Dominator Culture

Beginning at least with - oh I don’t know, it’s just an art historical game - let’s say the pre-Raphaelites.  There have been these waves of aesthetic and social descent.  I mentioned the pataphysics movement in France in the 1890s.  Dada, Surrealism, and the abstract-expressionists, the Beats, the Hippies, and the Punks.  These different tones, different adumbrations, but always the same message, which is satisfaction and completion can’t be found within the official culture.  I came up into that.  I was born and raised in an incredibly conventional situation by very loving parents in a pleasant environment and I just couldn’t wait to break their hearts and get away to sin and the big cities and all of that.  

So the important message to take out of all of this, I think, for people in your position who may or may not wish to grapple with abstract mathematical models of time, or trade with naked aboriginals in steaming jungles - what can you take into your own life?  It seems to me that what the whole thing, the tension between these bohemian countercultural critiques and bourgeois society is about, is what I call the primacy of direct experience.  If you are inside a Christian world, or a capitalist world, or a Jewish world, or a Republican world, or a Democrat world - these are worlds of ideas.  These are ideas.  We can live by ideas but we can’t live by ideas alone.  It creates megalomania.  It creates unbalance.  It creates a grotesque parody of what life is supposed to be about.  

What life I think is supposed to be about is the reclamation of the primacy of direct experience.  That means sex, and psychedelics, and dancing, and conversation, and good eating, and lots of exercise, and travel, and attention to what Wittgenstein called the present at hand.  The present at hand, meaning what you can reach is what’s real.  Everything else becomes progressively move hypothetical, more abstract.  Anticipating Wittgenstein, talking about our reach, William Blake said ‘attend the minute particulars.’  This was his advice for life.  Attend the minute particulars.  Well that’s good 18th century prose for pay attention to the details.  Keep your eye on the ball.  

The nexus of mystery and of being and the theatre of our drama of redemption is the body.  The body!  We have been thoroughly weirded out on the subject of the body because we have been the inheritors of a very complex, head-oriented, abstraction devoted, social system, cultural theory.  But we see the consequences of not feeling all around us.  The toxification of the earth, the toleration of overpopulation, and the institutions that promote it is all achieved through a deadening of feeling.  If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, to the elderly, to the young, to racial and social minorities - if we could feel the agony of what we do, we would stop doing it.  

But we have what we call reasons for why it is the way it is.  Arguments, theories, blame - it’s somebody else’s fault, or the poor are always with us, or something else.  These are all evasions of the obligation to create a community based on love and tolerance.  Hardly a radical notion, and yet incredibly difficult to bring into existence.  Perhaps the world will transform itself in 2012 and we need have no further concern about all these things.  But perhaps not?  

We need to live our lives in the light of the assumption of an open future, not an absolutely free future but not a determined future.  An open future, in which acts of human authentication, acts of human authenticity push forward the universal project of the conservation of novelty.  

You know, Martin Heidegger, the German metaphysician, the way he got it together was he said, what life is for is what he called ‘care for the project of being.’  Care for the project of being!  This is what we are called to.  Again, Heidegger’s phrase.  We are called to care for the project of being.  That means an appreciation for the minute particulars.  An appreciation and a recognition of difference.  An appreciation and a recognition of our position in the cosmos, which is both insignificant and paradoxically grandiose and the same time.  Pascal said man is a reed bent by the wind but he is a thinking reed.  That’s the paradox of our being, our fragileness in nature.  Yet, the supernatural grandiosity that we sense in the hallways of our souls.

And Shamanism is not religion, really, at its fundamental level it’s the science of direct experience.  Other forms of science may deal with the states of the quanta or the orbits of the Pleiades, but shamanism is the science of direct experience and its laboratory is the human body and the human nexus in space and time.  You’re given on average, sixty or seventy years, and on average, a hundred and forty-five pounds of meat.  This is what you’re dealt, the meat and the time.  Then it’s up to you to sort this out and make of it what you will.  The entropic path, the downward path into blame, unhappiness, self-blocking, so forth and so on - that’s always there.  You can release yourself into the river of consequences and take no responsibility for who you are but the higher stakes game, the more interesting game, is to see the whole thing as an opportunity.

Heidegger - I’m amazed that I’m quoting Heidegger so much this morning - Heidegger again, he said the body is not a thing, nor is it a process, which is surprising because that’s considered an advanced view, that it is a process.  He said it is not a thing, nor is it a process, it is a window of opportunity which opens into eternity.  It’s a window of opportunity.  But opportunity implies the non exercise of itself.  An opportunity is something that you must seize.  It doesn’t press itself upon you.  It doesn’t force itself upon you.  It merely is there if you want to use it.  

My approach to life and the whole megillah is that it’s like a puzzle.  It’s a mystery.  It’s a koan.  Salvation occurs simultaneously through an act of love (that’s not news, but here’s news), simultaneously through an act of love and an act of rational apprehension.  Understanding!  Love without understanding is not the full story.  Real love requires understanding.  Rational apprehension is a kind of penetration of the beloved, person, nation, ecosystem, whatever the beloved is.  Understanding is the higher dispensation.  

These psychedelics, which in the sixties and fifties, were simply called consciousness expanding drugs, a good ole phenomenological description.  If there’s an iota of possibility that they expand consciousness, then we must put our attention on this area because it is the absence of consciousness that is making our situation so very uncomfortable.  People going for the fast buck, people elbowing their neighbor and their neighbor’s concerns out of the way, trampling over each other.  Low consciousness activity is the problem.  As concerned people, as intelligent people, as people of wealth and leisure - you may think you’re scraping bottom but the lowest among us here is still in the upper five percent of the elites of this planet because you just don’t get here any other way.  So upon us devolves a certain responsibility, not only for ourselves…  The average human being on this planet is a 23 year old, black woman with two children.  A certain responsibility of that concrescence of the human experience.  

The thing I just want to leave you with, though this has been very heady and egg-heady, which is how I am, we have talked ideas but we have not laid down a method, or a dogma, or a program.  There’s nothing to sign up for.  There’s no higher level of initiation if you give me $1,500 dollars or anything like that.  What we have been celebrating here is an experience.  We haven’t had the experience, we’ve just talked about it and analyzed it and anticipated it.  But it is there to be had out there in nature with nothing between you and it.  To steal from Van Morrison, ‘no guru, no method, no teacher, just you and me, and mother nature in the garden, in the garden, wet with rain.’

You may choose to hear this message and then life will continue for you as it has with the tools you have in your toolkit, or you can choose to go out there and meet it.  It’s not an easy path because it’s the real path.  The fear is real, the risk is real, and the reward is real.  It’s beyond hype, which is for us almost unimaginable, because everything comes clothed in flamboyant anticipation.  It’s in a sense, a secret and yet paradoxically, a secret which can be freely told of as we’ve told of it here.  But the human mind has an incredible capacity to turn away from challenge, opportunity, risk.  So what I want to remind you is that we only circled around the mystery.  We used our intellectual flashlights, we saw glimpses of it, but the real meat of this path is alone in silent darkness on five grams or something.  

Plotinus, the great neoplatonist philosopher of the Byzantine empire and a great mystic, spoke of the mystical apotheosis as the flight of the alone to the alone.  I’ve always thought that was an excellent program for how to meet the psychedelic experience.  It is a mystery.  It is not an unsolved problem.  It’s a true mystery.  We are not accustomed to this.  I’ve searched the world for mysteries and I’ve found illusions, fraud, misunderstanding, obfuscation, impenetrable complexity, but never true mystery except in this one tiny, tiny area of the chemical and biological world.  There -I guess because in the greater plan, everything must exist so therefore must magic - but the doorway to it, the doorway into that world, is a very confined spot in the vast data field of this world.  You could miss it, although I’m doing my best to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Where spiritual advancement is discussed, I want psychedelics to be discussed.  Where transformative social visions are put forth, I want psychedelics to be part of the agenda.  To me, the only thing that you can compare it to is sexuality, on one level.  But it’s different from sexuality because sexuality is written into the bones.  Very few people can go from birth to the grave and escape it in some form, some confrontation.  Even the celibate monk, basically his life is a confrontation with sexuality in that form.  

The psychedelic experience is very different.  You can go from birth to the grave and never even hear of it.  Millions and millions of people have.  But they were - and I don’t say this in a blaming sense, it’s a tragedy - they were infantilized by their circumstances in time and space.  They never experienced that dimension of freedom.  It’s like having an automobile and you drive it around and it seems to work fine, but there’s this button on the dashboard and you never investigate to find out what it does.  What it is?  There is in us this switch which can only be thrown by forming, well until the era of modern science very recently, could only be thrown by forming a relationship with a plant.  With an entirely different order of being.  When that switch is thrown, this entire other dimension of humanness is revealed.  

You can tell, even if you’ve never been there, from the excited testimony, hysterical denunciation, and passionate defenses, that it is an area charged with meaning for the human experience.  So, I hope that this get together inspires you to go further and go deeper.  I think that there’s no other game in town.  Doing art without this in your experience is essentially like trying to do art without good light.  Trying to live a life without the illumination of this experience is a far more difficult thing because what do you have to guide you?  The secular faiths, the religious faiths, and the obvious confusion that both have spread in their wake.  Sexuality is a kind of path to authenticity but it has to be negotiated with another human being in a very careful and subtle dance of energy.  This is not like that.  There is a subtle dance of energy but it’s not with another human being.  It’s with, and then you can either think of it as a mushroom, or god, or universe itself, or Gaia - it will take all those projections with equal ease.  

So somehow each of you from different pasts and with different futures have come through this place where we were all cotangent for four days.  If you are not a psychedelic person and you, through the fact of having been here, become one, then you will look back on this weekend as a primary turning point in your process of simply growing and growing up.  If that happens to you, that is the satisfaction of my work.  

As I say, I don’t think of myself as a guru.  I think of myself as a doorman.  I’m very happy to see people pass into the forced art experience through the fog and etched glass.  That’s really all I have to say.  I’ll entertain loose end questions or if anybody wants to say anything, or whatever needs to be done - now we can do it.  

Thank you very, very much.  I look forward to seeing you all downstream, some sooner, some later, eventually at the general judgement, whether it occurs in 2012 or on some more extended scale, we will all stand in the same place.  

[Audience  28.27]  I had asked you once to give me your definition of the soul.  I’ve heard many people try to define it and I’d like to hear your definition.  

Yeah, well.  It’s a complicated thing.  It has a long history.  The idea of spirit is in there and so is the idea of intellect.  These spirit, soul, intellect; various philosophies have moved them around.  I think of the soul as a kind of, well, you know how we can assume that we all have a pancreas?  But probably no one here has ever seen their pancreas.  Well that’s because it’s in a dimension which is rarely revealed, i.e., within the confines of the tissue of your body.  I think of the soul as a hyper-dimensional organ.  It’s an organ that you can’t see like the pancreas.  

But if you open up the body, you will see the pancreas.  You won’t see the soul.  But if you were to rise up into a higher mathematical dimension, a human being would look like a worm because the worm would extend from birth to death.  All the intermediate states would be there.  The entire lifetime would be perceived in a single moment.  That’s how I think of the soul.  The soul is not who you are now.  The soul is who you are and will be and have been.  So it’s your self extended in time.  

Plato said time is the moving image of eternity.  What we were doing last night, in a way, was looking at snapshots of that moving image.  I think that at death, if the soul survives, then in a sense what happens is you flow back through your entire life and it exists all at once in a single moment.  That’s the paradox of hyperspace - that what is serially presented in Newtonian space is holistically apprehended in hyperspace.

Similarly, there is a group soul, a group mind and all the same processes apply.  In a way, the transcendental object at the end of time is history.  I think I said, at least I think, that history is like a psychedelic experience and we are building towards the apotheosis.  The place where language fails, where the ego dissolves.  You can no longer make sense of it.  It’s been getting weirder and weirder and finally the speed in which the weirdness is accumulating just avalanches over you and you can no longer make sense of it.  

An idea which I didn’t talk about very much in this workshop but that’s dear to my heart is the idea of the Philosopher’s Stone.  In the 16th century in Europe, before the rise of modern science and chemical theory, the ontological distinction between world and self was not as strongly defined as it is in modern people.  Consequently, people working with substances entered into a kind of participation mystique in which the contents of the unconscious were actually projected onto matter.  Carl Jung made much of this because he realized that these alchemical texts, which are so cryptic and bizarre, could be treated like dreams because they were downloads of unconscious material.  

But I think the alchemists were in a sense on the right track, in that what is being sought in the concrescence, what the essence of the thing at the end of the world is - it’s a union of spirit and matter is what it is.  It’s union of spirit and matter that occurs in such a way that each retains the characteristics that it brought into the union.  In alchemical terms, this is called the coincidentia oppositorum.  In modern terms, it’s not allowed.  It’s a logical contradiction.  But I think the essence of understanding the world is to be able to hold a logical contradiction in your mind and not force things to be either/or.  

The Philosopher’s Stone is the idea that you could have a kind of matter, think of it as a small pebble, which is yet somehow made of mind hence is an object freely commendable in the imagination.  They sought this.  They tried to make this.  This was a technological agenda from 1540 up until the Thirty Years War.  

The universal panacea, the pan supersubstantialis - all these terms for this lapis, this stone.  What it is, it’s a place in space and time where anything can happen.  Anything can happen!  So imagine that what we are involved in collectively and each of us, is an effort to give birth to the soul.  To somehow cause the soul to come into existence.  One way of thinking about this, I think I said this earlier but it probably means more now, is that the historical enterprise is an effort to turn the human body inside out so that the soul becomes visible and the body becomes a process that you can command in the imagination.  

Do you understand what that would look like?

So here then is the comic book version of what I’m talking about.  Here we have the Philosopher’s Stone.  I have just, by a crypto-biological process, regurgitated it into my hand and here it is.  Ok.  So it’s my soul objectified outside of my body.  It’s a holographic matrix of space and time.  When you look into it, you can see stars in there.  If you need to go somewhere, you stretch it out and sit on it and it carries you there.  If you’re hungry, you eat it.  If you need a shower, it becomes a levitating shower head above your head from which warm water pours.  If you need to know something, you ask it.  If you need to wear something, it becomes it.  What it is, it’s a union of matter and your imagination.  

You say, well such a thing could only happen in a dream.  Well, quite right. I think we may be headed into a dream.  Either the after death dream, or the nano-technological dream, or the pharmaco-shamanic dream - we are headed into some kind of  dream.  We are going to live in the imagination and the imagination is the domain of the soul.  I’m not kidding!  [Laughter]  We are going to live in the imagination.  It will cease to be metaphor.  It will become real estate.  That’s how real the imagination is going to be.  It may be virtual reality, pharmacological reality, after death reality, nano-tech reality - we’ll find the way.  We will find a way.  

I think this union of spirit and matter is an agenda in the human program that runs very, very deep.  This is why we spoke for the first time.  Language is a union of spirit and matter.  The spirit of the thinking mind and the very ephemeral matter of the air, which can carry an acoustical signal.  The word is on it’s way to becoming flesh.  Wasn’t that the promise?  Similarly, the flesh is on it’s way to becoming word.  That’s what all that raving is all about.  Language is a partial condensation of the Philosopher’s Stone.  So is a 747.  It will carry you places.  

All technology is the effort to create ultimately, the ultimate tool.  The ultimate tool!  What can the ultimate tool do and what is the ultimate tool for?  The ultimate tool can do anything.  Obviously that’s what the ultimate tool is.  Well now it’s very interesting that we have arrived in the last forty years or so into the realm of the cybernetic machine because it has a different Ontos that previous tools.  I don’t know how much you know about computers…all a computer is, even the most sophisticated of computers, is an enormous set of switches.  So here you have a machine with fifty million switches.  Set the switches one way and it will predict the weather.  Set the switches another way and it will give you a helluva chess game.  Set the switches another way and it will balance your checkbook.  The computer begins to look like the crudest approximation of the union of spirit and matter.

Look at it!  There it is.  Gallium-arsenide.  Silicon.  Gold.  Platinum.  But what is flowing through it?  Electrons.  But these electrons flow according to the architectonic plans of thought.  It’s thought that flows in the computer.  Not its thought - our thought.  We tell it what to think and it thinks it.  As the computer shrinks and as the data storage increases, more and more spirit is being stored in less and less matter.  

We talked about virtual reality, we talked about implants that could create dream states.  Or maybe we didn’t but it was on my mind!  All of these things.  So I think that through technology we are taking our oldest intuitions.  Call it the intuition of the Dreamtime and creating it so that it is real and the alchemical union, which was abandoned by early modern science, actually will reemerge as a reasonable scientific endeavor once the new sciences of information theory and chaos theory and complexity theory and so forth and so on are put in place.  

We are in a position to create the Philosopher’s Stone.  It will not only carry you through space, it will carry you through time.  I think that’s what’s going on at 2012.  That technology, which appears to be just a secular concern of capitalism and scientific R&D is in fact a sacred calling and that the purpose of it is to mirror the mind of human beings through the perfection of the tool.

The perfect tool, when it arrives, will end the historical process, which was the tool making process.  It will end it by virtue of the fact that among other features, the Philosopher’s Stone allows you to move through time.  That’s why that graph comes down to that place in 2012 and then can’t be propagated any further.  Because it’s a picture of serial, linear society unfolding and at that point, the serial linear society becomes an anachronism.

[Audience - 44.11]  You were raised Catholic and in the end, there were always the sheep and the goats.  Do you see…

You mean who eats it?

Well, I have two impulses here.  One is to say nobody eats it.  That it’s just a bad fairy tale.  

A lot of people - this is something that sometimes brings people clawing there way out of their seats to get at me - it goes back to what I said earlier.  I think redemption is an act of intellectual apprehension.  I had a professor when I went to college, Joe Tussman, and what he claimed was that intelligence is something that you can teach.  That we have been entirely mislead to think of intelligence as something innate that you’re born with.  He was a teacher.  He seemed to make good on his premise.  

So if evil exists, and I’m not sure it does, it is ignorance, which is a Hindu position.  Avidya.  Obscuring of Vidya.  Ignorance.

So I think there is an obligation to understand.  To understand!  I’m not putting aside the obligation to love and to feel.  Those obligations seem to have their defenders everywhere.  But there is an obligation to understand.  Ignorance is ignorance.  It’s not a good thing.  There’s no way it’s good to not know something.  One of the things that I come up against and we had humorous brush with it last night.  

This thing that I talked about, the Time Wave, requires a knowledge of history, a slight knowledge.  Nobody has it.  Nobody has it.  I go to Germany and I lecture this stuff.  When I first started going to Europe to teach this stuff, I thought oh this will really be fun.  These Europeans, it’s better educational system, they’ll know whats up.  They don’t know what up.  I talk about Otto the Great, they can’t place him within 500 years.  Generally the audience, occasionally someone can.  

Amnesia is a pathology in the individual.  If you have an individual that can’t account for where they were in 1990, then you need to look into it.  What was it?  A blow on the head.  A long drop?  What happened to you?  Yet in ourselves, we accept this weird historyless thing.  It’s going to bite us in the ass.  

It’s a cliche to say those who don’t learn from history are bound to repeat it.  That’s all very fine if your running around throwing spears and pulling catapults around.  But if you have atom bombs, you can’t be so stupid.  So one of the things that occurs to me - we human beings come equipped with something called the unconscious mind, discovered by Freud and Jung in Vienna for us but apparent throughout history.  The unconscious mind.  

Part of this technological and historical crises that we’re in, has to do with the fact that we can no longer afford this luxury.  This is fine if you’re chipping flint or running around howling at the moon, then you can have an unconscious mind.  But a global civilization cannot have an irrational and out of control component driving its social systems and social decisions.  So part of what we all have to do is get smarter.  Psychedelics, consciousness expanding drugs, expand consciousness - and so do these technologies.  I think I said to you - the little joke about how a computer is simply a drug that you can’t swallow.  In the future, that won’t be true.  The computers of the future will be the size of double lock capsules or smaller.  They probably will be taken internally and just insert themselves into your tissue and grow gold fibers into your brain systems and interact with you.

Well, now are we talking about a drug or machine?  The answer is that biology is very machine like at the micro-physical level.  The genes are being read.  The ribosomes are connecting the proteins together.  The whole thing looks rather like a factory of moving mechanical parts.  The databases that are being created and the protocols for moving through them are permission to a new level of intelligence.  

The internet, I find truly awesome.  When you get in there, I start out from my home in occidental.  Then I ask a question, which requires the internet to access the main computer at Shipibo University in southern Tokyo.  We’re there!  If I’m not paying attention, I don’t even realize that we are now talking to the university computer there.  But then we need a certain image of a certain painting.  Well it turns out, it’s online at a database at the Hermitage at St. Petersburg.  We’re there!  In a session, you may move around the world ten times.  I have an automatic system on my computer at home that goes on in the middle of the night and has a series of key words programmed into it - things I’m interested in.  In the quiet hours of the night, my computer moves from one university data system to another looking for files and downloading them into my system so that when I get up in the morning, I have these files on screen.

I’m interested in a dying cult in Iran.  A religion that’s existed for a very long time but is now down to a few hundred people.  Well there’s a scholar in Leipzig who is interested in this.  There’s some people at the UN.  We carry on a little on a little interest group.  There are even real Mandaeans.  Actual members of this dying religion.  It’s a special concern of mine and I’m fairly confident I’m connected up to 90% of the people in the world who care about this because so few do care.  So you build these interest groups.  You can expand your eccentricity.  It’s a tremendous permission for eccentricity and community because you find the other eccentrics who are into the same weird subset of knowledge that you are.

Then the other thing is, general knowledge is much more accessible and available.  You know schools have not changed essentially in two hundred years and yet education is the thing which allows us to be democratic societies and to control our industrial policies and make informed decisions.  Think of the change that has occurred in society in those two hundred years and people are still going to the little, red schoolhouse and sitting at their desks.  Yes, we have play group and indirect lighting, but hardly the revolution that we’re looking for.  

Anything else?  I’m just rambling here.

[Audience - 54.08]  In terms of language in this internet.  Is it that everybody speaks English?

Basically.  I mean that’s basically it but I think that’s necessary.  English is clearly at this point, for historical reasons, the richest language in the world because it has so many technical subsets and geographical subsets.  England alone, you move through linguistic zones and you can’t understand what people are saying and neither can the Londoners with you for that matter.  Then you go to India where English is spoken widely and that’s a whole experience.  One world language seems to me a fairly conservative but necessary thing to put on the agenda.  

[Audience - 55.13]  What sort of breakthrough do you think we can make with virtual reality in education?

In education?  

Well for instance, one application for virtual reality that is very big right now is archeologists have gotten onto this and love it because you can…let’s imagine a city like Dzibilchaltun.  It was continuously inhabited for 1500 years, so you just feed in the plans for every fifty year increment and then you can walk the streets of this city and look at astronomical arrangements, see how at the close of baktun eight, they apparently destroyed a fortification and moved it a hundred feet further west.  

So at the university of Pennsylvania and the places that the Maya thing is being pushed hard, they’re building basically a virtual database of the Mayan civilization.  This sounds to me much more exciting than reading about Tikal or pouring over maps, or even slides and film.  To be able to walk through imperial Tikal on a festival day on the close of baktun nine and see the reconstructed friezes and everything - they’re not doing that for education or entertainment.  They’re doing it as an adjunct as a discipline of archeology but obviously it will later be sold into the “education/entertainment” markets, you know?

So that’s one use.  To me the exciting thing about virtual reality is that we will be able to show each other our dreams.  It’s another way of objectifying the soul.  What we’ve been talking about.  A child of five, given a virtual reality toolkit, will begin to build their world and by the time you’re twenty, your world will be the size of Manhattan.  And that’s you.  That’s yours.  Nobody can walk those streets without your permission.  If you love someone and you give them permission, they can literally walk into your dreams.  Your dreams when you were five, when you were ten, when you were fifteen.  Your fascist phase, your mozart phase, your whatever.  

That is that four dimensional centipede of the soul that I’m talking about.  It’s not it itself but its an imprint of it, a download of it.  We will build our dreams and then live in them and share them.  Imagine!  Suppose you want to build a building and suppose you want it to be ten stories high, and suppose in the design process that actually it would better if it was one hundred stories high.  Imagine what this does to the budget of that building.  In virtual reality, one zero is what it takes to make to make the ten story building a one hundred story building.  Where it says number of stories, you add one zero and suddenly it’s now a hundred stories high.  No muss, no fuss, no zoning commission problems, no material delivery problems - because it’s made of light.  It’s made of mind.  

A very interesting exercise to do in your own mind is to sit down somewhere under a tree and imagine that you could live in any fashion you wanted, in any environment you wanted.  In order words, design your own flying saucer, let’s say.   Well at first you know, if you’re like me, at first it’s just very nice.  It’s Italian egg modern or something and will hang my favorite Pollack over here.  In other words, at first its just as if I had won the lottery and I’m suddenly staggeringly rich.  But then you say, but wait.  I can do anything.  I don’t have to have a Pollack, I could have Pollack!  

If I want a ceiling 700 feet high, done!  7000 feet high, done!  You realize, oh my god, I’m in the imagination.  I can have it any way I want.  Its a dizzying prospect.  It’s very interesting.  Would you have a body?  What kind of body would it be?  How would you spend your days?  Would you build the world’s greatest art collection?  You could become a bumblebee.  You could do anything!  It’s such a dizzying thing when it begins to open up in front of you.  Then finally you realize that with that kind of power, if you had that kind of power, there is an automatic desire I think to begin to pull it in and say well, I think I’ll not wear clothes.  I think I’ll live in nature.  In other words, the stuff obsession falls away when you can have anything.  

You begin to find your way back to some kind of bedrock.  I think I’ve told you, or I’ve told some of my groups, my vision of a kind of perfect future beyond 2012 let’s say, is a world where everyone is living as Amazon rainforest Indians live, or close to that level.  In other words, naked, very little work to do, plenty of food, everybody is sexually comfortable with themselves and everybody else, so forth and so on.  What it looks like is an aboriginal paradise of some kind.  But if you displace yourself from the point of the view of an exterior observer and step into the body of one of the people in this world, you discover that when you close your eyes there are menus hanging in space.  By looking the equivalent of pointing and clicking, you move into a cultural architecture of some sort that is completely virtual and that’s where people spend a lot of their time.  

This could be done.  This will be done.  We do it already except that the interface, as they say, is very clumsy.  You have to sit in an orthopedic chair and stare at a flickering phosphene screen.  But these are all just technical details to be worked out.  So I think this idea of neo-archaism, an archaic revival, will end with an aboriginal exterior in dynamic balance with a reconstituted Earth.  But that the interior horizon of transcendence will be a virtual cultural landscape that will be wilder than Blade Runner, more dynamic than Dune, more anything than anything that you can imagine.  We will be living then in the imagination and yet celebrating the body in three dimensional space.  History will be over then.  We will understand what it means to have history be over because we will be living the way people lived before the first furrow was plowed.  

[Audience - 105.08]  You said earlier that part of…it’s the mystical quest is love.  Then you said you wanted to emphasize understanding.  I’m having a lot of trouble incorporating that love in this reality/imagination.  I see myself, if I can have anything I want, the first thing that kicks in is greed then maybe I let go of it and I won’t need things any more like you said.  But I still can’t incorporate and imagine this whole thing, where whatever love is would fit in.    

Well love is not a dimensioned constant, as they say.  In other words, the love you carry in.  I think we’re pretty well wired for love, or we wouldn’t have gotten this far.  I mean, it’s been hell for the last five million years.  There’s been a lot of upheaval.  A lot of burying of miscarriages and small infants near the cave front and that sort of thing.  Love springs from biology and we are fully biologically empowered beings.  The love that springs from understanding is the intimacy that comes from penetration of another point of view.  I mean, the vocabulary is necessarily sexual but I think of love as a solvent.  It really penetrates any situation.  It just washes through and touches all levels of a situation.  It may be the unique complement that we bring to this mix.  I mean, our machines may think faster, image better, so forth and so on, but love seems to actually be the thumb print of divinity upon on biology because it doesn’t seem necessary.  Even sexuality is not particularly necessary in its intensely emotional realized form.  

There are fish where the female lays the eggs and an hour later the male swims over them and ejaculates.  Well what kind of community is based on this kind of intimacy.  It may not even enter these fishes minds that there is a relationship.  In other words, the female lays eggs, the male ejaculates.  No member of that species may have ever put together the fact that these things somehow have a causal relationship.  

Yeah?

[Audience -108.10]  Quick question about the unconscious.  Now that we can no longer afford it, and I can see why we reference to atom bombs, what do you think it was for originally?

I think that we’re going to need a lot of energy.  I think that we’re going to need to be able to undertake very dramatic engineering works.  The other thing is, you can look at it this way - knowledge is power.  When you’re talking about nuclear chemistry, knowledge really is power.  So in a way its a test.  You uncover these hideous sources of power and it injects a new immediacy into the moral dimension of your existence.  I find it extraordinary that atom bombs were used only in one case, the Hiroshima/Nagasaki case, against human beings by human beings.  You’ve got your Rwanda, Bosnia and even Auschwitz, but nevertheless, crazy as we may be, nobody ever got that pissed off.  

We’ve had them now for fifty years, these devices.  Able to be delivered within thirty minutes anywhere on the planet and there have been some mighty dicey tussles come and go within the last fifty years but nobody ever went for broke.  I think it means there is a measure of sanity at some level.  It’s too bad that you have to have the fate of the planet in the balance for people to exercise a little statesmanship, but that seems to be the case.  

[Audience - 6.05]  The drugs are prepared the way they’re natively prepared.  If you’re going to start preparing drugs by extracting supposed active ingredients, then you’re losing the synergism, the life and the history there too.

Yeah, and you’re losing a connection to the morphogenetic field if you believe morphogenetic fields exist.  

[Audience - 6.29]  Your losing the induction ritual that may be connected with the drugs use.  

That’s right.  But even on your own terms, you see, on your own terms you’re taking away what you need.  Because if you have a materialist view of medicine then all you really need is the substance.  

Well this is the Sheldrakian idea: that things long in existence have a kind of momentum to perpetuate themselves; that things that are very recently created lack.  It’s not a scientifically creditable notion but Rupert’s been working for many years to show that an idea like this is necessary to solve some of the problems of modern biology.  

Do you all understand the concept?  It’s slippery but fairly simple.  It can be simply stated by saying: once something happens, it’s easier for it to happen again anywhere in the universe.  It leads to somewhat magical expectations in the realm of experimentation.  In other words, if you design a maze of some sort that has never existed before and you teach rats in Canada to run this maze and they get very good at it.  Then when you go to Australia to teach rats to run the same maze, they should learn faster.

Believe it or not, there is some evidence for this effect.  A very interesting experiment was done a couple of years ago where a computer was programmed with Hebrew, programmed to generate three letter sequences of Hebrew letters.  Some of these sequences were Hebrew words, including words which occur in the Torah and consequently have been read by devout Jews since Abraham.  Some words were simply random combinations of Hebrew letters that meant nothing.

Then what they did was, they used a Korean population.  People who had absolutely no empathy or familiarity with Hebrew.  They would flash these three letter sequences on a television screen and you would be asked:  a.)  to guess whether it was a word or nonsense and then b.) you were asked to guess if you thought it was a word, what the word meant.  Then c.) you were asked to rate the confidence of your guess between 1 and 10.

What they discovered was none of these Korean people could guess the meaning of the Hebrew words.  But when confronted with a real word in Hebrew, they had high confidence that that was what it was.  So you see, this seems to imply that the Hebrew words that had been said by millions and millions of Jews over time had a field, a morphogenetic field, around them that the purely arbitrary stuff didn’t.  

Other experiments have been done with nursery rhymes vs. rhymes that were just made up by a poet a week ago.  I actually thought of an experiment which I thought would settle it once and for all because I noticed my publicist - I resist technology believe it or not - but my publicist finally forced me to get call waiting.  Well so then I noticed that the telephone would be silent for hours, then it rings.  You pick it up and you start talking to somebody and immediately the call waiting thing starts beeping.  It’s clear that a telephone call in progress attracts other telephone calls.  Well my notion was, you could create a computer system to monitor an office building where hundreds of people were getting calls and making calls and see if in fact ordinary statistical expectations are violated.

I think it’s uncanny.  I go away to Esalen on a weekend like this and I will go home and there will be 30 messages on the phone machine.  And when I listen to them, some of them will be no longer than 15 or 20 seconds and I can hear the call waiting on the message machine as the person is leaving the message.  So I can’t be receiving 3500 calls a day.  So it must be that a telephone call in progress is a magnet for another telephone call.  That’s morphogenetic resonance.

[Audience - 12.01]  So if you don’t pick up, call again.

Yeah right.

[Audience - 12.06]  Did you intend to discuss your current thinking about the eschaton philosophy and if you were, what I’m really interested in is whether we’re talking about Amazon people to ourselves and how people relate to experience - what’s the point of it all?  If you’re still convinced that this is a twenty year cycle before the entire universe that we know heads into the hole.  

Well I think if your hypothesis is that a universe of ‘twenty billion years plus’ age is about to go bazingo in twenty years, you should probably prepare a fall back position just in case it goes awry.  I’ve sort of talked around this because I didn’t know at what point we wanted to really engage it.  Because I talked about the condensation of the imagination as a physical object and the philosopher’s stone as an attractor for the historical process.  

I talked about this alien force attractor being that reaches into our species and begins sculpting us in its image.  And that’s where we are now.  All of this leads toward the conclusion I think, that biology is being drawn out of matter and that this is not some kind of process that goes on hundreds of thousands or millions of years in the future.  That history is actually ending within our lifetime.  It sounds silly in a way, to say it, but based on what will come this evening, maybe not so silly.  You can actually calculate the rate of closure.  You can actually figure out the kind of acceleration in which we’re involved in.  

It leads to the conclusion that history has only a very little bit more to run.  That in a sense realists know this but deny the implication.  We’re running out of everything.  That’s always a sure sign that the party is over, you know?  When the liquor is gone, when the hors d'oeuvres are munched, when the buffet table is wreckage - the party is over.  It’s time to go home folks.  Go get your hats and coats, call your cabs, and do your host a favor.  That’s where we are.  It’s impossible to imagine history continuing for centuries.  Given the rate of acceleration, it doesn’t appear that that is going to happen.  The only question is: is it extinction?  Is that what it is?  Or is it transformation?  

I choose to believe that it’s transformation because the evidence of the psychedelics seems to support that.  I guess I can’t stress enough my sense that history is anomalous.  That there is no way to get used to it and that it represents a phase transition.  It’s an extraordinary emergency circumstance.  It only lasts, tops, 25,000 years.  And really the intense part is the last five or six thousand years.  If you go back six thousand years, we’re talking 4000 BC.  The pyramids weren’t built yet.  Nothing familiar was in place in 4000 BC.

There’s a tendency in the occult thinking to fiddle with the dating because occultists have inherited, without sophisticated examination, the Renaissance's belief that the older it is, the better it is.  Enthusiasts of Atlantis want to place it 50,000 years in the past and Lemuria, 100,000 years.  This is all nonsense.  The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.  The whole thing has come into being since yesterday.  The people who built the pyramids are 1500 generations in the past.  Less, less.  Probably more like 600 generations in the past.

So the emergence of technology codes, high culture, is all very, very sudden.  I think it’s a phenomenon which could be elevated to the level of a general rule about reality - that each stage of cosmic development happens much quicker than the stage which preceded it.  So after the initial big bang there was a long, long period of basically just churning physical chemistry.  Not even physical chemistry, but an atomic plasma.  There were no elements, there were only electrons.  Later hydrogen and helium formed and could aggregate into stars.  Then a new property emerged in the center of these large masses of helium, fusion began to take place (because the pressure and temperature went so high.)  Well fusion cooked out heavier elements like iron and carbon, and they become the basis then for a whole new kind of reality.  Molecular existence and then organo-mo-molecular existence based on long chain polymers based on carbon.

Once life emerged, the tempo really begins to pick up.  Change is now coming on a scale of once every few million years.  Once you get higher animals, change is even more accelerated.  Once you have languages and culture, change takes an exponential leap forward.  The main characteristic of our culture is phenomenally accelerated change.  So much change that when you take this curve of acceleration and plot its future vector, you discover that within 50 years, we will release more energy than there is in the solar system, travel faster than light - so forth and so on.  If you assume these things are impossible, then it means we’re hitting the limit.  We’re approaching the limit.

[Audience - 19.54]  Can you talk about singularities in relation to your theory?

Yeah, the attractor at the end of time is a perfect example of a singularity.  In fact, good question.  

It seems that - first of all, what is a singularity?  A singularity is a place where the rules are broken; a miracle is a singularity.  Strangely enough, it turns out to be very hard to model the universe without resorting to a singularity or several.  A few years ago, Steven Hawking - who has incredible press I must say - Steven Hawking hypothesized that the existence of what he called mini black holes.  He thought that black holes left over from the early birth of the universe had evaporated so much matter of their surfaces that they might now be down to the size of a few centimeters in diameter.  

Well when they asked him to calculate how many of these mini black holes there are in the universe, they came up with a number like 14 high 11.  Well, if every one of those black holes has a singularity in the center of it, that’s a hell of a lot of singularities.  What kind of a theory is it that allows for 14 high 11 exceptions to its rule?

[Audience - 21.34]  That is the rule.

That there are exceptions to the rule?  Well that’s a fishy way - that’s a way of wiggling out of it.  

Straight science tries to do it with just one singularity.  Essentially the position of ordinary science is: give us one free miracle and then we can explain everything.  That one free miracle is the idea that the universe sprang from an area considerably smaller than a gnat’s eyebrow for no reason in a single moment.  If you believe that, then all the rest flows quite naturally.  Notice however that whatever you think about this idea, it’s the limit case for credulity.  Do you understand what I mean?  I mean you cannot think of a more unlikely proposition.  It’s almost like the unlikeliest of all propositions.  I defy anyone to dream up a position less intuitively compelling than that one.  Yet, that’s where they start from, you see?

So what I say is: OK, if science gets one free singularity then in the game of hypothesis building, it must be that each player is dealt one singularity chip at the beginning.  I choose to play mine at the end and say, it’s highly unlikely to my mind that a singularity would spring from an absolute nothingness.  That seems to be the least fruitful environment to seek a singularity of this type.  Far more likely, if singularities exist at all, that they would exist in a domain of complex energies, molecular bonds, chemical bonds, electromagnetic radiation, hard radiation, languages, biological systems, membranes, gels, liquid crystals…  In other words, the kind of stew of phenomena that our present cosmos represents.  Who can say what could arise out of this?

If you can get people, you could get anything it seems to me.  So rather than view the universe as the shockwave of an initial explosion spreading out through the dimensions.  Why not place the singularity as a chaotic attractor at the end of the life of the universe and see all processes as drawn toward it rather than pushed away from it.  Drawn toward it.  Complexified.  Interleaved.  Folded.  Mixed.  Connected in many, many exotic ways.  That’s what this eschaton object is.  It’s something which we anticipate through technology.  It’s something we are building out of ourselves, you know?  

The grand work of history is the condensation and concrescence of the visible soul but in the same way that alchemists are like catalysts to natural processes.  That was the idea, see - that gold and precious metals grew in the Earth and that alchemists were not doing anything unnatural, they were simply really speeding up time.  Well in that same way, what we’re doing is catalyzing the emergence of a process that nature would otherwise ultimately deliver at some yet more distant time.  We’re like an enzyme in the universal mix of being.  

What the eschaton is, is pointless to speculate upon because it is literally below the event horizon of rational apprehendability.  That means we’re too stupid to know what it is.  But when we look east, the sky is touched with the rosy blush of dawn but the surface of the solar disk of the singularity has not yet come above the horizon.  However, in the next twenty years, I think this will happen.  I will abandon this theory long before we reach 2012.  If it doesn’t begin to gain power as a meme in society.  One of the things the mushroom told me that I found to be true.  It’s interesting.  It said to me, nothing is unannounced.  There is no such thing as a surprise.  Everything is preceded by the ghost of its appearance.  If you’re sensitive to that, you can’t be taken by surprise.  That’s part of the nature of a fractal cosmos - that nothing is utterly unannounced.  How could it be since everything is distributed through the matrix?

[Audience - 27.17]  So your saying that this is a different notion than history?  Your starting history from this very beginning?

History is a series of approximations of the final singularity.  That’s what all these religions are.  They’re peoples best guess given their cultural circumstance and historical angle of regarding - their best guest as to what the singularity is.

[Audience - 27.48]  Mayan calendrics - how did they arrive at the end date in their calendar at the same time?

Well the only thing I share in common with the Maya is that we both did mushrooms.  It’s sort of like: is it that there is a barcode in there that no matter where and when in all of space and time you take the mushroom, you come to the conclusion that something very important is going to happen on December 22nd, 2012.  The Mayan calendar is a real puzzle.  Not the well known details of it, although to speak of any detail of the Mayan calendar as well known is maybe specious.  

The strange thing about the Mayan calendar, it’s about a 5,485 year cycle with many sub-cycles In it.  It begins in a slow Tuesday in August and it ends on a winter solstice.  A very important winter solstice.  A winter solstice when the heliacal rising of the sun is eclipsing the galactic center.  That seems to imply that the Maya did not establish the beginning of their calendar and count forward.  They established the end date and counted backward to establish the beginning.  There’s argument among astronomers about whether this is even possible for people at that level of culture to do.  

There are a number of these astronomical mysteries around - like the Dogon tribe in Africa, who before the era of telescopes cheerfully informed astronomers that the star Sirius, which is ten light years away had a companion too faint to be seen by the naked eye and that it had a fifty year orbit around Sirius prime.  This is true.  How did they know that?  And they go further.  They also claim a third companion, Sirius C, which to this day has not yet been detected.  If it is detected by long base interferometry or that speckling technique…

[Audience - 30.28]  Indescipherable

Well if Sirius C comes into focus, a lot of people will have to come to terms with the question of how did the Dogon get this.  However, there are odd examples of unbelievably - of what appear to be unbelievably unlikely coincidences or good guesses.  For example, Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels and he describes in there, the presence of two moons around Mars and their relative size and orbital periods.  Seventy years before William Herschel observed these objects through the telescope.  And nobody knows - was it just an incredibly lucky guess?  Or what was going on there?  

Yes?

[Audience - 31.20]  Likewise on the I-Ching - do you think that was put together by some incredibly smart Chinese or…?

I tend to be nervous about the extraterrestrial hypothesis.  I believe in extraterrestrials but I believe that real extraterrestrials are so peculiar that the job is to recognize them, you know?  

No, I think not the Chinese because the evidence seems to point to the fact that the I-Ching was actually composed in central southern China somewhere by a pre-Jo people.  But I think that these people had a technique, perhaps analogous to a Yogic technique, perhaps analogous to the stilling of the heart techniques, which are Yogas that suppress physiological functioning and that they were able to look into organism and there, looking into their own bodies with a completely different epistemic toolkit than what we have - they saw flux.  They watched, perhaps for a 1000 years, you know - and tried to model this flux.  And they finally realized that there were myriads of elements in this flux but not an infinite number of elements.  

All of the structure of the flux could in fact be reduced to sixty-four elements, which they then created the symbolical notation system which we call hexagrams.  In other words, in the same way that we, with our obsession with matter have discovered and satisfied ourselves that it only requires - 108 elements to create all material phenomena and all molecular configuration - they discovered that there are sixty-four elements necessary to produce all varieties of temporal situation.  It is no coincidence that the numbers which run the I-Ching, sixty-four, six, four, cube of eight - that all of those numbers are the same numbers that are necessary to describe the functioning of DNA.  

You can perfectly model the DNA using the I-Ching.  Not only the sixty-four codons that code for protein but templating, replication, so forth and so on.  All the functions of DNA can be modeled very cleanly using the I-Ching.  So really what it is, it’s a calculus of biological necessity.  We as creatures made of DNA then find that this calculus of biological necessity functions for us like magic.  It describes the matrix in which we are in fact embedded, and with which, we must come to terms.  That’s why throwing the I-Ching…even though I think it’s a completely corrupted use of it, still it is like dropping a dipstick into the flow of a river and then pulling it out and taking a depth measurement.  It’s something like that.  Yeah?

[Audience - 35.11]  About the eschaton, I was wondering if some of the things we’re seeing manifest now are perhaps reverberations of this event which is approaching and I was wondering crop circles might fit into that somehow?  

When pressed, I guess I think that all phenomena are reverberations and in a sense pre-echos (is that a precho, I’m not sure?) of the eschaton.  Many of you have heard me make this metaphor.  It’s like one of those mirrored bar balls in a disco.  It reflects its surround.  The essence of the eschaton is impossible to discern because its surface is mirrored.  So when you look at the eschaton, what you see strangely enough is your own face.  Religions and hysterias of various sorts are particularly strong incidences of reflection of the eschaton.  

This thing which happened in Waco Texas was just fascinating because it was a real cognitive dissonance.  It made no sense to most people and yet obviously to the people inside the metaphor, it made perfect sense.  I think we will see more and more of this kind of thing and that in fact, we need to guard against it.  Prophets of all sorts will arise in the last days.  Christianity taught this in an attempt to cover its own ass, not realizing that it is one of these cults which arise in the last days.  

The whole thing about the Christos, stripped of all the mumbo-jumbo, what this is about is the mystery of the resurrection.  The idea that Christ was somehow involved in some kind of crypto-biological transformation that was necessary in order to unlock the doors of paradise which had been slammed shut with the fall of Adam.  I find Christianity fascinating.  I don’t believe a word of it because I don’t think Christian theologians understand what they’re looking at.  What they’re looking at is the closest thing to the eschaton that we ever had but the conclusions are all wrong.  

There’s an amazing passage in, I think it’s Luke - it’s the morning after the entombment of Christ and the three Marys - Mary the mother of James, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Christ, go to the Tomb.  Christ is there standing beside the rolled away stone.  One of these women starts toward him and he says…go read it, it’s right there…he says, touch me not woman, for I am not fully of the nature of the Father.  

You just wonder what in the world is going on here.  He is alive.  He is resurrected.  He has overcome death.  But he says, touch me not, I am not yet fully of the nature of the Father.  

What it implies is a process of some sort.  Something is happening.  He is hypercarbolating is what is happening.  And the hypercarbolation is not yet complete.  It was a near miss.  If you read the whole thing from that light, it’s clear that the people involved could not understand what was happening.  So what you get here is a picture of somebody not fully in command of their own mojo, you know, and not themselves completely understanding what is going on.  I think that every religious teacher is a sense a victim of eschatonic precursive reflectivity.  A David Koresh, it’s a mess.  It’s a very distorted and twisted kind of reflection.  

A Christ, a Buddha, a Mohammed, a slightly cleaner shot at what it is.  But nevertheless horribly distorted and misunderstood by historical contextually.  

[Audience - 40.25] - I was wondering if that study of some of the phenomena happening in the crop fields in England might shed some light on the form and shape of the eschaton?

I think that there will be more and more of these anomalies.  The flying saucer is an interesting anomaly.  The flying saucer is clearly the ghost of the eschaton.  Our unconscious mind, the skies of this planet are haunted by the image of a spinning silvery disc that has eternity, the aliens, and the mysteries of existence locked inside of it.  The appearance of the flying saucers in ’47, the modern era of flying saucers, to my mind indicates closure with this eschatonic moment.  But as we get closer to this coincidentia oppositorum things will get whackier and rational analysis will fail.  

I think that the crop circles are a good example of this.  If it is not a hoax, and this is a huge if because there are things about the crop circles which just stink to high heaven - I mean it is so marginally convincing.  For instance, isn’t it a little odd these things begin to appear within an hour and a half drive of most of the people on the planet who will embrace the phenomenon.  I’m thinking of John Michel and his cronies.  What if it were happening in the wheat field of Siberia?  How inconvenient, you know?  

Another thing about the crop circles that’s puzzling is everyone says that it’s a communication.  It’s a curious form of communication because it communicates absolutely nothing.  What it communicates is complete confusion.  Nobody has a clue.  If you really wanted to communicate and for some reason you’re chosen method of communication was mashed wheat fields in England, you could still write in the Queen’s English.

Another thing that’s very puzzling about the crop circles, not about the crop circles per se, but where is the British establishment in all this?  My God, Southern England is dotted with airbases, RAF bases, nuclear weapons depots, cruise missile bases…  Are we being asked to believe that the Ministry of Defense is completely sanguine about nightly violations of British airspace, year after year, and they’re just perfectly comfortable with the idea that half a mile away from their nuclear weapons depot, corn is being snapped over on its side.  If you can snap a corn stock, you can reset a switch on an arming device or a missile.  

[Audience - 43.43]  Bent and molded?

Bent and molded.  So it’s puzzling that the British government is so nonplussed by all this.  I think that means that they must either know what it is, or more likely, they’re doing it.  

[Audience - 43.58]  They did have a military operation to observe a field. The military itself actually did observe a field for ten days.

Well, you know, you want to be very, very subtle in looking at a phenomenon like this.  

It is conceivable that inside MI5, people have observed the rise of the neopaganism in England that is characterized by the Glastonbury crowd and the rave culture and all that; and has created a hoax to lure those people out onto a limb.  In a sense, it’s already happened because for years the crop circle enthusiasts ran around saying no human being could make one of these things.  So then Sheldrake and company and the people at the Cereologist sponsored that contest last year where, under very rigidly controlled conditions, people were given ten acre plots of corn and told you have from midnight to 4am.  You can’t use any light.  We will be monitoring for sound, and here is a high resolution photograph of a recent crop circle.  Your mission is to make this crop circle in a convincing manner.  The people who won the prize produced a splendid crop circle.

So that put the ‘no human beings can do it’ people highly on the defensive.  I don’t know.  It amused me.  Here’s an example of how a cult thinking works.  Remember, what were their names, Ned and Dave, the two drunken painters…Doug and Dave.  

OK, so here come Doug and Dave, these two mildly alcoholic itinerant house painters who claimed to have done all the crop circles.  People who the week before were talking about Telluric messaging from the Gaian world soul just dumped all over Doug and Dave.  They said, well, you believe that two out of work painters could do this?  

Well what’s your position?  That a telluric force did it?  Well now I ask you just in the interest of fairness - which is more likely?  Doug and Dave may be a stretch of the imagination.  Telluric forces intent on saving the world is highly improbable.  So Rupert and I, we went to work on this because I felt…see it plays with people in the way that flying saucers never did.  For instance, I don’t know if you know this but last summer, I believe it was last summers most spectacular crop circle, was the logo of the crop circle society, the Cereologist.  Then the other big startling crop circle of last summer was a Mandelbrot set.  Well this is just a little too cute…

[Audience - 47.21]  It was right outside Cambridge.

Yes, isn’t that startling.  It was right outside of Cambridge.  So for instance when I criticize the crop circles and say isn’t it strange they all are in southern England where John Michel and company would be most likely to stumble into them.

[Audience - 47.36]  They’re not in southern England.  

Ah, that’s what people say.  They say, you’re wrong!  They’re not all in southern England.  What about the one in southern Arkansas?  What about the ones in Ontario?  Japan?  I say baloney.  I say, there aren’t.  There aren’t.  Did you see the one in Arkansas or Ontario?  Well of course we all saw pictures of it but it’s sort of like determining whether or not Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world.  How the hell would you actually verify that and how much faith would you have in the results?

Here we have a mountain in Tibet and a mountain in Bolivia, and you’re telling me that you know beyond a shadow of a doubt which has its utmost surface further from the center of the Earth?  The crop circles, if they are outside of England, they aren’t spreading.  They’re intermittent.  Enough that we could easily dismiss all cases outside of England as the hoax of enthusiasts.  Again, it communicates nothing.  It is anti-communication. It is noise in the circuits.  

[Audience - 48.49]  Maybe we don’t understand the language?  Maybe it’s something that’s happening a little ahead of us?

Well, yeah.  I had this notion.  At first see, I thought when I was more inclined to treating it as real.  I thought maybe somebody is trying to contact us and after forty years of flying saucers, they finally figured out that we just don’t get it with flying saucers.  And they said, well so we’ll leave a physical trace but to me the giveaway, the key to the crop circle phenomenon, is that nobody has ever seen one form.  And by god, if you want to rivet the attention of the population of this planet, just make a crop circle in front of us.  In front of television cameras.  In other words, if we could see the corn lay down then all skeptics would be just undercut completely.  

[Audience - 50.01]  Four or five years ago, 20/20 magazine said OK, we’re going to do something about it.  They went and put this show on, and they show all the different crop circles and all the different theories.  Then they said, we setup an infrared camera in a field one night and waited for a crop circle to happen.  Then they showed the infrared images of the people in the shadows.  Sure enough, by morning there was no crop circle and they were all getting ready to go when someone says, uh-oh, look.  In the field behind them, one that they weren’t filming, a crop circle had appeared.  That was the end of it…

I say arrest and torture the entire crew and you’ll get your answer.  You see, it’s perfectly clear that somehow, if you were to see the crop circle made, the mystery would flee.  So we only get before and after.  How come no during?  When that’s what in fact would convince us of its reality.  It’s playing with us or somebody is playing with us.

[Audience - 51.04]  Can you connect information theory to what we’re talking about?

Well that’s what I was trying to do when I said that it was a language virus of some sort.  Here’s the thing, think about this.  Suppose my other example: suppose you’re a scientist and you’re measuring the amount of electricity running in a line.  Just for purposes of argument, so you put a million volt meters on this line.  So you’re going to get a million measurements of the amount of voltage through the line.  999,999 of these meters tell you that the voltage flowing through the line is between three and five volts.   One volt meter on this line tells you that 8000 volts are flowing through the line.  Now what do you do if you’re a scientist?  You throw out that value.  You say well that can’t possibly be true.  All the other meters metered within a certain narrow range.  This one meter is broken.  Get rid of it.

Now think of each of other as meters, metering reality.  Millions of us, all reporting, no big deal.  No big deal!  Then comes one person.  They say that there’s a thousand ton Beryllium ship populated by little gray men who want to give you a proctological examination in the middle of the night.  Now, what do we do?  We don’t throw them out.  We put them on national TV and make a movie about it and hold conferences and try and figure out how could this be?

[Audience - 53.00]  But the same thing could be said about the very foundation of everything that you talk about?

No because psychedelic experiences are repeatable on demand.  That’s the great difference.  These phenomena which just come and go and leave you jaw hanging in the wind, since you can’t control the confrontation, you don’t know what you’ve got.  

With psychedelics, you can see elves twice a day, on schedule.  The people who find this assertion disconcerting don’t want to hear about it but it’s in fact true.  The drugs at last give us a handle on the other where we can deal with it rather than wait for it to occur.

[Audience - 53.55]  With large unbiased populations?

You mean that they get elves?  You mean people who’ve been contaminated by Terrence McKenna raps?

[Audience - 54.06]  I’ve read your books and I’ve seen elves.

Well do you think you saw elves because you read my books?

[Audience - 54.12]  I don’t know.

What do you think?

[Audience - 55.15]  I think I don’t know.

Well, I didn’t read my books when I saw elves.  It was on the natch.  I think that I spread the elf meme.  

I make it legitimate to report elves but I think people were seeing elves before.  It’s a difficult thing because it’s a mental phenomenon.  We can’t lug a camera in there.  Although with virtual reality and sufficient money, we could set out to create a virtual version of one persons trip.  Once they said, yes - that’s it.  100%.  You got it.  Then we would bring somebody else in and put the helmet on them and say - was this what your trip was like?  Please critique and modify the contents of this virtual reality.  I think that virtual reality is going to be a very powerful tool for exploring pharmacological states because at last we are going to be able to compare the contents of our own minds through something a little more fine tuned than verbal language.  

Basically my method has been - ‘what can you show me’ method.  I know that there is this particular style of refined English womanhood that seems at home with the fairies of the garden.  The dutch..

The things I encounter that I call elves or gnomes.  It’s just a gloss.  They’re small and they have the archetype.  They’re more like leprechauns and this maybe raises a racial issue.  They make things and they live in domed spaces.  The mythology of elves is that they live under hills and they’re master craftsmen.  Makers of jewelry and machines and stuff like that.  That is exactly the deal.  And they’re dead souls is what they are.  

Interestingly, the whole notion of fairy land is: when Saint Patrick arrived in Ireland to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity, they were practicing what’s called the fairy faith.  They believed in little people.  They believed they were the souls of the departed.  They believed that they were everywhere around us and they believed that certain people who had the eye could see these fairies and they believed this with such conviction that Patrick quickly realized that he was not going to get anywhere converting the Irish unless he made a place for this phenomenon.

So he invented Purgatory.  Purgatory was invented by Saint Patrick.  It was not church doctrine before that time.  If you are not Catholic or don’t truck in this domain, you might not know what purgatory is.  It is a place exactly like hell except you eventually get out.  It’s where you do penance for your sins.  Well he was so successful converting the pagan Irish with this concept that when word reached the Holy See, the Vatican, it was made church dogma and then it was very successfully used to convert the Pagan slavs who also had a belief in a kind of fairy land.

So I don’t know.  This thing about dead souls is puzzling to me.  Even with my predilection for the peculiar and the psychedelic, I find it hard to completely embrace the notion that these are ancestors alive in some other dimension.  But in some ways, that is the most conservative explanation.  After all, if you believe there are extraterrestrials who came from the stars, then you’re supposing and hypothesizing all kinds of things.  Since they are interested in human beings, since they can converse with human beings, since they seem to know our boundaries and limitations, they must be some kind of human being.  Then the choices are: a.)  they are a prenatal form of existence.  In other words souls that never incarnated into a body and are up there waiting for the stork or something or b.) they are some future state of humanity where apparently we no longer have bodies and we’ve changed ourselves into self dribbling jeweled basketballs (for God knows what reason).  Or c.)  they are post lifeforms.  They are people who once walked the Earth as you and I do but have gone beyond into this other circumstance.  

One of the things that is to me almost as puzzling as the elfin nature of the DMT encounter is that after you’ve been in there four or five times, and it takes a while because at first it’s just absolute shock and disbelief.  You bring very little out of it.  You’re just appalled and that’s about all you can say about it.  But after a while, I realized that the motif of the DMT encounter, and I guess I should describe it briefly.  When you burst into the DMT space, you have the impression that you’re in a domed space.  Approximately the size of the length of this room, but round with a somewhat lower ceiling, indirectly lit, warm, comfortable.  The moment you get your bearing, they’re there.  In fact, as you break into that space, they cheer.  Some of you may know that song by Pink Floyd from years ago - the gnomes have learned a new way to say hooray.  So you break into this space, they scream their greeting, and while you’re just trying to get oriented, they come bounding forward somewhat like dogs actually.  They begin to lick your face and crawl all over you and jump in and out of your body.  They say we love you.  

You send so many.  You come so rarely.  Welcome!  Welcome!  So your like trying to take your pulse, trying to make sure you’re breathing.  You have the impression that this is so serious that I may be dead.  I may have just simply killed myself ten seconds ago and this is what’s happening.  

They use their voices to make objects.  They speak a language which you do not hear but which you see.  You not only see it, you feel it.  So they use language to cause syntactical architectonic techno structures to condense out of the air.  They show you these things.  They’re proud of them.  They come bounding forward and jump up and down in front of you.  They say — look at this.  They’re all competing like children to show you this stuff.  As you direct your attention into one of these objects, you see beyond any power of contradiction that this thing they’re showing you is impossible.  They’re constantly transforming themselves into the most amazing way and they’re showing you this stuff and they’re saying - do what we’re doing!  You can do this!  Use your voice to make something.  

You’re like — this is now thirty seconds into this experience.  Reality has been obliterated and you’re just in this place.  Well, one can do this.  There is a glossolalia and then these objects condense out of the air.  The objects themselves are somehow alive.  You put one down and they emit sound and make subsets of their own type.  All of this - your just like, my god what has happened.

The strange thing about DMT is that it doesn’t affect your mind in the ordinary sense.  You’re not ecstatic or freed of anxiety.  You’re exactly who you were before this started happening with all your neurosis, fears, doubts - and your saying, is this all right?  Am I going to be OK?  How long is it going to last?  The point I wanted to make that I got started on a few minutes ago - after many of these exposures to this, I have realized (and I think I’m right) that this environment into which you are catapulted, bizarre as it is, it is someone very strange.  It’s their idea of a reassuring environment for a human being.  They are so marvelous to you because you’ve never seen anything like it.  But on the other hand you’ve just been born into this world.

This is why I think perhaps it is a Bardo.  Perhaps it is an after death, I don’t know if maternity ward is quite the phrase, but it’s where you start your existence in this other dimension.  But in the same way that a baby, lying in a bassinet in a maternity ward, could hardly conceive of growing up to drive Ferraris, collect art, and crush the competition, you laying there is this nursery.  How can you extrapolate what lies beyond that space because clearly the entire space has been prepared for baby and you’re the baby.  So you can’t figure out: is this the entirety of this universe or how far does it extend?  I suspect that when you die, this is what you get and that familiarity with the after death vehicle… that DMT actually is a thanatoptic compound and this trip, you’re peaking over the edge into eternity.  Questions you never thought you would have answers to are answered.  

Is there life after death?  You bet!  Next question.

Now there is a problem with this which some of you I’m sure of are thinking.  I hope anyway.  It’s what is called the grandfather paradox, which is the old conundrum that haunts all time travel schemes which is - if time travel were possible, you could go back in time and kill your own grandfather.  Well then, you wouldn’t exist.  So then this sets up a logical impossibility.  Either you exist or you don’t exist, and some science fiction authors have assumed that somehow massive influxes of synchronicity would preserve your grandfather.  You would approach him with your Saturday night special but it would blow up in your hand.  Or it would ricochet off the St. Christopher medal he always wore, or something like that because he cannot be killed by you, because in that case you wouldn’t exist, in which case he couldn’t be killed by you. 

This troubled me for a long time.  What exactly would happen in this situation because according to Hans Moravec of the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, time travel is no big deal.  The first paragraph of this paper, “the last few years have been good for time machines.”  Kip Thorne, from the renowned General Relatively Group at Cal Tech invented a new quantum gravitational approach to building a time gate.  An international collaboration gave a convincing rebuttal of the grandfather paradox arguments.  Another respected group suggested time machines that exploit quantum mechanical time uncertainty.  The technical requirements for these suggestions exceed our present capabilities but each new approach seems less onerous than the last.  There is hope yet that time travel will eventually become possible, even cheap. 

So I then saw another possibility and this is the way we can fulfill the expectation of Christian hermeneutics but not require the second coming of Christ or the intercession of God almighty into history or all these other extreme unlikelihoods.  To understand it, we have to have recourse to physical model in a very simple realm of chemistry and physics, which are the Bernoulli gas laws.  Some of you I’m sure are familiar with these and they’re very intuitive and easy to understand.  We have a cylinder and it contains a vacuum.  At one end of the cylinder we have a valve and the valve is connected to a line, which is connected to a tank of some inert gas – say nitrogen.  So we open the valve to let the nitrogen rush into the cylinder that previously was a vacuum.  Now what happens inside that cylinder I think is intuitly obvious to all of us.

The pressure equalizes over all points equally.  In other words, you can’t have fifty pounds of pressure at one end of the cylinder and five pounds of pressure at the other.  We understand that in a gas, pressure distributes itself evenly in order to achieve equilibrium.  OK, hold that notion in your mind.  Now think of our world in the late 1990s as a sphere or a cylinder of that sort and think of cultures as gasses at various pressures.  Let’s assign low pressures to the bare-assed folks in the Amazon and eastern Indonesia and let’s assign high pressures to the folks in Manhattan and at Cal Tech, Cambridge, Los Angeles and London.  Well then we can predict, correctly in fact, what is happening sociologically on this planet.  What is happening is that the high tech cultures are totally overwhelming the traditional cultures.  The values of Manhattan and Los Angeles are flooding everywhere and in spite of the tiny lip service we give to shamanism and body painting, the truth of the matter is Amazon cultures are not really making a major contribution at this point to the evolution of high tech, global, information dense, electronic culture.

OK, that’s the second level of this Bernoulli metaphor.  So now lets go back to situation where we send the lady Temponaut off into the future.  I’m not familiar with how they overcame the grandfather paradox so we’ll pretend that the grandfather paradox is very strong.

[Audience 11:02] – I want to say something about the grandfather paradox.

I’m close to question time.  Let me press forward relentlessly here because the coffee is running out.  I can feel it.  The equilibrium density is dropping. 

OK.  So we send the lady Temponaut into the future but now with what we know about the equalization of high cultures vs. low in a temporal medium – what happens from our point of view is that the rest of the history of the universe happens instantly.  Even if it’s billions of years of human culture and downloading into machines and claiming star system after star system and so forth and so on, somehow the state vector of all those event systems collapses.  I call this the god-whistle principle.  It’s that we can actually call God into history.  We can summon the end state of human evolution to appear a millisecond after we successfully achieve the implementation of this technology of time travel in order to avoid all the paradoxes that would prevail if there were any extension to the post time travel era beyond the moment of its inception. 

So this is a way of, in a sense, forcing the evolution of the universe and it creates the phase transition of the eschaton.  To my mind, it creates the basin of attraction within the domain of our own lives.  Now is there any kind of precedent for something like this, even metaphorically, in our own experience?  Well it turns out yes there is in a kind of bizarre anecdote, which should sober us considerably as we think about these things.  When the first atomic weapon was built by the Manhattan project in the desert of New Mexico, Fermi and Oppenheimer and all these people got together the night before the test at Trinity and Fermi had a pad on which he had scrawled some equations.  He had reached the conclusion in the week before that they were not sure how high the temperature would go when they triggered this device and Fermi had some back of the envelope calculations, which caused him to believe that the nitrogen in the atmosphere of the planet would begin to burn if they tested this thing.

They would in effect ignite the atmosphere of the planet and the fireball would spread around the entire planet and destroy everything.  They spent half the night going over these things and they finally decided that the information necessary to make the decision was not available and so they said, well – hell.  Throw the switch!  At least it will show those Japs and Germans that we mean business!  [Laughter]

Of course the test was carried out, the nitrogen did not burn and instead we were ushered into the glorious era of weapons of mass destruction.

So let me see, I’ve got some notes here.  I think I’ve covered everything.  What’s interesting about this is, for the first time…  In this article by Frank Tipler called The Omega Point as Eschaton, he seems - and this is why Paul is here and I couldn’t really get into it because it’s crazy to repeat what you can’t understand - but by an analysis and interpretation of quantum mechanics, Tipler reaches the conclusion that there is an omega point and it does represent the funneling together of all the what are called world lines.  He, for purposes of mental comfort, sets it far in the future but in principle, there is no reason to do that.  Twelve or thirteen years ago, the Swedish cosmological Hannes Alfven wrote a wonderful little book called Worlds-Antiworlds in which he made the suggestion that the entire universe is what’s called a vacuum fluctuation.  Ex nihilo, literally out of nothingness.  However, there’s a caveat which is - this creation ex nihilo can only occur if what’s called parity is conserved.  Now what this means is that these particles which come into being out of nothingness must come into existence paired with their anti-particle.  So it comes into being, an electron and an anti-electron and they divide on separate trajectories and then they reconnect and collide with each other and parity is conversed. 

In other words, nothing really happened.  No laws of physics were violated because they annihilated each other.  Now for a long time, this was thought to be entirely a theoretical kind of a construct.  But then it was noticed that the theoretical models of black holes, which we referred to a few days ago, seem to imply that no radiation could leave a black hole and yet certain kinds of black holes were observed to be giving off hard radiation in the form of X-rays.  It was realized that what was happening was vacuum fluctuations were taking place in the vicinity of the black hole and because one particle went one way and one the other, the black hole interfered with the conservation of parity and one of the particles was being sucked into the black hole and the other particle was flying off into the ordinary universe and being seen by astronomers as hard radiation.

So the fact that this process goes on has now been confirmed.  Now an interesting thing about these vacuum fluctuations is that quantum physics places no upper limit on the size of a vacuum fluctuation.  What it says is, the smaller the vacuum fluctuation, the fewer particles that are involved, the more likely the vacuum fluctuation is.  Obviously from observing black holes, we can see that very small vacuum fluctuations occur quite frequently.  Alfven took all this and said, well then is it not possible that the entire universe, our entire universe, is simply a very large vacuum fluctuation.  A vacuum fluctuation involving something like 10-high-50 particles and they have poured into the manifold in which we find ourselves and an anti-matter universe, invisible to us because it’s in another dimension was born at the same time.  So one universe went off into a higher dimensional manifold this way and the other one went off in the other direction.  What this sets us up for is the possibility allowed by this interpretation of quantum physics that the entire universe could disappear instantly.  Not gradually.  You wouldn’t see the stars going out because this is all happening in a hyperspace of some sort, which treats this manifold as a point like entity. 

So what you would have is just “click” and all particles in the universe would disappear and the original unflawed nothingness would be restored.  Actually no, there’s a further caveat to all this, which is – all particles have their anti-matter, anti-particle twin, except the photon.  The photon is this mysterious particle, which is different from all other particles.  It either has no anti-particle or somehow it has its own anti-particle embedded within it.  So what would happen in the case of a universe that was a vacuum fluctuation that encountered its ghost image and conserved parity and cancelled all particles except photons, you would suddenly have a universe made of nothing but light.  Nothing but light!  We then have to model the physics of a universe where the only kinds of particles that exist are light.  Well it’s interesting that all these human traditions of transcendentalism make a big deal about light.  Light is the metaphor for spirit.  The supposition is that the rarefaction of matter and of the flesh releases us into a realm of light.

I am not physicist enough by a long shot to say what the behavior of a universe made of light would be but I do know enough to say that if you or I were made of light, our subjective experience of the universe would be ruled by relativistic physics.  We would have the impression that we could go anywhere instantly and we would have the impression that the universe was aging around us at a tremendous rate.  The time dilation of the general theory of relativity says that as you approach the speed of light, time slows down.  Now it’s assumed that you can’t reach the speed of light because as you approach the speed of light, your mass asymptotically increases so that to push a single atom to the speed of light would require more energy than there is in the entire universe because this particle would have become so massive that there isn’t enough energy to propel it.  But a photon never moves slower than the speed of light.  It never moves faster than the speed of light either.  So the photon - if you were made of photons and you went from here to Zubenelgenubi, a star in our galaxy with a wonderful name, your impression of the travel time would be zero.  Again, here is a way without invoking God almighty where physics seems to lay into our hands metaphors for the anticipation of the eschaton. 

Paul do you want to say something at this point?

[Audience 24:14]  It’s fascinating.  You’re playing with physics.  Everything has to be conserved; it’s not just parity in the vacuum fluctuation.  Matter and antimatter are just one of the dozens of the conservations that has to be conserved in those phenomenon.  They’re happening all the time from the point of view of physics.  Inside our body there are trillions of these virtual reactions occurring all the time and they can be intercepted.  You can have a gamma ray break into a particle and an anti-particle and you can intercept before they come back together again.  That’s how they detect them on photographic plates on cloud changes.  But everything you say is right.  One thing, I don’t think this notion of the big bang – and I’m not sure whether I subscribe to the big bang model – but it sounds so far fetched because if there were something in the universe then we’d have a real problem explaining how it got here.  [Last sentence indecipherable 25:25]

You mean that we are in a vacuum fluctuation?

[Audience 25.30] – No, just that there’s nothing here.  There is nothing before the big bang and there’s nothing after.

This sounds like Buddhism.

[Audience 25:40] – A vacuum fluctuation includes everything; good and evil, male and female, the whole thing added together like a zero.  Just like it always was.

Well then what are the complex appearances that impinge upon our senses and what are we then?

[Audience 25:57] – Because we choose to pay attention to only half of the situation.  If we would let ourselves be and experience the whole, then it’s all unified.

It cancels.

[Audience 26:06] - It all cancels to zero.

Well this refers back to something you and I were talking about at dinner.  We all assume that there is one past and one future but it’s not clear why we assume that.  Think about it for a moment.  We’re all here gathered in this room, sharing this moment, but we all have different pasts.  Not one of us has the past of another and so what we have in this room is a convergence of pasts.  When this meeting is over, we will go our separate ways into a variety of futures.  So the assumption that there is one past and one future is just some kind of convenient mental bookkeeping.

We are tremendously under the spell of this illusion.  We worry about ‘the’ future all the time.  Well notice that you could just move to an island somewhere and get a brown-skinned girl and then you wouldn’t have to worry about anybody else’s future because you would have made your own future.  We can step out of the assumption of a universal history in which we’re trapped.  I think realizing this is the beginning of a kind of liberation.  Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds and this is one of our strongest assumptions.  The assumptions that there is ‘a’ past and ‘a’ future and our destinies are all caught up in that.  But actually you can – a word that rarely passes my lips – you can deconstruct that assumption and then you’re given back a whole different way of looking at the experience of being, which is empowering.  Somehow when we are embedded in ‘the’ future, we feel we have no control whatsoever.  We’re like corks in a raging river.  But in fact that’s a false model I think.             

Anybody want to get in on this?

[Audience 28:27] - Sometimes when I’m listening to you, I have the troubling thought that Terence hasn’t done enough psychedelics.  I think that you’re too straight in someway.  When you get onto some of your scientific tracks, and as you put it, you’re a rationalist – I start thinking, why get lost?  I start referring to experiences I have had with being altered where a lot of this seems incidental to the experience to one experience of eternity, which I know you’ve had.  How do you reckon with yourself sometimes when you doubt yourself and think this is just my ego concocting things to make my ego feel good?  This would be the worst-case scenario for you.  It’s hard for me to express this sort of well, but there’s something about the way you often refer what seems to be a scientific model that’s very linear even as you talk….

Well I would certainly say that I haven't taken enough psychedelics.  Reading these people, I doubt these guys are really psychedelic heads and they’re much further out than I am.  The real truth is and I’ve said it many times that the world is not only stranger than we suppose, it’s stranger than we can suppose.  In a way, that’s either permission to suppose anything you want or to just stop supposing.  These things are models.  Nowhere is it writ large that bipedal apes should be able to understand how the universe works.  Still less likely is it written anywhere that Terence McKenna should be able to understand how the universe works.  Were you here the other night when we talked about the black hole theory of enlightenment? 

It was two nights ago? 

[Audience 31:12] – I was here.  [Laughter]

Well that’s the idea - that the real idea that the truth can't be told.  I’m very aware that all of this is just stuff to support me, to make a living in other words you know?  That in fact what’s really going on defies rational apprehension, I hope!  I would hate to think that we could understand what’s going on.  Nevertheless, there’s something to be said to this modeling process and I agree, I think I’m getting old.  You can only push yourself so far.  When I read one of these things today and he was off on some tear and I just realized, it struck fear in my heart.  I said, my God.  I actually did a ‘mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the weirdest one of all.’  It said Hans Moravec is the weirdest one of all.  Shit!  I should bring him here and sit as his feet!  I don’t know – am I talking about what you’re talking about?  Oh good!

[Audience 32:39] – I find a fantastic parallel between the psychedelic experience and physics.  I haven’t found anything in the psychedelic experience that would be any problem to relate to the point of view of the physicist.  Actually, I think that all the stuff in physics got out of the bag because of the psychedelic breakthroughs in the ‘60s.  Fritjof Capra had psychedelic experiences and then started to figure it out.  In the 1920s, people were puzzling about these things and having the spiritual crises and throwing away all of their assumptions about reality and having these types of breakthroughs, but then it go lost because we started to use physics for the military.  It was all an environment that opened up because of the psychedelics. 

I don’t think that the purpose of science is to understand reality.  This may go to what your saying.  I think that the purpose of science is to advance technology, which is a heresy.  I don’t think that reality can be understood and that it’s absolute hubris for science to cloak itself in the mantel of philosophy.  All it’s for is to make better toys, or if your nuts, better weapons.  Ultimately there’s not going to be any closure in the effort to understand and I think that the thing that you take away from psychedelics finally is that all models are provisional.  That there is no truth. 

We talked at one point in here about Wittgenstein’s phrase ‘true enough.’  True enough to get you to the gas station.  True enough to get your taxes paid.  But there will be no closure on this stuff.  We have to live in the light of the mystery.  I think we also said in here, it’s the death of conversation if we glorify the mystery too much because then I’ll be just like everyone else here and I’ll announce that we’re now going to have a meditation, which I’ve never done to you I want to point out!

Somebody wanted to say something?

[Audience 35:15] – With that in mind, I wonder how you can project an end to eternity to a certain time?

Well I didn’t mean to imply a nothingness beyond.  It isn’t like that.  I think it’s an everythingness.  When I talk about what I envision it as - boundary dissolution.  If all boundaries dissolve then I am you, and you are me, and we are all together.  It’s exfoliation of the human experience.  The great boundaries are…no the small boundaries are man, woman, self, world, and then the big boundaries are life, death, past, future – all of these will be dissolved into something like William Blake’s Divine Imagination.  We will become our grandest dreams.  So the whole challenge is to dream a dream worthy of that dimension.  It’s a very interesting exercise.  I don’t know if you’ve ever done – god it comes close to being a visualization I’m sad to notice – but have you ever played the game, what would I do if I could do anything?

First of all, you have to wrap your mind around the concept anything.  What would I do if I could do anything?  I used to think about it and for some reason for me it takes the form of an architectural fantasy.  First of all, I just locate myself in the house featured in last months architectural digest.  Then from there I begin to work it out.  Well if you could do anything within a few minutes of entering into that exercise, you’re unrecognizable to yourself.  You don’t even have to exist in a forward flowing casuistry of three dimensions.  You can be a number of species, all possible sexes; you can be translocated at many points in time.  You begin to realize that you are tremendously limited by your assumptions.  This is sort of what I imagine death is.  It’s release into the divine imagination and if you’re blown up in an airliner, immediately after dying you’re just a dead person but then you begin to unfold and test the boundaries. 

As James Joyce says in Finnegan’s Wake, ‘up n’ent prospector, you sprout all your worth and woof your wings.’  And that’s just in the first thirty seconds that you woof your wings.  Then you’re able to divide your consciousness to assume any form, to be anyplace, to know anything.  Anything recognizable as human would quickly drop away or would just become a tiny and familiar touchstone that you would occasionally return to touch.  Somehow the dying, which occurs to each one of us, that’s the microcosm of the planetary and historical process that were caught up in.  It’s the thing that we hate most of all – we fear it, we really get agitated when death is raised as an issue.  James Joyce called it the grim reaper, a blessing in disguise, “if you want to be Phoenixed, come and be parked.”  Meaning, you have to die to fully exfoliate into this dimension. 

Sometimes I think, and I don’t often say it to groups because I’m misunderstood and I don’t want people to go out of here depressed, but sometimes I think that what human history pushes for is the extermination of all life on the planet for the simple reason that we’ll never be free until then.  That we are in some kind of hell world and we’re locked in a world of matter and energy and space and time and it is not, my god this sounds like Southern Baptists, but we are living death at this moment and that we must die in order to be born again.  In other words, that somehow what we are has become trapped in a lower dimensional matrix and our greatest delusion is to cling to this most tenaciously. 

Jorge Luis Borges in one of his stories has this idea that the species, any species, is somehow not completed in eternity until the last member of that species dies.  It is interesting that if you think about biology, 95% of all species that have ever lived on this planet are extinct.  This is what happens to species, they go extinct.  Yet we’re driven to pursue immortality.  It pains us greatly to imagine the death of all life on this planet and particularly the death of our individual selves or our species.  But the fact of the matter is, we don’t know what death is.  One of the puzzling things about the DMT trance is these creatures made of light in the mind that are so different from us, but have such affection and love for us - they seem like relatives.  They seem like, dare we whisper the word, they seem like ancestors.  Yet, we would rather believe that they were aliens from Zeta Reticuli or elves in a parallel continuum than apply Ockham’s Razor to the phenomenon, and say – since we are the only intelligent entities that we have ever contacted in this universe, these things which we contact in our minds in the center of the DMT flash – they must be human beings of some sort.  They don’t look like human beings but they love us so much and understand us so well. 

Is it possible that the kind of human being that they are is a dead human being?  That we’re actually breaking through into an ecology of souls.  If we say that the psychedelic experience is an experience of boundary dissolution or if we say that DMT is the strongest of all psychedelics, then may it not be that it is dissolving the most resistant of all barriers, which is the barrier between the living and the dead.  What you actually come into is the antechambers of eternity for a brief glimpse.  If you were to take that rap and properly translate it into Witoto or Munangi or something like that and go to the Amazon and query those folks – they’d say – ‘of course.’  Your own Mircea Eliade said that shamanism depends on the spirit ancestors.  For all the credit we give shamanism, we’ve never actually come to grips with the possibility that shamans really do work with the spirit ancestors.  That there really is an ecology of trans-material human beings in a nearby continuum that can be approached by a boundary-dissolving drug. 

It’s because we and certainly I, and certainly proving by this wrap tonight, are obsessed with technological explanations of it and how it’s going to be the flying saucers, or the time machine, or the collapse of the quantum vector.  But because the forward thrust of our technology is towards immortality.  That’s what gnawing at the back of our minds.  Yet what may actually be coming towards us, orthogonal, meaning at right angles to the historical process, is the dissolving of the barrier between the living and the dead which is so unsettling and mind boggling to us that we would take a flying saucer invasion any day over having that happen to us.

Yet it’s very, very late in the game.  Human nature is going to have to undergo a radical vertical translation of some sort if we are to avoid the extinction of ourselves and all life on the planet.  So then maybe that’s what it was for.  If we believe that we were always embedded in the machinery of nature - that we could never act outside the purposes of nature - then this must be what it’s for.  It’s very interesting in embryology.  I think most people think of a fetus in the womb as you all know – we begin as very fish like creatures in the womb and then what are essentially little paddle mitts, the human hand appears.  I think most people think that the tissue retracts tightly and that the human being emerges but if you’ve seen fetal stages in bottles in medical schools, what’s actually going on is that cells die off.  Massive amounts of dying goes on in the womb in order that the human form may emerge out of the fetal form.  The webbing between the fingers doesn’t retract.  Those cells die and are released into the amniotic fluid.  The growth of the fetus involves the death of millions and millions of cells.

We are born, you can almost say sculpted into life by the hand of death.  I feel as nervous about all this as you must but this is what we’re here for - to stretch the envelope.

[Audience 47.20] – Terence, I would like to go back to something you said about the beings of light and the shamanic capacity to see and interact with these beings, and that they could be the ancestors.  Thinking in terms of those individuals who refined their senses to be able to see more than the average ability to see and to hear more than just the normal ability to hear; there’s a growing awareness of inner-penetrating planes of beings that are actually co-existing with us but we can’t hear them or see them because we haven’t refined those senses enough.  The more psychically sensitivity individuals have an increasing ability in a non-drug state to be aware.  They can see more and hear more and I haven’t heard you say that. 

Well yeah, that’s a very good point.  The perfect example of it in terms of a cultural tradition is fairyland.  Fairyland is the pre-Christian Celtic peoples belief that dead souls stayed around in the immediate vicinity and that there were thousands of them all around.  The accumulated dead, very much in the way that when you smoke DMT there are thousands of these things and it raises the question – were they always there or what’s going on?

Saint Patrick, who brought Christianity to Ireland, found this belief (and also Anita makes the point about sensitivity), in Irish folklore there’s the idea that if you have the eye, you can see these things and no drugs are required.  It’s a psychic ability, which the country Celtic people have sometimes claimed.  So when Patrick came to Ireland on his mission of conversion, he found this belief in fairyland so powerfully entrenched in these people that he invented purgatory.  Purgatory was invented by St. Patrick to convert the Irish.  Then when word was carried back to Rome that Patrick, who was this great bishop of the early Church, that he had made this doctrinal concession to Celtic folk thinking – the Pope thought it was such a fine idea that they just wrote it into dogma.  So purgatory, which as you know is neither heaven or hell but a place where you expiate your sins for some amount of time before you pass on to heaven is nothing less than a cleaned up version of fairyland written in to Christian theology. 

I don’t know why the Celtic people had, not a monopoly but a firm grip on this.  It may be their innate gloominess, their obsession with death – it’s called the Ayenbite of Inwyt.  It’s that we just chew on ourselves until we dissolve.  There was something about that character that set it up for perceiving these entities.  Although in all traditions all over the world, if you dig deep enough, you can usually find a tradition of small people that live in the hills or under the hills – meaning graves – under the hills and they are the ancestors.  The best that straight folklorists can tell is they have some weird law that as a people recedes into time, they shrink which seems to me preposterous.  I just don’t understand that.

I think the evidence is pretty good that this is going on.  The fact DMT is a natural occurring neuro transmitter is very suggestive.  Rupert Sheldrake has made the suggestion that dying is a unique chemical experience and he calls DMT a necrotic hallucinogen.  You actually, if you are truly dying, your brain will be flooded with DMT and then you will see the ecology of souls waiting to receive you.  I once questioned a very well known Tibetan teacher about what was going on in DMT, and he said, yes, these are the lesser lights.  He said if you go further than that, you will break the thread of connection and be unable to return.  I think this is the most challenging idea to us on the conscious and unconscious level because - I’m only speaking for myself - but it seems to me true that we really have at a profound level accepted the scientific lie that death is non-entity.  It’s a permanently weakening idea because it makes us each such a finite being.  It means that no matter what you do, eventually it will all end in the cold, cold ground. 

Always at my back I hear, times winged chariot hurrying near.  This coyness lady would be no crime had we but whirled enough in time.  The graves a lovely private place but none do there I think embrace.  Well maybe Andrew Marvell was wrong.  Maybe there’s more fun on the other side than you might wish to be congealed. 

Anybody?  Save me from myself!

[Audience 54:12] – What I’m wondering, I have the impression of what comes to mind is a world that you project where everybody is schizophrenic.  So that today I can be Napoleon, tomorrow Jesus, and then I can meet somebody else that also believes that he is Napoleon, Jesus or Buddha back and forth in time.  I’m just wondering what kind of a place that will be. 

Well I would buy into that.  I think schizophrenia is the absence of cultural expectation.  In the most profound sense, the casuistry doesn’t even apply.  I consider myself schizophrenic and I have observed schizophrenia in other members of my family in close up and great detail.  What it is, is simply the breakdown of casuistry and then ordinary people - imprisoned in the hallucination of culture, language and linear time - lock you up and put you away because you’re reporting from outside the cultural envelope and carrying information that terrifies, alarms, and disturbs.  You drive other people crazy is what it is! 

I’m talking now about process schizophrenia, which is the spectacular kind – where you bring back information that is absolutely incommensurate with the models of your culture.  It’s been said that the world is becoming more schizophrenic.  Well, that’s just because they didn’t have the word psychedelic.  Psychedelic experience is essentially a kind of schizophrenia and the people who in the early phase of psychedelic research – they wanted to call it a psychotomimetic, meaning it mimics psychosis.

It doesn’t mimic psychosis.  It’s a schizomimetic of some sort.  Psychosis is a whole different pathology.  Schizophrenia is simply a category for behavior and insight that the rest of society is unable to do anything with.  That doesn’t trouble me at all.  I like talking about how I’m schizophrenic.  Maybe this answers your criticism that I’m linear and running down and old.  I can always go nuts.  If all else fails, you can go bananas I suppose.

The schizophrenics return with the great aesthetic visions and the scientific breakthroughs and the poetic understandings and it’s almost as though they have been aided by the demon artificers.  They have taken into their retinue supernatural helpers and a shaman would say – of course – allies.  I’m sure you all know the way in which schizophrenia and shamanism map together.  I mean our own Julian Silverman is the great pioneer in the one-to-one mapping of shamanism and schizophrenia.  Years ago, when I was completely bananas, every time they would approach from three sides with nets, I had Julian’s paper called Shamans and Acute Schizophrenia and I could quote it chapter and verse and back them off because what is called the initiatory crisis in shamanism is nothing more than a schizophrenia break with ordinary reality. 

The problem is, we freak out completely and rush to drug people and give them electroshock and tie them down and slap them around.  So then the unfolding of the process is interrupted and it’s as though you were to perform surgery on a fetus or something and then be amazed when it turns out a monstrosity.  When if you would have just left it alone for crying out loud, it was unfolding along its own cryode of morphological development.  This is why people like R. D. Lang seem to me to be the ones who fought most deeply and correctly about schizophrenia.

To become schizophrenic, it’s a wonderful opportunity.  The trick is to make sure that you’re nowhere where straight people can get at you.  My schizophrenic episode occurred in the Amazon basin and it was five days march to just a mission.  I’ve always felt that evading modern mental health care facilities saved my mind.  Absolutely!  In a traditional society, it’s supported.  If someone shows signs because their dreamy or they hallucinate, or they’re epileptic or something like that – then this is encouraged and they’re put under the care of shamans and drugs are used to initiate the crisis in some cases.  It’s a cause for great rejoicing to have these personalities in the culture because they’re the antennas of culture that are contacting the raw stuff of real being and transducing it down into cultural artifacts and institutions that then are useful.

Anything else? 

[Audience 100:39] – The Grandfather paradox.

Oh yeah, what did you want to say?

[Audience 100:45] – Your idea of the end point makes perfect sense to me and I don’t think the Grandfather paradox is an objection.  It’s not really a paradox.  It’s a self-consistent universe.  You’re here so you didn’t kill your grandfather.  If you killed your grandfather, you wouldn’t be here to ask us the question.

I don’t think it’s a paradox.  I think that’s the way to handle that.  I think that when we finally really understand time travel, we may find out that it’s common as dirt and it’s been going on all around us in all kinds of physical processes. 

[Audience 101:18] – We make up stories.  The human mind likes to make up stories.  So if you came back and killed your grandfather and you’re still here, we’d have to make up a story.  Like someone else got to your grandmother.

But since that isn’t how it works.

[Audience 101:36] – Well it may be working that way.  People disappear mysteriously and all sorts of things happen and we just fit them into a framework that makes sense to us.  When we’re in the realm of time travel, then maybe we’ll have to reinterpret all that weird stuff that occurred in history.

That’s an excellent point.  All kinds of stuff goes on around us that may be in fact the collapse of paradoxical situations that we don’t understand.  Like all these well documented cases of spontaneous human combustion and stuff like that.  Unless you just flat out deny that this goes on, which is a kind of cop out I think, because it just means that you don’t believe large bodies of evidence.  Not everything weird that’s claimed goes on, but on the other hand, I don’t think God is a republican.  I think that there is plenty of weird shit flying around and as I said, nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality.  Every culture that’s ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95% of reality and that the other 5% would be delivered in the next 18 months. 

From Egypt forward, they’ve been running around believing that they’ve had a perfect grip on things.  Yet we look back at every society that has preceded us with great smugness at how naïve they all were.  Well it never occurs to us that then maybe we’re whistling in the dark too.  That the universe is stranger than you can suppose.  The openness that that perception imparts is a great joy.  A great blessing because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor but in service to the living mystery.  The fact that you’re not going to understand it.  It is not going to yield to logic, or magic, or any other technique that’s been developed.  The novelist John Crowley has this wonderful old aphorism, the further you in you go, the bigger it gets.  I think this is true of most things. 

That’s all folks!  We got through another one of these.  [Applause]. 

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.  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.  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.  Yet, science would say that is a coincidence. 

P.W. Bridgeman, 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 casuistry and whose relationships to each other are simply hidden from you.  What I’ve observed and I think it’s 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 has never been allowed into the canon of science.  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. 

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 in to 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, organic.  Out of that chemistry come the macro-physical systems that we call membranes, jells, 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 unnucleated DNA that characterized primitive life on the planet.

Out of that life come eukaryotes, nucleated cells and then complex colonies of cells.  Then cell specialization – leading to higher animals, to social animals, leading to complex social systems, leading to technologies, leading to globe girdling, electronically based, information transfer oriented cultures like ourselves.  Someone once said, ‘what’s so progressive about media?’  ‘It’s the spreading of darkness at the speed of light.’  It can be, it can be.  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.  Out of complexity emerges greater complexity.  We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty conserving or complexity conversing 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 what has been said so far.  The added wrinkle, or an added wrinkle, is that each advancement into complexity, into novelty, precedes 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.  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 into three dimensional space as choppers, aeropoints, particle accelerators, gene sequencers, space craft, what have you. 

All of this complexification is occurring at a faster and faster rate.  This brings me then to the second quality or phenomena that science has overlooked, which is the acceleration of complexification.  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 fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, a million years ago – anyway recently – the crossover into the domain of culture, tool making, myth making, dance, poetry, song and story that set the stage for the fall into history; the incredibly unusual and self-consuming process that has been going on for the past fifteen or twenty thousand years.  A biological snap of the finger.  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 cliché that time is moving faster and faster, a cliché 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 and that time is in fact speeding up.  That history in which we are embedded because our life of fifty to eighty years is so ephemeral on a scale of ten to fifteen thousand years – but nevertheless history is a state of incredible destabilization.

It’s a catastrophe 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 towards 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; 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, adumbration of ideas, mathematics, 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 a conspiracy theory because I can't make the leap to faith that would cause you to believe that anyone could get hold of the beast enough to control it.  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.  The second quality, the acceleration of the movement into novelty, leads me to the third point, which is I suppose more controversial.  I am frankly willing to admit that my sensitivity to this third point is based on my psychedelic experience.  Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics.  I propose therefore to expand that enterprise and say we need a science beyond science.  We need a science that plays with a full deck.  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. 

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.  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. 

Instead, they throw you into the presence of the great ‘who knows.’  The mystery!  The mystery, which 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…[Audience Laughter]. 

You are paying attention, aren’t you?  Or the idea that it’s some kind of magnifying glass into the personal unconscious – your trauma, your childhood memories, your 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.  These are just cultural myths. 

What is revealed through the psychedelic experience I think is a higher dimensional perspective on reality.  I use higher dimensional in the mathematical sense.  Literally, you are lifted out of the plane of cultural assumptions and can look down with a 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.  Then if you look at the entire fossil record, what you see is the evolution of senses.  Sensory preceptors and organs of locomotion.  The preceptors, the eye, the hand, bring into the cognitive field the sense of things at a distance.  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 cannot only run with the best of them, see with the best of them but we can remember and anticipate like crazy.  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 towards the hidden domain of the future.  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 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 rearview mirror and the only thing that’s good about it is it’s better than driving with no mirror at all.

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.  This is the third item or really the second item on the list – what science forgot.  It’s what I call the Eschaton.  Now Eschaton is a rare word.  Until very recently, unheard of outside schools of theology which I understand were a dying enterprise.  Eschaton comes from the Greek word eskhatos, which just means the end.  The eschaton is the last thing, the final thing.

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 word impart to reality a purpose, you see.  If the eschaton exists then it’s like a goal or an attraction point or an energy sync toward which historical process is being moved.  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 reining philosophy was Deism and Deism was the idea that the universe is a clock made by God.  God wound this clock and has walked away from it.  The clock will eventually run down.  That theological construct was poisonous to evolutionary theory in the 19th century.  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 out 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 its like a religious idea like saying Jesus loves you so feel alright 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 towards 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 rearview mirror, it appears to us that we’re headed straight into a brick wall at a thousand 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 rainforest of five million years ago.  We can't even go back to the era of Cayuse and six-shooters of two hundred 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, classicism and materialism, then God help you.  You should call your broker.  If on the other hand, you’ve recognized that a life boat 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 is a lot of talk about cultural death and disenfranchisement and it’s usually couched in terms of some happy naked people in the rainforest 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 cultural 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.  That’s not the victory of somebody’s culture over somebody else’s culture.  Nobody ever had a culture like that, the victory of schlockmeisterism and crapola over good taste and good sense.

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 is 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 controlness’ is the most hopeful thing about it.  After all, whose control is it out of?  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. 

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.  Sometimes I’ve talked to many of you about psychedelic plants, shamanism, techniques, chemistry, approaches, so forth and so on – I’m approaching 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?  The conclusion that 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 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 we’ll give you a lease option for five dollars.  It makes no sense.  It is in fact no different from saying ‘and God said let there be light.’  What these 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 that 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.  I perceive that it is true when you build these large scale cosmogonic theories that you have to have kind of an umbilical cord 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 non-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? 

I think this is the great breakthrough of psychedelics and shamanism is that science got it absolutely wrong.  The universe didn’t begin in a singularity.  Who knows how the universe began or even presumes 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.  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 acknowledge that the human neo-cortex represents the most densely ramified matter known to exist in the biological world. 

You don’t have to be 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.  So I believe that science and its reluctance to deal with the psychedelic experience and the way in which science has used the 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.  Not one of us I think can imagine that history could go on for another thousand 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 thousand 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 and 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 pubescent stage.  It begins with naked monkeys and it ends with a human/machine planet-girdling interface 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 the 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 it’s ever more climatic 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 symmetries 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 patients 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 by these cultural values rushes the raw unanalyzed datum of reality.  This is what Aldus Huxley called removing the reducing valve of consciousness.  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 pre-history 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 towards a kind of egalitarian partnership in an environment of great material simplicity.  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 worshiping, monotheistic, linear, phonetic alphabet, tight ass straight culture that we are a part of. 

So now at a kind of moment of great cultural challenge and dynamic for western civilization which has for a thousand years called all the shots and shoved itself down everybody’s throat whether they liked it or not, in the last hundred years, through the science of anthropology, ethnography, ethnomedicine and botany, the news has arrived that these “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 fisherman.  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, macrobiotic, 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 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 arrive 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.  That’s mind over matter.  That’s the violation of every scientific principle in the books and yet it is the most trivial experience that 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 could but figure out how.  It’s the one drug that they can’t tear from our grip, 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.  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 unconsciousness 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.  When cultural values, created by male dominance, 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.  Now history has failed.  Western cultural institutions having become global cultural institutions now show themselves to be inadequate 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 known to the species are pedaled 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?  The value systems that aggrandize the possessions 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 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.  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.  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.’  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 awaiting us.  But it’s a cultural test.  Nature is pitiless.  Intelligence is a grand experience 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, the trilobites and the crossopterygian fishes and all those other folks that came before. 

[Audience] – Are their no futuristic drug companies at all?

Drug companies are the most bottom line gang around.  It’s a very cutthroat business and research curves are short because you’re in constant competition.  I don’t know.  Long-term research, this could be done.  If we spent as much money on this as we spent to dig the hole for the now cancelled supercollider, we would probably have the thing in hand. 

[Audience] – I’m curious about the parallels you drew between the DMT flash and orgasm, or the non-parallels that you said.  You said that you were baffled about that.  I guess my question is, have you experienced or do you know the orgasm to be potential for that kind of a powerful mind consciousness expansion, or is it just what you would term the post-coital fog?

Well the fog comes afterwards.  Orgasm is an interesting phenomenon.  First of all, it’s not necessary and it’s not expressed in lower animals.  Sex, as you descend the animal phylogeny, becomes more and more mechanical, less and less intimate, and finally it’s all about eggs that are deposited somewhere and then males come along and fertilize them.  There’s not even contiguous activity by male and female.  So then what is it that as animal complexity increases, there’s this concentration on this bust of boundary dissolving pleasure in the central nervous system.  I don’t exactly understand what the function is there.  Obviously we’re all interested in sex but are we interested in sex because we pursue orgasm and is that the payoff?  Couldn’t you build in a more gentle gradient of interest based on biology, which must be happening with these other animals?

There’s a book to be written about all this.  I have all the questions; I just don’t have any of the answers.  I can see that sexuality is related to consciousness and to the psychedelic state.  I’ve thought about it for years and years but I just haven't gotten anywhere.  When you have sex on psychedelics, there’s an incredible enhancement and reciprocal feedback into that, but I don’t know. 

Kathleen?

[Audience] - I’m thinking of the Tantric practice where that energy, that regenerative energy is conserved.  So at the moment of orgasm, to concentrate your energy at the base of the spine and let it wash the nervous system internally.  It seems like an evolutionary….

Well I was going to mention that.  One of the things that’s always puzzled me about Tantra is that if you analyze it, it’s a frustrating of the biological drive toward ejaculation in the male.  How strange then that at the top of animal organization, there would evolve a physiological response that is contra the biological momentum of the species.  A hanging man ejaculates but a yogin doesn’t apparently.  So I’m skeptical, not of the phenomenon but of the interpretation of the phenomenon.

[Audience] –Actually there’s a good description of why that’s encouraged in a book called The Jewel and the Lotus by Bodhi Avinasha and Sunyata Saraswati.  What it is - is that it transmutes that energy whereas that orgasm would send that energy out the bottom of the man, that it would come up the spine and accumulate in the medulla and activate the third eye and promote a superconscious state.  That’s actually the physiological thing but you were questioning the philosophical end of it.  But conserving sperm is a tradition in many martial arts and spiritual traditions and does seem to have in my observation and practice a good effect on spirituality and on states of altered consciousness. 

But that means that people with vasectomies should be enlightened.

[Audience] – No, no!  It’s a physical practice that comes about… [Audience] – That’s a cutting of the circuitry too with the vasectomy.[Audience] – It’s not the sperm, it’s the energetic.  Men have had accidentally dry orgasms that have gotten them to the same place mentally as a wet orgasm.  I think it’s a mistake to concentrate of the physiological part of it and the pleasure center part of it and look at the wider context of where and why and how it’s been practiced.  There is a lot there.  I’ve studied and practiced that a lot so I think it might bear looking at. 

I agree with most of what you’re saying.  I’m not so in agreement that it’s not important to understand the physiology of it.  The way to bring these things forward is to get some kind of handle on it so that it can be raised off the level of metaphor.  I suppose they’re trying to do that but it’s freakishly elusive considering how radical the claims are.  I’m very suspicious…

[Audience] - Actually it’s not.  It’s like anything else once you get interested in it.  There are a lot of teachers and there is a lot of literature on it.  It’s not freakishly elusive at all.  It’s just…

Well I mean to demonstrate to someone who is not pre-committed to believing it.  That’s what I mean by elusive.

[Audience] - Well, it’s been called the secret teachings for a long time but with what tools and media we have now, these methodologies and explanations are available.

We’re in a situation where all boundaries between knowledge systems have dissolved in the past hundred years.  Take something like Dzogchen.  When I studied Tibetan, you didn’t even mention this until you’d been with them for years.  It was inconceivable.  Now it’s pedaled on every street corner, which I think is a good thing. 

[Audience] – What is Dzogchen?

Oh it’s an advanced Tantric-Smantric something or other.  I’m using it as an example of the fact that there are esoteric idea systems have all been brought together and we’re sorting it out.  Over the past hundred years, this has been going on.  I have been underwhelmed by the accomplishments of Indian spirituality personally and overwhelmed by the accomplishments of Amazonian spirituality.  I suspect priestly hierarchies of unspeakable acts and intentions and always try to avoid that.  I’m also very suspicious of secrets.  If you tell me one, it’s finished as a secret.  I took a pledge long ago to tell all secrets as quickly as possible because I think that everybody is a lot stupider than you might think.  Nobody has a leg up on this stuff.

[Audience] – The only secret in Dzogchen is not to tell it to somebody who’s not interested.  The idea of a secret has nothing to do with a secret.  It’s keeping the energy and not going around telling it. 

Well what I found though…

[Audience] - It’s a technique.  It has nothing to do with a secret.  I tell you not to tell anybody and the hard part is not to tell.  The secret is irrelevant.  It’s only a technique for the student to hold energy. 

Real secrets can’t be told, period.  So that’s not an issue.  Secrets, which can be told, are not secrets.  Secrets are a way of controlling other people. 

[Audience] - What is your best guess as to what is the outcome of this experience?  In other words, are there any conceivable other choices besides a reversal or a going upward.  Could time go backwards? 

By this process, you mean this historical spin down that we’re caught in?  Well there are different ways to think about it; like a whole smorgasbord to think about it.  It could be that we are simply in anticipation of our death as a species.  This is a downer possibility.  That what the 20th century is - is like a terminal delirium.  We are sinking into coma.  All philosophies, books, teachings, points of view, are now swirling around the deathbed of human culture.  We remember the shattered affairs, the failed crusades, the ruined dreams.  We’re looking back over the wreckage of the past 10,000 years and trying to make peace with it and sinking into coma.

Another possibility – I mentioned that the Time Wave seems curiously appropriate to technology.  That what we’re calling novelty, the evolution of novelty seems linked to the evolution of technology.  A technology that would fulfill this whole scenario not requiring the intervention of God almighty or something like that would be time travel.  If it were possible to travel in time, then you would understand what it meant that this linear wave of novelty terminates on December 21st 2012.  It just literally means that’s the day history ends because after that day, you have a different kind of time.  You have a kind of time that is like space.  Notice that when we look at the evolution of life and human culture, it’s a conquest of dimensionality.  We started as some slime on a rock somewhere and slowly through the coordination of our senses, our eyes and then our limbs, we have conquered space.  Notice that when you decide to walk over yonder, this is a journey through space that is volitional but the time is not volitional.  No human being has ever traveled an inch in time or a moment in time.

[Audience] - We just can’t change the rate.  We travel in time constantly but we go at…

We’re in the river and the river has a speed and we’re carried along.  In principle, if it were possible to travel in time, you could create an entirely different kind of sociological domain and I have talked to the mushroom about this.  It says that time travel is possible but only of a certain type.  The type that is like this: you can travel back in time but you cannot travel further back in time than the invention of the first time machine because before that there were no time machines.  If you took a time machine there, you would introduce a paradox.

[Audience] – Is memory traveling back in time?  Like a vivid memory of something that happened a while ago.  Isn’t it a sense of manipulation of time in that way? 

Well that’s what’s called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.  The mind can travel in time but time is a domain of non-mental objects.  It’s a domain of real objects.  The mind traveling through time is fairly ineffectual.  If you could actually move matter through time and there’s reason to think you could – and if you could travel back in time than no further than the first time machine, then the moment the first time machine is created and turned on, time machines will appear from all points in the future visiting the most interesting place in time – which is the beginning of the era of time travel.  It’s as though if you have an airplane that you could fly to Kitty Hawk to December 17th, 1905, to witness the first flight of the Wright flyer.  So in a sense, what we call a time machine is not a technology at all and certainly not a technology for individual travel through a temporal medium.  What we call a time machine is a kind of switch which when pushed, collapsed the entire notion of future history down into a single moment.  It causes in a sense the rest of history to happen instantly.

[Audience] – Is this time machine mechanical or non-mechanical?

It’s a concept at this point. 

[Audience] – But I mean if there were a time machine, would it be mechanical or non-mechanical. 

I think you can visualize it any way you like.  It’s probably more like a drug than a machine. 

[Audience] – I guess maybe that’s true too.  I’ve often thought about this time travel thing about the fact that we couldn’t fly at least in a physical sense until a few years ago and I’m thinking that we can't time travel until we get a mechanical prop to help us along at first.  But then later on – we’ll learn how to do it without a mechanical prop. 

Although we’ve never learned to fly without mechanical props.  In fact the more we learn about flying, the less likely it seems you know. 

[Audience] – Because it’s so easy to fly with a mechanical prop... 

And fifty years in or seventy years in to the history of powered flight, we still haven't a clue to how you could fly without mechanical augmentation.

[Audience] – I’m thinking that each time you do a really deep psychedelic experience in some ways you travel to the first time that shamans interacted with the plant world because you’re experiencing basically the same connection that takes you out of present time and into something more ancient and more circular.  The other thing that occurred to me is if we were slime on the rock, we were pre-historical.  Maybe up to 2012 we become post-historical and maybe what that means is that we’re living life so much that we don’t have time to sit down and record it. 

Well, post historical existence would be non-linear.  People would live in time the way we now live in space and would spread out.  What was the first part of your thing?

[Audience] – If you’re on psychedelics and…

Oh, yes.  Well that’s how I think of psychedelics.  When I say boundary dissolution, the real boundaries I’m talking about are the boundaries of dimensionality.  The way a shaman is about to do what shamans do is by transcending Newtonian space and time.  Here is my model of it.  The mind is like a crystal growing under pressure and the pressure is the pressure of Newtonian space/time.  So the crystal grows and takes the shape of it’s confinement but when you liquefy the crystal matrix with a psychedelic, it has another preferred geometry and it unfolds into this second geometry and the second and alternative geometry is more hyper spatial.  Culturally our minds are confined by cultural pressure and cultural phase space to reflect cultural concerns.  How am I looking?  How much money do I have?  Are my social relations in tact?  Is my behavior falling within acceptable? 

When you take the psychedelics and you dissolve the social confinement, the intellectual confinement, the ideological confinement, then the mind is like taking it out of it’s box and it can configure itself in a most comfortable geometry and it’s free.  The reason shamans know what the weather will be, know where the game has gone, know who will recover and who will not recover from serious illness is because they have a relationship to the future that ordinary people lack.  They can see the vectors of possibility and propagate them into the future.

In a sense, chess is like good practice for shamanism because good chess players see deeply into the future.  That’s how you win chess games.  The person who can see the most moves ahead without obfuscation is who inevitably wins the game.  That’s all that chess is about.  If you’ve ever played chess on LSD, you know that it’s ridiculous. 

[Audience] - When you talk about transcending time and being liberated from that, is that also being liberation from the body?  Because so much of our sense of time is wedded to our embodiment. 

This freedom in time usually comes in a state of trance.  The I-Ching says keeping still.  Trance…

[Audience] –But even after 2012 when there’s this radical transformation of what we know as time, is that also a radical transformation of what we know as body? 

Well at other times we’ve talked about this.  There are factions who want to do away with the body.  Who believe that somehow in some kind of electrical simulation of the Ketamine space, we will all flow like amoeboid energies from one orgasmic nexus to another; genital consciousness, body image consciousness, all of this will be left behind.  I suppose I should have an opinion about all this but I really don’t.  If it feels good, do it, is my motto.  The choice between extreme artificiality and extreme naturalness, I think we talked about this the first night, didn’t we, about the gnostic choice?  On one level, it’s a choice about the body.  Is the body the glorious instrument of our interfacing with the miracle of creation or is the body a bag of rotten guts dragging us down ever deeper into Tartarus.

These are just shifts of perspective and people have vehemently argued both ways.  I like the idea of taking the body with you into cyberspace and creating a virtual body.  Obviously the body is a product of many millions of years of evolution and generally seems well adapted to the mind that inhabits it.  It is meaty, fleshy and perishable.  If that could be overcome…

[Audience] – Ok, so the perishability …

The perishability is what I think.  What I’ve said at times in the past is that the task of history is the inversion of the human being.  Our goal is to get the soul outside in three-dimensional space and the body folded inside in mental space.  Now we have it all wrong.  The body perturbs into three-dimensional space.  The most important organ, the mind, cannot be seen.  It’s harder to find than the pancreas because simply by opening the body and looking around, you can find the pancreas.  Opening the body and looking for the mind won’t give it to you.  It’s obviously in another dimension. 

Many religious traditions have this idea of building what’s called a light body.  They say, life is a preparation for death, you’re building an after death vehicle.  It’s a simulacrum of a living body but it’s made of light and it’s under the control of your higher intentionality.  There may be something to this.  Certainly we all do build our images according to how we cut our hair, according to how we dress, what particular reconstructive surgeries we elect to have, so forth and so on.  We sculpt the body and when the body is made of light, this will become much easier.  Rather than a boob job, you can become a canary if you want or whatever else is your particular….

[Audience] – Does the idea that time is compressing contradict the idea that the universe is expanding scientifically? 

Well there’s a lot of argument about whether it’s expanding or contracting.  The measurement seems to show that it’s incredibly close to the limit case, to the place where you can’t tell.  It’s either just barely expanding or just barely collapsing and why it’s so close to the limit case isn’t clear.  This contradicts all of that.  See, the scientific theory says, the universe appeared from nothing for no reason, 14 billion years ago.  It exploded outward.  It’s cooling.  It’s slowing down.  Complex processes are appearing.  Eventually it will reach the limits of gravitational expansion.  If it reaches the limits of gravitational expansion, it will then re-collapse.  If not, it will just go forward until entropic heat death. 

The model that I’m proposing is a little different.  It says that the big singularity lies not at the beginning of the universe but at the end.  So I call it not the big bang but the big surprise.  What’s happening is that process is complexifying.  The scientists want to say that the entire universe burst from a point smaller than the electron for no reason.  As I said yesterday, this is the limit case for credulity.  If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.

[Audience] – I have a feeling, I’m not a physicist but it sounds a little strange.

Yeah, how is that different from ‘and God said let there be light.’  It’s not different at all.  It just uses a personal pronoun in one case and not in the other.  I think that there are singularities but that they arise in complexity and that history is the shockwave of the approach of an animal species toward such a singularity.  In other words, when monkeys walk toward the mystery, they begin spouting poetry, solving quadratic equations and manufacturing instruments to measure the charge of the electron.  It’s a sign that you’re getting close to the source of gnosis.  That the noetic point source radiates understanding with such an intensity that the closer you approach it, the more you understand.  The closer a species approaches it, the more it manifests cognitive activity.  So we dance, we paint, we sculpt, we poeticize, we construct complex architectonic structures because we are close to the source. 

The way we are narrowing distance between ourselves and the source is by moving toward it through time.  It exists at a point in time and we are slowly wandering across the epigenetic landscape of becoming and it’s a steep hill.  So we are wandering down into this basin of attraction unconsciously being drawn closer and closer to the dwell point.  Now the walls are so steep, the momentum so great, that there’s no doubt where we’re headed.  We’re headed toward the point of maximum equilibrium within the system.

[Audience] – A few minutes ago, you were kind of laughing at the ridiculous claim of playing chess under LSD.  I was wondering why it would be ridiculous?  What would happen? [Audience] – The pieces would melt in your hands!

The thing is, it depends on how seriously you took chess.  If you took chess very seriously, it would be perfectly possible to do it.  Like everything else under LSD, the implications have to be kept under control.  So if you could just look at the chessboard and see it as a chess problem, you could probably play chess.  But unfortunately, everything will become symbolic of other things and it’s very hard to keep your eye on the ball.  You would have to have incredible powers of concentration.  You would have to really love chess.  Some people can do this.  I know people who cross country ski on psilocybin.  I find that unimaginable.  I can't cross-country ‘open’ my eyes on psilocybin.  So…

[Audience] – I’ve noticed in chess that what disappeared was the complete lack of desire to beat the other person. 

Yes, I think that the killer instinct declines.  If you were looking at it as how deeply can I see into it, it’s probably the way to take acid and play chess is with a computer.  Then you don’t get into the personal issues of what is it on the other side of the board.  What I find with psychedelics, it’s always people that are the most confounding.  People, as nexi of complexity, are orders of magnitude more complex than anything else in the universe and can always throw you for a loop if…always throw you into a loop, there’s not if or anything. 

[Audience] – This is totally off the wall.  Have you ever pointed a video camera at a TV screen and observed what happens?

Sure, that’s called a Hopf bifurcation.  That’s a standard thing in chaos theory to demonstrate.  That’s just a feedback loop.  That’s the equivalent of audio feedback but it’s visual feedback.

[Audience] – Extraordinary huh?

Well if you’re making a metaphor to the act of self-reflection, yeah.

[Audience] – It seems like you’re seeing into the particle matter or something; forms getting deep, deep between the molecules.  It’s very strange.  If you mess around with the contrast, the light button at the same time, you can get it just right to pointing in the middle of the screen on a tripod, and then mess around, you can video it too.  You can record an empty video.  You can make a light show out of that.  It’s extraordinary.

Ralph Abraham when he was studying dynamical systems built a device, which he called a macroscope.  What it was - it was two sheets of glass with a liquid like gel or something in between and there was a frequency knob and an amplitude knob.  You play with these two knobs; you illuminate the glass plate with Schlieren Optics, which is a polarized light system and project it on a screen.  You discover that there is this pulsating pattern but as you steer with the amplitude and frequency knobs, you can stabilize the pattern.  What’s interesting, when you leave the pattern and try to steer back to it with the same series of moves again, you can’t find your way back by repeating your previous action in reverse because it’s a dynamical system. 

This is what chaos theory, complexity theory and dynamics is studying now.  Very new mathematical tools are emerging for studying complex systems and this is precisely what we need.  See all of modern science up until 1980 was done as an extension of Greek mathematics.  You had the perfect Aristotelian solids.  Then you have the multivariable equations that come out of Algebra as it evolves into Calculus. 

[Audience] – Pi was interesting because it couldn’t be computed exactly. 

Right.  Well there were all kinds of problems in nature and mathematics, which were called pathological or a less dramatic term is, incommensurate.  Meaning that you could tell that there was a mathematical solution but nobody knew how to carry out the millions of operations necessary to do that.  Well now with computers, computers are making a revolution in mathematics that is very unwelcome among some mathematicians because with computers, you can perform hundreds of millions of iterative operations a second.  The computer becomes an eye into domains of complexity that previously could only be vaguely indicated. 

As an example, fractals have been known since the late 19th century.  They were not called fractals, they were called pathological curves; the snowflake curve, the piano curve, the anti-snowflake curve.  These things were known but you could only calculate them to the 3rd and 4th stage of expression.  Now with a little program on a PC like Fractasketch, you can calculate the 8th, 9th and 10th level of these complex objects and it only takes ten or fifteen minutes for it to draw them for you.  This is using technology, specifically technologies that mirror mental functioning, to push us deeper and deeper into the mathematical realm.

[Audience] – There was a composer named Cornelius Cardew and he came up with this one composition called paragraphs.  It was in a John Keats style.  It was not musical notations.  It had a series of written instructions and there would be forty people that would perform it.  Anyway, for instance an instruction would be: sing the word if in any note that you hear personally for the duration of a breath.  So there would be forty people who would go ‘aaaa’ and so what they would do, at that time they had all over the country, Europe and America, all these groups of forty people doing it.  The variables would be that they had five trained musicians and thirty-five people that just walked in and read the instructions.  Anyway, the piece was maybe twenty minutes long with a series of instructions and when you played all of these back to back, there was rarely a difference in the way it would sound and be performed.  People would have a tendency to hit A for instance.  

You mean it reveals an underlying organization that is not known to be there.  Well this is how the world is put together it turns out.  A story that I occasionally tell that illustrated for me how this works that was very interesting.  I was on a beach a few years ago in Southern California, a very long beach with no people on it.  I came upon a black round rock that was just deposited there and I noticed this rock and I kept walking along the beach.  Then I came to another black rock exactly like the first one about five hundred yards further on.  I had for some reason, probably because I was loaded on mushrooms, had the presence of mind to go back to the first rock I’d encountered and count off the steps between the two rocks.  It was like six hundred fifty steps.  So when I got to the second rock, I began walking continuing down the beach and I counted off six hundred forty-eight more steps and there was a third black rock as I knew there would be. 

So you see, what’s happening here is that you have a huge bay with this endless beach.  Some kind of incredibly complicated equation is being continuous run on the bay as computer.  Everything six hundred forty-eight to six hundred fifty-six steps, it’s solving this equation by depositing a small black rock on the beach.  Well now if I’d have had a naïve person around, I could have predicted that we would encounter the third black rock and then they would have deified me or offered sacrifice or something as proof of a prescient knowledge of the future.  But it wasn’t prescient knowledge of the future; it was knowledge of how fractals work in space and time. 

You know, if you get this attitude, it’s a firm basis for a kind of warm-hearted cynicism.  So that when people do something wonderful or terrible to you that has been done before to you, over and over again, instead of expressing outrage and amazement, you just notice that ‘aha,’ it’s happening again as it happened in the past and it surely will in the future.  This is how Finnegan’s Wake is written.  It’s just within the great fall are suspending many little falls and spread through that are many tiny falls; an infinite regress of repetitious pattern.  This is how the world actually works.

[Audience] – Science would have said it was incorrect because there was a difference of three or four paces between the distances between the rock, therefore nothing was proved. 

Well that’s Greek science that is trying for a kind of exactitude. But it turns out nature is not deterministic.  That’s why they used to have the idea that you could run the universe backwards and that all the particles would eventually rearrange themselves as they were in the original situation.

[Audience] - They’re slipping back to, isn’t it?

Yeah, that you could run it back to the big bang.  But this is an incredibly naïve and simple-minded understanding of how the laws of nature work because the laws of nature are not absolutely determined.  You can run time backward and it will sort of return to where it started from but Columbus will not sail the ocean blue in 1492.  It doesn’t work like that.  Once something has undergone the formality of occurring, it is never to be repeated.  It’s unique.  That’s what’s happening.  There is this moving wave in front of the class of the possible that slowly at the point of interest called the now translates itself into what is actually occurred.

[Audience] - But just now you said, the way things are.  It’s repetition – the fractals - it happens to you again and again but now you say that nothing is ever repeated.  On one level it’s a contradiction and on another level I don’t understand.  

In a fractal, there is no contradiction.  These two statements are both true.  Here’s the first statement.  Everyday is like every other day.  That’s generally true.  Here’s the second statement: but occasionally amazing things happen.  That’s also true.  You have to round one of the big corners in the pattern.  So everyday is like every other day.  Every century is rather like every other century and every million years is sort of like the million years that preceded it.  But then at the fine scale, there are incredible surprises.  So everything oscillates between its sameness and its uniqueness.  It is contemporaneously both unique and part of a universal plenum.  This gets close to some kind of Buddhist idea.  Uniqueness is the thing that hasn’t received enough attention.  That’s what I’m a Whiteheadian.  I think Whitehead dealt with uniqueness with more care and attention than anybody else has.

[Audience] – You have to follow this path.  Take that first step and you’re good. 

Well yeah.  Boolean algebra, which wasn’t invented until the late 19th century, so there was this long, long period where you had to make this choice.  This is again what’s called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.  The idea that ideas are things therefore they have to be A or B.  They don’t have to be A or B.  They can exist in a both/and situation.  I had a professor who seriously advocated, he said, you want to know when the world went wrong?  It went wrong when the Greeks stopped being fishermen and pulled their boats up on the sand and starting talking philosophy.  The road to hell was paved broad and straight from that point on. 

In alchemical thinking, which existed like a counter cultural alternative to all this Aristotelianism, there is what’s called the coincidentia oppositorum.  I found this very useful.  It’s a psychedelic idea, a Jungian idea and an occult idea.  It’s the idea that you have to practice thinking, holding two contradictory thoughts in your mind at the same time.  This is a way to snare the mind and it’s truer to reality.  So it’s also a great way to name books by the way.  If you ever have to title a book – this was advice from a New York editor.  He said you have to have a title that contains a contradiction.  ‘True Hallucinations’ or ‘The Invisible Landscape,’ or ‘The Archaic Revival,’ or ‘Black Neon’, a book I haven’t written that will be my foray in pornography if I haven’t made it already. 

This is the way to do it, to oppose these things.  That’s called a coincidentia oppositorum.  That’s what life is really like.  I really love you and if you really knew me, you would know that I don’t.  You can depend on me for the next thirty seconds, and so forth and so on.  This is what life is really like and people hate it because they want to extrude this residuum of the uncertain.  They say, I want you to be dependable or I want you to be X, Y, or Z.  When in fact everything is shifting and changing.

I see I’m over time.  This leads me to my final point.  First a question I’d like you to think about.  We can’t discuss it here but it’s, ‘are we psychedelic people different from anybody else?’  We make the claim that we have found the answer.  That it is suppressed by an ignorant and intolerant world.  We sound very much like the kind of whining that goes on among Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses or anybody else who has some screwball theory that if the world would but listen then everything would be fine.  So I’m very interested in this question.  

Are we morally superior?  Are we intellectually superior?  Do we treat our children people better?  Psychedelic users, that’s what I’m talking about because that’s the bottom line.  Does it inspire better lives, more love, greater care – that’s the question?  And then the last thought I want to leave you with which is sort of a coincidentia oppositorum thought because it will bum some and exalt others.  The one thing that I’ve learned from psychedelics that seems secure over all the decades and the embracing one idea, one ideology after another.  The one thing that seems secure is a truth that is hard to hear in the context of a dominator culture with an obsession with the material world.  That truth is that nothing lasts.  Nothing lasts. 

Your enemies will fade.  Your friends will fade.  Your fortune, your poverty, your disappointments, your dreams - everything is in the process of changing into something else.  So your agony is about to be assuaged.  On the other hand, your happiness is about to be destroyed.  So the obligation that comes out of this realization is an obligation to the immediate moment, to this thing that I’ve been calling the felt moment of immediate experience.  It isn’t who you were or what you were or who you will be or what you will be.  It’s the felt moment of immediate experience and this has been robbed from us by media and by our tendency to denigrate ourselves, to see the world in terms of the great ones not here, whoever they are.  Aristotle, Madonna or Jesus – whatever your particular bent is.  The overcoming of neurosis, of unhappiness, of toxic lifestyles is the felt presence of immediate experience in the body, in the moment. 

Psychedelics, sexuality, gastronomy, sport, dance – these are the things which put you in the felt presence of the moment.  That’s really all you ever possess.  Your memories are eroding away.  The futures you anticipate will mostly not come to pass and the real richness is in the moment and it’s not necessarily some kind of ‘be here now’ feel-good thing because it doesn’t always feel good.  But it always feels.  It is a domain of feeling.  It’s primary.  Language is not primary.  Ideology is not primary.  The propagation of future and past vectors is not primary.  What is primary is the felt presence of experience and that is the source of love and that is the source of community. 

If you get that together as people always have in the past, or we wouldn’t be here.  They to some degree succeeded with this enterprise.  If you get that together, everything will flow with considerably less resistance and you will find it in yourself to have enough inner equanimity and piece of mind to triumph over whatever life throws your way, whether it be poverty, obscurity, wealth, fame, power or the absence of power.  All of these things should be dealt with equanimity because all are ephemeral.  All are in the very act of coming into existence, passing away.  Panta rhei, Heraclitus said.  All flows.  Everything is both simultaneously coming into existence and dissolving away to make room for something else.  Clutching doesn’t work.  Fearing doesn’t work.  The only thing that works is a kind of affirmation to the process.  Psychedelics to my mind are the medicine that clears away the obstructions that make it difficult for us to touch this existential core and that’s what life is all about. 

So then we come now to the flashy possibilities.  The culture, the sub-culture in pornography, fashion and the advanced sectors of our society, meaning the people who edit interview magazines – I don’t know, something.  The subliminal message there is that three is far out.  A ménage à trois of some sort and if you get into a relationship like this, you’re really stretching the envelopment and are quite avant-garde and a growth opportunity and so forth and so on.  My analysis of this is that it is actually a male dominator fantasy of some sort.  It has a sadomasochistic flavor to it because what you have are two women who are somehow inevitably in competition, inevitably judged – male value judgments are happening.  It’s sick it seems to me, or suspect - let’s put it that way.  I don’t want to tread on anybody’s arrangement.

Here then is where I was left with this and then I won’t take it any further.  An interesting social arrangement is the three-one arrangement.  It’s almost in some sense fair and it is amoeboid.  No one can control it.  It’s too complicated.  I don’t think it’s a male fantasy.  I think if you suggest to most males that they should enter a simultaneous relationship with three women that there is a constriction because it’s over challenging.  But that in fact, if we’re talking about future arrangements that completely replace the ordinary family then one thing that would work I think are these three-one relationships with a periphery of children around them and 75% of those children are female.  I think built into this ‘one women-one child’ thing, is this concept that male birth should be reduced and that there should be far less males in the society and that is the way to change the ratio of the functions being expressed.  What we need is more nurturing.  We need more maternalism.  The way to do that is to get more maternal people and since most maternal people seem to be female, this kind of social engineering could be done.

This is like a fantasy in answer to your question because of course none of this will be done because it will be leaped on by hysterical fundamentalists and denounced as Satan’s work.  But I think the dynamic of three to one is an interesting one.  In a sense, following Camille Paglia and that kind of rhetoric, what we’re saying here is that if guys really got as much sex as they think they want, they would probably hand over the machinery of civilization without a fight.  So it’s like, ‘you want it, here it is.’

[Audience] – Isn’t this why prostitution is illegal?

Why?  Make it make sense to me.

[Audience] – Because males would spend all of their energy, all of their resources buying sex. 

Well but the fact that it’s illegal doesn’t make it non-existent.  I don’t know.

[Audience] – But it’s very tightly controlled by males. 

We have to have strategies for reducing male dominance.  We have to have strategies for advancing females but we can’t tromp on anybody living.  So obviously then what we have to do is twiddle the demographic dials.  We have to control birth rates overall then we have to create the sexual ratio of birth rates.  I just don’t think the monogamous marriage and the family unit…it’s really dysfunctional.  I came up with this three-one thing because I also don’t see us returning to the traditional extended family of many relatives and generations of people because modern transportation makes that impossible.  So a family based on genetic relationships doesn’t seem to me possible but what does seem possible is social cohesion based on erotic attachment.  That’s what this three-one thing and then the constellation of people around it would be.

[Audience] – What sort of feedback are you getting from females about that kind of thing?  It sounds more like a male fantasy than a female fantasy perhaps. 

Well I suppose to be absolutely fair, female fantasies might involve more males, but that’s not allowed.  We have enough.

[Audience] - Why is it not allowed?

Because the over-expression of this dominator tendency is what is running us to rack and ruin.  We’re not trying to create these social arrangements for the titillation of one sex or the other; we’re in a sinking submarine for Christ sake.  We’re trying to sort this out so that we live and then hanky-panky later.

[Audience] – Can you mention love or is that outside of the whole thing?  Does that cloud the issue?

No I don’t think that clouds the issue.  You mean that you imagination that love can only go on in this dyadic situation?

[Audience Indecipherable]

Well I don’t know.  I think that love…the thing I like about this three-one thing is that it’s inherently kind of unstable.  You can tell that the energy will never settle.  What happens with a lot of marriages and even extended relationships is that: people come together, there’s all kinds of excitement, they negotiate the arrangement, they get the negotiations taken care of and then everything goes stale as the contract is acted out.  If there were never any stability, if it kept changing all the time, then keeping track of this complex quadripartite relationship would be a full time task.  It would almost replace you’re job.

[Audience] – This isn’t going to work.  The women would kick the men out in no time at all because they get on much better with each other than the average man. 

Well that’s why the man has to be inspired to achieve indispensability.

[Audience] – But Terence what’s different between that, getting the men to fork over the goods for sex.  It seems like it’s as old as Cleopatra. 

No way and I don’t understand.  How did goods center into it?

[Audience] – I’m sorry, I thought you said that this was a way for the women to get the men to handle over the controls by offering them sex but it seems to me that’s been tried.  We see tycoons with beautiful women at their side.  Isn’t this the only way that women were allowed to compete to get the men to do what they wanted – through sex?  This seems very old to me. 

Well, I think we’re talking about a new kind of woman.  We’re not talking about submissive, slave-like property.  We’re talking about independent, educated, financially independent professionals.  It would be a phenomenon of the high-tech industrial democracies.  It’s weird to talk about this but on the other hand, you have two choices.  You can either propose something that sounds outlandish or you can stick with what we’ve got because what we’ve got, we’ve had so long that anything else would sound outlandish.  In the messy business of life, what really happens is that it’s sort of all kinds of things…come and go, gel and dissolve and work themselves out under the aegis of all kinds of pressures – economic, epidemiological, psychological, driven by images of media and self worth fads.  Yeah?

[Audience Indecipherable]

Well I was thinking of this earlier today for some reason.  I was thinking that - I don’t know why I was thinking this - but I was thinking that sex is so intrinsically a mental activity that the amazing thing is that it’s kept in the body at all.  Normally this equation is turned upside down and people say, it’s so intrinsically of the body but the fact that phone sex can be a nine billion dollar a year industry is telling us something about how erotic sensitivity is distributed through the network of the civilization. 

[Audience Indecipherable]

It’s a pity that it’s linked so closely to biology.  This is why the cult of sexiness is something very different and very modern than the cult of procreation obsession.  Sexiness is something probably invented post 1850 and it’s flash, that’s all it is.  It’s the permeating erotic sensitivity that characterizes modern civilization – in billboards, in advertising, in the constant assault of visual images.  I really notice this when I go up the Amazon because there’s no calendars, no girly pictures, nothing.  Then when you get back to Iquitos, you just realize that what civilization is - is an ocean of explicit erotic imagery that keeps us all in a state of probably willingness to consume stuff.  It’s a stimulant like caffeine but it’s a sexual stimulant.

[Audience Indecipherable]

That’s right.  Like bisexuality, which is a characteristic of feminine psychology.  In this society, I think it’s directed related to the rise of modern advertising.  There was no reason to reinforce that before 1850 or so and then you see this emerging.

[Audience] – Do you think that virtual will make it worse?

Well I don’t know.  I suppose there is a raging debate about pornography.  There’s a raging debate about everything.

[Audience] – What about pornography directed towards women and children?

Ah, pornography towards women and children.  Well, I make a distinction between…oh god, now do we want to go off into this?

[Audience] – I’m sorry, I take that back.

Camille Paglia asked a very interesting question to which I don’t have the answer and I don’t even think we need to discuss it.  But I think everybody should think about it.  The question was: can sexual liberation end anywhere but in sadomasochism?  That’s a very interesting question.

[Audience] – Sure it can!

Sure it can?  She said maybe not.  I don’t know.  I don’t want to mud wrestle over it.  What do we think about this?  For instance, aggression toward women.  What do we think of aggression toward women that is acted out and no women are actually abused.  This is where the pornography thing comes in.  Is it subliminal?  Is it a cause or a substitute?  If it’s a substitute, surely we must agree that it’s a good thing.  But if it’s a cause, we must surely agree it’s a bad thing.  Or is it both?  I don’t have burning opinions about all this.  I’m a first amendment guy right down the line and just take a position that nothing should be restricted by government.  Whatever the means by which the memes are sorted out, it should not be the wisdom of a benevolent government telling us what kind of images we should have. 

The tough one is images of pain and abuse, images of psychological degradation.  I don’t know exactly what to do about that.  If you go back to the roots of western civilization and read Plato’s Republic, Plato was very suspicious of the poets and did not think those people should be allowed to just run untrammeled over the landscape.  Here at Esalen, a great deal of time and effort has been expended to establish the medical concept that there are healing images.  Stan’s work, some of Michael Murphy’s work, some of the continuum work.  Healing images are an article of faith around here.  I believe it but has anybody stopped to notice that if there are healing images, there are sickening images.  Well then, if you have tuberculosis, we don’t say you have a right to mingle with the rest of us, or if you have some other contagious, rampantly contagious disease.  So if you’re carrying a meme that is toxic, do your first amendment rights exceed the mental health rites of the majority? 

This is a nightmare issue to discuss because I heard a discussion on talk radio and someone was inveighing against Silence of the Lambs and saying it caused psychotic behavior.  Somebody else called in and said, ‘well if you want to ban books that cause psychotic behavior, I think you better start with the bible.  It’s caused more psychotic behavior among more people than any other book in history.’  Certainly true but we’re not obviously going to do that.  But what is the relationship to toxic information?  Psychedelic people can take a more cutting edge role on this because we know the danger of toxic information because if you encounter some in your trip, it can really throw you for a loop. 

[Audience] – I think it comes down to integrating with shadows.  If you don’t integrate the shadow it becomes very toxic.  So we got to deal with our full humanity but so far what I know, we haven’t.  I grew up in the most neurotic country in recent history and of course the United States is catching up fast.  I was born in Germany in ’75 and I had this feeling when I grew up.  God, what is that around us?  I had no words for it.  I was just horrified.  I never wanted to grow up like this, then I end up in America and now it’s going to be like being German twice.

Bad luck for you!  Ha!  Terrible choices.

[Audience] – But it’s more comfortable than Germany.

[Audience] - But doesn’t it lead you right back to psychedelics again.  If you want to straighten all this stuff up, you’ve got to start with the brain and you’ve got to start with…

Yeah, although a question that interests me since I’ve been roughly doing workshops like this since 1983.  I’ve gotten to know everybody in the psychedelic movement and all the personalities and shakers and so forth and so on, and many of you in this room I’ve known for years and years, and a question that’s interesting to me is: like everybody else on some ideological bender, eventually we’re going to have to answer to the bar of public opinion.  What is so great about our thing?  Or are we just like Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses or Rajneeshees – we have this wonderful thing that we’re just convinced is the holy grail, yet if you’re not part of our little cliché, it just looks like a bunch of deluded lost souls reinforcing each other’s belief in some alchemical nostrum…you know?  So I’m interested in the moral consequences of taking psychedelics.  Time is passing.  Is the meme breaking loose?  Is it a positive meme?  Do people behave better to each other?  Do they perform acts of charity or acts of creativity?  Or is it good for the individual but inconsequential in its affects on society. 

In other words, that when the final catastrophe comes, you will meet it with great humor, equanimity, understanding – because your psychedelic training has taught you to take it all with a grain of salt, but nevertheless, the sludge will sweep over and all will be lost and you just went down without whining or complaining.  I don’t know.  The thing that is so amazing about the psychedelics is how close to the surface the state lies yet how dramatically different from ordinary consciousness it is.  It is dramatically different and it lies very, very close to the surface.  This is why it’s possible to suggest it’s just a one or two gene mutation away in the neurochemistry and then you would be able to slip into these places.  Thinking, what is thinking?  Reverie?  Where in the animal phylogeny does it begin and how intense is it?  Mental behaviors with the internal contemplation of language.  How broadly based are these behaviors?  How many different kinds of them are there?  We don’t know.  We don’t even have a vocabulary for this kind of thing.

[Audience] – Just an observation after twenty years of studying and experimenting with psychedelics is that one of the things that they do, they allow a person (this is assuming that we’re not thinking the thoughts, that we are [indecipherable]) and if you do psychedelics, you get to a state where you are beyond thinking.  Where you can step aside and there is a common denominator that a lot people, yogis and [indecipherable].  In history, we can’t really change anybody but ourselves, and by changing ourselves, we can change everything.  What’s going to happen and what’s not going to happen in the future?  If every person can work on being 100% conscious in the moment, that’s where all the magic happens, that’s where all the miracles happen.  It’s being 100% here, focused, and by doing that, then whatever is happening, you’re able to be part of a solution instead of part of an illusion.  So we’re really blessed to have really good psychedelics and being able to spend time that not many people have experimenting with them.  The gift is to be an example of what…[indecipherable]…and our child can grow up to be conscious.

One way to think of it is what you call 100% aware – is to just strive for appropriate activity.  If everyone in this room were to suddenly begin behaving completely appropriately, it would immediately change the context of things and set the stage for further appropriate behavior.  This would be like a cascade of appropriateness.  Enlightenment need be nothing more than that I think.

[Audience] – Now we’re just getting into that area almost like religion.  What you just said – it sounds like somebody behind a pulpit.  It’s really close to that but it’s good.

Well let’s hope it’s not too close to that. 

[Audience] – It’s contagious coherence. 

Well appropriate activity.  Is somebody going to speak up for inappropriate activity?  It’s a winning concept. 

[Audience] – But the inappropriate activity is rampant already as it is.  That’s pretty obvious.

Well inappropriate activity stems from bad communication – bad message transfer.  No, there should be some kind of maximum energy solution in any given situation that everybody can relate to.  Once when I was in the Amazon I discovered a sense that I didn’t know people had.  On psychedelics, I discovered this sense.  It’s an internal desk accessory, which allows you to calculate the least energetic path between two points.  Not the shortest distance but the path of least effort between any two points.  It has to do with following ridge edges.  I just discovered this ability in myself and it’s real.  I’m sure it was very important for primitive people before history.  Who knows how many of these kinds of talents, abilities, and behaviors… because they’re software programs, which when they become inappropriate, they just fade away.  Yet the hardware is perfectly capable of running these programs. 

[Audience] – I wanted to just harken back to this thing that we started out with.  In the dichotomy between history and eros - you say that within history is a kind of built in end point that you can sense.  So does that mean that the end of history is a dissolution into eros?  Is that the conclusion that you draw from that? 

I guess it is the conclusion that I draw from it.  That finally when language fails, as it surely must, then there will be love.  Love lies beyond all that.  So, you can only take ratiocination so far, you can only model the thing so much.  That’s why always in these wild far flung schemes of modeling the end of history and the end of time; the fractal key is one’s own experience.  The feeling of death, the feeling of love – these things can be extrapolated to universal proportion.  Everybody gives currency to the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, right?  Everybody knows what this means, correct?  Ah!  It’s simple.  It means that the fetus in the womb, the ontology, recapitulates the phylogeny – it means that the fetus in the womb goes through all the stages of evolution.  It begins as a single celled creature.  It becomes like a fish.  It becomes an amphibian.  It changes into a mammal.  It changes into a primate.  It changes into a human being.  But nobody even then takes the process further and says, ‘well what we’ve learned by observing this, we can learn more from further extending the process.’  The person in the womb, now a complete person, is born and then they have a life, and then they die.  So if ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, then the entire answer to how does the world work and what is it, is contained in looking at the fractal substructure of an individual history from conception to death.

[Audience] – What you’re talking about is the body.  There is considerable difference of opinion as to whether a consciousness dies or not, or whether some physical transmutation takes place beyond living in this plane that we can perceive. 

Sure.  Right, there’s no certitude about that question by looking at that process.  But everybody, you can see that for each of us as individuals, the thing ends in death, which is a big question mark.  So then as a society, we should not be surprised that there is built into the superstructure of society this same kind of dissolving.  It appears to happen even when there is no real good reason for it.  For instance, with the Maya.  Their civilization collapsed basically just because they were stupid.  In other words, they got bad habits.  There was no external pressure on them.  They just made stupid mistakes and then the whole thing came apart.  We could be in a similar situation. 

But to your question about how nobody knows what lies beyond death, nobody knows who is using the sanctioned tools of scientific investigation.  But if you go next door to the shamans, they claim all kinds of information on this question.  They claim essentially a technology for accessing an ecology of souls – where a great deal of power for potentially good or evil lies as a reservoir that can be brought across by certain kinds of practices and activities.  Now science says that that’s malarkey, but science says that the primary datum in support of that contention, which is the psychedelic experience, is also malarkey.  You can satisfy yourself that the psychedelic experience is in fact an ordered perspective on something coherent, simply by having that experience.

So you, little old you, can satisfy yourself that science is not dealing from the top of the deck on this question of the content and meaning of the psychedelic experience.  I feel like maybe the big news, the truly jaw dropping news that will come out of all this re-exploration of the archaic and shamanism and hallucinogenic plants – is a mapping of this realm of souls.  That what we are actually on the verge of securing is that there is something that survives the physical organism and it’s hard to tell what it is because essentially we’re at the stage with this where people were with electricity in 1700.  We have yet to build the technologies, establish the standards and create the vocabulary for talking about this.  But if the task of western epistemology is to integrate all knowledge into it’s way, then shamanism and the experiences of shamanism have to be brought into the metaphor.  I think what this may in fact secure is that biology is the platform for establishing some more hyper-dimensional structure that survives.

[Audience] – And therefore the cultural then?

It may be, you see, that in fact what the most pessimistic among us believe happening is happening.  In fact, there’s no way out.  In fact, we’re all going to die.  Then the question becomes, what is that?  What does it mean, you know?  Is that a good thing or a bad thing?  Borgias had a story where the entelechy of the species could not move on until the last member of the species became extinct.  There is some kind of relationship to mind across this barrier.  Or shamans have chosen to interpret a nearby, non-physical species of life as somehow related to the human after-death.  Why that should be and why that error should persist of fifty or one thousand years is not clear either.  I said earlier today, science precedes with the simple cases first.  What is a marble rolling down a slope, so forth and so on?  But the complex question – what is my perception of my being – what is the nature of the inner dialogue that describes the ontos of being – this is a very, very complicated question.  It takes 2000 years of preparing the epistemic ground before you can even reasonably ask the question. 

[Audience] – Why do you suppose…your talking about us all dying as a species, all dying as a civilization.  We don’t like the fact that we’re going to die as individuals but somehow we grudgingly accept that and we create a lot of literature and congress around it.  Why is the idea that we’re all going to die as a species that much worse?

Well because I think probably as a species we’re more neurotic than our individual members.  We’re pretty hysterical about this.  We’re not talking the news well that the doctor is handing out.

[Audience] – But as a culture, maybe something lives on?

Something lives on?  Yes, we’ve talked about this in the past in terms simply of technological innovation.  For instance if the technology of time travel were to be created, historicity would end.  The linear serial unfolding of events would become an epoch, which lasted from 10,000 BC to 1998 or something.  Then following the epoch of serial moments came the epoch of non-serial moments.  The epoch of simultaneity, in which people choose where to live in time the way they choose to live in space now. 

[Audience] – Eros?

Achieved through a knitting together.  Everything that is, is an anticipation of what will be.  Being is growing more nascent or something.  There is this appetite for becoming that everything is striving for manifestation.  Somehow what this boils down to mathematically is that all points seek co-tangency; which means that in terms of dimensionality, the phase space of description is collapsing and all the points within it are becoming co-tangent.  The 16th century anticipated this in the form of the philosopher’s stone – the alchemical quintessence, the lapis.  It’s a zone of space-time that is a singularity.  It’s where matter and imagination exchange clothing and matter behaves at though it was imagination and imagination behaves as though it were material physics. 

[Audience] – Ok, that’s really eloquent.  It’s like breaking the sound barrier for the first time.  Before we broke the sound barrier we didn’t know what that was going to be like.  So when we did it the first time, we have this glass afterwards.  You break through, it shakes but then afterwards it’s fine.

One of these little aphorisms that the mushroom handed out was, ‘history is the shockwave of eschatology.’  What that means is, as the species mind approaches the eschaton, what is called queue in engineering circles, vibration, begins to build up along the leading edges of the social vehicle.  As it approaches the eschaton, this queue force builds and this is where we are.  We’re literally having our teeth shaken out as the historical bowshock of encountering the eschaton builds.  If we can redesign the culture fast enough, the airframe of culture, then we can create an airfoil that will distribute the queue and we will just slide through.  If we can’t do that, then our airfoil will be ripped to pieces and we will go back to the drawing board.

[Audience] – That abyss we talked about.  First of all, will we all go together or will some people be on this side?

No I think it’s a temporal moment of embedded novelty.  They’ve come and they’ve gone but this is a critical one because it sets the stage.  It’s the summation of everything that has happened and it’s an anticipation of everything that will follow.  It is that history is a kind of psychedelic trip.  It’s a kind of alchemical distillation of the quintessence.  The stuff generated out of the alembic of history is this trans-dimensional, cyber, electric literalization of the imagination.  James Joyce said ‘man will be dirgible.’  What he meant was that the raw stuff of the unconscious will be downloaded into shimmering silicon and the protean child will be born out of the chaos of history; something like that. 

[Audience] – You’re taking a chance.

Well, the other thing is – a lot of what is called neurosis, or what is called less technically, unhappiness, is actually I think caused by performance failure that is ultimately sort of physical.  In other words, a person who is not working at their physical optimum will be mentally depressed but it’s crazy to look for childhood trauma or something that lies behind that because the cause of the depression is physiological, not psychological.  Well, if you can take a pill and your depression goes away and your performance improves, psychotherapy is not indicated in that case I would think.

Well if you delay it long enough, it’s solved.  [Laughter.]  I’ve always felt that tabling is a great solution for all kinds of problems. 

[Tape Cut]

How does the Time Wave apply to the individual life?

[Audience] – Do we speed up when we get older?

It’s a truism to say that the older you are, the faster time moves.  When you’re seven, a year takes forever.  When your seventy-seven, they just rush past like pages falling from the calendar.  Astrology went through a crisis several hundred years ago where under the emergence under a new class of wealthy people, there became a demand for personal horoscopes.  So astrology reconfigured its toolkit to be able to provide that.  I’m not very interested in individual time waves.  I don’t even have my own readily accessible but what you can do, you can take your birth date and add to it one full cycle, which is sixty-seven years, 104.25 days, and set that as an end date and then you do get good correlation between your life and the wave.  A way to think about how this relates to the general Time Wave, it’s that the general Time Wave is simply the average of all the little time waves.  In other words, it’s additive.  Obviously we all are at different places in our time wave, otherwise when I’m happy, you’d be happy.  When I lose money, you’d lose money.  It doesn’t work that way.  Some people are miserable in the presence of other people’s joy, often causally related.  Obviously these people are at different places in the cycle. 

[Audience] – Would you like to say anything about 2CB since we were talking about drugs.  A more general sort of political question, you obviously act as a very strong advocate for psychedelic drugs, has this attracted to you any official attention?  Are you getting audited every year? 

Well actually, I’ve never been audited.  It doesn’t attract any attention.  This is a great disappointment to the more delicately poised of my fans who would like to assume that we’re at the barricades, barely able to evade the long arm of the law.  I don’t know.  Their strategy in my case seems to be incredibly intelligent.  They just completely ignore me and why that is – maybe it’s because it just doesn’t matter, or because I use big words, I’m dismissed as an intellectual.  We all know how powerful they are in America.  So that’s that.

[Audience] – It’s because there’s obviously no money involved. 

Well that’s the other thing.  My theory on drugs, if you’re not making money from it, you’re of utterly no interest to anybody.  Opinions are free.

[Audience] – Except that couple in, where is it, Calaveras that got arrested for having the frogs.

Well then there are the occasional examples. 

[Audience] – They got arrested for what?

Toad-ranching.  A heinous and nightmarish crime.  They were extracting 5-methoxy DMT from Bufo Alvarius that they had in a domesticated situation in their home.  I suppose they were beaten with rubber truncheons and taken away, their house seized, their children taken from them, their animals murdered and so forth.

[Audience] – He was a teacher and a Boy Scout leader…

It just shows how deep into the middle class these nightmarish practices have reached.  The abuse of amphibians is something our grandparents contemplated and yet here we are, you see.  It’s an ugly, ugly business. 

[Audience] – But they did get into the press to say that they put an end to the rumor that you just don’t lick it. 

I think it was the Australian press which popularized the image of people nuzzling the under tummies of toads in order to obtain…

[Audience] – What about 2CB?

I know, I haven't forgotten you.  2CB – I have no opinion about that.  No experience with that.  I mean, I did take 2CB once but it didn’t prominently enough for me to form a bunch of opinions.  Just as a general rule, but rules are made to be broken – I’m not part of the faction that thinks we need ever more exotic drugs.  I think we have a full toolbox if we just would use it.  If you have ayahuasca, psilocybin, DMT, toss in mescaline, ibogaine and cannabis…

[Audience] – I don’t happen to have any of those.

Well capitalism is searching for you, I’m sure.  In it’s usual thorough fashion I’m sure.  It’s a very individual thing.  Whatever works, use it.  People have to come to terms with this.  We are very much the product of our genetic and biochemical differences.  Some people like things that other people can't handle at all.  Part of your self-education in pharmacology is learning what works for you.  Yeah?

[Audience Indecipherable]

Outside of the intellectual concerns of science, this has been a generally persistent attitude that time is as important as geography.  Not only astrology but also Mayan divinatory methods, African divinatory methods.  I think that science is running against the flow here with its attitude that time is not to be differentiated.  The reason for that, if you analyze it, is not far to seek.  Science depends on the concept of experiment and for experiment to mean anything it must be time independent.  So in a sense, you could almost say that what science is - is the study of those phenomena so course grained that when they occur, time doesn’t affect them.  So that leaves out most interesting things, you know?  All the subtler processes of biology, psychology, sociology are left out of that.  And yet, that’s why this idea I showed you last night – it may appear revolutionary but it’s really revolutionary because science could not operate.  It would be the end of science if this idea were accepted because it says that experiments are time dependent, therefore it is not ever possible to perform the same experiment twice.  Therefore the idea of building up a serial set of observations of many examples of the same experiment is bogus.  So this idea aligns itself with astrology and with all these other pre-scientific series of change that is modulated by both space and time.

[Audience] – If growing such items like ayahuasca vine and Psychotria Viridis, is it kosher for someone like us to grow it and not be hassled by the DEA or someone like that?

Well you have to be an excellent Amazonian field botanist to recognize these things.  It’s a pretty mute point.  You do have DMT in your brain, so your potentially bustable at all times.  Psychotria Viridis, it’s not easily recognized.  Ayahuasca and Psychotria Viridis can’t be grown in occidental for example because it’s too cold.  They can be grown in Hawaii.  This conference that I was at in Mexico, the great alternative technology that those people are excited about is what are called ayahuasca analogues.  Meaning that, at closer scrutiny to the flora of the earth, shows that in most environments, there are plants that produce DMT and there are plants that contain MAO inhibitors.  In most ecosystems of the world, there are plants that if properly prepared, create a kind of ayahuasca.  So people are retiring to their kitchens and laboratories to cook furiously all of these things.

If you’re interested in doing this, the way to proceed is as an MAO inhibitor, you need seeds of Peganum Harmala.  No more than two grams.  Peganum Harmala seeds are available from seed suppliers.  They’re also available in Iranian markets as a product called hermal – little hard black seeds.  Two grams of them, pulverized in a shot of water or alcohol will inhibit your MAO quite thoroughly.  If you then take a DMT source orally, you will have a response to it.  People are using Desmanthus Illinoensis, the Illinois bundle weed.  At this conference, letters were read from people in Australia who were using Australian Echinacea. Phalaris grasses can be grown, and using a sprouting device, you can grow Phalaris sprouts and dry them.  They are intense in the sprouting stage with DMT.  So this group of people I was with in Mexico – their great enthusiasm is to provide so many different psychedelic, so many different paths to the psychedelic experience that there is no way they can all be made illegal. 

DMT, we have not yet hit the crush in terms of the social debate about all this.  DMT was made illegal when LSD was made illegal.  At the height of a media fanned hysteria in an atmosphere of intense ‘no-nothingism.’  It was not known at the time that DMT occurs in human metabolism.  Nor was the physiological profile of DMT known.  What rational for keeping a drug illegal is there if there is not a social problem?  It begins to look just like sheer ‘for-your-own-goodism’ of some sort.  One way of measuring an index of the danger posed by a drug is to look at how many emergency room admissions there have been for that drug.  Well, I dare say in the last five years for DMT intoxication there have probably been zero emergency room admissions.  By the time anyone could get you to the emergency room, your main anxiety is that nobody find out that you lost it.

 The fact that it’s a human metabolite.  I don’t know what’s going to happen.  It’s a very interesting situation because the arguments for keeping the psychedelics illegal are becoming weaker and weaker and weaker and more and more flimsy, and more and more people are awakening to what a racket this is.  Weird forms of cooption are taking place.  It’s not easy in Garberville to advocate the legalization of cannabis because people are all around you getting $400 an ounce for it.  The thought of legalization strikes terror in their hearts.  They have a kid at Stanford, they have a house in Saint-Tropez, they have a sailboat – why in God’s name would you want to legalize cannabis.  This is a factor, you know?

In the past several years, three years or so, there’s been an enormous surge in psychedelic publishing.  I don’t know if you’re all aware of it.  You certainly should be.  Obviously you should buy and read every word I’ve ever written.  In addition to that, Sasha Shulgin and Ann Shulgin’s book PIKHAL has come out.  You should be aware of Jonathan Ott’s book Pharmacotheon, which in between the covers of one book, if you just want excellent scholarship and the longest bibliography ever to attend a drug book, this is for you.  Eduardo Luna’s book on Ayahuasca has come out.  Well, Schultes book, The Healing Forest: Medicinal and Toxic Plants of the Northwest Amazonia has come out.  There’s a resurgence of interest in this field.  I think it’s a very hopeful sign that people have enough sense to realize that it has something to do with shamanism, it has something to do with plants, it has something to do with taking charge of your own experience and spiritual growth and ditching ideologies.  Some of these beady-eyed gurus are being sent back to wherever they came from to find honest work among their own kind.  This is a fine thing I think.

[Audience] – Let’s imagine that we’re post legalization.  How would you see it?  Would it money that the government would want to go toward education, or would it be like Amsterdam where you sell it in cafés?

I don’t know.  I guess I’m a cynic about this.  I believe that the reason drugs are kept illegal have nothing to do with the reason’s given for why they’re kept illegal.  They’re kept illegal because if they were legal, it would be hard to make a lot of money off of them.  An enormous part of the world economy runs on drugs and always has: sugar, coffee, teas, spices – drugs, drugs, drugs.  It would be a much saner and safer world if drugs were legalized because intelligence agencies would not have these vast sources of money, which they then use to finance private armies, murder liberal magazine editors, setup phony political parties, indoctrinate people, so forth and so on.  So it’s really an issue of covert control.  Drugs are the last bastions of hidden slush funds at the billion dollar and up level.  If this were not a factor, the psychedelics never would have been illegal.  The whole drug-scheduling thing is completely cockamamie.  You have schedule one, which is the severest category, and what do we have in this most severe of all categories – we have heroin, we have cannabis and we have the psychedelics.  Schedule two is cocaine.  Cocaine has legitimate medical applications.  It’s used in certain types of throat and eye operations.  So it’s the psychedelics strangely enough which are the most stigmatized of all the non-addictive drugs.  This is just pure fear. 

It relates to what I talked about last night, the issue of surrender and how anxious the dominator types become when the issue is loss of control.  They are absolute control freaks.  Until people demand that this be changed, it won’t be changed.  People are not very demanding.  You give people the four-term governor of Arkansas and they think that Christ is healing in the market place or something.  That’s how pathetic the liberal position in America has become that it can embrace someone like Bill Clinton as its standard-bearer.  Not to launch into a knock on that.  I certainly prefer it over George Bush, but it’s very minimally important.  It doesn’t impinge on our lives.  All these people are jackasses and should be hung.  In a civilized society they would be hung before a howling mob but…

[Audience] – Would a civilized society hang anybody?

I can't think of an area in science where we have retained the vision that we had then.  The Earth was thought to be ultimately stable, pretty much as it had been on the day of creation even by the British geologists who were reacting against the story of biblical creation.  But there’s one area where surprisingly little has happened and it is strangely enough, the area of the human mind.  Strides were made in the early part of the 20th century by describing the unconscious but it’s important to remember that some of the hottest therapies that passed through a place like Esalen, which would be things like hypnotherapy, mesmerism – mesmerism had its great heyday in the 1890s of the last century – colonic therapy brought to a peak in Germany in the 1870s.  Reflexology, a 19th century theory.  Homeopathy, a theory developed in late 19th, early 20th century.  So we’ve not had in place really new models of the mind.  The body, because of Wilhelm Reich and the many, many schools he spawned as either his progeny or in reaction to his thought, have given us new handles on the relationship of psychology to the body.  But in the area of the mind, it’s been pretty much left alone.  Well now to go back to the previous example of these other areas where scientific revolutions were made – they were true revolutions.  They were not fine tunings or little additions of details but complete overthrow of old paradigms and the establishment of new ones.

The Earth went from being a solid body with continents pretty much in the same place since creation to a complex system of convection flows where continents are brought together and broken apart.  Man instead of being seen as the highest product of creation, a descent slightly beneath the angels is instead seen as a primate, a specialized monkey of a certain sort.  The hard atoms, the indivisible atoms of 19th century physics give way to fields first of all – fields which are characterized by action at a distance which had always been excluded previously.  Reason dictated that action at a distance was a kind of superstition.  Then James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated that these fields really exist.  So in each of these areas, a total revolution took place.  Now the reason that psychology was immune to this I think was because we did not have the tools to advance it.  They came to us out of ethnography and anthropology, out of the work of Wasson and Hoffman and earlier, Havelock Ellis and Weir Mitchell, Henri Michaux – all the people who worked with psychedelics.  At first it was worked with by artists, by literary people, by people who were interested in expanding their own sensation but slowly it came to be realized that it was an insight into the mind, not into the nature of it so much, which I think still remains a mystery but simply into its size.  That the mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.

We have somehow the idea that the mind is in the head.  It’s made by the brain and therefore it must be a smaller and less inclusive domain than the domain in which it is embedded.  But I brought along an example here – this is a box and this box has in it a box that is exactly the same size as it is.  This demonstrates how even in three-dimensional reality, expectation can be confounded.  This ‘which is inside the box’ is itself a box indistinguishable from this one and then that one goes in there like that and can be closed into this.  Now that’s what we’re here to talk about.  It’s just how to do that.  How to take a world with a world in it and put it into the world in it and put the world in it outside of it. 

What we’re talking about and what history is, I think, is an effort to exteriorize the soul and interiorize the body.  To make the fields of the lord that we all sense inside of us, meadows that we can actually throw our clothes off and wander into.  I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.  Science, when it examines the psychedelics as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution I believe that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective and will show that they were merely anticipations of finding out this final unimaginable fact about nature.  This weekend is called In The Light of Nature.  Nature, whenever you scratch its surface, has aspects that are unanticipated so when they looked at the shape of the continents, they discovered continental drift.  When Wallace and Darwin looked at the distribution of butterflies over the Indonesian Islands, they suddenly had a vision of the origin of species and how that worked.  The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature and when we scratch it, when we bring that tool to apply, we are not going to recognize ourselves.  We talked a little bit last night about LSD.  A kind of funny thing about LSD was that it was the right drug for the right time in that it fulfilled the psychological theories of the world into which it came.  Now this may have something to do with the fact that it was psychologists who were keen to promote it.  We’ll never know.  The thing seems to be inextricably wedded together.  But LSD made possible the recovery of traumatic material, lucid communication, re-visioning of self-image and the energy to break out of habit patterns and this sort of thing.  What was absent in LSD was any reference back into the natural world. 

The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along.  Maybe Gary Snyder said something about it once in a seminar but it was not heard by most people because what was being stressed about LSD was its utter newness.  I remember people saying that it had been created to save us from the brink of atomic catastrophe.  It had come into the world at the exact proper time to be there when we needed it.  There was not a sense of history, you see.  There was not a sense of twenty/thirty/fifty thousand years of involvement with the psychedelic state.  A society, a dominant culture, always assumes that it is the most sophisticated of a long line of precursors but as a matter of fact, the childishness and the sort of fragile un-informedness that the hip people saw in the straight people in the 60s was a phenomenon that everyone shared.  Everyone was naïve.  Everyone was more simplistic than they should have been and that’s why I think the first psychedelic revolution got into trouble because there was no sense of history.  There was no sense of: have societies ever integrated something like this and what then did they become?  What kind of societies can live in the light of the psychedelic experience?

There was no real discussion of that.  Now this dimension of earth crisis has been added in the intervening years.  This was another aspect that was missing from the hippy thing to some degree.  Yes?  No?

  [Audience] - I’m sorry I don’t think it was.  Because I recall the tremendous involvement with the Hippy’s in the 60’s at Millbrook.  There was a lot of attention paid to organic growing of food and of not abusing the fruits of this Earth.  There was tremendous involvement and it came out of the psychedelic and the LSD culture.

[Audience] - It was the beginning of the back to the Earth movement.

But don’t you agree Nina that if you were to walk down Haight Street on a hot day in August of 1967, ecological sensitivity would not be highly visible on the surface?

  [Audience] – That’s true.  That’s why Timothy Leary said get out of the city.  Everybody should grow their own food.  That consciousness was there. 

Well that was really the beginning of it.  That it was the end of the Summer of Love when they realized that they’d just been media’d to death and political things…they’d been overrun.  Then they moved into the countryside.  Communal living in the country, which is the tribalism.  Which McLuhan was talking about in the 60s, not from the point of drugs but of electronics.  I think that was the beginning of the permission for Earth day, ecological sensitivity.  Now the great philosopher of the psychedelic community, to my mind, is Rupert Sheldrake.  Rupert is a botanist, a natural scientist, a man in the tradition of Darwin and Wallace. 

We’re trying to say what is being realized, I think, is that the psychedelics have always been exerting a pressure on human beings.  That we, from about 1600, something like that, pick a date, from 1600 to 1960 - lost sight of that because we lived entirely in an industrial, mechanistic, materialistic, reductionist, capitalist kind of society.  But all other societies have had some awareness, at least of nature if not of psychedelics, of nature forming the aesthetic.  Now we’re returning to this.  There is an awareness that understanding man’s place in nature is going to require psychedelics…integration of the psychedelic experience.  When we go into nature, and this gets to your question, when we look hard at these tryptamine psychedelics and the plants they come from and the content of the information.  It seems to be very hard for people to bring it across, even having had ten or fifteen thousand years to do so.  Well then the awareness begins to grow that there is a presence on this planet that we have previously missed that we have been so busy about the anthill business of building human culture that we have paid lip service to the power of nature, to Gaia, to the Goddess.  But I don’t think anybody has realized how real it is.

If you wanted to talk about Gaia, most people would place you in the category of spiritual or religious.  But I think talking about Gaia belongs in the category natural science and natural history.  Gaia is a regulating set of grids that are laid over this planet that keep it going in the right direction that stabilize certain kind of processes and damp others.  The expression of Gaia outside of culture is the botanical world, the world of plants.  Man, woman, animal, plants – the plants were the first ones to have a feminine approach, if you want to put it that way.  They invented the feminine approach before there was even femininity, if you want to put it that way.  In other words, nurturing, staying in one place, cooperation, integration and regulation rather than dominance, conquest, mobility, these sorts of things that are then the animal solution to the same problem.  An orthodox evolutionary biologist tends to sneer at plants because we all have the built in assumption that the mind is in the brain and if you don’t have a brain, you don’t have a mind.  Or if you do have a mind, it’s so low grade that it’s just kind of a shimmer of perceptual awareness. 

If you examine this proposition that the mind is in the brain, it doesn’t hold water at all.  All the miles and miles of electroencepolographic tracings that have been done, nobody has ever correlated a thought with an electrical discharge in the brain.  The closest they’ve gotten is to correlate a kind state of state of focused awareness with a blip in the electrical activity of the brain.  When you’re told, prepare yourself for a question – then there is a measureable bit of activity in the brain as if you reorient: ‘I’m about to get a question.’

  [Audience] – How could they put together so incredibly complex?  They’re measuring billions of neurons operating at once. 

You mean why this correlation hasn’t been?

Yes – true.  But they’ve had fifty years to make good on their promise that they were going to show us thought in the brain.  Sherrington and those people, what was the famous Spanish neuro-physiologist – Roman Y Cajal.  Sherrington and all those people announced this in the early 1920s, since then we’ve had super computers, super imaging systems, microprobes, vast advances in the technologies they said they needed in order to make this point.  They have not made good.  It’s interesting.  There are a couple of areas.  In 1952, DNA, the structure of DNA was elicited.  Well the scientific literature was full of predictions of the cure of all diseases within fifteen years; certainly the elimination of all genetic defects.  A full understanding of what life is.  Well then as they began to elucidate the mechanisms of DNA – they turned out to be simply that – mechanisms, no more interesting than a water faucet or a torsion belt or a weighted governor.  The life that molecular biology seems to be able to describe is a life of chains and pulleys, falling weights and tightening chains.  There has not been a single step towards elucidating what it actually is.  Its mechanisms are better understood but not what it is.  To the mind even more so, to the point now where the people in the field, to each other, will admit that there’s a problem, there’s a crisis.  This past week there was a conference here called the Holonomics conference.  Karl Pribram’s theory of brain functioning, which is certainly state of the art and out there, but it just recently had to be restructured and renamed - changed from the holographic theory to the holonomic theory because the experimental data was not supporting the model that they had. 

This happens over and over again.  So I think we’re too patient with science.  Nobody should be allowed more than fifty years to get their act together.  If somebody claims…think about it – we think of the 20th century as the most rapidly evolving century that there has ever been.  A few years ago, Kat and I took the children to Mexico to wander around looking at the Mayan ruins.  We were in San Cristobal de las Casas.  Some of you may know, it’s high up in the mountains of Chiapas and there’s an immense cathedral there.  It was built in 1511!  Columbus discovered America in 1492 – so that’s nineteen years after Columbus had discovered America, in a world relying on galleons and horseflesh, the complete conquest of a culture was totally fait accompli and building six hundred feet long with three hundred foot ceilings were being put up all over Mexico.  We went to the moon nineteen years ago.  Today we couldn’t put a lawn chair on the moon.  You would think that by now we would have buildings six hundred feet long with three hundred foot ceilings; have the Indians all working for us and be looting the place of minerals.  See there is…we tolerate too much foot dragging and these scientists have been pontificating. 

A real sore point for me in the claims of quantum physics.  My God, how many conferences are there going to be on the connection between quantum physics and consciousness before somebody comes up with something better than a rap.  The new position of the particle physics community is: just give us six and a half billion dollars and a machine nineteen kilometers in diameter and we will show you something.  But five years ago we gave you four billion dollars and you built the machine four and a half kilometers in diameter and what you concluded out of that is that you need a bigger one.  We’re living in a world where people are starving, where people are dying of AIDS.  I’m not saying that you have to just give the money away to the poor, certainly nothing as radical as that – but if you want a scientific frontier that has positive feedback into the human experience, then let’s take the six and a half billion dollars and have a full assault on the mechanism of viruses in the human cell so that we come out of it with an AIDS cure, of course, but we come out of it also with a much deeper understanding of the mechanics of life.  I think it’s time to begin to call in the chips on these various disciplines which have been promising great things to us for the past thirty years.  Where would psychedelic research be if it had been going on at full funding since 1960 and hundreds of thousands of people well and healthy had taken it and the plants of the world had been fully surveyed?  The cultures of the world, databases have been built of their folklore and this sort of thing.  So we, and even though we represent a fairly deconditioned subgroup, are still enthralled to the promises of a science, whose promises begin to sound more and more hollow. 

Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is - is reclaiming your own experience.  We expect Karl Sagan to explain it to us or the evening news.  We don’t realize all these people are just like we are.  All of these people are utterly, utterly, utterly ordinary – totally ordinary.  I can’t impress upon you enough how ordinary everyone is.  We drift in the assumption that great men and women are at the helm and that deep thinkers are publishing all of these books.  It’s just not so.  It’s a groping, it’s a feeling toward it and any one of us is competent. 

This whole cult of professionalism is just a shell game.  The thing to do is to reclaim direct experience and then insist for other people that that be dealt with.  I’ve tried to do that by talking about the part of the psychedelic experience which nobody seemed to want to talk about – which is it seems to me that it’s not an exploration of our psychology, of our conscious or unconscious mind.  It’s a place.  There’s real estate in there.  It is as profound a dimension as the new world for Columbus.  We’re going to live in the world that the psychedelic experience is revealing to us because we primarily define ourselves culturally through language and the psychedelic experience will be found to be a revisioning of language.  Literally castles in the air await us in our global future.  We are journeying deeper and deeper into the imagination.  This conference that just finished this past week was called Living in the Imagination and its focus was not strictly or at all particularly psychedelic.  It was artists, writers, film people, performers, talking about living in the imagination.  I think you could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.  The imagination is a sense like seeing, feeling, touching – it is more than simply an anticipation of the future.  It’s an anticipation of those things, which lie outside the forward thrust of the momentum of probability.

The possession of the imagination is what characterizes us and distinguishes us from other creatures.  You can talk all you want about porpoises and dolphins and all of these things but you know, they may have rich interior lives but there is no trace of epigenetic coding.  In other words, they don’t write books, paint paintings or build cathedrals.  These are the things that we do which have built up a tremendously rich environment for each succeeding generation so that we do not birth our children into the world of nature.  We birth our children into the world of culture and culture is some kind of collective engineering process that up to this point has been largely unconscious, entirely unconscious.  People just thought what they thought and let the chips fall where they may and every once in a while a Christ, or a Mohammad or a Buddha would come along and would reshuffle the deck and then the game would play on.

We are coming to the place, a great turning place I would think, a cusp almost in the evolution of human psychology.  It’s the self-reflection cusp.  We are beginning to become sophisticated enough with our language and our awareness to stand outside of ourselves.  What is the human enterprise?  What is happening on this planet?  What the hell is going on here?  This planet has supported an endless succession of animal forms.  They can be traced back into the gunflint cherts of South Africa three and a half billion years.  In the last million years, phenomena never before seen on this planet have begun to emerge.  Not all of them having to do with the human species.  For instance, glaciers. 

I believe and subscribe to the school in geology, which says there were not glaciers a billion years ago or a hundred million years ago.  Glaciers are a recent phenomenon having to do with the accumulation of instability in the planetary orbit.  Ice moving southward, miles high from poles on a cycle of twenty to fifty thousand years is something entirely unique for the biology for this planet to encounter.  That process, which islands and then island’s populations of primates and other animals and then recedes so that these intensified island genomes then flow back into a general gene pool and then islands them again.  This is like kneading the bread of evolutionary adaptation and it’s in that world of ice moving south and moving north that the human story begins to pickup because the human story is a story that everyone who studies the matter believes began in Africa.  It was the forming and the un-forming of the glaciers that created the cycle of wetness and dryness in Africa that placed pressure on the evolving primates in the primary rainforest of the African tropics to begin to develop a dry grassland or limited resource adaptation in the background of the arboreal adaptation.  Well then as the ratios of selective intensity shifted in favor of the dry land situation, the previous mutation, which had been there all along but had not been prominent because it was not conferring an adaptive advantage suddenly came into the fore.  You get binocular vision, bipedalism, pact signaling – all of these things which are the beginning of the repertoire of our heritage. 

Now up to this point in that story, almost all evolutionary biologists and primatologists agree.  What I’ve recently been trying to say and hope to write a book about is, I think that it was the presence of psychedelic plants in that environment that provided the spark to begin to call forth conscious self reflection out of this primate species.  The case goes something like this.  The primates evolved; they abandoned their vegetarian lifestyle as the great forests were reduced to grasslands.  They adopted a more omnivorous lifestyle, which you see in most of the higher primates today.  They began to hunt the large ungulate mammals that were simultaneously evolving as the grasslands became a more dominant ecology.  In the manure of these ungulate mammals, cattle, mushrooms find their idealized environment.  Well if you’ve ever watched a baboon, the strategy of baboons for hunting food is they go along and they pick stuff up and they smell and taste and they’re always turning things over looking for bugs.  Well carrion beetles and stuff like that always congregate under cow pies.

Isn’t it wonderful that the evolution of the grandeur of the human mind begins with what’s going on with doodlebugs under cow pies?  It keeps your humility.  Searching for insect protein, the mushroom is a very conspicuous part of that kind of environment.  A child of three will run to it in the meadow because it’s neither fish nor fowl.  It is quite an anomalous and striking object.  Psilocybin its been shown increases visual acuity in small doses.  This is very solid research done by Roland Fischer in the 50s and 60s, some of the last research done with psychedelics.  He showed that very small amounts of psilocybin increase visual acuity before there is any other effect.  You don’t feel stoned or anything like that.  The way they proved this, they built an apparatus where there were two parallel metal bars and someone unseen by the subject, by turning a crank could impart torsion to one of the metal bars so that the two parallel bars would slowly…one would twist and they would cease to be parallel.  So you would get graduate students, the favorite experimental animal of psychology, and you give them light doses of psilocybin and you sit them down in front of this apparatus and tell them to push the buzzer when the two bars are no longer parallel.  Very consistently, the people who had been dosed with psilocybin scored higher on this test than the people who had not.

Fischer, wishing to be facetious, said to me, ‘you see, this is a case where we’ve experimentally proven that drugs give you a truer picture of reality than being straight.’  For him, it was a joke.  It was just this cute thing that you say to your academic colleagues but I was quite touched and struck by…this is true what this man is saying.  This is a simple experiment and it proves that sometimes it’s better to be stoned than not stoned and your life could be depending on it.  Because hunting is an activity where visual activity is 95% of the game and it doesn’t hurt to also have a CNS stimulant that can give you a running burst if you need it.  So since psilocybin provides both of these things, it turns you into a real killing machine! 

Fischer never considered the impacts of his findings in what this would mean in the natural environment.  But I wanted to think about it and it seemed to me that meant that those primates including the psilocybin in their food chain would automatically have a leg up over those that did not.  They would be able to move quicker in the hunting situation and more accurately.  Well you have to have studied evolution for ten minutes to know that that means then that these forms are going to preserved and selected in favor of over those individuals that do not have this in their food. 

  [Audience] – At the same time it could have made them a little more vulnerable.

In what way?

  [Audience] – Well you eat a bunch of mushrooms and suddenly you’re just sitting there watching all these patterns.  You’re more vulnerable to predators.

Yes, well that’s what I wanted to get to.  I don’t mean full trips.  I mean that in the process of eating bugs and roots and stuff, if they ate these mushrooms without even knowing they were psychoactive, they would have this visual acuity.  Now somebody at some point at a lot of them and they discovered that they were no good for hunting or bursts of speed or anything – they just wanted to lie on the ground and be with it.  At that point, I think this becomes a mystery for the first human beings.  The cow is the source of food, fuel, body covering, milk and an image of nurturing that’s very important because the birthing of the cow – it probably was the birthing of cattle and the observation of cattle probably taught people more about sex than their own sexuality did.  The husbanding of animals is how farm children learn about life.  I don’t know. 

This all relates to the theme of light in nature because there is a great mystery on this planet.  We are only one side of the coin of that mystery.  Our existence here should be the clue to us that something really weird is going on.  I don’t think most planets are like this planet.  I can stretch out to the idea that there are many planets with life but I think the level of complexity, the presence of a historical civilization which is just going to exist for a geological microsecond, we are very, very close to the people we came out of 50,000 years ago.  Yet, look at how we have changed the world.  Who is whispering to us in our dreams?  Whose hand is it that we feel guiding our destiny into the future?  We’re so accustomed to be rational and reductionist – the ‘there ain’t nothing really going on here at all’ school of thought that we’re just deadened to the mysteriousness of our own presence.  If we’re here, who knows what else could be here in the mountains, jungles and deserts of this planet.  We have not yet even carried out a complete cataloguing of nature.  We don’t really know what kind of a foundation we’re standing on and then when you take the psychedelics, which come out of the natural world, the message that they’re bearing in the broadest sweep is that our historically created, symbolic model of reality is almost worthless. 

I mean it’s OK for dealing bread and trading donkeys but once you get into anything deeper than that, it’s just a story we tell ourselves; a magic charm that we rattle against the darkness.  The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us except when we put our mind into the socket of nature and then we connect up to something so bizarre that we can barely recognize it.  Something lying so far outside our previous symbolic structures that we don’t know whether it’s an alien invasion, the eminence of Christ’s immediate return, the rise of Atlantis or just what it is.  It is confounding, that’s the main thing about psychedelics.  That’s why it seems to me, it divides people.  It’s for people who like the bizarre, the weird, the unthinkable, the unspeakable, the peculiar, the edge of meaning, beauty at its most Baroque and the world of Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Brueghel the Elder and some people don’t like that.  They like to be reassured.  They like closure.  They love being ensconced in concentric circles of expectation and tradition and solidity – that sort of thing.  This just gives them the heebeegeebees, this kind of stuff.  Because we’re saying the intellectual world has an edge and if you go over that edge, you will find the unanticipated tremendum.

  [Audience] - Maybe it doesn’t matter if plants are teachers and people are teachers too.  How it got there?  It’s a great question but I see it more as a way into a doorway somewhere that’s real and that’s the point.

Well maybe there’s a planetary regulating system and people are simply cells in a larger organism and when it comes time for something to happen, which maybe means all life leaves the planet or something, then the equivalent of hormones are produced in the environment to initiate this morphogenetic re-scripting of what is going on.  Suddenly animals, which were perfectly happy, hunting on the veldts of Africa, begin making art, watching the stars and moving into history for the purpose of saving the planet. 

I really like to think that we are biologically regulated and that history is a biological phenomenon under the control of the environment.  It isn’t something that is going against the environment.  Now the objection to that is that it looks so bad, it looks cancerous.  But the obvious counter to that is birth – I mean birth – there’s a lot of bloodshed, people make sounds as though they were in great pain, they are in great pain, it has all the attributes that we associate with violent, violent termination of the organism and yet it is the precise opposite.  It is the birthing of the new generation and it is unavoidable and it is perfectly natural.

Well as a woman grows pregnant and she loses her self like form and becomes heavier and all these things, the changes that go on in pregnancy – maybe something that has happened to the Earth over the past 20,000 years.  The Earth is pregnant with humanity and perhaps much else and obviously you just look at the Earth and humanity and these two can't stay together much longer.  They’re becoming a problem.  The mother can't function, the child is in danger and like the birth situation, if the child is not eventually birthed, toxemia will set in then everything goes haywire.  Then both parties are in danger and there has to be emergency intervention and so forth.  I don’t think we’ve really reached that point yet but I think we’ve come to term.

As you know concerning birth, transition is the psychedelic compression of where it all comes together and it seems like it is impossible and overwhelming and is going on forever and then it ends.  Then the baby is born and everything is seen to be all right.  Well I think the 20th century; it’s not a metaphor that we are birthing the new soul of humanity.  It’s actually happening and it’s ripping our society and our planet to pieces.  What will come out of it is the meaning of our destiny, perhaps the meaning of the planetary destiny.  And I hope we’re going to be privileged to be midwives of this process, to be there on the that great day when it all makes sense and then you can turn and look back at the process; the wars and revolutions and pogroms and migrations and the whole thing and say, now I understand what all that was about.

That’s I think the real promise of getting with nature through the psychedelics – being in on that process.  Because if you’re in on that process, anxiety will leave you.  You will not define yourself as a victim; you will define yourself as a privileged spectator.

  [Audience] - Have you thought about this outside and inside dichotomy?

But I wonder Clive.  Thinking about the question – is it inside or outside?  It seems to me more that what you have is a loosely coupled hierarchy where there are elements of freedom and self will at every level of the hierarchy but always constrained by deterministic factors that are also at every level.  So sort of the new model, which I think is coming, is that the Earth is an organism.  Yes that’s well established but human history is a part of that organism.  It’s as different from the rest of it as the brain is from the liver but that human history is not somehow against the planet or unexpected or unwelcome – that it’s actually part of the control system.  Yet it is controlled and this is where I think we need to revision what drugs are. 

All of human history is the sculpting of human populations by their relationships to plants.  Think of the effect that sugar had on the rise of mercantilism and empire building, or opium policy on the Far East, or the spread of rye, the replacing of wheat by rye in the Middle East - as you move north and how that made certain types of populations and migrations possible.  You could write a book about human history in which you analyze the entire phenomenon as movement toward equilibrium in response to states of disequilibrium introduced by plants, by foods, by spices, by drugs, by psychedelics, by addicting drugs.  So that’s how in our own bodies, a given system is regulated – through the release of hormones which turn on certain genes and turn off certain other genes and turn on certain secretions and turn off others. 

I think we assume that human history has just been something dreamed up by egomaniacal males, each one building on the accomplishments of the other.  But it may be that it’s actually always been regulated as a process by the planetary control system by regulating diet.  The diet of every species and in particularly this one, determines its energy levels, its intellectual preoccupations, its migratory patterns, its distribution of work and labor and this sort of thing.  Maybe this is over answering your question, but it’s not a dualism.  It’s not one or the other, whether you see the control and the information from the drug coming from within you or without you is really a matter of perspective where you choose to describe it from.  Intrinsically it doesn’t seem to be possible to know that.  We’re like cells moving at the will of a larger system.

Somebody once said, ‘electrons blindly run’ and Alfred North Whitehead said, ‘yes but inside the body they blindly run according to the body’s plan.’  I think that’s what you might say about people.  People blindly run but without realizing it, they run according to Gaia’s plan.

  [Audience] - I personally have experimented with a whole number of psychedelics and I must say that I never found that one psychedelic gives you a certain kind of vision and another gives another.  I’ve always found it has to do with where I was at; a lot of other things.  The key to me, all psychedelics are really keys.  They open up that reducing belt that Huxley talks about and once that’s open – whatever comes in, comes in.  For me it has nothing to do with the psychedelic itself.

[Audience 2] –I keep hearing this word, like expire – I felt like I might die.  Possibly one of you would like to address the relative non-toxicity of mushrooms.

Well you see it’s a funny thing. Now we’re talking about life and death and when we need reassurance in that realm, we immediately turn to science and talk about the LD50.  For those of you who don’t know, lethal dose 50 - so pharmacologists are asking of a given drug, what is its LD50?  That means how much of it had to be given to a hundred rats for fifty of them to die.  LD50s are considered a relative measure of the safety of a drug.  The LD50 for psilocybin is huge.  Something like 200 mg per kg of body weight.  So that means to kill yourself with mushrooms, you would have to eat four and a half dried pounds or something like that.

  [Audience] – That’s what I wanted to emphasis.  One of the basic fears that one may experience at a threshold dose….

Discorporation?

  [Audience] – That is, if you can grasp the fact that you’re must worse off drinking a couple of cups of coffee generally, that can alleviate some of that particular fear.  You might say, it’s not going to poison me; I just need to keep breathing.

Well a funny thing about this thinking your going to die.  If you tell a straight person this, they say ‘well psychedelic drugs, isn’t that the bit?  You take it and you think you’re going to die and you don’t and you’re so damn glad you didn’t, your ecstatic.’

  [Audience] – I’ve never taken ayahuasca and am wondering, since what I understand, DMT is the effective compound?  When you’ve taken that do you find that its characteristic is similar to pure DMT or is it very different than that?

No it’s a lot like DMT in the center of the flash but DMT unfolds over a minute or two and lasts three or four minutes.  Ayahuasca is more like mushrooms, it comes on about the hour and twenty-minute mark and it comes in waves.  But when you really get it and you’re looking at it, you say yes – this looks just exactly like DMT.  I suppose we should explain for people who aren’t familiar with it.  DMT, if you were to eat it, would be destroyed in your gut by monoamine oxidase.  So the strategy in the Amazon is to take a plant with DMT in it and a plant with monoamine oxidase inhibitors in it and combine the two into a beverage that can then be drunk and then the DMT passes through to the brain.  One of the great mysteries of ethnopharmacology in the Amazon is how they ever figured this out.  We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of species of plants and in this case it’s the leaves of one boiled with the pulpy main body of another – placed together in a certain proportion and then the thing works.  When you ask them how is this done they say, the plants have told us.  This seems like a more likely explanation than anything anybody has been able to come up with.

Some of you may know this book called Rio Tigre and Beyond, where this guy who had learned to make ayahuasca when he was kidnapped as a child by a deep forest tribe.  When he then in later life becomes a rosewood and curare collector, he meets people in the jungle who are extremely – what do I want to say – living in the natural state.  Uncontacted people.  But when he takes their ayahuasca, he realizes that it’s garbage.  They don’t know how to make it.  Then he makes it for them and shows them how to make it and they’re just knocked off their feet and hail him as a cultural reformer.  So it’s not always simply a matter of the uncontacted, so called primitive people have the skinny.  It’s a technology.

Something I want to say before we leave this.  If you think about natural drug complexes around the world, the interesting thing to notice about ayahuasca is unlike peyote or mushrooms or the Iboga cults of Africa or the morning glory cults of central Mexico or cannabis.  Different from all of these is the fact that it’s a combinatory preparation and in practical terms, what that suddenly means is a person is involved.  The person who makes it.  For the first time we’re getting a chemist into the picture – an alchemist, a teacher if you want – because ayahuasca unlike mushrooms and all these other things, is only as good as the person who made it.  Where mushrooms, you don’t have to worry about that in quite the same way.  A mushroom is ready to go when it comes out of the ground.  The ayahuasca is a combinatory drug and so it brings the human interaction and the lore of it into a much more central position.

But now I understand the argument a little better and it’s slightly deeper than I thought because here’s what they were trying to say the first time.  It isn’t this neuro-coordination.  It is really about planning.  It is an extraordinary thing to look at a rock in your hand and to make the calculation into the forward vector of the future.  Ah ha, if I hurl back and impart a certain energy in a certain direction with a certain intensity, this thing will follow a path through space and will land somewhere with benign consequences to me and my side.  The key concept in here is plan!  This is a plan and animals don’t do this.   There are no plans in the animal world.  Their consciousness is of the moment and doesn’t involve this complex triangulation out of the moment toward future consequences in quite this way.  What happens when you let go of the rock is that you can no longer control it.  It isn’t like hunting or beating something to death with a stick where the strategy is being readjusted moment to moment.  No, once the projectile is released from your hand, that’s all the planning you get to do.  So it represents a concrescence of intent and this building towards a concrescence of intent - this plan making - then is the tiny flutter of the butterfly’s wing that ripples out through the chaotic universe and the next thing you know, the kings of Babylon are issuing their codes of law and slaves under the lash are erecting cities and the stars are being brought into a mathematical model.

Well I just wanted to mention that I’m also working on a 2nd book at the moment where we’re going to go back into the psilocybin theory of the origin of consciousness and actually attempt to make a case that will demand attack.  In other words, to actually marshal all of the anatomical, paleontological primate data because the more we research, the more it appears true that by looking at the psychedelics, they become a kind of key to understanding the entire phenomenon of human emergence by looking at the larger issue of food as an environmental dimension.  In other words, our food has shaped us as omnivores.  We have exposed ourselves to a very high input of mutagenic material over the course of our omnivorous behavior and this has accelerated the rate of mutation in our species.  This is why there are so many cancers.  Those cancers are maladaptive mutations – most are - most mutations are non-productive.  But by being a creature of the jungle canopy that underwent a forced migration to an entirely different nutritional environment – the grassland – we opened ourselves up to this mutagenic influence.  It’s only the spectacular effect of the psychoactive compounds impacting on neuro-organization, cognition and social organization that I focused on originally.  But now the realization is beginning to ripple out through the evolutionary community that yes, this is the hidden factor - the mutagenic diet and the forced shift in environment. 

There are also ideologically unexpected twists and turns in all this.  I recently met a very interesting person.  He’s going to be my coauthor on this evolution book - Philippe De Vosjoli.  Some of you may know him and he is a lover of animals.  This guy has made a fortune in publishing books on reptile care.  If you have a broken iguana, he’s the man to see.  But he pointed out something to me, which is very, very interesting which goes against prevailing political correctness for sure, which is that browsing ungulate animals have actually no interest in the behavior of other animals.  They couldn’t give a hoot.  Who’s interested in the behaviors of other animals are hunting animals and that in order to successfully hunt an animal, you must in a sense be able to become it.  You must be able to transfer your consciousness into it and imagine its motivations, its behaviors, so forth and so on.  So Philippe has convinced me on one level, the earliest human consciousness was not human consciousness at all.  It was primate ability to enter into the behavior patterns and psychologies of other mammals in the grassland environment that it was predating upon.  Following vultures as a basis for the beginning of nomadism and this sort of thing.  Obviously predator animals are aware and their evolutionary success is based on environmental awareness and being able to act based on inputting the behavior of other animals.  This is a very complex mental world compared to the world of the fruitarian, leaf eating, canopy browser that we came from. 

Then it appears that in a series of coalescing involutions of culture and neuro-organization, driven by the spatial coincidence of human beings, cattle, mushrooms; our original primate programming was restructured and I’ve talked a great deal about this.  I think this is the key to understanding at least our sexual politics.  All primates have what are called dominance hierarchies and this is where the hard bodied, sharp fanged males – young males – arrange everybody else to suit themselves; the elderly, the sexually available females, the young, homosexuals, the sick.  Everybody gets told where to stand and what to do.  This is how primates operate.  This is how we operate.  However, I think that for a long period in human beings this was interrupted by nutritional factors and drug factors in the environment.  That in a sense a human society that is using psilocybin on lunar cycles of use is suppressing the ordinary pattern of male dominance – hierarchical dominance.  It’s not genetically touching it.  It’s still there.  But in the same way that if you give a population of aggressive people a lot of opium, aggression disappears.  If you give a population of people a kind of psychedelic boundary dissolving aphrodisiac that promotes group bonding and erodes monogamy and so forth, then you get a different social ambiance than if that weren’t present. 

I think the secret to understanding our curious relationship to the angelic and animal worlds has to do with the fact that under the influence of this hormone/enzyme, which was suppressing ordinary patterns of male dominance, consciousness underwent an extraordinary series of bifurcations.  Language, theatre, poetry, magic, religion, dance, music, ethical values and altruism – everything emerged some time between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago.  The Paleolithic, the pre-agricultural era; was an extraordinary period of novelty being expressed and conserved in the biological world.  The primate species, the hominids, suddenly just take the stage.  Through an amazing series of cultural transformations, they become a planet ruling species by 10,000 years ago.  And then not content with that, the process doesn’t slow down – it accelerates and this has to do with the fact that we have some how created through language a kind of adaptive strategy that is so flexible that unlike most adaptive strategies, which sooner or later run into a blind box canyon and are just simply trapped there butting their heads against the wall.  You see it everywhere, the mussels down on the rocks – most evolutionary developmental lines are dead ends.  But somehow we broke free of that by ceasing to be defined by the physical body, which is the stuff upon which evolution works and placing between ourselves and our environment a new thing called culture, we began to mediate evolution.

Evolution says the infirm, the idiot, the lame must die.  Culture says ‘we have different values about this.’  Maybe yes, maybe no, but we will decide.  Evolution says ‘you must be a scattered species; nomadic and moving across the surface of the planet like an animal.’  Culture says ‘no, we have strategies for food sequestration and common defense and we will build cities’ and so forth and so on.  Since about…pick a number, 10,000 years ago, evolution has not been the dominating factor; biological evolution.  Instead there is something else, which the word epigenetic has been suggested, meaning change not driven by genes – our genes are the same.  If you were to be with a group of people active ten to fifteen thousand years ago, they would like just like you and I.  We haven't changed that much.  We’ve mixed the genes but we haven't particularly added new ones or lost genes. 

But in the epigenetic realm, how many languages have been generated over the past 10,000 years.  How many world religions have come and gone?  How many systems of government?  How many theories of polity and society?  We just furiously cast these things off and beginning about 500 years ago, this phenomenon was embraced as a permanent aspect of human existence in Western Europe and the concept of progress became enshrined.  Progress is the idea that this process must go on, be extended and accelerated everywhere.  Now it seems to be happening and as a consequence of this acceleration of process, all the contradictions in the old system – and I mean reaching back to Egypt – all the contradictions in the old system are now on the surface.  I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality.  I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what’s happening in your mind.  The old paradigm is gone. 

We can talk about how different parts of it died, you know?   Maybe not everybody knows the story of how physics, the paradigmatic science of reason, turned into a place where nothing makes any sense at all.  Where stories are told so wild that a surrealist painter would flee from the gathering just shaking his head.  That’s physics, the very bedrock of the whole western shtick has turned into a place of utter psychedelic contradiction and chaos and the news hasn’t reach biology and psychology.  They’re still operating under different paradigms.  What is keeping science alive at this point is the fact that it is able to whore itself to the marketplace.  In terms of the old program, which was providing some kind of metaphysical recitation of the nature of the universe, it’s pretty clearly out of reach at this point.  The universe has been discovered to be stranger than you can suppose. 

What this means to the troops, which is you and me, the citizens of these linear, print-created, scientism ruled, democratic, industrial states – what it means to us is you get your mind back.  They have no need of it anymore.  It’s actually become a burden to them.  Yes, they struggled like hell to take it but then they discovered it really wasn’t worth all that much anyhow.  The great thing about living in the twilight of an imperial decline is the permission that exists.  Incredible resources lay before us and very few people are looking over your shoulder and telling you what to do.  The fact that this community has been able to persist and exist, this is the orphic community.  This is the tradition of descent, extasis, sexuality, ambiguity, so forth and so on, that reaches right back to Chalcolithic Greece and beyond.

Shamanism is about shape shifting.  Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a toolkit that works.  No religion, no philosophy I think, has ever gone very far down the road of understanding.  Understanding is not really a collective enterprise.  Understanding is an individual enterprise and you can read Husserl and you can become a Hasid, or you can assimilate these group understandings that are forms of wisdom but ultimately those are platforms for intrepid exploration.  Now at the end, I think, of this entire enterprise – I don’t know if I’m changing or if the world is changing or both – but it has gotten so rich recently that it’s like an enormous meal at some over-reviewed restaurant where you just have to push yourself away and say ‘the spectacle is endless and amazing and apparently it’s all going to come true.’ 

My impulse is to distance myself from it all.  The mushroom said to me once.  It said, ‘this is what it’s like when a species prepares to depart for the stars.  This is not unusual.’  The earth quakes, the oceans boil, the planet came into existence for this.  All life for over a billion years has been pointed toward taking this step, leaving the oceans for the land was dress rehearsal for what will now be done.  It’s chilling because it’s so huge.  You don’t even know.  It’s just enormous.  Yet apparently when you look back through the history of the universe, this is how it precedes.  Incredibly gradually over staggering scales of time but then every once in a while you come around the corner and there it is – a continent sinks, an asteroid impacts, a star explodes, two intelligent species meet somewhere out in the cosmos.  These things set ripples going for eons.

  [Audience] – I’m curious what this has to do with psychedelics because it seems to me that when you use psychedelics to break down perceptual barriers, that’s one thing.  But there is such momentum going on in the world today that things are breaking down without psychedelics – although it may appear psychedelic in terms of the way you see it.  Do you see what I’m getting at?  At this juncture, have we transcended psychedelics?

Well my idea is that the psychedelic recapitulates on the personal scale this universal meltdown that is going on without the need of psychedelics.  But this universal meltdown is very frightening to people.  Most people are pattern oriented and nostalgic and it scares them.  I think psychedelics are a way…it’s sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time.  People who have taken psychedelics should be in a better position to assure, reassure everybody else.  People say the laws of physics are breaking down and you can say ‘I’ve seen it before.’  And in a way this thing, this event that wants to emerge.  We think of it as quantized in a single moment where the shift will happen and it’s like the glory or something.  Our job, if we have a job and I’m not sure we do, but if we have a job then our job is to anticipate this and to live it out before it happens.  Somebody very dear to me said to me twenty-five years ago – actually it was in the same conversation where they said history is the shockwave of eschatology – how anybody could say that in 1975 I do not understand.  Anyway – he also said we should live as though the apocalypse has already occurred.  That’s the only way to transcend the historical hysteria because the historical hysteria is about this thing, it might happen, it won’t happen, it will happen.  No, you say it did happen so enough about that already. 

Each thing that we do anticipates this deeper fall inward into the dream.  The dream is what awaits at the end of history.  The dream, and you can call it hyperspace or cyberspace or the transdeath realm, but what it really is, is it’s a going into the dream and what is the dream?  The dream is a place where the laws are set by the imagination.  The imagination is God in the dream.  If there is a way for us to mirror our highest aspirations, in other words to inculcate the God image in ourselves, then it’s by becoming the masters of our dream and then creating through drugs, technology, magic - who cares the details come later – creating a way to share that so that we each then are a god with an open office doorway to all the other gods who wonder through looking at the cosmogony that we produce as art.  I was thinking about this, this morning, I was thinking about what am I going to say to these folks – and I was thinking about the Platonic triad of the Good, the True and the Beautiful.  Sometimes people have dissed me and my obsession with hallucination because they say, ‘LSD doesn’t really cause hallucination, it causes insight and complex thoughts – but why are you so focused on visual hallucination?’  Which I am.  If it doesn’t do that, I’m not interested.

Then I thought the way into it is: Plato talks about the Good, the True and the Beautiful, but the key concept is beautiful.  Good, it’s abstract.  True, it’s abstract.  But Beauty is felt, perceived with the senses as music, painting, whatever it is.  So the bridge to the metaphysical absolutes of truth and the good is through the palpable realm of the beautiful.  To my mind, this is what these psychedelics achieve.  They as Huxley said, they dial open the valve of consciousness or as Blake implied, the window of perception is cleansed and then you see through into an infinite, holographic, recursive world of mind and affectionate intelligence.  Somehow this mystery is in the body and therefore outside of time, therefore beyond, in some sense, the reach of culture.  Sex is like this to some degree.  Sex is in the body and outside of time.  Culture spends a huge amount of it’s energy trying to reach sex, trying to contort it, push it one way or another and has produced some pretty bizarre themes and variations but generally speaking has failed.  No society certainly has ever gotten rid of sex even though there have been societies ruled for thousands of years by men wearing dresses that gave us some of the most ribald minstrelsy around. 

So there is this mystery in the body.  I’m now returning to the subject of psychedelics beyond the reach of cultural manipulation.  Discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity.  Culture is a form of enforced infantilism.  It’s the last nursery and most people never leave it and they’re perfectly happy to interpret the world through the reassuring nonsense of their cultural values, whatever they may happen to be.  The reason psychedelics are so politically dynamite is because they cast doubt on this final cultural envelope of insulation and they do it very democratically.  It doesn’t matter what your cultural conditioning is – it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic.  For most people, that’s frightening.  Frightening enough that not only do they not want to do it but they are also keen to see that other people don’t do it because they realize that this is some kind of a doorway through which demons come; disruptive ideologies, strange forms of music, bizarre behaviors, unpleasant fashions – it’s all coming from this place where these people are messing around.  So there is an impulse to close it off.

So there is a tradition 50,000 years old of shamanism/bohemianism.  People who are deputized to be weird and are told, ‘ok you be weird, we’ll give you a hut at the edge of the village – you be weird and if we need you, we’ll call.’  That’s basically the role.  ‘No, don’t bother, we’ll call you.’  The political position of shamans is fascinating in these societies because they share it but they are not of it.  They are only asked in when things are really desperate.  I think that bohemianism, this orphic tradition I’ve talked about that goes back – way, way back - is the continuation of that.  So we here represent to some degree a self selected group of these Orphic eccentrics who carry this charge of otherness.  In many languages the word shaman means go-between.  The shaman moves between levels, and the mythologies differ but either into a spirit world, or an ancestor world, or an animal world – but a go-between. 

Let me see if I can tie this all up.  I wanted to follow this thing out about the suppression of male dominance through chemical and diet and psilocybin and all that.  The reason that is fascinating to me aside from the fact that it answers some real conundrums in hominid evolutionary arguments is that it then has an implication for the present because we are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about 7,000 years.  There have been various corrective measures, all failures I think.  Christianity, Christ – a corrective measure.  Somebody who comes and says don’t do it that way, and they get rid of him and within fifty years the church he founded is dealing real estate.  You get it in Islam, another corrective effort.  These things have not worked.  The cultural style has been too toxic.  With the rise of modern science and the acceleration of the toxic consequences of bad ideology, we now come to the 20th century.  Throughout the 20th century there has been an impulse…

  [Audience] – What makes bad ideology?

Ideology that has consequences that are bad for the environment and the gene pool.

  [Audience] – Who knows what bad ideology is?

            Well nobody knows absolutely but when you think about things like plutonium and nuclear weapon stockpiles…  I agree with you that in the largest picture moral relativism makes it impossible to say anything about good and bad, but I’m not that morally relativistic.  I think biology should be preferred to its absence and that intelligence should be preferred over its absence.  I think the universe wants to preserve novelty.  That could actually be the basis of a kind of ethic.  Bad is that which destroys novelty and good is that which promotes it.  It sounds awfully progressive.

I remember the first time I was in Pakistan and I caught this rickshaw into Lahore and I was being pulled by a human being, muscle power.  And this guy said, you’re an American and this and that – he said – this country is screwed up, this country is really screwed up.  He said ‘you want to know what’s wrong with it?  Progress!  Too much progress!’  This was a man who made his living pulling people around in a rickshaw, so it’s a relativistic thing.  What I wanted to say was there is an intelligence in the species that is deeper than the societies and the systems that we erect to rule us and this wisdom of the species can make enormous changes in the evolution of the mass psyche, such as the Renaissance for example.

In the 20th century, this has taken the form of what I call the archaic revival.  One of my books is called the Archaic Revival.  The 20th century, which is a vast stage crowded with different kinds of competing social phenomena, art movements and so forth and so on, nevertheless I think the entire thing is illuminated by the notion that what it is about is an impulse towards archaism.  That in the sciences, the arts, everywhere, the archaic ideal is raising its protean head and it begins with Freud in the early years of the 20th century discovering by interviewing these Viennese bourgeois housewives that human beings were brutes and incest, rape, all this stuff was right below the surface.  The rediscovery of the beast and certainly Germany developed that theme up into the 40s.  Meanwhile, people were bringing African masks to Paris and Cubism was basing its early theory on the deconstruction of primitive art.  Meanwhile people like Eric Satie were abandoning the cannons of classical composition in music and the twelve tone row was being experimented.  Jazz was being given new attention and for its primitiveness, its rhythm and its sense of something beyond the reach of civilization.  Meanwhile the deconstruction of painting, which had begun with Impressionism - Impressionism simply is twenty minutes into LSD, had gone deeper, had developed first of all into the deconstructive spirit of Dada where people tore up telephone directories and rang bells while they did something else.  In other words, the absurd appears for the first time, an enormous theme in 20th century life – the incoherent idiocy of it all.

Then Surrealism, taking up the Freudian tune, begins to portray these worlds of distorted association.  All of this is about boundary dissolution.  It was happening on the bohemian left.   It was happening on the fascist right.  The rise of Marxism is a collectivist theory of society very concerned with collectivism, and then enormous changes.  Auschwitz, the atom bomb, space flight and now where we are is for ten or fifteen years, there has been this awareness that it is about direct experience of the numinous and its been hideously marketed and raped by the entrepreneurial instinct and peddled back to us as dozens of New Age cults diced up and presented as different from each other.  But the impulse towards this authentic dissolving experience is real.  It was there in Theosophy.  It was there in the Beats.  It came up through the hippies.  It survived the trivialization of the New Age.  It has now found its way into the youth culture, into rave and house music and that whole thing and it’s healthier than it ever was.  Well the central figure in all of this when you get it down to the idea that a culture must have a culture hero, meaning a paradigmatic ideal to constellate around, the central figure it has been realized is the shaman, who is this person of indeterminate depth. 

Everyone else has a determinable depth.  They are the linear cardboard people walking around but the shaman is of indeterminate depth.  That’s the secret of Carlos Castaneda’s magic.  He creates a literary character that in any other culture would be deemed mythical but because of our attitude toward the depth of the shaman, we can’t tell.  We deputize this kind of depth in rock stars, in culture heroes of various sorts and worshipped that for the past twenty years or so.  Well then slowly it has dawned that the position of worshipper is not the most satisfying position.  The only position that satisfies is to be that thing.  At that point, you’re at the psychedelic crossroads because you will either make a conservative decision and seek a guru of some sort and be lost in that, which is a whole shell game, or you will simply cut through the human domain and make a pact with a plant, a substance, and then you will at that moment be at the threshold of your adulthood.  That’s leaving home.  Home is culture.  Home is this fabric of imaginary values that have been created and maintained by a pathological culture. 

So it’s a personal thing ultimately; very controversial, not easy to do and then once done, it has to be integrated, dealt with, thought about – and that as far as I can tell is a task that extends well beyond the yawning grave.

  [Audience] – When you talked about the dream, it reminded me of the aboriginal culture and that’s kind of how they live their lives – in the dreamtime.  Is that what you’re talking about, living in the dream and being in touch with?

Yeah to some degree.  I don’t know that much about aboriginals.  I’m interested.  I read Bruce Chatwin’s book Song Lines and I found it absolutely fascinating and I’ll talk about it for a minute because it bears on something I’m very interested in.  Part of the transformation that I think is going to happen to us lies in the way we deal with language neurologically.  Because under the influence of psychedelics, especially short acting tryptamines like DMT, you experience phenomena that seem to be transformations of the language modality.  I’ve described this stuff as visible language; that you can actually sing meaning into visible existence and I’ve seen this on ayahuasca.  This is what ayahuasca is about, the famous group states of mind that anthropologists talk about.  What they really are, are three dimensional acoustical sculptures that are made by groups of people who are loaded and it’s an extraordinary thing.  It’s an experience you can't have any other way and it’s not quite telepathy or perhaps more than telepathy. 

The key concept in communications is bandwidth.  The more bandwidth you have, the more detail, color and tone that you can impart to your signal.  Well a very low bandwidth channel is the small mouth noise channel.  This is about as primitive as it gets short of doing in Morse code; doing it by voice.  It’s amazing that we understand each other at all.  In fact you may have noticed that one of the most uncool things you can do is ask somebody – would you explain to me what I just said?  They say, ‘oh well, oh dear, I’m afraid I was generally’…a lot of floundering around.  In these ayahuasca states what you see are group generated acoustical hallucinations and because ayahuasca is composed of psychedelic compounds which occur in normal brain chemistry – in other words nothing exotic to human brain tissue is present – it raises the question, well how close is normal metabolic chemistry to having an ability to do this?

The answer is, nobody knows but very, very close.  The pineal gland produces adrenoglomerulotropin, which is a beta-carboline. 6-methoxy-tetrahydro-harmaline or maybe it is adrenoglomerulotropin – I can’t remember.  Anyway there are active beta-carbolines produced in brain metabolism and language is such an odd phenomena anyway in our species.  Notice that you have to have two people to do it, which raises real question on how you get that coordinated the first time out.  It’s a behavior.  It isn’t an organ.  It isn’t like my arm or nose, it’s a behavior and a learned behavior, yet a behavior so much more complex than any other behavior you ever learn.  If the average person could walk like the average person could talk, they would be a primo ballerina of the Russian ballet.  It’s very interesting that we have such facility to the linguistic enterprise and how it evolves.  It’s changing all the time.  Is it just changing in a kind of forward lateral direction or is there some kind of vertical gain here?  Can we actually describe things better to each other than the ancient Greeks could describe things to each other?  Can we say things, which they couldn’t say, or anything of consequence?  I maintain yes, that culture – freeways, internal airports, are the trailing edge of evolving language. 

So here’s a story that relates to this that it is in Bruce Chatwin’s book Song Lines.  There are these things called song lines, which cross Australia and they can be thousands of miles long.  If you’re a shaman and one of these things crosses your territory, then you are the keeper of the song, of that part of the line.  You must learn and keep this song.  There are a hundred and thirty-seven aboriginal languages in Australia, so these people did the following thing.  They went to the place near one end of the song line and they recorded a shaman singing his song of that place.  Then they went two thousand miles to another part of the same song line and they found the song keeper of that place and they played the guys song for him.  It was in a language he didn’t speak and he had never been away from his own home – he had never been to this place.  So he listened to the song and after a while, he began to sing with it.  Not the words but the melody and he sang with it the way you could sing with green sleeves if you didn’t know the words but you knew the melody.  Then after it was over he said, the man has sang this song.  His place is a ‘Beaut’ with three mountains and eucalyptus filling the valley and a red rock like a lizard over here. 

So then they tried to analyze, what is happening here?  Is this telepathy?  Is it magic?  What is it?  I think the key to understanding it lies in…I’ve recently seen, you can buy for about six hundred dollars a piece of software where you glue electrodes to your head and sit down in front of your computer and you see an undulating landscape of neuro readouts that look, lo and behold, like mountains, valleys, escarpments.  It’s like visit to Utah.  I am convinced that what’s happening is that when the shaman listens to the first shaman’s song, he does not process the sound the way we do.  He processes it the way this computer is processing the neurological input and what he’s seeing is an acoustical environment of sound and he can see the place.  The song is the way it is because the song is not a song; the song is a hologramatic acoustigram of the topology of the land through which the song line passes.  These people are called the most primitive people in the world, remember?

So I just recently became aware of this.  It’s very exciting to me.  I’m interested in this software but this is the kind of thing that lies out there.  The world arrives at the surface of your skin as one thing but the senses bifurcate the incoming signal.  The light goes to the eyes, the acoustical signal goes to the ears, the tactile signal is conveyed through the skin and so then when we reconstruct the world, the wells are showing rather prominently in the model.  What happens with the psychedelics is, it seems as though somewhere deep in the brain there is an organ or a program that can take all of the incoming sensory data and actually recombine it into a synesthesic whole, which is neither seen nor felt nor heard, but which is hologrok’d or something.  A sense which unites all of the other senses, and that’s what I call going into this informational super space.  That’s what the psychedelic experience is.   It reunifies the sensory datum of the world and I might add, the whole world, not the surface of the world, which is conveyed to us by light, but the internal dimension of transcendence that is in the world, is also present.

  [Audience] – It’s very interesting that you mentioned that binding together of the senses.  I attended a conference earlier this year called ‘Towards a Scientific Basis for Consciousness’ in Arizona and a number of the presentations focused on the way in which the brain operates when this binding takes place.  It turns out different cortical groups start to talk to one another by oscillating together in phase and when they’re phase locked like that, they begin to bind this into a whole.  I’m reminded of the research that Michael Persinger up at Laurentian University in Canada, who has been focusing on the electromagnetic field of the Earth and its affect on the brain.  In particular, he’s been interested in the correlation between earthquake activity and ghost sightings and such but he’s pointed out that the

Yeah, he wrote a wonderful book called Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events.  He’s been very creative with using the electromagnetic field as an explanation for all kinds of things.  I’m totally open-minded to his work.  It’s very interesting.  It does seem to be true that along earthquake faults, you do get piezoelectric buildup and release.  The world is full of bizarre phenomena.  Some of you may have seen in Science News last week, for the first time they have confirmed these enormous blue and red lights above 75,000 feet in the atmosphere.  Airline pilots have been seeing these things for years.  There was no theory.  Nobody knew what they were.  Now NASA dedicated an expedition to looking at this and they got thousands of images of these things.  It’s an electrical phenomenon; theory doesn’t account for them, nobody knows what it means.  On one level I’m sympathetic to Persinger and that approach to explaining some of these things and I do think that the place has been overlooked in importance. 

On another level, this is a very hard thing to talk about, but there is what I call linguistic viruses that infect the effort to communicate.  They’re very hard to catch at work.  It has to do with how can people believe things that are absurd.  It’s very interesting to spend time with people who believe something which is absurd.  A lot of people bring raps to me that they want confirmation or disconfirmation on and I passed this way last night when I talked about the rules of evidence.  The standard of discourse has decayed to the point where it’s very hard to get any kind of consensus about anything because most people participating don’t know how the game is played.  Linguistic viruses really are responsible for much more of reality than we suppose.  I suppose I can’t really talk about this without stepping on somebody’s toes so let me pick…for example, crop circles. 

Crop circles are important and what was going on at the England end, these things were absurd.  You had only to see one to understand what was going on and to see that a confluence of British eccentricity, ripe grain, a certain ambiance the air was allowing these things to come into being.  And the media was fanning it into existence.  Well now how does this work?  Talking of coupled oscillators and Persinger and all that.  Pardon me?

  [Audience] – Could you repeat that law?

Oh, the paranormal phenomenon has an impact in an inverse square relationship to the distance you are from the event.  You see?  Here’s how it works.  The media is reporting the onrushing phenomena of existence – stock markets, wars, diplomatic meetings, gangster killing, so forth and so on.  Then something weird happens, now I have a job, you have a job, and we note that something weird has happened but it doesn’t affect us.  But scattered through the society there are people who when they open their paper and see ‘Strange Pattern in Wheatfield near Wiltshire.’  They say, ‘ah ha – I knew it.  This is what we’ve been waiting for.  This is the sign.’  They jump in their card and they drive to Wiltshire to look at the crop circle and they get there first.  Well then comes the press and they say, ‘well what is this?’  The farmer doesn’t know and everybody standing around and finally the weird person takes courage and says ‘well actually I’ve been studying a peculiar form of biological energy for some thirty years and my theory…’ You’re off and running at that point.  So weirdness attracts weirdos who then interpret the weirdness very weirdly because they came with sharpened axes to grind, you see? 

The crop circle thing was a test case for this.  This is why I spent so much time on it.  It did no credit to anybody.  The occult just went sailing over the edge and science didn’t behave any better.  If any of you are interested in this, there’s a wonderful book called Round in Circles by Jim Schnabel that goes into all this.  But anyway, there was a fellow named Terence Meaden who was a meteorologist and when the first crop circles appeared and the weirdos began talking about telluric forces, messages from Atlantis, so forth and so on – he jumped into the fray and said, ‘nonsense, nonsense!”  This is a meteorological phenomenon.  In the warm days of summer on the lee side of these certain kinds of hills, a kind of circular low-pressure wind can get going and this is nothing to get excited about and we’ve got the statistics.  The press loved him.  They loved him as much as the screwballs and they would put him on.  First they would interview the mad people and then Terence Meaden would come on and pooh-pooh it away.

So that was the first year of the crop circles.  The next year the crop circles became considerably more elaborate with arrows coming off of them and zigzags and so forth and so on.  Bring Terence Meaden onto the scene and he says, ‘well the new field of dynamic instability indicates that the mathematical solutions to these breakdown states are very complicated and unusual patterns…’ So then the next year, it was inconceivably complex, the crop circles.  Meanwhile, crop circle time is in the springtime.  It’s dead in the winter because the fields are empty, so Meaden had used the winter time to go to the Institute of Electrostatic Physics in Nagoya and came back full of talk about roving plasmic fields and this sort of thing.  Armed with the roving plasmic fields, no crop circle was too bizarre to not be proclaimed the product of natural forces. 

This went on and on and finally BBC2 - and you can think about this what you like - but they made a crop circle in frustration with this whole thing.  They made a crop circle and among the crop circle cognoscenti, there are certain moves that are the favorite moves that are the authenticating moves that no human being could possibly do it.  So the BBC2 people made a very good crop circle and they brought Terence Meaden out and said, Terence we’ve just spotted one over here and we need to get you right to the scene before the tourists got there.’  They toured with him and he pointed out the distinguishing characteristics, no doubt about it.  Then they sat him down in the center of this field and said, Terence, we made it. 

It’s a horrible thing actually to see a grown man cry.  He is devastated.  This is just one of many moments.  You know Rupert, my comrade in arms?  Rupert Sheldrake was one of the people who sponsored the contest that basically put the crop circles out of business because the claims were fantastic, you know?  No person could do this.  So what they did was they got farmers to donate ten acre tract of English corn, which is wheat, and for fifty pounds you could enter and everybody had to make the same crop circle, which was one chosen to have all the difficult little smiggies in it and you could use no lights, you had to go into the field at 10pm and be out by 4am and at dawn, the helicopters flew over with the video crews and the crop circles were toured on the ground and awards were made.

This guy, Jim Schnabel, who wrote this book I mentioned, by himself in total darkness, in two and a half hours, made the winning entry.  It was very close tie to him and a helicopter crew to a nearby airbase who also made one.  Yet, this is to some degree the point of the whole story, there are people whose eyes fill with tears when I do this rap because they haven't heard.  It will never die now I’m convinced. It’s an informational virus loose in the world.  Crop circles will occasionally appear but it was really a breakout that was so predictable from the unconscious that it amazed me while it was going on how many friendships that were strained over this thing.

  [Audience] – Wasn’t that kind of also the capitulation of the History of the Catholic Church?

And the fall of the Ming dynasty I believe? 

  [Audience] – It’s like a virus embedded within a virus here because part of what happens when these sorts of things erupt onto the media scene and this is true for UFOs, whenever one of those outbursts take place, is that there is this incredible elaboration and complexity that emerge in the kinds of stories that people are telling.  The abduction thing would be the latest.  By the way, Persinger is involved in that too by showing that electro-magnetic fields to the brain can induce these weird out of body experiences.  But in the case of crop circles, they’ve been reported for many decades but they’ve not received much attention.  They’re just little circles that have a spiral pattern in them and they’ve been seen over the world.  My personal view is that there is probably a series of different phenomena that have been shuffled into one category but when the media gets a hold of them, all crop circles are the same.  When fractal designs start showing up outside the university campus there – the Mandelbrot set which is one of the most ridiculous of the crop circle patterns, the media presents the image that these are all the same.  They’re all the same phenomena.  So consequently, I wouldn’t be surprised if Meaden might not be right at some level that there are dust devil like phenomena…

No I agree with you completely and they track down a 1733 account of something called the Devil’s Mower.  I grew up in western Colorado and part of my rite of initiation into manhood was in forced elk hunting on horseback every autumn.  We would come upon these places in the forest that had been whirled down and the explanation was just that these are deadfalls from whirlwinds but it always seemed to me – had anybody ever seen one of these things occur?  It was a very odd explanation.  Yes, it’s about informational distortion and decay.  You’re quite right.  I went to a flying saucer convention against my better judgment and I learned more…my opinion about flying saucers evolved more over that weekend than in the previous thirty years of being interested in flying saucers.  I read all the books, all the special cases, I knew the data and all that but I had never hung out with flying saucer people.  It was so obviously a private Idaho that I just couldn’t wait to get away. 

There are two impulses in the human psyche, at least two in this case.  I just don’t resonate with believers in anything.  I get insulting to Buddhists for God’s sake.  It’s just something about their smugness and their whole bit, I just want to squash it.  So you can imagine how I behave in the presence of scientologists and the rest of it.  Belief is again, it’s a form of infantilism.  There are no grounds for believing anything.  The flying saucer thing, I went to this conference imagining that what I would meet would be a whole bunch of really interesting sincere people who wanted to discuss the phenomenon of unexplained things in the sky and contacting human beings.  What I found was booth after booth of people who had all the answers!  Learn how a nearby planet reduced crime by 500%!  I got news for you, not even God can reduce crime by 500% once you’ve reduced it by 100%; you’ve got it! 

This was the quality of thinking that was going on.  Then there were a lot of really scary people in brown leather shoes with thin smiles and cheap suits who were clearly third rate, semi retired intelligence hacks who were there to keep the flock headed in the right direction.  People wanted to talk about experiments on human fetal tissue that go on in underground laboratories out in Arizona through the connivance of the CIA and the Pledian high command.  And you just think, I’ve just got to call my broker.  I’ll get back to you on that.  I don’t know.  It’s an aesthetic thing.  I believe that great weirdness stocks the universe.  That’s not the issue with me but it’s not tacky.  It is not tacky.  People who wear low cut gowns with a lot of sequins on them and tiaras and pass out flying saucer shaped business cards, that’s tacky.  So it can't be so!  I know this.  I’ve never been wrong.  If intelligence fails, aesthetics will pull you through.  People don’t like this part of me.  I don’t make it comfortable for other squirrels.  I don’t share the branch very generously. 

A place where I’ve gotten into lots of trouble is with the face on Mars.  I just have not got enough unpleasant things to say about the face on Mars, everybody connected with it, the whole idea.  Talk about something, which should never have been let out of the box – that’s it.  The idea of a chachka 17 x 11 miles in size just gives me the heebeegeebees.  I don’t want to know those aliens.  They should go back where they came from and take their chachka with them.  We need people who can build in light and balance planetary ecologies and do really cool things. Massive earth moving projects – we’ve been there, we’ve done that. 

  [Audience]  We never went to the moon either.  Books will appear on these subjects.  One of the interesting things about UFO experience though and the other kinds of different phenomena that you’re talking about, is the potential for manipulation of belief systems and this is something that Jacque Valay talks about in his books.  There is a kind of sinister undertone that the military is bringing people in who are UFO diehards and saying look at these documents, we can prove that there is this majestic group and then snatching them back and then the UFO enthusiasts go out and tell the world about it.  They launch stories about aliens under the desert in Nevada collaborating with the military and the newspapers pick it up but completely pooh-pooh it.  Meanwhile there are tests of a new spy plane called project Aurora, which travels six times the speed of sound and leaves a trailing ball blue of light and if anybody sees it traveling over the desert and picks up the phone and calls the paper, nobody will report it. 

No, it’s clear that those black projects and Aurora is the one, is being run out there.  That’s very exciting.  I mean a plane that can fly into orbit.

  [Audience] – Terence, what is your opinion on the biosphere?  Did you get into that at all?  John Allen and the whole shtick there?

I knew those people in the early 80s - 1983, 1981, in the Amazon.  They said they were headed for Mars.  I don’t know.  They are derivative of J.G. Bennett’s school of Gurdjieffians and I have a rule, which is, I’m against any group that keeps secrets and Gurdjieffians keep secrets. I’m not against Gurdjieffians per se; in fact it’s kind of too bad they get into the category.  Secret keeping is a bad habit and if you tell me a secret, I’ll probably tell it.  Nobody ever told me not to say anything.  So I’ve followed them with interest over the years.  It’s too bad it’s another thing lead by a middle aged white guy but they seem to have the pull.

But I want to return to something you said.  This can be the last thing about flying saucers but let me give you my conclusion from this weekend of how the whole flying saucer thing worked.  This is just one person’s opinion but this is how I explain it to myself.  As you know in 1947, the Rainer lights appeared and that was the first big modern flying saucer sighting and set off the whole modern flying saucer phenomenon.  Well cast your mind back to the ambiance of 1947.  The atom bomb was in 1945, the defeat of Germany, the H-bomb was under development, Einstein was advising Truman.  People were on the brink of things they could not understand.  Nobody knew what the H-bomb really meant.  What does it mean that we can do this?  They said, we don’t know, maybe the universe is monitored and what we’re doing is so outrageous that maybe it will bring those who do the monitoring.  Then they began to get these reports of these things in the sky.  My god this must be it.  There were very high-level government – secret, secret, secret commissions that were setup and they began to study the flying saucers furiously.

They penetrated all those groups and they penetrated the flying saucer thing from one end to the other and I’m talking 1947 to 1954.  They studied it and they studied it and Carl Jung was brought in, and all kinds of people were brought in, and at the end of that period, they concluded that what it was.  They actually understood it.  They concluded that it was the cosmic giggle.  They concluded that it was that un-reducible nub of nuttiness that haunts reality and that it was not a threat to the security of North American air defenses.  That was their question.  Is this a military problem for us?  By 54 or so, they had decided whatever this is – a linguistic virus, a mass hallucination, whatever it is – it is not a problem for the military defense of North America.

But they had spent millions infiltrating and completely taking over the weirdest group of screwballs you can imagine, the flying saucer, hardcore cultists.  They said, these people will believe anything.  We know that because we’ve been to their meetings.  We’ve read their publications.  What should we do with them?  Should be just withdraw all our agents and let them go back to whatever they are doing and the answer was no.  These people will become a pool for experiments in manipulation of information, control of belief systems and response to propaganda.  A whole bunch of black box, psychological, programming and informational kinds of research will be done on this pool of people because they’re so weird, if they start telling their relatives that they’re hearing voices in the head or something like that, their relatives and friends are just going to say what else is new.  You’ve been talking like this for years.  I think it was kept like that right up until the present moment.

I think it’s very low budget. This is not high priority for the CIA.  They’re sending, as I’ve said, semi-retired guys in scuffed brown shoes who are definitely over the hill.  But they shepherd the group along and as you said, they release these outlandish documents and then they pull them back.  Some guy comes forward and says it’s all a fraud and I know because I was on the inside and I was the one paid to tell you all these things and then somebody else comes forward and says no – he’s a walk in and has an implant and it wasn’t that way at all.  It’s sort of like the JFK assassination.  There is no bedrock there.  There is no ground zero and I find these things sort of spooky.  I think it’s bad mental hygiene to spend too much time with squirrels.

  [Audience] – They can infect you.