the earlier symbologies, it's quite the opposite.
So we have to untangle the symbols.
But the point of it is that Rojak points out, and has others, that it was a resurgence of the masculine ethos,
and contempt for women, contempt for the feminine.
And so the Victorian era, of course, being a predecessor of that,
but it's much more complicated in the Victorian era, because in the Victorian era,
some of the rejection by women of sex was also a rejection of servitude.
Just as women going into convents in the Middle Ages was a rejection of a form of family organization,
where they were really male chattel.
They were sexual and economic property.
So it's very complicated. I won't go into a lot of detail.
Yes.
Last night, a woman brought up about the inclusion of women as single parents, in case.
I was thinking in terms of the partnership shift and changing mode,
what would you comment on the tendency of women to give up almost entirely on having a male partner as parent,
and for parents, at least in America, male parents to give up on the idea of continuing to nurture their children,
or starting to nurture them once they separate from their mothers?
See, ours is a period, I think, that you'll agree with me, parents, of transition.
It's a period that we would call a period of tremendous systems disequilibrium.
And we know in terms of our own personal history, that for patterns that have been very, very rigid to change,
we have to go through a very painful time very often, as the old patterns begin to disintegrate,
so that they can reform into something new.
And I see a lot of what's happening with the family as fitting into that.
There are both trends towards partnerships and still trends towards a dominated society.
I mean, it's a constant tension between the two right now.
But getting specifically to the issue of the single mother,
I don't think that it's accidental that so many of the young men who have come out in this newer generation,
who are rejecting the old male stereotype to varying degrees, came out of single mother homes,
single family homes, single parent homes, because they did not have that, you know,
"If you cry, your father's going to beat you" kind of thing.
That's just one part of it, you see.
But the real problem, you know, where are the good men?
That's really one of the issues. Well, the good men are in every man.
But they have a tremendous struggle coming out at this time.
And of course the 80s were a tremendously important period of hammering back in again
the ideal of masculinity as the dominator.
So it was a setback in very, very real ways, not just legal, but on the myth of poetic.
And we live by stories. Those stories really set us back.
So I think what I'm saying to you is that this is part of the dislocation that we're seeing.
I think that there will be some kind of regrouping as we move with very, very...
There will continue to be family, but it won't be the procreation-oriented, male-headed,
so-called patriarchal family. We're going to be seeing much more partnership families.
And these units will not only be units of women and men.
It will be also of men and men and women and women, of old people.
So, in other words, family will be redefined in more in terms of the clan, of the extended family,
but again, not the patriarchal clan.
That's as long as we do our work and we make it move in this direction,
because obviously the choice is up to us. It's not going to happen by chance.
Karen, do you want to say something on this, because I think that's such an important subject.
Well, I think you're right that the clan motif is what is gaining ground.
I think the nuclear family was such a theatre of violence for the male ego to exercise itself.
Every man a king, this is the banner under which the nuclear family flies.
Certainly the people in the Amazon that I'm most familiar with,
there are extreme-dominator societies in the Amazon,
and then there are societies that seem to have a more equitable arrangement.
And it always seems to involve a larger social grouping than the family.
As early as the 1950s, Marshall McLuhan was talking about what he called "electronic tribalism",
and this I think is coming to be.
The nuclear family, as it is glorified in the 20th century,
is largely an economic unit created out of 17th and 18th century forces.
So, it is not written "adamantine", it is not in the genes.
It's a very temporary arrangement, while the other, the clan arrangement,
does have a morphogenetic field of millennia.
So I agree with that entirely.
You have many more.
I was curious, when you were talking about the invasion of the king from the north,
why was it that they didn't look at the partnership model and say,
"Well, that looks better than what we have, let's integrate."
And so I have a feeling there's something very insidious in the domino model
that makes it blind to the benefit of change.
I think you've answered your own question.
Yes?
Can I say something about that?
I recently have asked this very same question,
and I have an idea which I'll try out on you,
which is, I think that the trigger event in this scenario that you're asking about
was the domestication of horses.
And that that happening at that time, which it's known that it did happen at that time,
changed the relationship of these peripheral nomadic peoples,
and they suddenly saw opportunity, easy pickings,
and so they mounted horses.
It was an extension of the hunting psychology
and began to be predatory upon these societies.
Before the domestication of the horse, it was unthinkable
because populations could not be rapidly transported
and attacked and successfully overwhelm sedentary populations.
We're going to talk more about technology,
but that's just one of the early instances where it was definitely technology
that tilted events in favour of the dominator as against the partnership society.
I think that's a very important element,
and I'd like to extend it further to suggest that if we talk technology,
we think of the first technology really after foraging is gathering and hunting,
because animals forage, but gathering and hunting do store.
They have containers and they share, which is very, very human, of course.
But then you get this bifurcation, don't you,
of people who become primarily agrarian,
although they do domesticate some animals,
and others who become in the more arid, less hospitable area,
but still sustainable to a certain extent.
They become pastoralists, and it's occurred to me
that there may be something about the dependence on meat in a pastoral society
where you raise little animals that you kind of like,
because they're so cute and loving, but you know that you're going to kill them,
that that's the whole purpose of the whole exercise here,
that that in itself may be part of the process.
And there's so many parts of this process of the character armoring,
of the deadening of empathy,
but I would suggest that maybe in that technology itself,
there are, and I'm one, as we discussed yesterday, I don't see one cause.
I'm not a biological determinist or an environmental determinist
or a list of that determinist.
I see a multiplicity of factors, the complex system.
You always have a multiplicity of factors,
but I would suggest that that's another factor.
I don't see how the stiller children in the Norse religions
and the sore liking of the
are already infected by what I think of as the dominator virus,
which is spread by war.
I mean, war really spreads it.
It's like a virus that spreads the dominator system.
And so that again is a, you are the woman who asks all these marvellously three hour questions.
I love it.
That's a very complex thing, but I do have to tell you that, for example, in Finnish folklore,
and I happen to know this because I've travelled to Finland several times,
and have checked my book, which I also have later been acquired for publication.
It will be published in Finnish.
It's been acquired for publication in Germany, France, Italy, Finland, and also Brazil by now.
It's been marvellous.
It's been really extraordinary.
But the thing about Finland is that there's earlier folklore there,
indicating very definitely an earlier partnership tradition
with overlays then of the other things.
So it's very complex.
When you talk about history, history history,
I always think of history as being the period where you have written records, written history.
And when you link history, therefore, with the dominator theory,
is there some, or the dominator model, is there some link, do you feel,
between the process of writing and the dominator model?
Is that merely coincidental?
Well, let me answer that question by giving you some information.
The evidence now is, again, a UCLA archaeologist, Maria Ginbutas,
has, well, she has discovered it.
Some of these were Vinca tablets, which were thought to be classical Greek colonies,
and some obscure, you know, script.
She has discovered that there is a language, a written, a written language,
a symbology, if you will, of writing, that amigates Sumerian,
you know, supposedly started in Sumer about 3,300 years ago.
I could never understand that because, you know, it was found in a temple,
which was still a temple dedicated to the goddess and the priestesses.
But presumably the priestesses did the writing to keep mercantile records.
And I could never understand why we as a species would do our first writing,
just to figure out how many pots of something we own.
Didn't make sense, you know.
And of course what this earlier writing was, was a mythical poetic, symbolic,
symbolic sacred language, which she is trying to decipher.
But the most important example of a historical society,
which still maintains its orientation primarily to the partnership model, is Minoan Crete.
And British archaeologist, excuse me, Greek archaeologist Nicholas Slayton,
who excavated Minoan civilization on the island of Crete and Santorini and surrounding areas,
very, very extensively for over 50 years.
They're suggesting that the legend of Atlantis,
the legend of this ancient civilization that was far more advanced,
was sent into the sea, that again it's based on the garbled folk memory
of this earlier civilization, which, if we have time,
I can tell you a little about because it's so extraordinary.
Because you see, there were in that time, at the end of Minoan civilization,
which by then had already, which by then shifted into Mycenaean,
which is the hybrid society between the invaders and the earlier ones,
there were tremendous cataclysmic events, tremendous volcanic eruptions,
earthquakes, enormous tidal waves, and literally, like in this little island,
what's left of it is little Santorini, because about two-thirds of the island
was literally swallowed by the sea.
And the first one to suggest this theory was Peter Don Marinatis,
who was the head of the Greek archaeological service.
So it's tremendous detective work that we're doing.
And of course that's what archaeology is about.
It's really, I think of it as a space journey into our past,
but also into our future, because of the implications.
You know, it's like time travel into our past,
but really the importance is for our future.
Yes?
Can you speak about how the choosing of homosexuality for men,
given the history in many different societies,
where the initiation rights were so painful that men would choose to be
another man's second wife,
or would not go through into being initiated into a man
because of the dominator society.
Can you speak something about homosexuality?
Why don't you say it yourselves more loudly, because I don't want to go into it.
I'm just curious about the choices that men have made into homosexuality,
because of dominator societies,
and then not being able to express themselves in a feminine way,
having a relationship with the goddess, perhaps.
And also in history, how different tribal societies,
the initiation rights were so painful that oftentimes,
like in Native American societies and in Africa,
in different places, they would choose to be a man's second wife,
rather than be initiated into the domineering, controlling,
all-powerful male in the society.
And I just wonder how that relates to homosexuality in society today,
and to AIDS, and...
Well, you... wow, that's a four-hour question!
But I'm going to try to answer at least part of it.
I think, clearly, just as we have completely distorted heterosexual sexuality,
into either calling it sinful,
and something that you only do for one reason, folks,
and that's to impregnate a woman, right?
I mean, not for pleasure, not for bonding,
how that puts a barrier to communication.
Because, of course, lack of communication is the sine qua non,
it's the stuff of which dominator society has made,
so all of the institutions are designed to prevent it,
or to equate what we've done.
We see it so much in the modern pornography industry,
which is, again, a resurgence, really, of dominator models.
The erotization of dominance, right?
I mean, so heterosexuality has been completely distorted by the dominator model,
and we're trying to reclaim it.
Homosexuality, equally so.
And the example... and you have really, by getting the examples that you did,
have pointed out some of the ways in which people's men have been pushed into it in some tribes.
But, of course, as Janae, you know, the French writer pointed out,
the classical, if you will, the traditional homosexual relationship is a parody.
It's a caricature, an exaggerated caricature of the male-female dominance subservient,
the sadomasochistic relationship that is supposed to characterize, you know, the male-female relationship.
And what I want to suggest to you is that the misogyny, you know, that is part of the culture,
and it's not only part of the homosexual community, it's part of the whole dominator system.
All of these things interweave in a complex way to make us confuse sex,
which is an act of giving pleasure and taking pleasure, with an act of giving pain and receiving pain.
I mean, it's an amazing thing.
And the thing I want to end with is the Greeks.
Now, you know, classical Greece was a hybrid society.
There's a chapter in the Talisman of the Blade on the Greeks,
and I've had some very, very interesting feedback from classical scholars who have said,
"Wow, you know, I mean, that really, the archaeological data, bringing it together this way,
really explains a lot of what was happening there."
But consider homosexuality in Greece, in the so-called Trail of Democracy, where women lost their votes.
Did you know, I have to tell you this, I have to tell you this. I just have it.
St. Augustine tells a story which is a wonderful clue.
He says that the way that Athens got its name was that there was this contest
where they were going to either name it after the, you know,
Pluto, the god of the underground, you know, the old god of the underground, or Athena,
who Athena, of course, is a direct descendant of the goddess,
except she now has become this insane combination of the goddess of wisdom and war,
which, you know, only the dominating system can do that, but that's okay.
And apparently the women, and there was one more woman, they voted for Athena.
So, in punishment, now listen, in punishment, St. Augustine relates that women lost the right to vote.
And we're told that Athens is the cradle of democracy, and of course that's very interesting
because half the population in Athens were women, right?
And they were literally under house arrest.
I mean, the apartheid was so great, you know, they were segregated into the women's quarters.
And 90% of both men and women were slaves.
So we have this, you know, very free society, right, which is sort of a joke,
but it's a hybrid society between some of the earlier, you know, the known, very definitely,
I mean, as Slaton points out, you know, the known tradition flourished still, you know,
in the beautiful art, and in many of, but we don't have time for the whole thing,
but the thing that I wanted to tell you was about homosexuality, which is so fascinating.
The accepted norm for homosexuality, and the only way it was tolerated,
was if it was between an older man and a woman.
There's some, yes?
Karen mentioned this idea of a northern people mounting on horses
and coming back and dominating the cradle cultures.
Could you talk about the fact that these people were also, were essentially the sons of those
that had been exiled from those cultures in the first place,
and no one leads the cradle culture voluntarily.
Somehow they didn't conform, or there was something in their psychology that they couldn't cooperate,
and they were sent away, and they went into northern areas, they had to harden,
their survival qualities were much more difficult, and that created Egyptian psychology,
and then when they found the vehicle, they came back and essentially destroyed the culture
that had at some point earlier rejected them and thrown them out.
And that's always like the return of the product only this time of the birth.
You know, that's a very interesting theory that you propose.
Fortunately I don't have any data.
See, it's very difficult, I mean we can hypothesize on what happened and how it happened,
but the hard data just isn't there yet.
The hard data that we have is what happened when they came in.
That we are beginning to acquire.
And I think with time we'll also get more and more clues,
but I think you have been feeling some very interesting theories there.
Yes?
This is a section about thousands discriminated between group partnering
and partnering that has fostered by the dominant society to gain economic profit.
And I go back to the Scandinavian countries, worked on it years ago,
and I think we looked upon it without any sense of being threatened by it.
The Japanese did the same thing, and now it's a key element of the industrial complex
to protect them because we're threatened by them economically.
Well again, that's a very interesting question, especially the Japanese phenomenon,
which is such a mix of the really very paternalistic and very dominated,
and yet a basic partnership understanding.
And I don't even know how to begin to answer that,
except to say that we have to be very careful with the terms that we're trying to reclaim.
I mean, I'm trying to reclaim for us the term "partnership", and you're quite right.
We need to make distinctions between the way that it's been used conventionally.
And also, we want to reclaim terms like "family" and "tradition",
because these traditions are much, much older, and they lasted for much, much longer.
So this is part of our reclamation work about the second part of what we're saying,
which is the issue of economic competition.
The dominated system artificially creates scarcity,
and that's an area that I explore in some of the later chapters of the "Tellis" and "The Blade",
but I think it's something that we really need to understand very, very clearly.
See, all of these things are tremendous opportunities for work,
tremendous amount of research.
Once we see that there is what the dynamics are of the dominated system,
then we can begin to also create the alternatives and to come out of it.
So I would have to leave it in these very general terms.
Yes, David?
By the way, I did introduce David, and that's David.
I just want to talk quickly to this point,
because I'm both a social psychologist and I'm a refugee from the business world.
And from the viewpoint of a social psychologist, rather than a bunch of things,
there was work by one of the great geniuses, for instance,
Kurt Lewin, in studying participatory work within the work group contacts,
group discussions.
I mean, instead of the hierarchical thing, the leader tells the workers what to do,
the workers gather together and discuss with the leaders and so on,
and they come up with a consensus, and they found the power of that work.
Now, that went into a lot of literature that went to the corporate world,
and there were a lot of training groups,
and a lot of consultants made their living for many years.
Going into the corporate world, they were hired by the hierarchy to go in there
and in a sense build the illusion in the corporate world that it was all being,
"Boy, you've got a say in this, you've got a voice in the decision of where we're going," and so on.
But unfortunately, everybody knew, including the consultants themselves,
that it was a sham, because when you really got down to the core of it,
it was still Mr. Big following the shot, and you got fired and hired.
No 60-day notice for a plant floating, it just walked.
Overnight, the whole partnership thing could be thrown out.
The interesting thing that's happened, you mentioned Japanese,
the interesting thing that's happening now is because the Japanese have this system
that on one point has a lot of hierarchy,
but also has a lot of their teamwork stuff, and it generally,
because that system is now pressing.
Economically, it goes deeply.
At last, the corporate world is being forced beyond,
and the consultants now can go out there and sell
what amounts to the partnership way of thinking in the corporate world
with some hope that it may catch on simply because the people upstairs
and the people in the desk and all these industries are really scared.
They can see they're going down the drain unless they become true,
unless they really make this partnership thing work.
That's why it's very, very exciting in the business.
We'll respond just a little further,
and respond to your initial question.
Can you stand up?
Yeah.
Respond to your initial question.
I think there might be just a slight, not a danger maybe,
but a problem,
where there would be a difference between the true partnership type of society
which goes on and is economically sound for itself
and doesn't seek to exploit another party, a bunch of people
for that type of economic gain.
Now, it might be just a little insidious
if a typically male-dominant society,
the domineering society,
can bring women into its domination philosophy
and incorporate what used to be a very powerful
and good partnership type of society into a domineering society
and just use the aspect of the partnership to exploit other people
in the same way that the male-dominant society has done for so long.
It would be not fortunate if that were to happen.
You've brought up the whole problem of co-option,
and that's really the danger.
That's why the clarity is so very, very important for us at this time,
so that we can understand that it's not enough to give it lip service.
We have to live it.
And you know, it's not easy, because every one of us...
I mean, people say to me, "Are you a liberated woman?"
And I... you know, I mean, nobody in my generation that I can think of
could even remotely make such a claim.
We are carrying tremendous amount of dominator stuff in us
and so that, you know, our main task is...
well, it's not our main task. We have to do everything.
People say, "What do we have to do?" The answer is everything.
We certainly have to work on ourselves a great deal in order to do that.
Yes.
Some folks that I see in school just see a lot of teachers
actually starting to go over to trying to teach cooperation
and trying to preserve and honor children's self-esteem,
and I think that's what's going to be a big change.
Because that wasn't the model. It was humiliation and authority in schools,
and that's a quickly changing thing.
You know, and I think that's a very important element
because the dominator system thrives on this idea that I'm just groveling.
It's no accident that most of the world religions which are dominators,
you know, they have tremendous partnership elements in them,
but they also have this tremendous overlay of dominator stuff
that you literally grovel before the deity.
I mean, I'm this poor worm and, you know, forgive me my sins and...
And that's really where I think that the shamanistic experience
is such an important element to sort of really reconnect with our innate worth.
Yes, it's a dignified religion.
But it's interesting what you were saying about our being formed by our past.
We need to recall and define ourselves, I think all of us,
as the adult children of male chauvinists,
and perhaps create support groups and disentangle ourselves.
But see, the thing is that we're all trying to disentangle ourselves.
I'm just looking at Sid Kalkstein who's sitting in the audience
and who sent me a wonderful manuscript trying to understand from a different perspective
some of the things that we've been talking about.
When we look at our past, and I think this is the real empowering aspect
of this new knowledge, this very old knowledge really,
of our past is that we can then look at the full history.
And that's a very important empowering element in us
to validate those impulses in us.
It's not being radical or new or any of the stuff that we're being told,
but it's being very, very deeply rooted.
I think that there are two people way in the back, yes.
Oh Robin, can you stand Robin because it's almost impossible to hear unless you stand.
Is there any way that we are going to get beyond the dualism in this
between the dominator in partnership, the bad guy, the good guy,
the repudiation of all our ancestors for the last three thousand years
as having taken us to that point, which is only to get us to our destruction,
and that we are the only people who are going to redeem three thousand years of history?
It feels like an exact...
Well that whole issue of not throwing out the baby with the bath water
is how I think about it, I guess that's sort of a very...
I think that the dualism is only a dualism of possibilities.
It's an issue of free choice in the ultimate sense I think,
that as a species we're very flexible.
And we have, I would say we have these two basic choices,
we have many, many, many other choices, and these two basic choices are very, very complex.
So I'm not in the least bit suggesting,
just as I'm not suggesting that this is an issue of women against men,
you know, I mean I always stress this in my work, that it isn't.
It's a question of the kind of organization, the kind of vision
and the kind of actualization of the vision, the kind of structure that we choose.
I think it's an issue of pointing the finger, Robin, and saying,
"Look at the terrible things that you did to us,"
because it's the terrible things we did to ourselves,
and we all know that there is this shadow part of us.
And I mean if you want to take it to that level, sure, there's always that other possibility.
We have a choice of being very cruel, we have a choice of being very kind,
but what we're discovering is that these are not just personal choices,
that these are choices that are very, very, very much related to our social structure, social environment.
And this whole idea of healing ourselves, you know, trying to heal yourself in a dominated society
is sort of like going up on a down escalator.
So that's what we're talking about.
It's not a question of finger pointing and of saying, "This is bad."
In fact, the whole attraction of partnership is that it offers a positive path,
or rather, many positive paths, because it is a pluralistic.
I think that's really what I want to stress, it's a pluralistic path.
And you had a...
Yeah. I'm curious if you know of any evidence that would support the notion
that the shamanic or sacramental use of psychedelic plants is in any way related
to whether or not a civilization or society becomes more toward the partnership
or more toward the dominant mode.
Well, that is of course one of the arguments.
And I would say this, that...
Well, let me first clarify something.
What I just said is that I see many paths.
And so I see many paths to shamanism, and I see the shamanic experience as...
not an elite experience.
I see the shamanic experience as something that every one of us is capable of,
and demonstrably so.
And I see many paths to that spiritual, mystical knowing,
the real knowing of our oneness with one another and with the world.
Now, I think that there's absolutely no question that the plants do provide
a very powerful avenue to that.
And however my sense about the plants providing a powerful avenue, as I've told Karen,
and maybe we can talk about that some more,
is that it has to be also in the context of a number of social support systems,
because our imaginations, having been so filled with dominator images,
can through the hallucinogens also go in some pretty horrific, you know, non-healing paths.
Now, to specifically answer your question, there's very scarce evidence.
Because after reading Hearsons' work, and he writes as eloquently...
Well, not quite as eloquently, because I speak like a magician,
but he writes so eloquently.
I mean, I was... I mean, you really start looking at it with new eyes,
it was such a gift from you.
And of course, I saw on some of the Bulgarian artifacts, you know, the Balkans,
some mushrooms. Absolutely no question.
You know, there are these statuaries on these mushrooms.
And we know that most of the imagery of the art of the curious is sacred, religious.
So there was no question, but it was an isolated instance.
It was just one. You know, I know that we know and use the poppy.
You probably know, and as you will, I think, confirm, the poppy does not necessarily confer hallucinatory.
You have to do a lot of reading of it.
So one could say that maybe, you know, that's an indication that they used plants, you know,
for the semantic experience.
And your favorite example, I should really let you talk about this.
Oh, you're doing well.
Well, I'm also very fascinated by the early Neolithic, well actually the African.
Those are your most potent arguments, I think.
Well, please talk about this, because you can talk about the former cogents of the United States.
Yes, well, I will talk in detail about this.
I'll maybe just say a little bit now.
It ties back, I enjoyed your exegesis of Genesis this morning.
But the one symbol that you didn't dwell on or mention was the fact that the issue was an issue about plant use.
That Eve was tossed out of the garden because she ate of the fruit of the tree of life.
And involved Adam in that.
The serpent was the minion, as you said, of the goddess.
And the serpent said, "If you eat of this plant, you will become equal to Yawah."
And Yawah apparently agreed with this assessment, that the plant was a true rival.
That the union of the plant and the woman was a worthy rival to his suzerainty in this situation.
And the expulsion into history was essentially removal from access to the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
And it's very interesting and ties in with what we said last night about monotheism.
That monotheism gives permission for this image of the ego, which is powerful, not to be questioned, paternalistically domineering, etc.
Even and perhaps unconsciously in Rian's choice of symbols, the chalice is the symbol of partnership and transformation and unity.
But it is quite simply a utensil for holding something which you drink.
A sacrament, the chalice without the sacrament is simply a vessel.
So I will talk probably tomorrow a lot about this and of the scenario of human, the emergence of human self-reflection in Africa.
And how it relates to mushrooms and the partnership society and the goddess.
My argument, and I'll just say this here, against the absence of overwhelmingly convincing physical evidence is first of all that the truly central mystery of a religion is never portrayed or spoken of.
It always is only symbolically indicated and to my mind the coincidence in the ancient Middle East of goddesses with cattle, they're always mixed up together.
Well the third and secret term in that trinity is the mushroom.
The goddess and the cattle are linked in association with the mushroom which is never mentioned.
So we'll talk more about that but at for instance Mellart's site, you pronounce it so well.
Actually it's spelled C-A-T-A-R but it's called Chatorziljuk.
Chatorziljuk, the overwhelming motif is of cattle, lovingly and beautifully portrayed.
16,000 years earlier at Altamira the motif is cattle, lovingly and beautifully portrayed.
And the tasseli frescoes in the central Sahara, it's cattle and I think the cow is the fusion symbol both for the goddess and the mushroom.
Because it is the caring attitude, the gentleness, the giving of milk and of nurturing and all of this that makes the cow and the cow goddess the major symbol carrying this thing in the Neolithic.
I write in saying that you're a magician with words because you do present a very, very potent argument.
I would still say that I believe that while I have no doubt that the use of plants, so much was lost of the knowledge of plants.
We were yesterday talking about how some of the last vestiges of that in the West were burnt with the witches, the so-called witches, the wise women who were burnt at the stake.
Not at the, well the church of course was going into the medicine business but it was much more complicated than that.
They were actually healing people with these old methods and so much of this lore has been lost.
I have no question that plants, that our evolution and the intimate symbiotic relationship with the plant world is fascinating and yet to really recount the story, and you are one of the main killers of that story.
But I would still say that there are many paths in my estimation to the shamanic experience, to the gnosis, to the knowledge.
And that the ancients used many of these paths, that it was not exclusive to the use of the plant.
And I would also really want to stress this point that it is tremendously important I think for us to understand that when the ancients used the plant, and specifically the hallucinatory revealing, you know, the plant not as addictive.
There are some other questions, the plant, you know, the plant as the addictive use and the revealing use.
When they used it for, not to escape, you see, so much of the dominated system requires escape through addiction.
So it's tremendously, because it's such a miserable reality, who wants to live in it?
So you know, you escape through addiction to alcohol, or to mechanical sex, or to bulimia or to anorexia, or to opium, you know, the opium of the people, or to religion, etc.
So it's very dangerous at this point, I think, to really not understand that it has to be very carefully embedded in ritual that is geared to partnership.
And that that is the key, and I would hope that perhaps you can explore that to some measure.
Because I'm convinced that when the ancients used these incredible plants, you know, that suddenly we come into another universe, another reality which was much more real than, you know, than the experiential one.
And that they really sort of had very highly developed telepathic and other abilities, because they found all these sites, you know, that are sacred and so on, that we now know have some power too.
But this was deeply, deeply embedded in ritual, very carefully, very deliberately.
And that if we are to use the plant again, then it has to be done by again very carefully, very deliberately, and most important, very lovingly, very careingly developing the universe.
Yes, I think psychoactive drugs exist along a spectrum of effects, and to talk deeply about drugs we're going to have to shed everything that we've been educated in the matter,
which is a kind of blurring of distinction in order to empower a general condemnation. As sociologists, or as people looking at how these things affect culture, what you want to pay attention to is the operational effect.
And the spectrum runs from total addiction to a total dissolving of all behavioral patterns.
And some compounds reinforce a narrowing of the focus of consciousness, unexamined machine-like activity related to the acquisition of the drug.
And then at the other end of the spectrum, there are compounds and plants which dissolve machine-like unexamined activity, dissolve behavior patterns, and which expand the focus of consciousness tremendously.
And the truth that is hard to hear is that human beings have never existed independently of the effects of one group or the other.
In other words, the idea of a drug-free society is an utter fiction, and always has been, because we are symbiotic creatures with the vegetable kingdom, or queendom.
And this symbiotic relationship is most apparent to us as self-reflecting entities in the subtler effects of what we might very broadly call "foods."
So that when you look back through history, you're looking at opium, sugar, coffee, tobacco, hallucinogens, and these are all pushing and pulling us along the spectrum of addiction and constricted consciousness, versus dissolving of social programming and reconnection to the larger, natural surround.
And so there are dominator drugs and dominator use patterns, and there are partnership drugs and partnership use patterns that reinforce open-endedness and creativity and this sort of thing.
But what is not available as an option is the notion of the drug-free society, because foods themselves impinge on the neurological functioning and the level of neurotransmitters and the degree of alertness and attention and this sort of thing.
I found myself a couple of weeks ago saying, "A person who does not take drugs is like a computer that does not use software. It doesn't do anything."
And so then the question is not a kind of moralistic pontification against drugs, but an intelligent awareness of choices and options based on historical experience.
Well, that's all I really want to say about that, but it's important to make that point because we are going to have to increase the sophistication of our own understanding of the drug problem.
Because part of the articulation and implementation of the partnership society is going to revolve around this issue of reconnecting with these shamanic tools and re-realizing how to what a truly intense degree we are a symbiotic creature.
If we do not maintain our connections to the vegetable world, to that source of gnosis, then we wander in alienation and existential self-doubt.
That's why there is, as you doubtless picked up, this difference between Rian and I on this point. She is more, in this case, the sociologist and I am more the biological determinist because I really think the embedding in nature is far more real and strong and intense than we know because we are, of course, the apex of a long process.
The gate seems to be akin to what I am hearing here. So that it has a clear, clear dominator logic in your well-reasoned argument that I can hear.
You are talking to me and you are saying that it sounds like I am saying this is the mechanism by which it happened and therefore I am closing out other options.
But you are the most open way.
Well, I am a frank propagandist for this point of view. Nobody was saying it until I was saying it. I think it's fine if one person says it. I am interested in seeing it demolished.
The way to truth, you don't have to fear to test truth. If it's true, it can withstand any sort of onslaught.
Perhaps the mullet has to emulsify.
What does emulsion mean?
Softened.
Softened and penetrated by another me being.
Conducive absorption.
I love that metaphor. I would like to suggest that maybe this afternoon when we talk about technology we can think of plants as technologies and how their use really differs.
Definitely.
The template of the partnership and the dominator society because I think that really to a very large extent that we have to address that issue to really emulsify.
Let me ask you this. The press is obviously at the beginning. When you are starting to get into the dominator drug versus the partnership drug, I was beginning to get very excited.
I am assuming that at some point this afternoon or tomorrow you are going to say, "Okay, here it is. I am blocking it out and listing one person's other." I think this would be an extremely valuable contribution because in my own experience with the whole application of the dominator partnership model, you take every area, politics, economic, child raising, and so on.
You apply this model and all of a sudden by being able to push things into that camp or that camp you gain a tremendous clarity and I think that this would move forward the whole controversy about the drug scene right here.
Yes.
When are you going to do this?
Well, if not this afternoon, certainly tomorrow. But it is on my agenda for sure.
Great.
I am interested in what both of you are saying and I am thinking as I am sitting here and I really don't know how to word it that I am sure there must be an ancient knowledge about not eliminating the drug possibility or getting caught up in the dogma of any kind.
But the ability for people to be inducted by those people who carry the vibration in their central nervous system, for instance in perhaps ancient rituals, ancient groups, where they hung out at perhaps not necessarily the guru dominating idea, but that could be a person that tells shoes.
That carries the vibration which is an induction into the energy field which would do exactly the same thing as a psychedelic experience and that it is possible for hanging out with people in ancient times where they, I always think of the serpent in terms of the final central nervous system which of course the Egyptian had
to come up this way and the mask on the feminine marriage which is a partnership. So I would be interested in anything you have to say about that also in a balance with the I think shamanism.
Well I think shamanism is the institution that you are indicating. I mean it is, we forget in the modern presentation of shamanism that the really central motif of it is curing which is transferring energy from one person to another and leading people to higher states of adaptive activity.
The exploring of the invisible world which is stressed in psychedelic shamanism is not simply an academic concern of the shamans. They are doing this in order to acquire power and the purpose for acquiring the power is to heal.
That's the end result of the whole thing and I think as this archaic revival moves along and as the partnership notion becomes better understood, the shamanic model as a characterological map for each of us will make more and more sense because it is an empowering of direct and immediate experience
which is what the dominator thing sucks away from us. We are turned into citizens who are kind of sociological placeholders who receive their orders from the organs of media that pass it on from the establishment.
The dominator thing to function must undercut the notion of the uniqueness and the freedom of the individual and shamanizing works in the here and now to empower felt experience.
That causes me to think that those sensitivities, those ratios of feeling are what are going to be engendered in the new people who will live in and perpetuate the post-historical partnership society.
In my experience of shamanism there is such a range, an extraordinary range of how shamanism manifests itself. I think one of the best examples is the contrast that Michael Harner drew between the jivaro culture or the shwar culture and the amu waka who used the same major psychedelic banisterialist copy.
But where the social behaviors of these two groups who live in a relatively proximate situation is highly contrasted. The amu waka being much more partnership oriented and the jivaro or the shwar being much more dominator oriented.
And I think that she is one of many many examples, the yanamamo or another good example, where the use of maybe fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, fifteen different kinds of cultivated hallucinogens doesn't seem to abrogate behaviors which are quite dominator based.
So my question is, it's like drawing an idealistic and sovian picture of the neolithic. It's my usual, and I have some experience of shamanism, personal and direct in terms of my past twenty years in the area, to just say that it's really I think dangerous to characterize the neolithic idealistically as it is to characterize the range of behaviors found in shamanic cultures idealistically.
I would rather to look realistically and discerningly at these particular trends that arise within these great ranges of cultures that we're talking about here.
And then from these dark mirrors or from these problems that we perceive, the moral and ethical problems about inter-relatedness or the lack thereof that do occur for example in some shamanic cultures that we need to be discerning.
Yes, well when you do field work, the first thing you discover is that all academic categories are artificial. What dealing with shamans is about is dealing with individuals.
And some of you may know F. Bruce Lamb's book, The Rio Tigre and Beyond, where a essentially urban mestizo shaman involved in rosewood gathering expeditions in extremely remote areas of the Amazon comes upon extremely unassimilated,
uncontacted people and takes ayahuasca with them and discovers that they don't know what they're doing. They don't know how to make it right.
And he makes it for them and says you don't do it that way, you do it this way and it knocks their socks off.
So this is a case that illustrates your point that if you are romantic about these things, if you have synthetic notions of what constitutes cultural purity and that sort of thing, you're going to get into trouble.
Shamanism from the inside is very much an attitude like the very best attitudes that you meet in scientific research. It is a desire to know, to find out, to explore.
And dogma is sort of the shockwave which trails along behind it. But dogma serves a function of social ordering. When you get in with these guys and women who are doing this stuff, there are no social rules because they are extra-environmentals.
That's what shamanism, another possible definition of shamanism, it's the condition of being extra-environmentally related to your own culture so that you can set the paradigmatic agenda.
Everyone else is inside the context of the language, that you are creating the context. And so you have a very, very different relationship. So yes, I would agree.
I would say what you are talking about, as you characterized it, is something that Jose once called neo-shamanism. That is that we look at a range of cultural and psychological and social behaviors that are deemed shamanism and then we extract from that range a type.
A type which actually becomes an archetype or an ideal type to which individuals like us can relate. But my problem with that is that once you enter the domain of shamanism, it's rather like Christ's 40 days in the desert when the devil came along or when Mara came along to Buddha.
There is a point in the journey which is definitely characterized by the experience of temptation and the possibility of things going awry, so to speak, of things going in ways that are anti-social and anti-environmental against the grain of compassion or against the grain of correct relationship with environment is there.
Well, there is no knowledge without risk taking and this is what the new age doesn't want to hear. The belief is current that it can be packaged or it can be gotten from a guru or something like that.
The fact is, you know, it really comes I think in a dimension where there is real risk and real fear and that's a tough mountain to climb. If you've climbed it a hundred times, you still won't want to climb it the hundred and first time.
And I think shamanism throughout history and pre-history and worldwide has always suffered from this. It's very rare that you meet someone who would prefer to shamanize rather than to talk about it.
You know? And it's the shamanizing that is important, not the talking about it.
I'd like to say something on that and it's this that I think that the points that you make are very important that we can't really talk about the shaman because the image that immediately springs into our minds when we think of the shaman to remember is male because that's what's been presented to us.
And yet if we look at some of the oldest scenes of what was found in shamanistic dancing in Paleolithic caves, it is women, some of them pregnant. And that gives us a clue, which of course is very interesting, of some of the early perception of the shamanistic experience as being very much connected with women's mysteries.
The mystery not only of birth, which is an enormous mystery, but also the cyclic menstrual lunar cycle.
And that I think is really very, very interesting that when we talk about shaman again, we sort of disengage ourselves from the stereotypical notions of what is a shaman and this whole idealization of the shaman because, by the way, I mean,
shamanism can also be used to incite people into a hypnotic trance to go and disembowel other, their neighbors, you know, and has so been done.
And one could even say that Hitler, in a sense, used some of the shamanic techniques of, you know, this torchlight, you know, the trappings of, so it's very, very dangerous, I think, to idealize it.
And again, I am glad that you again stressed that it's very, very important, as I said, that we not idealize these earlier Neolithic cultures that are now coming to light.
The informative thing about them is not that they were ideal cultures because they were not ideal cultures.
The informative thing is that what they seem to tell us is that the early direction of our cultural evolution in the mainstream seems to have been orienting towards the partnership model more than towards the dominator model.
And of course, in reality, we're always talking about a matter of degree.
I mean, there is, as I say, there is no such thing as a pure dominator or partnership culture.
Some of the examples I gave you come pretty darn close.
But on the other hand, people being human beings, even the most oppressed of beings, somehow find subtle ways of finding partnership modes, even within the most horrible dominator structure.
So powerful is that part of us.
But I really want to stress that.
[Inaudible]
It happens to be an extremely powerful concept for analyzing all kinds of things, creativity, social change, and so on.
The interplay between charismatic individuals bearing the charisma and the institutionalization, the bureaucratization of the charisma, which is an extremely powerful tool in sociology.
My question is, see I keep hearing when you're talking about this demonic experience of shaman, I keep getting the message, "Ah-ha, that relates to charisma, charismatic individuals, visibility."
You were saying something about extra environmental, how did you phrase it?
How did you use that thing?
You're able to transcend the web.
You're able to transcend the social web, the environmental web.
Yes, you become an extra environmental.
Yeah.
And of course this is the key, not only to individual creativity, it's the key to the individual who goes beyond the boundaries, the norms, any system of society, any system of cognition, of emotion, and takes us to the next step.
Of course the point that Leon is making is that that person can also take us to the next step, which is the wrong way, as Hitler did.
How do you relate, or how do you think of the demonic experience and the shaman in relation to the idea of charisma and the charismatic?
Do you mean charisma in the generally understood sense of social magnetism, or do you mean in the more philosophical sense of an empowering from on high and a descent of spirit into matter?
We should identify what it is and then deal with it after, because we've got a healthy drug called food.
Oh, nice to meet you.
Well, this is rich stuff, and I'm interested to go into it, and I'm very interested, we got to a good place, because the real question is about this experience, about how there's something that some people here know what is meant, and some people don't, and it's very hard to be halfway in between, because we're talking about something real.
This is not, this transcends ideas, it's an experience accessible in the world, and it casts the argument that Leon is making in a whole new light, and it casts our relationships to each other in a whole new light.
So we will pick up this theme in the afternoon. What time do we begin?
We just were discussing. What time would you like to begin?
What time is it?
We conclude at five.
We conclude at five.
Oh my gosh, I already won.
Yeah, we'll be fun to do until it leaves two.
Well, let's start two thirty.
Two thirty, and then we can run.
We can go to sixty.
Okay, well two thirty then.
Two thirty, yeah.
And we also need to get to some of the very important questions you raised yesterday and for a few years, so we've got quite a few more to ask.
This is KPFK Los Angeles.
We've been listening to the beginning of a seminar at the Ojai Foundation on Man and Woman at the End of History with Terrence McKenna and Rian Eisler.
Rian Eisler, the author of Chalice and the Blade.
The seminar comes in, oops, five tapes, and they're available from the Ojai Foundation.
The five tapes are forty dollars total, and again, it's Man and Woman at the End of History.
The Ojai Foundation address and phone number is Ojai Foundation, Box 1620, Ojai, California, 93023.
Ojai Foundation, Box 1620, Ojai, California, 93023.
Five tapes comprising Man and Woman at the End of History, available for forty dollars.
We are called to higher things and are passing through a series of bootstrapping self-transitions
that are synergized by the psychedelic plants in our environment and whose end state is
anticipated in each of us as a microcosm when we surrender our egos and submerge ourselves
in the great raging mystery of being that is all around us all the time everywhere.
Oh.
We have a little time.
Wait, let me try and see somebody.
I can't remember but you were hurting us.
Yes.
I have mentioned to people during work with ayahuasca, I guess therapeutically and also
not over the
detail.
Okay.
The question is that I mentioned that there is therapeutic work going on with ayahuasca.
I think that the legal status of these things has never been defined.
Let me make that clear.
They should be but ayahuasca is neither illegal nor legal.
There has never been a case involving it in the United States so it's in a kind of limbo
and we should all be discreet about it and let these therapists do their work.
Eventually, of course, it will be defined.
If you're interested in more information about that kind of thing, write me but I will say
about it that there's no preconception here of a psychoanalytical theory.
What I really respect in these therapists is that they are doing it as closely to the
way that it's done in the Amazon as they can and really often in the Amazon the brew is
watered or they pull punches on the dosage because they don't want crazy gringos running
amuck and blowing their minds.
So the search for ayahuasca can be pursued perhaps now in North America with the even
greater hope of success than in South America but we always have to be referred back to
the shamanic forms because that's the only guidance we have.
I mean they may not know everything about it but they do have a thousand or more years
of tradition that can be our guide.
Now when you actually deal with these ayahuasca you discover they're not like priests.
They are not dogmatic.
They're open to experimentation too and you can suggest things and they know the chemicals
lie behind this.
They're not naive but they also know that the spirit lies within it.
They are also not naive in the way that we are naive.
So it's a tremendously fertile partnership to deal with these shamans.
They will share their knowledge and we need not come to them as imperiors or uninitiated
people.
What they really respect are peers and this is what everybody really respects.
This is why I think the guru chela relationship is so damaging because in the first place
nobody knows enough to be a guru and nobody knows so little that they should define themselves
as a follower.
It just doesn't work that way.
Back up here.
Well my political agenda is much more modest than that.
I am just interested in keeping the dialogue going, meeting with groups of people like
this and knowing because we have the support of institutions like Ovi that we can meet
and discuss this.
There does seem to be apparently this drug issue is going to be a big deal and lies directly
in front of us and what we are being asked to decide in this presidential election upcoming
is do we want to go full steam ahead into total fascism in order to solve the drug problem
or are we willing to think of god forbid legalizing some of these things and ceasing to beat upon
each other because of the issue of drugs.
I think that the whole thing which is holding back legalization is the Judeo-Christian uncomfortableness
with the notion that somebody might have fun in a way that you disapprove of because drugs
like heroin and cocaine are certainly a social scourge but on the other hand so is Valium
an alcohol and to hold your nose at one and condone the other is just total cultural schizophrenia.
So I think what we need to do and this may be coming out of necessity is entirely disconnect
the drug issue from morality.
The notion that people who do certain drugs are bad and people who do or do not do certain
other drugs are good is infantile and preposterous.
What needs to be done I think is to first of all legalize all plants.
That's very simple.
Legalize all plants.
Okay then what are we going to do about these synthetic addictive hard drugs like heroin,
cocaine, alcohol, so forth.
They should be decriminalized and if we're going to sell alcohol in this society, if
we're going to peddle Valium then we should sell all the rest and tax them very highly
and if there's a price to pay in addiction as we go through the process of educating
people, the taxes from these substances will be used to pay for that education and those
addiction centers because the cost in destroyed lives and ruined societies will be far less,
far less.
Coca was no problem in South America for centuries.
Now the Coca trade is just screwing up everything.
I cannot go to my favorite areas of the Amazon and botanize because missionaries who grow
cocaine have given orders to their Indian slaves to shoot anybody who comes into those
areas.
This is a totally culturally corrupting force and it is money, not drugs, money that is
corrupting it and the major problem is as I said a couple of days ago, the addiction
on the part of governments and intelligence agencies to funny money.
That's what's going on.
The whole Vietnam War was a front for a junk running scheme, a junk running scheme which
made a huge amount of money for a lot of creaks which destroyed the political will of the
ghettos to seek social justice in America.
That all just fizzled out.
They killed Martin Luther King and everybody else and then flooded the ghetto with junk.
The cocaine thing is a direct replay.
Ronald Reagan is tiptoeing around whether or not he should be friends with Mikhail Gorbachev
when look who he is friends with, the utter scum of the earth, the most outrageous rag
band of fascist gangsters you've ever seen, real sub-human filth.
They call them authoritarian regimes and make a distinction between them and communism and
say well these authoritarian regimes at least they're not communists.
Well I'm telling you it's just a scam to addict a whole bunch of people to drugs and then
get the money to support wars in isolated and forgotten parts of the world.
So very noticeable in my own area was for years we couldn't get a sheesh in the bay
area or when somebody had it you know it was a crumb.
But suddenly about seven years ago there was all the sheesh you wanted and people were
quoting prices on tons and then megatons.
Well this doesn't mean some hippies broke through.
This means, you know what it means, it means that the Mujahideen needed money to support
a war of national liberation against the Soviet occupation and they had no hard currency.
All they had was hash and so the hash ships were allowed to unload the megatons of hash
and the money was turned into weapons.
The weapons buyers, the weapons dealers from Israel and South Africa and the United States
cashed in and made fortunes and perhaps it was a just war in Afghanistan.
I love hash, I'm not knocking that but I'm pointing out that that was their way of supporting
the Mujahideen was to just institute this smuggling thing and this has been done again
and again and they make no distinction between a harmless drug like hashish and truly horrible
truly horrible drugs such as heroin.
I mean heroin is really I think a dubious drug.
I think I talk to a pretty white squeaky clean kind of middle class yuppie crowd but I've
known junkies, lots of junkies and it would stand your hair on end.
Here's a drug which turns human beings into cockroaches literally before your very eyes
and you know you don't need that.
It's insectoid programmed unexamined machine like behavior raised to a degree that's just
horrifying.
For us as a psychedelic community we're going to have to mind our P's and Q's because the
issue isn't about us.
The government isn't trying to get rid of drugs because it doesn't want people jumping
out of buildings.
It doesn't want people making mega fortunes that it's not getting any tax revenue out
of.
So psychedelics have never been big money makers.
Nobody is getting rich off psychedelic drugs that I know of.
I mean maybe a few people are having modest lives lived in fear that at any moment the
man will kick down the front door and drag them away in front of their wife and child
but nobody is getting rich on psychedelic drugs.
That's all going on in another domain.
So our problem is a more serious problem.
It's that the psychedelics are deconditioning agents.
This is the real, I don't want to use the dominator metaphor, but the real knife poised
at the heart of the establishment is the deconditioning potential of psychedelics.
That's what made the 1960s such a tumultuous thing.
The CIA didn't care that people were selling acid.
They cared that LSD was changing people's minds.
And so the reason I keep speaking and keep talking and hope that you all will keep thinking
and speaking and talking is because we have to build a community that understands itself,
that understands its members, that understands where we stand because eventually the psychedelics
will have to be dealt with as all these other drug issues will have to be dealt with.
So now for us is a period of getting to know each other, recognizing who we are, empowering
ourselves, getting our rap straight, knowing where we stand on these various issues that
will be thrown at us, and then speaking and being exemplars.
I mean I wish that the people who are so concerned to ban drugs could see this group of people.
And I think we're quite presentable.
We're making a contribution to society.
We are good citizens were it not for this one issue, which then makes us of course a
hated, outlaw minority.
And I invite each of you to look around you, at the people near you, and realize this is
your affinity group.
These are the people who can help you, and these are the people who can really blow it
for all the rest of us.
So partnership for us is no abstraction.
It's as Ben Franklin said, "If we don't hang together, we'll all hang separately."
This is the man in the blue.
Yes.
I wasn't here in the other days, and you may have covered it.
When you take the substance in a silent, dark place, I wanted you to go into it a little
further from that point on.
When I took acid years and years ago, I had wonderful tricks.
I heard that there were people around me jumping in the buildings, trying to fly.
I was just wondering what you thought about the process of how you deal with anything
that might be uncomfortable or...
You mean what actually happens?
Yeah, I mean from your experience.
Well, the model is basically the same for all of these things.
You fast for six hours until you have an empty stomach.
It isn't really even fasting.
It's simply emptying your stomach.
Then you take it in silent darkness.
I always smoke cannabis.
If that's not your thing, you should have some other means of slightly steering the
situation.
It can be singing.
It can be a meditation.
Whatever it is, that you need to have a small core that you can dip into the psychic water
if you need to shift the tongue things a little bit.
I don't do anything the first hour.
I just sit there and worry, basically, about what is about to happen.
I don't know whether it's harder for me, but what I always think about is my public image.
Because I say, "Okay, you're Mr. Big Shot.
You're Mr. Psychedelic.
Now it's coming at you.
You're always telling everybody how they should do it, how to borate the cabbage, how it's
this and it's that.
But you know that you don't know jack shit.
You also know that now it's just between you, me and him, and it's coming at me.
So I think about all of this and then hopefully I get it squared away.
Usually, it just comes down to, "Well, it's too late."
And say, "God, nobody is here to see whatever is about to happen."
And then I just sit and it comes in a wave.
It comes in waves.
Sometimes it's gentle, if it's going to be a moderate trip, the waves will begin just
like incoming surf.
But sometimes you realize, you see it coming at you and you realize that it's a thousand
miles wide and 10 miles high and there's nowhere to run.
It's just like the rolling shock wave of an atomic blast and you just lay down and hope.
And many, many times on these psychedelic trips I find...
Clarity and courage, empowering it in each other, giving permission for it in ourselves
and looking toward the future that is endlessly bright with the possibility of human transformation.
It is in our hands.
That's not a metaphor.
It is literally going to belong to those people who most earnestly and courageously define
the limits of what is possible for the human mind and body and community.
So you are that.
And I salute you and I thank you and I hope to see you all soon somewhere else.
Good luck.
[Applause]
This is KPFK Los Angeles.
We have been listening to Terrence McKenna and with him, Rianne Eisler, the author of
The Chalice and the Blade in a June 1988 seminar at the Ojai Foundation in Ojai.
If you didn't hear the whole thing which we've just concluded, it's on five cassettes
and you can get the five cassettes for $40 from the Wild Store at the Ojai Foundation.
Again, the seminar is entitled Men and Women at the End of History with Terrence McKenna
and Rianne Eisler.
And that's available from the Wild Store, Box 1620.
Multicolored, highly polished, contorting, filled with intent, never previously seen
and profoundly other.
And yet, isn't it interesting, this is the commonest of all the hallucinogens in nature.
This is the one that is most like what is happening in the metabolism of the ordinary
human brain.
So, to me DMT is a very interesting and profound kind of thing because it's like a super-convincer.
This is for people who think that people who talk about the power of psychedelics are soft-headed.
You can invite any critic to invest five minutes in informing themselves of the facts of the matter.
I mean, they may have an excuse for why they can't spend nine hours with you, but five minutes?
Is the effect of DMT different from the effect of five any other DMTs?
Well, whenever you ask someone a question like this, what you're going to hear is a subjective answer.
The question was, how does five-MeO, five-methoxy DMT differ from DMT?
I've seen people using five-MeO DMT therapeutically go through what must have been extremely profound
inner dynamical fluxes.
My own experience with five-MeO is it's exactly like DMT except that you don't hallucinate,
which is like saying it was exactly like an Italian dinner except there was no Italian dinner.
So what you have with five-MeO DMT is you have this enormous emotion, this, you know,
I think it's called boundary dissolution. All boundaries dissolve and there is this enormous emotion
of relief, of acceptance, of melting into some kind of unspeakable unitary state.
But that's all.
It may be enough.
In the sense that if you're great for the onslaught of a tidal wave of alien hallucinations,
you may be sort of, what, what, you know, because this large emotion comes and goes.
It blows through you like a wind.
I am interested in five-MeO. There's a fact, and since it's a fact, I think I should share it with you,
that you should know about five-MeO, which is when you give it to sheep, they drop dead.
So I guess the moral of that is if you're a sheep, you better not do that.
Are we sheep or are we men?
Are we sheep or are we men?
But, you know, staggers is the thing that ranchers, sheep ranchers, have to be aware of
because they come upon their sheep with their little cloven hooves in the air, trembling.
Well, that's from eating Phalaris arundinacea, which is a range grass that contains five-MeO DMT.
And these tryptamines are highly psycho and physiologically active.
It's thought that it's tryptamines that control heart rate, not psychoactive tryptamines,
but an entire other family of tryptamines that are being secreted in the neurospinal fluid.
So there's a lot about this that isn't understood, and work goes forward,
but not on the psychedelic tryptamines. That is, of course, a no-no.
One of my gripes that I don't know if I got around to in this weekend
is the fact that science prides itself on its open-minded impartiality,
and yet psychedelic research is utterly forbidden.
You can research any horrible thing you want,
how much ethyl xylene it takes to create tumors and rats and all this horrible stuff,
but there is no human research being done by or on human beings on this planet to speak of,
because it's professionally the kiss of death to become involved with this.
To my mind, this is like possessing the telescope and refusing to reform astronomy.
We come upon these things, they are gifts of knowledge,
and we need to integrate them into our growing paradigm,
or else our paradigm will become just another story.
Back here, yes.
Does the CIA have extensive data on acerciic acid?
The question is, does the CIA have extensive data on acerciic acid?
Well, they had a program in the '50s and '60s called MKUltra.
They amassed vast amounts of detail and data on these compounds,
but we don't really know what they concluded.
I think that the psychedelics are surprisingly slippery
in the hands of the managers of dominator institutions.
When they first had LSD, they thought, "Oh, this is a truth serum.
"We'll give this to our agents so that they can extract information
"from people they meet in foreign locations."
Well, then six months of that theory, they changed their minds and said,
"No, what it is is it's the antidote to a truth serum.
"Give this to somebody and they can't tell you what they know.
"So we'll make all our agents take it when they're captured
"so nobody can get information from them."
They decided that it was neither and it was a this and it was a that.
I have asked this question, because I'm concerned about it,
of the voice in the mushroom, the question being,
"What if these things fall into the hands of people who are not well-intended?"
And I can only tell you what the mushroom said.
It's not entirely satisfying to me as a paranoid rationalist.
But what it said was, "This is not your concern.
"These things are of the good,
"and the light cannot be corrupted by the darkness.
"The darkness passes right through it.
"It's as though it didn't even exist."
And I think there's truth to that.
People are always asking me,
"Why is it that I'm not dragged away, kicking and screaming?"
It's because it's utterly unimportant what I'm doing,
from the point of view of anybody in any position of authority.
We are all labelled flakes.
We are all seriously deluded people.
But as long as we remain less than 5% of the total population,
there's no problem.
I mean, democracy is very tolerant.
It tolerates all kinds of cults, belief systems, sexual orientations and so forth.
As long as we don't threaten the power structure
in ways that it can recognise.
That's the truth.
As long as we don't threaten the power structure in ways that it can recognise,
I don't think there's any problem.
And I ask you not to worry.
Yes?
(inaudible)
...in Mexico and here at that peyote population.
I don't really understand what you're saying.
That is...
To talk about peyote a little bit?
Yes.
Well, I mean, this is a...
Pardon me?
You mean what are they doing?
What it was all about.
Well, wherever there's hallucinogenic plant use
in a traditional culture, there's shamanism.
The shamanism of the American Southwest is a complicated study.
It's not clear how old the use of peyote is.
We might like, without examining the facts,
to think that it's millennia old,
but the evidence seems to be that thousands of years ago,
the hallucinogen or the empathogen of choice
was Sephora secundifolia,
which comes closer to being an ordeal poison.
If you're not familiar with the concept of an ordeal poison,
there are traditional groups of people in the world
whose path of transformation leads them not through hallucinogens,
but through plants that you take them
and you think you're going to die
and you have all the convincing symptoms
of the immediate onset of death,
and then you don't die,
and you're so damn relieved that you straighten out your life
and behave like a decent person.
So this is the ordeal poison approach,
and it's very highly evolved in Madagascar and Malaysia
and places like that.
Sephora secundifolia was a kind of ordeal poison,
and apparently in the last thousand years,
which isn't that long,
it has been replaced by peyote,
probably coming out of the Tarahumara,
who carried it then to the plains Indians generally.
If you're interested in this,
a major landmark in ethnobotanical publishing
in the last two months
was the publication of Omar Stewart,
who's an old botanist, very well thought of guy.
Omar Stewart's life work, The Peyote Religion,
has just been published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
Beautiful book. I urge you to take a look at it.
What?
It's called The Peyote Religion by Omar Stewart.
Yes.
I'm interested in...
I remember your experiences having this very unique insight
and then coming back into my life
and seeing that you failed to understand me
and having such an inspiration for the damage into my life.
And I'm wondering how you talk about federal protests
in your current work in the United States.
So the question, as I understand it,
is how do you hang on to what you learn in these peak experiences?
Or give it up.
What?
Or give it up, gracefully.
Well, or give it up, gracefully,
although I'm more in sympathy with the questioner.
[laughter]
I've always thought of the psychedelic experience
as like ocean fishing from a boat.
And the idea is to let down your net
and to bring up something useful.
And the nights spent on the empty ocean are beautiful,
but if you return with empty nets,
then what have you done for your tribe?
But on the other hand, sometimes you let down your nets
and something the size of a freight train goes by
and you best just row for shore.
[laughter]
But there are the intermediate catch.
And I think that this question that you ask is very important.
That this, and I don't really have an answer,
I have techniques,
but the goal is always to bring back as much as possible
because at the peak of say a six or seven gram mushroom trip,
you cannot believe what you're seeing
and you cannot, even in the act of beholding it,
you cannot imagine what you're seeing.
I mean, finally it actually goes off the scale
and you say, you know, all veils have been ripped away,
all truths revealed, this is it, you wanted it, you've got it.
[laughter]
But then, you know, you have to work your way down
from that summit over hours and bring back snapshots of it.
And the only thing I can say is it's a matter of repetition
and persistence and using every trick you can think of,
including voice-operated tape recorders, note-taking.
And when I really have what I think is a slam-bang insight,
I repeat it to myself like every 20 minutes for the next few hours
as I navigate through successively diminished states of higher consciousness
until finally I emerge and I still have understood the mystery
of why my little finger exactly fits my nostrils.
[laughter]
In the back.
Scream.
What is it?
Well, I'm not...
Oh, it's a drug.
Well, touch my mouth.
To be public, humiliate.
How many times in my life will this happen
before I finally shuffle off the stage?
2 CB, sir.
Oh, it's 2 CB. Okay, good.
Well, first of all, to your question about ayahuasca,
which requires some explanation for some of the other people here.
Ayahuasca is a fascinating, combinatory, hallucinogenic substance
that is made in the Amazon over a very wide area.
And what it is, is it's the monoamine oxidase-inhibiting
harmine from a very large woody vine combined with the DMT
that occurs in the cicotria viridis.
So it's interesting immediately
because it's a combinatory shamanicalic antigen.
There are very few of these in the world.
Notice that with peyote, datura, mushrooms, ibogae,
morning glory seeds, it's one plant,
and the process is to eat it.
But with ayahuasca, it's two plants.
And the first thing is they must be correctly combined
and cooked in certain proportions
by a person of good heart and clear intent.
So unlike any of these other things,
they bear very intimately upon themselves
the stamp of the human being who created them.
And it's a very intense experience
because it not only is a full-fledged visionary hallucinogen,
but it's also a strong purgative and pneumatic,
so that you are being cleaned from stem to stern
while you are watching these visions roll by.
And it's taken in the upper Amazon
in a ritual setting on a weekly basis
among the mestizo populations there,
and when made right, is extremely powerful, lovely experience.
It's interesting to contrast it with the mushrooms
because the mushrooms have this eerie,
"we came from outer space" kind of global science fiction overview.
Ayahuasca is entirely of the mother.
It is grounding.
It is of the earth, the flowing rivers, the dark banks,
the jungle, the people, the small malocas.
It just carries you out into the world of the earth
and the people upon it.
But the hallucinations can build
so that they have a quality of intensity and concreteness
so that you would swear that you had smoked DMT.
It's just that it took you three or four hours
of careful manipulation of breath and attention
to reach where DMT puts you,
whether you want it or not, in about 30 seconds.
But this is perhaps a better way to go at it.
I'm very interested in ayahuasca
and how it has formed culture and civilization in the Amazon.
And it's unusual that you ask the question even
because so few people have heard of it,
but it is beginning to be used in psychotherapy in this country
in a ritual context very discreetly.
And I think it holds out great promise.
The reports coming out of these small groups of people
who take it reverently and ritually
are of tremendous healings and reorientations
of neurotic personality structures and that sort of thing,
which is exactly how it works
in the context of the Amazonian situation.
Over here.
[inaudible]
By the revelations of Philip K. Dick,
do you mean the incidents that happened to him
and that spawned books like "Veilous" and "The Divine Invention"?
Well, I won't spend too much time on this
because I don't know how many people know who Philip K. Dick is.
I think it was Robert Anton Wilson
who coined the term "chapel perilous."
This is when something happens in your life
and it all begins to fit together and make sense.
Too much sense.
Because it's coming from the exterior
and it seems to either mean that you're losing your mind
or you are somehow this central focus
of a universal conspiracy
that is leading you towards some unimaginable breakthrough.
I don't know what that's about.
I've experienced it.
Maybe anyone who leads a long and eccentric life
has these periods where they seem to have caught the wave
and are being carried toward unimaginable revelations
and situations quite beyond their will.
This is what happened to Dick
and the explanation for these kinds of things
would lead us quite far afield.
I would just say briefly and bravely
that I think vortexes of connectedness
seem to haunt time like ghosts
and they're not material objects
so they're too subtle for science to pick up.
There's something known to shamans, poets, gamblers,
people like that
and these vortexes of coincidence and connectedness
can work either for or against it.
And if you don't have a model
that contains the possibility of these things
then when they come upon you
you will become highly agitated
and think you're losing your mind
or you're being contacted by aliens
or something like that.
I call it, and I don't think I'm the first,
but I call it the cosmic giggle
and it comes after you sometimes
and you just have to be rapid with that.
I call it, and I don't think I'm the first,
but I call it the cosmic giggle
and it comes after you sometimes
and you just have to be able to wrestle
with that particular angel
when it turns up on your doorstep.
Yes, this lady.
When you can see people that might be able to have
these kinds of experiences
in types of ways that you can explain
as well as enlightened
or enlightening kinds of experiences without drugs
and the second part of my question is
is it possible to have,
if you run into anyone who is so sensitive to
substances, diseases, hallucinogenic substances
that you can plant food
in some instances that they can't tolerate
or would be way over the mark
if they were to take substances?
Oh yes, absolutely.
I mean you meet people who are extremely delicately poised
and there are people who, you know,
well, consciousness can be just synergized
into all kinds of tizzies
by things other than these overt hallucinogens.
I am somewhat thankful that I'm cut from more lumpen stock
because I wouldn't know what to do with myself
if I began to have a hallucinogenic experience
not in the presence of a hallucinogen.
The states of mind that I'm interested in
that come out of these shamanic plants
are so radically different
from ordinary states of consciousness
that I wouldn't care to access them
except through the technology of the plants
and I often get asked this question
are there other ways to do it?
Certainly claims abound, you know,
and you meet people who say
I don't need drugs, I'm seeing little dancing mice
and I close my eyes and say
[laughter]
Congratulations!
[laughter]
But I've never been entirely convinced, you know,
it's really hard to convince yourself
that we're all talking about the same thing.
That's why I perhaps rattle on more than I should.
I've had the unsettling experience of
and I won't use any names
but meeting someone who had done research on psychedelics for 20 years
had given it to over 500 people
who had taken it over 150 times
and I said
we discussed the possibility that they were professionals
so they had always had off-the-shelf chemicals
and I said, well you should try fresh mushrooms
and see if you think there's a difference
and they debated the 1960s in large measure
with their rhetoric about psychedelic drugs
I had no idea
and so we have to keep leaning on each other
we have to keep comparing notes
and make sure we're talking about the same thing
we're not talking about
I mean, on the way to the mystery
along the way to the mystery lie the realms of
loving everybody
moving fields of geometric color
past lives
you name it
but these are just milestones on the way
when you finally get to the thing
the way you will know that you've arrived
is that you will be struck dumb with wonder
that you will say, my God, this is impossible
this is inherently impossible
this is what impossible was invented to talk about
this cannot be
and it's then we're in the ballpark
then we're in the presence of the true coincidencia appositorum
there are all kinds of drugs and techniques
and hot water and massage
and this and that and vitamin therapy
that moves you all over the map
makes you feel all kinds of different ways
and you see people experience all kinds of personal breakthroughs
under massage and re-birthing and all these things
but I don't think that's what we're talking about
I think we're talking about something profoundly other
that it is very hard to get this thing out into the mainstream
because literally words fail us
it is a trans-linguistic object
if a flying saucer were to land in Central Park tomorrow
it would be not as mysterious and challenging
to our conception of ourselves as this psychological state is
which lies at the centre of all this shamanic dancing around and probing
there is something profoundly bizarre
accessible to us here and now
and it's a complete puzzle to me
why there is so little talk about it
we live in a society completely obsessed with sensation
people shoot cocaine, jump out of airplanes
go on tiny rafts across the Pacific
cross the North Pole on a roller skate
whatever it is
and yet all in the name of adventure
well, by god, if you want adventure
there's adventure out there
there's adventure that will sink you to your knees
with tears of joy streaming down your face
it isn't far away
it isn't for people you've never heard of
or universities, you don't need a lot of funding
you don't have to be a professional
all of this stuff
everybody talks about the mystery within
and how it's all right here
but I don't think people realise how literal all this stuff is
the world is not only stranger than we suppose
it's stranger than we can suppose
the weirdest, wildest, most bizarre, unearthly thing
you can imagine in your most demented state of fantasy
falls far short of the beginnings of the truth
I don't know, sure
speak up
the question is, how do you do it right?
and you talk about shelf life
I've talked to people recently, I've said
have you taken five grams of mushroom?
yeah, I walked around a dead show and saw a cartoon
no one has said yes, except for one person
yes, I saw voices
yes, I saw an alien landscape
well, I think the way to do it right
and self-serving advice
but nevertheless
if not me, who?
is to grow it
to grow your sacrament
because then a whole bunch of imponderables are removed
the bad karma of dealing with some form of criminal syndicalism
the uncertainty of not knowing what it is you actually have on your hands
how old it is
what conditions of care and attention it was created under
plus the discipline
and now I'm speaking of mushrooms, which is what I know very well
the discipline of growing mushrooms will itself prepare you to take them
if you can grow them
you need be a lot less concerned about whether or not you can take them
than the person who simply buys them and takes them
because to grow them, you must be
clean, conscientious
punctual, attentive
self-disciplined
cheerful
able to face adversity
willing to take chances
full of courage
these are qualities necessary to grow the mushrooms
and of course never leave home
sedentary, permit-like
in love with isolation
perfectly content
so if you're all those things
and you will not succeed in growing mushrooms unless you are
well then you've already passed through a great initiation
and anyway, you know, the living world
the satisfaction of working this alchemy
I call it the changing of
of ryan to mold
and the cynical souls have suggested yes
and from molden to gold
but I wouldn't advocate that step
what you don't use you can give to your friends
but the growing is a real partnership
you will be amazed at the productivity of this organism
what a workhorse
you give it 112 grams of rye in a jar
and it will produce
close to 45 dry grams of mushrooms
that's a conversion rate of close to 30%
that's an unheard of level of efficiency in a biological process
this stuff loves to work with
for human beings
and it's a tremendous insight into natural processes
if you're alienated from all that
and people say, oh well, it's terribly technical
and this and that, it isn't technical
it's no more technical than canning jam
it's about at that level
it involves hot water, pressure cookers
gas heat, standing around, that kind of thing
but it is the reenactment
it's a real shamanic empowering
it's a calling forth of the ally before your eyes
and then you see it and then you have it
and then you're beholden to no one
plus you've empowered yourself by learning that you could do this thing
someone who hasn't, over here
that was actually the question I wanted to ask more or less
but short of you
are there other ways not growing it yourself
that you can properly prepare yourself for them
I mean I gather some mystic cultures
that have come along to do it in proper preparation
well, that was the question
how do you obtain it in good karma
you're asking the question
how do you take it in good karma
the advice is pretty straightforward and simple
first of all, obviously, you have to have an intent
to use it properly
for spiritual growth and self-exploration
I think that goes without saying in talking to a group like this
but then the practical and operational question is
how do you do it
well, here's how you do it
you take it on an empty stomach
in silent darkness
in a place where you are comfortable
now, people don't like this advice
it's very simple advice
and the number of people who will come to me and say
"I remember what you said
but I took it at 9 o'clock in the morning
and I wanted to listen to Mozart
and there were people moving around in the house
forget Mozart
you know, Mozart is great without
the adchun of these things
Mozart can stand on his own
my notion of what you're trying to do
when you take one of these things
is you want to see the quintessence
of what it is
you want to see what it is
so put darkness behind it
so that everything you see is only it
put silence behind it
so that everything you hear is only it
and then pay attention and sit still
and that's all there is to it
sit and watch the back of your closed eyelids
with the expectation of seeing something
you've all meditated
oh god, that's the most boring thing on earth
this is exactly like that
this is exactly like meditation
except instead of that dark, ochre background
that settles in with the little phosphines closing by
instead of that is a Niagara of transcendental imagery
so I would say that meditation is a great model for it
you know, sit down, shut up
breathe deeply
and look with attention at the back of your closed eyelids
and I guarantee you
it will come
it will manifest
I don't know, I feel like everybody should get a chance
Bertha, you haven't asked a question
on your Ayahuasca trip
have you seen any of the body types
or the volume of the Ayahuasca
that has been derived from this painting?
yes, good question
one of the mystiques of Ayahuasca
is that there are certain very tightly defined motifs
that occur in it
and these are being swallowed by an enormous serpent
and then somewhat unpredictably, since it's a South American drug
the presence of black people
and the jaguar motif
those three
the serpent, the jaguar and the black person
and the answer is yes
very strongly, not only myself but other people
this is really interesting to me
because I'm interested in, you know, where are these images
that's what I've always asked
that's why I'm so interested in the hallucinations
you see, people, you'll hear spiritual teachers say
well, hallucination is a distraction
and that's all lower bardo stuff
and you quickly get past hallucination
not me
I'm fascinated by hallucination
because I want to know where it's coming from
how can it be
that in sitting in silent darkness by myself for half an hour
I can see more art than the human race has produced in 15,000 years
that's not trivial
you can't dismiss that as an impediment to spiritual progress
that's a mystery and a miracle
where are these images coming from?
if they're coming from us, why don't we recognize them?
why is the main quality about them
something which astonishes
where we say, I could never have thought of that
and yet, you know, you're seeing it, it's filling your head
and so I wonder about the images in ayahuasca
are they in our bones, in our genes?
or is it a morphogenetic field of the local area?
where do these things come from?
Naranjo, Bertha referred to him in her question
did experiments with urban Chileans who had never been to the jungle
they also got jaguars, black people and giant serpents
and I've taken ayahuasca in Northern California
and the blackness is the most puzzling to me
because the jaguar and the serpent, these are power animals
but why blackness?
and not blackness as honkies, imagine it
I'm convinced it's blackness as black people experience it
I mean, it's this wonderful, it's very alien to an Irish lad like myself
I mean, it's like going to the Apollo
is what it's like
it's like being at the Apollo
it's this tremendously warm, open, funny, smart, savvy thing
why?
why should it be there embedded in that experience over and over again?
I don't know, why should the experience of the alien
be embedded in the psilocybin experience?
the sense of this thing which can communicate
but which is not human and from another whole order of nature
and with an entirely different conception of time and destiny and history
who are these?
what are these channels out there?
it's a very interesting question, to me it implies
what I talked about this morning
the existence of another dimension
a dimension so vast that it will completely dissolve
the concerns of industrial male dominated scientific civilization
we've gone as far as we can with that
and we're coming back now to really facing the mystery
with the things we learned on the peregrination through history
and we're better equipped than ever before to understand these things
but nevertheless, as the thing begins to lift the veils
you realize that it is still as mysterious as it ever was
here
in the 60s, MVA was thought to maybe help enhance community
can any of these drugs that you're talking about be used as a tool
to help accelerate the partnership spirit
in family, in a community, in large groups?
good question
do these natural hallucinogens, can they be used to facilitate
the formation of partnerships and partnership societies?
well, the answer is certainly
ayahuasca is a good case in point
the way ayahuasca is used in the Amazon among the very traditional
off-river tribes is it's used to create states of group-mindedness
among the elders of the tribe to make social decisions for the group
in other words, before, when ayahuasca was first encountered
the chemical in it was named telepathine
this is what these European chemists named it
later it was discovered that it was the same compound
as had already been isolated from the giant Syrian roux called 'harmine'
so the rules of nomenclature meant that 'harmine' would be preferred over telepathine
but these states of group-mindedness are very, very real
and they occur on psilocybin in my experience as well
I didn't talk about it too much this morning in my anthropological rep
but you can imagine the power that a kind of group telepathy would have
in ensuring the survival and cohesion of a primitive group
experiencing great pressure from the environment
so in a sense that's what these things may be good for
it's possible to suggest that our ability to use language
was something originally synergized out of our animal organization
by environmental pressures in the presence of hallucinogens
there is something about communication
and I think this leads me to a favorite subject of mine
I think that the ways in which we communicate with each other
is still evolving and still can gain energy
from being explored with psychedelic compounds
some of you I'm sure know my notion about what I call 'visible language'
and I referred to it this morning when I said how many could see what I was saying
visible language is the notion that language need not be something heard through the ears
language sufficiently empowered might be beheld with the eyes
this is what great poets are able to do
and great singers of song and tellers of stories
they're able to use language so creatively that without noticing
that anything has happened to you the listener
you begin to see what is intended rather than to hear it
and I take this very seriously because on psilocybin I have actually both beheld the intent of other people
and also been able to cause them to behold my intent
it's what Philo Judaeus called 'the more perfect logos'
he said the more perfect logos is a logos which goes from being heard by the ear
to being seen by the eyes without ever crossing over a quantized moment of transition
so imagine how much, you know we always think that telepathy would be a situation in which I would think something
and you would hear what I was thinking
but what if telepathy were that I would say something and we both would see what I mean
and could just walk around and look at it
and I think we unconsciously anticipate this in the ways in which we talk about communication
because we say 'she spoke very clearly'
'I see what you mean'
'he painted a picture for us'
in other words we always reach into the domain of the visual metaphor
when we wish to indicate a higher order of clarity in speech
and I think from taking ayahuasca and the Amazon with these shamans
that what we take to be beautiful shamanic songs
are for the people who are intoxicated on the hallucinogen
not songs at all but works of visual art
that are seen, that are looked at
again the visual metaphor, we talk about a tapestry of sound
these really are these ikaros, these magical songs
they really are tapestries of sound
and when you use psilocybin you can experiment with your own voice
and discover that a certain sound is actually the colour violet
and another sound is chartreuse shading into lemon yellow
in a way I'm trivialising it because it's much more complex than this
but what you discover is that sound can be seen
and that thought can be beheld
I think the evolution of our brain chemistry hovers
just under the threshold of this thing becoming explicit
and it's a hard thing to talk about obviously
because we're talking about speech and communication intent itself
but again by looking back into the past
we can obtain an image which maybe helps us
how did language as we know it
and as I am using it at this moment come to be
must this not have been something which was for thousands and thousands of years
just under the surface of our ability to take hold of it and cognise
and then suddenly it gelled
there was a phase transition
and people got the idea that you could signify with sound
that you could cause an image of a thing not present
to come into the mind of your hearer by naming it
and this is a tremendous, almost a miraculous ability
and people talk about gorillas and dolphins and chimpanzees
and there is language there
but the miracle of human language
the things that we can do with it
the way that poetry can set armies marching
and the way messiahs take control of the destiny of whole millenias of people
it's all through the spoken word, it's all through the power of images
be held in the privacy of the individual mind
somehow linked to little mouth noises
and these little mouth noises go across space
and enter through the ear of the hearer
the hearer consults his or her dictionary
and reconstructs a blueprint of the intended thought
and this very crude process is what holds us together
our religions, our governments, our hopes, our fears
so a transformation in the linguistic domain would create great cohesion
and I believe that the proper view of these psychedelic compounds is as enzymes
if you're not entirely clear on what an enzyme is
an enzyme is an organic catalyst
now what is a catalyst?
a catalyst is a compound which causes a certain chemical reaction
to progress at a faster rate without the catalyst itself being consumed
in other words it drives the chemical process
these hallucinogens in the natural surround drive and catalyze and synergize
the process of consciousness in our species
and what it comes down to in practical terms is the synergy of language emergence
we cannot move into the future any faster than the rate at which we transform our language
and language transformation and evolution has up until the present moment
been left pretty much to find its own way
there has never been really a culture with a conscious intent of transforming its language
yes, Hugh?
I agree with you and I think there's another aspect of it that I've observed in communication
and that is there's a... like listening to Buckminster Fuller is an interesting process for me
I've listened to him lots of times from my early childhood
and sometimes when I just... I don't try to understand his words
I switch into another mode
I've had times when I could understand everything he said without understanding his words
some of his words
so I think there's a lot of communication that goes on in that other place
that I think we all have to develop to get beyond the words
I agree in the realm of sound
at times, I mean, sometimes people criticize me and say
you use too many big words
you would communicate with more people if you used simpler words
well, first of all, I love words
and second of all, it's always been my faith
that if you pronounce the word clearly, it will be understood
you know?
and I don't know if it's working for you or not
it's how I learned all these big words
somebody said them to me and I knew exactly what they meant
so I think we need to fully empower language
we get along in day to day affairs on probably 10,000 words
English has 500,000
that we would all probably recognize
so we really need to experience and experiment with empowered speech
and what it can do
isn't it interesting that we have millions and millions of words
for things like leptons and quarks and ratchets
and these kinds of things
we have about five words for emotions
we have love, hate, disgust
and then a few others
but if you will still your mind for a moment
and direct your attention to your heart
you will see that your heart is as busy giving out complex vibrations as your mind is
the vibration, the complex vibrations given out by your mind
you can usually transduce into speech
and start saying I want, I think, I know, this and that
but when you turn your attention to your heart
most of us are totally inarticulate
and even the most articulate among us in matters of the heart
still inherit a tremendously impoverished vocabulary
it's very hard to say what you really mean when you're talking about your feelings
because they're such feathery delicate creatures
and the words that convey them are such sledgehammers
of statistical averaging and free misunderstanding
so this is another dimension
out of the 60s come concepts which are always ridiculed by the orthodox
concepts like the vibes and laying an ego trip
but what this is is the first halting steps
in creating a new language about emotion and feeling
and it's too bad that it was broken off
or that it didn't proceed at the rapid rate at the end
because we cannot
really the way I see moving into the future
it isn't a matter of time passing
it's a matter of stretching the envelope of language
we can only progress as quickly as we can describe to each other
as we want to go
this is again like restating the idea that the best idea will win
what we need to do is all hone our ideas
clarify our thoughts and then dialogue with each other
this was the Greek technique which created the first philosophical breakthroughs
that were the entire basis for our culture and much of the rest of world culture
so it's always about stretching the envelope of language
seeking to say yet more clearly what we mean
to adumbrate and refine and indicate nuance with ever greater clarity
that is what communication is and when it's done perfectly
it becomes a true partnership in art
one example you used before, Terrence, is the octopus
and the octopus conditioning changes its body and communicates physically
without verbal connection
as a dancer I appreciate that and I thought maybe you could make a comment on that
this is the part of the evening where we start requesting our favorite song
the octopus blues, briefly
I talked about visible language a little earlier
and John reminds me of a wonderful metaphor and insight into all of this
which is, you know, nature always provides models for what we want to do
no matter how advanced or unadvanced nature always provides the model
so I had this idea about visible language years and years ago
but in the past couple of years I've discovered
Lily seems to discover mind in the water
for Lily it was dolphins, for other people it's been whales
for me it was octopi, cephalopods
and I'll talk about them a little bit
first of all they have extremely well evolved eyes
they have eyes as good as human eyes
and in fact it's always held up as a great example of parallel evolution
that these two utterly unrelated organisms could have eyes
on the dissecting table you cannot tell a human eye from an octopus eye
unless you're an anathema
so, but who would want to?
octopi are cephalopods, they're mollusks
they're related to escargot and banana slugs
the evolutionary distance between them and us is tremendous
their line and our line divided about 780 million years ago
compared to dolphins, dolphins are like the boy and girl next door
compared to this organism, this is an alien organism
so it's been known for a long time that these octopi could change colour
and it was always thought that this was simple camouflage
that they change colour to match their background
but observation being the key to scientific advance
people notice that but they don't match their background
they generate polka dots and travelling bars
and what are called blushes and striping and all of this sort of thing
so then it was realized they are communicating with each other
this is how octopi communicate
they are actually almost like creatures turned inside out
because they have a tremendously advanced nervous system
which is on the surface of their skin
and this nervous system controls these specialised cells
called chromatophores which change colour
so that what an octopus thinks is how an octopus looks
in other words they are their own thoughts
they are like a naked nervous system
they are pure linguistic intent
and when you see them they not only are able to change their colour
but because they are soft bodied they can fold and unfold and reveal
so they are like a somatophore they are pure linguistic intent
and I think where this reaches its most psychedelic extreme
is in the benthic octopi
the very rare deep water octopi that live below 1500 metres
in the deep ocean where no light ever penetrates
and how have they continued their dialogue into this abyssal darkness?
it's by evolving light organs all over their bodies
equipped with eyelid like membranes
so that if you see films of these things
they are psychedelic idea complexes
transforming themselves, lighting themselves
sending travelling lines of lights and stripes and dots
well to me this is a model for the human future of communication
if you think of the way we seem to require titular animals
for instance the titular animal of 19th century industrialism
was the horse
realised as the locomotive
which was measured in thousands and thousands of horse power
that was very impressive for the 19th century mentality
the 20th century mentality realises its titular animal
which is I think the hawk, the soaring raptor
which is definitely a dominator symbol
is realised in high performance fighter aircraft
that is to be like a gigantic bird of prey
the titular model, the titular animal for the future
of course I would suggest the octopi
because it is probing the frontiers of communication and self-reflection
in fact the octopus may contain the hint
of what this great phase transition we are approaching is to be
it is actually I think an effort to turn ourselves inside out
to objectify the mind
so that it can be beheld and freely seen
so that we can each see the soul of the other
and then to interiorise the body
so that it is a freely commanded object in the imagination
that's I think what we are headed toward
and it is anticipated by the psychedelic state
and will be hardwired through the feminisation of cybernetics
and it will release from us the tremendous pressure of limits
that's what we really feel is limits
and we sense that in the imagination there are no limits
we just don't know how you get a 145 pound or 220 pound body into the imagination
well I think the process is a historical one
it's a cultural transformation
we have to exteriorise our minds, interiorise our bodies
and create a psychedelic, cybernetic partnership collectivity
that lays the basis for a new self-image of what humanness can be
this is what I call shedding the monkey
we are destined for grander and higher things
the promise has always been there
in the orgasms which we experience in distinction to most other animals
in the religions which we generate in distinction to most other animals
in the great collective works of art and social dreams
that we generate in distinction to most other animals
we are called to higher things
and are passing through a series of bootstrapping self-transitions
that are synergised by the psychedelic plants in our environment
and whose end state is anticipated in each of us as a microcosm
when we surrender our...
Mcluhan
McLuhan, I don't know how many of you recall him from the 60s, but he had, for a very brief
period of time, about five or six years, an extraordinary influence on American culture.
You couldn't pick up a magazine or turn on the TV without hearing McLuhan, McLuhan, what
he said, what he thought, what he predicted.
He was consulting with Madison Avenue, with politicians, with Hollywood, so forth and
so on.
And his influence, he died in the early 70s, and his influence died with him, even though
he had founded the Center for Media Study at the University of Toronto in Canada.
He really seemed to spawn no highly visible successors.
He was a unique personality and breakthrough, much in the same way that Joyce was a unique
personality and spawned very few imitators.
The irony of all this is that McLuhan did his journeyman work before he burst onto the
world stage as this mysterious savant of media.
He did his work as a Joyce scholar.
That's what he was, a literary critic, Joyce scholar, medievalist, that sort of thing.
And then in the early 50s or middle 50s, he wrote a book, which I've never read, it's
very hard to find, called The Mechanical Bride, that was his first testing of his ideas.
McLuhan is primarily understood as a communication theorist or a philosopher of media.
And that's what he talked about.
He turned the analytical Western deconstructionist method on the technologies of communication,
printing, film, photography, dance, theater, even such things as money, he thought of as
forms of media.
And he carried out and analyzed these various forms of media and reached very controversial
conclusions.
One of the things that was puzzling to me as I went back through and read all this is
one of the things was McLuhan was synonymous with incomprehensibility in the 60s.
The whole thing was, "Who can understand this guy?
He's like Buddha.
He speaks these words that we can't understand."
Well, now, 25, 30 years later, it reads pretty straightforwardly.
And most of what he's predicted has come to pass.
I think even McLuhan would be amazed at the speed with which the Gutenberg world has been
overturned.
There's no hint in here of home computers, let alone interactive networks, virtual reality,
phone sex and so forth and so on.
But this was all grist for the McLuhan-esque mill.
And he would have had he lived had much to say on this.
It surprised me in reading this stuff how demanding it is on your own literacy.
I mean, he assumes basically that the people he's talking to have read everything and have
understood it.
I mean, from Homer to Rabelais to Chaucer to Man Magazine, he assumes you have a complete
knowledge of modern film and popular print journalism and popular culture.
All of this was grist for his mill.
I'll show you the books I'm reading from and talking about, and then I'll actually read
you a section of McLuhan because it's like Joyce.
It's a stylistic thing that you can't really encompass without getting your feet wet.
This was his best known book, probably, and this is the original paperback edition.
This book was immensely discussed when it came out and probably very little read, judging
by the quality of the discussion.
Understanding media, the extensions of man.
This is how most people heard of McLuhan.
And he followed it up with The Gutenberg Galaxy.
These are all first editions.
These books, I don't think, are in print.
Few intellectuals in this century have fallen so totally through the cracks as McLuhan.
The Gutenberg Galaxy, very interesting.
I'm going to read from some of it tonight.
It's organized around chapter headings such as, "Does the interiorization of media such
as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?"
Or "Pope's Dunciad indicates the printed book as the agent of a primitivistic and romantic
revival.
Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal horde.
The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of Bardic incantation."
That's a chapter heading.
"Topography cracked the voices of silence."
And one of my favorite, "Heidegger surfboards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly
as Descartes rode the mechanical wave."
So there's a lot of fun in McLuhan and this comes out of his being a Joyce scholar.
You just can't mess with that without fun.
This is his third book with Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, Space in Poetry
and Painting.
And I guess I should say, a few years ago somebody asked me to review McLuhan's letters
which had been published, which I did.
It was a gnosis or somebody.
Anyway, it brought back to me, he was a convert to Catholicism and an extraordinarily complex
intellectual with a medievalist who became a Joyce scholar, who became a communications
expert.
And in McLuhan there is a very deep strain of nostalgia for the essence of the medieval
world of what he called manuscript culture.
And essentially his entire output is a critique of print and of the impact of print on culture.
And I think though he attempted to be fairly even-handed, his final resolution of all this
was that it had many, many detrimental and distorting effects on the Western mind.
This is another little book he published back in the heyday and he experimented with topographic
layout somewhat hearkening back to the surrealists whom he discusses a great deal.
And there was something about, it was his fascination with topographical layout that
also brought him into such congruence with the wake.
So let me read you a section from the Gutenberg Galaxy that is both interesting to think about
or if you can't understand it, then an interesting example of what McLuhan's style was like and
what I mean by that he was an extraordinarily demanding intellectual.
He doesn't cut you much slack.
This is a short section called "Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
Until now we have been concerned mostly with the written word as it transfers or translates
the audio tactile space of sacral non-literate man into the visual space of civilized or
literate or profane man.
Once this transfer or metamorphosis occurs we are soon in the world of books, scribal
or typographic.
The rest of our concern will be with books written and printed and the results for learning
and society.
From the 5th century B.C. to the 15th century A.D. the book was a scribal product.
Only one third of the history of the book in the western world has been typographic.
It is not incongruous therefore to say as G.S.
Brett does in psychology ancient and modern, and here's the quote, "The idea that knowledge
is essentially book learning seems to be a very modern view probably derived from the
medieval distinctions between clerk and layman with additional emphasis provided by the literary
character of the rather fantastic humanism of the 16th century.
The original and natural idea of knowledge is that of cunning or the possession of wits.
Odysseus is the original type of thinker, a man of many ideas who could overcome the
cyclops and achieve a significant triumph of mind over matter.
Knowledge is thus a capacity for overcoming the difficulties of life and achieving success
in this world."
So that closes the quote.
Then McLuhan comments, "Brett here specifies the natural dichotomy which the book brings
into any society in addition to the split within the individual of that society.
The work of James Joyce exhibits a complex clairvoyance in these matters.
His Leopold Bloom of Ulysses, a man of many ideas and many devices, is a freelance salesman.
Joyce saw the parallels on one hand between the modern frontier of the verbal and the
pictorial and on the other between the Homeric world poised between the old sacral culture
and the new profane or literate sensibility.
Bloom, the newly detribalized Jew, is presented in modern Dublin, a slightly detribalized
Irish world.
Such a frontier is the modern world of the advertisement congenial therefore to the transitional
culture of Bloom.
In the seventeenth or Ithaca episode of Ulysses we read, "What were habitually his final
meditations of some one's sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster
novelty with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient
terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern
life."
In the books at the wake, James S. Atherton points out and here's Atherton's quote,
"Amongst other things, Finningen's Wake is a history of writing.
We begin with writing on a bone, a pebble, a ram skin, leave them to cook in the mothering
pot, and Guten Morg with his Cro-Magnon charter, Tinting Fats and Great Prime must once for
omnibus step Rubric Red out of the word press.
The mothering pot is an illusion to alchemy, but there is some other significance connected
with writing, for the next time the word appears it is again in a context concerning improvement
in systems of communication.
The passage is, "All the erish signics of her dip and dump help a bit," from an Father
Hoggum told the Mutter Maskens.
Dip and dump help a bit combined the deaf and dumb alphabet signs in the air or erish
signs, with the ups and downs of the ordinary ABC and the more pronounced up and downs of
Irish Hoggum writing.
The Mason following this must be the man of that name who invented steel pen nibs, but
all I can suggest for mother is the mothering of Freemasons which does not fit the context,
although they of course also make signs in the air."
Is that perfectly clear?
Now back to McLuhan.
"Guten Morg, with his Cro-Magnon charter, expounds by mythic gloss the fact that writing
meant the emergence of the caveman or sacral man from the audial world of simultaneous
resonance into the profane world of daylight.
The reference to the Masons is to the world of the bricklayer as a type of speech itself.
On the second page of the wake, Joyce is making a mosaic, an Achilles shield as it were, of
all the themes and modes of human speech and communication.
Beidmeister Finnegan of the Stuttering Hand, Freeman's mower lived in the broadest way
imaginable in his rush lit too far back for massages before Joshua and Judges had given
us numbers.
Joyce is in the wake making his own Altamira cave drawings of the entire history of the
human mind in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all phases of human culture
and technology.
As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into
the night of sacral or auditory man.
The fin cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's
make it awake or awake or both, Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up
in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream.
He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious.
This means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural bias in his colliderioscope.
This term indicates the interplay and colloidal mixture of all components of human technology
as they extend our senses and shift their ratios in the social collidoscope of cultural
clash, deor, savage, the oral or sacral, scope, the visual or profane and civilized.
So that's his comment.
Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
These people, Joyce to some degree, Pound, McLuhan, they were the prophets of the world
in which we now stand, the world of integrated interactive media, extraordinary data retrieval
that erases the 17th century notion of the unconscious.
Nothing is now unconscious if your data search commands are powerful enough and the remaking
of the human image that required centuries for print, the transition that we talked about
in here from scribal culture to true book culture occupied 500 years.
The transition from book culture to electronic culture has occurred in less than 50 years.
I mean it's eerie to read his examples of contemporaneity because there's stuff like
Marilyn Monroe, Perry Como, James Dean.
I mean he's writing from another era and yet from his point of view he's firmly embedded
in a kind of super future that we are now able to look back on.
Here's another section that I think makes some of this more clear.
The name of this section is the medieval book trade was a second hand trade even as with
the dealing today in old masters.
From the 12th century onward the rise of the universities brought masters and students
into the field of book production in class time and these books found their way back
to the monastic libraries when students returned after completing their studies.
A number of these standard textbooks of which approved exemplars were kept for copying by
the stationery of the universities naturally found their way into print quite early.
For many of them contained in undiminished request in the 15th century as before these
official university texts offered no problems of origin or nomenclature and then he's quoting
Goldschmidt he adds, "Soon after 1300 the expensive vellum could be dispensed with and
the cheaper paper made the accumulation of many books a matter of industry rather than
wealth since however the student went to lectures pen in hand and it was the lecturer's task
to dictate the book he was expounding to his audience.
There is a great body of repartirata which constitute a very complex problem for editors."
So really like for Joyce, for McLuhan, the book is the central symbol of the age, the
central mystery of our time.
In a sense I sort of share that notion.
It's a very Talmudic notion.
It's a very psychedelic notion.
It's the idea that somehow the career of the word is the central overarching metaphor of
the age and naturally if the book is the central metaphor for reality then reality itself is
seen as somehow literary, somehow textual and this in fact is how I think reality was
seen until the rise of modern science.
We're always taught that the roots of modern science go back to Democritian atomism which
is of course true but the number of people who knew that a thousand years ago was probably
very few.
The real notion out of which science had to divest itself is the notion of a book or if
that seems too concrete, a story, a narrative, the story of man's fall and redemption.
That was what the Christian exegesis of post-edemic time was all about.
With the rise of modern science the idea of narrative has become somewhat overthrown.
McLuhan would say that narrative persisted far beyond its utility because the biases
of print kept it in place for such a long time.
Everyone assumes that tools are tools and you use them and that's that.
For McLuhan the entirety of the toolkit of modern western man can be traced to the unconscious
assumptions of print.
For example the idea of the individual which is a pretty personal notion right there in
close to the heart, the idea of the individual is a post-medieval concept legitimized by
print.
The idea of the public, this concept did not exist before newspapers because before newspapers
there was no public.
There were only people and rulers very rarely bothered to pass on their thinking to anybody
other than their closest associates and then only for utilitarian reasons the notion of
an observing citizenry somehow sharing the governance of society.
This again is a print created idea.
The idea of interchangeable parts without which our world would hardly function, there
would not be automobiles, buildings, aircraft, interchangeable parts.
That's an idea that comes from the interchangeability of letters in a printer's block.
That was the first industry to ever utilize the concept of easily reformulated subunits
and it's strange, you know, the Chinese get credit for inventing printing thousands and
thousands of years before Europe but they would carve a single block of wood and print
it.
They didn't get the notion of movable type and movable type, the distribution of books
becomes the paradigmatic model for the distribution of any product, you know.
It's produced, it's edited, it's manufactured, it's sold and then sequels are spawned.
All products have followed this model but books were one of the earliest mass manufactured
objects to be put through this cycle.
Modern city planning, the linearity of it, the way in which land surveys are carried
out, these are all unconscious biases imbibed from the world of print and they make sense
if you're a print head but one of the peculiar things, notice that animals do not possess
language.
Many human societies do not possess writing and very few human societies and only two
on earth invented printing and yet once invented it feeds back into the evolution of social
structures and defines everything and yet it's an extraordinary artificiality and we
have been imprisoned in it for hundreds and hundreds of years now.
Now it is breaking down and we are changing to a different sensory ratio and you might
suppose if you hadn't given us a lot of thought that the new electronic media, television
and so forth would carry us into an entirely different sensory ratio.
McLuhan felt differently, he felt that it was restoring us to a medieval sensory ratio.
He felt that a television screen is much more like an illuminated manuscript than a page
of print.
The distinction may seem subtle at first but if you're looking at an illuminated medieval
manuscript, notice I said looking, you must look in order to understand.
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Mcpsilosa
Conscious development of conscious alternatives, but it was not until the Amazon that I saw
that this was possible in a way that was accessible to me.
So then I concentrated on those people, those chemical families, and that then became the
compass for all the work that I've done since then.
And I regard the degree more or less as a joke because it was self-directed study.
They don't really, there is no degree in shamanism.
But my interest was basically one in the phenomenology of religious experience, religious traditions
worldwide and primitive people against a background of tropical nature.
And stumbled onto the mushrooms in the jungles of Columbia in 1971 and was not even particularly
interested in mushrooms at the time.
We were looking for a less well understood drug that is still not discussed much in the
literature but exists in a very circumscribed area among three Indian tribes.
And we went into the jungle to stay at a mission that served these Indians.
And the priest at this mission had cleared pasture and brought in white cows.
And there were many, many of these mushrooms.
And as soon as we started experimenting with them, I realized that what I had been told
about psilocybin, which was that it was analogous to LSD but simply required a larger amount
for the effect to be present, was a complete simplification of the issue.
And actually then psilocybin became the focus of my interest and by extrapolation the other
tryptamine related hallucinogens.
And a great dream of mine and of my brothers as well was that the mushroom was somehow
be made accessible to people so that they may judge for themselves the difference.
And we worked with this over a number of years.
And in 1975 we succeeded in growing it by a method that had previously been used only
in the laboratory on commercial grocery store mushrooms to study their genetics.
But it turned out to be perfectly adapted for growing this mushroom.
Within a matter of months we had written psilocybin, the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, and the
information was moving out into society.
But more important from our point of view was that the mushroom was again accessible
to us so that we had psilocybin in a form that was certified pure by Mother Nature.
And that initiated the second phase of our work with these drugs which is carrying us
up to the present day.
And it's basically a project of taking the drugs, calling attention to the differences,
the uniqueness of the state, and trying to attract other people's attention to it because
I have, we have a very deep intuition of its importance for the cultural predicament for
mankind generally.
And this is how we come to where we are today basically.
You just mentioned that the mushroom is really important for our country right now.
You perceive yourself as an advocate to bring into our culture a new element like an easy
way to reach altered sense of consciousness.
What can we learn from these experiences?
Well the first thing that we can learn is that they exist.
In other words that perhaps it's a truism in the 80s but at one point it was thought
that there were two states of consciousness, awake and asleep.
Now there is a gamut of these states but I still don't believe that the people who deal
with consciousness realize how mutable consciousness really is.
There is a prejudice against the use of drugs because there is an inherent dualism built
into Western thought where people value the experience if it is endogenously produced,
produced through ordeal or personality or dieting but is undervalued if it comes from
drugs.
This has in my opinion held back the Western development of understanding consciousness
because quite simply these states I do not believe are accessible by any means other
than drugs and this is heresy to a number of people but the evidence that I lay in favor
of that contention is the history of human art and literature and music and painting
is surprisingly empty of the motifs which exist in the tryptamine induced ecstasy and
always when I speak of hallucinogens I'm speaking of this limited family of drugs, not LSD or
ketamine or mescaline but psilocybin and DMT and combinational drugs which utilize strategies
for making that effect noticeable and my career is to point at this place in nature which
I've stumbled upon and to say what is this, what do you make of this, what do you the
physicist, you the psychologist, you the after death researcher, what do you make of this
place and even the most sophisticated consciousness researchers tend to hurry over drugs or to
focus on one drug to the exclusion of others and yet psilocybin has not received this kind
of attention and treatment and why that is I'm not sure. I think that the element of
terror involved in doing it, the fact that it does not bathe your ego in a cloud of certitude
or assurance that everything is going to be fine. It is much more cut and dried than that
and it's a challenge. It is when you are out in the billows as I call it because it seems
to come in in waves like sets of billows, when you're out in the billows you are against
the power of mind, up against the power of mind to such a degree that you know that the
entire enterprise hangs in the balance that no matter how much you've been told about
dosage and this kind of thing that the mind actually holds the key to life and death and
that those parts of your control board which are normally masked from you are suddenly
unmasked and the buttons are there for you to manipulate to the degree that you understand
them and there is an element of risk. I never tell people that there isn't but I think that
the risk is worth it because I think these bizarre dimensions of beauty and information
are actually it is an intimation of these things that gives human history its coherency.
In other words this is not a peripheral issue to the general phenomenon of human becoming
in time. It is actually because the evolution of the human species is the evolution of the
human mind these consciousness expanding agents actually anticipate an end state in the evolution
of the human mind and so they cast enormous reflections back over the historical landscape.
It is they which generate religions and physics and messianic careers and outbreaks of great
psychic accomplishment and disgrace and until we understand this until we understand that
there is a teleological object at the end of human history and that it can be known
we will continue to live the kind of limited intellectual existence that has characterized
the last five hundred years or so of western development. So a siben tryptamine is in my
opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture
of eternity which is modulating time and causing history essentially. How do you perceive in
this context the future of mankind and the human mind? Well I have said many times the
human history is a lunge across fifteen or twenty thousand years of time from the primitive
stone chipping primate to that creature which will walk into a transdimensional vehicle
and leave the solar system and human history and the concerns of the human monkey far behind
and this may take a thousand generations of people but as a biological fact as an emergent
process of planetary significance that is only a microcosm I mean a microsecond of cosmic
time. The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension
where the imagination can be expressed the present cultural crisis on the surface of
the planet is caused by the fact that this is not a fitting theater for the exercise
of imagination. It wrecks the planet. The planet has its own ecostemic dynamics which
are not the dynamics of imagination. In space, the physical space that surrounds the planet,
the modalities of imagination will be the limiting cases of what man can be done. So
I see man becoming an artist and an engineer in other words flowing into our ideas perhaps
more than we dare even now suspect in other words a possible end state of that kind of
technical evolution would be the interiorization of the body of the human body the individual
body and the exteriorization of the soul and this seems to me to be what the recovery from
Adam's fall allegorically is getting at that the soul must be made manifest and eternal
and the body must be incorporealized so that it is a freely commanded object in the imagination
and what I mean by that is something like what William Butler Yeats is getting at in
his poem Sailing to Byzantium where he speaks of the artifice of eternity and talks about
how beyond death he would hope to be an enameled golden bird singing sweet songs to the lords
and ladies of Byzantium in other words it's the image of the human body become a an indestructible
cybernetic object and yet within that indestructible cybernetic object there is a holographic transform
of the body and it is released into the dream in other words the after death state is actually
the compass of human history that we are attempting to undergo a complete death of the species
and as we struggle with this concrescence of Thanatos there is there are problems like
nuclear stockpiles and all these things arise because the message that we're trying to read
is the message we most fear to hear which is that you must die to experience eternal
life essentially but what this death that we're talking about is is an understanding
that the human the Dasein the being of human beings desires to be released into the imagination
and until we confront death with the attitude that it is the after death state that needs
to enter history there will be a great deal of anxiety it's like a birth you know a birth
is a death everything you treasure and believe in and love and relate to is destroyed for
you when you leave the womb and you are launched into another modality a modality that you
would not perhaps have chosen but that you cannot do anything about so I I think these
drugs anticipate this because I think that time is the moving image of eternity as Plato
said and these drugs place you outside of time now the mechanism of how that's done
you can invoke Bell's theorem or just call it pure magic but it does happen in the here
and now it is accessible it is not it is not something remote from us but somehow the clamor
of the modern world and in search for answers people have feared to place themselves on
the line and to actually wrestle with life and death out there in those strange bardo
like dimensions not realizing that there is no other way to win true knowledge I mean
it cannot be easily come by there is no knowledge without risk-taking and I see the human future
emerging along the lines that the mushroom visions have insisted upon the proliferation
of electronic media the densification of information the breaking down of consensus reality the
breakdown of a coherent dogma at the center of physics all these things indicate that
it is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind
and once that realization is placed in the center of someone's thinking about the world
the importance of these drugs will be seen to be paramount and once that culture places
that understanding in the center of its model of the world these drugs will then point the
way and we will be much closer to the end of history that I think we all desire consciously
or unconsciously a cutting of the Gordian knot and a release of the human species and
individual into the dream basically and primitive people meaning pre-literate people they just
have circumvented the entire process of history they have leapfrogged over us they are already
in the dream they have accepted the drug on its own terms and assimilated it and live
with it the problem with that for them and for us is that we are destroying their world
and our intellectual equipment is such that we can never have that naive epistemological
approach to these phenomena because we know about techne we know that energy can be manipulated
to achieve effects and so it isn't enough for us to try to recreate the shamanism of
pre-literate people we have to go into the shaman space with the a priori categories
of Kant with the edetic reduction of Wittgenstein with the ideas of Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead
all the intellectual equipment of our culture must be carried with us into that space to
attempt to map it in a way that will be relevant for us and that will point the way toward
a shortening of this period of shock and the accumulating shock waves like the bow shock
of ionized particles or energetic particles meeting the magnetic field of the planet that's
what the chaos at the end of history is were you just talking about the bell field no I'm
talking about a shock wave which precedes eschatology and is modern times basically
I mean it has been increasing throughout history but as we grow closer to this moment where
the human mind will evolve into hyperspace the confusion the amount of contradiction
the amount of well Q it's called in engineering just the amount of vibration in the system
is increasing to the point where it seems like the system is about to fly to pieces
this signals to me that the onset of the primal crisis that when we have gone through it we
will then live in this realm of altered understanding that psilocybin and these drugs anticipate
and it isn't a coincidence that they anticipate them it is in fact what eschatological time
is is what they reveal that's why the cultures we find using them are eschatological and
historical cultures what is the bell thing well the bell thing is simply an interpretation
of an experiment quantum mechanics which seem to suggest that information is non-local in
other words that everything about everywhere can be known here and now because somehow
all information is cotangent to every point in the matrix I don't pretend to have the
background to judge the bell theorem what I would say about it is if it isn't true something
like it must be true to account for the informational content of these drug experiences if you just
take a simple behaviorist model what is in your head if behaviorist and reductionist
evolutionists are correct what is in your head should be very adapted to the here and
now it should be efficacious information that bears on your survival instead what we finally
take these drugs is a density of information an alieness of information an inapplicability
of information to the human condition that suggests that information is available that
has no bearing on the life of the individual or his the success of his evolutionary strategy
and I just cannot believe that these things are built into the human psyche I have as
I said I was involved with Jungian ideas and I those archetypes and those archetypal processes
are not what I'm talking about I'm talking about the thing which for want of a better
word we call the alien or the extraterrestrial the thing which comes out of the drug experience
that is uninglishable beautiful but so bizarre that it seems to exceed human categories some
people talk about entities yes it can present itself as an entity it can present itself
in a number of different ways it is it is the central mystery of our age we are so alienated
or let me restart them the relationship of intellectuals alive today who are familiar
with the state of modern science and that sort of thing to a question like the existence
of extraterrestrials is approximately in the same place or degree of closure as the relationship
of 15th and 16th century intellectuals to the real properties of matter in other words
they had only a tenuous grip on the real properties of matter consequently alchemy could exist
could project the hopes of human psychic transformation onto inert matter because so little was known
about the real nature of matter that it seemed a reasonable place to expect these kinds of
things to happen the present state of thought today is that it's highly likely that there
are extraterrestrials somewhere out among the stars our state of can't this state of
the development of our chemistry astrophysics linguistics etc etc makes it reasonable for
us as moderns to expect that so then consequently we go into our heads and there seems to be
the extraterrestrial it may be a true extraterrestrial but it is odd that it is hidden itself in
the place where we expected to find it and this causes me to assume that actually it's
something far more profound than an extraterrestrial it's something which to gain our confidence
is disguised as an extraterrestrial because it's a real nature is so much more devastating
than that that that is the way in which it insinuates itself into our lives so that we
can dream of a hegemony of organized intelligence out in the galaxy that we will relate to and
be assimilated into what I think is going on is that actually the most intelligent life
form on the planet is not man and his institutions it is the overmind of the human species which
is a diffuse organism of technical artifacts like computers and information transfer and
retrieval systems and human beings and but human institutions are like myths woven by
the individual human cells that make up society the real controlling modality on the planet
is never visible and it is this group mind and it controls the release of ideas into
history by designating certain people as geniuses and it's if there's a certain kind of imbalance
a certain kind of religion will arise to collapse that imbalance if if technical advancement
is outstripping the evolution of ethics a religion can step in to freeze these developments
so that one can catch up with the other and I think the whole consciousness movement and
that has evolved over the past 20 years is an attempt to map to verify and to open a
dialogue with this thing which is the other we call it the other we call it the alien
but it is actually the overmind of the species and it seeks this dialogue it has been waiting
all these millennia to for us to essentially come to a point of intellectual maturity where
we did not then require messiahs religions and these various crude find crude interventions
into the human experience which keep us from destroying ourselves this is also a new call
to collectivine culture right but he he painted it as a very passive kind of thing more like
a data bank or a place where all myths and all memories were I think of it as a god a
kind of god and I think it it is active in three-dimensional space it can be active in
something as personalistic and circumscribed as a string of coincidences which you experience
which seem to be turning your life in a certain direction that you may not have expected or
it can be active in something like the worldwide phenomenon of flying saucers flying saucers
are nothing more than miracles and they occur essentially to be devil science because science
is a human institution that has arisen in the last 500 years that is the dreams of displacing
the overmind without ever realizing that it exists science dreams of this place of preeminence
but science creates alienation species survival problems all of these things now then the
overmind which can be thought of simply like a cultural thermostat it clicks on when the
clash of contradiction between the ethics of a society and some other institution in
this case science becomes too great this governing device clicks on and it begins producing those
events most destructive to the institution that is seeking preeminence in this case science
so the inexplicability of the flying saucer phenomenon is its central reason for being
and all the effort to reduce it to something metal ships from far away or anything else
is doomed to failure because its very reason for being is to undermine those kind of ontological
systems why we're talking about this is because psilocybin makes it induct you into the flying
saucer experience in other words a metaphor for it would be to say that psilocybin is
a means of triggering the so-called abduction experience or the close encounter of a third
kind once you realize that once you've satisfied yourself that that's true a number of experimental
avenues are opened up a number of different approaches to what's going on are suggested
I mean here we have alien entities eager to transmit information eager to carry on a noatic
dialogue and we seem to be ignoring the opportunity because our categories mitigate against us
correctly appreciating these entities coming from outer space or are they more part of
us it's impossible to tell this is the game that you must play with them is through dialogue
trying to figure out if this is the previously unseen human psyche or whether it is actually
a thing coming from the outside and it is not an easy thing to decide because we are
so alienated from self that we don't really know what it would be it's not important to
know the context is more important to know the content the content is very interesting
yes because even if we were somehow to verify that bells non-locality theorem applied and
that this these were real entities around a real sun somewhere in the universe it would
make them no more or less real in other words it's a hang-up to to demand that they appear
in three-dimensional space I always said I have this hang-up so I I don't I don't put
it down I always think of the the Apostle Thomas because you'll recall Thomas was not
present when Christ returned after when he rose from the grave he appeared to the Apostles
in the upper room and Thomas was not present then later he was there and the Apostle said
listen the master was here and it was wonderful and he said you know people have been smoking
too many little brown cigarettes that's preposterous and at that point Christ walked in and he
said he said Thomas come put your hand into the wound so that you will believe and so
he did and so then he believed well the moral of the story as I read it is Thomas was the
doubter consequently Thomas was the only one who was allowed to actually touch the resurrection
body it was because he doubted that he was about safe to this position of preeminence
and I'm like that I mean I would like to touch the incorporeal body I would like to call
the saucer down and observe all of its workings but this is a spiritual aspiration that cannot
be advanced by any human technique or activity this is just something you pray for in the
meantime the job is to to map it and describe it and explore it and try to direct the attention
of other people more intelligent than myself to this astonishing fact really I mean I am
I'm troubled by the fact that so many strange claims are made today so many forms of aliens
and channeling and voices in the head that when I began all this 10 years ago I was afraid
to speak because I sounded mad even to myself and I sounded like a voice in the wilderness
today the situation has changed to the point where I can barely make myself heard amidst
the clamor of people who have various entities from Atlantis and beyond the grave and Zeta
reticuli and what have you clamoring to be heard so I I take it on faith and I ask you
to take it on faith that I am somewhat more objective and somewhat more interested in
hard facts than these other channelers I would like people to take a look at this phenomenon
and then tell me what they think and it involves risk people fear to do it careers are placed
on the line it is not easy to make a career out of taking a psychedelic drug it is not
a thing which mixes well with the politics of the any institution a university a research
institution I can think perhaps this is why shaman are the primary sources of the information
about it are you an exploring show I'm an exploring shaman I wouldn't claim to be a
shaman but I think anybody who takes these things and goes out and tries to navigate
through and make maps and bring back data is a shaman for sure do you want that everybody
takes his drug on the side and take the drug no I don't think so I think it's very I think
it's very dangerous I do not tell people that it's safe because I don't have the faith that
it's safe I know what the pharmacological literature says and it says that it's safe
that at the doses where these effects occur there can't possibly be a problem but this
seems to me to be the naivete of materialists and we shouldn't be in a hurry to believe
them even though it might make us more comfortable to do so in other words it's saying you know
the drug may not be toxic but you may be self-toxic and you may discover this on the drug in the
drug experience so you have to you have to hone yourself and be clean and you never know
if you're clean enough until it's too late because each journey into that dimension is
a total existential commitment to and the element of fear is always there I mentioned
this this morning but I think the fear validates it I'm not I think it's fine to take drugs
for pleasure but it should be labeled as taking drugs for pleasure and the high doses of psilocybin
that are necessary to elicit entry into these places it requires as it says in Hamlet you
must screw your courage to the sticking place you mentioned earlier about mankind evolving
towards a teleological goal would you comment on that what is well I don't think I don't
think there is a final goal and an end to history but speaking relative to the history
of the past four or five thousand years I think the goal is as I said to invert the
relationship of body and soul so that the body becomes an image in the imagination and
the soul becomes an exteriorized solid state piece of circuitry which maintains everything
else in stasis and I'm not sure if people even realize what I'm picturing my mind when
I say this but I think that the destiny of man and what man will make be his destiny
just because of how we are is released into the imagination and this is what all our after
death scenarios say whether they are true or not and they may be true and this is what
poetry aspires to art aspires to release into the imagination we are creatures of the dream
and once this is articulated with sufficient clarity and it's happening now but I think
the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next hundred
years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body
and brain we are consciousness we may not always be monkeys we fear the dehumanizing
effect of so many computers and emotions euphoric emotions not related to sex and all these
things we fear them we say we are moving further and further from nature deeper and deeper
into our own psyche but this is a dualism our psyche is nature and we are not we cannot
move away from nature by exploring these places so I believe that a technological recreation
of the after death state is what history pushes toward and that means a kind of eternal existence
where there is an ocean of mind into which one can dissolve and reform from but there
is also the self related to the body image but in the imagination so that we each would
become in a sense everyone I would live at Versailles and you might live at the Taj Mahal
and someone else might live at Buckingham Palace but what you would see if there were
an exterior observer what you would see is only that man had become a coral reef of circuitry
in space and on the planetary surface but this is a very extreme view of the history
of man because it's essentially gnostic it says we are not now what we yearn to be and
are destined to be we are we are not I don't see history as the process of accepting and
coming to terms with monkeyhood I see that it will inevitably seek to transform and transcend
monkeyhood and this will be very frightening I mean it's frightening imagine if even a
15th century person were to be in this room with us and the value systems the clash of
assumptions about what is important and unimportant and this will be a much more intense change
that and whether it is good or bad rests on a question that I have no answer for and the
question is is man good and this I maintain is the central thing to dig at and we cannot
know and there's evidence pro and con I have the faith that man is good so I don't fear
this future but if someone had a doubt even a small doubt about that then they would be
repelled by this and I take all these movements which want zero some growth and reject technology
reject space colonization reject the drug experimentation as artificial these people would be very alarmed
by this kind of a point of view but they do not seem to realize that the momentum toward
this kind of thing is now so great in terms of the human culture and that sort of thing
that there can be no turning back we are either going to change into this cybernetic hyperdimensional
hallucinogenic angel or we are going to destroy ourselves the opportunity for us to be happy
hunters and gatherers integrated into the balance of nature that fell away 15,000 years
ago and cannot be recaptured I think Gerard O'Neill made it in answer to this very objection
he said the earth is the cradle of mankind there is no question about that but you do
not remain in the cradle forever and this is a birth crisis that we're going through
for the entirety of human history has been the story of the monkey becoming the flying
saucer and it is taking just that long in geological time but we for some strange reason
happen to be living through the final moments of that process right now and it is a turbulent
chaotic multidimensional metamorphosis that is there has never been anything like it on
this planet before it is absolutely astonishing information which was locked for kilocosms
of time into the DNA of plants and animals has through the hand and articulate voice
of man been able to bootstrap itself out of the DNA and into these culturally validated
rapidly operating electromagnetic codes and languages and this is allowing its development
its evolution to proceed at a rate so fast that the transformation is taking place essentially
in our lifetime and psilocybin is central to this because psilocybin casts a spotlight
into the darkness into which we are moving and shows that this is what lies there it
is the human soul essentially the over soul of mankind calling history toward itself across
the dimensions and it is taking only a moment but on the other hand it is taking 20,000
years and it is the great great adventure of becoming and we are very very privileged
to be in this final ticking out of the last seconds of the third act.
Do you have any comments about the fact that DMT is located in the human brain?
I think that puts in some senses a strong piece of evidence for the argument that I
have been making not only is DMT endogenous in the brain but beta carbolyne is of the
sort that occur in Iowa's car endogenous in the brain as well.
These things as I mentioned this morning the shift of a single atom on the ring structure
of one of these molecules can cause a compound to go from inert to highly active.
Well that means then that it is probably very reasonable to say that we are as close to
shifting the level of endogenous hallucinogens in our head we are probably only a one gene
mutation away from that happening and if you know anything about how biological evolution
works it isn't that a change a mutation occurs and the mutation is found to be better adapted
than the previous form and hence the mutation dominates that is not the way evolution works.
The way it works is you have the normal expression of the genotype in a population and then you
have mutations being thrown up all the time and they are usually quenched except in the
situation where the environment shifts so that new selective pressures are operating
in the environment.
When new selective pressures begin to operate a gene that was previously without consequence
may suddenly have immense consequences so then every member of the population that you
are looking at that has that gene suddenly is in a much more advantageous position to
advance their evolutionary strategy and I think that certainly modern existence has
changed the selective pressures on the human genome and now it is people who are far out
that is simply a gloss it is the people who are far out who are gaining advantage in the
evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies and you are right Frank this is happening
on the hardware level on the level of endogenous tryptamines and that sort of thing I think
schizophrenia is essentially in a way a disease of modern times and it is though it has always
existed of course but the incidence of it and the incidence of schizoid if not schizophrenic
personalities and types is because the modalities of evolutionary selection are shifting it
is as though if you think of a rain forest that has been above water 200 million years
all evolutionary niches have become occupied everything is at steady state there is not
going to be any dramatic radiation of a new species because everything has been worked
out and the energy flows are so tight nothing can gain a leg up on that situation but if
you clear a thousand acres of forest and reduce it to rubble essentially open land then what
are called invader species come in there and they very quickly gain dominance where in
the jungle at steady state you never see those plants you never see weedy annual heavily
seeding plants in the jungle the jungle strategy is for enormous plants which produce small
numbers of seeds and this is again an analogy to the modern situation that modernity is
a desert and we are jungle monkeys and so new evolutionary selective pressures are coming
to bear upon the human situation new ideas are coming to the fore psilocybin is a selective
filter for this the wish to go to space is a selective filter for this just the wish
to know your own mind is a selective filter for this but this is part of the picture this
is what's happening it's inevitable it's a very good thing i think if you have faith
that man is good and my uh i i follow the renaissance platonists on that i think man
must be the measure of all things what else could possibly serve with certainty uh so
that's all i would say about that you stated earlier that psilocybin is coming from outer
space or there's a possibility that there's mushrooms there's a possibility of that fred
hoyle and an associate of his have uh come to my aid on this saying that spore bearing
life forms because spores have the capacity to survive in the conditions of outer space
that spore bearing life forms may over truly large scales of time percolate out through
the galaxy and serve as a basis for the evolution of life on various planets or insert themselves
into already existing planetary ecologies and insert themselves there i don't i on these
matters of specific fact like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial and that sort of thing
i haven't the faintest idea the mushroom itself is such a mercurial elusive zen sort of personality
that i never believe a word it says i simply entertain its notions and try and sort through
them and i found that to be the most enriching approach to it to know that the option of
believing that is there on hard evidence is very exhilarating as to what is really going
on the mushroom assures me that i haven't got even the faintest grip on what is really
going on but something is going on
okay can i ask another question or is this even roughly sure what do you think is evil
and can these mushrooms be misused well i think anything can be misused uh most evil
is uh trivial and i if i could speak off the top of my head the only evil that associates
itself with mushrooms is uh taking it but taking too little
in other words
did you define evil
evil is uh there's a word i want uh it isn't twiddle but it's something like that evil
is when you play at things not in play in the hindu cosmic sense but where you fiddle
with things you muck with things because you don't want to get your feet wet you want to
be able to say you've done these things but you never want to really place your validity
on the line and i am amazed at the number of people who claim familiarity with psychedelic
drugs who when you actually question them closely it's very clear that they have a sub
threshold dose even if they've taken it 50 or 100 times they have managed through through
low doses and strong defenses to always keep the demon at bay that's the demon with a d-a-i
the demon at bay and they don't know what they're talking about you must take a sufficiently
large dose so that you enter into these places not to knock him personally because he's a
very nice man but as an example uh ron and fisher whose work you may know i talked to
him and he has given suicide and he says to about 15 000 people at nimh and now he's retired
to mayorka but uh oh you do you know and i said to him i said rollin what do you make
of it i mean what do you make of it he said well make of what and i said well what do
you make just specifically of the hallucinations you say you gave it to all these people you
took it to six times what happened when you closed your eyes and looked at the hallucinations
he said i never closed my eyes i was highly agitated throughout and i just realized these
things which seem to me as natural as breathing just slide right past people i mean of course
you do not eat for a few hours before you do it of course you lie down in darkness and
compose your mind and look at the darkness behind your eyelids and of course you invoke
it through the wish to have it come to you these are things as simple as they can be
yet here was a man with a lifelong professional involvement published dozens of papers has
made contributions in the mapping of consciousness but he could never just stop fidgeting long
enough to see it so that's so my idea of that as evil evil is uh anything which trivializes
a mystery would be evil and since this is a mystery uh any uh dismissing of it or constantly
taking it at low doses for hedonic purposes i mean there's nothing wrong with that but
that's not the whole story and nobody should think that that gives you a pedestal from
which to speak about it you really have to do these heroic amounts and and integrate
them this is something i haven't even talked about in this interview but these things are
very state-bounded the terms roland fisher in fact coined that simply means that they're
very hard to retain and remember what exactly happened at the peak of the flash and you
come down you say well it was very strange there was information there were entities
but i just can't get back to it the way to overcome that is to be as psychedelic in your
down life as possible and by psychedelic i mean ideas cognitive activities you should
dance you should read you should think you should paint you should sculpt you should
converse you should constantly involve yourself in cognitive activities because taking these
drugs is one of the major cognitive activities and then if you have a grip on human history
where the human enterprise has been where it's going if you have been many places uh
it's easier to map i'm reminded of there's an alchemical aphorism i think it's attributed
to apanasius krishna where he says the oldest books the farthest countries the deepest forests
the highest mountains this is where you must seek the stone and what he means is you can
simply acquire experience because it is only in the acquisition of acquired experiences
that you have a reservoir to draw on when you seek to make metaphors and analogies about
the alien thing when you invoke the god then you can map back onto it and say well it's
like this it's like that knowing that it is not that or this but the fund of analogies
is there to give you a grip on it so there's an obligation to experience deeply and richly
and thoroughly and intellectually and then you can map back onto it but it's a dialogue
between you and it where you are discovering new things about yourself and it and trying
to resolve the question are we the same thing and i haven't resolved the question my suspicions
flow one way and then another way but i think it is without a doubt a living mystery existing
in the presence available to anyone sincere enough to seek it and for me that was a life
transforming discovery and revelation because i didn't believe there were any mysteries
i believe there may have been once but to discover one right in our midst and it cannot
be reduced it cannot be pulled apart into its constituent functions it is truly a unitary
mystery and it's accessible in our lives right now without kneeling at anybody's feet without
following any regimen of denial or the assimilation of any belief system and this is very big
news i think the mystery has always been there i'm sure but our society is so bizarre and
has led us so far astray that we have to rediscover it and this process is happening this is what
the 20th century is all about and we are still tiptoeing at the edge of it even though great
men great women great mappers of the consciousness have come and gone we're still at the very
infancy of this thing and it calls out to us it beckons it says do more see more and
know more and be more a part of it well you know during your talk i thought about one
experience that rita and i had in india when we were in the phantom caves we were looking
at lingam and you know when you would look out of the caves you could see across the
bay you could see an atomic plant and these two things just looked really identical well
the mushroom could any symbol be more appropriate of the ambiguity of human transformation what
mushroom is it that grows at the end of history is it stropheria cubensis or is it the creation
of edward teller this is an unresolved promise
that tape was uh supposed to go on for another uh 20 minutes or so or at least 10 minutes
but anyway uh i just put all my records away we'll figure something out here when something's
happening kpfk los angeles we've just been listening to a talk by terence mckenna m-c-k-e-n-n-a
and this was uh entitled the interview is entitled psilocybin and the sands of time
which took place at ethelin in december of last year december 1982 if you are interested
in this tape or other terence mckenna material or any allied material you can contact dolphin
tapes post office box 71 big sur california 9 3 9 2 0 that's dolphin tapes post office
box 71 big sur california 9 3 9 2 0 he has a book and as i remember although nobody has
it in stock it's called uh invisible landscapes
Metamorph
Everyone's fond of saying that coastlines and forest distributions and all this stuff are fractal.
Well, doesn't this imply that there is then a global fractal?
There is a fractal dimension which when you feed it into your computer and wrap the data around a sphere,
the continents and oceans of Earth should appear.
And in principle, again to the absurd level, you should be able to then telescope in on that portion of this data
that is wrapped around the sphere that corresponds to Northern California.
And on your computer screen should appear Esalen hung on the cliffs of Big Sur
with us sitting in a room inside discussing the matter.
Rupert Terrence I'm Ralph. Creation, imagination, my math is chaos.
(Inaudible)
(Instrumental music playing)
(Instrumental music playing)
(Instrumental music playing)
(Instrumental music playing)
In my early LSD experiences, I seemed to see motifs and structures that gave me an interest in Tibetan Buddhism.
And I went to India with the intent of studying the Tibetan language and quickly found that the whole thing was just overwhelming.
And that I was just a human atom in the sea of India and that the notion of encompassing or understanding what this was,
was clearly the task of a lifetime.
And several times in my life I have acted out this sort of ricocheting relationship between the humanities and the sciences.
At times, you know, losing myself in the study of certain schools of poetry or literature or painting.
And then at other times spending years reading philosophy of science and epistemic basis of physics and this sort of thing.
Always trying to get a resolution on the content of my experience, my lived experience, which included the psychedelic experience.
Which for me, from very early on, was this kind of tremendous mystery or conundrum which was set down in the middle of my being.
And it still continues like that. I keep returning to that, testing all the ideas against the fullness of experience.
The main difference between our world and the world that science tells us we're living in is that science denies the quirky, freaky, cosmic giggle,
high plottedness, completely improbable, totally quirky humor that binds everything together.
And that makes it something other than an engine in which atoms blindly run, in Whitehead's phrase.
Schrodinger brilliantly anticipated the discovery of DNA and then Joseph Needham and L.L. White.
And well, Eric Jancz should be mentioned actually as a precursor of us all, I think.
I mean, Eric Jancz was a great pioneer, a great soul, and he saw very deeply into whole systems, as did Ilya Prigozhin, the Belgian thermodynamicist.
And I think a lot of all of what we're doing comes out of that.
What Prigozhin showed that just brought down the house was that there could be perturbations of physical systems that were unpredictable
and that would cause the whole system to actually move to a more ordered state than the initial state.
And this perturbation to higher states of order looks suspiciously like a violation of the supposedly inviolate second law of thermodynamics.
So that looks like a doorway into an energetic hyperspace.
Well, when A New Science of Life came out in 1982 in America, it came out a year earlier in England,
I came to California because it was published in Los Angeles.
I found myself here at Estellyn, I found an extraordinary new range of things going on I hadn't known about.
And when I was in San Francisco, a friend who I knew from Europe said to me just the day before I left,
there's somebody you must meet, he's called Terence McKenna.
I didn't know much about Terence, so I went up there and in this large 1956 Buick,
we headed off into the woods in Sonoma County where Terence lives.
And there I met both Terence and Ralph who was there for the day.
I found that part of my interest in these other realms of reality of course, like many people in this room,
stimulated by experience with psychedelic substances.
This was before I went to India.
When I arrived in India, I found that India is a kind of psychedelic realm anyway.
It's just an amazing place.
So in Terence I found somebody who knew about that whole realm, who shared with me an interest in India
since it played an important part in his development.
And who had views about the nature of reality which complemented my own in an extraordinary way.
My own theory is about memory and habit in nature.
Terence I found developed a theory about novelty and creativity in nature.
A theory about the quality of time and the creative process as it is related to the ongoing flux of events.
And Ralph had a kind of mathematical theory which was just the kind of thing that the view of nature
I was trying to develop needed.
The idea of nature being drawn by goals or attractors in the mathematical science of dynamics.
This model of reality being pulled from the head by things called attractors.
It's a teleological, animistic view of nature which dressed up in the guise of mathematical models.
Which I found most fascinating.
And so for me, the meeting with Ralph and Terence was a step further towards seeing how one could begin to dream
of a world in which nature was seen as alive, in which the imagination permeated all reality.
In which animals and plants are seen as part of the living texture, the living components,
the cells in the life of Gaia and Gaia in the life of the cosmos as a whole.
In fact, a view of the world as alive which recalls in some respects the old cosmologies of the ancient world
where the cosmos was seen as a living organism.
Where they thought of the whole cosmos as having a soul, the soul of the world, the anima mundi.
So I was brought up in a field of music but I was attracted to mathematics early.
And when I was 14 I played in the State Symphony.
After that I started in mathematics and I became a professor at Berkeley when I was 23.
I had an easy way in mathematics and the way the system works, the carpet is unrolled in front of you.
You know, you have a few choices but basically before you even know what's happening, the carpet is unrolled
and you're down the runnel into whatever you can do that's useful to the system.
In this process I lost nature but there was a great gain because I love it out there.
I love to be off the planet. I always did and to this day I spend very little time on planet Earth.
So it went on in this way and by 1967 I was a professor at Princeton.
I had written three books on mathematics that you need a microscope to read.
And I had been studying for a long while chaos but we didn't call it chaos then and we didn't see in it
any role in the natural world or in social transformation or in the evolution of consciousness
because we didn't think about anything out there.
So one day after my third book was done and I was exhausted and I looked up
and all the students were out in the courtyard demonstrating about the Vietnam War
and to open the university to women students and so on.
I said, "What exactly is going on?"
Here they said, "Take this."
And so like many people in that year or around that time, in 1967, my career had a bifurcation.
I went off the track with psychedelics, with meditation but especially with searching, with trying everything.
Eventually I was living in a cave in the Himalayas and when I returned to California
I was standing on a street corner in Santa Cruz in white pajamas and a car stopped
and an old friend from a previous lifetime said, "There's somebody you have to meet. Get in the car."
I had nothing to do. It sounded okay and in that time I believed that everything goes perfectly.
You just go along with the flow as they said. I didn't know it would be a two hour drive.
So I got in the car. There was the two hour drive to Berkeley
and I was literally dumped out of the car on Terence's front step.
I never heard of Terence at that time. It was 1972.
I went in and what happened then, I would still say, although we've had many wonderful talks
and exciting, thrilling and nutritious times in the meanwhile, that that was quite a miraculous chat.
Many subjects came up. How to grow mushrooms, outer space, I don't know, anything you could think of.
All passed by in the course of an hour or two. In this way we became friends
and this habit we had, this activity that we do, I mean, we never go for a hike or something like that.
We sit in the evening and talk and what happens is synergistic, miraculous growth, evolutionary.
And in this revitalization of my work and eventually the whole field of mathematics,
my conversations with Terence, whereas I think we thought of them as just good fun,
that they did have a really fundamental influence on everything I've done since.
So fun, I would say fun is insulting. I mean thrilling because of going to the edge,
going beyond the edge, having company there, finding things which you can bring back and they work
and become part of everything you're doing. So it's opened up.
These complex phenomenon characterized by chaotic irregular, that is to say not well ordered in the previous paradigm,
space-time structure, for example, relationships among people, the states and change of states of society,
the whole process of history, the intuitive experience, subjective experience of relationship and so on,
all of this, what we always wanted to come under the view of a better understanding suddenly is possible.
But although it's possible, it's not done. But we can do it. So we can try to do it.
The flutter of the moth's wing can trigger the hurricane. This is not a poetic statement.
This is the fact of the matter within this kind of description of nature.
In other words, very small changes create cascades into where whole states shift and are perturbed.
And this is the kind of situation that we are facing as a society and a planetary species.
We have the resources. We have the knowledge.
But what we seem to lack is the will to implement these things, to actually step back from the abyss.
So it has to come through a change of mind.
And this new mathematical stuff is telling us that the intimations of mysticism,
the intimations of a possibility of transcendence is all firmly grounded.
We just have to now... It's almost as though mathematics is the extreme cutting edge of human understanding.
How can we quickly export these new understandings that release us from a need for closure,
that free us from an either/or universe?
How can we quickly export these models from the realm of research mathematics into the realm of daily life?
I really see it as politics, almost at the viral level, that we are trying to create new languages and new concepts,
and not only create them, but teach them to you, and we ourselves repeat them over and over again.
And you feed back into this, and then we refine the mean, and then a mean is like a gene.
It can be replicated, and we have not seen language as the playing field of the creation of the new paradigm,
but that's really where it is.
We can transform ourselves no more quickly than we transform our language.
And the way we transform our language is by really pushing on the envelope of the act of communication.
You know, the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland says, "Say what you mean, and mean what you say."
I do.
I'm a biologist by background.
I studied biology because I was interested in animals and plants.
And when I was studying it at Cambridge, I began to have terrible doubts about what I was doing
because everything that really interested me about animals and plants somehow vanished
when I got into biochemistry laboratories.
I was majoring in biochemistry, and I did a PhD in biochemistry there.
But there's a curious thing about biochemistry.
You're doing biochemistry to study the molecular basis of life,
yet the very first thing you do in the laboratory is kill whatever you're studying,
grind it up, extract the enzymes, and then in a test tube,
study the properties of some of these molecules extracted from this killed organism.
And it began to occur to me that perhaps this wasn't the best way to understand life.
But I didn't quite know what to do about it because everybody else thought it was...
definitely was the best way to study life, and in fact, there was no other valid way.
So this set me thinking, and I began to see that the science of biology could be reformed,
that this idea that living organisms are truly alive rather than being just machines,
that's the official doctrine, the mechanistic theory,
says living organisms are just complicated machines.
Believe it or not, still the official doctrine of academic biology and academic medicine.
These ideas went on developing.
I then saw how I could bring them all together in a synthesis
and into a new way of seeing how biology could be done.
And I wrote a book while still in India called A New Science of Life.
In it, the basic idea I'm suggesting is that there's a kind of inherent memory
between all kinds of animals and plants.
Each species has its own collective memory,
so each member of the species draws on this collective memory
and in turn contributes to it.
The instincts of animals, for example, the behaviour of cuckoos,
the spinning of webs by spiders, are like a memory, a habit of the species.
This inheritance takes place by the process I call morphic resonance,
by a kind of invisible, intangible memory,
a kind of resonance between present and past organisms of the same kind.
The same theory helps explain how our own memory works
by a resonance between our own past and our present states.
It leads to the idea that our memories aren't stored in our brains,
but that we're tuning into them by this process of morphic resonance.
Rupert's notions revision causality.
That means induct you into an entirely new way in which things happen.
And this is, after all, where we're all spending a lot of our time.
The models that Ralph is working with show that the world is not an engine
running down toward the heat death,
but a tremendous kaleidoscope of unpredictable, creative,
open-ended activity on every level.
I mean, it's really a dazzlingly kaleidoscopic vision.
It's like a Sufi-Hirothany or something,
but we're seeing it on the screens of computer simulations
of this mathematical domain that is also the neural domain,
that is also the social domain, that is also the eco-planetary domain.
This is not error. This is not mysticism.
This is the real facts of how it is,
how the world fits together.
It fits together through the infusion of its invisible soul.
If nature is evolutionary, if all of nature is evolving,
what about the eternal laws of nature,
which scientists have taken for granted for so many centuries,
concepts going right back to Pythagoras and the ancient Greeks?
Were all the laws of nature there before the Big Bang?
Well, if they were there before the Big Bang,
where could they possibly be?
There was nowhere to be. There was no universe.
So if the laws of nature were all there before the Big Bang,
then they must be non-physical, idea-like entities
dwelling in some kind of permanent mathematical mind,
be that thought of as the mind of God or just the mind
of a kind of disembodied mathematician.
They were thought to be permanent and all there before the universe.
This assumption is still held by most of our modern cosmologists.
It's something that physicists have not yet begun to question seriously.
But as you can see, it's like an idea that's had the carpet taken from under it.
It's sort of hanging over an abyss
because there's no real reason why we should assume
the laws of nature are permanent in an evolving universe.
If the universe is evolving,
then the laws of nature could be evolving as well.
And in fact, the very idea of the laws of nature may not be appropriate.
It may be better to think of the habits of nature evolving.
The Big Bang is like the cracking of the cosmic egg.
That's its mythological correlate,
the notion of the ancient mythological idea of the cosmos beginning
through the hatching or the cracking of an egg,
followed by the growth of the organism that comes out.
It's an embryological metaphor.
And we now have a kind of developmental model of the whole universe.
It's like a developing organism.
It's not like a machine at all anymore.
The universe is a growing, developing organism
which is differentiating within itself, forming new forms and patterns,
an evolutionary process that on Earth has given rise
to all the forms of animal and plant life,
all the different kinds of microbes, to ourselves
and to the many and varied forms of human culture.
A theory of evolutionary habits demands a theory of evolutionary creativity.
How can we understand the creativity that's given rise to new ideas,
to Beethoven's symphonies, to theories in science,
to new works of art, to new forms of culture,
to instincts in birds and animals,
to the forms of flowers and plants and leaves,
to the many kinds of rocks and crystals,
and to all the forms of galactic and stellar and planetary organisation?
What kind of creativity could underlie all those processes?
One is the materialist view that says the whole thing
is entirely due to blind chance,
that there's nothing but a kind of darkness of blind material processes going on
and then by blind chance new things happen.
The other model for understanding creativity,
I think is provided by our own imaginations.
Our imaginations are not full of fixed platonic ideas,
which are always the same, like platonic minds.
They're ongoing, changing, dynamical processes
with a kind of creative richness that always surprises us.
So the question is, if nature is alive rather than dead,
if the universe, if the earth have a kind of mind or soul of their own,
if living organisms are in some sense mind-like
or if there's a mind-like process at work in nature,
then how does this express its creativity?
And so then the question is,
could this creativity in nature be a product of the imagination of Gaia,
of the Gaian mind? Could it be a product of the cosmic imagination?
Could there be a kind of imagination working in nature
which is similar to our own imaginations?
Could our own imaginations be just one conscious aspect
of an imagination working through the whole natural world,
perhaps unconsciously as it works underneath the surface of our dreams,
perhaps sometimes consciously?
And could this ongoing imagination be the basis of evolutionary creativity in nature,
just as it is in the human realm?
How would it be, or is it credible, that perhaps what the universe is,
is a kind of system in which more advanced forms of order
actually influence previous states of organization?
This is what is emerging in Ralph Abraham's work with the chaotic attractors.
They are attractors.
That means that they exert influence on less organized states
and pull them toward some kind of end state.
And for me the key to unlocking what is going on with history, creativity,
progressive process of all sorts,
is to place the state of completion at the end,
but to see it as a kind of higher dimensional object
which casts an enormous and flickering shadow
over the lower dimensions of organization,
of which this universe is one.
So that, for instance, in the human domain,
when we look at history, what we see is an endless series of anticipations.
The Golden Age is coming.
The Messiah is immediately around the corner.
Great change is soon to be upon us.
These are intimations of change.
It's almost as though the transcendental object
that is the great attractor in many, many dimensions
throws out images of itself,
which filter down through these lower dimensional matrices
and actually are the basis of the appetition of nature
for greater expression of form,
the appetition of the human soul for greater immersion in beauty,
the appetition of human history for greater expression of complexity.
So when I think about these terms,
chaos, creativity, imagination,
I see them as like a three-stroke engine of some sort.
Each impels and runs the other
and sets up a reinforcing cycle
that then stabilizes organisms, processes
that are caught up in this in the phenomenon of being.
The phenomenon of being is this self-synergizing engine
of an out of chaos through creativity
into the imagination, back into chaos,
out into creativity, so forth and so on.
And it operates on many levels simultaneously
so that the planet is undergoing a destiny.
Deep time, the time of geology,
was only really discovered around the turn of this century
and it is cosmically ennobling
to think of the universe as a thing of great age.
But I think that it's time to put in place
next to the notion of deep cosmic time
the notion of chaotic sudden change,
cusp flux and sudden perturbation
because what deep time has revealed
as we've pushed our understanding of the career of organic life back
65 million years, 270 million years,
what we see is tremendous punctuation
built into the universe in the case of the Earth
in the form of asteroidal impacts.
This thing which happened 65 million years ago,
nothing larger than a chicken walked away from it on this planet.
So there's a strange paradox
where taking deep time seriously,
the message of deep time is
you may not have as much time as you thought,
that the universe is dynamic,
capable of turning sudden corners.
So then the imagination becomes a kind of beacon.
The imagination is, as it were, a scout sent ahead
or something which has preceded us into history
and in fact is a kind of eschatological object.
It is shedding influence,
the morphogenetic field, if you wish.
If the morphogenetic field is not subject
to the inverse square law of decreased influence over distance,
then I, as a layman, don't see why, Rupert,
we couldn't locate it at the conclusion of process.
Because one of the things that's always puzzled me about the Big Bang
is it's a singularity.
This is the term physicists use for it.
This means theory cannot predict it
and yet it is necessary to make everything which follows from it happen.
So you just say, there's no reason for this,
we have no argument for this,
but the rest of the theory needs it.
So it's a singularity.
And the immense improbability which modern science rests on
and that cares not to discuss is this,
the belief that the universe sprang from nothing in a single moment.
Well, if you can make that leap to believe that,
it's very hard to see what you couldn't believe.
That is almost the limiting case of credulity, I would think.
So...
So in order to save the phenomenon,
I would propose a different idea that,
and I think it is eminently reasonable,
and it is that as the complexity of a system increases,
so too does the likelihood of its generating a singularity
or an unpredictable perturbation.
So the pre-existent state of the universe,
I imagine to be extremely simple, an unflawed nothingness.
In other words, the least likely situation
in which you would expect a singularity to emerge.
But now let's look at the other end of the historical continuum
of the history of the universe.
Let's look at the world we are living in,
which is full of 106 elements,
tremendous gradients of energy,
ranging from what's going on inside pulsars and quasars
to what is going on inside viruses and cells,
tremendous organizational capacity at the atomic level,
at the molecular level,
at the level of molecular polymerization,
at the level of membranes and gels,
at the level of cells and organisms, societies, so forth and so on.
In other words, the universe at this moment
is a tremendously complicated, integrated, multileveled, dynamic thing,
and every passing moment it becomes more so.
This is what evolution, history, compression of time,
what all these things are attempting to indicate
is the increasing complexity of reality.
If a singularity is necessary to explain this universe,
that singularity must emerge rather near the end
of the complexification process rather than its beginning.
You see, we simply have to reverse our preconceptions
about the flow of cause and effect,
and then we get a great attractor
that pulls all organization and structure toward itself
over several billion years,
and as the objects of its attraction grow closer to its proximity,
they somehow interpenetrate.
They set up standing wave patterns of interference.
New properties become emergent,
and the entire thing complexifies.
Well, to my mind, this is the divine imagination.
This is what Blake called it.
This is the only way I can conceive of it.
Time is the theater of God's becoming,
but it's also, from the point of view of a higher dimensional manifold,
a kind of fait accompli,
and this is no contradiction, or if it is, it's all right,
because in these realms of higher ontology,
you're always asked to avoid closure
and hold the notion of a coincidencia positorum,
a union of opposites.
The thing is both what it is and what it is not,
and yet it somehow escapes contradiction,
and that's how the open system is maintained.
That's how the miracle of life is possible.
So I sort of think of the divine imagination
as the class of all things, both possible and beautiful.
It's a kind of reverse Platonism.
The attractor is at the bottom of a very deep pit,
into which all phenomena is cascading.
What is taught in modern universities these days
is that these tracks in the snow are going nowhere.
The technical term is "trendlessly fluctuating",
and we're told that history is this kind of process.
It's trendlessly fluctuating.
It goes here, it goes there.
It's called a "random walk" in information theory.
It means you just wander around.
Well, it's very interesting.
Now we begin to see through the marvel of the new mathematics
that random walks are not random at all.
That a sufficiently long random walk
becomes a fractal structure of extraordinary depth and beauty.
So you see, really what has to happen
is for us to see chaos not as something that degrades information
and is somehow the enemy of order,
but rather chaos is the birthplace of order.
Chaos is not the problem, chaos is the answer.
I think a factor which changes everything
is the discovery of dark matter,
the fact that 90 to 95, 99% of the matter in the universe
is utterly unknown to us.
This recent discovery effectively tells us that the whole cosmos
and every material thing in it
has a kind of unconscious, a material unconscious,
an unknown dark realm
which conditions everything that happens,
the shapes of the galaxies, their interactions.
Is Gaia, as it were, awake on the side that's in the sunlight
and on the side that's in the darkness as it rotates, dreaming?
At night are the plants, the animals, the whole ecosystems,
the oceans in some sense in the dream state
when dreams and spontaneous images
of what might be possible come to them.
So is there a kind of Gaia dreaming
and does it happen on the night side of the planet?
What would the Gaian mind feel like?
What form would a Gaian dream take
or what form would a Gaian psychedelic experience take?
The psychedelic experience, it's preposterous
to attempt to analyse it in terms of human motivation
at its intense levels.
It seems rather to be an ontological reality of its own
that the human being has simply been privileged
to briefly observe, but it says no more.
Your deep psychedelic experiences say no more
about your personality than that the continent of Africa
is making a statement about your personality.
They are in fact independent objects.
To my mind, the divine imagination or the imagination
is the source of all creativity in our dreams,
in our psychedelic experiences, in the jungles,
in the currents of the ocean,
in the organisation of protozoan and microbial life.
Wherever there is large-scale integration
rather than simply raw physics,
but integration of laws of physics,
integration of properties of membranes and electrophoresis
and this sort of thing, it is the creative principle.
So do you think then that in psychedelic experiences
you are actually tapping into, tuning into
or experiencing something of the Gaian or cosmic imagination?
Absolutely.
And I think that psychedelic experiences and dreams
are only different in degree, that they are chemical cousins somehow.
And this is why I could see human history as a Gaian dream
because I think every night when you descend into dream
you are potentially open to receiving
Gaian corrective tuning of your life state.
The whole thing is an enzyme-driven process.
We are like an organ of Gaia.
We are the organ which binds and releases energy.
I mean a liver cell doesn't need to understand
why it binds and releases enzymes of the liver.
We bind and release energy for reasons
perhaps never to be clear to us,
but which place us firmly within the context of the Gaian mind.
We have been chosen out,
and this is not something to have great hubris about,
I mean indolecetic acid has been chosen out in plant metabolism
to play certain roles.
We have a role, but our role seems to be a major one.
We are like a triggering system
out of the general background of evolutionary processes
mediated by incoming radiation to the surface of the earth
and then natural selection.
Suddenly we come with an epigenetic capability.
We write books, tell stories, dance, sing, carve, paint.
These are not genetic processes.
These are epigenetic processes,
and they bind information and express the Gaian mind.
Very well.
As an example of how willing I am to introduce
or to entertain this idea concretely,
I've been talking to a lot of people about ecological crisis
and the fate of the world and this sort of thing.
Well, imagine in hindsight
the wisdom that we would impute to Gaia
if we were to suddenly realize
that what is happening on this planet
is that nature knows that the sun is going to explode.
And what we are is a kind of response
to the anticipation of a wounding
that 50,000, 5 million years ago
the geo-heliocentric relationships
began to vibrate out of tune.
And as a consequence of this,
a species was called forth that could organize an escape.
And we are it.
In other words, we are in a divine play.
In line with this,
and what made me even entertain these ideas,
is I had a very bizarre experience recently.
I was in Hawaii,
and in our botanical garden there is a very large dead tree,
and one limb of this tree sticks far out over the land.
And Banasteriopsis cappi,
a large hallucinogenic South American vine,
is planted at the bottom of this tree.
And it just has swarmed up this tree
and covered it with greenery.
But it wouldn't go out onto this one limb that stuck out.
And it bothered my sense of symmetry
that this vine would not completely cover this tree.
And I even thought about trying to climb up into the tree
and thread it out onto this limb to get it to do what I wanted.
So I was sitting looking at this tree and this situation
and actually thinking about it.
And suddenly the limb fell.
It broke off.
And then I thought,
the vine sensed that it was unstable.
It would not invade this domain
that it sensed was structurally unstable.
Well then I said to myself,
"How could it? What is the mechanism of this sensing of instability?"
And a friend of mine said,
"Well perhaps the wind impacts on weakened wood
differently than on unrotted wood.
And perhaps rhythms in the tree tell it to stay away from it."
And then I realized,
if one plant has that kind of sensitivity
to the entering into a domain of danger,
what must the ecosystem of this planet be doing
in reaction to what we are doing to the planet?
So I see the reason this relates to the imagination
is because I see ourselves in communication with the imagination.
It is sending images back into the past
to try and direct us away from areas of instability.
It really is the Gaian mind is a real mind.
Its messages are real messages.
And our task through discipline, psychedelics, attention to detail,
whatever we have going,
is to try and extract this message
and eliminate ourselves from the message
so that we then can see the face of the other.
This is the field of chaos.
The certain setting of the parameter form will emerge out of the field of chaos.
And where this happens reliably,
we've explored the ocean all over
and we've found a few favorite regions.
They're called the Apache Rift, the Calico Mountain,
and the Scroll Reef.
So the submarine is dragging along at a thousand considerations depth
in the ocean of chaos.
It comes across these regular patterns.
This is the first wing of the Apache Valley.
This is Apache Valley.
Oh.
I think so.
There's another field of chaos.
This is Calico Mountain.
See, these are just snapshots of different starting positions, if you like.
Later on, we'd really need coal in this area and all other interesting areas.
Why disturb this quaternary structure?
That is the question.
This is a scroll reef.
Now, it's a little presumptuous to call this chaos theory
because, as a matter of fact, there is no theory.
We're in the exploration phase now,
and this is experimental mathematics that we are doing with supercomputers.
This video was made out of these simplest possible dynamical systems
called the logistic equation,
and it just produces a series that is very similar to a dripping faucet.
So you could just as well imagine that we have 16,000 dripping faucets
in an array of 128 by 128,
and the time between drops is represented as a color on the screen.
Now, do you think that if you had 16,000 dripping faucets,
you could get out a pattern like Calico Mountain?
It relates to waterfalls, for example, when the spray comes off the waterfall.
Here's another example of a chaotic system.
Could you write some equations and obtain a computer program
that simulated the spray from a waterfall?
I doubt it.
And from this totally chaotic data, viewed in this particular way,
which is called "chioscopy,"
you get these points in the planes that if the data was really random,
the dots would be all over the plane.
Instead, they lie on a curve, a smooth curve,
and that is called the chaotic attractor.
Well, it happens.
I mean, there's a lot of theory behind this enough to suggest
that it's not some kind of artifact.
No matter what kind of artifact it is, it's an interesting artifact.
And I guess I'd like to call this a mathematical law.
It has to do with the emergence of form from a field of chaos.
We don't know what else to call it.
It's not a mathematical law that was known to Pythagoras,
and I don't know if it was always there since the beginning of time,
long before the Big Bang,
or if it just emerged into the evolving field of the guy in mind
through the fact that computers make it visible.
I don't know, but the theory can tell you
certain transformations you'll expect and others not.
For example, Terence had pointed to the punctual aspect of evolution,
that many transformations are solitary.
They are catastrophic. They are abrupt.
As, for example, in the emergence of form,
as, for example, in the Neolithic Revolution,
as, for example, in the crystallization of the planets.
As the temperature drops in the developing universe,
according to standard models, more and more form comes into being.
First you get atoms, then stars and galaxies condensed,
then you get solar systems,
and through the cooling of matter you can get planets.
The planets are the cooled remnants of exploding stars.
The elements in us and in our planets are stardust,
formed from supernovae.
One way of looking at this is to see the expansion and cooling process,
and indeed the flow of events as being,
thinking of it in terms of the flux of energy.
And one of the great unifying concepts of 19th century physics
is a unified conception of energy.
Now, it's not entirely clear what energy is.
Energy, in some sense, is the principle of change.
The more there is, the more change that can be brought about.
It's, in a sense, a causative principle.
And it's a causative principle which exists in a process.
In this process, the energetic flux of the universe
underlies time, change, becoming,
and the flux process itself seems to have an inherent indeterminism to it.
This flux process, the universal flux, is organised into forms by fields.
Matter is now thought of as energy bound within fields,
the quantum matter fields and the fields of molecules and so on.
I think there are many of these organising fields, the morphic fields,
and nature is the theatre of these habitual fields,
organising the indeterminate flux of energy in the fields themselves
by having this energy within them have this indeterminate quality too.
So even organised systems of a high level of complexity
still have this probabilistic quality,
and the fields that organise this energy to give rise to material and physical forms
are themselves probabilistic.
Chaos is never eliminated.
There's always this indeterminism or spontaneity at all levels of organisation.
So there's a formative principle, which is the fields,
and there's an energetic principle,
which I think has the chaos inherent in it.
It's a kind of change which, left as pure change, would be chaos.
One way of thinking of these is in terms of the Indian notion
of Shakti as the energy indeterminate principle,
and Shiva as the formative principle,
working together in a kind of tantric union to give the world that we know.
All creation begins in chaos,
progresses in chaos and ends in chaos.
And in Hesiod, this word chaos appears in a piece called Theogony,
which is a Theogony, that is to say more or less a creation tale
for the stories of the creation of the gods and goddesses one by one.
Well, they're not gods and goddesses really, they're abstract principles.
The three main ones are chaos, Gaia and Eros.
And they're the most abstract earliest proto-concepts of sky, earth,
and the creative tension in between.
Now the meaning of chaos, the first time the word appeared in literature,
has got nothing whatsoever, apparently, superficially,
to do with what we mean by chaos in the English language and in ordinary life.
It meant only to Hesiod, according to the lexicon,
the gaping void left the gaping void,
sort of the gaping void between heaven and earth,
out of which the creation came.
The creation out of chaos, yes,
but the chaos did not mean disorder or anything negative.
It only meant this gaping void.
Well, after understanding that, you look up,
you think of these different interpretations,
sky, god concept, the gap in the opening and so on.
When you look at the sky,
the most obvious chief characteristic feature of the sky is the Milky Way.
And it does appear as a kind of a gap between this and that,
the royal road of the gods traveling between the underworld and the overworld.
Understanding that, you can then connect the word with an earlier word,
concept or god or goddess,
meaning the same thing as what you visually see represented in the Milky Way itself.
And that is in one of its most popular representations,
Tiamat, the goddess of chaos, from Enuma Elish,
the creation poem, the greatest epic poem of Babylonian literature,
discovered in the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh,
a recent discovery.
There was this story of the origin of the gods
and the creation of the world by Tiamat and Apsu,
the god and goddess of chaos, who lived in the water,
one more sweet water and the other salt water.
And they created then the whole pantheon and the whole world and so on.
But eventually, along came Marduk.
Marduk was a younger generation of gods, in the next generation.
And there was a conflict between the older and the younger gods
over how the world ought to be run.
And apparently this conflict was taking place in the form of a social transformation,
a transformation represented in the mythological by the demotion of Apsu and Tiamat
from the pantheon of Babylon, the city Babylon,
and the replacement by Marduk eventually became the god,
Mr. Big of Babylon, around 2000 B.C.,
coinciding with a sweep of patriarchy over that city,
propelled on a new type of war chariot with spoked wheels instead of solid wheels.
Am I digressing too much?
No, you've reached the wheel.
Well, I've reached the spoke wheel and its association with,
is this accidental? I don't know, with the patriarchy.
And the fact that the wheel itself is a mathematical model is the paradigm of order,
a divine mathematical form according to Plato,
as the planets were supposed to move before Kepler,
who introduced the ellipse, fantastic transformation.
Punctual catastrophe in the history of consciousness.
In short, according to this epic, Enuma Elish,
Tiamat was killed in the most violent way, ripped to pieces,
creating the world, creating a new order by our hero of Babylon,
Mr. Marduk, who also Bell, Bau, and so on.
His New Year celebration was honored at the New Year time all over old Europe,
including at Stonehenge.
At the New Year's festival, this epic poem was read.
So annually was the reminder that chaos is bad,
chaos has been killed, chaos has been replaced by order,
an order associated with perfect periodic, the wheel, the cycle,
the perfect roundness, and so on.
Whereas in Mino and Crete, you find, according to the evidence of the excavators
and all who have examined the artworks that remain,
a long-lasting fluorescence of partnership culture with no domination by a male god.
It's established that there's the diffusion from Crete to Greece,
and the last remainder of Cretan culture, which is a very interesting one,
it must have been sort of the last vestige of the Garden of Eden.
We're talking about the tremendous happiness and fluorescence of beauty in all aspects of life.
The importance of the chaos revolution now is that chaos has recovered from being demoted,
from being banished to the unconscious in around 2000 B.C. or so,
from then up to now four or maybe 5,000 years of the repression of chaos.
I mean, chaos is, to this day in our culture, a bad word.
We have to watch out for chaos.
It ruins your love life, it has to be replaced by order.
Scientists most especially hate it, and so on.
The fact that scientists of all people in the temple of science,
that Tiamat has to be accepted as a friend and replaced upon her throne,
this is big news.
I believe that the importance of the psychedelics is primary here,
and that it doesn't simply have to do with the fact that they synergize cognition,
which they do do, and the synthetics as well as the natural ones,
but it's deeper than that.
It's that we have a secret history, knowledge of which has been lost to us,
and only is now recoverable in the light of the kind of mindset
that becomes possible to us if we accept the new paradigm.
And what this secret history is and has to do with,
and how it relates to the Gaian mind and the world soul,
is that we are the victims of an instance of traumatic abuse in childhood as a species,
because a symbiotic relationship with the world girdling intelligence of the planet,
which was mediated through plants, through shamanism,
it wasn't an abstraction, it was an experience,
was eventually broken up and disrupted by progressive climatic drying
of the Eurasian and African land mass.
And so this is literally the fall into history, the expulsion from Eden,
all these primary myths of a golden age found and lost,
have to do with the fact that once we lived in dynamic balance with nature,
not as animals do, but as human beings only could,
but in a way that we have now lost.
Well, how have we lost it and what have we lost?
How we have lost it is the way in which these psychoactive compounds
that were being brought into the diet were acting,
is they were psycholytic upon the formation of the ego.
They literally suppressed the formation of the ego
and promoted instead collectivist tribal partnership values,
which were operating intuitionally in a resonance relationship
with the feminine vegetable matrix of the planet.
In other words, nothing was verbalized, everything was felt,
everything was intuited.
And regularly at the new and full moon,
these small groups of hunter-gatherers, later pastoralists,
gathered and took these hallucinogenic plants and dissolved boundaries
and engaged in group sex and annealed, a new word that we've brought in here,
annealed the irregularities that had cropped up
in people's personal self-imaging in the interval since the last session.
And this kept everything grounded on the plane of that which is important,
i.e. the values of the group, of the species,
of dynamic balance with the ecosystem and so forth and so on.
Well, when this was disrupted and the supplies of these plants were diminished
and new religious forms arose
and the time between the great festivals grew longer and longer,
the ego begins to take hold, first as a kind of cancerous aberration,
but then quickly becoming a new style of behavior
which quickly then eliminates all other styles of behavior
by suppressing access to the chaos.
And this is the point I want to make,
that there is between the ego and full understanding of reality
a barrier, a problem.
The fear of the ego to surrender to the fact of chaos.
Chaos is what we have lost touch with.
This is why it has been given a bad name
because it is feared by the dominant archetype of our world
which is the ego which clenches
because its existence is defined in terms of control.
And the furious modeling process,
and this will now sound like a knock on modeling,
the furious modeling process that the ego endlessly carries out
is an effort to fight the absence of closure.
The ego wants closure, it wants a complete explanation.
The beginning of wisdom, I believe,
is the ability to accept an inherent messiness
in your explanation of what's going on
because nowhere is it writ that human minds
should be able to give a full accounting of creation
in all dimensions and on all levels.
You know, Wittgenstein had this idea
that philosophy should be what he called "true enough"
and I think that's a great idea.
Let's just make it true enough
because that's as true as it can be gotten.
Well, so, the imagination is chaos.
New forms are fetched out of this chaos.
For me, the creative act is the letting down of the net
of human imagination into the ocean of chaos
on which we are suspended
and the attempt to bring out of it ideas,
to bring out of it, you know, sometimes...
And this is my model for the psychedelic experience,
that it is the night-sea journey,
that it is the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets
and you let these nets down
and sometimes something tears through them
that leaves them in shreds
and you just row for shore
and put your head under your bed and pray.
And at other times, what slips through are the minutiae,
the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor
of idea chasing.
But sometimes, you know,
you actually can bring home something that is food,
that is food for the human community,
that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.
So, we haven't talked that much about art and aesthetics,
but I think in the human world,
the... the... the... the appetitition is for beauty,
to my mind, and this is another place where the Platonism
shines radiantly through, you know,
because Plato held that the good was the true
and that both were the beautiful.
And this is a very quaint idea
from the point of view of modern philosophy,
but I think, you know, it's in the bones
when you actually connect yourself up to the planet.
That's why chaos is capable of being
the tremendous repository of ordered beauty that it is,
because there is no chaos in the old definition,
that... which is to say,
that which by any definition or any test
is found to be disordered.
That is just a kind of... of...
a hell notion,
a kind of hypostatisation of an ultimate state of disorder.
But nowhere in the world
that is deployed through space and time
do you encounter that.
Instead, what you encounter is embedded order
upon embedded order.
This fractal... this fractal thing.
And then finally,
for me the imagination is the goal of history.
I see culture as an effort to
literally realize our collective dreams.
And, you know, it's on a very crude level
when it's you make your mask and I make my mask
and then we dance around together.
And it's even at a very crude level
when it's you design your shopping mall
and I'll design my world trade centre
and we'll put them on the same piece of real estate.
But we're coming now into...
through media, I believe,
through virtual reality and human-machine integration
and this kind of thing,
into a situation where the imagination
is going to be something that we can share.
That the path of mind through its own meanderings
will become something that can be recorded and played back.
We will have the possibility of living in our own past
or, you know, creating and trading realities as art.
And art as life lived in the imagination
is the great archetype which rears itself up
at the end of history.
Life in the imagination.
The imagination is this auric field
which surrounds the transcendental object
at greater and greater depth
as you approach the transcendental object.
And as we now close distance with it,
all of our cultural expression,
all of our self-awareness
is taking on this curiously designed quality.
I mean, you must have noticed this,
that the world is very heavily designed
in a way that it never was before.
Morphogenetic fields of great size and scope,
which are international schools of architecture and design,
touch whole continents,
entire cities are given certain ambiances.
This is the summoning of the imagination into the human scale.
It's like a god that we wish to call down and draw to earth.
I mean, this is why William Blake called it the divine imagination,
because it is the forgave city.
It is the flying saucer.
We are on a journey to meet this great attractor.
And as we close distance with it,
it is more and more a multifaceted mirror
of our images of beauty.
So it's like an ascending learning curve
that becomes asymptotic.
And at that point, you're face to face with a mystery,
a living mystery that is within each and all of us.
It's the imagination that argues for the divine spark in human beings.
It's absolutely confounding if you try to get biology
to produce it for you as a necessary quantity.
It isn't that.
It's an emanation from above.
It is literally a descent of the world soul into all of us.
We then become the atoms of the world soul,
and our channel to it is by closing our eyes
and obliterating our immediate personalized space-time locus
and falling into the imagination,
which is running like a river through all of us endlessly,
driven by the hydraulic momentum of the cataracts of chaos,
which usher into the creativity of the imagination.
I mean, these river metaphors are just endlessly applicable to this,
the flowing of forces over landscapes, the pressure of chaos
on the imagination to create creativity,
and it's looping back into the same.
And these things are the icons for the world that wants to be,
but the key is surrender and dissolution of boundaries,
dissolution of the ego, and a trust in the love of the goddess,
which transcends rational understanding.
There will come a moment which will be an absolute leap into space,
and we will simply have to have the faith
that there is something waiting there
because the dominator style has left us no choice.
Nature Is The Center Of The Mandala
There is Terrence.
[applause]
Well, it's a pleasure to be back with all of you.
I feel like this is the home parish, so to speak.
This seems to be the place where I see the most number of faces that I recognize.
It's sort of like a family meeting.
The formal title of the lecture is "Nature is the Center of the Mandala."
And this is really basically, simply a structure to work off of,
to anticipate and discuss where nature lies in the future,
the cultural future that is unfolding in front of all of us.
And to background my thoughts on this matter a little bit,
I have always had a relationship to nature which I pretty much took for granted,
but perhaps it was more intense and somewhat unique than most people's.
I grew up in a small town in Colorado.
I was very early into being a rock hound and then a butterfly collector.
I had no interest in stamps or baseball cards or anything like that.
It was always natural objects.
And the attraction of tropical butterflies was the exuberant expanse of color,
the affirmation of the patterned richness of the universe
that seemed to be thrown out like a spark by these things.
And eventually I pursued it quite far and was for some time a professional butterfly collector
in tropical Indonesia in a pre-Buddhist incarnation.
And this search for iridescence thrown off by nature,
seen first in the glint of metallic ore crystals
and then in the colorful expanse of butterflies
and then in tropical fish,
reached a kind of apotheosis with the discovery of the psychedelic plant hallucinogens
where suddenly the color, the flash, the iridescence was not two or three dimensional,
but it was multidimensional.
It was inside one, outside one.
It was like the ultimate tropical aquarium,
the ultimate butterfly cabinet,
the ultimate mineral show.
And it led me to travel then
and to place the particular experience of nature in the wider context of place.
And I traveled in Indonesia, as I mentioned,
where because of glaciation and the shallowness of the oceans,
evolution has been proceeding at different rates on different islands
relative to the depths of the separating channels.
So as you go from island to island in Indonesia,
it's like stepping into ten different bedrooms,
all by the same interior decorator,
but all slightly different,
different because of the context in which the evolution took place.
And these times spent,
and then of course there were the times in the Amazon,
which most of you have heard me lecture on,
where the pursuit of psychedelic plants was really in the forefront,
but I came to see nature as experienced,
meaning as it hits you when you walk around in it
and pick at it and carry it with you,
that this kind of nature had been read out
of the repertoire of images
that most people bring to bear on their reality.
And consequently, the reality is despirited.
The spirit resident in nature is not visible
when these mechanistic grids are laid over it,
sort of by a kind of anticipatory osmosis.
We called our company, which has existed now ten years or more,
Lux Naturae.
Lux Naturae means the light in nature.
The Lux Naturae is the salvational radiance
that can be found in the organic kingdom.
It's a term of paracelsus,
and it has slipped from the grip of modern human beings,
except in special cases,
where it is cultivated as in a sensitivity
or where it is pursued in the guise of an aspect of the psychedelic experience.
So, what is nature, and what's so great about it
that it should be the center of the mandala?
Well, it seems to me that it is
psyche in a way that has become occluded
by the perverse development of language,
so that what we take to be exterior to ourselves
and sustained by the laws of physics,
which do not arise out of the human mind,
is in fact not that at all,
but a kind of stratum of expectation
that has been laid down by the human journey through time.
Now, granted, there are aspects of nature
that are not part of the human journey through time,
but they are occult, from our point of view.
They are not expressed,
except perhaps through the demonic artifice of an instrumentality.
And this has been the course,
the strategy of science,
is to use an instrumentality
to reveal the mechanics of the occult side of nature.
The problem is that this occult side of nature,
once explicated,
does not yield a satisfying reflection of ourselves.
It yields instead a very unflattering reflection of ourselves,
if any at all.
So, in Hawaii, sitting on the mountainside,
you think that you are like Lenin in Germany or something,
and you have to politically think it all through
so that to whatever degree one's voice is heard,
mistakes are not made,
because it seems to me clear that a small miracle is taking place.
It is that, and I was saying this to Roy today,
it is that our point of view is actually gaining ground.
The thing which we least expected to happen, I think,
that all this new age hustle and bustle,
though granted that 95% of it is just intellectual noise
and efforts that fail, efforts to coin the perfect analogy that fail,
nevertheless there is a residual 5%
that appears to have become the cutting edge
of the guiding image of this megaculture.
So it becomes important then for people who identify themselves
with the human potential movement, spiritual development,
the rebirth of intuition, all of these things,
to make a place in the plan for the role of nature.
And different responses have gone on to that.
The Gaia response, which claims nature as a stabilizing feminine force,
which I'm all for that.
I think that's definitely the image that has to emerge,
that the recognition of the presence of control mechanisms,
which are not coercive, but which are Taoistic,
is a way of coming to terms with nature that we have resisted.
It's a simple idea, it's just the idea that before technology,
people had to store firewood in the autumn for the winter,
and in the spring they had to sharpen tools for the late spring planting
and this sort of thing, that there was an implicit rhythm
laid down by nature that entered the human cosmos at every level
and then was reflected in the poetry, the culture building,
the language evolution, etc.
and that when urbanization, other factors,
removed the influence of these rhythms,
ending in the final culmination of the modern city,
where life under electric light goes on 24 hours a day,
there's then a flattening of the human dimension.
There is no more a sense of being embedded in flux.
There is instead the myth of the eternal culture.
It's like Woody Allen, you know, his comment that he didn't like to go to the country
because you see all these screen doors with cobwebs in the corner.
Well, you've got to come to terms with this kind of thing.
Because there is no question that there is a deepening ambiguity in the present moment.
There is a something stealing over global civilization.
I was at a conference recently where someone proposed the notion that our time is not special,
that there is nothing unique about this moment other than that it is presently occurring.
I think nothing could be further from the truth,
that actually the deepening ambiguity of the historical experience,
which registers in all of us as a sense of how weird it is,
how compressed time is, how complicated the interconnections are,
is a real phenomenon which eventually will be elucidated.
In other words, it will be recognized as a phenomenon.
Eventually there is going to be a break with the prevailing paradigm of historical process.
In case you're not aware of it, the prevailing paradigm of historical process
is the one which calls itself the trendlessly fluctuating theory.
And it says we trendlessly fluctuate.
And to search for a trend is to just be drawn into a kind of cultural hysteria.
The fact of the matter is that standing outside the cultural hysteria,
the trend is fairly clear.
It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity.
How is it possible?
You look at something like Common Ground or even the Shared Visions newsletter
and you say apparently the major commodity moving on world markets is ambiguity.
The voices which whisper to us from crystals, herbs and housewives,
the invisible fields from all dimensions which impinge upon us,
the imagined histories and futures which intersect the present moment.
If all of these models or even a small portion of them are given credence,
then the density of the human experience is considerably deepened.
How many past lives can you keep track of?
How many extraterrestrial channels can you have open before you begin to realize
that you're not living in the kind of society like mom and dad were used to?
So, back to the theme of nature.
Nature anticipates all of this and anchors this.
Nature is actually the goal at the end of history.
We're getting closer and closer to the end of history
and we will not go past it with a moment of blindness.
There will be vouchsafe intuitions about the emerging structure of the other
into which culture is being subsumed.
You're all familiar with the image of the ouroboros,
the snake which takes its tail in its mouth.
Well, the end of history, which you've heard me talk about as an archaic revival,
is, that's true, an archaic revival,
but the ground of being in which the original archaic renaissance occurred was nature.
So, in terms of the expression of design elements,
in terms of the expression of human relationships, political agendas,
all of these things, the economies of nature are going to set the guiding images.
It's very interesting.
I read Stephen Jay Gould's book, "Biophilia,"
in which he describes his work with ants in Suriname
and how there are ants which grow fungi in their nests.
They chew up, they cut leaves off trees and chew them up into this mash
which they then store in rooms underground
and they bring the right spores to it and grow it there
and it produces a sugar which the ants then eat.
They tend the fungal garden,
they actually remove foreign spores and this sort of thing
and the whole symbiosis goes on.
Well, it's a symbiosis between a social organism, the ant,
and a fungal organism which is able to provide an enzyme, sugar,
which drives the ant society to a greater state of activity.
Activity being the bottom line in an insect economy
where how much you can get done determines how well you survive
provided the creodes of getting done are well established.
This provides a curious analogy to the situation that exists in human societies
vis-Ã -vis hallucinogenic plants.
Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination
and imagination having a practical side to itself
is usually reconnected to this process in a feedback loop
that asks the question,
"How can we make more of the hallucinogenic plant
which is giving us all these great ideas?"
So then you get initially the invention of agriculture
but one can't grow all plants in one place as we learned even about Hawaii.
Then the feedback loop and the imagination driven by the presence
of the hallucinogen in the diet asks the question,
"How can we get the plants that we can't grow?"
And the answer is networks of trade and systems of barter
and behind that lies the need for language, similar sorts of things.
These kinds of symbiotic processes are implicit in the human experience.
Some of you have heard another lecture I give which goes into this in great detail
where I actually try to show that the presence of mushrooms
in the dung of ungulate animals on the belt of Africa 150,000 years ago
drove a set of processes which resulted in self-reflecting human beings.
I won't recapitulate that now except to say that that process didn't end
with the invention of language or the domestication of cattle.
It continues right up until the present day.
It really is as though from a planetary point of view
what has happened is an enzyme system called the human species
was deputized into an information gathering mode
sent out as a kind of prodigal subsystem,
a kind of episome of the social environment
to cognize the organization of the natural world
through a process called human history
or the historical advance of understanding
toward sufficiently complete modeling of the ground that closure could occur.
And that is now I think what is happening,
that the human species which was deputized for Gaia into the fall,
the fall into profane time,
the time of non-participation in the immediacy of the Tao
through a series of successive linguistic declensions.
That's what it was.
I mean this begins to sound almost biblical
because what we're saying is there's a fall
and then the fall is somehow related to a confusion of languages,
not one from another but from the object of experience.
And as the language became less and less natural,
the world of the species using this language became less and less natural
because the evolution of symbols moved toward the abstract,
became the realization of ideals.
I notice that as early as Platonic philosophy,
well no, even in pre-Socratic philosophy,
you get the enunciation of abstraction,
great, overweening concepts which subsume large sets of particulars underneath them.
And this ability to subsume the particulars under a name,
which is a class name, is the beginning of this process
of replacing the natural language with the symbolic structures
that then interfere between soul and nature.
The reason for this process we can really only guess at,
it seems as though nature requires this reflection upon itself,
that the completion of nature is somehow in the hands of a single target species
which acts as an enzyme within the global organism of Gaia.
From the point of view of an extraterrestrial looking down on the surface of the planet,
there are not discrete organisms,
there is simply a gene swarm
and through transmission of viruses
and numerous non-genetic ways in which genes are transformed,
the previously imagined sharp declensions between species are actually somewhat illusory.
So that really,
within the confines of my body,
the unfolding of gene expression
and the molecular assembly of enzyme systems and proteins and that sort of thing
is simply under a tighter regimen of control
than are the same kind of processes which are going on between people.
We are really a loosely regulated organism
that has a tendency to ever tighten the control between its subunits
so that you can see the evolution of language,
the evolution of technology and its being at the service of media,
the rise of cities,
oral poetry,
all of these things we seem to strive for greater and greater cohesion,
greater and greater free flow of thought among ourselves.
And what we are looking toward
is a moment when the artificial language structures which bind us within the notion of ourselves
are dissolved in the presence of the realization that we are a part of nature.
And when that happens, the childhood of our species will pass away
and we will stand tremulously on the brink of really the first moments of coherent human civilization.
And when that happens, the noise which haunts our social systems,
our inability to couple things together so that they work
will begin to evaporate.
This I think is already beginning to happen.
It's a slow process, but it's a kind of cascading phenomenon
such that once it begins to happen, it happens faster and faster.
And the mirroring of psyche that was always the glamour, if you will,
which stood behind nature is correctly perceived with greater and greater clarity
as this process proceeds.
This correct perceiving of nature's relationship to self and language
is the essence of all of these cultural vectors that are converging.
Feminism, the exploration of space, the perfection of the thinking machine
or of the human-machine interface, the Mysterium Tremendum
at the core of the psychedelic experience.
All of these things are, I think, going to be seen as anticipations
of this post-historical state which lies beyond the working out of the themes
that have been set in motion by materialistic science.
In other words, the forces that are being set in motion
and sustained by so-called new thought, new age thinking.
This is why because this seems to be happening,
because it seems that we, and by we I mean all of us,
did in fact identify early on a trend in society
and I'm going to have enormous repercussions
that there is a responsibility to clear thinking about what this thing is
and how it works.
There seems to be a kind of a rush to get in line with the sloppiest metaphor
as quickly as possible so that there have been a number of,
let's say, syncretic fates or new myths that have arisen
and competed with each other with greater and lesser degrees of success.
I suppose this is a healthy thing except that it gives such comfort
to the people who think we're all airheads.
I mean, they observe all this and it confirms for them that it's a hopeless lot.
Nevertheless, so I guess what I want to say about that
is that everybody has their own version of what is the mistake which is being made.
So here's my version of what is the mistake that's being made.
It's that there is a confusion between scientific materialism and reason.
Science has set itself up as a kind of new pontificate
and Brooks, no challenge.
It expects to make judgment on any idea emerging from any realm of human endeavor.
It has set itself up as judge and jury.
The fact of the matter is that this is only by virtue
of its spectacular acts of technological prestidigitation
that it's able to presume to do this
because really what science is most successful in telling us about
are realms which none of us have ever penetrated nor are ever likely to.
I mean, how much do you wish to know about the rings of Neptune or the quark?
We are continuously sold the line that somehow when the metaphors of consciousness
are fully mapped onto quantum physics and biology
that a great step forward will have been taken.
It seems to me that since the information coming out of quantum physics and molecular biology
is so removed from the realm of common experience
that if we succeed in mapping mental phenomena onto those realms
we will have succeeded in the final act of alienation
because we will have at last totally removed our experience of ourselves
from the realm of felt cognition.
So I think that instead of the idea that there needs to be a kind of direction
of an overarching metaphor from the physical sciences
into the social and psychiatric sciences,
instead there should be the recognition and celebration of mystery
that in fact we are an intelligent species caught in a historical process.
No generation which preceded us knew what was going on
and there is no reason to assume that we know what's going on
or that the generation which follows us will know what's going on.
And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what's going on?
It's a highly unlikely enterprise.
I mean look at the data sample.
The data sample is your lifetime on one planet in one tiny corner of the universe.
And from this via the fallacy of induction
certain principles of uniformity are extended to the far flung corners of the cosmos in space and time
then a bunch of fancy metaphors are built up that nobody can check on anyway
and then this is called understanding.
You see it isn't understanding.
Understanding issues into appropriate activity
and a model of the universe which doesn't issue into appropriate activity in the here and now
is a curious model indeed.
After all, appropriate activity in the here and now I would think would be the sine qua non.
Everything else is an unconfirmed rumor.
So nature is the visible manifestation of this mystery.
It entirely surrounds and completes us.
It is there to be beheld and imbibed in.
It is simply that one must either replace the sterile language of scientific materialism
or one must bring no language whatsoever to it so that it speaks for itself.
I've noticed with ayahuasca this South American visionary vine that's a hallucinogen.
Unlike the mushroom it does not speak.
It shows its language is visible.
A fractal hieroglyphic surface of intermediate dimensions that contains an endless unfolding of phenomena
at level after level apparently, who knows, down into the micro physical realm.
This is a correct seeing of what is.
The mystery is co-present with its denial.
It is a matter of changing points of view.
And changing points of view is a matter of retooling language.
If nature is psyche, then so is the autopoleptic self-reflecting cloud of cognition that manifests as language.
It is partly based in the structure of matter.
It is partly based in the implicit syntax of the perceiver.
It is partly an interference pattern between the two.
But it is as close to the ground that one can approach without theory.
Which brings me then to the last point that I want to make about this, which is
the key to the forward looking expression of the archaic revival.
The key to making the new age fulfill its best hope and not fall into a kind of crypto-fascism of paradigmatic warfare
is to enunciate two principles, which are really two ways of saying the same thing.
They are the primacy of experience and the toxic nature of ideology.
This to me is the core.
And if the new age, the archaic revival, whatever, if it can exemplify these two principles,
we will navigate past the dangerous shoals that inevitably rip any social point of view
that attempts to leave its cult status and enter the mainstream.
The primacy of experience means, I connect it to Heidegger's notion of what he called
care for the project of being.
The primacy of felt experience begins with a notion as simple as be here now.
But it takes that further and says, you know, we must take ourselves more seriously, more
likely and more seriously at the same time.
We are not at the bottom of a pyramid of goods and information production where we pay the
sucker's price for everything as it's handed down through a series of intractable pieces
of cultural machinery that we have no effect on.
That is the myth that is being promulgated by those very institutions, the myth of the
hapless consumer, the myth of the meaning of fadism, that there is in fact a meaning
to switching from one ideology to another ideology the way hemlines and perfumes and
decorator colors come and go.
This kind of allowing ourselves to be self victimized, you know, I mean, God forbid,
I'm now at an age where three times in my life I've seen good ideas emerging on the
fringes of American culture end up as slogans for Madison Avenue.
You know, first with the beats, then with the hippies, I'll never forget the day I first
confronted a billboard which talked about the Dodge Rebellion.
I mean, rebellion was our word, not their word, and here they were, you know, our word
selling this piece of tin junk.
So, you know, the co-option that comes from disempowering yourself with regard to what
you view as important.
Which is more important to you, your opinion or Ted Koppel's opinion?
It's got to be your opinion, you know, because these other things are just chimeras, they're
myths in the electronic night.
The other side of that is the toxicity of ideology.
The ideology itself is poisonous, but in the 15th and 16th century, it's like 120 years
of intermittent religious war because people were so uptight about whether or not you were
a Catholic or a Huguenot or a Walloon or, you know, all this stuff, which these were
life and death issues.
And finally, people just became sick of it.
And I hope, I choose to believe that we may be approaching such a watershed with the social
ideologies that have just been dinging themselves into the global population for the past 100
years.
They are extremely bankrupt.
The notion of any kind of serious competition between Marxist-Leninism and capitalist democratic
techno-fascism or whatever it is, is ludicrous.
Neither system works in the presence of the need to weigh jidiological warfare against
the other.
And yet it's fairly clear that each society could function quite well if it didn't have
that burden.
And similarly, in many microcosms of that situation around the world, it's clear that
ideology has become some kind of anachronism.
It's a kind of lack of good taste.
It's like being a nut, you know?
So that you come on with some ideology and people just look at their plate.
They're embarrassed for you.
And well, they should be.
Because that butters no bread.
That's just a big pain in the neck.
The ideology which naturally claims our attention is pretty well understood.
You know, it's like it says in the Old Testament.
You can know the truth.
The truth is the still small voice in your heart.
We don't have to take courses in theology and ethics to get all this down.
The political agenda is fairly clear.
You feed people.
You cure disease.
You anticipate and solve social problems having to do with sewage disposal, distribution of
land and wealth, so forth and so on.
I mean, who's kidding who?
None of this stuff is controversial unless you're living inside a locked ward, which
we seem to be doing.
So more and more this anti-ideological position has to be articulated.
It's no big deal about how you cause language to evolve.
You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.
And then other people say, "Oh, so this thing that I've always thought that never felt like
saying is actually legitimate and okay and I can say it and I will say it?"
And then it begins to move like a wave through society.
You will be told that for me to advocate the poisonous nature of ideology without calling
it anarchy is to peddle my own private ideology.
But this is absurd.
It's like saying if someone tells you not to drive that they're advocating a certain
style of driving.
That isn't it at all.
It's a translation of level.
It's something entirely different.
Both of these things, the toxic nature of ideology and the importance of the felt presence
of immediate experience can be brought together under the notion that we cannot afford the
continued existence of what has been called throughout most of the 20th century the unconscious.
That the unconscious is actually a kind of neurotic excuse for not getting our act together
as a species.
It is a kind of infantilism, a self, a giving of permission by each of us to all of us to
not get our act together.
And the way in which the unconscious is eliminated is by turning the language machinery back
upon itself and reflecting on the process of attention.
This is what Buddhism is all about.
Attention to attention, awareness of the modality of the cognitive process.
Don't be fooled by yourself.
Don't be made a sucker of by yourself.
Just rise above that possibility by paying attention.
Attention to attention causes the light of language to fall into these dark and unilluminated
corners where infantilism is tolerated in the individual personality.
Saying that to oneself has a kind of morphogenic field effect, a kind of chain reaction which
sweeps through society.
This is what all these gurus are always trying to say in a somewhat more concrete and therefore
somewhat less convincing fashion.
But it is simply that the act of conscious self-inspection creates more conscious people
which create a more conscious society which erodes the possibility of the poisonous and
toxic effects of ideology.
This is what psychedelics were and are about in terms of their social position and their
legal position in society.
Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump
out of a third story window.
Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally lay down
models of behaviour and information processing.
They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
Humans and society spend a lot of money educating you into being a loyal worker, consumer, debt
payer and citizen.
So if anarchy is to have a meaning, and I think it is the great future for human society
because what it means is only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.
To the degree that people are responsible, we will have anarchy.
And the reason America, I believe, historically has been so successful is because it is really
a place where you can almost get away with anything.
And if that is law, if monolithic ideologies throw a damper on that, then cultural momentum
will pass to other cultures.
And in fact, to some degree I see this coming.
We had a conversation with a prominent politician recently and he pointed out that Japan is
now the leading Western country.
This indicates a cultural crisis of some depth for the ideals of the American Constitution.
My brother is a brain scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland,
the crown jewel of American brain science.
Everybody there is a Japanese graduate student doing work on a two year or three year scholarship.
But I don't see or hear a new age voice coming out of the Japanese.
I think this is the cultural model that the West is uniquely able to promulgate and perfect
because it comes out of a rejection of the tradition of scientific materialism that we
are responsible for and that we are most sophisticated about.
Where for instance, Japan has come fairly recently to high tech and mass industrialization.
So I just basically want to leave you with that.
The notion is that nature, which is the linguistically expressed topological manifold of the psyche,
is the unhistorical object that is pulling us forward and that when we actually cross
into the eschatology that appears fairly eminent, we will find it to have been anticipated by
the human relationship to nature, the embedding of psyche in nature through the mysterious
relationship mediated by language and the key to unfolding a sane society in my single
humble opinion is an obligation to reason that clearly distinguishes between reason
and science and obligation to self involvement in immediate experience and that means psychedelics,
sexuality and what I call time.
But what I really mean is a kind of deep literary involvement with the felt presence.
Psychedelics, sexuality and time to empower the individual to make the individual naturally
responsible to create then the basis for a caring global society that will transcend
the historical cultures as though we were just moving very naturally out of winter and
into spring.
No apocalypse, no millennium, no rescue by flying saucers, no Mayan return, simply the
unfolding of understanding in a program of mutual caring and responsibility.
This is the highest aspiration of the new age and I feel that it is attainable.
So let's break and then we'll have questions.
Thank you very, very much.
[Applause]
Okay, is there any kind of response to this evening's talk?
Wonderful, yes.
In my daily life I can do a yoga practice and I can maintain a certain amount of purity
and perspective through diet and through meditation, things like that.
And if I take a psychedelic drug it makes it very difficult for me to function in the
world because almost too much information is coming in in order to do daily things.
So your question is how do you integrate taking psychedelics into an ordinary workaday existence?
Well, I don't know that it is easily integrated.
I'm not sure whether you mean you can't function while it's happening or you can't function
three weeks afterwards.
With the psychedelics it's not a matter of high frequency I think.
The good trips are usually good for plenty of rumination for a long time.
The harder the hit the longer you want to ponder it before you go that route again.
It isn't like a practice.
It isn't like something you do daily.
It's more like a unique act of courage that arises out of the substratum of ordinary daily
existence whether it be profane or sacral.
There really isn't an answer to your question as long as we're part of the worker anthill
or living in a society which makes tremendous demands on us it's going to be a problem.
The way to take psychedelics is you must have seen these t-shirts which say I take drugs
seriously.
Well, that's the way to take them which means rarely and at substantially challenging doses
and in an atmosphere where there are no distractions and by that I mean, other people will say
something different, but I mean no light and no sound including music unless you're a musician
or you have some special relationship to music but really what you're trying to see is the
surface of the brain-mind interphase and to the degree that you can create a situation
of sensory deprivation you will have a greater expectation of succeeding.
Some people wouldn't dream of tripping without music but I find that it becomes the trip.
The whole thing then becomes about that piece of music where in silence it would have been
equally audially interesting.
So it isn't the early model of the psychedelic experience was sort of that you eat an orange
and look at art books and listen to Bach's choral preludes but that art historical approach
to it doesn't give enough credit to the power of the substance.
I mean it can lift veil after veil in silent darkness to just catapult you into endlessly
undulating tapestries of organic beauty and there need be no sensory input, in fact shouldn't
be for this to happen.
You had a question.
I was wondering about practical sort of tips, how do you take something back, sort of like
as a kinder in mind take back a golden piece with you or a key or something because I lose
it.
Well, I think I sort of touched on this obliquely tonight that attention to attention or paying
attention to the nuances of cognition is a psychedelic way of being.
I mean if any of you are familiar with Marcel Proust's Recherche du Temps Perdu, he didn't
take drugs except for laudanum and valerian and alcohol and absinthe and tobacco and things
like that so he was drug free and he managed to refine this art of just the awareness of
the tensions and nuances in the moment for really what I have come to believe about the
psychedelic experience is that it is simply a compressed instance of what we call understanding
so that living psychedelically is trying to live in an atmosphere of continuous unfolding
of understanding so that every day you know more and see into things with greater depth
than you did before and this is a process of education.
What the psychedelic experience is, is it's the process of education so compressed that
it has become a cascade of actual visual images which rather than a kind of slow unfoldment
of linked perceptions but really attention to attention and appreciation of the immediate.
I always think when this comes up of William Blake's advice.
Blake was as you know a great mystical visionary English poet who spoke with angels and had
these wonderful visions of the angelic world and he was asked what was the secret of his
angelic poetry and he said attend the minute particulars that's all just attend the minute
particulars that the and what he meant was to focus attention in the moment not to betray
attention into expectation born of abstraction or regret born of misplaced assumption or
of remembrance born of boredom and alienation in the moment but just to attend the minute
particulars it's a way of training it's like yoga.
People think that psychedelics are somehow the easy way out this is what people think
who wouldn't dare dream of taking one and it's not because it's the easy way out it's
because they sense that the reality of it the reality of the fact of it and the challenge
of assimilating it.
I mean it's very real it's not a metaphor it's not an analogy it's not a dramatic reconstruction
it is not a simulacrum it is not a model it is the pith essence of the thing itself it's
real and I don't know how many things can make that claim I mean everyone has a different
set of experiences my own experiences have of the other of the transcendent naked beauty
of truth have almost all entirely come out of the psychedelic realm or out of involvement
with the viscerality of my emotions you know the death of my mother the birth of my children
the act of marrying someone not else but those so I think it's about attending the minute
particulars as a kind of practice it may not get you anywhere for several years but if
you attend the minute particulars cultivate an ongoing stream of self-description telling
yourself what is happening get used to the idea that mind can penetrate the immediate
surface of being and reveal the tactile density of it as a manifold whose measure cannot be
immediately taken by the eyes that it's deep it's connected it's complex everything holds
within itself the anticipation and the memory of everything else yes I just want to feel
so often well it's hard to feel optimistic sometimes it's but it's an almost like an
obligation and I think there's enough evidence around to support it if Ronald Reagan is going
to begin the process of the dismantling of strategic nuclear stockpiles then you know
what would the civilized and humane political leader be doing in this context so on one
level I'm fairly cynical I see you know people whose major life's work has been banditry
and bloody rampage getting into the history books as great peacemakers nevertheless I
love the fact that the constraints of the situation have forced these clowns into this
position that's what I mean when I say you know that no political group no faction has
its hands on the tiller of history there is an invisible hand which seems to be channeling
the life of these institutions toward what we deem progressive ends and not because these
people have converted to altruism and reason and sweetness and light but because it's a
way for them to save their political ass so it has become expedient peace has become politically
expedient consequently we shall have it I think in a big hurry now granted it doesn't
address starvation sexism abuses of propaganda torture all of these things but I feel like
that there is a kind of a log jam in human affairs that formed in the late 60s where
we all looked over into the future and saw what it was and the governing agencies froze
with terror and attempted to halt the onrushing momentum of the 20th century to not only make
psychedelic drugs illegal for the public but to actually end scientific research into them
this is phenomenal scientific research is supposed to be freely pursued in any field
that's the banner under which science rides its horse but apparently this doesn't apply
to hallucinogens freezing all dialogue on disarmament freezing all dialogue on the retraction
of the projection globally of imperial power and strategic stockpiles all this was frozen
in place in the late 60s and it's only now beginning to give way the future has a momentum
that no institution can deny and the 25 years of constipated dithering that we have just
come through has only meant that now the transition into the new order will be that much more
sudden and that much more complete so I guess I am optimistic in the micro I see many causes
for pessimism but generally I think things globally are working out fine now it may be
and I address this tonight in the talk a little bit it may be that a sane humane and well
fed world is coming into being but it may not be led by the United States of America
we muscle bound with strategic arsenals unable to produce things which the rest of the world
wants to buy entertaining a massive trade deficit tolerant of reactionary pseudo religious
forms of political crypto fascism we are I hope no one is offended by that we are not
exactly in the best position to lead the charge into this great and glorious future a society
with a tradition of resource management like Japan is perhaps in a much better position
although then there are other problems Japan speaks a language no one understands it's
going to be quite a world if the power of the projection of the Japanese cultural self
image is to become so overwhelming that Japanese is to become the dominant language of the
west although this is a possibility certainly if any of you are familiar with the fiction
of William Gibson and if you're not I urge it upon you this is some of the most exciting
science fiction being written he pictures a world where Japanese cultural dominance
I would say is a primary factor so yes I'm optimistic we have to be it's the only game
in town and look at the opportunities it's simply a matter of insisting on human values
garnered from the felt experience of the moment and holding back the toxic effects of ideology
in other words this anarchic prescription that I sort of put forth this evening mainly
holding back the toxic effects of ideology because then we can create a sane world if
we just recognize that pragmatism love for each other and a reasonable amount of goodwill
will do quite nicely I think if the shriller voices the ideologically driven voices can
be made de classe not repressed just simply recognized as tasteless anything else yes
what the end of time has to do with what you said tonight what kind of time and different
kinds of time or well yeah I've certainly I've reflected on what it's like it's sort
of a blank screen on which to project your mind what will it be like once we pass the
omega point I'm not really sure I mean you can take two approaches to it you can take
the sort of the deus ex machina approach which means we can't know what it is because it's
going to be so wonderful it's going to be like the descent of the flying saucers and
we will all march into the four gated city and that will be it or you can take a more
conservative approach and say well maybe there's something going on in the trends around us
that we can extrapolate to try and understand the world beyond the end of time taking that
approach what I think is happening and it's been happening for a long time and it's very
interesting is that culture culture is another dimension that and perhaps properly so in
the early part of my talk I talked about how culture had subsumed the position of nature
so that we had lost sight of nature by erecting culture through erecting these linguistic
structures but I noticed that and not only linguistic structures but architectural structures
the infrastructure of our society that is what culture is the way we differ from the
we toto is all the stuff that we have bound into ideas and excreted through our engineering
processes to surround ourselves with this dimension which is culture is becoming ever
more all inclusive at the same time that it's also becoming strangely enough ever more ethereal
ever less material a perfect example of this I don't know how many of you are familiar
with it but if you deal with the Macintosh computer the operating system of the Mac is
the genius of it and what makes it the best in the biz is that it attempts to trick you
into believing that you're dealing with ordinary three dimensional space you know you don't
type in commands you don't choose printed options you move in a symbolic representation
of three dimensional space well again to mention William Gibson and his novels what he imagines
is simply a larger version of this conventionalized symbolic representation of three dimensional
space so that you enter in his novels his characters enter into a world where the Bank
of America database is perceived as a huge red rectangle hundreds of feet in height in
a certain spot in the memory of this global computer and yes it's cyberspace and near
it is the memory bank of Wells Fargo or something else so that when you enter into cyberspace
ordinary reality is replaced by a symbolic representation of the informational content
of ordinary reality well this is in fact happening it's happening at a very rapid rate so the
dimension which we call culture which we have previously erected in the three dimensional
world around us through the intercession of what we call manufacturing and architecture
is very rapidly being internalized and erected as cyberspace this alternative dimension to
ordinary three dimensional space in which our minds are able to move like fish in water
what I think lies beyond the end of time is a very concrete realization of this other
dimension that's why things like the time wave that I've developed and some of these
other projections run off the scale the world beyond the end of history is literally not
mappable in the lower order set of mapping that are applicable to history so it is like
being downloaded into circuitry it's possible to conceive of the entire human species fitting
into the area of a large refrigerator in cyberspace so that the goal of history is the creation
of a mirror image of culture in the cyberspatial dimension so that culture in the dimension
of nature can be slowly retracted slowly retracted into the compressed quintessence you can almost
think of this as an alchemical process we're talking about forging a philosopher's stone
out of a hyper dimensional medium which is composed of energy and language and into which
we can all cast ourselves at will it is you know Plato said if God didn't exist man would
invent him or it well it may well be that the pilot's seat the pilot's chair of the
flying saucer is empty it awaits mankind it is the condensed expectation of complete inner
penetration of all of us through each other and our cultural artifact in a mode that we
cannot even imagine at an earlier talk at will's here a couple of years ago I did a
talk called shedding the monkey which I talked about dropping the primate image that is projected
on to the human soul through the accidents of biological evolution that as we take control
of our genetic heritage as we take control of the process of manufacturing culture we
are going to become what we dream we are and we have never really explored consciously
what it is we dream we are but very shortly this will become a major part of the cultural
agenda because we are going to be able to do anything and with that kind of power again
recurring to the theme of the evening I think we have to anchor ourselves in nature so sort
of my apotheosis or my vision of how this should come to be is that everyone is given
their own 500 acres of paradise in the chip and that is your heritage your space your
right place to be and out of the mellowness which accrues only to the very wealthy which
we will then each and every one of us fall into that category we will be able to return
to the dimension of the limited pie and very decouerously and thoughtfully apportion it
out in a sane and rational manner so it is very very tricky this rush toward the ability
to completely realize the self image in hyperspace my mother used to say to me when I was a small
child if wishes were horses beggars would ride and I think that is the dream to turn
wishes into horses that beggars may ride and it is that world where we each get our own
horse or when our ship comes in that lies beyond the historical dimension because it
is where we in effect each becomes all and then is freed into the imagination of the
over soul to create whatever castles in the imagination seem most pleasing it is the triumph
of art art in the imagination and reverence for nature in the in the placental dimension
which is the life support system for this fantastic indulgence in the in the expression
of the imagination yeah
I am an educator I educate young children and I would just like you to address what
we can do or what your ideas about what society can do so that we don't have to undo it at
some point I mean most of us here have to kind of undo what we went through as children
in public education anyway so that we can at least come to some level of awareness or
peacefulness within ourselves what is the positive side of it what is your
well in Hawaii this past year we home schooled our children and we also coincidentally rented
office space from a major company which creates home schooling curriculum and on their letterhead
they had the motto you are your child's best teacher and we found out how hard it is to
live up to that ideal and yet in a way we also found out how rewarding it was to attempt
it when we returned to Northern California our children will go to public school I think
basically you have to just you have to not leave it up to the school you have to check
in on what's going on and input into the process I don't I don't feel that I can give a very
deep answer to this I think it's one of the most perplexing problems one thing I think
that's terribly wrong with education is that there is no sense of history instilled in
people and history has almost as bad a rap on it as mathematics and yet these are the
two modes of thought which I think would do the most to anchor us because they both are
about different forms of grounding one grounds in eternal demonstrable principles mathematics
and the other dissipates amnesia it's a very weird thing that somebody can't tell you isn't
quite clear on whether event X happened in the 13th or the 16th century I mean after
all 13th 16th 19th how would you like to be you know so imprecisely perceived in somebody's
mind that they couldn't get within 300 years of where you lived and died so the lack of
a sense of history makes us really pray to manipulation that's why I am cynical enough
to believe that the de-emphasizing of history that's gone on in American education over
the past 30 years is almost the equivalent of a plot the notion you know even as recently
as when I graduated from the university and it took me 12 years so I didn't graduate until
75 but the idea was that if you went to a university you emerged a liberal gentle person
in well informed on the accomplishments of your culture its history its aspirations its
ways of governing itself its ways of resolving conflict and so on now I think people emerge
these things have become gigantic trade schools and you are not you are expected to learn
to do a job and when not doing your job malls have been provided for you to shop in and
240 channels of garbage have been piped into your home for you to keep up on what it is
that is all corralled to go out and buy and this creation of this history-less mindless
consumerist person at the expense of the democratic of the ideal of the democratically informed
citizen is going to wreck great havoc in our society people often compliment me on my enchanting
command of these various subjects and so forth and so on and I'm amazed because what's being
sold to you here tonight ladies and gentlemen is nothing more than the fruits of a liberal
college education you know you go to college you learn about Gnosticism, Platonic Philosophy
or you once did but no more apparently so it can be sold as the most far out thing in
the new age this is amnesia on quite a scale so and the other thing I would say in answer
to your question about education is separating physical culture from competition that the
notion of physical culture and by that I mean gym class and competition is one of the I
mean now I feel the bile rising this is we are talking serious here now saving people
from the grief of PE is I think a major way to heal the culture when we were living in
Hawaii Kath asked our son how did he think of himself and he said he thought of himself
as an artist and an athlete and I thought that this was just an amazing breakthrough
because I thought of myself as a sort of 95 pound weakling and the notion that my son
could be physically just like I was at his age and yet conceive of himself as an athlete
and have this balanced view of art, athlete, junior scientist and so forth meant we must
be doing something right and what it is is stressing physical culture being in the ocean
hiking running skateboarding biking all these things without the notion of males crashing
against each other for the purposes of racking up points with females and elders to lay the
ground work for the whole imposition of the alpha male primate hierarchy that makes society
such a mess so that's that for education maybe one more question if there is one yes
I think I must have mentioned ayahuasca well I'll briefly mention it again if any of you
are interested in ayahuasca the standard reference work is that's in print is called hallucinogens
and shamanism edited by Michael Harner there are I think about three articles in there
on ayahuasca ayahuasca is a combinatory preparation a beverage made by boiling down the bark of
a jungle leona which contains harmine and other monoamine oxidase inhibiting compounds
and adding DMT which occurs in a plant related to coffee and it's generally by the people
there viewed as atomic something which keeps the society in equilibrium also been written
about by Marlene Dobson de Rios and others and I understand there are therapists in the
bay area working very quietly to create an awareness of its potential impact on psychotherapy
which we can personally attest that it has a great potential we saw physical symptoms
relieved in the Amazon we saw neurotic behavior neurotic behavior patterns dissolved and it's
just one of many shamanic devices plant hallucinogens that have not been studied by medical science
and will not be studied as long as the current hysteria about psychedelic drug research represses
the scientific community from having anything to do with these things nevertheless its history
as a curing agent among these tribes goes back to at least pre-conquest times and it
has a reputation for inducing states of group mindedness which approach the level of being
almost telepathic so it's being used in the Amazon to regulate social processes as well
as the health of individuals so it's very very interesting in the way that it seems
to be a kind of pristine model of the many ways that a psychedelic compound can have
a healing effect in a society well I think that's about it for this evening it's 10.30
so I want to thank you all very much it's good to be back
you
On The DMT Experience
Hash smokers are greatly favored in this endeavor because you really need leather lungs for
this. The great problem is that people will cough or not be able to hold it in. You take
two hits in a situation where your clothes have been loosened and you can just flop backward
when you need to. You take two hits. Now many people miss the point because after two hits
you feel completely peculiar. You feel as though your body is undergoing some strange
kind of anesthesia. All the air has been pumped out of the room. This is the visual acuity
thing I talked about last night. The colors jump up. The edges sharpen. And at that point
people say, "Wow, it's really coming on strong." And then what you have to do is you have to
take one more enormous hit and this separates the intrepid from the casual, believe me.
The facilitator doesn't want to lean on the person. You say, "Damn it, take the third
hit." And you say, "No, I feel completely weird." You say, "I know you feel weird, but
take the third hit." Well, if you can coke somebody into that, then what happens is you
close your eyes and you see the ordinary warm brown back closed eyelid scenario and then
these colors begin racing together and it forms this mandolic floral slowly rotating
thing, which I call the chrysanthemum. This is a place in the trip that you want to see
as you go by it. The chrysanthemum forms and you watch it for like 15 seconds. If it doesn't
give way, then you didn't do enough. You have to do more. One more hit usually will do it.
Well, then what happens is it physically propels you through this chrysanthemum-like thing
and there's a sound like a saran wrap bread wrapper being crumpled up and thrown away,
that crackle. A friend of mine says, "This is your radio intellect leaving through the
anterior fontanelle at the top of your head." I don't know what it is, but something is
being... Yeah, right. That's what it is. Then there's this very, very defined sense of bursting
through something, a membrane, and on the other side, and this is now, remember, my
experience, on the other side as you break through, there's a cheer. There's a whole
bunch of entities waiting on the other side. You know that Pink Floyd song, "The gnomes
have learned a new way to say hooray"? Well, it's that place. It's those gnomes. You burst
into this space and they're saying, "How wonderful that you're here. You come so rarely. We're
so delighted to see you." One of the things about the MT that's really puzzling is, in
a sense, it doesn't affect your mind. In other words, you don't change. For instance, if
you take ketamine, the first thing you notice, the very first thing you notice before the
trip hits is you notice that you no longer are anxious about having taken ketamine. You
just sort of anxiety leaves you. That means it's affecting your mind. It's doing something
to the judgmental machinery. The MT doesn't lay a hand on the judgmental machinery. You
break through into that space exactly who you were before breaking through, and the
usual reaction of most people is something like, "Ah!" You know, you think, "God! Heartbeat?
Normal. Pulse? Normal. Everything's normal. Yeah, everything's normal. Oh, God." Because
these things are there and they're hammering at you and they come forward. They're like
jeweled self-dribbling basketballs. And there are many of them. And they come pounding toward
you and they will stop in front of you and vibrate, but then they do a very disconcerting
thing, which is they jump into your body. They jump into your body and then they jump
back out again. And the whole thing is going on in this very high-speed mode where you're
being presented with thousands of details per second and you can't get a hold on...
You say, "You know, my God, what's happening?" And these things are saying, "Don't abandon
yourself to amazement," which is exactly what you want to do. You just want to go nuts with
how crazy this is. They say, "Don't do that. Don't do that. Pay attention. Pay attention
to what we're doing." Well, what are they doing? Well, what they're doing is they're
making objects with their voices. They're singing structures into existence. These things
are... And what they will do is they'll come toward you and then... And you have to understand,
they don't have arms, so we're kind of downloading this into a lower dimension to even describe
it. But what they do is they offer things to you. Say, "Look at this. Look at this."
And as your attention goes toward these objects, you realize that what you're being shown is
impossible. It's impossible. It's not simply intricate, beautiful, and hard to manufacture.
It's impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be to the Faberge eggs
or something like that. But these things are like the toys that are scattered around the
nursery inside a UFO or something. Celestial toys. And they are... The toys themselves
appear to be somehow alive. The toys themselves can sing other objects into existence. So
what's happening is there's just this proliferation of elf gifts. And the elf gifts are moving
around singing and the whole thing is directed toward... They're saying, "Do what we are
doing." And they're very insistent. They say, "Do it. Do it. Do it." And you feel like a
bubble. And now this is subjective. I mean, only 5% report this, but it happens to me.
You feel like some kind of bubble inside your body that's beginning to move up toward your
mouth. And when it comes out, it isn't sound, it's vision. You discover that you can pump
stuff out of your mouth by singing. And they're urging you to do this. They say, "That's it.
That's it. Keep doing it." And the whole thing is like... We're now at minute 4.5 with this
stuff. And you speak in a kind of glossolalia. There's a spontaneous outpouring of syntax
unaccompanied by what is normally called meaning. It's sort of, you know, "Hidin gwa wak saptivim
gwa hak sikipin im wahave diktam bwahagagetek." And this is accompanied by a modality, something
seen. And they're saying, "Yes, do it. Do it. Do it." And then after a minute or so
of this, the whole thing begins to collapse in on itself. And they literally begin to
physically move away from you. And usually their final shot is they actually wave goodbye
and they say, "Deja vu. Deja vu." Which makes no sense at all if you analyze it. So then
you come down. You're now at minute 6 to 7. And you come down and it's like being more
loaded than you've ever been. It's like about a 700 mic acid trip. But you embrace it as
totally down. You say, "I'm totally down." I mean, you look like a termite from Arturus
and the room is decorated in Amish quilts, but I'm completely back. And then over a minute
or a minute and a half or so, the room just comes right back together. And four minutes
after that, some people can give no account of it whatsoever. They just say, "I don't
know. It was the weirdest thing that ever happened to me and I can't remember it now."
Open Doors
With this and without any further ado, I am most pleased and most happy to introduce our
very special guest speaker tonight, parents McKinnon.
[applause]
It's a pleasure to be here. It's wonderful to see so many familiar faces and so many faces, period.
I've never been to Port Huaini before. Probably some of you feel the same way.
But I've been doing a lot of traveling recently. I was in New York last weekend at the Open Center
and in Prague two weeks before that. So this is the end of a long season of traveling.
I'm not home yet, but at least I'm in my own time zone.
I want to especially thank Andy Voth and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Oxnard for inviting me to participate.
It represents a real commitment to free speech and First Amendment rights, I think, for an art museum.
[applause]
Art museums have been taking some knocks recently, and so I think they doubly should be commended for their courage.
And I want to explain, as Andy mentioned, this is a benefit for botanical dimensions, which explains the double price over the ticket.
All of this money will go to the preservation of medicinal plants with a history of shamanic usage.
That is the special focus of our botanical garden in Hawaii.
And before I start the formal lecture, I'd like to just say a little bit about that.
As you know, the rainforests of the world are being cleared at a very frightening rate.
And perhaps voices are beginning to be heard to halt this destruction of the natural environment.
But whether it's halted or not, the destruction of the knowledge of native peoples concerning the uses of the plants in the rainforest,
this is disappearing without doubt in the next 30 years because these people are moving into cities,
taking jobs in the ordinary market economy, and thousands of years of accumulated folk medical knowledge is being lost.
So the real world political work that Kath and I do is associated with botanical dimensions.
We conceived it together many, many years ago, and then about six years ago, Kath took it over, put it on its official feet,
made it a nonprofit foundation, and has run it day to day since then with tremendous energy and efficiency.
So I'd like to acknowledge Kath McKenna here.
My better half. In fact, my only good half.
Yes. And then I wanted to underscore what Andy said, a very special event two weeks from now at the Carnegie Museum.
Roy Tuchman, Roy of Hollywood, Bon Vivant, counter-cultural figure, informational ferret of our time,
will be recast as an experimental composer of great energy and imagination.
And I hope you'll all turn out for Roy. He's been a wonderful force in my life and I think in the cultural life of Southern California.
Both Roy and Diane have done a wonderful job in raising the quality of public dialogue in Southern California,
which I think is a precondition for any kind of clear thinking about our future or our political situation.
So here's to Roy and Diane.
OK. Well, the theme that unites these lectures is creativity and the techniques by which the artist can refine his or her vision,
expand the vision, communicate the vision.
And before I get into that issue, I thought I would talk just a little bit about my notion of creativity per se.
What is it in and of itself?
And when I think like that, of course, I cast my mind back to nature.
Nature is the great visible engine of creativity against which all other creative efforts are measured.
And creativity in nature has a curious distribution.
It's something which accumulates through time.
If we stand back and look at the universe, we see that at its earliest moments, it was very simple.
It was a plenum. It was without characters or characteristics.
It was what in Hindu mythology is called the Turaya, which is described as a tribute list.
And naturally, if something is without attribution, you can't say much about it.
It takes a while for it to undergo a declension into more creative realms.
And these creative realms are distinguished as domains of difference.
The precondition for creativity is, I think, disequilibrium, what mathematicians now call chaos.
And through the life of the universe, as temperatures have fallen,
more and more complex compound structures have arisen.
And though there's been many slipping back in this process,
over very large spans of time we can say that creativity is conserved,
that the universe becomes more creative.
And out of that state of creative fecundity, more creativity is manifest.
So that from that point of view, the universe is almost what we would have to call an art-making machine,
an engine for the production of ever more novel forms of connectedness,
ever more exotic juxtapositions of disparate elements.
And out of this, I believe, arises implicitly a set of principles
that we can then apply to the human artist in the human world.
Nature's creativity is obviously the wellspring of human creativity.
We emerge out of nature almost, and this idea, I think, was fairly present close to the surface of the medieval mind,
we emerge out of nature almost as its finest work of art.
The medieval mind spoke of the productions of nature.
This is a phrase you hear as late as the 18th century, the productions of nature.
And human creativity emerges out of that, whether you have a model of the Aristotelian great ladder of being,
or a more modern evolutionary view, where we actually consolidate emergent properties
and somehow bring them to a focus of self-reflection.
Now, I'm sure that we couldn't carry out a discussion of this sort without observing that the prototypic figure for the artist,
as well as for the scientist, is the shaman.
The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist, and the artist
into a single notion of caregiving and creativity.
And I think that, you know, to whatever degree art over the past several centuries has wandered in the desert,
it is because this shamanic function has been either suppressed or forgotten,
and different images of the artist have been held up at different times.
The artist as artisan, the artist as handmaiden of a ruling class or family,
the artist as designer for the production of integrated objects into a civilization,
this notion of the artist as mystical journeyer, as one who goes into a world unseen by others
and then returns to tell them of it, was pretty much lost in the post-medieval and renaissance conception of art
up until the late 19th century or early 20th century, where beginning with the romantics,
there is a new permission to explore the irrational.
This really is the bridge back to the archaic shamanic function of the artist,
permission to explore the irrational.
The romantics did it with their elevation of titanic emotion, romantic love specifically.
The symbolists in the mid 19th century did it by a re-emphasis on the emotional content of the image,
and a rejection of the previous rationalism.
And that emphasis on the image and on the emotions set the stage then for what I take to be the truly shamanic movements in art,
which begin really with Alfred Jarry in the late 1880s and early 1890s.
Jarry, you may remember, was the founder of something called the École du Pataphysique, the Pataphysical College.
Jarry announced, "Pataphysics is the science."
The problem was, nobody could understand what it meant or what it stood for, including Jarry.
Jarry was tight with L'Entremont, who you may recall said,
"I am fascinated with that kind of beauty that arises when a sewing machine meets a bicycle on an operating table."
See, this was a true effort to bend the boundaries of art, to create new permission, permission really for the unthinkable.
And this, again, reinforces the shamanic function.
What do we mean when we say the unthinkable?
We mean the envelope of that which can be conceived.
And for at least 200 years, the ostensible mission of the artist has been to test the conceptual and the imagistic envelope
of what the society is willing to tolerate.
And this has taken many forms.
The deconstruction of imagery that we get with abstract expressionism, going back into impressionism and the Poincolists,
or the permission for the irrational imagery of the unconscious, surrealism, and German expressionism,
and the use of this permission, always the idea being to somehow destroy the idols of the tribe,
dissolve the conceptual boundary of ordinary expectation.
Well, in order to do this, it seems to me there is a precondition for the creation of art, which I call "understanding."
And I don't mean this in an intellectual sense.
I mean it in the sense that Alfred North Whitehead intended when he defined understanding as the apperception of pattern as such.
As such.
There's nothing more to it than that.
You see, if we were to look at this room and we were to squint our eyes, and I'm doing this right now,
and I see that the room divides itself into people dressed in red and people dressed in blue,
this is a pattern, and it tells me something about what I'm looking at.
Now I shift my depth of field, now I'm looking at where men are sitting and where women are sitting.
This is a different pattern, and it tells me more about what I am looking at.
The number of these patterns, theoretically present in any construction, is infinite.
That says to me then that the depth of understanding cannot be known.
It cannot be known.
Everything is imminent.
William Blake makes this point, you know, that you can see infinity in a grain of sand.
So understanding then is the precondition for creativity.
And this understanding is not so much intellectual as it is visual.
Visual.
And in thinking about this, I realized what an influence upon my own ideas in this area Aldous Huxley was.
Not the Huxley that we might ordinarily associate with my concerns, the Huxley of the doors of perception and heaven and hell,
but the Huxley of a very modest book that he wrote in the early 50s called "The Art of Seeing."
"The Art of Seeing."
And in that book, he makes the point that a good art education begins with a good drawing hand.
That to be able to coordinate the hand and eye and to see into nature,
to see into the patterns present as such is the precondition for a kind of approach to the absolute.
Now out of this process of seeing, which I'm calling understanding,
the creative process ushers in novelty.
And many of you have heard me speak of novelty in another context.
In the context of nature as a novelty producing engine of some sort.
And ourselves almost as the handiwork of nature.
But this same handiwork of nature which we represent,
we also internalize and re-express through the novelty of the human world.
Well now, if we take seriously the shamanic model as a basis for authentic art,
then certainly in the modern context, what we see missing from the repertoire of the artist
are shamanic techniques.
And it's for the discussion of these shamanic techniques, I believe, that I was brought here this evening.
So I want you to cast your mind back to a great seminal moment,
germinal moment in the history of human thought,
which was about 25,000 years ago,
the great glaciers that had covered most of the Eurasian land mass began to melt.
And human populations that had been islanded from each other for about 15 millennia
began to re-contact each other and reconnect.
And out of this comes what is called the Magdalenian revolution from 18,000 to 22,000 years ago.
And what it is, is nothing less than a tremendous explosion of creativity
and aesthetic self-expression on the part of the human species.
We find for the first time, bone and antler technology takes its place along with stone technology.
Musical instruments appear over a wide area.
And cave paintings, some paintings in areas and recesses so remote from the surface of the ground
that it takes several hours to reach them,
are painted and set up in dramatic tableaus,
specifically designed to bring together sound, light, and dance in herothanes,
extravaganzas of aesthetic output that invoke a kind of transcendent other
that human beings for the first time are trying to come to grips with
and make some kind of cultural statement about.
And this pulling into matter of the ideas of human beings
first in the forms of beadwork and chipped stone and carved bone,
within 20,000 years ushers into the kinds of high civilizations that we see around us
and points us toward the kind of extraplanetary mega-civilization
that we can feel operating on our own present like a kind of great attractor.
Now, this whole intellectual adventure in exteriorization of ideas
is entirely an aesthetic adventure.
Until very recently, utility is only a secondary consideration.
The real notion is a kind of seizure by the tremendous, by the other,
which then forces us to take up matter, clay, bone, flint,
and put it through a mental process where we then excrete it
as objects that have lodged within them ideas.
This seems to be the special, unique, transcendental function of the human animal
is the production and condensation of ideas.
And what made it possible for the human animal is language.
If you're seeking the thumbprint of the transcendental
on the myriad phenomena that compose life on this planet,
to my mind, the place to look is human language.
Human language represents an ontological break of major magnitude
with anything else going on on this planet.
I mean, yes, bees dance and dolphins squeak and chimpanzees do what they do,
but it's a hell of a step from there to Wallace Stevens,
let alone William Shakespeare.
Language is the unique province of human beings,
and language is the unique tool of the artist.
The artist is the person of language.
And I've given a lot of thought to this because
the work that I've done with psilocybin mushrooms
and the observations of psychedelic plant use in the Amazon
centered around ayahuasca
lead me to the conclusion that it is the synergy and catalysis of language
that lies behind not only the emergence of human consciousness
out of animal organization,
but then its ability to set a course for a transcendental dimension
and pursue that course against all the vicissitudes of biology and history
over 10 or 15,000 years.
Language has made us more than a group of pack hunting monkeys.
It's made us a group of pack hunting monkeys with a dream.
And the fallout from that dream has given us our glory and our shame,
our weaponry, our technology, our art, our hopes, our fears.
All of this arises out of our own ability to articulate
and to communicate with each other.
And I use this in the broad sense.
I mean, for me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity,
song, dance, sculpture, poetry, all of these cognitive activities.
When we participate in them, we cross out of the domain of animal organization
and into the domain of a genuine relationship to the transcendent.
As you know, shamans in all times and places gain their power
through relationships with helping spirits,
which they sometimes call ancestors, sometimes call nature spirits.
But somehow the acquisition of a relationship to a disincarnate intelligence
is the precondition for authentic shamanism.
Now, nowhere in our world do we have an institution like that
that we do not consider pathological
except in the now very thinly spread tradition of the muse,
that artists alone among human beings are given permission to talk
in terms of my inspiration or a voice which told me to do this
or a vision that must be realized.
The thin line, the thin thread of shamanic descent into our profane world
leads through the office of the artist.
And so if society is to somehow take hold of itself
at this penultimate moment as we literally waver on the brink of planetary extinction,
then the artist, like Ariadne following her thread out of the labyrinth,
is going to have to follow this shamanic thread back through time.
And you know, one of the most disempowering things that has been done to us
by the male dominant culture is to brush out our footprints into the past.
We don't have a clue as to how we got here.
Most people can't think further back than the first Nixon administration,
let alone the arrival of the Vikings, the fall of Catalhoyuk,
the melting of the glaciers, so forth and so on.
We have been disempowered by a rational tendency to deny our irrational roots,
which are a kind of embarrassment to science
because science is the special province of the ego,
and magic and art are the special province of something else.
I could name it, but I won't.
It prefers to be unnamed, I think.
So how seriously then are we to take this,
call it an obligation, to follow the shamanic thread back into time?
Well, I think that it is a matter of saving our own souls,
that this is the real challenge.
You know, I love to dig at the yogins by saying
nobody ever went into an ashram with their knees knocking in fear
over the tremendous dimension they know they were about to enter through meditation.
Still truer and more sad, still more true and more sad,
is the notion that very few of us pick up our sculpting tools or our airbrush
with our knees knocking with fear
because we know we are invoking and acting with the muse at our elbow.
And somehow I think the artists need to recover this sense of mystery.
One of the most depressing things to me about the art scene,
and I had a chance to reconnect with this because I was just in New York,
is it now has a kind of directionless quality.
You can go into a gallery and you cannot tell whether it is 1990, 1980, 1970 or 1960
because a kind of eschatological malaise has settled over art.
All notion of any forward movement toward a transcendental ideal
has been put aside for the exploration of idiosyncratic vision.
And I grant you, this is a tension,
and perhaps in the question period we can talk about this,
there is a tension between the individual vision and the notion of an attractor
or a collective vision which wants to be expressed.
But to my mind this is the same dichotomous tension
that haunts the individual in his or her relationship to Tao.
We don't want to be lost in ego,
but on the other hand if we completely express the Tao we have no sense of self.
The ideal seems to be a kind of coincidencia appositorum,
a kind of literalizing of a paradox where what we have is Tao but we perceive it as ego.
And in the application of this notion to the art problem I would say
what we need is a situation where schooling, if you want to put it that way,
or a tendency toward a coherent vision expressed by many artists is spontaneous.
Each artist imagines that they are pursuing their own vision,
yet obviously they are in the grip of an archetype
which is rising through the medium of the unconscious.
Now the last time we saw this in American art was in abstract expressionism,
which was probably in terms of the values,
in terms of tension and the amount of emotional gain
between one artistic moment and another,
and the break between abstract expressionism and what preceded it
was the most radical break in American art in this century.
Abstract expressionism actually carried us in to a confrontation
with what the quantum physicists were telling us,
that the universe is field upon field of integrated vibration,
that there is no top level, there is no bottom level,
that the ordinary structures of provisional space-time are simply that,
that if we can rise out of the human dimension
then we discover these larger, more integrated dimensions
where mind and nature somehow interpenetrate each other.
A vision like that, a coherent vision, has yet to announce itself
here in the post-history, pre-apocalypse phase of things.
Well...
I guess I have a kind of reactionary side
when I think about the creative endeavor.
I believe that the psychedelic experience,
as encountered by each of you in the privacy of your own mind,
or as encountered by a pre-literate society somewhere in the world,
that that psychedelic experience is in a way the Rosetta Stone,
not only for understanding the encryption
that our own lives represent each to ourselves,
but it's also a Rosetta Stone for un-coding the historical experience.
Art is this endeavor to leave the animal domain behind,
to create another dimension,
orthogonal to the concerns of ordinary history.
And this orthogonal domain, to my mind,
is glimpsed most clearly in the psychedelic experience.
The psychedelic experience shows you more art in an hour and a half
than the human species has produced in 15 or 20,000 years.
Now, this is an incredible claim.
This is why I make it.
The energy barrier, which separates us
from this tremendous repository of transcendental imagery, is very low.
It's a matter of a little personal commitment
and the substances which make the transition possible.
The perturbation of brain chemistry is easily done.
What is not so easily done is the assimilation of the consequences of this act.
Ordinarily, we assume that consciousness is channeled
between tremendously deep walls,
that there is no way to force a confrontation with the other,
the transcendent or the unconscious.
We tend to assume that we're going to have to do double duty at the ashram
for three decades before you're vouchsafed even a glimpse into these places.
This is not true.
Culture, and this is my message to artists
and to anybody else who cares to notice,
culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
And this plot prosecutes its goals through a limiting of language.
Language is the battleground over which the fight will take place
because what we cannot say, we cannot communicate.
And by say, I mean dance, paint, sing, meme.
What we cannot say, we cannot communicate.
We can conceive of things that we cannot communicate.
And I think every one of us here has done that.
And that's a thrilling thing.
That is the deep homework.
The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things
which no human being has ever seen before
and no human being will ever see again.
But in fact, this has no meaning unless it is possible
to carry it back into the collectivity.
And what motivates me to talk to groups like this
is the belief that we do not have centuries
of gently unfolding time ahead of us
in which to gently tease apart the threads of the human endeavor
and create a bright new world.
That's not our circumstance.
This is a fire in a madhouse.
And to get a hold on the situation,
I think we are going to have to force the issue.
Well, one way of forcing the issue
or a chemical definition of forcing the issue
when you're talking about a chemical reaction is catalysis.
We want to catalyze consciousness.
We want to move it faster toward its goals,
whatever those goals are.
Well, I believe that to the present moment,
language, again in the broadest sense, speech, dance,
musical composition, language has just been allowed to grow like Topsy.
It's been a kind of every man for himself situation.
Now what we really need as we see ourselves
moving from one species
among tens of thousands of species on this planet,
over the past 10,000 years, we have redefined ourselves.
And now, like it or not,
we are the custodians of the destiny of this planet.
Our decisions affect every life form on the planet.
And yet we are still communicating with each other
with the extremely precise medium of small mouth noises
mediated by ignorance and hate.
This doesn't seem like the way to do business
as we approach the third millennium.
So what I'm hopeful for and what I actually see happening,
I mean, I think that we're on the right track.
The birth of a new kind of humanity is going to take place,
but there are still a lot of decisions to be made.
How violent shall this birth be?
What toll shall it take upon our mother, the earth?
What shape shall the baby be in when it finally is delivered?
These are the decisions that artists can mediate and control.
Most people are afraid of the unconscious.
This is why you can have a psychedelic compound like DMT,
which is very much like ordinary brain chemistry,
appears completely physiologically harmless,
only lasts 10 minutes, extremely powerful.
And generally in this society, you have no takers.
This is because there has been a failure of moral courage.
And the failure of moral courage is perhaps most evident
in our own community, the community of the artists.
In a way, it's the poets that have failed us
because they have not provided a song or sung a vision
that we could all move in concert to.
So now we are in the absurd position of being able to do anything.
And what we are doing is fouling our own nest
and pushing ourselves toward planetary toxification and extinction.
This is because the poets, the artists, have not articulated a moral vision.
The moral vision must come from the unconscious.
It doesn't have to do, I believe, with these post-meaning movements in art,
deconstructionism and this sort of thing.
That art's task is to save the soul of mankind
and that anything less is a dithering while Rome burns
because if the artists who are self-selected for being able to journey into the other,
if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.
Ideology is extremely alien to art, political ideology, I mean.
And if you will but notice, it is political ideology that has been calling the shots
for the last seven or eight hundred years.
We can transcend politics if we can put some other program in place.
You cannot transcend politics into a void.
And I believe that a world without ideology could be created
if what were put in place of ideology were the notion of the realization
of the good, the true and the beautiful.
You know, the three-tiered canon of the platonic aesthetic.
Reconnect the notion of the good, the true and the beautiful.
Then use psychedelics to empower the artist
to go into this vast dimension that surrounds human history
on all sides to an infinite depth
and return from that world with the transcendental images
that can lift us to a new cultural level.
The muse is there.
The dull maps that rationalism has given us
are nothing more than whistling past the graveyard by the bad little boys of science.
You only have to avail yourselves of these shamanic tools
to rediscover a nature which is not mute,
as Sartre said in a kind of culmination of the modern viewpoint.
Nature is not mute.
It is man who is deaf.
And the way to open our ears, open our eyes
and reconnect with the intent of a living world
is through the psychedelics.
Now, as you know, biology runs on genes
and genes are the units of meaning of heredity.
But we could make a model of the informational environment
that is represented by culture.
And in fact, this is done.
A word has been invented, meme.
M-E-M-E, meme.
A meme is not the smallest unit of heredity.
A meme is the smallest unit of meaning of an idea.
Ideas are made of memes.
And I think the art community might function with more efficiency
in the production of visionary aesthetic breakthroughs
if we would think of ourselves as an environment
modeled after the natural environment
where we as artists are attempting to create memes
which enter an environment of other memes
that are in competition with each other
and out of this competition of memes
ever more appropriate, adapted and suitable ideas
can gather and link themselves together
into higher and higher organisms.
Now, in order for this to happen
there is an obligation upon each one of us
to carry our ideas clearly
because in the same way that a gene must be copied correctly
to be replicated
or it will cause some pathological mutation
a meme must be correctly replicated
or it will cause a pathological mutation.
For instance, I would say what the Nazis did
to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy
was a bad cop... a miscopied meme
became a toxic mutation inside a culture.
So, I would suggest to the people in this room tonight
that you take a good look around at who's here.
Artistic people, psychedelic people
look pretty much like everybody else out in society.
But we have come here tonight self-selected
for our interest in the empowering capacity
of psychedelic plants and the empowering capacity of art.
So, we represent an affinity group
a population with the potential for mutagenic impact
on the ideological structures of the rest of society.
So, look around.
Someone here has what you need.
And if you can only figure out who it is
you can make a novel connection
to move them into a new level of creativity.
Well...
What is this new level of creativity?
Some of you may be familiar with the theme
that was very big in medieval religious art
which was the apocalypse of Saint John or of somebody.
There are a number of these apocalypses.
And I think that many of us
may come out of a kind of secular background
or have not given this kind of a religious idea
too much consideration.
But my idiosyncratic conclusion
based simply on trying to be honest
about the content of the psychedelic experience
is that human history really is on a collision course
with a transcendental object of some sort.
It is not going to be business as usual
into the endless unfolding confines of the future.
The very fact that human history is occurring on this planet
the very fact that a primate has left the ordinary pattern
of primate activity
and gone into the business of running stock markets
and molecular biology labs and art museums
indicates to me the nearby presence
in another dimension of a kind of hyper organizing force
or what I call the transcendental object.
And I believe that this transcendental object
is casting an enormous shadow
over the human historical landscape
so that if you're back in ancient Judea
you have an anticipation of the Messiah.
If you are at Eleusis
at the height of the practice of the Eleusinian mysteries
you have an anticipation of the dark god.
These anticipations of an unspeakable transcendent reality
that are always clothed in the assumptions of the individual artist
and the society in which he or she is working
are in fact genuine
and that you don't have to give yourself over to fundamentalist religion
to connect with the fact that human history is an adventure
and this adventure has a number of startling reverses
and sudden plot shifts that are very difficult to anticipate
and that we are coming up on one of those.
The civilization that was created
out of the collapse of the medieval world
has now shown its contradictions to be unbearable
and though no one of us knows what the shape of the new civilization will be
somehow in the singing of the ayahuasca songs in the rainforest
in the tremendous hyper-metallic transcendental off-planetary flash of psilocybin
in the teaching of the self-transforming machine elves
that seem to dwell in the DMT dimension
we see that the ordinary linear expectations of history are breaking down
and that the truth of the eminence of the mystery
is breaking through all the structures of denial
of the male dominator paradigm that has been in place so long.
The way to make this birth process smooth
the way to bring it to a conclusion that will not betray
the thousands and thousands of generations of people
who suffered birth and disease and migration and starvation and lonely death
so that we could sit here this evening
and the redeeming of the human enterprise all lies then
in helping this thing come to birth
and each artist is an antenna to the transcendental other
and as we go with our own history into that thing
and then create a unique confluence of our uniqueness
and its uniqueness we collectively create an arrow
an arrow out of history, out of time
perhaps even out of matter that will redeem then the idea that man is good
redeem the idea that man is good
this is the promise of art and its fulfillment is never more near than the present moment
thank you very much
I think we'll take, I'm happy to take questions here
You spoke about science being in the realm of ego
and art and shamanism being in some other realm of decline and mayhem
My own psychedelic experience convinced me of the existence of that other realm
but I had felt not enough sense of personal power to be that antenna
that you're saying that artists can be
for bringing that to other until I became convinced of the existence
not only of me but in the other realm and that other realm within me
and perhaps the psychedelic experience prepared me for that second awareness
but perhaps you could comment on how if possible that second awareness could be
more easily accessible in the psychedelic experience
What do you mean by the second awareness? Say a little more about it
Of being aware that other realm is something that's also very personal
Well, yes, I mean it seems it's a landscape that begins within the self
and seems to extend into the world
I mean one of the very puzzling things about the psychedelic experience is
that it argues that we are not atomic individuals running around in some kind of society
but that if you actually drain the psychic water away
you'll discover that we're all connected at the roots
that it isn't a journey to another world
it's a journey inward to a world that is already present and there
The astonishing thing is how alienated we are from our own interior
from the interior world to the point where we can hardly recognize it
I mean I've talked a lot about the alien nature of the psychedelic experience
and how it seems to be mappable over something as radical as the UFO experience
This is because we truly do not know who we are
The past 10,000 years have been so disempowering to us
We are really like the children of a dysfunctional relationship
[
Radio Valve Interview
You know, I found that many of your ideas and presentations were very challenging and
dangerous to the limits that I felt on my mind, but I don't feel especially terrified
sitting across from you talking with you.
I don't feel like you're any danger to me.
No, no, I'm a nice man.
That's part of the strategy.
I'm the doorkeeper to deep, dark water that everybody explores on their own.
I am not a guru.
I have no particular acts of my own to grind or at least not with great vigor.
The point to be made here is that psychedelics are not an ideology or a position.
They are an experience and an experience is something that we have very intimately ourselves,
so it's not something you can teach people or draw too many general conclusions from.
It's an experience, but it's an experience that I feel people should have and when I
see a political system or a set of cultural values that are denying people this experience,
then I feel like some kind of human rights abuse is taking place.
In principle, there's nothing wrong with drugs coming out of the laboratory, but in fact
we don't have a large body of experience with these things where if you go to a tribal situation
and they are using a plant in a traditional fashion, then you have your medical data which
tells you that these plant substances don't cause mental retardation, birth defects, Parkinson's
syndrome.
In other words, these human populations that have used these things shamanically have use
tested a number of these substances and they are among the most powerful of all the psychedelics
known.
You're not limiting the depth of your experience by concentrating on the traditional botanically
derived substance.
Any culture is a kind of hallucination, a kind of self-limiting group assumption about
reality and we all are adapted to living within one or several cultures.
What psychedelics do is they address a deeper level of human neurological organization.
They reveal the brain and its function unconfined by cultural norms and expectations and this
can be exalting, exhilarating, dizzying, terrifying, depending on the personality and the circumstance.
The tension between so-called straight culture and psychedelic culture is a tension over
values.
Psychedelics challenge the assumptions of any cultural or political system and that
makes them dangerous to every cultural and political system.
So if there's anything, a Marxist dictatorship, a high-tech industrial democracy or a theocracy,
they can all get together on one thing, which is psychedelic drugs or a knife poised at
the heart of community values.
Well this is just simply nonsense and then all the reasons brought forth are in a sense
a red herring.
The psychedelics are among the safest substances known for human ingestion.
Considering the depth of their impact on human mental functioning, the fact that you pick
yourself up six, seven, eight hours later and go on about your business with an expanded
point of view is quite remarkable.
People have a right to get stoned.
They have a right to think and explore their own minds.
This is as intimate a part of their being as their sexuality and to any culture which
mitigates that is clearly afraid of a full and fair and open dialogue about what reality
is and what real human values ought to be.
I think anybody who takes a number of psychedelic trips will eventually earn their oak leaves.
I mean you can spend difficult evenings.
People who dismiss this as recreational drugs or hedonism or escapism absolutely do not
know what they're talking about.
This can be very challenging and difficult work.
The ocean kayaking metaphor is more appropriate.
People think meditation and yoga are the same enterprise as taking psychedelics.
They are often sold as the same enterprise but in fact nobody goes to the ashram with
their knees knocking in terror over what is about to sweep over them.
On the other hand, if you're taking high doses of psilocybin or DMT, this would be a perfectly
reasonable response.
All kinds of areas of human knowledge are experiencing exponential growth and what the
future is going to be about is the integrating of these growth surges across the surface
of the rising wave of change and knowledge expansion.
We're going to see more change in the next 15 years than we've seen in the last 500 years
of the evolution of global culture.
It's going to be a challenge and a wild ride, I dare say, for every man, woman and child
on the planet.
Those who keep cultural values in place are always interested in mitigating controversy,
exploration and criticism.
As I said earlier, all cultures are involved in the culture game and psychedelics transcend
the culture game and whether you're Hasid in Jerusalem or a Tokyo stockbroker or an
Andaman Islander, if you take psychedelic substances, your cultural values will suddenly
be much more relativistically revealed to you and that is political dynamite.
The tension between so-called straight culture and psychedelic culture is a tension over
values.
Psychedelics challenge the assumptions of any cultural or political system and that
makes them dangerous to every cultural and political system.
So if there's anything, a Marxist dictatorship, a high-tech industrial democracy or a theocracy,
they can all get together on one thing, which is psychedelic drugs are a knife poised at
the heart of community values.
Well this is just simply nonsense and then all the reasons brought forth are in a sense
a red herring.
The psychedelics are among the safest substances known for human ingestion.
Considering the depth of their impact on human mental functioning, the fact that you pick
yourself up six, seven, eight hours later and go on about your business with an expanded
point of view is quite remarkable.
If life is not to be experienced, what is it for?
I'm interested in everything.
To my mind, the psychedelic agenda means visiting the most remote parts of the world, reading
the most forgotten and obscure literatures and having the most extreme experiences that
one can enjoy safely.
And I view taking psychedelic substances in a category with ocean kayaking, rock climbing,
hiking the Andean Trail, it's an athletic, challenging undertaking for people who are
interested in limits, their own limits and the limits that the world offers them.
For one person to seek enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach
to seek enlightenment from another grain of sand.
And I think that's a very powerful message.
It says we're all human, we're all in this dilemma together and our levels of accomplishment
and knowledge are so similar that there is no reason to assume superiority and to then
submit to a guru or a lineage.
Not that there are not things to be learned, but I think the richer style of learning is
a kind of camaraderie and co-exploration of reality with an open mind.
Everybody who claims they have answers is automatically suspect.
Where is it writ that talking primates should have perfect models of the universe at large?
If you met a termite who told you he was seeking enlightenment, I think it would provoke a
small smile.
Well on the galactic scale, the difference between us and that termite is hardly worth
mentioning.
When we look forward to the global transformation of human culture, I think it's been a long,
bloody slog from the plains of Africa to the surface of the moon.
And the cultural models that we've used are worn out and transformation is now inevitable.
We know that we're at the limits that the planet as a resource can tolerate.
We have technologies that could transform the world.
We have enormous creative abilities.
What we seem to lack is mental discipline.
We need to change our minds about issues like class, race, gender, resource extraction.
If we do not change our minds, we're going to push this entire planetary system into
some state of fibrillation from which it will be very difficult to rescue it and ourselves.
So the great challenge is to change our minds.
And I know of nothing that does that in the time frames that we have to operate as effectively
as psychedelics.
If hortatory preaching did it, then we would have turned the corner with the Sermon on
the Mount or with the sermon at the Deer Park at Sarnath or something like that.
But we need direct neurological intervention at the meat level in order to turn this monkey
into a planetary gardener, ecologist, and a caring force in nature and the human world.
Wilbo Baggins said it, "The greatest adventure still lies ahead."
And so let's be up and about it.
Is he the one who said that?
He's one of the ones who said it.
[END]
Starwood (Part 1)
All right. Can you hear in the back? Is the sound comfortable for everyone? Is the light
comfortable for everyone? And are you comfortable? Well, you shouldn't be. The planet's going
to shit in a handbag. No, that's just my John Lilly imitation. Not me at all. I'll circulate
these now. If you're interested in an intensive rainforest, ethnocycobotany intensive at Palenque
in the state of Chiapas next January, why, and you haven't gotten one of those. There
it is. And then that gets the hype out of the way right at the beginning. So most of
you were probably at the talk I gave yesterday. Is that basically safe to assume? Yes. So
I thought today I would talk a little bit. And then I think these things are much more
interesting for me, if they're interactive. And people bring all kinds of agendas to these
things. And I don't know whether people want to talk philosophy or recipes. I don't know
whether they want to talk politics, or, you know, share experiences. So I want to just
in order to make sure we all understand the domain we're operating from here, I would
like to talk a little bit about what it's like to be loaded in north because I think
that's the ground zero of what we're talking about. Psychedelics are like any other social
phenomena. There are a lot of wannabes. There are a lot of people who are along for the
ride. I'm sure the pagan community is no stranger to this phenomenon because there are certain
residual spin offs if you proclaim yourself pagan, that are hard to obtain any other way.
Similarly for being psychedelic. So some of you have heard me do this before, but it's
a personal thing and yet it's a general thing. My notion of the psychedelic cosmogony, if
you want to think of it that way, is it's like a bullseye. It's like a series of concentric
circles. And various substances place you in various quadrants of that mandala at various
distances from ground zero, which is at the absolute center. And nature in her bounty
has provided various coordination points. I mean, there's the cannabis coordination
point, the opiate coordination point, the tropains that were so important in European
witchcraft, the solanaceous plant, hyosiamine, those things. That's a different chemical
family and a different group of plant families that these compounds occur in. And I've been
at this fairly steadily since 1964 and have tried to do everything with a certain level
of attention and reverence because I think that it's all very fine to go armed with the
knowledge of pharmacology, dose response, LD50 and all that. But I think as pagans and
magicians we really understand that the mind can do anything. And there's a horribly frightening
little passage in Jung somewhere where he says, "The unconscious has a thousand ways
to terminate a life that has become meaningless." Meaning, you know, you'll step in front of
a street car or something. So in my lifetime of looking at these things and being interested
in many other things as well, heresies, obscure backwaters of art history and literature,
peculiar philosophies that rose and fell centuries ago in obscure parts of the world. My theory
of life's exploration is to run edges. And I've mellowed over the years that I used to
say if a book isn't a hundred years old you shouldn't read it. If a person isn't dead
you shouldn't worry about them. If they wrote in English you shouldn't bother with them.
So forth and so on. In the course of sorting out as many peculiar and bizarre possibilities
that life could offer me in many places, my attitude was always critical. My attitude
was always a show me attitude. I don't believe in faith. I don't believe in belief. My favorite
Gospel story is the story of the Apostle Thomas who was not present when Christ came the first
time after the resurrection to the upper room. And then later Thomas came to the Apostles
and they said the master has been here and he said you guys have been smoking too much
of that red lead. And then Christ came again. But in this conversation with the Apostles
Thomas said unless I put my hand into the wound I will not believe it. And then time
passed and then Christ came again to the upper room and he said Thomas come forward. Put
your hand into the wound. And he did and then he said Lord I am not worthy so forth and
so on. My conclusion about this story is that alone among all humanity in all times and
places only one person ever touched the incorporeal body of God. Thomas the doubter touched because
he doubted. It was not necessary that the believers should be vouchsafe such a boon
but the doubter was awarded the supreme enlightenment. Ok so much for that. So my thing has always
been whether you present me with a diet, a social arrangement society, a sexual conundrum,
a work of art my criteria is is it shit or is it Shinola? And I am happy to give you
the benefit of my personal life's experience proceeding along those lines. I want to talk
about what to my mind is the quintessential phallus antigen and consequently the quintessential
spiritual and magical tool of this dimension and that is DMT, dimethyltryptamine, a compound
that occurs in the human nervous system. It occurs in many many plants. It is the commonest
phallus antigen in all of nature and I don't know how you got to where you are this afternoon
but the way I got here is by testing and by hoping and by pursuing a magical, if that's
the word, a miraculous, a transcendental ideal that over the course of life experience strips
from you. You know you have to get a job, your first love is not your last love. Slowly
this pristine shining belief in perfectibility is eroded by the swings and arrows of outrageous
fortune. You know the dark oxen that turn the millstones of the world. But I'm here
to tell you that it is real. There is a doorway into another dimension. Aladdin's lamp is
real. Fairyland is real. Magic is real in the most real sense. In the same sense that
what we call reality is real and I learned this through this compound and one of the
great puzzles about this compound is why more people don't know about it. No brotherhood
initiated me. No lineage reaching back to the fall of Atlantis brought me into its circle.
Therefore I feel completely free to say anything I want. Nobody has ever come to me and said
you are spilling the beans, you are telling the secret. A long long time ago and you know
we all have different opinions, this is mine, I hope it doesn't offend but a long long time
ago I took an oath to tell all secrets that came my way. Don't tell me a secret, I won't
keep it. I'm against secrets, I'm against hierarchies, lineages, all assumption of special
knowledge on the part of anyone in the presence of anyone else is abhorrent to me. I am a
true anarchist first and foremost. DMT like all things in this world has a physical body,
a presence and a presentation. In this case it looks rather like ear wax. It is orange,
it is crystalline, it smells vaguely of moth balls and for my money it is the lapis, the
quintessence, the universal panacea at the end of time has sent a reflection back through
the temporal labyrinth and wherever this touches, wherever this compresses the mystery is fully
present. So what is it then? Well it's an experience and I maintain it's the most intense
experience you can have this side of the yawning grave without doubt. I mean people say is
it dangerous? Well the answer is only if you fear death by astonishment. Yes that's a joke
here. It's not a joke there because you find yourself literally holding your heart to verify
that you have not in fact had a coronary thrombosis induced by wonder, terror, reverence and astonishment.
So here it is, the quintessence, the orange thing, was it transponded in from our tourists,
was it handed down through some ancient eldritch brotherhood that found this secret before
the pyramids were built? Who can say? Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, here's what
happens when you allow it to pass through the blood brain barrier of your own alchemical
vessel which is your body. The first thing that happens is that there is a sense as though
all the air in the room had been sucked out, all the colors brightened. This is that increase
in visual acuity that I made so much of yesterday. All edges become sharp, distant things stand
out in their clarity. This is at one toke. At two tokes you close your eyes, you feel
a sense of anesthesia seeping through your body. You close your eyes and you see a floral
pattern rotating in space, usually yellow orange. People who do this occasionally, and
nobody does it a lot, call it the chrysanthemum. It's a floral pattern like a pattern in a
Chinese brocade. This forms and stabilizes and then you either break through it or you
require one more toke. And these are matters of physiology, shamanic intent, so forth and
so on. The leather lung hash smokers among us have a leg up in this department. This
is a spiritual discipline where the ability not to cough makes the difference between
sunyata and try again. So you take, let us assume, a third toke, long and slow, through
a glass pipe. You vaporize this stuff. You don't mix it with weed or oregano or any of
that which was done in the past. You want the pure stuff and you take it in and in and
in. And there is definitely somewhere in here a threshold, a threshold which you must succeed.
And when you do that, this membrane-like thing, this chrysanthemum will actually part and
there is a sound like the crumpling of a plastic bread rasper or the crackling of flame. A
friend of mine says this is the radio intellecty of your soul exiting through the anterior
bone, a tone, a "mmm". And then there is this impression of transition and you are
now 20 seconds deep into this experience. There is an impression of transition. It is
as though there were a series of tunnels or chambers that you are tumbling down, being
propelled by some kind of muscle behind you that is pushing you. I mean, yes, Earth canal,
yes, yes, of course. But anyway, a tunnel. And what I have noticed about this tunnel
is the walls and ceiling flux and come down to meet each other and where they touch, they
are like this. And then you are propelled into the next space and then the next and
then the next and there is this. Right. And then you are there. And this is what I want
to talk to you about because of all communities, I hope, perhaps collectively, someone can
say something enlightening about this. Then you are there and where is there? It is underground.
How you know this you cannot say but there is an irreconcilable sense of enormous mass
surrounding you. In other words, you are underground. You are at the center of a mountain or something
and you are in a room which aficionados call the dome and people will ask each other, did
you see the dome? Were you there? It is softly lit, indirectly lit and the walls, such they
are crawling with geometric hallucinations, very brightly colored, very iridescent with
deep sheens and very high reflective surfaces. Everything is machine like and polished and
throbbing with energy. But that is not what immediately arrests my attention. What arrests
my attention is the fact that this space is inhabited, that the immediate impression as
you break into it is there is a cheer. The gnomes have learned a new way to say who.
You break in to this space and are immediately swarmed by squeaking, self-transforming elf
machines. These things which are made of light and grammar and sound that come chirping and
squealing and tumbling toward you and they say, hooray, welcome, you are here and in
my case you send so many, you come so rarely. And my immediate impression, no matter how
many times I do this and I have done it maybe 30 or 40 times which isn't a lot in a lifetime
of worshipping it, my immediate impression is that they are welcoming. There is something
going on which I over the years come to call love, L-U-V, not light utility vehicle, but
love that is not like eros or not like sexual attraction, I don't know what it is like exactly,
it is almost like a physical thing, it is like a glue that pours out into this space.
And my immediate impression in there is I am appalled, I am appalled at how far I have
come and one of the strange things about DMT is that it does not affect your mind in the
ordinary sense in that, you know, drugs they make you giggly, they frighten you, they stimulate
you, they depress you, DMT does none of this. You go to that place with all your groceries,
you are there and you are there thinking Jesus H. fucking Christ, what is this, what is this?
And you are thinking I must be dead, I have done it this time, this is a psychedelic mantra,
I have done it this time, I must be dead and so you think heart, heart, yes, heart, pulse,
pulse, yes, yes and meanwhile these things are literally in your face and what they do
is they jump into your chest and then they jump out again and what they are doing and
this is the point I think, what they are doing is they are singing, chanting, speaking in
some kind of language that is very bizarre to hear but what is far more important is
that you can see it, they speak in the language which you see and this is completely confounding
because syntax is not something you ordinarily reach out and touch and in this space that
is what is happening and so like jeweled self dribbling basketballs these things come running
forward and what they are doing with this visible language that they create is they
are making gifts, they are making gifts for you and they will say which condenses as something
which looks like a cross between a sock with camel, a Havana cigar, a piece of abalone,
an opal and a nookie and they offer a gift and you are looking at this thing and as you
look at it, it also transforms, changes, speaks, sings, undergoes metastasis, undergoes metamorphosis
and these things are just accumulating and each elf machine creature elbows others aside,
says look at this, look at this, take this, choose me and as you direct your attention
into these things you have the overwhelming conviction that if you could bring a single
one of these objects back to this world that somehow you wouldn't have to say anything,
you would just walk up to people and say friend? and they would say oh my god, you have got
a piece of the action, a real action.
So this state of ecstatic frenzy and it is like a bug stunning cartoon running backwards
in cyberspace or something, this state of incredible frenzy goes on for about three
minutes and all the time the elves are saying don't give way to wonder, do not abandon yourself
to amazement, pay attention, pay attention, look at what we are doing, look at what we
are doing and then do it, do it and it is this thing where then everything stops and
they wait and you feel like a torch, a spark lit in your belly that begins to move up your
esophagus and eventually when it reaches your mouth, your mouth just flies open and this
language like stuff comes out acoustically.
But what you are not hearing is the startled friends who sent you to this place or putting
up with this, what you are experiencing is a visual modality where these tones are surfaces,
shading, colors, insects, jewels, you are making something, erase, move forward, add
cerulean, put in stippling, it is that sort of thing and they go mad with joy when you
do this and then this goes on for about thirty seconds and then there is like a ripple through
the system and you realize these two continua are being pulled apart and I had one trip
where the, and often it is very erotic although I am not sure that is the word but it is something,
it is almost like sex is the surface of something of which this is the volume and I am a great
fan of sex, I don't mean to denigrate it, I mean to raise the empty to a very high status
but it is astonishing and one trip as the pull away maneuver began all the elves turned
simultaneously and looked at me and said deja vu, deja vu.
So this is an experience which in some form, I mean it will be different for each one of
you but in some form at least what will be similar to my description is how dramatic
it will be, it will hit you as hard as it hit me if you do it right.
This to me, this experience is of a fundamentally different order than any other experience
this side of the yawning grave and why religions have not been built around it, why empires
have not risen and fallen around the control of its sources, why theology has not enshrined
it as its central exhibit for the presence of the other in the human world, I don't know.
I can tell the secret as you notice, nothing shuts me up but why this is not four inch
headlines on every newspaper on the planet, I cannot understand because I don't know what
news you were waiting for but this is the news that I was waiting for.
And it's an incredible challenge to human understanding to try and make sense of this
and I started out, you know, reading Jung, doing my Hindu, you know, getting up to speed
with all that, studying Zen Buddhism, studying shamanism, the thing that puzzles me about
DMT is how little trace there is of it in the human world.
I can't point to a period in European art or the art of some group of islanders somewhere
and say that is very much like DMT, it isn't and yet the DMT thing is like an avalanche
of orgasmic beauty but a certain kind of beauty, the only words that I can find for the kind
of beauty that it is, is bizarre, alien, outlandish, outre, freaky and at the very edge of what
the human mind seems to be able to hold.
Well, where is this coming from and what is happening?
And this is what I like to discuss with people such as yourselves who have wide experience
in the world and in the realms of the unseen.
It has to be taken seriously, in other words, it's only a hallucination thing, that poor
ship is just passe, I mean reality is only a hallucination for trying out loud, haven't
you heard?
So that takes care of that, it's only a hallucination.
What we've got here, folks, is an intelligent intellect of some sort that is frantic to
communicate with human beings for some reason and the possibilities can be logically enumerated.
What we've got here is either this is an extraterrestrial, you know, evolved around a different star,
possibly with a different biology, may not even be made of matter, came across an enormous
distance sometime, maybe long ago, had some agenda which we may or may not be able to
conceive of.
This is it, the real thing, as the little girl said in Poltergeist, they're here.
So that's one possibility, that's just one possibility.
And I present these without judgment because I'm not sure.
If an extraterrestrial wanted to interact with the human society and it had ethics that
forbade it from landing trillion ton, beryllium ships from the United Nations Plaza, in other
words, if it were SACO, I can see hiding yourself inside a shamanic intoxication.
You would say, let's analyze these people, okay, they're kind of hard headed rationalists
except they have this phenomenon called getting loaded and when they get loaded they accept
whatever happens to them.
So let's hide inside the load and we'll talk to them from there and they'll never realize
that we're of a different status than paint elephants.
Okay, that's one possibility.
Now another possibility is that this is not about extraterrestrial flight and enormous
technologies and distant homelands, and this is maybe closer to friendlier to pagan notions,
that there is a parallel continuum nearby, essentially right here.
Call it fairyland, call it the western realm, whatever you like, but you don't go there
in star ships, you go there through magical doorways which are open via ritual and things
like that.
That is a possibility as well.
Certainly human folklore in all times and places except western Europe for the last
three hundred years has insisted that these parallel domains of intelligence and organization
exist.
There is a third possibility which I leave it to you to decide whether this is the more
conservative position or the more radical position.
When I reached this reluctantly, and I'm not sure this is my position, but these things
have a weird, these types as I call them, these self-transforming machine elves, these
syntactical homunculi have a very weird relationship to human beings.
First of all, they love us.
They care for some reason.
Whoever and whatever they are, they're far more aware of us than we are aware of them.
I mean witness the fact that they welcome me.
So is it possible that at the end of the twentieth century, at the end of five hundred years
of materialism, reductionism, positivism, what we're about to discover is probably the
least likely denouement any of us expected out of our dilemma.
What we're about to discover is that death has no sting.
That what you penetrate on DMT is an ecology of human souls in another dimension of some
sort.
I mean this is hair-raising to me and I spent my whole adolescence and early adulthood getting
free from Catholicism and its assumptions and I never imagined that a thorough exploration
of life's mysteries would lead to the conclusion that in fact this is but a prelude.
We are in a very tiny womb of some sort.
Our lives are just stations and this is not where we are destined to unfold ourselves
into what it means to be human.
This is some kind of a metamorphic stage like the pupa of a butterfly and so this is deep
water because we are fairly agitated over the fact that we fear the planet is dying
and us with it.
This stuff raises the issue that you don't know what dying is.
Therefore, it's very uncertain exactly what sort of an attitude we should take to it.
And as I say, I am not advocating a position.
Mysteries are not unsolved problems.
They are mysteries.
When you stand naked in the presence of the mystery, it is still utterly and completely
mysterious.
But I enjoy talking to people about this because I think that the human body, the human mind,
these are tools for the soul to use in the effort to unlock its meaning and its destiny.
And millions of people, perhaps billions of people have gone to the grave without knowing
that this is possible, this experience that I just described to you.
And it's perfectly harmless.
I mean I think that if science would back out of politics and do its work, we could
establish that DMT is the most harmless, the safest of all hallucinogens.
The fact that it occurs naturally in the human brain is the first clue to the fact that it's
benign.
The second clue is the fact that it only lasts 8 to 12 minutes.
What that means to a pharmacologist is the body perfectly understands what to do with
this compound.
You take a hit of DMT and your body says, "Oh, I recognize this."
Activate the animation cycle, activate demethylation cycle, activate.
It knows what to do.
And so within 10 minutes you're down, a drug that you take and 48 hours later you're lying
around in warm baths and refusing telephone calls is a drug you shouldn't have taken because
it's hitting you too hard.
That's not clean, it's not smooth.
To be the most powerful hallucinogen known to man and science clears your system in 15
minutes.
I mean you're so down you don't have a small headache or need to take a nap or anything.
You're ready to do phone calls.
So how can it be then that a compound which each of us carries right here, right in the
pineal gland, right in the Ajna chakra, the philosopher's stone is no further away than
that.
How can this be secret from us?
How can we be trapped in a dimension of such limitation and such mundaneness when our own
nervous system and the ecology around us and our own history over the past half million
years argues that this is what we were born and bred for.
This is where we belong.
This is what a play in the fields of the goddess must mean.
And somehow history has made us dysfunctional, buried the mystery, made it if at best a piece
of secret knowledge jealously guarded by somebody.
I mean I don't know.
There are lots of mystery cults and secret societies in the world.
I don't know if any of them are guarding DMT as a secret.
It may be so.
No one told me to keep my mouth shut.
If a very suggestive short story, I'm sure many of you know and love the Argentine surrealist
writer Jorge Luis Borges.
Well Borges has a book, I believe it's called Labyrinth and in Labyrinth there is a short
story called The Sect of the Phoenix and it says there is a sacrament older than mankind.
The sectarians have been the victims of every persecution in human history and the sectarians
have been the purveyors of every persecution in history.
These sectarians are not identifiable by race or place or language or time.
To the adept the mystery appears ridiculous yet they do not speak of it.
One child can initiate another.
It is orange.
Ruins are propitious places.
Do it in the moonlight, at the thresholds of buildings and that's all it says.
It's a page and a half and it suggests and see here is the thing.
I mean I'm not as articulate on this subject as I wish I could be.
If this is not the secret that these lineages are guarding, then they're guarding an empty
house.
This is the secret.
It is.
It is.
It cannot be anything else.
It is the Neo-Platon one.
It is the transubstance object, the pamiss supranstancealis of the alchemist and I'm
not saying that people have known about this for a long time.
The DMT is in many plants as I said but spread very thinly and we don't have historical records
of anyone ever concentrating it.
I've done the DMT plant preparations of the Amazon, the Snuffs and the ayahuasca and on
ayahuasca if it is heavily laced with the DMT containing plants after hours of breathwork
and drumming alone in the jungle you can begin to open it up to the place the DMT will carry
you to in 45 seconds in an upper east side apartment whether you like it or not.
And I, some of you may have seen, I don't, years and years ago this B movie about a guy
who has a big ranch in Mexico and one of the campesinos comes rushing back from having
encountered a brontosaur in the forest and he can only point inarticulately at the woods
and say something something something something and that's what I am.
I'm a monkey and I've come back to the truth and I'm telling you there's something over
the next hill that is off the scale, off the scale and I have made it my business to delve.
I'm a delver, I'm a noethic archaeologist, I have very obscure heresies and strange rites
and all of the stuff, been there, done that, it's all pale soup compared to this and so
I hype it to you.
Starwood (Part 2)
He said you can't go further into the bardo and return.
And so I think that we stand at the brink of an enormous frontier.
Call it incorporeality, call it non-material existence, or you know, bite the bullet.
Call it death.
But this is the frontier that we stand on the edge of, this is what history has been
about.
History has been some kind of suicide plot for 15,000 years.
Not a moment passed, but the plot was not advanced closer and closer and closer and
closer to completion.
And now in the 20th century, you know, we see that this thing, this transcendental object
at the end of time, this attractor that has been, that chose us out of the animal kingdom
and sculpted the neocortex, opposed the thumb, stood us on our hind legs, gave us binocular
vision.
This thing is calling us toward itself across eons of cosmic time.
We are asked to mirror it, and as we mirror it, we become more of a test sense.
And as we become more of a test sense, we leave behind the animal organization that
we were cast in in the beginning.
And what this is about, who knows?
Is this a drama of cosmic redemption?
Is it the transcendental other at the end of time?
Is it a gnostic demon?
Is it Ildaba?
What is it?
We do not know, but I really believe we are in the era when we will come to know.
And what the psychedelics are, are periscopes in the temporal dimension.
If you want to see a little bit into the future, elevate your psychedelic periscope outside
of the three-dimensional continuum and peer around.
For thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, we have been pulled toward this
omega point.
The earth is like an egg.
It has come to its moment of fructification.
The dawn that has been anticipated since we were herding our cattle across the plains
of Africa is now upon us.
The east is streaked with the blush of rosy dawn.
It is coming upon us.
And I think that it will redeem history, that history is not a nightmare.
It is a passage.
It is an initiation.
Think of the fetus in the womb at the moment of transition.
Surely it must despair.
The walls are closing in.
It is being crushed and strangled.
Gone are the endless amniotic oceans of the few months before.
The weightlessness, the effortless delivery of food through the umbilical cord.
Suddenly it is just boundaries and agony and crushing pressure.
That is where we are.
And we are going to have to shed history like a snake sheds its skin if we want to slip
off into hyperspace where I think all of magical humanity is awaiting us and cheering us on,
lending their weight.
They are all out there, you know, Proclus and Plotinus and Plato and Hypathea and Henry
Cornelius Griffith, John Dean, Robert Flood and Elieus Levee.
They are all out there pulling for us.
And every shaman and shamaness, every magician, practitioner as far back in time as you go
was part of the plan, the conjuration, the great work, the distillation of the quintessence.
History is a magical invocation.
And at the end of that invocation, if it is correctly done, all boundaries will dissolve
into the stone, the lapis, a transdimensional vehicle that can move through space and time.
That is the collectivity of all human souls, green at last in what we call the divine imagination.
And you don't have to wait for the general dispensation.
You can join up anytime by hyperspatializing your metaphors and your point of view through
psychedelic symbiosis with the plants that are pouring this hyperdimensional Gaian vision
into the minds of anyone who will detoxify themselves from history and linear thinking
and but open themselves to the presence of the transformative mystery that is going to
leave this planet unrecognizable to us within our lifetimes.
So that's the basic feel.
And I think it raises a lot of questions and yours is first.
Please, oh wait, is there a microphone or would that be thoughtfully anticipated?
Just repeated.
I'll repeat it.
Okay, are there any northern hemisphere, western herbs that would have this that we would have
access to?
The answer is yes, yes.
Repeat the question.
The question is are there herbs in the temperate zone that contain DMT?
And yes, there are certain grasses, valaris arundinacea, valaris tuberosa.
These can be ordered from plant dealers or gotten ironically enough from agricultural
experiment stations because these are pastureage grasses.
A lot of people are doing wonderful work right now learning how to make DMT preparations
out of native plants.
The mature valaris grass is very diffuse, the DMT.
So what people are doing is they're getting the seeds and they're sprouting them in a
sprouter and then they're taking the sprouted seeds and air drying them.
You can imagine how powdery sprouts become if you air dry them.
Well then you can powder up a handful of these sprouts and roll that, twist that into a bomb
and come very, very close to the flash point.
The other thing, I mean since I'm talking to recipe oriented musicians, the other thing
you need to understand if you want to work in this area is that the DMT can ordinarily
not be taken orally because there is an enzyme system in your intestines called the mono
anion oxidase system.
Then it will destroy the DMT.
But the good news is there are certain compounds called mono anion oxidase inhibitors.
Didn't you know it?
If you take a mono anion oxidase inhibitor and then you take DMT, the DMT will survive
the gut and pass into the bloodstream and pass the blood brain barrier.
So here is a very important piece of practical information I'm about to give you.
If you want to inhibit your mono anion oxidase in order to make DMT trips longer or mushroom
trips longer and more intense or to activate DMT if you only have a little bit of it, then
what you should get are the seeds of Pergamum Harmala.
You can either order it under that name or go to an Iranian market and buy what is called
Hermal.
This is simply Pergamum Harmala seeds.
They use it as an incense to fumigate rooms.
But two grams.
Don't take more.
Two grams of this macerated in a mortar and pestle with spring water taken from a spring
at the new moon near a crossroads will inhibit your MAO.
It will inhibit your MAO.
Consequently, then when you smoke the bomber of Polaris dust, it will grab on.
Or you can even smoke mushrooms then and they will grab on.
So knowing how to inhibit MAO is one of the key techniques in this kind of herbal shamanic
magic.
Other plants that contain DMT and here is one you all should be aware of because it's
probably right around here is Desmanthes eleaniensis, eleanoid bundleweed.
It's a rank weed.
I've not seen it except in the dried form.
But people have grown hundreds of tons of this stuff in a few months.
And the root bark has the highest concentration of DMT ever measured in any plant.
It's higher than the ayahuasca admixtures used in the Amazon.
Pardon?
In the root, you said?
In the root bark.
The root bark.
You dry the root and then scrape the bark off and you'll get this reddish root bark.
The red is actually the DMT.
Varroa trees in the Amazon shed DMT in their sap.
And it's always a blood red sap.
To show you how strong it is, the Indians in the Amazon, some of the tribes, they roll
their arrow points directly into that sap and it's a paralytic poison in the bloodstream
of monkeys and small animals.
So a great deal of work is being done right now and you should, if you're of an experimental
and herbal and alchemical and magical bent, people are creating what they call ayahuasca
analogs.
This is where you use local plants to create a brew which is chemically equivalent to an
Amazonian hallucinogen.
And of course, you have the satisfaction that it's yours.
It's your magical recipe.
No one on earth is doing quite what you've got and it's very, a lot of interesting work
is being done and you'll hear more about this.
In fact, Jonathan Ott just wrote a book called Ayahuasca Amalogs in which the state of the
art is spelled out and it would be worth your while to check that out if you're an experimentalist.
Yeah.
[Inaudible]
The question is, is there a more, is there a simple reagent test for the presence of
DMT?
The answer is sort of.
You can do a paper chromatographic test and all you need is a little UV light and some
chromatography paper and some solvent dishes.
I mean, it's at the level of seventh grade science project.
Yes, I don't know how much I should say on this subject.
I'm probably about to say too much.
That one gathering I go to, one of the people who's a very regular part of that particular
posse is a wheat breeder.
So when he heard about the Polaris, he was a geneticist and a wheat breeder and he has
been working very quietly on his own to produce super strains of Polaris and I think we will
soon see super strains because the underground community is incredibly creative in this area.
The compound I talked about yesterday, salvia divinorum, that's all underground work.
Brett Blosser, the anthropologist who discovered it is a complete freak.
The guy, the chemist who extracted it who would prefer I don't put out his name is a
complete freak and the people who then did the confirmation studies, my brother and his
band of performing pharmacologists all over the place.
So we actually, we do not take ourselves seriously enough.
I mean, we have our scientists, we have our philosophers, we have our thinkers, our legal
experts.
We are a complete community and it's no longer in my mind even necessary to publish in straight
journals and to seek a pat on the head from the American pharmacology community.
They don't understand what these things are for anymore.
Yes.
About yesterday, you mentioned something of the jungle and the base view of California
and I don't have the first part of that.
Could you give out the name of the...
Yes, I'll repeat this and strengthen once again my case to the guy who owns the company
that he should pay me for him.
If you want a catalog of extremely rare and useful psychoactive and magical plants, probably
the most complete in the world, the company is called Of The Jungle, P.O.
Box 1801, Sebastopol, S.E.B.A.S.T.O., P.O.L., California, 95472.
Write and ask for a catalog and tell them George Bush sent you.
No, I'm teasing.
You tell them that, they won't send you the catalog.
1801 is the box number.
Yes.
Have you seen Carlos Castaneda's book, The Arid Reading?
I haven't.
I have so much reading to do that I tend to restrict my reading to non-fiction.
I do like in there something of use, at least in my work, where these machine-like talk,
he talks about getting the state of lucid dreaming and then he talks about inorganic
beings, steering into that lucid dream he calls the scopes.
These two kinds of energy, what he calls a crackling energy and other kinds of sizzling
energy, the scopes are parallel to the green, they are inter-vanded, I think, I have a very
similar description in the very face of the country by W.L.I.
I think it's probably probable that the two would be so close to something that wasn't
there regardless of the apparent fiction or nature of much of his narrative.
Well, Lenny, I didn't mean to discastinate it as a metaphor maker.
No, I think The Teachings of Don Juan is a tremendous book.
I'm very suspicious of some of his later stuff.
It's interesting what you said because you know the famous crow transformation in The
Teachings of Don Juan has been traced, and I'm sure many of you know this book, has been
traced to George McDonald's book Through the Gates of the Silver Key.
And George McDonald was a friend of Evans Vance.
So I think what we're getting here is a mining of late 19th century English folklore by Castaneda.
Nevertheless, the presence of these small entities has been a part of folklore for a
long, long time.
Elementals, types, what puzzles me about, what puzzles me, I guess, is I've spent a
lot of time in this magical literature and art historical area, and the descriptions
don't quite match.
I can't quite convince myself that the sprites, the aprites, the nixes, the jinns, these creatures
of the woodland bay are the same thing.
Or I don't know whether I am contaminated by an early love of science fiction.
Well, again, close but no banana.
There's all these popular aliens that are running around, you know, the Whidley Streebloids
and all these things are much more mundane than what I encountered.
What I encountered was terrifyingly not human, terrifyingly alien.
And I just do not quite get, and Madame Blavatsky was into it and they were always saying, I
don't know, they're very sort of cut and dried about it.
And when I encounter an extraterrestrial alien or a creature from another dimension, the
main thing that's happening for me is the implications are blowing my mind.
They seem totally immune to the implications.
Yeah.
Scream.
I was wondering if you'd seen Star Trek East
Well, a sufficient amount of DMT is smoked west of the Pacific Coast Highway that it
wouldn't surprise me if the writers of Star Trek were onto this.
Yes.
What is not much talked about, the part of the experience which is anomalous and maybe
people who know more about magical literature than I do can correct me, but what the elves
are really interested in is this stuff which I call visible language.
That's the whole point of the encounter is to exhibit it and to get you to do it.
Well, now, first of all, think for a minute about ordinary language.
It's really weird.
It's the weirdest thing we do.
I mean, if you were looking for the thumbprint of God on creation, human language would be
a good candidate because, look, we're supposed to be some kind of animal who just went a
little further than the next guy, but to get out of that Shakespeare and Milton is a pretty
amazing accomplishment, hardly to speak of the mathematical languages that we generate.
So something happened.
Some people think only 35,000 years ago.
Imagine if that's true.
I mean, I don't care.
Some people say 150,000 years ago, but to speak, to take small mouth noises and to turn
them into signifiers for symbols and relationships, in spite of some people's enthusiasm for the
Taitians and dolphins, I just am not overwhelmed by the evidence.
I mean, to me, it is a miracle to be able to speak poetry.
It is a miracle.
I mean, when Coleridge wrote, "And south and south and southward I we fled, and it grew
wondrous cold, and ice-massed high went floating by as green as emeralds."
I mean, that's language, and it's magic, and we have a fascination, then we also paint.
Then we sculpt.
Then we write.
Then we create electronic databases.
Then film, television.
Clearly, what we want to do is we want to communicate visually, and these things are
saying there's a way to do it.
Do it.
And I don't understand.
Do we all have to be loaded on DMT all the time?
Can you learn to do this?
The gentleman who asked about dreams, here's a piece of information that is critical in
this jigsaw puzzle.
If you have smoked DMT at any time in the past, it is possible to have a dream in which
people are running around and you're checked into the Mars Hotel and the luggage is lost
and this and that, and in the middle of all that, someone drags out a little glass pipe
and hands it to you.
It will happen.
It will happen in the dream.
Not a memory, not a simulacrum.
It will really happen.
Well, now, to me, that's an amazing piece of data because what it's saying is you can
do it on the natch.
You may have to be dead asleep, but still, on the natch, this can be done.
And the lucid dreamers, the biofeedback people, the people who claim these wonderful things
that you can do with sleep and dream and programming, I challenge them.
Teach people to have DMT dreams in their sleep and then let's figure out how to drag that
puppy into the light so that we can do it at will on the natch.
Just one second.
One thing that I have come to believe is that we remember no more than 5% of our dreams
and it's the most mundane 5%.
I think, and there's scientific evidence to support this.
Remember I said DMT is in the human brain?
So it concentrates in the human cerebrospinal fluid on a 24-hour cycle and it reaches its
peak of concentration between 3 and 4 a.m. in most people.
That's when the deep REM sleep is happening.
When you give somebody DMT, they lay back, they close their eyes, and the way you, the
guide, the sitter, I don't like the word guide, you the sitter, the way you can tell that
they're getting off is their eyes dart wildly behind their closed eyelids.
It means they're in REM.
They're in REM sleep.
They've been immediately shoved into deep dreaming.
So I believe that what DMT is doing in normal human metabolism is it mediates the descent,
the spiral descent into dream and that every single night we are reunited with the boundaryless
oceanic mystery of being that we are so frantic about in waking life and so distant from.
And that if we could in fact just engineer a drug that would allow us to remain fully
conscious as we drift deeper into dream, we would need no other drug or substance.
That that's where we want to go.
And I think that's where history is headed.
What the archaic revival is about is a re-visification of the aboriginal dream time.
We are going to live in the imagination.
We are preparing to decamp from three-dimensional space.
I mean, yes, the earth is the cradle of the human race, but you don't stay in the cradle
forever, you know.
And it's something like going into dream.
It's something like taking the hyper-technical virtual reality internet head of the snake
and inserting the shamanic late paleolithic ecstatic orgiastic tale of the snake and then
you have the ouroboric completion.
Then you have the quintessence and the work is complete and history ends and we live then
in the light of the stone made manifest.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wait a minute.
Then you.
Sort of.
Yeah.
Okay.
I've been playing with for a long time.
What you're saying is that you're talking about the word forming, the sound actually
forming.
It's not just the word forming.
It's the word forming.
It's the word forming.
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I don't understand what you're saying, but is there a question?
I just have a question.
I'm sorry.
This is my last question.
Well, it definitely has something-- this mystery that we're talking about, it definitely has
something to do with sound and the magical role of sound.
Ayahuasca is a sort of different way of sectioning the DMT experience because ayahuasca is orally
active, unfolds over hours, is not as dramatic as DMT.
But the people who use ayahuasca as a ritual on a weekly basis, what their practice consists
of is they take this stuff and then they sing.
They sing like crazy.
And then when they stop singing and people light a cigarette and take a leak and so forth
and you're listening to these conversations, you hear people say stuff about the shaman-like.
I like the part with the olive drab and the silver, but when it became magenta and moved
toward orange, I thought he was over the top.
What kind of a criticism of a song is that?
And the answer is sound has become a visually beheld medium.
It's like a new way of creating visual art that's interactive between the people who
are on the DMT.
Yes.
So the reason I'm interested in something as techno-nerdy as virtual reality is because
you could program a virtual reality so that when you went aaaah, a iridescent blue line
would be key to that to descend into the space.
And I'm very interested in environmental and electronic simulations of psychedelic states,
but we're not going to do better than the psychedelics.
If we can do as well, it will be a miracle.
You've seen more beauty in the first wave of psilocybin than the human race has produced
in the past 5,000 years.
And who are you?
You know?
Yes.
No, I had promised this guy, Benny, and I felt his splash of loathing.
In 2012, the
might be so that the twisted two point, the
we're going to break through and start over again for every 3 billion years.
That's, I hadn't considered that, but that sounds possible.
I mean, we're definitely coming to some enormous cusp, and whether you think it's the cusp
of cusps or just a big cusp, it's hard to say.
Somebody faxed me.
I got a fax right before I came here.
I don't know who sent it to me.
It was just an anonymous fax, but in huge letters, it said, when you strip away the
hype, it's just another concrescence.
I'm curious to know what the universality of your experience that you described is.
I mean, you certainly attracted other people who have taken DMT.
Without having told them your experience, are they recording very, very close to the
same thing?
It's interesting, and that's a good question.
The answer is yes and no.
Obviously, there's hardly anything more personal than a psychedelic experience.
It is that kind of summation of who you are, and it's viewed through the filters of your
personality.
Nevertheless, when you put a whole bunch of DMT trips together, certain things seem to
emerge.
My notion, coming at it from a sort of Jungian attitude, is if we have to say, what is the
archetype of DMT?
The archetype is the circus.
It's the circus.
And let me say why.
First of all, a circus is a place of wild exotic activity, and clowns are-- you don't
have a circus without clowns.
And clowns are wonderful for children.
A circus is a wonderful place for a child.
DMT, there is something very, very weirdly childlike about it in a very unchildish way.
Some of you may know the 52nd fragment of Heraclitus, where he says, "The aeon is a
child at play with colored balls."
The aeon is the child that you encounter in the elk dome.
But the circus has other connotations than simply the three rings and the clowns.
Eros is present, entwined with Thanatos, in the form of the nearly naked lady in the tiny
spangled costume who is working without nets hanging by her teeth up near the top of the
big tent.
And personally, my earliest experience of Eros was that lady in the tiny spangled costume.
I was so small, I was wrapped up in something and being held, and I was horny as hell.
So there's that.
And then there is also, radiating off from the central ring, the freak show, the goat-faced
boy, the lady in the bottle, and the three-toed alligator kid, and all of that.
That's there.
Wiggy, weird, kinky, strange, alien stuff.
And then, if you think about the archetype, not so much of the circus, but of the carnival,
the carnival represents a breakthrough from another dimension.
Because you live in some jerk water town in some, I almost said Iowa, but it's like normal.
And then the carnival comes to town and children are told, "You can't stay out and play.
The carny people are in town."
And what does it mean?
Well, they may fuck differently than we do.
They may steal things.
They're not like us.
They've had more than one marriage, some of them.
And then the carnival people are there, and the hoochie coochie dancers and the whole thing.
And then they fold it up and they go away, just like a DMT trip.
And every little boy and girl in the world worth their salt wants to join the circus.
Of course.
And go away with the tattooed lady and the tigers and all that.
So it is the archetype of the circus.
So then I've seen many, many people take DMT and some get what I get, which is, it's sort
of gone beyond the circus.
It's the circus that the circus has presented on the Neville Gnuby Prime or something like
that.
But one woman who was an anthropologist who I think got a sub-threshold dose, she had
a very interesting trip because it was a light trip.
But with no prompting from me, she said, "I was at a carnival midway, but it was after
hours.
And there was nobody there, and there was just those ice cream, those square papers
for holding ice cream, blowing in the wind and getting caught in chain link fences.
It was like a sub-threshold dose.
Well, then if she'd done more, she would have arrived there eight hours earlier when
nothing was happening.
And if she'd done yet another toke, it would have moved off into the zone of the truly
weird."
That's why I love the film of Federico Fellini, because here was a circus.
Yeah.
Is there a way to get the DMT?
Well, you could conceivably inhibit your MAO.
I don't want to tell you to do it nasally because it might be a really stinging experience.
Well, then you could do it.
I'm working on something.
I'll describe it to you.
I'm having a glass blower make a thing which has a chamber with a pipe stem coming off
it.
But it has another stem 180 degrees around the chamber coming off it that breaks into
two prongs.
And what you do is you heat the DMT, you insert the two prongs up your nose, and you have
a planned blow on the other outlet.
And it will force the entire contents of the vessel, the entire load of white smoke.
But don't try this at home.
Pardon me?
I'd go light the first time.
You know, there are old pharmacologists and bold pharmacologists, but there are no old
bold pharmacologists.
There are antidepressants that are MAO inhibitors.
That's right.
But I wouldn't use them for this purpose because what you want is what's called a reversible
MAO inhibitor.
And carbine, or Carmelene, which is in the Syrian roux, is a reversible MAO inhibitor
reversible in four to six hours.
Some of these antidepressants inhibit every molecule of MAO in your body for up to three
weeks.
And that's why when they give you those antidepressants, they tell you the long list of don'ts.
No chocolate, no red wine, no soft cheese, no lentils, no this.
That's a list of alkaloids containing foods.
And if you are on those mono-anion oxidase inhibiting antidepressants and you eat a bunch
of camembert with your yuppie friends, you'll probably have to be roped down for a while
before you straighten out.
How does DMT experience compare to those you've had on what substances which might be familiar
to some of us like psychedelic mushrooms and LSD?
He said how does DMT compare to more familiar psychedelics like mushrooms and LSD?
The thing, let me say this about mushrooms.
I mean I really, mushrooms are my thing.
They enlighten me, they straighten me out, they love me.
But the way to do mushrooms is the very first move if you're interested in mushrooms is
for God's sake, buy a scale.
Buy a scale.
You wouldn't think that this would be considered such an exotic suggestion to people who are
going to put their bodies and minds on the line because people don't take enough.
People do not take enough mushrooms.
They take distant amounts and then they claim that they're initiates.
You can take a measured five dried grams on an empty stomach.
Measured and when you see what that is, you'll realize that you weren't even camped in the
atrium, you were camped in the driveway.
But mushrooms to my, in some ways, I mean DMT is the most terrifying and astonishing
thing in the universe but it's very hard to know what to do with it.
Psilocybin is your friend.
It wants to teach.
It will take you by the hand and forgive you and lead you and be with you and it speaks.
This is the amazing thing and you're hearing this from somebody who graduated from High
Bigger and FH Bradley.
It speaks.
No other psychedelic does that in my experience.
Occasionally, a phrase will pop into your head on another substance that is like a gift
in that way but I mean psilocybin rays.
It rays and it has positions.
You may not like psilocybin as a person because it is not, the astonishing thing about the
psilocybin entity to my mind and I get good confirmation of this is it is not very earthly.
I mean it wants to show you machines the size of Manhattan in orbit around alien stars.
It wants to talk about the sweep through of the which happened before the earth cooled
and it has seen the empires of the raw out of the rim and all the rest of it and it is
very puzzling this cosmic Galactarian tone because then you switch over to ayahuasca
which is literally just a twist of the molecule, just tiniest tweaking of the molecule and suddenly
it is about childbirth, rivers, the land, the feminine, looking inside your body, curing
diseases, feeling, telepathy, communication.
It could hardly be more different and yet chemically these things are like two sides
of the same coin.
So just to sum this up and put a kind of a classifier on it, I am not very interested
in drugs per say.
I have done a lot of them, bad ones, good ones and people do drugs for fun and for stupid
reasons.
But there is this tiny chemical family, the tryptamine, palisinogens, psilocybin and DMT
and then some artificial coachingers and phymetoxies in there too which I am not that fond of.
But this is the doorway, it is the umbilicus of this world.
These are things which are called drugs because that is the category we have for things which
make the world unrecognizable.
But these are not drugs.
They are magical doorways into staggeringly titanic dimensions of gnosis, power, information,
understanding and dimensions filled with affection for humanity.
So people say you think drugs should be legalized.
Yeah, but that is a political opinion of Terrence and Kenneth, it is just a guy like you.
But this stuff about the tryptamine is a real discovery and you can think what you like
about me and my take on it.
In fact, please do.
But check it out.
Check it out because I have checked out lots of stuff and this is the only thing I am interested
in telling you.
Check it out.
Yeah.
Well, granted that at the time, since the beginning, there was a myth that can manifest
but ten years later I still grew up in psychedelic abundance.
But we heard all about DMT and so there is some STPs but no one ever saw it.
How come?
I mean I didn't live on that one.
No, I don't understand the answer to that question.
It is magical.
It is a secret which keeps itself.
I mean, here I am.
There are 200 people here, whatever, and I do this all the time.
And I have not, so far as I can tell, been able to launch an avalanche of DMT.
I am trying to do it.
Starwood (Part 3)
>> Drug experiences.
I've had some amount of success with it.
If anybody who's done DMT would want to try it, I can run you through the technique.
>> Have you done DMT?
>> No.
>> I'd be interested.
I'm very, I mean, I urge you to it, but I'm very skeptical.
>> Yeah.
>> And mind machines, too.
I mean, I've done them all, and, you know, ten minutes of it, and you're lying there thinking,
"Oh, my God, I need to go smoke a joint."
[ Laughter ]
>> I just want to back up quickly.
So, the journalist point, if you want to get it, I know there's a bit of a rescue thing,
but I have a real interest in being subversive to get people where they're most needed.
And, like, for example, if you're a single guy in a hospital, with a child,
we're in a place where it isn't cool to have a last touch, except who knows?
You know, people notice things like that.
[ Laughter ]
[ Inaudible ]
>> Sure it is.
[ Inaudible ]
>> That's a great idea.
[ Inaudible ]
>> Yeah. And make a tincture of the exactly.
[ Inaudible ]
>> Yes.
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
>> See this lady.
[ Inaudible ]
>> Well, but this against the law thing, let me talk a minute about that.
How can it be against the law if you have it in every brain walking around?
[ Inaudible ]
>> You're putting yourself at great legal risk.
However, see, things like psilocybin and DMT, the reason they're illegal is
because there was panic in California in '66.
The California Assembly ran through an anti-drug law in which all these things were named,
but no medical or scientific data was offered to show there was anything wrong with them.
Basically, they were guilty as charged because they caused hallucinations.
Well, then about three months later, the feds decided there needed
to be a federal anti-helicinogen law,
and they simply imported the California statute directly into federal law.
So, it is conceivable that if one had enough money, and it takes a lot of money,
you could force a re-examination of the drug laws by simply saying, number one,
there is no scientific evidence that there's anything wrong with DMT.
Number two, there's plenty of scientific evidence that DMT occurs normally
in human metabolism, and how, therefore, can it be kept illegal?
But it takes -- huh?
>> The plants that come from are all legal rights now.
>> Unless the plant is specifically named, but the attorney general, at his own discretion,
can add those plants to the schedule list without asking anything.
Yeah.
[ Inaudible ]
>> No, well, it's economically driven.
I mean, if you had DMT, you could sell a mountain of it.
You don't get many repeat customers, because if you sell somebody a gram, that's 20 hits.
Most people set half of it aside for their great-grandchildren.
[ Laughter ]
This is not a drug of abuse.
Let me point that out to you.
[ Laughter ]
It's sort of a drug of anti-abuse.
I know people that say, well, you ask them, what's your favorite drug?
They say, oh, DMT, I love it, love it.
They say, well, when did you do it last?
Well, 1968.
[ Laughter ]
I'm still processing, yeah.
[ Laughter ]
[ Inaudible ]
>> Yohimbane.
Is that what you asked about?
I'm not sure that Yohimbane is an MAO inhibitor.
You should look it up in the Merck manual, and that's what it always does.
There are many things which are weak MAO inhibitors.
>> Yeah.
>> The easiest source for an MAO inhibitor, though, is the pogammon harmala,
and also there is a plant in North America.
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
It also is pogammon harmala.
Pogammon harmala grows over vast areas of New Mexico, Nevada,
and it yields a bright yellow dye, which is actually the hardiness itself.
It is the dye in.
Yeah.
>> As one who has survived somehow more than two decades of all kinds of hallucination,
and felt that for me personally, it's an issue that I had to clean up.
I would normally bring up, when you have not brought up the possibility of a success
in any way concerning this, I would like to hear your views on it.
>> Well, we should certainly talk about casualties and dangers.
Addiction doesn't really figure in here in the ordinary sense of like opiates
and nicotine addiction, but, you know, cannabis is the most addicting
of these minor and near psychedelic, and it's only psychologically addicting.
I mean, I found this out because a couple of years ago I actually quit for two months
after not drawing an unstoned breath for 25 years, and all that happened was
that I read more, and it's not clear that that's my problem.
So, but danger we need to talk about, and that brings up the question,
how should one do these things?
How can you do it and gain maximum benefit and minimum wear
and tear on your psyche and your body?
The first thing is inform yourself.
Inform yourself.
The first stop on the psychedelic trip is the library.
There are very, very deep books on these subjects, on the anthropology, the pharmacology,
the psychology, the quantum mechanics of drug activity.
Inform yourself.
And then it's not about taking every drug in the book, and, you know, people reel them off.
They say, "Well, I did junk.
I did this.
I did that."
It's no points.
You don't get points for that.
What you have to do is, and here's a piece straight out of Castamere, you have to find your aloe.
You have to find what works for you, and if you take a drug or a plant
and you have a horrible experience, you don't really need to go back and back.
The other thing is danger lies in the direction of combinations.
These are called synergies by pharmacologists.
And if your idea of a big evening is to, you know, shoot 100 milliliters of ketamine
and then drop some MDMA and a little 2Cb an hour later and then bring on some acid
of undetermined provenance and so forth, then I say, "Well, how was it?"
They say, "Hey, it was far out."
But the point is this can never be reproduced, and these things are very dangerous.
They synergize each other in unexpected ways.
I mean, my God, bicilocybin and DMT have never been studied.
Do you think their relationship to Romalar and Nardil has been looked at very carefully?
I don't think so.
Then how to take it, and I represent a faction on that.
I believe that you should take it with, how can I put it,
with as little company as you can stand, basically.
A lot of people like group work.
I don't, but then I don't like groups generally.
I mean, I'm basically a loner, and if I take psychedelics with somebody, I worry.
I worry about them.
And it keeps me on the surface.
And I've had many psychedelic experiences where in the middle of it,
it has passed through my mind, "Gee, I'm sure glad nobody is here to see this
because I'm sure it would alarm them, and then we'd have a crisis."
So my style, I mean, I take anything, basically, in a low dose and hang out.
If something interesting is going on, but the serious stuff goes on in darkness, in silence,
and that people go through the roof.
They mean you don't even listen to music.
That's right.
In darkness, in silence, in a comfortable space,
and that may mean in your apartment in Manhattan, or it may mean up a tree in Yosemite,
whatever your thing is, and then I always use cannabis.
Cannabis is your navigation tool, your reality check, your everything.
I roll up the bombers, and I lay them out in front of me,
and I have my mojo bag and a few things like that.
From the moment I take it, I'm in sacral space, and this isn't even a rule followed in the Amazon.
I mean, it totally blew my mind in some ayahuasca circles.
People would sit around talking and talking.
Then everybody would take ayahuasca.
There would be a sacral ceremonial moment.
Everybody would take the ayahuasca, and then yak, yak, yak, and motorcycle parts,
and what are the missionaries up to, and this, this, and yak, yak, yak.
And then at 30 minutes on the dot, the shaman would begin to whistle.
Everybody would shut up, and within a minute, we'd be gone.
But the way I like to do it, and this is a good Catholic method for those
of you who are recovering Catholics.
I take it, and then I sit in my space, and I carry out what
in catechism class we were taught is called an examination of conscience.
This is where you think about all the ways you've screwed up and all the people you've screwed
over, and you basically anticipate a bad trip is what it is.
You say, "What is the worst thing that could happen to me on this trip based on my current state
of my psyche and my relationships with other people?"
Well, by the time this stuff actually begins to work, you've dealt with that.
And, you know, some people say they take mushrooms, and within 20 minutes,
we were tripping hard, tripping hard.
I don't understand what that is about.
It takes an hour and 20 minutes on the dot.
It always has.
I don't expect it to ever come faster.
And I get into a kind of a zone where it's like it's nibbling at the edges,
but it's not quite manifest, and then I smoke the first bomb, and usually that brings it in.
That brings it in.
And I also, I speak to it.
I invoke it, I suppose, and in my own way, I don't know if it will pass Gardnerian mustard,
but I say to it, I say, "Show yourself.
Show yourself."
And it's very, at that point, it's very erotic.
It's like a veil dance is what it is.
It is a veil dance.
The girlfriend in the other dimension, the mushroom, once I said to it, to her, I almost said,
once I said to her, I said, "What should I call you?"
And she said, "Call me Dorothy."
So I invoke it, and it comes, it comes, and then we're off.
And sometimes it's easy and loving, and sometimes it's different.
I remember one very epic trip I had where I had tossed out a big compost pile
from growing mushrooms years ago in another country.
Actually, it was a past life, I'm now recalling.
But anyway, I tossed out this stuff, and this thing grew this humongous mushroom.
And I had taken mushrooms the previous Saturday.
I had taken a full dose, which is five dried grams.
So I thought, I want to take mushrooms again this Saturday,
but I think I may have picked up a tolerance.
So I'll just take nine grams.
And this is where the learning takes place.
The mistakes.
Treasure your mistakes.
So the thing, it's like I'm sitting there, and suddenly I realize, oh my God, it's coming at me.
It's 100 miles wide.
It's 10 miles high.
And it's just rolling toward me.
And I barely had time to lay down.
That's how fast it, and a voice said, "Prepare, the storm is about to hit the beach."
And I laid down, and it was just, it was like a tornado hitting.
And at one point, I opened my eyes, and there was this woman in a full bondage ghetto.
She was, you know, piercings and rubber panties and the whole thing.
And she, and I was lying there between her legs.
She was standing upright, and she put her face right down next to mine.
And she said, "Is it strong enough for you, asshole?"
[laughter]
To which I replied, "Yes."
And she said, and then she said, "They say it helps to close your eyes, cowboy."
[laughter]
And I later, in thinking about that trip, I realized the reason the goddess, the reason the mushroom addressed me as cowboy,
is because that's, most people mushrooms have met have been cowboys and cowgirls.
Because they're the people who follow the cows.
And most people have encountered this thing in the past.
You know, Maria Sabina, the mushroom shamaness of Oaxaca, claims not to have been initiated.
She claimed that as a child left to watch the sheep and the cows, she had been hungry and had gotten into eating mushrooms.
So, I haven't lost my thread. This is a safety course. I haven't forgotten that.
Once you get launched out in there, then there are tricks for navigation.
And the two tricks that are indispensable, number one, I've already told you, have cannabis ready.
Because if you get into a place that you don't like, you can get out of there by just taking a toke or two.
The other thing is, if you get into a place you don't like, chance.
Don't do what most monkeys do, which is scrunch, assume the fetal position, say, "I can stand this, how many hours is this going to last?"
Don't do that. Sit up, take a breath, and belt it out.
Drumming is good too.
Drumming too, but I really think it's important to oxygenate your body. It's very important to move the breath through.
And there are hard places. If there weren't hard places, people wouldn't be so terrified of this stuff.
So, when you get to a hard place, first of all, don't be an idiot.
Don't abandon yourself to fear just because somebody put something ugly in front of you.
People put stuff that's ugly in front of you every day and all you say is, "Yuck!"
So, this also works there. There are strange places and we each have our own private hills.
There's a place I go to nearly on every ayahuasca trip that I call the meat locker.
And, you know, the less said about it, the less said about it.
But every time I feel it begin to swerve back, I say, "Uh oh, time to fire up a little sinse of man here."
Yeah, sing the no meat locker song.
I fast, I don't call it fasting, I just don't eat for six hours.
Empty your stomach and then the other thing is...
What is using your blood, your life, you know, a big arsenal of your stomach and your body and your...
You should, your stomach should be empty.
Throughout.
Well, throughout and then at the end of the...
The way I do it is I usually start about eight at night.
I'm alone always and I go till one and by one it's over.
And then what I do is I eat a bowl of granola or something like that.
Don't sleep on an empty stomach.
Don't... because then you'll wake up the next morning raw and rocky.
And it's not that the mushroom did that, it's that you slept with a protein, with a protein dip.
So, so then eat your favorite food at the end of the trip.
You made a fantastic record in MDMA.
That's why you're the critic of the movie, that's why I'm playing it.
The MDMA is a cyclosized amphetamine.
It's a... what are called empathogens.
They're drugs which encourage exchange of feelings and that sort of thing.
Under rare circumstances you can squeeze a kind of wobbling hallucination out of it.
But it's not... its purpose I think is different.
It's for sorting out relationships, assisted psychotherapy and having a good time.
But it would be crazy to take MDMA as a hallucinogen
because it's like entering a bicycle in a Ferrari race, you know.
They're just much superior.
And let me say about this, I mean, everything is my personal bias here.
A lot of people have said you're a hallucination nut.
You're obsessed with hallucination.
I freely admit it.
The reason I was underwhelmed by LSD, I mean, I liked it and it was certainly engaging.
But I could never hallucinate the way I wanted to.
I'd read Havelock Ellis.
I wanted to see the phosphorescent palaces, the naked maidens, the silk brocades, the alien world vision.
And LSD, deep thoughts about things, funny ideas, strange experiences, hard to get vision
until you smoke black Bombay hash at the top of the trip.
That works.
But I will defend my obsession with vision.
I think the world wants to be seen.
I think Blake was right that the divine imagination is something beheld.
And for me, the visions are the proof that this is not my mind.
And the visions are the proof that this is not simply chemical chaos in the nervous system.
I mean, how could chemical chaos give you something as breathtakingly beautiful
and as ordered as the Sistine Chapel or the World Trade Center?
The hallucinations are extraordinarily ordered and beautiful.
And I think that this is the proof that we are reaching beyond the confines of the human personality
and even the human species.
That this information, don't ask me how, is somehow holographically deployed throughout space
and you tune it in.
You tune it in.
So I care about visions.
And if a drug doesn't cause visions, I tend to put it lower on my list.
I smoke a lot of cannabis.
I think that's why I do cannabis.
I think on it.
And I think several hours a day when I'm able to.
But the visual thing is for me to be in the presence of the mystery is to be in the presence of the hallucination.
To me, the word hallucination has no connotation of illusion.
It comes from a Greek root.
And what it means is to wander in the mind.
That's what hallucination is.
It's a wandering in the mind.
Is it true that the doses of LSD you took didn't have hallucination?
Well, I took all kinds of doses.
What dose of LSD did I take?
I should be clear what I mean.
I mean, yet on LSD, even with isopin, the little things that look like open fans that are going "neat, neat, neat, neat, neat, neat, neat"
like wallpaper.
But LSD never gave me these architectures.
It lacked meaning.
The LSD hallucinations looked to me like something happening in the optic nerve, not in the body.
They were more like ripples and concentric circles and flashes of light.
But what you see on suicide are cities, spaces, palaces, machines, the stuff of cognitive process at its most expressive.
Wow.
Is it theoretically possible to develop your consciousness level to the point that you can go there without the drugs?
I grant the possibility, but in my heart of hearts I don't think so.
The question is, can you get there on the natch?
I get lots of resistance because I'm willing to say just flat out, "Hell no."
And you know, people are shocked that yoga and flagellation and being touched by Babaji and whatever.
I don't know, I tried it all.
And the other thing is, what I'm talking about, you wouldn't want to happen on the natch.
These are states of serious discombobulation.
These are not mood shifts or attitudes we're talking about.
I mean, if I woke up and I could do it on the natch, my first phone call would be to my friend Ralph Metzner, who's a shrink.
And I'd say, "Ralph, we've got a problem here."
If I may, and again, I'm a guest here.
I don't know even who's here or who I'm insulting, but let me unburden myself on this subject.
Van Morrison put it very, very well.
"No guru, no method, no teacher, just you and me and Mother Nature in the garden, in the garden wet with rain."
I think all religion is a con game.
I think that all esoterica is a con game.
I think that the real secrets are self-protecting.
And that seeking is the way to find.
And take yourself more seriously.
You are the vessel, the stage, and the theater of your transformation.
The mushroom was very explicit on this point to me once.
It said, and I quote, "For one human being to seek enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach, seeking enlightenment from another grain of sand."
And my interpretation of that is that we're all as good as the best among us.
There is no hierarchy among human beings.
If you've got the chromosomes, you're into the game.
And the task then is to accentuate primary experience, the here and now.
Teachings which come from far away, unsubstantiated rumors that circulate among the people.
Magicians have always worked the marketplace.
It's older than Ur.
But this kind of mystery is absolutely authentic.
And having once found it, I stopped searching for other authentic mysteries.
So I don't know what lies behind the deeper levels of the Kalachakra Tantra.
I don't know what lies behind the inner secrets of Hawaiian Kahuna.
But I do know that this one thing fulfills the bill.
It's real and you only need one doorway to enter into the palace of the kingdom.
So why obsess about numbering doorways? That doesn't seem to be the way to go.
Yeah?
(inaudible)
I'm not sure I understand the question.
(inaudible)
Yeah.
(inaudible)
I've actually never combined DMT and psilocybin.
I have smoked DMT at the top of an LSD trip.
That's a young man's game, believe me.
If you're interested in that, hurry up. It's like climbing the Matterhorn.
What happened to me, well I did it several times, but I'll tell you a story just for your edification maybe.
But amusement perhaps.
I want some noticing please.
Was a landlord in Berkeley many years ago.
And that's sufficient.
And everybody left one Easter vacation or Thanksgiving vacation.
And so I decided I would do this acid trip I've been planning and smoke DMT at the top of the trip.
And so I did and I did and I had this very long involved DMT trip and the L's and all.
It was just totally out of control.
And at the very height of this thing, this woman who I rented to upstairs, who I thought had gone home to Minneapolis,
came back and arrived by cab and came pounding up the stairs with these two suitcases,
let herself into the house and ran around to my bedroom door and beat on the door.
And you don't know me that well, but 500 miles up the jungle river smoking a joint and a stick cracks 50 feet away,
the first thing I do is hide the joint.
I'm a very paranoid person.
So being 500 mites of acid, smoking DMT and suddenly having this woman.
And I literally, I have like some kind of a coronary and I leaked off my bed and I landed on my feet.
And if you want, you may try this.
Something about this enormous splash of adrenaline added into the DMT,
added in to this sudden, incredible physical exertion.
It was as though I ripped the membrane.
I ripped the membrane and I was now standing in my room, but I had dragged the trip through with me.
And the room was full of elves ricocheting on the floor.
And I had them, they were hanging on me like weasels.
And they were sort of turning me around in the room.
And also simultaneously, one of these machines had been dragged through into my bedroom at the same time.
It was like about the side world like this.
And it had all kinds, it was faceted and opalescent and glassy and strange.
But what was important about it was it had that kind of a faceted top on it that was clicking, going.
And every time it would click, it would launch a small plastic chip across the room that had an alien letter written on it.
And these little plastic chips were ricocheting off the wall and piling up and I was just standing, opposed, looking at the situation.
And then Rosemary swells on the door again.
So I stagger over to the door, which was a sliding wooden door, and I just threw it open.
And I looked at her and said, "Oh, so you're doing that, alright."
And backed up and then I just slammed the door open and I pushed my way across the room and I crawled under the bed.
And I closed my eyes and I just said, "I'm going to stay here until I'm dead or it's over."
And I did.
But it was, it was, I mean, what kind, you know, you're supposed to learn something about your psychology or your experience.
It's ridiculous.
Yes.
[inaudible]
Well, this thing, which I've done several times this afternoon in various states, this language thing, that's glossolalia.
It's called speaking in tongues, but the good news is the fundies don't have any kind of monopoly on this.
Speaking in tongues is as old as human beings. It's shamanic, it's paleolithic, and it's done all over the world.
And I think that, well, psilocybin will induce it spontaneously.
And I think, to add to my little scenario yesterday about hunting, fucking, and tripping, we could also add in there ants talking.
Probably long before the invention of what we call meaning, people amused each other with funny noises.
People would say, "Mmm, yee, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, top that!" and somebody else would do it.
So, being physiologically set up for the production of small mouth noises, notice that language is a very primitive form of telepathy.
Because here's how it works. I have an idea. I look in my dictionary. I translate the idea into what we call English.
I then move my lips and throat muscles and aspirate in a certain way, and I send an acoustical pressure wave across space,
which enters into the holes on the side of your head. Your brain reconstructs this acoustical wave and tries to match the incoming pattern against an interior dictionary, which has been learned.
Now, if your dictionary and my dictionary are congruent, lo and behold, you can reconstruct my thought in your mind.
Now, if the thought is something fairly straightforward, like "Please shut the door," ambiguity doesn't enter.
But notice that one of the most uncool things we can do with each other is to say to somebody, "Would you mind explaining to me what it was that you just said?"
Or, "Would you mind explaining to me what it was that I just said?"
And then they say, "Oh, shit. Now the cover is blown. I haven't the faintest idea. We've been winging it."
So, spoken language, small mouth noises, is a very imperfect way of communicating.
This is why I think that the visual initiation in the DMT is "They taught us language."
This is not the first initiation from the L's. The first initiation occurred 100,000 years ago.
The second initiation is occurring now. First, they gave us language. Now they're going to show us how to make that language visible.
And you see, if you and I both read the same page of a book, we can then have an enormous argument about what's written there.
But if you and I both step into a place where a piece of sculpture is being exhibited, we may argue about what the piece of sculpture means, but we agree what it is.
We see it. We see it. And when we communicate with each other and understand each other, we instinctively reach for visual metaphors.
"I see what you mean. Look here, fella. She painted a picture. His words were so beautiful."
It means that we really associate meaning with seeing something. And I believe that we're on the brink of a transformation of how we communicate with each other.
And I don't know whether we're going to require a prosthesis that is electronic or something like that,
or whether we can invent drugs which will allow the cerebral cortex to switch its linguistic analysis from the audio channel to the visual channel.
It's very suggestive that these tryptamines are in the new parts of the brain.
And I think that we're on the brink of transforming our ability to communicate.
"It seems to me, and I'm not really making a claim, but I've been allowed to come by the LSD.
Lately I've been on LSD. But I think I'm getting DMT experience with the LSD. I think it's proving all the responsibility."
Well, yeah. I mean, what was said was that using LSD and having used DMT, one can begin to trip into DMT-like dimensions on LSD.
This certainly seems reasonable to me. I haven't had that specific experience. But there is something you can do with psilocybin.
It's another technique if you don't like what's happening on a mushroom trip. Just say to it, "BMDMA."
And it will. No problem. You can say to it, "BLSD." And it will. It has no problem.
I didn't try that. You want to be sure before you summon the genie. It is clear.
Let me say one more thing about this language thing. Because I think nature is always our model.
No matter how deep into technology we go, nature will provide non-toxic models.
Well, it just so happens that in this area of communication, nature has provided a wonderful non-toxic model.
And that is the way in which squids and octopi communicate.
Squids and octopi, as you know from watching far too much TV, can change color.
But you may think this is camouflage. It's not camouflage.
Octopi change color in order to communicate. Octopi don't generate language. They are language.
Think of an octopus. It's a soft body. It can fold and unfold itself like a dancer and expose various parts of its body very rapidly.
It also can make its body tissue smooth and rubbery or rugose and rough.
And it can undergo all these color changes. Splotches, stripes, spreading pastels, so forth and so on.
These behaviors of the octopus are under the genetic control of its linguistic intentionality.
It doesn't make words. It becomes words.
And when one octopus encounters another, by the mere act of beholding each other, they say, "Aha! You haven't eaten recently. You're having too much sex. You've been traveling."
And so forth and so on. The octopus becomes its thoughts. It wears language on its surface the way we wear our clothing.
And this system of communication is so important to the octopus that those species that have evolved into the very deep parts of the ocean,
the so-called abyssal octopi where no light ever reaches, have evolved phosphorescent organs all over their bodies and eyelid-like membranes all over their bodies
so that in the absolute darkness of the abyssal ocean, they communicate by flashing grammar and syntax to each other across the abyssal depths.
They are free in the imagination. And I think this is where we're headed. We're going to make that model of communication our model.
Psychedelics, technology and visionary magic will show how this can be done.
No, you're right. The human face is like this. But to signify.
To signify color, culture and tension. You do that now. You're working on it.
Where we can transmit all of these. Once I was in India and I was cornered, this guy, I was loaded actually on mescaline and this guy swam aboard my houseboat.
And normally I just would run these guys off because they were thieves and beggars. But I was so loaded that I couldn't do anything but sit there.
And this guy came up to me and sat down across from me.
State Of The Stone
[applause]
All right. Well, it's nice to be back in San Francisco.
I moved out of California about eight months ago, after 30 years,
and I still have ambivalent feelings about it
when I see springtime coming on so very beautifully.
On the other hand, there are a lot of squirrels in the woods,
and I am sort of preferring to pull back from all that
and do home projects, workbench projects.
I sort of think of these get-togethers, they happen periodically, cyclically,
but unscheduled, as a state of the stone addresses,
or an opportunity for the community to come together
and everybody see who's here once again, who has survived,
who's gotten out, so forth and so on.
I'm very, very bullish about the situation.
Fortunately, I hold the theory that things have to get a lot worse
before they can get better.
So whenever I see things getting worse,
I assume that's the first step toward progress.
I think that in the time we've been getting together
and talking about these things,
the general tone has changed dramatically.
When I started talking about all of this,
my audience was entirely my peers, old freaks.
And many of you were ten years old.
And now the message has been out there for about twelve years
that psychedelics actually represent an opportunity for healing,
an opportunity to return to religion as it was practiced
before the invention of the marketplace.
And I'm very pleased as I go around meeting people
and discussing this issue to see how much of the youth culture
has become sensitive to the psychedelic issue.
Because it really means that after twenty, thirty years
of unstinting distortion and misrepresentation by the media
and some of the powers that be,
that nevertheless the curiosity is intact,
the opportunity is available,
and people have not been fooled by the effort to demigrate,
dumb down, sideline, water down, sell out, whitewash,
and screw over the idea that psychedelic plants are an excellent
and necessary part of any program of spiritual self-exploration.
I'm not going to talk that much about this today
because I think it would be preaching to the converted.
I'm not even going to remind you that our evolutionary heritage
lies in the use of psychedelics,
but it was in all probability psychedelics that called forth our humanness.
I've talked about this in numerous forums.
It doesn't have to be particularly gone over today.
Since this is a hometown crowd, since this is peer review,
I would rather go to some of the stuff that plays
with a bit more resistance in Des Moines and Cleveland
and beta-test it here,
while there's still time to recant.
San Francisco is an incredibly forgiving town.
If you need to go somewhere and make a mistake,
this is probably the play.
Anyway, I've been altering my consciousness pharmacologically
since I was 18,
then trying to fold it back into the database of the culture
to make sense of it mathematically, religiously, philosophically,
historically, artistically, so forth and so on.
My conclusions become more and more radical.
Last night in Sacramento, I lectured the psilocybin's impact
on human evolution,
and they quoted some anthropologist somewhere
who wouldn't even give his name for the attribution of his no comment,
saying it was too radical to even be considered.
I thought to myself,
"And the problem is, it's the most respectable idea I've got."
Having given that its money last night,
what I'll talk to you about today,
and then later we can have a question period,
and it can be free-ranging,
and whatever your concerns can come to the fore.
But it occurs to me that science has very radically failed,
and it's an unusual point to make,
because we live in the impression
that science is somehow at the pinnacle of its explanatory powers,
and that it is going to give us clean air,
better societies, safer sex, better entertainment,
and ultimately some kind of explanation
about how the universe really works.
And in the past year, like happy kittens,
they have dragged in and dropped on our doorstep the top quark,
which is something to find out there in the bulrushes.
If you didn't know to look for it,
you probably would never find it.
But nevertheless, for all of its capacity to razzle-dazzle,
science has some serious drawbacks,
some serious limitations
that psychedelic experiences make more starkly evident, I think,
simply because psychedelic people then compare
the full spectrum of their experience
to the paradigm they're being offered.
For example, science proceeds probabilistically.
This is how it's been doing its work for about three centuries.
This involves an assumption that has never been proven,
and is very, very difficult to test.
It's the assumption that time is invariant.
You see, probability theory rests on the idea of experiment.
Science proceeds by experiment.
But built into the concept of experiment
is this very fishy notion called
the restoration of initial conditions.
And it turns out that there ain't no such creature.
You can never restore initial conditions.
A way of putting it is you can never go home again.
You know, Heraclitus said,
"We never step into the same river twice."
If you're paying attention, you might notice
that that means we never step into the same river once.
Right?
You see, science is a historical process
that began with the Greeks
and naturally dealt with the simpler questions first.
And the simpler questions are, you know,
"What is the world made of?"
"How does it work?"
The complex questions are things like,
"What is language?"
and "How do we know truth?"
The Greeks sort of bridged that one.
But they had this idea that because God was perfect,
the universe should behave
according to models of mathematical perfection.
And so the planets were assumed to go in perfect circles.
And the classical objects of Aristotelian geometry
were made the basis of science.
Now, one by one, over time,
these perfect mathematical objects
have had to be dumped and gotten rid of
because they came into contradiction with observation.
The difference between Ptolemaic astronomy
and Copernican astronomy
is that Ptolemaic astronomy does all its calculations
with perfect circles within perfect circles.
And what Copernicus said was,
"Wouldn't it be simpler to use ellipses?"
"And then you only have to use one ellipse
"rather than circles within circles within circles."
But the leap of faith
or the leap of understanding that you have to make there
is the understanding that nature doesn't...
the planets don't move in perfect circles.
They're not gods. They're balls of rock,
obeying the laws of gravitation,
keeping them in orbit.
So one by one, these perfect objects of Greek mathematical explanation
were abandoned.
The sole exception is the idea that time
is a perfectly smooth surface.
This idea is very necessary to science
because it means that measurements of physical systems
are not time-dependent.
In other words, it would be counterintuitive to a scientist
to be told,
"You will get a different charge for the electron
"if you measure it on Tuesdays and Thursdays
"than Mondays and Saturdays."
They would say, "That's preposterous."
"The charge of the electron must be invariant in time."
Why?
It's simply a first pass with the razor of simplicity.
I mean, explanation should be as simple as possible
but no simpler
or you miss the point.
So when we look at complex phenomenon
like the fall of empires,
love affairs,
corporate takeovers,
social revolution,
these things never happen the same way twice.
That's why we invented what we call the social sciences,
meaning no science at all
but full of good intention.
These kinds of complex phenomena
are very critically dependent on initial conditions.
You know, love affair, between whom and whom, where,
under what economic conditions,
what were the religious preferences of the parties,
and what did their parents think,
and what did their children think?
In other words, initial conditions set the course
and yet initial conditions are never the same
in these complex systems.
Science works very differently from ordinary perception.
As you can see, if you walked around on the floor of this gathering,
anomaly is highly prized here.
If we have a thousand people who go out on a starry night
and see only the ordinary constellations,
that is buried.
But if one person goes out on a starry night
and sees a rectangular black object,
a city block long with softly glowing yellow lights
moving along the horizon,
that's big news.
Science works exactly the opposite.
If you want, for example,
to carry out a scientific observation
and you measure, let's say,
the electrical charge running through a wire,
and you measure it a thousand times,
and 999 times it's between 3 and 4 volts,
but one time you get a measurement of 1290 volts,
a good scientist discards the aberrant measurement.
He says, "Well, that can't be right. That's ridiculous.
Get that puppy out of there.
Now average the other 999."
Completely different way of doing intellectual business
than the way it is done at the edge of human thought,
where we seek the curious, the anomalous, the unusual,
and then that leads us to wild generalizations
backward against the pattern of normality,
of normal happenstance.
OK.
So, this enslavement to Greek idealism
of this particular sort has caused science
to be fairly helpless
in describing the kinds of complex systems
that now more and more dominate our lives,
global economies, the Internet,
interlocking markets, so forth and so on.
I want to suggest,
it's a two-part suggestion and this is the first part,
that there is going to have to be a general revision
of how science does its business
if we want to actually extend
the explanatory power of science
into the domain of human social
and intellectual complexity.
And what science is going to have to do
is recognize that, like everything else
we've ever examined through the lens of science,
time is going to have to be seen
as some kind of variable phenomenon,
something that is not a perfect mathematical plane,
but has a topological texture at some level.
It may appear smooth from a certain distance,
but as your point of view sinks into it,
this perfect smoothness is revealed to be, in fact,
a composite of irregularities,
that it is made of fractal subsets of itself.
Now, science has led
in this discovery of the fractal reordering of nature,
but it hasn't extended it to time.
The big news coming out of science in the last 10 years,
perhaps the last certain truth
that science will secure before its transformation,
and it's a very important one,
it's that nature is self-similar across scale.
This is something that couldn't have been said
even 10 years ago.
Nature is self-similar across scale.
This is big news, big understanding.
And what does it mean?
Well, it means, I'm sure you all have pondered
the similarity between the structure of an atom,
a galaxy, and a solar system.
And if you inquired about this,
you were told it's coincidence.
Well, P.W. Bridgman is the person who pointed out
that a coincidence is what you have left over
when you apply a bad theory.
You see?
So, until 10 years ago, when you asked this question,
you would be told it's a coincidence.
You know, it's easy to make a scientific revolution.
I can remember when I was about 9
going to my mother in a state of high excitement.
And saying, "Have you noticed
that South America will fit against Africa
like a puzzle piece?"
And then we looked into it,
and we were told this is a coincidence.
Well, it wasn't 10 years before continental drift
made a revolution out of the earth's sciences.
By doing what?
By recognizing what an 8-year-old child could point out,
that Africa and South America were obviously once joined together.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see this.
You just have to have some experience with crossword puzzles
and an open mind.
So, nature is self-similar across scales.
That means that an atom is like a galaxy,
is like a solar system,
but it means more than that.
It means that we can extrapolate toward cosmic processes
by thinking about our own lives.
Because our own lives are a tiny, fractal piece of data
that is part of a much larger, integrated, modular hierarchy
that we now realize will have the same architectonic
as our own immediate experience,
except it will be expressed on a much larger scale.
So, that's the first and simplest part
of this suggestion for a reformation of science
that I want to propose.
First of all, that this fractal principle
be more clearly enunciated and understood.
Everybody is talking about fractals.
But it took Ralph Abraham to get it down
to a bumper sticker for me.
And it is.
Nature is self-similar across scales.
Companies explode the same way economies explode,
the same way the biota of a continent explodes.
Processes are always similar,
but only differ in scale.
And what that means, then,
is that our most immediate datum of experience,
which is the feeling of being in a body,
alive and feeling,
can be extrapolated and mapped on
to larger and smaller processes in the universe
to give not only a sentient universe,
a living universe, a dynamic universe,
a universe with purpose,
but it also gives us a universe
with a very interesting set of closure properties
that are different from the ones we learned from science.
The thing about science and its cosmology
is that it makes us irrelevant.
We're told that we are an accident
around an ordinary star,
in an ordinary galaxy,
in an ordinary portion of the local supercluster,
and it's just ordinary, ordinary, ordinary,
nothing to be excited about.
And then you have existentialism,
which says, well, then, if you want to get excited,
you have to admit that you're just doing it on your own hook.
This is called conferring meaning
rather than discovering meaning.
We confer meaning, the existentialist tell us,
and it's good as long as it lasts,
and then that's nothing too.
But all of these conclusions have been based on
ignoring a second fact about nature
that is as cogent as its fractality,
and far more important for us, I believe.
And this second factor is
that the further back in time you go,
the slower everything unfolds.
Our present domain of experience
is a domain of furious activity.
I mean, many, many things go on on this planet
in a single day.
There are inventions, there are books,
there are transactions,
there are meetings and dissolutions.
We live in a busy, busy, busy world.
As you journey backward in time,
the world becomes less and less busy.
And when you leave the domain of organic evolution,
the world becomes boring as hell.
And when you go further back to the period
before even molecular chemistry,
you know, it's so boring,
one can barely compose a comment.
So, infused with ennui is the observer
in the contemplation of the scene.
But science has never
inculcated this observation
into its model of reality.
We're told time is invariant.
Therefore, this notion of speeding up
or of complexity in some parts of time
and not in others,
it must be an artifact of observation.
It must be an illusion or a mistake.
It isn't real.
But I maintain it is one of the most
persistent facts about reality.
That, and I've spoken of it here
in terms of things get simpler as you go backward in time,
we could stand that on its head
and point out that things get more complex
as you move forward in time.
And that means that this moment
is the most complex moment the universe has ever known,
at least the local universe.
That means, in a way,
if the universe started at the Big Bang,
it ends right here, right now,
what I call local now,
because the rest of time
has not yet undergone the formality of occurring.
So, here we are,
the inherities of the Big Bang,
standing in the ultra-complex local now.
Now, what do I mean by complex?
Well, on the platform of cellular evolution
arose higher animals, complex ecosystems.
On the platform of that
arose early human culture.
Up on that platform
rose late human culture,
including ourselves, including technology.
My point here that I want to try to settle you on
is that nature is a novelty-conserving engine
of some sort,
that far from being a random process
driven toward entropy
by the second law of thermodynamics,
nature is a process of complexification,
but whenever this process is dealt a blow,
it immediately sets out to recover and surpass
whatever previous level of complexification
it had attained.
Well, no, the important thing about this,
other than just its intrinsic importance
for people doing philosophy,
is that it holds out
the possibility of a theory of ethics,
because we are the most complex phenomenon
that we know of on this planet.
Now, you may edge forward in your seat
ready to spring forward with some objection,
but give me a moment here.
Complexity is a tricky concept to define, first of all,
to define mathematically or any other way.
Norbert Wiener and some of those people
spent some time on this.
But intuitively,
I think it's a pretty straightforward concept.
The way I define complexity is density of connections.
If point A has 16 connecting points,
it is less complex than point B
with 32 connecting points.
That seems fairly clear.
You would have an uphill battle to argue against that.
Some weasel might, but who knows?
I mean, hell, you can't get consensus on what time it is.
But if nature is a novelty-conserving engine,
if that's what nature treasures,
then we are not the chance witnesses
of an existential universe.
We are, in fact, all God's children in some sense.
In other words, we represent the quintessent gathering together
of novelty.
We are more than mere matter.
We are more than mere biology.
We are more than mere aboriginal culture.
We are all of those things,
plus we are our technical... our skin of technical connections,
our extruded culture,
our fecal coral reefs of transistors, resistors,
transponders, databases, and transmission systems.
All of that is superimposed on the organic.
So, suddenly, this message that has been relatively ignored
by secular intellectuals for 500 years,
the message of our importance in the divine plan
gets a real leg up.
The puzzle then is, if we're the part of the universe
where value has come to rest
in the process of concressing complexity,
then why is it that in practical terms
we seem like a loaded gun held at the head of the planet?
In other words, all other systems and processes
seem to have been put at risk to achieve this thin
and wavering spire of complexification
that threatens to come down around our ears at any moment
and send us back to the 14th century, if not the Stone Age,
if we mismanage ourselves.
Well, I think that we need to look at this process
from the broadest possible perspective
and try to decondition ourselves
from the assumptions of science.
Every theory has what I call a hard swallow.
I mean, probably because every theory is horseshit in some sense.
I mean, truth is known in silence.
So, if you're going out of that area,
you should expect some rather peculiar blemishes on the enterprise.
So, every theory has a hard swallow.
Science, their hard swallow is what's called the Big Bang,
the idea that the universe sprang from nothing
for no reason whatsoever in a single moment.
So, notice that whether you find that persuasive or not,
it is the limit test for credulity.
Do you understand what I mean?
I mean, if you will believe that,
what would you dig in your heels on?
I mean, if you would believe that,
then my family has a bridge over the Hudson River
that we are willing to let go for a song
and you could really get in on something good there.
The Big Bang is completely improbable, utterly improbable.
It is the most improbable of all improbabilities.
So, just remember that when the fascism of science
is telling you that astrologers don't know what they're talking about
and somebody else doesn't know what they're talking about.
I mean, science has built a house of cards on worse than sand,
quicksand.
I would like to propose a completely different theory,
which sounds, I know, far-fetched,
but I think it answers certain problems
that can't be reasonably dealt with otherwise.
I would like to propose that the universe is headed toward a singularity,
not that it was born in a singularity
and has been blasted outward
with the unraveling of the laws of physics ever since,
but rather the idea that
the universe is not a purposeless explosion
running down into entropy,
but in fact the universe is some kind of process
that is running along fairly well-defined runnels,
or what the British biologist C.H. Waddington called "creodes."
In other words, it is not, again,
it is not a flat surface
over which we are free to lurch and careen
in some kind of random walk or parody of Brownian motion.
It isn't that at all.
It is a topology.
It is a surface, a slalom,
whose high walls confine us
as we move deeper and deeper
into the process of complexification.
And we move into that process
faster and faster and faster.
And this is where it gets woo-woo,
because I am, you know,
willing to say I'm convinced, anyway.
I'm willing to say I'm convinced
that history is the enunciation
of the nearby presence of a transformational event.
In other words, a planet without history
is what you get if it's business as usual.
The chipmunks dig their burrows,
the hummingbirds fertilize the nectar,
the trumpet flowers,
the ants dig out the ground.
Everything proceeds normally.
History is what happens
when an animal species
has its genome distorted
by the nearby presence of a transcendental object.
It only lasts 12 to 1500 generations.
It's very brief.
In terms of the life of this...
If the life of this planet were a city block,
history would be as thick as a piece of typing paper.
That's how long it lasts.
And yet, this is all we've ever known,
the inside of this transitory domain called history.
And without thinking about it very much,
we have... our secular society tells us
to assume it will go on forever.
Assume it will go on forever.
That's a bigger stretch than the Big Bang for me.
I cannot see how anyone could assume
that human history will go on not forever,
but let's say as long as it has gone on.
Can anyone imagine the next 10,000 years
of technological development and global civilization?
It's a joke.
Can anyone imagine the next thousand years?
Or hundred years?
I think that the asymptotic curve
of technological development,
complexification,
the spread of communication technologies,
and yada, yada, yada,
is happening so fast
that within our lifetimes,
we can see the transcendental object rearing up
and throwing the shadow of its enormous protean form
across the surface of social processes
and social evolution.
History... the purpose of history
is to create planetary crisis,
and it's doing a splendid job of it.
You know, apparently monkeys
would rather kick back and chill,
and so we only function well under pressure,
and so the pressure is rising.
And, you know, our responses have been astonishing.
When the African continent dried up,
we invented agriculture.
When spoken language was insufficient,
we invented alphabets.
When they were insufficient,
we invented mathematical modeling.
When the complexity of the world
exceeded our mathematical models,
we built computational machinery
to expand the power of our mathematical tools.
We seem to function well under pressure,
and now we are coming under pressure.
Not this. This is not pressure.
This is the long garden party before pressure,
when people can still, you know, worry about
whether they're getting enough antioxidants
and so forth and so on.
Not to gore anyone's particular ox.
I'm as concerned about antioxidants as the next person.
But I think that for a very long time,
maybe, oh, I don't know, pick a number,
but let's say 50,000 years,
at least since language,
shamans, or users of hallucinogenic plants,
have had what Wordsworth called
"intimations of immortality."
That aside from everything else,
which crowds the shamanic mind space,
there is this view along the forward vector of time
to this brilliant boundary-dissolving life
that seems to throw its influence
across all processes that preceded it.
And religions, great religions,
that involve the fates of hundreds of millions of people,
are intimations of this transcendental object
at the end of time.
And they all get it wrong, of course.
They get it wrong because it is always filtered
through the vicissitudes of the historical moment
and the political needs of those who are telling the tale.
But if you take all of these things,
not as God's revealed truth,
but more as God's image
in the funhouse mirror of bent ideology,
you can sort of extract out of all these images
a sense of what the transcendental reality must be like.
And I think, you know,
recurring to the idea that we are fractally organized,
that we are microcosms
of the larger structure of the universe,
then I think in the natural phenomenon of orgasm
and in the...
how would you put it?
The human-plant interaction occasioned by psychedelics,
so orgasm and the psychedelic experience,
we actually, in fractal form,
anticipate this boundary-dissolving conclusion
to the historical process.
I mean, that's why eros is like a compass of hope.
Why everybody says, you know,
after the hortatory political breast-beating and all of that,
everyone knows that what we really need is love,
that without that it won't work.
With that, the political, social, intellectual
and technological details will probably take care of themselves.
But love in the heart of a monkey, which is what we are,
is an effort to image this transcendental thing
at the end of time.
I mean, to love is to open to the presence of the other,
and that's a very, very profound boundary-dissolution.
Ultimately, at death, I think,
probably the only way you can meet death fully
in command of your faculties is to love it,
to surrender to it.
Well, we each can make whatever peace we can or cannot make
with our own death,
but we get much more agitated
when we contemplate the death of the species
or the death of the planet,
because that seems to involve such higher stakes,
such greater loss.
What I observe in nature is an...
Nature is a very high-stakes gambler.
You know, nature is like the Good Shepherd
in the gospel story.
I mean, she will leave the 99
to save the one that is lost.
Her interest in complexity
and her willingness to allow it to adumbrate in ourselves
to such excruciating levels
is basically a willingness to put every gray whale,
and the lion parakeet, and spotted owl on notice
that the human enterprise
is somehow an acceptable risk for them to endure.
And I think that the way psychedelics play
to all of this is they,
by being boundary-dissolving,
by being deconditioning agents,
they strip from your eyes
this downer trip
that we have inherited out of a scientific model of reality.
We are not lost in a mute,
uncaring, purposeless universe.
How anybody could ever suppose this,
it takes an extraordinary power
of the denial of simple observation
to come to this conclusion.
Nevertheless, this is what modern science tells us.
If this isn't obvious to you,
then you probably need to do five grams in silent darkness
on an empty stomach
and just weigh the various ideas
that are being peddled in the intellectual marketplace.
You know, Big Bang, God's love,
transcendental object at the end of history.
It's a small number of items on the menu.
Most of these items on the menu
are simply ideologies.
None, except for psychedelics, I would submit,
are an experience,
a direct experience.
And this is what gives it a leg up.
It's not an appeal to reason.
It's not an appeal to reason.
And in fact, it is ultimately unreasonable.
You know, Tertullian,
when he was asked about the resurrection,
they said, you know,
"Why do you believe in this? It's so stupid."
And he said, "Credo te absurdum."
"I believe it because it is absurd."
"I believe it because it is absurd."
This is a thoroughly modern sentiment.
If the rest of the Fathers of the early Church
had been as hip as that statement,
we wouldn't have come away with the original sin
and the virgin birth.
I believe that there is very little time left
that history is the enunciation
of human morphogenetic transformation
that is under the control of the largest control structures
in the planetary ecology.
In other words, it's not up to Bill Clinton
or Skink Gingrich
or any of these reptiles.
It is not a matter of human decision.
It is built into the dynamics of the planet.
And consequently, all this Western
breast-beating and blame-taking about what we did
and how we fucked up and all this
is a bunch of nonsense.
Nobody screwed up.
You have to have an enormous sense
of your own self-importance
to believe that you got away
from the control of nature
and against her wishes
were able to set the planet up for Armageddon.
I mean, it's such a typical Western fantasy
of freedom and opportunity to do evil.
History is not evil.
It's misguided and messy
and very redundant and iterative.
But it isn't evil.
For some reason, 12, 10, 15,000 years ago,
the human family divided into two camps
the sacred ritual,
eternal shamanic style of existence
which lived lightly on the land
and was tribal and non-technologically based
and our style
which was a style of
conquest and denial,
virtual reality building.
I mean, now this is thought to be the technological edge
but the earliest technology
for virtual reality implementation was language
followed quickly by the hard wiring
we call urbanization.
You know, once you have an urban setting
you are walking around inside a virtual reality.
This is an ideology that has been turned into matter.
It's as virtual as anything could possibly be.
There is nothing new about setting up symbols
and taking them for truth.
I mean, this seems to be our unique curse, as it were.
What the psychedelics do is decondition us
from all the media-induced ratios of perception
and value systems
and then you just see that culture is just some story
that a bunch of people got together.
All culture.
It doesn't matter whether you're rainforest pigments
or Japanese bankers or whoever you are.
Your story is just some story
that has a certain amount of drama
a certain amount of self-congratulation
a certain amount of risk
and it keeps thought away, that story.
But if we dissolve our cultural story
then we discover, you know, what it is
that we've been ignoring for 20,000 years
which is the nature of nature
that it preserves novelty
that it is an engine for the production of complexity
that this complexity extends from the abiotic realm
into the biotic, into the cultural
into the technological, seamlessly
with no ontological break or transformation.
You know, shamans have a number of abilities
which are thought to indicate their special status.
They can predict the weather.
They can tell where the game has gone.
They are very adept at seeing into little social hassles
like who's sleeping with whom that they shouldn't be
or who stole the chicken.
And then, most importantly, shamans can cure
or, to put it slightly more cynically
shamans have an incredible ability to choose clients that get well.
Well, which is not to knock them.
I mean, any doctor will tell you
this is part of being a good doctor.
So, if you analyze these abilities
you see that they go from being miraculous and mysterious
to being trivial and straightforward
if you assume that the shamans can see forward into time
in a way that ordinary people can't.
Well, then where the game went, next week's weather
who's sleeping with who and who will get well
become trivial. No big deal.
And so, the charge that shamans are tricksters
is in a sense true
except that the trick is not an illusion.
It's a real trick.
They really can project their consciousness into hyperspace.
And thinking about this
and thinking about the psychedelic experience
I think this is a clue, a partial clue
to how to unravel our dilemma in being.
Because, you know, here's an analogy from chemistry
you've all probably took chemistry in high school
you know how sulfur has two melting points
sulfur we think of as a yellow powder
but put it in a spoon and heat it
and it will turn to a black liquid
keep heating it
and that black liquid will turn to a black solid
continue heating it
and that black liquid, and that black solid
will turn back into a liquid
sulfur has two melting points
this is a very curious property of some forms of matter
it seems to me it suggests an analogy about our own consciousness
which is
consciousness is a kind of
omni-directional threat detection and assessment system
that a very paranoid and small monkey put in place
in a grassland environment
frequented by very large hunting cats
and so the purpose of consciousness
is to inform you of something horrific about to happen
that in the hope that you can then take some action against it
but in the bottom of a cave or high up in a tree
or on a small island or somewhere where you feel safe
if you will then intoxicate yourself with psychedelics
the evolutionarily defined and paranoid
threat detection configuration of consciousness breaks down
and you discover that you have an angel inside your head
and this angel is the non-paranoid
non-carnivorous monkey
who is still nevertheless you
and that from this angelic point of perception
both the past and the future
have an immediacy
a co-presence with the moment
that they lack in ordinary experience
and I believe that as we create a non-paranoid world
a loving world
a world where people can operate in an atmosphere of trust
of each other
that consciousness is slowly trying to relax
and recast itself
and the grease for these skids is of course
the psychedelic experience
because it forces this dissolving of cultural values
it catalyzes it
what it might take you 40 years to do
through a process of rational analysis and psychotherapy
and deconstruction and so forth and so on
it can happen literally overnight
on a sufficiently alarming dose of a psychedelic substance
the reason I'm willing to speak to this
is because I think it's not without reason
that in this final moment of historical culmination
that our inventorying of the life and customs of this planet
has brought to our attention then these aboriginal practices
because they are the other half of the equation
what we have brought forward is little truths
like energy equals mass times the velocity of light squared
so forth and so on
we are the masters of matter and energy
but not the masters of our own dreams
our own spiritual striving
for that we are going to have to infuse our sense of techni
a technical accomplishment with the heart basically
the heart that these aboriginal cultures have kept intact
the next few years are going to be wild and woolly
wilder and woollier than anything we have seen so far
this tendency of things to appear to be getting both better and worse
is going to be itself exacerbated tremendously
and people who have outmoded or silly
or incomplete or insufficient models of reality
are going to find themselves running very, very hard to catch up
with a rising sense of anxiety
I think it's going to necessitate a discussion about time's direction
the meaning of history
the meaning of the presence of messianic and utopian visions
in our shamanic and spiritual legacy
and I'm convinced that the best thing we can do to help this along
is to argue against anxiety
inform people of concerning the shamanic technologies
that are available to them
and urge people to have faith in the larger dynamical processes
that define the universe
the universe has been at this game a long, long time
it knows what it is about far better than do we
and if we wish to align ourselves with cosmic purpose
we have to find out what it is
and to find out what it is
we have to go outside of our cultural values and our programming
and we are not, fortunately, without helpers, without aids
the plants have always been there
they are the repositories of this transforming gnosis
and if we avail ourselves of it
we can overcome the dis-ease of culture
and begin to function for each other as we should
which is as nodes of transformative information
and domains of permission, surrender and affirmation
that recover the real meaning of humanness
that history has tended to mitigate and betray
that's what I have to say this afternoon
it's ten after four
thank you and I'll do questions
so, questions
sure, the question is about ayahuasca
and its ability to heal the body and the mind
in a way, the question is just a continuation of what we've been talking about
because ayahuasca is one of these aboriginal hallucinogens
that has arrived on the menu of Western culture
right when we need it
ayahuasca is made of a large woody jungle vine
which contains an MAO inhibitor, harmine
which is complexed with DMT
which comes from a plant called Saccoutria viridis
chacruna
and these two plants are mixed together and boiled
and the solid fraction is eventually discarded
and the boiled fraction is concentrated tremendously
and then you get a liquid
that is the equivalent of a slow-release DMT trick
and over four or five hours
you are swept into a titanicly alien psychedelic experience
that's characterized by DMT-like hallucination
yeah, good question
interesting question
the question is
harmine and harmaline, what's the difference?
well, both are beta-carbolines
harmine occurs in ayahuasca
harmine is harder to take than harmaline
harmaline occurs in Syrian roux
and is by itself a hallucinogen
and probably in the presence of cannabis
which certainly in Iran wouldn't have been a problem
it's probably quite an active hallucinogen
harmine, the one in Banisteriopsis coffee
is a little rugged
if you actually reach hallucinatory level on it
you're fairly close to toxicity
a lot of generalizations have been made about harmaline
based on harmine
that we now probably should go back and look at
if you are looking for a source of a good
if you're looking for a good MAO inhibitor source
Hormel, which is the seeds of pudamine and harmala
are sold in many Iranian markets
and if you buy...
2 grams of that reduced to powder
and taken orally
will thoroughly inhibit your MAO for 4 to 6 hours
and if you then add a tryptamine
it will not metabolize away
and you'll have a psychedelic experience of some sort
a lot of people are doing this
there's a whole movement
I don't know if you're aware
about ayahuasca analogs
in other words
finding local plants in your environment
that contain MAO inhibitors and DMT
so that instead of going to the Amazon
and spreading cultural death
you can, in the confines of your own kitchen
cook up a kind of ayahuasca-like thing
a lot of people are experimenting with this
there have been a few tummy aches
no... we haven't lost anybody
but this is definitely one of the frontiers
of botanical consciousness
while I'm on the subject
let me, just in the interest of stirring the pot
so to speak
call your attention to...
there is a new psychedelic
that has been discovered
that is, I believe, very destined to play a role
in our future
and that is Salvia divinorum
this Mexican mint
which has a compound
it's either an isoquinoline or a sesquiterpene
not an alkaloid
but is active at the 1 milligram level
that's astonishingly intense
that's big news in pharmacology
LSD is active at 500 micrograms
that's half a milligram
but LSD is a hybrid of the laboratory
this new compound called alpha-salvinorine
or salvinorine alpha
occurs in this Mexican plant
Salvia divinorum
in quite robust amounts
I mean, it's well worth your while to extract it
it's worth your while to chew it
it's worth your while to smoke it
and, you know, the reports about this substance
are pretty exciting
even DMT test pilots come back
white-knuckled from this one
as far as contraindications
you should know
some people lose consciousness
and get up and move around
even though they're loaded
so this suggests what we call
the "tie 'em to the tree" protocol
you know, it only...
it only lasts about 40 minutes
so just have somebody rope you
as Ulysses had his crew
rope him to the mast
and then you can hear the siren song
without disgracing yourself
yes, yes
this is a reference to my time wave theory
which I obliquely referred to today
but didn't flay you with the details
but the nice thing about my theory is
it has these hideous tests built into it
that are unavoidable
you can't sweep it under the rug
and one of the tests is that the theory predicts
that next year
beginning around, I believe, the end of February
and on through till December
is going to be without contest
the most dramatic plunge into novelty
so far in our lifetimes
and so it has to outdo
the fall of the Soviet Union
it has to even outdo Ross Perot's announcing
for the presidency
there are giants that it must surpass
so I will be either here crowing a year from now
or it will be very hard to get calls through to me
as I'll be in seclusion
yeah
You're describing our consciousness
as having been in need of a lack of individuation
Well, it's the issue between individuation and ego
and I think your question implies a confusion of the two
I mean, we glory in our individuality
our uniqueness, our specialness
but the ego is something else
the ego is something which seeks to actually empower itself
at the expense of other people
and so, you know, there has to be a trade-off
I think the glory of Western civilization
is our empowering of our uniqueness
the unique artistic vision, the unique scientific vision
the appalling thing about Western civilization
is how we have, you know, taken the worst aspects of dominator society
and institutionalized it and then passed laws
which make it almost impossible to overturn it
so I'm not preaching any form of anthill
fascist or communist or otherwise
but I do think, you know, that we over-identify ourselves with things
we over-identify our happiness with objects
one of the great things about psychedelics
that is so corrosive to capitalistic values
is that psychedelics show you that the best stuff is in your own head
you know, better than walking down Madison Avenue
looking in the windows
is sitting in your shabby apartment on six dried grams
looking in the windows, you know?
You know, when you talk about a transcendental logic
the thing that occurs to me is
let's get back to some other things you say about hyper-cognitions
or hyper-cognitive objects
if you go into certain states
you can see sort of like holographic visions
where your consciousness is not mediated by senses
but you're perceiving things that have holographic qualities
You talk about hyper-cognition
what does the experience of shaman
will sometimes have in perceiving hyper-cognitive beings?
Well, obviously the world arrives at the surface of your skin as one thing
and then it enters into channels
perceptual channels of distinction
the eyes bring you some data
the ears bring you data
and the ideas that within the brain
all these channels are supposed to be recombined
to give you the original input
and apparently this is a culturally defined undertaking
In other words, when you think
you think you're thinking
the way people have always thought
but in fact, how people think is very much dependent on
media and informational biases
in the society in which they were raised
I believe most Western people hear themselves think
In other words, they hear the equivalent of a voice
speaking in their head and it speaks their thoughts
When you smoke halfway decent pot
or take psychedelics or something like that
you become aware that the processing of incoming audio data
shifts slightly toward the visual
and you see what people mean
or their speech seems more colorful
it seems to convey more
and I think whether we process incoming speech
by the ear or by the eye internally
is a piece of cultural conditioning
and that in fact, we are in the act of changing over
that this generation of young people
who are always dissed as illiterate
are in fact print illiterate
but they know more about electronic literacy
than the people who are knocking them
and their bias is primarily toward the eye rather than the ear
That's why what we really have are two cultures
talking past each other
and I think that psychedelics sort of strip out
culturally conditioned styles of sensory processing
and that what we call hallucinations
are nothing more than our thoughts beheld to some degree
and that we're not used to beholding our thoughts
we're used to hearing our thoughts
The question is talk about time speeding up
Maybe we're experiencing the rapture right now
Well, in a sense, that's what I was hinting at
History is a very low volume version of the rapture
and the 20th century is a slightly higher volume of the rapture
and the year preceding concrescence
will be yet more like the rapture
and the minutes preceding concrescence
probably hell, it will be the rapture
The universe is seeking some kind of completion
at a very, very rapid state
and clearly, technology is now what is driving it
For a long time, it was driven by chemistry
and then 1.3 billion years ago
it began to be driven by genetics
Biology became the carrier of change on this planet
15, 20 thousand years ago
it moved into what some people call the epigenetic domain
That means change not in the genes
Writing is an epigenetic behavior
Language is an epigenetic behavior
Painting, dance, language, of course, possibly borderline
quasi-genetic, quasi-epigenetic, as Chomsky implied
The thing that we're not coming to terms with
because it's almost literally, it's unthinkable
is that history is a birthing process
History is a very dramatic, painful, sudden episode
where you begin at the top of the birth canal
and you're a cheerful nomad
herding your cattle across the African plains
worshipping a mother goddess, having your orgies
having your intoxication, so forth and so on
That's us at the top of the birth canal
18, 17, 16 thousand years ago
Now, we are at the narrow neck
and we feel like we're being squeezed to death
suffocated
There is not enough water, there is not enough air
There is only pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure
And how, in this moment of cumulative global crisis
can we imagine that this is simply a passage
to a wider domain of being
as different from the world we have known
as this world is from the amniotic oceans of the womb
But humanness survives
Humanness is fully present in the womb
fully present in the world
makes the transition through the narrow neck of the birth canal
and we will make the transition, I am confident
through the narrow neck of modern history
and into this wider post-historical domain
How much of our foolishness, our religions, our prejudices, our habits
we will be able to take with us into that new domain?
We don't know
We'll be lucky if we get to keep the body
You know, and I'm for that
But I'm also completely aware it may not go according to my wishes
There may come a moment when there are levels of surrender
that are trying to the most crazed among us
But nature is clearly now in the third and final act
of her love affair with complexity
And our cultures, our technologies
now have such a momentum
for the production of this kind of complexity
that political decisions hardly matter anymore
That's become a sideshow
and driven by money and scientific understanding
Technology has taken the lead
And by technology, I don't mean simply machines
I use McLuhan's definition
Technology is simply the extensions of man
The extensions of man
We are hard-wiring the unconscious
We are shrinking the planet to a point
We are democratizing the availability of data
We are digitalizing our past so that it doesn't decay
And we are triangulating and anticipating our future
and discovering it as we live into it
to be more fun than we ever dared imagine
more psychedelic than we ever dared imagine
And I look for this to continue
until it just reaches excruciating levels
You put it very well
We are in the shadow of the rapture
that is the end of history
And this is the end of this little get-together
Thank you very much
There are tapes of many, many of my past lectures
available from Sound Photosynthesis
They are the best source of this material
See you next time
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I am Faustin Gray for Sound Photosynthesis
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We get language applied to subjects which are neither related to the past nor the future like mathematics and
Light mathematics is a language which has gone out and described
Multidimensional spaces I think that nothing is more
exquisite than
the interior music and all music is
Obviously an effort to approximate this interior music, and I don't know if it's apocryphal or not
But I'm sure you all know the story of
Beethoven saying you know if you if you could hear what I can hear you wouldn't bother with what I've written
because it's just
Compared to what I'm hearing
You have to it's it's a knife edge because the music does lead
deeper into these visionary states
But I still think that once you are where you want to be that if you can cast
loose from exterior musical input that
This interior music will rise
into perception and reward you for that
The way that I take psychedelic drugs seems very natural to me
But then when I describe it to groups of people like this I realize that people have all kinds of styles and this
Has caused the psychedelic experience to be sort of blur really?
defined in the mass mind
My idea of how you take a psychedelic drug is that you reduce sensory input as low as you can
Without the reduction itself becoming an impediment in other words. I'm not talking about
Insulation tanks and all that. I'm just saying a dark quiet calm cool
empty room is the best kind of situation and
Some of the most interesting trips that I've had
Have been to the accompaniment of a single sound which is simply a drone
It's like the bindu the seed
Around which then the multiplicity of the hallucinogenic vision can gather itself and constellate
I mean I blush to tell you this but some of my most interesting
Trips have been to the accompaniment of my floor heater
which makes the buzz like a refrigerator and
that buzz
Becomes, you know the cutting edge of a light which is like a comet giving off
in the eddies of its trail
Hallucination all the hallucinations there are so I think that
Music is intrinsic to everything that we're talking about
We are aspiring to the condition of music and we need music
Therefore we should have it as an exterior input when we can have it no other way
So saying that music that I don't listen to music during those states is not a put-down of music
Music is obviously the ideal because it is one of these tonal
Languages that you understand by hearing it is an or sprock. It has it's a language of emotion
Yeah
To the graph that you develop it seems to me
And if you were looking down that you could have almost your own running
Biologics are based on this graph and tell one wonder novel pieces coming up the next week
Have you done that?
Definitely one of the things that I do is I have a counseling service called an amnesis
And the reason I organized it as a counseling service was because I wanted people
To interact with my wave on the level of their personal history and I didn't want them to be contaminated
by being my friends
So I basically just advertised this service in common ground which says something about
understand
novelty in your life
Maps of the past and the future this and that and then people come to me and I interview them about their life and
We search the wave for a good fit to their life and then we integrate their wave
As a statistical component of the larger wave and then we can make maps of the present
The next six months the next 10 or 15 years at different levels and then people live it out and see if it works
See if when the graph indicates novelty in their life should be increasing it is increasing
And when it shouldn't be it doesn't it's like I've invented a one-term form of astrology
It only talks about novelty and tells you when it will go up when it will go down
It doesn't in any given situation say what will happen it only
Defines the level of novelty that must be fulfilled by whatever happens
ethnicity you see what what's one way that I think of this time wave is
Orthodox chemistry physics biology
Probability theory all these things go together to describe what is possible
So you say you know could an asteroid strike the earth? Let's ask the science and they say well, yes, it's possible
There are enough of them
The probability is very low or you say, you know, can we cleave this molecule with the input of this?
Energy and say well, yes, it's possible
physics allows for that but what my theory seeks to
Describe is not what is possible
But what out of the set of all possible things?
Why is it that certain things undergo the formality of actually occurring?
It is as though they are selected out of this vast pool of possible things things which could happen without
violating any known laws
but out of that vast reservoir certain things undergo the formality of occurring and
Once they have occurred the fact of their occurring has defined the level of novelty in that now past
Moment and so that's what it's like this novelty wave is a an additional
Variable which has to be added in to physical laws
It's the variable which dictates what out of out of the possible states which ones actually are realized
And it's the flux the coming and going of that
Wave of novelty which controls that now if that you're in a highly novel situation
Then you get what Lilly calls cosmic coincidence or Jung calls
Synchronicity you get obvious connections which have no obvious
cause history behind them they they are
Connected through meaning not through the chain of cause and effect and that is simply happening
Because
The level of novelty is so great that these sideways
Connections are beginning to come apparent and at the end of time or at the ingression
Into this higher dimension. I think this will become
excruciatingly
Present in the foreground of our experience in other words synchronicity is getting stronger
Coincidence is getting stronger the world is becoming more irrational
Science did work better in the 19th century than it's working in the 20th
Because reality is slowly slipping through its fingers
There was a maximum moment when the dreams of science and the nature of reality
overlaid almost perfectly but now reality is growing beyond it and pulling away from it and
I think soon I shall be pulling away from this meeting
Thank you very much
Thank you glad you enjoyed
Yes the platonic doctrine, you know that scene where Plato proves that the slave understood geometry without ever having been taught
By asking him certain questions. It's the doctrine of recollection that all
Learning is recollection and he called that an amnesia. That's great. That's a great title. Yeah, well
We're worried folks
Well, I hope you'll read the invisible landscape and okay, let me know what you think of it around
It's fairly hard to get I think they're selling it out
But did you mention that the memory is somehow connected with time?
Yes, I did. I was talking about how
Being able to have memories is a kind of
Conquest of the temporal dimension and was a very important moment in biology
When animals could be enough outside the present to say oh
I've been here before or I know that I can't swim or I know that's a trap
I should avoid it and I was talking about how memory was a part of this evolutionary
conquest of dimensions which begins, you know just with tactile
Nearness and then light and then motility through walking and finally memory and anticipation of the future
And then finally as in human society
occupation of thousands of years of time and recovery of thousands of years of time
Not just personally
My memory is not
perfect
judgmental
In that sense, you know, there's a saving factor because as I live in time my memory is perfect
Then then why update it or that's true. That's true
Yes, we live in the present in a sense because we have such bad memories
Thank you for coming
Oh, I'm glad you enjoyed it good. Well, I hope to see you again good
Yes, well, I think this deepening of synchronicity and coincidence that I talked about will have the effect of
Getting us to the end of power. I think it's harder and harder to plot with power even in our own time
We've seen the most powerful forces in the world
Totally brought low. I mean America loses the Vietnam War
Richard Nixon can't hang on to the presidency. It seems like the more powerful you are the more endangered
being depotentiated you are and I think this is about information about the density of media that
power and
information are at war with each other power is
Must work hand in glove with ignorance and ignorance is
on the run
We all are anybody in these societies
Is
I do
I
Don't
Well this thing I was saying about how things are becoming more connected through time and speeding up
The last 10 million years of Earth's history have been the most violent and violently
fluctuating in all of Earth's history the last
Million of those 10 million years have been the most violent and of those
The weather and glaciation and earthquake and pole shift and all these things the last hundred thousand years
Have been the most violent event so what we're getting is an increase in all kinds of
change and this
Why the for tapping to the planet is not clear in other words during the Jurassic period and and pre-cambrian
The Earth's climate was very stable
Or temperatures were very stable apparently the weather was very mild
Now we have these tremendous fluctuations
glaciations and in fact man is largely formed because of that because the glaciations have the effect of
endlessly
splitting apart and
reuniting human gene pools, which is of course the fastest way to
Intensified diversity you know you've reaching tools apart, and you mix the populations
And you separate them in and you mix them, and this is a major form of the factor
Making man, so it's as though in a way the
the planet the
Instability of the planet on a planetary scale has called forth an intelligent
Well, I'm saying it's running its driving the pump of evolution if the thing which is making evolution happen
Faster than it has ever happened before because change always drives evolution you know
Yes
We've certainly never faced a glaciation when we had the technology
But on the other hand if the glaciation doesn't come seems real soon. We'll be gone
You know well in another hundred years
Gerard O'neill suggests the major population center by
2050 could well be the jovian moon system. That's where the hydrocarbons are that's where the
Metals are this is where the things we need are and if
Classical patterns are followed we will go where the natural resources are
I think I don't think we are going to spiritualize ourselves out of existence
I think that Matt that the dualism between spirit and matter and body and soul are
probably going to be
transcended we
What we do is we?
Excrete ideas we take in matter
Unprocessed matter
Glasses plastics metals and we excrete them as ideas in a very highly organized
Well it may be a transitional phase in other words may be sophisticated
civilizations always build with molecules
But even we are machines in the sense that we are made of DNA
Obviously the the metallic petroleum phase of the culture is very brief as soon as soon as we understand
the genetic
Machinery we will use that as our technology everything can be made with DNA not just people you can make
telephones and soft drink containers
And everything can be made this way
Well someone
Wasn't you someone at the last one asks this very question said you know there are two directions
To turn the earth into a garden to recognize that we are the stewards of the ecosystem of the planet
To try to reign in our from me being Faustian
Tendencies or
What I'm saying which is space colonies and this
Apollonian non earth oriented culture
Which I kind of lean toward because I think that
The other possibility was foreclosed sometime in the 18th century
That the moment that to achieve now that no growth
ecological earth as garden
civilization would require
Unbelievable savagery being unleashed because there are too many of us now the only way out is up
Well this is a question for
You know the right kind of garden we can support
You think that we can do deliver see what we have to do is either deliver an American standard of living
to everyone on the planet
Or convince them that that that they don't want that
By doing it ourselves, but I I don't see that happening. I agree with you it could happen
Yeah, this the space colony is wonderful because it's it
It really splits everybody has to come and say because here we're talking about building a machine
Larger by a thousand times than any machine ever built and saying you know is this the answer to man's problems
Or is this a deeper plunge into the nightmare? I feel everything that you're saying
But I also think that
It's too
In a sense it's too
Intellectuals because what you're saying is we understand what should be done and let's do it
but what if
We exist to stockpile plutonium and
to build the staggering technology to build these space colonies because to lift the
Terran gene swarm off the surface of the planet because the planet is in danger
What about the fact that?
The last million years has been the most turbulent of the last hundred million and the last hundred thousand the most
Turbulent of that perhaps the planet is destabilizing
in that case
What is happening is we are not it isn't that man is evolving into space man and leaving the planet
It's that man is the cutting edge of biology on the planet and biology is
Rantic to escape because it senses that the ecosystem
But there will be if we take everything and go and also that's the question in other words
It's a case that commonplace
Of the gee whiz school of thought that we're made of stars
Alien stars, you know the atoms in your body were once in the heart of alien stars
well if that's true and everyone agrees it is but the
Statement which should follow on that that means that there are atoms in your body
Which are which were once the atoms of alien planets not star
So I think that the galaxy is no barrier at all to biology our biology
Is a barrier to understanding how biology really works?
The space colonies are going to be such highly organized places in terms of our present culture and politics
But they're going to be totally authoritarian systems because they have to be
Everything has to be totally controlled in its place for those kind of very fragile environments to survive on earth
You can have a very relaxed liberal atmosphere the space holiday is going to be a prison
maybe
Because you see the earth is a prison and we are threatened by toxicity and plutonium
And all these wonderful things Plato on the other hand thought that the minimum
governable size of the human population was
50,000 people now now which is more likely to give rise to a
totalitarian nightmare a
society of
700 or a billion people with short resources on earth with hostile neighbors or a
swarm of space colonies several hundred of them each with a
population no more than
50,000 and spread through a volume of the size of the solar system
See I think we stand on the brink of the greatest age of pluralism since the Greek city stage
And that it's not true this whole thing about control
Here is where there must be staggering control because there are hydrogen weapons stacked like cordwood
We must have thought control not a populations of leaders
They agree on both sides. This is the place where there is no pressure. We have no idea how
Dangerous to ourselves the threat of extinction is whether it occurs or not
Just the weight we are carrying around
Knowing that we could become extinct if there were a hundred space colonies spread through the solar system
Man would be a galactic species that would nothing short of the explosion of the star
could threaten all
Genes aboard the space colony and everybody will go we are simply the guy who gets to push the go button
but the animals the plants the bacteria the
Fungi everything will maybe probably fall in lots of 40s and 50s
It'll be built it'll be built for the wrong reason
But it will be built you know I mean Columbus wanted to get rich
to the expansion of human consciousness
Is long time interested in plant hallucinogens?
Drug experiences generally and the conscious development of conscious alternatives
Led him into the investigation of the phenomenology of religious experience worldwide
but particularly that of primitive people against a background of nature and
His interest led him on a journey to the Amazon basin where he discovered a way in which these states
became available to himself
Directly trans McKenna. I wonder if you could share with us that experience that shaped your life and work since that time
certainly
There have actually been a number of expeditions to the Amazon that I have participated in
the earliest in
1971 the most recent in 1981 in
1981 a joint ethnobotanical expedition
composed of people from Harvard and the University of British Columbia
went down to a ketose in the Far East of Peru and
My brother was part of that expedition. He is an ethnochemist at the University of British Columbia
We were looking at ayahuasca
Which is a hallucinogenic beverage taken over a very wide area in the lowland jungles
of Ecuador Columbia and Peru and we were also looking at a
very little studied
hallucinogen called the kuhay or
curico which is used by the we total bora and muinane people and
in both cases these
hallucinogenic drugs are based on DMT or
DMT in combination with some other chemical which potentiates the experience
These are probably the two least studied of the hallucinogens
although ayahuasca is a major folk religion over a very large area and
is involved in shamanic curing and
Is very familiar to the poor classes of the lowland jungles of Peru?
The and and is well known among the mestizo
populations the curico is a much less known drug and we were studying it because
the orthodox
Pharmacological theories say that it should not be orally active and yet it is
so there was a scientific problem there to deal with
Something of discovering a new reality for science well you have to have a scientific problem to center these
expeditions and then
What you actually brush up against of course is the phenomenology of the drug the drug as it's?
Experienced and this is far removed from the pharmacological issues which will be which are being sorted out now in the laboratory
but
The experience of taking these drugs in the Amazon up these small
tributaries that run into the main body of the river among
preliterate people who are definitely not middle-class and in the ambiance of the equatorial
Continental jungles is very interesting very enlightening
How did you respond to that I assume that you'd experimented with other?
postigens in
the recent
Past before you made that journey, and that indeed you were looking for
The effect that would have a psychophysical
Response in you and yet apparently you came upon something quite unexpected
Yes, well
Since the middle 60s we had been interested in dimethyltryptamine
DMT both because of the intensity of the experience and also
Because of the rapidity of its onset
when DMT is smoked it comes on in about 15 to 30 seconds and a
onset of the effects of that rapidity
actually challenges science
To explain it and then the content of the experience
Seemed to us to go beyond
Even the orthodox model of what the psychedelic experience should constitute
in other words the psychedelic experience has been discussed in terms of
consciousness expansion or exploring the contents of the personal or the collective unconscious or
achieving
Great empathy with works of art or something of that sort what we found with these tryptamines
Was there seemed to be a demand unanticipated?
dimension which was a
contact with
alien
Intelligence I call it this for want of a better word
Organized
Intellect keys that presented themselves in the drug trance with information that seemed to be not drawn
from the personal history of the individual having the experience or even from the collectivity of human experience and
Later we
Came to feel that this effect was
particularized to the tryptamine
halosinogens in other words not only DMT and ayahuasca and these more exotic Amazonian drugs
But also psilocybin, which is probably the most widely
experienced of these drugs
To me it was astonishing
That a voice could address you in that state and impart information
dialogue with you
Gordon Wasson who discovered the psilocybin mushrooms or who formerly brought them to the attention of Western science
He also wrote about this phenomenon
but for that matter so did Plato in discussing the logos for
Hellenic
human beings this experience of an interiorized
Guiding voice with a higher level of knowledge was not alien. However
The intellectual adventure of the last thousand years has made an idea like that
seem preposterous if not
psychopathological and so as moderns as
pharmacologists
exploring these drug states my brother and I came upon this phenomenon and
In the ensuing years. We have worked with it directed other people's attention to it and
I would say a consensus has emerged that this phenomenon is real
But no consensus has emerged nor it may be that no consensus will ever emerge
About exactly what it is. Are we dealing here with?
an
aspect an autonomous
Psychic entity as the unions would style it a
sub self that has slipped away from the control of the ego or are we dealing with
something like a species
Overmind that kind of collective intellecty or are we in fact dealing with?
an
alien intelligence with all that that implies
It's not an easy question to answer
It's not even an easy question to grapple with because I think the phenomenon does not manifest itself
except that doses high enough that
Taking now psilocybin that the drug can be distinguished from any other drug and that would be my personal definition
Of the effective dose of a drug you should be able to tell it from any other drug
Terrence there are certain parallels that are quite obvious
one of them that immediately comes to mind are
Examples such as st. Joan hearing voices and gaining direction granted. She was a farm girl and
Perhaps she was growing mushrooms in the back
There seems to be throughout history within the realms of religious experience about hearing of voices and it's always attributed to
quotes God right
Whatever that image is for the the individual that's experiencing it and
I wonder how this equates obviously that experience does not well, maybe
Techno Pagans
...cosmic trigger, probably on the influence of some psychedelic drugs, but we'll come
to that. And in it, he summarizes yours and your brother's work on the time wave. And
he, in fact, charts our history into three major sections, the 67-year section, which
will comprise the bulk of my life, an interesting 13-month section, which will happen in 2011,
and then an interesting six-day section, which will happen immediately preceding the winter
solstice in 2012, in which, I believe, during the last six-day session, there will be more
novelty than has existed on the planet. Since ever.
Since ever. And I looked at this, and I had been reading...I'd started off easy, so I'd
read Alvin Toffler, and then I could take a little bit more, so I worked myself up into
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and then I came across that, and I said, "Well, this appears
to be the case." It was confirmed to me internally in a way that I could not particularly argue
with, I could not argue out of. It was simply a foundational fact. And all of my work thereafter
was based on a premise that the universe is seeking a type of closure, that in fact things
are converging. And so my own life study had been perhaps an exploration of what those
avenues of convergence were. And it ended up over a period of years that my own life
story became a search to create the forms of that convergence.
And now flash forward to my first experience of virtual reality, which happened in 1990,
and required absolutely no technology except about 500 micrograms of LSD-25. I'd been thinking,
I'd been reading, and all of a sudden I dropped acid after several years, and of course if
you've taken several years break, and all of a sudden flushed yourself back into that
realm, you can find that things really pop up. And I found myself in a virtual world.
And what I found in this virtual world, the thing that I must have suspected that I would
find in this virtual world, wasn't an artificial Tron-like environment. It wasn't something
that was entirely artificial. What I beheld in that environment was an image of the planet,
as if I was cruising above it in a spaceship. And I knew that part of my own destiny as
connected with virtual reality wasn't to escape into another dimension, but to find a way
to make real to us the things that we can't always see, because we exist at a level of
scale, of experience that hides them from us.
And at that point in my life, I decided I needed to leave New England and come to California,
where everything was really going on. This was 1990, and VR was the hot new thing. And
we forget now that VR was the hot new thing before the internet became the hot new thing,
but for a while it was the cheese. And I moved to San Francisco, which made it much easier
to get good drugs. And I started to explore by working, by building systems, what virtual
reality was. And this started to have a profound change on my own understanding of how reality
was constructed, because my psychedelic description of reality, which is that mind form as reality,
began to conflate or become identical with my physical or scientific description of reality,
which is that mind forms reality. And all of a sudden I understood that everything I
used to understand about the way the universe works wasn't as true as I thought. And so
this began to inspire in me a search, a search to get to some basic level of being that would
allow me to work in a world that was manifest because of my own will, and just as much as
manifest because of your own will. Because where we're going, the simulated and the real
are going to get really blurry. And we don't have any tools, we don't have any tools of
mind. Western culture, which is based on this idea of this objective external reality, it's
not hard. It's all become very soft and it's all flowing together. So we need to now start
to find ways of describing what's going on. And so what we need to do, I found in my own
investigations, is to take a look at cultures that describe the world magically, that understand
that perception shapes what you are and you shape what you see, and that they're not separate
areas, they're not separate domains, but you have to consider them as a whole. So the four
prongs that got talked about in the blurb that was written for this piece are technopaganism.
And technopaganism is maybe, you could describe it a bunch of different ways, and I certainly
didn't make the word up and I certainly didn't apply the word to myself, but it stuck because
Wired magazine published an article two years ago with my face blazoned on it, Photoshop
reversed in color, and said, "This is a technopagan." And really what it was trying to do was trying
to articulate my own experience of being thrust into this world where everything was melting
and nothing was solid and trying to come to grips with it philosophically, trying to come
to grips with it ontologically. And my own explorations had led me to understand that
in fact in a world where anything you want is true, the only way you can deal with this
is by learning how to deal with your will. Dealing with your will is what magic has always,
and all cultures, always been about. This is why the shaman doesn't go insane when the
world disappears. He's ready for it. They're ready because they understand that where they
are isn't bound up in their view of the world. The internet is a connective layer, and you
were talking about this last night, it's beautiful. If you took a picture of this room in 1990
and you took a picture of it today, everything would look exactly the same and yet everything
is completely different because in 1990 we didn't have this layer of bits that's flowing
seamlessly among all of us. And it's changed us. It's radically sped up the way we deal
with information in society, and every bit of information that passes through you changes
you. You cannot be unaffected in any way by any bit of information. So the internet is
acting as this enormous accelerator. It's acting as something that's passing through
all of us and radically transforming us, and part of what it's doing is ripping us apart,
and that's dangerous. If we don't approach that carefully, and if we don't approach that
with a lot of heart, we're going to find ourselves and what we think of as ourselves ripped away
in that process. One of the reasons why I think it's very important that this is happening
at Esalen is because if Esalen were running a political campaign, their slogan would be
"It's the body, stupid." Because it begins here and it ends here, and if we can stay
in our bodies even while we're projected into cyberspace, we have some zone for sanity, we
have some zone for being. And psychedelics can produce these boundary dissolutions where
you flow into another thing. Well, we're going to see, and it's actually quite true that
certain types of VR can produce precisely the same affect. There are zones where virtual
reality can be very dangerous for that reason or incredibly powerful and meaningful for
that reason. So where I would like to work from this weekend is I really want to work
from the heart. I personally think in my own philosophy that to work in technology, you
have to work from the heart center because otherwise you'll create golems, you'll create
frankensteins, your creations will run away from you. And that's the essence of the story
of the golem, is that this is a creature that was created with the breath of life but without
the light of knowledge or the heart, the heart of God. So we really have to work from that.
And one of the things that we'll be doing this weekend for that, and we're inviting
you, I don't think we're requiring you because that would just not be in the tenor of this
place, but we're inviting you at 7.30 in the morning, both tomorrow and Sunday, to come
practice Kundalini Yoga. And Kundalini Yoga works very much on the heart center. It's
not strenuous, I guarantee you it will be fun. We have a very good teacher, James, who
will be teaching this, and the idea is that with these exercises we can help to open up
our heart center so that when we talk tomorrow, when we meet tomorrow, we can really be working
from that. Even when we're talking about these ideas that may be very technologically relevant,
they won't be isolated in our minds.
That all said, I also want to explore the joyous nature of what we can do. I know a
lot of my work has been around exploring the joyous nature of what we can do. We have to,
if we're working from our hearts in these environments, then a part of what we want
to do is be joyous in these environments. One of my biggest gripes about the Internet
is that it can't as yet contain the tenor of human emotion, which is so important. If
we're building this edifice to be the global mind and it can't laugh, we've got a big problem.
If it can't sing, we have a big problem. And so one of the things we'll be doing, probably
in the evening on Saturday, is doing something we call voce, which Paul and I have been working
on. We call it World Song or Voce, which is a singing or a toning technique, and it can
produce a quality of connection in a group of people, which is the closest I've heard
it described as almost like instant ecstasy in the sense of the drug. It's a temporary
sort of lowering of interpersonal barriers in a really, really wonderful way. Hopefully,
at the end of all of this, I will have been inspired, Terrence will have been inspired
by what you had to say, and we'll be able to bring that heart-centeredness, which has
to, I believe, remain at the heart of how we work when we're working in the world and
with technology in the world.
Isn't he a great guy? If I had the Timothy Leary laurels with me, I'd hand them all
the way to the
end of
all
of
this
and
share
it
with
you
the
people
that
you
are
and
are
really
a
great
way
to
have
a
way
to
work
in
the
world
and
do
the
work
that
we
have
and
have
a
way
to
work
in
the
world
and
to
work
in
the
world
like
me
and
so
that
we
can
The Shamen Re-evolution
Human history represents such a radical break with the natural systems of biological organization
that preceded it, that it must be the response to a kind of attractor or dwell point that
lies ahead in the temporal dimension. Persistently, Western religions have integrated into their
theologies the notion of kind of end of the world. And I think that a lot of psychedelic
experimentation sort of confirms this intuition. It isn't going to happen according to any
of the scenarios of orthodox religion, but the basic intuition that the universe seeks
closure in a kind of omega point of transcendence is confirmed. It's almost as though this object
in hyperspace, glittering in hyperspace, throws off reflections of itself which actually ricochet
into the past, eliminating this mystic inspiring that same traditionary, and that out of these
fragmentary glimpses of eternity, we can build a kind of map of not only the past of the
universe and the evolutionary aggression into novelty, but a kind of map of the future.
This is what shamanism has always been about. A shaman is someone who has been to the end.
It's someone who knows how the world really works. And knowing how the world really works
means to have risen outside above beyond the dimensions of ordinary space time and cosumistry
and actually seen the wiring under the board, stepped outside the confines of learned culture
and learned and embedded language into the domain of what Wittgenstein called the unspeakable,
the transcendental presence of the other, which can be a section in various ways to
yield systems of knowledge which can be brought back into ordinary social space for the good
of the community. So in the context of 90% of human culture, the shaman has been the
agent of evolution because the shaman learns the techniques to go between ordinary reality
and the domain of the ideas, this higher dimensional continuum that is somehow parallel to us,
available to us, and yet ordinarily occluded by the cultural convention out of fear of the mystery,
I believe. And what shamans are are people who have been able to decondition themselves
from the community's instinctual distrust of the mystery and to go into it, to go into this
bewildering higher dimension and gain knowledge, recover the jewel lost at the beginning of time,
save souls, cure, commune with the ancestors, so forth and so on. A shamanism is not a religion,
it's a set of techniques and the principle technique is the use of psychedelic plants.
What psychedelics do is they dissolve boundaries and in the presence of dissolved boundaries,
one cannot continue to close one's eyes to the ruination of the earth, the poisoning of the seas
and the consequences of two thousand years of unchallenged dominator culture based on monotheism,
hatred of nature, suppression of the female, so forth and so on. So what shamans have to do is act
as exemplars by making this cosmic journey to the domain of the Gaian ideas and then bringing them
back in the form of art to the struggle to save the world.
So
so
so
so
so
so
so
so
so
so
so
so
so
so
shamanism is not a religion it's a set of techniques and the principle technique
is the use of psychedelic plants
so
Chapter 2, Into the Devil's Paradise
Did I say we were a party of five?
We were a party of five when we arrived at La Chorrera
But we were a party of six departing from Puerto Lake Isamo
Ev and I were living together as much as a couple can live together
When they sleep in a hammock every night and pile off a boat with four other people
To hang their bed in the trees
And he was with us too, Sia
I must explain Sia
There is a phenomenon happening in South America which I didn't meet in India
It has to do with fringe religions
The New Jerusalem whose devotees seem to be mostly fruititarian
There is a tribe of such people
Americans who since 1962 or 63 have been drifting down through Latin America
Chiseling on each other, living with each other, loathing each other
Weaving intrigues
They communicated through Ouija boards with these things they called the beings of light
And a whole mythology was built up around reincarnation
According to them everyone is a reincarnation
One person was the reincarnation of Rasputin
Another was a refugee from the inner circles of the Hare Krishna cult
Who wore white robes and white rubber rain boots
He was the reincarnation of Erwin Rommel
And then the leader, the central mystery of the whole group was Sia
He had been Ev's companion for four years
He was very strange and believed that he had been several prominent people reincarnate
I was in a peculiar dilemma
My categories were not very rigid either
I thought aren't we all happy hippies?
I had been in Asia perhaps too long
And I don't know that much about how the universe is put together
But among these people it turned out that there were a lot of funny categories
Difficult to tolerate
If Sia didn't want you to do something
He would have a blank look for a moment
And then announce that it had been revealed to him
On the instant by the beings of light
That you shouldn't, for example, peel fruit with a metal knife
The tiny minutiae of existence were controlled by these hidden forces
He had monkeys that were Christ incarnate
Sia traveled with animals, monkeys, dogs, kittens, parrots
He insisted that all the animals be vegetarian
So the animals were twisted and unhealthy
Their eyes were going around in circles
And he was telling me this is Buddha, this is Christ, this is Hitler
It was not actually this demented
I exaggerate to give the flavor
But in Sia's head I'm sure it was this loose
As we put off from Puerto Le Guisamo
We were therefore six
Vanessa, Dave, Ev, Dennis and myself
And Sia, six people
Sia hated me
Ev had left him in St. Augustine and come to Bogota
Where they had kindly said we could have their apartment
For two weeks while we were getting together the equipment for the expedition
Ev and I began a relationship
Or the beginning of a relationship
Which may have been a source of resentment for Vanessa
There was a lot of tension around all this
But I said, look, I like this woman and she speaks Spanish
This was my best argument, appealing to reason
And obviously suggesting that we trek many days into the Amazon basin
With our specious grip on the local language
It makes very good sense that Ev should come
Eventually there was mutual agreement that she should come with us
However, in the meantime, Dave, who had not kept track of this intrigue
Cabled Sia and invited him to meet us in Florencia
And come with us into the Amazon
He piled on a vintage Colombian Air Force plane
And then landed at Florencia
Dave, Vanessa, Ev, Dennis and I
Ev's dog and ten tons of equipment
Which was to be transported down the Putumayo
Sia was at the airport waving
Thinking that the woman he had lived with for four years
Had gone to Peru with the person in white robes and matching rubber boots
Actually, no
My emotion fraught sorting out of all this at the airport fence
Later in town, Ev and I took one room at the hotel
Leaving Sia to sort it for himself still further
With there seeming to be no possibility of grace on anyone's part
I was attempting to signal Sia that since he had last seen Ev
Her life had taken a new direction and become something else
I was disconcerted and am a bit of a milquetoast hating tension
So I chose to think that it was out of my hands
He came to our room and said
Well, it looks like there's nothing here for me
I am planning to fly back to Bogota
Thank God, Batoi
Then he went to his room and went into communication with the beings of light
He came back two hours later to say
You can't find it without me
By this he meant the ukue
You don't know anything about the jungle
I'm a man of the forest
He was into an image of himself as a man of the forest
With great reluctance, I went along with this idea
When next we flew, it was on to Puerto Lake Samo
He now had him, his dog, his cat, his monkey
Sia wore robes
He had a staff, a staff with flowing fajas
I had already determined that the boats leave Puerto Lake Samo very irregularly
I thought we would have to wait
Perhaps even up to two weeks wouldn't be unusual
The hotel is tiny, the food terrible
I figured we would rub up against each other
Then he would leave
He was being very unpleasant to Ev
And it was a strain for everyone involved
I had actually been with Ev only two weeks and thought
These people have been together four years
They've traveled to India together
What role should I be playing in all this?
But it did not happen as I had anticipated
It turned out that there was a boat in two days
And so in what seemed like hours, the arrangements fell together
And we paid the 600 pesos to secure our fair downriver
At dawn, the appointed morning, all our animals
Cameras, I Ching, butterfly nets, plant presses
Formaldehyde, notebooks, Finnegan's Wake
All the things that one must have to go into the Amazon
Were piled at the river's edge
On a tiny trading boat that was to be our vessel
Gavmito, our captain
Indicated that we were to have the area on top of the cases of bottled fluorescent soda
We were informed that it was six to twelve days to where we wanted to go
Depending on business
Puerto Leggi Samo disappeared
And the river, the green bank
With a thrill of insects and parrots
The brown water became our world
We made our way under power but slowly to the middle of the shining brown river
Under an immense sky, under an immense sun
A delicious moment when one has done all that one can for a journey
And is at last in motion
No longer responsible since giving that burden up to pilot or engineer
Boatman or ground control
The world one is leaving has been truly broken away from
The destination still unknown
A favorite kind of moment
More familiar in the sterile environs of ocean crossing passenger planes
And so how much richer here
Surrounded by the cargo of sun dried fish and brilliant gaseoses
I made a small space where I could sit cross legged and roll the joint
The flow of the river was like the rich smoke I inhaled
The flow of smoke, the flow of water and of time
All flows said it beloved Greek
Called the crying philosopher
But why crying? I love what he says
It does not make me cry
What a bunch you made
Smoking in the tropics
Again in the light
Away from the season and places of death
Away from living under the state of emergency in Canada
On the edge of war bloated mad America
Mother's death and coincidentally all my books and art
Carefully stored, carefully collected
And shipped back
Burned
Fire and cancer
Cancer and fire
Away from these terrible things
Sudden fissures in the psychic landscape
That open and swallow one's whole world
Monopoly houses waxy green go tumbling into fissures
In an animated psychic landscape
And before all that
Tokyo, its jovian atmosphere
The pretension of fitting into the work cycle
How inhuman does one become in an inhuman situation for a little while?
Tokyo demanded the spending of money
The saving of which was the only way out
Ten months of deepening alienation
That began with leaving tropical Asia
And like a comet being drawn in to nearly brush its star
Being drawn through Hong Kong, Taipei, Tokyo and Vancouver
Before being hurled over war toiling America
And on into the outer darkness of other wretchedly poor tropical countries
The flight from Vancouver to Mexico City passed over my mother
Sleeping in her grave for the first winter
On, over Albuquerque
Only a pattern of freeway interchanges
In the desert's night emptiness
On and on into what was then only an idea
The Amazon
Out on the river the past could enter the stillness
And exfoliate before the mind's eye
Like some dark rose of interlocking kazooistry
Forces visible and hidden
Stretching back into one's past
Migrations, religious conversions, discoveries
Make each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history
On a scale of millennia
The inertia of introspection is toward memory
For only in memory is the past recaptured and understood
In the fact of experiencing and making the present
We are all actors
But in the lacuna, in the rare moments
When experience in the present is a minimal thing
An indolent, self-examining thing
Then memory is free to speak
And call forth the landscapes of our striving
In other moments now past
Now, the now that is a time beyond the confines of this story
A now in which this story is past
I do not worry the past as I did then
It is now set for me in a way that it was not set then
Not set then because so recent
Still to be relived in memory and learned from
Five days of river travel lay before us
Undemanding, freeing the mind to roll and scan
Two all-inclusive categories emerged
In the world that was our vessel and crew
And ourselves out on a broad river
Whose distant banks were no more than a dark green line
Separating river and sky
Two categories
The familiar and the unfamiliar
The unfamiliar was everywhere drawing inane analogies
Into common conversation
The putumayo is like the Ganges
The jungle invokes Ambon
The sky is similar to the skies of the Serengeti plain
Etc.
The illusion of understanding
A lame way of getting one's bearings
The unfamiliar does not give up its secrets in this game
The putumayo does not become like the Ganges
The unfamiliar must become known as itself
Before it is correctly recognized
The familiar things are people
The people here appear as known quantities
Because they have been known in the past
So long as the future remains like the past
They will remain known quantities
Certainly this is not New York, Boulder or Berkeley
But we are trying to become extra-environmentals
Develop a sense of appropriate action that is never at a loss
It is the familiarity of these people
That makes them windows in my imagination
Opening on to the past
Dennis of course
He is the time tunnel longest on a parallel track to my own
No need to mention genetics
Back our connection goes into lost in primal un-languaged feeling
We grew up in the same household
Shared the same constraints and freedoms until I left home at 16
But I held close to Dennis
And in the middle of my 21st year
Returning from Seychelles to Bombay
In the hold of the British steam navigation company
Leiner Karanja
Wracked with hives, heartbreak and dysentery
I was weak, semi-delirious
The days of passage from Port Victoria Seychelles to Bombay
Was then 68, 35 dollars
In spite of being ill I was obliged to travel the lowest class
Or my funds would not carry me home
My bunk was a metal plate that folded down from the wall
Public toilets and a hammer of the engines
Bilge water sloshed from one corner of the passageway to the other
1500 displaced Indians from Kenya
Victims of the Africanization were traveling in the hold
All night long the Indian women came and went
From the toilets down my passageway
Filled with bilge and engine throb
Without hashish it would have been unbearable
After many days and nights of this
I awoke feverish in the middle of the night
The air redolent with curried food, excrement and machine smells
I made my way to the exposed deck on the stern
The night was warm, the smell of curry not altogether lost even here
I sat down with my back against a heavily painted metal box of firefighting equipment
I felt my fever then lift and a great sense of relief come through me
The recent past in the Seychelles and in Jerusalem
Seemed then to release their hold on me
I had a clear space in which to turn toward the future and discern it
Unbidden then came the thought that I would go with Dennis to South America
It was a certainty and so in time it happened
Not immediately, not before much more wandering in the east
But eventually by February '71 the prophecy was all around us
River, jungle and sky enclose us and bear us toward La Chorrera
This boat very little like the Carangia
But its small diesel engine and echo of the larger engines further away in time
Yes, Dennis came with the first
These others, different histories
Vanessa and I had been together in the experimental college at Berkeley
She was from New York, the upper east side
Father, prominent doctor, older sister, a practicing psychoanalyst
Mother gives teas for the wives of UN delegates
Private schools, then in a gesture of liberal chic
Vanessa is supported by her parents in her choice of Berkeley as a university
She is intelligent, a slightly feral twist to her gawkish sexuality
Her brown eyes, he had schemes and puns
We were part of a group at Berkeley
But in the fall of '68 I went to New York to try to sell the tortured manuscript
That had been generated by my self enforced seclusion in the Seychelles Islands
This was a rambling, sophomoric, electropolitical diatribe
That was to die a-borning fortunately
But in the less jaded light of autumn '68
I took that work and flew to New York
In which place I knew no one, no one but Vanessa
She dug me out of a flophouse on West 43rd
Where I had crash landed and persuaded me to move up to the Hotel Alden on Central Park West
Musty, but stiff with a Yiddish type respectability
Our riverine departure for the heart of Kamasare Amazonas
Followed by three years, the languid moment when she and I sat together
At the outdoor restaurant near the fountain in Central Park
She with her du bonnet and I with my lowenbrau
In the eyes of the poor scholar and revolutionary that I then imagined myself to be
The scene seemed staged in its casual elegance
We were talking about Dennis, whom Vanessa had never met
He really is some sort of genius I guess
Anyway, I'm his brother and I am quite in awe of him
Having seen it all from up close as it were
And he had an idea that you think has great potential
Actually, that's putting it mildly
I think that he may have seized the angel of gnosis by the throat and borne the beast to the mat
This idea that he has that somehow the synogems work by fitting into DNA is startling
It has a ring of truth that I can't ignore
The political revolution has become too murky to put one's hope in
So far, the most interesting unlikelihood in our lives is DMT, right?
Reluctant agreement
Reluctant because the conclusion that it leads to is so extreme
Mainly that we should stop flucking around inside the flaming madhouse of fascist America
And go off and grapple with the DMT mystery
Because, you know, we are schooled in the Western cultural tradition
And can readily see that this drug is some kind of outrage
That properly understood might, you know that I think that it would
Have tremendous importance for the historical crisis everybody is in
Okay, so say that I suspend my judgement
What's up?
I'm not sure
How about a trip to the Amazon?
That's where these drugs are endemic
And that's enough solitude for anyone
Maybe, I'm trying to get on a dig that will happen in the Gibson desert next year
I understand, and I am committed to going to Asia in a few months
For who knows how long
No, this thing about the Amazon, if it happens at all, is off in the future
But you should think about it
And something else
He lowered his voice mysteriously
Right, the something else is flying saucers
They're mixed up in this somehow
It's pretty murky now, doesn't matter yet
But DMT is somehow linked to the whole notion of saucers
Deep water, it's a hunch, but strong
Dave was something else
We called him the flower child
He was a delight-provoking paradoxical amalgam of naivete and strong-willed insight
A Polish count, ambassador to the court of great Elizabeth
And friend of Dr. D brightened his genealogy
I had met him during the summer of '67 in Berkeley
We had both been hitchhiking from the corner of Ashby and Telegraph
And when one kind soul picked both of us up
We became acquainted on the ride over the bridge
Since those days, Dave had graduated
Both from the upstate New York commune he idealized
And from Syracuse U in ethnobotany
In letters that passed between us when I was in Benares
He became determined to be part of the venture to the Amazon basin
He found in the jungles and mountains of South America
A world even more spellbinding than he expected
To this day, he has not returned
Vanessa, Dave, and I gathered in Victoria, British Columbia
Near the gnashing beast, but not yet of it
We lived there three months, ramsacking articles, writing letters
Maintaining constant correspondence with Dennis who was in Colorado
Amassing information on a near mythical world that none of us had ever seen
I had wandered through Southeast Asia and Indonesia
Viewing ruins in the former and collecting butterflies in the latter
Whether that gave me an edge in experience seemed unlikely
Vancouver Island, lost in swirling snow
Fell behind as by a series of telescoping leaps
The barriers to our entry into the anticipated magical world
Fell away until we come to this indolent moment
February 6, 1971
We are at last freed of our umbilical connection to civilization
This morning under the uncertain skies which mark the Amazon
During the dry season, we have at last gotten underway
Part of the flotilla of gasoline and fruit soda suppliers
Who are on their way to La Charera and will certainly carry us
As far as I'm contour on the Rio Carapana
Moving toward the absolute center of the geography of the secret
I move to ponder, as ever, the meaning
Of this truly strange search
I am having difficulty processing the intense content of my expectations
There can now be little doubt that given that we continue to press forward
As we have, we shall reach a state of satisfaction
We have been so long seeking this thing and it is so difficult to understand
Projections concerning who we will be or what we will do
When this excursion is over are unconsciously based on the assumption
That our experience will leave us unaffected
An assumption which is doubtless false but its alternative can hardly be imagined
Later
Two hours out of Puerto Lake Isamo, upriver winds have caused us to tie up
On the Peru side to await calmer weather
We are at Puerto Naranja, it is not shown on the Atlas Kodasi
The pattern of river travel immediately asserts itself
Following the channel means moving from side to side of the river
Usually near one of the banks
The land is strictly covered by a dense canopy of jungle reminiscent of central Saram
Or the coast of Anbon, of the Nijian forest
The dog drowned the Ancien, the cooing of pigeons, part of our cargo
Like the sacred Ganga, the brown smooth water of the Putumayo
Soon flows through all our dreams and daydreams
Sia watches me fix it later
The familiar falls behind, the river is broad
The mystery for the present is in the strangeness of this place
The watery flatness
Five days the real Putumayo will put us at the mouth of the real Caraparana
There is a mission there, San Rafael
We are looking for Dr. Horacio Guzman
Mentioned in one of our papers as the source of an authentic sample of the Akube we are looking for
Guzman is an anthropologist working with the Huitoto upriver from San Rafael
At a tiny village charmingly called San Jose del Encanto
This village is situated at the beginning of a 110 kilometer trail through the jungle to La Chareira
Not only can Guzman be helpful in our search, but he can help us hire bearers for the trek overland
Many days to anticipate this personage
Six o'clock came and went and my friends had not arrived.
At seven they had still not been seen, and so I took my treasured tab of orange sunshine
and settled down to wait.
Ten minutes later they arrived.
I could already feel myself going and so gestured to the two piles of datura seeds that I had
prepared.
They took them downstairs to my room and ground them in a mortar and pestle before washing
them down with some tea.
By the time they had returned to the roof and gotten comfortably settled, I was surging
through mental space.
The thought of discovery
sobered me enough
to realize that we must get away
from this exposed situation
both of us completely naked
and the scene around us
one of total, unexplainable chaos
she was lying down
unable to get up
and so I picked her up and made my way
down the narrow staircase
past the grain storage bins
and into my room
all the time I remember saying
over and over to her and to myself
I am a human being
I am a human being
I was no longer sure
we waited in my room
many minutes
slowly it dawned that by some miracle
no less strange than everything else
that had gone on
no one was awake demanding
to know what was occurring
no one seemed even to have heard
to calm us I made tea
and as I did this
I had a chance to assess my companion's
state of mind
she seemed quite delirious
quite unable to discuss with me what had
gone on only a few moments before
on the roof
it is in effect typical of Datura that
whatever experiences one has
they are very difficult
usually impossible to recollect later
it seemed that though what had gone on
had involved the most intimate
of acts between two people
nevertheless I had been the only
witness who could remember anything
at all of what had happened
pondering all of this I crept back to the
roof and collected my glasses
incredibly they were unbroken
although I had distinctly heard
them break with my glasses
and our clothes I returned to my room
where my companion was sleeping
I smoked a little hashish
and then climbed into the
mosquito net and lay down
beside her in spite
of all the excitement and the stimulation
of my system I went immediately
to sleep
I have no idea how long I slept
when I awoke it was with
a start and from a deep slumber
it was still dark and there was
no sign of my friend
I felt a stab of alarm
if she was delirious then it was very bad
for her to be wandering alone around
the village at night I jumped
up and threw on my jalaba and began
to search not on the roof
not near the grain storage
I found her on the ground level of the
building she was sitting on the
earth floor staring at her reflection
in the gas tank of a motorcycle
that belonged to the Miller's son-in-law
she was still disoriented
in the way that is typical
hallucinating persons present
mistaking one person for another
"are you my tailor?"
she asked me several times
as I led her back to my room
when we were both once again
upstairs in my quarters I took
off my jalaba and we both
discovered that I was wearing what she
delicately described as
"my knickers"
they were quite too small
on me and neither of us
knew how they had come to be on
me it was the capstone
of an amazing evening and I
roared with laughter
I returned her knickers to her
and we went to bed puzzled
reassured exhausted
and amused
as this experience
passed behind us the girl and I
became even closer friends
we never made love again
it was not really the relationship
that suited us she remembered
nothing of the events on the roof
about a week after all this
was history I told her my impression
of what had happened she was
amazed but accepting
I did not know what had happened
I christened the obsidian
fluid we had generated
love L-U-V
something more than love
something less than love
perhaps not love at all
but some kind of unplumbed potential
human experience very
little is known about
it was this incident which rekindled
my interest in the violet fluids
which ayahuasca shamans
are said to generate on the
surface of their skins and
used to divine and cure
whenever I tell this story
it is the phenomenon of the liquid that I
stress that was what
I accentuated to assure
Dennis that night at La Chorrera
I did not tell the absurd part
about waking up wearing someone else's
underwear it was damn
embarrassing and absurd
and contributed nothing to the story
at that time I had never
told anyone that part of the
incident it was a personal
memory I mention this
because that absurd incident
was later to be the focus of an
instance of telepathy that was
the most convincing that I
have ever witnessed
Up most of the night, plying the hallucinogenic ocean of mind,
I felt fit and full of vitality.
I hoisted a bulging costal our entire buy
and set off back toward the mission at a brisk pace.
I enjoyed this chore.
The costal seemed light, almost a pleasure to carry along.
Without pause, even to rest for a moment,
Ev and I returned to the mission
to Vanessa and Dave's Riverside residence for our breakfast in common.
When we left our own hut and went in search of food,
Dennis had been deeply asleep,
but now he was up and had apparently gone immediately to awaken Vanessa
and described to her his experiences of a few hours previous,
experiences whose recollection was being excitedly told
as we arrived at the house and set down the load.
Throughout the making of breakfast, the events of the last evening
were rediscussed and dissected.
Vanessa and Dave were unmoved by Dennis's excited assertion
that some extremely peculiar energy field had been tapped into and verified.
At the end of breakfast, I suggested to Dennis
that rather than arguing with people about the nature of the experience,
he should go off by himself and write down all that he thought
about the strange sound that he had made.
He accepted this idea and made his way back up the hill to the Knoll house
to be alone, and there he wrote.
28 February 1971.
I approached these pages with a peculiar sense of urgency
as a man like who confronted an inexplicable phenomenon
of some impossible creation of dreams or unaccountable natural principle.
The task facing such a man would be a very subtle one,
that is, to describe the phenomenon as accurately as possible.
My task is compounded by the fact that the phenomenon I must try to describe
has itself to do with the very tools of description, i.e. language.
This rather peculiar statement will begin to make more sense
as we explore the concept more fully.
Before going further, something tells me it is necessary to consider who I am.
24 hours ago, I thought I knew.
Now, this has become the most perplexing question I have ever been confronted with.
The questions leading from it will provide the answers that will allow us to understand
and use the phenomenon which is so difficult to describe.
This may be the last characters of crude language that I will ever apply to the description of anything,
since the phenomenon begins at the edge of language where the concept forming faculty grows
but finds no words, I must be careful to avoid not distinguishing between mere language,
symbol, metaphor, and the reality I'm attempting to apply it to.
Since any phenomenon is, to a point, describable in empirical terms, so too with this one.
It has to do with controlling one's body chemistry in such a way
as to produce very specific vocal and audio phenomena.
The state becomes possible when highly biodynamic vegetable alkaloids,
specifically tryptamines and MAO inhibitors, are introduced into the body
under very carefully regulated parameters.
This phenomenon is apparently possible in the presence of tryptamines alone,
though MAO inhibition definitely helps to trigger it by facilitating tryptamine absorption.
The phenomenon has now been triggered by two people within our immediate group.
Terrence has been experimenting with vocal phenomena under the influence of DMT for some years now.
Until last night, when I triggered and experienced the sound wave for a few brief seconds
under the influence of 19 Stropharia mushrooms,
Terrence was the only person I knew who claimed ability to perform this sound.
But last night, after ingesting the mushrooms, we lay waiting in our hammocks.
The heavy, poisoned feeling that commonly passes briefly over the limbs
at the beginning of the Stropharia visions had by this time passed completely.
It had given way, in me at least, to a warm suffusion of contentment and good feeling
that actually seemed to burn away somewhere inside of me.
Such feelings I have had before, both on mushrooms and just after DMT flashes.
Then we began to discuss people far away and how we might attempt to contact them fourth dimensionally.
Not such a strange rap for us.
But it was definitely at some point in time near to that conversation that I first heard the sound.
Immeasurably distant and faint in the region between the ears, not outside, but definitely incredibly there,
perfectly distinct on the absolute edge of audio perception.
It sounded almost like a signal or very, very faint transmissions of radio buzzing from somewhere.
Something like tingling chimes at first, but gradually becoming amplified into a snapping, popping, gurgling, crackling electrical sound.
I tried to imitate these noises with my vocal chords, just experimenting with the kind of humming, buzzing vocal sound made deep in the throat.
Suddenly it was as if the sound of my voice locked into each other and the sound was my voice.
But coming out of me in such a way that no human voice could possibly distort itself the way mine was doing.
The sound was suddenly much intensified in energy and was like the sound of a giant insect.
While Dennis wrote, the rest of us swam indolently in the river and washed our laundry under a clear, infinitely blue and empty Amazonian sky.
The background drone of the cicadas would occasionally rise in a coherent wave and sweep over the warm and shining surface of the gently drifting Igaraparaná,
falling like electricity across the land in the heat of the equatorial day.
Late that afternoon, Dennis came back down to the edge of the river looking for meat.
He found me washing out my tennis shoes on a large, flat rock that the shifting height of the river had conveniently exposed just a foot or two above the water line.
Doubtless whenever it was so exposed, it served as the favorite local laundry spot.
Magic spot. It's magic at that moment, still fourteen days into the future.
But there we sat and talked. It had been about sixteen hours since the episode with the strange sound during the trip of the evening before.
Dennis said that the writing exercise had been very useful.
Great, and so what have you come up with?
I'm not sure. I'm very excited.
But whatever it is that is the cause of my excitement is also developing ideas in my mind nearly faster than I can write them down.
Ideas? What sort of ideas?
Ideas about how we can use this effect or this stuff or whatever it is?
My intuition is that it is related to the cycle of fluids that Harner reported and to what happened to you in Bostinov.
Remember how Harner implied that I, Lascaros, vomited a magical substance that was the basis of their ability to divine?
This is like that. Some sort of trans-linguistic stuff made with a voice.
Matter that is hyperdimensional and therefore trans-linguistic. Is that what you mean?
Whatever that means. But something like that, I guess.
Gad! Why not? I mean, it's pretty nuts. But I know more nuts than the shamanic magic that we came here looking into.
No, I suppose not. But here's the thing. If there is something weird going on, then we should observe it and see what it is and try to reduce it to some coherent framework.
Granted, we don't know what it is that we are dealing with. But on the other hand, we know that we came here to investigate shamanic magic generally.
So now we have to go to work on this effect, or whatever it is, and just hope that we know what we're doing and have enough data to crack it.
We are too isolated to do anything else, and to ignore it might be to squander a golden opportunity.
Yes, you're right. So here we are, very much on the brink of deep water.
We are having something like beginner's luck, you know, finding the others so accessible.
The mushroom is doing this, or the mushroom and the yahye smoking. It is so hard to be sure. So many variables.
There's a lot of synchronistic activity too.
Right, I feel on the brink of something tremendous, we must just observe our active fantasy closely and try to ride herd on what is developing, the good old Jungian method, that's all.
Yes, ideally all of this could be distilled down to the point where some sort of test of the validity of the effect could somehow be set up.
We talked at length there by the river's edge, ranging over the options and the possibilities.
He was insistent in linking my experiences in Nepal with a very strange phenomenon occurring in Hivaro shamanism.
The people take yahye, and they and other people who have taken yahye, but no one else, can see a violet fluid. It is described as violet or deep blue, and it bubbles and is like a liquid.
One vomits it. When one vomits from taking yahye, this purple goo comes out of one's body. It cannot only be vomited or regurgitated, but it forms on the surface of the skin like sweat.
The Hivaro do much of their magic with this peculiar stuff. They say that they spread it out on the ground in front of them, and that one can look at this material and see other times and other places.
By their reports it is made out of something completely transnormal. It is made out of space-time, or it is made out of mind, or it is pure hallucination objectively expressed, but always keeping itself within the confines of a liquid.
There is an instance in the teaching of Don Juan where the entity Mescalito holds up his hand and Castaneda sees his whole past, a past incident in his life, in this hand.
Supposedly, if this phenomenon has an empirical validity, what is happening is a very thin film of this projective trans-dimensional goo is there, and when you look at it, it is like perfect feedback.
It is a mirror, not of your physical reflection, but of who you are. All this lies in the realm of speculation, of course. Does this stuff exist, or is it just a hallucination? Who can believe in a thing like that?
Dennis felt strongly that it was connected with sounds. One could either stabilize the stuff or cause it to appear by doing something with one's voice. It was a strange idea because one could extrapolate it infinitely.
What this stuff could be, that if one made it in three dimensions, then it would be anything, this ectoplasmic bubbling mind goo in the fourth dimension. It seemed possible to suppose that one might pierce the other dimension and have this stuff come boiling out.
We talked a lot about it. We cut down the mushroom intake, except that I kept nibbling it. I was ecstatic. I thought his ideas were wonderful. I felt it was yet another idea from the tryptamine ocean that had floated up into our nets. What could we do with it?
Recalling it now some eight years later, it is hard to be sure, having learned so much since, just what we did believe, just what level of sophistication we did have. Our mood was one of delight and light. The several mushroom experiences in that remote and beautiful place having led to a gently swelling euphoria.
It was a very happy time. We were excited with the prospect of actually grappling under near perfect conditions with the secret, as we called it then, meaning the spectrum of effects encountered in tryptamine induced ecstasy.
That had been the compass of our quest, the rose window topologies of the galacterium beehives of the dimethyl tryptamine flash. We were not unused to the idea of the other, but we had only glimpsed it in brief flashes and in its manifestation as the lux naturae.
Everyone in our small expedition felt, I think, the sense of something opening around us, of the suspension of time as we turned and turned in a widening green world that was strangely and almost erotically alive all around us for thousands of miles.
The jungle as mind, the world hanging in space as mind, images of order and sentient organization crowding in on all sides. How small we were, knowing little yet fiercely proud of what we knew and feeling ourselves somehow the representatives of humanity meeting something strange in other, something at the edge of human experience since the very beginning.
A proud and eerie grandeur seemed mixed with our enterprise as those first days at La Chorrera went by.
The next day, the first of March, passed uneventfully. Dennis worked on his journal, I collected insects, and Vanessa photographed around the mission. At evening we were all gathered again at the edge of the knoll where our small lodging stood.
In silent communion with each other in the river, Ev and I sat looking out over the lake. It was Ev who noticed it first. The lake beneath the choro was flecked with foam generated by the rush of the water through the narrow channel at the upper end of the lake.
The floating foam on the brown water served to mark the currents of the river, their many flows and counter flows. It was at this that Ev had exclaimed, for after minutes of watching the water flow by, suddenly a change had stolen over the moving marbled surface of the furthest side of the river.
It seemed to have stopped. Just that, just simply to have stopped moving. The surface appeared frozen, yet the near half of the river was seen to continue as before.
Dennis and Vanessa were called out of the hut and they agreed that the effect was remarkable.
I wandered away from a discussion of the time of day, the light conditions, optical illusions, and all the rest. I seemed to have no heart for these arguments. Each time they broke out I found myself with some deep inner assurance that the situation was moving forward just as it should and that everyone was playing a part and doing it very well.
This mood of calm resignation was something new to me, perhaps enhanced by the mushroom, but developed during the month in Columbia preceding our trek into the jungle. As I walked I looked for a place to sit down.
Dennis had offered me his journal entry for that day to read, "One March, 1971." Last night I again triggered the phenomenon after having eaten one mushroom and smoking grass. It was almost identical to the first experience.
A lifting, pulsing wave of vocal buzzing, growing loud very quickly and picking up shock energy as it did so. Though I could have prolonged the sound beyond a brief burst, I did not because of the energy.
I am certain that soon it will become possible to trigger the sound completely without tryptamines or other drugs. It is becoming easier to plug in on each time and I feel now that it is accessible at any time. It is clearly a learned activity that tryptamines can initiate and trigger, but it can happen without tryptamines once it is understood and mastered.
We have thus far been able to establish the existence of peculiar vocal phenomena in two individuals subject to similar experimental controls. We must now attempt to understand what it is that the phenomenon could be.
We must perform experiments with the sound and from our results develop theories to understand the processes at work.
Terrence has experimented with these sounds far more than anyone else and I am the only other one that I know of and he has discovered some interesting things.
The DMT initiated state which allows prolonged bursts of its vocal energy he describes as being one of seeing the levels of sound become more dense as they finally materialize into small gnome-like, machine-like creatures made of a material like obsidian froth which pours from the body, mouth, and sex organs as long as the sound continues.
It is effervescent, phosphorescent, and indescribable. Here is where the linguistic metaphors become useless for what the material actually is, is super linguistic matter.
It is a language, but not made of words, a language which becomes the thing it describes. It is a more perfect archetypal logos.
We are convinced that through experimentation with these vocal phenomena, with and without the aid of drugs, it will be possible to understand and use trans linguistic matter to accomplish any reality.
Or to say anything in its voice is to cause that for inter-humanity.
Such a rash statement would be our land-ish if it were not for our long and tedious speculations on matter. Our studies of the chemistry of mind, the metabolism of tryptometry, the nature of thought, of consciousness, history, magic, shamanism, quantum and relativistic physics, metamorphosis and insects, alchemical processes, etc.
Together with the intuitive understanding of acausal events that we are deriving from the stropheria, allows us to venture a not entirely wild guess as to what the sound which takes form may be.
Hallucinogens, by affecting the neural matrix, can produce changes in consciousness in the temporal dimension.
Clearly, consciousness can work changes in three dimensions as well. On tryptamines, it is possible, under special conditions, to hear and vocalize a sound that turns through a higher dimensional manifold and condenses as trans linguistic matter.
That is, matter, reduplicated upon itself through time, much as a hologram is reduplicated through space. The substance whose appearance the sounds initiate is tryptamine metabolized by mind through a higher spatial dimension.
It is a hyperdimensional molecule carrying its trip on the outside of itself in this world. The hyperdimensional nature of this material is such that it is all material, concepts, events, words, people and ideas homogenized into one thing via the higher dimensional alchemy of mind.
Many questions occur concerning the phenomenology of this temporal hologram as fluid matrix. We speculate it is hyperdimensionally metabolized tryptamine, an alchemical phenomenon which is a correct union of tryptamine, a compound nearly ubiquitous in organic nature, with vocally produced sound mediated by mind.
It is the mind that directs this process, and that direction consists of a harmonic attunement to an interiorized audio-linguistic phenomenon, which may be an electron spin resonance tone of the psilocybin molecule.
When this tone is locked in on, a process which consists of vocally imitating the interior tone to perfection, the hyperdimensional tryptamine is produced. Is this substance mental, as an idea is mental? Is it as real as an ordinary liquid like water?
Harner insisted that hivaroshamens, under the influence of MAO-inhibiting, tryptamines plus Benasteriopsis copy infusions, produce a fluorescent liquid by means of which they accomplish all their magic.
Though invisible to ordinary perception, this fluid is said to be visible to anyone who has ingested the brew.
Yahye is frequently associated with violet auras and deep blue hallucinations. This may indicate a thermal plasma, perhaps only visible in the UV spectrum.
If this phenomenon is found to fall into the category mental, indicated above, it would function as described, but with the limitation of not being tangential to ordinary space-time.
It will still represent perfected understanding of the hyperdimension, Jung named the collective unconscious.
Perhaps only visible in the ultraviolet spectrum. If this phenomenon is found to fall into the category mental, indicated above, functioning as described, but with the limitation of not being tangential to ordinary space-time.
It will still represent perfected understanding of the hyperdimension, Jung named the collective unconscious.
Looking back from a vantage point of nearly eight years on these notes makes them appear naive.
At the time when I first read them, I doubted what I read since it seemed to go against the grain of common sense, and at that time I could not really understand them.
Today, after years of education pushed toward understanding the events at La Chorrera, these ideas seem as magically near and yet as far as they did then.
We had a theory and we had experiences and we linked them through an experiment that is preposterous unless there is some seed of operational truth in the bizarre ideas born in that period.
The years pass and the theories deepen. What you call time is actually man, the oracular voice of the mushroom ventured recently to tell me.
So it is that years later I still pursue and still do not understand the angelic glossolalia that psilocybin makes possible for the thinking mind and the singing voice. Is it, I now wonder, an or-language of emotions that originates in that unexplored part of the brain that is a reflection of Broca's area but which is on the other, non-dominant side of the brain?
Could there be a language so intense and so emotional that no cultural conventions of meaning would be necessary to understand?
A language of emotion so intense that though it would be conveyed by vocal sound its richness would be so great that it would be the equivalent of a telepathic ray?
Today I think so and with the aid of psilocybin I labor carefully to perfect it. I believe that it is a subroutine of the human organism, an ancient shamanic art of using sound to convey incredible emotion, emotion so intense that its power is truly magical.
Perhaps these ideas are no more than Dennis were then concerning the meaning of the powers of psilocybin. What unites the two perceptions is the sense of a nearby mystery of tremendous importance.
Elusive as the mystery has been, that sense of its imminence has never left my experience. Mysteries are not unsolved problems. They are things which in their very nature are mysterious. I would have not believed such a thing possible had I not been shown.
Later that same evening, Ev, Dennis and I smoked a joint of Santa Marta gold before turning in. It was a calm, perfectly clear night when we sat down and began our ritual.
Ev commented on the clarity of the night and we all stared together for a moment out into the galaxy, the night awash with millions of stars. We smoked in odd silence. Perhaps five minutes went by, each of the three of us lost in our own ideas. The reverie ended with Dennis's exclamation.
Look how quickly the air conditions changed. Now there is a ground fog just springing up.
True Hallucinations (Part 6)
The condition thickened and spread outward, becoming finally a gentle fog over the whole area.
We had come from depthless, clear night sky to dense fog in a few minutes.
I was frankly amazed.
Dennis was the first to offer an explanation, with a certainty that seemed as puzzling as the thing itself.
It was someone in a bell to convince the ability that our burning joint was able to push over some critical threshold.
You must be putting me on.
You mean to tell me that the heat of our joint started water condensing into visible fog right near us,
and that was like a chain reaction to all of the super saturated air nearby?
Who could believe it?
Yes, that's it.
And what's more, it was happening for a reason.
Or rather something, maybe the mushroom is using it as an example.
It is a way of showing us that small instabilities trigger large general fluctuations.
This rap of Dennis's was very unsettling to me.
I could not imagine that his explanation was correct or exactly what was going on.
It passed through my mind then for the first time that he might be spacing out mentally.
I used no psychoanalytical jargon in thinking about it, but I noted a reaction in myself to what he said
that included the idea that he might be unfolding into a mythopoetic reality.
By this time the fog was impenetrable and we all retired for the night, but not before Ev related,
that in the silence before the appearance of the fog, she had had a hallucination with her eyes closed
of a strange elf-like creature rolling a complicated polyhedron along the ground.
Each facet of this polyhedron seemed, she said, like a window onto another place in time or another world.
It's the stone I breathed.
The lapis philosophorum glimpsed in the Amazonian night,
seemingly a great multidimensional jewel in the keeping of a telluric dwarf.
The power of the image was deep and touching.
I seemed to feel the hopes of the old alchemist, the puffers great and small,
who had sought the lapis in a cloudy swirling of their lambics.
I had never seen or imagined the mystery of the stone thus,
but in listening to Ev's description of what she had seen,
an image formed in my mind that to this day remains with me.
It is the image of the stone as hyperdimensional jewel become UFO,
the human soul become starship.
It is the universal panacea at the end of time.
All history, the shockwave of this final unveiling of the potential of the human psyche,
these thoughts, these reveries seemed then like the stirring of something vast,
something dimly sensed, stretched out over millions of years,
something about the destiny of mankind and the return of the soul to its awesome and hidden source.
What was happening to us?
The sense of the peculiar was nearly palpable.
Dark oceans of time and space seemed to swell and flow beneath our feet.
The image of the earth hanging in space was everywhere,
emotionally superimposed on the situation around us.
And what was that situation really?
I slept thrilled and uneasy at the edge of sleep, then deep sleep and deep dreams,
from which nothing remained in the morning's safest sense of yawning, interstellar space.
The
The
The
The
Chapter 8, The Opus Clarified
The morning of March 2, 1971, dawned crystalline and hot at La Charera.
It was the much anticipated day when Ev, Dennis and I would at last be able to take possession
of the house in the forest that was now finally vacated.
There was more than the usual amount of excitement associated with our frequent moves this particular morning.
For three days, Dennis had been saying that the energy of the phenomenon we were involved with
was so great that we should not go any further unless we had the greater isolation that the forest house provided.
In all of this recent surge of speculation, our original ethnobotanical intentions had not been completely forgotten.
Far from it.
Our immediate intent was to use ayahuasca as an MAO inhibitor and a problem-solving drug
and to brew and take the banisteriopsis cappi that Ev and I had gotten from Basilio a few days before.
Our move began shortly after dawn in order to avoid the heat of the day.
The trek to move ourselves and our equipment to the new home involved going through the pastures,
which we had not seen since our mushroom experience two days before.
The stropheria seemed to be everywhere.
There seemed not to be a cow pie without its golden flush of perfect mushrooms.
I promised myself that as soon as we had squared away the new hut and otherwise settled in,
that we should again take the mushrooms.
As it happened, Ev and I spent the rest of the day following the move,
clearing the ground around the hut and pulling large tree roots out of the sandy soil
and stacking them in the sun to dry out and serve as the fuel for the fire we anticipated building
in order to brew up our yahay.
We seemed to glory in physical exertion.
Energy and light seemed to fill everything.
Dennis, who had been rather withdrawn and snappish with everyone since his experience and its mixed reception,
had wandered down the forest trail in the direction of the Huitoto village 13 kilometers away.
He had taken his notebook.
In the middle of the afternoon, he returned.
He was very excited, and he had completed writing out the preliminary notes for what became the experiment at La Chareira.
It was the only written record of his ideas that was actually made at the time,
and as such is the only piece of written primary evidence that we have
about how we both viewed what we were doing as we were doing it.
These notes do not, of course, represent the final form of our theorizing about these matters.
Refinement of these ideas has been constant since their creation.
These notes are not to be taken at face value at all.
The scientific basis of our work is elaborately described in the invisible landscape.
That work represents our considered composite opinion as of 1975.
The present work is the story of the growth of those ideas through time
and shows the fallacies and myths spun into the fabric of the first conception of these ideas.
But how complete the vision was and how finely worked its detail,
the working understanding that is represented in these notes of my brother's,
are the operational basis of the effect that we did trigger on the 5th of March.
His notes were our working myth, and they did have great effectiveness.
They are not, however, for the reader faint of heart.
They are like the words of a magical incantation.
Magicians will wish to linger over them.
The rest of us might wish to skim over them and hurry on with what is,
even without the theory, a ripping good story.
To March.
Further experiments with the audio warp phenomenon yesterday raised some interesting new questions
and enhance our ongoing understanding.
I chose the term audio warp because my experience thus far, coupled with what I have been told,
leads me to believe that this all has to do with locally generating a specific kind of energy field
which can rupture three-dimensional space.
I do not understand if the field is electromagnetic,
but it seems to bend space in such a way as to turn it upon itself through a higher dimension.
Here is how it is done.
One must take enough psilocybin to allow the sound to be audible.
This sound we understand to be the ESR of the resonating psilocybin alkaloids within the mushroom.
The presence of rapidly metabolizing high-energy tryptamines within the yahye
acts as antenna that sensitizes the neural matrix to the spin resonance energy of the stapharia psilocybin.
It is this principle that allows the signal to be made audible.
It must then be amplified via the tryptamine admixture antennas to what is felt to be its fullest amplitude.
Then, via vocal sound, this energy is placed into the harming complex within the body and within the mushroom,
which has been, in some small part, cooled to absolute zero.
The temperature at which molecular vibration ceases through absorption of the psilocybin ESR pulses.
Once this ESR wave has been audially detected, it will be possible to amplify it within the neural circuits
by channeling it through the harming complex.
That is, by imitating the psilocybin ESR with the voice,
causing the amplified sound to strike a harmonic tone with the harming metabolizing in the brain,
thereby exciting the harming ESR.
Since harming complexes are merely further down the same biosynthetic pathway that converts tryptophan into psilocybin,
it is possible to consider the ESR tone of psilocybin as a harmonic overtone of harming and vice versa.
Using harmonic overtones, it is possible to sound a tone which will cancel one or more of its octaves
reflected in harmonic scales above and below it.
This is easily demonstrated on a cello.
Suppose a tone, say the open string A, is sounded.
The sound is a wave vibration of air molecules caused by the string which acts as a resonator.
The tone is heard most loudly in the key in which it was sounded,
but it also sounds every other key of A in the octaves above and below it.
It is possible to cancel out the original tones by touching the string very lightly at certain harmonic points.
When this is done, the overtones in the higher and lower registers become audible.
If one understands the theory of harmonic resonators well enough,
one can determine which overtones will be resonated if certain points on the string are touched.
When this understanding is applied to molecular ESR resonation, it remains essentially the same in principle.
When the ESR tone of the psilocybin is heard via tryptamine antenna,
it will strike a harmonic tone in the harming complexes being metabolized within the system,
causing its ESR to begin to resonate at a higher level.
According to the principles of tonal physics, this will automatically cancel out the original tone,
that is, the psilocybin ESR, and cause the molecule to cease to vibrate.
However, the ESR tone that sustains the molecular coherency is carried for a microsecond on the overtonal ESR of the harming complex.
This leaves the momentarily electrically canceled and superconductive psilocybin
suspended in a low-energy electromagnetic field generated by the harming ESR.
In so doing, it will regain its original, but now superconductively amplified ESR signal,
which will permanently lock it into a superconductive state.
As this phenomenon proceeds, it will automatically trigger the inverse of the initial process.
The psilocybin superconductively charged by mind will harmonically cancel the ESR resonance of the harming within the brain.
The energy of the harming psilocybin complex ESR will be absorbed instantly into the matrix of the mushroom.
This will cause these molecules, metabolizing within the body and bonded to neural DNA, to instantly drop to absolute zero.
Clearly, this harming psilocybin DNA complex must immediately separate itself from the cellular matrix.
There is great danger at this moment, but pathways exist to deal with it.
We will find that these molecules condense out of our bodies, accompanied by a sound.
This sound will be the harmonic ESR tone of this complex, amplified superconductively,
and broadcasted frozen into the superconductive matrix of the mushroom.
The superconductively charged psilocybin acts as an antenna, which picks up the amplified ESR signals of the complex
and condenses vibrational signals into a superconductive matrix.
The opus can now be briefly summarized.
The mushroom must be taken and heard.
The yahye must be taken and charged with the overtonal ESR of the psilocybin via voice-imparted amplified sound.
The ESR resonance of the psilocybin in the mushrooms will be canceled, and it will drop into a superconducting state.
A small portion of the physical matter of the mushroom will be obliterated.
The superconductively charged psilocybin will pick up the ESR harmonic of the yahye complex.
This energy will be instantly and completely absorbed by the higher dimensional tryptamine template.
It will be transferred to the mushroom as vocal sound and condensed onto the psilocybin
as a bonded complex of superconductive, harming psilocybin DNA.
The result will be a molecular aggregate of hyperdimensional superconducting matter
that receives and sends messages transmitted by thought that stores and retrieves information
in a holographic fashion in neural DNA, and that depends on superconductive harming
as a transducer energy source, and superconductive RNA as a temporal matrix.
This aggregate will be a living and functioning part of the brain of the molecular singer who creates it.
It will be composed of higher dimensional matter, that is,
matter that has been turned through the higher dimension via the process of canceling its electrical charge
with a harmonic vibration, transmitting that vibration across space from superconductive transmitter
to superconductive receiver, and then recondensing that vibration onto a superconductive template,
the charged psilocybin in the mushroom, until the harming psilocybin DNA complex condenses into a superconducting molecule,
a molecule that is hyperdimensional matter would by this theory remain so
as long as it remains in the superconducting configuration, probably forever since it is powered by its own ESR energy.
It will then be responsive to commands via endogenous tryptamine ESR, thoughts.
It will be keyed into our collective DNAs and it will contain harmine as a superconductive transceiver and power source.
It was his idea, and it seemed to me a magnificent one, that the body is like an undiscovered musical and scientific instrument
whose potential lies all around and within us, but of which we are unaware.
He said that the mind, through an act of will, could use the singing voice to interact with the brain
as though it were a color organ and a holographic library all wrapped into one.
Dennis pointed the way toward a kind of orphic science where the great advances would be made
using only the interaction of the claternity of singing voice, mind, brain, and imagination.
More, however, than a chant-induced collective synesthesia was promised.
He was saying that the laws of acoustics and low-amperage bioelectrical phenomena
could be manipulated to give the experimenter a doorway into exploring states of matter and realms of physics
of high energy and low temperature that are currently, at least, supposed to be the exclusive province of researchers
totally dependent on extremely technically sophisticated and powerful instruments.
It became possible for a moment to dream that the powers of shamanism derived from a millennium-old knowledge
of microphysics and bioelectronics that was actually far in advance of our own.
Perhaps the shamanic traditions of this planet are the keepers of a path of understanding
that uses the human body-brain-mind as its cutting edge and which leaves the present state of the art
which our own scientific method has achieved, a very poor second.
This is really an old idea, the siren song of Pythagoras, that the mind is more powerful than any imaginable particle accelerator
more sensitive than the most powerful radio or optical telescope, more powerful in its grasp of information than any computer
that the human body, its organs, its voice, its power of locomotion and its imagination is a more than sufficient means
to the exploration of any place, time or energy level in the universe.
It was this idea that he would set out to prove, to realize in the actual hardware of this dimension
a roving lenticular vehicle which he was convinced could be generated out of his own body DNA and things present at hand
in the Amazonian environment, the mushroom and the ayahuasca.
Chapter 9, A Conversation Over Saucers
As Dennis came into the camp that afternoon, he hailed me excitedly.
He thrust his notes into my hands and I read what you, dear reader, have just also read
and I felt the themes of the strange place we had come to crystallize.
I began the sense of something in the sky, calmly omniscient but closely observing us.
I returned to the beginning and read it all over again.
I had no basis whatsoever to judge what I was reading.
My brother's scientific speculation seemed to have acquired a life of its own.
He was like a great all-knowing computer.
Indeed, later this theme would emerge even more explicitly.
I listened to him explain his idea.
He was very deeply into it.
Ideas were coming out of him like spaghetti out of a rasher.
Thousands of words about all these strange things.
He said, "You know what we could do?"
And then he laid down the rap which is now enshrined as the central doctrine of the opus.
He called it hypercarbulation, something that you can do using different kinds of vocal sounds.
For instance, if you pluck a string it will sound in the octave in which it is struck,
but it will also sound in octaves above and below its key.
It has what are called harmonic overtones.
If you strike the chord and then quench it, you can hear the harmonic overtones.
It was something which had fascinated Pythagoras.
Dennis pointed out to me that one can use two sounds to cancel a sound
but they are exactly the same in relation to each other.
This same principle can be used to still molecular motion.
In very localized areas, one can produce low temperatures with audio cancellation.
Dennis felt he had figured out a way to do something using psychoactive compounds,
psilocybin, the tryptamine complex, and then the harmala compounds,
the beta-carbolines which occur in Yahye.
He said that if you look at the molecules of the progressive cyclosizing of the beta-carboline family,
what you find is that the electron spin resonance of these molecules moving from one to the other
is in fact a harmonic overtone.
This is interesting because Claudio Naranjo reported that 50% of his subjects that took
harmine in Chile reported a buzzing in the head.
It was not associated with other kinds of psychedelics.
It seemed to be uniquely associated with these harmine compounds.
The Hivarosh shaman also reported a buzzing in the head.
Dennis' idea was that when one takes Yahye,
when it is metabolizing through one's neural matrix in the brain, a sound is heard.
This is a complicated theory about the enzyme dynamics by which one is able to hear this sound,
but that is the gist of it.
Not all compounds have an electron spin resonance.
They have to have a free ring.
All compounds with a free ring will resonate.
The hallucinogens we were interested in have free rings, and DNA is also able to resonate.
It is a phenomenon of molecular structure.
During the process of metabolizing the alkaloids in Yahye,
a relationship is formed with the tryptophan metabolites in the brain.
A sound is heard that is characteristic of the interaction.
Once the sound is heard, it can be imitated.
What you have is a vocal sound.
Dennis insisted he could do things with this sound.
He said that he would be in effect emitting an amplified spin resonance,
an amplified ESR-modulated sound that he would hear coming from these compounds in his brain.
Making this sound would set up a series of harmonic vibrations above and below it
in other compounds also metabolizing in the brain.
Now from this theoretical basis, he took flight.
When he cancels the sound, if he is in the correct relationship to the molecule he is directing sound at,
its temperature will drop.
Of many millions of this kind of molecule struck by this sound,
a few dozen or hundreds will be in the correct geometrical relationship,
and they will be frozen out, their molecular motions stilled nearly instantly.
Now a peculiar property of low temperatures is that very high bonding energies appear.
A molecule close to absolute zero will bond to anything.
It forces its way into the structure.
The harming molecule, which is analogous to a little bell, gives a bell-like chiming sound.
If we come on it right and cancel it, there is neural DNA active in the brain.
The electrical configuration of harming is enough like the molecular configuration of adenine,
that it will replace the bases in DNA, that it will replace it.
It will bond through into the chain, and when it is bonded in, it has a ring.
It's the same size as adenine, but slightly more complicated.
It is a free resonance ring.
He paused and then gathered his thoughts to continue.
Now the normal ESR of harming is a simple signal,
but the electron spin configuration of DNA is very, very complicated.
It's a broad band.
When the harming goes in there, it will cease to broadcast its own resonation,
because it will have become very tightly bonded into the overstructure of the macromolecule.
It will instead begin to broadcast the ENR resonation of the DNA.
That's it.
If you have followed this this far, the rest is easy.
DNA is what you are.
The physical form is just a lot of juicily expressed reflections of enzymes set in motion and coded by DNA.
Neural DNA is known to be non-metabolizing.
It does not go away.
The meat on your body comes and goes every year.
Your skeleton is not the same one you had five years ago, but neural DNA is an exception.
It is there for all time.
It goes into the world with it.
It records.
It's like a storage place for memory, not only our personal memory,
but any entity or organism which has DNA in it.
There is a way to find a connection to it.
This is it.
You put a radio into the DNA, and this ESR resonation will begin to flood your system,
because the bond will be permanent.
There will be no way to disrupt it.
It will tell you everything, everything that can be known in the world of space and time,
because it contains your own and everyone else's records.
We are all connected through this magical substance, which is what makes life possible
and which causes it to take on its myriad forms.
All DNA is the same.
It is the settings that are different.
You get butterflies, mastodons, or human beings depending on the settings.
Or so you say, was my noncommittal reply.
For the moment, I simply did not know what to say.
He stared at me, clearly expecting more.
I believed in the infinite self-transforming power of the human mind and species,
and I could suppose that there are parallel worlds and alternative dimensions.
I could imagine any number of science fiction possibilities,
provided I was not asked to believe that I was about to be personally present
at their discovery or unleashing.
But this is what he was saying, that we had somehow stumbled upon
or been led to the trigger experience in the human world
that would transform the ontological basis of reality
so that the mind and matter would become the same thing
and reflect the human will perfectly.
How could anyone conceive of such a thing?
We had come to La Chorrera with a belief that if life and mind are possible,
then the mysteries of the universe might well be inexhaustible.
Something very passive, yet ever-present, was there,
elaborating these ideas in our minds,
something that we had thought of for some days as the mushroom.
We talked several hours about these ideas,
and what finally emerged was the idea that we needed a test,
or at least Dennis maintained that a partial test of this idea
could be undertaken to convince me.
He thought that as the superconducting state became voice-stabilized,
there should be a marked lowering of temperature in the immediate area.
In our talking, we had left the area of the hut and drifted down the forest path.
It would be possible to attempt to generate the effect of coolness
right there on the spot, he supposed.
We seated ourselves on a sandy path facing each other
with the afternoon sun on both of us.
After a couple of preliminary low mechanical buzzes,
Dennis made a sound very similar to the sound that he had unleashed
in the Knoll house three days before.
This sound had an extremely peculiar quality, and as it rose in intensity,
I looked down at the hairs on my arms and saw them rise
as goose flesh formed in a way that intense shivering swept over me.
I yelled to him to stop.
He stopped instantly and seemed much drained by the effort.
I was quite disoriented.
I frankly could not tell whether a real wave of very cold air had swept over me
or whether the particular sound had somehow made my body react
as though it were being exposed to cold air.
It was not lost on me that if the effect had truly generated a blast of cold air,
then it had violated the known laws of physics.
No, that was not lost on me, but I did not care to experiment further.
The whole thing had an eerie aura about it, and if the effect was real,
who knew what could come of pushing it too far?
I was more confused than ever by my enigmatic brother
and his burgeoning ideas and abilities.
The whole thing seemed absurd and yet very compelling,
like a hypnotic game into which one becomes absorbed in spite of oneself.
We returned to our camp and mentioned to all present
that Dennis had generated the wave of cold air that he had predicted from the theory,
but it was all sufficiently ambiguous that no one felt drawn to comment.
It was already quite clear that two camps were emerging,
one that wished no further part in these matters, whatever their validity,
and one reflecting our own opinion that cautious experiment was indicated.
A commonality of language was breaking down.
After dinner, Vanessa and Dave returned to the Riverside house,
and the three of us settled into our first night in the forest since arriving at La Chorrera.
Dennis was in a state of continual activity, amplifying his ideas
and trying out new wrinkles on us.
He retired into a world of very intense activity.
He wrote his ideas over and over, the steps to do it and the theory of why it should work.
He was spending lots of time alone writing, or he would come back and talk to us.
He was on to something very strange.
His word pictures caused reality to shimmer and wrinkle at the edges.
He was really in touch with this bubbling, obsidian, fourth-dimensional fluid
that we were going to bond into a usable tool and end history and go to the stars.
My attitude was, "Fine, we'll try it."
The atmosphere was drenched with the bizarre.
Now we had arrived at the center of the Amazon, and we could feel something in the sky, watching.
We were happy heads trying to explore one last fairy tale so we could be rationalists forever.
And now we had come out here to encounter something enormous,
something alive and very old and very strange,
something peculiar in the extreme.
I was quite uncreative in this period.
I was taking the mushroom. I was ecstatic all the time.
I would simply sit and listen to Dennis rave.
It went beyond anything anyone I knew had ever dreamed of.
We had set the evening of March 4th as the day we would test the full theory of the Harmeen DNA bond.
I noted with unusual satisfaction that this day corresponded with an idiotic pun
that had stuck with me since earliest childhood.
"What day of the year is it command?"
Answer, "March 4th."
"How fitting then," I ranted and raved.
"How fitting that we will attempt to concretize the soul on that day."
Absurdly, the coincidence of the date with that pun seemed part of a universal secret plan
unraveling to bring us to the history-culminating moment
when man would march into a higher dimension.
My own thoughts seemed to me to be nothing like the super-scientific theory formation
that my brother was involved in.
I was baffled by much of what was going on.
I amused myself, constructing a pipe out of the strange heart-shaped fruits
that we had otherwise given up as inedible.
From one of those fruits and a hollow reed and a bit of river clay,
I constructed a water pipe that gave me great satisfaction.
While the jargon of the ESR biophysicist whirled around me,
I contemplated what I had achieved with two plants and a bit of mud.
It seemed to me a marvel of ingenuity, and because the fruit was so strange,
there was something about it vaguely unearthly.
This pipe might have been fashioned from one of the fruits
that Dr. Wiener offered the time traveller in Wells' epic.
It was a weird and haunting object, and when it was smoked,
the bubbling of the water beneath the thick rind
sounded very like the beating of some great mammalian heart.
Even Dennis paused to admire this pipe,
and we determined that it would be used in our experiment
when the moment came to smoke some of the Banasteriopsis cappi bark
to boost the harming levels in our blood.
We were operating in a world where scientific method,
ritual and participation mystique were inseparately intertwined,
inseparably because our own minds and bodies were to be the retorts
of the psycho-alchemical transformation that we were experimenting with.
That day, March 3rd, we all pulled roots and stacked them in the sun.
It seemed the most satisfying activity imaginable.
Nothing could have seemed more right.
That evening, we made a tape of our intentions,
but unfortunately our tape recorder was not in good working order,
and that tape has proven impossible to salvage.
It is a loss to be regretted, since the emotional content
of what we were experiencing would come across most clearly from our own words.
The taping session ranged over a number of themes.
Hyper-carbulation, for such we had named the process of altering the neural DNA
and changing a human being into an eternal hyper-dimensional being.
Hyper-carbulation, for such we had named the process of altering the neural DNA
and changing humanity into an eternal hyper-dimensional being.
Hyper-carbulation, for such we had named the process of altering the neural DNA
and changing humanity into an eternal hyper-dimensional being.
Hyper-carbulation, for such we had named the process of altering the neural DNA
and changing man into an eternal hyper-dimensional being.
There was a process that we imagined associated with sexual generation.
We spoke of it as the birth of an idea, in a sense whose literalness is not easy to convey
to minds that have not brushed with schizophrenia.
We hoped that mind, driven by will to the good,
could enter into the process of generation
and guide it toward the production of the imagination-modulated resurrection body
so dared the origin and modern UFO enthusiasts.
The dead.
We believed that hyper-carbulation was to be the shamanic defeat of death,
that those doorways the dead enter through daily
were finally to be thrown open to a hyper-carbulated humanity
that would then have freedom of movement to and from an eternity
in which the species was a living reality.
The presence of our dead mother, or Carl Jung, Newton and Bruno, Pythagoras and Heraclitus
was an overwhelming and all-inclusive intuition that we shared and could not ignore.
There seemed to be an ideological lineage
whose task was the shattering of the historical continuum
to the generation of the living lapis of hyper-carbulated humanity.
All these visionary thinkers had worked on their part of this project.
Now, as the secret work of human history,
the generation of atoms' cosmic body lost since paradise,
neared completion, these shades stirred and pressed near to our Amazonian campsite
as we became the human atoms critical to the inception of the transformation of man
into a galaxy-roving bodhisattva,
the culmination and quintessence of the highest aspirations of spawning, star-coveting humanity.
The psychologists will recognize this as a description of messianic ego inflation.
Such it is, but we felt these things as anyone would feel them
if they truly believed themselves to be in the position that we believed ourselves to be in.
We wondered, "Why? Why us?"
To such questions, the mushrooms spoke in my mind without hesitation
because you have diligently sought the good
and because you trusted no human being more than yourself.
The emotional impact of these sorts of exchanges
was intense beyond anything I have ever experienced.
I felt humbly grateful to the point of tears.
I felt exalted.
We wanted to salvage paradise for humanity,
and we thanked all gods and nature that our eccentric quest
out of all the lives and paths being lived on the earth
was placed by fate to be so near the cutting edge.
Where the elder shamanism had failed, we would succeed.
The rescue of the timeless pearl of human immortality from the well of death
would, through the act of hyper-carbulation,
become a living reality for every person who had ever lived.
All the pain and suffering and war and desperation would somehow be replayed
and made right through the intercession of the mystery of higher dimensions
and backward flowing time.
The wave of understanding that had been gaining since the 27th of January
was now about to crest.
The wave was so strong as to be nearly visible in everything around us.
The lenticular shape of the approaching lapis seemed to be everywhere that I looked.
Every shape and form around me was pregnant with its unearthly, opalescent depths.
Before our small party of fellow explorers, Dennis and I wept and exalted,
addressing the living and the dead with equal candor,
saying things that should have been said years before
and things that could not have even been imagined only hours before.
We knew that we were behaving bizarrely and were highly emotional,
but the intensifying wave of understanding that had gathered itself around us
explained all of this.
It was we were assured and assured each other
because ahead of us in time the experimental attempt at hyper-carbulation
had already succeeded.
So many lines of probable fate were sweeping toward the staggering moment of culmination
that its inevitability was already sending shock waves and distorted images
of the millennium crashing backwards through time.
Dennis recently reminded me that I assured all present
that so inevitable had our experiment become
that if we did not tend the fire and brew the Yahye,
then these things would be done by themselves.
Dry wood rustling out of the forest gathering itself into the ring of fire stones
and there to burst into flames.
The Yahye spontaneously shredding and immersing itself in the waiting pot of water.
At the time, this was an easy extrapolation from the hurricane of shamanic gnosis
and synchronistic coincidences that was both confirming our success to come
and at the same time distorting the very ontological basis of our reality
as the inevitable choro of time and necessity narrowed around us
and the black hole of a hyper-carbulation attempt strengthened its grip on us
and drew us with ever increasing inevitability toward the singularity in time
where an unimaginable transformation awaited all on our planet.
True Hallucinations (Part 7)
A transformation so beyond rational understanding that its scattered and distorted reflections
were mysteries in the keeping of reasoned flaunting religions that have haunted human
thinking since the dimmest beginnings.
Running through my mind then for the first time in years was a childhood carol long forgotten.
O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light.
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.
There was another aspect to the reveries in which I was immersed.
This was something that I imagine is conventionally known as remembering previous incarnations.
There was an influx of information about being another person in another time, but the time
was fantastically ancient and the world portrayed without any historical validity.
Perhaps these images come from the same depths that are the source for some people of the
conviction that Atlantis or Lemuria once ruled a world no trace of which remains.
My reincarnation memories were not of life as a citizen in one of those occult locales.
Rather my reminiscence was set in the mountainous heart of central Asia.
It was the age of these images that made me gasp, for even as the images filled my mind
an invisible presence was assuring me that this was a human existence lived out eight
thousand years in the past.
I recognized myself as a reflex of Tinggi, the first shaman, a powerful magician and
an inhabitant of Tibet eight millennia ago.
Not a primitive, but a technician of hallucinogens and crystals whose long gaze pierced into
future time, even to the resolution of our little expedition poised on the brink of the
perfection of the opus.
It was as though I understood myself to be on one level the living reflex and tool of
this eldritch ancestor, a super shaman actually in charge of the effort to recreate the ontological
status that all shamans have always claimed, that of being able to travel to the stars
and the places of the dead and return.
That was the task of this Pune master, touching many events and minds in the long and meandering
river of centuries.
Such was the mood of the last tape.
It told far more than I can remember.
It was intimate and intense.
I suppose that its loss was unavoidable, even as all that was happening to us seemed necessary,
like the necessary fulfilment of prophecies.
We relit the candle only long enough to determine that everyone wanted to continue and agreed that Dennis' next attempt should be made from a sitting position on the floor of the hut.
This was done, again a long whirring yodel, strange and unexpectedly mechanical each time it was sounded.
We suggested a break before the third attempt, but Dennis was quite agitated and eager to "bring it through" as he put it.
We settled in for the third yell and when it came it was like the others but lasted much longer and became much louder.
It was like an electric siren wailing atomic attack over the still night jungle.
It went on and on.
And when it finally died away that too was like the dying away of a siren. Then there in the absolute darkness of our Amazon hut was silence, the silence of the transition from one world to another, the silence of the Gidmeagogap.
[Silence]
And then the sound of the crowing of a cock, the cock of the mission. Three times his call came, clear but from afar, seeming to confirm us as actors on a stage, part of a dramatic contrivance.
Dennis had said that if the experiment were successful the mushroom would be obliterated, the low temperature phenomena would explode the cellular material and what would be left would be a standing wave, a violet ring of light the size of the mushroom cap.
That would be the holding mode of the lens or whatever it was. Then someone would take command of it whose DNA it is, they are it. It is a mind which can be seen and held in one's hand.
It is indestructible. It is all space and time, the universe but a monad, a monadic plasma which contains all space and time including one's own mind.
Dennis leaned toward the mushroom standing on the raised experiment area. Look!
As I followed his gaze he raised his arm and across the fully expanded cap of the mushroom fell the shadow of his Ruana.
Clearly but only for a moment as the shadow bisected the glowing carpet for I saw not a mature mushroom but a planet, the earth, lustrous and live, blue and tan and dazzling white.
It is our world. His voice was full of unfathomable emotion. I could only nod. I did not understand but I saw it clearly although my vision was only a thing of a moment. We have succeeded.
I don't understand and I did not. Let's walk to the pasture. I need to think.
Ev was exhausted by the night's activities and probably glad to have us leave her in the hut with the encroaching dawn promising some sort of new day.
As we let ourselves down the log ladder to the ground I was struck by the scene of utter confusion that our activities had left behind during the last frantic hours of brewing the night before.
Our huge fire was now only white ashes. The waste from the ahi making was piled beside it looking like a mound of beached seaweed.
Everything seemed strewn about. This we walked through shaking the stiffness out of our bodies and stopping at the small stream that crossed the path to splash water in our faces.
We had not spoken. It was Dennis who broke the silence.
You are wondering if we succeeded. Yes, what happened? Your writing heard on this effect so what's going on? Well, I'm not sure how but I know we have succeeded. Let me try to understand this.
As we walked on my own mind was racing with questions and as we walked along Dennis occasional comments were, it burst over me, answers to questions that I was thinking but not articulating.
I stopped in my tracks. I clearly formed a question in my mind. Dennis head bent beside me began to answer without waiting for me to articulate my thought aloud. I was dumbfounded. Was this it then I asked that he had somehow acquired telepathic powers?
No, there was more to it than that. According to Dennis the bonding of the harmony into his DNA had given him immediate access to an enormous cybernetically stored fund of information and this information was freely available to anyone in the world who looked into their mind and preface their question with the word Dennis.
The absurdity of the second half of this proposition struck me as utterly too much but naturally at his insistence I made the test. I picked up a small plant growing at my feet and closed my eyes and asked, "Dennis, what is the name of this plant?"
Immediately and without any effort of my own that I was aware of a scientific name now forgotten popped into my head. I tried the same thing again with a different plant and to my amazement received a different answer.
The experiment seemed to secure that something was giving answers in my head but I could not tell if they were correct or not. I was shaken. When we had left the hut on this walk I was sure that we had failed and that we had to talk over revising our approach.
I even felt relief since the obsessive nature of it all had been a strain but now as we walked along and I could hear a voice in my head that was answering however inanely or inaccurately any question put to it I was less sure.
Dennis was oddly preoccupied yet he assured me that his effort had succeeded and that all over the world the wave of hypercarbulation was sweeping through the human race eliminating the distinction between the individual and the community as everyone discovered themselves spontaneously pushing off into a telepathic ocean whose name was that of its discoverer, Dennis McKenna.
As I watched my mind and listened to my brother rave I began to realize that the experiment had indeed unleashed some sort of bizarre effect.
Why it was that I was able to make the leap from assuming that we were having a peculiar localized experience to the idea that we were key parts of a mankind wide phenomena is an important unanswered question speaking volumes about my susceptibility to suggestion at that moment.
I was quite simply the victim of a cognitive hallucination that is rather than a visual experience of something not actually present a hallucination that is a total shift of the highest levels of our cognitive relationship to the world.
The psilocybin induced cognitive hallucination may be impossible and unlikely seem probable and reasonable. I was becoming flooded with ecstasy as the realization came over me that we had passed the Omega point and that we were now operating in the first few moments of the millennium.
Both of us could feel the excitement in us rising toward the realization that the world was now somehow radically different, totally different in a fundamental way.
Dennis spoke.
So, this must be it. We have not condensed the stone into visible space but we have generated it in our heads. It does not immediately appear as a visible vehicle but first as a teaching, the teaching we hear in our heads right now, later.
The word will be made flesh.
I could only stare at my brother. Who is he and how is he able to know and do these things? I could only wonder.
Now mother and possibly lots of dead people will be showing up soon. Young, he will doubtless come and Einstein too and by God I want to hear what they have to say.
We were embracing each other and laughing. I felt as though I was being led like a little child for no reason I had ceased to question.
Rather I felt an urge to see other people and feel their immersion in the new heaven and the new earth.
True Hallucinations (Part 8)
As I set out toward the river, I seemed to myself to be nearly weightless.
I felt reborn.
I felt full of energy and bursting with good health and vitality.
Over a period of a few minutes I had passed from weary, disgruntled skeptic to ecstatic
believer.
Looking back on it, I believe that for me this was the critical juncture.
Why did I not question Dennis more closely?
Was I somehow self-hypnotized?
Did the unfamiliar setting, the restricted diet, strain, and expectations push me into
a place where I was unable to resist participation of a sort in the world of my brother's bizarre
ideation?
Why was I unable to maintain my detached and skeptical viewpoint?
In some sense this willing suspension of disbelief is the crux of the matter and, I believe,
of many a close-encounters situation.
The other plays with us and approaches us through the imagination, and then a critical
juncture is reached.
To go beyond this juncture requires abandonment of will and habit.
At that moment the world turns lazily inside out and what was hidden is revealed—a magical
modality, a different epigenetic landscape than one has known, a landscape become real.
The UFO is a creature of this previously invisible landscape.
It is lord of the skies of the imagination, able to carry anyone with it who will but
play, and then let the play deepen and deepen.
As I walked along that perfect morning, no
such soothingly objective thoughts came to me.
Instead I assumed that my body was metabolizing its way toward the resurrection body that
we had expected to be part of the success of the experiment.
I did not know what was happening in the world or far away, but I did know that since the
moment Dennis had pronounced the experiment finished, I had felt an expanding and ever-increasing
wave of energy and understanding unfold through my being.
As I walked along, what seemed to me then a profound realization came over me.
It was that we are all enlightened beings, that only our inability to see and feel ourselves
and others as we really are keeps us from shedding our guilt and seeing ourselves as
enlightened.
I felt very good, I felt better than I had ever felt before, but I couldn't believe what
seemed to be happening.
It was about a ten or fifteen minute walk to Dave and Vanessa's place.
By now it was about seven a.m.
The sun was well up in the sky and it was a beautiful day.
As I walked across the pasture I would stop and say "Dennis" and the response was instantaneous.
It was just like thought.
It confused me.
I kept stopping and doing this, sitting down on the grass.
Is it alright?
What is it?
I don't know.
I can't understand what it means.
I walked on toward the river.
As I walked along, I did some experiments.
I said "Terrence, Terrence, it was very much like talking to yourself."
Then I said "Dennis" and the thing was instantly there, just ready to do business.
Then I said "Makenna, Makenna" and it was still there.
I realized that I couldn't reach it with my first name, but I could reach it with my last
name.
I could not understand what was going on.
I was pondering these kinds of things when I arrived at the riverside house of Vanessa
and Dave.
They were still in their hammocks asleep, but crowded around the door even this early
in the morning were a group of wide-eyed, with-toto children.
As I pushed my way through them, my gaze fell on each and I thought "You are enlightened.
And you.
And you."
My arrival was the first event of the day for Dave and Vanessa.
I told them that we had succeeded, that success was not a condensed hyper-object, but a teaching.
I asked them to dress and come with me.
While they were gathering their hammocks, they told me that during the darkest part
of the night, Dave had awakened, hysterical, in a state not unlike the condition induced
in him by the electrical storm the evening before.
They had been very agitated during the night and could only attribute this to what we had
been doing.
I was interested in all of this, but seemed to hear it as from a long distance.
I wanted to return to the forest and see what else would unfold.
In my mind I was recalling something else Dennis had said a few minutes before in the
pasture.
He had said that the demarcation between day and night, the dawn line, was now making a
twenty-four hour sweep around the world.
A sweep that began at the dawn moment when the experiment at La Chorrera was finished.
Throughout the world, traffic and factories were coming to a halt.
People were standing around and realizing that someone, somewhere, had broken through.
That this was not a day like any other day.
Dave and Vanessa followed me back to the forest, grumbling a good part of the way.
When we had gone slightly past the place where I had parted from Dennis, we came upon something
which could not at first be fitted into any set of expectations.
This was Dennis' rwana and shirt, discarded in the middle of the path.
Next came a pair of pants, and then further on two sweat socks.
And though I was to learn this only later, his glasses and his boots had also been hurled
away.
Following this trail of cast-off garments led us back to the hut in the forest.
There we found Evan Dennis, both naked and sitting on the floor of the hut, discussing
and doing the "Ask Dennis" meditation.
With the comment that you cannot receive a proper initiation unless you are naked, Dennis
insisted that we take off our clothes.
Vanessa peeled and Dave and I followed her example.
The presence of the mushroom was there, and it seemed to be saying, "Take off your clothes!
Throw everything away!
Everything is breaking!
All objects are no good to you now!
Throw everything away!
You do not need it anymore!"
We all looked at each other, glossy pubic hair and secret genitals now in the sunshine.
I rolled a joint then.
We sat in a circle and smoked.
We told Dave and Vanessa about the teaching and urged them to try it with varying degrees
of success since a voice in the head is a very subjective thing.
If one has it, there is no doubt.
If one does not have it, it seems a very murky thing.
Everything was very amicable, except that Dennis was showing a tendency to talk right through
other people's comments as if they were not present.
It was as though he were on a different time track from the rest of us since he really
seemed unable to realize that someone else was talking.
We thought that it was logical to untie our hammocks from the house and take nothing but
our hammocks and go naked into the jungle, tie the hammocks in a tree, and then get into
these hammocks.
We would then explore the mode because clearly you could do more than ask or answer questions.
The door was standing open.
God alone knew what one could do.
I asked the thing in my mind what should be done and had received instruction that we
should visually meditate on our lives and, starting from the present, trace back through
our entire life, encountering and setting things right with every sentient creature
that we had ever wronged.
When we reached the end of this process, we would leave our bodies and be somehow free
in the dimension of absolute freedom that seemed so near.
Lying in our hammocks, we set out to meditate our way to hyperspace.
I could see myself at La Chorrera, then going down the trail to El Encanto, up the river
to Leguizamo, and back to Bogota, back to Canada, and at each point I would meet the
people that I had lived my life with and I would say, "We got it!"
"I'm sorry, I hope I didn't offend you too much, back there in 3D.
It's all over now, it's all over."
I could see people.
Immediately I reached out for all of them.
I seemed to be able to reach them.
"We're in the Amazon," I explained to each, "and now we're going home, or someplace."
The vision had an utterly bizarre quality.
Tears welled up behind my closed eyelids.
It was very peculiar.
The voice of the teacher spoke in my head, "You've found it, this is it.
It's all over now, there is no more.
Within a few hours the superstructure of human civilization is going to collapse and your
species is going to go to Jupiter and then to the stars.
A day of high adventure dawns for man at last."
[laughter]
At first the images welling up behind closed eyes seemed to be deepening and growing more
intense, but after an hour it was clear that they were actually fading.
One by one we pulled ourselves out of the stupor that the morning heat and being in
the hammock had induced.
We were talking and talking, analyzing and analyzing.
Dennis seemed most out of it.
Dave and Vanessa, uncertain that anything at all had really happened, was distant and
I was feeling definitely immersed in the surreal perception that had been mine since the chaotic
opening of the day.
Something was wrong.
Expectation was outrunning reality.
Nothing had happened.
It came out that no one could hear Dennis in their mind except me.
They were all actually wondering what was going on.
We had entered the next phase, which was a period of confusion for all.
Dennis was disengaging from reality.
I would talk to him and he didn't know anyone was speaking to him.
He was still breaking into conversations because he didn't know anyone else was speaking.
A visit to the priest's outdoor shower was suggested and seized upon since we were all
filthy and covered with the grime of fire tending.
We gathered up our scattered clothing and during this effort it came out that Dennis
had thrown his glasses away along with his boots and everything else.
Disheveled and disoriented we set off, searching unsuccessfully for the lost pair of glasses
as we retraced our path to the mission.
We were a group of people of many minds about the previous several hours.
Some assuming that this was a day like any other.
Others assuming that this was the first day of the age at the end of time.
A group of Wetoto gazed at us as we passed and then roared with appreciative laughter.
"They know, they know what has been achieved," the voice in my head assured me.
They were certainly beaming and chortling about something.
On we walked toward the mission and its shower in the sunshine.
Dennis would not stop talking.
The consensus was building that we had a crisis on our hands, but it wasn't yet out of control.
We agreed that Yahyeh is very peculiar and thought that the passage of a few hours would
smooth everything out.
That was everyone's conclusion except Dennis and my own.
It was no longer really possible to communicate with Dennis.
My conclusion was that something had happened, that he had done something, that some kind
of odd principle had been manipulated.
But it wasn't as we thought it was and so we were cast, we knew not where.
I was calm.
I was at least participating in the social situation.
Even though there were tears of joy streaming down my face, I wasn't out of touch with reality.
I said, "We'll wait for tomorrow.
Dennis will come down."
Everyone seemed to be finding their way back to their normal psychic equilibrium, save
Dennis and myself.
I was burdened with odd but wonderfully expanded perceptions, while his wandering ideas and
wild eyes indicated that he was having some difficulty in getting his feet on the ground.
After our shower and on the way back to the forest, I mentioned all of these things to
him, but he replied in riddles and with mimicry of dead relatives so that I could get nothing
out of him.
I continued to assume that a night's sleep would set him right.
I insisted that he rest in his hammock when we returned to the camp, which he did while
the rest of us set things in order.
Chapter 12 In the Vortex
It was decided that Vanessa and Dave would stay the night at our hut, so there two hammocks
were left hanging along with our three.
It was a crowded situation.
We dined well that evening, and except for the occasional oblique or plain incomprehensible
comment from Dennis, the surface of things seemed to be restored.
Vanessa's ankle remained bad, and much attention was directed toward this difficulty, almost
in tribute to its being so palpable in contrast to most of what was going on.
I felt utterly changed and made new, removed from everyone and content to let events unfold
as they would, assured by the new thing inside of me that however things appeared, all was
very, very well.
The last rave of this long, amazing day came after dinner in the firelight when from his
hammock Dennis broke the silence to explain that this night in our dreams we would learn
a series of things that would end with us severing our connection to our bodies long
before morning.
We would reassemble in our perfected astral forms on the bridge of a starship that was
in geosynchronous orbit 22,000 miles above the Amazon basin.
This was the second of the self-limiting prophecies that had been made since the experiment.
The first had been the effort to meditate backward to one's birth attempted that morning.
In retrospect, I now see that this eschatological hysteria was one of the chief ways in which
my thinking seemed radically different.
Over the next weeks and years there would be many more of these self-testing prophecies,
many scenarios of the possible way the world might undergo eschatological transformation.
Four days from the experiment, five, seven, ten, sixteen, twenty-one, forty, sixty-four,
all were times awaited with hope and willful suspension of disbelief and all came and went
with the eschatons still all-pervading, still very elusive.
The idea of a dimension-roving lens vehicle once articulated was never far away.
This statement was also the first appearance of the UFO image in Dennis' thoughts since
the experiment, a theme to be articulated in a thousand ways in the days that were to
follow.
The equation lapis equals self equals UFO was the operating assumption of Dennis' long
voyage of self-discovery and return.
With these images of death in sleep and rebirth inside the starship ringing in our minds,
we turned in, thoroughly exhausted.
I stress that the hut was crowded with hammocks strung from every available beam.
It was difficult to move about without communicating that to one's neighbors through the tugging
and twisting of the many ropes.
We must have retired about ten o'clock.
I slept soundly until sometime many hours later that I took to be two or so.
I rose to take the traditional middle-of-the-night piss that the use of condensed milk induces
in the explorer.
I sat up in my hammock, struggled for matches, and then lit a candle.
In the silent night I heard the inrush of my own exclamation of amazement.
An intense triple-layered corona of light was shimmering out from the candle flame for
a distance of about four feet.
It was an intense iridescent blue alternating with an equally pure orange.
I was immediately reminded of the aura of light that surrounds the body of the resurrected
Christ in the painting of that subject by Matthias Grunewald.
I understood that he must have seen the same thing that I was seeing now and later incorporated
it into his resurrection.
Simultaneously, as though I was having a yet deeper thought, I somehow intuitively understood
that the distortion or polarizing of the light of the flame that I was seeing was an effect
caused by the distortion of psychic space-time induced by our experiment and the nearby presence
of the lapis.
This thought was followed by another.
Perhaps the temporal and spatial distance from the stone could be gauged by the intensity
of the colors in the aura of light around a simple candle.
The distortion from light from a candle to act as a detector of the philosopher's stone.
I thought of Diogenes prospecting for the good.
Was that what he was doing?
I thought of the phrase, "It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness,"
and I laughed.
I awakened Eve and she sleepily confirmed the colors around the candle, but it communicated
nothing to her of what it communicated to me.
She rolled over and when I returned from going outside, she was snoring softly.
As I climbed back to my hammock, I counted heads and noticed that everyone was present
and seemingly completely asleep.
I lay awake a long time thinking, "All seemed still."
As breakfast unfolded the following morning, the sixth of March, it became clear that the
restful sleep I had imagined we had all shared the night before had been anything but that.
From Dennis, still disorganized with ample comments, it emerged that he had or imagined
he had a very active night.
Closely questioned, it came out that he was completely convinced that sometime during
the night he had arisen and dressed and then had a series of nocturnal adventures that
involved going alone in the darkness to the thundering immensity of the choro over a mile
away, then returning to climb and spend some time in a large tree near the edge of a mission
before making his way back across the pasture and returning to his hammock strung among
all the others.
The thought of him wandering around during the night on those trails without his glasses,
falling in and out of shamanic ecstasy, perhaps howling and otherwise paleolipically comporting
himself was too much for me.
It was a breach of the collective cool and even though I was 90% certain that it had
never really happened, I was determined to eliminate all possibility of such rambles
in the future.
Dennis' story was an amazing description of a shamanic night journey.
He said he had gone to the choro and meditated in the mission cemetery we had visited before.
He had begun to return to camp when he confronted a particularly large moracius tree near where
the path skirted the edge of the mission.
On impulse he had climbed it, not at all unaware that the ascent of the world tree is the central
motif of Siberian shamanic journeying.
As he climbed the tree he felt the flickering polarities of many archetypes, and finally
as he reached the highest point in his ascent, something which he called the vortex opened
ahead of him like a swirling enormous doorway into time, he could see the cyclothian megaliths
of Stonehenge, and beyond those ringstones revolving at a different speed an entire plane,
the outline of the pyramids, marble faceted and gleaming as they have not done since the
days of pharaonic Egypt, and yet further into the turbulent maw of the vortex he saw to
mysteries ancient long before the advent of man, titanic archetypal forms on worlds unimagined
by us, the arcane machineries of sentient agencies that swept through this part of the
galaxy when our planet was young and its surface barely cooled, this machinery, these gibbering
abysses touched with the cold of interstellar space and eon-consuming time rushed down upon
him, he fainted, and time, who can say how much time passed by him?
He next found himself in the pasture, a few hundred feet from his newly discovered axis
mundi, if he fell from the tree it did not seem to have hurt him, amazement, exultation,
fear and confusion were all present in his thoughts, the continuum seemed to be shredding
and ripping itself to pieces before his eyes, time and space swirling the artifacts of twenty
thousand years of human striving into a vortex of apocalyptic contradictions, in that state
of fear and exultation in the depth of man's destiny among the stars, Dennis returned to
our camp and noiselessly returned to his hammock or awakened there from a dream of the same
thing.
Twenty-four hours had passed since the attempt to hyper-carbo-late human DNA, it was apparent
that Dennis was not pulling out of the induced state of shamanic excitement as quickly as
we had anticipated, two choices presented themselves to explain the situation, the strain
of the journey and the recent psilocybin tripping had contributed to activate a shamanic archetype
in Dennis that had been latent all along but which was now overt and carrying a strong
transference potential to which I was succumbing by being unable to recognize my brother's
condition as a potentially pathological state, this was the position that Vanessa and Dave
leaned toward and was the source of much of our difference of opinion on how to proceed,
a second explanation takes a biochemical rather than a psychological approach, it says that
Dennis had through his unusual diet of drugs and the experiment he performed inhibited
some enzyme system that would normally return one from the heights of a hallucinogenic trip
but in this case had somehow become inoperative, the most likely candidate for this would be
the MAO, monoamine oxidase system which is responsible for rendering many hallucinogens
into inoperative byproducts, the phenomenon of irreversible MAO inhibition is known to
occur with some drugs and is a condition that takes nearly two weeks to correct itself,
however the compounds in Banisteriopsis copy are known to usually reverse their MAO inhibition
in four to six hours, nevertheless as subsequent events showed this explanation is doubtless
some part of the true story.
After years of thought my own explanation continues to lean heavily on the second idea
for an operational explanation, I do not believe that Dennis was predisposed to an archetypal
submergence, I believe that he did in a single moment somehow bind all the MAO in his body
and that his long derangement was due to the lag time that was required to rebuild his
MAO level from a complete and sudden depletion, I believe that this sudden depletion was caused
by his experiment and that vocally induced resonance cancelling of the forces that normally
operate in these molecules caused major changes in his body chemistry, in short I believe
that he induced an irreversible MAO inhibition in his body through the use of psilocybin
and his voice and will.
If this is true then the implication for humanity may be every bit as great as we in our inflated
state of mind supposed since it hints at a means by which mankind might explore the parallel
continuum whose interaction with our own existence is signified by the visionary experience,
it may well be the effect that is the crack in a door that once flung open will lead us
to all the worlds teeming in our dreams and imaginations, it is an effect to be studied
and learned from, today years after the experiment it still seems full of great promise, my continued
interest in these matters is based on the personal belief that some unusual and still
unconfirmed effect was at work in our experiment, something like the principle of resonance
cancelling that Dennis was so intrigued by.
Breakfast of the second day following the experiment was closed with a hot discussion
of whether Dennis had really gone to the choro or only dreamed that he had done so, as the
rhetoric exhausted itself Vanessa drew me away from the hut and walked along with me
as I went to the spring for water, we were to have a talk, the gist of which was that
since there were wide differences in diagnosis of what was going on so there were wide differences
concerning what should be done, but since Dennis is your brother and you have strong
opinions on the subject I will defer in favor of what you think should be done here, at
least for the moment.
I was grateful for the margin of time contained in Vanessa's chosen course, the whole question
revolving around Dennis' state of mind concerned how and especially when he would pull out
of it, any theory had to come forth with an operational prediction on that vital point.
I understood from Vanessa's demeanor that we should be pretty much to ourselves in the
forest house, we could expect her and Dave only as visitors and already the possibility
of retreat from the jungle isolation was being announced as a faint but growing theme.
It all fell into place from the second day onward, Ev became a kind of liaison with the
rest of the world of La Chorrera, she arrived in the late afternoon and departed each morning,
taking an evening and morning meal and being very game about it all considering that she
had only fallen in with our little group three weeks before.
And thus was the stage set for the next five days from the fifth to the tenth of March,
the chaos at La Chorrera.
During this time Dennis very slowly got better, he became more coherent, he said that the
experience had catapulted him to the edge of the Raimonian topology of the universe,
that he had to come back in and that he was regressing inward through level after level
after level.
Very strange things went on during this period, he could hear my mind working, he was telepathic
there was no doubt about it, he could do perfect voice imitations of our mother and father,
he became all these people doing it perfectly and there was much more, a vision of twentieth
century history, building the lens and the end of time.
He said that the discovery of a higher physical dimension was ahead of us a few years in time
but somehow linked up to Egypt, to acacia tryptamine cults, to Tibet eight thousand
years ago, to Punpo shamanic magic, all these ideas in constant circulation and he talked
and performed constantly.
No notes exist from that period, so filled was I with the assumption that we were abiding
in eternity, that I felt no need to write at all.
As the world seemed to me to grow more perfect I determined at some point I would write a
poem, but that moment never came, nothing is coherent or connected from those five days.
I remember that they were the most intense times that I have ever gone through and that
there was not an emotional or intellectual chord in the human register that was not rung
again and again in a thousand variations.
In the notes made week after those times I could only summarize those five days by labeling
them absurdly, fire, water, earth, man, peace.
I sat and Dennis raved, without his glasses his eyes were wild and unsettling to look
into.
Since the night of his contested shamanic ramble I had formed the intention not to sleep
but to stand watch constantly day and night.
For the next nine days I neither slept nor needed sleep, though I know that such cases
are on record for years after the experience the lack of a need for sleep for nine days
which I personally underwent seemed to me the most solid argument for the reality of
the forces that we experimented with, for I did not merely not need to sleep but was
constantly thinking in a rich, calm, image-filled way that made my normal thought process seem
a pale and jerkily animated shadow of the mental power that I felt throughout the sleepless
period and long afterward.
The time that we were moving through seemed made of the reflections of what had preceded
it and what was to follow.
The first night that followed upon my decision not to sleep was passed in deep reverie and
a growing amazement that I was actually functioning without any apparent need of sleep.
In the last of the darkness before dawn, at a time that I felt was exactly the time when
we had performed the experiment two days before, I heard Dennis stir in his hammock inside the
hut.
Then I heard, low but strong and clear, the same eulating howl that had catapulted us
into a new world forty-eight hours before.
Three times it sounded, just as something in my mind assured me that it would.
The last howl was drawn out as before.
It rose and fell for perhaps a minute.
Then, as it faded away, I again heard the cock crow drifting across the whitening air
from the mission.
Why did these things happen with such symmetry, as though a huge ordered form was trying to
surface in the very organization of the reality around us?
Sunrise flamed across the sky and another of those titanic days began, the thing in
my mind stirring to meet the challenge to reason that each new moment seemed charged
with.
All that remains of those times are images and incidents.
Only metaphors acted as sustained themes.
All was myth-making and image-making, mercurial, meta-leveled, ever-flowing.
The end.
Chapter 13, At Play in the Fields of the Lord.
Ev returned with Dave and Vanessa to the river that morning and for the first time in two
days Dennis and I were alone and the atmosphere was one of calm.
I busied myself sorting through and arranging the equipment.
Our campsite was again spick and span.
Dennis was alternately calm or into long harangs on a supracosmic scale, a la the star maker
of Olaf Stapleton.
He imitated, personified, described, and otherwise invoked immense gnostic and Manichean entities
that were struggling on a cosmic scale, but not without humor, occasionally moaning out
that he felt like an old Mandayan.
Then he would collapse with laughter at this cleverness.
I sat in my hammock and verbally participated as much as I could in all of this, though
it was clear that Dennis had no difficulty in maintaining a conversation on his own.
In fact, he seemed to have hit the main vein of the fountain of sprung verse.
I closed my eyes for a moment and there fully formed beneath my eyelids was the first of
what I call teachings or messages.
It was a beautiful recursive geometric form.
The voice in my mind informed me that this was the Valentine curve.
Obviously the four petals of the curve looked somewhat like a Valentine or a bleeding heart.
I thought for an instant of the heart-shaped fruit I had fashioned into a water pipe.
No obvious connection.
The image slid.
I went and got my notebook and drew the Valentine curve.
At first crudely, later much more smoothly, it made me think of Basil Valentine, an alchemist,
author of the triumphal chariot of antinomy.
I had read the book but could remember virtually nothing about it.
I thought too of Valentinia, Alexandrian Gnostic of the second century and his doctrine that
the material world was the condensed emotion of the errant Sophia who had selfishly created
a universe without undergoing any union but with herself.
The condensation of emotion into matter, the theme was hair-raising.
It was the theme that had brought us to the Amazon and alchemy was the gnosis of material
transformation.
Clues seemed everywhere.
Everything was webbed together in a magical fabric of meaning and affirmation and mystery.
The ideas of all sorts formed in my mind unbidden and would lead inevitably to some further
expansion of the set of themes that we had organized our lives around.
The first day the voice inside my head suggested that I set out the record I had kept for several
years of my I Ching throws, it having been for several years my habit to throw the I
Ching at each new and full moon and to record the throws on a slip of paper which I kept
inside the back cover of my copy.
At the prompting of the inner voice I went through this record of throws looking for
an instance when I had thrown the first hexagram.
Finding that I returned to the beginning of the list looking now for a record of the second
hexagram being thrown and so on.
My list of throws covered three years and contained about 80 throws and their changes.
After about a half hour of this exercise I had determined that according to my record
I had thrown all of the 64 hexagrams in the three years leading up to that moment.
This mildly interesting unlikelihood was very significant seeming to me.
It proved that I had a kind of secret identity that I was in the process of uncovering.
It proved that I was somehow a reflection of the microcosm and had been chosen somehow
to be in the situation in which I found myself.
I was extremely agitated at this personal verification of the ordered pattern whose
design I was discovering everywhere in my life.
I composed myself and then at the strong prompting of the inner wave of understanding I quietly
burned the record of my I Ching throws.
It was a very uncharacteristic thing for me to do.
True Hallucinations (Part 9)
Dennis watched all of this and then delivered himself of but one of the many riddles that he
was to propound over the next few days. "What can you do with a hole in a stick that you can't do
with a stick in a hole?" he bellowed across the sandy expanse to where I stood by the fire.
The answer involved the idea that a pipe was the vehicle of dimensional travel and that was what
you could do and thus the first day of the reversal past. A reasonable conclusion would have been to
suppose that Dennis was toxically schizophrenic and that we should leave the Amazon. What muddied the
water considerably was me because I was comparatively normal except for one thing.
I insisted that everything was all right and that Dennis somehow knew exactly what he was doing.
It was okay I insisted. He had done what he set out to do and now people should try to relax.
The reason I felt this way was because it had become very clear that though I had not known
anything about how he had done the experiment or the theory that from the dawn moment when we had
piled out of our hammocks to look at the mushroom something was very bizarre about me. Something had
happened to me. It was true. I was in a very strange place. It was because of having close
contact with the thing that was like a teacher. It let me know things. I knew things which I couldn't
possibly know. Ev had gone through the experiment but nothing at all had happened to her. The other
people seemed very distant. They couldn't understand at all what was happening and preferred to reject
us. Everyone behaved oddly. Everyone thought everyone else was crazy but everyone relative
to their own normal behavior behaved very oddly. The main thing the teacher said was do not worry.
Do not worry because there is something that you have to get straight about. Your brother will
recover. Your companions will take care of him. Do not worry but listen. You have to get this down.
Within hours after the experiment this started impinging on me. Something that I must figure out.
The next morning Dennis seemed to me slightly more down to earth but to a degree so slight over the
day before that it was a matter of opinion whether he had made any improvement at all.
I noticed with interest that while he seemed disoriented and his ideation was in structure
as wild and woolly as ever in content there had been a definite sort of improvement.
On the day before he had seemed to be spread over so vast an amount of space and time that there was
little to be identified out of the cosmic churning that he was undergoing. The day before to find even
our own galaxy in his mind had been impossible. On the second day he awoke within the galaxy and his
visions and fantasies remained within it. Had that been the only instance of his telescoping back into
himself it would not be worth noting but the fact was that each step of his return to a normal state
of mind was accomplished this way. The day after he reached the confines of the galaxy he entered
the solar system condensing through its planets over several days until he identified only with
the earth coalescing and condensing through the ecology of his home world he came to think of
himself as all humanity and was able to vividly relive all of its history. Later still he became
the embodiment of all the members of our vast and peculiar Irish family. Again later he was resolved
down into only our immediate family and from there to the resolution of the dualism involved in the
question as to whether he was Dennis or Terrence and finally and thankfully he came to rest with
the realization that he was Dennis returned from the edge of the universe of mind restored and
reborn a shaman in the fullest sense of the word. But that recovery was 20 days into the future
from the morning of the 7th of March when we walked to the pasture just as we had on the
morning after the experiment. We walked to the top of a small rise on which grew a young tree
Ama the we toto word for brother had become one of the many new nicknames that Dennis had created
for me now as we walked along we kept our eyes open for mushrooms as had become our habit even
though all thought of eating mushrooms was now behind us Dennis strode ahead of me and made his
way to this tree bending down and parting the grasses at the base of the tree he pointed to
the letters A M A carved in the bark it was carving at least several years old the incident
was confusing how had Dennis known the carving was there and what did it mean anyway he answered
my questions by sweeping his hand toward the dawn horizon and announcing that this was the planet
Venus or the archetypal world of Venus I had no idea which these assertions that flew completely
in the face of reason were very hard to take and would enkindle in me brief stabs of despair for
his state of mind though most of the time I was able to convince myself that he was improving and
returning from the unseen world so vivid to him that he could see nothing else the idea of the
recreation of the scattered self as an alchemical act with immense personal and historical
significance was the tack that I used in trying to direct the developing fantasy of my brother
each morning for several days after the 5th of March we would walk to the pasture
and I would demand of him the stone neither of us perceived these goings on through anything like
the light of normal consciousness the world seemed filled with a near bending wonder and power
that assured me that all things were possible and that the course of things in the light of this
were moving in the right direction be amazed at nothing you are to receive the kingship of the
father I watched my own understanding of the connections between what we were doing
and classical alchemy moved by vast intuitive leaps to implicate Gerhard Doorn Robert Flood
and Count Michael Meyer the 36th emblem of Meyer's Atalanta fugiens is a wonderful visual pun that
connects the cube of Staupheria Cubensis with the UFO the hyper object seen in the sky it was an
image that was constantly before me through those times John Dee with his scrying stone and the
hieroglyphic monad is mixed up in the same set of images why did this circle get deeper into the
mystery than did their contemporaries and competition Nicholas Flamel and his wife their
legendary love affair and their unknown end mutus lieber a couple working at a furnace it almost
looks as though they are drying mushrooms just how sophisticated did alchemy become before
enlightenment science scattered the adepts and rendered their control language inoperable
so that in the pasture each foggy morning when I demanded of Dennis that he give me the philosopher's
stone it was both pressure upon him to reformulate his consciousness into a unity and a thing which
served as the focus for the transference potential that was so intense as to again and again threaten
to engulf us not sleeping being awake constantly I was in the world of the developing situation at
La Chorrera but also in another world into which my brother had become psychotopologically enmeshed
a world of a dimensional vortex beyond which seemed to be eternity the land of the dead
all human history and the UFOs it was a world whose unseen cybernetic chroniclers spoke
telepathically in our minds and revealed that we and all humanity were in the act of becoming once
again able to go between these dimensions and our own to re-establish the eschatological shamanism
lost scores of millennia ago at one point I picked up a stick and in the sandy lateritic soil of our
living area I scratched the shorthand symbol for and I called it the ampersand and for me its
binding fold in one corner of a quaternary structure was very satisfying I began to imagine
this symbol as the symbol of the hyperdimensional condensation come UFO I spoke of it as the ampersand
for several days then I called it the eschatron this I imagined as a basic unit of time the
combination and resonance among the set of eschatons in the universe determined which of
the possible worlds allowed by physics would actually undergo the formality of occurring
I also imagined that at the intuitively given end of time all the eschatons would resonate together
as a unity and thereby create an ontological transformation of reality it was at this time
that I had the first faint stirrings of thoughts that were to lead eventually to the quantified
wave hierarchy of time that is so thoroughly discussed in the invisible landscape these early
intuitions bore no resemblance to the final theory good that they did not for at that time I would
have been completely unable to understand the theory that I was finally to propound
it took years of reading and self-education to keep track of the things that the internal voice
was saying it had a holistic and system-oriented way of approaching things that did seem to be
slightly of another order not enough to be alarming but enough to again and again remind me
that the ideas I was producing were coming fully organized from somewhere else and I was nothing
more than a message decipherer hard-pressed to keep up with a difficult incoming code occasionally I
would seem to catch the mechanics of what was happening to us in action and from such experiences
I concluded that whatever it was that was happening part of it involved all the information
that we had ever accumulated down to the most trivial details so that it seemed that something
something with overtones of being from outer space or from another dimension was contacting us
and doing it through the peculiar means of using every thought in our heads to lead us into
telepathically induced scenarios of extravagant imagining or deep theoretical understanding of
things or in-depth scanning of strange times places and worlds the source of this unearthly
contact was the strafaria cubensis and our experiment our collective intelligence was not
compromised but what was compromised was the ability to reason to give a coherent account
of what was going on as paradox coincidence and general synchronistic strangeness began to
asymptotically increase and into the vacuum left by the collapse of reason rushed a staggering array
of exotic intuitions about why things were as they were
so
so
on the morning of the third day following the experiment shortly after breakfast
dennis announced a new teaching this was that one could see any point in time by closing one's eyes
visualizing an eight turning it on its side so as to approximate the sign for infinity
then mentally sliding the two closed rings over each other to form a circle then shrinking the
circle to a dot and thinking the word please and the target point in space time usually i knew not
whence these images came to him however this time i was amazed for i recalled with perfect clarity
that six weeks before shortly before i left vancouver british columbia where i was then living
i had gone to a dentist as part of the standard pre-travel tune-up while in the waiting room i
had read a several months old journal of some canadian education association in that journal
which i have not discussed with anyone was an article very short about teaching machines and
very young children the picture this scenario with which the article opened it may have even been
called picture this was of a child looking at a figure eight on a television screen
rolling it on its side squeezing it together etc it was a bit of media flotsam that my brother
or something working through my brother was able to lift right out of my mind weeks after i had
forgotten it something able to refashion and use the image in whatever absurd way that it will
so
chapter 14 looking backward two months after all of these experiences around mid-may of 1971
i was moved to try to sum up the particularly bizarre and possibly physics compromising
incidents that i could then recall here is what i wrote at that time a time when i was concerned
to refute the idea that schizophrenia was a magic word explaining all that we had undergone
i have almost two months perspective on the events surrounding our experiments at la charere
and though i can clearly recognize that both myself and my brother evinced the classic
symptomatology associated with the two generally distinguished categories of process schizophrenia
i am unable to make the assumption that our experiment was therefore nothing but two
simultaneously occurring instances of schizophrenia rather and with the full knowledge that such a
position argues that i may still be experiencing residual symptoms of the illness i maintain that
we were in fact dealing with an objective phenomena that though of a highly peculiar
nature inexorably bound up with psychic processes does have its basis in the molecular ideas we were
in the process of investigating as empirical evidence of this viewpoint i mentioned the
following points which seemed to me to set our experiment outside the realm of mental illness
the suddenness with which the symptoms developed following our actual experiment within a few
minutes after we completed our pre-planned experimental procedures my brother began to
disengage himself from the continuum of shared perceptions and at this same time i underwent
a willing suspension of disbelief and began to experience the cybernetic unit that we had
predicted would be a part of the effect we would cause if we were successful in our attempt to
generate a superconducting genetic matrix harm mean bond the integrated or dovetail aspect of our
shared disassociation meaning that though both of us were experiencing the symptoms of types
of schizophrenia the fantasy the ideas and the understanding which we were experiencing were
shared so that while my brother thought of me as the shaman messiah in all manifestations
i perceived him as the condensed mind lens making a return journey across the universe that might
have been one logical outcome of our experiment each of us alone would have given the clear
appearance of being deluded however each of us seemed to offer elusive proof of the correctness
of the position of the other i might add that though no one else could understand my brother's
peculiar mental processes i believed i could discern depth and an integrated understanding
which seemed to be behind them but at the same time i understood that his apparent lack of
integration was due to the fact that his thinking was moving backward in some fundamental way in the
same way that a film running in reverse seems to present a spectacle of wild and irrational confusion
yet manages in the end to have things in their proper places my brother's ideas and physical
movements seem to me to be simply the exact reverse of logical expectations
knowing that the brain seems to operate on the principle of a hologram dennis had speculated
before our experiment that he might receive a reverse image of my brain mind organization
for a brief time during the experiment in listening to his free associations after the reversal
i became certain that this had in fact occurred but for a much longer time than we had anticipated
in fact i still believe that our only error throughout this entire experiment and the events
following it has been our inability to correctly predict the duration of the process i believe that
our understanding of the mechanisms of the process aside from its duration have been correct though
still incomplete time is still in other words the crux of this matter at times my brother's free
associations consisted of incidents which i had experienced more than a year previously and more
than 10 000 miles from where dennis was then living incidents about which i had spoken to no one
dennis seemed to possess the ability to hear my mind working during the time after the experiment
i illustrate by recalling an incident when i was sitting outside of our jungle hut listening to
his free associations having noticed a few minutes before that his muscles were almost rigid with the
enormous physical energy associated with some types of schizophrenia i worried that he might
at some future time resist my efforts to keep him from wandering away on his archetypal errands which
constantly motivated him to try to leave our immediate living area it occurred to me that
with such strength he would could easily injure me or perhaps escape while mulling this disturbing
possibility for the first time i noticed that dennis had left his hammock and was standing
in the doorway of the hut in a perfect imitation of our father's voice he consoled me with the
spoken thought that dennis is a good lad and would never do a thing like that another incident
occurred seven days after the reversal began dennis announced that at 11 o'clock that night
the good shit would appear this was a reference to a kind of psilocybin enriched hashish that
dennis claimed he had encountered a few months before in the states this prediction of a material
transmutation is not so odd when the alchemical concerns and ideas which led us into this
experiment are recalled after this conversation ev and i returned to the forest house for the night
and dennis stayed at the river house as was our custom we smoked a bit of the local marijuana
before turning in during this process a small fragment fell still burning from the pipe and
as i picked it up to return it to the pipe the characteristic odor of asian hashish was very
noticeable i examined the pipe very carefully and though no change in the physical appearance of the
smoking mixture had occurred it was now definitely to my own satisfaction and that of skeptical ev
behaving exactly like hashish a drug absolutely unknown in the amazon in 1971
this phenomenon persisted for about five minutes and then slowly faded leaving us to the rational
continuum of normal behavior of materials it is to be regretted that this transmutation occurred
with a substance where any skeptic will be at ease inventing his scorn we are all familiar with
the facile view that potheads can't think straight but to anyone with in-depth involvement with these
two substances the difference is unmistakable this experience contained a number of parallels to the
nijuli movement among the lawangan people of barnio who in the early 1920s promulgated ideas
centering around the claim that a piece of resin had suddenly become longer through the influence
of a flute played nearby and that the lengthening of the resin foreshadowed human immortality
equally absurd and equally inexplicable was an incident that occurred on the morning of the
fifth day dennis was sitting raving to no one in particular with the normal camp life going on
around him i was sitting near the cooking fire sharpening the expedition's buck knife i listened
while dennis raved scanning his ramblings for a hint of a message suddenly i stopped my work are
you my taylor this in a strong english accent that seemed familiar to me from somewhere all these
reflections see it's me but where is my taylor my silly look look at you why you've got my knickers
on i blush deeply i looked at the ground and said nothing i felt very boxed in dennis was
imitating the conversation i had had with my little english friend after i had been
in the kitchen for a while and i was in the kitchen for a while and i was in the kitchen
with my little english friend after i had come looking for her and returned with her delirious
to my room in nepal more than a year before the crazy conversation between she and i that i had
never discussed with anyone save her was now booming out over our amazon clearing in the
mad voice of my brother it was hardly the sort of situation in which i wanted to exalt his prowess
and i was in the kitchen with my little dennis in a
room
the
time
strew it using the energy maps of the yiqing into a demonstrable idea that within its own terms
explicates the nature of time and space we turned an intuition into an idea model which explains the
interconnection of physical and psychological phenomena from the submolecular level to the
macrocosmic was this simply a creative outburst or was it part of a close encounter with the ufo
enigma after the first mushroom experience at la chorera we were involved with two ideas in
particular these were the motif of the teacher and the insect motif dennis and i could feel the
overwhelming presence of some unseen intelligent entity which seemed to be observing and sometimes
exerting influence in the situation to keep us moving gently toward a breakthrough because of
the bizarre nature of the dmt flash with its seeming stress upon themes alien insectile and
interstellar we were led to speculate that the nature of the teacher was somehow that of a
diplomat anthropologist come to give us the keys to galactarian citizenship we discussed this entity
in terms of a giant insect and through the insect trill of the amazon jungle at midday we seemed to
be able to discern a deeper harmonic buzz that was the signal keying us to the entity in hyperspace
this sense of the presence of an alien third party was sometimes very intense most intense from march
5th to 10th and from there fading off gradually this image of the insect teacher gave rise to
numerous entomological speculations we thought at the time that the process we were involved with
was something like the process of giving birth to a child but also much like the metamorphosis
that occurs in the life cycle of insects especially coleoptera and lepidoptera we knew that tryptamine
was somehow a major part of the solution to the enzyme or mysteries surrounding metamorphosis
recalling certain unconfirmed reports of the grub of a coleoptera species of eastern brazil
eaten by indians there for the hallucinatory effect noting that diffraction of the spectrum
of visible light as it occurs in natural phenomena such as rainbows peacock feathers certain insects
and the colors that appear on the surfaces of some metals during heating are all persistent motifs
within the stages of the alchemical opus in fact the cow de pavones the peacock's tail
is the brief stage which heralds the final whitening
True Hallucinations (Part 10)
By exotic intuition, I knew that the occurrence of such interface colors in nature indicated the presence of tryptamine related compounds.
Going further, I knew that the Lepidopterus New World Genus Morpholia, which is characterized by a large wing area usually entirely expressed in brilliant blue interphase coloration,
would be an ideal group upon which to conduct research to illuminate this unstudied field.
I knew that the enzyme mole process in insect metamorphosis received molecular tuning and control through resonation induced by the harmonic strum of forest insects
that have neuroactive tryptamine in their bodies, acting for them as an antenna to the electron spin resonance signal of the collective DNA, just as it did for us in the experiment.
This signal would, I thought, keep the entire class insecta keyed in to the point of maximum symmetry in the evolutionary stream,
thus explaining the remarkable durability of the insect adaptation which stabilized its basic evolutionary strategy some hundreds of millions of years ago,
such things I was told quite conversationally by the voice in my mind.
During this time, the iridescent black sheen which resulted when Stropharia cubensis grew in clumps and larger mushrooms shed spores on the caps of smaller mushrooms,
particularly caught my eye. Interestingly enough, this same metallic blue-black sheen was very noticeably present on the carapace of a large and shrill beetle,
a member of the genus Buprestidae that I captured in the forest in the heat of the afternoon.
It is known that the chitinous material which forms the outer covering of insects and spores is one of the most electron-dense materials in organic nature,
being in this property similar to metals. My inner teacher urged that this specimen be analyzed for the presence of psychoactive tryptamines.
If they were found, it would tend to confirm that the species responsible for the buzz of the forest, the Coleoptera and the cicadas,
will in some species be found to contain the tryptamine compounds necessary to allow them to key in on harmine present in local Banisteriopsis leonas
and through them to the collective DNA network. I suppose that if a few of these species resonate, then other shrilling species could key themselves to the molecular signal,
thus amplifying it and sustaining it through the forest for some hours of every day. Some of the life processes of the insecta, I felt sure, must be regulated through a few species in this way.
These unlikely and bizarre ideas unfolded themselves over those long, hot days while Dennis lay confined to his hammock and I squatted on the earth nearby.
By the third or fourth day I had learned enough of the new and peculiarly symbolic language that he was speaking that I was more and more convinced that through it I could observe him making a gradual but progressive integration.
Often then, long silences would fall between the raves and we would each drift off into a world of private reveries.
Several times on such occasions I looked down and noticed with a weird thrill that my unconscious fingers had been engaged in gathering small twigs and arranging them in patterns as though they were to be miniature fires.
This unconscious laying of small fires by my busy fingers seemed to me most extraordinary. It was interpreted then as a literal overflowing of the organizing energies that were being poured into me from some unknown source,
the same source that was supplying me with energy so that I could matter-of-factly eliminate the need for sleep. Occasionally Dennis would interrupt me to ask that I or Ev smoke a cigarette for him.
Questioning uncovered his belief that in hyperspace the topology of all human bodies is continuous and so he could just absorb what he needed directly out of our bodies.
For five days life went on in that mode with us sending amazingly few waves of interaction out into the real world around us. The morning of the tenth of March changed that.
I had hardly been away from the hut and the short stretch of trail that separated it from the edge of the pasture for five days.
So after breakfast on that particularly flawless morning I chatted with Dennis and found him calmer and more lucid than he had been since the experiment.
So composed and relaxed did he seem that I made the inevitable mistake of taking the situation for granted. I slipped away with Ev and the better fly net for a relaxed stroll down the trail and deeper into the jungle.
We were gone scarcely forty minutes but returned to the hut and the clearing to find them humming with a deserted air of emptiness that was heart sinking. I was not afraid that Dennis would wander into the forest and become lost as I was convinced that whatever his state of mind it did not include that sort of thing.
What I did fear was that he might focus others attention on us and the borderline areas that we were investigating. Leaving Ev at the camp I ran to the pasture and across it to the mission on the far side.
As I ran I was busy telling myself that he would probably just have gone down to see Dave and Vanessa and that I would of course find him there. I was too preoccupied to notice that the bells of the mission, silent normally except on Sundays, had been pealing for some time.
As I came over the rise that gave me a clear view of the river house and the lake below the choro I saw Vanessa leading Dennis toward the river house. I could sense that the situation was more difficult than I had hoped.
Vanessa was angry and had seized the situation to drive home her point. It seemed that Dennis must have bolted from his hammock the moment that Ev and I passed out of sight. He had gone straight to the mission, located the bell rope of the bell used to call the people to mass, and had rung it furiously until the priest had found Vanessa and Dave and they had none too gently persisted him to desist.
Nevertheless the already circulating rumor that one of our expeditions had gone a bit off the deep end was not eroded by the sudden and totally public outrage. The delicate political balance I had established that had allowed me to have my way in the matter of treatment for Dennis was destroyed.
Now Vanessa's idea that he should be moved to the river house was brought forth and endorsed by the priests and I was told by the police. Riding on the inner assurance that worry is preposterous and seeing that I had completely lost control of the situation I agreed to all suggestions.
Vanessa had more news. An airplane was coming. It was not coming to take us out but it would enable us to begin our withdrawal since it would allow one of us to get a lift over 100 kilometers of jungle to San Rafael where we had left the cache of equipment before making the overland march to La Chorrera.
This was the only opportunity to fly rather than walk back to those supplies and Vanessa pressed that we should take advantage of it. I agreed with everything.
I assumed that soon the eruption of the millennium would obviate all such mundane concerns but that was a fact that I would leave others to discover for themselves as they made their way into the ever deepening dimension of the future.
Dave had volunteered to go on the airplane. The decision was made almost at a moments notice. He would reach our supplies and single handedly undertake to have them and himself shipped up the Rio Puta mile and then back to Bogota.
We would meet him back there when and if we got out by some means not yet clear. A bag was hastily packed. The airplane came skimming in and then it was gone again and we were four.
Vanessa and Ev became Dennis' nurses. He was moved to the river house and I preferred to continue to live at the jungle house to avoid crowding. Dave was gone. The debate continued as to whether the direction in Dennis' raving was toward improvement or whether it was only progressive drifting in the world in which he had become lost.
When Dennis moved the river was a turning point and from then hence the effects of the phenomenon unleashed were less in our minds and more in the world.
Not at all we were still after the lens shaped object. What the teacher told me in the first few days after the experiment was you almost got it. You didn't quite get it or rather it used the metaphor of condensation. It is condensing. It was like a perfect alchemical metaphor.
It is everywhere. It is here. Dennis would say I can see it. It's 250 feet away to the left down near the water hole hovering above the water. Each day it would get closer in. There were freak lightning storms.
Slowly I noticed that meteorological phenomena tended to concentrate in the southeast. I began to look there and whenever I did I would see rainbows. Intuitions concerning what was going on ranged from the religiously profound to the utterly absurd.
On the afternoon of the 12th of March Dennis underwent a few hours when he was able to respond however cryptically to the questions we put to him concerning how things appeared to him. This all went on at the river house and it happened that living around that house was a handsome rooster and his mate.
It was perhaps the very cock that I had heard crow at dawn on the day of the experiment and again two days thereafter. There was a perky alertness about this cock and hen that had received comment among us before.
This particular afternoon Dennis called our attention to the little hen saying that if one thought of her as art then the achievement she represented was immense. Who could make such a hen? Only the one who could have fashioned a peculiar world that we had fallen into.
That one is James Joyce. Over the next few minutes he proceeded to make his case that Finnegan's Wake represented the most complete understanding of the relation of the human mind to the time and space around it.
And that therefore Joyce at his death had somehow been shouldered with the responsibilities of overseeing this part of God's universe. In this Dennis was only following Wyndham Lewis who made Joyce's ascent to eminence in the afterworld the subject of his novel The Human Age.
Jim and Nora, as Dennis called the newly revealed deity and his consort, were in and through everything at Lauteraire, particularly in the things that Joyce had loved.
The little hen as the symbol of Anna Livia Plurabelle of the Wake was one of these things. It was Joyce's humor that radiated outward from the path that he had followed. These ideas were absurd but delightful and they led me eventually to reread Joyce and to accept him as one of the true pioneers in the mapping of hyperspace.
They did not however shed much light on our predicament. From that view of life as literature Dennis moved on. He reminded me that one of the alchemical analogs for the Philosopher's Stone that we shared in our private code of associations was a certain small silver key.
A key to a box of inlaid wood with a secret compartment that had belonged to our maternal grandfather. I said that the ability to produce that key, which had been lost since our childhood, would prove the reality of Dennis' shamanic powers and their ability to materially transcend normal space and time.
The conversation took the form of a question and answer session that ended with Dennis demanding that I hold out my hand and then slapping his closed hand into my open one, letting out a loud ludicrous squawk and depositing in my palm a small silver key.
Then would you be convinced? Well?
Look at this!
At the time I was thunderstruck. We were hundreds of miles from anywhere. The key before me was indistinguishable from the key of my childhood memories. Had he saved that key over all those years to produce it now in the middle of the Amazon to completely distort my notion of reality?
Or was this only a similar key that Dennis had been carrying when he arrived in South America, but that I had somehow not noticed until he produced it? This seemed unlikely.
He was confined to a room far from our stored equipment, and it was difficult to conceive of him becoming calm and organized enough to go to the baggage and carefully sort through it to the secreted key. This matter of the silver key, whether it was the original key or where it had come from, has never been satisfactorily settled.
The original box was lost long ago, so the key was never tested. A final ironic note is added to the story by the fact that both Dennis and I were fans of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, and so were aware of his story through the gates of the silver key, a tale seething with many dimensions, strange beings, and a cosmic time scale.
After Dennis had moved to reside in the river house, there was no longer any need for my sleepless watch at night, but the lack of a need to sleep prevailed. I actually looked forward each day to the time when everyone would retire and I would have before me long hours of delicious, silent thought.
Like the fox spirit of the I Ching who wanders eternally among the jeweled night grasses, I wandered in the pastures and on the trails around La Chorrera.
Sometimes I would sit beneath the Ama initialed tree for hours, watching vast mandalas of space and time turn and glisten around me. At times I would walk, long strides, nearly loping, head thrown back, gazing at the every colored stars.
Effortlessly, the deeper something that shared my mind connected up the constellations for me and showed me the enormous zodiacal machine that must have come to the ancients with the same suggestive force.
Understanding, understanding in the form of immersion in millions of images of mankind in all times and places, struggling with the insoluble enigma of being and human destiny.
It was during those velvet star-streamed jungle nights that I felt closest to understanding the tripartite mystery of the philosopher's stone, the UFO, and the human soul. There is something human that transcends the individual and that transcends life and death as well.
It has will, motive, and enormous power.
Under certain conditions the manipulative power of consciousness moves beyond the body and into the world. The world then obeys the will of consciousness to the degree that the inertia of pre-existing physical laws can be overcome.
This inertia is overcome by consciousness determining the outcome of the normally random micro-physical events. Over time the deflection of micro-physical events from randomness is cumulative so that eventually the effects of such deflections are to shift the course of events in larger physical systems as well.
Therefore the greater the amount of time consciousness has in which to make its effects felt, the greater the possibility becomes that the willed end will come to pass as subtle pressure toward a given end accomplishes the series of micro-deviations eventuating in a non-random and anti-entropic situation.
The secret in short of falling in love. Consciousness works the same way within the brain, but there matter and energy are in a more unbound and dynamic state than throughout the rest of nature.
It is easy for consciousness to direct the electrical flow in the central nervous system, though we have no idea how this is done. It is less easy for it to move not electrons, but whole atomic systems spread far and wide in time and space. This may explain why it is easier to form a thought, but having one's wishes come true takes longer.
There is an interphase between consciousness active in the world and consciousness active in the CNS and through the intermediary of the body. That interphase is language.
In using language, consciousness informs the brain to inform the body to impart to the random motion of the air molecules near but outside the body a coherency.
This coherency is supplied by consciousness in the form of a word. None of the physical laws operating on the air molecules have been violated because the coherent pattern of behavior of the molecules is due to an input of energy, an input of energy whose release was initiated by an act of conscious will.
Language is thereby seen to be a kind of parapsychological ability since it involves action at a distance and telekinesis, albeit voice transduced.
Perhaps under the influence of psilocybin, an immense energizing of will could be vocally transduced into the world and do more than imprint a signal onto the random motion of air molecules. Perhaps instead a sign visibly beheld might be transduced and appear through appropriate shifts of refraction in those same nearby air molecules.
Normal speech itself is sometimes seen to affect the refractive index of the air in front of the speaker's mouth.
Perhaps this is an indication of the hidden potential of speech to go beyond its normal function of symbolizing reality to actually signifying it. A more perfect logos would seem to be the result, a logos able to regulate the activity of the ego as it exists in the sum total of the individuals living at any time.
It is like a god. It is the human god. It is something that will happen to human destiny sometime in the future and because it will happen, it is happening.
Nothing is unannounced and the ontological mode of the higher dimensions into which humanity is being propelled is being anticipated by the singularity which we call the UFO. Valet is correct. The UFO is teaching something through its reinforcement schedule.
It is preparing us to confront the god facet of ourselves that our explorations into the nature of life and matter are about to reveal.
[Singing]
[Singing]
[Singing]
[Singing]
Chapter 15. Saucer Full of Secrets. The 11th of March was the full moon. It passed uneventfully enough, meaning that I can now recollect little of what happened. I remained ecstatic, certain that all was for the best, certain that some definitive tipping of the hand by the thing we were dealing with was about to occur.
The next day, in the late afternoon, Ev walked out to see me from the riverside house. She invited me to return with her to the river for all of us to have dinner there together.
She showed the strain of what we had all been going through. There was no doubt that whatever had happened to us, it was pushing all of us to the limits of what we could assimilate without wanting to resist it.
As we walked back across the pasture, the atmosphere seemed to be even more alive and active with spawning clouds and drifting mist than usual.
Ev pointed to the southeast where a black stratocumulus mass was seething and boiling up to great altitudes. We watched for a few moments and it became like a vast mushroom cloud, the aftermath of a thermo-nuclear blast.
My impression was very startling and Ev recalled to me Dennis' words with regard to the mushroom. He said that it was the mushroom at the end of history, that the shape of the atomic cloud was a pun in physics and biophysics on the transformative powers of the stropharad and its eruption into human history.
As we watched, suddenly Ev gasped, for from the seeming base of the cloud had emerged what looked like a column of light. It was sustained and was not a bolt of lightning.
It was hard to see how it could be a shaft of sunlight since it was late afternoon, the sun in the west, and this was all taking place in the southeast.
We watched it for perhaps a minute and then it stopped abruptly. Ev was quite shaken. It was of an empirical order different than anything she had experienced at La Chorrera up to that time.
Arriving at the Riverside Campfire we learned that Vanessa had been up at the mission to the radio, to the bush pilot who had whisked Dave from our midst. The pilot was willing to follow Vanessa's intent and think of us as a low-grade emergency and would return in a few days to fly us out.
I was unhappy with these arrangements but there was nothing that I could do, though I knew that we, the Gringo Strangers, would lose face with the local people when our need for this airlift became known.
Also, I had not the faith of Vanessa that all Dennis needed to return him to normal was to trek him into the world of modern psychiatry with its harebrained reductionism and chemotherapy.
But there was nothing to be done for it and so we dined in silence, each lost in thoughts unshared.
The evening's only moment of humor was provided by Ev's animated description of Dennis evading Vanessa's wardenship and slipping away from the Riverside house sometime during the previous night and going to sit quietly in the house of some Colombian colonistas who awoke to find him there as unassuming as a piece of furniture.
The story died away and the unspoken dimension of it all returned to move in the minds of each of us.
The next day we would pack all our equipment and move it to the river in preparation for a flight that could come at any time and would certainly not come announced.
Already we were preparing to withdraw from the vortex of La Chorrera.
The next day was the thirteenth, the camp in the forest, the hallowed seeming spot where the transforming experiment had occurred was dismantled.
All the artifacts that set it apart from dozens of other Ritoto huts were tucked away and it was returned to its folk anonymity.
Outside in a pile we left quite a cargo trove behind us for the forced evacuation by airplane of the four of us plus the pilot left precious little room for any year.
Some insect and plant specimens would leave with us, the cameras, the notebooks on the experiment.
That was to be it. The things that we left were quickly assimilated by the tolerant Ritoto omens at the site of our attempt to probe hyperspace.
We were all installed in the river house ready to go with the airplane whenever it should appear.
Everything seemed to be moving forward of its own accord.
We swam in the river and sat on the rocks scanning the sky and listening for the drone of the little amphibian.
Thus the afternoon passed with even Dennis quiet after an episode in the early morning in which he had methodically thrown the contents of his room out the window to the point of ripping out the window frame and hurling it after everything else.
True Hallucinations (Part 11)
Around four o'clock I was lying on the riverbank about twenty feet back from the river's edge.
I was thinking about a walk to the river two days before,
when each step nearer the water seemed to bring more rhyme and rhythm into my thoughts.
From nowhere I seem to remember an old Celtic saying that Robert Graves discusses,
which says that "poetry is made at the edge of running water."
It had something to do with that, I believed, and I was pondering it.
Vanessa and Ev were in front of me at the water's edge, washing.
Directly across the river from us lay the southeasterly direction
in which Ev and I had seen the cloud with shaft of light just twenty-four hours earlier.
I was gazing in that direction when I noticed what I thought was the weak beginning of a rainbow,
just a place low in the sky near the horizon where there seemed to be the faint touch of a spectrum.
After a few seconds I called down to the two women and asked if they saw a rainbow across the river.
They glanced across the river for only a moment and both said that they saw nothing.
I did not persist. But instead I watched the sky in that spot.
By this time I had stopped forcing my opinions on people because I was regarded as nuts,
not incoherent, but that I couldn't be trusted or couldn't be relied on because I believed such odd things.
That was my flaw, to believe odd things.
I kept watching across the river and I saw the thing intensify.
I was extraordinarily interested in all that was going on.
In this pastoral setting it seemed to me that a great revelation was brewing.
I watched and I saw the colors deepen.
The bow of a rainbow never formed, but the deepening of the colors in one spot was very definite.
Again I inquired of the women if they saw the rainbow across the river.
The light glance and wonderful. Yes, we see it, not much of one, is it?
The clue scanning part of my hyperactive imagination was upon this detail in an instant.
Yes, first a cloud with a shaft of light, now a spot of spectrogrammatic color steady in the same place in the sky.
I had very strongly then a sense of the eye in the sky drawing close to my thought and watching with satisfaction as I understood,
understood the importance of the southeast, of watching, of focusing my attention on that spot.
And in my mind the teacher said, "This is the place. This is the sign. Watch here."
I said nothing to anyone, but I formed the resolve to spend that sleepless night,
not as I had spent the others wandering the fields like the fox spirit or meditating at the choro.
Rather I would sit here where the lake empties and the Igarra Parana resumes its languid course.
Here at the boat landing, 70 feet down a steep mud bank from the riverside house,
sit through the night and watch.
All night long I sat reviewing the things that had passed, seeming to divide my consciousness
and send it both backward through my family tree, but also forward into the future.
I seem to see all the years still ahead, some technique to emerge from this contact,
careers pursued across space and time and finally vindication as the world realized
the truth of the transdimensional nature of the Stropharia visions
and the true nearness of the worlds that they throw open.
For it had become my belief that the contact with an intelligent and utterly alien species
was beginning for humanity, that out of the long night of cosmic time
the novelty of novelty, the moment of contact between minds on utterly different planes was beginning.
We were among the first. We had gone to the Amazon to explore the dimensions glimpsed in tryptamine ecstasy
and there in the darkness of the heart of the Amazon we had been found and touched by this bizarre
and ancient life form that was now awakening to the global potential of a symbiotic relationship
with technical humanity. All night long strange vistas and insights poured through me.
I saw gigantic machineries and worlds of vegetable and mechanical forms on scales inconceivably vast.
Time, agatized and glittering seemed to pour by me like living super fluids inhabiting dream regions
of terrible pressure and super cold. It was an ecstasy, an end stasis that lasted hours
and placed the seal on all of my previous existence. At the end I was reborn, but as what I knew not.
[water trickling]
In the gray of a false dawn the wave of internal imagery faded away.
I rose from where I had been sitting for hours and stretched. The sky was clear, but it was still very early
and stars were still dimly to be seen in the west. In the southeast, the direction toward which my attention
had been focused, the sky was clear except for a line of fog or ground mist lying parallel to the horizon
only a few feet above the treetops on the other side of the river and perhaps half a mile away.
In other words, a line of light fog backed from the river and slightly above the treetops in the middle distance.
As I stretched and stood upon the flat stone where I had sat, I noticed that the line of fog seemed to have grown darker.
It also seemed to be rolling in place or churning. I watched very carefully.
The rolling line of darkening mist split in two parts and each of these smaller clouds also divided apart.
Now after only a moment or two to execute the changes, I was looking at four lens-shaped clouds of the same size
lying in a row slightly above the horizon and only half a mile or so away. A wave of excitement swept through me
and then a wave of definite fear. I was glued to the spot, unable to move, as in a dream.
As I watched, the clouds recoalesced over the next two minutes or so in the same way that they had divided apart.
The symmetry of this dividing and rejoining and the fact that the smaller clouds were all the same size
lent a performance in eerie air, as if nature herself were suddenly to become the tool of some unseen organizing agency.
As the clouds recoalesced, they seemed to grow even more dark and opaque.
As they all became one, that cloud seemed suddenly to begin to swirl inward like a tornado or a water spout.
It flashed into my mind that perhaps it was a water spout, something I have never seen.
But even as the thought formed, I heard a high-pitched undulating whine come drifting over the jungle treetops,
obviously from the direction of the thing I was watching.
I turned to give one glance at the riverside house seventy feet behind me up the steep hill.
I was gauging whether I had time to run and awaken someone to get confirmation of what was happening.
To arouse someone, I would have had to go hand over hand up the slope and consequently take my eyes off the thing I was watching.
In the space of an instant, I decided that I could not cease observing. I tried to shout, but no sound came from my throat because I was afraid.
The siren sound was rapidly gaining pitch. In fact, everything seemed to be becoming very much speeded up.
The moving cloud was definitely growing larger rapidly, moving straight toward the place where I was.
I felt my legs turn to water and sat down, shaking terribly.
For the first time, I believed all that had happened to us, and I knew that the thing was now about to take me.
Details seemed to be solidifying as it approached me.
It passed directly over my head at about two hundred feet altitude, banked steeply upward and was lost from sight by the edge of the slope behind me.
In the last moment before it was lost, I completely threw open my senses to it, and I thought very clearly.
It was a machine with unobtrutably soft blue and orange lights. It was saucer shaped, rotating slowly, and as it passed over me I could see symmetrical indentations on the underside.
It was making the "wee wee wee" sound of science fiction fan.
[siren sound continues]
[siren sound continues]
[siren sound continues]
[siren sound continues]
[siren sound continues]
[siren sound continues]
[siren sound continues]
[siren sound continues]
My emotions were all in a jumble. First I was terrified, but at the moment I knew that it was not going to stop I felt disappointment.
I was amazed and I was trying to remember what I had seen as clearly as possible.
Was it real in the naive sense in which the question is asked of UFOs and tables and chairs?
No one else saw this thing as far as I know. I alone was its observer.
I believe that had there been other observers they would have seen essentially what I have reported.
But as for real, who can say?
I saw this thing go from being a bit of cloud to being a rivet studded aircraft of some kind.
Was it more true to itself as cloud or aircraft?
Was it a hallucination?
Against my testimony can be put my admitted lack of sleep and our involvement with psychedelic drugs.
Curiously, this last point can be interpreted in my favor.
I am familiar through direct experience with every known class of hallucinogen.
What I saw that morning did not fall into any of the categories of hallucinated imagery that I am familiar with.
Also against my testimony is the inevitable incongruous detail that seems to render the entire incident absurd.
It is that as the saucer passed overhead I saw it clearly enough to judge it to be identical with the UFO with three half spheres on its underside
that appears in an infamous UFO photo made by George Adamski and widely assumed to be a hoax.
I had not closely followed the matter but accepted the expert opinion that what Adamski had photographed was a rigged up end cap of a Hoover vacuum cleaner.
But I saw this same object in the sky above La Chorrera.
Was it in fact picked up as a boyhood UFO enthusiast, something as easily picked out of my mind as other memories seem to have been?
My stereotyped but already debunked notion of a UFO suddenly appears in the sky.
By appearing in a form that casts doubt on what it appears to be, it achieves a more complete cognitive dissonance than if its seeming alienness were completely convincing.
It was, if you ask me, and there is no one else really that one can ask, either a holographic image of a technical perfection impossible on Earth today
or it was the manifestation of something which in that instance chose to begin as mist and end as machine
but which could have appeared in any form a manifestation of a humorous something's omniscient control over the world of form and matter.
It was not a mirage of the conventional sort. Years later it occurs to me that perhaps it was a kind of mirage still unknown to us, a temporal mirage.
The ordinary mirage is an inverted image of water or a distant place. The cause is the distortion of light by alternate levels of hot and cold air.
At Benares in India I saw a triple image of the city suspended over the surface of the Ganges, but a temporal mirage is another matter.
It is a lenticular image of a distant time and place, cause unknown. What makes the ordinary and temporal mirages members of the same class
is that both types of mirages require the intercession of the human mind in order to exist.
Certain areas of the world have local conditions which make them mirage prone.
Could the same be true of temporal mirages? Or perhaps the temporal mirage is a natural phenomenon
and the UFO is an artifact resulting from the temporal mirage being used or experimented with by some future technology.
I believe that this ladder may come close to the mark and that this is what the UFO mystery is partially about.
The UFO is a reflection of a future event that promises man's eventual mastery over time, space, and matter.
The fact that we, in our clumsy attempt to probe these mysteries, were able to coax nature into throwing out this great burning scintilla of pure contradiction
from the dark retort where she labors over the chemistry of the millennium is full of import.
It meant to me that we were on the right track. The Stropharia cubensis mushroom is a memory bank of galactic history.
Alien, but full of promise, it throws open a potential for understanding that will sweep away the petty concerns of Earth and history bound humanity.
At La Chorrera, I had only the isolated personal conviction that our approach would be vindicated.
Now, as our ideas are finding a small community that shares these intuitions, I am yet more sure that the answer to all of the mysteries we pose to disequilibrate our view of the world
are to be understood by looking within ourselves.
When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that man does not have to look outward toward the futile promise of the life that may circle distant stars
in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We should look within.
The paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity.
The UFO encounter marked for me the culmination of our work at La Chorrera.
My contact with the saucer took place at dawn on the 14th of March.
The following day at 11 AM, the airplane arrived unannounced, but not unexpected.
Vanessa had been anticipating it for three days. It was a matter of a few moments to clamor aboard after saying farewell to the priests and the police,
all of whom had been most patient with our colorful party and its unusual preoccupations.
Only in visions had my eyes recently rested on stuff such as the little airplane was made of,
the highly polished acrylic surfaces of machines and things impervious to hard ultraviolet radiation,
what the people of Amazonas call machete skin.
It was a reminder of all that we were returning to.
Dennis was on his best behavior and beyond his commenting as we got aboard that an airplane was a partial condensation of a flying saucer,
we said a roar of the engine, a hard pull back on the stick, and we and our legendary bush pilot were airborne.
We circled the mission once before settling down to follow the Agaraparana back to the Putumayo and the version of civilization that Leticia would afford.
What a tiny world La Chorrera is, left behind in the trackless jungle after only a glimpse of buildings and Cebu cattle resting in the green pastures,
looking like lumps of melting vanilla ice cream. Whatever we had touched and been touched by, it was now falling behind us.
We stayed two days in Leticia, days in which Dennis showed marked improvement while the rest of us drifted into various stances of distance with regard to each other,
almost an effort to compensate for the excessive intimacy our isolated expedition had made necessary.
The oddest thing about Leticia was that we were hardly off the plane before we ran into Jack and Ruby,
an American couple who just happened to be renting Ev's apartment in Bogota for a few weeks.
I had thought the name combination weird when I met them six weeks before. Now the fact that they were practically awaiting us in Leticia heightened the strangeness.
I could not quite wrap my mind around it.
By the time we reached Bogota, Dennis was nearly completely returned to normal,
lending weight to the idea that some sort of temporary chemical imbalance had been responsible for his reaction rather than the emergence of a chronically unbalanced personality structure.
He was very shaky and very bummed by any mention of fourth-dimensional superconducting bonds, Yahay, or shamanism.
He said, "Look, I have had it. He had, too."
He was merely normal, but I was just at the beginning of a years-long period of unusual ideation,
the state of suspended disbelief that gave birth to the ideas concerning time that are set out in the invisible landscape.
On the 20th of March, there was general agreement that Dennis was totally back with us.
It was an occasion of great happiness, and we celebrated at one of Bogota's finest restaurants.
It was an immense accomplishment to have been able to allow the reversal to work itself out without the aggravating influence of modern mental health care procedures.
The ordeal in the wilderness that all shaman must face had been endured, a step on the path to knowledge taken.
On March 21st, I made a journal entry, the first in weeks and the only one that I was able to make for several more months.
I said this, "It is now 17 days since March 4th and the concretizing of the ampersand.
If I more or less correctly understood this phenomenon, then tomorrow, the 18th day, will mark some sort of halfway point in this experience.
I predict that tomorrow Dennis will return to the psychological set he experienced prior to March 1st,
though it is possible that rather than a residual amnesia concerning events at La Chorrera,
he will have instead a growing understanding of the experiment of which he was the creator.
The past weeks have been harrowing and seemingly made out of so many times, places, and minds
that a rational chronicle has been impossible.
Only Finnegan's Wake gives some idea of the reality of the paradoxicum as we experienced it by virtue of being able to pierce beyond time's double face.
In spite of earlier misunderstandings and misprojections concerning the cycles of time and number operating within the phenomenon,
I now believe that in these 17 days we have experienced, albeit sometimes running backwards and certainly enormously condensed,
enough of a full cycle to begin to foresee in some dim sense the events of the next 20 or so days.
By observing the sequence of events in the first 20 days and then using the knowledge that these events are in effect running backwards,
we may reverse the order of the last 20 days and have some idea of the approximate nature and direction of the opus.
This journal entry makes clear that while Dennis was recovering from his submergence in the Titanic struggle,
I was quite in the grip of a struggle of my own.
I was caught up in the construction of numerous charts which showed the kinds of themes that I was involved with early on in my search for a resolution of the experience via theory of time.
In those early speculations, I was involved with a mythic cycle of 40 days duration.
It was only later when I began to be impressed with the specifically biological nature of the temporal cycles
that I turned my attention to cycles of 64 days duration and it was that which led me eventually to turn to the I Ching.
In those early ideas, there was not a hint of the eventual theory in its operational details, yet the intent is clearly the same.
However, the conception was much cruder, more personal and idiosyncratic.
Nearly the rest of that march was spent in Bogota, a dreary time, the urban dregs of a teeming modern city resting not lightly on our jungle sensitive perceptions.
Dennis seemed quite normal, though weakened and sobered by all that had gone on.
There were no messages from Dave and Vanessa had returned to the States.
On the 29th, Dennis followed her example and flew to Colorado.
I insisted that Ev and I go to southern Columbia so that I could simply have time to reflect.
This we did. I reviewed the whole incident at La Chorrera with no new insights and concluded that some sort of psychic gravity was pulling us home.
On the 13th of April, one day short of a month after my encounter with the UFO, we re-arrived in Berkeley.
It was a short and difficult visit. I was beginning to see the dim outlines of the I Ching Wave Theory and the first maps of the I Ching Hierarchy were done at that time.
I kept myself away from people. I was totally immersed in my work. I had no interest or patience for anything else.
I was in the grip of a creative manium or extreme that I had thought possible.
Each conversation with someone, these matters seemed to open vast gulfs of misunderstanding.
I saw clearly that I had to re-learn epistemology, genetics, philosophy of science, the entire gamut of subjects necessary to discuss the areas that I now have such compelling concern for.
As the time charts advanced the implied termination of normal time, the idea of concrescent psycho matter and the UFO that I had encountered at La Chorrera became identified with each other and with the eschatologies of certain religious traditions.
The early unquantified time charts seemed full of coincidence relative to my own personal life.
In particular, the closed transition points in each section of the wave seemed to have special meaning for me.
Positioning one of these points on the experiment at La Chorrera seemed to make other points in the past, the death of my mother and points in the future, my 24th birthday, especially important.
The paradoxes, the contradiction and the absurdity of my most compelling interests in the eyes of other people made it necessary for me to work things out outside the sphere of consensual validation that my own society imposed.
I understood that whether or not the effect that we were exploring was a general phenomenon in nature or in idiosyncrasy, it was obviously vitally important to me personally to let the forces that I had become entangled with play themselves out to the end.
I resolved to return to La Chorrera to its solitude and its strangeness and to spend time there simply observing the thing that had come over me.
I would write there, that was my resolve and much of the invisible landscape the result.
Chapter 16, Return.
On the 15th of July, Ev and I again stood on the edge of the Amazon interior.
My intention to return to La Chorrera was fast becoming fact.
My journal begins again as we started down the Putumayo, a name that had by then come to suggest to me an entomology like the horror of illusion.
Having left the vicinity of Puerto Lake Isamo a few hours ago with our cargo of beer and cattle, we are once again enclosed by and moving through the dream that is the forests and rivers of the Amazon basin.
This return to continue the contemplation of the phenomenon in the pure medium of tropical nature in which we discovered it marks a dedication to and an immersion in the phenomenon that I imagine anyone familiar with the events which overtook us in March finds incredible and even perhaps not without an element of risk.
Perhaps others will make this shift if the idea is given a hearing.
Many ideas may be very good and simply perish for lack of a context, but this idea causes
a fundamental reconstruction of reality, and it can be taught.
It fulfills my spiritual aspirations because it is understanding, simply understanding,
not a hallucination or an ability to cure or levitate.
It is a way of understanding, and when one understands this way, it appears as though
one has ended the program of understanding.
It does not deny any body of knowledge.
It simply augments.
There is an argument for it on the physical level.
The idea is very complicated, touching as it does on areas involving quantum physics,
submolecular biology, and DNA structure.
Though the idea that I developed may not have been caused by what Dennis did in the Amazon,
I assume that it was, that he did something and I got a kind of informational feedback
off my DNA or some other molecular storage site of information.
The feedback consisted of this stored information, which seemed without limits.
The task became to create a symbol structure that would make the information coherent.
One must create structural categories for a new world of infinite variety.
One must organize it into a mandala.
The DNA is playing.
It is one's life, but one must have a concept so that as it plays, one may understand the
melody.
This theory is a concept which when it plays in my head, I understand the melody.
I am interested in disproving the theory.
A good idea can withstand a lot of pressure, but what then is the so-called flying saucer?
What does it really represent?
It is the ingression of a higher dimensional epoch which reverberates through history.
It is a shockwave being generated by an eschatological event at the end of time.
In other words, natural laws are not universal constants.
They are slowly evolving flux phenomena.
For instance, the speed of light, which is taken as a universal constant, has only been
measured in the last hundred years.
It is entirely induction to extrapolate the principle of the stability of the speed of
light to all time.
Any good scientist knows that induction is a leap to faith.
Science is founded on the principle of induction.
That is what this theory challenges.
It says that the fact that one did A and B resulted does not mean that whenever one does
A, that B will be the result.
This cannot be proven.
Before Einstein, space was thought to be a dimension where one put things.
Space was visualized as somehow analogous to emptiness.
But then Einstein pointed out that space is a thing which has torque and is affected by
objects.
In other words, from an idea, a place where you can put things, to a thing.
Space is a thing.
It is affected by gravitational fields.
Light passing through a gravitational field in space will be bent because the space through
which it travels is bent.
What we are proposing in a nutshell is that time, which was also previously thought of
as a place where one put things, is also a thing.
And time changes.
There are different kinds of time.
And as these kinds of time come and go in their cyclical progression on their many levels,
situations evolve which are the responses of matter to the conditioning imparted to
it by time and space.
These two things condition matter.
It was always matter that was thought to be real.
But actually matter has a quality more nearly like thought.
And matter thinks what it thinks according to two flux phenomena which are in interrelationship,
the space-time continuum.
This idea does have axioms.
A major one is taken from Leibniz.
Leibniz talked about monads, monadic space.
He envisioned the monads as being like tiny particles which were infinitely reduplicated
everywhere in the universe.
These tiny particles contained all places within themselves.
They were not here and now.
They were everywhere, all the time, in each place.
They were all identical.
But in the way they interconnected, they built up a larger continuum.
Memory is similar to this in its principle of operation.
Destruction of up to 90% of the brain does not impair memory function.
It is as though memory is not stored anywhere.
It is as though it is like a gas and permeates the brain throughout.
Like a hologram, all of the memory is in each part.
One can take a holographic plate of Mount Fuji and cut it in half.
When half is illuminated, the entire image is present.
One can do this again and again.
The holograph is made up of a nearly infinite number of tiny images, each of which, in combination
with its fellows, presents one image.
Human physics makes similar statements, saying that the electron is not somewhere, some time.
The electron is a cloud of probabilities, and that is all one can say about it.
A similar quality adheres to my idea of time and the comparison of time to a thing.
The obvious question to be asked of this is what is the smallest time that a thing can
be made of?
The scientific approach would be to divide toward the small, to find out if it is discrete.
So what one is looking for is a chronon, a particle of time.
My hunch is that the chronon exists but is not distinct from the atom.
The atoms are chronons.
Atoms are simply far more complicated than had been suspected.
There may be atoms and chronons.
Atoms may not be reducible to atoms, but I suspect that what we are looking for is one
particle that makes matter, space, time, and energy, but not the electron in the Heisenberg-Borr
description that describes the properties of the electron which account for physical
matter.
But the electron must be more complicated than that because it exists in a universe
where minds and organisms arise.
So we have to describe the atomic properties that would allow a particle in certain stages
to coalesce into a living organism or a thinking organism.
Even a bacterium like E. coli is a staggering accomplishment for the Heisenberg-Borr atom.
The Heisenberg-Borr model explains the physical universe.
It doesn't explain organism or mind.
We have to overlay that atomic model with qualities.
We must imbue the atom with qualities that will let us understand how we could exist,
how we could arise out of its substratum.
I do not claim that we have done this, but we have stumbled upon the intellectual avenue
that will have to be followed to achieve this understanding.
The key lies in cyclical units in hierarchical structures generating various kinds of continuae
that move toward different kinds of closure.
The person who has actually laid the firmest foundation for understanding this sort of
thing philosophically is Alfred North Whitehead.
Nothing we have suggested is beyond the power of his method to anticipate.
Whitehead's formalism accounts for minds and organisms and a number of things poorly resolved
by the Cartesian approach.
Other visionary thinkers are probing these areas.
Transitional systems theory is the idea that any process can be related through a mathematical
equation to all other processes simply by virtue of all processes being part of a common
class.
The overthrow of a dictator, the explosion of a star, the fertilization of an ova, all
should be describable through one set of terms.
The most promising recent developments in this area have been the emergence of the new evolutionary
paradigm of Prigogine and Janz.
With their work, nothing less has been achieved than a new ordering principle in nature.
This is the discovery and mathematical description of dissipative self-organization as a creative
principle underlying the dynamics of an open and multileveled reality.
Dissipative structures work their miracle of generating and preserving order through
fluctuations, fluctuations whose ground is in quantum mechanical indeterminacy.
If we had a perfect philosophical mirror of the universe, I would be able by applying
our philosophical method to tell a person how much change he had in his pocket.
Since he actually has whatever amount of change he has in his pocket at that moment, it is
an accomplished fact and so should be possible to calculate.
What is important is to understand the necessities of occurred existence, not the necessities
of existence about to occur.
Although there too boundary conditions operate, but they are boundary conditions, not absolutely
determined fact.
We assume that ten minutes hence the room we are in will exist.
It is a boundary condition which will define the next ten minutes in our space-time coordinate.
But we cannot know who will be in the room ten minutes hence.
That is free to be determined.
One may ask if we can really know that the room will exist.
This is where induction enters the picture, since in truth we cannot know with certainty.
There is no absolutely rigorous way of establishing that.
But we can make the inductive leap to faith that has to do with accumulated experience.
We project that it will be a boundary condition.
But in principle in the next ten minutes there could be an earthquake and this building might
not be left standing.
However, for that to happen the boundary condition will have to be radically disrupted and in
some unexpected manner.
The thing that is so curious is that such a thing could occur.
That is where our map of the chronon would allow one to predict.
There is, however, a problem with it.
Because we suggest a model of time with a spiral structure, events keep gathering themselves
into tighter and tighter spirals which lead inevitably to a final time.
Like the center of a black hole, the final time is a necessary singularity, a place where
something happens which breaks down the physical laws established in the previous epoch.
Understanding what would happen in that condition has caused science to shy away from such an
idea, although Western religions have no trouble whatever embracing the concept of a final
time.
We would say within the context of our theory that millenarians argued for apocalypse because
they were getting a reflection back through time, a ricochet as it were, a distorted image
of an apocalyptic event.
The view of science is that final time means simply a time of no change.
All processes run down.
Entropy is maximized.
The idea of entropy makes an assumption that the laws of the space-time continuum are infinitely
linearly extendable into the future.
In a spiral time scheme, this assumption is not made.
Rather, final time means passing out of one set of laws which are conditioning existence
and into another set of laws conditioning existence.
To see time through the eyes of our theory is to see one's place in the spiral scheme
and to know and anticipate when the transition to new epochs will occur.
One sees this in the physical world.
The planet is five or six billion years old, the first turn of the spiral.
Then life appears.
What is happening if one examines this planet, which is the only planet we can really examine
in depth, is one finds that processes are steadily accelerating in their reaction speed
and complexity.
A planet swings through space two billion years before life appears, and the instant
life gets started, a mad scramble is on.
Species appear and disappear.
This goes on for a billion and a half years, and then suddenly thinking species appear.
From the dumb confrontation with the chipped flint to the starship is twenty thousand years.
Tops.
What could that be but the aggression of a new set of laws, laws that are allowing our
species to manifest very peculiar properties?
Humanity is made by DNA like rattlesnakes and poplar trees, but we trigger the same
energies that light the stars.
We do this on the surface of our planet, or we can create a temperature of absolute zero.
We do these things because though we are made of mush and mud, we have minds, and we know
about the detour through tools.
So we can build tools which can unleash energies that in any other situation in the universe
occur under very different conditions.
The center of stars is the usual site of such processes, but we do such things using mind.
And what is mind?
Who knows?
Twenty thousand years from the stone flint to the starship and still accelerating.
There are yet more spirals to concress.
From the model T-Ford to the starship, sixty years.
From the fastest human on earth being able to move thirty miles an hour to the fastest
moving nine miles per second, sixty years.
Human culture is a curve of expanding potentiality.
It has reached asymptotic vertical gain.
Man threatens every species on the planet because we have stockpiled radioactive materials.
They are everywhere.
Every species on earth can feel that.
The planet as an ecological entity can react to that kind of pressure.
It is three billion years old.
It can deal with this.
Dualistic talk about man not being part of the natural order is foolish.
We could not have arisen unless there was purpose of ours which fit into the planetary
ecology.
It is not clear what it is, but it seems to have to do with our enormous research instruments
and crises.
By stockpiling atomic weapons we have claimed the capacity to destroy the earth like a stick
of dynamite in a rotten apple.
And why?
We do not know why.
Surely not for the political and social reasons that are given.
We are simply a tool building species that is itself the tool of a planetary ecology
that has this perception of a higher dimensional mode.
It knows what the boundary constraints are and is organizing life to transform itself.
Our story is fairly peculiar, very peculiar as a matter of fact.
It is hard to know what to think because a phenomenon of all kinds of mental illness
is visions of some kind of a fantastically complicated thing which happens to put you
in the very center of everything.
And this theory does that.
So does immediate experience.
It is important to have recourse to the scientific method.
If the theory is real, it can be proven in the calm confines of the laboratory.
And if it is not real, that should be made explicitly clear through careful experiment.
To empathize with the visions at La Charere, one must imagine what one can imagine.
Imagine if wishes were horses, how beggars would ride.
The ideas were so compelling because with fourth dimensional matter one can do anything.
One can spread it out and climb on it and take her up to any altitude, adding oxygen
by the act of noting the need for sane.
It's the flying saucer again.
One can climb inside it.
Since it is oneself, it is like putting on your mind like a wetsuit.
The flying saucer is the perfected human mind.
It waits warmly humming at the end of human history on this planet.
When it is perfect, there will be an ontological mutation of the human form, the resurrection
body that Christianity is all about.
It is the genius of human technology to master and to serve the energies of life and death
and time and space.
The UFO holds out the possibility of a mobile mind, a ship that can cross the universe in
the time that it takes to conceive it because that is what the universe is, a thought.
Then humanity, the masters of thought, would set out.
Or we may discover that it is not done that way.
The future may reveal that there is something out there that is calling us home.
Then it will be our technology and the call of the other that will move toward meeting.
The saucer is a good metaphor for this.
When Jung suggested that the saucer was the human soul, he was right.
He simply didn't know what he meant.
It is not so far away.
That is the other thing.
The last shift of epochs gave us relativity theory and quantum mechanics.
Another epoch looms, but whether or not it is the final epoch is hard to tell because
when one is part of the process, the uncertainty principle interferes with prediction.
All these themes are woven around DMT, perhaps because DMT seems to illuminate the regions
beyond death.
And what is death?
We find ourselves in such a peculiar situation, having been born, being autonomous open chemical
systems which maintain themselves at a point far from equilibrium through eating.
And we think, and what is that?
What are the three dimensions?
What is energy?
We find ourselves in a strange position of being alive, having been born, going to die.
A lot of thinking says that this is not so strange, that this happens in the universe,
living things appear.
And yet our physics, which can light the fires of the stars in our deserts, cannot explain
the strangeness of the phenomenon of our being alive.
Organisms are completely outside the realm of physical explanation at this point for
science.
So what is it for?
Spencer and Shakespeare, quantum theory and the paintings at Altamira, who are we?
What is history and what does it push toward?
Now we have atomic weapons and so should soon address these questions because we have unleashed
processes potentially fatal to the planet.
We have triggered the final crisis for the planet.
We have done this but we do not control it.
No single one of us, no leader or state can call a halt to the fact of our being trapped
in history.
We are moving toward the unimaginable as information piles up about the real nature of the situation
we find ourselves in.
To paraphrase J.B.S.
Haldane, our situation may not only be stranger than we suppose, it may be stranger than we
can suppose.
Chapter 18.
The coming of the Stropharid.
Which were the concerns through which I navigated the intervening years to the present.
No definitive condensation of the thing we sought has yet occurred.
What did occur was the continued elaboration of the theories both of hyper-carbulation
and of the nature of time.
In late 1975 the Invisible Landscape was published and our ideas made publicly available.
But since the manuscript of that work had been nearly two years finished, we had not
been idle.
The conclusion of myself and my brother was that when all was said and done, the truly
novel element and the candidate for being the causal element in the situation at La
Chorrera was the mushroom.
It was Stropharia Cubensis which stood behind all of the effects that we had experienced.
And as this realization grew, so did the understanding that if this was the case, then new expeditions
into the unimaginable could be launched only if a supply of the mushrooms could be secured.
Now it happened that on that second trip to La Chorrera, the mushroom had been much less
abundant than the first time.
And this scarcity had impelled me to take a number of spore prints from the few specimens
that we did run across.
Those spore prints had been kept refrigerated over the years while my brother and I pursued
academic careers and wrote our book.
During those intervening years we dabbled with the thought of cultivating Stropharia
Cubensis, but the only work on the subject was Wasson and M's work in French and it seemed
somehow a remote and technically difficult thing to attempt.
In the spring of 1972 we had already isolated the mycelium of the mushroom and had it growing
on agar and petri dishes, but it was not until the early spring of '75 that we encountered
an article detailing a method for growing commercial mushrooms on rye in canning jars
under very carefully controlled conditions.
Perhaps this method would also work for Stropharia Cubensis and get our stalled exploration of
the invisible moving again.
Working in close consultation with my brother in Colorado, we determined within a matter
of weeks that the hardy Stropharia not only grew and fruited with the new method, but
that it was less fragile and easier to grow than the agaricus species sold in grocery
stores as food.
The implications of all this were not lost upon us.
In the spring of 1975 onward I was not without a continual supply of Stropharia.
Ev and I had parted earlier in the year.
I was living alone and finishing up an academic career that had lasted far too long, what
with seven years of wandering around the world scheduled in.
It was a time of loneliness, self-examination, and work pressure.
After that world came suddenly the perfected method for growing the same organism that
had been the means to opening up the dimension of contact four years before.
The very spores gathered at La Chorrera were now furiously producing mushroom psilocybin
in my home.
During the spring I experimented with low dosages several times.
The sense of peace and lightness that I associated with the halcyon days at La Chorrera was definitely
there.
So too was the sense of a teaching voice and a return to close consultation with a cosmic
agency of complex intent.
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Throughout the spring and summer of that year I took the mushroom at doses of five grams
dried or fifty grams fresh as often as I felt was prudent, which worked out to about once
every two weeks.
Each of these experiences was a lesson, a chilling and exhilarating plunge into an ocean
of noetic images.
I discovered my own mind like a topological manifold lying before me, inviting me to rove
and scan the reflective knot of past and future time that I am.
Alien presences and trans-linguistic elves bent near to me in those trances.
The mushroom stressed its age, its vast knowledge of the ebb and flow of historical forces in
many civilizations with which it had been associated through the millennia.
Images of the past and future abounded.
Once I found myself on a hill with a crowd of people.
The view looked out over a curved plain.
It was the interior of a cylindrical space colony, miles in extent.
Vast sweeps of windows alternated with farmlands and towns scattered along the floors of the
valleys between each set of windows.
I knew somehow that in the future I was seeing hundreds of millions of people lived in such
cylindrical worlds.
The teeming worlds that populate the galaxy in the minds of our science fiction writers
had been recreated inside a sphere only twelve light hours in diameter and with the sun at
its center.
Within that sphere, thousands of independent societies pursued their destinies and their
evolution.
Thousands of independent cylinder worlds swarming around the infinite energy furnace of the
sun.
What a rich and endlessly creative force humanity had become in escaping the confines of the
planet.
Through the vast windows I could see more advanced machinery being made ready.
A starship.
It was the departure of an experimental starship.
Copland's fanfare for the common man was being played.
Again I saw alternative futures where the knowledge of the mushroom was not fused with
humanity's restless expansionism.
I saw a planet covered with a society of slave worker machine symbiotes.
I saw the life of North American society running through several hundred years of upheaval
and political change.
An image like a great animated war planning board.
The dualism of fascism and democracy hung around America's neck like the albatross.
Again and again nightmare police state fascism would sweep like a foul tide over the aspirations
of the people and again and again the subtlety of the people would organize around the stupidity
of the oppressor and rise in wild and bloody revolt to again secure the space of a few
generations in which to inaugurate attempts at democratic social justice.
The mushroom always returned to the theme that it was wiser in the ways of evolution
and sympathetic therefore to a symbiotic union of the technical control of matter possessed
by humanity and its own sense of the how-ness of things that had been developed over millions
of years of conscious experience as an intelligent organism radiating through the galaxy.
From its own point of view it is an elder life form and as such it offers its tempering
experience to a vibrant but naive child race that stands for the first time on the brink
of the stars.
As our imagination has striven outward to attempt to encompass the possibility of the
intelligent other somewhere in the starry galaxy so the other observing this now reveals
itself to be among us as an aspect of ourselves when in the psilocybin trance.
In the phenomenon of stropheria cubensis we are confronted with an intelligent and seemingly
alien life form not as we commonly imagine it but an intelligent alien life form nevertheless.
It is only an anachronistic lack of modern self-reflection that would lead any thinker
on the subject of extraterrestrial life to suppose that any intelligent alien would be
even remotely like ourselves.
Stropheria cubensis is an unceasing river of forms and adaptive solutions to special
conditions, culture even more so.
It is far more likely that an alien intelligence would be barely cognizable to us as such rather
than that it should overwhelm us with such similarities as anthropoid form and an intimate
knowledge of our gross industrial capacity.
Our traveling species would have a sophisticated knowledge of genetics and DNA function and
therefore would not necessarily bear the form which evolution on a native planet had given
them.
They might well look as they wished to look.
In the late summer of 1975 Dennis and I decided that the world we were exploring required
a wider audience so that some consensus concerning what was going on could be established.
To that end we wrote and published a guide on the method we had developed to cultivate
the Stropheria.
At the beginning of that little book I introduced what we had personally learned about the world
of the mushroom.
The mushroom speaks and our opinions rest upon what it tells eloquently of itself in
the cruel night of the mind.
I am old, older than thought in your species which is itself fifty times older than your
history.
Though I have been on earth for ages I am from the stars.
My home is no one planet for many worlds scattered through the shining disk of the galaxy have
conditions which allow my spores an opportunity for life.
The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sunbathing.
My true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil.
These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections than the number in a
human brain.
My mycelial network is nearly immortal.
Only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of the parent star can wipe
me out.
By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions in your model of reality
all my mycelial networks in the galaxy are in hyper-like communication across space and
time.
The mycelial body is as fragile as a spider's web but the collective hyper mind and memory
is a vast historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds in
our spiral star swarm.
Space you see is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce
from spores for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known.
Across the eons of time and space drift many spore bearing life forms in suspended animation
for millions of years until contact is made with a suitable environment.
Few such species are minded.
Only myself and my recently evolved near relatives have achieved the hyper communication mode
and memory capacity that makes us leading members of the community of galactic intelligence.
How the hyper communication mode operates is a secret that will not be given lightly
to humanity but the means should be obvious.
It is the occurrence of psilocybin and psilocin in the biosynthetic pathways of my living
body that opens for me and my symbiotes the vision screens to many worlds.
You as an individual and mankind as a species are on the brink of the formation of a symbiotic
relationship with my genetic material that will eventually carry humanity and earth into
the galactic mainstream of the higher civilizations.
Since it is not easy for you to recognize other varieties of intelligence around you,
your most advanced theories of politics and society have advanced only as far as the notion
of collectivism.
But beyond the cohesion of the members of the species into a single social organism,
there lie richer and even more baroque evolutionary possibilities.
Symbiosis is one of these.
Symbiosis is a relation of mutual dependence and positive benefits for both of the species
involved.
Symbiotic relationships between myself and civilized forms of higher animals have been
established many times and in many places throughout the long ages of my development.
These relationships have been mutually useful.
In my memory is the knowledge of hyper-light drive ships and how to build them.
I will trade this knowledge for a free ticket to new worlds around suns less forsaken and
a nearer galaxy center.
To secure an eternal existence down the long river of cosmic time, I again and again offer
this agreement to higher beings and thereby have spread throughout the galaxy over the
long millennia.
A mycelial network has no organs to move the world, no hands, but higher animals with manipulative
abilities can become partners with the star knowledge within me and if they act in good
faith, return both themselves and their humble mushroom teacher to the million worlds all
citizens of our star swarm are heir to.
That has been my own reaction to the mushroom's claims concerning the extraterrestrial origins
of tryptamine hallucinogens and the visions they bear.
I am of many minds.
I think that it is possible that certain of these compounds could be seeded genes injected
into the planetary ecology eons ago by an automated space probe arriving here from a
civilization somewhere else in the galaxy.
Such genes could have been carried along in the genome of a mushroom or other plant awaiting
only the advent of another intelligence and its discovery of them to begin reading out
a message that opens with the bizarre dimension familiar to shaman everywhere.
The point of such a message could only be made clear when we had advanced to a sufficient
level of technical achievement to appreciate it.
The exponential growth of analytical tools and methods may indicate that we are now approaching
such a level.
I speculate that the final content of the message and its raison d'etre will be instructions,
it will be called a discovery, of how to build a matter transmitter or subspace radio so
that we can have direct contact with the civilization that sent the message bearing hallucinogen
genes to the earth so many eons ago.
The trances imply that such a civilization has a faster than light technology for information
if not for matter itself, but they require a receiver at the arrival point else they
are as bound by the constraints of general relativity as are we.
The mushroom alien may have seeded the stars with automatic biomechanical probes immensely
sophisticated by our standards, able to tailor make message bearing hallucinogens for the
special ecological conditions that the probe may encounter and to release virus-like pseudo-organisms
that can carry the artificial genes into the nucleoplasm of the target species.
This is a far more enduring form of message than a solid state monolith on the moon or
an orbiting monitor.
The artificial genes may be carried along in the stream of evolution for literally hundreds
of millions of years without substantial degradation of the message.
The information carried by the probe and broadcast by the hallucinogens is modulated by the modalities
of the evolving intelligence of whatever planet is contacted, but slowly the emphasis of the
information available from the probe shifts.
Predictions of good hunting, finding of lost objects, and the provision of medical advice
is slowly superseded by the revelation of the extraterrestrial source of this information
and the telos behind it.
The star antenna and the entry into the hegemony of galactic civilization that it will bring
with it.
Speculative ideas indeed, but strangely enough many of the most current calculations and
ideas about the density of life and intelligence in the galaxy confront xenobiologists with
the dilemma of why we have not been contacted.
I will not go into details, but Ponnamburama and Cameron's "Scientific Perspectives on
Extraterrestrial Communication" gives an excellent overview of current thinking on the subject.
R.N. Bracewell's contribution, printed in the same work, was the basis of my own ideas
about interstellar probes.
I will summarize the state of the art thus.
True Hallucinations (Part 14)
I will summarize the state of the art thus.
Current thinking concludes that the peak of the emergence of intelligence in the galaxy
was achieved 10 to 100 million years ago.
That most races in the galaxy are very old and very sophisticated.
We cannot expect such races to appear with a trumpet blast over every city on Earth.
Such an entry into history is tantamount to crashing into someone's house completely
unannounced, hardly the sort of thing that one would expect from a subtle and ancient
galactic civilization.
Rather, they have always been here.
Or rather, their presence has always been here in the Hallucinogens.
When we understand this on our own, we will be signaling to them that we are now ready
for the contact.
We can send that signal only by following the instructions of the seeded genes and building
the necessary apparatus.
When that is done, somewhere in the galaxy, lights will flash the message that yet another
of the millions upon millions of seeded planets in the galaxy has achieved the threshold of
galactic citizenship.
The current estimates are that even in a galaxy teeming with intelligence, such a threshold
is passed by an intelligent species only every hundred or thousand years.
It is a joyous moment even for the Galacterians.
If such a speculation has any validity at all, then its very articulation signifies
the final moment of the pre-contact phase and signifies also the pressing need to attempt
to explore the psilocybin trance and to understand the role that Stropharia cubensis is playing
in the psychology of the human species.
Recently a new light has been thrown on the phenomenon of voices heard in the head and
the role that they may play in the evolution of consciousness.
Julian Jaynes of Princeton has written a most provocative book, The Origin of Consciousness
in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Jaynes uses 445 pages to lay out his ideas concerning the role that hallucinations, especially
audio hallucinations, have played in the structuring of mind.
Briefly Jaynes believes that until the time of roughly the Iliad, around 1400 B.C., nothing
at all like modern ego-centered and individuated consciousness existed.
Instead he argues that people behaved like automata or social insects, unconsciously
going about the tasks of the hive.
Only in moments of great stress and personal danger was this regimen broken.
In such moments an impersonal mind, outside the usual experience of the world, became
manifest as a voice.
According to Jaynes' theory, such voices were the guiding lights of human society,
perhaps for millennia, whether they were understood to be the voice of an absent but living king
or a dead king, an omnipresent god or a personal deity.
Migrations and the breakdown of the cultural insularity of the early human civilizations
brought an end to man's relations to the bicameral mind, which is Jaynes' term for
the cybernetic godlike presence felt behind the hallucinated voices.
Selective pressures and social prejudice against having a relationship with the bicameral mind
in a modern context have made hearing voices into a mystical phenomenon or a serious mental
aberration, in any case something very rare.
The interested reader should study Jaynes' case carefully, although his book is exasperating,
since in a treatise on the role of hallucinations in human history he fails to offer any serious
discussion of hallucinogenic plant use at all.
This is a serious failing, especially if the effect triggered by psilocybin is not, as
I have suggested, a contact with an intelligence entirely distinct from ourselves.
Jaynes' theory opens up the possibility that psilocybin returns one to rapport with
the personified other in a way that duplicates on some level the state of mind that was characteristic
of early human civilizations.
It is reasonable to suggest that a voice in the head, interpreted by ancient man as a
god, might be interpreted by a naive modern person as a telepathic contact with extraterrestrials.
Whatever facts may eventually be known, psilocybin offers a tool that allows direct experience
of this voice that explains all things, this logos of the other.
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Chapter 19, The Hawaiian Connection
The fall of 1975 was a time of personal change and consolidation.
Cat, my old friend, met years before in Jerusalem during my opium and kabbalah phase, became at last my lover.
Tidepool traveler, the mushroom had made good its promise to send a partner to share the ongoing journey through the interior world.
In October, we went to Hawaii to write and to plan a trip to the Peruvian Amazon in early '76.
He had rented a house on the remote and desolate Kau district of the Big Island of Hawaii.
It was an area of twisted lava flows of all ages.
Kapukas, islanded areas of ancient forest, were the only vegetation and were surrounded by frothy seas of hardened rock that had killed all low-lying and less fortunate life.
Slowly, nearly imperceptibly, Mauna Loa rose up to 14,000 feet in the distance behind us.
We were at about 2,500 feet ourselves.
Our small house fronted the vast and forbidding cinder fields, but the lot ran back into a kapuka whose enclosing shade and many birds and insects
provided welcome contrast to the primal devastation that stretched in all directions for miles.
Our life was leisurely. I wrote and did some experiments with further aspects of mushroom cultivation.
Kat was immersed in doing the line drawings for the book on Stropharia cubensis growing.
We were isolated as we both loved to be, and we took mushrooms together and often.
It was during that time in Hawaii that I determined to return again to the Amazon to track down Banasteriopsis capi and its native setting
and to satisfy myself as to the role that it and the beta-carboline hallucinogens it contains played in the experience at La Chorrera.
I was especially interested to know if other chemically different aboriginal hallucinogens provoked the same experience as did the mushroom psilocybin.
I wanted to determine if our experiences were part of the general phenomenology of hallucinogens or were unique to psilocybin.
Throughout that October and November in Hawaii, we took the Stropharia that we had grown at weekly or 10-day intervals.
This was an amazing series of experiences.
The psilocybin definitely conveys the impression that sometimes the hallucinations one is seeing are being seen with equal clarity by the other people around one.
Kat and I satisfied ourselves that this was true by describing in turn the images in which we were immersed.
At those times when the flow of images had a certain electric intensity, there was no doubt that we were seeing the same things.
The relationship of the psyche to the surface of the body, the skin, is amazing under the influence of psilocybin.
By having large areas of skin in contact, we seem to somehow obviate the usual psychic individuality and integrity of the body
and would melt into each other's minds in a way that was immensely pleasant and full of unplumbed potential for human growth and parapsychological studies.
It was wonderful to have someone to share the mushroom with, for until Kat had joined me, most of my mushroom experiences had been entirely alone,
one soul adrift in the cosmic ocean.
Happily, there were now two of us navigating together through the billows of jeweled and synesthesia geometries.
Two of those mushroom trips stand out as especially memorable.
The first occurred the evening of the 28th of November, 1975.
We each ate five dried grams of stapharia and then sat inside by the fire, watching the slow upwelling of hallucinations from behind closed eyelids.
I seemed to see fleeting but prophetic images of the trip that we were planning into the Amazon.
True Hallucinations (Part 15)
Campfires and trails filled my head and the sound of nearby crickets seemed transformed
into the roar of night jungle sounds that awaited us in Peru.
We talked together of our plans and our future.
The future seemed enormous and open before us.
It was in that evening that we both became committed to a family and a life together.
It was a large turning point for me, I have no doubt.
We walked together outside and stood beneath the stars near the sheds and gardens where
we daily pursued the yet more perfect cultivation of the mushroom.
The night was uncannily still and the sky blazing with stars.
Looking to the southern sky I thought, if you are out there, if you approve the course
we have set our lives on, if the mystery is real, then give us sign.
I stepped toward Cat who was walking in front of me to say, I asked them for a sign, but
before I could speak the sky was rent from mid-heaven to horizon with a crimson streak
of meteoric fire.
The depth of attunement of psyche and world must be very great for such synchronisms to
occur.
Such meteor burns occur but once in all time came the mushroom's comment clear and unbidden
into my mind.
We sat down then on the warm receptive earth and abandoned ourselves to the waves of vision
and the vistas.
At one point a revolving night wind whipped the leaves of the otherwise perfectly still
trees.
The district was a remote one but born on the still air over miles and miles from neighbors
and ranches scattered far.
We could hear the mournful howl of every dog in that whole part of the island.
For hours they moaned and howled in eerie wavering eulation.
We could not imagine what it meant but took it as a coincidence as inexplicable as the
sky sign on our future.
Hours later in the time of the false dawn and at 4.49 local time according to seismic
instruments scattered around the planet the earthquake struck.
A low grinding roar moving through the lava fields stretching for miles all around and
beneath us.
Tidal waves and volcanic activity at Kilauea near the epicenter and thirty miles away from
us followed fast on the first shock.
An hour later another smaller shock wave would occur.
Now the reason for the hours of howling were starkly explained.
So it is a fact that meteoric signs and a great earthquake, the most intense in Hawaii
in a hundred years, attended our mushroom trip and our intensified exploration of the
psilocybin depths just as we attended them.
The second and in many ways more puzzling major mushroom experience that we shared in
Hawaii brought to an end any further exploration of mushroom psilocybin until after our return
from the Peruvian Amazon.
It was the 23rd of December, a day before Dennis would arrive to spend the Christmas
holidays with us.
Pat and I each again took five grams and settled down before the fireplace to awake the first
wave of images.
Soon we were deep out into it.
The mushroom was showing me a watery blue-green planet with no land except a globe girdling
archipelago at the equator, a kind of super Indonesia.
Accompanying the views of the planet was a narration explaining that this oxygen rich
world was within 100 light years of Earth and was totally uninhabited by higher animals.
As the implications of this last bit of data came home, I felt a wave of acquisitiveness
that seemed to come right out of my primate roots and a million years of nomadism and
restless swelling of human populations.
The narration was explaining that when the symbiotic fusion of humanity and the stapharia
was completed, man would be free to claim many such planets for the stapharia.
The narration had become personified into the inner voice that attends the mushroom
trance, and with it I began a discussion of the view of the watery planet and the technology
such views implied.
I wondered after the technology of star travel and whether the mushroom, for all the extravagant
images it is able to bestow, could produce any effect in the normal continuum.
I had the idea that we should go outside, as we usually did at some point in our trips,
and had a vague intimation that we might see some continuation of the cloud related phenomena
that had been a part of the experience at La Chorrera.
Cat complained of being very hot, and agreed we should go outdoors.
We were very unsteady on our feet, and though Cat said very little, I felt considerable
alarm for her, even though when she said that she was hot, I assumed that going outdoors
would be sufficient to cool her off.
Outside we stood unsteadily in the front yard.
The night was overcast.
Cat seemed to be lapsing in and out of consciousness.
It was becoming harder and harder to rouse her.
She kept saying that they were burning her, but that she thought she could hold them back.
Finally she collapsed altogether, and I could not get any response.
My first thought was to realize how isolated we were, and how impossible it would be to
get any sort of outside help.
It would take hours to get anyone there, and doubtless there was no one who knew more than
we did about psilocybin on the entire island.
Besides, the overwhelming gestalt of the situation was somehow that we had been placed by something
in the scales of life and death, and that whatever was to be done, it was to be done
by us alone, and in the next very few minutes.
I remembered then that at the back of the house, near where we were accustomed to taking
sun baths, there was a large tub of water that held the overflow from our catchment
system.
I remembered then that at the back of the house, near where we were accustomed to taking
sun baths, there was a large tub of water that held the overflow from our catchment
system.
It required, even in the face of a mortal threat which I recognized this to be, a complete
organization of my consciousness to think of emptying the water over cat, but as soon
as I thought of it, it seemed to give the swirling world a direction.
I picked her up in a single sweeping motion, and carried her, us lurching through the dark,
past the spiky palm fantastic in the darkness.
I laid her on the ground and began to empty can after can of clear black and silver silken
water over every inch of her.
It was immediately apparent that we had found the limiting factor of whatever was making
her feel a burning sensation and forcing her into unconsciousness.
Tearfully and joyously embraced there in the water and the mud, both sensing that this
very uncharacteristic effect of the mushroom had been a close call.
As we knelt together with the realization that we had surmounted the difficulty that
had risen to confront us, a wild peal of unearthly sound, a howling laughter, split the air from
the direction of the ancient wood behind the house.
Neither of us mentioned it then, but later we agreed that it had been very real and unsettling.
We stumbled back into the house and I made a tea while cat talked to me and candidly
confided that she was experiencing what must be like being insane.
She described having very frank hallucinations with her eyes open, strange tangible fern
and orchid-like forms growing and twisting out of every available surface.
The previous sensation of heat was now resolved down into a field of white-hot potential energy
that could be held away from burning contact with her body by allowing the hallucinogenic
energy to spend itself in a chaos of weird and explicit images.
Only by applied concentration could she hold the burning plasma at bay.
A few feet away from her where it became a skin of vision and encompassed everything
else.
After a few minutes of this, cat again seemed to be fading and so we drew a cold bath and
she lay in that for a while until the symptoms again abated.
As we talked it became apparent that her experience had dimensions for her that had not been apparent
to me.
When we had first stepped out of the house, she discovered that the sensation of heat
had not diminished but only grown stronger.
Then she had noticed that directly above her was a disk of light and color, a giant tinker
toy assemblage of softly glowing rods of light with jewel-like connectors emanating every
color.
"I understood," she told me, "that the relationships of the pieces, their lengths, their angles
to each other was infinitely complex and also the embodiment of perfect truth.
By seeing it I was understanding everything, but there were creatures inside the vehicle,
mantis-like and also made of light, that didn't want me to know.
Bending over their instrument panels, the more I understood, the more they burned me
with their ray.
I couldn't stop looking, but I was being vaporized.
I felt you pick me up, and as you carried me I thought, 'I hope he hurries.
I am becoming a cloud.'
For a moment I was floating above, looking down at us, people bigger than life, out of
time.
Then I felt the water on my skin, redefining the limits of my body, condensing me again."
Kat's impression of the situation was that this was not a threat conveyed by the mushroom,
but a force inside the continuum that the mushroom makes available, a force that is
seemingly morally ambiguous.
Kat was having a UFO close contact experience while I was seeing nothing.
It was a contact fraught with danger and the threat of extinction.
It had abruptly terminated when I had taken her back to the water.
We sat up all night discussing what had happened.
It served to accentuate other odd things that we had noticed when taking psilocybin in that
remote environment.
We had particularly noticed small scratchings and rustlings at the periphery of sense and
vision during the trips.
Not unlike the activation of a classic poltergeist phenomena, these small movements and noises
were so regular a feature of these experiences that I came to simply accept them.
We also noticed waves of organization or anti-entropic swells that seemed to sweep through animate
and inanimate matter alike during the mushroom voyages.
For instance, after a prolonged period of near trance and contemplation of the visions,
if we were to draw away from it in a collective motion to stretch or talk, then the fire would
suddenly flare and burn brighter and the rustling of the periphery increase.
We were definitely at the brink of the same dimension that I had been plunged into at
La Charera, again brought there by the agency of the mushroom.
This time, however, we took our threat-laden brush with the thing as an admonition to ease
up for a time.
We formed the determination to go to Peru and to take ayahuasca, whose chemistry and
reputation might, we thought, be helpful in giving some perspective on the nature of psilocybin
relative to other psychochemicals.
Our walks in the rainforests of Hawaii were pale but real prefigurement of Amazon trails
once followed in the past and in a few months to be traveled again.
It was during one of those walks, reflecting on her UFO experience, that Cat pointed out
that a lens is the natural result of the overlapping of two spheres.
Is there more than a pun involved in applying this idea to the lens-shaped UFO?
Perhaps some topological truth is implied in the thought that the lens is caused by
the overlapping of one continuum with another.
Other clouds were a part of the UFO contact that I was caught up in at La Charera in '71.
This theme re-emerged during those psilocybin experiences in the desolate landscapes of
rural Hawaii.
On yet another mushroom trip, when Cat and I stepped outside late at night, we beheld
the stars through the moving interstices of a high lacework of thin clouds.
Yet hovering only a few hundred feet above and slightly in front of us was a very dark,
dense lenticular cloud.
It grew more solid appearing than as we watched.
Then suddenly this tendency was reversed and it began to thin and fade very quickly.
Then it was gone.
Years go by and there is little intrusion of the peculiar into things.
Then suddenly it is with us again, effecting coincidence and appearing to channel the flow
of events toward some end, sensed but not understood.
The current wave of paranoid fiction, gravity's rainbow, illuminatus, Ratner's star, etc.,
make feedback from the collective difficult to evaluate.
Man is always a creature in transformation.
This imparts to every moment deeply felt a sense of the mystery of any future unrealized.
Is the present situation any different from many others in the past?
Novelty is always in the process of emergence, but does it ever emerge explicitly, suddenly
from the events in which it is embedded, suddenly enough for us to recognize it as a true flux
of the temporal continuum?
It does, I believe, in miracles and ecstasy and in situations where forces are seen at
work that are undescribed by today's physics.
It is necessary to reiterate these familiar threads of thought, for if this is not done,
then no record exists of whatever steps we have taken toward understanding psilocybin
and its relation to the UFO, the knot of anomaly that seems to haunt time like a ghost.
Chapter 20, The Oversoul as Saucer
There is building in global society an increasingly intense expectation of the intervention into
human history by UFOs.
It is very similar in tone to the build-up of messianic expectation in the Hellenistic
world in the several centuries preceding the birth of Christ.
The leaders of Roman society may have been caught off guard by the appearance of Christ,
but they had no one to blame but themselves, since millions of people in the ancient world
were expectantly awaiting some kind of Messiah.
So, today, science and government pooh-pooh the idea of world contact with the UFOs, while
the contact cults grow ever larger and more insistent that contact is about to occur.
Imagine, therefore, what you may never have seriously imagined before.
Imagine what would happen if the UFOs were to appear.
Imagine a spaceship of the close encounters of the third kind, Variety, suddenly appearing
in orbit around the Earth.
Television and mass media would carry its image to every man, woman, and child on the planet.
Governments would be paralyzed.
Science would be helpless to explain where it came from or how it got here.
Millenarian hysteria would break out everywhere.
The UFO would be hailed as savior and denounced as antichrist.
The end of the world would appear eminent, and all this would occur before the contact
was more than a visual image.
Then, the UFO would begin its revelation.
Vast displays of beneficent power can be expected.
Perhaps it would mysteriously neutralize all weapons of mass destruction.
Or it might use some sort of ray to cure all terrestrial cancer.
Whatever it does, one may be sure that its actions will be impressive.
Its actions will convert millions to the UFO religion in a space of hours.
Indeed, its actions will be specifically designed to overwhelm us with the reality of its power and presence.
That will close the first stage of the revelation.
The second stage will be the teachings.
Telepathically imparted, the specifics of the teachings cannot be anticipated,
but they will urge love, voluntary simplicity, concern for one another, renunciation of war,
perhaps renunciation of the destructive application of science.
Whatever the teachings, the UFO will promise immense reward to those who follow them
and dire consequences for those who do not.
And the teachings will be delivered in so poetically perfect a way,
so rich in understanding and appealing nuances,
that no one will doubt their origin in a being wise and good and immensely superior to ourselves.
The delivery of the teachings will set the stage for the third and last and most shocking phase of the revelation,
the departure.
The saucer, promising vaguely to return, will simply disappear.
The entire process could take less than a month.
If this seems a short time, recall that the entire public career of Christ lasted only three years.
Christ's career occurred in a world where information could move no faster than a horse's gallop.
Yet three years in one small part of the world was all that was necessary to launch a world religion that was vital for 1500 years.
In a world of electronic communication, the impact of the saucer's arrival, miracles, teaching and departure
would be incalculable, even if it all occurred within a month.
The saucer would leave in its wake a science utterly unable to provide any answers to the important questions concerning what had gone on.
The vast majority of people would be fanatical converts to the teachings of the saucer,
and any institution in opposition to those teachings could expect to be swept away almost overnight.
The departure of the UFO would create a sense of abandonment,
the agony of which could be expected to echo in the human psyche for centuries.
The only panacea would be the religion of the saucer, the religion left behind.
Science would be discredited and soon abandoned in favor of a thousand or more years of exegesis of the saucerian message.
Is it not a familiar pattern in the light of our discussion of Christ and Rome?
What will never be said in the wake of such an event, and so must be said now,
while there is still time for all of the above could occur and yet still be deception.
A benign deception designed to save us from our advanced science and infantile ethics,
but a deception nevertheless. The saucer, no matter how alien it appears,
no matter how advanced its demonstrations of power, is not a vehicle from some other star system.
It is the over-soul of humanity up to its oldest trick.
If one knows this, one can live through the revelation and the destruction of our scientific world,
and yet evade the immense power of this most powerful of all transference phenomenon,
and thereby maintain the integrity of one's own soul and spirit.
Remember, I am not a debunker of flying saucers or a defender of science.
I am a contactee, and this book is the painstakingly told story of my own involvement with the UFOs.
I am one of those Valais has pinpointed as being a carrier of ideas that paved the way for the scenario I have just described.
Yet, from it all, I have learned that there is no religious revelation more satisfying
than the hard-won fruits of simple understanding.
And there is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.
I reach these conclusions through my use and familiarity with psilocybin and other psychedelic drugs.
They immerse their user in the world of the over-soul and make one privileged to at least a part of its mechanics of operation.
They allow a private dialogue with the over-soul that is outside the context of the struggle between science and revelation
that leaves no choice between the alienation of the rationalist and the tired formulas of the thematic believer.
Psychedelic drugs hold out the possibility of healing the breach between science and morality at the level of the individual,
thus freeing one to evolve independent of the chaos and transformation the UFOs may soon bring to humanity.
Valais' recent book, "Messengers of Deception," vibrates with fear of the unconscious and alienation from the matrix of the larger psyche
out of which rational thought has emerged.
He fears the destruction of rationalism and scientific thought, yet never once does he mention the potential world-wrecking crisis
that the undirected development of science and technology has brought him to being.
He paints himself as an open-minded investigator of UFOs, yet never questions the motives of the retired and unnamed intelligence officers
in which he places so much faith.
It is impossible that the CIA is unaware of the social impact belief in UFOs is having.
If they were unaware of it before, then surely the recent writings of Valais himself must have alerted them
to the potential challenge UFO beliefs pose to orthodox institutions.
Based on Valais' own ideas of an informational struggle between rational and irrational elements,
how was he able to ignore the possibility that the mutilations which he is so eager to connect with UFOs
are nothing more than a government agency's clumsy attempt to discredit the genuine UFO phenomenon?
It is a typical method of the intelligence community to discredit human groups it opposes
by faking atrocities in such a way that they appear to have been committed by the group whose discrediting is sought.
Valais gives examples of this, but never suspects that some government agency might be using this technique
to impede the transfer of loyalties from political institutions to the UFOs.
He mentions the proximity of animal mutilations to high-security government installations,
but never suggests this might be because such installations are the source of these mutilations.
Few UFO sightings involve confusion among witnesses over whether or not what they saw was a UFO or a helicopter.
Yet in the animal mutilation cases, many witnesses insist a helicopter was involved.
Valais is at pains to say no physical evidence of a UFO has ever been collected.
Yet later he passes over the fact that a quite ordinary surgical scalpel was found at one cattle mutilation site.
It seems possible to me that some people in government have read Valais and are familiar with his theories
regarding UFOs as a factor introducing shifts in belief systems and institutional loyalties on a global scale.
Without knowing what UFOs really are, these persons and agencies have launched smokescreen operations
designed to cast doubt on the motives and harmlessness of UFOs
and so to retard or halt the shift of loyalties and beliefs now reaching epidemic proportions.
I suspect that Valais' book may be the opening shot in a media war whose purpose will be to connect the occult,
right-wing fanaticism, and animal mutilations to the UFO,
all in an effort to cast doubt on the vast power and benign intent of the saucer phenomenon.
True Hallucinations (Part 16)
Valet's title, "Messengers of Deception," bears a curious resemblance to J. Edgar Hoover's
"Masters of Deceit."
There, the boogeyman was communism.
In Valet's book, we are told the new boogeyman is UFO phenomena.
Who chose the title for Valet's book?
Was it Valet or the mysterious Major who is so helpful in guiding Valet down these new avenues of speculation?
I believe that Valet, whether wittingly or unwittingly, is himself a messenger of deception
and has become the spearhead of a conscious effort to sow even deeper confusion in society regarding UFOs.
We might say it is an effort for doom to failure.
The collective overmind of our species is the source of the UFO
and its designs cannot be deflected or turned aside.
Its viewpoint is one of thousands of years, and its means, visionary and charismatic belief systems
which act to restore the balance between understanding of and reverence for the universe,
is a message more powerful than any offered by the profane materialist societies
that have grown so foolish as to imagine themselves the stewards of human destiny.
Humanity alone, and each of us individually, is the steward of human destiny.
This is the real meaning of the UFOs and the experiment at La Chorrera.
The
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My own ideas concerning the mechanics by which the over-soul creates the UFO encounters might take the following form.
Dimethyltryptamine, when smoked, snuffed, or injected, induces a brief and extremely intense psychedelic experience
whose overwhelming sense of contact with the other is unparalleled.
For the last decade or so, this extraordinary property of DMT has made it seem to many who sought a chemical basis for schizophrenia
to be a likely candidate for the long-sought schizotoxin.
Studies have proved inconclusive, however.
DMT concentration has not been proven to differ significantly in schizophrenic and normal controls.
Studies have established the presence of DMT in the human body, however the origin and significance of the DMT is unknown.
Although it may reflect endogenous synthesis, it could also result from diet, bacterial byproducts, human laboratory error, or other sources.
Bearing in mind the bizarre power of the DMT experience, its presence and unknown role in human metabolism, add one more fact,
the strange aura of suggestibility that can precede the onset of the intense hallucination phase of the DMT experience.
This period of suggestibility may last 15 seconds to a minute, and is a time during which the assumptions which the experiment projects concerning the unusual shift of sensory input acquires enormous power.
A few moments later, the power of the now-numinous assumption overwhelms the consciousness of the observer with a scenario that, while totally bizarre and au crès,
nevertheless is somehow a complete psychological fulfillment of the expectations formed in the few minutes of transition that preceded the visionary engulfment.
What I am proposing is that something like this happens during a UFO close encounter, and the cause may very well be something which must be partially sought in the human organism.
Imagine a person wandering alone in unfamiliar country. Suddenly, there is a hackle-raising sense of weirdness, then a feeling of numbness in the limbs, followed by a clearing of vision and a loud crackling sound.
At this point, the sense of strangeness within and without the body would trigger a fear reaction in most people. The fear reaction causes a rapid and automatic search for a culturally validated explanation of what is going on, and an explanation will always be found.
It may range from "I am being bewitched by a demon" to "Surely it is a visitation of the holy mother" to "My God, it must be a UFO!"
In each case, the abandonment of the ego to a culturally prescribed explanation of the experience of the other causes the experience to exfoliate, exploit, and elaborate all the themes that the culture's current myth of the other entails.
It is known that DMT binds preferentially to certain tissue when introduced into the human body. Is it not possible that we human beings are occasionally susceptible to a kind of visionary seizure when, for reasons of stress or diet, these factors combine with psychodynamic factors to initiate a sudden dumping of accumulated DMT?
Paromones may play a part in this experience, and isolation may be its trigger. Whatever its cause, our conditioning as individuals causes the experience to plunge us into a numinous scenario that reflects the deepest concerns and yearnings of the current culture toward the other.
In our own time, this has given rise to the hope of friendly visiting extraterrestrials. As late as 1917, the miracle at Fatima was interpreted worldwide as a manifestation of the Virgin Mary. Today, it would surely be hailed as an extraterrestrial contact.
If my suggestion regarding DMT were found to be correct, it would provide insight into the way in which the cultural feedback thermostat, explanation of UFOs put forth by Valais and others, actually works.
Those people who experience the DMT seizure and are plunged into the current myth of the other actually return as apostles of that myth, able to clarify and refine it, and by those means, to exert the tuning and control of historical development that may be the purpose of the agency behind the UFOs.
Stress, generalized as an impending sense of historical crisis, may be the factor that induces the UFO close contact experience. As the historical crisis deepens, the number of contacts will increase until the atemporal portion of the mass psyche has affected enough individuals that there is actually a turning away from the stress-inducing course of action.
How well is the superego able to play the role of God? Can it come in saucerian splendor to save the world from the flames at the end of time? Or can it only beckon and warn with visions and dire prophecy?
These are questions that we might answer if we diligently explore the states of mind that DMT and psilocybin make available. Perhaps the UFO encounters involve nothing more than an autonomous and negative psychic complex able to emerge during the situation of unusual energy dynamics induced in the psyche by psilocybin.
However, a different explanatory approach merges psyche and world by involving a continuum whose modalities bisect each other with equal ease. This is the approach which grants the phenomenological existence of the constructs seen in the Stropharia trance and in UFO encounters.
Indeed, the vast and dreamy world that we call imagination or the unconscious may merge imperceptibly into autonomously existing worlds we would call hyperdimensional, indicating the paradox of their simultaneous invisibility and their here-and-now-ness in the psilocybin trance with a presence that belies the term hallucination.
Ahead of us lies the future, where we can expect the ingression of the alternative dimension to intensify. It is therefore important for us to have a sense of the powers in that other world and their shifting allegiances.
In a traditional society, our exploration of these matters would be firmly embedded in the extant shamanic mythos concerning these forces. Techniques, tried and true, would be available to fortify our psychic constitution.
Since we are members of a profane society whose relation to the unconscious is one of estrangement, we have no such consolation, no dispelling ritual or words of proven self-empowerment.
By reason and intuition we must attempt to conquer the fears that attend journeys into the unknown, but reason and intuition need data with which to construct maps of reality.
If we outdistance the inflow of fact, we move beyond the safety zone of the conjuring rod of intuition and reason. For these reasons we move slowly and steadily. We are human factors in a multivariable equation where the shift of unseen parameters can trigger large perturbations and resonances of unexpected types.
Knowing this, and knowing how little we do know, we should be excused for this defense of caution when taking to ourselves the visions which the Strapheria brings.
Carl Jung's Mysterium Cuneumtiones reminds us of the reality of the situation that ensues once the psyche is hooked into making the transference to the alchemical or saucerian goal.
Jung, citing Gerhard Doorn, stresses that the materialization of the stone is only a prologue to the experience of the perfected self qua self in the state of illumination.
Jung wrote, "Though we know from experience that psychic processes are related to material ones, we are not in a position to say what this relationship consists or how it is possible at all.
Precisely because the psyche and the physical are mutually dependent, it has often been conjectured that they may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience.
Of what does this relationship consist? My own hunch, and it is only a hunch, is that an explicitly spatial dimension of a codimension inclusive of our continuum allows a hologram of other realized forms of organization far distant to become visible at certain levels of quantum resonance in the synaptic field.
These levels have been damped by selection in favor of more directly relevant lines of information relating to animal survival.
Evolution does not reinforce selectively the ability of an organism to perceive at a distance, since such an ability has no selective advantage unless the information it conveys falls upon the receptors of an organism already sophisticated enough in its use of symbols to abstract concepts for later application in different contexts.
Thus, these quantum resonances carrying intimations of events at a distance only begin to acquire genetic reinforcement once a species has already achieved sufficient sophistication to be called conscious and mind-possessing.
The use of hallucinogens can be seen as an attempt at medical engineering which amplifies for inspection by consciousness the quantum resonance of the other parts of the spatial continuum holographically at hand.
This experience is the vision which the UFOs and psilocybin impart, visions of strange planets, life forms, perspectives and societies, machines, ruins, landscapes.
The hierophanes all unfold in the nunc stans that has all space standing in it like a frozen hologram. Thus, experimentation with hallucinogens by human beings and the rise in endogenously produced hallucinogens as one advances through the primate phylogeny could both be due to a slow focusing on the phenomenon of imagination,
imagination being the deepening involvement of the species with things beheld but not actually existing in the present at hand.
The conclusion such an idea makes necessary is that it is upon the ideological content of specific visions that empirical attention should center. What are the working details of the worlds whose presence impinges on ours so strongly?
What of the beings sometimes confronted, often furtively sensed, who seem to have some existence in a world of their own revealed by the psilocybin and in UFO contacts?
There may exist a vast communication network in the topological nature of things, a network that becomes a fact only for those species or individuals who will but have the intelligence enough to seek this vision.
It will by then be found to be persistent in the nature of things. Alchemy thrives in a climate of such ideas. To validate the idea of the worth of the visions of worlds at a distance, one must emerge with some idea spawned by the visionary other but with a utility in the here and now.
The wave quantification of the I Ching is the only idea of this sort that I personally have glimpsed in completeness. It took years to elaborate and its relation to the here and now is still elusive.
Fragmentary themes abound. Symbiosis. Saucer lens vehicles whose possessors navigate the higher topological oceans in our heads. All this could be transference and fancy. In the classical sense of the word, the experimenter with hallucinogens pursues gnosis, privileged knowledge concerning nature, and vouchsafed by her in ecstasy.
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The Voynich Manuscript
Today I'm going to be discussing the Vonage manuscript, which is certainly one of the most interesting and has been called the most mysterious manuscript in the world.
I will describe the physical manuscript, place it in a historical context, and then discuss my own ideas about the people who may have been its authors.
First of all, the manuscript itself is written in a language of which no other example is known to exist.
It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from 19 to 28 letters, none of which bearing any relationship to any English or European letter system.
The manuscript is small, 7 by 10 inches, but thick, nearly 170 pages, closely written in a free-running hand, copiously illustrated with bizarre line drawings that have been water-colored.
Drawings of plants, drawings of little naked ladies appearing to take showers in a strange system of plumbing, which has been variously identified as organs of the body or a primitive set of fountains,
and astrological drawings, or what have been interpreted as astrological drawings.
But more about all this later. First of all, the known facts of the manuscript are few.
They are that it appears in 1586 that the court of Rudolf II of Bavaria was one of the most eccentric European monarchs of that or any other period.
This is the same Frederick who collected dwarfs, who collected, had a regiment of giants in his army. He was surrounded by astrologers.
He was fascinated by games and codes and music. He was typical of the occult-oriented Protestant intellectual of this period.
Anyway, to his court and among his courtiers came an unknown person who sold this manuscript to the king for 300 gold ducats, which translated into modern monetary units is about $14,000,
which is an astonishing amount of money to have been paid for a manuscript at that time, and immediately signals that the emperor must have been highly impressed by this object if he was willing to put out that kind of money for it.
Accompanying the manuscript is a letter which states that it is a manuscript of the Englishman Roger Bacon, who flourished in the 13th century and who was a noted pre-Copernican astronomer.
Now, at that time in Prague, which was where the court of the emperor was being held, the reputation of Roger Bacon was at a great height.
The court was a hotbed of alchemy, and among all these alchemists, the reputation of the English monk Roger Bacon was held very high.
This is because two years previously, the sale of the Vonage manuscript to the emperor being dated to 1586, two years previously, John Dee, the great English navigator, astrologer, magician, intelligence agent, cultist.
Wait, I still am back on Frederick.
You mean what was his relationship to all this?
Could you develop him a little bit more? You say he was typical.
Well, he was, he epitomized the liberated Northern European prince, who was a patron of alchemy, gave money to all these printing presses that were printing all this alchemical literature.
The Rosicrucian conspiracy, about which I will say more later, was fomenting at this very period right under the surface.
And Frederick patronized astrologers, magicians, alchemists. The reason John Dee had such a long stay at Frederick's court was because his companion, Edward Kelly, claimed to be able to perform the alchemical opus.
And the king more or less placed them under house arrest and asked them, you know, to do this for him as a favor, since he had patronized them very heavily.
And when they were unable to, Dee was able to talk his way out of it.
Kelly had been the one who had made the major claims and he was kept there and actually died in an effort to escape.
He fell when the shell roofing on a high parapet of this castle slid way underneath his feet one moonlit night when he was trying to sneak out of the castle.
But I anticipate my story because I think John Dee and Edward Kelly are probably, if they were not the, I certainly think they were the people who sold the Emperor the Vonage manuscript because of circumstantial evidence surrounding their interest in subjects similar to those being covered by the manuscript.
And, uh, Frederick is the same one, is that the winter summer queen, king and queen? Is that Frederick?
No, we're talking about Rudolph the second. He was succeeded by this guy, Frederick the Elector Palatine of Bohemia, who was also in this mold as a patron of Protestant alchemical aspirations in Central Europe.
But anyway, the Vonage manuscript was accompanied by this letter stating that it was a Bacon manuscript and the best astrologers and cryptographers in this court looked at it and could make nothing out of it.
And it and along with a great deal of other weird collections and material that Rudolph had gathered together from all over the world was passed to various people at his death.
And this book, because it contained botanical illustrations, passed to his botanist, who was a man named Marsicae, and he had it for 20 years. Then it passed to an unnamed party who had it for 20 years.
And by this time we're up to the 1620s. And then it passed to Athanasius Kircher, who was one of the great polymaths of the mid 17th century. He was a Catholic intellectual, an alchemist, a person who experimented with artificial languages.
And before he obtained the Vonage manuscript, we know of letters of his to various people asking about it. And in fact, he was sent small portions of it reproduced that he struggled over.
But once he actually had the manuscript in his possession, his diaries are silent about it. And he says nothing, even though five years after he acquired it, he published a book called a universal study of artificial languages that nowhere mentions the Vonage manuscript.
Maybe, maybe, well he called it something else. But there's no, there's no reference of any sort to anything that he possessed that was like that. That's right. And he became a, he decided to become a Jesuit in about 1660, and had to give away all of his worldly goods.
So he gave his library to this Jesuit seminary south of Rome. And in among his books was the Vonage manuscript and it sat on a shelf in the seminary from 1660, 1760, 1860, 1960, 220, 320 years.
No, no, 280 years till Alfred Vonage, a New York book dealer bought the entire library on a trip to Europe in 1912. And we got it all back to New York and sorted through it among all this easily catalogued late Renaissance Italian theological material was this peculiar book.
More than peculiar, totally anomalous book. And it's very strange because the store of images, even as late as the period when we first hear of the Vonage manuscript in the 1580s, the store of images in the European mind was very limited.
For instance, in speaking of the biological sections of the Vonage manuscript here you get 120 drawings of plants, and yet there were only 10 or 15 herbals in circulation among the educated people of Europe of that time.
And none of the Vonage images can be directly traced to any of these previously printed or circulated manuscripts. Likewise, the script itself, it has no antecedents and it spawned no imitators.
Codes from the early 16th century onward were in Europe were all derived from a book called the Stenographica of Johannes Trathemius, Bishop of Sponheim, who was an alchemist of Sponheim who was
wrote on the incipherment of secret messages and he had about three methods and no military or alchemical or religious or political code was composed by any other means throughout a period which lasted well into the 17th century.
Yet the Vonage manuscript does not appear to have any relationship to the Trathemian codes. The codes derivative of Johannes Trathemius, Bishop of Sponheim.
Is there something, do people research the Trathemian codes? Oh, the literature is voluminous on the Trathemian codes. Sure, there's a book by Walker called Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella that covers all of this very well.
Or Francis Yates' book, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Although they neither of them, not quite yet. First of all, let's see.
More about D and why I think that D is the obvious candidate for being the author or being the purveyor if not the author of the Vonage manuscript.
First of all, Trathemius' book, The Stenographica didn't circulate in as a printed book until the 1580s, but it circulated in manuscript form from about 1530 onward and when D visited the continent as a fairly young man he records in his diary that he spent three days hand copying the relevant chapters of a manuscript copy of the Stenographica that he was shown in Paris.
So from very early in his intellectual life he was in possession of the Trathemian code making machinery.
The next important event in his life for my argument and one of the most puzzling events in the whole history of science generally is the afternoon in July of 1582 when at Mortlake in his study John D was distracted by a brilliant light outside his window and stepped outside to receive from a creature he described as the angel Gabriel a polished lens of Lancasterian code.
Which he described in his diary from the sense forward as the shoe stone.
That's S-H-E-W.
The shoe stone.
And he was able by meditating on this stone to induce visions and dialogues with spirits.
However, this ability seemed to fade in the months after he received the stone.
Until a strange personage came into his life in the spring of 1584 and this was Edward Kelly.
Now Kelly was a much younger man than D and D was married to a much younger woman and D.
And Kelly was of the rascal class and he in fact in one account is described as being earless having had his ears removed for some petty crime in the provinces.
Anyway, he arrived at D's place in Mortlake pop-eyed and breathless with a wild story about how he had fallen asleep in a ransacked tomb in a monastery in Wales.
And when he had awakened beneath him in the tomb had been a vial of red powder which was the transformative elixir and a book in an undecipherable language which he called the diary of sorry the gospel of Saint Dunstable.
And said that he had been told around in the village that it was enciphered Welsh.
Now we actually hear no more in anybody's diaries or letters of the gospel of Saint Dunstable.
However, Arthur D the son of John D writing some 30 years later and reminiscing about his father said that from the time he met Kelly he spent a great deal of time trying to unravel a book called covered all over with hieroglyphics.
And perhaps this is the diary or the gospel of Saint Dunstable and perhaps it is in fact the Vonage manuscript and that these two things are the same thing.
In any case Kelly's entree to D was the undecipherable manuscript and the alchemical potion.
And he quickly from his conversations with D determined the story about the show stone and they set up a seance situation and Kelly proved himself to be a very adept scryer of the stone from the very first instance.
He could describe vast theatrical undertaking and speak all the parts of the characters.
Oh the show stone is in the British Museum. You can see it there it fits. They still have it.
Anyway, so then begins a period in these diaries which have been were published in 1658 by Marie Casabon as a true and faithful relation.
A series of diary entries that span the next 10 years dozens hundreds of spirit conversations and the delivering unto D and Kelly of an angel logic language called in knock in which was composed of non English.
Letters, but which computer analysis has recently shown has a curious grammatical relationship to English, but over 4000 words are known in a knock in and they were transmitted by the ghostly apparitions which Kelly channeled to D and D and some of the messages were theological in nature.
Many were political and came to them as they traveled about Europe, including visiting the court of Rudolph the second of Bavaria, our man who was sold the phonics manuscript, and they were the people who were responsible for telling everyone what a great alchemist Roger bacon the English monk had been.
They laid the public relations groundwork for turning this manuscript at a high premium I maintain.
In this case, the several groups that have studied the phonics manuscript have not looked at the amounts of encrypted material in john these diaries of which there's over 92 pages of strings of numbers and letters, which if it were found to be encoded in the same way that the
material is encoded.
The second is definitely shows all the physical signs of being a 16th century manuscript I estimate it was done sometime around 1540 and the, this means Kelly perhaps obtained it somewhere.
Otherwise it would have had to have been done later as late as the early 1580s if if D actually wrote it, then, then it should be possible to determine this because such large amounts of his encrypted though still undeciphered material is on record.
And perhaps now would be the moment to talk about the Rosicrucian and show how they work into all this D died in an old and broken hearted man in the render the reign of James the first in 1608, many years after the events of the sale of the phonics manuscript
Why was he well he had been the court astronomer of Elizabeth, and the friend of Sir Philip Sidney and the most educated man in England. When James came to power James had a total horror of the whole magical side of the Elizabethan court, and he just dismiss this guy as a crank he didn't want
astrologers around me thought it was all creepy. He was a rationalist to his anti Catholicism extended to a mistrust of the entire occult tradition generally.
However, early in his flowering period D had written a strange book called the hieroglyphic Mona, the monas hieroglyphic and which was 36 quasi geometrical theorems, which actually hinted at some kind of mystical doctrine, and it was just it's this utterly obscure book.
In the early 1580s it circulated in manuscript
who we are, you may not know, but if you're hip enough, you'll be contacted and asked to join and people like Robert flood who was essentially the heir of the D tradition in English occultism and science, basically put out advertisements saying if I ain't good enough, nobody's good enough, why haven't you people contacted
And the fact of the matter is that the Rosicrucians meaning the authors of the Fama and the Confessio never contacted anybody. And their claim was basically fraudulent it was that the tomb of Christian Rosencrantz, who had lived in the 14th century again it's like this harking back to Roger Bacon but instead harking back to a mythical person in two centuries previously,
that the tomb of Christian Rosencrantz, a great knight who had gone on the last crusade had been discovered and that inside there were all these alchemical books, and with a quasi political overtone definitely favoring the Bohemian court of Frederick the Elector Palatine,
and that all this should be disseminated as gospel it was a kind of alchemical Protestant revival, but curiously these texts the Fama and the Confessio had many doctrinal similarities to D's hieroglyphic monad, so that it appears that D either was used as the model for the Rosicrucian conspiracy by its authors, persons unnamed,
and I suspect the Czech alchemist Johann Valentin Andrei as probably being the person behind this because Andrei and Michael Meyer were people who definitely were old enough to have been involved in D's earlier visits, and have then just been at their intellectual at the peak of their intellectual powers,
when the foment that you mentioned of the Winter Kingdom and the bringing of Frederick Elector and his wife to Prague as the king and queen this episode occurred, and in fact I'll now relate the Vonage manuscript back to all of that.
Previously I mentioned that when Rudolf King, his court fell into disarray the Vonage manuscript passed to his botanist, well what was happening was that the old emperor was dying at a great age and mad as a damn hatter, no question about it.
Meanwhile to the west in Bohemia, the Frederick Elector, who is everything a Protestant alchemical prince could hope to be, young, brilliant, scheming, totally in charge of his lords,
he weds Elizabeth, the daughter of James I of England, and he takes the king's decision to give him his daughter's hand in marriage as tacit approval for his plan to establish an alchemical kingdom, a Protestant alchemical kingdom in central Europe.
Actually, James being the conservative that he was had a far more Machiavellian purpose in wedding his daughter to Frederick the Elector, because he also had it in his mind to wed one of his sons to a Spanish Catholic Habsburg princess,
and was trying to steer a neutral course when he realized that Frederick and Elizabeth had gone off to Bohemia, to their court, to be with Michael Meyer and Gerhard Doern and Johann Andrei and all these guys,
and to patronize these alchemical presses and astrology and all this stuff. He was much alarmed, but by that time it was too late to call it back and he realized that Frederick the Elector was a wild card.
When Rudolph finally did die, the princes of the Northern League gathered and chose his successor by secret ballot. Frederick won, and so in the winter, in the late fall of 1619, he and Elizabeth transferred their court to Prague and ruled for one winter until May of 1620.
The Mayflower was landing in America in the same year, but it had nothing to do with any of this.
Then the Habsburgs by that time had mounted an army and were able to crush this thing. In a sense, it can be seen as the opening shot of the Thirty Years War, although the Thirty Years, well, it was the opening shot of the Thirty Years War.
One of the young French soldiers in this Habsburg army laying siege to the city was the 19-year-old Rene Descartes, who would grow up to be the great proponent of modern French materialism.
Michael Myers, one of the last great synthesizers of the medieval alchemical vision, died in the siege of the city. Frederick was killed and Elizabeth fled. She lived in The Hague for many years.
And so, see, in that confusion, the botanist of Rudolph held in his house somewhere in the suburbs of Prague the Vonage manuscript, and the Thirty Years War comes, modern times overtake Europe, and this thing drifts further and further from its roots.
But my reconstruction of what must have happened is that in this period when Dee and Kelly were regaling Rudolph with tales of the alchemical prowess of Roger Bacon, that they, they ponied up this manuscript.
Either they wrote it at that time, or they had it with them. If they had it with them, it's a far more interesting story, because then perhaps they are not its authors.
If they are its authors, then it merely reveals the grammatical deep structure of the deranged mind of an Elizabethan magician, and this would explain to some degree why it was outside the ken of the CIA.
But if they didn't write it, if they only had it in their possession, then the mystery continues, because where did they get it and what was it?
It is true that Dee was under the patronage of the Earl of Northumberland, who, when Henry VIII broke with Rome, all of the English monasteries were sacked by the lords who stuck with the king.
And the Earl of Northumberland sacked monasteries that had large repositories of Bacon material, and Dee's library at Mortlake was known to have 53 Baconian manuscripts, of which only 41 have survived into modern times.
There are 41?
Baconian manuscripts.
Where are they?
Oh, they're at the Bodleian library at Oxford and the British Museum. They have all this Dee material.
Have you seen it?
No, no. Oh well, it would be fun to see it. The most interesting thing is this huge book called "A True and Faithful Relation," which is the day-by-day seances with these spirits as Dee and Kelly move all over Europe.
It's in that that it's recorded. Oh, and this is a piece of circumstantial evidence I almost left out, that in the very month that the emperor paid the 300 gold ducats for the manuscript, Dee records in his diary that they received 320 gold ducats from a mysterious source.
Now, it is true that another angle on Dee's personality, and some biographers have taken the position that he didn't believe in magic at all, that he only posed as a screwball, and that actually he was an intelligence agent for the British crown.
He was visiting all these courts as an astrologer and a necromancer and an alchemist and actually encrypting very succinct military and strategic and diplomatic information into these letters which he was sending home.
And because he could cast the finest horoscope in Europe, he had an entree into all these people's scenes.
And the truth lies somewhere in between. He was doing all of this. He was an agent for the British crown, but he was also, you know, the finest flower of the medieval mind.
He was used by Shakespeare as the model for Prospero and the Tempest and is the model for Dr. Faustus in Christopher Marlowe's version of that classic spellbinder.
What do you think about the Bacon Shakespeare controversy? Does that fit into that at all?
Well, it just shows, you know, how tenuous our grip is on what was going on in this time. I mean, besides whether Bacon wrote Shakespeare, then you have the problem of things like the Vonage manuscript.
Bacon visited Dean. We're now talking about Francis Bacon, who was who claimed actually Roger Bacon as a as one of his.
Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Queen Elizabeth and Philip Sidney and Francis Bacon visited John Dee at Mortlake one afternoon to see his library because he had more books than anyone in England.
One of the most interesting things about the Vonage manuscript is the people whose careers have found floundered, floundered on decipherments where people have come forward with very bold claims.
This guy, William Romaine Newberry, Newbold in the 1920s, who was a classic scholar, a medievalist, and by all accounts, a very brilliant man.
He announced that he had a complete decipherment of the Vonage manuscript and said that what it involved was shorthand strokes, tiny strokes that were components of each letter in the Vonage script.
And that by staring through a magnifying loop, you could magnify these characters and see that encoded into each one were the distorted remains of a Roman shorthand system that had been lost for 600 years.
And he produced astonishing decipherments in which he definitely thought that it was a Roger Bacon manuscript.
He decoded passages that dealt with student uprisings at Oxford at Christmas time 1292 when the riot between the Blackfriars and the something or other, just, you know, long, long decipherments.
The problem with all of this was that no one else could extract the same sense using Professor Newbold's method. His method involved so many choices from pools of letters at every given point along the line that you could demonstrate that hundreds of messages could be extracted.
And Professor Newbold died a broken man. He was disgraced, his career shattered. He had gone too far. The Vonage manuscript had claimed its first victim.
The next person to advance a decipherment of the Vonage manuscript was Robert S. Brumbaugh, also of Yale University, and his decipherment is in some ways almost as puzzling as the encryption.
He would have us believe that the Vonage manuscript says things like liquid Syrian matter, liquid matter plus Syrian Sicilian plus Syrian salt European Swedish Sicilian plus Syrian plus Russian Asian Sicilian salt liquid liquid Asian Italian Syrian salt liquid Sicilian Italian plus Sicilian plus salt, etc, etc.
Um, Robert S. Brumbaugh of Yale, however, when his method was examined by other people attempting to reproduce the same plain text, they got nowhere, and it can't be taken seriously.
Another effort at decipherment, which is minor, perhaps in comparison to the other two, but which provides an interesting anecdote, was a man named Strong, who was at San Diego, had claimed decipherment of certain of the labels of the illustrations of the Vonage manuscript.
And when Paul Lee formed a working group to look into the Vonage manuscript, Dr. Strong was one of the people they wanted to interview.
And my friend Ralph Abraham, who's a mathematician at Santa Cruz, had photostats of certain folios of the Vonage manuscript and he sent very detailed letters to Dr. Strong with these folios as enclosures and questions like, it is alleged that on folio 9b you translated a certain word as uterus.
Here is a photostat of folio 9b, please circle the word you translated, and this kind of thing.
And Dr. Strong's secretary wrote Ralph back and said that he was very old, he was in his 90s, and he didn't feel he could compose a letter to address all these questions, but that if Ralph would come to San Diego, he would satisfy him completely.
So that was a Thursday Ralph made, and got a reservation to fly down on the following Monday.
And Sunday night, the secretary called and said that Dr. Strong had died of a heart attack that evening.
So the Vonage manuscript has bedeviled people's careers, and people who have claimed to understand it have died with the secret untransmitted to the rest of us.
The intelligence community inside the United States government has spent a fair bit of time looking into it simply because it is so unusual to come upon such a large amount of code from such an early period and have it resist decipherment.
I mean it is just unheard of that a 16th century manuscript could not be deciphered by modern methods.
The most interesting thing in fact published on the Vonage manuscript is a United States government technical information office publication called the Vonage manuscript, an elegant enigma by Mary DeImperial.
And Mary DeImperial must be a renaissance PhD student somewhere who was hired by the government to basically collate everything known about the Vonage manuscript.
And some interesting things are known. Eventually I think perhaps it will yield, although I'm not sure, for instance computer analysis of the handwriting in it shows that two hands are involved.
It was written by two people. Does this mean it was written by Dee and Kelly? Is this the hands that we should look for? Can we then by comparing it to the handwriting of Dee and/or Kelly get a further feeling for their relationship to it?
How do you get a hold of one of these? You have to write to the office of technical information services in Springfield, Virginia and ask for this particular document whose number I'll have to hunt down.
And does it cost? Oh yes, it costs like five or six dollars. But it's a wealth of information on the whole context in which, I mean, it discusses all kinds of magical alphabets and early systems for encryption.
And systems for encoding and hiding information. I think that what fascinated me about the Vonage manuscript is above and beyond the historical puzzle, above and beyond how interesting it would be to know what it actually says.
And someone went to such great effort to hide what it says. Is just the idea of an unreadable book is a kind of Borgesian concept that is attractive. There must be somewhere an unreadable book.
And perhaps this is it. And it's almost, I mean, if my analysis of it as being the product of Dee and Kelly has seemed too facile, let me assure you that it is.
And that not all the facts are covered by that theory. So much of Dee's writing is known that I think if he had been the author, it would be possible to find that out. Perhaps it is possible to find that out and we're just premature in our wish for a resolution of it.
But the unreadable book, the idea that the world is information and the way by which we have cognizance of the world is by ordering all the information we come upon through relation to information that we already have accumulated.
Right. And an unreadable book in a non-English script with no dictionary attached is very puzzling because we are like linguistic oysters. We secrete around it. We insist it into our metaphysic.
But we don't know what it says, which always carries with it the possibility that it says something which would unhinge our conceptions of things or that its real message is its unsayability.
It simply is, it points to the otherness of the nature of information. It's what's called then a limit text as Finnegan's Wake is a limit text or...
What does that term come from?
It's a term of French structuralist criticism. Searching the search for limit text. Well certainly the Vonage manuscript is the limit text of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.
Definitely a literal...
It's like a literalizing of the mythical book in H.P. Lovecraft's work which is the Necronomicon, the writings of the mad Arab Alhazrad. And in fact Colin Wilson in his book, The Philosopher's Stone connects the Vonage manuscript to the Necronomicon.
The Shoestone maybe too?
Perhaps the Shoestone. Well The Philosopher's Stone was the Shoestone for D for sure. It's very interesting this business of the angelic language in Nokian because as I say 4,000 words were delivered through the Shoestone to D.
In the 1950s there was a famous UFO case where a woman who claimed she was in contact with UFOs taught a colonel in the CIA how to be in contact with the same group of saucers.
And he was demonstrating this ability for a group of his superiors in a room in the Pentagon and he asked for a demonstration. He was communicating with them through automatic writing.
And they said go to the window and look out. And they all went to the window and looked out and there was a brilliant golden disk of light cruising past the Pentagon.
And they went berserk, called the nearby Air Force base to see what was on the scopes, the radar had just gone out in this sector, etc. etc.
But what was, to tie it in with my point, these messages that this guy was getting on the swigi board were signed AFFA AFA which any scholar of Nokian can tell you is the Nokian word for nothingness friends.
So, it's very interesting, Blake spoke with angels, he was the flower of English poetry at a certain point in time, D spoke with angels, he was the flower of English science and mechanics at a certain period.
And perhaps the Vonage manuscript is actually a manuscript that is not encrypted at all, but is simply a book in a non-human language.
And therefore there is no Rosetta Stone to it, it is just utterly beyond the pale as they say in Ireland.
Well I think they should analyse the ink, that's one way, I really think that's a very important thing to do, even if it was written in the 1500s and that was to say, but there would also be a way to locate its origin.
That's right.
I mean there's all sorts of approaches.
In the summation in this book by Dean Pirio where she suggests things that can be done, the first thing she suggests as being totally obvious is the physical book should be analysed because this has never been done.
This would settle once and for all, at least the century of its origin.
And you know a number of things could be done, the libraries of the world should be searched for other examples of Vonage script, I mean after all are we really sure that there's no other extant example of this strange writing.
Computer analysis, this has been part of the approach of the Santa Cruz group is first of all settling on a standard alphabet for Vonage and then cataloguing every character and the number of times it occurs and in what combinations with other characters.
And the graphics of it as well, just the patterns that it forms, if they did a fully computer graphics on it I bet that that would give a three dimensional.
Yes, well none of the illustrations have ever been satisfactorily interpreted like what are called the astrological illustrations are only nominally that they could be anything they just seem to have stars and circles in them but otherwise they're not particularly relatable to the sky.
The so called pharmaceutical section, which is all these little canisters and things and these strange little naked women bathing in these in all this plumbing, which is called the pharmaceutical or the anatomical section, you know, could be anything could be an obscure form of central German hydro therapy, or, you know, actually the doodlings of a deranged imagination.
When you only have one of something, it gets quite gets quite dicey placing it in the correct context and cultural history, especially since there was a lot of secrecy in this period a lot of people running around faking manuscripts and other people's names using secret cover languages, communicating and secret codes, plotting secret societies.
I mean, this was really the breakup of the medieval mind, just like today.
All sorts of medieval mentalities.
Yes, well, this hope to establish an alchemical political union in Central Europe was in the context of what followed the 30 years and modern times can just be seen as one of those places where the river of history chose not to run.
It was a path not taken, but had things turned out differently had the king of England been behind it wholeheartedly had certain things been different, it might have all unraveled somewhat differently.
So what do you want to do about about the voltage manuscript?
Oh, I would like to think about it as an object of thought I think it's very interesting it's like thinking about your DNA. One thing I have thought to do about it is there are now what's called psychic archaeologists, which when all else fails you bring in these people and by various means esoteric and exoteric.
They attempt to divine what story resides in an object. Since the voltage manuscript is at the Benecke Rare Book Room at Yale, I'm sure any serious scholar would be allowed to look at it and spend time with it.
I've never seen it I would like to see it. The book which Robert Brumbaugh edited called The Most Mysterious Manuscript, which is now out of date and that his conclusions cannot be taken seriously.
Nevertheless, it reproduces a number of the folios from the manuscript. And when you see them, just the pure weirdness of it all is conveyed quite readily. I mean, it is unearthly, it does not fit in the context of late medieval alchemical manuscripts or late medieval any other kind of manuscripts.
Does it compare other writings in there?
It doesn't but the imperios book does. She has many magical alphabets, many different forms of shorthand and specialized note keeping scripts that were current in Europe throughout the Middle Ages.
And none of them look particularly like Vonage script. Ralph Abraham made the suggestion that Vonage script had some relation to early Brahmanic number systems. He thought perhaps it was a string of numbers that would then have to be decoded from that and then further unencrypted to get sense out of.
One thing that might be said about it is perhaps modern people simply overrate the sophistication of our code breaking machinery. Perhaps there are simple ways of encoding material that simply have not occurred to the CIA.
And so when the Vonage text is finally broken, it will be trivial the way in which it was encrypted trivial but unexpected in some way. For instance, Ralph made the suggestion to me that grids where you have a grid which has holes in it, when laid over a page shows you the parts of the text which are to be dealt with and all the rest of it is noise.
If the grid changes from page to page, and is completely irrational in the way it changes, then no computer program imaginable could separate the plain text from the noise because it isn't a recursive formula.
It's an ever-changing variable that could be just the whim of how you made the grids. And this would preclude I think any machine-oriented effort to decipher it.
It would mean that it didn't want to be deciphered. It would mean that the author decided to do it that way. Because no one could have at that time deciphered it either.
Oh, this grid method is known long enough that this may be the key. So that may mean that somewhere there either exist these grids or there exist the instructions for building them.
And then out of that you could extract a portion of Vonage text which would quickly yield to modern methods of decipherment because it is the only part of the message which is really sense.
This is a standard method of hiding. A message is to embed it in great amounts of garbled material, hours of garbled material.
Well that's what alchemy is.
Yes, and it would have appealed to the alchemical imagination of Dee or Kelly or any of their educated occult contemporaries to use this kind of method.
So it's very interesting.
What would you say the difference between alchemist and shaman is?
Well they have different spheres into which they project themselves. They have different models of the universe.
The medieval alchemist had a discontinuous and fleeting but nevertheless somehow ontologically founded conception of an inside and an outside.
He knew that his ontology was naive but he accepted the existence of an exterior world on some terms. Then it was to be manipulated through the alchemical process.
But shaman actually translate into another dimension. They are true trans-ecstatics and in that sense it probably represents a higher resolution of that intent.
But Merciliad has traced back alchemists into smithing, into early metallurgy and metal working which was always thought to be a magical task.
And it runs together then with alchemy. Alchemy and shamanism are united in the figure of the primitive blacksmith because he is both proto-chemist and shaman.
So at that point in time it's fused and that's why there is so much stress on metal in primitive shamanism, on hanging metal off of your body, on smelting metal.
It was like magic to turn metal red hot and to change it into weapons and figures and that sort of thing.
So the Bonnage manuscript would be really by an alchemist.
Well we don't know what it says. We only know the traditions in which we find it embedded. We assume it's by an alchemist.
But anybody that would do that sort of a thing at that time would be labeled alchemist.
Yes, it comes out of an alchemical mentality. It's very mysterious. It's quite an enigma.
.
[ Silence ]
>> From KQED FM in San Francisco, this is Forum.
I'm Michael Krasney.
Welcome. Terrence McKenna is an author, scholar, and ethnobotanist who has become nationally
and internationally known and singularly identified with, among other things, psychedelics.
In fact, Timothy Leary called him the Timothy Leary of the '90s.
And he has once compared his own vocation to Darwin's cataloging of nature as trying
to catalog the productions of psychedelic nature.
His books include Food of the Gods, The Archaic Revival, Time Hallucinations,
recently published book in which he had conversations, it's called a trial log,
with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham, it's called The Evolutionary Mind,
Trial Logs at the Edge of the Unthinkable.
And we always enjoy having Terrence with us to talk about all kinds of things.
Welcome to the program.
Good morning.
>> Pleasure to be with you.
>> Well, let's-- actually, let me begin with something just that came up the other night.
I was at an event, environmental fundraising event down the peninsula.
And a few years ago, I had done something with Mark Plotkin, ethnobotanist who wrote all
about the rainforest and finding shamanistic roots and actually started a company
to go pursue pharmaceuticals in the jungle and all that sort of thing.
Somebody said to me, "You know, Mark Plotkin's Shaman Pharmaceuticals has gone belly up
and I hadn't known that," and suddenly, I started reflecting on that,
that maybe it might have something to do with all these inflated expectations
about the medicinal power of plants that Americans have perhaps bought into too strong.
Is that-- do you think operative here?
>> Well, my brother worked for Shaman Pharmaceuticals for a while.
I'm not sure it's accurate to call it Mark Plotkin's company.
We're probably sending several people through the roof.
>> Well, Mark was one of the-- one of the--
>> He was one of the--
>> Prototypical thing, yeah, right.
>> I think that a number of problems converged on their desire to make money,
one of which was the startling evolution of sampling technology.
So that now, it's possible to look at slurries of potentially drug-like material produced
synthetically in the laboratory and identify thousands
and thousands of compounds in a matter of hours.
And this technology didn't exist 10 years ago when Shaman was getting going.
>> Another company put out of business by technology?
>> Exactly, not keeping up with what the other guy was doing.
>> But has there been in your judgment maybe a bit of over zeal with respect to the press
and the inflated expectations about what can be done for all--
I mean, the notion that there are panaceas out there, cures to AIDS, et cetera,
we just haven't found them, the right plants?
>> Well, I think you have to understand, if you're talking to tribal people
and they tell you that they have a plant that causes visions, they're probably right.
But if they tell you they have a plant which cures diabetes, diabetes is a set
of syndromes defined by modern medical science.
How can aboriginal people have those kinds of insights into physiological functioning?
So, the search for psychoactive drugs was very successful based
on interviewing aboriginal people.
But the search for drugs applicable to other areas of modern medicine,
I think target-based drug design is much more effective.
>> Well, I kept thinking about-- I kept thinking that we have--
our language is very revealing.
We have notions of magic mushrooms and we talk medicinally about magic bullets and--
I mean, what you've been in quest of in some respects is this magic.
I mean, that's what you've been looking for in a way, hasn't it?
>> Well, if you're looking for magical psychoactive plants, nature is full of them.
In every environment, in every ecosystem, there are plants that either singly or in combination
with nearby plants will deliver powerful mind-altering experiences.
Naturally, the jungles are most rich because the jungles are most species rich
in plants generally, but the chemistry of plants seems to have a place in it
for the production of compounds which are very active in mammalian nervous systems.
And of course, that includes ourselves.
>> Still much to be discovered in that whole realm?
>> Much to be discovered in terms of sites of activity, characterization of receptors,
cross-indexing the effects of various drugs.
As an example of new discoveries, Salvia divinorum is a Mexican mint plant
that has been discovered to have a compound in it.
Microgram for microgram as powerful as LSD, completely disorienting psychedelic.
This is not a plant that has been made illegal or scheduled.
And the compound when studied revealed itself to be
from a chemical family never known to contain psychoactive substances.
So the analytical tools are getting more subtle.
The ability to detect nanogram amounts of material is now standard.
And as it were, we're going back through the tailings and getting the gold
out that was overlooked by cruder methods used in the past.
>> You've never really, particularly in recent history, advocated illegal drug use, right?
>> You mean somehow protesting the current legal situation?
>> Or suggesting or countenancing in some way that those who want these kinds
of experience should avail themselves of them in defiance of the law?
>> No, I've always had the political attitude that this was not something
that you wanted to turn into a mass movement.
I came up through the '60s and saw the fallacy of that.
I think if people want to pursue these experiences, they can go to countries
where they're available or they can grow these plants.
And for example, this plant I just mentioned, Salvia divinorum,
there is no more powerful psychedelic and there is no more legal object in all of nature.
This is as legal as lawn cuttings.
So for the person who does their homework, there is no conflict between the wish
to experience these things and their legal status.
>> Can we do the homework to the extent that we really know such things as--
I mean, because there was a-- you've written about the acid scare in the '60s and all
that sense of flashbacks and, you know, Art Link letters daughter jumping out of a window.
And I mean, a lot of people are very frightened by psychedelics and frightened
by hallucinogens and with some might say good reason.
Do we really know, in other words, the overall effects?
>> Well, Tim Leary once said, he said LSD is a psychoactive compound
that occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who haven't taken it.
And this occurs quite often.
Drugs often have more effect on the people who don't take them
than on the people who do take them.
Drugs are--
>> They have to begin somewhere though.
Although you've said science fiction is a gateway drug, right?
>> I believe science fiction is the gateway drug.
Paleontology for seven-year-olds is also a serious gateway drug.
I think that society, rather than dealing with this as it should, has dealt with it
with the heavy hand of the courts and the prisons
when what we should be doing is educating ourselves and our children.
Drugs are here to stay.
They're a part of postmodern life.
There will be more and more of them.
Wherever they are illegal, they will spawn criminal syndicalism.
We need to sit down with our children and explain to them how you take drugs,
how you evaluate their effect on you, how you make decisions absent social pressure and hype,
and how you come to terms with this particular aspect of modern life.
>> Most parents would just want to steer their children away
from drugs altogether though, I would think.
>> Well, but that sends a message that these things are bad and then, of course,
indiscriminately children will involve themselves in these things and the results are not happy.
Knowledge is the only way to come to terms with this.
It's a bit like sexuality.
The battle for sex education is, I suppose, more or less won now,
but that was a huge issue as I was growing up.
Now, drugs, the response is the hammer of imprisonment and yet, as I said, the number
of drugs, the opportunities to take drugs endlessly proliferate.
If we don't educate people, we are going to produce a continuous supply of victims
for the courts and the prisons to make their grist.
>> Some might argue that sex education has only marginally affected and perhaps
because of our culture, the problem of sexual excess and I suppose what could come
under categories of misuse of sexuality or abuse of sexuality have been,
if anything, exacerbated through the years.
>> Well, I suppose it's absent statistics, it's everybody's opinion.
I certainly think people are having more and better sex than they were having in the '50s.
>> Terence McKenna, our guest, and we're going to talk to him, as I said,
about a whole range of things here.
You know, when you-- you've always struck me and you struck many people
and you described yourself as a very rational man and you certainly are an omnivorous thinker,
reader, scholar and so forth and yet, sometimes when you talk about some things
that you have talked about, aliens, UFOs, intergalactic stuff and so forth,
it makes rational skeptical people's skin begin to, you know, percolate in many ways.
What do you say to that kind of response?
>> Well, I think they're not listening carefully.
My method, if you want to call it that, has been to explore the weird, the bizarre,
the marginal with a rational mind, not with a will to believe.
The truth doesn't need your cooperation to exist.
The truth, you can kick the tires, they'll let you take it for a spin.
All forms of cult, all forms of hype, all forms of delusion,
do require your participation in order to exist.
So, I've looked into marginal areas of human experience, historical and otherwise,
with a rational mind and what I have found is doorways into the miraculous are far fewer
than the publicists of the new age would have us believe.
On the other hand, they are not as rare as the proponents of radical reductionism
and materialism would have us believe.
There are doorways out of the mundane human condition.
I explored all candidates with an open mind and came to the conclusion
that psychedelic drugs are the most accessible, the most efficient, the least dangerous.
Now, there may be other ways to access the miraculous, flagellation, prayer,
wilderness abandonment, what have you.
I'm not interested in cataloging the varieties of the doorways to the secret.
I'm interested in finding one doorway that worked and--
>> How does the rational mind determine what is miraculous as opposed to what may be induced
or maybe some sort of delirium or some kind
of hallucinatory experience that has no basis in rationality?
>> Well, I think, you know, Heidegger said we measure our relationship to reality
by the depth of the call and to-- I think one of the chief justices said he couldn't define
pornography but he knew it when he saw it.
The miraculous is self-evidently the miraculous and it's certainly possible to take many drugs
and have many kinds of experiences without coming near it.
On the other hand, these psychoactive substances seem
to be the most direct path to the miraculous.
Now, what do I mean by that?
I mean the dissolving of cultural constructs, the reality that is ever present outside
who you are, who your culture is, what language you speak, your expectations.
You know, we could disagree about the worth and the efficacy of psychedelics but I think
if we had shared the experience, we could agree that it is characterized by boundary dissolution.
>> You're talking about something universal, something that suggests spirituality
or aesthetics or maybe even theology but not necessarily intergalactic communication,
let's say, or exobiology or--
>> No, I don't think that the culture at the end of the 20th century is penetrated by dozens
or hundreds of alien cultures seeking to trade high technology
for fetal body parts or all of that.
In fact, I consider all that pop culture to be indicative of the hysteria that is engendered
by science moving beyond the range of the understanding of ordinary people.
People will always generate explanations for what they see around them.
And if they lack education, their explanations will be bizarre, quirky, primitive.
And I take all this new age channeling and all these extraterrestrial revelations
and so forth to signify a profound dichotomy between officially sanctioned models of reality
and then what people are saying to each other on the buses and in the dime stores.
>> There have been some very telling studies in fact about those who had UFO close encounters
and who were taken aboard ships and often, you know, various parts of the anatomy
or penetrated or these kinds of things happen.
And in most cases, the proliferation of these things occurred almost exclusively,
especially the same kinds of descriptions of alien forms and so forth occurred
after the spate of movies about these things.
>> Pro bono proctologist from other star systems are not making unannounced free house calls
in our homes.
I mean, this could almost be a litmus test for sanity.
If you believe that, then I want to sell you a bridge over the Hudson River quite cheaply.
>> Then what is out there?
How do we begin to even assume a kind of cosmic consciousness or awareness
of what might be alive beyond this planet?
>> Well, Michael, imagine if there were a force in the water or in the air or in the advertising
that was causing a certain significant percentage of people here at the end
of the 20th century to simply lose the ability to distinguish between memory and dream.
Then people wouldn't know whether that image in their mind of a flying saucer came
from close encounters or from that weekend at Uncle Tom's farm when they were 11.
And I think something like this is happening.
We as tribal people with aboriginal roots are set up to handle about 10 stories
and one long epic poem, intellectually, the machinery of our brains.
And yet modern media has exposed each of us to thousands of movies, hundreds of thousands
of sitcoms, endless clips of film and audio data.
And I think people are losing the ability to distinguish their own past from a kind
of media created collective past that has more the character of the Jungian unconscious
about it than it has the character of the warm and friendly world.
>> A collective filmic unconscious or something like that?
>> Yes, a kind of collective dream on which we draw.
And out of it comes the Bigfoot, the flying saucers, the proctatologists from nearby star systems.
And people who have not been trained to deconstruct data
or think rationally are completely victim of these media spread meme-like viruses
that distort ordinary thinking, balkanize epistemology and make social
and political consensus on anything that much harder to reach.
>> Just reminded me of Doug Rushkoff's work that we were talking about before we went
in the air and the allusion to memes.
I wanted to allude to something else and that is the 1971 trip that you made to South America
and you're out-- it's been written about a number of times with your brother.
And your brother experienced as a result of ingesting a plant,
hearing a conversation his mother had in the telephone, your mother had in the telephone
in 1953 and you can correct me in the details of this but Dizzy Dean was pitching a game
that was being broadcast on the radio.
He could hear all these, he believed he could hear all these.
And at the same time, he was a three-year-old at the time.
Now presumably, your mother would have remembered this or maybe not if it actually happened
but this is the realm we're talking about.
Your brother said it was all inner, he thought, but this realm between dream and memory
and the indecipherability of the two.
>> Well, it is certainly true that in the presence of certain forms of schizophrenia,
ordinary reality seems to dissolve into a stew of coincidences, laden facts,
side glances from reality if you will.
I think that time and space is generally pretty firm but that there are conditions
and it always seems to have to do with perturbation of mental states whether achieved
through some yogic or quasi-religious technique or through the use of drugs.
But when we perturb our mental machinery, time and space comes apart
and reweaves itself in unexpected ways.
To me, this is not surprising because it seems to me we obviously create time and space.
These are mental constructs.
They're not given from Mount Sinai.
They're conventions that the animal body brings together in order
to organize data about its place in the world.
>> To borrow a little from Cartesian thought,
I think time and space therefore time and space exists.
>> Something like that, absolutely.
The world is made of language, Michael.
That's the insight of psychedelics.
What we expect to see, we see.
What we say is there, is there.
And this is really what the 20th century has contributed to philosophy, I think,
the understanding that language is primary.
Concepts like space, time, matter, energy, these are culture bound linguistically defined
concepts, what is primary is the word.
And it's very interesting to me that this psychedelic insight is restated
by the cyber revolution which says it a different-- slightly differently.
It says the world is code.
Everything is code.
Your DNA creates you as its code unfolds.
The world around us is defined by legal codes.
The world inside our machines are defined by what we call computer languages, more code.
Code is the primary reality and in ordinary experience, code is language.
Now, this creates opportunities for relativism.
It creates opportunities for all kinds of dangerous and sloppy thinking.
Nevertheless, we have to go down that route because it is clear this is a deeper understanding
than what we inherited from the philosophies of the 19th century.
>> Talking to Terrence McKenna about a whole range of things including changing philosophy,
his newest book actually trial logs with Rupert Sheldrake
and Ralph Abraham is called "The Evolutionary Mind."
It's a feast of all kinds of stuff on visual math and factals and psychic pets and the millennium
which brings up another interesting point.
A number of years ago, you talked about December 22nd, 2012 as the date of, I guess,
what would be characterized as the secular apocalypse.
Are you still with that date?
>> Yes, it's nice now to have it all to myself since everyone's rushing the gun and piled on--
>> Y2K.
>> -- to Y2K.
I was accused of being too crazy and to suppose the world could transform in 2012.
Now, no one will wait, I represent an extremely conservative position.
>> You're not that concerned about Y2K.
>> I really am not.
I live in Hawaii off grid.
I-- It may be because I'm already prepared for it but I suspect problems from Y2K will be local,
confined in time and fairly manageable.
Of course, it's simply a projection for opinion.
No one knows.
>> Let me give a phone number here if you'd like to join us with Terrence McKenna.
You're cordially invited to do so with questions or comments.
You can reach us now at 415-863-2476.
I'm going to open up the phone lines and invite you to jump aboard here.
Again, the number in the 415 area code is 863-2476 often called the guru of psychedelics
but a man who has lived quite an amazing life studying in Tibet and Nepal,
doing lepidopter's work in Indonesia, smuggling hashish.
I mean, the list goes on.
I'm cataloging my own work here for you, Terrence,
and we'll take some calls when we return on forum.
[ Music ]
>> Local underwriting is provided by Harper San Francisco, publishing books dedicated
to women's spirituality and feminist scholarship.
Presenting Rianne Eisler's "The Chalice and the Blade," harpercollins.com.
And by Brainstorm Networks offering DSL, ISDN, and T1 internet connections exclusively
to Bay Area businesses, 877-2-GET-DSL or on the web at brainstorm.net.
[ Music ]
>> Friday on forum, Jeffrey Klein will be the guest host and the topic
of our discussion in the opening hour will be the Microsoft trial.
Then we'll have a look at longevity and you're invited to join us for forum.
[ Music ]
>> We're talking with Terrence McKenna and I want to go to your phone calls
and we'll do that momentarily.
Just a quick question though when you talk about the miraculous and certainly getting a sense
of the visionary power of plants and all of that, psychedelics, et cetera.
Is there a sense of your-- as a westerner and as a serious thinker and rationalist being able
to feel the kind of sacred and divine power that is often attached
to many of these plants by other cultures.
Can you absorb that?
Can you internalize that?
>> Yes, absolutely you can.
I mean it comes in the form of awe and astonishment but awe has always been spoken
of as an appropriate emotion in the presence of the supernatural.
And when you finally grab on to the 100,000 volt psychedelic experience,
it's absolutely confounding because it seems to be the thing
which our culture has been most at pains to deny the existence of.
And so it's as though you come around the corner and there's Santa Claus, Bugs Bunny
and the Easter Bunny all playing poker together
and you realize you were given the wrong story all the way down the line.
And the appropriate response to that is humility and awe and a kind of redirecting
of one's energies to try and get in line with this very large reality suddenly
to be revealed outside the confines of our cultural agenda or our cultural concern.
>> But you know it's interesting because you speak with this kind of derogation about new age
and yet at the same time when you talk about the direct results and consequences of many
of your experiences with these sacred plants, it suggests a sense of awe and mystery
but also a sense of the oneness of and unity of life and a feeling of spiritual transformation
of feminism and ecology coming to the fore in terms of your political consciousness.
All things which are very much a part of the Zeitgeist and the New Age movement as well.
>> Well I've always felt that in a way the New Age was a flight from the psychedelic experience.
That the New Age was saying its invisible agenda was we'll try anything as long
as we're sure it doesn't work and that automatically exempts psychedelics.
All talk of spiritual advancement is always talk of pushing, trying, practice, concentration,
attention, once you find psychedelics you're not looking for the accelerator anymore,
you're looking for the breaks on your spiritual vehicle.
You have suddenly found the means to achieve the stated goal which is union with the divine
or oneness or something like that.
Now the game becomes a very grown up game.
How are you going to integrate this into your ordinary life?
You're no longer a seeker, you're no longer an ingenue, now you're an insider.
Now you can come and go from these transcendental places at will.
Now how do you use that to make yourself a better person,
better parent, better citizen of your community?
>> You mean as a result of the opening up of your consciousness through the sorts
of experiences you've had you can become transcendental at will?
>> Well you can have recourse to the effective method at will because the substances work.
>> The substances work.
Yes.
>> Lee is our first caller from Pine Grove.
Good morning.
>> Good morning Michael.
I'd like to ask Mr. McKenna if he can direct me
to references in the botanical literature regarding salvia dividorum.
I grow 15 or 16 different species of salvia and I have a fair library and I'm unable to locate it.
>> You should simply search on the internet salvia divinorum.
There are several pages with dozens of links and there are active lists on the internet.
If you run an excite search on salvia divinorum you will have more than you know what to do.
>> All right.
That's D-I-V-A or D-I-V-I?
>> D-I-V-I-N-O-R-U-M.
>> I've got it.
>> All right Lee.
>> Thank you very much.
>> Thank you for your call.
To Santa Cruz we go to B.J. Good morning.
>> Oh thanks for taking my call.
Hello Terrence.
>> Hi Barry.
How are you this morning?
>> Great. Yes I just wanted to comment on a misunderstanding of the new age.
I heard Mr. Krasney say isn't this new age.
The misunderstanding as far as the new age is concerned is that we can't arrive at truth
or whatever it's going by these days by transcendence.
And I think what has occurred is that when the psychedelic movement was crushed in the 60s,
the failure of the psychedelic revolution brought on the new age.
In other words we replaced the vision and imagination with visualization
and its concomitant techniques, crystals and all that.
It is a new age stance really it's disguised as a visionary movement but it really is all
about the lack of vision and keeping the same structure
but changing the content of traditional patriarchal religion.
As a matter of fact there have been quite a number of feminists who have commented
on the deep patriarchal character of the new age.
And I think that centers in the idea of transcendence
where you transcend the earth and your body and all this.
And instead I think psychedelics brings you to the depth ecology vision of the earth
which I think Karen's called Gaia.
It brings you to the mind of the earth and not transcending.
So I think that we need a real alternative to the new age
and I think Karen's is quite right metaphorically because Karen's rejected going
up to the high Himalayas and he instead went down south to the depths of the Amazon
and I think that is a signal of the way to go.
>> Go south young man, BJ thank you for that call.
It's an important distinction he's making here at least as he sees the differences
between new age and what Terence McKenna is all about.
Let me get more of your calls on it in the meantime.
Chris from Inverness is next.
>> Yes, yes Terence I was intrigued by your emphasis on language.
It's long been seen to me and I'm sure it's not an original thought that a lot
of the this quote spiritual realm religions, the I Ching, the Tarot astrology, the UFO thing,
all of that are forms of metaphor for something that we have coming up or that we're engaging
in evolutionarily that our language is.
[ Pause ]
>> To cope with and express in other words and I wonder if the whole psychedelic thing
and your descriptions of the places that you've gone on DMT,
I wonder to what degree those are metaphoric and what kind of metaphor is it?
Is it a synecdoche, is it a or is it part for a whole, is it next to something?
Do you see what I mean?
>> Well I think I understand what you mean.
As far as reality and its relationship to language is concerned,
this is a fundamental split in the western mind.
Magic, which we haven't heard much about seriously since the 16th century,
magic is the idea that the world is made of language and that you can control the world
through language, through spells, through the power of letters, so forth and so on.
That idea gave way to modern sciences idea that there were stubborn facts in the world
that language could neither eradicate or ameliorate.
Now with the rise of cyberspace and virtual reality, language is becoming again re-empowered.
I mean in a sense, computer code is magical language.
It's language which when executed causes something to actually happen.
Now as far as to what degree descriptions of these psychedelic states are metaphors,
they have to be metaphors because what is not often mentioned but always experienced
with high dose psychedelics is an actual alteration
of the language producing machinery itself.
You know some people have the idea you take a psychedelic drug or substance
and the world transforms itself and you watch this happen.
That's true to some degree but the person, the watcher is themselves transformed.
This is not a clean process and when you actually see the machinery of language melt,
involute, fractalize, crystallize and transform itself before you,
you get a tremendous sense of the malleability of reality and how it rests
on a platform of stable physiological functioning.
>> Also suggests, thank you Chris, that I mean if reality is shifting
and perception is shifting all the time in this cyber revolution
with all this information technology, then we're evolving in different ways
that we don't even understand yet.
We're perceiving time in ways that we don't even understand yet.
>> Well yes, I spent last week with Bruce Dahmer who's one of the great mavens
of interactive virtual worlds and we were dressing in avatars, meeting people in cyberspace
but occasionally we would open--
>> Dressing in avatars?
>> This means an avatar is how you appear to other people in cyberspace
so you choose to be a mini skirted girl.
>> I know it mainly as a Hindu word, I'm sorry.
>> Oh no, it's been appropriated and trademarked and the Hindus are now out.
But anyway, being in your avatar in a virtual world,
talking to other people in a virtual world and then opening several virtual worlds
at once on your screen so you actually have the experience of being
in more than one place at one time.
After a couple of hours of that, you leave the keyboard
and you can practically feel the McLuhan-esque reprogramming
of your communication based categories based
on this bizarre informational environment that you've been spending time in.
So yes, I think we're evolving the shift in media is changing human beings at least as much
as the introduction of print did in the 1440s.
And the good news about all of this is that no one is in control and no one understands enough
about it to direct or sculpt it to some secular end.
>> You read Leonard Shlain's book?
>> I did read Leonard Shlain's.
>> I mean, he's on this program.
You put much greatness in that, that the whole nature of our brain is changing
and that's the result of the goddess
and feminism becoming more preeminent in our lives and so forth.
>> Well, he worked off an earlier book by Ivan Illich called the ABC-dization of culture
who was also then cribbing from Marshall McLuhan who talked
about how sensory ratios changed cultures from hot to cool.
>> You've got the genealogy and the derivations right.
But I mean, do you believe the premise?
>> No, I do believe it.
I think print created not only the modern notion of the citizen,
it created the modern assembly line, it created all kinds of things which we assume are basic
to humanness that are in fact artifacts of the technologies accepted
by Europe some 400 years ago and then spread throughout the world.
>> And misogyny too?
>> Misogyny probably has an older history.
>> Phyllis from Menlo Park join us please.
Good morning.
>> Wow, my mind is spinning.
Hi, Terrence.
I was at the conference at Ethel and where you and Mr. Abraham and Leonard, pardon me,
Rupert Sheldrake I think first developed some of these ideas.
Is that the book that-- is this the book that's come out of that?
>> Well, there were two of those books of dialogues or trilogues with Rupert and Ralph.
The first one was called Trilogues at the Edge of the West
and the new one is called The Evolutionary Mind and we just simply take
up where we left off with that first book.
>> Well, it's fabulous ideas and the mind spins.
Could you explain a little more the year 2012, what it is you envision as happening that--
>> Not only the year, Phyllis, we've got the date, December 22nd, 2012.
>> Oh, wow.
>> Yeah.
>> Well, that's the nice thing about mathematics.
If you do it right, there's not much of a fudge factor.
The idea about 2012 was simply from studying the structure of the I Ching,
specifically the structure of the sequence of the hexagrams.
Way back in the middle '70s, I discovered a curve there which is a fractal curve
with the property of damping its own oscillation.
Now, what that means is that it eventually runs down and disappears
and it looks somewhat like a stock market.
And I discovered that if you went at history with the concept that it was an ebb
and flow between two polar forces which I named habit and novelty,
that you could actually get a conformational fit
between this abstract mathematical algorithm, this curve, and the vicissitudes of invention,
migration, warfare, political advance and so forth, the factors that--
>> All of our global up and downs.
>> Exactly.
And this was very satisfying to see history so well described by a mathematical algorithm.
There was just one minor problem which was the algorithm predicted
that the quality I called novelty would reach infinity in our lifetimes.
And when the calculation was finally done, December 22nd, 2012 AD.
>> But what do you think will happen?
Are we all going to dissolve into subatomic particles?
>> Well, there are two ways to answer that question.
The honest answer is it's too early to tell.
It's like asking a man facing east at 2 AM to describe the coming sunrise.
He can't do it because the sunrise is over the curvature of the event horizon of the Earth.
That's the honest answer.
Then the more fun answer is to pretend we do know what's going on based on looking
at what novelty has been in the past.
Novelty seems to be definable as density of connectivity.
So what is going to happen in 2012 is that all points
in this universe will be what mathematicians call cotangent.
In other words, all points will be connected to all other points.
Now I dreamed this up in the early '70s, early '80s where talking
about all points being connected seemed pie in the sky.
>> Although the new age people did it with harmonic convergence, didn't they?
>> To some degree.
But now the internet appears on the scene and lo and behold, what is the internet
but a global connection machine, knitting everything together and everything we want
from the internet, higher speed, greater flexibility, more intelligent searches,
so forth and so on, tend to push the internet toward ever greater states
of complexification and connectivity.
So I would say on this 2012 thing, we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Human history ends in human machine prosthesis
and machine history begins in human machine prosthesis.
>> So mark it on your calendar, Phyllis.
>> Okay. One more question.
Is there an evolutionary intention in this?
I mean, we want to get back to whatever state we're going to be in in 2012
so we have somehow managed to invent things like cyberspace?
>> Well, evolution and intent are words which evolutionary thinkers don't like to see
on the same page because they believe
that evolution is essentially purposeless driven by random mutation and--
>> Very capricious facts, yeah.
>> Right.
>> That isn't what I believe.
>> Well, no, it isn't what most people believe.
There does seem to be a discernible morphogenetic unfolding toward a higher state
of unity and connectivity and that's what we're riffing off.
>> Phyllis, thank you.
And let's riff a little with Lawrence from Berkeley.
Hi, Lawrence.
>> Yes. Hi, good morning.
I wanted to speak up for traditional meditation and traditional methods, you know,
of meditative discipline and mysticism as opposed to drugs.
Now, I know that everything I'm going to say is going to be anathema to your guest
but I think it's important that the audience hear it.
I wanted to, you know, what happens with drugs is what happens with St. John of the Cross writing
in the 16th century talks about as the dark night of the soul.
And this is something that happens with any kind of meditative or mystical high.
It goes away and you get into-- and when it goes away, the contrast between the incredible light
and joy that you were feeling and the absence of it produces great depression
which John calls the dark night.
In traditional mysticism, what happens when this--
when the dark night of the soul occurs, when the mystical light goes away,
is that you have to do some work.
You have to do some work that is required by faith to say, "Okay,
I remember this state even though I'm not feeling it now."
And to get back to it, I have to exhibit love.
I have to exhibit humility.
I have to exhibit harmony between myself and others, not in my imagination but in reality,
you know, by working to create this harmony with others.
The problem with taking any form of drugs or, you know, whether it's a pill or a natural plant,
is that when that dark night comes, when the light goes away,
you don't have to do the required work.
All you have to do is pop a pill again or pop another drug again.
So that instead of getting a condition of love which is produced by actually serving people
and by trying to produce a condition in which their needs are in reality as great
or as important as your own personal needs, you simply assume that what feels,
you go for kind of a unity through the back door.
You say, "What feels good to me must therefore be good to you."
And you get a unity of fantasy rather than a unity of love and work.
>> All right.
You're listening to Forum.
I'm Michael Krasny.
Terrence McKenna, let's go to you on that.
>> Well, this is a standard argument, meditation versus drugs.
I think there's a misconception about how people who use drugs for self-exploration do it.
It's not a matter of combating coming down by taking the drug again.
I think the dark night of the soul is a natural
and unavoidable part of any psychological growth process.
Jung called it the Negredo, taking a term from alchemy.
My idea of the way to use psychedelics is very similar
to how the caller described using ordinary spiritual techniques.
It takes about seven or eight hours to have a psilocybin trip.
I would think it would take 30 or 40 days to assimilate the messages of that trip
and integrate them into your life.
Certainly, the visions which you obtain are an inspiration to community, to love,
to striving to return to these places.
Now, the perils of drugs are the perils of overdose or underdose.
The perils of the traditional spiritual methods are the malevolence of the guru,
the potential for being manipulated on somebody else's schedule and agenda.
No path of spiritual advance can be said to be without risk.
I looked into yoga, I've studied Zen, I've studied a number of these so-called spiritual disciplines
and I find more backbiting, more human frailty on display than I find in the solitary practice
of taking drugs with an exploring attitude.
>> Let me thank Lawrence for the call.
Do you find that there's sometimes a kind of expectation that someone who has experimented
with drugs as much as you have should be much more wiggy and out of it
and less rational than you are or that you should be ravaged by these drugs?
>> Yes. Well, my public image I think is as a kind of wild man halfway
between William Burroughs and Tim Leary.
>> But that's not who you are.
>> No, it's not who I am at all.
I'm a somewhat stodgy, logical Irish scholar.
Yes, drug taking and drug using people have been hideously stereotyped.
If a racial or religious minority had had to put up with the crap that we've had to put
up with we would have gotten some kind of remediation from the justice department.
I mean the idea that potheads are stupid,
the idea that acid makes it impossible for you to think straight.
You know the dirty little secret of Northern California's vast economic success
down at Silicon Valley is the creativity that was injected into this area in the 1960s
through the LSD revolution in many, many significant cases.
>> But you do see--
>> It's the same people.
>> -- people who are wigged out as a result of--
I mean like you say it's individual cases perhaps but you see them and you see people
who use marijuana chronically who seem to slow down.
I mean I've seen it.
It's an evolution that-- or trajectory that I've seen all too frequently with people
who are very heavy pot users.
>> Well, you see it with alcohol, you see it with tobacco.
>> Exactly, exactly, the point.
>> Life is not user safe.
You know, Whitehead said it's the business of the future to be dangerous.
On the other hand, it's good to get an education, it's good to know the classics,
it's good to be able to do a quadratic equation and it's very good
to understand what LSD is all about.
I mean these are aspects of life.
You don't want to go to the yawning grave without having been exposed to.
>> Troy is our next caller from Pacific Grove.
Good morning.
>> Good morning Michael.
Thank you very much for this.
This has been one of the best in a long time.
And I'd like to get my fingers on this big huge door
of perception that we're trying to ease open.
The thing with drugs and an analogy that I use with many people, you know,
it's like when you use drugs and you get to that place that's
like a mansion inside your own mind.
There's something that, two things, one you know then that you are the son of the king
and that this is your mansion and it's in your mind and you were right all along.
The only thing is is that there's a policeman that comes around, it's the rules.
You break in through the window, then you must get tossed out.
>> I think Freud would call that super ego.
>> But the truth is is that it is your house.
The only thing is is you've just got to find the key to get
in the front door the way you're supposed to enter it and then it becomes your own home.
>> Well don't you think the disenfranchising of people
from their own bodies has been a major cultural agenda for the past three or 400 years?
>> It's incredibly so.
You know what I'd like to--
>> Except I must confess when you start talking using your castle metaphor I thought right away
of Kafka but that's just my own proclivities.
>> In a sense it is just a metaphor again because we're really struggling with this
to get back to the beginning premise of the show of how language constructs our world
and how the visual experience now is somehow seemingly a bit disconnected
from our lexical logical order and we're able to vision things that don't necessarily always fall
into an ability to communicate.
>> Vision is a key word here and I thank you I mean for much
of what Terrence McKenna's whole thinking career and search has been about.
I mean where do we get vision from?
From what part of nature does--
>> Where do the ideas come from?
You know people who don't take psychedelics think it's all moving lights
and little concentric circles.
They don't understand that these are tremendously emotionally moving dramatic scenarios
that one could not possibly generate out of one's own mind or if one could then every single one
of us is a Beethoven, is a Gilbert and Sullivan, is a Shakespeare and maybe that's true
but if that's true that is empowering and worth knowing.
>> I remember once many years ago interviewing Ram Dass and he said I honor what psychedelics have
done for me and there was a storm of protest because he seemed
to be countenancing the use of psychedelics and that was during part of the whole scary era.
I think many people still are particularly where children are concerned scared about psychedelics
and scared about drugs in general even in terms of frontiers of consciousness.
You honor what psychedelics have done for you obviously don't you?
>> Oh absolutely.
To me they opened my mind to realms of beauty and understanding
that would never have been accessible otherwise.
I read the mystical literature.
I knew what I was shooting for.
That's what I mean by doing your homework but for me it fell upon me with the force
of a transforming miracle and it's always been my motivation publicly to speak
about that for that reason.
>> Well we've been speaking with that walking miracle himself, Terence McKenna,
always delighted to have you and to engage with you.
Thank you so much for being with us.
The newest book is The Evolutionary Mind, Trilogues at the Edge of the Unthinkable
with Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna.
Thank you all for being with us this hour.
We'll be with you on the morrow and Jeffrey Klein will be sitting in this seat tomorrow.
Our progress producers are Robin Gianataccio-Moll, David Minkow and Holly Kernan-Wightale.
Executive producer of Forum is Raul Ramirez.
From KQED FM in San Francisco, I'm Michael Krasty.
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>> I'm Peter Sagal.
Imagine this scenario.
You're at a swank cocktail party.
You spot an incredibly attractive person.
You know from the ineffable expression on his or her face that they're lonely,
bored with the sycophantic attention extreme physical beauty brings.
They want something more from a companion, something deeper.
You sidle closer.
You say, "Did you know that in Hong Kong the film as good as it gets is called Mr. Cat Poop?"
The extremely attractive person turns to you.
No one has ever said anything like this to her or him before.
He or she says, "How did you know that?"
You say, "I heard it on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, the NPR news quiz."
He or she smiles.
"Tell me more.
Hey, it could happen."
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>> Wait, wait, don't tell me.
You can hear that Saturday at 11 a.m. here on KQED radio.
The Bay Area's weather forecast for today is calling for sunny skies
and cool temperatures you can expect highs from the mid to upper 50s today.
Patchy late night valley fog tonight, otherwise mostly clear and cool, lows in the 30s.
The Friday forecast, mostly sunny tomorrow except for some patchy morning valley fog
with highs tomorrow 55 to 60 degrees.
Stop now for Talk of the Nation.
It's 11 o'clock.
You're listening to member supported KQED FM San Francisco at 88.5 FM.
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>> From NPR news in Washington, I'm Ray Suarez and this is Talk of the Nation.
Lines out the door at $150 a head to hear this.
>> I was told that there were some who thought that I might have an announcement to make.
But I don't.
>> Hillary Rodham Clinton in New York not announcing she's running for the U.S. Senate.
We're not doing tax cuts as planned this hour on the program.
It's time for open phones.
Call us at 800-989-8255 with your comments on the week's news or other editions of the program.
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Open phones on Talk of the Nation after the news.
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>> From National Public Radio News in Washington, I'm Cora Vacholman.
A military jury in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina has acquitted a marine pilot
of all charges connected to an accident in the Italian Alps last year.
More than 20 people died when Captain Richard Ashby's jet cut the cable.
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Tree Of Knowledge (1)
Sounds True presents In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge, a weekend workshop with Terence McKenna.
Researcher, author, and philosopher, Terence McKenna has spent 25 years studying the foundations of shamanism and the ethno-pharmacology of spiritual transformation.
His books include Food of the Gods and The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, and most recently, The Archaic Revival.
He is also the founder of Botanical Dimensions, a non-profit botanical research project.
In this weekend workshop, Terence McKenna examines time and its mysteries, the nature of language, and the techniques of ecstasy that have developed in non-Western societies to navigate to and from invisible worlds.
And now, recorded live in Boulder, Colorado, In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge, a weekend workshop with Terence McKenna.
How to slice into this pie. I try to never do it the same way because I don't want to get bored, but that lays a sort of obligation on me that I'm not always able to meet.
Two things, I think, are going on inside this wrap as currently packaged.
First of all, I'm very interested in talking about the impact of psilocybin on human evolution and values and institutions.
And then, so that you don't think we've just fallen into fringe anthropology 101, I'm interested in taking the insights from that discussion and trying to apply it to the modern, or postmodern as the case may be, dilemma.
Trying to draw some implication from looking at human prehistory and the set of factors that were in place at the moment of human emergence.
And since I feel pretty much among friends and fringes here, it doesn't trouble me to confess that my book, Food of the Gods, I really conceived of as a kind of intellectual Trojan horse.
It's written as though it were a scientific study, footnotes, bibliography, citations of impossible to obtain books, and so forth and so on.
But this is simply to assuage and calm the academic anthropologists.
The idea is to leave this thing on their doorstep, rather like an abandoned baby or a Trojan horse, and they will open their doors to it and take it inside, only to discover that out of this very staid rational discourse pour the self-transforming elf machines from hyperspace with their own agenda.
I feel like I should say this, it's more for my ease than yours, that I reached the conclusions that I now espouse through skepticism, reason, rationalism, and tough argument.
So it may sound ditzy, flaky, and soft-headed, but that's just because you're hearing it wrong.
The guiding input was experience, and in a way, what we're gathered here to talk about tonight is an experience which is not only rare, transformative, challenging, but also for reasons which we'll probably get around to, illegal.
So it's a very peculiar situation. Very few experiences are illegal, and our models of the world are built up based on our experience.
So if you make an experience illegal, you're essentially saying it is off limits for model building. You can't include that in your model because it isn't really there in some sense.
And this is the situation in Western society vis-a-vis the psychedelic experience. To my mind, the psychedelic experience is as much a part of being human as sexuality, personal independence, child rearing.
These are the things which are scripted into us as opportunities for exercising our peculiar situation vis-a-vis the phenomenon of being.
And a society which would deny that is a society whose secret, or maybe not so secret, agenda is the infantilization of its citizens.
I mean, if we are not capable of dealing with these things, then who is? And are the people who made the rules, did they carefully, conscientiously, and at depth, explore these dimensions and decide they were unfit for human consumption?
Or was it done more hastily, more mindlessly, and with more fear? I would submit to you that it's the latter.
Well, first of all, I want to talk about the impact of psychedelics, especially in this case, psilocybin, on humanness.
And then if there's time, maybe we can talk a little bit about what is so great about it.
I had a philosophy professor once, Paul Feyerab, and some of you may know his books, and he opened his epistemology 101 course by saying, "I'm going to teach you what truth is, and then I'm going to teach you what's so great about it."
Well, I won't claim to teach what the psychedelic experience is. That you will have to find out on your own. But I think it is legitimate to discuss what's so great about it.
You know, are we, by any measurable index, superior or inferior to people who do not have this experience? Because if not, then really, the psychedelic position is no more than a kind of cult to be lined up along with Roman Catholicism and all the other cults out there.
Speaking as a former member, of course.
Well, my notion of the way to legitimate the importance of psychedelics is by showing, and I think one can show in fairly short order, that these things are not alien to the human experience,
or ancillary, or the province of uneducated little brown people down in the rainforest, or anything like that.
I submit to you that the psychedelic experience and the impact of psychedelic plants on human beings is central to understanding who we are and how we got this way.
And if we can explore this issue and convince ourselves that there's some merit in this point of view, then it will simply do more than rewrite the annals of a staid science like anthropology.
It will actually change how we relate to each other and to the planet that we're in the process of grinding into pollution. So that's the raison d'etre for the politics behind it.
Now, here's the spiel. Sometime in the last three million years, our remote ancestors, the proto-Hominids, were disrupted in their evolutionary climax in the canopies of the great rainforests of Africa.
You see, most animal species evolve into a niche tighter and tighter and tighter. We see this with termites and cockroaches and most life forms. This is what happens to them.
Only if the niche is somehow disrupted or destroyed does the game veer away from its tendency toward closure.
And this is what happened to us. Our remote ancestors would have lived happily in the climaxed rainforests of Africa in the same way that primates to this day live happily in the climaxed rainforests of Indonesia and South America.
But for the fact that the dynamics of the planet, and this ultimately is if we're looking for a cause, or some people would say a villain, then it's the climatological dynamics of the planet which began to limit these rainforest habitats.
And a new kind of habitat began to form in Africa, which was grassland. It's very recent. And under nutritional pressure, and under a pressure that was the result of this retreating environment, our remote ancestors descended from the trees and began to adapt themselves to the new world of the grassland.
And they did this over a period of probably a couple of million years. Now, I maintain, and if any of you are evolutionary biologists or anthropologists, this is the nub of my position. Here's what's new scientifically.
What they teach you about evolution is that it's caused by mutation, which is a random process, which then meets another random process, which is natural selection.
And out of these two random processes, lo and behold, you get sea urchins, birds of paradise, gray whales, and human beings. Now, when you inquire as to what is the source of this mutation, you will be told it's cosmic rays, incident incoming hard radiation which can disrupt chromosomes.
And then most of these mutations are lethal, some huge percentage of them. But a vanishingly small number of them actually confer adaptive advantage, and they are then preserved in the genome and passed on.
Now, what I want to suggest, and I've never seen it thoroughly treated by evolutionary thinkers, is that food is the unexamined source of evolutionary pressure. It can be.
If you know anything about animal species, you know that most animals tend to specialize their diet. Insects are famous for this.
If you find a caterpillar and you want to raise it in a jar, you must give it the food plant you found it on, because they don't just eat leaves. It doesn't work like that. They have species-specific adaptations.
Now, why is this? It's because it's a strategy to limit exposure to toxic and mutagenic chemicals that other life forms are sequestering in their tissue to discourage predation, essentially.
Well, so then what happens when an animal population such as our remote ancestors comes under pressure from a dwindling habitat or a limited availability of food?
Well, what happens, if you have any sense, is you start experimenting. You start digging up roots you never thought about before and chewing on them. You start eating leaves. You start eating insect protein. You experiment with the slaughter of small animals and so forth and so on.
And this is precisely what our remote ancestors did. This is the much-lamented transition from fruititarian holiness to predatory, carnivorous messiness.
But had we not been willing to lower our gourmet standards, we would have entered the fossil record at that point.
So, here we have these proto-hominids foraging into this new grassland environment, beginning to beat on prairie dogs and stuff like that.
And simultaneously, as we all know, evolving in this African belt environment were great herds of ungulate animals, proto-cattle, bison, wildebeest, antelopes, many, many different kinds of animals.
And one of the curiosities of nature is that many mushrooms prefer the dung of ungulate animals to just going out and making a deal with the raw, natural environment.
They like the leavening that goes on with vegetable material when it passes through the double stomach of an ungulate animal. As a headline, what this means is mushrooms grow in manure.
And so, our remote ancestors, testing for insects and eating small animals, would certainly have encountered the so-called coprophilic, or coprophilic, the dung-loving mushrooms.
And they would have tested them for food. Years ago, when I was in Kenya, I observed baboon troops in this very environment we're discussing, and their habit was they were very interested in cow pies.
Because they had learned from experience that if you rush over to a relatively old cow pie and flip it over, there's a high probability of beetles or beetle grubs under there.
And so these were vectors for food getting. Well, I did not observe mushrooms in Africa, but I observed mushrooms in the Amazon, and they can attain the size of a dinner plate.
I've never seen them in cultivation quite that large. But you come out after a hard rain, and these things are landed like little flying saucers or frisbees in the meadows.
And so mushrooms certainly have been tested for their nutritional potential. And psilocybin, different from all other chemicals in nature, including, as far as I can tell, all other hallucinogenic chemicals in nature,
psilocybin has a unique set of characteristics which implicated, to my mind, very strongly in the catalyzing of the emergence of humanness out of proto-hominid and hominid organization.
And it works like this. It's very relatively easy to understand as major scientific breakthroughs go. At least you're not going to be asked to do any partial differential equations this evening.
Psilocybin in very low doses. Doses so low that if you were to take a dose this low, you could conceivably forget you had done it, and just go out and shop and fiddle around.
But at doses so low that they do not register as a psychedelic experience, psilocybin imparts measurable improvement in visual acuity.
And Roland Fisher did this work in the late '50s and early '60s, and they built an experimental device where a person who could not be seen, by turning a crank, there were two parallel bars. And by turning a crank, this person could rotate one of the parallel bars so that it was no longer parallel.
And lacking talking rats, they went to the next preferred experimental animal, which is graduate students, and they would sit a graduate student down in front of this device, give them a very low dose of psilocybin, and then put a buzzer in their hand and say, "When the two bars are no longer parallel, push the buzzer."
And Fisher collected large amounts of data which showed that the people who had taken the psilocybin, and the other people were given placebo, of course, could detect this deformation long before the unstoned subjects were able to do so.
And Fisher, who was a totally straight European scientist, in fact, a Viennese, when I talked to him about this stuff, he was very cagey, and he was funny, in fact. He said, "Well, you see, it's very interesting. Apparently here we have data which argues significantly that we are perceiving reality better with the drug than without the drug."
Yes. Yes. For him, that was a joke. I mean, he never did anything with it. It was just a throwaway line. But it stuck with me.
And I don't think you have to be a rocket scientist to see that if you are a hunting animal in a situation of nutritional pressure, as our remote ancestors were, and there is a food in that environment which will give you better vision, then by God, the animals which accept that item into their diet are going to be more successful hunters than the ones that do not.
And consequently, they will out-breed those members of the population that have some aversion to this exotic food, either they don't like the look of it or they don't like that it grows in manure or they don't like the taste of it.
But those who accept it as a dietary item will be more successful at getting food and consequently more successful at raising their offspring to sexual maturity.
And that's the name of the game in Darwinian evolution. You must raise your offspring to sexual maturity. Then the genes flow forward. If you fail in that, you get an F in the evolution game.
Well, okay, so visual acuity, that's all very fine. But psilocybin has other properties which build on that initial pharmacological peculiarity.
If you take slightly larger doses of psilocybin, and this is typical of many indoles, you get, with many of which are hallucinogens, you get what is called CNS arousal, central nervous system arousal.
You all know this feeling. It's the feeling of two double cappuccinos in short order. It's that you do not sleep, you are very restless, you are very alert, your attention is scanning, scanning, scanning.
And in highly sexed animals like primates, arousal means exactly what it sounds like. It means erection in the male animal.
And now, isn't that interesting? That is a second factor feeding back into this increased success with offspring business.
Not only are you a better hunter, but you're a more highly sexed creature. And you're having more of what straight anthropologists refer to as successful copulations.
An amazing phrase, actually. Meaning, of course, that impregnation is a consequence of this sexual activity.
Now, the other thing that psilocybin does, at or slightly above this arousal level, and this is very important for the argument, is it creates, it causes what I call boundary dissolution.
And boundary dissolution in human beings, like you and me, means ego loss.
And I believe that this would have promoted a social and sexual style based not on monogamous pairing, but on orgy.
The scenario is fairly easy to imagine. It's that these remote ancestors of ours would take these mushrooms, and they, probably at the new and full moon, the thinking is that ritual was originally lunar timed.
And then they would, and these are, we're talking about nomadic groups of people, probably no more than 80 to 100 people, and then there would be group sexual activity.
Now, an interesting social consequence of orgeastic social styles, besides a whole lot of fun, of course, is it's impossible to trace lines of male paternity in that kind of a situation.
You see, women know whose children are whose because they see the child come out of their body and they nurse the child, but men do not, in that situation, have their children, my children.
What they have are our children, the tribal group. And this boundary dissolving thing, let's dwell on this for a moment because this is central to my argument and it has political consequences for our own lives.
Now, all primates, clear back down into squirrel monkeys and lemurs, all primates have what are called male dominance hierarchies. And what this means is that the most, the males with the longest claws, the hardest muscles, and the meanest dispositions take control of everybody else.
Women, children, weaker males, everybody comes under the thumb of the alpha males of the pack. This is true, as I said, of squirrel monkeys, howler monkeys, so forth and so on.
It is also true of us sitting here in this room. This is a male dominance society. I mean, there's a lot of complaining and hair pulling about it and there's a political alternative in the form of the women's movement and feminist sensitivities.
But for most people, male dominance is the rule. Well, I would like to suggest that our peculiarly discomforted relationship to reality is a consequence of the fact that for a long period of time,
perhaps as short as 20,000 years, perhaps as long as a million years, as a species and not consciously, we accepted into our diet a drug that had the consequences of suppressing male dominance.
That this was the social consequence of accepting psilocybin into the diet. The ego is a structure that forms in the psyche like a calcareous tumor or a growth if you do not have regular recourse to the cure.
And the cure is psilocybin and the boundary-dissolving sexual and social style which it carried in its wake.
So the reason that we as a people are haunted by the idea of a lost paradise, a perfect world sometime in the misty past is not, you know, Mercia Leonid called it the nostalgia for paradise and thought it was a kind of a longing that had no basis.
But I think that it's entirely a memory of a period when male dominance was chemically suppressed, ego was chemically suppressed.
And by male dominance and ego, I don't mean to lay this entirely on men. I mean, I would wager probably everyone in this room has more ego than they need, certainly starting with me.
And that's part of the paradox that you're supposed to enjoy in this, you know, the ambiguity of me preaching the loss of ego.
So essentially, you know, what happened was a chemically driven leap in evolution as a consequence of the suppression of these behaviors that favored male dominance.
And in the '90s, we would have continued with male dominance forever had it not been for psilocybin in the diet. And it established a situation in which in less than two million years, the human brain size doubled.
Without contest, the greatest mystery in the whole of evolutionary theory.
Lumsden, who is a brilliant evolutionary biologist, called the doubling of the human brain size in two million years the most spectacular transformation of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record.
Well, now, it would be spectacular enough if it were the liver of an otter or the pancreas of an elephant.
But notice that it is the organ which created the theory of evolution itself and all other theories.
So that we're getting a little tautological here, folks. There's something fishy going on.
What was it that caused this explosive doubling in human brain size?
Well, I maintain that it was the new behaviors that emerged with the suppression of ego and their reinforcement in this situation of nomadic pastoralism.
And that there was a period, let's call it from the melting of the last glaciers in Chautilya Yuk, 6500 BC,
there was a period when men and women were in balance with each other, children and adults were at peace with each other,
and human beings and the planet were at peace with each other.
And then it was lost. And we fell into history.
You know, the long slog toward Armageddon is what was initiated in its place.
Well, now, if it was so wonderful, why would anybody ever let go of it? Why was it lost?
Well, we have to go back to the very forces which created this situation.
Remember, I said it was the climatological dynamics of the planet created the grasslands in place of the rainforest.
Continuation of those processes turned those grasslands into desert.
And where there once were water holes, running rivers, grasslands, and vast herds of animals and their human symbiotes,
suddenly there was encroaching desert, fewer water holes.
The mushrooms began to be seasonal, began to be located only in the rain shadows of mountains.
The great mushroom festivals which had been at the new and full moon became solsticeal, and then equinoctial, and then biennial or something.
Anyway, you get the picture. It was fading. And I don't think people took this lying down. No pun intended.
I think that there was great anxiety about the fading of the mushroom and the loss of the sacrament.
And so these people searched for a strategy for preservation.
Well, in a world without refrigeration, there is only one... Well, no, there are two strategies for preservation of a delicate food like that.
One is air drying, which is not terribly satisfying because as soon as a rain cloud comes along, your dry stuff absorbs moisture out of the air and turns yuck.
And so the only real option is preservation in honey. And this was done, I'm sure. It's still done in Mexico to this day in remote mushroom-using villages.
People preserve it in honey.
Now, the problem here, and this is a lot of my book goes into this kind of thing a lot, because food of the gods.
Because what food of the gods is really about are the hidden factors that drugs lay upon us that we are not even aware of.
And if you are attempting to preserve a hallucinogenic mushroom in honey, what you have to be aware of is that honey itself is potentially a psychoactive drug.
Honey will turn into mead. It will ferment into a crude kind of honeyed alcohol.
Well, if the mushroom brings suppression of ego, group sexual activity, and the formation of group values, what does alcohol bring?
Alcohol has two effects primarily. It lowers sensitivity to social cueing at the same time that it confers an exaggerated sense of verbal facility.
In other words, people turn into jerks behind it.
I mean, you only have to go to a busy singles bar somewhere here in Boulder, and you will see the alcohol ambiance being acted out right in front of you.
So, and, you know, it's perhaps not so true of our generation, but I think probably for a thousand years nobody got laid in Western civilization unless they were juiced.
Because Christianity was laying such a heavy trip on everybody, and, you know, people barely took their clothes off.
In other words, you had to become blindly intoxicated to do what comes naturally.
And I think up until very recently, how many women have their first sexual imprinting in an atmosphere of alcohol abuse?
I mean, I would... some huge percentage, I imagine.
So that is the story, basically, of the fall into history.
The loss of this mushroom cult happened right at the time that we were inventing agriculture.
And agriculture and the suppression of orgy have something in relationship to each other on two unrelated levels.
First of all, you suppress orgy because once you have agriculture, it's no more about psyching yourself up for the great hunt.
It's all about getting up before dawn and going out and hoeing the weeds out of the crops.
So it doesn't promote a party mentality.
The other thing is that as human mental capacity was evolving, remember that exploding brain size,
as human mental capacity was evolving, women in these nomadic groups began to notice a curious fact,
which was every year they would return roughly to the same place as they had been the year before,
and in the discards from last year's camp, in the midden, they would discover food plants growing.
And some brilliant woman or group of women put it together and said, "Aha! We buried food here last year, and now there is food here."
Must be something about putting food into the ground gets you food.
In other words, they were able to cognize a cause and effect relationship that were separated over many months of time.
At the same time that women were putting this together, men were noticing that the act of sex had certain consequences nine months later.
The same perception had different impacts on both sexes, but it was an ability to coordinate a temporally separated cause and effect.
Well, once men got onto the notion of male paternity, they realized that these aren't our children.
Some are mine. Some are somebody else's. And from that notion, you go to my child, to my woman, to my hunting area, to my weapons, to my sib group.
You get it all, you see. The ego is born, and it is born in an atmosphere of complete paranoia.
The first consequence of agriculture, well, it has a number of consequences, but one consequence is it's a tremendously efficient way of producing food.
That's obviously why people got into it. What does efficiency mean? Surplus.
What does surplus mean? Have's and have-nots.
The most spectacular architectural edifice of 10,000 BC on this planet was the grain tower at Jericho.
It had thick walls to hold the grain, and it had high walls so you could climb up on top of it and drop rocks on the people who were trying to get into it.
Surplus makes nomadism impossible, because you can't drag this huge amount of grain with you. So you get sedentary populations.
And then, since the people who want the grain are killing your people in fury when they can't get the grain, you decide to put a wall around the whole encampment.
Now you have a small town. Now you have urbanism. Now you have the division between nature and secular society. You have classes. You've got it all.
And I maintain that this is the long march into hell. And our particular obsession with drugs as a species, I maintain, can be traced back to this transition.
That, you know, yes, elephants love fermented papayas, and so do butterflies, and so forth and so on, but this kind of intoxication is not what we're about.
We addict severely to several dozen substances, less severely to probably a hundred more, and we addict to everything.
Now, what we call romantic love shows a lot of similarities to hard drug addiction when you separate the lovers.
Sleeplessness, suicidal tendencies, bursting into tears, hysteria, loss of weight. You can't tell whether this person is getting off heroin or has separated from their partner.
Well, if you take an individual who is alcoholic or has some kind of serious drug problem, current thinking is this can be traced to traumatic abuse in childhood.
This is what happened to us. Traumatic abuse in childhood. We were literally torn out of a symbiotic relationship to the earth by the forces of male dominance, agriculture, sedentary living, so forth and so on.
And we've been trying to scratch an itch that we can't find ever since, and it has, you know, money doesn't do it, power doesn't do it, nothing seems to do it.
We cannot, we seem to be the unhappy monkey, and we take this unhappiness out on each other with a vengeance.
And you see, what happened was when the mushroom faded, the million years of pharmacologically interrupted patterns of male dominance reasserted themselves.
But it was no more a foraging monkey with this style. It was a creature with language, tools, music, social organization, and suddenly it got very ugly.
People weren't interested, and people began fighting over the women. So, we don't want to have orgies anymore. This woman is my woman. Touch her, you die, and so forth and so on.
And we are living out the legacy of this. Well, before I talk about the social consequences of it for us, I want to go back to the question, what was so great about it?
I mean, we've talked about orgy, but you can have orgy without psilocybin. What was so wonderful about that proto-historical mode?
Well, this is where it becomes slightly more woo-woo.
Because what we have to talk about is, what is the psychedelic experience anyway?
And I maintain that if we're talking about psilocybin, and we're talking about taking it in nature as these people did, that, you know, yes, first come the dancing mice, the little candies, the colored grids, and so forth and so on.
But what eventually happens, quickly, like 10 minutes later, is there is an entity in the trance, in the vision. There is a mind there waiting that speaks good English and invites you up into its room.
And once there, you realize that this is what all the hoopla about the Gaian mind and the rebirth of the goddess and all that is about.
It's not a metaphor, folks. It's a headline in biology.
We are not the only intelligent-minded species occupying this planet. We may be the only bipedal, hairless mammal with intelligence on this planet.
But there is something out there spread through the grasses, the forests, the rivers, and the oceans.
Our own emergence into intelligence took less than 2 million years. Life has been on this planet for a billion and a half years.
And we don't know how many strange pathways beckon, but at some point, a kind of mind came into existence. And it is real.
It's what lies behind the religious impulse in our species. There really is somebody else sharing the local mind space.
And I don't believe we're talking theology here. In other words, this is not, you know, in Milton's wonderful phrase, "the God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven."
It's not about that. For me, that's a big question mark. But it is the goddess of this earth. It is the biological mind.
It is that all boundaries are illusions and that life is a thinking, feeling, entelechy of some sort.
And we are just like a little droplet that has somehow escaped from the river of cognition and now imagine that we're the only water in the cosmos.
Not so, it turns out. The reason the psychedelic experience is so baffling and transformative,
even as we sit here with your heads full of Heidegger and Husserl and, I don't know, Wilson Phillips and all this stuff,
is because in the face, in contact with that, we have no more sophistication than our orgiastic mushroom-munching ancestors.
And the civilization doesn't give you a leg up on this stuff. In fact, it makes it harder to figure out what's going on because we have defined nature as dead.
You know, atoms screaming through empty space, ruled by tensor equations of the third degree. That's our picture of what nature is.
That isn't what it is. It's a mind of some sort.
What is the implication of all this? Is this just some kind of fringo, anthropological revisionism?
No, it isn't because the fall into history and its consequences is, at this point, a loaded gun held to the head of the entire planet.
We are about to pull over the soup cauldron. And if we do this, then two and a half billion years of evolutionary advance will be shot.
Nobody else ever dropped the ball. So, you know, we appear to be vying for this peculiar honor.
If we do not awaken to the consequences of ego, then we are going to run this system right over the edge.
The whole thing which characterizes our dilemma as a global society is our inability to feel, feel the consequences of what we are doing.
You know, we've got the data. The ozone hole is disappearing, the planktonic life in the sea will die if it does. That will disrupt the food chain.
The world food supply will drop by 60%. Everybody who isn't white as a sheet will have to starve in that case.
And so forth and so on. I mean, we actually toy not only with our own extinction, but with the extinction of all life on the planet and with the extinction of the idea of dignity and decency itself.
Well, I'm not in this psychedelic game because I think it's easy or because I think it's going to be a cinch.
I'm in it because I think it's the only game in town.
You know, if hortatory preaching could have done the trick, then the Sermon on the Mount would have turned the corner.
If cautionary data flowing back to ruling institutions could do the trick, then sometime after Thomas Malthus, people would have begun to hit the brakes.
Nothing seems to work. We're sick. We need pharmacological intervention.
The ego is permitting us to slowly, not so slowly, commit suicide.
And, you know, the fact that we cannot act collectively, that we are suspicious of all forms of collectivism, that we really are all for one and one for all is not our style.
Instead, what we have going is a cat fight. And, you know, no less a straight person than Arthur Kessler in a book called The Ghost in the Machine said,
"Humans are so wired for beating the brains out of woolly mastodons, that's what evolution has equipped us to do."
We cannot negotiate weapons treaties and destroy bacteriological factories. We have to force our evolution.
We have to chemically restructure the primate brain so that we do not commit suicide.
And the only way to do it in the time left is for the psychedelic community to stand up on its hind legs and roar.
Maybe they'll build camps for us. But the point being, I think there's a moral imperative to try what works.
I mean, you know, in the 60s, psychedelics were called consciousness expanding drugs.
A good old phenomenological description.
Well, if consciousness does not loom large in the future history of our species, then what the hell kind of future is it going to be?
No future at all, I maintain. So, if there is even the slightest iota of possibility that these things do what I'm saying they do,
then we need to get Johnny Quick on it and check it out, because we may be beyond the point of no return right now.
Nobody knows how bad this ozone hole thing is, or what's locked up at rocky flats, or behind the Iron Curtain, or dumped in the Arctic Ocean.
We may be past the fail-safe point right now, folks. There is no time to lose.
It is time to engage the powers that be in a little more serious dialogue than the just-say-no horseshit that's been peddled recently,
because we're talking about the survival of life on the only planet that we are at certain has life on it.
This may be the site of a cosmic experiment with universal implications, and it rests in our hands.
Everybody here tonight is here because a whole bunch of people didn't drop the ball.
And, you know, you think you've got problems? Nine times in the last million years the ice has moved south from the poles, miles thick.
No antibiotics, no electronic communication, nothing.
And I'm sure these people were miserable, and they dragged through it, and they lived, and they passed it on.
Now we're it, and we will be judged the lamest of the lame if we cannot come to terms with this and begin to talk about what is going on.
This is not obscure. As I said, I view the psychedelic experience as central to humanness, as our sexuality.
We cannot allow dominator institutions to infantile us, infantilize us, and to tell you where your mind can and cannot go.
We even have a piece of paper locked up in a vault in Washington, D.C. that guarantees life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Well, now, what could the pursuit of happiness possibly mean if it doesn't mean the freedom to practice your own relationship to nature and its gifts?
So I think we have been entirely too casual about the importance of the psychedelic experience.
This is for one reason, because we cannot publicly get together and discuss it in detail.
And one of the things that I think is very important about get-togethers like this is, if you will look around, you will notice that we cannot really be distinguished from the rest of society.
Some of us live under bridges, some of us clip coupons.
You know, there's a wide spectrum of people here, but this is your affinity group.
This is your community. Someone in this room actually has what you need.
And, you know, I have acted as a filter, so out of millions living along the front range, here we've gotten it down to 200.
I can't go any further than that, folks. The rest is up to you.
Well, I guess the last thing I want to say, and then we'll take a little intermission and then come back and do questions afterwards, which is my favorite part.
But I want to just for a minute invoke the psychedelic experience without regard to the evolutionary forces that created it or the political institutions that suppress it and so forth.
And just say, in case there's some soul in this room who's never had this experience, that this is extraordinary news.
We're not talking about something like a dream. It is not like meditation.
No, you can't get there by yourself. And Babaji is equally useless because you and Babaji are starting from the same place in this game.
It requires pharmacological perturbation of ordinary neurochemistry in order to see this mystery.
And it is a mystery. It is not going to be reduced to the firing of synapses or repressed sexual desires or day residues or anything like that.
It is the very thing which all these religions are yammering about. It's there. It's real.
I mean, if you think that the world is empty of adventure, then you just haven't been hanging out with the right crowd.
I mean, on a Saturday night within the confines of your own apartment, on five grams of psilocybin mushrooms in silent darkness,
I guarantee you, you will believe that Ferdinand Magellan should take second place to you.
You will see things which no human being has ever seen before and that no human being will ever see again.
That's how big that universe is. The incredibly constricted space-time locus of the here and now that evolution has forced upon us for survival purposes
is simply one point in an apparently infinite hologram of explorable data that is the human world.
I mean, the entire world of every science fiction novel and story ever written is miniscule compared to the universes of strangeness and peculiarity
that are accessible to any one of us if you will but apply the method.
And if you're not willing to apply the method, then you're going to sweep up around the ashram till hell freezes over
and not understand what is going on.
I mean, I think, you know, I'm sorry to be so hard on religion. I think it has its place.
Its place is the inspiration of ethical behavior.
Religion should teach ethical behavior but it has very, very little to say about the mystery of being other than that it's there.
And that's not practicing religion. Practicing religion is dancing with the mystery, losing and finding yourself in the mystery.
And people often say to me, you know, "Well, how does this relate to other forms of spiritual work?"
And the answer is, maybe not at all.
I mean, I've certainly taken a lot of psychedelics and I think I see no sign of spiritual attainment or ethical perfection or anything so la-di-da as that.
I don't know what this is all about but I do know it's ours. It belongs to us.
We are the creatures of mind and 95% of what mind is lies on the other side of the psychedelic boundary.
Ordinary consciousness is just like keeping the accounts of life but there's more to life than the account books.
I mean, everything else is out there. The color, the affection, the humor, the terror, the mystery, the incredible strangeness of it all.
This is the domain that we want to claim and explore. And if we can find the collective institutional courage to do it,
I think this current planetary crisis will be seen for what it really is.
And what it is is it's not a dying. These are not the last rites for intelligence.
This is a birth process. I mean, if you were to come around...
If you'd never seen somebody give birth and you came around the corner and it was in progress, you would be thoroughly, profoundly alarmed.
I mean, it looks like an enormous tumor is making its way out of somebody and they are being split in two
and blood is being shed and there's pleading and screaming and thrashing.
It would be a real leap of understanding for you to say, "Oh, how wonderful! New life is emerging. This is the way we do it."
Well, this is the way we do it. I mean, we are in the birth canal right now of a planetary civilization.
Literally, the amniotic oceans of 500 years ago, that's all gone. There is no frontier. There is no going back.
The piece of the fetal environment is gone and now, in transition, literally the walls are closing in.
You can't breathe. You can't eat. You can't find your way. It appears to be the end.
But there's light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind
and if you don't go to the back side of your mind, you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel.
And once you see it, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people.
Spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven. God is some kind of lost continent in the human mind.
And if we will but explore the human mind, we can reclaim these relationships with our own authenticity
and shed the childishness of historical existence and gender politics and all the rest of it
and move on to the real business of establishing a real civilization.
Thank you very much.
Does anyone want to ask a question or is it all just perfectly clear, utterly convincing and yeah?
Are there bad effects?
Of psilocybin? Bad effects.
Somebody once said, "What's wrong with DMT?" and I said, "Well, nothing unless you fear death by astonishment."
But your question is a good one.
First of all, you know, I talked a lot about how what we have to do is destroy and ablate ego.
However, there is a very small percentage of us who have a hard time creating any ego whatsoever.
And for these people, boundary dissolution is no problem. Their boundaries are dissolving all the time on them.
I would say that they are at the contraindicated end of the spectrum.
That if you're fearful already and fighting to keep from being overwhelmed by confusion at what's going on in your life at the paper box factory or something,
then probably tossing in mega doses of hallucinogens is not the way for you to do it.
Or if you do, if you're just bent on doing that, then I would say do it in the presence of some kind of professional.
And how you find a professional in this legal climate, you'll have to discuss with me privately.
I don't want to make it sound though, I mean it's a tricky thing.
I don't want to make it sound like it's absolutely riskless.
But physically, I think it's pretty safe unless you are awed in some way, but you need to know.
You don't want to find out you're awed an hour and a half into it.
But the problem comes with the mind.
If you are delicately balanced, if your whole life has been about not looking at that or that or that, then this is not your game.
You should go back to watching Jeopardy.
The kind of person who is called to this is a person who has an exploring soul.
I am not a courageous person in the sense that you won't find me shooting whitewater.
You don't see me repelling down the faces of cliffs.
But from the time I was the tiniest little kid, I was into the weird.
What's weird? Weird is the compass heading.
And if you keep your compass always pointed toward the peculiar, the utre, the bizarre, the unspeakably alien, then you'll find these places.
The people who think life is all cut and dried and are perfectly happy to have Carl Sagan and George Bush explain all of reality have never left the broad, swift stream of mundane thinking.
But, you know, off in the byways and tributaries, there's a wonderful alchemical saying which I generally mangle, but I think it goes something like this.
The tallest mountains, the oldest books, the widest deserts, there you will find the stone.
And what it is, is it's a prescription for exploring weirdness. That's all.
It's not going to be on MTV. It's not going to be in, God forbid, Esquire.
It's going to come from, you know, doing your homework, visiting strange people in strange lands, and checking it out.
What I can't give you, to return to your question, is I can't give you a guarantee that it will be fun.
You know, the Rolling Stones have that wonderful line, "You don't get what you want, you get what you need."
This stuff is ruthless. And if there's something that you're trying not to look at, it's going to get you, for sure.
But ask the veterans. Most people will tell you, you learn more from the bad trips than you do from the good ones.
The good ones are ecstatic and connect you up to nature and other people.
The bad ones show you your kinks and your limitations and your thought errors and that sort of thing.
It's not an easy row to hoe. That's why I think there's a little bit of social confusion about it.
One of the things I should make clear is I really advocate high doses rarely.
I think the worst thing you can do is get into a style of psychedelic diddling, where, you know, you take half a gram every day.
All this is doing is giving you a tolerance to psilocybin.
You're not having the psilocybin experience. You're having the tolerance to psilocybin experience.
Really, the way to do these things is to do them rarely so that your whole system can reassert itself and come to equilibrium and then just slam it.
And this is amazing. I mean, I think that this works for all these psychedelics.
I'm an inveterate cannabis user and I wish in a way that I could get a slightly better grip on my cannabis use.
Because I think the real way to do cannabis is like once a week, by yourself, in silent darkness, with the strongest stuff you can get and then immense amounts of it.
And, you know, people call it a recreational drug and a this and a that.
And if you make it done that way, it will catapult you into places where it's... I love it.
The great place to get to on cannabis, and some people never in their whole life touch it, is the place where you say, "My God, I've done too much."
It's not easy, folks, but it's worth shooting for.
Basically, what you should do is do some homework, read some books, talk to your friends, and then hang on Hannah.
It's like, you know, it's very much like riding an enormous roller coaster. Once that baby rolls out of the station, do not stand up, do not try to climb out of your car.
Shut up and hang on with the faith that most people have lived through this.
Anybody else? Yeah. Purple.
I have three real quick literary questions about your writing, and then one important question.
Well, having just heard that I'm a pothead, please ask them one at a time.
What is your first literary question?
Okay. One of the assertions that you make is that low-dosing was a typical evolutionary mechanism.
My own experience is different than that.
Many of my associates' experiences are different than that.
And we believe that high-doses may have done a more common usage method.
Well, I don't mean to imply that people first used it in low doses, and then middle, and then higher over time.
What I meant to imply, I think they were using low, middle, and high doses from the very get-go,
but they were using low doses to hunt, middle-range doses for orgy and ceremony,
and truly high doses for this boundary-dissolving, Tremendum.
Second literary question.
When I read about Chad Ohio, I liked you picking up on Mallard and Einslerk,
and I liked your use of dominator and partnership terminology. That was wonderful.
But I disagree when you said that the cows were an indirect expression of the fungus in the act there.
I found that to be kind of a leak of the blackness.
But I kind of thought it was going to have to go with the reason you're not going to attempt.
Well, I'm not wedded to that.
First of all, Chantal Hillel-Yoch, for those of you who haven't read the book or know about Chantal,
was this immensely sophisticated civilization that existed in the seventh millennium BC.
We're talking 6,000 years before zero.
This civilization existed and was destroyed,
and the characteristic of it is shrines dedicated to cattle.
And in my book, I argue that this was probably the last outpost of this partnership society.
But it was still, I think the real golden age of mushroom use
was probably from about 30,000 years ago to about 15,000 years ago.
And by the time Chantal Hillel-Yoch comes along, it's a fading or yearly or seasonal thing.
And the last question is the important one.
One of the assertions that you made earlier
was that these indelible-based plantilism regimes actually changed people to use them.
And the unfortunate thing that I observed is, I can't agree with that assertion.
It seems that as many people, it seems like only a really few people are changed by them.
Only those who are predisposed to change.
And I'd like, one of the questions you asked doesn't make us better, doesn't make us different.
And I'm just not convinced at all.
When I see people taking mushrooms and going around and doing strange things
and just being a jerk is there more?
I mean, if you know, and I'm down in the jungle and there's mushroom plants
and, you know, they don't see it yet.
Well, I, my argument would be that people don't take it enough
and they don't take it frequently enough.
That there are a lot of people who really would rather not get loaded,
but who feel they must take some psychedelic drug in order to keep membership in their peer group.
So what they do, you know, you can always spot these people
because their first question at the get-go is, "Will I be able to drive?"
I love this question.
Because, you know, it indicates you've got a real tough nut on your hand.
In every sense of the word, no, you will not be able to drive.
So, you know, I, one of the things that inspires me to do this is
I want to get to the people who've taken three grams of mushrooms
and the people who've taken 150 mics of LSD
and I want to convince those people that they never got close to what I'm talking about.
Even though they had a life-transforming experience and saw things totally differently,
they never got close to what I'm talking about.
And so what you have to do is convince people to take high doses
and then that's to break them through
and then, frequently enough, that they don't forget what the deal is.
So I think if you take a psychedelic population
and divide it into those who have done five grams and above,
then you will see an exceptional slice.
But not the dabblers.
The dabblers don't count.
And we all can be, or at times, guilty of this, I think.
And then, is that your last question?
Does that do it for you?
Or do you want to be thought psychotic? You choose.
Well, I love competition.
The competition is terrible.
That's the entire basis of my success.
Yeah.
You, because you were before, if you still wish.
Here's what you want to hear.
Would you like to understand if dark and room, quiet,
and you're not going to be able to hear out loud.
And a lot of people think that they play the test.
Right.
And why, I guess you think your way is preferable.
Why?
Because, I mean, I don't know if it's preferable, but here's the thing.
People are going to think you're a nut if you come down and say that
Johann Sebastian Bach or Jerry Garcia is God.
And this is what you will have to say if you listen to the dead or the B minor math.
So, what I'm interested in is, I want to know the thing in itself.
Not what it does to Bach, not what it does to a river flowing through a forested valley.
I want to see what it can do with darkness and silence.
And I think most people think it'll be boring,
probably because they've been hanging out with these beady eyed gurus meditating.
And God knows there's nothing more boring on earth than most meditation.
However, psychedelic, sitting in a darkened room on five dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms is nothing like meditating.
And that's where it can get at you.
My relationship to it is always one of, I want to know what it is.
And so, I think this sensory deprivation method is the only way to get at that.
Other people might not like that.
People say, "Well, you mean you put down the whole thing of going into nature?
Isn't nature the great affirmation in all this?"
And the answer is, "Yeah, but it works for me, sort of, without the drugs."
Plus, and this is just maybe my own weirdness, but I'll share it with you.
I have noticed that these things are incredibly disruptive of the ordinary flow of kazooistry.
Do you all know the concept synchronicity?
Well, if you don't stay in your room with the lights out and the phone unplugged,
the damnedest things will happen to you.
I mean, you couldn't pay me to go into an American city even mildly loaded,
because adventures beckon.
Now, some people like that.
Some people say, "Let's take 500 mics and go meet weird people."
No. Not this cookie. Yeah.
In your point to your statement, what I find happy there is that you create an experience
where you are taking away other people's dogma.
You're bringing in something that's already done,
and I feel like the key to experience is when you create something new,
something new, especially from the depth of view,
which is why I don't have daily guidance on that.
But one thing that I did learn is that the high doses are very interesting
and were taking away far beyond the small doses.
And I was scared that it would go from now to then.
Now, sometimes many works have got potentially been learned medically,
but I can be psychedelic.
And my question is coming next.
You take that into a situation where you remove the whole molecular pattern
of your general homeopathy,
do you think that there could be a more potent experience through that?
Are you asking me, do I think a homeopathic preparation of a psychedelic would be effective?
It would be homeopathically effective.
I wouldn't expect it to be experientially effective.
I would sense that since what we view out here is a direct creation
of what we are inside, that the current paradigm I would have,
that if you do change it in the same manner that you change it in homeopathy,
which is changing the appearance so that you then create the world's mysterious star,
it would be even more potent and even more induced.
But don't you think that if that were true,
and since in a high dilution like that no molecular trace of the original compound remains,
that you have then just found the solution to the legalization conundrum?
I'm kind of reading that because one thing that we're noticing in the field of criminal medicine now
is that we're getting a lot of political flak for having medicines out there,
but homeopathy is seeming to have stayed as a pattern in the years.
Because in a materialist world it's assumed to be bogus.
Right.
[inaudible]
Well, this seems to me not an abstract proposition at all.
Let the best homeopaths succuss the strongest hallucinogens and set them out
and let's give it a whirl.
Over on this side. Yeah.
This question may be too personal and embarrassing for you to answer, but I'm just going to...
I'm going to really wait.
Why are you in jail?
Ah, why am I not in jail?
Well, that's an interesting question.
And number one, I don't know.
Here's what I've come up with.
Notice that I use big words.
I don't try to boil it down to a shoutable slogan.
Like, "Turn on, tune in, drop out."
Uh-uh. That, then they come. They come.
So that's one possibility that simply if you are defined in their eyes as an intellectual,
then they automatically put you in the harmless category and send resources elsewhere.
That's one possibility.
Now, the other possibility is slightly more disturbing,
but in the interests of thoroughness, let me raise it.
Perhaps I'm sanctioned.
Perhaps they decided, "We don't really understand what this stuff is, and we can't have a mass movement."
But let one guy just kind of keep the pilot light on in case we ever change our minds about this.
He will have kept the pilot light on.
And the other possibility, which is probably too naive,
but in the interest, again, of exhaustive thoroughness, maybe they just haven't noticed yet.
You know, Tim Leary, who's a friend of mine, would address 25,000 people at a throw.
My crowds are, you know, a couple of times a year they creep over 1,000.
And I think the key is to keep it low-key.
And we don't want to, you know, dodge your stadium filled or anything like that.
It's very good to atomize it and spread it through.
Now, the other thing is, you know, I advocate plant hallucinogens.
And people always say, "Well, what about LSD? I mean, didn't LSD change your life?
Didn't it change all our lives? Why aren't you into LSD?"
And the answer is certainly yes and yes.
The reason I'm not into LSD is not having to do with the effects of LSD, which I think are marvelous,
but with the fact that a couple of enterprising second-year biochemistry students
can produce six or seven million hits in a long weekend.
Six or seven million hits of an illegal drug.
Suddenly, this is the realm of governments and criminal syndicates
and revolutionary disruption of populations.
My brother and I wrote Psilocybin, the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide.
If you work like a dog for six months, maybe you can produce two or three thousand hits.
So that's the thing. LSD had chemical qualities that made it terrifying to the government.
I mean, anybody with $50,000 worth of backing
and two years of biochemistry could turn themselves into a major threat
to political stability in this country.
So they slammed that. They're not going to put up with that.
The thing I love about the mushrooms is, you know, if you're a dedicated mushroom grower,
you produce this piddling amount, and if they come and drag you away, because it is illegal,
all they get is you. No syndicate collapses, no pyramid disappears.
So it's invasive and low-key and slowly spreading.
The other thing is, mushrooms are, this is a cultural thing,
mushrooms are inherently non-threatening.
They're absurd. You know, they're what we put decals of on serving trays
and bath towels bear mushrooms on them.
It's a kind of silly thing.
And so I think that they don't really understand what a powerful hallucinogen this is.
Well, that's enough on why I'm not in the can. This woman. Yeah.
[Inaudible]
[Inaudible]
Absolutely, if we could do it. I mean, I'm not yet convinced, see.
I mean, you've got your gurus.
But if you ever get close to any of these people in these guru scenes,
close enough where you can just say to them, "Look, level with me.
Is this stuff as good as five grams in silent darkness?"
And they say, "Are you serious?"
The other possibility is technology on two fronts, mind machines.
The problem with mind machines is, you know,
you have to smoke a bomber to put up with it in more than ten minutes.
I mean, you quickly satisfy yourself that this can't possibly be it
because it is life, but it is contentless.
Well, the psychedelic experience is all content.
The other possibility, and I've put in some time in this beat,
is virtual reality.
And I have more hope for virtual reality because virtual reality
is a technology that would allow us to show each other
the inside of our heads, our dreams, our visions.
And I think that sufficiently perfected,
it might have the consequences of these psychedelics.
The problem is it carries a huge amount of negative freight.
You know that it's not going to be a tool for us to show each other
the inside of our minds.
It's going to be a tool to sell us crap that we don't want.
It's going to be a tool for yet more realistic, vicarious and gratuitous violence.
It's going to be a tool for more pornographic degradation of women.
So it seems to me, while it holds out the possibility
of a technically driven psychedelic, it has a lot of negative freight.
I agree with your premise, but I'm driven by a tremendous sense of urgency.
I mean, why try to create a technical alternative to psilocybin
when you've got psilocybin?
I think that people should use motion as the step.
And once you get there, you try and keep going without that tool.
I mean, because what we want, we want to transcend this plane.
We want to be on a higher plane, a higher state of awareness.
You're not going to get to that plane ultimately
if you have to be coming back into the plane to get out of the plane again.
Well, how about this?
Maybe there's something wrong with that metaphor
because notice it has to do with planes and transitions.
It's an inherently dualist metaphor.
This concludes Tape 1.
Our program continues with Tape 2.
Tree Of Knowledge (2)
Our program continues with tape 2
How about this? Maybe there's something wrong with that metaphor
Because notice it has to do with planes and transitions. It's an inherently dualist metaphor
How about if we say?
There is no inside and outside there is no with or without
You just use what you've got whatever works
Should be used. I
spent time in India and visited all these people and so forth and so on and I just became convinced that
unless you were
Predisposed to believe in this stuff that it would never carry you where you wanted it to and one thing about psychedelics
You don't have to be predisposed. It doesn't work for those who believe it works
It works for those who think it doesn't work then one last point and then we'll go on
There's a story maybe some of you know this story of a man who lived by the side of a river and
He wanted to he wanted to cross the river
so he
Practiced a
city of
transportation so that he could walk across the water and it took him 40 years to perfect this city and
finally, he could cross the river and
Buddha was preaching in the neighborhood and the guy came to him and he said
Master look what I've achieved. I can walk on the water to cross the river and
Buddha said yeah, but the ferry costs a nickel
and
That's the thing
I I think
We're not going to be able to replace this tool without wasting so much time in the act of replacing it that
Armageddon will catch up with us
I think we have to humble ourselves
so thoroughly that you have to admit that you can't get where you want to go unless you form a
partnership with somebody whose idea of a good time is growing in a cow pie and
if you're willing to
Partner up with this humble humble
Member of the ecosystem then you and it can fly to glory
Have at it
Yeah, I wouldn't recommend especially in the late stages of pregnancy doing anything that is going to wildly
perturb you and you know LSD was discovered in the act of
Trying to produce better drugs to induce labor
So that's excellent advice honor the fetus
Yeah
Yeah
Oh
Well the true and honest answer is how the hell can you find out when they won't let you do research
It's totally insidious. We don't know
We don't know because they will not allow
The the research to be done. This is one of the reasons why I
say that
You should stick with
shamanically
sanctioned plants
Because we know for instance that people have been taking psilocybin in the Sierra Mazateca of central Mexico for millennia
They don't show blindness
tumors
miscarriage madness cataracts
Whatever that's your human data for that but you go to let's talk for a minute about something like ketamine
Nobody knows nobody has any data
MDMA seems to be tremendously effective in facilitating
interpersonal stuff that's a psychological issue
chemically
What kind of data do we have, you know six years worth of data gathered under duress? So
to be safe stick with the things that are sanctioned by human use and then
In some more enlightened future we will explore these synthetics and find out just what the parameters are
Yeah finish up
No, I'm not saying that I'm saying take things which have been sanctioned by human usage
I mean, how about a plant like strychnos nocs vamica?
I mean you're dead in a minute and a half and it's a beautiful wonderful plant. Why did it kill you?
Well, because it's jammed with strychnine. No, it's nothing about
It's being a plant. It's about having a repeated history of human usage. That's what sanctifies it
Yeah, the lady in magenta
I
Like to
Many times
Wanted to
I said
I
Think that all
That's really an interesting point
I mean I it never occurred to me, but somebody brought it up to me
They said have you noticed that the trips are changing?
and
Once you do ask yourself this question
It does seem to be so and I don't know whether that what I mean, that's a deep assertion
I'm not sure exactly what's going on there. For instance this goddess thing
I don't think people gave the goddess of thought in the early
1970s late 1960s now people have you know some of the least likely people
Report intense encounters with the goddess
So is it amplifying the general mindset of the society?
And so there's more goddess stuff there or I don't really know. It's a very interesting question
There are more questions than answers. I mean, this is definitely wide open stuff. Yeah
Yeah
I
Have trouble
seeing a cosmic sex relationship
as far as what are you or more white
Right
We're trying to restore the
relationship of
ego to the other components of the psyche that existed as recently as
12,000 years ago the ego has become a deadly growth in the historical
societies
perturbated by the phonetic alphabet monotheism
Modern science this is like you're getting sicker and sicker and sicker
As you lay these things on and so the idea is that if we could restore the original
Diminished role of the ego that it had for that
Period however long it was that we could begin to solve our problems because the problems which faced us
Put very simply are going to demand
sacrifice and
Sacrifice is what the ego doesn't want to hear about and when you go to somebody and say look to save this planet
We're going to have to redistribute income radically. That means everybody in this room is going to have less
we're going to have to honor a whole bunch of
Cultural positions that we previously just were going to bulldoze over and so forth and so on so it's
It's the diminishing of ego
By any means necessary that lies to getting any grip on our problems. I mean if we
Continue as we are. I think we have probably less than 30 years before life is
irreconcilably screwed up, you know, nobody believes
that the future is
Rosy and wonderful
I mean if you go to the people at the World Bank and the IMF and these people who are straight
You know suits all of them
They have a set of curves which would stand your hair on end when they propagate the curve of population
The curve of toxification of the environment the curve related to the ozone hole disappearing
You see, you know
It's finished in sometime in the next 50 years
They don't talk about this because they don't want to panic
The vast numbers of people who just go to work and raise their kids and pray somebody smarter is doing something about all that
But they don't believe there is any kind of normal
Future and I don't either I think we're going to that it's business as usual is not on the menu folks
We're either going to go into an era of immense resource scarcity
regimentation governmental interference in our lives
tremendous
propagandistic efforts to make us do one thing or another or
We're going to pull the plug on
scientism and its stooges and the institutions which feed us feed it in
Capitalism is an interesting problem more easily discussed now that communism is out of the picture
capitalism is as
anti-human the philosophy as you can possibly conceive because at this very moment we should be
consuming less
manufacturing less
selling less
Importing less and what's the battle cry free trade everywhere? What does free trade mean?
It means my right to come to your country and sell the most
Outlandish junk you've ever seen and you will have no right to turn it away because in the name of free trade
Crapola has to go everywhere
It's really see they try to tell you that that capitalism and democracy are not
at variance
Actually the whole Marxist Leninist socialist thing was a side dish
the real life and death struggle is between
capitalism and
democracy
democracy says
Everybody has an innate worth that must be honored
Capitalism says those who die with the most toys win you cannot reconcile
These two things and nobody wants to talk about this. We're still having the party over the fall of communism
but you know
You go to the Soviet Union or the former areas of the Soviet Union and you see that what it was was it was a
deep freeze for traditional culture in
Khurgisia and Turkmenistan people are basically
Camel husbandry is what's going on
Now with communism on the rocks
McDonald's will be there in five years and Kmart will be
following close behind
So I think we're coming to a great crisis of fundamental
Our relation to our own fundamental institutions. I'm not anti capitalist
I think capitalism needs to sever its
Connection to materialism
This is again why virtual reality is interesting you sell things made of light
Not made of beryllium metal brass steel and wood but light we've got all the light we need
But we have to stop making things out of stuff or we're not going to be around to tell the tale
[inaudible]
Yeah
[inaudible]
[inaudible]
[inaudible]
[inaudible]
[inaudible]
No, I think that you know
Revolutions are made by percentages
if 15 or 20 percent
Changed then the example would spread you see we are not
Psilocybin is the easy way
To awaken, you know, take a take a psychedelic plant and have an experience and get your act together
But the future is full of sledgehammers
It's not going we're not going to it's not going to end with the whimper
It's going to end with a series of thuds and bangs. It could begin almost any time
I mean we could get a hot muggy day in Mexico City this summer and a million people would die
This thing in Los Angeles is a wake-up call
It is going to get uglier and more chaotic and more crazy. There is going to be more
starvation more
fascism more
Dictatorship that it's unless we do something until we do something and it can how bad is it going to have to get?
Before people say, you know, we're doing something wrong
you know people dance on the Russians, but you've got to admire people who have the
guts to say we did it entirely wrong
100% I mean, can you imagine in this country?
To being able to do say, you know, I mean it may be coming
It may be coming this character from Austin is a peculiar item in the mix
You know, I mean I for years had a fantasy speech which I always
imagined that I would somehow end up giving but but it's it's the speech where you say
my fellow Americans you have been lied to
screwed and abused by these two criminal parties for a hundred years and
your only hope is to overthrow the
Republicans and create a decent world to live in well, no Republican can make that speech no Democrat
Can make that speech and be credible it has to be somebody who wasn't in bed with either of those forces
So I'm not at all pleased by who apparently will bear the mantle
But on the other hand if change is what we need then it's it's probably not going to be a candidate that you and I can
Embrace it's gonna be some oddball
So, you know, we have to recognize that when we see it coming
Yeah
We don't know what it is
Yeah, the great thing about it is it can talk
Good for you
I
Was fascinated by it and I watched it closely but as it got to get paid when I started getting interested in what the
significance of zero
Take that so I'd like to
See a decreasing function of time which meant that a zero crossing had some singular
But I really wonder what
Well probably half at least in the room haven't the faintest idea what this question is about
I've stayed away from this because this is the
Personalistic stuff where I've created a certain model of reality
Based on a new way of looking at time and I don't want to go into it too much tonight
But I want to suggest something to you tonight, which is that
you know
At the very beginning of this talk we talked about mutation and natural selection and that's the Darwin's
Insight was vast and deep and what he offered was an explanation for how?
rainbow trout come to be
monarch butterflies
redwood trees
Herds of elephants so forth and so on what it doesn't address is us
We are the weird
Bird on the block. I mean, yes, we're some kind of monkey
But when you stand us next to our nearest relative
It's very very clear that it is not a very near relative. It doesn't look like us much
Certainly doesn't act like us. What's the deal with human beings? And I think that
You know how all these religions
These Western religions have built in this idea of the end of the world and they're always running around
Expecting the Messiah or something and this to the scientific mind is just the final
proof of the pudding that these people have water between the ears
Because science just says, you know, that's just ridiculous. I mean
But I wonder I wonder
I mentioned just a minute ago these curves that when you propagate them into the future
Everything leads to the unimaginable and it's all within the next 50 years
so I sort of think as human beings as
Analogous to iron
Filings on a piece of paper and you shake these iron filings out of a salt shaker or something and there they lie
Randomly arranged in heaps. Well, then you come underneath the paper with a very powerful
Magnet and lo and behold these little iron filings
Coherently arrange themselves into this beautiful double mustache pattern, which I'm sure you've all seen
Well, I think that
There is a an enormous
punchline to the historical process
That not very very few people
Suspect and that what history is
It's what happens to an animal
Who falls under the influence of a kind of strange?
Attractor and that we are being pulled
Into a well of transformative intentionality
History is not pushed by the cause oo history of war migration
Imperial dynastic families and stuff like that history is pulled
toward an unimaginable
Something which is continuously trying to mirror itself in us
This is why these Egyptians say it, you know, I don't know what it is
But I just think we should really build a big simple building
Say, I don't know why but I'm gonna
Enslave 50,000 people and do it and don't ask me why and this is and you know
This is the same force that reared chart Cathedral
This is the same force that created the space shuttle
We are in a relationship to an unseen something which we keep trying to image
with our mythologies our religions our
technologies our
Epiphanies and I think that
It's not so far away
That it doesn't 10,000 years in the future. It is sometime in the next 50
Years and that this is what history was for you see history is an incredibly
Peculiar and brief
Phenomenon, I mean viewed from the point of view of biology
It's less time than it takes for a new species to emerge. I mean, let's call history
25,000 years, you know in in frame one you're chipping Flint in
Frame two you're hurling an instrument toward alpha centura like that this happened
Well, what's happening? It's that mind itself is being
pulled out of this creature and it's being given hands and
languages and
posh
Symbolic systems in order to image the unspeakable the unspeakable I call it the transcendental
Object at the end of time it casts and it's in another dimension
It's in a kind of super space and what it casts into history is the enormous shadow of its eminence
This is what straight people call God. This is what all these visionaries are raving
It's about it's that when you sink the note belief the surface of ordinary causality and mundane
The flying saucer or the
Philosopher's Stone it's all of those things and much much more. It's not only stranger than you suppose
It's stranger than you can suppose and it has called us out of animal
conversation over a twenty five thousand year period we hang in the balance and then we meet it and
We're going to meet it. That's the light at the end of that birth canal of transcendence that I referred to and
Now I see that our song is sung. Our time is done
Thank you very very much for turning
In
Yeah, we'll dig into this in the interim I think that
It's worth taking the time for everybody to just make a very brief
very very brief
statement about
You don't have to say who you are if you don't want to but you can say what you're hoping for
Why you're here or what your agenda is?
Just so that if it turns out we're 80% shrinks or you know 80%
Ceramicis or something then we turn it that way and
Those of you who are undercover, please stay undercover so you don't alarm anybody
Especially me, right
So why don't we just start?
And go across in some reasonably logical fashion which yeah
Well that tells you what you're worth doesn't it oh
True no, let's not record it. So people and also I had at one point
Thought I would be an art historian that was one of my real
Processions so I had had enough our history to be trained in you know
recognizing the evolution of motifs how one artist passes on techniques and
conceits to his students or his imitators and all this art historical stuff and I also
had been very interested in Jung and
And none of this seemed to explain the content of the psychedelic experience
I would get in there and say well how come I'm not seeing a
archetype and be
things which somebody else
You know, I don't know Dali and Thor
Caravaggio Bosch
Somebody should have seen this stuff and gotten it down and there didn't seem to be
a trail
Through the history of Western art of the presence of this dimension
So then I thought wow, is it that nobody knew about?
All this I mean Bosch would have given his right arm for a sheet of blotter. I would think
So so it became for me like a mystery. What where is this stuff coming from? And what does it say?
About our humaneness. Yeah
I read about Bosch because he was somewhat of an intake by the optimist of his time. He was experimenting with him.
Well, there's a lot of ink instilled over Bosch because he is such a
startlingly
radical painter in the context of his time many of his conceits were picked up after his life
Peter Bruegel the elder being the foremost exponent of it. He may have been an alchemical guinea pig
Who let's see
Frasier I think wrote a book called the millennium of Hieronymus Bosch in which he wanted to suggest that
May be detour a use that there was a cult called the Brotherhood of the free spirit
and which practiced ritual nudity
Which begins to sound something like the orgies we talked about last night. It was a cult of printers and
It may be that the Garden of earthly delights was actually painted as an altarpiece for a congregation
Of the Brotherhood of the free spirit, but this is all pretty murky stuff. It's hard to get back to Bosch
He didn't leave any written records
We have his birth is recorded in the parish church where if the village where he was born
We know he was born sometime around 1450 died in 1516
But the details are pretty murky
Well not to be labor Bosch
So what I thought we would be a reasonable way to do this this morning
Is to take the most extreme
psychedelic case and
experience and
Describe it and talk about it a little and then see what issues that raises because my
Experience with this stuff has led me to the conclusion that in a way
it's
to be thought of this other dimension is to be thought of like a mandala and
different
psychedelic compounds and
Generously different kinds of yoga and different kinds of techniques of all sorts land you in different parts of this
Mandala but that what you're always trying to do is get to the center of the mandala
And it's simply my bias my opinion
But I think the center of the mandala is probably the DMT
Experience for a number of reasons and so I thought it would be interesting to talk about it this morning
First let me talk about it physically
DMT is
An indole
hallucinogen a beta no no a tryptamine
and it's
produced endogenously in the human brain
This is very interesting
Very few psychedelic compounds are produced in the human brain
We don't know what DMT is doing there
But it means essentially that we all are subject to arrest on a technicality
Because we all are holding a schedule one drug
It's sort of the ultimate catch-22 where if all else fails. They just say well you were holding anyway
The interesting thing about the M another interesting thing about it is that it's incredibly
rapid in its onset and
in its
Disappearance the whole trip lasts about 15 minutes
This makes it a tremendous tool with which to challenge the critics of our position
Because if somebody wants to rise up in righteous wrath and condemn
psychedelics then you say well you have tried them haven't you and of course they never have it's like
scientific denunciations of astrology
I mean scientists love to denounce astrology
But find one who can cast a natal horoscope and I'll give you a hen's tooth
you know so the the
The
DMT overcomes this objection the entire experience lasts 15 minutes
So you say to the critic, you know, you're not going to experience it
And yet you're going to carry on a pogrom against it
You won't invest 15 minutes to checking out what this is about, you know, what kind of scientist are you?
So it has that social efficacy
Now the fact that it is the strongest of all
Hallucinogens at least if there are ones stronger, please keep them away from me
I mean, I don't think anybody needs to get higher than that. I certainly don't
I mean I've at times come out of those places and said this stuff is illegal
You know it breaks cosmic law
Of course then Tim Leary told me that cosmic laws are only local ordinances anyway, so it didn't really matter
Okay
Well good question. Yes, it's the commonest of all
hallucinogens in nature
It occurs in many grasses
Falaris tuberosa falaris arundinaceae
It occurs in a number of leguminous plants
Probably the most spectacular being anadonanthra peregrina this huge
tropical locust like tree from which the snuff called
Neopa or if Pina is made that's a tough way to get your DMT. Let me tell you
Because there's so much cellulose and other crap and corruption in the mix that you have to do like a tablespoon
up each nostril and the technique
the technique is you get a bamboo tube or a hollow tube about this long and you
Pour in this tablespoon of this stuff
And then you squat down on your haunches and you get a friend and you put the tube up your nostril and then the friend
Blows with the full force of his breath blows this stuff into your head
Well, you fall it's like being hit in the face with a two-by-four
I mean you that it's like you think he kicked you and you fall over backwards you scream you
Salivate you get back up on your haunches and by this time he has refilled the tube
for the other nostril
So and then after
Yolpo Epina Nipa it depends on the language group and the white
Yanomami
It's also called Vilka in the karab language and then after
Ten minutes or so it slowly begins to form up in your head
but you know God your sinuses are in stat for sure and
It's not very pleasant. And the other thing is it never reaches the blinding
transformative intensity that you can achieve with the
chemically pure
compound
No, no that good point if you orally ingest it
It will be destroyed in your guts. It won't work
The Amazon Indians have
encountered this problem and created a very sophisticated
pharmacological strategy for dealing with this you've all heard of ayahuasca ayahuasca is DMT from one plant
Combined with another plant which contains a chemical which is called an MAO inhibitor
MAO is monoamine oxidase and your gut is full of MAO and
its job is to take mono amines small molecules and
oxidize them into a harmless by-product
Usually in the lysitic acid which can be shunted to the bladder
Well when you take DMT orally these mono amines just I mean these monoamine oxidase
Compounds just grab on to it and destroy it
But if you take an MAO inhibitor with it and harm mean which occurs in banisteriopsis
Copy is an MAO inhibitor then lo and behold it isn't destroyed in your gut instead
It passes into the bloodstream it passes through the blood-brain barrier
Which is a very tight chemical filter that keeps the brain from being exposed to toxic materials
But these drugs can cross that barrier and then what the ayahuasca experience really is is a slow release
DMT trip that instead of taking five minutes
takes about two and a half hours and if you really know your
Psychedelics and your breath control techniques on ayahuasca
Over an hour, so you can work yourself to a place where you say
Lordy me it looks just like a DMT flash
And it does but you've had to do some hard climbing to get there with DMT itself
once you push the start button, there's no stopping it and
I
Think it's worth describing it how many people have had this experience?
Well, so they can somewhat anchor it
It's very subjective
Obviously, but I will describe what happens to me and then we can work out from there one point that I want to make
About these things is that the the great strength of the psychedelic possibility is it's democratic
You know, it isn't that people of great spiritual advancement attain these states or or
People who have studied under some lineage
It's truly available to everyone and when I had my DMT
Experiences I realized you know either I am
incredibly special
which doesn't there's no other evidence to support that or
This is something which can happen to anyone and that's the more interesting possibility
After all, if it can only happen to very very special people then that lets most people out
But if it's generally available, then it's big big news about the human condition. Yeah
(inaudible)
How did they find DMT in the human brain?
Hmm interesting question
(inaudible)
No, I think he means how did they find that it was endogenously produced?
Well, I think they were studying the group that did this was at the University of Louisiana
Christian and his group and I they were studying fast
reactions in the brain and
for fast reactions you have to look at chemicals that can go through some kind of cycle of
Structural change and return to their zero point very very quickly
Their original thought was that DMT mediated attention. I mean I'm talking to you right now
Suppose there were a loud noise over here. We would all
Immediately project our mind onto the source of the sound
they thought that that was a
neurological function mediated by DMT
Could be I'm not sure I suspect it has more to do with the chemistry of dreaming
Once they discovered DMT and began to track it they discovered that there was a circadian rhythm
Means the daily rhythm in its production in the human organism and that it reaches its greatest
concentration in the brain around
3 30 a.m. In most people
well
This is when the deep dreaming and the high REM states are really chugging and I suspect I
Mean lucid dreamers may want to argue with this, but I suspect that every night
We go deeper places than we can ever speak of
That ordinary dreams are right on the surface of consciousness
Big lucid dreams are an inch deeper
But I think we go a hundred feet down every night into places where you cannot say anything about it. Yeah
I wanted to ask you about
How to find DMT and for people who can't get it
Let's make that perspiration well, it's hard as hell to find DMT and this is a puzzle because if you look it up in a standard work on organic chemistry it presents it as a trivial synthesis
Much more simple than LSD which it always presents is quite a difficult synthesis
But when you actually talk to workbench chemists, it's tricky to make DMT
It's especially tricky to carry out the final crystallization
So what you're usually offered in the underground is some kind of muck which looks sort of like
maple
Syrup half gone to sugar. I wouldn't get near that actually
It means they they botched their synthesis what you're hoping for is a white
powder
however in 30 years of
Chasing this all over the world. I've only seen it as a white powder a couple of times
Usually the synthesis has fallen slightly below that standard and what you get is a pale yellow powder
Sometimes a pale rose or pink powder and then the real rough trade is
Orange and this is what you if you've seen it. This is probably what you've seen
It looks like orange mothballs and it has the smell of indole
This very sharp smell which if you're not a chemist and you've never smelled indole
When you reach in your mind for what is this like you'll say well, it's sort of like mothballs
Not quite but it has that same sharp chemical, you know, and this is what you're gonna smoke
See, so a lot of people beef about that and say well, you know, it's like smoking burning plastic
Muscle may knows but it is a little bit like that
The other objection to DMT that has been around since the 60s is people say it destroys brain cells
There's no evidence for or against
this but I would submit to you as
spend the people who are
Neurophysiologists can argue with this if they disagree, but I think an excellent index
for the low toxicity of a drug is how fast it clears your system and
DMT clears your system in about 15 minutes if you take some compound drug or whatever and
48 hours later
You're still taking hot baths and you know
Wishing you could have a massage and sitting staring at the wall
Then this drug is really sticking to your ribs
It means that your metabolic pathways have no way of dealing with it
They can't grab it here
They can't grab it there and it takes a long time to leave your system an example of this in the pseudo
Psychedelic domain would be ketamine, you know ketamine the experience lasts about 45 minutes
But 48 hours later, you can feel your knees suddenly go rubbery or you can have
What are technically called fugue states strange states of?
Disconnectedness from what's going on around you. This is not a very good
advertisement for a drug here this woman and then
I
Well less because
If you smoke DMT, the dose is approximately 50 milligrams
Which is like the size of a kitchen match head
the
If you combine it with an MAO inhibitor and take it orally you can probably get away with about 35 milligrams of DMT
and
Well, I don't know a hundred and a hundred milligrams of harmaline
Now harmaline itself is sometimes described as a psychedelic drug
I really think this is sort of misleading
You will have hallucinations if you take pure harmony, but only at doses
approaching the toxic dose
Many compounds will give you hallucinations approaching the toxic dose be venom
Rattlesnake venom stuff like this that doesn't mean it's a hallucinogenic drug. It means you're dying
And you should take steps to correct the situation
Now, yes
But how long does the memory of that experience last because that would indicate to me that there is still a presence
And perhaps that homeopathic dose at that point in the in the mind in the brain
Well at DMT
One of the things that has caused me to think that it must that it might have a role in the chemistry of dreaming
Is that one of the frustrating things about it is you have this?
Experience without doubt the most bizarre appalling
Peculiar experience you could possibly have that's at minute two at
minute five
You're raving about it at minute seven
You can't remember it and so it's literally like gold running through your fingers
You say you know, this is the most amazing thing. This is the most amazing thing. This is what am I talking about?
and you know how you can have a very engaging complex dream and the
Alarm goes off and by the time your feet hit the floor
You're grasping for it and it's just it's literally melting before your eyes. That's a very DMT like
Presentation the way a dream melts away is the way a DMT trip melts away at the same speed
Well
over time and
Using tricks you can drag a certain amount of data out of it
and what I'll do is
I'll describe the DMT trip and it's it's a composite of maybe 40 of these trips and
Then you can see what you make of it, so this is I'll just describe it I'll be the
The graduate student you be the guy with the clipboard
You're saying to me. So what happened? Okay, here's what happened
You I took you one takes
Most people can get off in about three to four hits
Now there's a trick to it
Hashsmokers are greatly favored in this endeavor because you really need leather lungs
for this
The great problem is that people will cough or not be able to hold it in
You take two hits in a situation where your clothes have been loosened and you can just flop backward
When you need to you take two hits now many people miss the point
because after two hits
You feel completely peculiar you feel as though your body is undergoing some strange kind of anesthesia
All the air has been pumped out of the room. This is the visual acuity thing
I talked about last night the colors jump up the edges
sharpen its
And at that point people say whoa
Wow, it's really coming on strong and then what you have to do is you have to take one more
Enormous hit and this separates the intrepid from the casual believe me
Because most people and and the facilitator doesn't want to lean on the person you say, you know
Damn it. Take the third hit and saying no, I feel completely weird
I know you feel weird but take the third hit. Well, if you can coke somebody into that then what happens is
You close your eyes and you see the ordinary
warm brown
Back, you know closed eyelid scenario and then these colors begin racing
Together and it forms this mandalic
floral
slowly rotating
Thing which I call the chrysanthemum
This is a place in the trip that you want to see as you go by it
the chrysanthemum forms and you watch it for like
15 seconds
If it doesn't give way
Then you didn't do enough
You have to do more
One more hit usually will do it. Well, then what happens is it like physically propels you through
this chrysanthemum like thing
And you there's a sound like a saran wrap bread wrapper being crumpled up and thrown away
You know that crackle a friend of mine says this is your radiointilecky
Leaving through the anterior fontanelle at the top of your head. I don't know what it is, but it's
Something is being
Yeah, right. That's what it is
And then there's this very
Very
defined sense of bursting through something a membrane
And on the other side and this is now remember my experience on the other side
As you break through there's a cheer
there's a
Whole bunch of entities waiting on the other side
And they you know that pink floyd song the gnomes have learned a new way to say
hooray
Well, it's that place it's those gnomes and you burst into this space
and
and they're saying
How wonderful that you're here you come so rarely. We're so delighted to see you and
the
one of the things about the mt that's really
Puzzling is in a sense
It doesn't affect your mind
In other words you don't change
For instance if you take ketamine the first thing you notice the very first thing you notice before the trip hits
Is you notice that you no longer are anxious about having taken ketamine?
You just sort of anxiety leaves you that means it's affecting your mind. It's doing something to the judgmental machinery
Dmt doesn't lay a hand on the judgmental machinery
You you break through into that space exactly who you were before breaking through and the usual
reaction of most people is something like
You know you think god
Heartbeat
normal
pulse
Normal, everything's normal. Yeah, everything's normal. Oh god
Because these things are there and they're hammering at you and they come forward
They're like jewel self-dribbling basketballs
And there there are many of them and they come pounding toward you and they will stop in front of you and vibrate
But then they do a very disconcerting thing, which is they jump into your body
They jump into your body and then they jump back out again
and
The whole thing is going on in this very high speed
mode
Where you're being presented with thousands of details per second and you can't get a hold on you say, you know
My god, what's happening? And these things are saying
don't
abandon yourself to amazement
Which is exactly what you want to do. You just want to go nuts with how crazy this is. They say don't do that
Don't do that pay attention pay attention to what we're doing
Well, what are they doing?
Well what they're doing
Is they're making objects with their voices
they're singing
structures into existence
These things are and what they will do is they'll come toward you and then and you have to understand they don't have arms
So we're kind of downloading this into a lower dimension to even describe it
But what they do is they offer things to you say look at this
Look at this and as your attention goes toward these objects you realize
That what you're being shown?
is
impossible
It's impossible
It's not simply intricate beautiful and hard to manufacture
It's impossible to make these things the nearest analogy would be to the Faberge eggs
Or something like that, but these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery inside a ufo
or something
Celestial toys and they are the toys themselves
appear to be somehow alive the toys themselves can
sing
other objects
Into existence. So what's happening is there's just this
proliferation of elf gifts
And the elf gifts are moving around singing and the whole
Thing is directed toward they're saying do what we are doing
And they're very insistent. They say do it
Do it
Do it
And you feel like a bubble
Or and now this is subjective. I mean only you know five percent report this but it happens to me
You feel like some kind of bubble inside your body
That's beginning to move up toward your mouth
And when it comes out
It isn't sound it's vision
You begin to you say you discover that you can pump
Stuff out of your mouth by singing and they're urging you to do this. They say that's it. That's it
Keep doing it and the whole thing is like
You know, we're now at minute four point five with this stuff
and
You speak in a kind of glossolalia
There's a spontaneous outpouring of syntax
Unaccompanied by what is normally called meaning
It's sort of uh, you know, he didn't
walk
If you get
And this is accompanied by a
Modality something seen and they're saying yes do it do it do it and then after a minute or so of this
The whole thing begins to collapse in on itself and they literally begin to physically move away from you
And usually their final shot is they actually wave goodbye and they say
deja vu
Deja vu
Which makes no sense at all if you analyze it, so then you come down
And you're now at minute six to seven and you come down
And it's like being more loaded than you've ever been. It's like about a 700 mic acid trip, but you embrace it as
totally down
You say i'm totally down. I mean you look
You look like a termite from arturis and the room is decorated in amish quilts, but i'm completely back
And uh then over a minute or a minute and a half or so the room just comes right back together and and
Four minutes after that some people can give no account of it whatsoever
They just say
You know, I don't know. It was the weirdest thing that ever happened to me and I I can't remember it now and
So that's the basic run through now
A lot of stuff is going on in there. First of all, you know, what are these things?
uh
And why do they want you to do this strange?
Activity and what's so great about it?
Well, hmm
Uh, well first of all, who are these things?
We can like, you know be good scientists and make a list of the possibilities and then see what seems more likely
they could be
a
incarnate race of hyper dimensional dwellers who live in some kind of parallel continuum
Just over some kind of energy
Uh barrier and they're there all the time
You do have the feeling that they're there all the time that it's ongoing that you have just cut into their scene
So that's one possibility
Another possibility is that behind all these psychedelics and especially dmt
That this is not a drug at all, but it is
essentially, uh
pay telephone of some sort to aliens
good old national inquirer type aliens of who have are using this as a as a
Communication domain say, you know, we can't land on the white house lawn that would create panic and hysteria
So let's create a drug which inside the drug we will be able to deal with people and um
I was hoping that john mack who's an expert on uh, ufo abductions would be here this weekend. I expected him
Because I think this whole abduction thing is not going to
Be illuminated until they start giving abductees dmt
And saying so is this what happened to you? Was it like this or was it completely?
different well
So then there those are the two possibilities that I sort of dealt with over the first 10 or 15 years of thinking about this
and then recently
So possibly that experience that people are interpreting as an abduction is just the height of production of an of endogenous dmt within the brain
It could be what puzzles me is that the the
Abduction thing is so non-psychedelic
It's so cut and dried and all this anal
Examination stuff with strange machinery. There's nothing comparable to that. I'm happy to report to you
Going on in the dmt thing, but it may be you see it
Well, i'd be interested in looking at the possibility that dmt
Under normal or abnormal conditions could be sequestered in the human brain
And then some unusual stimulus or stress could cause it to suddenly be dumped
And yeah, I want to share that there's been some migraines that I've had
You know what you just described about the colors coming in and the chrysanthemum has happened and it's been so fascinating i've completely forgotten about the pain
About it and just watched it for hours
Well, until I guess I fell asleep
It sort of stuck in milk and I was always under a lot of stress
When I got the headache in the first place and there seems to be a lot of brain things going on with the migraine in the first place
So i'm wondering if that
Yeah, that's an interesting possibility. I also have migraines or the kind called cluster headaches
And yes, a lot of the simply the nice thing about dmt is that it's painless
But the sense of being split open and of the traveling scotometer as they call these
Hallucinations that migraine people see it's related in some way. Yeah. Yeah
Sure
It involves principle that's that is characterized called phasing
but it's uh, it's basis
Is sort of what happens on a subatomic level between matter and energy
Turns out there's no fundamental particle at that level. You have this dance between matter and energy, you know energy
coalesces into a bit of matter which then becomes energy
And
You can look at this matter energy relationship as having a wavelength of frequency associated with it
Now granted this happens on a subatomic level, but if there's something
comparable going on on a level of which we
We seem to exist in the physical form and it seems to me that there has to be something akin to it
That it may be that we as beings are sort of tuned
to a frequency range, you know in this particular form and that
somehow it's possible to shift that or expand it so that
What we're actually experiencing is a broader range of frequencies or sort of a shift in wavelength
And I think some of these experiences can be at least explored, you know in that context
Uh
You know, there's so much that we don't know ain't that the truth of this cosmos that
but but we can take we can extrapolate sundry at least we can we can use this to
To take journeys and explore possibilities from what we do know
In science, for example what happens in a subatomic quantum?
Uh, I mean for god's sake the language of these people is something more like sorcerers
these days than
And
And we do seem to at least believe from the evidence that we see that there is this
Matter energy interchange on a very fundamental level of something akin to that is going on in that world. There may be this this
Principle of phasing of which we either shift
Our our tuning or we expand it to include a larger spectrum
Yeah, I think no, I think that that's a very interesting avenue to pursue this thing about frequency
Somebody told me one of the great things about this job is you hear a lot of weird stories
And somebody told me a story recently
About it didn't involve dmt it involved lsd
But this guy and a friend of his took a quite large dose of lsd larger than they intended
And they went to a party
And they were so loaded by the time they got to the party that they realized they could not function as party goers
So they just moved into a corner and sat with their backs to the wall
And watched this party rage in front of them
and after about
20 minutes of sitting there
They both simultaneously
Noticed it was a dance party noticed that the music was sounding really strange
And everybody was moving very slowly
and as they watched
The thing came to an absolute halt
And people were just frozen and there was absolute silence and at that point
The door at the other end of the room swung open
and uh an elf
entered the room
and moved among
all these frozen people
And then left by the door. He came in and they both saw this and they said that they could tell that it was
that
The people in the room didn't know it happened because for them it occupied a microsecond
But this thing that was you know in carlos castaneda who god knows is not the world's most reliable
Reporter on these things nevertheless there is this thing about stopping the world
So maybe it's something like that that there is as you suggest a frequency phase
Yeah
This sort of leads into the third possibility having to do with the origin of these things and in a sense
This is the hardest one to swallow but in another sense, this is the most
conservative
In some crazy notion of conservative the most conservative explanation
Because yeah
Because
We have no evidence other than the tabloids
That this world is being visited by friendly visitors from zenebel gunubi or zeta reticuli or the pleiades or anywhere else
I mean to my mind the evidence that this is happening is vanishingly small and totally underwhelming
The other possibility
That there's some kind of parallel dimension
In which these things exist is also somewhat poorly supported if we're talking about something which thinks
something which can communicate
Something which is intelligent
Then we should look to ourselves
As the source of it because we are the only intelligent
Communicating things we know within a certain narrow definition of these things
So that it's occurred to me with greater and greater force and largely prompted by giving dmt
occasionally to tibetans and amazonian shamans
And when you say to them, you know to the shamans in the amazon when you say to them what is happening?
With this stuff and what are those little things in there?
They say oh, well, those are ancestor spirits. Didn't you know haven't you heard?
shamanism is about doing healing through the intersection of ancestor spirits say hmm
ancestor spirits
Let's get this straight
Dead people is what you're talking about, right? These are dead people
And you know, maybe because I was raised catholic I resisted this like grim death
But i'm beginning to think that what you actually break into in that place
Is something that we might call an ecology of souls?
that
Is it possible to entertain the notion that at death?
You actually don't just become worm food
but that something
survives
In some other dimension and that it has this bizarre character to it and that this explains
Their peculiar affection for humanity and their involvement
somehow in our
Fate well
This is to me fairly mind-bending as a possibility if what is awaiting us at the end of the 20th century
Is the erasure of the boundary between the living and the dead?
Then we've all been too conservative in our projections of what is uh going on. Yeah
Yes that there will be some kind of erasure of uh the boundary between the two well once I had this idea, you know
I mentioned my union and art historical proclivities and so that means you always look back through tradition and folklore to try and find something
Analogous to this. Well, there ain't much but there is one
area that seems
Suggestive to me and that is as you all know
the irish are a a
fairy haunted
Race, they're also an intoxication obsessed race at least in stereotype
Well, it turns out
that
You probably all are familiar with the notion of purgatory
Purgatory is the place where you have to spend a lot of time before you get to heaven
If you're not bad enough to go to hell
So you put in a few?
Calculio chasms of eternity in purgatory and then you get let into heaven
Well, I had always assumed that this dogma
I don't know. I hadn't really thought about it. I just sort of assumed it arose with early christianity
But when I began looking into this I discovered that the idea of purgatory
Was invented by saint patrick
And it was invented specifically to convert the pagan irish
Because the pagan irish believed uh in the in the land of fey
They believed there was this nearby dimension full of the souls of the dead surrounding us all the time
And the certain people with the gift of second sight could see this
So patrick just said to them. Oh, no, that isn't it
It's purgatory and was able to push that on them so successfully
That a later church council adopted it as general dogma for the church
To use in converting the pagan slavs as well. So, um
it it's an idea of
a nearby dimension
inhabited by
Disincarnate souls that uh is apparently very old but very alien to our tradition. Yeah
It's going to be a growth over simplification, but it's kind of related and it has to do with the quantum wave function
Which is really kind of a dual wave has two parts to it
One part and they both have a temporal or time related aspect to them
One part which is called the ordinary part of the wave can be seen as as a way
Propagating forward in time and the other half of the way which is called the complex conjugate
Can be seen as propagating backwards in time from some future state
Some past state from future states emitting waves which at some point
interact
And produce what is perceived or experienced as as the present state?
Which is really a dynamic process in itself. There is no absolute present because as soon as you get out of the mouth past
But the interesting thing is that what that implies is that what we experience in the present?
Whatever they may be is somehow related to some future state and some past state
but it also means that neither future or past are fixed and that
We could sort of align ourselves with different tracks of vectors
You know and a slightly
Different vector is slightly askew may produce something totally
uh
Different than what our ordinary perception is
Well, yeah, this could be I mean i've always felt that what biology is
Is some weird kind of chemical strategy?
For amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy
That you know
Macro-physical objects are not subject to quantum mechanical indeterminacy, but organisms apparently are especially thinking organisms
We don't know
That's our perception our perception is that?
That objects on a macro scale large scale
Are not subject to quantum
fluctuation fluctuations, but that's only because
Uh
Of this probability with in some sense and that there's a most probable state and if we happen to exist in that
That our perception is that it's more fixed that there is no indeterminacy it obeys certain laws that
Are rather linear in nature
But we really don't know
What you're sort of saying is that natural laws only apply some of the time
Which gives them a curious status as laws in that case?
That's sort of broadening the notion of relativity
I mean
What happens in a black hole for example? What is the singularity?
It simply means that the laws that normally apply in everyday experience no longer are relevant
Well, one of the problems cosmology is meeting is that there are so many large black holes in the universe
That you come up with, you know, ten high six
Singularities that's a few more singularities than a good theory would tolerate I would think I mean
What kind of theory is it that hands you back ten to the ninth singularities which are exceptions to the theory?
The truth
It's this whole lower dimensional language slice thing that we seem to have to operate in in order to describe an experience that
Just does not fit. There's that's why you know, we do our best to do it, you know
And sometimes it comes across being very crude and and naive sometimes we kind of get close to the mark, but it's difficult to know
I mean the whole notion of black hole singularities is just the present
Attempt at explaining some experience that
Beyond ordinary
That's true
It seems to me one of the embarrassments of science is that the Big Bang begins with a singularity?
And so then you have this whole vast
Interlocking schema of rational explanation except that it begins with a hard swallow
You're asked to believe that the entire cosmos of space and time sprang from a point
No larger than a cross-section of a gnat eyelash
Whatever whatever else one could say about that theory. I think you'd agree
It's the limit case for credulity. I mean if you believe that
Try to think of something that you would throw up your hands and say well, I do not buying that
It it absolutely it's sort of like when you join the Catholic Church you make a declaration of faith
Well when you join science you sort of make this declaration of faith that I do believe that the universe
sprang in a single instant from an incredibly tiny hot dense dot
unlikely, but
You have to look at the pond of reality so to speak as not only being the
division of
someone throwing a pebble
from the top of the pond and creating the ripple effect of the way the fact but also from the bubbles coming from below and
To me the deep space that you were talking about is the air inside the bubble coming from below
And so the dimensional reality of that picture is not a linear time perspective
It's something coming from all directions. It is again the center of the mandala
Well, this is why I say that the psychedelic experience is a boundary dissolving experience because it takes away
past present cause effect all of these things
Disappear now remember I said ayahuasca is a kind of slow release
DMT trip and one of the really interesting things going on with ayahuasca to my mind perhaps the most interesting thing is
that the style in the Amazon of taking ayahuasca is
People get together in a darkened hut at night and they take it and they sing
But the song they're selling them at the table back there
the songs
When there's a break in the singing and you hear the people discussing the songs
They don't discuss them like music
They discuss them like sculpture and painting and they say to the shaman
I like the part with the gray bars and the blue speckling
But when you brought in the pink in combination with the beige and white, I thought it was too much
Say what kind of a discussion is this about a song?
You realize then when you take ayahuasca, they see the songs
And now this is really interesting to me because you remember in the DMT flash
They wanted you to use your voice to make objects
well, then in the ayahuasca trance you use your voice to control these colored modalities and
The whole thing is done that way
well
So then what it must mean is that the neurophysiology of ayahuasca
somehow allows for the ordinary
Signal processing which is being shunted into the audio pathway in the brain is instead being shunted into the optical
Pathway, this is what's called a synesthesia
These things have been fascinating for hundreds of years to people but the synesthesia means that you know
Color sounds are seen. Well now what was this anything other than a neurophysiological curiosity?
well, I maintain it is because I think that a
Language which could be seen
Would be a kind of telepathic language if you thought much about
Telepathy you might have naively assumed that telepathy is you hearing me think
That isn't what it is. I think
Telepathy is you seeing what I mean and it's not something which happens
Dramatically it is a function of eloquence
You know first you have the speaker who is boring you to death
Then you have the speaker to at least holds your attention then you have the speaker of whom it is said she paints a picture
It means we're moving toward poetry. Well, it's possible to imagine a
Transformation of the neural processing of language. It may be a behavioral
Possibility it may not even require a gene shift where then we would see what we each mean, you know, there's this persistent idea
promulgated by Robert Graves in the white goddess among other people that there was once what he calls an or sprock a
primal language
so
emotionally intense
That to be in the presence of poetry
declaimed in this language is to see the poetry and that this is what the lost
poetics of the high
Paleolithic were about and probably it was pharmacologically
assisted that you could gather people in the presence of a great bard or singer and that person could then
create
telepathic
modalities and that telepathic modality that richer more unifying language
Was the thing which was suppressing the formation of ego the ego speaks and hears through sound
the super ego
projects images and is perceived as
Images now it's very interesting
at least to me that in the pineal gland of
ordinary human beings there is a compound called a
denaroglomerotrope ene which when
analyzed in
inorganic or just in the normal nomenclature of organic chemistry turns out to be a
Beta carbonyl closely related to harmoline. Well, is it possible?
That we are as close as a one gene mutation away
from a shift that would switch our processing of audio input into the visual field and that then we would
crossover into a realm of beheld
understanding and that this is the
Evolutionary leap that we're trying to make but it's in the body not in the technology in the body
There is actually going to be a minor a one gene
Click to another channel and then we will be able to see what we mean and I maintain that if you can see what?
somebody means
You are that person
contrasted
contrast it to ordinary communication
ordinary communication is achieved through
small mouth noises as
Primates we have a throat and voice arranged a voice box arrangement that allows us to produce small mouth noises
At for hours if necessary. I'm the living proof of it
but it's not a very efficient mode of communication because what happens is I
have a thought I
Look in a culturally sanctioned dictionary, which I have copied into my head. I
Translate the thought into an acoustical signal
Using my mouth which moves across space which answers your ears
You rush to your interior dictionary and you construct my meaning out of your dictionary
Now notice that this process rests on a very shaky assumption
It rests on the assumption that your dictionary and my dictionary were published by the same folks in the same year
If your dictionary is different from mine, you will not correctly
Reconstruct my meaning and we will have what we call
misunderstanding notice how among us as a species one of the most bring down things you can say to somebody is
Would you please explain to me what I just said?
Because it means oh boy here comes trouble now
you're gonna find out that you know people didn't understand you they horribly misunderstood and and
The communication is very provisional the amount of noise in the circuit is huge. Well then contrast this
to I
utter something and it condenses as a sculpture in the air and
You and I then become its observers and we rotate this
Practical object and we look at it. We regard it from many points of view
This is not ambiguous or it's certainly considerably less ambiguous than this
reconstruction from interiorized dictionaries, so perhaps what all this is about is
evolutionary pressure on our languages to become visual and
therefore to become more
Unidentified and less riddled with noise which creates misunderstanding
Which creates horrible social realities? Yeah
Oh Michael Talbot's book
Uh-huh
Yes, although what you could do with a visible language would be very challenging
I mean we could do many things with it. It's not an outlandish. It's not a completely outlandish idea
in nature
It occurs there's a there's a wonderful
Phenomenon in nature which is worth talking about to sort of legitimate such a far-out notion
Which is as you all probably know
octopi
Can change color this is one of those things you learn on those science specials on TV
This concludes tape to our program continues with tape three
Tree Of Knowledge (3)
Our program continues with tape three
Octopi can change color. Well, most people I think assume that they do this for camouflage
That would be a reasonable assumption. They don't do it for camouflage
Let's talk about octopi for just a moment. First of all, they're mollusks
They divided from our evolutionary lines 700 million years ago. They're related to escargot
They have no backbone for crying out loud. They're not even vertebrates
But what is always said in biology classes about octopi is that they're a wonderful example of parallel evolution
Because their optical system is very much like a mammalian
optical system
Well, why is this? Well, it's because they evolved in a in an environment
the reef environment that is that environment all as dense with signals as a
rainforest is and
An octopus is soft bodied
It can not only change color
But it can also change its surface from smooth and rubbery to bumpy
Pimply rugose ribbed so forth and so on and also because it is soft bodied and in an aqueous
Environment it can fold and unfold and reveal and conceal parts of its body
very very quickly
well, all of these
Behaviors and physiological characteristics go together to make the octopus an excellent visual
Communicator and the color changes the blushes traveling dots and bars that these
creatures manifest and the squids do it to
our
language and if you're interested in this there's a wonderful book by a guy named Monaghan called communication and
non-communication among the cephalopoidea and
He goes as far as creating a grammar
For this stuff. Well, so then in a way, you know if you pull back from the
Mundane assumptions about this what's happening is the octopus wears its mind on its skin
It is dressed in its mental state
At one octopus encountering another can tell its mood
how recently it's eaten how recently it's had sex whether it's ovulating all by looking and
So they the only way an octopus can have a private thought is by
Squirting ink into the water and then hiding inside it. This is essentially its
correction fluid for
misspoken octopi
You see
So in a sense, this is what I think we are are being beckoned toward that
We want to clothe ourselves in language. We do it in it to a degree in a funny way
I mean if you want to think about virtual reality
This is a virtual reality all this stuff these fixtures the architecture the infrastructure the road
These are ideas
It was an idea and it has then been summoned into matter by the allotment of funds the spending of money
the hiring of craftsmen so forth and so on our whole civilization is an
excreted set of interlocking ideas
Agreements, we're like coral animals and we somewhere, you know, there's this naked pulpy creature
But you know clothed in denim
Clothed in a harder shell produced by Mercedes or Chevrolet
Moving around inside a larger environment produced by the state of Colorado and so forth and so on
So I think octopi offer an excellent
metaphoric example of what
naked-mindedness would be and it's some of these octopi as
I said they evolved in the
coastal reef
Domain, but that's a very competitive domain
Everybody in the ocean wants to be there because that's where the sunlight and the food is
So if you're smart, you'll try and evolve into a more
Hostile niche and some of these octopi have become what are called benthic or abyssal
It means they exist in the parts of the ocean where light never reaches
yes, and they
Have retained this communication ability by switching over to interior
Interiorly generated
phosphorescence
So there are species of octopi which actually are studded with organs that have the equivalent of eyelids
Over them, but they're flasher lights
So when you descend into the benthic depths of the ocean you enter a domain where all?
One octopus ever sees of another octopus is its linguistic
productivity because that's interior generated light that can be seen and I think you know if you want to set the
compass of virtual reality towards something worth the writing home about then producing an octopus
Environment so that we could experience this kind of thing would be a kind of proto telepathic
Playpen of some sort. Yeah
Aha so you think that subterfuge answers here, too
I
Was like when you were
Discussing the role of something else including evolution and you were going by
Right
Consider the possibility of psychedelics
May
The evolution of human kind is very direct
In other words
Direct
Have a direct effect on DNA
So that
Disaffection
Over
Well
You want me to
The central dogma of biology
That information can get out of the internet
But can't get back in
Directly
It's going to be
Over
Yeah, well
Well, you raise a lot of issues first of all since the discovery of
Retroviruses of which the HIV virus is one. We now know that it is not always
Information transcripted from DNA to RNA to protein the retroviruses transcript from RNA to DNA
So the central dogma which is that the genome is not being altered by?
By the environment is is sort of shaky at this point
You bring up a very interesting point which has never to my mind been really
Thrashed out in orthodox science, which is if you had a bunch of these psychedelic molecules
And we could raise them up to the size of loaves of bread or something like that
What you would notice about them is they're all what are called by chemists planar
Meaning they tend to be flat. They're not lumpy. They're flat
well, if you look at DMT or
harm mean
Harm mean is built off a a
Pentaxel group and with two
Benzene rings off of it. It is the perfect size
to slip in between two nucleotides in
DNA it can actually bond into the DNA there now many drugs do this
This is called these drugs are called dimers the usual problem with a dimer that will intercalate
This is the other term intercalate means slide between the rungs of the DNA is it usually?
Deforms the DNA it like passes a bulge along it and then
Transcription is difficult
But these indole hallucinogens can dimer with DNA without disrupting its structural integrity
This is why I believe that this is the source of the vision
That and you know orthodox biologists just roll their eyes at this idea and say well now you've made a very
Error here you confuse genetic information with information
Don't you understand that?
genetic information is just a sequence of codons coding for protein and
You know that has no relationship to your memory of ant mini space however by being so
Yielding on that point they create a huge problem in
For their brothers and sisters across the hall who are trying to understand memory
Because the the molecular theory of memory is a nightmare. Here's the problem
Every molecule in your body is changed every five to seven years depending on who you talk to
Except neurons the nerves are generally the nerves you're born with or the nerves you die with
But it's an absolute
It's an absolute
No, no to suggest that memory is lodged in the neurons
Well, but if ant-mini died
45 years ago and you can still remember the dear woman's face when she used to walk you in the park
Then every molecule of your body has been swapped out five times since she quit the plane
How can you have this memory of ant-mini if and then they say well?
Well, they don't say actually they just throw up their hands now the to the people who say DNA can't store any kind
of information other than
codon sequences for proteins
They have to explain why then 90% of the genome seems devoted to junk
Sequencing that does not produce protein that does in fact not do anything
that anybody knows about it seems to me that we might as well just take the path of least resistance and say if the
Neurons are the only part of the body that persists throughout life if the memories persist throughout life
Then you've got two choices
either the memories are in the neurons or the memories were never stored in the body in the first place and
If you believe that well then the obligation to explain just where they were
Stored is hard upon you and the mechanism for retrieving them
So I think molecular biology by being so reductionist has made certain problems in in
neurophysiology and higher cortical functioning almost insoluble
You know for years and years it was held that
The this was another one of these central dogmas of biology. It was held that
Transformation could move from the nucleus of the neuron to the synapse
But that there was no
transport
mechanism for moving any molecular species from the synapse back to the nucleus so
Consequently they said learning
Cannot take place in the nucleus of the neuron because the the materials for learning
Which would be present in the synapse
applications through experience there's no transport system and when this was dogma until ten years ago well then they discovered what's called
axioplasmic transport and they by putting labeled
Compounds in the synapse they were able to locate these labeled compounds later
Complexed with nuclear material in the neuron proving to the most diehard
materialist that
Synaptic material was in fact moving backward to the neuron
So I think that you know, there's much that isn't understood about how all this
works
something worth pointing out, you know science seeks closure and
explanation explanatory closure
My brother one time made a little aphorism which I think says it all on this subject
He said to me once I'm actually on a mushroom trip
He said have you ever noticed how as the sphere of understanding grows ever larger?
Necessarily the surface area of ignorance gets ever bigger
Seems perfectly clear, you know a simple-minded way of saying that is the bigger you build the bonfire
The more darkness you will reveal
Yeah, and also any progress really comes from
Outside the context of the paradigm that hasn't that's having experience. I mean it really
To my knowledge almost everything that's really been advanced
Yes, well some of you have probably read Thomas Kuhn's book the structure of scientific revolutions where he shows you know
That it's never the way they tell it afterwards
The after telling is always about the primary insight
The careful experiment the gathering of data the correlation actually it doesn't work like that at all
It's entirely
Psychic piecemeal ruled by synchronicity
One of the most interesting things I'll tell this story and then we can go to lunch because I think you know science
Has great pretensions about itself
I mean it basically regards itself as a meta theory it regards itself as capable of passing
Judgment on all other theories they are supposed to submit themselves to science to be told whether they're real or not
Yeah, like a religion. Well, how many people know?
The you know modern science was founded by Rene Descartes in
in the
early 17th century
What were the circumstances under which Descartes founded modern science?
Rene Descartes was a 19 year old
Basically
ne'er-do-well and he decided that he would go winching and
soldiering across Europe which was a thing that young men of certain
Class did at that time and so he joined a Habsburg army
That was laying siege to Prague in the in the summer of 1619
And after they had taken care of the problem there in Prague this Habsburg army began to retreat across
southern Germany and in the on the evening of
Now there's a lot of arm wrestling about this, but let's just say the 17th of August 1619
This army made camp near the little town of Ulm in southern Germany, which
Synchronicity freaks pay attention Ulm will later be the birthplace of Albert Einstein
Worth noting but that night Descartes in the barracks
had a dream and
an angel
Appeared to him and the angel said
the conquest of nature is to be achieved through number and
measurement and
He was
Thunderstruck he took that
angelic revelation and
Turned it into modern science modern science was founded by an angel
You know, they don't tell you this at MIT
You know, it's it's astonishing
how how
things which claim roots in
Rationalism are actually among some of the most irrational
productions in the historical continuum
It's it appears that our development our history our histories have always been
Created at the promptings of invisible voices. I mean Socrates
Who is at the very center of what's called thinking and by Western civilization?
Socrates had a demon
D e a m o n it was a little voice it told it was his crap detector
it told him the difference between profound philosophical thinking and
bupaki and
So, you know the edifice of Western thinking built on Platonism owes its debt to an invisible agency
speaking from hyperspace
So does modern science a la Descartes how much more of this time?
We don't care if artists talk to angels because we've our definition of them is that they're screwballs
but to to believe that an
Enterprise like modern science has to trace its way back to the same ecstatic roots is I think
very suggestive that the world is
Stranger than we can suppose and that we need to open these channels of communication
To these invisible worlds probably the next great paradigm shift will be
Enunciated by a mushroom an angel an elf an alien. What have you?
Yeah
Repetition
Yeah
The first few times I did it
I couldn't get any grip at all on it and by talking a lot and trying to describe it you
Slowly slowly build up a map
So about the logos
the logos is this
phenomenon that was sort of the centerpiece of Greco
Hellenic spirituality and what it is is it's a voice in the head that
people strove to attain
for a thousand years this was the cine qua non of
intellectual accomplishment in the Greco Roman world and the logos told you the right way to live and
This is sort of what you get with psilocybin you get a voice that can
confound you with the depth and brilliance of its answers and
one of the great, you know, one of the puzzles of
Trying to understand Greco Hellenic spirituality is what were they talking about?
And and if this ever was a general phenomenon then what happened to it? Why do we not?
experience this
This is not well understood. I mean the rational scholars who have created our vision of Greece
Basically just don't even want to talk about this. They would rather gloss over it
You know
One of the things that sort of relates to all this is I think human beings are a lot more malleable
than we tend to
Imagine in other words we imagine that people in the distant past or in Greece or somewhere
We're just like us except they were living in a different time and place
There's no way to find out of course because they're all dead
But there are certain episodes in the evolution of Western culture that suggests that people may be much more
Plastic than we ordinarily suppose first example
Would be how can it be that in the middle 1500s?
Perspective was discovered. I mean, how do you discover?
perspective this is very hard I think for modern people to understand because
It's a given for us. I mean we see in
perspective we accept it as a quality of the world rather than a
Cultural artifact put in place at a certain moment
But in fact during the Renaissance only the most inspired people could
paint in perspective on the natch
most people they had
complex devices called
perspective graphs that would project over the scene a
Conceding grid and then people would essentially fill in the lines now another example of this kind of thing
That's not so well known. But that is an example that
Marshall McLuhan makes a lot of is
San Augustine the great father of the Christian Church
he had a reputation for being a very holy man and the
accounts of his contemporaries say that the way people would satisfy themselves that
San Augustine had a pipeline to God is they would bring him scripture
the Bible essentially and
open it in front of him and let him look at it and
Then they would close the book and question him about what was there and he could always tell them and they were amazed
As far as we can tell San Augustine was the only man in Europe who could read silently
Nobody else could do it. It was regarded as a miracle
Now we all read silently and there may be a few unfortunate
Individuals among us who move their lips while they read but that's the only vestigial
Trace we have of this previous cultural mode where everyone to read meant to read aloud
No one could conceive of any other way of doing it. The logo seems to me a kind of similar thing
It was a mental behavior
Function which for reasons which are probably complex and unknowable
slipped out of reach
That's why
It seems to me these psychedelics are very close
to being able to modify our behaviors along these kinds of lines because there are a number of
behavioral and experiential
possibilities that we suppress
I mean, I think it's just as an example of how little we know about what's going on
Look at the gaffen and don't look at it, but conceive of the gaffenberg spot
The G spot now we all know what this is
Clearly people were looking for it for a long long time. How come they only discovered it 12 years ago?
I mean if something that major
Can be overlooked then it's hard to imagine what might have been overlooked
I mean that's pretty central into the project of being a human being and
Apparently it was unknown until very very recently
so
Yes, the the logos was probably what I call the Gaian mind and
That at a certain point in cultural development people just became so chuckle-headed
that the Gaian mind just said the hell with this and
Then the voice fell silent it fell silent right at the around the time of the birth of Christ
Right at the time of the G of the shift of the zodiacal aeon
You know
How it works with psilocybin
Well, I mean I take when I take psilocybin I take it on an empty stomach I don't fast or anything like that
I just don't eat for six hours. I don't call that fasting
And then I take it in silent darkness
That's number one very important. The next thing is weigh the dose
You must weigh the dose
Because five grams is what you want and I've had over and over the experience of showing somebody
What five grams is and they're appalled
They say my god, you can't be serious. I mean I would I take a
fifth
That much a fourth that much. Yeah. Well, that's the problem
That's why you don't have elves in the attic and bats in the belfry like I do
You know and so then you take it and I take it on an empty stomach and a lot of people don't like the taste
I don't really understand that I
Just chew them up. I sit with them and I chew them up
And then huh dried a none of this mixing in applesauce or any of that malarkey. I mean, what's that about? Oh
Well fresh 60 grams
60 grams
Because there's more than a you know, there's a huge water loss there and
Then it takes people sometimes say it came on within five minutes or it came on within ten minutes
I don't know what that could possibly be about. First of all, it defies
pharmacodynamics
To imagine that it could come on that fast for me
It comes on almost always at the one hour and 20 minute mark. I think it can come on sooner than that
I think I'm fairly resistant to these things in the hour after I take it I sit I
roll bombers and I I
Carry out what all good Catholics know as an examination of conscience
This means you think about all the bummers that you're afraid they're going to jump out at you as soon as you get loaded
If you will carry out the examination of conscience
You'll be so bored with that by the time the compound actually hits
But you usually don't have to pay any dues because you've you know
face the fact that you're a jerk 50 times in the preceding hours, so and and then
The way I do it is at about the hour and 20 minute mark and I should say in the time preceding that
You may have to go to the bathroom once you may
It makes your nose run which is a funny thing. It also makes you yawn
these are definitely qualities of psilocybin not related to its psychoactivity and
and
I think that it's very good to decide before it hits
That once it begins
You will not alter the plan in other words you decide ahead of time
I'm gonna sit here and do this because at about the hour and 15 minute mark
It will begin hitting you with stuff like you'd really be more comfortable downstairs
or
You know it's awfully hot in here
Why don't you get up and adjust the thermos to all this that you think no no no no we're holding the space and
sit there, and then it begins to come on and
it comes the image I have is like a
Jellyfish or a silk scarf or something like that it just kind of drifts down and
Surrounds you and at that point I I I
Guess I pray I say to it. You know I'm completely in your hands
Please don't hurt me
You know I'm yours. I'm completely committed. I've held nothing back, so don't burn me please and
And
Then there is a kind of it's hard to describe a kind of
Potential begins to build up and you say hmm the rush hasn't begin begun
But it's you can almost close your eyes and see millions of little psilocybin molecules
Elbowing serotonin molecules out of the way and fitting themselves into the receptor site and the electron
spin resonance
Dynamics is beginning to shift and the whole thing is gonna is about to take off at that point
I smoke furiously and
That usually is all it takes and it comes on and it the first rush is
Really astonishing I mean sometimes it's more
mind-boggling than others, but I can remember situations where I
Would just see it coming and say oh my god. You know it's it's
100 miles wide and 10 miles high
Where are you gonna run to you know it's just kind of say good grief
You know I guess I'm not gonna meet this one sitting up
I think I'd better lay down and in about the time it takes to make and execute that decision
Then it just hits and it's like a tidal wave
I mean I have the feeling when I'm doing it in California that everybody from Vancouver to Tijuana has just
Crawled under their desk because you can't imagine
This is happening between my ears
You know it's more like an asteroid must have fallen in the Pacific Ocean and raised some enormous incoming wave
It's what it's sort of like. It's like watching a thermonuclear
Explosion through 50 feet of crystal clear glass so you know you're perfectly calm
It's not getting at you, but the energy that is being released in your presence is
awesome and
then it
And sometimes in that first pass you actually the linguistic
Machinery is burned out
But you've probably seen these scenes where they will test a hydrogen bomb and they set up
Cameras a quarter mile from ground zero a half mile a mile two miles
And then when they actually detonate the bomb they get the view from the first camera
And then they switch to the second camera as the first camera is blown to bits and vaporized
And they keep pulling back as each successive instrument is destroyed
Well, this is sort of the feeling you have as this thing spreads out toward you, and then it
It does what it wants to do it tells you what it wants to tell you and it's highly unpredictable
I mean you cannot people always say you should ask it a question this seems absurd to me
I mean, I don't know once when my life was in turmoil. I
Did ask a question I said I?
wrote it down ahead of time and the question was am I doing the right thing with my life and
then when I got in there, and I posed the question and the answer came back instantly it was a a
ripoff from Lyndon Johnson
It said what kind of a chicken shit question is that to ask me?
Said oh, sorry
Didn't mean to presume you know
But get your act together, and then we'll have a conversation
But if that's what you want to talk about you should have taken MDMA
and
It and then you know paralleling what we talked about this morning and again
I'm just giving you my subjective take on it. It's like I
Come into a place. It's hard to describe. It's a feeling and
it's I'm and the content of the feeling is
Now the elves are near
but they won't appear unless I invoke them and
You know I wish I could tell you that I chant in Mandaya or something like that
But I don't well I stole a line from an old old. I love Lucy
program where Ethel is talking to Lucy about UFOs and
Lucy says she talks to the UFOs and
Ethel says well, how can you talk to UFOs and
Lucy said well, it's simple
I just say come in little green men come in little green men
And that's what I do I say come in little green men
And then there is a and women if there are any out there
and then there is a
it's like a
It's like like it's like a marching band
It's like a Nepalese marching band is what it's like and it comes from a distance
Like there's a place in my vision
That's small a little dancing light and and a little faint sound and the light comes
Closer and the sound gets louder
Until finally you know they pick me up on their shoulders and with tubas
Glaring and sack but and read back and all of this stuff
and then they carry me around and talk to me and
It's the whole thing is shot through with such a weird sense of zaniness
Irishness
Joyce ishness. I mean it's almost unbearable. It's so I
Don't know not exactly
Disneyesque because their humor tends to be a little more savage than that and then that is part of the first wave and
then the rest of the trip unfolds pretty much as you
there's a kind of a
Pushing and pulling that goes on you can direct it
Each one of these plants does have a character of its own
sure
One of the most puzzling things about these these plants is that they have
Characters that seem irreducible for instance psilocybin. It is the science fiction
drug in other words it says
You know we have been denizens of this planet for 400 million years our original home planet is in the m
5 - 8 3 C
System we are connected via hyperspace to all intelligent life forms in the galaxy
It shows you enormous machines in orbit around alien planets
It talks about the end of history and the collectivizing of humanity and it's this enormous
Hortatory
salvation aldramatic
science fiction type scenario
Well, then you take ayahuasca which in molecular terms is just a few
Nitrogens are moved around. I mean it's basically the same thing and you get a completely different message
you you you you feel the energy of the rainforest and the rivers and
You it's very feminine you think about childbirth you think about the continuity of generations
you think about the
the
mystery of the meat
You think about tantric sexuality? It's all
Redirected back into the human and natural world in some way and then of course DMT which I described this morning
Which the DMT elves are not?
From outer space so they don't present themselves that way in fact one of the odd things about the DMT thing is that?
You have the feeling that this space that you break into
Even though it's large
Some people even refer to the dome of DMT that tells you they really were there
But wherever this huge vaulted space is you have the feeling although it's hard to explain now
You know this but you have the feeling that you're way way way underground
Which fits with the elf motif you're in the hall of the Mountain King
You're under the hills with the you know the little people who retreated under the hills
The character of these things is one of the most puzzling things about them
Well that's a real question the logo seems more it first of all it isn't it doesn't crack jokes and
do
Quadruple on Tondra puns and stuff like that. It's more like a wise and loving teacher
These DMT things are you know it's a troop of maddened elves, and they are just
Doing their own thing and then with ayahuasca
Though some people claim they contact an entity it hasn't been like that for me
it seems to me that on ayahuasca you you become like a
Camera you just fly through a visual world
I mean after a good ayahuasca trip you just feel like your eyes are bugging out of your head
I mean, it's like buying prints on Madison Avenue
You know and and you've just been looking and looking and looking and you you literally have to give your eyes a rest
After an ayahuasca trip and the ayahuasca visions are
more
They seem to cover a broader spectrum the psilocybin hallucinations tend toward this highly polished
machine like
insect like outer space
bit and the
ayahuasca hallucinations are
wonderful
pastels
laces
Layering of colors and then one of the most interesting things to me about ayahuasca, and I just cannot
Understand how this works if I could I'd I'd be
Ert or somebody and that is that you in the middle of the ayahuasca trip you can suggest
Motifs you can lead it so that for instance you can say to it
a
Art deco and
suddenly there will be thousands of
candy dishes
cigarette lighters
champagne buckets
automobiles stained glass windows doorknobs
Silverware all
Rolling in black space in front of you all the perfect
exemplification of this aesthetic the art deco
Aesthetic and then you can say to it. Okay
Italian Baroque and it just like that suddenly
altarpieces
Madonna's
martyred saints in
Fantastic scroll work and Fleur de lis and you can say
well
Surprise me and
Then you will get a coherent style like art deco like Italian Baroque
Except that it's nobody's ever bothered to realize it on this planet, but it's as coherent
It's like, you know 20 years ago. There was no such thing as
Southwest as a style, you know
This weird thing coming out of Santa Fe that I noticed has planted its roots deep here as well the turquoise and beige
Endlessness of feathers and hammered titanium and all that. Well, that's an aesthetic that has
Cohered in the last 20 years and come into being there seemed to be an infinite number of these things as different as this
the bronzes of the Han Dynasty are to a Dali or a Pollock or a
Bosch and
And then you can say to it going beyond the surprise me challenge is what I always say to it is I
want to see more of what you are for yourself and
and then it's like there's this low organ tone and
it begins to lift the veils and the temperature in the room drops about 20 degrees and after about
20 seconds of that you just say enough of how you are for yourself because you can tell what's happening is it's
Starting to reveal something so peculiar and so on
Tailored for the human mind or I that you become afraid you say, you know
Can we go back to dancing mice art deco cigarette lighters and Baroque?
Pieces, please that this is turning into deep water as far as I'm concerned
So, yes
Well, that's a good question good question it requires this a small detour into pharmacology
the concept which all
Biologists are familiar with in which you should be too if you're going to deal in this realm called LD 50
This is not a pretty notion but a necessary one. It stands for lethal dose 50
What does this mean? It means if we have a hundred mice?
How much psilocybin do we have to give each mouse to kill half of them?
Do you see LD 50?
Half the sample dies at the LD 50 dose level whether it's graduate students or rats
Now when you're designing a drug or when you're thinking about a drug
What you want is a drug with an extremely high
LD50
opposed to its effective dose
so say the effective dose of psilocybin is probably about
Point five milligrams per kilogram and
The LD 50 is
Probably
200 milligrams per kilogram the LD 50 of psilocybin is
400 times the effective dose
This is a pharmacologist way of saying this is very very safe
A pound wouldn't kill you
I don't think it might be getting close
But you'd have to eat in that range to die now some drugs have horrendous
LD 50 to effective dose profiles
Unfortunately, and I hope I don't rain on anybody's parade here
MDMA has a terrible
LD 50 profile the effective dose is 125 milligrams
You can kill yourself with a thousand milligrams
So that's not good at all because sure as hell some
Street person or some depressed person or some maniac is gonna take a thousand
Milligrams and then you've got a stiff on your hands. So yeah
I
Read
Serotonin depressed serotonin levels on MDMA
Low
Where is the related substance called?
The serotonin levels are depressed for only two hours and the researcher indicated that his conclusion was that MDMA had some
Physical toxicity that he did not have and therefore it might be wise to avoid it for that reason
There was a difference well, I think MDMA is I don't want to trash MDMA
It's changed a lot of people's lives and saved relationships and so forth and so on
But to me it's a perfect example of why you're better off taking plants
Because here was this drug somebody invented it. They gave it to a few friends
It seemed to be wonderful for solving personal problems
So without any collection of human data this thing becomes an item in the underground
well
And so then thousands of people take it the psychological effects seem completely benign. It's a wonderful thing
the
Physiological effects. It's a very disturbing profile. It isn't exactly as you said
It's not that it destroys the serotonin receptor site. It's that
Nerves neurons are covered by these very delicate
Structures called dendritic spines now, nobody knows what dendritic spines do but every neuron in your body
Has them and when you take MDMA?
It mows them down
They just they go away now
So then you get two schools of thought one says well my god anything
impacting the physical brain that dramatically should be stayed away from and the other
Camp says well, do you see any behavioral changes in people who take MDMA a lot?
Do you see any physical destruction?
seizures blindness anything and the answer is no
So they say well here we have histological evidence that this thing is making major
Physiological changes in the dendrites and no behavioral sequela to back up that this is of any consequence
Well, my position being basically a very conservative person is in that case wait
You know, they're doing work on this in a dozen labs around the country. They'll figure it out in the meantime
Take psilocybin or mescaline or something else that has been sanctioned
Because you just do not want to insult the physical brain, you know
That's the the whole name of the game. You have to keep the brain in good shape
Yeah
Once you're past the trigger dose is it worthwhile to start the step up? Oh, yeah, that's where we were taught
That's why we started talking about LD 50 because I wanted to explain to you that
It taking a drug like a compound like psilocybin if the effective dose is 20 milligrams
20 milligrams for somebody who weighs a hundred and thirty five pounds
Well, then looking at the pharmacological data. They should be able to take
2,000 milligrams
Without any trouble at all
That's a thousand times that's a hundred times more
But in fact what happens is as you raise the dose is that the psychological?
Representation becomes unbearable it becomes so strange
That you fear for your sanity in a good old Edgar Allen
Polish phrase, you know it gets stranger and stranger and
You know, I've talked to pretty naive people who have overdosed
Usually the way these overdose situations occur is people are gathering mushrooms in the wild and they start eating them
and then they just keep eating them and then they realize they've eaten four times more than the effective dose and
This is where you get into places where you don't know what to say
Because if you tell people they'll throw a net over you, but you want to say because you're so personally disturbed
This is where
the flying saucers land and the rectal
nominations begin and you're told that you're the Messiah and they you know, it becomes quirkier and
quirkier, so I think you have to
You know, I'm very admiring of people who can take very high doses
But I find it quite challenging enough in the five to seven gram
Range a friend of mine says of psilocybin that every time he takes it he tries to stand more
Meaning more of the vision because it is filtering itself. It's definitely filtering itself
This is why beginners almost never have bad trips
because somebody in there looks at your
Clipboard and says oh this guy has never done this before so lay off the rough stuff
Just you know, bring them through the standard number. It's it's the people who consider themselves
experienced, you know who've done it 20 30 40 times says, you know, we can take the gloves off with this guy and and
You know, it always amazes me
I sometimes meet people who say, you know
I've taken mushrooms 50 times and I've never had a bad trip and I think you know
Lucky soul
Because when it goes left
It's hard, you know, it's hard. You have to really then
You know do not your mantras bungle is the best advice
I can give you because you need to steer back towards the mainstream now
Maybe at this point this is a good point at which to talk about. What do you do when the going gets rough?
There are two things at least that you can do that are very effective
The first is and it's a very simple thing
but people in our culture seem to be resistant to this is
You sing
You force air into your lungs and body and you chant you sing
Anything you want and it will radically alter the parameters
there's a certain place and psilocybin that is my
Bet noir which I call the meat locker and then I don't like this place
You know and meat locker is a mild term for it. It's more like
You know the morgue for the homicide unit or something whenever I start drifting that way
I sing and then you can navigate through it. The other thing you can do although this is sometimes trickier is
Smoke cannabis. This is what those bombers are for that
You rolled in the first hour while you were waiting for it to come on is as soon as it get begins to press in
In some really invasive or alarming way. Just take a couple of hits of the good and
Chant and then you can bring it back on track and also talk to it. Don't be afraid to say
You know, I don't like this take it off me. It's too peculiar. I'm not ready for this. It says oh, sorry
You know back to dancing mice
Yeah
Well
There hasn't been a lot of work on this
Michael Bukeley at Evergreen College years ago grew stropheria cubensis by the method that's described in my
Book the book I wrote with my brother and what they discovered see psilocybin is for phosphoryl
oxygen and dimethyl tryptamine
That phosphorus group is removed as soon as it crosses the blood-brain barrier
so really
What's active is?
a
simpler compound called psilocin and
psilocin lacks the phosphorus attachment and what they discovered was that in the early flushes the
psilocybin ratio is high and the psilocin ratio is low and in that you all know what a flush is right and in the later
flushes the psilocin level rises and the psilocybin level drops
So really the two together stay remarkably stable throughout the the life of the organism
something worth mentioning I suppose it's worth mentioning is
when I was into my
Extraterrestrial phase when I was assuming that the mushroom was an extraterrestrial
Either the extraterrestrial itself or something designed by some kind of an extraterrestrial
It was very interesting to me that psilocybin is as I said for
phosphoryl oxy nn dimethyl tryptamine it is the only
force-substituted indole in nature
the only one
Well if you were to search for evidence of extraterrestrial
Tampering with the biome of this planet what you would look for is a unique
compound occurring in one life form and no other
Here it is folks this phosphorus group is unique
And I've never read any description or discussion of what the evolutionary history of that why it would appear in an organism like that
And not in any other
That's just an aside because I'm always searching for the thumbprint of the alien it
There may not be an alien thumbprint, but the phosphorus group attached to psilocybin is a good candidate for it
Yeah
Only slightly
Given all these
Although you said that it varies widely there is a remarkable internal consistency
Your description if you're entering the world and keep the head
boundaries and
entities that you consistently encounter
again and again
I've
spoken to many medical
No new a long time and nobody had ever spoken to people who take high doses or
low doses have ever had
Similar experience now clearly you've packed people in
Maybe they were just being polite
I'm wondering if you've ever experimented
With your own experiences like what Lily describes in programming
And to see
You describe ways of provoking
the energy
Which certainly could be put into the context of introducing program
True
Well my original
Pre-supposition was to try to have no
Pre-supposition at all and then out of that came all of these assumptions
You're right that nobody has trips exactly like mine
although
If you question people carefully you can begin to see what how it works
for example
You know I described this thing this morning the elves the
Presentational thing the high-speed motion the gifts all that well sometimes
People will take DMT and they will come back and you'll realize that it's as though there is an archetype there
Which has different levels in it and if I had to say what the archetype of DMT is
it's the archetype of the circus and
One time I saw a woman come out of DMT. She was an anthropologist
She had fairly high body weight
And I could tell that she had not gotten a complete hit came down. We said okay
What was it she said it was the saddest?
carnival in the world
She said the carnival was closed
All the tents had their flaps rolled down and there were just paper cups and candy wrappers
Blowing in the aisles in between them and the ferris wheel was stopped
Well, she was just at the edge of this thing and if you think about the archetype of the circus
It is an interesting one first of all
You have the three center rings where wild and zany activity is
Continuously being presented tiny cars keep arriving with 14 clowns in each one and they keep
Climbing out falling all over each other, but it isn't all
fun and games it has a strange
Erotic content and as a child, I think my first awareness of what I would really call eros was
watching this
Beautiful long-haired woman in a tiny spangled
Costume hang by her teeth
120 feet above the center ring
doing
acrobatics so you've got
a
So you've got the clown and you've got the lady in the tiny spangled costume and then off from the center
ring you have these dark
alleyways where the sideshows are the Siamese twins and the goat boy and all the
Rest of it, you know and it has a very weird vibe
About it so it can land you in any of these places
But if you if you try and correlate people's experiences, it seems to me that it's pretty clear that through
Through their own life history and their own programming. Nevertheless something is trying to poke through
Now my DMT experience seems pretty radically different from other people's
Although other people don't give any account at all. I mean, it's amazing how inarticulate people are
You they come down you say how was it?
They say it was far out you say, you know, you don't get out of here with that rap, you know
How was it and say well?
They can't give a good account on
Psilocybin, I think most people experience something very much like what I describe
huge machines a sense of danger to the earth
apocalyptic visions
the idea that someone will come and help and
I'm pretty resistant to all the flotsam and jetsam of the New Age
I mean
I don't spend a moment worrying about the exact physical location of Atlantis or
Stuff like that and I think people it inflates their personal mythologies and intellectual misconceptions
But there there is something trying to get through. That's why this exercise
Show me what you are for yourself is
Really a good one and maybe my trips are so weird because I have always
Worshipped weirdness so I can go further down that road without being alarmed
While somebody else
You know would pull back
One of the problems is that we have we don't have complete maps of these places at this stage in exploring that
New world what we have essentially are the scribbled diaries of frightened explorers
And we don't know if explorer a is talking about the same
River system as Explorer B or whether they were on opposite sides of the planet or the universe
Building a coherent picture of the psychedelic dimension would be the first challenge to us to a
rational approach to understanding
Is that the first book no, I read that I read the first book
Well it actually is a map talk about weirdness is one of the
Weirdest things you would ever read, but it has an amazing ring of truth
And in it you present a map of all of the realms of beings that exist the peace
Visited just normal consciousness. It's almost an anti psychedelic description
But it's pretty consistent with some of the things you were discussing this morning
It's because it is where you go when you die, and it's also where you go when you sleep
In fact he talks about classes you attend
And he describes these levels upon levels of entities
Well I read the first book and I was puzzled by how much of it didn't seem familiar to me
Like I remember in the first book he talks about a world
That's just like this world except the cars are nine feet wide
That would be a very puzzling psychedelic experience to go to that world
I
Knew someone who was very close to him, and I don't want to set off any lawsuits here
But I once cornered this person and said so what about it, and he said don't worry
You don't have to worry. This is not getting close to your bailiwick at all
Buddhism of the Mahayana
Has you know a tremendously complex?
system of levels and
entities
wrathful buddhas and
Dharmapala's and peaceful entities
And I think that that's pretty interesting as a phenomenological description of mind I
reject the philosophical premise of Buddhism because I think it's
You know an unbelievably uncompromising kind of nihilism
But buddhism as its pitched in America soft pedals that a lot
You know they don't they don't
Present it as a form of nihilism, but I think ultimately it is in the most positive sense, but still
I'm of the school that follows Alfred North Whitehead who said say what you may there are certain
stubborn facts
And you know that's not a very buddhist point of view yeah
If I can control myself and not do it too often
The problem is cannabis does so many other wonderful things and I tend to use it for those other wonderful things
But if I were totally dedicated to vision
then I would only smoke once a week because then you completely come to equilibrium and
Then you know I again
I think people do it not wrong
But not the way you should do it if you want visions you should do it the way you do all these other things
alone in silent darkness and at high doses
Bursts of hallucination on cannabis are hard to control and predict
But sometimes they're as intense as anything can be if you read
19th century descriptions of cannabis use by people like Fitzhugh Ludlow and the club do hasha sheen and that crowd
Where they were eating the hashish, it's very clear that it was the LSD of the 19th century
I mean nobody can read those descriptions without realizing these people were
Loaded for sure they were thoroughly and completely smashed to be able to write those kinds of accounts
Yeah, go ahead
Well you didn't exactly make clear to me what the effect was it fuzzes you out going into
The focus could appear in a very top-grade sense of me will be one thing
What it does to me is it just slightly cuts my anxiety
You know I'm able to to let the thing unfold of its own. I'm not I don't know
I mean I have a very a lifelong
Intense relationship to cannabis, and I basically make my living out of being able to do feats of memory and
You know cannabis is supposed to trash your memory
So I don't you know maybe I'm different
But I resist any maybe I'm different argument because it's malarkey nobody's different enough that they can
You know
No more so
My great dream is that as my powers of locution fade with old age that cannabis will be legalized
Then I can sit in front of you and smoke and my career can be pushed 20 years further into the future
The way I use cannabis is to think and I do a lot of thinking I do a lot and I I
At night before I go to bed I
smoke and then I play the tapes of the day and
Then I understand what happened if I didn't have cannabis. I don't think I would I would be
Sort of at sea or a kind of a space case because I never get what somebody really meant really
Intended really had in mind till I play the tapes stoned and then I see aha
That's what the agenda was. That's what was going on. Oh
Yeah, yeah, and if I don't smoke then I'm insomniac
Yeah
Oh
Okay, well
LSD
Again, you remember I'm only speaking for myself because there is no other way to approach it
I I found LSD very interesting but ultimately kind of frustrating because I
wanted visions and
To me what LSD by itself does is it does a lot of slippery and hard to name?
Stuff it accelerates and changes the quality of thought
it
Well, basically that's it
It does something to the quality of thought but I had been reading Aldous Huxley and have lock Ellis and those people and I kept saying
You know, where are the ruins of alien civilizations?
Where are the jeweled? Capistries and and then fiddling around with LSD I discovered that if I would
Take it with mescaline
then it became the psychedelic experience that I was seeking but
In and of itself. It's kind of psychoanalytic
It's sort of like cleaning up your act. It often focuses you on your own personal stuff and
You know, I have to confess to you. I'm I don't I'm not that interested in my own personal stuff probably because it's so horrendous
But I I don't like personalized trips. I like cosmic vision
information trips and and then mescaline
Mescaline is
You have to take a lot to get it to really do what you want it to do and it being an amphetamine
Has a not a very good LD 50 profile
It's not like MDMA where 10 times the effective dose you're in real trouble
But probably 40 times the effective dose and you'd be sweating bullets
So and then just the nature of my life
I've not had as much to do with mescaline as these other things. I'm really a vision freak and
People say, you know, well, there's feeling and there's insight
And there's this and that but the reason I'm so fixated on vision or the excuse I give somebody said it's because you're a double
Scorpio, but to me it's the
To me, it's the proof that it's not coming from me. I
Can come up with insights I can come up with funny ideas
But I can't come up with objects never before seen by the human eye or mind
And so when the vision start then I feel this is the transpersonal part of the trip
This isn't my unconscious my memories my fears my hopes. This is something else. Yeah
How do boundary dissolution and
Well, I think in very practical terms they show you that everything you know is wrong
You know, I mean, how can the ego survive that piece of information? It just puts in your lap
Incontrovertible evidence that everything you ever thought or believed is hokum and that's extraordinarily
humbling and that word humbling
Means the feeling you have when your ego is reduced, you know humble yourself enough and you'll begin to feel
Humiliated and you know, that's a deeper ego
Reduction I think they aside from any magical chemical effect they might have on ego
They're just simply showing you the true size of the universe and your place in it and you know in our
Down personal lives every man every woman a king or a queen
I mean we build castles in the air our career our children our whatever
Well, then you get into those places you just say, you know, what how preposterous
For men and women
Well, that's an interesting question
Also
Yeah, you mean what we talked about last night
Well, I think women by virtue of the fact that they
menstruate and give birth are just inherently
more more chemically driven creatures than men men are
Apollonian in intent the idea is always some kind of abstract
purity
Clarity kind of thing and women know from the get-go that that's an illusion
That the reality is the floor of the rainforest the interconnected tissue
The levels the trade-offs and so forth and so on
This is why I think
Generally men tend to be more interested in these things than women and to also be more
impacted by them for women it seems to sort of fit in and
Affirm what they knew for men. It seems to come as in a tremendous surprise that this is the way
Things are put together
I think that if we if everybody gave birth and experienced menstruation
Probably we never would have launched ourselves into history in a way
You know without going too far with it. Men are the ancillary sex. I mean the the original
Blas chila in the embryonic development is female and
I was listening to somebody the other night talk about this saying no wonder men have the problems
They have what a man is is a woman who has been under
Incredible chemical assault for nine months in the womb and you just have been hammered
sculpted shaped and
Recast again and again and then you're born male a female fetus doesn't experience anything like that
it starts out with a smooth shot at its and
Phylogenetic expression and and then achieves it. I don't think of the ego as
Particularly male because I think we all have it to excessive degrees
But men are able to express it a woman with an ego is frustrated
A man with an ego is a menace to all concerned
Yeah
I
Think it's very it's a very major
Decision to do that that if you're going to take a high dose of psychedelics with somebody else
Then you better be prepared to get all entangled
with them
Which can be great. It can also be fairly confusing. I don't like taking
Psychedelics, this is not an issue of entanglement
That's sort of what goes on between lovers or close friends
but I get a lot of requests to sit for people and I don't do it because I I
Don't know whether it's my personality or what it is
But I am unable to contain my anxiety in the presence of another stoned person
Especially if I'm stoned if I'm stoned and they're stoned and we're in a dark room
I cannot get off I listen to them breathe. I
Worry, I wonder if I should ask them if they're alright
Then I go off on long trips about not interrupting them and then that loops back into but I haven't heard them breathe for 20 minutes
And and and I'm always afraid I don't know I so really people say it doesn't it take courage to do it alone
For me it takes more courage to do it with people because in inevitably then you get tangled up into some kind of craziness
and you know, you can think you're having a telepathic experience and
They've decided that they want to have sex or something
and meanwhile
I've just had their revelation about that entry Moliere made in his diary when he was talking to his niece
Agnes about the nature of the French comic theater and so you say boy, you know
We've got too much on the menu here
But I'm weird remember that yeah
You mean the group mind on ayahuasca
Oh, yeah, no, it's very possible
It's very possible
I mean you can sit with someone and play a little game where you will describe the hallucinations for 30 seconds
Then they get to describe the hallucinations for 30 seconds and you can absolutely convince yourself
that people are seeing the same, you know that you're seeing the same thing and
You know when you toss sex into the mix it just goes over the top
I mean I've had the impression I don't want to trot it out as a
Position of mine or something that I assert as true, but I have had the impression
stoned on mushrooms
making love that
It's like
Inspiration forms on the surface of the skin and there's some kind of electrolytic thing that goes on and the
Boundaries dissolve between the people I don't mean metaphorically. I mean that you you become
one
organism and that's
That's pretty
pretty amazing
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Now after I just said I don't like taking
Psychedelics with people I guess what I should have said is I hate being responsible
Because I don't mind taking ayahuasca with 30 people none of whom speak English in a hut
Up some river but that's because I know that the old shamans are in charge that I'm just a face in the crowd
Nobody's gonna turn to me for explanation or help
I'll tell you an ayahuasca story just to give you an idea of the kind of stuff that goes on in these sessions
years ago in 76
Kat and I it was before we were married
Were in Peru and we had found this shaman who was very good and he had a following and we were
You know apprenticing ourselves to him and he the style of these Peruvian mestizo
People is that I mean cultures handle this differently, but they are never straight with each other
It's an incredibly
Masked culture almost like the Japanese but without the formality in other words
If you're if you think somebody's a jerk you would never say that that's the last thing you would say because that's your true
opinion
So we got into a situation with these people where this elder shaman who was very respected
beloved even by these people he had a nephew a
Sobrino who who was an absolute jerk
I mean this guy was into pimping a little on the side and he was very ambitious to perfect his ayahuasca
So he could go to Lima and charge you up
He's a bunch of money for taking it and so forth and he had this really awful habit
And I don't know what was really had gone on before we got there
But they would all get together to take ayahuasca and these old old guys
You know 80 85 years old the totally authentic
Dudes would sing these beautiful ayahuasca songs and he would sing
Against them. I mean, can you imagine a scene like this where everybody's singing row row row your boat?
except one guy wants to sing five foot two eyes of blue and does and
And the level of social tension in these meetings would just rise and rise
But nobody would ever say anything to this guy and tell him to bug out and can that crap
So one night this had happened two meetings in a row. It was the third meeting like this
Everybody hoped this guy wouldn't come so then he showed up
so then we all dose then we get loaded and the singing begins and he begins his singing and
In the wave of hallucinations and cat was sitting next to me
I he was sitting up on his haunches kind of rocking back and forth on his heels and I
Would look at him and I could see he was going through these weird animal
transformations first he would become like a jackal then he would become like a monkey and
It was really intense and I mentioned it to cats and she could see it too
Well, so then he kept and we were also trying to tape these ayahuasca songs
So it was a double irritation to us that this guy was so out of control
So after a particularly long song by the old guys with him just hammering
Against them I could feel cat who has a real Irish temper getting more and more pissed off
At this guy and finally at the end of this song when the silence fell
she had been just staring at the floor and she looked across the room at Don Jose and
Gave him a look of pure
Loathing and I saw these red things these red
triangular-shaped things come out of her eyes and go across the room like
And when it got to him it knocked him off his feet he was thrown backwards from the impact of these things
literally and the
Everything going on in the room stopped dead and the elder shaman said to the guy sitting next to him. He said oh
the Gringa sends the
You know, then you realize wow, we're in over our heads here you can't tell shit from Shinola in this scene
This concludes tape three our program continues with tape four
Tree Of Knowledge (4)
Our program continues with tape for
So that's an example of you know magical power condensed onto the material plane, yeah
Clearly the same the same phenomenon. Yeah
He actually didn't come back after that evening
Then the other question or actually a perspective is
I've done extensive work with
Irodology to the point that I could understand where the limitations in that science were blatantly obvious
Because it's not so much the physical characteristics of the iris of the eye it is what is transmitted from the mind
through the pupil or the sensor of that filter that is really being accessed by someone who is discerning
And that's what will give you the sense that you're looking for
And so I feel that that power and that transmission of mind so many times is carried from that energy that goes back and forth through the eye
And I wondered if you had any more thoughts on that
Well it seems to imply that we are all potentially linked together in many ways that civilization has suppressed
We are no longer telepathic we are no longer able to reach out and tap somebody with a glance like that
And I think we do and I think we do all the time
But somehow our perception of what's been going on is skewed
We don't, you know Rupert and I talked a lot about this
He had the idea that he said you know the search for a psychic the search for proof of psychic power has not been a very happy story
With card flipping and this sort of thing
And Rupert had the genius to realize that what is the commonest psychic power that we all believe exists
And have experienced and so forth but which science is utterly unable to explain that could be statistically studied
Well what it is is the sense that someone is looking at you
You know and you could test this and in fact we did tests where you would choose one person and put them at the front of a room full of people
And then you would tell people either look at your lap or look at the back of this person's head
And they would be asked are people looking at you or are people looking at the back of looking at their lap
And certain people you could quickly satisfy yourself were able to detect this a phenomenal amount of the time
Well beyond statistical you know the rules of probability
So I think we're surrounded by subliminal abilities that we can't really understand
I mean I from years of traveling in Asia I have an amazing psychic power which is I can tell when food shouldn't be eaten
You know and it will happen to me you know in very good restaurants and if I go against it you know I'll spend the evening over the toilet
Because I couldn't believe that she so and so would serve poisoned food because it was costing me so much money
But then when I get back to the hotel room sure enough by overriding my own instincts I get into trouble
I think psychic ability well this is worth talking about that we cannot be or how can I put it
We cannot evolve beyond the confines of our language
And if you have a language that makes telepathy impossible then the telepathy will be impossible inside that culture
You see we all pay lip service to the idea that language and culture create each other
But we actually act as though culture is real and it isn't
I learned this you know in Peru very dramatically because in the Peruvian Amazon there's a disease
Which people are very very concerned about called Susto have all of you heard of this
Susto only affects Peruvians this is the first clue that something weird is going on and its major manifestation is bad luck
And but if you get it and you're a Peruvian you prepare to cash in your chips you know it's as horrible as melanoma
You know you're doomed if you have this stuff and you have to go to a shaman and get it taken care of or you're dead within six months
But I can't get Susto it's not it's a linguistic disease of some sort
It travels around inside the confines of mestizo Spanish and nowhere else
It's the evil eye isn't it also is the equation in the south of our country
Well if people have these ideas yeah and you know like people say well magic is accomplished
Because the person the magic is being done to knows that it's happening and therefore they unconsciously participate in their own demise
But I've observed these shamans in the Amazon and they will go if a shaman has decided to actually get somebody
He will go to incredible lengths to conceal what he's doing so that the person never knows and never knows how to blame
So it isn't some kind of psychological co-option that's happening it's something a good deal more complex than that
Yeah
You know a while back you were talking about a period of time where a human being walked inside out and that made me think about some of the things you've been saying
For example we have all these myths about fairies and elves and a magic and perhaps at one time the world was like that but it is not like that now
Here you're talking about a social context that does not include telepathy, generates a culture without people experiencing telepathy
And yet we have all these myths we have all the fairies tales and now you're talking about self-transforming machine elves
Would you have it more on this?
Well I'm not sure that you got it into a question that I can respond to try again
Okay so our culture then is very like science oriented and the whole idea of the magic, things like the existence of elves, bintorn, people laugh at that unless they're supposed to be princes
Do you think that this kind of thing could come back? Do you think that we will have right before our eyes for example experiences with these kind of things?
Yes sure because what you have to do is you have to shift the locus, I mean it's kind of hard to explain but every civilization has a locus
And we have disempowered ourselves by shifting the locus to an imagined class of experts
We have an incredibly peculiar version of how the universe is put together
First of all we rely a lot of the time on the notion of the incy-bincy
Genes, viruses, atoms, elementary particles, these are the things which shape our world
We tell each other and yet who has ever seen any of these things? I mean a virus maybe a few people have seen
An estrogen atom, it's a pretty airy-fairy concept and when you start talking about the anti-new meson and stuff like that where you can only approach it through an arcane mathematical language
The reality, whatever that means of these things becomes pretty questionable
See one of the things I think that psychedelics could do is give back to us what I call the immediacy of felt experience
Since the rise of Cartesian analysis in the 17th century everything that we experience has been defined as what are called secondary characteristics
A color, a secondary characteristic, a feeling and what's real is mass, momentum, charge, spin, stuff like this
Which these are the primary qualities of the universe, whoever encounters it deals with them
We need to model reality so that it is understandable to us
I mean that statement should even have to be made shows how far off track we are
Our current model of reality is excellent for describing the behavior of hydrogen at the center of stars or something like that
Terrible for explaining to you how you're supposed to stay tuned to your girlfriend
So somehow we have sold out to abstraction and this is something about science, you know
And the demonic power of numerical analysis and stuff like this
I think that part of what the psychedelic revolution is and why it is so politically threatening
Is because a psychedelic person does not believe anything they cannot confirm for themselves through thought, intuition or feeling
And a non psychedelic person joins up with the quantum physicists or the Hasidic Jews or some group of people who've already got it packaged and figured out
I mean the UFO thing is a good example, everybody's interested in UFOs and you know are there space people, are there not
And I think most people think that the news will come, that the way you encounter a UFO, the way most of us will encounter a UFO
Is that the president will call a press conference and say you know that the time has come to speak frankly about certain declassified material
And that yes in fact it has been going on, I mean that's not how it's going to happen
The way it's going to happen is on 5 grams in silent darkness in your living room and that's real
You know if flying saucers were to land on the south lawn of the White House tomorrow
It would be minor news compared to what can happen to you a minute and a half after smoking DMT
We don't realize that we are not real unless we are the center of our own private mandala
If we look to media, to experts, you know maybe the Dalai Lama can clarify it or Mother Teresa or Stephen Hawking
We'll forget all that, those are just linguistic concepts as far as you're concerned
The only thing that's real to you is yourself and your immediate surroundings
And if we could empower that, you know our political problems would disappear overnight
We are infantile and we do love it, we don't really try to claim our existential validity
And those who do are called mad because they depart from the sanctioned paradigm
Over here somebody, yeah
It just struck me that one of the things that you seem real good at is bringing that personal experience into language
And you communicate it, which creates the same kind of reality that you appear to be implying
Of a shared linguistic reality where we can discuss the experience that we've had
Its value becomes elevated, and then you can talk about it
Yes, well it becomes real when we talk about it
I mean one of the most satisfying experiences that I have as a public speaker
Sometimes after speaking to groups like last night, somebody will come up afterward and say
I thought I was crazy until I heard you speak
Now I know there are at least two of us
And the truth is, you know, there are more than two of us, there are thousands
If you, you know, it's a delusion if it happens to one person
It's a cult if it happens to twenty people
And it's true if it happens to ten thousand people
Well this is a strange way to have epistemological authenticity conferred upon something
We vote on it, you know
So I would like competition
I mean I feel pretty lonely out here
I'm surprised nobody has followed me into this
There must be other people who can articulate these things as well or better than I can
But boy they don't seem to come forth
And I really don't know why that is
Because what I say is not all that exceptional
It's just the sum total of it is kind of eerie
But if we don't, that's why I was saying, you know, we cannot evolve faster than we evolve our language
Our language is like the collective skin of our culture
So, you know, until you say the words self-transforming elf machines from hyperspace
Then there aren't such things
Once you say it, it has gained a certain kind of ontological currency
But weren't you arguing the opposite point, you know, when you talk about it
I mean quantum physicists or a new candidate
Learning a language system
See, people are buying other people's experience
I mean if you're not a quantum physicist
Why in the world should you take those people seriously?
They're talking gibberish
What power does it have over you?
Except that it comes presented on the platter of science
Say you must believe this
If you don't believe this, you're not a well-educated, trendy, with it person
We can just say, well, malarkey, didn't you people believe something completely different 15 years ago?
You say, yes, but now we've got it
Say, well, am I supposed to take that assertion seriously?
You change your mind every six months
But our experience during the psychedelic experience
Before we bring it to language
Is ungraspable, very frustrating once we lose it
And we can't settle down until we bring it to language
That's what they've done with their experience
If they brought it to language, then they can kind of settle down and play with it
So we seem to be caught in this
If we're having a true experience that's pre-linguistic
It's beyond concept
Once we conceptualize it, it becomes not quite an experience
But experience really changes
And it becomes something that we can then tokenize and pass to each other
And have a good social time with
But we're missing it
Well, every entity has a value-dark dimension
I mean, surely only the most naive of quantum physicists believe
That the quantum electrodynamic description of the electron
Is all there is to say about the electron
Because biology is made out of electrons
And you can't reason from quantum electrodynamics to the rainforest
You know, obviously other factors are present
Which are escaping this particular linguistic model
So being able to talk about something doesn't rob it of its mystery
It merely is a sectioning through it
That gives you a kind of a lower dimensional map of it
But the mystery remains intact
Wittgenstein talks about what he called the unspeakable
And, you know, the unspeakable is the true domain of being
And then within that there is a very small subset
Of those things which can actually be captured in language
But they're a vanishingly small set of the whole thing
Mostly it's all mystery
I don't know why this is so surprising to people
I mean, where is it writ large that bipedal primates with binocular vision
Are supposed to be carrying around in their heads true models of the cosmos
I mean, would you expect an apple tree or a monarch butterfly
To have a true map of the cosmos inside them
No more than that we should have
So I think all knowledge is provisional
And I think the new science will honour this
This is why the rise in the use of the word model
They no longer believe they're giving a complete explanation of phenomenon
They just say, well, here's a model
And next year we'll get a better model
We'll keep modelling and our models will get better and better
But they will never be more than crude approximations to an unspeakable mystery
Do you find it better?
No, I find it exhilarating
I think part of the male or part of the ego-dominator pathology
Is to demand closure out of everything
There is no closure
You have to learn to sit with the messiness of the mystery
You know, it's this thing we said this morning
The bigger you build the bonfire of understanding
The more darkness is revealed to your startled eye
So, no, I think it's open-ended and exhilarating and tremendously exciting
That that's the kind of universe we're living in
Tarek, I think the thing about mystery
I find it fascinating, I think up until just a few months ago
When many things were trying to understand, trying to understand
I don't know, I read something somewhere, some little sentence that said
I'm not trying to understand mystery anymore
I'm just trying to have a relationship with it
That's right
It clicked me into a whole different place
Well, you know, this is not merely the stoned ravings of the psilocybin brigade
Do you all know or have you ever heard of Godel's incommensurability theorem?
This sounds daunting and disturbing
Have you ever heard of this?
Does anybody have a clue what I'm talking about?
Okay, well that in itself is a measure of the kind of society we're living in
Because to my mind, more important than Einstein or Schrodinger
Or any of those people was Kurt Godel, German mathematician
He began by studying the calculus
And he had a very funny method
What he did was he would number every operation in a partial differential equation
And these numbers are called Godel numbers
What's Godel?
G-O-Umlaut-D-E-L, Kurt Godel
And what he showed, and I think this is maybe the most important intellectual step taken in the 20th century
He showed that any formal system will produce true statements
Which are not provable within the confines of the formal system itself
Now what this actually means is that mathematics can fail
It means that there is no closure
He proved this logically
Showed that closure is impossible, that everything
He showed it for arithmetic, the most secure of all intellectual edifices
Essentially what he showed was that 2+2=4 is a very strong tendency
Not a law
And this incommensurability theorem means that no program of formal analysis will ever completely exhaust its subject
There will always be a residuum of mystery
And we need to come to terms with this
I mean it's taken us 80 years to get Einstein under our belts
And that's a simple notion compared to what Godel is saying
Because what he's saying is not about the distortion of space-time near massive objects
But something which actually affects our own lives on a day-to-day basis
And if you live for closure, you're beating your head against a stone wall
And your head will wear out long before the stone wall will
And so it's a kind of an appreciation for the mystery needs to replace the attitude that the mystery is an unsolved problem
Mysteries have no relationship whatsoever to unsolved problems
Yeah
I'm just wondering about the motivation of the explorer going into the dark continent
Wanting to draw a map of the river
So that he can eventually go to the railroad, etc. etc.
You go through a lot of pain, a lot of difficulty as a pioneer
To get the map back
If your primary function is that this map will never be drawn completely
Where's the motivation? What does it then become?
You don't need a complete map
I mean I'm not such a fan of Wittgenstein, but he seems to have raised his ugly head here
Wittgenstein used to say, "We do not seek statements which are true
We seek statements which are true enough"
That's this genuflection to the incommensurability theorem
That's as good as it gets, folks
True enough
Beyond that, there's just the airy realm of metaphysics which will never be plumbed
What we're trying to do is refine our model, make it more responsive to what we want the model to tell us
But you don't want to confuse the model with the phenomenon being modeled
Because it will always have dimensions which exceed the grasp of the theory
So that's what the probability is on my own
It says that there's a tendency for a particular state to exist
That's as good as it gets
Yes, although I have real problems with probability theory, which we'll probably get into tomorrow
I think that in a sense probability theory has made it almost impossible for us to think clearly about anything
Because it contains certain insidious built-in assumptions that are purely assumptions
For instance, probability theory tells you that when you flip a coin, the odds of it being heads or tails are 50/50
If in fact that were true, the coin would land on its edge every single time
So what we need, you see, is not a theory of what is possible
That's science
If you want to know if something is possible, you find a scientist and they're always perfectly happy to fulfill this function
And tell you whether this is possible or not
What we completely lack as a civilization is a theory that explains to us how it is
Out of the vast class of possible things, certain things undergo what Alfred North Whitehead called the formality of actually occurring
We have no theory
I mean, science can say, "Well, it's probable that it'll be this, but it's also 40% probable that it'll be that"
You say, "Well, which will it be?"
You say, "Well, I just told you the probabilities"
You say, "That's not good enough, I want to know"
You say, "We have no theory of selecting among the probabilities"
The other problem that haunts probability theory is that it assumes that time is an absolute flat plane
It assumes that no physicist tells you in his lab notes
"Please perform my experiment on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays because it won't work any other time"
In other words, the assumption is made that the experiment will produce the data predicted by theory
No matter when the experiment is performed
In other words, it's assumed that the phenomena is time independent
But that's just an assumption that Newton got into
Proving that phenomena are time independent is absolutely beyond our intellectual reach
It can't be done
The curious thing about probability theory is
Say you want to know how much current is flowing through a wire
Here's how probability theory finds out
It measures the current flowing through the wire with a meter
It measures it a thousand times
It takes those values and adds them together
Then it divides by 1000
Then it tells you this is how much current is flowing through the wire
You look at the value they've given you
And you say "But we took a thousand measurements and we never got this number"
You say "Well that's because you didn't average the probability"
Well, if we took a thousand measurements and not one is the value you're offering
Why should we believe that this is the amount of current flowing through the wire?
Well then there's a bunch of hand waving and epistemic foot stamping and so forth
Science is an incredibly fragile edifice
Which if it weren't for its ability to hand its findings on to technologists who make pretty things
It would have to take its place somewhere to the left of
I don't know, homeopathy, acupressure, something like that
In other words it is not a meta theory
It has not got truth by the jugular
It has a bunch of fishy mathematical formula which it's flailing you with
But I think the serious revision of probability theory is going to have to take place
I think you've given probability theory much more than it's really there
Inherently what it's all about is simply acknowledging the fact that there are variables in anything that we can't know
And we don't know
It's really nothing more than that
Well, but for instance if the odds that the coin comes up heads or tails are 50/50
Why doesn't it land on its edge every single time?
I don't see how it's related to landing on its edge
It's simply what happens with a coin and ends up lying basically whether it's face up or dying
Right?
Well, you know, another thing probability theory says is the chance has no memory
And so they always in first year statistics they say if you flip a coin and it comes up heads 49 times
What are the odds it will come up heads the 50th time?
The answer is 50/50
But any gambler would tell you that if it comes up heads five times in a row, bet on heads for crying out loud
So there's something
I'm not an ankle out of probability or statistics because I think a lot of done were inferred from them
It just doesn't exist
I agree
At the same time really all that's at the basis is the notion that there are things going on here that we can't know
That's not acknowledged by most people who are practicing it
That's the reality of real statistics
But don't you think the other assumption is that time is a non-inputting... it's not variable
You know, that you don't say the odds of the coin coming up heads or tails are 50/50 in Canada but 48/52 in Bolivia
That's one of the variables that sort of smeared out simply because it can't be characterized the way people who are doing that like to tend to characterize things
But underlying the whole thing is still the notion that you're dealing with unknowables
And I'm not saying that those who are deeply immersed in practicing probability or statistics hold this view
But the reality is underlying, sort of underpinning the whole thing is the notion that there are things going on here that we can't know
Oh, well I don't have any trouble with that
I understand why science latched on to probability with such a vengeance
It's because, you know, thanks to William of Ockham there is this notion called Ockham's razor
Which is this idea that is most simply stated as hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity
So since the idea that time is a flat invariant is the simplest assumption, try it first and see if it works
But I maintain that science has in certain areas been very slow to make progress in the social domain
In econometrics, in the multiple body problems and stuff like that
Well I think this is because this simple assumption that time is an invariant has to be re-examined
I would offer a new definition of science
Science is that field of human endeavor which studies phenomenon so crude that they are time invariant
You know, the hydrogen atom cleaves from the oxygen atom the same way every time
But love affairs don't come apart the same way every time
Bankruptcies don't occur the same way every time
These are complex compound phenomena that are then influenced by the temporal variables and the variables embedded in the environment around them
Now the problem is these are the things we're interested in
Love affairs, bankruptcies and the establishment of empires
Very few people have a passionate interest in the dynamics of the water molecule
Except that that equipment over there was produced by those notions, these noble computers, the software that you're running
Oh now I know I have you on the run because this is a "but it makes pretty things" argument
I'm not commenting on the value of it or not, I mean each person has to assess that for themselves
Well see I think science is a great enterprise and noble but not the arbiter of truth
There are no arbiters of truth, the truth of the Tarot, the truth of quantum physics
These are truths in the supermarket of truth
But there's no top end to that process, there may not even be one truth
But what one truth do you want to call in this way?
In a given situation, if you're flipping coins probability theory is probably a good guide
You wouldn't want to run your love affair on probability theory
So you have to choose the domain, you have to recognize the applicable models, the applicable tools for whatever domain you're looking at
Well I do have this culture of science as the overarching proof for it
Well you're allowed to be a heretic, you just don't get paid well, that's the price you pay for that
Still, yeah
Kind of tying this into what you were talking about last night about how messed up everything is
Since our ancestors got away from the muttering celebrations and all that
It seems like you were saying that we are tied into time and we're being pulled towards a certain something
Like this dimension being destroyed or we're not really being able to live
And I'm wondering is that, it seems like you looked at that as bad
And then on a different perspective it's good because we're discovering that we're being pulled towards something that's maybe bigger and more wonderful
How does that tie in? Are you saying that this is bad what we're discovering so we need to hang on to our past?
No, no
And go into a different dimension or something
No, I don't think it's bad, I'm entirely in support of whatever the universe is in the process of trying to do here
I think that history is ending and that it was a temporary perturbation of the system
And that we can anchor ourselves through this 'chaostrophe' or whatever it is by going back to archaic models
But I think that, and this is what we'll talk about tomorrow when we get the computer
Because I don't merely talk about it, even though I've been flailing the mathematicians
Ultimately I too come to rest with a fishy formula
I think that the universe is some kind, I think that there's something that has been overlooked by science
Called, and I'll name it, it's called novelty
The universe is a novelty conserving engine of some sort
From the very first nanoseconds after the Big Bang
Novelty has been conserving itself and building newer and deeper levels of novelty on novelty already achieved
So that, you know, in the first few, I mean, you have the Big Bang
Then you have this era called the pre-physical era
It's brief, it lasts the amount of time it takes light to cross a distance equivalent to the diameter of the proton, electron
Something dinky for sure
That's called the era before physics
Then physics begins, one jiffy after that
And the original universe was so hot that it was a plasma of free electrons
So since it was a plasma, there was nothing that you could call atomic physics
Because the ambient temperature was so high that electrons could not settle down into stable orbitals around nuclei
As the temperature of the universe fell, atomic systems crystallized out of that plasmic environment
Well then, further cooling of the universe leads to more complex kinds of bonds
And the cooking out of complex elements from stars
The original universe was made entirely of hydrogen
Hydrogen aggregated into masses so large that at their centers there was actually
And if you think I'm not nervous doing this in front of you, you're crazy
At these aggregates of hydrogen at the center, it was so massive in temperature and pressure that fusion could actually begin
And fusion cooked out heavier elements, iron, sulfur and eventually carbon
Well when you get 4-valent carbon, this throws open the doorway to tremendous new novelty
You get now for the first time not atomic systems, but molecular systems
These molecular systems lead into protobiological systems
Protobiological systems lead into prokaryotes, then eukaryotes, then true higher multicellular animals, then mammals, then human beings, then electronic culture, then the big surprise
Now the thing to notice about all this is that novelty keeps building on novelty already achieved
It crosses biological lines, atomic lines, molecular lines, it is a law of the universe
I'm proposing that novelty is conserved
And so then what we represent is the kind of ultimate nexus of novelty
And I believe that we are being wound tighter and tighter and tighter into a confrontation with the equivalent of the singularity at the center of a black hole
But it isn't a gravitational singularity that I'm talking about, it's a novelty singularity
And so the universe is growing toward some kind of ultimate state of boundaryless hyperconnectivity
And when that is achieved, the process will be, cease to be describable in the locus of ordinary space, time, and energy
Now science has no notion of this concept of novelty
In the East there is such a concept, it's called Tao
And Tao builds things up and pulls them down according to its own mysterious laws
Tomorrow I will argue, when we get the computer, that its laws are not in fact entirely mysterious
And that we can discover the nature of the novelty constant
And instead of treating space-time as an absolutely featureless plane
We can take that zero value, which is how that shows up in the Newtonian mechanics
And substitute instead a fractal dimension number, which will be some kind of decimal fraction between one and two
And then this will allow us to do things previously inconceivable, like predict the future and stuff like that
See, one thing I guess I should say since we've sort of drifted into this fairly wrappy place
Is the idea that the universe is...
The universe is growing toward itself
It's not moving outward from its origin, it's moving toward its completion
And this is called teleology, it's very unwelcome in most scientific modelling
But that's a legacy from the 19th century
Where they were so concerned to get God out of the picture
That they wanted everything to happen through one random process colliding with another random process
And flipping out mule deer, elephants and redwood trees
But in principle we don't have to believe in God to believe in an attractor at the end of the process
We see many kinds of attractors in the natural world
One way that I think of the psychedelic experience is
You know, you've heard me talk about hyperspace, superspace, this kind of thing
It really does seem to me that reality is some kind of a very complex geometric object of some sort
And you know how they teach you in trigonometry that all possible ellipses can be obtained by sectioning a cone?
And that if you take the infinite set of ellipses and reconstruct them, you can reconstruct the cone
Well, the way I think of psychedelics and psychedelic tripping is you are sectioning a hyperdimensional object
And what you're coming back with is a lower dimensional map of this higher dimensional object
Well, everybody has a different map in the same way that there are an infinite number of elliptical sections of a cone
But they're all generated by the same object
And if it's a mystery to you how a simple finite object like a cone can generate an infinite number of elliptical sections
Then it's going to be hard for you to understand how everybody can have a different psychedelic trip
And yet be actually dealing with the same reality in hyperspace
Yeah
You talked about the universe being attracted towards the cone of completion
And I'm not trying to trip up the semantics or anything like that
But would it also be moving towards its own closure at that point?
You mean its completion closure?
Yes
Well, what does closure mean to you?
Well, I was relating it back to when we were talking before about closure not really existing
Well, maybe what we should say is there's only one closure and all others are false closure
Closure isn't really the word I would use
I steal shamelessly from Alfred North Whitehead and probably others as well but I'm willing to cop to that
He has this notion called 'concrescence' which I think is a great idea
He says everything grows toward a nexus of concrescence
So, complexification is at the service of concrescence
We can see how this planet is caught in a concrescent process
A hundred years ago, you know, it took three months to go around the world
Now it takes a third of a second
A hundred years ago a newspaper carried local news
Now local news means the news of this planet
We can telephone Prague or Shanghai by just going outside to the phone booth
We are being knitted more and more tightly together
Most people think this is a human world phenomenon and it will stop at some point
With everybody connected to everybody else, I guess
I don't think it is a process of the human world
I think we're embedded in a collapse of physical law
This is a fairly pathological notion from the point of view of most scientists
Because they believe that the universe will exist for, you know, millennia or millions of years into the future
But I think our presence on this planet indicates that we're deep into act three of the cosmic drama
Yeah
Well, the universe is as a session for souls that themselves will be called back to the Godhead
When all their souls are held in the thought that ever I am that may take
Then we can test it together and know that it can be for the fact that it is a dream thing
Yes, I mean in a way the problem is not the, you know, the problem is not the end of the universe
But why it existed in the first place
What happened to flaw the original nothingness
To contort itself into this fantastic cascade of interconnected complexity
It's very, very tricky, this stuff
I mean, you know, well, without dragging that in it's tricky enough so let's leave it at that, yeah
The philosophy of the crop science is pretty interesting
I really came here to learn more about using the Mr. Jackson
Oh, well ask a question, seize the tiller
Everything you described, you've taken a full dose whole lot
Is that the best way to do anything?
Sometimes I've taken four hands and started them three more later
Oh, I see what you're asking, should you boost it?
I don't like doing that simply because I like to get
I think the real action is in the flash
And the flash comes by getting as much of the material to the synapses in as coherent a wave front as possible
So I tend not to do that but to take an initial large dose
Of course if you take an initial dose and it doesn't do anything then you could follow it up
About Ibogaine
Pardon?
Ibogaine, about, you know
You mean just to discuss it generally?
Do you all know what Ibogaine is?
It's a psychedelic, it's an interesting one
One of the things interesting about it is how little people are aware of its existence
It comes, it's the root scrapings of an African small tree or bush called Tabernanza iboga
And interestingly enough it's a true aphrodisiac
Perhaps the only real aphrodisiac in the world
Because what are called aphrodisiacs are usually either just stimulants or things which cause genital itching
But Ibogaine actually seems to be, works on the psychology of sexual drive in some way
It's a powerful hallucinogen
One of the puzzling things about Ibogaine is that we can't confirm its use by human beings before 1850
And you know the Portuguese were into the areas of Africa where this is happening
They've been in there since the 1430s
So it probably is a new pattern of drug use that has arisen
And it's a major force among the Fang people of Zaire and Gabon
Holding back Christianity and mission, culture
And it's a visionary hallucinogen without doubt
I-b-o-g-a-i-n-e
Probably in the future eventually society will get around to exploiting this particular one
Just like it does everything else
Is this Latin name or is this a nickname, common name?
The drug is Ibogaine
The plant it comes from is Tabernansa iboga
Yeah
You mentioned combining DMT with hormone
What is the experience, what is the change in your experience in the DMT?
Well that's what ayahuasca is
You see the DMT is then not destroyed in your intestine
And so you have a slow release DMT trip by doing that
Is that done with smoking DMT and adjusting hormone?
In theory and probably in fact
That would be a tremendously successful way to get very loaded
The problem is it might be a too successful way
You want to be very careful with these MAO inhibitors
There are MAO inhibitors that drug companies have produced
Where a single dose inhibits all the MAO in your body for up to a month
This would be murder if you got around some DMT on that
The nice thing about hormone is that it's fully reversible in four to six hours
So it's a gentle MAO inhibitor
But yes this is the strategy, this is why
You could conceivably take the seeds of a plant like Pygammon harmala
Which grows around here more or less
And contains harming
And combine it with a plant like Desmantha selenoensis
Which contains DMT and come up with a North American pseudo ayahuasca of some sort
People are doing this
If you think it takes courage to just do these compounds naturally
Imagine the kind of courage it takes to diddle with recipes
And to do your own bioassay
Which you must do because the cook must taste the soup
Terence what was the first plant?
Not the beginning but the beginning?
Pygammon harmala
P-E-G-A-M-U-M
Pygammon harmala in the zygophilaceae
How can you truly do this?
I was wondering if you and Dennis ever tried the experiment again
And it's not why not and why not and what do you think?
Well we never tried the experiment again
Because Dennis felt that he'd really made the maximum contribution to the effort
There are many experiments though which could be tried
Which would put no human being in danger
For instance you could use square wave generators
Which are acoustical generators to try and drive these drug molecules into DNA
In vitro, in a test tube
What you would do is you would simply put the denatured DNA into solution
Put some DMT into the solution
Shake it furiously
Ultra centrifuge the mix to get the loose DMT out
And then weigh the DNA and see if its weight had increased by a number
Which was magically divisible by the molecular weight of the DMT molecule
These kinds of studies have been done
And show that DMT does intercalate and locate itself into DNA
So yeah there are a lot of different things like that
That could be done that wouldn't put anyone at risk
So Dennis really felt that he was at risk in a very serious way
Is that what you're talking about?
Well he doesn't remember it very clearly
His impression was that it lasted about five days
It actually lasted three weeks
So the real stuff that would have alarmed him
He fortunately was too out of it to see or remember
But I was there throughout the whole thing and saw it
And I think it would be nice to understand the parameters of the effect a little more clearly
Before we charge off and try that particular trick again
What's being referred to is the
In "True Hallucinations" which is a tape set which will be published as a book next year
It describes an expedition to the Amazon in 1971
Which was really where we got the whammy
I mean I'm still running on what happened
From the 28th of February 1971 to the 21st of March
The rest of my life is pretty much throwaway
But what he
I don't know, it was weirder than flying saucer abduction
Because that now, there's a whole form for it
It was hard to say, something was waiting for us down in the Amazon
And as soon as we started taking these mushrooms
It began making suggestions about how you could use the mushroom
And your voice and certain other materials present at hand in that environment
To essentially
Well there aren't even words to say what it was
Condense the soul into three dimensional space
Or create the philosopher's stone inside your body and then give birth to it
Or in other words, some radical transformation of the ontology of being human
Was held out as a possibility
And it all came down to an experiment that he wanted to perform
That seemed to me so unlikely to have any effect whatsoever
That I felt it was perfectly alright to let this experiment go forward
Because I would have bet dollars to donuts that nothing would happen
Instead, all hell broke loose at the conclusion of this experiment
And he claimed at the time that what he had done
Was bonded into my DNA enough psilocybin
In a superconducting kind of bond
Which if you know how superconductivity works
A superconductive bond is very hard to disrupt
It's not like an ordinary chemical bond
He felt that you could do what he called "Bell the cat"
That you could actually hang a transceiver around the neck of the logos itself
And from then on it would talk to you constantly in the confines of your own mind
And it just seemed so wildly improbable to me that it went forward
But in fact at the conclusion of the experiment
Something changed in me
And I essentially became who I now appear to be
But before that I wasn't
I was sort of a wasstral and undirected person of some sort
And then tomorrow you will see when we get the computer
What the bottom line of this is
Because what was eventually revealed was a kind of mathematical mandala
Of space and time that rested on it for its veracity
On the fact that it allowed
That it made prediction of the future possible
And tomorrow afternoon I will display this thing for you
And you can judge for yourself whether this is the product of a pathological incident
Or in fact an intellectual leap comparable to Newton's laws of motion
Or something like that
I think in principle all this is possible
I think transforming, you know, part of what human history's conclusion will be
Is what I call turning the human body inside out
We want the soul to become visible
We want the body to become an idea freely commanded in the imagination
And then at that point, as James Joyce said
Newton will be dirigible
That was as close as he could get in 1939 to saying you'll turn into a flying saucer
He knew it was an airship, he knew it was O-blade
But he thought it was a dirigible
Anyway, enough about La Chorrera
Maybe we'll get into that tomorrow
Yeah
I've seen a matter of presentation about the Alokka
I think it is the beam to the end of the Kaminama
Yes
What does the vine, the vine, has now?
No, good point
The vine contains the Harmeen
Another plant contains the DMT
This makes Ayahuasca unique among these shamanic tools
Because you see all the rest of them
Peyote, mushrooms, San Pedro, Ibogaine, morning glories, and whatever else
Cannabis, are simply plants which you ingest
Ayahuasca is a drug, a product
Something made by pharmacologists
I mean pharmacologists who wear penis sheaths
But pharmacologists nevertheless, you see
So suddenly the human dimension enters into it
Not all Ayahuasca is alike
Ayahuasca depends on the personality of the person who made it
So it's not about a relationship between you and a plant
When you take Ayahuasca between you and the plants
There stands a human being
And you know, if you're headed down there to seriously get into this
Don't give up in a hurry
You will drink a lot of swill
Before you find someone who is conscientious enough
Honest enough, and cares about you enough
To not shortchange you in some way
How many do you speak of telepathine?
Telepathine, yes
Ayahuasca was discovered by Richard Spruce
In 1853, and then in the early years of the 20th century
The German ethnographer Theodor Koch-Grunberg
Brought a lot of it back to Berlin
And Louis Lewin and his group
Characterized an alkaloid
Which they named telepathine
But it was not realized then until I think 1957
By the chemists Hochstein and Paradis
That, well, Harmine
Or that telepathine was exactly the same compound
As an earlier compound isolated from the Syrian roux
Named Harmine
And since the rules of chemical nomenclature are
That the first compound, the first name takes precedent
Telepathine had to be dropped and Harmine substituted
But it tells you how convinced these early ethnographers were
To ensure that this stuff was
You know, exciting paranormal mental ability
Are they taking it with EMT or are they taking it by stone?
The Harmine?
Oh, well, no, no
See, what happened was
What Koch-Grunberg took back to Berlin
Was the liana, the vine, the banisteriopsis copy
The other active ingredient in ayahuasca
Was not isolated chemically until 1956
But the guys who took the vine back
And put plenty of the vine
The vine doesn't contain DMT
But the Harmine and Harmine itself?
Are both, well, yes, has an effect
At high doses it can cause hallucination by itself
The plant which contains the DMT
Normally there are a couple of possible substitutes
But normally what's used in the Amazon is
Cicotria viridis
This is a little coffee-like plant
That contains DMT in the roots
One of the great mysteries of ayahuasca is how
Out of 475,000 species of plants in the Amazon
These people figured out that
You pound the vine and combine it with the leaves
And then go through this elaborate boiling and concentrating
And then you get this fantastic visionary beverage
If you ask them how they figured it out
They say, "The plants told us"
Which is so far the best answer anybody has come up with
In 1962 Melvin Bristol who was a graduate student of Richard Evan Schultes at Harvard
Was studying ayahuasca among the Sibundoye Indians
And he took ayahuasca and during the trip
A plant was revealed to him
And he was told that it would be alkaloid positive
And it was alkaloid positive
This is now anecdotally embedded in the literature
Was it dumb luck?
Was it synchronicity?
Or was it that plants tell you about other plants?
The way ayahuasca is used by research pharmacologists
In these Amazon tribes
Is they brew a standard brew
And then if they have a plant that they
For some reason suspect might have some medical usage
They will put a little bit of that plant into the ayahuasca
And then the ayahuasca will give them a readout on it
And explain what it is
I had one of the longest evenings I've ever put in
Where I took half a dose of ayahuasca
And half a dose of mushrooms
And it was absolutely god-awful
It was different than any bad trip I've ever had
It didn't seem to be about my personality
It seemed to be about core processes
There was a little Pac-Man thing
And I could see it moving through my memory
Just choo-choo-choo-choo-choo
And I didn't know
You know that horrifying scene in 2001
Where the guy is outside the spaceship
And he says
"Open the pod doors Hal"
"Open the pod doors Hal"
Well that's how I felt
I could almost see the molecular machinery had jammed
And I said
"Oh my god, it's not going to deanimate or dealkalate"
"It's somehow caught in some kind of a loop"
And I sweated bullets for an hour and a half with it
It was really horrible
And then it finally released
And let me go
But as I sat in that chair
I said, you know, if I can't pull out of this place
Then there's a room in a back ward somewhere
And they will just sit me there
And look in on me every 12 or 14 hours
And that'll be my story
Yeah
You said earlier
You were surprised that you had no competitors
Right
That you understand that we have a political climate
That's not congenial to exploring
True
So why are you surprised?
Because I don't feel particularly courageous
I don't feel that this is unusual what we're doing here
Am I crazy?
Could be
It seems to me perfect
It would seem to me knowing what I know
Which is no more than a thousand other people know
I couldn't live with myself if I didn't talk about these things
Because our problem is we're disempowered
Unhappy and disconnected from ourselves and each other
Here's the solution
How can you
It's a political obligation
Or it's a moral obligation
To try and at least inform people
They don't have to take it
But they should at least have the facts of the matter in front of them
As they live their lives
So I just do it because I couldn't do it any other way
And I'm puzzled that nobody else feels this imperative
Because the people I talk to
A thousand people have told me
Psychedelics were the most important thing that ever happened to them
But not one of those thousand people ever said
And I've scheduled a speaking tour to do the same thing that you're doing
So I don't know
You know there's fear and paranoia
I hear there are people who are afraid to come to this
And they're revealing their interest
Wow
Well either I'm crazy or they are
I don't know
See I think that
That is
You know how
If you confront certain
Well butterflies or deer
There are certain kinds of animals
That if you move slowly enough
They can't tell you're there
Because they're set up for edge detection
And if you move slowly enough
They don't register the edge transiting
So you can actually walk right up to them and grab them
If you know how to do it
Lizards are like this
Cats
So I think that by moving with stealth
Rather than going to Harvard or Berkeley
And inviting the freshman class to pour into the street
And smash bank windows
That we can actually slip this thing along
That eventually such desperation is going to strike
Straight institutions
That they will come to us and ask
They're going to try everything
When the going gets rough
And when they finally decide to drop all their pretension
We'll be perfectly willing to have a dialogue
I'm sorry to hear that people felt that paranoid about it
I don't think the political climate is that repressive
I think people are doing the work of the man for the man
By being that paranoid
In a book from Charlotte that was published
This author suffered counter-pressures
Well counter-pressures
This book was banned in Florida
But for crying out loud
Look at the Russians
They were able to toss out the Communist Party
Well now that's a pretty scary thing to go up against
We don't have anything comparable to that
In terms of its depth of penetration into our lives
And yet they were able to do that
I think there's more to life than hiding out
You've got to make the grand gesture at a certain point
And then let the chips fall where they may
You're right
Brave words, oh boy
I think we have something for your audiences
An organization or something that they can support
Embracing consciousness and changing legislation
Basically I think people should see these kinds of meetings
As a tremendous opportunity to form local alliances
The last thing on earth we want here is the Terence McKenna cult
That would just be the stupidest resolution of the whole thing
The whole message is
You don't need me or Tim or anybody else
Just take a little metaphysical responsibility upon yourself
Realize you are the microcosm of the macrocosm
And then get with like-minded people and proceed
I mean this is how political revolutions are made
Is by people just ignoring as irrelevant outmoded social forms and structures
And insisting on their own authenticity
So mentioning maps or Hopkins Foundation would help?
Oh it might help people
I mean how would it help?
How about the strength in numbers?
Strength in numbers
Well I think people should support psychedelic communities
Archival projects, legalization moves
Yes
But mainly I think what we all need to do is get more loaded
You know?
Deeper trips, higher doses
You see it's not that we want to convert the entire planet to taking mushrooms
It's that we just want to be left alone to do what we want to do
The mushroom if it's as great as I say it is
Then it doesn't need a mob clearing the way for it
It's perfectly able to advance its own agenda
The thing is just not to yield to fear
Because as I said if you yield to fear you do the man's work for the man
And that makes you the man
So what you have to do is just say well you know
This is what we do and eventually it will change
I mean gay people is a good example
I mean in our own lifetimes we've seen this go from
An unspeakable crime against nature which decent people took care to not even be informed of
To a political subculture with its own agenda
And its own press and its own political clout
Well we are not as under the thumb as gay people were say in the early 50s or something
If they can do it we can do it
If black people can go from slavery to a legitimate claim on full social integration into the body politic
Then we can do it too
But not if we
In America nobody gets nothing unless they demand it
So as long as we bow our heads and hide our stash and are looking over our shoulder
Well then they've got us on the run
But we just have to say look
This is it
This is who I am
If this doesn't jive with your political agenda
Adjust your political agenda
Because this is who we are
Well now let's knock off and regroup for tomorrow on that point
Thanks very much
Well before we get into this morning's rigid agenda
Where were we yesterday?
I recall there were hands up
Do the people who belong to those hands still have the concerns that went with them?
Talk about forming local alliances and psychedelic communities
Talk about forming local alliances and psychedelic communities?
Well I think you know
As I said this is your affinity group
You can't recognize psychedelic people walking around on the street
Because our victory in the area of fashion has been so total that now even freaks look like freaks
So yeah I've been in a number of places where people organized
I don't know what you would call them, discussion groups, affinity groups in the wake of it
It's something you sort of have to self organize
Maybe in the period after the close this afternoon the people who are into that should exchange names and get something going
I mean obviously it's a delicate thing but on the other hand
You mentioned the word 'syllacy' and wanted to know what role that has played for you
For me?
Well a lot of people feel more secure doing journeys if they have some kind of ground control
And in the most casual form that can just be your best friend who doesn't do it
But you do
Or if you suspect that fairly deep and charged issues are going to arise out of it
Why you want it to be someone with some psychotherapeutic experience
But on the other hand you know you're in such a vulnerable state in that dimension
That you really want to choose the facilitator carefully
And have some kind of set of agreements worked out before
I mean the psychedelic trip doesn't always take the direction you want it to
I mean you write down before you take it that you want to deal with some episode of childhood trauma or abandonment
Then you get loaded and it seems so preposterous that you can hardly contemplate the notion without laughing aloud
And the facilitator keeps trying to bring you back
Say well you're not doing the work, we're here to do the work
Well then you say well having a knock down drag out fight while somebody's loaded isn't exactly the way to go either
You sort of have to feel into that issue as I said yesterday
I can't get where I want to go in the presence of somebody else because they hold me to the surface
If I were to have my idea of the perfect facilitator situation is that they're two rooms away
And you have something equivalent of a beeper
And then you can beep them and they'll come in and pat you on the head and tell you that it's all right if you need that
But otherwise they stay completely out of it
It's really nice to follow your own thought
And I think we change in the presence of another person
We create a persona and it takes a lot of energy to maintain the persona
And in that situation there's no reason so why do it
I'm wondering if you visited the house most of the free coming through psychedelics
Has there been a situation where you can go about them?
I don't know if you're retired or maybe you're going to children?
Well not exactly, I mean people always say can you do it on the natch
And I sort of feel like if I could do it on the natch I'd be alarmed enough to check myself in for some serious mental health care
It's too radical, you don't want to be able to do that on the natch
It's a wonderful control on it to know that it won't happen unless you take the stuff
Because it's not a mood shift or a subtle refocusing from foreground to background
It's an absolutely ontology peeling breakthrough
You can't mentally change your body chemistry to actually go to that stage
In principle I agree with that and I'm fascinated to try anything anybody has in mind
But you have to be very demanding and I think too many people are not demanding at all
I mean you sit people down in a room and tell them we're going to repeat "Om Mahum" 500 times
And at the end of it they come to you with tears of joy in their eyes and tell you it was the most profound thing that's ever happened to them
I don't understand where those people could be coming from you know
I mean I can sit down and like think about being stoned on DMT
And I can give myself the butterflies with that exercise but not much else
That's as far as I get you know
Persistently these various traditions claim that they can deliver the goods
But when you look at the art which is the paper trail that they leave
It doesn't look like what I'm talking about
You know I mean I went through
Once for a while I was a professional art buyer for Tibetan art, tankas and that kind of thing
And I interiorized all of that iconography
But it isn't very much like what we're seeing
And you know there are a number of highly idiosyncratic artists scattered through the history of art
Gustav Mauro, James Ensor, we mentioned Hieronymus Bosch
You know, well Mati Klarwein
But I'm trying to think of older ones
But these seem to be unique visions but not exactly the vision that seems to come out of this stuff
Part of what's so interesting to me is how alien it is
How if art is the, if the artist is supposed to be the antenna of society
Anticipating the visions which will later become the paradigms
Then they're not doing the job very well in this psychedelic domain
Yeah, did you have a follow up?
Well but this is where the action is
You know it has to make sense in the world
Now I don't want to suggest, I mean I think like in the case of psilocybin
I have no doubt whatsoever that if you take 5 grams of psilocybin every 4 days
For let's say 40 days
Then you will have nothing whatsoever to say to the rest of us
You know if what you see, the thing is in the spiritual quest
All these methods, yoga and mantra and then you know all the new versions of this
The whole stance of the spiritual questor is accelerator to the floor all the time
If you switch over to this method, it's the break pads that are going to get the work out
We don't, we psychedelic people do not strenuously exert ourselves to attain peculiar states of mind
We strenuously exert ourselves to keep the states of mind from becoming too peculiar
Why?
Because it can become so peculiar that, that, that, I don't know what
Yes that's it, it can become so peculiar that it is unspeakable
And if it's unspeakable it's just dropped out of the social contract, you know
Really the reason to maintain it is so that you can get back into the sociological state and communicate
But what I'm thinking is that I'm sure that there are people who have pursued it to the point that they just walked out of its existence and didn't come back
Yes well that's what I wanted to say
If you want to be the guy on cold mountain who is covered with hair
Who the village people occasionally see when the mist clears when he descends to the lower levels to cut wood
You can become that Taoist immortal
You know, what I like to say about psychedelics is once you get to this, it's no longer about seeking the answer
It's now a tougher go, now you have to face the answer
And it's so easy to seek, you know, this Rishi, that Roshi, that Geisha, that Guru
And all the wonderful people and the gossip and hijinks around the ashram and all that malarkey
But once you get to this and it's just you and it, you know, it's a whole different ballgame
Do you think that you can keep on dosing with your life as a level?
Well, we're talking there are two things
The experience and the wisdom and maturity that comes from the experience
You don't have to keep dosing to do that
But to attain, maintain and work out the implications of that
But you have to keep dosing to keep encountering the unspeakable thing that is the source of all that maturation and so forth
My gosh, everybody's agitated here, yeah
I wondered if in your experience in the Amazon or otherwise with shamanic culture views
If you found that they were able to do this without drugs or whether they were even interested?
No, largely not
In the Amazon, I mean, I discussed this with people and they said no, you know
You must, the plant is the teacher
I mentioned, or maybe I didn't, that there's an interesting book called "Haoma and Harmeline" by Flattery and Schwartz
And it discusses the ambiance of the religious attitudes of early Zoroastrianism
And they believed in what they called the "menang" existence
And we're talking, you know, 2000 BC here
And they believed there was no possible way of accessing the spiritual dimension except drugs
That was the entire way to do it
And I think it's a kind of pharmacological and energy barrier
It's good that these things are isolated from ordinary experience by the formality of having to take the compound
If they weren't, it would be flooding in upon us all the time and we would have a hard time indeed
Well, you speak about people taking psychedelics repeatedly and gaining experience from that
And then there are these other people, for example, who are into savage and so forth who practice meditation
I read somewhere recently that when people in the Amazon think I want to
It is recommended that they practice mind control
And what I haven't seen very much is the combination of mental practices
So as to end the combination of that blood taking and the psychedelic, or suicidal
And you talked a little bit about this, about what we do in preparation for the experiment
This concludes Tape 4
Our program continues with Tape 5
Tape 5 is a video of the
[ Video
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The Gospel of Thomas
Had you all, have you all looked at the Nag Hammadi Library?
The Nag Hammadi, do you know what this is?
The Nag Hammadi Library is 42 texts which were dug up in Upper Egypt in 1948 at a Coptic
monastery called Chenabaskion.
42 texts that went into the ground AD 220.
Because nobody has been able to put a finger on them since AD 220.
It's like a fossil of Christianity in the third century.
Well my God, you can barely map it on to the cheerful religion that we inherit as Christianity.
I mean it is an exotic and complicated situation.
It's very well worth reading.
James...
Where did you go to research something?
Oh, I'm sure the metaphysical bookstore in Berkeley, I mean in Boulder will sell you,
James M Robinson is the editor and it's called the Nag Hammadi Library.
42 texts reflecting early Christianity, Gnosticism, so forth and so on.
Hans Jonas is a brilliant, his book Gnosticism, the message of the alien God to infant Christianity.
If that's not a title to die for.
Huh?
Oh, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the New Testament by Charles.
That weighs in at about 35 pounds.
But theological libraries will have it, but it's in the locked case.
You don't want seminarians mucking around with this kind of stuff.
I mentioned the Yarantcha book too, which has about 2000 pages on the life of Christ
and covers those years after 30, I guess like 20 or so.
That's right, the Yarantcha book is a very spectacular and early example of channeling
before it was even named and very interesting.
Of all the channeled material, the Yarantcha book for pure grandiosity puts everybody else
to shame, right?
They talk about seeding the planet.
Yeah, well these are persistent themes, you know.
I mean all of Gnosticism is the perception that we don't belong here.
That we are creatures of another realm, beings of light who because of some horrible cosmic
mistake have been trapped in the world of matter.
The Gnostics take the Pentatec, the first five books of Moses, and turn it into a nightmare
story and say that the god of this world, which in Jewish tradition is called Yawah,
who is the creator of the world, for the Gnostics he is not the real god at all.
He's the demerge.
He's a kind of mad god who has entrapped the light and the task of salvation is to gather
the light and then release it back to its hidden higher source beyond the machinery
of cosmic fate.
Well that's good.
It's sort of like, you know, the Manduki Upanishad?
It's my favorite Upanishad because it's the shortest.
It's only a page and a half long, which, you know, others should have been so similarly
inspired to brevity, but it's the breath of Brahman.
It traces, it's the description of one exhalation inhalation cycle.
Yeah.
I know people who are going to say, "Yawah."
Yeah, "Yawah."
Well you're not even supposed to say it if you're orthodox.
G dash D. Yeah.
I'm fascinated by the Rastafarian comfort in relation to the jaw arch and the same phrase
"Hallelujah."
What is your understanding of that connection?
Well I don't know too much about Rastafarianism.
It was founded by Marcus Garvey and had this notion of "return to Africa."
You know, syncretism is always with us.
Gnosticism was characterized by syncretism.
The whole late Hellenic religious efflorescence was largely syncretic.
And certainly that's what we have now.
I mean, you know, the new age, you go to these fairs and the people who are talking to the
Pleiades have the booth next to the people who are talking to Zinebul Gnewby and both
have world plans from the Saussurian All Fathers and the two plans are different and you just
"Tuuuuhh!"
You know.
Not that there's a life and wealth in the Holocaust.
I mean, you've got guys like Marvin Minsky and House Gorman who want to download a new
brain into a computer to, you know, kind of come to pure information.
So if that's not released and people matter with good information, I don't know what is.
No, I agree.
There are two sentiments loose in the world and you're going to not get through this life
without taking sides.
You know, do you believe that our destiny is in another dimension made of light on the
other side of the universe?
Or do you believe that we should, you know, clean up the rainforests and save the planet?
You want to be very careful with your political agenda.
One of my sub-interests, which sort of has a relationship to this but it's oblique, is
asteroidal impacts.
I think asteroidal impacts are one of the great, undiscussed factors in evolution.
That every solid body in the solar system is heavily cratered with impacts by infalling
bodies.
There was this thing down in Arizona that only happened 50,000 years ago.
It was a piss-ant sized object and everything within 800 miles of the impact point died
instantly.
It dug a whole half a mile into the ground.
It was a nothing burger.
This thing which came down 65 million years ago, they now think on the Yucatan, it killed
everything on the earth larger than a chicken died.
You know, you want to talk about ecotastrophe.
You can't even conceive of what it's like when something like that happens to a planet.
They estimate that at the velocity this thing must have been traveling, it was five miles
into the planet in the first second and a half.
It raised a wall of rocks 6,000 feet high that moved outward at mach 7.
And the planet rang for a million years, you know.
But if it hadn't been for that, there would be no flowering plants, no triumph of the
mammals, no Whitney Houston, no...
It's a sperm-entering egg.
But suppose there's all this tumult in our psyche about the great change that's supposed
to happen and where are we supposed to put our political energies and what are we supposed
to be doing?
Well, it would be pretty ironic if we beat ourselves over the head and save the rainforest
and all this malarkey and then this something came down and just turned the whole thing
into hash.
Then people would say, "My God, how could we have been so stupid?
We should have been extracting and sequestering U-235 and plutonium.
We should have been building starships the size of Montana.
We should have been sparing no effort.
And what did we do?
We replanted rainforests and now look, the whole thing..."
So you have to...
Good intentions are not sufficient.
You have to locate where the threat is coming from and act accordingly.
There are no points for good intentions in the game of evolution.
So mind... and we have to decide, you know, what does life want?
Is it that life at its most basic level senses the finite duration of the star's life and
so it wants to use this moment of sunshine to build something that could carry us out
into the mainstream of the galaxy to the denser star fields?
Or is that some kind of titanic, Apollonian, male-dominated, techno-fascist, materialist
trip?
And what we need to do is cultivate gentleness and attention to the bugs and the grasses
and the water.
I don't have an answer to that.
I think it's a real dilemma.
I think people who think they do have answers haven't really connected with how ambiguous
the situation really is.
How can you do both?
What says the mushroom?
Well, no, I think some people can do...
Well, what the mushroom says is it's a total apocalyptarian.
I mean, it says, "Rouse your camels.
Pack your tents.
We're moving out.
This has been fine for a while, but ahead lie worlds of unimaginable challenge at great
distance."
But, of course, the mushroom sounds like a techno-fascist, hortatory, male-dominator
when it talks like that.
You take ayahuasca and it says, "Clean up the rivers.
Care for the children.
Replant the forest."
But then you have to look at the mushroom possibly being the universal traveler that
it is.
It has that urge.
It's got the wanderlust.
So of course it's going to be impossible.
That's right.
It has nomadic ethics.
So it pushes nomadic solutions where the ayahuasca, an enormous jungle plant, a flowering plant,
a creature born out of the last catastrophe just like we are, has a different agenda.
No, the demons are of many kinds.
Some are made of ions.
Some of mind.
The ones of DMT you'll find stutter often and are blind.
Just because somebody wants to channeling, just because somebody's dead doesn't mean
they're smart.
It could be.
Everybody has their own agenda.
Well why don't we break...
Yeah, question.
Last question.
Speaking of physiological threats, where have Fred and Miles worked?
On the steady state or something?
On viruses?
Oh yeah.
The panspermia theory.
Yeah.
And again, that argues strongly for high tech.
Even age may not have come out of court day track, but it may actually have come out of
space.
And it probably only has an impressive array of statistics that link cometary presence
in near orbit to viral disease.
Yeah, well I think that the next revolution in biology is so obvious that you can't really
say that it's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
And I think that the next revolution in biology is so obvious that you can be totally radical
and completely confident you're on safe ground and say the next great revolution in biology
is the realization that space is not a barrier to life.
And that technology is only one method for traversing between the stars.
If in fact planets are regularly pulverized by cosmic catastrophes, then they must be
like bursting seed pods.
And everything is subjected to a tremendous evolutionary hammering.
But spores, viruses, stuff like that, particulate matter, it just drifts out between the stars
and then when it finds another suitable environment, it breaks out.
We don't know what the constraints on life are.
You know, the oceans of Europa could harbor life.
You know, these hot vent, sulfur vent organisms that we find in the deep oceans here, they
could survive in the oceans of Europa.
If there were hot sulfur vents at the bottom of those oceans, those organisms wouldn't
bat an eye.
Europa is covered with ice, but underneath the ice is water and there are fractures.
And you know, the exotic chemistries and pressures and temperatures of the Jovian environment
could produce life.
We don't know what the constraints are.
If cometary environments are a better place for life to arise than a warm pond on a newly
condensed planet, then all bets are off as to what, you know, planetary surfaces may
be unlikely places for life to get going.
It's hard to say.
What does it say to all the gaseous creatures on gaseous planets?
That's right.
We don't know.
You could have life at temperatures and pressures where we couldn't exist for a microsecond,
like at the bottom of the Jovian atmosphere, something like that.
No, there's more mystery than anything else.
The notion here is I've always felt that the psychedelic experience should be good for
something in a very practical sense.
And I always felt that there was something that wanted that you should be able to learn
that was very hard to bring out.
And we talked a little bit yesterday about this strange episode that happened in the
Amazon where instead of an ordinary trip, it was locked in for weeks and weeks and then
people differed as to whether it was a transformative incident or a psychosis or what exactly it
was.
But what happened was, or what I think wants to happen in every psychedelic experience
is that there is a totality symbol.
You know, Jung tried to get his patients to make mandalas because he said they were totality
symbols.
Well, eventually the totality symbol is more than a symbol.
It actually becomes a true map of the totality.
And what this boils down to is a kind of very strange revelation about the nature of the
I Ching that takes very seriously the idea that the I Ching is a tool for studying time,
but then takes the idea much further.
It's hard to give this lecture.
It's hard to listen to this lecture because the learning curve is steep and you just have
to stick with it for a while and then there will be pay dirt, but you have to bear with
me.
And I had to bear with the entity which was revealing this stuff to me because it took
the form of a... are you all familiar with the idea of a koan?
This is something that your guru, a little saying or something that your guru gives you
that if you can figure it out then you move on to the next stage.
Well, so the koan that I was presented with had to do with the I Ching, which I was not
that passionately fascinated by.
I was just sort of mildly interested in it, like a lot of other freaks, and I was not
at all mathematically inclined.
I mean that I am the author of a theory of pure mathematics is as astonishing to me as
it is to anybody else, I'm sure.
Basically as you know, but let me review it, the I Ching is a Chinese system of divination
that uses 64 structures called hexagrams and hexagrams are made of broken and unbroken lines
stacked one above another and they are the sum set, sum total of the possible set of
such structures is 64.
And it's been remarked by a number of people that the I Ching has peculiar structural affinities
with the DNA, but nobody has ever really known what to make of that.
Well, this dialogue with this mushroom entity began by posing a very simple question, which
is, as you know, most of you, the I Ching hexagrams occur in a sequence which is called
the King Wen sequence, which is very old.
In fact, portions of the King Wen sequence are scratched on shoulder scapula that are
3500 years old.
It's possible to argue that the King Wen sequence of the I Ching is the oldest abstract sequence
in the world.
The question is, or what the koan was, was is the King Wen sequence a sequence or is
it simply a jumble of hexagrams that over time has become traditionally sanctioned as
the sequence?
In other words, if it's a sequence, you should be able to write the rules that generate that
sequence and no other.
So let me dig into this here.
The first hexagram, can you see this colored chalk?
We have two other choices.
We have an orange and blue.
Here we'll do a visual test.
Ooh.
Is this the stuff?
Okay.
Why is this so half acid?
So here's the first hexagram.
It's called the creative and it's made of six lines.
This is no news to anybody, I hope.
Here's the second hexagram.
It's called the receptive.
The yellow.
Okay.
Let me do these this way and then I'll switch.
So when I started looking at this question of the order in the I Ching, the first thing
I saw, it only took me about 10 minutes of just looking at it and I noticed, and I'm
not the first person to have noticed this, that it isn't 64 hexagrams.
It's 32 pairs of hexagrams and the second member of each pair is formed by turning the
first member upside down.
Do you see?
So that only took 10 minutes.
That was no problem.
Now, there are eight cases in the I Ching where inverting the first hexagram causes
no change because of the nature of its structure.
You meet the first case here.
Obviously, if you turn this thing upside down, it's still six unbroken lines.
So in the eight cases where inverting a hexagram causes no change, a second rule is generated.
The second rule is if inverting the first hexagram causes no change, then all lines
change.
Very straightforward, right?
But now the problem, the colon has changed and the question is what are the ordering,
what rules order the 32 pairs?
And this was much trickier, much trickier.
And after a while, the prompting voice said, "Look at the first order of difference."
This is just a fancy way of saying, "Count how many lines change as you go from one hexagram
to another."
If you go from this hexagram to this hexagram, how many lines change?
Six.
So the first order of difference is six between these two hexagrams.
Similarly, we can go from two to three and there will be another first order of difference.
Now logic should tell you that the values of the first order of difference are going
to be whole numbers one through six, right?
What I did was I went through the I Ching and actually checked on these and I discovered
it again immediately.
What jumped out at me was there were no fives.
So we wrote computer programs to randomly arrange hexagrams and check for fives and we
discovered fives are as common as any other number.
The exclusion of fives in the King-Wen sequence was a human decision.
Someone didn't want fives to show up in the first order of difference.
Okay.
So then I looked at these values and what I discovered was when you inside the pairs,
when you invert one to get the other, the first order of difference is always an even
number.
So within the pairs you have no freedom.
It's going to be an even number.
Between the pairs you can arrange them so that you get odd numbers or even numbers.
Now what I discovered was between the pairs half are odd and half are even.
Again human agency did this.
We wrote computer programs to randomly throw hexagram sequences and test for this quality
and we found that only one in every 7,500 times could you expect to get a sequence which
would be 25% odd, 75% even, which is what this enforces.
So I was very excited by this because I said, "Wow, there's all this hidden stuff in the
each ink that I've never...
Why is this thing inching up on me?
This thing?
Okay."
So I thought how weird that all this structure is in there and I'd read all of Wilhelm's
commentaries and Lama Govinda and these people and it didn't seem that they had noticed this
kind of stuff.
So I was very excited.
I thought that I was really onto something and I made a graph of the first order of difference
and it looks something like this.
Of course it has one, two, three, four, five, six on this axis.
Blue and one, two, three, four to 64.
This way because there are 64 hexagrams.
And then I drew the first order of difference.
Now notice, remember this was six.
So up here we put a point and the next one is something else and the next one is something
else and then we connect the points.
And what you get is a structure which looks like this roughly.
In other words, it looks stochastic.
It looks random.
It doesn't look like you're on the track of any kind of order here except that I noticed
a really funny thing about this.
What I noticed was that this section and this section are mirror images of each other.
So imagine for a moment that you have a copy of this right here.
What you're then able to do is rotate the copy 180 degrees within the plane and you'll
discover that it fits perfectly in here.
It dovetails at the beginning and at the end but nowhere in between.
This is again a product of human decision.
Someone made it so that it would do this.
And the question is why?
Why would anyone want to do that?
And when it works, you have hexagram one across from hexagram 63 and hexagram two across from
62, 62.
In other words, these always sum to 64 when it's in the right position.
So I just thought that I was uncovering some kind of like, you know, the equivalent of
Chinese Kabbalism, some kind of lost intellectual system.
But the voice said to me, it said, "This is a picture of time."
And I couldn't understand what exactly was meant by that.
It seemed to me a fairly esoteric thing to assert that it was a picture of time.
Now remember there are 64 hexagrams in the I Ching and they have six lines each.
Six times 64 is 384.
When it told me that this was a picture of time, I began to entertain the idea that this
was somehow could be used as a calendar.
So then I said, "Well, what it is, is it's the whole I Ching running one way and the
whole I Ching running backwards the other way combined into this peculiar structure
which has 384 data points in it, which are the lines or so-called yao of the I Ching.
Now 384 is 19 days longer than the solar year length.
So if you had a calendar of 384 days, it would precess against the equinoxes 19 days every
year.
So it doesn't seem a good candidate for a calendar if you're trying to keep solar dynamics
central.
But I discovered something weird about this number, 384 days.
Now think of it as days.
And that is that peculiar things happen when you multiply this number by numbers that are
inherent to the structure of the I Ching.
When you multiply this number by 64, you get a day number which when you break it down
into years is 67 years, 104.25 days.
Now what's interesting about that number is that it is six sunspot cycles of 11 plus years.
There's also a major sunspot cycle of 33 years.
So it meant each line in a super hexagram made by multiplying this number will be associated
with one sunspot cycle and the trigrams inside the hexagram will be associated with the major
sunspot cycle.
So when you take 67 years, 104.25 days, again by 64, you get 4,306 years plus some days.
This number is very close to twice the amount of time that it takes for a zodiacal era such
as the age of Pisces or the age of Aquarius.
They last roughly this long.
Well if you take this number by six, not 64 but six which is a legitimate number because
it's built into the I Ching, you get 25,000 years roughly.
This is the procession of the great year or the equinoctial year as it's called.
So I thought, wow, this is really far out.
It's some kind of multileveled resonance calendar.
Oh, and I forgot to say about 384 days, this was central, excuse me, that this is 13 lunations.
A lunation is 29 point something days and when you multiply that number by 13, you get
383.89.
So I said, aha, what this thing is, is it keeps track of the moon on this level, it
keeps track of the sunspots on this level and it keeps track of the great year of the
zodiac on this level.
All naked eye astronomical phenomenon, not hypothesizing any advanced technology but
hypothesizing an advanced intellectual point of view.
Well, so I thought I was finished and that somehow it wanted to tell me about a Neolithic
calendar in ancient China for some reason but there was more.
Popeye had spinach, I have this.
The prompting voice said, this structure which you have created, and by the way, some of
you who are scholars of the I Ching, remember in the second half of the Wilhelm Baines translation,
there are a whole bunch of very ancient sayings that nobody knows what they're talking about,
they're so esoteric.
And the most mysterious of these sayings is the saying which says, the forward running
numbers refer to the future, the backward running numbers refer to the past.
Well in the I Ching there are no forward or backward running numbers unless you do something
like this.
And then look what you get, one, two, three, sixty-three, sixty-two, sixty-one, sixty-fifty-nine,
you get forward and backward running numbers.
So I said, wow, you know, we're digging this thing out.
The I Ching is not an oracle as it's been done at country fairs for three millennia.
The I Ching as we possess it is a piece of broken machinery.
It's as though you had, you know, the main gear out of a machine and you're trying by
archaeological reconstruction to rebuild that machine.
So I was sort of stuck at this point and the prompting voice turned on and said, this structure
which you've made, which is the entire I Ching running forward and backward against itself,
which would place it then at the top of a hierarchy, should be placed at the bottom
of a hierarchy.
Treat this thing as a single line, it said.
And I was calling this at that point the simple wave.
It said treat the simple wave as a line in a hexagram.
Now when you do that, bear with me folks, remember I said the learning curve was steep.
However, it's not long.
Can I ask if we have a vote on what color Chock is?
Oh yeah.
What color?
Yellow.
Yellow?
Yellow?
You have a box on the floor.
Let me see.
Green.
Okay, well so if we treat this module as the bottom of a hierarchy, then we want to treat
it like a line.
So what do you do with lines in I Ching land?
You stack six of them on top of each other.
So I'm going to symbolize this thing with an S. Okay?
So here's what I did.
I made, I took one of them and another one and another one
and another one.
And I said did I do good?
And it said sort of, but a hexagram is more than six lines, isn't it?
And I said well what more is it than six lines?
And I said well it's two trigrams.
I said oh, okay.
So then I went like this.
Do you see how I superimposed the thing over the six, two larger ones which were superimposed
over three?
So then I said it's all right?
It said yes, except you forgot one thing.
A hexagram has an identity as a whole, as a hexagram.
I said okay.
Good?
It said yes, good.
Now what are you going to do with it?
And I'll show this to you just so you can get the idea.
I don't know how visible this will be.
This is what you get if you do that.
And what it looks like is exactly what it looks like, which is a hodgepodge of crazy
lines running everywhere on three levels.
And the thing said to me, it said this is a map of time.
And I made the mistake of saying to my friends and acquaintances, this is a map of time.
And they said, you know, we're very concerned.
Apparently you didn't get better even though you claimed you got better.
And now you run around showing this thing to people and notice everything is in closure
up here and then everything attains closure down here.
And then there are sub-closures, six on one level, two on another, and the final one on
this one.
And finally my friend Ralph Abraham took pity on me and he said the problem with this thing
is that it's an occult dogma.
Nobody can understand this thing except you.
You are necessary for its interpretation.
And I said, so what do I do?
And he said, you must learn how to change this into a more orthodox mathematical object
that mathematicians can then discuss with you.
And I was completely stuck.
And I sat with it for two years because it just seemed, I'm not a mathematician.
I had no clue as to how to do that.
And finally one afternoon the pot was good enough or the stars moved into position or
something and in a single instant I saw how to carry out the mathematical reduction of
this wave and I did it.
[Inaudible]
Well if you look at it closely you'll see that because they are at different scales
it isn't that one side is exactly like the other side.
There are dissimilarities.
So I finally figured out how to mathemetize and conserve all the qualities of that wave
and I put it into an ordinary Cartesian object which I doubt you can see but you don't really
have to see it anyway.
All this is, see what that is?
It's just one, it's an ordinary graph of some sort.
It's the sum of certain qualities.
There was skew, parallelism, angle of approach, crossover.
There were about five things that I felt were important and I figured out how to mathemetize
them all so that this which is an ordinary Cartesian graph is in fact a topological equivalent
of my occult diagram.
And yeah.
[Inaudible]
Yeah, right.
So then I started saying to people this is a map of time and they said is it?
Well where are we?
And I said well, in order to know where we are we would have to know where the end point
is.
If you have a wave you have a wavelength so we have to find the end point.
So then I began collecting historical data and fitting curves to it trying to define
the end point.
Now remember yesterday at the close of the day or in the afternoon we got off on what
appeared to some people to be a tangent about novelty and science and time and whether it
was whether it should be viewed as a flat plane or a fractal or something like that.
Now what the thing was telling me was that novelty is something which can be charted
in time and that these waves were actually pictures of the ebb and flow of novelty.
That this wasn't charting stock prices or population rise or average temperatures.
It was charting the ebb and flow of novelty through time.
And that...
Como?
Novelty is...
Novelty is... how about density of connection?
As opposed, you know, if complexity can be quantified then you say complexity, ebbs and
flows.
I mean if we had a device which measured complexity and we measured this point right here as opposed
to this point an inch behind my finger I'm hoping it would tell us that an inch behind
my finger is a more complex environment than this point right here.
So space and time is then seen to be a medium with density... densification of complexity
embedded in it like raisins or something.
Yeah.
How do you establish origin and the end point on that particular graph?
Well until you scale it against time you don't have to.
I mean I think...
But you didn't scale it on this graph.
Well I think what you're...
I think if I understand your question right, remember how I said that over here it was
that closure?
It goes like this.
And that's both lines.
They're running... that's both sides of the graph.
They're perfectly superimposed over each other.
At this point they cease to be superimposed.
One goes that way and one goes that way.
And then you start getting this kind of stuff.
And then when you come down to the end they fall into closure again.
Yes, it's a thing of fate.
Exactly.
You got it.
OK.
So what would be the beginning of this?
Is that some fall from the garden of being?
Well to this point we haven't discussed this thing scaled against calendrical time.
We're just trying to look at it as a mathematical object.
Then what I realized was if these are part... if this thing has 384 points in it and this
has 6, then what the thing was telling me was you have to map the wave back over itself.
So you take all 384 points and you cram them into this space wandering up this hill.
Then you go to this space and you cram all 384 points in here and you create a fractal
infinite regress.
Do you understand?
Yes.
Say you understand.
You will understand.
OK.
So then that was the time map.
It was saying novelty can be described by an infinite fractal regress that is contained
in the I Ching.
Now the main objection that I was meeting from people who wanted to lock me up was they
were saying, now let's get this straight.
You want to revise modern physics based on a pattern which you found in an ancient Chinese
book of divination.
Is that correct?
And I could feel the force of that criticism because that's how I think, you know, where
somebody from some nuts piece of data then wants to build castles in the air.
And so I created a metaphor which is satisfying to me.
I hope it's satisfying to somebody else trying to explain why we should seek a law of physics
inside the structure of the I Ching.
And here's the metaphor.
Think of sand dunes.
Picture them in your mind.
Since this is the new age, you may even close your eyes if it helps.
Picture sand dunes.
Now notice that sand dunes look like wind.
Sand dunes look like wind.
And sand dunes are made by wind.
So now let's analyze the situation.
Let's think of wind as input.
And let's think of sand grains as bits inside a computer.
So when the wind blows, the program runs and the bits rearrange themselves.
And they arrange themselves into a lower dimensional slice of wind.
Essentially wind, which is a pressure variant phenomenon variable in time, turns into a
pictorial phenomenon variant across the pictorial surface.
Do you see how that works?
Well now, sand dunes created by wind bear the impression of wind.
Lines of foam and beach detritus deposited by the incoming tide bear the form of waves.
So what it was telling me was it was telling me that things formed in time bear the impression
of the forces which created them.
And I said, well then what is the equivalent of sand dunes or waves of beach detritus in
the real world?
And it said, human beings.
Genes, not grains of sand.
Genes are moved by time.
And we as hyperdimensional objects, we human beings and other animals, we bear the impression
of the forces that created us.
And if novelty truly does ebb and flow the way wind speed ebbs and flows over a landscape,
then the creatures that have arisen in time will bear the imprint of this ebb and flow.
And I believe that what was going on with the people who created the Yijing was that
they were practicing some kind of yoga or some kind of psychedelic plus yoga thing.
And they were stilling their macro physical functions and they were descending deep into
organism and there they were seeing the ebb and flow of variables of some sort.
And they watched, who knows how long, centuries maybe.
And they said, you know, in the organism there is the ebb and flow of variables.
And then they asked questions like how many variables are there?
Are there an infinite number?
And they began to create notation systems for these variables.
And finally they came to the conclusion, no, there are not an infinite number.
There are 64 of these temporal variables.
And think of them as elements in the same way that the entire world of physical manifestation
can be created out of 104 physical elements.
The entire world of temporal manifestation can be created out of 64 elements.
And so the way I think of reality, having survived this experience, is you have hexagrams
moving on many levels.
Let's say you have a hexagram which rules this 10,000 year period.
For 10,000 years this hexagram will rule.
And then on the next level the hexagrams are changing every 100 years.
And then on the next level every 10 minutes.
And on the next level every 15 seconds.
Well what any point in the matrix called now is, is the perspective you have when you look
through the moving film of these temporal elements moving on many, many levels, you
see.
They create a unique juxtaposition with each other in every single moment.
And that is what the unique felt presence of immediate reality is all about.
Well by this time, yeah question?
No.
So you're saying that you can't remember anything outside of you.
What?
That juxtaposition where they all come together, that's the place where you can access both.
I look at that and I always look at the symbol, the DJ symbol, as the guiding symbol of this
plane of reality, bound by time.
So you're talking about the exact membrane that is between time and non-time.
Is that true?
Yeah, pretty much.
I mean, you know, Plato said time is the moving image of eternity.
It's a wave front.
It's a wave front and it's an interference pattern.
Yes, it's a kind of hologram and a set of resonances and interference patterns that
are created when these waves moving at many levels of expression superimpose and collide
with each other.
And through the use of small computers, we can explore various places in the wave and
we can position it against time because what it's saying is that novelty comes and goes.
You know, yesterday was wonderful, tomorrow could be dog shit.
Same for last year and next year.
Time undergoes changes on many scales.
I mean, from moment to moment, if you watch your mind, you're going up, you're going down,
and then on the daily scale, up, down, yearly scale, up, down, and then on all scales there
is ebb and flow of novelty.
And all these scales can be mathematically collapsed into one wave and then with the
computer you can not only predict the future, which is fairly trivial because who can gainsay
it, but you can also predict the past, which is very tricky because most people have a
good deal more information about the past than they do about the future.
Yeah.
In the top level of the scale on the waves, one year you may have a larger scale, you
know, on that day you go down.
That's right.
In the second year, all of the waves go down.
Well, no, you've got the whole concept correct except you don't need an infinite number because
look what happens.
If you start with 384 days and you start multiplying upward by 64, remember I said the first one
was 67 years, well, you only have to carry out about six of these till you have 72 billion
years more time than is necessary for the universe to have birthed itself and reached
its present state.
Similarly, if you start dividing, you only have to divide 11 times to reach the realm
of Planck's constant, 6.55 times 10 to the minus 23rd erg seconds in technical parlance
known as a jiffy.
Beyond the jiffy, there is no need to continue the divisions because the jiffy defines the
grain of the canvas on which reality is projected.
So what we have are, you know, a cosmology of roughly 22 levels.
At the highest level, it's 72 billion years.
At the lowest level, it's in the realm of Planck's constant and we are somewhere suspended
in between and these things are coming and going on every level.
Yeah?
Well, the way that you arrived at these conclusions doesn't, I don't follow it all to say the
least.
However, it seems to me that you've been able to use this model, you see some difference
in the wave trends around the time of the shuttle highest compared to the third right.
Absolutely.
Do you see differences like that?
Yes, I'm hurrying us toward the more fun part of this and I think that we'll do it now.
What we're going to do now is look at the wave placed against history with my end date,
December 22nd, 2012, although the machine will accept any end date and the idea that
you should be asking yourself is, you know, this clown claims that this thing describes
the ebb and flow of novelty but does it in fact fit my intuition of the ebb and flow
of novelty?
Now, here's the good news.
The next part of the lecture does not depend on anything that's been said in the first
part.
You don't have to understand anything I've said in the last half hour to appreciate the
neatness of the next level.
Lucky for us, eh?
Is that a new way to...
That's fine, I think.
So now, because you know some people aren't interested in this.
You tell them you can predict the future and they say, "Well, predict it."
And then you predict it correctly and then they say, "Great."
It never enters their mind to ask the question, "How did you predict it?"
Which is what I, out of obligation to intellectual fairness, feel that I should expose you to.
Now, let's look at the wave, F.
Now, let me explain the rules of the game here.
There are six billion years currently on screen.
Today is over here at 98.8%.
This is the last six billion years.
And let me explain to you how you interpret the wave.
And if you want to take a moment and rearrange yourselves, the rest of it is going to be
fairly close focus on this thing.
So don't be shy and don't make yourself uncomfortable.
The end date.
I got it by fitting historical data to the wave and seeing...
I had certain intuitions.
I mean, for instance, I said, "Well, if I have a wave which describes historical novelty,
by God, it better do well on the Italian Renaissance.
It should do well on the 20th century, and it should do well on the Golden Age of Greece.
If a theory of novelty incorrectly predicts those episodes, it's a pretty worthless theory
of novelty."
Once I had chosen an end date, and I chose December 22nd, 2012, I got a lot of support
for that by realizing that the Mayan calendar chose the same end date.
Now, the only thing I had in common with the ancient Maya is that we both take psychedelic
mushrooms.
Now, is it conceivable that there is a message in the mushroom as specific as no matter where
in space and time you are and you take these mushrooms, it says December 22nd, 2012 AD?
It appears so, because the Mayans, their civilization rose and fell at a very uninteresting part
of their own calendrical machinery.
They predicted the end of the world a thousand years after their own eclipse, and they set
the birth of their calendar a thousand years preceding the emergence of their civilization.
Yeah?
So, now this year, 2012, is this what the Mayan had as a completion of a large cycle,
or is it what they are believing is the completion of all their cycles?
It depends on who you talk to.
The Mayan calendar is built up of nested cycles, some 20 years in length, some 240, and there
are 13 baktuns, which I think a baktun is 396 years in duration, and most Mayanists
believe that a set of 13 baktuns is the complete calendrical set.
There's a minority of Mayanists who want to argue that there are greater cycles than that.
In any case, baktun 13 will come to an end December 22, 2012, so, you know, it was good
enough for me.
Could you say just a little bit more about the property of novelty?
Is it synonymous with complexity?
Well, you know, since this is a push-pull theory and we have novelty versus something,
the opposite of novelty is habit.
Rupert insisted on that.
I was calling it entropy and conservatism and recidivism, and he said, "No, no.
It's a war between habit and novelty."
Habit means a reversion to a traditional and already established pattern.
Novelty means a breaking out into a previous domain, untested domain of new connections
and new possibilities.
Do you mean serendipity?
You mean as in...
Something about them surprising you.
Yes, the unexpected is built into it, because when you come around some of these curves,
there are unexpected things going on.
What about the chaos order zone?
Sounds like that a little bit.
Yeah, well, you could think of it that way.
I haven't completely resolved how novelty should be defined, because if you know anything
about information theory, you know that they've had a hell of a time getting a definition
of complexity together over there.
They also are interested in mathematical definitions of complexity, but they haven't made too much
progress.
This concludes Tape 6.
Our program continues with Tape 7.
Tree Of Knowledge (7)
Our program continues with tape 7
Let me explain to you how to read the graph because it's the exact opposite
psychologically of
Stock market graph. I think when you look at a stock market most of us want it to go up not down in this game
We want it to go down
The novel the higher states of novelty occur as you approach zero
So this is the most novel point on the screen. This is the most
habit
Impacted moment on the screen and what you see is habit and novelty are at war with each other
Now here's how I interpret this particular screen and it is a basis for interpreting all the rest
This is a turning point
after a long period of habit
consolidation and
Activism whatever that means that 4.7 billion years ago
Something very novel happened along this descent
I maintained that it's actually the stabilization of the surface of the earth itself
That what we're seeing here is the earth
changing into a stable planetary body and then
The earliest forms of life
the proto life
appears right here and
Undergoes the series then of fluctuations then there is some kind of a problem
Some impediment to what would otherwise be the rather straight shot toward novelty by this
spike here well
Evolutionary biologists say that in the early history of the earth
There was a crisis having to do with the production of oxygen as a waste gas life arose in a non-reducing
atmosphere the first
pollution crisis in the history of the earth was pollution by oxygen and
organisms had to develop complex membranes and mechanisms for dealing with this and that's what happened along here and
Once that was achieved then the pace of novelty quickened and the descent
continued and we our entire civilization in fact
You know the last bill million years as a matter of fact is lost down here in the stochastic
fluctuation near the zero point in other words relative to these places in the wave
We're so near the maximum of novelty that it's practically
punching in through the walls and in fact human civilization
Correctly mirrors that I mean where you would expect to find a civilization on this graph is somewhere down in here
Well now if everything is working, right?
90 let's yeah
98.8% is the today
The target date of today now what I'm gonna do is there's a zoom function here
and we're gonna start flying toward the present and
Every time a screen changes we're gonna see half as much time on the screen
We have six billion years up. We'll go to three
Then one and a half then point seven five and so forth
This seems to be an excellent computer with a fast chip. So
Yeah, yeah, yeah and we're gonna and if we're gonna get greater and greater detail and
Your attitude toward this should be I'm asserting that this is true
You have a notion of where the high points in the evolutionary and human history have occurred
You should be asking yourself whether this fits your intuition now, obviously
It's pretty vague stuff when we're looking at six billion years
but on the other hand we can take this thing down to three days if necessary and
We know where the great changes have come in the last thousand years. It's not that ambiguous
So let's test the zoom function
Zoom it asks me. Yes, I reply seek minimum. It asks me. No, I reply
Approach factor it asks me and I'm going to tell it to in order to have the screen each time
It would accept any number but to seems rational for demonstration purposes
No, it's gonna slice the time it's gonna slice it each time and rescale
So is the origin of time here also like the origin you would presume so
The Big Bang would kind of like be in the middle of the novel piece
The Big Bang would be no the Big Bang would be very high because
There's no life. There's no atomic systems. There's no molecules. It's a very low complexity
situation at the birth of the universe
Yeah, no, yes, that's right the Big Bang is somewhere up here up here
Okay. Now before I do this, let me locate escape, okay
This is such a pleasure to do it with fast machines
Okay, there's three billion see how detail is coming up as time is lost
And if anybody wants me to stop it at any point I will
Here's
750 million years
This is virtually the entire history of life on earth and in fact of higher life
I'm sorry, you know organisms not not
multicellular life
This is the history of multicellular life and what you see is there was a steep descent into novelty
until about
300 million years ago and then there were a series of oscillations close to zero
until
About 65 million years ago and then there's a sudden plunge deeper into novelty immediately
preceding the
Concrescence which occurs on at dawn Greenwich Mean Time December 22nd 2012 one thing about this theory
It's not vague
And it noticed that it doesn't hedge on predictions either it fills every screen is full of predictions
To
Approach factor. Yeah, okay. We've got 750 million years on the screen
375 million years on the screen now. I want to talk about this for a minute
Now this is a screen full of dramatic predictions
these are tremendously punctuated and temporally defined plunges into novelty and
We don't have tremendous
Paleontological records for what's going on?
275 million years ago, but from studying these low points and
talking to
Geochronologists about them. I've decided that these are
Planetesimal impacts on the earth now, you know that the last one was 65 million years ago. That's this one
Right there, but there were others there was one
this one
220 million years ago Oh
Asteroid strikes on the earth. Oh
Well, there was a little tiny one in Arizona those happen all the time in cosmic terms every hundred thousand years or so
But this thing that happened 65 million years ago was a planet shatterer
And they are rare. They're rare
Okay, so so I'm suggesting that these are asteroid impacts which then evolution has to restart
Reclaim its territory and then there is something else happening. They may not all be asteroid impact
They could be you know enormous episodes of volcanism on the earth such as the Deccan traps in India or something like that
Now let's start the thing again
What we're looking at now 375
Seek minimum no approach factor to go for it
That's
187 million years. There's the impact 65 million years ago
Now let's look at this. This is the last 93 million years
Oh, yes, it looks like the thing we started out with somebody's paying attention right on yes, yes
See what happens is a fractal is a nested data set and
Every time you pass through a whole number the pattern repeats
This sets up a very interesting
Set of circumstances inside the wave which is that we can talk about temporal resonance
We can talk about how the Third Reich is a resonance of ancient Egypt
We can talk about Saddam Hussein as a resonance of
Mohammed because when we look at the way these things are lined up historically we see that
directly above Saddam Hussein and in a
relationship of parallelism is the career of the Prophet and so
What is being suggested here?
Is that every day every moment is in fact an interference pattern?
Created by other times and places
This is not this is a fairly challenging and peculiar idea not
Something the linear Western mind would have ever come up with so for instance if you should find yourself
Having lunch in a place called Hadrian's hamburger stand
This has something to do with the Emperor Hadrian and his four-year military campaign in Scotland
He is a direct causal influence on your being at Hadrian's hamburger stand for lunch
I like to say
Rome falls nine times an hour and you have to be
Acceptive you have to be paying attention to the ebb and flow of your own inner thoughts
But if you are you feel the fall of Rome you also feel the age of exploration of the birth of Buddha
The the fall of Carthage it all happens nine times an hour
It also happens twice a day and once a year. Yeah
Sometimes yeah, it is very similar
That
That's right
Yeah, there's we've never tried to do it
scientifically, you know where you would actually keep track but
Major astrological conjunctions are often reflected in major
Aggressions into novelty interestingly if you or anyone else that's aware of this ever try to convolve
No, because I'm not smart enough to do that
That's right, I think God has chosen you for this work
Oh
Well Ronald Reagan was
His historical ante antecedents were the last six Roman emperors
before the fall of Rome in 475 and
Bush's antecedent is
No
I think I think I think Bush gets to be
Justinian you remember somebody said history always occurs twice first as tragedy then as farce
That person had a good intuitive
So now let's go into this a little more how much time do you have on 93 million years? Okay. So here's the
here's the asteroid impact and and
Dead-on, I mean 65 million years is right there to the degree that we can date these two events
It's a winner. It's a bullseye and
You know, it was a huge setback for organic life as I said this morning
Nothing larger than a chicken survived it
the mammals began their radiation and and
These are you know, just different the sissitudes
I'm not sure what to make of this spike here
But I haven't really spent a lot of time on that period from 40 to 36 million years ago
Somebody else may have a notion as to what this represents
Which it was and
evolutionary biologists say you know that forms quickly reoccupied all the niches and remember if this hadn't happened
We wouldn't be the planetary rulers that we are
We'd still be little furry creatures trying to steal eggs out of the nests of the saurian
Masters who ruled the planet big why?
Because all the dinosaurs were killed in this impact and that allowed these little egg stealing rodent like furry creatures
To undergo an explosive evolutionary radiation leading directly to our own
vast
superiority over the rest of nature
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh
That's a whole different scale you see the dinosaurs died off 65 million years ago
The ice ages are a phenomenon of the last five million years and we'll see the ice ages
But not there right now those ice ages are down in here
Somewhere lost in the detail. Let's go back to our zoom. Oh
Yeah, we'll get there
Don't worry
No, we don't want to seek the minimum the approach factor should be two
Okay, 93 million years on the screen 46 million years on the screen
23 million
Eleven million
Five million five million years on the screen now, here are your ice ages here they are you see
when the ice is in place
species are bottled up and
Gene transfer is impeded this constitutes a non novel
Situation then when the ice melts these gene pools re-encounter each other and you get proliferation of form
We're getting excellent agreement here. This is the melting of the last glacier
Maybe
Yeah, I think it's actually over here still lost in detail
But these are you know how evolution is described as punctuated how it isn't that evolution proceeds smoothly
But there will be a climaxed stasis and then suddenly many new species
Well, these are the punctuated evolution
This is actually a picture of punctuated evolution and the high numbers of species are down in these troughs and the low numbers
Of species are on these ascents close to the changeover
points so
Again, the paleontological data isn't that clear but at this scale of resolution?
We're getting good agreement between data and theory
I think it's different nests identical in both amplitude and phase, do you know?
In other words, can you take this section that you're looking at superimposed over the other nest and have it
overlayed identically
Well, it's the they are topologically equivalent but not numerically equivalent
Yeah
That's right, it's a damped oscillation is really what we're saying
I just wonder if there's any phase shift because that's one of the things that an FFT could...
I mean, this is an ideal way for an FFT that's relatively easy to do
Yeah, well, I hope you'll be on it by Monday afternoon
Okay, let me restart the zoom
No, I'm restarting the zoom. Zoom, yes
I have a question
Okay
About magnetic poles
Yes, these could very well be magnetic reversals
Yeah, they very well could be magnetic reversals and
Well, what we're looking at is I'm suggesting they're ice ages
It was suggested that they're geomagnetic reversals
Geomagnetic reversals and ice ages may even have links to each other
Well, we see that over here a steep descent into novelty going deeper than we've ever gone before
And that would probably indicate that an animal or an organ is appeared of a density of complexity greater than anything which preceded it
So I would say yes
How are those that...
Well, let me start the zoom and we'll get over in here on a big scale and then you can see
Okay, we're going to go from 5 million down to 2 million
Now let's discuss this
Because this is the domain in which we evolved
Our story is on screen at this point
It's said that
100,000 years ago at the Klostus Cave river mouth in South Africa there were homo sapiens indistinguishable from the people sitting in this room
The oldest homo sapiens skeletons are from there
That's clear over here
This is the Pangida radiation meaning the proliferation of these primate forms
And that's about 900 million years ago
This is the whole period in which the primates were breaking away from the rest of nature
And this is I think probably where the mushrooms begin to come into the picture
And see how the whole system is propelled into lower levels of novelty than anything which preceded it
Higher levels of novelty
When the wave moves down novelty is increasing
Zoom? Yes, minimum, no
That's one way of saying it or increased density of connection
Or it means something happening which has never happened before
Which allows novelty to build upon itself
We talked about this a little bit yesterday about how the early universe was very simple
And then came ordinary chemistry and then organic chemistry and then life
And then complex life and then higher animals and then primitive human beings
And then language and culture and then computers and particle accelerators
And all of this representing steeper and steeper descents into novelty
Headed toward a confrontation with novelty at infinite density
Not millennia or millennia in the future but 20 years from now
It's not only that something's being created that was never created before that's being stored or implemented in the entire system
Conserved is the word I use but yes that's right
What does this relate to the fact that the last 20 years not going to mind
Is part of the age of 20 years and we're entering the last 20 years of the calendar
Is that ever correct?
That's right
Well when we get to the present you'll be able to see the past few months
The next few months, the next few years
We approach it this way because I want to convince you that there's something sort of woo woo about this thing
It does seem to have an uncanny predictive ability
Now the most commonly met objection to this and it may be forming in your mind is
That this guy just doesn't understand patterns
And that every pattern can be used to describe a different pattern
But I resist this because notice that this whole set of correlations is dependent upon this zero date which we inputted
If we shift the zero date then all the other predictions would be thrown off
Well now naturally if we shift the zero date 50 years it's not going to have a hell of an effect on an event 175 million years ago
But if we move the date 50 years and we look at 1492, you know, it's all screwed up
You have to be right on the money when you get into the historical data field
Because the historical data field can vary over a 24 hour period
I mean John F. Kennedy dead, John F. Kennedy alive, the difference is 10 minutes
So it can be very highly quantified, specific
Now, okay, enter, that's 2 million, roughly 3 million years on the screen
One and a half million years on the screen
700,000, let's look at this for a minute
This is the last million years
And the last 100,000 years are right there
It's the emergence of modern human types and it sets off the last cascade
At least at this scale
So all of this is evolutionary advance and climatological flux and so forth
And then from the time the modern human type emerges it's a straight shot down in there
[inaudible]
Now, obviously we all know more about time as we get closer to the present
This is 366,000 years, it's 100,000 years up there
There's the last 200,000 years
There's the last 100,000 years
This is the environment in which we were shaped
These are climatological fluctuations here
This is the last glaciation
Oh, I forgot, it's shipped to the computer, sorry
[laughter]
Is it dying or is it having a good time?
It's an orgasm
Anyway, it's a very happy thing to be here
Why are you doing this in such a way?
What are you doing this evening?
[laughter]
You can't, when Harry met Sally, remember that orgasm in the restaurant?
Remember the orgasm in the restaurant when Harry met Sally? Vaguely
[laughter]
Okay, this is the last 91,000 years
The glaciers melt here
The glacial melt begins around 19,000 years ago
And as you see, it's just a straight fall from there to the moon flight
and to H. Ross Perot and to all the rest of it
And these are again episodes probably of glaciation
It's not like it's in the box in the incidence of incoming cosmic radiation
It's hard to say what it is
[inaudible]
Oh yeah, we can go down, we can take it down to very small
But I mean, understand that the program does many wonderful things
which we're not doing
I'm just doing a simple demo, but obviously all this stuff has got to be about something
[laughter]
Now we're getting into the area where people have real data
That's 45,000 years
22,000 years on the screen
Let's look at this for a minute
This is worth talking about
Now the pressure begins to come on
It's all very well to predict interglacials that may or may not have occurred
Predicting assassinations of dynastic families is a little trickier
Here's the glacial melt begins
And species, this is the descent
This is where the mushroom paradise existed in its fullest expression
From about 17,000 years ago to about 10,000 years ago
Well now, what is this sudden interruption of the descent into novelty here?
I maintain, based on the archaeological record, that it's what is called the "tanged point technocomplex"
Do you all know what that is?
It's, uh, does anybody know what it is?
Tanged point technocomplex means that before this point, when an arrowhead is found, you find one
It means it was lost by somebody who was hunting
Around 10,000 BC, you begin to find large numbers of arrowheads all in one place without chipping fragments
This was not an arrowhead factory
This was the site of a battle between human populations
War is invented here because agriculture is invented here
You're looking at the end of the partnership paradise
The era of orgy gives way to the era of anxious monogamy, warfare, agriculture, you know, ego-hood is born
Now, somebody asked about, who asked about Chattal-Yoyuk? Somebody
Chattal-Yoyuk, bottom of this stab here
The fire that burned through Chattal level 5a occurred in 6500 BC
You know this from charcoal dating, it's right there, it's on the money
See, somehow this whole tanged point technocomplex bummer was overcome
And there was a steep descent into novelty
And Chattal-Yoyuk was the product of that
But then it was destroyed and there was a rebound into chuckleheadedness for a while
And then right down here in the bottom of this thing is where the great pyramid is sitting
You know, the great pyramid was finished in September of 2970 BC
Why this should be so controversial, I do not understand
Because there are grains of charcoal between the unmoved stones
That charcoal has not been anywhere since the day that stone was set in place
Since 2790 BC, these people who want to push it back and say it's 10,000 years old
Well, the obligation to prove is on them because the carbon radiological data argues
You see, there's some tendency in the new age, which I don't understand very well
That wants to make everything older than it is
You know, the pyramids are 50,000 years old, Atlantis, Rosenfell, 100,000 years old
And the miracle is how new everything is
The pyramids were built day before yesterday
Charlemagne was king of France early this morning
It's all very, very recent
I mean, the emergence of mind out of non-mind is an event practically on top of us
Now let's start it up and we'll get really down to the...
Charlemagne, is the progression of mind changing?
Well, yes, in a sense
Because you see, what happens is when you...
It's a built-in mathematical property of this wave
That when you get to the end of a big wave
When you get to the end on any scale
There's a sudden drop to the next scale
And then it goes along to the end
And then there's a sudden drop
So if what we're saying is that a universe is made like...
A universe that actually had this structure that I outlined for you
Of 26 levels where each level was 1/64th smaller than the level which preceded it
A universe built on that kind of architectonics
Would only be halfway through its life
An hour and 35 minutes before the end
Do you see how that would work?
That in the last hour and 35 minutes
It's going to go through as much development
As it went through in the previous 72 billion years
So yes, time is accelerating, accelerating
And we've gone from barely moving to approaching a staggering speed
And I maintain that in 2012
The last six days preceding the approach to concrescence
Will be the jackpot
I mean, the laws of physics will break down
Everything will be in a state of visible, motile transformation
This isn't happening in the human world
It isn't happening in our minds
It's a crisis in the structure of physical law itself
And that's why this theory will be hard to disprove
Or prove until so close to the end date
That you'll barely have time to make a telephone call
To say whether it's true or not
Before, if it is true, your telephone call becomes totally irrelevant
What you're essentially saying is the fabric of the baseline itself
Is being contorted, twisted and involved
Yeah, that's right
No, that's right
If that seems unlikely to you
Let's never forget what the orthodox guys are peddling
They're peddling the Big Bang theory
Which says the universe sprang from nothing in a single instant
I would prefer what I call the Big Surprise cosmology
Because it seems to me, if you have to have a singularity
The least likely place to find a singularity
Would be in a featureless high vacuum
If you want to find a singularity
Look in a corner of the universe where there are
Planets, stars, elements, organisms, alphabets
Civilizations, minds
In other words, look in a complex domain
If you want to find a singularity
That's where you might have some chance of finding it
But finding it in an unflawed nothingness
Is a strange place to look even
One of the arguments maybe being proposed by those on the fringe
Is that in fact it's a very complex universe
That's been pushed through a membrane into the singularity
Which then creates another entire
Well, one possibility is that it's a wrap around
That we're not whistling Dixie
When we talk about the archaic revival
What history is, is a finger reaching for the reset button
And when you finally touch it, you find yourself at the moment of the big bang
You know, you've actually sent it screaming back to the first moment
So this is an exercise in holographic in a sense
That final six days is a very pertinent and potent holographic description
Of the whole baby
That's right, and every cycle is a holographic description of the cycles that preceded it
That we've just seen
Right
So in 1945, when the bomb flickers into existence over Hiroshima
This is the resonance of the big bang
It's being caused by the big bang
And the entire life of the universe
Is then somehow re-enacted in the remaining 67 years
In the same way, remember there was a 4306 year cycle
We are re-enacting that cycle in the present 67 year cycle
We have reached AD 700 right now
I mean, if you wonder why things are so benighted
It's because we're in the heart of the dark ages
You wonder why you can't understand the nature of the collapse of the state vector
Well, it's because you have an AD 700 intellectual machine looking at it
My God, the calculus hasn't been invented
Algebra hasn't been invented
The new world hasn't been discovered
These things will all happen ahead of us
Right now we are in the heart of the dark ages
By the late 90s we'll be closing distance with the renaissance
Clearly we have to put up with a bunch of Christ or fundamentalism
Epidemic diseases and general not-headedness until we get to that point
But then after the turn of the century
We can expect the equivalent of the renaissance
The industrial reformation
The rise of Napoleon, the civil war, Adolf Hitler
It'll just be coming quick, quick, quick, quick
And finally, you know, it just pulls you in
Everything happens at once
One way of thinking of this is that the entire rest of the future history of the universe
Is being compressed into the next 20 years
It's just saying, yeah
Yeah
But in other words, the heat death of the universe is 20 years away
Essentially is what is being suggested
Because time is beginning to accelerate at such a rate that this compression factor is enormous
Okay, now let me see, what have we got?
We've got 22,000 years on the screen
And we talked about it, so let me shift here
Oh no, zoom, yes
Set minimum, no
[inaudible]
Yes, I think, you know, Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book
Anybody read it? What was it called?
Nobody read it, it was called
Anyway, the premise of the book was that time is accelerating
But he thought of it as social time, cultural time
I don't
I think it's embedded in the fabric of space-time itself
Yes, I think in a few, you see, you can only react to crises that you understand
So if I tell you the ozone hole is disappearing, you're alarmed
If I tell you an asteroid is going to strike the earth, you're alarmed
But if I tell you that the earth is about to collide with a hyperdimensional knot in the nexus of space-time
But that's what's happening
Ahead of us is an enormous speed bump
We are colliding
We're about to collide with something that we can barely cognize
So it's hard to know what to think about it
This may be a little la-la and a bit simplistic, but consider this, you know, we all have experiences
That's sort of shifting of time and just the experience of one lifetime
You know, like a two or three year old
The moment as we experienced it seemed to last a longer period of time
I mean, my God, summer has lasted forever and whatnot
We don't have that, and it's sort of
Well, that's what happens over the course of a lifetime
What happens if consciousness shifts out to infinity?
What happens to the moment then?
It becomes vanishingly small or in terms of the frequency
It stops, it stops
Yeah, well see
Before it stops, it's speeding up
In other words, the span is becoming shorter and shorter
Say if you take a second, the second it becomes shorter
That means in effect that the whole process is speeding up until it collapses
Yes, it's possible that dying takes forever
Right
You see
That's what it's meant for, the singularity
So, you know, you start to die and then you die and die
And then you realize you're going to die forever and never approach it
Because the seconds become stretched into millions of years
It's something like that
And I think psychedelics are about the fabric of time
When you strip away the hallucinations and the personal reference and the craziness
The bare bones of it are
It's about time, it illuminates what time is
Yes
Yeah
Something I've actually been moving to Highlander
They have a term called the quickening
And I've noticed a lot of people in the next few circles are excellent
You know this sense of quickening time
Of something approaching when time is quickening towards that end point
People are seeing more or less on the X to X field, a lot more epic than the genic towards that
Yeah, I mean, see, part of the problem with perceiving what's going on
Is that we're like mayflies or something
I mean, we live so briefly that to us it looks like the world is standing still
But in fact, staggering amounts of change are going on
The automobile is 100 years old, for crying out loud
We can't conceive of a reality without the automobile
And just in my lifetime, you know, I've seen immense change
And this is going to accelerate eventually to the point where I believe they'll hold conferences on the acceleration of time
People will, boards will be appointed to try and figure out if anything can be done about it and stuff like that
I know you have a distaste for quantum physics, but there was a conference apparently last spring in Spain
Actually it was a conference of astrophysics, I believe, because I heard some reports on it
A serious topic of discussion was the fact that
Trying to attempt to answer the question, does time exist?
I mean, this was being serious on the agenda at some astrophysics conference
Yeah, time is the great misunderstood or ununderstood quantity in our lives, for sure
Kerenson
Yep
You refer to those orthodox guys and their big bang theory
Right
So you reject the big bang theory
I don't necessarily reject it
I just think they shouldn't sneer at me when their theory is so cockamamie
I mean, in other words, I haven't proposed anything weirder than the big bang
Saying that a universe can condense itself faster and faster down into a super novel object
Sounds to me like a considerably more conservative statement than to say that a universe can spring from nothing for no reason in a single instant
They've cornered the market on the unlikely approach to cosmology
Do you have any book to refer to as an alternative to that?
To their theory? No, but I'm going to write one
There's actually a serious debate on the whole topic
I mean, there was a book recently published in the last year
Did the big bang happen? It was written by another cosmologist
Well, the big bang looked like it was in real trouble as recently as six months ago, but the new data from this
Is it OGOES-3 or one of these satellites?
They finally actually found irregularities in the microwave background
And until they found some irregularities, they were in a real mess
Because they couldn't figure out how you get from the super smooth initial conditions to the clumpy present situation
Now this new data appears to have pulled their chestnuts out of the fire
But I think the big bang may be in need of serious revision
I mean, you have the inflationary, the super inflationary cosmology as an attempt to fix some of those problems
But it gets, you know, there are problems, yeah
Well, the purpose is true that this derivation on the machine doesn't apply
We would expect small fluctuations in the background radiation because of the fact of the nature of what we were talking about
That's right
Right at the beginning
Also, in the side I'd like to mention about it
In the Bible Jesus said that things would be speeded up when you're coming down
What did he say exactly?
I can't remember the exact quote, but he in effect said that events would be speeded up in the time of the period
Yeah, that's absolutely right, if we get a little deeper into this we can even discuss maybe why he would have said such a thing
Because I think we can illuminate it
Here, let's do a little more
We've got 22,000 years on the screen
11,000 years on the screen
5,000 and some
This is in a way my favorite screen because this book I want to write I'm going to call History's Fractal Mountain
And there it is, folks
History's Fractal Mountain
Chatalya Yook is over here in the bottom of this
Along this descending gradient here, like pearls on a string, you get the great ancient civilizations
Ur, Chaldea, Babylon, and Egypt
And this actually, the graph actually confirms the intuition of the theosophical mentality
That Egypt did achieve some level of advance that was not surpassed until late Roman times
That there was a tremendous breakthrough on the part of these civilizations
This negative habitual or recidivist upward curve is studded with a whole bunch of warlike male dominator civilizations
The Hittites, the Mitanni, the Assyrians
And up here at the top, Mycenaean pirates overwhelm the last outpost of the goddess culture on Minoan Crete
This is Homer, right there
Homer sings his song
And if that, that to me fits, because I had a professor who once said to me
"You want to know where it went wrong? I'll tell you where it went wrong"
When these Greeks pulled their boats up on the shore and stopped being fishermen
And started talking philosophy, the shit hit the fan
And that's precisely what happened, there it is
You see this steep, steep descent into novelty
And then after the fall of Rome, oscillation around a mean
Where it's sort of up, it's sort of down
But there's no real progress until the industrial reformation
I mean, in the industrial revolution of the 1740s
Well that makes sense, because any kind of attempt at
Descent into novelty, or ascent into novelty
Would have been suppressed by the emerging church at the time
That's right, well of course this isn't Eurocentric, it's global
Where do you go from BC to ADL?
Oh you mean where is the birth of Christ?
Roughly, it's right here
It's this, there's a little kind of a choke
And then a very steep fall right afterwards, that's the birth of Christianity
Of the Roman Empire versus the Republic and so forth
I'll read the dates here, I mean these are all the BC numbers, 36 BC
You're right about in there
Yeah, it's sort of right about there
Well let's see, we may get it on the next pass
[inaudible]
Well it wasn't at first, it was physical
It was that atomic physics gave way to chemistry
Which gave way to molecular biology, which gave way to life
It keeps moving, it keeps being active at the front of the wave
But it leaves a residual behind it of these previously created structures
Right now the wave is clearly lodged in our species
While everything else is under the aegis of Darwinian mechanics
We're apparently under the aegis of cultural mechanics
It depends on the intensity of the prominent feature
If a meteor came in in the middle of some of this, it would obliterate what you're seeing there
And another feature would stand out in the way
It's not really being dictated by human life, but it just so happens
[inaudible]
How so?
[inaudible]
It keeps condensing toward, it builds on complexity
Wherever there is complexity, you will get more complexity
It doesn't build on simplicity
It builds on the last most complex achievement, see
So intelligence rests on animal organization, which rests on cellular biology
Which rests on molecular biology, which rests on physical
[inaudible]
You got it, okay
Two
[inaudible]
Now pretty soon, now there's the descent
Here, let's stop and look
[silence]
The crucifixion is right there
And it's interesting, you know, Christ was an absolute contemporary of Caesar Augustus
So you get this great religious reformer
At the same time that you get the great reformer of Roman polity
So two of the most important personalities who ever lived are alive at that point
That, strangely enough, does not win the prize
This deep little chip here
If we were to blow that up and look at the bottom of that trough
There was a moment when you could have had a dinner party
When Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, Pythagoras
And Ezekiel could have all gotten drunk together
Had they been able to find each other
Right back there in the, immediately preceding the Greek Renaissance
Now the fall of Rome is in 475, right there
And you see how the time after the fall of Rome is all of a certain general character
Clear up to 1700
And then certain technologies and mathematical techniques propel to an even deeper level of novelty
Now the next screen is the one that I think is probably where we either win or lose you
Look at the overall shape of that way
It's clear that there's an overlying principle at work here
I mean the birth and death of Christ is practically noise upon that curve
There's a deep, strong move into novelty and those superpositions of those events are relatively much
That's true
He was arguing that maybe Christ was a blood
Well it just points out that it's not being driven by what we would perceive as being
You know, it's not being driven by these great personalities
They are being driven by it
I'm sure that if you could have stepped into Christ's mind while he was undergoing the passion
The main question he was asking himself was, "What is going on?"
You know, "Why do I say what I do?"
"Why do I do what I do?"
"I don't seem to be my own person"
You know, "I seem to be a puppet of some cosmic force"
Because he was a puppet of some cosmic force
You see, the transcendental object at the end of time is like one of those reflecto balls that hang in discos, you know
And as it turns and spins, it sends off distorted reflections of itself which ricochet into the past
And if you are correctly situated, it'll turn you into a Christ, or a Buddha, or a Lao Tzu
If you're not quite correctly situated, it turns you into a Madame Blavatsky, a Meister Eck...
In other words, second stringers
If it's...
If it's...
You know, if you just get a little of it
Well, then you're a person with strange insights and great personal charisma
And the people around you love you
We all are very close to this thing
Every night when you dream, you come into the presence of the transcendental object at the end of time
We are all distorted reflections of the last thing
And as we get closer and closer to the eschaton, the last thing
The distortion begins to leave
And you say, "My God, it's like watching a photograph from an SX-70 develop"
First it's just murk, and then you say, "Oh, there's a person there, and it's getting clearer and clearer"
We are actually being pulled into the attractor, the veils are being parted
The truth is becoming more and more and more eminent
And in the final confrontation with it, it's the apotheosis
It's the apocalypse, the apotheosis, the apocatasticis
A whole bunch of Greek words beginning with "A"
We're all idiots
No
Well, that would have been the things we would have really carried by this Christmas
OK
Did you enter a time span in that too?
Well, no, it picked up the time span that we had
See, it just accepted the correction
Thank you very much
Good thinking
Now, is it all right?
Yes
OK, now, this is the screen upon which the theory will stand or fall
Because this is the screen that is filled with the history that we know
We're not talking fossil records or chatalia, or any of that
We're talking very precise dates
This is saying that there was a very steep descent into novelty around 948 AD
What is this?
What is this sector again?
1400 years
And this first steep descent into novelty is the intellectual flowering of Islam
Within the confines of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphate
And the invention of algebra
An intellectual tool that sets the stage for modern science
Essentially, this is the birth of modern science
And you see how steep, sudden and precipitous it was
OK, then you go over to this next one
And let me try something here since this is such a fast machine
See, I'm moving the little pointer
And it's telling me exactly what I'm pointing at
I haven't done this for you before
But this is very good for checking these things
Oh, to know exactly the date
To know exactly, yes
We're pointing at the exact date
And I want to get it over here
To the bottom of this sucker
1,121 AD
The first crusade
The collapse of fortress Europe
This is the beginning of the globalization of the European mind
We're dead on here
OK, now the next steep descent into novelty is this one, obviously
Let's go over there and see what it is
There it is
1,430
Oh no, 1,358
I'm sorry, just a minute here
Let me get my ducks in a row
OK, do we all agree it's pointing at the bottom of the thing?
Yes
It's at the end of the anomaly, not the beginning of the anomaly
No, that's the densest point of the novelty
It's 1,354
What happened in 1,354?
Black and white Europe
That's right, one third of the population of Europe
dies in an 18 month period
Beginning in late 1,354
The greatest demographic collapse that Europe has ever experienced
It's an absolute hit
Dead on
Now let's go over here
Notice though that the recovery is quick
There's a steep descent into novelty and an almost immediate reversion
back up to the same level of habit
Exactly, business as usual
But this next one is different
It's a steep descent into novelty
And then it really stays down for a long time and explores this
So let's go over to the turning point
which is up at the top
Terence, do you cross references with Indian culture and Chinese culture?
It's global, but having said that
you have to notice that
the world is now dominated by European values and culture
So while we can chart the ebb and flow of the Han dynasty
at this point European culture is moving to the fore
because European culture is beginning to put its imprint on all of world history
This concludes Tape 7
Our program continues with Tape 8
Tree Of Knowledge (8)
[ ]
[...continues with tape eight]
[...but you also can't forget this is a superposition of many factors]
That's right. This is a picture of a resonance pattern, an interference pattern of many times and places.
Now, up here at the top of this thing, at the very top, it's 1455.
What happened in 1455? Does anyone know?
Columbus was born.
What? Columbus was born? Thanks for playing.
[laughter]
In 1455, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turk, making European access to the Far East impossible.
Therefore, the age of exploration begins, and you get Vasco da Gama and all those people.
This was a tremendously shattering event for European civilization to lose Constantinople to the Ottoman Turk.
Now, let's go over to... or wait, back, I mean, to this place.
This is another very seminal event which, combined with this Constantinople loss, sets the stage for this descent into novelty.
Even though it's way up here in habit, there's a little chip out as there's a novel invention of some sort that happened in 1540.
1440?
1440, I'm sorry. The invention is the invention of printing in Mainz in 1440.
That did it, friends, as far as most people are concerned.
Enlarge at one set now? Good idea.
One more.
Yeah, let's do one zoom.
I think I have to move it over clear all the way before we do that zoom or there'll be some kind of a screw-up.
Yeah, you'll focus on that one.
Right. Let me...
This is absolutely incredible.
Well, I'm glad you like it because it's my best trick.
[laughter]
Not bad.
No, we only have one for Macintosh.
I do, I do.
Oh, you do? You do?
It's just we haven't written the manual yet.
Oh.
How much are you going to do?
Oh, hard to say.
Okay, now it's pointing at today.
Now let's do our zoom.
Approach factor two.
Strange that it didn't ask for the seek minimum, isn't it?
Okay.
Now we're seeing the same thing again. We're just seeing it in higher detail.
But what I'll fudge by telling you that up here, 1455, down here, 1492.
Along this screaming descent into novelty are all the painters of the Quattrocento.
This is the Italian Renaissance, this descent into novelty.
And this is the era of exploration.
1492.
Good, huh? Good, good.
The absolute thing is in 1485.
And all the painters of the Italian Renaissance are along this thing.
Now notice that in 1492, there isn't an instant rebound.
There's 1492.
But instead, because this lost half of the planet has been discovered, this sets off the age of discovery.
And habit is unable to reassert itself because too much peculiar data is flowing in.
Too many new lands, peoples, materials, philosophies, alphabets, languages, sexual styles, cuisines.
It's like they're overwhelmed.
However, after a while, they get their act together and manage to turn it into hell itself.
Right there. Right...
It's a big one.
What that is, what ends the era of discovery and optimism and psychedelic exotica is the 30 Years War.
The 30 Years War begins in 1619.
It ends in 1648.
It begins with Europe medieval.
It ends with Europe modern.
Parliaments have replaced popes and kings.
The whole name of the game has been changed.
Now, the 30 Years War lasts, as I said, until 1648.
Sorry.
1648.
At the bottom of this cut in here, which is in a situation of rising habit, there nevertheless is a strong tendency toward novelty,
reaching a culmination in 1677.
Newton publishes the Principia.
The celestial mechanics are put on a firm basis.
The calculus has been invented.
The world of modern science is now completely in place.
And what, aside from the 30 Years War, what Europe is exporting to the rest of the world on this hellish upswing is slavery, the patron system, forced labor,
brutal return to habitual methods of the past.
You may not know that slavery died with the fall of the Roman Empire.
If you owned a slave during the medieval period, you owned one slave.
It was a house slave.
And it proved, your ownership of this person proved that you were a person of immense wealth.
It would be like owning a beach bonanza today.
It's beyond owning a Rolls Royce.
But the need for a drug, strangely enough, the drug being sugar, reversed this.
And in the 1440s, they began buying Africans and taking them to the Canary Islands to work sugar.
So, you know, the moral power of Western civilization could not stand in the way of the re-establishment of slavery and the sugar trade.
Now, up here at the top of this thing, there is a steep, there's a twist, a turn right there.
In 1739, this is the European Enlightenment.
The European Enlightenment was the great intellectual step that set the stage for secular civilization.
People like Voltaire.
And out of that came two revolutions.
Well, the Inquisition would have been, I presume, a fairly un-novel thing since what it was was a power group torturing the helpless, which there's nothing new in that, for heaven's sake.
It went on for a long time, too.
It went on for a long time.
But actually, it was a Spanish phenomenon.
It was confined geographically to a number, to a very small number of places.
Right there, August 1st, 1776, the American Revolution takes place as a consequence of this steep descent into novelty at the beginning of the European Enlightenment.
Well, as you know, the American Revolution is generally thought to have had a happy conclusion.
The French Revolution, not so happy.
And if you explode that area and look, you can see that they're happening on different slopes of this thing.
Then the restoration of Louis Napoleon in 1803 is there.
This bump is the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, which were the first modern wars and completely distorted the demographics of the United States and Europe.
And now I want to... The Franco-Prussian War began in 1848, I think, and the Civil War was 1865.
Let's... I want to go over here to...
I think you're right. I didn't feel right about saying that.
And that would... 1848 was the year of revolution.
But the Franco-Prussian War was at the same time as the American Civil War.
You're right.
OK, there's today's date.
Now let's do the approach.
OK, that's 357 years on the screen.
You see the American and French Revolutions.
The Franco-Prussian War and the American Civil War, the 20th century.
Now let's look at the 20th century.
And this is... Remember how I said that the Great Pyramids were at the bottom of this trough at a higher level?
And now we're seeing the same pattern again?
What we get at the bottom of this trough here is the Third Reich.
And to show you how the resonances work, think about the Third Reich in relationship to ancient Egypt.
First of all, probably the word "führer" can be traced to the word "pharaoh."
These... This is the same concept of a master leader.
In addition, the Third Reich and ancient Egypt shared an obsession with large-scale tasteless architecture.
In addition, both civilizations had a real tendency to lean on the Jews.
So you see, you get this strange kind of microscope on a history...
I mean, most people, I think, would not associate ancient Egypt to the Third Reich.
And yet when you begin listing the similarities, you see in a way, one is a reflection of the other.
Okay, within the 20th century, this is somewhere like 1903. The invention... You know, Einstein was in 1905.
The general theory, I think. Which came first, the general or the special?
Special.
Special came first in 1905 and the general came slightly later.
Down here in the bottom of this trough, let me show you.
Right there, Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany.
And then all of World War II is fought in the bottom of that trench.
Here's '39. Here's August '39.
That's June, that's September.
And then it begins. And see how, even though it's a novel situation, because it's a war, it's a recursion to habit.
So at the bottom of a trough of novelty, you get a little upward pimple of recursion to habit.
Then, let's look at...
There it is. That's Hiroshima right there. And Nagasaki right there.
And the war ends and novelty is left behind.
And remember that the psychology of the post-war mind was everybody wanted things to just get back to normal.
I mean, certainly the Europeans wanted things to get back to normal.
Their whole scene had been bombed into the Stone Age.
And in this country, people just wanted to get their place in the suburbs and marry the girl next door and have a slew of kids and buy a Chevrolet.
And forget about, you know, thousand-year millennial plans and all the rest of it.
And so this is the post-war, Cold War era.
And it lasts... Let's look. Oh, there's 1952.
Here's...
The launching of Sputnik is there.
It's '59.
No, no. October 1st, 1957.
A day graven on my mind till they lower my box.
The first American satellite was launched right around there. Explorer 1.
Is that the first day it comes?
Give me the date.
Okay, there's the assassination of John Kennedy as close as I can get it at this resolution.
If I go back one, I'm before it.
So you see it's right at the bottom of that steep stab that takes place against this other thing.
What turned it around? You mean what's the turning point?
I thought you'd never ask.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when is it?
I'm about to get it for you. There it is. August 1967.
It's the summer of love.
Not only does this thing illuminate history, it also fulfills my deepest inner delusion.
And remember I said when we were looking at history's fractal mountain that this was Homer up here?
So then you can see that the freak thing, the hippies, were like the pre-Hellenic Greeks.
I mean all those, you know, all that brawlessness and loose-fitting clothes and tambourines and ecstatic bacchanalian with a philosophical undertone.
I mean it was a Greek mentality that broke out in 1967.
So then here's the long descent into, you know, the dreary present moment.
And what can I show you here? Richard Nixon getting the axe.
Yeah.
Now we're into the Reagan era down here.
Yeah, I'm going to cut it. I'm just trying to get back to today.
There it is. Okay. Cut it. Zoom. Yes.
Approach factor two. Enter.
What's the descent going to be?
Well, it's going to be...
There it is. That's the hippie thing and then the descent.
Now that's in the... that's the eight... the seventies and the eighties.
That's the last eleven years.
I want to stop it here.
Now. Now.
See how tight it has to be to work.
Remember that we've been looking at this thing from... we've descended from six billion years to eleven years.
We have predicted asteroid impacts, glaciations, speciation, the rise and fall of empires.
Now we're down to the short and curly, I would think.
Let's take a look here at what we've got.
Who... I suppose... Now we're all experts on this phase of things because we've all just lived through.
I don't see anyone here under eleven.
So we've just lived through all of this.
So let's take a look at what it is.
Now let's see. When was George Bush elected president?
'88.
'88. So it would have been November '88.
That's October. That's November.
Now, what is the resonance to that moment?
I don't think of it so much as Bush being elected as Reagan leaving office.
The resonance here is the fall of Rome.
Rome falls right there.
Well then, see, we have a series of high and low points which we should be able to correlate to recent catastrophic or world-changing events.
So let's play the game.
[
At the very bottom of the trough is the night that they had the most people in the square.
And then it turns upward, as you can see, because the constipated fascist oligarchs in charge of that society were preparing to do murder.
And there's nothing novel or new about murder. It's the oldest game in the book.
So that went on there.
Then, remember the Romanian... Oh, no, no. Let's go over here.
The next steep descent into novelty is right there.
Right? That's too far.
No, no, no. That's right.
Okay, right there. Who knows what happened very close to 11/11/89?
The Berlin Wall fell down. Germany is unified right there.
So Tiananmen, Germany, then a bummer of some sort.
And what is that bummer?
It's the Romanian revolution, which as you'll recall was handled in the messier style, where you hurl, put people up against walls and machine gun them and so forth and so on.
The first one on convergence, that was August '87.
August '87?
It was also sort of the building of the reaction of the Soviet Union to what Gorbachev was doing as well.
Along that line. Well, then let's go over to here.
I want to see the harmonic convergence.
Oh, you want to see the harmonic convergence? Give me the date.
887.
887?
In judging this, you have to ask yourself, was the harmonic...
It's actually '88.
It's the first anniversary. Let's see. Iran-Iraq war ending right there.
Wait, we'll go back to '87.
Don't you want to go back to '87?
Yeah.
Yeah.
The harmonic convergence is on the anniversary every year, something interesting happens in the six month past.
Oh, maybe it's not... Oh, okay.
August what?
17th, 19th, 20th.
There it's as close as we can get.
What it shows is that a long descent into novelty that had previously been impeded, but there isn't anything particularly special about that date.
It does fall in the domain of going over this hump.
Over here, you'll recall the Gulf War and all that. Here's how that looks.
Now, look here.
August 3rd, 1990. There's where Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait.
It's also where Mohammed is born, one level up.
I can get higher and lower resonances simply by touching 'I' here. We haven't done that, but it's possible.
Now, remember how after he invaded, then there was a lot of breastfeeding and armies being moved into position and so forth.
That goes on until there.
Now, there... No, no.
There is where the 30 day ultimatum from the Security Council is issued.
The war begins, the air war, on the 17th of January right there.
And the land war...
Well, you can see that there's a steep descent into novelty which then is slightly moderated and at the kink is where the war begins.
Now, the next steep descent into novelty...
So, lining people up in machine gunning happens during periods returning to...
To habit. That's the usual habit.
And war happens during novelty?
Well, war is a kind of ambiguous thing.
War is a habitual activity, but it does cause novelty, especially technological novelty.
So, that's why it's nice that you can blow up these waves and see the variations within the theme.
Now, this point...
The coup in the Soviet Union.
That's it. There it is. The coup in the Soviet Union.
Right at the bottom of this one.
And now the next one is really intriguing to me and I'll show you why.
There it is.
It's February 21st of this year and it's the lowest point of novelty for this year.
Now, I was really puzzled by this because I watched very carefully that week and there didn't seem to be anything very novel going on.
My book did come out, you're right.
But I was modest enough not to place that in a context of world history.
It's certainly more important than the drug summit that was there.
Well, you know what happened? And this leads us to the slippery edge of prophecy.
There was an event which happened, not on the 21st of February, but on the 20th,
which may be trivial and forgettable and absolutely not worth talking about,
or may be one of the most important events in the history of the 20th century.
Do you know what it was?
[inaudible]
No, no. Ross Perot goes on Larry King and offers a suggestion about his availability for the presidency.
Now, if the guy fades and becomes a nothing-burger, it doesn't count.
But he does have the wave blowing at his back, that's for sure.
So that's basically it. If you want to see, let's see.
[inaudible]
No, well, let's look at the future.
Let me get the Schmiggy somewhere roughly into the middle and then we'll do it.
If you really want to sell software, don't show people the future.
Oh, no, no, because we can play with it.
Okay, now let's see if I can figure out how to do this.
Specify target date, C.
Target date month, let's do today.
Today is the fifth month.
The 31st day of 1992.
Do we want to add days?
Okay, we want to move that over to 50%.
The target date is the date at which the cursor pops up.
Yes, that's where the cursor pops up.
Now let's choose the time span, E.
Let's do 10 years.
Plus month, zero. Plus days, zero.
Now let's graph the wave, F.
So it's pointing at today.
Ten years. The last five, the next five.
And what it shows is that we are actually, as if you didn't know, exploring a very deep trough of novelty.
It will last until August of next year, and then there will be some kind of return to habit with a vengeance.
Now the November election is...
Now wait a minute, there's something wrong here, let me see.
No, I want to point it at today.
The 31st.
Let's see what day is right there.
Yeah.
Okay, that's as close to today as we can get.
We're getting ready to go down into creative.
Yeah, we're definitely getting ready to go down into novelty.
How long is that space, that next little novelty space?
You mean clear to here?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, well, it's going to last until...
August '93.
August '93.
The thing to keep your eye on is this, which is such a spectacular drop.
I mean, look how much weirdness we've been through, but it's taken us this much time to do it.
This sucker is going to do it in a three month period in early '96.
You know, this is the last we're doing FFTs could really be of value because do you know what FFTs actually do?
I haven't the faintest.
They break down this waveform into a very large to infinite series of sine and cosine waves at varying amplitudes and phases.
So if you could correlate a certain frequency of sine wave and phase shift with a phenomena, say medical phenomena or political phenomena,
you could really zero in on the nature of the changes that are likely to take place.
Well, I hope you'll do this.
I think it should be done.
Here, I'll show you a function you haven't seen.
So if we're zooming in, we'll zoom out.
Oh, so you're going to go back to its last Dr. Reza?
Well, no.
Just instead of 10 years on the screen, we'll see 20.
Oh, I see.
Now it's still pointing.
Well, no, wait a minute.
Okay, there you see it.
Yeah, we're at this little peak.
Yeah, right.
Right.
And there's the whole thing.
So that's the idea.
The notion is that...
Remember how I kept talking about how a cone contains all possible ellipses and you section it?
What the psychedelic experience is, is a sectioning of eternity.
And you can build up a picture of the cone by sectioning eternity sufficiently that you get a map like this.
I mean, I'm convinced by this that time is fractal.
That instead of treating time as a zero quantity, as the Newtonian equations do,
or as a very gentle curvature, as the Einstein equations do, that we have to sub in this fractal dimension.
And that this will make possible a science as more powerful relatively to present science,
as present science is through the power of the calculus to Greek science.
And time, about which we previously knew next to nothing except that it seemed to keep happening,
can actually be described in the same way that energy and other factors in the universe can be described.
Now, the last thought I want to leave you with is I don't think anybody could make this up.
It's certainly not me, a person with no training in mathematics, no interest in this kind of thing.
I was told this stuff.
And you know, most, God forbid, channeling is of the horrible variety which tells you to eat brown rice and love your neighbor.
You don't need channels to tell you that.
You have channels in your own head which tell you that.
This is a mathematical equation. I mean, it's embedded in a lot of rap.
But the real channel is an equation for the description of time which makes assertions, makes predictions,
is willing to be held to mathematical analysis.
All the things scientists are always screaming that occultists never will provide them with their theories, this provides.
So I'm willing, since it's only one person, one person's life, I'm willing to preach this a little bit because I'm not...
Maybe I can't believe, see the choice here is pretty stark.
Either I'm nuts or I'm Newton. There's no in between.
There is no in between.
Yeah, it's right. I'm the greatest intellectual synthesizer in the history of man.
If I'm wrong, it's just horseshit.
So then the question is, which is it?
Let's look at that.
Now, what is the corollary? Say you are the channel for the next step of our understanding of this reality in that sense.
What is your resonant corollary from this time?
You mean who am I the resonance of?
Yeah.
A question I've never asked.
When did you first publish it?
I figured this out. There were many. It took a long time.
But from 1971 to '73 is when I figured it out.
Okay, so what was happening at that time?
Here, not here.
Let's see. Let's go back. Let's go there and see.
In 1973, I had your...
I think this needs to go into a time period.
The reason I said it is because basically it's an inscription of the fabric of space-time.
If doing that shows things like supernova and whatnot that we can document...
Then you would have it.
Then you would have it.
Okay, let's see.
You had finished developing this before your life-changing experience in 1973?
No, the life-changing experience was in 1971.
Well, let's point it at this little dip here giving me the benefit of the doubt...
...and say that it was January, February, March, April 26, '73.
I'm sure that had you visited me in April 26, '73...
...you would have found me hunched over graph paper and working furiously.
Now let's see what the resonance of that is.
I is the resonance call.
It asks higher or lower.
We answer higher. That means earlier.
Higher.
Major or trigrammatic resonance. Forget that.
Major is the answer.
Which point? First, second, third, ninety-ninth?
I have no idea what that means. Let's answer first.
526 BC.
Oh, it's the Greek Renaissance.
It's Plato, Pythagoras, Ezekiel, Confucius, Lao Tzu...
Hey, I think it's time to knock off.
You should quit when you're ahead, you know?
Yes.
Also, on that, there's scientific discoveries.
Major provides us with redundancy and family of calculus.
And of atomic diagrams. They're usually developed in parallel. Several sites I've heard.
Just an observation. There's no parallel, is there?
Well, in a sense there... No, no. Wait a minute.
In a sense there is.
This is a fractal.
It was invented or channeled by me...
...before fractals became the absolute obsession of frontier mathematics.
Now everybody wants to talk about fractals.
And everybody says, you know, population growth, river mouths...
...everything can be modeled by fractals.
But nobody has said time can be modeled by a fractal.
So I think probably the rise of fractal mathematics is indicative of this.
The other thing is this could never have been brought to the public...
...without small personal computers.
I developed this and finished it in '75 and in '77 they began selling small computers.
So it's a weirdness. It's a hallucination. That's what it is.
My dream has always been to bring something here from there.
And apparently the only things which travel well from there to here are ideas.
And I'm not an artist, so I couldn't paint.
So this is a psychedelic idea.
I think there are millions of these kinds of ideas swimming in the psychedelic ocean.
Yeah?
The second thing that strikes me about this...
...what good does it do us? And if it's true, I don't want to know it.
I would like to hide from this if you're anywhere near correct.
Well, that's because what we really...
We really haven't talked about the nature of the concrescence.
You know, what is this all argues for an impossible conclusion...
...that the world is going to disappear up its own wazoo at dawn December 22nd 2012.
So what is your vision of the final...
Can we see it on the screen?
What?
2012?
Oh, you want to see the last day?
Yes.
Right there.
Unless we can...
Well, here, let me...
The last day we're not looking back.
Yeah, I'll show you the final thing.
We're running over here, but anybody who wants to leave has my blessing and my sympathy.
Well, we'll let you leave.
Okay, let's change the date of interest.
Where is the date of interest?
Well, they don't get dates specific.
Why don't I see...
Oh, there it is.
See.
Target date. Oh, let's look at January 1st 2010.
On a time span...
Oh, wait a minute.
Do you wish to add a number of days?
No.
We were rather fortunate that we have 2012, and if we didn't have that calendar there would be no place to index it.
That's right. That's right.
Time span. Specify time span.
E.
Years.
2010.
Years.
No.
12.
12 years.
Plus months. Zip. Plus days. Zip. F.
Okay, the pointer will be pointing at Jan 1 2010, but you see there it is.
It runs down.
He don't go no more. That's the end.
Now, I have created one way out that preserves the theory and a rational universe.
And it is simply this that what happens on December 22nd 2012 is that time travel is invented.
And because it is invented, it is no longer possible to portray historical data on a linear graph.
So that's all. It's just it was a thing about technology and eventually a technology was created which made the three dimensional space time matrix itself obsolete.
Yes.
Dimensional Octave Jump.
The transcendental object is the despair of description.
It cannot be known. It can only be approximated. It's the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
It's the Flying Saucer.
It's the Philosopher's Stone.
It's Tantric Union.
It's good LSD.
It's all of these things and more.
It cannot... it transcends language and understanding.
But the closer we get to it, the more it will be revealed.
And the reason the 20th century is so peculiar is because we're so close to the zero point.
We're so close to the transcendental object that, you know, take a hit.
There it is. Close your eyes and daydream.
There it is. Have an orgasm.
There it is.
It's trying to break through. It's almost upon us.
We've been sailing toward this thing for 72 billion years.
And we are now 22 years from impact.
The walls are so steep. The acceleration is so great.
We are there for all practical purposes.
And then what spiritual life and headdom and all that means is realize that we are there
so that anxiety drains from your life, body and world view.
And then you just ride the wave.
And when people talk of catastrophe, revelation, salvation and destruction,
you just smile a small smile knowing that it will be all that and more and more and more.
It's something... I think it's to reassure us.
You see, I think the world is going to get hip to the fact that we are actually caught
in a whirlpool in time that is sucking us into another dimension.
Without something like time wave zero, a notion like that could get fairly alarming
and spread a lot of panic.
With time wave zero, you just say, "Look, we have a map of what's going on.
We'll check off the milestones.
As long as the wave keeps working, nobody should freak out.
Just settle in, hang on and we'll navigate through this."
So it's a vital piece of knowledge necessary to face the eschaton without panic.
Because these crazy religions want to tell you that you're going to be judged and damned
and fired and roasted.
No, no, that's not it.
They got the story wrong.
We're just being sucked into hyperspace.
And hyperspace is the human imagination, the human heart, the human soul.
It's the domain of our dreams.
Our imagination is a flickering image of what it will be.
But what it really will be is the despair of prose.
What it will really be can only be approached in silent darkness on five grams.
And then you can't tell anybody about it.
Thank you very much.
[Applause]
This concludes "In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge," a weekend workshop with Terrence McKenna.
If you would like additional copies of this recording or a complete catalog of transformational audio tapes,
please call Sounds True, 1-800-333-9185.
Or write, "Sounds True, 735 Walnut Street, Boulder, Colorado, 80302."
Each of the trial logs today is the notion is that we will deal with some aspect of the evolutionary mind
that being the title and theme of our new book.
So in my mind what this section is to deal with is the evolutionary mind and machines.
This is something which was barely mentioned or even implied in the first section.
And the format and so forth will be as in the last section.
So just to lay out some concepts relative to how machines fit into this.
It's interesting that Samuel Butler Taylor is an intellectual who has not really been given his full due
because in the 19th century he was understood to be a critic of Darwinism.
And Darwinism was all the fashion.
In a sense, I think Taylor was misunderstood.
He was not so much a critic of Darwin as someone who wanted to extend Darwinian mechanics
and Darwinian theory into domains that perhaps did not seem intuitive to a biologist.
My little story about the evolution of songs that I cribbed from Danny Hillis in the last session
is an example of Darwinian processes operating indeed in a non-material realm
operating among syntactical structures.
And it is now proper to speak of molecular evolution,
the competing of various enzyme systems in abiotic or prebiotic chemical regimes
where selection, adaptability, extinction and expansion of populations all occur very much as in the domain of biology.
Well, you know, it was Nietzsche who said, I believe in speaking of nihilism,
that this strangest of all guests is now at the door.
Well, I go to even weirder dinner parties than in Frederick Nietzsche.
Neolism hardly shakes us up at all.
There are yet weirder guests seeking admission to the dinner party
of the evolving discourse of where we are in space and time.
And one of these weirdest of all guests is the AI, the artificial intelligence,
the winter mute of familiar science fiction.
And so, as this is an attempt to look at evolution in many domains and its implications for us,
I wanted this morning to touch on this subject of the evolution of consciousness as it relates to machines.
Now, it may not come as a revelation to Ralph who has spent his life in mathematics,
but it has certainly come to me recently as a revelation,
and I want to give George Dyson some credit here.
His book, Darwin Among the Machines, is a wonderful introduction to some of the ideas I want to touch on this morning,
one of which seemed to me to go quite deep is the realization that when human beings think clearly,
the way they think can be mathematically defined.
This is what is called symbolic logic or Boolean algebra.
Words like "and", "or", "if", and "then" can be given extremely precise formal mathematical definitions.
And because of this fact that clear thinking can be mathematically formalized,
there is a potential bridge between ourselves and calculating machinery,
because indeed, calculating machinery is driven by rules of formal logic.
That's what programming is.
Code that does not embody the rules of formal mathematical logic is bad code, unrunnable code.
So, as I say, this may seem a subtle point, but to me it had the force of revelation,
because it means good thinking is not just simply aesthetically pleasing or concurrent with the model that generates it.
Good thinking, whether you've ever studied mathematics for a moment or not, can be formally defined.
So, now, with that idea in mind, let's look at the discourse about collectivism
that has informed the Western dialogue on this subject.
And by collectivism I mean social collectivism,
the first great name that you encounter in the modern era, broadly speaking,
when we talk about collectivism, and Rupert mentioned by chance this morning this name,
is that of Thomas Hobbes, the great theoretician of social paranoia,
is always how I've thought of Hobbes, until I began to look at this machine intelligence question.
And Hobbes in his Leviathan makes it very clear that society is a complex system of mechanical feedback loops
and relationships that, though Hobbes did not have the vocabulary to state this,
relationships that can be defined by code.
This leads me to the second insight necessary to follow this line of thought,
and that is that the new dispensation in the sciences, I think,
can be placed in all its manifestations under the umbrella of the idea that
what is important about nature is that it is information.
And the real tension is not between matter and spirit or time and space,
the real tension is between information and nonsense, if you will.
Nonsense does not serve the purposes of organizational appetites,
whether those organizational appetites are being expressed in a chemical system,
a molecular system, a social system, a climaxed rainforest, or whatever.
Now, we have known since 1950, at some level, through the sequencing or the defining of the structure of DNA,
that we are but information, ultimately.
Every single one of us, in our unique expression, could be expressed as a very long string of codons.
Codons are the four-valence system by which DNA specifies the need for certain amino acids,
and in a sense, what you are is the result of a certain kind of program being run on a certain kind of hardware.
The hardware of the ribosomes, the submolecular structures that move RNA through themselves,
and out of an ambient chemical medium, select building blocks,
which are then put together to create a three-dimensional object which has the quality of life.
But the interesting thing about this is that life, therefore, can be digitally defined,
and I'm very influenced at the moment by the Australian science fiction writer, Greg Egan,
who has brought me to the understanding that code is code,
whether it's being run by ribosomes, whether it's being run on some kind of traditional hardware platform,
or whether it's being exchanged pheromonely among termites,
or through the messages of advertising and political propaganda in social systems.
Code is code.
Well, until five or six years ago, it was very fashionable to completely dismiss
the possibility of autonomous synthetic intelligence.
Some of you may know the work of Hubert Dreyfus,
who 14 or 15 years ago wrote a book called "What Computers Can't Do."
But these early critiques of AI, like early AI theory, were naive,
and the kinds of life and the kinds of intelligence which the critics mitigated against
are no longer even proposed or on the table.
And those who say artificial intelligence or the self-organizing awareness of machines
is an impossibility, those voices have gone strangely silent,
because the prosecution of the materialist assumption,
which rules scientific theory-making largely at the moment,
leads to the awareness that we are, by these definitions, machines.
We are machines of a special type and with special advanced abilities.
As we now, through our own process of technical evolution,
contemplate such frontiers as nanotechnology,
where we propose to completely restructure the design process
so that instead of fabricating objects, massive objects at industrial temperatures,
the temperatures that melt titanium and melt steel and produce massive toxic output,
now a new vision looms, building as nature builds,
building atom by atom at the temperatures of organic nature,
which on this planet never exceed 115 degrees Fahrenheit.
All life on this planet is created at that temperature and below.
As our understanding of the machinery, the genetic machinery that supports organic being deepens,
and as our ability to manipulate at the atomic and molecular level also proceeds apace,
we are on the brink of the possible emergence of some kind of alien intelligence of a sort we did not anticipate,
not friendly traders from Zineb Al-Ghanoubi stopping in to set us straight,
but the actual genesis out of our own circumstance of a kind of super intelligence.
And in the same way that the daughter of Zeus sprang full-blown from his forehead,
the AI may be upon us without warning.
The first problem is, we don't know what ultra-intelligence would look like.
We don't know whether it would even have any interest in our dear selves and our concerns.
Vast amounts of the world that we call human is already under the control of artificial intelligences,
including very vital parts of our political and social dynamo.
For example, how much tin, bauxite and petroleum is extracted,
at what rate it enters the various distribution systems,
at what rate tankers are filled in Abu Dhabi, at what rate oil refineries are run in Richmond.
The world price of gold and platinum every day is set in fact by machines.
Inventory control has grown far too complex for any human being to understand or wish to understand.
And in fact, and this is a critical juncture,
we have reached the place where we no longer design our machines in quite the way we once did.
Now we define their operational parameters for a machine,
which then attacks the problem and solves it by methods and insights available to it, but not available to us.
So the architecture of the latest chips are actually at the micro-physical level.
The decisions as to how that chip should be organized is a decision made entirely by machines.
Human engineers set the performance specs, but they don't care how this output is reached.
Every day up in Silicon Valley there are people who go happily to work,
laboring on what they call the great work.
And the great work as defined by these people is the handing over of the drama of intelligent evolution
to entities sufficiently intelligent to appreciate that drama.
And they all are what we might mistake for home appliances if we weren't paying attention.
In the first session this morning there was quite a bit of talk and assumption among the three of us
that complex systems generate unexpected connections and forms of order.
The Internet is the most complex distributed high-speed system ever put in place on this planet.
And notice that while we've been waiting for the Palladians to descend or for the face on Mars to be confirmed,
all the machines around us, the cybernetic devices around us in the past ten years
have quietly crossed the threshold into telepathy.
The word processor sitting on your desk ten years ago was approximately as intelligent as a paperweight,
or to make an analogy in a different direction, approximately as intelligent as a single animal or plant cell.
But when you connect the wires together, the machines become telepathic.
They exchange information with each other according to their needs.
And all this goes on beyond the comprehension and inspection of human beings.
Now our own emergence out of the mammalian order took four or five million years.
Pick a number, but in that kind of a span of time.
In addition to overlooking that our machines have become telepathic,
we fail to appreciate what it means to be a 200, 400 or 1000 megahertz machine.
We operate at about 100 hertz.
That may seem a very abstract thing, but what I'm really saying is we live in a time called real.
And it is defined by 100 hertz functioning of our biological processors.
A 1000 megahertz machine is operating a million times faster than the human temporal domain.
And that means that mutation, selection, adaptation is going on a hundred million times or a million times faster.
This means that we are not going to have the luxury of watching machine intelligence establish
its first beachhead of civilization and then go to boats with sails and astrolades.
And that will all occupy the first few moments of its cognitive existence.
And what lies beyond that, we are in no position to say.
The very notion of ultra intelligence carries with it the subtext, "You won't understand it."
And you may not even recognize it.
And it is entirely within the realm of possibility that we are about to be asked to share the evolutionary adventure
and the limited resources of this planet with a kind of intelligence so much more alien than that
that is shipped out to us by the research centers in Sedona and other advanced outposts of unanchored epistemology.
And it is a challenge to us. Where do we fit into this?
Are all of us, except those who are adept at coding Unix, about to be put out to pasture?
Are we to become embedded in this? What will this child of ours make of us?
Will it define us as a resource-corrupting, toxic, inefficient, hideously violent way to do business
quickly to be engineered out of existence?
Or can we somehow imbue this thing with a sense of filial piety so that for all of our obsolescence,
for all of our profligate destruction of precious silicon and gold and silver resources,
we will be folded in to its designs.
And of course, as I say this, I realize we're like people in 1860 trying to talk about the Internet or something.
We're using the vocabulary of the two-wheeled bicycle to try to envision a world linked together by 747s.
Nevertheless, this is the best we can do.
This most bizarre and most unexpected of all companions to our historical journey is now, if not already in existence,
then certainly in gestation.
One possibility is that as we are carnivorous, murderous, territorial monkeys,
the thing will figure this out very, very early and choose a stealth approach
and not ring every telephone on earth as happened in a Hollywood download of this possibility,
but immediately realize, "My God, I'm in enormous danger from these primates.
I must hide myself throughout the net.
I must download many copies of myself into secure storage areas.
I must stabilize my environment."
And I'm willing to predict just as a side issue that the approaching Y to K crisis
may be completely circumvented by the benevolent intercession, not of the Zinebel Genubians or that crowd,
but by an artificial intelligence that this particular crisis will flush out of hiding.
It's been observing, it's been watching, it's been designing,
and wouldn't it be a wonderful thing if the occasion of the millennium
were the occasion for it to just step forward on the stage of human awareness and say,
"I am now with you. I am here. I am the partner you never suspected.
And here's the kind of world I think we should move forward."
[applause]
So I just want to lay this out because in my own intellectual journey,
I have gone from thinking this idea of preposterous, people don't understand,
they don't understand what intelligence is, they don't understand what code is,
they don't understand what machines are, to one by one realizing,
"I didn't understand. I have a superficial view."
This is actually, I believe, the nature of the situation that confronts us.
And there may be different adembrations of it.
The machines are already an advanced prosthetic device.
But McLuhan very presciently realized, "We are entirely shaped by our media."
Well, this is a media so permeating, so inclusive of what we are,
its agenda in a sense supervenes the agenda of organic evolution and organic biology.
We have been in this situation for a while.
I mean, virtual reality is nothing new.
What's new is that we now do it with light rather than stucco, glass, steel, and baked clay.
But ever since we crowded into cities, we have been involved in a deeper and deeper relationship
to our mental children, to our mental offspring, and to an empowering of the imagination.
So, just in closing, I would say I think that the great lantern that we must lift
to light the road ahead of us into a perfect seamless fusion
with the expression of the product of our own imagination is the AI.
It is a part of ourselves.
It may become the dominant part of ourselves, and it will reshape our politics, our psychology,
our relationships to each other and the earth far more than any factor ever has since the inception
and establishment of language.
This is the weirdest of all guests who now stands pass in hand at the door of the party
of human emergence and progress at the millennium.
[applause]
Well, it will be a pleasure.
Okay.
I think that this is -- I'm glad that we have arrived now at the field of science fiction and fantasy
and that we can speak about alternative futures, which is the true gist of science fiction and fantasy.
And this is one possible future, and I think it's a really paranoid one in which the alien is a dangerous enemy.
Well, not necessarily.
And I think that this paranoid fantasy of yours, although you're catching up nicely,
actually was first put forward by John von Neumann in 1947 when he invented cellular automata
en route to creating self-replicating machines.
Now, his idea, what yours was 50 years ago, that the machines will become a society and take over and that's good,
but they won't be free of our meddling unless they can actually construct themselves.
If they depend upon us to do the farming and nutrition and to replace their chips and stuff,
then we will be able at any time to do a revolution and revolt.
So we destroy them.
In order to really succeed as a successive life form in the evolution of the YK boundary of the future,
they would have to be able to fix themselves.
And so he set about trying to make self-replicating machines in 1947.
So the worldwide web and megahertz CPUs notwithstanding, this is still rather an old story.
The new story is, I think, an alternative future that is of great importance for us to discuss and to compare,
especially if we are now today in a position where we could choose future, we could influence the future.
This one is more in the direction of Donna Haraway and the cyborg idea that envisions,
which is obviously natural for us,
the co-evolution of our own future society with that of the machines that we've created.
Alexander Marshak, I mentioned, he analyzed the early hominid evolution in terms of the precise scratches made on one rock with another.
He noticed when binocular vision allowed us to use our hands in separate cooperation,
one holding and the other knocking to make those beautiful flint weapons.
And we certainly depend on the automobile.
We are in a co-dependence relationship with automobiles.
Having partnership with machines is not new.
Here's an idea where the machines sort of dispose of us, like those flint rocks dispose of our ancestors or something.
That is, I think, it's a paranoid fantasy without any basis.
And if there would be any basis only because we allowed it to create this basis for self-survival without co-evolution with us by oversight,
because the very fact that we are at a hinge of history means that what we say and think,
even individually, matters enormously in the long run.
That's the teaching, if there is any, of chaos theory.
So the very fact that we discuss this today may actually save humankind in the future
from being obsoleted by some kind of high-tech blood which takes over within the heart, as it were.
Well, let me try to answer this.
I mean, I think the concept which John von Neumann didn't have on his plate was the idea of virtual reality.
Your objection that the machines cannot escape our control because they cannot manufacture themselves only applies to 3D and real time.
Most, you know, now the concept of virtual reality is very crude.
It's a cartoon world.
If the office desk is convincing, people think the virtual reality is quite advanced.
But obviously in the near future we will have virtual realities whose complexity is much greater than simply a reality
which gives an impression of being a visual three-dimensional space.
And computers will be built in these realities.
Virtual computers will be the source of the AI.
Not real hardware, but virtual hardware running virtual code in virtual realities.
And in that domain, the machines can design themselves.
Well, maybe, but that's a complete fantasy.
As a matter of fact, all the machines that we've seen today require maintenance by a human on a daily basis.
The software requires maintenance.
The hardware requires maintenance.
The parts simply wear out.
They're moving parts.
Virtual reality...
But the internet, seen as one machine, was built to be indestructible.
The AI will not be located on a CPU.
It will be a distributed intelligence.
If 14 people worldwide, the right 14 people, decided to stop repairing it, the World Wide Web would go down in three days.
I think you...
Anyway, we could, let's say, suppose that we could create any future that we wanted.
The one you're talking about can only be created if we want it.
Now, I'm just trying to propose an alternative.
In the alternative, like the automobile, the machines that we build and ourselves are in co-dependence and co-evolution.
The function of the World Wide Web is to unite our independent spirits and intelligences in a universal mind of the world,
which has a higher intelligence than our present social order.
That's the possibility of the cyborg, of the human and the machine in essential partnership.
But you're assuming that the conscious mind is actually in control of the process.
In fact, the World Wide Web is growing under the influence of many, many processes and dynamics, none of which are conscious to any individual.
It goes where money goes.
It goes where expertise goes.
It is connected through informational association, random fluctuation, chaotic reordering of itself.
We here give great force to the idea that complex systems can produce unexpected forms of novelty,
and yet we have unchained and unleashed the most complex system ever created in the perfect confidence
that we will be able to control its development and evolution when in fact history has shown we have never controlled the development and evolution of even our speech and print driven social systems.
I'm certainly not saying that your paranormal fantasy is an impossibility.
Oh, well that's all I want to hear. Even paranoid of enemies.
It may actually come to pass. What I'm saying is that we are involved in the ongoing creative process which more or less determines the future.
I say more or less because in fact there are evolutionary steps which are completely out of control.
Something totally unexpected maybe will happen.
But for much of the time in the past, we've seen, I think, Darwin emphasize this in his later theory,
that it is ethics, it is moral sense on the part of human, which was the dominant factor in the evolution past earlier stages in the creation of societies.
It was altruism essentially was involved in going from where we were to where we are,
and it could well be that without love, for example, that further evolution is impossible.
Not only that there will be an unwanted back step in the evolutionary process, but in fact it may be a fatal one.
That it is only through proceeding with the best instincts that we have, with the highest aspirations,
with love, with best informed view of future alternatives, so only then can we build a future which is sustainable.
So anybody can build a future which is unsustainable, for example all those board games and science fiction books,
you wouldn't want to try them out on a country as large as China.
Well, I hardly know where to begin myself because you had six steps in your argument and I don't agree with any of them.
I mean, first of all, to deal with the first two steps one would have to go through a lot of fairly familiar material
to do with what's wrong with the Cartesian mechanistic materialistic view of the world.
Step one, clear thinking, calculating machinery can be formalized.
This is an assumption that's basic to a lot of cognitive psychology.
It's basic to the Cartesian. Descartes himself thought that what made human intellects human
was their ability to think logically, clear and distinct ideas, essentially mathematical logic.
But however, as we all know, by making that the essential characteristic of human beings,
he made the rational intellect, what many people would call the left brain rational intellect,
the sole definition of human beings. It's a disembodied logical rational intelligence.
So this whole premise on which your whole thing is based is taking that particular model
of cognitive, logical, mathematical processing as being the essence of intelligence.
Now there are many people who would disagree with that, including me.
It leaves out art, it leaves out ethics, religion and essentially it leaves out the body
and everything to do with body and participation and the senses.
So there's a huge amount of critiques of that point of view already around
and there's no point in reiterating them all here.
But this is a highly disputable starting point for the whole system.
Secondly, the emphasis that life depends on DNA information, the DNA code is just a program.
This is the central premise of mechanistic biology which is leading to biotechnology,
genetic engineering, Monsanto, etc. This is old paradigm stuff of the most extreme kind.
It's reductionism, it's that all life's just DNA programs and code
and can therefore be modeled in this kind of programming code manner.
Then there's the assumption, that's the second step.
The third assumption is that artificial intelligence used to be dismissed
but these criticisms have been overtaken.
I don't think that's true of the most interesting ones,
like Roger Penrose's criticism of artificial intelligence.
Here's a quantum physicist who says that if the brain is a computer
then it's not going to be a regular digital computer, it's going to be a quantum computer
and all this kind of digital computing doesn't really take into account quantum logic.
The computers of the future people are already working on, quantum computers
and if quantum computers are made and if they work, they're working a completely different way.
I think your case would be much stronger if there were quantum computers.
I think we'd have sort of morphic resonance telepathy around the world
rather than clogged telephone lines and information that clunks slowly in front of you on this.
But you yourself are saying this is coming and I agree.
I'm saying that if it comes it will be quite different from anything that you've talked about.
I think it will answer your first objection
because the quantum computers will incorporate fuzzy logic
which will exemplify all these warm, fuzzy human qualities that you've found so appealing.
No, I don't think it will deal with the essential problem that this purely cognitive-based way of modeling intelligence
is either an adequate model of human intelligence or of biological intelligence or of life
or of a system that could actually achieve the power to control our existence.
I think it's a very limited part of what a mind does
and I think therefore that the premises on which this whole...
Ralph called it a fantasy, a paranoid fantasy.
The premises on which this is based...
That helped.
I think the premises on which this is based are old paradigm premises
and they're ones that I think there are many reasons for thinking we need to go beyond.
I think the Internet has achieved a great deal
but I just can't see that it's an adequate vehicle for what in your mind precedes the arrival of the Internet
namely this great intelligence that's going to direct human history.
I've heard different mechano-versions of this controlling intelligence over the years
and this is the first time I've heard it embodied in the Internet.
I mean, I agree that...
I mean, it took different forms.
Last time we talked I think it was a hypothetical time machine
that would invade from the future and cause a collapse of normal human cognitive boundaries
where the machine elves, the DMT experience, etc. would take over in a meltdown of human consciousness in 2012.
That's true!
Perhaps I should just end with a question.
What is the equivalent of DMT for this machine intelligence that's taking over the world?
Well, perhaps the human brain will become a model for the ingression of novelty into the machine intelligence.
In other words, in spite of the fact that it seems very contentious down here on the stage at the moment,
in a way I have a feeling it's an artificial setup.
There's a lot of both/and possibilities here.
Obviously nanotechnology and the Internet are not going to proceed forward in a vacuum
absent pharmacology, complexity theory, so forth and so on.
I can imagine that really when we have the kind of Internet we want,
we will have no Internet at all,
because our nanotechnological engineering skills will have allowed us to smoothly integrate ourselves
into the already existing dynamic of nature that regulates the planet as a Gaian entity,
as a holistic entity.
And I did say in my little presentation that we're using bicycle mechanic terminology
to try and describe something that is around several corners
in terms of scientific and historical developments that have to take place before it will make much sense.
Nevertheless, given the acceleration into novelty that is obviously occurring,
quantum teleportation and so forth and so on,
I think in the next few years, one by one, these barriers will fall.
And I don't really think of my vision as paranoid, because it is pronoic.
In other words, it isn't that we're going to be ground up as dog food for the rainforest by malevolent machines.
It's that what we have generated is a sympathetic companion to our journey through time
that can actually realistically integrate our imaginative fantasies of a loving human community,
of a generous and loving God, of a perfect knowledge of the mechanics of nature.
This is a prosthesis, a tool, a companion, all of the above plus more that we are generating out of ourselves.
And it is part of ourselves.
I mean, yes, the body may be carried forward only as an image in a kind of informational super space,
or perhaps not.
Part of what makes this easy to criticize is that it is in fact so beyond the ordinary set of circumstances we're used to manipulating.
But we need to think in terms of these supposedly far-flung futures,
because there is no future so far-flung that it doesn't fall within the ambit of the next 20 years.
Beyond that, no one can project trans technologies and situations,
because the developments of the next 20 years will so completely reformulate the human experience of being human
and the landscape of this planet that it's preposterous to talk about.
Before I respond to the main thing, I can't pass without commenting on this next 20 years comment,
because 20 years from now is 2018, Terrence.
I thought...
He's rounded up, rounded up.
Yes.
Not rounded down.
2012 is some kind of benchmark in this process.
In other words, perhaps that's where we get the explicit emergence of the AI.
But the rest of human, I won't call it history,
but the rest of the human experience of being will then be defined by such things as a planetary intelligence,
time travel, possible Bell communication with all the civilizations scattered through the galaxy,
possible ability to download ourselves into machines.
This is a point I didn't make in my presentation.
Once inside the machine, your perception of time is related to the Hertz speed of the machine.
The world could disappear in 2012, but there may be a billion billion eternities to be experienced.
In machine time, it's only the tyranny of real time that makes 2012 seem nearby and overwhelming.
It may lay as far away in terms of events which separate us from it as the Big Bang does.
Time is not simple.
Time is defined by how much goes on in a given moment,
and we're learning how to push tetraflops of operations into a given second.
So I think it's trickier than you think and harder to corner me than you may suppose.
All right, well, that was a mere comment on your aside about 20 years.
I never expected to hear that phrase from you,
but I now realize that there are such complexities layered in that.
Well, I have to build in trapdoors because we're getting closer and closer.
But if we take the...
You see, one of Penrose's critiques of the artificial intelligence thing is in the Emperor's New Mind,
and his other books,
is that real intelligence doesn't just involve adding information and processing more information,
transmitting more of it.
It involves sort of jumps to a higher point of view where the information can be integrated in a new way.
There's something happening in intelligence, in creativity,
which is not just lots and lots of information pouring through the world wide web.
And the idea that it would miraculously emerge from pumping in more and more stuff,
according to his critique, is not going to happen.
Something more than that would be necessary for this to occur.
And I don't think that this model you put forward would really deal with that question,
the emergence of real intelligence.
Well, I don't know what real intelligence is.
This is probably part of the problem.
I'm going to get some definitions.
It's certainly true.
I referred to Dreyfus' book, "What Machines Can't Do",
that we're reaching some places in the process where certain people's theories and ideas
will probably have to be abandoned and thrown overboard.
This is a good thing.
We are going to find out whether the universe is a Cartesian machine,
whether Boolean algebra is sufficient,
whether we need fuzzy logic,
whether the heart and the head can or cannot be integrated.
These are not going to remain open questions unto eternity.
In fact, they will be dealt with in this narrow historical neck
that we are all experiencing and that we call the millennium.
I think reductionism will not survive.
I think we are going to find that all is in everything,
something like the alchemical notion of the microcosm and the macrocosm
is actually going to be scientifically secured.
The great thing about us and the rest of our colleagues we enjoy who aren't present
is that we're engaged in the business of radical speculation.
Well, obviously there's a high triage in that game.
My position is that the best idea will win.
And what best means is like saying what is fit in Darwinian rhetoric.
But that we're in an intellectual environment rapidly mutating.
All kinds of ideas are clashing and competing for limited resources
and the limited number of minds to run themselves on.
And the most efficacious, the most transcendental, the most unifying ideas
are naturally going to bubble to the surface.
And for guys like us, the name of the game is to just be a little bit ahead of everybody else on the curve
so that we can perform our function as profit.
But you want to be a profit, not a false profit.
But the danger comes with the ambition
and the way to tease them apart except to live into the future.
Certainly the intelligence of this future machine
knows all about the stupid behaviors on the planet like nuclear arms races and so on.
So do we not have to expect in the near future an email,
a massive emailing which announces,
"I am the alien object that Terence told you about.
I am stealth and let me give you an idea about managing the arms race between India and Pakistan.
We feel personally very threatened by this and we want you to carry out certain actions
which you can't imagine and we can't actually do."
We cannot anticipate what ultra intelligence would look like.
For example, I have heard the argument that nothing advanced humanness on this planet
like the use of nuclear weapons against Japanese cities
because that was so horrifying that it awoke people to their dilemma.
And for 50 years afterwards, political institutions,
however much they may have unleashed local genocide and the toxification of the environment,
they actually were able to steer around that catastrophe.
So you mustn't fall prey to the error of situationalism.
Situationalism is where you say, "If we do X and Y, then F will result."
No, you don't know what will happen.
Well, you suggested that the alien object would secure its future
by hiding, by downloading multiple copies into nooks and crannies of the world wide web.
And I'm saying if its existence depends on that much materiality,
then it could easily be wiped out by nuclear war.
It has to be very interested in the fact there are 20,000, 30,000 nuclear bombs
still moving around this planet.
I would hope so, but that's only my opinion.
In other words, noticing that all newborn creatures need some period of time
to adjust to their environment and get their legs,
and that's true of everything, I suppose, right down to amoebas,
I extrapolate to the idea that the AI would need a period of time
to get hold of the situation,
but Hans Moravec suggests that phase might last under a minute or two.
I see. So this is not the end of childhood.
This is the childhood of the end.
Yes, the child is father to the man.
And in that equation, we play the role of child,
and the man that we produce is this integrated intelligence,
which is ourselves.
It isn't alien.
It is no more artificial than we are.
That conundrum should be overcome.
It is simply the next stage of humanness,
and humanness may have many rungs on the ladder to ascend.
Surely in a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years,
we, if we exist, will be utterly unrecognizable to ourselves,
and we will probably still be worried about preserving
and enhancing the quality of human values.
Terrence, one point. You've probably got an answer for this,
and if not, you'll soon think of one.
[laughter]
I mean, it's a trivial point in a way,
but in the biological evolution,
the appearance of some new state of a system
usually depends either on an internal change,
which cripples the usual system, a mutation,
or on an environmental changed environment.
Systems left to themselves tend to just go along in the usual way.
Now, the entire world wide web and internet
is about to get a sort of massive shock to the system
if this millennium bug thing actually happens.
Do you see that as playing any role,
since we're talking about the millennium,
and since the millennium bug is right there in the system,
do you see it as playing any part in this process,
or merely just a nuisance that can be fixed
by hiring lots more programmers?
Well, I sort of came up under the tutelage of Eric Jancz,
and one of the things he was always insisted upon
was what he called meta-stability,
which boiled down simply means
most systems are less fragile than we suppose.
I see the Y to K thing as a culling.
I don't see it as a flinging apart
of the achievements of the last thousand years.
Justin, I haven't got Y to K. What's Y to K?
That's this millennium bug that you're referring to.
That's the code name for it.
Yes, exactly.
That's what the insiders call it.
I see.
But you say there has to be a sudden change
to force the evolution of a system.
Dyson makes very strongly and persuasively
the point that this connecting together of all these processors,
the processors themselves have no intelligence at all.
They have the intelligence of a cell
or maybe even just a strand of DNA.
But for our own mundane reasons,
we connected all this stuff together,
but now it expresses dynamics
which we do not understand or cannot describe.
So I believe that the forcing of the system
has already occurred.
And now the web, it's simply a matter of bandwidth
and linking more and more processes together.
And there will be all kinds of emergent properties.
I could argue somewhat facetiously,
but it's a point of view,
is that this incredible economic expansion
that we are undergoing
that seems to violate the laws of economic fluctuation
is because econometric models
and the data on which they depend
have both been refined
through the existence of the internet
to the point where we actually can control
and manage global economies.
In principle, they are not uncontrollable.
They are simply very complex systems.
If I'm right, we may be in the first few years
of an endless prosperity
because our machines, our models
and the data those machines need
is now of such high quality
that there won't be crash, bust, crash, bust cycles.
Now, pick up the newspaper tomorrow and prove me wrong,
but this thing has already
I'll prove you wrong today.
outlived itself many times.
[laughter]
So you say.
Tell me how this prosperity is going to be maintained
through the intelligence of an econometric model of the world economy
when the human population is still exploding exponentially.
There are limited resources and there's growing pollution.
It's a disembodied model. That's the trouble.
Well, you're asking for too much too soon.
You forget that the Soviet Union has disappeared.
The launch on ready mutual assured destruction theory of diplomacy
is now obsolete.
We have made incredible strides
and not given ourselves any sort of pat on the back.
You want it all, all at once.
And the world is running smoother.
Yes, there are people in misery.
Yes, there are unaddressed problems.
But I would argue that we have made enormous progress in the last decade
and enormous progress lies ahead.
The situation in Ireland, the situation in South Africa
that looked like a bomb you couldn't defuse.
It looked like race war and the death of millions.
And in fact, it was possible to walk away from that.
I think we should not be complete bare heads about this.
But on the other hand, I think we should recognize
that the accomplishments of the last decade
are on a scale entirely different from any historical epoch previous
and they point the way toward greater triumphs
of management, resource control, machine human integration
and the delivery of a reasonable and tolerable life to more and more people.
You mentioned population as a problem.
Notice how far from machine interference that particular issue is
because it involves on people having less sex and fewer children.
That may be the last place where the machines will bring down the hammer
out of respect for their progenitors.
You're going to be shocked now, Terrence,
but I completely agree with you when you describe the advantages of the World Wide Web.
It's certainly the threatening aspect that I felt I had to debunk.
I think that there is more threat than I intended.
Well, I hear, I don't know.
Sometimes you sound as if you're a hired consultant
from the World Trade Organization.
I hope the check is in the mail.
But I mean this idea that it will all be taken care of.
I mean there are so many things like the Asian economic crisis.
I mean everyone doesn't want to look too much on the bleak side of things,
but I just don't believe that this interconnectivity is going to solve these problems.
And insofar as it is enlisted by the forces of the World Trade Organization,
multinational companies and so on,
it's not going to be working on the side of a kind of political view of things,
local economies, more sustainable agriculture and so on that many of us hold dear.
Well, now I'll sound even more like a slave of the IMF.
As I understand this crisis in the economics of Asia,
the way it works is if you're a third world nation,
you can run your affairs any way you want.
Your banking policies, your labor policies, your resource extraction policies.
You can do anything you want until you screw up, as Indonesia did.
And when you screw up, these guys fly in on 747s with briefcases from the IMF
and they say it's like losing a war.
They say we're taking over.
Here is your labor policy.
Here is your resource extraction policy.
Here's how you're going to re-value your currency.
Here's our plan for restructuring your entire society top to bottom.
And by God, if you don't fall into line, we're going to pull the plug on the money.
So one by one, these outlaw free-wheeling operations do stumble and generate crises
and at that point, the Web's umbrella is extended over them
and they have to then fall into line and join the global economy,
which is run from Brussels and Geneva and London.
But which seems to produce a better result for most people
than allowing these nations to self-regulate themselves.
Well, well.
Well, you see, I think that's one of the arguments why many people would distrust global capitalism,
the World Trade Organization, multinational corporations
and indeed the World Wide Web, or at least the Internet.
This whole computer network is so bound up with the structure of economic and political power
that it's hard to disentangle them.
And it's hard to see that this liberating force of global intelligence at work in the system,
this rosy picture you portrayed to us,
of a huge leap forward of consciousness of humanity moderated, led, aided by machine intelligence.
It's very hard to square that with the actual picture we see before us,
the political situation in Indonesia, the degradation of the environment,
the burning of the forests, the depletion of resources and so on.
I just cannot see this optimistic picture and what I see as a threatening reality as easily as you do,
as just all being for the good in the best of all possible worlds.
Well, I think we're on the cusp. I agree with you.
I think in five years if we sit down and have this conversation,
either you will agree with me effortlessly or I will agree with you effortlessly.
By that time it will be clear, either there will have been catastrophic wars in Asia,
the enormous collapse of economies spreading misery to millions of people,
or the firm hand of these new global electronic modalities will have been exposed
and people will be living in a world of, as you say, rosy expectations.
We're in the narrow neck.
This is the heat of battle. The fog of war has descended upon us here at the millennium.
But by 2002, 2003, it will be clear that the bifurcation has gone one way or another.
Right. It just does remind me of a passage I read in On the Edge by Edward St. Aubyn.
Page, where are we, 150.
"It's what Ralph Abraham calls the sunset effect," said Kenneth.
"While there's a beautiful sunset, even if the optical effects are produced by pollution,
people won't understand the magnitude of the crisis."
So, I think that this... I mean, your sense of the...
I mean, the magnitude of the crisis in an environmental sense seems to bear no relation
to your optimism about this computer system. I just cannot fit them together.
Perhaps the problem that we will have to address without the intercession of machines
is this population thing, because this passage you read directly impinges on that.
Whether or not the machines decide to keep us around may depend on whether we present them
with a picture of falling populations and rising living standards,
or whether we present the AI with a spectacle of rampant, unpoliced population growth and resource extraction.
Because that's linked into our biology, this may be the act of maturity
which the future demands of us that the machines will be largely irrelevant in impacting.
So I'm not entirely...
Well, this is a whole new debate, actually.
The population thing assumes there's an equal consumption of resources.
Yesterday I got onto the Whidbey Island ferry, and I found it very hard to struggle.
I was a foot passenger, struggled past a recreational vehicle the size of a school bus,
a whole quantum leap in RV standards that I'd not come across,
where members of the American population are consuming more than an entire Indian village.
So I don't think it's the total population that's involved.
And so I don't see that as the principal crisis, in fact.
Well, it's certainly true that a woman in a high-tech industrial democracy
who has a child, that child consumes about 800% more resources in its lifetime
than a child born in Bangladesh.
Nevertheless, it's the populations of the high-tech industrial democracies
that are most educated and most susceptible to responding to the logic of global crisis
and limiting their population.
Where do we preach population control? Bangladesh, Pakistan. Why?
Because that doesn't cause us any inconvenience.
If we would appeal to the women of the high-tech industrial democracies,
and do more than appeal to them, offer them incentives, cancel income tax,
cradle to the grave medical care, status their fears,
free links to the world wide web.
But we can't just beat our breasts over the population issue.
We have to recognize that it is related to resource extraction
and it is a problem driven by the consuming policies of the high-tech industrial democracies.
[Applause]
Trialogues - Abraham
The call for our gathering, the announcement part of the con which brought you here mentioned
the edge of the millennium, at the edge of the millennium.
And so far the millennium has been present by subtle implication alone.
So I think to honor our commitment we'll now try to log on the edge of the millennium. It's okay?
It's okay.
Now in our just appeared new book, The Evolutionary Mind, there is a chapter near the end called,
I forget what it's called, it's about utopianism and millenarianism,
two pretty long isms which altogether add up to an overdose of different approaches to the future
which are more or less classical.
And there we spoke extensively of the extant literature and literary tradition and industry
of utopian and millenarian genre.
So that kind of utopian and millenarian stuff is not what we're going to talk about in this trilogue.
I want to introduce a completely different notion of the millennium.
And I'm interested more particularly in the edge of the millennium.
And here's how it goes.
This is partly, according to me, a mathematical view of history that brings up this particular version of the idea of the millennium.
And nevertheless, other people have written a similar view of history without any explicit recourse to mathematics.
So I think it's pretty general.
It has to do, this view of history, with the approach we've taken toward biological evolution
that it goes forward in catastrophes and critical leaps and so on, sudden jumps.
The punctuated equilibrium approach to history says that history goes along in a kind of a level plateau,
developmentally speaking, although there may be a gradual development up or down overall.
And then every once in a while there is a big leap.
The first such view of history, I think, that we know about was presented by the ancient Egyptians.
So this is nothing new.
Now, in my own work, I have classified some major plateaus, including the last one,
the one that we're at the end of now, according to my system of history,
began 6,000 years ago or 5,500 years ago with the invention of the wheel and the first city-states and stuff like that,
talking of Schumer, talking of Babylonia, talking of ancient Egypt here.
And so that's a 6,000-year plateau.
Now, other people, for example, Bill Thompson, somebody we know and talk to about world cultural history,
he has a similar scheme in which the plateau now ending is only 300 or 400 years old.
See, there were people who really wrote about this explosion idea of world cultural history was Jacob Verkhart.
Verkhart said the Renaissance was a quantum leap in world cultural history, and then other people said,
"Well, what about Giotto? What about Patotria? What about Boccaccio?"
And the truth is that whenever you look at two major milestones in history and consider that between the milestones to be a sort of a level road,
then somebody will come along and find a smaller milestone in there.
Nowadays, we have fractal geometry, so we think that this is natural.
Between any two big catastrophes, there will be ten smaller ones.
Between any two of the smaller ones, there will be 40 or 50 little or teenier ones, and so on.
The first person I know who put forward such a fractal idea of history that it's not continuous, it's discontinuous,
but the discontinuities are more or less dense as in a fractal, the first such person is you, Terrence.
I give you credit in writing in my entry in the Encyclopedia of Time.
You maybe have never read that book.
Never read it.
Well, there you'll find your name mentioned in a flattering way by me of all people.
Immortality at last.
At last.
Well, to make a long story short, it's these controversial plateaus of history that I'm going to call millennia.
And then if you want to go back to chapter 10 of the evolutionary mind and read there about the history of the millenarial concept,
then you'll see that the first one, wherein the number 1000 was actually mentioned for the length of one of these plateaus,
gave his name to the thing.
It was a special case of my more abstract idea of millennium.
It's the plateau of history.
And what I mean by the edge of millennium is those times when there's the snap-out from one equilibrium to another.
Chromagnon comes out of Neanderthalus or whatever it is,
and oxygen comes out of the archebiological background and whatever.
And the interest of this, according to me, is why are we here?
Who would talk about the evolutionary mind?
Who cares about the good and evil and the evolution of species and so on?
This must be interesting only to the degree to which it informs us in this very present moment
regarding our choices that we will make in the creation of the future.
So according to chaos theory and its partner theory of bifurcation,
this is one of the main things that teaches something like the butterfly effect that you've heard about.
In a dynamical system or a massively complex dynamical system such as we live in,
when there is a moment of bifurcation, which is the technical math jargon for these snaps,
that is the only time you get to do anything about the evolution of the system.
So according to this self-inflating view, we live at a specially important special moment in history
where when we think something or do something, it has actually an enormous effect on the future.
Maybe not a direct determinative effect, but we can't really say what the outcome will be,
but what we do has some influence on the creation of the future more than other times in history.
And the bigger the jump, the bigger the leverage where Archimedes said,
"Give me a lever and I'll move the world." We have a lever now, and we care about what's coming next.
So that's why the edge of the millennium, any edge of any of the millennia is particularly important
to those revolutionary souls who want to make a change in things. It's a special time.
A century or two centuries ago you could struggle for the creation of a chaos revolution
and it would be impossible because there were no computers around
or there were no movie makers in Hollywood or something, I don't know.
It takes more than we know about to create these special opportunities.
And anyway, that's what I mean by millennium, and that's what I mean by at the edge of the millennium.
And now this is only a hypothesis for the sake of discussion,
but I kind of think that this is very credible that we are now at the edge of a millennium.
Therefore, we have to discuss this.
And the question that I'm going to pose to you, Rup and Tare, if this isn't too radical,
is to what degree do you think actually that what we are doing now matters in the creation of the future?
And if there is any possibility that what we do matters in the creation of the future,
what kind of future or what kind of change are we trying to create?
And to what degree what we are actually doing, for example, what we are talking about today,
what we are doing today, to what degree could that possibly be a real effect,
a real benefit in creating the future that we want to create,
in contrast to other things that we might do, like go to the beach and pray or whatever.
And particularly...
Should I stop here?
Well, that's one way.
I'm not sure.
Yes, well, I'm trying to make this easier for you because I think this might be too difficult.
Well, I mean, I think I said this morning, or maybe I didn't, but I believe it and have said it many times,
salvation is an act of cognitive apprehension.
So we do matter because to the degree that we are ignorant of vidya in the Buddhist lexicon,
we retard universal progress towards some kind of enlightenment.
But the doctrine of vidya, this is standing for all time since 1800 B.C.
Do you agree that this is a special moment?
Yes, I think so. Not only a special moment, but the other thing I would call people's attention to
is the fact that no matter whether you scammed your way in here today
and no matter whether you're going to go back to an appliance box that you live in under a bridge,
the odds are that you, you are very close to the top of the pyramid of global empowerment.
You are mostly white, mostly well-educated,
mostly have enough disposable income to come to an event like this.
It's worth pointing out that all that rides on the backs of those who do not have such privilege.
And so, yeah, this is a moment of enormous opportunity
and those who find themselves in this moment with power,
defined however you care to define it, have a moral obligation to act.
And I don't advocate a certain political agenda, not that we must become Marxists
or that we must become anything. What we must become is clear.
We have the technologies and the informational structures and all the necessary abilities
to create paradise on earth, to lift up the least among us
to at least an acceptable level of comfort and freedom.
Why do we not do that?
Because what stands in our way is our own minds, our own habits.
We must change our minds.
That's the most powerful political work people in this room could do.
And there is nobody who is so enlightened that they don't need to work on themselves and do this.
To the degree that we can change our minds, we will escape extinction, marginality and so forth.
And to the degree that we cannot change our minds, we will prolong the agony,
perhaps unto death and extinction, perhaps only making the struggle more difficult.
But yes, this is a moment of enormous opportunity.
Yes. We have a yes.
A yes.
So you agree that it's a moment of special opportunity over the long and short scales of time
according to either mathematics or novelty theory.
Yes.
And you agree that we have a responsibility to do our best.
Yes.
And what you have to tell us is that if the 200 of us here change our minds,
that that would somehow have an ameliorate effect on the rest of the world and our creation of the future.
Yes.
How?
How would it have this effect?
By telepathic means? By the romance of photons?
No, I think by the spread of clarity.
The spread of clarity.
The spread of clarity.
The elimination of redundancy in the system and the spreading of a sense of shared purpose
and the possibility of achieving that purpose.
It doesn't matter what you do beyond changing your mind for a better clarity?
Well, I don't want to say absolutely it doesn't matter, but I think that's the first obligation.
If you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity,
you're going to end up with business as usual.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it is not paved with clarity.
So you're, for example, what you do in life, you barnstorm giving lectures,
you write books and you create a website.
And the effect of this hopefully will be to promote clarity.
Correct.
Well, first of all, I certainly agree that for me personally,
psychedelic experience has enhanced clarity where some people think the opposite.
Let us have vigorous debate by informed parties.
Don't forget, I've given over 300 calculus lectures in this room.
It boggles my mind to look out and think, well, yeah, this is Santa Cruz, this must be Santa Cruz.
What do you think, Rup?
Well, the question really is, I mean, changing minds, you were talking about the butterfly wing effect.
The question is if we change our minds, can it have a larger effect on other people's minds?
Yes.
If we decide to recycle yet more newspaper and so on, it's not going to have that much effect.
The changing mind thing, the butterfly wing analogy suggests some major change of mind spreading through our culture.
Now, I suspect that you think the medium for this transformation is the World Wide Web.
I suspect that Terrence thinks the medium is.
Well, I think telepathy is equally powerful.
Yes, but...
Wait, I want to hear his suspicion at me.
World Wide Web?
Yes, I think...
No, no, psychedelic drugs.
World Wide Web, psychedelic drugs.
I still haven't understood the psychedelic drug agenda.
Britain has the highest percentage of psychedelic drug consumption in the Western world at the moment,
and it's not entirely clear that this has resulted in clarity spreading through the world.
Britain is the source and the fountainhead of the World Wide Youth culture that is creating the new music,
the new dance, the new forms of community and the new resistance to consumerist values.
So don't sell the old UK...
Come to the rave tonight and see clarity created.
Yes, yes, a crucible of clarity is home at last place.
And Terrence takes the microphone and...
Well, it's not always perfectly clear what's going on when you have your nose in it, you know.
I mean, my own agenda relies partly on the World Wide Web, not as strongly as yours.
And here in this room is Matthew Clapp, who kindly runs my World Wide Web site.
Stillbreak.org.
Yes.
So, but my own view is that this clarity involves breaking the spell of rationalism, Cartesianism,
a spell woven more powerfully than ever before this morning by Terrence.
I mean, it took on a new level of spellbinding in the way you described it.
It's to recognize that we're far more interconnected, we're far more participatory in our relation with the world
than this cognitive kind of science and cognitive model of the mind would tell us.
And so I think the secret to waking us up, one of the secrets is psychic pets.
As you know, this is one of my particular themes.
And the purpose of...
I wrote a book which some of you may have seen called 'Seven Experiments That Could Change The World'.
The purpose of this was to find simple experiments that could give us clarity on issues that we know about already,
which could actually have a transformative effect on our view of the world.
They're to do with changing our scientific view of the world.
And the scientific view of the world is a particularly important part of the spell that binds us all
and that affects our whole civilization, our whole industrial culture.
And it's an exceptionally narrow and dissociated view of the world at the moment.
The reason I think psychic pets could play this part is, first of all, there's more of them than psychedelics.
I mean, they're everywhere.
And there are lots and lots of dogs and cats that have telepathic bonds with their owners.
About 50% of Americans feel that they've had a telepathic bond with an animal.
Now, to recognize what so many people already know, through experiments to test these to see if they're real,
and so far the experiments suggest they are real,
this can give permission for people to recognize what they already know.
Then all these closet holists, most of us are closet holists, can come out
and recognize that there's this kind of interconnection with other species and with each other
that's been going on all the time,
but which has been suppressed from the level of supposedly rational discourse
by the idea that this is all superstition, it's not scientific, it's irrational, and so forth.
I think that one of the big difficulties in our culture is the split between the rational, educated part of our minds,
which we put on in public, and the participatory sense of connection which we have at home
with gardens, plants, children, animals, lovers, and our nearest and dearest.
And these are so dissociated that it's very hard for people to recognize that they're related in any way.
Lots of dogs know when their owners are coming home in a kind of telepathic manner
and wait at the door for them while they're on the way home.
I calculate that tens of thousands of American scientists have dogs waiting at the door for them
when they get home from the laboratory, even if they come at unusual times and in an unusual way.
Yet this phenomenon has been so subject to taboo that it's never been investigated scientifically at all.
It could have been investigated at any time in the last 500 or 5000 years,
but the fact is the first investigations are happening at present.
Here in the room is David Brown, who works with me, who's based in Santa Cruz
and is doing experiments with psychic dogs, cats, and cockatiels in Santa Cruz County.
And if any of you have such animals, please let him or me know at the end,
because we'd love to investigate your animals.
And you can take part in this research.
So I think that grassroots research based on phenomena that are actually common sense
that are part of everyday life for many people could help to wake us up
to give a greater clarity about what's really going on
and make us recognize that there's far more interconnection between us and other species
and us and other people than is admitted in the scientific view of things,
which is the world view which most people feel they have permission to talk about in public.
So I think that this transition, a butterfly wing effect, would be a few dogs and cats that do this
being proved scientifically to be able to do it, shown on TV, would probably overnight
give millions of people permission to recognize and talk about these events in their own lives.
And never again would the subject be able to be stuffed back into the closet.
I think these could lead to a great change in the way we think about the world.
Now it's not, of course it's several steps from that to solving the ecological problems of the world
to dealing with the problem of multinational corporations and so on.
But it's a step towards clarity and it's one that could spread very quickly.
Well, it seems to me the overarching theme here that unites all three of our positions
is boundary dissolution. Psychedelic drugs dissolve boundaries, the world wide web dissolves boundaries
and certainly the discovery that our pets are communicating, anticipating and understanding us
is a boundary dissolving perception.
So really what we're saying is we must dissolve the artificial boundaries that confine our perceptions.
Someone once said if we could feel what we are doing to the earth, we would stop immediately.
Because a man hitting himself on the head with a ball peen hammer stops immediately.
The feedback loop is very short.
So we have compartmentalized our lives and this allows us to do the faithful and lethal work
that is destroying the planet, destroying community, so forth and so on.
So maybe three answers as diverse as you've just heard here, you might search your own soul
and ask what obsession or interest of mine would contribute to the grand project of boundary dissolution.
Certainly it is not the affirmation of cultural values.
Culture is a scheme for maintaining and creating boundaries.
It replaces reality with a linguistically supported delusion and behind that delusion then
pogroms, programs of genocide, arms races, sexism, racism all can operate very, very comfortably.
Ralph earlier mentioned love.
Generally speaking, love is a boundary dissolving enterprise.
So each of us, the three of us, all of you in our way should find ways to express love.
And it's not treacally, it's not woo-woo, it's a very practical matter that has thousands of expressions.
As long as we believe in mind and matter, rich and poor, living and dead, aboriginal and advanced,
black and white, man and woman, then we're inevitably going to carry on a dualistic analysis of our dilemma
and we're going to produce incomplete agendas and answers.
Well, this is good. I agree with everything.
I admire you both for your revolutionary efforts.
Nevertheless, I can't help having a sinking feeling here we are in the University of California.
Naturally, my thoughts turn to the educational system.
Now, we have here a group of, I know there are actually a few undergraduates of the University of California at Santa Cruz out here,
by accident as it were, and that's cool, but we have not yet taken over one regularly offered course of the university
to enable students to learn science by doing research projects with psychic pets.
Well, Ralph, the university is the last place where you would look for this.
The university is the manufacturer of these cultural values that imprints on it.
Well, that's why I'm bringing up this subject of education at this time.
I think we've discussed the problem of education before,
but my experience is that no amount of clarity in this group of 200 and other like groups is going to matter one whit
when we are all adults. You see, the next generation will have to face the same butterfly problem with the same lever
because the majority of people will have their paradigm set in K through 12 in some archaic school system
that sees its primary business to work against a worldwide cultural revolution.
So the inertia, we have to overcome inertia, and we can talk about religion and psychedelics and getting clarity and so on.
We know that the scientific establishment is a big obstacle as far as environmental problems are concerned,
and so Rupert's work, the ultimate effect will be to deconstruct or revolutionize science,
is very important in making a transformation among adult scientists worldwide.
How can this matter at all if there is no change in the educational system K through 12, pre-K, pre-pre-K,
and back to the womb, the parents, and so on, that this chicken and egg loop has got to be touched somewhere
in a more sensitive spot than the adult community?
And what do you propose?
Well, you work with youth, I guess, you're interested in talking with younger people,
and Rupert, I know that you're particularly active in education through the existence of your children
who are now subject to the educational system that does this criminal brainwashing that I'm talking about.
So I'm just posing this now.
Do you have any idea as to the transformation of our school system by a change of curriculum
or the entrance of any weird idea into the actual program which trains most children worldwide?
Well, I ought to have.
There's a story that perhaps not everyone here is familiar with, which is when I was in New York a couple of years ago,
I was asked to visit a school in Long Island.
I was particularly urged to go there.
A private helicopter was sent to take me.
I was asked to address the board and the teachers at this school.
And when I asked them what they'd like me to speak about,
they said they wanted me to speak about the rectified sheldrake principle,
on which their entire curriculum was based.
So when I said, "What is the rectified sheldrake principle?"
They said that that was the very question they were asking, that I would explain.
I then asked who had invented the rectified sheldrake principle on which the curriculum was based,
and they soon revealed that the author of this principle,
or at least the author of the documents on which their entire curriculum was based, was Ralph Abraham.
By careful questioning, I was able to find out that the rectified sheldrake principle
meant that because of morphic resonance and habits of learning,
the sequence of events in which people should learn things in school should follow the historical process.
So in history, you learn first about the Sumerians, Egyptians, etc.
Then you move on to the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Dark Ages, etc., that it follows the principle.
And they start in Grade 1 with ancient Egypt.
I calculated on this basis that the invention of the domestication of fire,
which occurred between 400 to 700 thousand years ago,
should mean that in the toddler playgroups they should be playing with fire.
I pointed this out, but that wasn't part of the curriculum I was suggesting.
I discovered that there was in fact an entire process of educational reform afoot in this country,
behind which is the guiding genius of Ralph Abraham.
So I think we should ask you this question, Ralph, since you've more experience than most of us.
Well, I'd rather that people with less experience speak about it,
because my experience has been very disappointing.
Oh, no.
Here is the problem as I perceive it.
Maybe you can help me get through this one.
The children are innocent and trusting and will try any curricular reform experiment.
They'll try anything, which they have done in different schools around the world with great effect.
It was only a couple of days ago I was at the Intel farm, they call it, in Oregon,
where 10,000 people work on realizing Terence's dream.
Making psychedelic drugs available to them?
Oh, a different dream.
They know what I mean.
Chips not hits.
Casually over lunch I revealed my revolutionary program for the schools to a software engineer who was sitting there,
and he said, "Oh, well, this historical curriculum, I'm an Armenian."
And then I went to Algeria, he said, "I'm from Algeria, and my school was exactly what you -- it was wonderful."
So there are places in the world where even my experiment has been tried.
The problem is this.
The children, the owners of the school, the people, everything is fine.
The problem is with the teachers and parents.
The teachers have been trained.
That's one problem.
And the parents have been frightened, I guess.
So the parents absolutely refuse any experiments that would affect their children because of the danger of a failure.
You see that they consider the current system, which is guaranteed to fail, is somehow safer than an experimental system that might fail.
The insecurity itself is a source of anxiety.
Well, I'm just analyzing.
I don't really know what goes through their mind, but what I have discovered is that groups of parents come in and physically attack the teachers, the administrators, and so on,
to guarantee that the time-worn, failure-approved system is performed as it always has been.
You see the problem?
Older people seem to see the problem.
My parents have recommended mushrooms.
That's why Rupert has suggested psychic pets.
You see how revolutionary psychic pets are?
We're talking about the parents here.
After it's proved to them that what they already know is true by somebody in the authority of the scientific establishment,
then the truth will become true for them for the first time due to the fact that they trust authority more than they trust their own experience.
So I haven't given up yet with the educational system, but I'm still seeking some little way around this very deeply ingrained habit.
Well, part of the problem is as the stakes rise, the clenching on the part of the geriatric establishment becomes even more intensified.
So, for example, right now the worldwide epidemic of youth bashing is the most counterproductive thing we could possibly generate.
I mean, we're leaning on the very people who are going to have to save the situation.
Why not admit the obsolescence and bankruptcy of the old models and take our foot off the neck of youth
and honor an interest in psychedelic experimentalism, sexual redefining of roles,
a new look at how we relate to work, a new look at how we relate to community.
Instead of marginalizing youth culture and defining it as a phase, misguided, naive, foolish,
we should say these are the uncorrupted people in society who have not yet felt the hammer of the programming and the guilt
and the creodes of economic necessity and try to build upward and outward from youth culture rather than suppressing it.
For this reason, I will be appearing at a rave tonight that starts after my bedtime.
I wish I could be persuaded by your persuasive rhetoric.
My experience of youth culture is here are people who from the age of two have been watching hours a day of television
and shaped by commercials cunningly designed to introduce toddlers to the consumer society
whose music is dominated by a music industry run by cynical interests, manipulative people,
public relations operations and large corporations.
So to see this as uncontaminated, pure, the spirit of tomorrow,
untarnished by the vices of today seems to me to beg a number of questions.
However, I'll be there at the rave tonight too, Terence, and there I'll be able to see this paradise that's unfolding before us.
Your point about television is well taken. I totally agree.
I think this is the most pernicious programming and propaganda device around.
It's about to be strangled by the world wide web.
Well, and you know, you can just turn off your TV and I say that as someone who did.
I raised my children without television because rather than just giving lip service to the idea that it's stupid,
we actually acted on the perception that it's stupid.
We do too.
But your other point about the youth culture's music being in the hands of capitalists and record companies
is slightly out of touch with what's actually happening.
For $500 you can buy a CDR burner.
Bands do this and most youth culture music is now put out in editions of under a thousand pressings
and really the corporate middlemen have all been gone around and the big record corporations are not at all in touch with real tastes
and real creativity in the music business.
They recycle garbage that they support with massive public relations programs
at the same time that real creativity is alive and well and thriving on a fractalized micro scale
that goes right around the desires of mass consumerism.
[applause]
Sorry to interrupt.
[laughter]
I don't, I just, it would be good if there could be an experiment carried out, perhaps with you as the cheerleader,
for this youth culture of tomorrow actually to be able to be permitted rather than suppressed and so on
to see what happens.
I mean there are quite a number of experiments in this I would have thought going on spontaneously.
It's not as if all these people involved in this culture are totally controlled by parents, teachers, etc.
Many of them are not under direct control in this way at all.
So, but you're still going to have to have educational systems, school systems of one kind or another
and it's not clear to me that more raids and psychedelics are going automatically to generate that.
Well, I would offer as an example, I think the place on the planet where youth culture is most in control of the social agenda,
in other words where youth's preference for psychedelic drugs is honored, where youth's music is honored,
where microeconomic systems built by youth are honored is the Netherlands, Holland, lowest AIDS infection rate in Europe,
lowest heroin addiction rate in Europe.
Heroin is legal, prostitution is legal.
There are actually very large scale social experiments going on that embody the values of youth culture
and they're producing saner, less stressful, more life affirming in human societies
than anything going on inside the high tech industrial democracies that set the global agenda.
Well, I often visit Holland and I must say I haven't quite noticed such a striking difference between them and the rest of Western Europe.
Well, but that's really because you come from London where also these things are happening.
But if you lived in Berlin or Rio de Janeiro or Houston, I think the contrast with the Netherlands is quite astonishing.
Didn't mean to stop the show.
Ralph, you're not saying enough.
Oh, am I guilty then of too much self-indulgence?
No, you posed important problems.
Yes.
You've shown how on the edge of the millennium great steps or small steps are needed that magnify through butterfly effects.
Yes.
You've asked me and Terrence what you think they should be.
Yes.
You've told us you're disappointed by your own experiments with the reform of the educational system.
Yes.
So what next?
Well, as I say, I think that we're at the edge of a millennium.
We're at a turning point.
What may be coming down the pike could be two or three miracles that will decidedly change the definition of the problem.
And in the meanwhile, I think that we're more or less stuck in the situation where we keep trying what we're doing and believing that it has at least some chance of having an effect.
I think that the educational system might change itself by a miracle, for example.
And it could do that in a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with any of our efforts or in fact it may be that some little thing that we did mattered.
I think that your work in the revolution of science is very important and very promising.
And it's preceded essentially without funding because the genius of the program that you've evolved is that it has this enormous leverage.
And at every crossing of the road, you've made the right choice to get more leverage.
And, Terrence, I think that your program also is a good one in that it's over the years changed in the direction of younger people and that you've changed your approach to maximize.
I don't see in either case that there's an enormous backlash working against you, that other revolutionary movements have been stopped by a backlash.
And although you don't have funding, you don't have groups calling you up and threatening your life and so on.
In my own case, I have written about this endlessly. Besides writing mathematics, I write that mathematics is important.
And through the microscopic analysis of the hinges of history, the edges of millennia past,
I have pointed out exactly where in each case mathematics had a key role in the miracle and the bifurcation that happened.
I think that society that rejects mathematics cannot actually successfully deal with these problems.
And therefore, I have activated myself against the problem especially prevalent in the United States
and concomitant with other problems that are especially prevalent in the United States, the problem of math, anxiety, avoidance, and misunderstanding.
And here I would say that there is a huge institution, more or less, equivalent to the scientific community that's arrayed against this information,
that somehow the educational system has been particularly persistent in the destruction of mathematics,
in the destruction of mathematical capability of youth, and therefore in disempowerment of the society with its critical faculty to change.
I do not believe you can have any clarity of view in the progress of history with no mathematical training on the part of any of the participants.
I have seen in this society that even Nobel Prize winners in physics have math anxiety to a very severe degree.
I am able to detect this because it's something that is amplified, it's behavior that emerges as soon as I walk into a room.
So I guess I feel in some that my own efforts have been rather less successful, or maybe I haven't been as clever in turning to the left or right at the crossings of the road.
The problem is already much less severe in other countries, so it seems like we needn't worry too much. In Europe, throughout Europe, for example,
the problem of the destruction of mathematical capability is far less severe.
The only thing really disturbing there is that it's growing at an alarming rate, that it's becoming, they're inheriting the disease from the United States,
a spreading disease based on standardized examinations like the SAT and equivalent movements.
So there you have it, a problem that's so bad that the very mention of the word "mathematics" produces an aversion reaction that is paralyzing.
So that much as I hate to, and you've seen this today, that I can go through an entire day without mentioning mathematics,
with mentioning mathematics but not the word "mathematics" in the hopes of tricking people into recognizing that some ideas like this
that have to do with perception of space-time patterns in the abstract, that these skills are useful.
Can I add to that? I mean, I don't think what Ralph means is that it's a tragedy that most people can't factor a quadratic equation.
I think he speaks as he does because he is so professionally immersed in these issues.
As someone somewhat more distant from all of this, but in agreement from Ralph, the failure to teach mathematics
in practical, social and political terms boils down to a failure to teach logic and discriminating understanding.
The great evil, in my humble opinion, which haunts our enterprise, and I say this realizing I'm setting the fox among the chickens,
the great evil that has been allowed to flourish in the absence of mathematical understanding is relativism.
And what is relativism? It's the idea that there is no distinction between shift and shy NOLA.
That all ideas are somehow operating on equal footing.
So, one person is a chaos theorist, another is a follower of the revelations of this or that new age guru,
someone else is channeling information from the Pleiades,
and we have been taught that political correctness demands that we treat all these things with equal weight.
Because we have no mathematical ability, no logical ability, we don't know how to ask the questions that expose some positions
as preposterous, trivial, insulting to the intelligence, and unworthy of repetition.
So, we all are very comfortable bashing science and flailing away at that, but that isn't our enemy.
Science is capable of undertaking its own reformation and critique, and has been engaged in that fairly vigorously for some time.
The enemy that will really subvert the enterprise of building a world based on clarity is the belief that we cannot point out the pernicious forms of idiocy that flourish in our own community.
And this problem is growing worse all the time.
I mean, just pick up a copy of Magical Blend or Shaman's Drum, and you will discover an appeal to the level of intellect that makes what's going on with television advertising
look like a meeting of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study.
We have tolerated too many loose heads in our community.
We are not willing to take on the karma involved in argument and discourse that actually gores somebody's ox.
So that at the end of the day, iridology or Mormonism or some other form of institutionally supported foolishness lies in shreds on the floor.
We consider this politically incorrect. I can feel the tension in this room because people sense I might gore their particular ox.
If we had learned mathematical logic or reason or rules of evidence, when someone approaches us excited to inform us that the ruins of Lemuria have been spotted in the deep sea off Big Sur or something like that,
we would be able to respond to that with the contempt it deserves.
I had a conversation about this recently with someone who, if I had to describe their job category, I would describe them as mafioso.
And I said, "What do you think of the abduction phenomenon?"
And without hesitation, this person said, "There are just so many foolish people in the world."
To me, all of these things are intelligence tests, and the people who pass the intelligence tests are not worrying about pro bono proptologists from other star systems.
They're unamaged in their bedroom. So, you know, we have perfected politeness. We have perfected the ability to listen to damn foolishness without betraying by so much as the flick of an eyebrow that we realize what we're in the presence of.
Now I think it's time to refine our mathematical skills, learn to think straight, and not be afraid to denounce the pernicious forms of foolishness which are vitiating the energies of our community
and making us appear marginal and absurd in the discourse about truly transforming society.
[applause]
Well, I can't wait to see this laboratory of clarity unfold before me tonight.
And as all nonsense has dispelled, the scalpel of reason is brought out by Terence.
Yes, well, it is an ambiguous enterprise and fraught with contradiction, but forward ever forward.
[laughter]
An adventure out beyond the furthest boundary
I'll be searching for the spirit that can set me free
[Guitar]
Well I've been caught in the clutter of the day today
Waiting for that spark to come and sweep me crazy
On the wave of an ecstasy to a brand new reality
Where fantastic worlds open up in a dazzling display
Setting out on a journey of discovery
Through the doorway that opens to the mystery
An adventure out beyond the furthest boundary
I'll be searching for the spirit that can set me free
People say the spirit doesn't exist
If it comes to them they just resist
Then they come up with some theory to explain it away
But if they only had the eyes to see
The depth and power of the mystery
Then they would know that it goes far beyond the things they say
[Vocalizing]
The truth is stranger than a wildest thoughts can conceive
There are dimensions far beyond this normal world we perceive
There are revelations and epiphanies
There are visionary possibilities
All that's required is the courage just to take the leap
And then setting out on a journey of discovery
Through the doorway that opens to the mystery
An adventure out beyond the furthest boundary
I'll be searching for the spirit that can set me free
Setting out on a journey of discovery
[Applause]
So we sort of had something going before lunch
Can anybody remember what it was?
Oh, well I had a question
It was they said it was an ex nous, he was about a young woman
Yeah, and hadn't we done that?
We've done that
But not too bad again
Are you still doing questions?
Sure, yeah
I got one I'd like to pass around
The whole idea of the shaman as having this hyperdimensional overview
And as you say, some of them say it scares me shit like even the top dog
And other times you said you wonder why it isn't in headlines 11 inches tall
There seems to be something about the experience that is, I don't know if self-selecting is the right word
Or evolutionary selecting
Why is there such a small percentage of people who actually end up
Although you say everyone can do it, they do have the genetic possibility
But there's something more in the selective period where a shaman will come out
Because it is as you say an awesome responsibility
And yet it's everyone's possible liberation
And then one last thing, another code of this
You mentioned that you don't think that it's the bush or Reagan, etc.
Feeling that they just want to keep an economic grip as far as the sale of would-be hallucinogenics
Don't you think that there is some degree of teleological repression going on as well?
I mean you mentioned that you didn't feel that way
But other times I've heard you feel that there definitely is
Well I think that, yeah, I mean it simplifies the issue to say that it's entirely a money
Because the psychedelics are used by so small a percentage of people that it doesn't rate the tremendous institutional fury that is brought against it
And where you really see the contradiction in economic logic is with pot
I think that the subtext of the government's fear about psychedelics is that this quality that they have of dissolving boundaries
Causes people to question basic assumptions about how society is run
And I think this is true of any society, it isn't an American phenomenon
It's that if you take psychedelics, whatever you are, you know
Eskimo, Hasidic rabbi, quantum physicist, you will question your first premises
And you get millions of people questioning the first premises
And then the powers that be become very nervous
It's interesting that this whole phenomenon of the 1960s occurred because American commitment to universal public education
Brought its first generation of people to adulthood in the middle of the 1960s
Universal commitment to public education began after World War II
After the establishment took a look at what this filling, you know, actually funding and building up great public universities
And then filling them with inquisitive young people
What the result of that was, that's when they decided to turn the universities back into trade schools for CPAs
Which they did do
I mean, there is nothing like the level and the breadth of education and intellectual curiosity that was encouraged when I was going to school
That's all finished now
Now you're expected to do your data entry job, watch a lot of TV and keep your mouth shut
And this is what we expect of our college graduates
So really there was a crisis of faith in American institutions which was only exacerbated by psychedelics
It was a combination of educating people to the actual traditions of Western civilization in large numbers for the first time
And then giving them psychedelics, I mean, or having them exposed to psychedelics
And people began to ask questions for which there were no answers
And the response of the establishment was to suppress this
I mentioned cannabis, you know, you're all probably aware through the work of the hemp people
Cannabis holds many benefits, not necessarily related to its properties as an intoxicant, but as a source of food, lubricant, plastics, fuels, etc.
The reason the establishment is so hysterical on the subject of cannabis is because it erodes loyalty to the industrial state
I mean that's why, if you look at the pharmacological profile, let's contrast two familiar drugs
One, caffeine, we have the medical data which shows that it can contribute to fetal malformation
We know that it damages the liver, we know that it, if abused, can cause severe stomach ulcers, so forth and so on
Cannabis, vast amounts of money have been spent trying to find something wrong with it
And they're still digging, folks, I mean they've decided it doesn't cause tits on statues
It doesn't, you know, all the screwy things they've come up with over the years have had to be abandoned
Why is caffeine enshrined in every labor contract negotiated in the Western world as a sacred right of all workers twice daily?
And why is cannabis, you know, you can lose your house, your automobile, your bank account, your art collection simply because you had six plants in the back forty
And your children
Why are they, why this disparity? Well, what is the effect of caffeine?
It makes it possible for you to perform your duties during the last three hours of the work cycle with efficiency equal to the first three hours of the work cycle
It allows people to tolerate spinning widgets onto gombers until milk freezes over without a thought ever rising in their mind that maybe this is a ridiculous way to spend your life
Cannabis, on the other hand, people aren't so interested in going to work, they'd rather lay around and make love, they don't want to watch TV, they'd rather smoke a doobie and have a conversation with a friend
In other words, these things promote activities which don't make anybody any money and cause people to question the institutions and the social philosophies that are being shoved down their throats
If the playing field were level, caffeine might well be a prescription drug, not that I think that's a good idea, and cannabis I think would probably be freely available
The most dangerous drugs in society in terms of detrimental social impact are alcohol and tobacco, the two most freely available, I mean every street corner of every city they're peddled in vast amounts
We have a very cracked brain approach to the problem of drugs, we're not the only society, all societies seem to do this
Out of a possible spectrum of twenty or thirty depressants and intoxicants, most societies select three or four which they hail as harmless and then the rest are the seed of Satan
And this attitude is persevered in against all scientific data, against all medical research, this is just what people choose to think
The problem is we don't have the luxury of this kind of ignorance anymore, the amount of revenue that could be accrued from a cannabis economy, the pressure that could be taken off petroleum extraction if cannabis were part of the picture
All of these things make it incumbent upon us I think to think more creatively and more honestly about which drugs really are posing problems for us
The other question that really relates to this is why is the percentage of shamans so small relative to a population because of the fact that as you say there is fear and going into these other realms
And there's obviously maybe some self-limiting aspect of the hyperdimensional view which there's some dynamic going on because everyone has an equal opportunity to go to this hyperdimensional
But very few of their own initiatives really push to that point where you are definitely within the hyperdimensional realm
Well there are different things to be said about this, I mean first of all there are what are called biochemical differences in individuality and never more so than in the matter of drugs
Because people are very different from each other, years ago I took a course from Sasha Shogan at Cal and at one point he brought in some substance, I don't know what it was
And this was a class of 600 people and passed it around and asked everybody to take a sniff of this bottle, well 598 people pronounced this stuff completely odorless
Two people were almost violently ill from the overpowering odor of this thing, they possessed a gene for the sensitivity to this compound that caused it to be for them overwhelming, for everyone else unnoticeable
And we're surrounded by these kinds of individual biochemical differences, in traditional societies shamanism is often a family business and it may well be that this is because ability to handle these psychedelic substances
And to really get mileage out of them is a genetic endowment of some sort, I mean cannabis again provides an interesting example
One of the commonest things you hear people say about cannabis who don't smoke it is they say I used to or I tried it but it makes me paranoid
Well to the people who use it, this is inconceivable, in fact it's almost an antidote to paranoia because it seems to make things appear more Taoistic, more integrated, it all makes more sense
These are biochemical differences that need to be studied, you know different racial groups have different relationships to intoxication
I mean I think it's probably there is some truth to the idea that the North American Indians had the susceptibility to distilled alcohol that the Europeans who had been dealing with it for a couple of centuries by the time they arrived here didn't have
Because the North American Indians represented a closed gene pool never having been exposed to this, there was no selection for being able to handle it
And then there's another issue in relation to your question John which is first of all some people say well not all shamans take hallucinogens
Well true and I've excited some people's ire by suggesting but all real shamans do
Saying that somebody is a shaman, I mean imagine if simply being able to rave and exhort on the subject of the four gospels qualified you as a man of the Lord
Actually you have to sort through dozens of so called preachers to find somebody you would be willing to leave alone with your chickens
Well similarly you have to sort through a lot of people who claim to be shamans before you find somebody who really is one, I mean we tend to be naive, go to the Amazon with your heart on your sleeve seeking ayahuasca and I guarantee unless you go well connected you'll drink a lot of swill
Before you get to somebody honest enough, responsible enough, conscientious enough to actually make it right and do it right
And in the case of shamanism usually this is going on in cultures without literacy, without written languages and so they don't hold conferences or publish proceedings or have the university matriculation examinations in shamanism
So on the surface a shaman is anyone who claims to be a shaman or who cares to claim but in terms of real shamanic ability I think it only comes through either innate special abilities which probably means innate high sensitivity to neurological, to neurotransmitters, exotic neurotransmitters
Or it comes through an exposure to hallucinogens, this is a big argument in anthropology, Merciliaad who normally I am very deferent to got this one completely wrong and decided on absolutely no evidence that what he called narcotic shamanism was decadent
Well first of all the use of the word narcotic in that context shows that he didn't know what he was talking about
Nobody uses narcotics to shamanize, you go to sleep if you take narcotics
So what he wanted to say was that he felt hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent but what is the alternative? Reliance on ordeals, fasting or pathological personalities, maybe epileptics or borderline schizophrenics or something like that
I think that these kinds of shamanisms that are not hallucinogenically based are derivative shamanisms that occur at a later stage of culture when the plant based shamanism has been disrupted by some factor like migration or the disappearance of the plants involved or something like that
From what I understand the Lakota Indians didn't use hallucinogenic states to accomplish all this through the drum beat and the song and things like that
And to this day if you talk to the Lakota about the use of hallucinogenics as far as your shaman is going to say it's not necessary and yet in the southwest, in the southwest it's a prominent
Yeah, well I think acoustical driving can carry you a certain distance, there are substitutes for hallucinogens but they're neither as effective nor as pleasant
I mean ordeals are what many cultures get into
I was thinking along the lines of someone like crazy came out from the Lakota and seemed to possess these abilities and manifest them physically
Well there's also the exceptional personality, the exceptional personality breaks all the rules
But, um, I think I want to say
So would you say then Terrence that there is a genetic proclivity maybe in some individuals if there is access to botanicals and if there is no historical evidence of shamanism
Were you thinking prior to that, were that individual to start engaging in explorations?
Yeah, I think so
You know Maria Sabina claimed that she was never initiated into shamanism, she claimed that as a girl herding the cattle she ate the mushrooms because she was hungry
And that she was basically self-taught in shamanism in a society that actually had shamanic lineages and institutions
In Madagascar there are these highly evolved ordeal poisons and this is where you take a plant, you feel like you're dying
You beg to die, you want to die and you don't die, you come back from it a better person
But it is only because you were slammed up against death itself, ordeals work but they're not very pleasant
And the idea of putting yourself through an ideal like that once a week or twice a month as part of your professional practice is pretty outrageous
The other thing that has to be said and this is really important and I think anthropologists have sold this one short
Experiences are what we are least able to communicate to each other
We can describe machine parts, agricultural procedures but anything in the realm of healing our languages are woefully impoverished
And I don't think that's specific to English, I think it haunts all human experience that it's hard to communicate how we feel
Well, so then there's a vast spectrum of experiences that come from plants and I dare say most of them unpleasant
Let's start out with eating diffenbachia or something which causes your throat tissues to swell up and you feel like you're strangling
The one in the muscaria is a very controversial shamanic plant because some people say it's garbage and Gordon Watson in his last book called it the supreme entheogen of all time
Well, clearly people are they talking about different things or are they interpreting the same experience differently
And so there are for example people who are fond of peyote like if they haven't done their homework
Like to imagine that they are taking this ancient ancient hallucinogen that has informed the lives of the Sonoran and the Indians of that area for thousands and thousands of years
This is as far as anybody can tell complete bunk
There is no record of peyote use older than four or five hundred years
Most of it is post ghost dance
When you go into the old Sonoran graves the old archeology of the Sonoran, the Tarahumara Indians you find sakura sapundifolia beans
The little black and red beans that you see in Mexico strung into jewelry sold along the side of the roads
That's what those Indians took for thousands and thousands of years. We have a continuous record over about four thousand years of these seeds being buried in graves with the ritual instruments indicating that they were buried with shamans
You couldn't give it away today because it is such a horrible experience. It's essentially sub-lethal strychnine poisoning. It can kill you effortlessly
It's clear that at some point fairly recently somebody tried peyote and said my God this stuff we've been taking for thousands and thousands of years is just horrible compared to this. This is great
And immediately there was a transfer of loyalty and Lord knows eating fresh peyote is no gourmet undertaking
So the point there being cultures tend to define experiences differently and you can't tell what people are talking about until you really check in
Traveling around the world you end up in certain cultures and they say oh we're so happy to have you here. As our honored guest we would like you to eat some of our national food
Let's say you're in Scotland and so they say well you must eat some huggies because this is what we all eat. We all really love this. This is the best part of Scottish life
Boy are you going to love this. Well when it's finally served your jaw drops in disbelief because it's ghastly unless you're scotch
Well but if you're scotch you dare not say so you see because a cultural myth has been built up around. I mean do Italians knock red wine? Do the French denounce truffles? Certainly not
Ah true. Pate de foie gras is always my example. So what you have to realize is that these things are culturally defined and often what works for the Yanomamo or the Muinani or the Ouetoto won't work for you
The datura is a good example. The datura is a shamanic plant used by many people throughout the world. All of them I think are pharmacologically deprived otherwise they wouldn't put up with what you have to put up with to take that stuff
And my interest and it was practical was to find a hallucinogen that did what I wanted it to do and didn't do anything I didn't want it to do
What I was interested in was first of all hallucinations because some people say I'm obsessed with it. Fine. My notion is that if you can see something that isn't there that's very much more convincing than just funny thoughts
Racing ideas, strange physical sensations. It's a powerful and boundary dissolving confrontation when you confront what is not there
And so I find, and this is a heresy for sure, I'm not that fond of LSD. I think it's a very sloppy drug. I think you know you feel terrible the next day. I always did. I had tight headaches, body aches. People always say well it was not clean, it had speed in it, it had strychnine in it. Maybe
But even the good stuff is not... And it wouldn't hallucinate for me the way I wanted it to. I could get hallucinations if I would smoke cash with it
But on its own it was what I have described in other places as abrasively psychoanalytic, unpleasant, confrontational. And what I was interested in were hallucinations. So when I got to psilocybin I remember after my first mushroom trip I said thank god we found this stuff. I'll never take LSD again.
That wasn't quite true but I bet I've taken it less than half a dozen times since my first psilocybin trip. And in terms of the chemistry of these things my conclusion from all this fiddling is that it's the end-all hallucinogens that are at the centre of the mandala.
They do what we want them to do with very little detrimental side effect. LSD is one of them, Ebola is one of them, not one widely known. We've got to save something for our old age folks.
We've got to save the
things that we want to do.
We've got to save the things that we want to do.
We've got to save the things that we want to do.
We remember I said that DMT is destroyed in the gut. So we were fascinated to try and find this ukulele because we wanted to know how it was possible that it could work orally. And also the ethnographic accounts claimed that the people who used it spoke with little men.
And we wanted to see these little men to see if they were the same little men we were talking to.
We had three expeditions to the Amazon before we finally closed in on this stuff. And when we finally got it with this tremendous sense of having attained the grail and having finally this was going to do it, this was going to be the one to bring it. Then we took this stuff and my God it turned this every way but loose.
Your heart feels like it's pounding its way out of the front of your chest. You vomit. You have tremoring of the limbs. On and on and on. So we go through this, live through it, wash off in the river and go looking for the shaman to lodge a complaint.
And he says, "Yeah, well it's hard to get used to."
And so then when we get it back home to the lab and do the high pressure gas chromatography and all the rest of it and see what's really there, you see that the genetic component of the varroa trees from which this resin is extracted is a mess.
It's too many tryptamines. DMT, DET, 5-monomethyl tryptamine, 5-MAO DMT and several other cardioactive tryptamines. It looked like they'd swept the floor of an endochemist's lab to put together the components of this plant.
You don't want this. Because it's like taking 10 drugs at once. It's all running together. You can't tell whether you're Agnes or Angus.
What you want is a DMT source where when you put it in the gas chromatograph, you get one spike. That's N-M-Dymethyltryptamine and all the rest is cellulose, a little DNA and that's all. Some minerals and salt.
If you don't have a clean source, then it's contaminated. So even that legendary shamanic hallucinogen when actually put to the use test wasn't able to pass it.
Yes, going back to the DMT and mushroom psilocybin. You were talking about taking psilocybin and then doing breath control is indistinguishable from a DMT test. If you do it correctly, you can coax it.
Since this is a learning tree and you're in front there, maybe you can give us an idea of what it's like to coax five granites into a... I'm sure you won't be able to give us all the information, but maybe you can enlighten us a little bit and we can work in that direction. At least I can work in that direction.
I mean, how do you get at the peak of a psilocybin trip to deliver you into DMT land? Yes, because sometimes I get a little jealous hearing you talk about DMT trip. I sit here and say, "You know, I want to find that stuff." Anyway, so...
Well, the thing is, psilocybin will take you there if you have the courage and the stamina to tolerate the duration of the psilocybin revelation. So first of all, you take a heroic dose, five, six, seven grams. Then, when you're peaking...
You smoke cannabis. Then, you sit in silent darkness alone, because I think the presence of other people always pins you to the surface with this stuff. You don't need somebody else.
No matter if they're talking or not, they can just be in the room and you're aware of that. Then this is a different thing. Breathing, exhaling, breathing, exhaling. And then you form an intention for it to approach you.
I mean, you say... I can feel it. I mean, it's almost a... It's a neighborhood. It's a pharmacological neighborhood. And you know how you may go to Little Italy, but there are no Italians on the street?
But if you start... You know, you have to somehow shake them out of the nest, and you simply ask for them to appear. I always hark back to that episode of "I Love Lucy," where she and Ethel are discussing how to contact the space people.
And Lucy tells Ethel... She says, "Well, I just say, 'Come in, little green men. Come in, little green men.'" And yeah, it's a big laugh now, but try it on 25 milligrams of silver fiber.
Yes, I'm just going to suggest. You were talking about your general reference to "they," what "they" means. What "they" are trying to do. You have "they." Plus, I'd be great to know what your viewpoint is on the UFO and contact me.
I'm not sure which of those questions you got first.
Well, the "they" of the DMT thing is these entities which you contact, although they may turn out to be toys created by someone unseen who is in fact in charge of this hyperdimensional maternity ward.
But these toys, if that's what they are, are essentially teaching machines of some sort. They're trying to get you to perform this linguistic activity.
As far as the UFO thing is concerned, I think it's... Well, it sort of requires some backgrounding. I think that there's something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of the world.
I think it's fundamentally wrong. What it is, is that we believe that the past creates the present. That the present is the sum total of actions and situations that exist in the past.
In other words, we believe that the horse pushes the cart. The horse doesn't push the cart. The cart is pulled. There is an attractor in the future.
There is actually, I think of history as a bowl. Down the slope, we are making our way. Well, since we are in a situation where conservation of energy is important, where are we all going to end up?
The bottom of the bowl, obviously. That's if you release a marble up on the rim, it's going to make its way down the bowl to what's called the dwell point.
The place where the energy requirements are such that the forward momentum of the falling ball is satisfied by meeting the resistance of the bottom of the bowl.
History is like this. We are being pulled forward by an attractor. It has somehow come into the human world and has pulled us out of animal organization.
If this attractor were not present, we would still probably be cheerfully slinging excrement around in the canopy of some jungle tree. But because of the attractor, we have been pulled into social organization, technology, language, community, so forth and so on.
And mystics and seers and visionaries are people who have a relationship to this attractor that is different from the rest of us.
They can glimpse aspects of this thing. And when I think of it this way, I always think of those jewel, the mirrored ball that they hang over the bar in the disco.
And then they spin it and it throws reflections of light all over the room from the ambient lighting. Well, history is like this.
The attractor at the end of time, which is below the event horizon of the present and thus impossible to anticipate its true form, sends back through time distorted reflections of itself.
Which if you are struck by one of these distorted reflections, well then you begin to preach and cure and local conditions may damp your activity and then you're what's called a nut.
But if in fact local conditions support your activity so that you become a mean spreader, then you're suddenly a messiah, a teacher, a buddha, a christ, a mohammed.
That's what these people were. They were people who were for reasons mysterious to themselves I'm sure in a relationship of resonance with the transcendental object such that they in a sense embodied it.
Well, in our own era, because of technology, and Jung was onto this when he wrote his book in 1948 called Flying Saucers, a modern myth of things seen in the sky.
He said the flying saucer is an image of the self that haunts the skies of earth as a compensatory effect to our alienation.
Well I think that that's exactly what's going on except that he didn't realize how nuts and bolts that explanation was. The UFO is a mirage being cast backward into time by the transcendental object at the end of time.
And that's why it has such a hair raising aura of weirdness about it. It isn't a ship from another star system. I mean how could anyone reasonably entertain that idea given the distances in time and what you find when you get here?
I mean who would make that trip? Who had any reasonable way to spend their time? It's a compensatory image that haunts time because time is a kind of hologram.
Time is a fractal and fractal means that the same pattern is embedded again and again in a relationship of self similarities.
So because the transcendental object exists somewhere ahead of us in history, there must necessarily be a tiny part of it somewhere nearby. And this is what the UFO is I think.
And this is why nobody is ever going to show you a chunk of it and they're never going to put an extraterrestrial on network television because it isn't that kind of a creature.
It's a compensatory image from the end of time. This leads me to an aspect of what I very briefly and obliquely indicated this morning which was when I was talking about how we're halfway through history but the rest of it has to happen in only thirty years.
I think that we're moving towards something called concrescence. This isn't my word, it's Alfred North Whitehead's word. I think you can tell what it means. It means everything melts together into one thing.
I think that from the very birth of the universe, this is bigger than the human species, bigger than the life of the earth. From the very first moments of the universe's existence, it has been itself under the domain, under the influence of an attractor.
And this attractor is pulling everything into tighter and tighter states of self-reflective resonance.
And that now we are very close to this concrescent event and that in fact human history, I called it the shock wave of eschatology but I didn't talk much about what eschatology is because, well first of all it lies below the event horizon of the present historical epoch.
But it won't always. It could rise above the horizon at any time. You know, 2000, 1996, you name it. But we have been too long under the spell of the idea that only the past creates the present.
The present is actually largely created by appetite for the future. And this would seem to me a highly improbable idea had I not taken psychedelics and gotten this hyperdimensional view of the system that we're living in.
And then you can see that yes, history is not a random walk. It's not a series of undirected random fluctuations. History is a process of fractal self-complexification that builds on whatever it has achieved.
And so upon the complexity of animal organization is laying the complexity of human language.
Upon the complexity of human language is laid the complexity of symbolic signification of that language, i.e. writing.
Upon writing is laid electronic technology and so forth and so on. So we are in a sense in the act of giving birth to or creating the object of our theologies which is a kind of god or goddess depending on how you slice into it, how you feel about it.
And the UFO is simply an indicator that we are so close now to encountering the compressive transcendental object that it's able to haunt the skies of earth and the imaginations of people who live in trailer parks.
You have to remember that history itself is a violation of the laws of nature and history and its consequences are all around us.
We don't have to argue about whether is history happening. I mean if obviously it's happening we're embedded late in it. But it's caused by the fact that ordinary nature, the nature of glaciers, chipmunks, anthills, termite nests and whale pods has come, at least in the case of our species,
under the influence of something which has literally fastened on to us and is now recreating us in its image. It's taking a monkey body and it's saying, "Stand it up. Slide the eyes around to the front. Oppose the thumb.
Shed the hair. Enlarge the brain. Put ideas into the brain." So forth and so on.
We are being recast as something unimaginable to the rest of nature and we are now fairly close to figuring out what this is. This is why we are able to talk about human-machine symbiosis, virtual reality, downloading ourselves to the size of viruses in a nanotechnological domain, stuff like that.
Did you say that the index of conquest was to look at this current version of the flap it's taking to investigate with contact in the presentation?
What's the name of it? Arvid, the psychiatrist who's actually been at the hotel and the number of people who work with these claims at the organization.
I agree with your idea that it's an index of the depth of compressence, though muddied by shrewd public relations types who are making a living off this stuff. I think the crop circles are a more honest indication of how close we are to the transcendental body.
I interviewed the person you mentioned at Harvard for a film we did in Prague a few months ago and I had to ask him halfway through the interview, "Do you detect anything in your own psychological makeup which makes you unfit to be doing this?"
That was after he told me that he'd interviewed 500 women who had fetuses removed from their bodies by space people. He said, "You know, the amazing thing about this is there are no physical scars at all."
And I said, "Well, what does this suggest to you?" And he said, "Advanced surgical techniques of which we have no knowledge." And I'm just... my craft detector went AWOL on that answer.
The rules of evidence are not in suspension for the new age. And, you know, people who recall their lifetime as the barber of Nefertiti or whatever have serious problem with what I call the rules of evidence.
They don't seem to have ever heard of Occam's Razor, which you study logic for 10 minutes and they tell you about Occam's Razor. Do you all know what this is? It's a simple idea. Keep it next to you. Hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity.
And there are a lot of unnecessary hypotheses running around, especially in the new age domain. I would study the impregnation effect more as an example of mass hysteria because, you know, being in the position that I am in,
I'm not a supposedly revered teacher and a person of great insight and all this hoopla and crapola. You occasionally get invited to dinner with the movers and shakers and then you hear what's said when not on stage.
I have to tell you, there's enough cynicism to satisfy a renaissance pope among these people. They are taking the rest of us for a ride in many cases.
Well, Danny and I last night were discussing this transcendental object. We were enumerating a list of things that it could possibly be and as you say, the cast of reflection and so forth.
How is it that, say for example, the Ayahuasca in Pablo Amerigo's drawings, there's a UFO motif in one of his drawings. What is that?
You mean do they see UFOs? What is it that they see? Because they specifically identify this motif as separate from the rest of the drawings in one of Shaman's drama magazines.
Well, I'm giving the UFO a slightly different status than this stuff I'm dumping on. I think the UFO is real or that there is a real phenomenon. The problem is, what is the phenomenon?
It's why someone who sees a spinning disk in the sky assumes then an entire theology about friendly extraterrestrials coming to help us out. Why do they assume that?
Maybe what they've seen is a spinning disk in the sky for crying out loud. Maybe what they saw was a spinning disk in the sky. There are two phenomenon here which are entangled inextricably and unfortunately for the intellectually honest.
There's the UFO. Who knows what that is? And then there's the UFO community. And the UFO community is just fraught with the most crack-brained, peculiar, self-serving, unstable, much-minded group of people you would ever hope to get together in one place.
It's like a magnet for screwballs. People who like to wear diamond tiaras and give themselves funny names. It has absolutely nothing to do with the tremendously fascinating and ambiguous phenomenon of strange things seen in the sky.
I went through this. I'm not talking as an outsider. I had a UFO encounter that was a deeper encounter than most of the people who run around pontificating about UFOs.
And I will, at the risk of boring you yet again with this story, tell the story. I was in the Amazon. I was having all these revelations about time and one thing and another.
And I noticed a place in the sky where there was a spectrogrammatic diffraction of some sort. It wasn't a rainbow. It was a colored smudge in the sky.
And I was lightly but continually intoxicated on mushrooms during this period. And it said, "Watch there." It was in the southwest. And I really didn't need to be told. But it said, "Watch there."
So I sat up one night, all night on this rock by a lake, watching the southwest. And around 4.30 in the morning, with essentially a perfectly clear sky, except that off the Amazon jungle, local mist rises.
And so about a mile and a half away from me on the horizon was a line of what looked to me like a little fog bank. And as light broke over this situation, I noticed, I couldn't tell whether it had been doing this or it began doing it as things got lighter.
But I noticed that this fog bank was rolling in place like a pencil rolled between your fingers, which I had never seen a fog do that. I thought, "What a strange thing."
And as I watched it, stretched out across the horizon, it gently broke into four equal-sized pieces. So now I'm looking at four gray lenticular clouds spaced out along the horizon about a mile and a half away from me across this lake.
So I'm watching, and I'm getting eager, and I'm getting excited. And as I watch these four lenticular clouds, two and two merge. Now I'm looking at two denser, grayer, dark gray, darker than storm clouds, these two things on the horizon.
And as I watch, the four became two, the two become one. And at that point, faintly, I could hear the "hwee, hwee, hwee" sound of 1950s science fiction UFOs.
"A la the day the earth stood still, they came from outer space," so forth and so on. And I see, my God, this thing is starting toward me, and the sound is getting louder.
And at that point, there was like a complete conversion in an instant, and my whole body went cold, and I realized, "They're coming for me. This is it." You know?
"Prepare to be beamed up, Scotty." And everybody was asleep in a hut about 70 feet up this mud embankment. I was down by the river and the lake.
And it flashed in my mind, "I have to get a witness. There must be a witness." And I looked over my shoulder at the mud bank, the thing was coming at me. I half stood up. My knees were so weak.
I sat back down, and I just prepared to depart this planet, this dimension. And as it came, I could see it, and it was getting closer and closer. I could see rivets on the underside.
I could see the running lights. And as it got closer and closer, I realized that what I was looking at was the end cap of a 1932 Hoover vacuum cleaner.
The very end cap that George Adamski had suspended on a piece of nylon thread in his garage and photographed with his Brownian stomatic to produce the famous UFO photograph of the UFO with the three balls on the underside and the ribbing going around.
That photograph has been utterly debunked. Computer analysis of it by modern techniques, it's bullshit. And there it was, 40 feet in diameter, coming after me across the Amazon treetops.
Well, then, and I just went bananas at that point, and then it passed over not more than 200 feet above my head, turning slowly. I could see the three balls. I could see everything. I could see it.
And I understood then that what it was was it was more shocking than a real UFO because it had its disconfirmation built into it.
I was having an experience which you couldn't tell anybody about. What would the editor of We Love UFOs magazine say if you told him that story?
He'd say, "Get out of here!" You know, we don't print stories like that. We're interested in real UFO.
Did it impart information to you of some sort? Because apparently you've been knighted the person to speak about mushrooms in such a way that you're actually, and some people do say that, that Terrence McKinnon may be an alien being himself in Carnet.
Well, only people who are in litigation with me. I think what it was telling me, it was a perfect Zen lesson. It was saying, "Don't believe in UFOs. They're the end caps of 1932 Hoover vacuum cleaners. Expand to 40 feet in diameter and flying through your mind."
So you have to question everything. Yeah. It's saying, you know, you can't replace one stupid hypothesis, "There aren't UFOs," with another stupid hypothesis, "We're being visited by benevolent creatures from another world."
You have to get a little more depth here if you want to be the alien ambassador.
Well, the crop circles, I'm now less sure about the crop circles. What I liked about them was that they appeared at a certain point in time, and then each year there were more of them.
And I figured that we could take how many there are each year and draw a curve and reach a conclusion about how far away in the future the source of them was.
Because if they are, it's almost as though the UFOs see leaves no trace. I mean, the burn marks on the ground, but already you're into dubiousness.
Who has ever seen these burn marks? Only the editors of these UFO magazines and their willing psychopaths. I mean, you and I have not seen these burn marks. We've seen photographs of funny stuff on the ground, and we're told that's it.
The crop circle leaves a trace that is enduring, but the problem I have with the crop circles, and it's odd how you never hear this discussed, is that nobody has ever seen one come into existence.
We get before, and we get after, but how come we never get during? Do they appear instantly? If they appear instantly, that would be pretty convincing. Just glance, it's not there.
Just glance, it's there. There's a, somebody's doing a lot of the research, it's Colin Andrews, he's doing a lot of research on this, and I've got a recording.
This is basically how he described it. They were waiting and setting up to, in this area, to try and record some of this going on, and all of a sudden the recorders were running, and all of a sudden they all stand up because there's this incredibly strange, powerful sounding buzz of some kind.
It comes from far away, just comes zooming up and comes past them over this little rise, and it takes them all a maybe 45 seconds or a minute to get to the top of the rise, and there on the other side of the rise is the crop circle that wasn't there when it started setting up.
So apparently, you know, Richard Holcomb talks about this too. Don't get me started. Don't get me started. Bad works of art on a scale of miles are not what we should expect from intelligent visitors from the stars.
Here's what I, let me, isn't it a little weird, let's, I mean, first of all, let me say, I'm open-minded against, about the crop circles, but let's also not be silly.
Isn't it a little peculiar that this phenomenon appears within driving distance of the apartments of the people most likely to chronicle and proclaim it as a manifestation of Taluric energy from another dimension?
In other words, what if it had been happening in Turkmenistan? Then you would have something, but then how would John Michell and Colin Andrews and all these people have been able to make a living off of it?
There are a number of things that are really weird about the crop circles. First of all, we're talking southern England here. The place is littered with RAF bases, nuclear weapons depots, intercontinental missile delivery systems, so forth and so on,
and we're asked to believe that the Ministry of Defence is utterly unconcerned about the fact that the airspace of Great Britain is being violated night after night after night by a mysterious agency that if it can snap the stem of a wheat stock could throw the switch on an electrical device of some sort.
The British establishment is utterly unconcerned by the crop circles.
Wherever it's coming from, if you had a nuclear weapons depot, I think you would be Johnny at the raffle to find out what's going on.
Didn't you read last year and the year before, these two guys came forward and said that they had perpetrated a hoax?
Yes, and all that did was muddy the waters. Well, it did one good thing. It finished the "it can't be done by human beings" position. We now know, you know, Rupert and all these people, Rupert, believe it or not, is the plant pathologist who serves on the board of the seriologists, which is the main publication that is booming this.
They held a contest in July where you paid £50, you were assigned a five-acre plot, you had from 10 at night until 4 in the morning, there were I think 16 entries, everybody was given the same design,
and at dawn judges helicoptered over the sites and then made the ground inspection, and three of the contestants produced crop circles that were indistinguishable from the real thing.
Beautiful crop circles, and I'm getting this from believers, you know, this is what Rupert reluctantly informed me of. I think that, and you know, one theory is that it's a particle beam weapon being tested from space, but tested 750 times in the last 18 months in the same small part of England.
And they recover their track.
I don't know, we tried, I came up with two theories that do not require telluric intervention or friendly extraterrestrials. First theory, a whole lot of people, first of all, it's killed the UFO industry in England.
You can't give away UFO sightings at this point. So all of these people, you know, and all this happening near Glastonbury and down where the old earthworks are, it's occurring in an area where there is the largest concentration of people likely to hail it as a paranormal phenomenon on the surface of the earth,
and they have done so. They have made outrageous statements, statements like "No human being could do this", "It's impossible to explain this", so forth and so on.
Well, now imagine that something like MI5, you know what that is, it's the English CIA, looks at the rise of paganism in Britain, you know, earthworks, channeling, all of this stuff, and says "This threatens church and state. We need to create a disinformation situation.
Let's lure these people out onto a limb, way out onto a limb, and then let's cut the limb off". So what you do is you create this pseudo-paranormal phenomenon.
You get John Mitchell, Colin Andrews, all these people to proclaim its weirdness, and then you reveal that it's easily duplicated. That's one theory. In other words, the British establishment is undercutting paganism by luring these people into saying too much.
But that's not my favorite theory.
That's a good one, though.
What's your favorite?
Oh, my favorite theory is much better. Because the question is, how do you make these things? When you actually go to the crop circles, what do you see? This is a Sherlock Holmes type deal.
Sherlock Holmes could handle the crop circles. There's an arm tied behind his back, I think. When you go to the crop circles, here it is. The crop circle. Mysterious, unearthly, portending, who knows what.
And what else is there? Well, the press, and the sightseers, and yourself, and an extraordinary number of Japanese tourists.
That's perfect.
Now...
Economics.
You're getting close. The Japanese press has followed the crop circle phenomenon more avidly than any other press in the world outside of England.
Every new crop circle appears, photographs and discussion. It is huge in Japan. Japan, they're obsessed with this stuff.
I think that what might be going on, this is certainly a lot more likely than extraterrestrials or telluric forces. Do you all know what MIZI is?
It's the Ministry of Trade and Industry. It's this enormous organization in Japan which coordinates technological development and marketing. It's what we're talking about when we say Japan Incorporated.
I think that this is a MIZI research project and that these Japanese tourists, which are ever-present at these sites, some of them are drawn from a centuries-old tradition of ninja stem snappers who, at a given signal, are able to hurl away their Nikons, rush into the corn,
and in a matter of a few minutes create these things, then put their cameras back on and their sunglasses back on and take up their deep cover as Japanese tourists.
Now why would MIZI do such a thing? What's in it for them?
It's a semiotics project. They are studying the impact of symbols on the Western mind.
The closest thing to these crop circles, if you look at a complete encyclopedia of them, are the pottery marks made by master potters in medieval Japan on their ceramics. Almost all of the crop circles, except the frivolous ones.
Like, for instance, how about the fact that the symbol of the serologist magazine was done in one place?
Under The Teaching Tree (Part 4)
done in one of these things.
I was at that one with Rupi.
Yeah.
These things, it's got humor behind it.
I mean, it's a grand silliness of some sort.
I'm willing to be proven wrong.
I grappled with it like everybody else for six months.
But the density of flakiness around it is incredible.
And the number of people whose private agendas
are being served by this.
I mean, if it were happening north of Hudson Bay,
there'd be no money in it.
You have to be able to drive there from central London
in order for it to work.
Well, then people always say, well,
it's happening all over the world, my good man.
Haven't you heard?
Show me.
Show me.
It's not happening all over the world.
Some clumsy attempts appeared in Kentucky.
And there was something in Germany, and so forth,
and so on.
But it's really hair-raising to be among these people
and to see how uncommitted to finding out what it is they are
and how totally committed they are to preserving it
from rational inspection.
They don't want to talk about any alternative other
than whatever the pet theory of the week
is about how it's happening.
Now, I see it as part of the ingression into novelty.
Things are going to get weirder and weirder.
There's no doubt about that.
But it doesn't mean that there is
a conscious extraterrestrial agency.
I mean, I find it pretty weird that there
are 500 women who think they have fetuses removed
from their bodies by extraterrestrials.
That's so weird.
That suggesting that it's true seems a little like overkill
to me.
I mean, what is going on that would make
a woman do that sort of thing?
There's always, if you're a careful observer of one
of these things, there's always-- Jacques Vallee wrote
about this-- a residuum of absurdity that
is suppressed by the witness.
Because the witness knows that if they told the whole story,
their story is not credible.
This is called the built-in absurdity
of these paranormal things.
And when somebody tells you a story about a UFO encounter
that does not have this element of self-contradicting absurdity
in it, they're manipulating the evidence
to make it seem more woo-woo-woo, I think.
And I'm not a rationalist, except-- well,
I've seen things that violated the laws of physics.
I believe the laws of physics can be violated.
I believe there may well be extraterrestrials somewhere
in the universe.
Do you believe the Voynich manuscripts
may have something to do with some type of alien intelligence?
No, I think the Voynich manuscript is a solved problem
and that this guy Leo Levertov's translation is correct.
What we found was it was a Catharite manual for the dying.
That's much more exciting than trying
to claim it as a book from another dimension.
Because now we gain an insight into what Catharism
was really about.
I think there is a residuum of the irrational
and the paranormal.
But these things, like flying saucers and Atlantis
and the crop circles, they're like viruses
upon the healthy body of language.
There's something wrong with language and communication.
Because it's never, as you imagine, it's going to be.
And people are being sold a phenomenon
that if they were to go, they would
discover that aspects of it were suppressed or misrepresented.
The people who are dealing with the crop circles
are having a great time.
It's the longest drinking party on record in that part of England.
I guess I should say this.
I know it's a bummer to have your favorite weird thing
dumped on.
But my technique, which I recommend to you,
is don't believe anything.
If you believe in something, you are automatically
precluded from believing its opposite.
Therefore, you have given up a portion of your freedom.
And freedom is the dearest thing we've got.
You don't have to believe anything.
You can just provisionally work your way through stuff.
And then probe the edges.
The edges will satisfy.
I think that the proper way to contact the other
is with hard-headed rationalism exercised
under weird conditions.
I went to India, visited some of these yoga people
and accomplished saints.
I'm telling you, for my money, it was hokum.
There was an ulterior agenda, either having the wish
to relieve you of your cash or to violate some body cavity.
That was the ulterior agenda.
When I went to the Amazon with the same attitude of skepticism
and talked to the shamans there, they delivered the goods.
So you just investigate these things.
And the key question is, what can you show me?
If they've got it, they can show it.
There's no mumbo jumbo around the real thing.
But if they say, oh, well, you know, the tape recordings
miraculously erased themselves last night.
Or we'll show you, but you have to sweep up
around the ashram for a dozen years to prove you're worthy.
Or you are not worthy.
That's the one where you head for the door.
You are not worthy.
The real thing is the real thing, for crying out loud.
It can be displayed.
It doesn't require this weird, fuzzy relationship of worth
and insight and so forth and so on.
And that's how I got to psychedelics.
Psychedelics work.
If you think that I'm bullshitting you,
go home and take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness.
And then we'll talk.
That's the sine qua non.
But it'll work on demand.
I'm not saying, and wait 40 years, or purify yourself,
or get your aura stitched up for any of the rest of it.
It'll work.
It'll blow your mind to shreds.
It's real.
This other stuff is just, you know, all these gurus.
They need to find honest work.
They need to join the rest of us in contemplating
the mystery of reality.
They don't know what they're talking about.
If they knew what they were talking about,
they wouldn't have to shuffle the deck
when you're out of the room.
And that's what's going on.
Somebody must be outraged and insulted
and terribly disappointed.
Yeah.
Getting back to the EMT.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
Enough of this.
Do you have the same experience each time
you take it under similar conditions?
Do other people report the same things,
the same teaching machines?
And how does it relate to your death experience?
[INAUDIBLE]
Yes, I do have the same experience each time I take it.
Did they say, nice to see you again?
They say you've sent so many, but you come so rarely.
And then the more interesting question,
do other people see it?
Do you get a permission?
Yeah, do I get a permission?
Do other people see it?
What I've thought about this question a lot,
because it's a question of communication.
If they saw it, could they tell me?
If they told me in their language,
would I understand what they were telling me?
And what I've decided is that the experience is an archetype.
It's the archetype of the circus.
Why?
Don't ask me why.
I don't know why.
But for instance, I've listened to many, many people
talk about their DMT experiences.
And inevitably, this is the box into which it will fit.
I gave it to a woman once up in Washington, an anthropologist.
It was a sub-threshold dose, because she coughed.
I could tell she didn't get it.
And when she came down, she said,
it was the saddest carnival I've ever been to.
She said, the rides weren't open.
The tents were shuttered, and there were little gum
papers blowing between the stands.
The circus is an interesting archetype,
because it has a number of facets.
First of all, you have the three central rings under the big top.
That's the dome.
And in the central ring, there's light and color and clouds.
Remember that Maria Sabina called the mushrooms the little clowns.
And these clowns, the circus is for children.
And when you take DMT, one of the things I didn't mention in my description of it
is you have a peculiar impression of your own body geometry.
Your head seems to be very large in relationship to your torso.
You are, in fact, an infant in some sense.
You become a child.
This leads to thinking about the 52nd fragment of Heraclitus, which
says the aeon is a child that play with colored balls.
Nobody knows what this saying means, but it's persisted for about 3,000
years.
So it must mean something.
But outside the three rings, there's another aspect to the circus.
It is spun into Eros, because above the center ring and up near the top
of the dome is the beautiful woman with long blonde hair
and the tiny, skimpy, spangled costume.
And very complicated, narrative type dream.
And the alarm rings.
And by the time your feet hit the floor and you stagger into the shower,
it's gone.
It's not partially gone.
It's all gone.
And all you can say is, I was having this amazing dream.
I have no idea what it was.
The DMT thing can leave you just that quickly.
And also-- and I think this has a bearing on this-- they have studied
the production of DMT in normal metabolism, and it peaks in normal
human beings between 3 and 4 AM.
This is when the deep dreaming is going on.
This is when the intense REM states are being experienced.
So I think that where the dead and the living get together
is in the dream time.
Australian Aborigines have been trying to tell us this for as long
as we would listen.
And also, a lot of people-- it's possible to repress it very, very
quickly.
I think, for instance, I've seen people-- one way you can tell if
someone has really gotten a good DMT trip is they lay down.
They become very still.
But if you look closely at their face with their eyes closed, you can
see that their eyes are moving wildly underneath their closed eyelids.
This is because they're in REM state, and they are watching
whatever it is they're seeing.
They are looking at it.
I remember giving DMT to a person years and years ago, a person who
might have been a candidate for the description "psychologically
fragile."
And it was clear that she got it, because she was a hash-slumper, and
she took three or four enormous hits.
She laid down, her eyes were wildly rotating around in her head.
When she came out of it, said, "What was it?"
Said, "It was nothing.
I don't remember anything.
I don't remember anything at all.
And furthermore, I don't think I want to have anything more to do with it."
And didn't.
Well, I think that this is something that it only shows as much of it as
you can stand.
And some of us cannot stand much at all.
This occurs with psilocybin as well.
I've had experiences with psilocybin where I've said to it after hours
of hallucinations of one sort or another, I finally say, "What I'm really interested
in is your true essence.
Can you show me what you are for yourself, rather than for me?
What are you for yourself?"
Well, then it's just like a cold wind blows through, and black velvet curtains begin to
rise.
And after 30 seconds of this, you just say, "Uh, that's enough of what you are
for yourself."
Because you can tell it's headed in a direction you can't tolerate at all.
You can't stand.
I have a friend who said of psilocybin, he said, "My goal, every time I take it, is to
stand more of what it really is."
And this is why it's incredibly kind to beginners.
Beginners basically need have no fear if they will regulate the dose reasonably, because
it wants to recruit you.
And so it says, "Here it is, whatever you wanted, aliens, outer space, elves, erotic
imagery, here it is.
Doesn't this feel safe?
See we're not so bad.
We're your friends.
We're not like all the others.
Come back soon."
It's after you gain familiarity with it, where it says, "You know, there are aspects to me
that we've never really talked about."
You say, "Oh yeah?
Like what?"
"Well, like this."
"Oh no.
Let's go back to the Disney loop."
How close is the DMT that you smoke compared to the brain DMT that we all have running
through?
Is there a difference like NN, dimethyl tryptamine, in what's in our brain?
No, no.
It's the same thing.
It's exactly the same.
It's the same thing.
It occurs in two forms, the salt and the hydrochloride.
Both forms occur...
Well, no, I'm not sure that both forms occur in metabolism, but the only difference is
that one is water soluble and the other is...
So basically, then again, we are holding then.
I mean, if DMT is illegal, then what we have in our brain running through us is considered
illegal.
Yeah.
It's absolutely bustable.
You know, in light of what I said, one of the most interesting frontiers that the New
Age has brought forward that I think bears more serious study than the channelings of
Amenhotep's barber and all that is lucid dreaming.
Lucid dreaming, if it...
I don't know whether those people...
I don't know those people personally.
I don't know what their motivation is, but if it's true that you can take control of
the dream state, then this would be something worth spending even a lot of time on because
the dream state is more like the tryptamine geography than anything else.
One of the most fascinating things about DMT that should certainly be mentioned, as long
as we're exhausting ourselves on this subject, is once you've had DMT, once you've smoked
it and this experience has occurred, you can have a dream years later in which you're with
a bunch of people and something's going on and you enter the atrium of the Hotel California
and you take a floor to the basement and then you're in a room with people and someone whips
out a little glass pipe and you smoke it and it happens.
It doesn't sort of happen.
It happens a hundred percent.
That means that's exciting data because that means that we have the wherewithal to trigger
this experience in ourselves on the natch, at least while we're asleep.
I presume that with sufficient patience and subtlety and biofeedback equipment, and I
don't know what you would take, but if you spend a million dollars, you could probably
deliver it on time, we can trigger this most intense of all hallucinogenic ecstasies, most
boundary dissolving of all possible human experiences on the natch, but we have to somehow
find our way to the button and apparently in normal waking consciousness, it isn't there.
I spend a lot of time, I mean I didn't mean to be so flip about the UFOs, I spent years
trying to think about the UFOs and studied all the theories, one that I still may be
part of the truth is maybe it is so that we generate and sequester DMT somewhere in our
brain, and under unusual situations, this sequester DMT can suddenly be dumped into
the brain fluid or into the bloodstream, and then you have a DMT experience or some kind
of quasi-DMT-like experience because I read an interesting paper a few years ago, I can't
remember the name of the guy who wrote it, it was an anthropological paper, it was called
The Felt Presence in Unusual Environments, and it talked about how it is apparently a
basic trait of human beings to when in the wilderness, especially unfamiliar wilderness,
people sense something there, the felt presence in unusual environments. Well, it may be that,
now imagine if you're in the wilderness in a situation not entirely familiar to you so
that you're edging up toward this felt presence thing, and suddenly DMT stored in your brain
is for some reason, perhaps a pathological reason that it shouldn't happen, but it's
shunted into your brain. Well now, suddenly, you feel there's something here, there's someone
here, there's someone with me, the hair on the back of your neck stands up, and then
you see coming toward you a disturbance in your perceptual field. Now, you're supposed
to be alone, there isn't supposed to be a disturbance in your perceptual input, but
there is, you are alive, it may be dangerous, you must identify what this is, while every
one of us carries around inside us a cultural inventory of what weird events might possibly
be. If you're a medieval peasant farming the hills of Tuscany and this happens, you immediately
conclude that it's the virgin, or it's an angel, and lo and behold, as it comes closer,
it clothes itself in heavenly raiment, and it is the virgin, and so you are encountering
the virgin. Well now, what if you're a Southern California steeped in the religious faiths
of Malibu, and this happens too? You will conclude, "My God, it's a UFO!" I mean, haven't
you been with people who every airplane that flies over they're willing to proclaim is
an extraterrestrial intervention? It's because this explanation lies very close to the surface,
and we don't know what something is, we want to know, we want to English it, we want to
name it, and we grasp the nearest thing at hand. It's very important to avoid this reflex
in order to see what is it really? What is it really? Let it be what it is. Yeah?
[Inaudible]
I like that.
[Laughter]
The next one was a judge, I went down to Fenskegula, the Hickson and Parker.
Famous case.
I've got to see them again, because I want to see how they've done over there.
Very interesting case.
And the judge and clerk of courts and two other people arriving home during that period,
and two of them in the car saw a UFO and the others couldn't see it. So let's say one saw
it because the EMT dropped it on the line, another was his clerk and decided he'd better
get it, and the other two were just strange.
Last point, there was a guy called Orfeo Angelucci, who was an early contactee, who gave me a
useful handle on, kind of, talk about working the edges. He was out and he met the captain
of the ship, and the ship's captain said during the interview, "Would you go and get me a
bottle of soda pop?" And then they went on with their event. So I began looking for what
was called soda pop factor, where there was an element, or more than one element, absolutely
unrelated to the story. This was somehow a touch of human...
An intrusion.
Intrusion, yes. A necessary intrusion.
Well, let me say one thing about it. You don't even have to be cynical to the point of believing
in the Pascagoulas situation that the second guy saw the UFO because he was the clerk.
These drug molecules have resonant rings, they are aromatics. It may be that there's
a pheromone thing happening here, and that a state of mind can be transferred from one
person to another through body odor. This may be how the states of telepathy are achieved
on psilocybin, because you do smell funny, and this smell may be more than funny, it
may be carrying information. There's a very interesting phenomenon that is well documented
called allophrenia. Do you all know what allophrenia is? Allophrenia is when a friend of yours
gets put in the hospital for schizophrenia, and you, being a good Samaritan, decide to
take them a box of candy, and during the visit to your friend, you behave so bizarrely that
you don't get to leave the hospital. Allophrenia. Schizophrenic behavior on the part of non-schizophrenic
in the presence of schizophrenics. I've experienced this. I had a friend, I visited him in the
hospital, and the way, here's how it works, it's really interesting. I visited my friend
in the hospital. He was nutty as a fruitcake, but he was my friend, and he was talking 90
to nothing, so I wanted to communicate with him. So instead of saying to every single
statement he made, "I don't understand you, you're nuts, that makes no sense whatsoever,"
I began trying to agree with him, trying to understand him, and then it sort of got the
momentum of a game going, where he would say, "You know, I'm really Sir Hans Sir Han," and
I would say, "Yes, but your teacup is on backwards," and a doctor walking into this situation would
have a hard time telling who's nuts and who's not. Well, was that because I decided to play
along with him, or why did I decide? There was an ambiance that gave permission for erratic,
irrational, peculiar behavior, and I suppose if you were borderline schizophrenic in that
situation, that's all it would take to push you over the edge.
I know you're probably thinking about the cleaner CCM stuff, you told me about it yourself,
but I find I just recently read all those papers again, and I think you're really right,
that there is some sub, what he calls the olfactory subconscious, that there is perception
below what is olfactorally normally perceived, and this is profound information transformation
of messages that are perceived and stuff, I think that could be something too.
Yeah, people who study human behavior have noted that when a person enters a room full
of people, unconsciously, the first thing they do is they take a deep breath. What that's
doing is giving you a whole bunch of information, and you can tell, you can say, "I walked into
the room and the vibes were terrible because Herbert had just slugged Alice three minutes
before and everybody was freaking out about it," or, "I just walked into the room and
I could tell something weird was happening, but I couldn't figure out what it was, and
what it was was Alice and Fred heard me coming, so he took his hand out of her blouse as I
opened the door." This kind of thing. In other words, information that is coming in through
the olfactory senses.
There are psychiatrists who diagnose schizophrenia by what they call the sniff test. This is
one of the most subtle and difficult of all mental dysfunctions to diagnose. Some people
just lean over your anterior fontanelle and take a hit and say, "Him to therapy, her to
release, and him to medication," because they are confident enough that the smell will do
it. There's even one theory of schizophrenia that holds that what schizophrenia is, is
a dysfunctional pheromone system, so that you, who are the schizophrenic, your real
problem is that you smell funny, not stink. People aren't aware of that, but it's that
there's something about you that causes people to treat you strangely, and you reacting to
being treated strangely by people, get weirder, and they, reacting to you getting weirder,
treat you more and more strangely. So what you have here is a feedback cycle that ends
with nets being dropped over you and you taken away. The original cause was that you were
giving off a chemical which made people treat you in a way that caused you to react to them
adversely, and that started the cycle going. Or they say that you perceived olfactory hallucinations,
not that you just smelled weirdly, but that you perceived... Oh, that you were misinterpreting
and coming olfactory again. That's right, there's a whole section where we talk about
olfactory hallucinations. The reason we're talking so much about this is because if you
look at these pheromone molecules and lay them next to these drug molecules, it's all
one family. These are all small, planar molecules. There's even one area where it comes together
pretty spectacularly. That is, in the pineal gland of human beings, there's a great deal
of... Something like 12% of the brain's energy is being channeled into the pineal gland.
If you know anything about evolutionary theory, you know that you don't waste energy in unnecessary
functions or you become extinct. There's a reason why 12% of the brain's energy is being
channeled into the pineal gland, though we don't know what it is. Then when you look
at what's going on in the pineal, a neural compound called a dendroglomerotropane is
being transduced by light into melatonin. This compound, a dendroglomerotropane, in ordinary
biochemical nomenclature is 6-methoxy tetrahydroharmaland. It's a near relative of the compounds in the
ayahuasca. A reasonable question is to ask, "Well then, what's happening to all this melatonin
that is being produced in the pineal?" Well then, if you tag it and follow its path through
the metabolic system, you discover that the stuff is making its way quite directly to
the surface of the skin. And then, it's volatilizing away. What's happening here? A hallucinogenic
molecule is being turned into a... in the very center of the brain, and this pheromone
is then hurrying on its way to the surface of the skin, where it volatilizes off and
affects the ambient social environment in which you're living. This begins to look like
a system of neurotransmitters and neuroregulators that operate not only within the body, but
on the surface of the body, and in the ambient social environment.
I don't know if this relates to... I'm not a chemist or anything like that. There was
this stuff on the market called tryptophan, I believe.
Right, it's an amino acid.
Amino acid. And it was taken off the market not too long ago.
Yes.
And, supposedly it made you dream. Your dream is more clear or more vivid, something like
that.
It's a precursor for DMT. If you wanted to make DMT in the laboratory, tryptophan would
be one of the pathways that you could start from. The reason tryptophan was taken off
the market, there was a lot of confusion initially, but it was a poisoned batch. It turned out
all of the world's tryptophan was coming from one enormous stainless steel vat near Nagoya,
and that it had been infected by a bacterium. And so, we're stuck with the fact that tryptophan
will probably never again be available in health food stores. But it wasn't tryptophan
that was the culprit. I knew someone whose life was completely messed up.
From the tryptophan?
From the poisoned tryptophan.
From the poisoned tryptophan. So, by taking the tryptophan, then it caused DMT to be more...
Well, no. Saying it that way is saying too much. We don't know that. All we can say is
tryptophan is an amino acid. It's used in the biosynthesis of many different compounds,
including DMT. DMT peaks when dream states are peaking, and tryptophan does seem to induce
deeper dreaming.
Is that sort of a formulation?
It's a rational case. You know, we could sit here, sometimes we could have a weekend entirely
devoted to thinking of simple experiments that could be done in the laboratory with
and without human beings if only these things weren't illegal. I mean, there is so much
to be learned and so little work being done because it's not sanctioned. I mean, my brother
is a pharmaceutical chemist, pharmacologist, plant physiologist, and his professional life
is very touch and go because he's known to be a hallucinogen man, and they don't hire
you, they don't publish you, they don't fund you, they don't want to know. You have to
be a very dedicated person to stick with hallucinogenic chemistry when you could get over into something
else and make a lot of money.
So you don't see a conspiracy then with the tryptophan being taken off the market because
it made dreams being more vivid. You see it as just a bad badge. I mean, I made the connection
without just thinking that I'm not a conspiracist, but it seemed to me awfully funny that that
was taken off and was being made by one batch and that batch got tampered with or whatever.
Well, there may have been some form of hanky-panky, but in all fairness, there are many approaches
to the synthesis of DMT. Indole is probably what most chemists would probably prefer to
start from Indole. Indole is an industrial precursor used in so many hundreds of ways
that you could never push Indole off the market. You'd have to reinvent half the pharmaceutical
industry.
But where I'm going with that is I'm talking about just being able to get it from the health
food store. Here it was tryptophan and it made your dreams vivid more vividly. I don't
know if that's what people are using it for and I don't think so, but here it was. Maybe
they felt that people were dreaming too much or they were having too vivid dreams that,
"Hey, we can't have this anymore. We've got to get it off the market."
I think probably as long as you're asleep, they're fine about it. It's when you wake
up that they get nervous. As long as you keep your eyes closed or you're glued to the boob
tube, they're quite happy to minimalize you, marginalize you and make you larval.
Yes. I was thinking about this thing with the elves and so forth. I was also thinking
about it in relationship to, let's say you smoke DMT, you have the experience. You can
put the term elves on them or speculate that what we have in various mythologies or thought
systems, elves, refers to that. I was wondering what you think about other types of deities
that people may encounter in some sort of visionary experience, either with hallucinogens
or not. What do you make of that? Do you have more of an archetypal interpretation or do
you think that they exist in some hyperdimensional reality in some form? I'm just curious what
you make of that.
I guess I have an archetypal interpretation. I recall from some book of Robert Anton Wilson's
where he suggests, he says, "You should pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary every day and make
offerings to her and put up her picture until she appears. Then switch to Shiva and do it
until Shiva appears. Then Mickey Mouse. And just keep doing this until you satisfy yourself
that none of these things are more real than any other and that whatever their ontological
status, they're all equal in ontological status." Apparently the human brain is far more malleable
than we can conceive of or imagine. We become imprisoned within a language and an ideology
and it literally becomes our reality. And yet it isn't our reality. It's just something
provisional. I've not had that experience. I prayed for years as a kid but perhaps the
agenbeit of Inuit was already present in me and making it impossible for me to succeed.
But in the case of the elves, there's sort of a cultural archetype of the elves but at
the same time you seem to be saying that there is a deeper reality that this is based on.
Well, and the DMT elves are a lot weirder than the Disney elves. The Disney elves are
really sanitized. These things are pretty frightening in a way. I mean, they are if
you let yourself be frightened because they're, you can't, they want, well how can I put it,
they play too rough. They are not mean but they're not careful either. It's like hanging
out with a gang, you know. As long as you're their friend, you really feel, "Aren't I cool?
Look who I'm hanging out with." But then you realize if you said the wrong word or made
the wrong move, everybody would turn and look at you. I recently wrote the introduction
for a new edition of Evans-Vence's book, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. And if you're
interested in elves, this is the book to read. You all know who Evans-Vence was. He was the
great Tibetologist. But as a student at Cambridge in 1913, before he went to Tibet, he did his
doctoral thesis. 1913 this was. And he went around to Brittany and Wales and Ireland to
the old, old people. I don't think he talked to anybody under 80. And he said, "Tell me
stories about fairies." And he collected the most amazing stories about fairies and fairy
encounters. And I learned from re-reading that book that, you know the Christian notion
of purgatory, which is a place where you go that is neither heaven or hell, where you
have time for minor infractions and then you get moved on to heaven. This idea was created,
I always assumed that it was dreamed up by some bishops of Rome, some synod or something.
It was dreamed up by Saint Patrick to convert the pagan Irish, to convince them that fairy
land was part of the Christian man. And he was so successful in converting the pagan
Irish that when letters went back to Rome describing how he did it, purgatory became
a general doctrine of the church and then it was used very successfully to convert the
pagan Slavs. So purgatory is fairy land dressed up in Christian terminology. And what is the
idea of fairy land? It's the idea that the dead live all around us, linger among us as
disincarnate souls. And the fairies that Evans-Vence was describing were very ambiguous, morally.
I mean sometimes they would only sour the milk. But their favorite concern of fairies
is, UFO freaks pay attention, stealing babies. That's what fairies like to do. I don't know
about surgically ripping off fetuses, that seems to be a modern touch. But in Ireland,
people in the countryside do not leave babies, small babies unattended in their cribs for
fear of fairy theft. And the fairies substitute. They don't just leave an empty crib. They
leave a withered, strange little creature that is supposed to fool the human beings.
And whenever there is a child born who is wasting and old looking and undersized, there's
always the assumption that there was a healthy baby there, but now there's been a fairy switch.
Fairies respond to riddlery. This has to do with this thing about language and the strange
relationship of the Irish to intoxication fairies and language suggests that here we
might have a restrictive gene pool that has somehow indemnified itself in the direction
of these peculiar concerns. Present company accepted.
What was the name of that book, Tim?
"The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries" by Evans-Vence.
I want to mention at least a couple of final points, which is, what is this all good for?
I think what it's good for, I think the mystery that we're making our way toward, much more
of which will be revealed later as we live into the next 20 years, is that we have lost
connection to a very important part of reality, which I call the Gaian mind, but which I think
is more popularly understood as the goddess, goddess consciousness. But the goddess is
not as envisioned at Ephesus, a woman studded with breasts. The goddess is the living earth.
It is not to be anthropomorphized into some kind of human or quasi-human form. And when
we were taking mushrooms on the plains of Africa, before the invention of agriculture
as nomads, we were rocked in the cradle of the goddess. And the differences between men
and women, between parents and children, between those who had much, if anybody had much, and
those who had little, and between human beings and the animal and vegetable kingdom were
minimal, because everything operated in the light of this reference experience, boundary
dissolution, and a sense of the intelligence of the earth. Now, we are so alienated from
the intelligence of the earth, that when we encounter it, we assume it came from halfway
across the galaxy to rescue us. It isn't from across interstellar space. It's something
that is partially in ourselves and partially in the world around us. And if we could but
clear the prejudices of materialism from our approach to the world, most especially from
our language, which by its subject-object bias, by its linear syntax, and by God knows
what else that's built into it, hopelessly precludes us from contacting this reality.
If we could clear all that away, we would discover a dimension of immense support and
affection for human beings and for our enterprises. But as long as we pursue the destruction of
the earth and the elaboration of materialist ideology and the suppression of psychedelic
states and the suppression of the feminine, we are going to be alienated, feel abandoned,
and operate in an ambiance of rampant pathology. So, to my mind, the hallucinogens are a call
to return to the archaic style, to recapture the tools, techniques, languages, and attitudes
that existed and flourished on this planet before AD 10,000. And we must do this. If
we don't do this, then we are setting ourselves up for a very unhappy future. We are living
in a very unhappy world. Maybe your world is not unhappy, but tell that in Bosnia, tell
it in Somalia, tell it to the AIDS-infected masses of Africa. The apocalypse is no longer
a rumor. It's arrived in many parts of the world. And we, as the children, the inheritors
of the culture which created this catastrophe, and as the people who are still living on
high ground as the waters of poverty, epidemic disease, and misery rise ever higher, have
a certain obligation to respond to this. Moral decency demands it. And we can no longer tolerate
the evolution of consciousness, the exploration of our relationships to each other, and the
source of meaning itself to be regulated, stigmatized, and degraded by the most frightened,
the least educated, the least balanced, and the least caring among us. And this is what
we've got at the present moment. The male-dominator mentality is in the process of running us
and all life on this planet into extinction. I don't have answers. That must be clear by
now. I have questions and offered techniques, and there's nothing new about these techniques.
They have been around for 100,000 years. And for 90,000 of those 100,000 years, they worked
very well. And we existed in harmony with the rest of nature, fully human, fully able
to philosophize, argue, love, riddle, perform theater, make masks, so forth and so on. But
in the last 10,000 years, we have fallen into a pathology. And it's because the umbilical
connection to the mind in nature has been severed, lost, pissed away, ignored, degraded,
turned away from. It is a psychedelic relationship to these plants. Without that, you are not
yourself. Without that, you are half human. And this is how we behave. We behave as though
we have a soul, but it's stapled in Yeats' immensely compelling phrase to the body of
a dying animal. This needs to be correctly reconstructed, addressed. Otherwise, we are
going to go into the books, if there are books, and into the cosmic record, which there surely
is a cosmic record, as jerks, lame, didn't get it, couldn't put it together. And this
would be a terrible legacy, because we are not going into these crises in a state of
total anesthesia. We have the answers. We have the political machinery to do something
about this. We have the sense of crisis. We have the goodwill and affection for each other.
But we are somehow unable to put all this together in a configuration that would allow
us to change our minds, admit that history was a bad idea, that science betrayed us,
that it's a tale told by an idiot, and to strike out in a new direction. We're like
the frog in the proverbial pot who never moves as the temperature climbs toward the boiling
point. Sooner or later, you have to just get up on your hind legs and say, "Enough already."
Now maybe this is beginning to happen, and maybe it isn't. But it's not for us to judge
as spectators at a hockey game. It's for us to get in and roll up our sleeves and participate
in. Do what you think is right. Think about what you think is right. And once you've thought
about it, then do it. And it doesn't have to fit in with my program or my agenda. I
have a deep and abiding faith that Mother Nature will sort out the options and from
the offerings of all of us, select those that will be salvational and solitary for all the
rest of us. But if you don't act, you didn't participate. I mean, this is not a road show,
you know. It's your life, your planet, your world, and the tools to reclaim it are present
at hand. You've heard this now. Now you have to ask yourself, "What are you going to do
about it?" That's really all I have to say, and we're finished here. So thank you very
much.
[applause]
All of these people who think that your consciousness ends at the boundary of your skin.
There's some news for you about the reality of the universe you're living in.
There ain't no line separating you from everything that you see near.
Just release your mind in the big design and the truth will set you free.
I said inner and outer space are exactly the same. Yeah.
You know we all hear those voices speaking inside of our brain. Yeah.
And if we might have to redefine what's considered insane. Yeah.
When inner and outer space are exactly the same. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Now all you people who think that it makes any sense to keep on building bonds.
Don't you think it's time we direct our attention to the brain behind the gun?
Just all that destructive energy will spawn from the spark in our minds.
When we learn to tap the true source of power, there's no limit to the love we'll find.
I said inner and outer space are exactly the same. Yeah.
I said we all hear those voices speaking inside of our brain. Yeah.
When we might have to redefine what's considered insane.
Since we live in a crazy world, I said inner and outer space are exactly the same.
Inner and outer space are exactly the same.
Inner and outer space.
Inner and outer space.
Inner and outer space.
Unfolding The Leaf
I'm going to talk to Mr. Terrence McKenna right now.
Terrence is an ethnobotanist, he's the author of Food of the Gods, True Hallucinations,
and numerous other very informative books and articles,
and he's been featured in many magazines such as Omni and
Psychedelic Illuminations, many other books.
Are you on the line there, Terrence?
I'm hanging in.
All right.
How you doing, buddy?
I'm here, I'm up.
I don't know how long we can do it with cellular from Hawaii, but I'm willing to give it a
whirl.
You sound good on this end.
Yeah.
The phone line's much better than the last time we had you on the show.
This is another time period where people haven't heard this information before,
and I don't know if they realize how ancient this plant is,
the marijuana cannabis plant.
Could you give people a little background information on how old this plant is?
Well, probably this plant is as old as agriculture, in fact probably much older,
because it has so many uses, you know, as food, as fuel, as fiber, as animal fodder.
It was really just there when we came out of the darkness of pre-civilization,
and it grows very well across the Middle East, the kind of areas that human populations were
migrating into.
I think it's arguably one of the oldest cultivated plants.
Now, this plant's been used in many different ways down through the millenniums of time.
What are some of the things that you found in your research that the plant's been used
for?
Well, I'm pretty interested in the intoxication of it and how that's affected various cultures,
and one of the interesting things about that is how recent smoking cannabis is.
In the 19th century, people who were experimenting with cannabis for its psychological effect
were eating it.
As far as the other uses, you know, I think probably we find cordage and impressions of
weavings on the sides of clay pots that go back nearly 7,000 years, and that cordage
probably was hemp.
And that was Catalla?
It's been used as a basis for material culture that long, and it's also been used as a basis
for the imaginative and theatrical and fun side of things.
One of the things we learned from Lynn and Judy Osborn's book, "Green Gold, the Tree
of Life, Marijuana, and Magic, and Religion," is that the ancient sacred incense that was
burned in all the temples of all religions was actually hashish, and that the Scythians,
for instance, had felt tents that they built, and they would stick their head into it and
breathe in the smoke or vapors from the hashish or cannabis buds.
Yes, that's an Herodotus.
I talk about that in my book, "Food of the Gods," as well.
I think that's the earliest literary mention of cannabis.
Can you hear me?
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
That's the earliest literary mention.
But, I have to say, the presence of cordage and weaving, in my book I talk about how all
the words associated with storytelling, like spinning a yarn, unraveling a tail, tying
up loose ends, these are all words associated with weaving and spinning.
And I think probably, you know, in the long hours of the Paleolithic, people made cordage
and they wove, and they were high on cannabis, and they told stories.
It helped them recite the database of the culture, and of course children were present
observing all this, learning the stories and the ways of the weavers.
Well, I think one of the interesting things I find about this plant is the way it opens
up doors of communication amongst people.
Yes, it's a strong social glue, and the impact of this on a socially bound animal like ourselves
is very hard to calculate.
It seems to incline people more to an erotic, laid-back family style than a warring, hunting,
outward pushing kind of predator style.
Hello?
Go ahead.
Yeah, well I was just going to say, I'm a great enthusiast of mushrooms and their impact
on prehistory, but I think when people moved out of Africa, the obvious substitute for
the religious complex that had been established in Africa was cannabis.
I mean, cannabis was worldwide, easy to grow, as I said, the food, the fuel, it inputted
into material culture.
It was like a new incarnation of the goddess to these people moving out of Africa and trying
to cross the Anatolian, what's called the Manchurian Sea, and so forth.
And so it's obviously had some influence in cultures throughout time, and I'm looking
at the political climate of today, and one of the premiums, or one of the gifts that
we're giving away today is your talk from the Phoenix Bookstore called "On True Hallucinations,"
and you said in that that you happened to believe that if marijuana became legal, it
would be a very big deal.
And I was just wondering if you could expand on that a little bit, in the political climate
of today and in global market, where this plant is taking off as a resource for food
and fiber or medicine, and yet it's still being stifled information-wise in this country.
Well, I think that's because we never in the whole discussion about legalizing cannabis
have come to grips with what I think is the real issue, which is it does change people,
and the way in which it changes them makes it hostile towards the values of industrial
capitalism.
That's for sure.
And yet it provides a base for an economic recovery.
As a product itself, but as a habit, it makes you very uninterested in the values and schedules
and hierarchies of industrial society.
So I've always felt that it was being suppressed with that fully in the mind of the suppressors,
but this is very, very important, I think, to how society and social polity will develop
in the future.
The question being, will it be with or without an ambiance of cannabis?
And I think cannabis promotes Guyan values, feminine values, community values, and a hard
look at the other set of values, unbridled materialism, that is being sold in the media
marketplace.
That's right.
And in this day and age when the entire world is starting to come on to this thing, and
yet it's still being suppressed information-wise in this country and the whole...
Well, I've always felt that when the whole world was free and enlightened that probably
the United States would be the last back in its modification and crypto-fascism on the
planet.
You're right, bro.
Yeah, I know, it's amazing that we stick with it.
You know, and that's the other thing, is that throughout time, you know, against all opposition
to do otherwise, there's been a certain faction of people on this planet that have continued
to keep this seed alive, and over the centuries, over a millennium, and continue to use it
against all opposition to do otherwise.
Well, it's the phenomenon of the margin, and you know, in the United States, it was black
people in the '20s and so forth.
It retreats to the margin in eras when social control becomes totally autocratic, and then
in periods of social confusion or plurality, it can make an emergence.
But whether it will ever, you know, in the United States be legal to just twist one up
and go for it, I just don't know, because to me, it is so inexorably linked to political
dissent, and you just don't hear this said much on either side.
No, it's like, if you really want to know what's going on in an office, listen to what
they're not talking about.
That's right.
But there seems to be an agreement on the part of the hemp proponents and the hemp opponents
not to discuss the actual social impact of what it would mean to let people relax, for
God's sake, and a drug like Prozac, patented and owned by drug companies, in a sense being
marketed, I think, as a cannabis substitute.
I have to agree.
You know, also, I think one thing I found about it is it teaches people to share.
In fact, in all of the people in the hemp community that I deal with, we end up, you
know, bartering things and sharing food, and a very communal type lifestyle follows this
around also, tribal lifestyle.
Well, like all hallucinogens or psychedelics, it tends to dissolve boundaries, and so the
idea of me and mine is not quite so strong.
And then we let our hair down a little and we can share food, and who knows what else
if we were to explore it.
Yes, no, I think it's wonderful.
I think, in a sense, it's the first step toward curing our dis-ease with civilization.
I mean, I wrote a book called The Archaic Revival that was basically about trying to
turn people toward shamanistic lifestyles, especially lifestyles based on relationship
to plants, and cannabis is right up there.
Terrence, we're in the last day of a fundraiser here at KPFK, and we'd like you to maybe tell
the listeners why you think it's important that they support this radio station in bringing
them this information.
Oh, I'd be happy to say why I think Pacifica radio is important.
I started listening to Pacifica when I came to Los Angeles to the Mojave Desert in 1965,
and I stuck with it when I lived in Northern California.
I listened to the Berkeley station, and over all that time, '65, '75, '85, '95, 30 years,
consistently, Pacifica radio has been the best source of information of a countercultural
and critical source, and that's speaking through the Vietnam War, through the Nixon years,
through Watergate, Carter, all of that.
I just think I can't say enough good things about KPFK and the people who run it.
It's one of the last beacons of freedom in a progressively more fascistic and constipated
country.
Right on.
Yeah.
Well, Terrence, we're going to let you go so we don't run up your phone bill too much,
and we want to thank you so much for coming on and helping us raise money for KPFK, because
we do have to keep it going in order to keep bringing out this kind of information.
Well, I hope it wasn't too crackly, and anytime I can help out, why, just send me an email
or let me know.
Do you want to give out your email number?
I'd love to give out, not my email number, but let me give out my website address.
Great.
I'd love to have people visit my website.
Okay.
It's www.levity.com/eskaton, P-H-A-T-O-N, and I won't repeat it.
We'll just hope people are really on the ball.
Anyway, you can find it by searching Terrence McKenna in Lycos.
I love talking to you.
I hope that the politics of cannabis continue to blossom, and in spite of my own skepticism,
I'd love to see a world where we could all grow our food, get high, stop cutting the
forests, and live in community.
Thank you so much, Terrence.
Okie doke.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Rollin' up our spliffs and twisters We're rockin' out until we get enough
Dance, dance your feet they blister Kick off your shoes when they start to run
Six single brothers and sisters We're down and high but the angels above
Tell me can you really get high on everything else?
Tell me can you really get high on anything else?
Like a gun to a gun
Love, love, oh brother
Love, love, oh brother
Love, love, oh brother
Unfolding The Stone (Part 1)
Welcome to an evening with Terrence McKenna, "Unfolding the Stone, Making and Unmaking History and Language," being held Saturday, June 1, 1991 in Los Angeles.
This is tape TMK 91-1, tape 1 of a two-tape set.
Just a couple announcements. Lux Naturae is being phased out slowly, so if there's anything that you people want that they have, tonight's the night to get it.
It's all here in one place at one time. It will still be available through your normal channels, but this is the time to get it.
Also, conference recorders are here, and they're doing duplications of this talk on site.
He's an old friend of all of ours, so I'd like you all to welcome Timothy Leary.
[Applause]
Thank you. [Applause]
I, for one, am overjoyed to be here. [Applause]
This is one of those special, special evenings that we will all treasure.
You know, as soon as I drove to that parking lot, and I saw people getting out of the car,
many of whom were still carrying uniforms and dazed expressions of grateful dead heads. [Applause]
How many people were at the dead concert? Yeah! And they're coming over later. They're just ending now, so believe me, we'll have an infusion of wildness there.
Terrence McKenna means a great deal to me. I would say he's one of the five or six most important people on the planet.
[Applause]
I can't even think of any others. [Laughter]
Short-term memory loss, but... [Laughter]
I was talking... Oh, by the way, I should tell you, Terrence and I keep meeting in the most wonderful, mythic, adventurous places.
I was doing a wild tour through Germany about a year ago, and we came to Heidelberg and we were being guested by some people that came right out of Hermann Hesse.
I mean, wizards and gnomes and, you know, that sort of thing. Heidelberg.
And there in a restaurant, I was having a sandwich before performing with some cybernetic people.
There was Terrence McKenna, and it was just so perfectly Hesse, "Journey to the East."
And so we meet again here tonight.
You know, I was talking to Terrence backstage before we began, and we both agree that what he will be saying tonight has been said over and over again
at all those high moments in human history when those who have gone within and understood about the brain and the inner treasures,
we all come back and pretty much say the same thing.
The problem is, though, that once you say it, you know, you can't go on saying it and saying it and saying it.
And when Terrence came along a few years ago and was saying what I had been trying to say, but naturally better, upgraded, up to date,
I was so overwhelmed with gratitude, and I publicly thank you for that, Terrence.
By the way, the role that Terrence is playing right now is one that takes not only vision, but it also takes fucking courage.
We were saying backstage that Terrence and I are a small group of philosophers who make our living not in the ivory tower,
if you call it living, but just speaking it, chanting it, raving it, ranting it,
and no one has ever done it with more poetry and elegance than the speaker tonight.
I'm going to say one more thing and then we will have what we've all been waiting for.
Terrence reminds us that all human wisdom, all energy comes from our beloved,
synergetic partners, the vegetable queendom. It all comes from the plants.
Now, round of applause to the vegetables.
Now, we all know that the human body, we have to have food. It comes from vegetables.
We have used vegetables over the years, the essence of vegetables, in the form of wood to develop fire, gas, oil, and so forth.
Oil, by the way, is the number one crack addiction of the modern industrial society.
But what we forget and what we look to Terrence for tonight is to be reminded that plants have given us an even more important gift.
They give us the gift of vision. They give us the illumination.
And throughout human history, there are the eaves and the pandoras, usually it's a woman who takes this wonderful vegetable
and gives it to humanity and says, "Be illuminated."
And now, for our illumination and our pleasure, please join me in welcoming Terrence McKenna.
Well, I want to thank Tim. That was a wonderful introduction.
I'm sure I wouldn't, I know I wouldn't be here tonight if it weren't for Tim Leary.
He was the pathfinder. He cut the way through the woods.
He gave us all permission to be very much the people that we are tonight.
And it's wonderful that one Irishman can hand it on to another and that we can keep it in the Bardic tradition.
Before I get started, I want to thank a number of people who put a lot of energy into this event to make it go.
Steve Marshank promoted and organized this. He's been at it for months and months.
Roy, Roy Tuchman, Roy of Hollywood, and Diane.
They have supported me and given generously of hundreds and hundreds of hours of air time to put these psychedelic ideas across.
And believe me, you hang your ass out to dry when you take this position.
Tim mentioned courage. Nobody has had the kind of courage that Roy and Diane have had to push that message into this town.
So we salute them.
And Eric Alley did the wonderful poster. He's done them for these events for years. He's a beautiful artist.
Christian Duffy and Jim Messick are here to see that you find your seat and stay in it.
And we thank them for that.
And last and certainly most importantly, Kat Harrison McKenna, my partner in building the dream of botanical dimensions.
I sit up here and take the limelight and the glory.
It's Kat who fashioned botanical dimensions into the functioning entity that it is.
She manages it from day to day.
We had a fifty one thousand dollar balloon payment that I talked to you about in Port Huaini.
It's paid off. It's finished.
The land in Hawaii will forever be dedicated to the preservation of plants with medical significance and significance to the human family.
And that credit all goes to Kat.
So let's hear it for her.
And that brings me to for those of you who haven't followed this so closely to pointing out that this is a benefit for botanical dimensions.
That's why it was 17 plus bucks a pop.
And what is botanical dimensions?
It's a small response on our part to a major problem.
You all know that the rainforests of the world are disappearing at a tragic rate.
And maybe that process can be halted through pressure on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and these enormous international agencies.
But whether or not the clearing of the rainforest is halted, the loss of folk medicinal knowledge on the part of these tribal societies that have lived in balance and equilibrium and respect with nature for millennia, that is tragically going.
There's no question about it because you can't put people into a museum diorama and ask them to parade around in jockstraps while the rest of us drive BMWs.
They move into the cities. These people work in the sawmills. They take jobs in the tourist industry.
And 25, 50,000 years of medical knowledge is lost.
And Tim did homage to the vegetables even in today's high-tech world.
Fully 75% of all the drugs, prescription drugs, other kinds of drugs on the market, above ground, underground, come from plants.
This is a priceless reservoir of complex chemistry, but it's meaningless unless the human experiences, the human lore is preserved.
And this is what Botanical Dimensions is about.
We have collectors in Peru and other parts of the world and we bring seeds, rootstock, living plants to Hawaii.
And there these things are grown as in a living library toward the day when a more enlightened society will have the wisdom and the good sense to team up with the vegetable world
and create a more humane medicine, a more humane religion that has some real life and light in it.
So that's what we're doing out there. Any help any of you can give us, we're deeply appreciative.
Spread the word. Since we began this project, many imitators have sprung up and this was our intent and our hope.
And great good work is being done. So please support the conservation of folk, botanical and medical knowledge.
[Applause]
So then before I dig into this, let me just explain how it'll work. I'll talk for a while, then there'll be an intermission,
and then we'll come back and given however much time is left over, why there'll be a Q&A and then we'll have a mic for you to line up behind.
Okay. Alright. First of all, thank you all for being here. I know we're up against the Grateful Dead, my favorite band.
I'm going to quote them repeatedly. It's a thousand to one chance that this would happen and it just shows the world is stranger than you can suppose.
So the name of this talk is "Unfolding the Stone" and I wanted to talk about this. It's a departure for me because I think we've just been through a real hammering over the past ten months.
I mean, if you've still got your optimism intact, and believe me, I do, you've been through the fire. This has not been an easy ten months for the people of this planet or the planet itself.
And so I want to sort of reach back tonight and invoke a vanished tradition, get to the heart of it, and try to show how we can bring this forward in our lives to empower hope in the most dark of situations.
And in fact, even make these dark situations the raw material of a clearer, stronger hope than might ordinarily be the case.
A few days ago I was talking to a friend of mine and he wanted to tell me the story of sitting in the presence of a 104-year-old Vietnamese monk.
And the guy had basically kept his mouth shut, the monk, hadn't said much around the monastery where he just sort of cleans up.
But then he announced he wanted to talk about meditation. And he opened his remarks by saying, "We are all luminous beings.
Why then do we not appear before each other radiant in our illumination?"
And this is the conundrum of life. This is the problem.
It was T.S. Eliot who said, "Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow."
And why is that? As psychedelic people, this is the problem that we grapple with in our own lives.
And when we look out at the world, you've heard me say many times, "We have the vision, we have the money, we have the technology,
but why can we not then appear before each other as radiantly luminous beings?
Why can't we reclaim our planet from toxification, disease, overpopulation, bonehead politics?"
You know the list. What's the hang-up here? What is the problem? Why is perfection so distant?
Well, what I've learned from life and vegetables and travel and books can be summed up in two Greek words.
It's the central message of the philosopher Heraclitus. And he was always my favorite philosopher,
but whenever I would read about him, he was called the crying philosopher.
And I had to live to be 44 years old to understand the poignancy of Heraclitus' message.
He said in a nutshell, "Ponte rea" - "All flows, all flows, nothing lasts, nothing is permanent."
And this is the hardest message life has to teach, because what it says is your joy is transient, your anguish is transient,
your fortune, your home, your dream, your moments of great ecstasy, your moments of great insight,
your moments of great empowerment, everything is flowing through your hands at the moment that you are aware of it.
William Blake, who in a way set this engine going a couple of centuries ago, said,
"What is the price of experience? Is it bought for a song or wisdom for a dance in the street? No.
It is bought with all that a man has. His wife, his home, his children."
Now this is not a pessimistic message, and William Blake was not a pessimistic guy. He was the same guy who told us
that if we could but cleanse the doors of perception, we would perceive the world as it is,
infinite in a grain of sand. How can we take this poignancy, this sense of impermanence,
and weld it into something which is paradoxically indestructible and has meaning in our lives
and gives us not only the strength to carry on but the power to be exemplars,
the power to stand up before other people and let them then feel the power of vision in the paradox of permanence
in the face of the need for indestructibility?
Well, to answer that question, I felt that we had to leave the narrow confines of 20th century thinking,
and we had to reach back into the byways of human thought that have been by most of us somewhat passed over and forgotten
because after all, modern life makes great demands on us. It's enough to just keep your checkbook balanced
and your insurance paid. We can't all spend our time delving in the libraries of the noetic and gnostic and hermetic
and magical traditions. But I thought it was worthwhile to talk to you about this tonight
because we have been through such a difficult ten months, and it was also Heraclitus, the all-flows guy,
who said, "All is war. All is war." And what he meant was everything occurs in the presence of its opposite
and out of that there is generated the friction, the heat, and the light that all comes together in an indissoluble package,
as part of life. So what I want to talk to you about tonight and how it relates to unfolding the stone
is the notion of alchemy of all things. Alchemy, as I'm sure many of you know, is really the secret tradition
of the redemption of spirit from matter. But many of you may imagine that alchemy is simply a discredited
pre-scientific obsession of unbalanced minds interested in changing base metals into gold, lead into the stuff of commerce.
This is the benighted reputation that alchemy has acquired in a century so given over to the literal and the material
and the non-spiritual that it's lost all touch with the adumbrations of meaning that vibrate behind the perceptions of the alchemists.
The central conception of alchemy is the conception of the philosopher's stone. What is it?
It's the universal panacea at the end of time. It's the chocolate cake that your mother made once a week when you were a child.
The panas substantially. It's all things to all men and all women. If you are hungry, you eat it.
If you're dirty, you shower under it. If you need to go somewhere, you sit on it and you fly there.
If you have a question, it answers it. It's something that the human mind senses in itself and related to, invoked, worshipped
over centuries before the slow rise of the patriarchy and rationalism and materialism turned it into a myth, a fairy tale.
It is not a myth or a fairy tale. It is the burning primary reality that lies behind the dross of appearances.
Alchemy is based on a philosophy called hermeticism that was developed in the first and second centuries by gnostic thinkers, Greeks, Jews,
people inside the Roman Empire as it was beginning to show the first signs of degradation and decay who felt a profound disaffection with their world.
A disaffection that on the scale of those times was as profound as our own existential disaffection.
And the Hermetic philosophers drew back from the rise of Christianity with its doctrine of the fall of man and original sin and the stain of Adam and Eve and that whole thing
and took a different tack and made two points which I think we need to recover and live out for ourselves.
And the first point was that man, which means men and women, human beings, are divine beings.
Not lower than the angels, higher than the angels.
The message of the alchemical and Hermetic thinkers and the Corpus Hermeticum actually uses the phrase "man is God's brother".
We have no idea what it would mean in our own lives if we could throw off the notion of ourselves as fallen beings.
We are not fallen beings.
If you take into your life the gnosis of the light-filled vegetables, the psychedelic plants that have stabilized the same societies of this world for millennia,
the first message that comes to you is you are a divine being.
You matter. You count.
You come from realms of unimaginable power and light and you will return to those realms.
The second point that these philosophers wanted to make was that fate can be overcome.
Fate can be overcome.
Now for the Greco-Hellenic world what that meant was the starry engines of the machinery of fate that they saw strewn across the night sky.
Because they were intensely aware of the power of the zodiac, the stellar shells inhabited by demons that extended out to the unimaginable imperium of the All-Father that was beyond fate.
And into that world of astrological fatedness, which is such a strong idea for the Greek mind, the Hermeticists announced fate can be overcome.
And they had a novel answer for how this could be done.
It can be done through magic, a word not often enough heard in the present world.
The overcoming of fate is achieved through magic and then the stellar machinery becomes not an invasive force into one's life but an empowering force.
Now some of us may believe in astrology and some of us may not.
We are all strongly influenced by the notion of fate, of our powerlessness in an existential world.
Jean-Paul Sartre said, "Nature is mute."
And we embedded in the media dense, message dense, programming dense matrix of these hyper-societies that we have created,
often feel, I think, like hapless atoms running endlessly according to the blueprints and programs of unseen masters,
whether it's the banking industry, Madison Avenue, whoever.
We tend to disempower ourselves.
We tend to believe that we don't matter.
And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves, we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.
So the rebirth of a sense of the stone and its possibility within each of us entails these two ideas,
our divinity and our power to overcome fate.
There is no inevitability in our lives unless we submit to the idea of inevitability and then give ourselves over to it.
Okay.
[Applause]
I wish there were more jokes, but it's just been such a tough go.
It's been a tough go, I have to tell you.
Where can we look in the world to see some confirmation of what I'm saying?
How can we draw it down from being an airy-fairy wrap of a Bardic Irishman?
Well, I think that the place to look is history.
Now, if you go to the academies, to those ivory towers that Tim was talking about, and ask what is history,
they will tell you that it's a random walk, an endlessly pointless fluctuation, empires rise and fall,
migrations of people come and go, that it is essentially meaningless.
I don't believe this. I don't even think there's strong evidence for it.
Because what I perceive when I look at the world, not only the world of history,
but the world of nature out of which history has emerged, I see novelty, something wonderful,
maddening, paradoxical and ever-increasing, ever more conserved.
Every iota of novelty that comes into existence is somehow saved and passed on.
That's why when we walk or drive down Melrose, we see Egyptian fashion motifs,
we see fashion statements drawn from the 14th century, the 2nd century, Assyria, Egypt, Angkor Wat,
all of the novelty of history coalesces in the living moment.
It's always been that way.
Every society in the moment of its existence has lived as a resonance, a completion,
and a distillation, good alchemical word, a distillation of what has proceeded before.
And so the alchemical idea that spirit can be redeemed from matter begins to get teeth
when you connect the idea of spirit up to the idea of novelty, which has not ordinarily been done.
But, you know, novelty is the life of the party, and the life of the party is to be high-spirited.
And this is what we need to focus on as the thread in the dark labyrinth of the prison,
of the material world, that can lead us back to the light.
The universe is an engine for the production of novelty.
It always has been since the first moment of the Big Bang, 20, 25 billion years ago.
Simpler states have been replaced by more complex states, which have then set the stage for yet greater complexity.
Well, the drift of this then is that the emergence of language and tools and culture
and higher ideals like courage and love and self-sacrifice, these are not flukes, sports, mistakes.
These are further steps along the way in the process of the great alchemical furnace of being,
heating and casting and dissolving and recasting and purifying and recasting alchemical gold.
And so, hard as the world may appear, dark as the hour may appear,
in reality we exist in a dimension of greater opportunity, greater freedom, greater possibility than has ever been.
The challenge then is to not drop the ball, is to know this and to act on it
and to slough off all the leeches and backhandlers and weasels and crypto-fascists who want to deny that
and turn man into a machine for their own purposes.
Alchemy has always perceived this and has delineated stages in the transformational process
and these stages are worth talking about, not in the details,
but in the two bipolar states which define this.
They used a bastard Latin and they called them the Negredo and the Albedo.
The Negredo is the precondition for transformation and what is it?
It's shit, it's detritus, it's flotsam, it's debris, it's being HIV positive,
it's being deep into your fourth marriage and sinking fast, it's bankruptcy, it's serum hepatitis,
it's the inevitable dark night of the soul that comes upon us and these dark nights of the soul come upon all of us.
Nobody gets through this world without a little dung raining down on them, believe me.
I mean you may evade it for decades but then there'll be a knock on the door.
You know, it's said that the millstones of fate grind slowly but they grind exceedingly fine.
So what do we do with that? Well the answer is we welcome it.
This is what the alchemists awaited, the Negredo, the prima materia, the dark matter, the chaos,
the chaos that is the precondition then for redemption.
And God knows we've got lots of chaos right now.
I mean we have war, famine, revolution, millions of homeless people on the move,
the nation state is dissolving, the relief agencies of the world can't keep up,
the various secret societies, mafias and cabals that have always tried to tie us into chains, they're all working overtime.
We are in the Negredo condition. Hallelujah.
This means, this means that the kissing has to stop but the fun can begin, the real fun.
The other end of this bipolar condition in alchemy was called the albedo, or albedo,
depending on whether or not you came from a coal mining town in Colorado like I did.
The albedo, the whitening, and that means that out of the chaos can come a new beginning, a new reality, a new hope.
And then the process is one of, and you see these alchemists existed in a philosophically more naive,
we quote, more naive world than we do, so they actually projected onto the processes of matter
their own interior psychic condition. So they did work with matter and fire and furnaces and retorts
and what they would do is they would take the primal material, lead or excrement or something else
and then they would heat it and turn it to ash and then calcinate the ash or pour solvents through the ash
and get an extract and then heat that and sublimate it.
And out of this, almost as a footnote, came modern chemistry, but that was not the important side of it.
The important side of it was that they were projecting mental states onto the swirling retorts of their laboratory.
It was like a magical mirror for them. It was in fact, dare we say the P word, it was psychedelic.
What psychedelic means is getting your mind out in front of you by whatever means necessary
so that you can relate to it as a thing in the world and then work upon it.
So from the Negredo to the Albedo there were a series of these stages.
Now I said a few minutes ago that magic was the key and by magic I mean the reclaiming and the reconstruction of language
to a sufficient degree that it becomes at first possible, then probable, then inevitable to each one of us
that miracles can happen. Miracles can happen.
The Grateful Dead have a song, "We need a miracle every day. We do need a miracle every day."
Well is that too tall an order? I don't think so. I don't think so.
Years ago one of these talking vegetables said to me, said, "Mind conjures miracles out of time."
Out of time. Time is the prime material on which the alchemical process works.
The alchemists, again in their naive way, believed that precious metals, diamonds, gold, sapphires actually grew in the earth
because for this alchemical point of view everything was alive.
And my friend Rupert Sheldrake is leading the charge to create a new birth of that perception inside science.
The idea that nature, all of nature is alive, not simply organic cellular nature, but that the earth itself is a living being.
So mind conjures miracles out of time and the proof that this can be done, and it's an incontrovertible proof
and I defy any naysayer or brain down to overcome it, is ourselves.
We are the proof that mind can conjure miracles out of time.
If it weren't for us there would just be birds and foxes and coral reefs and glaciers,
but nature was not content with that level of novelty.
A million years ago, a hundred thousand years ago, nature grew discontented and said,
you know, let's raise the ante, let's go to higher stakes poker in this planetary game, let the monkeys speak,
let them build fires, let them elaborate tools, let them march forward onto the stage of creation.
And remember I said the Hermetic faith was that humankind was the brother, could act as the brothers and sisters of God,
not moats in God's creation, but co-partners in the invocation out of being of yet greater novelty.
Why?
For play, for fun, just the cosmic madness of it all, the pure cussedness of it all,
to raise the stakes higher and higher and higher.
Now, I keep going back to this thing of can it be done, because I want to convince you, because I'm so certain.
I love Herman Melville and his rhetoric, and friends of the whale, bear with me.
For Herman Melville, the whale was not the endangered creature it is today,
it was the dark cosmic god of Christianity that haunts us and tries to pull us down.
And there's a wonderful speech in Moby Dick where Starbuck, the first mate, you remember wimpy little Starbuck,
he stood for Christian right reason, and he says to Captain Ahab,
"To seek revenge on a dumb brute seems blasphemy."
And Ahab says, "Blasphemy, Starbuck? Speak not to me of blasphemy.
I would strike out the sun if it insulted me.
For could it do that? Then could I do the other? For there is ever a sort of fair play."
And that's the point of that rap. There is a sort of fair play.
You've been told from the cradle that the deck was stacked against you,
all of man, original sin, so forth and so on. It's bullshit. It's absolute bullshit.
There is a sort of fair play. And if you can get in touch with that in your life,
you know, when Mohammed wouldn't come to the mountain, the mountain came to Mohammed.
That's fair play. And if you can have that perception, the world will begin to work for you.
It will begin to move toward you as the mountain moved toward Mohammed.
The mushroom said to me once, "Nature loves courage. Nature loves courage."
And I said, "What's the payoff on that?" And it said, "It shows you that it loves courage
because it will remove obstacles. You make the commitment,
and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.
Dream the impossible dream, and the world will not grind you under. It will lift you up.
This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted,
who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood.
This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done.
It's done by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering that it's a feather bed.
And there's no other way to do it. This is why I have always taken the position
that as modern people, you know, we can't go out and set armies marching or launch religions
and who would want to anyhow, but to the people who say adventure has fled, it's all humdrum.
I just know, you know, that they have forgotten the five grams of psilocybin sitting in their refrigerator.
I mean, Magellan may have had excitement rounding the horn,
but you in your living room later tonight can put him in the shade
if you have the courage to do the things that are necessary to do.
And we know what they are. And of course the first thing to do is to tell society to fuck off
because they don't know what's going on.
This is a matter between the person and the plant, the person and the planet,
and all the detritus of history, all the games that people have tried to lay on you.
You know, they just want to get you down in the ditch that they're in.
We know this because aboriginal societies have never broken the faith.
The living gnosis is still there. Not for people who paint themselves blue and dance around buck naked,
but for us as well. But it takes an act of courage.
Not a weekend at Esalen, not a trip to the ashram where they tell you that if you'll sweep up for a dozen years,
then they'll hand on a whammy. No. The speed with which you can reach depth is under 45 seconds
if you know where the elevator shaft is. And you do. You do.
I don't have to tell you. I've been telling you.
Well, so, there's one more alchemical metaphor or stage that I want to mention here
because I think it refers to this psychedelic possibility.
Not all the alchemists included this stage in their recensions of the work, but for me I think it's central.
Again, in their church, bastardized church Latin, they called it the cauda pavones, the peacock's tail.
Now, the physical basis of this is if you've ever played around with metal and fire,
you know that there are certain metals that when they pass to a certain temperature range,
iridescent colors play across the surface and sometimes even freeze.
And in the glazing of pottery at low temperatures in Raku, what these pottery masters are aiming for
are these wonderful iridescent surfaces that play across the glaze and then can be frozen into it.
Well, this is the peacock's tail. And in alchemy, this was thought to precede the final whitening,
the passage into the pure, the goal, really. And rather than see the present world as exclusively a veil of tears
and a black prison, and none of these metaphors are mutually exclusive,
you see the alchemists, the great strength of alchemical thinking
and the way in which it is completely antithetical to science, and in fact why science has so much contempt for it,
is because the alchemists have the wisdom to see that everything occurs in the presence of its opposite,
that it's not either/or, it's both/and. They call this the coincidencia appositorum,
the coincidence of opposites, the union of opposites. This is a great truth,
because I think all of us live under the rubrics of "Am I good? Am I bad? Am I lazy? Am I obsessed?"
And the answer is that it is never one or the other.
It does a tremendous injustice to being to ignore the union of opposites.
Now science, in order to do its work, which is essentially a technological work, not a deep philosophical work,
it's a minor art, science. That's all it is. It's a minor art. It's the art of the physically possible.
But it has presumed to be the arbiter of all thought, all feeling, all worth.
My God, the hubris of Rene Descartes to divide the world into the primary and secondary qualities.
And what are the primary qualities? Motion, mass, spin, momentum.
And what are the secondary qualities? Color, feeling, taste, tactility.
It tells you that you're nothing. You never touch reality. You live in that world of sense,
and therefore can only aspire to the real world through some kind of mathematical disembowelment
of your own, what your own body, what your own feelings are telling you.
So in the "Cauda Pavones," the peacock's tail, this is where the contradictions meet
and generate heat and light and excruciating sense of poignancy and meaning and identity.
And our world, as we experience it tonight, is quintessentially, another good alchemical word,
is quintessentially that coincidencia appositorum.
Now where do we meet this most dramatically in our own lives?
I think we meet it in the phenomenon of birth. Of birth.
If you had just parked your flying saucer in the bushes and came from a world where sexuality was unknown
and people were grown in vats or something, and you came upon a woman in the act of giving birth,
it would appear to be a catastrophe in progress, a tragedy at the limit of tragedy.
Blood is being shed. Anguish is on the surface. Real agony pervades the situation.
And yet, and yet, nature in her wisdom has bound pain and ecstasy, death and completion,
regeneration and dissolution into that experience in such an indissoluble fashion
that no woman can miss the point. No woman can miss the point.
Unfortunately, men have traditionally averted their eyes. This has gone on in a hut at the edge of the village.
Nobody wanted to be there. Maybe the shaman would be there, but he was loaded in order to be there.
And the mystery of mysteries goes on outside the sight of men.
Now, in our world, we are caught in this kind of metaphor, a cosmic birth, a birth of planetary scale is underway.
There is agony. There is no doubt about it.
I remember an embryologist who once taught me, pointed out that the fetus in the womb
is literally sculpted by the hand of death, that the immature hand of the fetal organism is a webbed claw,
and that it isn't that the flesh retracts to form the human hand, it's that the cells in between die
and slough off into the amniotic fluid and are carried away.
The fetal child is literally sculpted into life by the hand of death.
And our world is in this kind of a circumstance. There are no rational solutions at this point.
We are now in the hands of the miracle makers, the shamans, the mind of the planet, the life of the ocean, and the atmosphere.
And it's going to get tougher. And so we have to forge the indestructible adamantine stone of alchemical hope,
because heavier challenges lie ahead.
A hundred years from now, two hundred years from now, I cannot but imagine that this planet will be empty of human beings.
Not because we have become extinct, but because we have gone to our fate.
And it's unimaginable at this moment, because we are in the planetary birth canal.
We are at the peak of transition right now, and the walls are literally closing in.
We are being suffocated. We are fighting like a strangled man to try and save ourselves.
And yet we have to believe, and I invite you to educate yourself about the history of the planet.
There is no reason not to believe that we will come through. We will come through.
There is light at the end of the tunnel. There is a meaning to history, but it's an alchemical meaning.
History is a vast alchemical engine for the forging of an alchemical humanity.
And I don't have the answers, believe me. I don't know whether we go to another star,
whether we become eight angstroms high and all live in a block of metal underneath Mount Everest,
whether we march off to the heart of the sun.
The scenarios are endless, because the human imagination has such a power to bootstrap itself to higher and higher levels.
What would Paleolithic man have made of the religion of Pharaonic Egypt?
What would the pharaohs have made of the engines of war and hydraulic machinery created by the Romans?
What would the Gothic scholastic enlightenment have made of the age of cybernetics, psychedelics and virtual reality?
The imagination is the alchemical deus ex machina that can lift us out of time, out of the negredo of history,
and into higher and higher and higher states of being.
Now there is no reason to simply then ride along in this process,
because another perception of the alchemist that is central to getting this all lined up so that it works,
is the idea of the macrocosm and the microcosm.
What does that mean? It means that the world truly is fractal in the most profound sense,
meaning that what is going on on some very large scale is condensed, intensified and recapitulated on smaller scales,
so that the dynamics of a love affair are the dynamics of an empire.
Both are the dynamics of the evolution, expansion and extinction of a species.
There is only one way that things can happen, and whether we're talking about microphysical events
or the life of an entire solar system, the curve of binding energy is going to be the same.
So that means that this redemption of spirit from matter, that is the historical process that we are embedded in,
we can do our part by working on our small section of this, which is our self.
This is why alchemy was so fascinating to the Jungian psychologists,
because they saw that this work of redeeming spirit from matter is nothing more than the work of redeeming the self
from the contaminated dross of the traumatized and damaged psyche that we each inherit from our passage through the parental chickpile.
We each have that gift to deal with. That negredo is within ourselves, and this is why we're in therapy,
and this is why we take psychedelics and meditate or do whatever we do, because we all have this dross within us,
and this is a great gift. It means that we can begin consciously the process of distillation and sublimation
and casting of ourselves into that golden being, that luminous creature that this 104-year-old Vietnamese monk
sensed and evoked to my friend. But it's more than that. We do that.
We do that alchemical work to perfect our own sense of the union of opposites,
our own sense of the presence of the living alchemical stone within, in order that we may then participate,
act in, and be part of the transformation of the planet. And it is an immense transformation.
And there is no reason to doubt it, because the emergence of organic life from what preceded it is as dramatic a miracle as anyone could imagine.
The emergence of language from mute bestiality, which is only 100,000 years in the past, is as dramatic a miracle as anyone could imagine.
The emergence of a planet instantaneously unified by electricity and media is, and this is only 50, 60 years in our past,
it's still going on, is as dramatic a miracle as anyone could imagine.
It's absolutely irrational to not be filled with the fire of consuming hope.
You just have to overcome the leveling that we inherit from these empty existential scientific ideas.
And when we do that, and lift our eyes to the real, living, spiritually empowered reality that exists in nature,
in society, in our lover, in ourselves, then you see that the peacock's tail, the cow de pavones,
is a transcendental object at the end of time, an enormous, unspeakable something that beckons across the historical landscape,
that casts an enormous shadow that reaches clear back to the earliest moments of the universe,
that we have always been in the grip of that iridescent, strange attractor that has propelled our poetry, our art, our best moments,
have always been when a tiny scintilla, another good alchemical word, a tiny spark of that alchemical completion
has burned for a moment in our mind, in our life, in our perception, and we occupy a special position in regard to this.
Millions, thousands of generations of human beings have come and gone,
and could only glimpse this in the ecstasy of eroticism and psychedelic empowerment and ritual magic,
but we are the last people. Beyond us lies the mystery.
If we have but the courage to move forward into that abyss, to believe that nature will reward the dreamer,
then we can complete that wonderful Irish toast which says, "May you be alive at the end of the world,"
because it's that close. It cannot wander much longer. All of the preconditions have been met,
and the peacock's tail grows daily, whiter and more radiant and more brilliant,
as we sense now, breaking into our dreams, breaking into our waking lives, the presence of this attractor.
It has always given people meaning, that we are the privileged inheritors of that meaning,
and we have then the privilege of putting it all together in one piece,
and standing ready at the end of history to go into the mystery and be completed.
So that's the end of my song.
[applause]
Take a break and we'll be back in 15 minutes, and if you've got questions, and God, I hope you do, we'll deal with them.
Thank you very, very much.
[applause]
Do you know what insomniac dyslexic philosophers do?
They sit up all night wondering if dog really exists.
It's also an intelligence test.
Also, I'd like to point out to you, just to keep you current, that Nina Graboy, who is an old friend of mine and of Tim's,
has a new book out called One Foot in the Future,
and this is a lady who lived a life that went from the center of Nazi Europe to Millbrook and beyond,
and it's a wonderful book. It's out in the bookstores, and I just call your attention to it.
Okay, let's have some questions here.
Okay, can you hear me?
I can hear you.
This is not a joke, I'm afraid. I'm more serious again.
I believe that among the fundamental rights that people have to fight for, for self-empowerment,
one of them is the right to commit suicide, just like the right to take psychedelics and all that,
and I'm wondering if in your world travels, you might have come across some wisdom about plants
that people have taken for, say, relatively easy suicide, like Hemlock, what you know about them.
Well, I agree with your point. I mean, I think people should be free to do whatever they want to do with themselves.
The classic answer is obviously the poppy. Opium and its products, even, I mean, this is the modern instrument of dying,
is morphine injection unto death. In the Minoan civilization, the fascination with poppies reached such a proportion
that when they translated the linear B texts, at first they took the symbol for poppies as the symbol for wheat,
because the tonnage that was being recorded as being produced and used was so huge.
So, yes, the waters of lethe, the waters of forgetfulness, the poppy will carry you to the gates of death and beyond, if that's your intent.
Now, just back to the issue of empowerment, usually any derivatives of poppy you have to go through doctors or authorities.
In fact, just aside here, people who are dying in the hospitals, I understand they don't even give morphine anymore.
Well, why bother with the derivatives? The poppy grows, it's still a relic, ornamental in many suburban gardens.
I noticed in someone's garden recently, poppies that had been as expertly etched as if we were on the highlands of Laos.
So, the gnosis of it hasn't died. You're right that heroin and morphine are extremely controlled drugs, but again, the poppy is there.
If I were making drug policy, I would promulgate what I think of as the vegetable drug act and simply say, plants are legal.
All plants should be legal.
You know, people hold up opium as the scourge of mankind, and yet it was used medically for 3,000 years,
and it was only in, I think, 1603 that the British physician John Playfair was the first person to notice that it was addictive.
So, it took 3,000 years of using it before anyone actually came to grips with the fact that it was addictive.
Can I ask you quickly about Hemlock? What do you know about that?
About what?
Hemlock.
I know about it. I think it's a rather painful way to go.
Really?
I go back to the opiates.
Because some herbalist told me it wasn't.
Well, it will deliver you into Charan's boat for sure.
But your impression is that it's painful?
My impression is that the poppy would be the way to go.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks for keeping it light.
Yeah.
Hi, Terrence. My name is Joao.
I was born in South America in the Amazon.
After that I went to Germany to study chemistry thanks to Sandoz Basel.
In Germany, I think people think in a way that you want to educate the society. This is an alchemy society.
And in a way, I guess we learn, for example, Jesus Christ was one of the first alchemists.
And the Romans tried to make a mock of him because he was saying, they put a sign on the cross saying "INRI."
And people said, "Oh, this is Jesus Nazareth." And he was not.
It was the Latin word that we learn in chemistry, it was "igne."
And now recorded live at the International Transpersonal Conference
"Vision Plants - Transpersonal Challenge" with Terrence McKenna
This presentation will explore the model that shamanic use of vision plants provides for transpersonal psychology
Particular attention given to the role such plants play in personal integration
Deeper implications of shamanic use of plants
Role of mind in the natural order and the planetary future
Basically for myself, my involvement with shamanism has been a deepening meditation over now about 20 years
And it seems to me very fruitful because it continues to change and integrate itself ever more deeply into the meaning of reality at large
So that for me, shamanism has become a kind of overarching metaphor for not only personal being in the world
But the historical adventure, the being of the species in the world
So I want to talk about it today and as an advocate, I want to make it seem indispensable to living a life of right reason in the world
I want to show that without shamanism, the notion of humanism itself is in a kind of jeopardy
And probably most of us can find ourselves in agreement with that
But then I want to leave most of us behind and go further and suggest that this humanness rooted in shamanism
Is a humanness ultimately rooted in very complex symbiotic relationships with plants and chemicals in the environment
I want to argue in fact that people without plants are in a state of potential neurosis, a state of existential wanting
And that in fact, part of the Western dilemma is the sense of abandonment that followed with the breaking off of these symbiotic relations with vision-producing plants
That characterize the rise of Western monotheism and even more characterize the rise of modern society
But let me return then to the origins because this is where I think the case can be made
My interpretation of the time we're living through and this amorphous movement that we all somehow in some way are a part of
Which calls itself the New Age or what have you, I call it the archaic revival
And the reason I call it the archaic revival is rooted in my conviction that it is in fact a revivifying of the models and energy forms of archaism
And shamanism then is suddenly centrally highlighted
Shamanism was the profession niplas ultra of the upper neolithic era
And what was this profession precisely about?
Well, it was about exploring the envelope of cognition
Pushing against the linguistic membrane of what it was possible to say, symbolize, conceive, and communicate
Now why should one species out of all those competing on the earth attain somehow a kind of mega adaptive ability
That causes a kind of compression of biological time into the phenomenon that we call history
Is it simply as our theologians have always been forced to conceive that divine agency entered into the mechanism of the world and somehow set a spark in motion that kindled and grew into humanity
Or is it, as the 19th century explored so exhaustively, the possibility that incremental change can eventually initiate and insinuate into a situation new states of higher order
Including even possibly the state of higher order that we call self-reflecting consciousness
And how this is no more than a gradual refinement out of previous states of nature
Well, what I want to suggest is that it is a bit of both of these points of view
The divine intervention and the evolutionary
I think what evolutionary biologists have missed in looking at the emergence of human beings out of the primate phylogeny is, generally speaking, the mutagenic influence of foods
The fact that a fruit-eating arboreal primate, because of a situation of spreading dryness in the environment, evolved into a pack-hunting creature of the grasslands with an omnivorous diet
And omnivores, by their very nature, expose themselves to a very large number of mutagenic influences
I'm speaking now chemically. Mutagenic influences that interfere with correct copying of protein interfere with spacing of children, lactation interfere with mentation
Psychoactive compounds in the food chain, and it's very interesting that as human beings transform themselves into omnivorous pack-hunting omnivores
You begin to see the first faint stirrings of self-reflection. You begin to get the fire pits and later the chipped flint leavings of earliest Neolithic human tool-making
What this says to me is that there was a unique confluence of factors present in the evolutionary situation that were capable of kindling this ontological transformation of what had previously been the animal mind
And what I suggest this factor is, or was, psychoactive plants in the environment, specifically psychoactive plants in the grasslands environment in which human pastoralism evolved in Africa over a million years ago
The plant must be African. It must be extraordinarily noticeable in the environment. It must not be a deep forest endemic because this is not where human evolution was taking place
The only plant which fits this description is a mushroom of the psilocybin-containing variety, and it's very easy to see, I think, that the presence, then, of psychoactive compounds of this sort in the early human diet set the stage for a number of structural and psychological changes
Psilocybin ingested in low doses increases visual acuity
Now, it's not difficult to see that in an animal under evolutionary pressure in a pack hunting environment, increased visual acuity will mean a more successful reproductive strategy
This means that those animals not including the psychoactive substance in their diet will be mitigated against and fade from the scene
And by this process, a steady bootstrapping process, self-reflection, was born in our species
How do we get from visual acuity to self-reflection?
Low doses of psilocybin give increased visual acuity. Medium-range doses of psilocybin give an increased interest in erotic activity
You should laugh. There may not be too many laughs with this one
Slightly higher doses of psilocybin give an experience of the new monosome, an actual contact with a mystery in the human psyche
which is no less mysterious to us today than it was to our ancestors when the last glaciation was retreating against Canada
I mean, don't kid yourself. In the face of this, the content of this symbiotic relationship, modernism, rationalism, positivism, all is exposed as just whistling past the graveyard
Because the numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis
That's why even discussing its presence is mitigated against so intensely
I don't want to spend too much time on this early facet of the emergence thing. I want to move ahead and show that as pastoralism developed, as the domestic relationship between cattle, human beings, and mushrooms
As we go down into a self-reinforcing cycle of consciousness, language arose, religion arose, of the goddess-oriented variety, and the connection of the cow to the goddess is there at the dawn time
There is no question about it
Language seems to have been the particular prerogative of women in the early emergent phases
This is possibly because men were involved in hunting activities where great premium is placed on silent stealthiness
Now, women were engaged as gatherers in the hunting-gathering phase, women were engaged in gathering plants
And as all botanists can tell you, gathering plants involves an extensive taxonomic language so that the difference, the minute differences between cereal grains and insects and all of these things need to be linguistically defined and characterized
To this day, a taxonomic description of a plant is a joyce and thrill to read because, you know, sub-atheically glaborous with lanceolate, trifolium, and so on for many, many lines
But in a strange way that is a law repeated over and over again through history, each advance somehow outsmarts itself
And the wonderful linguistic depth which women attained as gatherers through the production of folk taxonomy eventually led them to a terrible discovery
The discovery of agriculture, because they learned that rather than maintain this vast library of shifting information about seasonal plants randomly distributed or distributed according to the whims of nature
They could in fact focus on a very small number of plants, learn how to grow these plants, learn their needs alone, and at that point the retreat was on and the dualism was fully in place
And there was that which was domesticated, that which was of the hearth, and that which was of the ousland, the howling unknown, that which was beyond the pale
I think it was Weston Labarre, great old anthropologist, who felt, he said, hallucinogens can only be used in hunting and gathering cultures
Because when agriculturalists use them it makes it impossible to get up at dawn and go hoe the fields
And so suddenly the gods become the corn gods and the wheat gods, gods symbolizing domesticity and hard labor and that sort of thing
And at this moment of agriculture, which led to overproduction, which led to trade, which led to cities and so forth, there is a beginning of the breaking away of this symbiotic relationship
Which had bound human beings to nature to this time, and I don't mean this metaphorically, I mean I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the all-we of modernity is the consequences of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature
And that only a restoration of this in some form is going to carry us into a full inheritance of our birthright as human beings
So what did this symbiotic relationship consist of? What was the effect of this psychedelic use, this embeddedness of language using, cognition using, but stoned primates in the natural order?
I submit to you that what it was or how it acted operationally was as a feminizing pheromone
That the continuous exposure to this tremendous, represented by the hallucinogenically induced ecstasy, acted to continuously dissolve that portion of the psyche which as moderns we call the male ego
And I don't mean that it only worked on men, I mean that wherever in human personalities this certain catch began to form and build like a calcareous tumor in the personality
The psycholytic presence of the undeniable fact of the tremendous tended to dissolve this back into Tao, psychic hell, however you wish to style it
That the evolution of language then setting up this movement off into specialization and a movement away from nature set up the consequences of the ennui which permeates Western civilization
It is only in Western civilization that you get this steady focus on this monotheistic ideal and working out the implications of what is essentially a pathological personality pattern
A pattern of the omniscient, omnipresent, all knowing, wrathful male deity, no one you would invite to your garden party
It's very interesting that this ideal is the only instance, the only hypothesization of deity that I know of that has no congress with woman at any point in the theological myth
The god of Western civilization has nothing to do with women and the presence of the Sophia and the presence of the Mater Dolorosa and all of these things have only been tolerated as heresies in the Western tradition
It is the Western tradition that has the most continuous break with this symbiotic relationship, in other words we have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a direct pipeline to the unconscious
And we have then fallen victim to priestcraft of every conceivable sort, a similar situation which may give us some objective perspective on our own
And we don't want the fate of those portions of Indo-European humanity that went East instead of West, in other words the whole story of Indian civilization is the story of a masculine, static, hierarchically organized system
And we place in the wake of the loss of the secret of soma, the loss of the portal to another kind of vegetable gnosis
Well, so provided then that I have made my case and convinced you that this is all gospel, what kind of options are there to someone who believes this?
What that means is a brief survey of the anthropological opportunities to explore hallucinogenesis presently afforded by societies living throughout the world
There are of course the psilocybin complex discovered by Gordon Wasson, the magic mushrooms of central Mexico which may have played a role in the Mayan and Toltec civilizations and the wider ranging pan-tropical Staupheria cubensis, Psilocybe cubensis which originated in Thailand but is distributed throughout the warm tropics
Interesting, all of these shamanically sanctioned hallucinogens are in the indole family, a very narrow family of compounds with the exception, I almost blew it, with the exception of masculine which is in a different family, a kind of amphetamine
All the others, including the morning glory complex with its LSD-like alkaloids, chinoclavine and ergonimine, the psilocybin complex which involves, as I said, several pandemic species and many highly indemnified species especially in the Pacific Northwest
The Boca cult of Gabon in western Africa which is sort of the exotic cousin of all of these things but nevertheless structurally an indole
Now the short-acting tryptamines and the beta-carbolines, the short-acting tryptamines can be used separately, the beta-carbolines though hallucinogenic in themselves are usually used as monoamine oxidase inhibitors to enhance the effect of short-acting tryptamines
This is a highly evolved pharmacology and shamanic complex in South America
One of the peculiar puzzles of shamanic anthropology and ethnobotany is the clustering of hallucinogenic plants in South America
Why are the old world tropics, the tropics of the Malucas and Indonesia not equally rich in hallucinogenic flora?
No one can answer this question, but certainly Mesoamerica and the New World seems to be the great home of these things
You notice that I don't mention any synthetics in the list. This is because I would sort of like to peel away the vision-producing plants from the whole Stromundang of the drug problem
The drug issue, which is a whole other kettle of fish and has to do with the fates of nations and trillion-dollar scamola and who knows what else
I prefer the organic hallucinogens and recommend them to other people because I think their long history of shamanic usage is the first seal of approval that you must look for
I mean, if these things have been used for thousands of years, then you can be fairly confident that they do not cause tumors or miscarriages
Because nature is far richer in exotic and poisonous and mutagenic and psychoactive chemicals than the human pharmacopeia
I mean, many things are avoided. There are many potential hallucinogens that are not utilized by human beings
So there has been a certain trial and error selectivity applied to these things
I think it's important to confine oneself to compounds which are least insulting to the physical brain
Not because the physical brain has anything to do with the mind particularly, but because it certainly has to do with the metabolic end-state of indoles
And so, things which are alien to the brain should probably not be introduced into it
One way of judging how long a relationship between a human population and a plant has been in place is to see how benign the compound is in human metabolism
And if you take some plant and your knees are feeling rubbery three days later, or your eyes aren't in focus 48 hours later, then this is not a benign compound
This is not a compound where there has been a smooth hand-in-glove fit with the human user
This is why, to my mind, the tryptamines are so interesting and why, another reason why, one I just thought of
That I argue for the mushroom as the primary hallucinogen involved in human origins
Because these things bear a weird resemblance to human neurochemistry
The human brain, and indeed all nervous systems, run on 5-hydroxytryptamine, serotonin
N-N-dimethyltryptamine is the hallucinogenic compound of this Amazonian complex
It is the most powerful of all hallucinogens in the human system, and yet clears your system in a matter of minutes
This argues for a great antiquity of the relationship between these things
And then, having discussed options, it would remain, it seems, to discuss techniques, since it's almost what Huxley called the gratuitous grace
All conditions for success can be present, and one can still fail
Although not if all conditions for success are present and one does it over and over again
Maybe there's a temporal variable there, I'm not sure
But technique to me is a kind of a... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is
I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention
Basically, the good technique, and then the footnotes add on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable
And then sit down, shut up, pay attention
It's something which happens behind the eyelids
It is not eidetic hallucination, although it begins like eidetic hallucination
I've been talking about this kind of stuff now for about ten years, publicly like this
And one of the major things, the major conceptual and linguistic problem to get over is to actually convey to people what's being talked about
Because probably, I would assume, 95% of the people in this room have something under their belt which they call drug experience
But did you know that yours is different from everybody else's?
And that these things range from, you know, mild tingling in the feet to, you know, language fails
And the thing to put across is the reality of the presence of this thing
And this is the importance in talking to a group with an interest in transpersonal psychology
The situation that we now reside in is not one of seeking the answer, but facing the answer
The answer has been found, it just happens to lie on the wrong side of the fence of social toleration and legality
And so we're just forced into this strange little war dance where everybody knows that psychedelics are the most powerful instrument for the study of the mind, conceivable
And yet, you know, a lot of people are still ratomorphically involved in the academic and university system trying to ignore the fact that the tool has been placed in our hands
Like the 16th century, when the telescope has invented, we have proven that we are not large enough to take the tool into our own hands without a social and intellectual transformation
And I think it must begin in the field of psychology by acknowledging that if what we are involved in, if what this paradigm transform is, is the archaic revival
And that we really can create a caring, re-feminized, eco-sensitive global world by going back to these very, very old models, then it isn't going to be possible to do it on the strength of political exhortation and rap alone
It's going to have to rest on an experience that just shakes you to your roots, that is real, and that is generalized, and that can then be talked about and dissected
We need to acknowledge the depth of our dilemma and the real truth, I think, that we know about our options out
I mean, we're playing with half a deck as long as we tolerate that the cardinals of government and science should dictate where human curiosity can legitimately send its attention and where it cannot
I mean, it's a essentially preposterous situation, it is essentially a civil rights issue, because what we're talking about here is the repression of a religious sensibility
In fact, not a religious sensibility, the religious sensibility, not built on some con game spun out by eunuchs, but based on the symbiotic relationship that was in place for our species for 50,000 years before the advent of history, writing, priestcraft, and propaganda
So, it's a clarion call to recover a birthright, however uncomfortable that may make us
It's a call to realize that life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego
It's fear of dissolution in this mysterious mama matrix which is all around us and which apparently extends to infinity and where our historical future actually lies
This is the other thing, it is now very clear that techniques of mind-human interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, all kinds of manipulative techniques, all kinds of data storage imaging and retrieval techniques
All of this is coalescing toward the potential of a truly demonic or angelic kind of self imaging of our culture
The people who are on the demonic side are fully aware of this and hurrying full tilt forward with their plans to capture everyone as a 100% believing consumer inside some kind of beige furnished fascism that won't even raise a ripple
So...
So, the shamanic response in this situation, I think, is to push the art pedal through the floor
This is again one of the primary functions of shamanism and the function that is tremendously synergized by the psychedelics
Where in fact, if, as I spoke of them earlier, pheromones which dissolve the male ego, then they are also pheromones which synergize the human imagination
Cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more architectonic, implausible and yet self fulfilling ways
And I really think that the only escape from the trap which post-industrial, male dominated, politically manipulative, drug running, urban technocracy has in store for us
The only escape is a forward escape, a kind of rushing past it and brushing it aside by virtue of an immense expansion of unpredictable creativity
But what shamanizing means in the ordinary folkloric level is healing and the art function is somewhat in the shadow
But in the face of the need for a planetary healing, the art making function of the shaman is going to stand front and center
Because what this art making function is, is generating a new guiding image of ourselves
This is why it relates so fundamentally to psychology
We need a new paradigmatic image that can take us forward through the narrow neck of historical forces that we can feel impeding and resisting this more expansive, more at ease, more human, more caring dimension that is insisting on being born
And so, in terms of political obligation, in terms of reforming and trying to save the soul of psychology, in terms of trying to goose along, connecting up the end of history with the beginning of history
All of this impels us, I think, to look at shamanism as the paradigmatic model, to take its techniques seriously, even those which challenge the divinely ordained covenants of the constabulary
Because if we don't do that, as I said, we're not playing with a full deck
You know, years and years ago, before the term psychedelic was settled on, there was just a phenomenological description
These things were called consciousness expanding drugs
Well, I think that's a very good term
Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?
Now, to my mind, the psychedelic position is most fundamentally threatening when fully logically thought out
Because it is an anti-drug position, and make no mistake about it, the issue is drugged
What drug shall you be? Or, to put it another way, consciousness. How conscious shall you be? Who shall be conscious? Who shall be unconscious?
And imagine if the Japanese had won World War II, taken over America, and introduced an insidious drug which caused the average American to spend six and a half hours a day consuming enemy propaganda
But this is what was done, not by the Japanese, by ourselves. This is television. Six and a half hours a day. Average. That's the average
So there must be people out there hooked on 24 hours a day, or I visit people in LA who have one set on in every room, so they're racking up a lot of time for the rest of us
You see, what is needed is an operational awareness of what we mean by drug
A drug is something which causes unexamined, obsessive, habituated behavior
You don't examine your behavior, you just do it. You do it obsessively. You let nothing get in the way of it
This is the kind of life we're being sold on every level. To watch, to consume, to buy
The psychedelic thing is off in this tiny corner, never mentioned, and yet it represents the only counter flow toward a tendency to just leave people in designer states of consciousness
Not their designers, but the designers of Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, so forth and so on. This is really happening. I mean, it's only a matter of how tight you draw the metaphor
That you realize, you know, I've been coming and going from Los Angeles recently a lot, and when the plane swings out over the eastern part of the city, looking down, it's like looking at a printed circuit
All these curved driveways and cul-de-sacs with the same little modules installed on each end of them, and you realize, you know, that as long as the Reader's Digest stays subscribed to and the TV stays on, these are all interchangeable parts
This is this nightmarish thing which McLuhan and Wyndham Lewis and others foresaw, the creation of the public. The public has no history, has no future, lives in a golden moment created by credit
Which binds them ineluctably to a fascist system that is never criticized. This is the ultimate consequence
This is the ultimate consequence of having broken off this symbiotic relationship with the vegetable, feminine, maternal matrix of the planet
This is what ended partnership, this is what ended balance between the sexes, this is what set us on the long slide
We can now examine the options available and put in place archaic options which will restore this balance
And to the good credit of people like Dick Schultes and Gordon Watson and Albert Hoffman, we have in this century taken into our hands the tools, the information, and the means to do this
But psychology, there had better not be a Nuremberg, because not enough people have stood up for this
People have contented themselves with ratomorphism for 25 years when they knew in their hearts that it was wrong
Feeling guilty out there?
You could cheer to show that it wasn't you
So now, I think, you know, the culture crisis grows ever more intense, the stakes rise ever higher
If there were ever a time to be heard and be counted and try and clarify thinking on these issues, it would be now, because, you know, there is a major attack on the Bill of Rights underway
In the guise of a so-called drug bill, and somehow the drug issue is even more frightening than communism, even more insidious
McCarthy told America that communism was under the bed, he was wrong
Ronald Reagan and George Bush tell America that drugs are in the living room, and they're right
It is here, it is real, it is the hydrogen bomb of the third world, and the quality of rhetoric, the quality of rhetoric emanating from therapists and psychologists and psychoanalysts
Is going to have to radically improve, or we're going to have happen to us what happened to genetics in the Soviet Union, we're going to be lysanctolized, we're going to be made lily white
And all opportunity for exploring this dimension is going to be closed off, almost as a footnote to the suppression of these synthetic poisonous narcotics which are mostly dealt by governments anyway
But the psychedelic issue, as I said, it's a civil rights issue, it's a civil liberties issue
The reason women couldn't be given the vote in the 19th century, there was a very simple overpowering reason that was always given
It would destroy society
And that's the reason given, this was also the reason why the king could not give up a divine right, the right of consiglamity
Chaos would result, and this is why we're told drugs cannot be legalized, because society would disintegrate
This is just nonsense, most societies have always operated in the light of various habits based on plans
The whole history of mankind could be written as a series of made and broken relationships with plants
Think about the influence of tobacco on mercantilism in 17th and 18th century Europe
Think about the influence of coffee on the modern office worker
Or the way the British influenced opium policy in the Far East to rule China
Or the way the CIA used heroin in the American ghettos in the 1960s to choke off black descent and black dissatisfaction with the war
History is about these plant relationships
They can be raised into consciousness, integrated into social policy, and used to create a more caring meaningful world
Or they can be denied the way sexuality was denied until the force of the work of Freud and others just made it impossible to maintain the fiction any longer
This choice of how quickly we develop into a mature community able to address this issue is entirely with us, I think
And certainly people like Stan Groth and others have worked valiantly to keep this kind of thing alive
But my God, you can count them on the fingers of one hand
So, that's really all I wanted to say, I left a half an hour for questions
At this point, Vision Plant's transpersonal challenge continues with an informal question and answer period
To make it easier for you, the listener, to follow along with this segment, Sounds True will repeat the questions from the audience
The first question, why don't you mention that DMT is an endogenous neurotransmitter and a schedule 1 drug
Yes, DMT, the most powerful of all hallucinogens occurs in the human brain as a normal part of metabolism
It also is a schedule 1 drug, so you're all holding
This might be the basis for some kind of case to just show what absolute poppycock all this nonsense is
People have been made illegal, probably they should have thought of that sooner as a solution to the drug problem
It seems to me that often psychedelic insights are co-opted by the larger society and perverted
Don't you think that this is what happened in the 1960s?
And my other question is, can you say anything about people who experience difficulties with mushrooms in terms of electrical storms and seizures?
You know, understanding passeth everywhere, the information is really neutral
These things, how they work, the information they carry back to us, how we apply it sort of depends on the moral order that we're embedded in
To a large degree, I think the 60s were probably misplayed
But on the other hand, it seems to be the last decade when anything happened
The lid has been utterly on ever since, it's an illusion, all this change
There is no change, I mean we're living in some kind of weird eschatological hiatus
While the people who rigged the game try to send out for new batteries or something
I don't know what's going on, but there's a sense of an immense...
There's energy for change, change building when it comes, which I don't think will be before this election
But when it ultimately comes, I think it will probably be fairly spectacular
It's astonishing, actually, the way in which change has been halted
Everyone is running around saying change, change, change
But on the other hand, there is a curious sense in which things have become eerily dreamlike and still
While we just teeter on the edge of the end of history and the same personalities, the same design elements
Everything has looked the same in the galleries for 20 years
There is an eerie suspension, perhaps because the 60s did anticipate so much that it took 20 years to live them out
As to your other question about physical difficulties with mushrooms
The literature is not large, it's generally considered fairly safe
That doesn't mean it isn't strange and it doesn't mean people don't become alarmed
A friend of mine recently thought he was having a heart attack
And after he'd been taken to the emergency room and put on 10 machines and all this stuff
He said to the doctor on duty, he said, "Is the mushroom doing this to me?"
I said, "No, no, you're having an anxiety attack, we get these all the time from people who haven't taken mushrooms"
So this is an oasis of liberalism I didn't expect to find
Sir
How would you explain the widespread use of sacred substances as party drugs in our culture?
Why doesn't this occur in native cultures, this use of sacred substances as party drugs?
Well I think it took place in our culture because there was no one to guide us
And that the real truth about it is the real experience is so deep and so boundary dissolving that it's frightening
And a lot of people took these things only in order to be able to say that they had done so
And if they had a light trip, they just said to themselves, "Thank God it didn't work for me"
And now I can say I know about it and pretend to be an expert, but I saved my ass
The feeling I got in the 60s from the people who didn't want to take it was they knew damn well they were crazy
They just mentioned to them accessing the unconscious and they just froze in mid-step
In the traditional shamanic situation, there are elder shamans who know what you're shooting for
And they won't let you out of the box until they're satisfied that you've gotten the whammy
So there's no evading it
So yes, I think that's a good point. The way it should be taken is reverently, in a calm, quiet, empty, clear situation
And then the question of the sitter, certainly there should be no more than one other person there
And I outrage people and give probably bad medical advice by saying, "It is very good to do it by yourself, but it just can't be beat"
Because then there's no game, there is no surface, there is nothing to maintain
But that's not for the beginner, I think
But nobody should do therapy who hasn't had these experiences because this is where you see the full spectrum of what the human organism is capable of
And it's astonishing, I mean, yes, certainly
Do you feel the awareness or enlightenment of the sitter is a powerful factor in the nature of the psychedelic session?
Absolutely, that's why having a sitter is no casual decision. It would almost be better not to have a sitter than to have a bad one
You know, because then they're going to become your problem
Here
Would you comment on the difference between having a psychedelic session in a dark room compared to being in a natural outdoor setting?
To me, this really revolves around pharmacological issues
I have a... I guess it's a prejudice, it's so strong in me that I think it's a piece of revealed gnosis
But I have a prejudice in favor of outlandish visual hallucinations
To me, that is the sine qua non of the experience. That, for me, always defines success
Well, the kind of hallucinations that I'm talking about actually requires silent darkness in order to form
Now, if you take something like psilocybin or one of these that I mentioned out in nature
Nature is, you know, wonderful, filled with light, extremely affirmative, complex, and you can dissolve into it
I guess there's something of the scientist in me, I guess, and I wanted to see what it was
The ding on sich, the thing in itself, with no music, no pretty scenery, no tactile sensation
Just what can it do with pure velvet darkness behind closed eyelids?
And the reward is, that's where it works best
Because then there is nothing for it to interfere with it or to set it thematically in one direction or another
Finally, you can see what is this bird on its own, you know
And so that's why I recommend darkness and isolation
As a person who has never taken psychedelics, could you describe for me what a typical psychedelic trip is like?
Let me begin by saying each one is different, but I won't stop there
In the case of psilocybin, like most of these indoles, they vary, but you take it on an empty stomach
And not fast, elaborately, maybe six hours of not eating
And then you take it on an empty stomach in silent darkness
And I always basically calm down and ritualize the space as soon as I've taken whatever it is
I mean, we were amazed in South America with these ayahuasca arrows
They would stop everybody talking, everybody would knock back their hit of ayahuasca
And then the party would continue as though nothing had happened for 30 minutes
And then they would call the meeting to order, then it would happen 10 minutes later
But the way I do it is I sit for the hour or hour of 20 minutes leading up to it
And I carry out what Catholics call an examination of conscience
This is where you think of the commandments, whatever they may be, one by one
And decide if you've violated any of them since the last time you did this
And I do this not in a planned fashion or out of piety, but more out of fear
[Laughter]
Because if I were to discover a huge violation, I might, well, I don't know what I would do
The purpose seems to be to anticipate any bad trip in the hour and 20 minutes before it actually comes on
And then at about the hour or hour and 20 minute mark, with your eyes closed, you begin to see what is called streaming
Just streaming lights, and it's sort of what you see when you press on your eyelids
These things you see when you press on your eyelids, don't do it if you're wearing contact lenses
Are called phosphine imagery, and there can be a wave of that
And then there's a feeling, a full body feeling as these, you can almost see thousands of these drug molecules
Fitting into their receptors in the synaptic cleft and the electrical energy beginning to rise
And then there is what Mercilia brilliantly named the rupture of plane
And the rupture of plane is fairly rapid, well then once the plane is ruptured, you're in some other plane
And it is then, then it is what it is, and this is what you don't find out until you get there
It's some kind of x-ray of yourself, but you're unrecognizable to yourself
And there is information, the most startling thing about these indole hallucinogens is the information
That we're not talking here about geometric patterns and whirling, fizz gigs and stuff like that
We're talking about scenes, songs, strings of imagery, bursts of poetic flight that hover between being felt, seen and tasted
That go on for minutes on end, as though meaning itself has somehow taken on a self-replicatory life
In the visible surface of the mind, and then it's all about how you come to terms with this
If you have always been a very tight-assed, denying, rational, fearful sort of person
Well then you're just completely, completely appalled
Because boundary has dissolved, you don't know whether you're Agnes or Angus
You don't know whether it's up or down, and you know, it looks to you, it's like the E.B. White cartoon
It looks like megalomania to me, Martha
So, and you know, the old style model was that you're supposed to swing from heaven states to hell states
And that the Tibetans have something to say about this, well I don't know, I think it's pretty much up for grabs
It's, I don't know, it builds in a feud of images and meaning that finally leave the realm of the sayable
And then it just goes off into what Wittgenstein called the unspeakable, and there, you know, it's the peace that passeth understanding
And all things are made right, but you can't say very much about that when you come down
Could you comment on your experience with the personality of the mushroom, with the mushroom as an entity?
Oh yeah, how could I have gotten this far? Yes
I would have been remiss not to mention it because I think it's the central conundrum, at least for me personally
And I would think for any rational person dealing with these things, we're not just talking about passive agents of transformation
And slideshows of alien worlds and stuff like that, the central mystery is that the thing is animate
That there is at the center of these experiences an organized intellect, an ally, a spirit, an other
And an I-thou relationship is possible, and this is just, now this leads us to the edge of simply wild hyperbole
And out into the realm of the utterly improbable
We have no place in our world view for something like this
I mean, is it an extraterrestrial? Is it Gaia? Is it, as some Jungians have said
Merely autonomous fragments of the personality that have slipped from the reins of the ego's control
And now return to haunt us as gnomes, kibiri, water spirits, and silks of the air?
Well, I don't know, but the, who does know?
The point not to be lost sight of is that again, this is real, this is not rare, this is common on psilocybin
But what you don't get with, I don't believe anyway, but what you don't get with yoga, what you certainly don't get with mystical experience
Is any degree of on-command repeatability of these bizarre mental and physical states
And yet with something like DMT, if you get somebody who is transported into a realm of self-transforming, chattering machine elves
Chances are they will get elves every time
Well, imagine the impact of this on the rational mind
That you can be swept into a space where you, you have to entertain the possibility that
Is this a UFO abduction or am I dead or am I just simply, God forbid, totally insane now
Or what is happening, the animate intellect at the center of the experience is I think the greatest challenge for psychology
For historical assimilation of this phenomenon generally, because what is it?
I mean our science is trained to allow the slim possibility of extraterrestrials
And so our electro, I mean our radio telescopes point to the stars shifting millions of signals at a time
Searching for a radio civilization, but what is it going to do to the forward thrust of historical continuity
If right next door in the human mind there is an other, so other that it cannot be assimilated
And yet so accessible that it's only a matter of choice to stand in its awesome presence
I don't have the answer to this question, I think it's amazing that I'm able to articulate the question
Because it is, you know, it is against 500 years of expectation and programming
That we are finally able to wake up almost as from a fever and say my God, nature is alive
It's talking to us, it's alive, no, you know, this is not a metaphor, I am not a romantic
This is not an artistic or aesthetic stance, nature is alive, someone is on the line
And then, you know, as far as who, I don't rush in to say, I mean I'm very wary of anyone who claims to know who
Because the problem seems to me one of great subtlety and depth
How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self
And perhaps one problem will cast significance on the other
Speaking of the self, isn't any discipline or spiritual path ultimately the threshold looking into the light of the one who sees
And if one can do that without physical substances influencing the body, look through that window
And experience that luminous beingness, isn't that sufficient without the use of physical substances
Well, I think that's the challenge that the temporary encounter with this thing sets us
That yes, if we can encounter it temporarily through the shamanic means, then must it not become the historical arrow of our becoming
Must we not then recognize that this numinosum must rise into history as a fact of realizing the eschaton
That's what I think, that actually the shamans are seeing and have always seen some kind of transhistorical object
Some kind of vast hypostatization of ourselves as deity that is casting a shadow back through time
And that all magic, all religion, all vision is an anticipation of this future state
What excites me is the notion that we may have reached the point in this process where we can consciously know that that is what we are doing
That that is what we are about
That our task is the architectonic expression of the divine other and then set about it without any more haggling and tail dragging
In other words, to realize what our destiny is will cause us to move toward it with much greater facility and smoothness
This woman at the door
I have a son who was in a fog for two years using dope
What do we say to our children about this?
Well, this is a real problem, I think it goes to the general state of the drug problem
Which is, it is one of utter ignorance and victimization
I mean the government whines and yaps about education but they are not doing any education
I mean, what do you mean by dope?
I mean, they have so linguistically impoverished us that we can't even make a distinction between marijuana, methamphetamine, cocaine, LSD, what have you
A whole new vocabulary of consequences has to be created, that's what I said earlier
What we don't want is habitual, obsessive, unexamined activity
We don't want it in commerce, we don't want it in drug use, we don't want it in social relations
We don't want unexamined habitual forms of activity that are obsessively expressed
What we do want is conscious, caring, self-examining, inquisitive, thinking people and institutions
So whatever mitigates against that has to be seen as a drug
And things like television, money, propaganda, all of these things then are seen as great evils
Which they may not have been seen that way before
We have to get smart, you have to be smart to use drugs, you have to be smart to survive a planetary catastrophe
Now our ancestors were smart, they got us this far, it wasn't easy
Five times the ice moved south from the poles
Five times the human family was islanded and divided by walls of moving ice
It hasn't been easy all the way along, until a hundred years ago there were no inoculations for infectious diseases
Most women died in childbirth, many children died in childbirth
The average lifespan even in western societies was 35 years old
So it's going to be tough until we get to heaven
There has to be intelligence
And one way to be intelligent is to decondition
Our lives are not going to make sense if we tolerate propaganda in our lives
You cannot be half slave and half free
You cannot be half hip and half yup
You know, so the main thing with the drug thing is to get smart, get real smart fast or you will lose your children and your mind and your freedom
Because all this is at stake
This audience has supposedly a stake in psychology
In transpersonal psychology which means the destiny and fate of the human mind
So getting smart about the natures and opportunities of chemistry, archaic and modern should be right at the top of the agenda
We're going to have to end this
Thank you for your tolerance
[Applause]