Mind and Time, Spirit and Matter

Terence McKenna, 1991 1 Wonderful, I can hardly believe Im here. I made it past the Camaro raffle.2 I survived the offer for reconstructive cosmetic surgery, and Ive had my smart drugs for this evening, so, glad to be here. [laughter and applause] Well until a few minutes ago, I thought that this was a 45 minute gig. So, you get to see grace under pressure this evening. Naturally Im kidding, it doesnt matter how long it goes. We could never get to the bottom of this stuff. Nor would we wish to, I think. By coincidence, merely, I became 45 yesterday, so [applause] Its sort of a good moment to do some summing up, so in thinking about this talk, and knowing as I did who would be here, I thought that I would sort of orient the theme to distilling the psychedelic mind, which is a way of talking about the psychedelic mind, but also trying to considering the amount of money you paid for this session give you the entire shtick in one fell swoop, so that you would never have to attend a Terence McKenna lecture or workshop again. You can just move past that, turn the page on that kind of thing in your life. And I think its coming together for me. I dont know whether its writing these books, was a very nice introduction here tonight and, the whammy in it was after 25 years of being ignored by straight publishers, or publishers of any sort for that matter, it appears that Im on the brink of entering the marketplace, if not the mainstream, so [applause] with your help and word of mouth advertising, maybe I can continue to meet my mortgage obligations. Okay, lets cut to the chase. Enough of the obligatory clowning around. [3:40] The psychedelic question in the society just seems to refuse to go away. It sort of cant be swallowed and cant be spat up. And so society just sort of runs around, knocking into walls, and kicking its feet in the air. And this is been the situation that weve been in, for at least 30 years now. And, as a person who has spent a great deal of time in the underground, Ive observed with amazement the persistence of the counter cultural agenda to alter consciousness. And like many of you I came to it in the 60s when the basic argument in favor of altered states of consciousness were almost entirely narcissistic. Deep insight into yourself, an ability to overcome childhood programming, so forth and so on. And I certainly think because of the kind of society we are, because of the kind of people society has made us, that this was a valid place to begin. But after 30 years of having the psychedelic issue on the social agenda, at times hailed as a universal panacea,3 at times demonized as a scourge from hell, but never quite silenced, never moved out of the public eye, Ive reached a number of conclusions about this. And I thought it would be interesting tonight, I guess because of my recent birthday or something, to sort of try and distill all this and sum it up and put it in front of you. [6:00] In terms of what is psychedelic shamanism? Why should people like ourselves who live in high density electronic culture, why should we care about this? What does it say about our future? What does it say about us as a group? And what techniques are there that we each, on our own, can bring to bear on this question. So with your help hold me to the straight and narrow Id like to make my way through this agenda this evening and talk about these various aspects of what to my mind is the most astonishing facet of reality. I mean, maybe sex is pressing hard in the second position but these two things run neck in neck, as aspects of the mystery of what it is to be human. And believe me, human psychedelic

Seeking the Stone

At The Whole Life Expo, Los Angeles, California, November 1991. Referring to a Chevrolet Camaro being raffled at The Whole Life Expo. 3 panacea, noun, a solution or remedy for all difficulties or diseases. Origin: mid 16th cent.: via Latin from Greek panakeia, from panaks all-healing, from pan all + akos remedy. In Greek mythology, Panacea (Greek , Panakeia) was a goddess of healing. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panacea
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experiences and human sexual experiences are orders of magnitude removed from anything going on in the animal realm. These things are set apart from the rest of being. Because what we bring to them is mind. This is what we pour into the sexuality of human beings that makes it unique. This is what we pour into the contemplation of our own experience. Mind is a focus that is lacking. At least its expression in the unique form that we experience it, is lacking in the rest of nature. And I believe that the persistence of the psychedelic experience within the social agenda has to do with the fact that it actually addresses something basic in human beings. I mean, it may seem like a radical proposition to say that to a white, high tech, industrial democracy audience because we are the people who have drifted furthest from this birthright. And I would like to suggest to you this evening that much of the civilization that we have created has been achieved based on a direct denial of the psychedelic experience and all that it implies. Our humanness, our connection to the rest of nature, our connection into the feminine, our place in nature. Because for the Western mind we have no fixed place in nature. Our place is ours to define. We are from the point of view of the cultural machinery that empowers us completely free to become, to be, whatever we want to be. Now the problem with that prescription is, that in Western culture, what that means is, permission to express ego, permission to profligately use and destroy resources, permission to set aside the political agendas of outclasses and outgroups. And this untrammeled expression of will, outside the context of nature, has turned us into a kind of Frankensteins monster at best, a toxic force in the body of the Gaian world soul at worst. And I believe that our origin, and our future culmination, and our present happiness, all can be secured, understood, illuminated, and expanded, only if were willing to look at our relationship not only to altered states of consciousness but to the mind behind nature. Because thats really what this is all about, to my mind. [10:52] What these psychedelics are empowering, or conveying, or revealing depending on, you know, how you come at it what they are showing us, is that we are not alone upon this planet. We are not alone in the universe of mind. And I realize this is a soft audience to preach this in because there are probably people within the sound of my words who sincerely believe they were once citizens of Zeta reticuli.4 You know, its, its, when the jar is so leaky, its hard to know where to put the water. But I come to this as a show me kind of guy. And so, though my conclusions may sound as flakey as anybody elses it was hard for me to get this flakey. I didnt embrace it. I was forced to it. And this method works. You see, I mean there are two ways to get flakey. You can just get flakey which takes no effort at all, you know. I mean you just announce youre a walk in, start eating wheat grass juice, and, you know, tie it to Maitreya.5 Or you can get flakey by testing the edges. By stretching the envelope of being. And this works. For the most hard headed among us. The aero-space insurance adjuster mentality is not only who Im speaking to, but who I feel I represent. [laughter] Because, no kidding really, at age 18 I was a Marxist, an existentialist, I had ambitions in the field of aeronautical engineering, so forth and so on. And I discovered that you can take that kind of a mentality out into the theater of real experience and you can come back a space bunny just like everybody else. [laughter] So what that means then, is that a straight person, and I speak as

Zeta Reticuli is a binary star system located about 39 light-years (12 pc) away from Earth. It is located in the constellation Reticulum, and is visible to the unaided eye in very dark skies. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeta_reticuli 5 Maitreya (Sanskrit), is foretold as a future Buddha of this world in Buddhist eschatology. In some Buddhist literature, such as the Amitabha Sutra and the Lotus Sutra, he or she is referred to as Ajita Bodhisattva. Maitreya is a bodhisattva who in the Buddhist tradition is to appear on Earth, achieve complete enlightenment, and teach the pure dharma. According to scriptures, Maitreya will be a successor of the historic kyamuni Buddha. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitreya
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someone from the 60s with apologies to all our gay friends who later appropriated that word. Because when I say straight I mean un-stoned. A straight person is not a guardian of truth or propriety,6 a straight person is simply a frightened proto-flake, you see? [laughter] [14:12] I always think, and most of you have heard me say this, but when we get off on this subject I always think about the wonderful thing Tim Leary said years ago, he said it so many years ago that when I told him how much I admired him for saying it he didnt remember that hed said it. But the man once said [laughter] waitll I give the line LSD is a drug which causes occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it. [laughter and applause] You see? And I certainly saw this, I mean I saw my parents become violently psychotic from not taking LSD. And so my point is, and I make it in a forum like this, because here we have so much permission for belief. I mean, you want to believe in, you know, channeling from beyond the grave? Fine, no problem. You want to believe in the healing power of nematodes, hematodes, hematite? You name it, weve got it all. Really I think that the spirit of child-like, untrammeled curiosity is what we are striving for. Not the anal retentive, rational person, not the, Ill go for anything, channeling flake, but an attitude of we dont have to look far for miracles because theyre all around us. Everything is astonishing. The universe on its surface is alive with mystery. Well, how do we make our way toward that when we live in a culture, practice a language, embody a philosophy scientific rationalism which is entirely designed to suck wonder out of reality, to turn everything into shades of gray, to subvert all hope that lies outside the realm of career accomplishment and material possession. [16:54] Well the way that we can overcome this is through a personal acting out of what I have been calling now for several years, the archaic revival. And I want to talk about that a little bit this evening, because I think it you know, however much we may kid about the new age it is an important aspect of what is going on. Its triviality is rooted in the side of it which is ungrounded, ephemeral, and self promoting. But it springs from a fairly profound and deep sense that things are not alright in this society. I think that I first encountered the phrase new age in the writings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.7 She wrote in the 20s, I read her in the 50s. The New Age has been with us for a long time. So long that theres nothing new about it. And in fact the reason I call it The Archaic Revival is because I think we can understand this movement, if instead of accentuating what about it that is new, novel, and never before seen, instead we emphasize that this is a profoundly conservative impulse. A conservative impulse that would set the hair of George Bush and his Skull & Bones 8 buddies standing on end. Because when we talk about conservative were not talking about returning to the era of Eisenhower.

mispronounced as propety. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (12 August 1831 8 May 1891) was a theosophist, writer and traveler. In 1875, Blavatsky together with Colonel H. S. Olcott established the Theosophical Society. One of the main purposes of this Society was to form a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blavatsky 8 Skull and Bones is an undergraduate senior or secret society at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. It is a traditional peer society to Scroll and Key and Wolfs Head, as the three senior class landed societies at Yale. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones
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Were talking about returning to the era of Isis,9 Astarte,10 the great horned Goddess of the high Paleolithic. In other words, this program of material civilization, exteriorization of ideas into matter through first alchemy and magic, and then science and industry, this process is coming to an end. One way or another. [19:33] We are either going to plant ourselves and most of the rest of the life on this planet by blindly pursuing this cultural model until we run it right over the edge into the apocalypse. Or from the genes, from the bones, from the oceans, from the forests, from the glaciers, there is going to have to come a turning point. A change. A revulsion so profound that it allows us, by the 10s of millions to change how we think about reality. To change how we live. And I have ended up an advocate for the psychedelic experience not because I think its easy, not because I think its sure fire, but because I think its the only game in town. The only chance left. If we had a thousand years, if we had 500 years, maybe propaganda messages on boxes of cereal, photographs on cartons of milk, I dont know, something might do it. [laughter] But we dont have 500 years, we must come to a screeching halt, now! Because we are barreling toward the brink of ruin. And the only thing that I have ever seen that turned anybody around, on the dime, was psychedelics, you know? [21:20] The talking cures, invented by Freud 11 and Jung 12 at the beginning of this century, it takes years, sometimes it never happens. The body work that came along behind that with Wilhelm Reich,13 and others, Feldenkrais 14 and so forth Ida Rolf 15 all of this brings it into the theater of the body. At least now we understand its a body-mind system. Its not a disembodied voice lying on a couch speaking, you know. But it seems so obvious, what were trying to do is perturb the mind. We want to perturb the mind so that we can then see it differently. So that it may see and be seen differently. Well, the mind rests on a
Isis or in original more likely Aset (Ancient Greek: ) is a goddess in Ancient Egyptian religious beliefs, whose worship spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. She was worshipped as the ideal mother and wife as well as the matron of nature and magic. She was the friend of slaves, sinners, artisans, and the downtrodden, and she listened to the prayers of the wealthy, maidens, aristocrats, and rulers. Isis is the goddess of motherhood, magic and fertility. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis 10 Astarte (Greek , Astrt) is the Greek name of a goddess known throughout the Eastern Mediterranean from the Bronze Age to Classical times. Originally the deified evening star []. The name appears also in Etruscan as Uni-Astre (Pyrgi Tablets), Ishtar or Ashtart. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astarte 11 Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis. An early neurological researcher into cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy, Freud later developed theories about the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression, and established the field of verbal psychotherapy by creating psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient (or analysand) and a psychoanalyst. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_freud 12 Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as by nature religious and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and symbolization. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung 13 Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897 November 3, 1957) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. He was the author of several notable books, including The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Character Analysis, both published in 1933. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich 14 Mosh Pinchas Feldenkrais (May 6, 1904 July 1, 1984) was an Israeli physicist and the founder of the Feldenkrais Method, designed to improve human functioning by increasing self-awareness through movement. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosh_Feldenkrais 15 Ida Pauline Rolf (May 19, 1896March 19, 1979) was a biochemist and the creator of Structural Integration or Rolfing. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Pauline_Rolf
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foundation of chemical machinery. Were not saying the mind is chemical machinery. Were saying the mind rests on a foundation of chemical machinery. So if you want to perturb the mind, you dont go to the talking, you dont go to the deep tissue, all of this has efficacy, it is necessary, but not sufficient by itself. For there to be a sufficiency of method there must be an initial perturbation of the mind. And this comes about through the use of psychedelic plants. This is not something that was discovered post LSD in Manhattan by psychiatrists or in Prague, or Berlin, or at Esalen. This is a truth 20,000, 50,000, 100,000 years old. This is how its always been done. Only in the last 6,000 years on the European continent and those civilizations that are the children of Europe has there been any other approach to these problems. Well, and what the other approach linear thought, the phonetic alphabet, science, mathematical abstraction, so forth and so on what these other approaches have brought us is toxicity, pollution, mutation, catastrophe, revolution, death and yes friends even unhappiness. It hasnt worked. Western civilization is now crowing over the fact that the only opposition it ever had, which was Marxism, a pathetic, weak sister, has now collapsed upon itself. Well, there should be no congratulation in that because the contradictions which undid Marxism lie and wait to undo this society as well. [applause ] Both societies are materialistic, both societies define human beings and treat them as things. And the fact of the matter is, Western civilization at this moment is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet. And we, for all our pretensions to a sensitivity to the presence of Vitamin C or Zinc in our diet, or all the rest of this malarkey, we are the major prevaricators of this situation. So, a certain obligation rests upon us. And I think we are meeting this obligation. I wouldnt say were doing a great job, or a terrible job, I think were functioning at approximately a B+ level. You see, I mean, human life is so ephemeral. I mean a person who lives 70 or 80 years is really as ephemeral as a may fly or something. I mean, its not long enough to get the full picture. For instance, many of you, by virtue of not having spent a great deal of time thinking about it, probably dont realize that this psychedelic plant-shamanism option, this is not something that Western civilization has grappled with for centuries and come to terms with, and found the proper pigeon hole for, and put aside. Not at all my friends. [26:20] The fact of the matter is, all of this information about psychedelics has arrived in Western society in the last hundred years. And we have to say hundred years, because we want to include things like Mescaline, 1895/98, it was begun to be studied in Germany.16 And things like Ibogaine,17 which was known toward the end of the last century but which has had virtually zilch impact on American psychedelic populations. So we have to say, the psychedelic option has only been an object of the Western minds curiosity for approximately a hundred years. But really, 90% of that occurred in the last 50 years. As many of you know, I am a great fan and spokesman for psilocybin, for the mushrooms. The mushrooms that I am so stoked on were discovered in 1953 by Gordon and Valentina Wasson,18 in Huatla, discovered in 53, made absolutely schedule 1 illegal in 1966. Thirteen years was the window in which Western

Mescaline was first isolated and identified in 1897 by the German Arthur Heffter and first synthesized in 1919 by Ernst Spth. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mescalin 17 Ibogaine is a naturally occurring psychoactive substance found in a number of plants, principally in a member of the Apocynaceae family known as Iboga (Tabernanthe iboga). A hallucinogen with both psychedelic and dissociative properties, the substance is banned in some countries; in other countries it is being used to treat addiction to opiates, methamphetamine and other drugs. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine 18 Robert Gordon Wasson (September 22, 1898 December 23, 1986) was an author, ethnomycologist, and vice president of J.P. Morgan & Co. In the course of independent research, he made contributions to the fields of ethnobotany, botany, and anthropology. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Gordon_Wasson
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civilization had to study this compound and figure out what it was for. And they were just beginning to focus upon it when it was made illegal. LSD, discovered in 37, not brought into the scientific literature until 48, not generally available even in the laboratory until 1950. Made totally illegal in 1966. 16 year window. Think about the fact that when LSD was legal, psychiatrists, professional researchers, were consistently reporting cures of chronic alcoholism with one 500 gamma dose. One dose. Cure, like a 50% cure rate without recidivism for chronic alcoholism. Spectacular findings were being reported. When LSD swept through the scientific community, it for pharmacologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists it had the same kind of excitement and feeling of breakthrough that the splitting of the atom had for the physicists, for the physics community in the late 30s. Well, science, we are told, is this absolutely impartial, god-like, body of knowledge, prosecuted by great men. And it will fearlessly send its questing mind into any situation or environment. This is a mental discipline so dispassionate that it sees nothing at all wrong with strapping monkeys into apparatus and hurling them into walls at 70 miles an hour to study traumatic injuries. This is a discipline so unflinching in its pursuit of truth that it will design tiny television cameras to be implanted in plastic penises so that we can see the changes in the color of the vaginal wall as it approaches orgasm. I mean, these guys are unstinting in their devotion to truth in any form. And yet, and yet, for thirty years, science has accepted governments refusal to allow science to look at the potential impact of psychedelic plants and compounds on human consciousness, on chronic alcoholism, on schizophrenia, on depression, on autism, on learning disorders, on dyslexias, on memory enhancement, so forth and so on. [31:00] This to me is obscene. The future is mental. Figure it out! If the mind does not loom large in the future history of this species then what the hell kind of future is it going to be? I mean this is our crowning glory. Our aesthetic sensitivities, our ability to create values that are not simply based on the next meal, the next sexual encounter, the next empowering social move, but an ability to create social values based on, creating a viable future environment for children, creating a viable present environment for the less fortunate among us, creating a social safety net so that the more maladaptive of us are not reduced to living under bridges and in abandoned automobiles. I mean, these are the things which set us above the apes. These are the things which take us out of the context of organic nature and make it seem as though, hey, there actually are some transcendental values being maximized here. There actually is something going on within the human family that if it would to be lost, fumbled away, compromised, or destroyed, the universe would be a poorer place for it truly a poorer place for it. [32:50] And I think we take our humanness too much for granted. I dont think we realize how nasty, brutish, and short most of life has been over the centuries. And how really only within the confines of the 20th century has a level of comfort, and food availability, and shelter, and basic creature needs been met to the point where most people can begin to lead the philosophical life that previously was the privilege of emperors, kings, great courts. Now we all indulge ourselves. We all have the philosopher kings point of view. We all have a model of history, a model of the future. And we all feel capable of stepping into the shoes of our leaders and discharging that responsibility. [34:00] Well, in order to do that I think we need to overcome our amnesia about how we got to this place. I dont see you see what science would have you believe and explicitly implies, is that we are an aberration. Here, over here you have nature, the beautiful rain forests, the wonderful coral reefs, the symmetry of the humming bird, the sea urchin and the butterfly. And here you have us, grimy, tawdry, polluting, ugly, driven, in disequilibrium, in denial. I dont believe that. I believe that this kind of thinking that breaks humanity away from the rest of nature is the first of the great disempowering myths by which the western mind has enslaved itself. And we are not outside of nature, we are not a runaway toxic

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process, we are not a mutation, We are in fact that part of nature which has been deputized for a purpose. We are the energy gathering aspect of the Gaian Mind. We are the language forming capacity of nature herself. You may know the concept of a catalyst in chemistry. A catalyst is something which when you stir it in to a chemical reaction the reaction proceeds more quickly but the catalyst itself is not destroyed. And this is what I think we are. We are a strategy on the part of the Gaian Mind to produce an effect that would otherwise take much, much longer to produce. The main effect of the presence of human life on this planet has been to vastly accelerate the speed at which nature is able to creatively express herself. And I would like to believe that this fragile, fragile thing which we call humanness, which is nothing more than a set of interlocking ideas which we share ideas about caring, and responsibility, and generations yet unborn, and obligation to the integrity of the earth, and so forth and so on. I would like to believe that these things arose in us in a very, very brief window of opportunity. As you may or may not know, all you know there is a lot of talk about the relationship between the masculine and the feminine in human beings and gender issues and so forth and so on. Well, if you go back into the primate line, what you discover is primates always have dominance hierarchies occupied by males. This is the bad news part of the thing. You see, it isnt that we are a perversion of the primate program. At this point we exemplify it right down the line. But clear back to squirrel monkeys you get male dominance hierarchies. Why is this, and why then is it even an issue for us? Why dont we just blindly accept it, I mean there isnt a womens liberation movement among termite societies or, you know, among reindeer herds. So why are we so discomforted by our attitudes toward each other? [38:39] Well, I believe its because we actually created at a certain point in our history a kind of paradise. We actually solved all the problems which now bedevil us twenty to fifteenthousand years ago. And how this happened and half of you I hope are amazed and the other half will groan because youve heard it so many times before what happened is an evolutionary synergy that occurred on the plains of Africa sometime over the last 100,000 years. Its that as the African continent dried up, our remote primate ancestors were forced out of the trees and on to the African grassland, where they were in an environment completely different from the kind of environment that our ancestors had been living in for millions of years. Gone were the fruit filled bowers of the climaxed canopy of the rainforest and instead what there was, was a grassland with very little cover, a very restricted flora and fauna and into that grassland poured these hungry, displaced, dispossessed, formerly fruititarian primates.19 When a species gets under that kind of pressure it must make a choice between extinction or dietary expansion. Many, many species will choose extinction. This is an interesting thing about animal species. Most animal species eat one or two foods that they are very tightly focussed in on. The reason for this if youre not an evolutionary biologist is, its a strategy for avoiding mutation. You see, all plants produce have a tendency to protect themselves from predation by producing toxins, mutagens. Poisons is what were talking about here. So an animal species will evolve a preference for just one or two food sources and then it can hold its exposure to mutagenic agents to a minimum. Now our species, when we moved into that African grassland situation, were plastic enough, malleable enough, that we decided No, by God, were not going to go to extinction because of the absence of papayas in this situation. Were going to test other foods. And we began testing other foods in that environment and that immediately swelled the number of mutant strains in the human population. Now, in this grassland environment the number of new foods to be tested was somewhat limited. And the most spectacular and obvious of the unfamiliar food sources in this environment were the psilocybin mushrooms seen to be growing
fruititarian, a McKenna-ism for frugivorous, a being feeding on fruit.

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in the cow pies of the many different kinds of cattle-like ungulate animals growing up in that environment. And if youve ever been to the tropics and seen the Stropharia cubensis mushroom in its natural habitat you cant miss it. Its the most spectacular thing going on. I mean you walk out into a Columbian pasture after a few days of mist and rain and these mushrooms the size of dinner plates will be scattered across the environment. Now when I was in Kenya in the late sixties I observed baboon troops and their food gathering behaviour and what they were into was running around frantically looking for cow-flops and then flipping them over looking for beetle grubs or carrion beetles. You see they understood that the cow-flop great phrase, eh? the fecal deposit of the ungulate animal was a vector for protein, insect protein. This was a likely place to find carrion beetles, worms and what have you and of course the mushroom. Well when you observe how primates react when theyre testing a food, they are very careful and they are very conscientious. A baboon will take a suspect potential food source, take a leaf put it into their mouth, just hold it there, no chewing, no nothing, put it in their mouth, wait thirty seconds, chew, wait, and then either spit it out or swallow, and if swallow then begin to eat. Well, I believe that this encounter with the psilocybin mushroom and in the course of this workshop maybe in the question and answer period well get to this. But psilocybin has unique properties which set us up for a sudden, enormous evolutionary kick in the pants. And we can talk among ourselves about whether this was just blind coincidence, good old chance and arent we fortunate for it or whether benign extraterrestrials operating from their base on Zeta reticuli were , you know, we can save that for you, we dont have to get rid of it. [45:09] Whether it was those shifty Zeta reticulites or blind chance, whatever the force was, the exposure to psilocybin has three reinforcing consequences that are of tremendous importance for understanding human evolution. And they are as follows: Psilocybin in very low doses, doses so low, that if you had taken this amount you would not feel it or you would be just slightly antsy. In other words, very low doses of psilocybin, actually increase visual acuity, means it improves your vision with this stuff. Well, again, you dont have to be a rocket scientist or an evolutionary biologist to figure out that if there is a plant in the environment and you are a hunting animal, and this plant improves vision youre going to be a better hunting animal if you include this plant in your diet. And this is precisely what happened. Early human or proto-hominid hunters accepted psilocybin into their diet. It made them better hunters. Being a better hunter means being more successful at obtaining food. Being more successful at obtaining food means more of your children reach reproductive age themselves and so you outbreed the non-psilocybin using portion of the population. Simple enough, right? On the next level remember I said this was a three-step process, where each step reinforces the other at slightly higher doses of psilocybin you get whats called CNS-arousal, central nervous system arousal. Well now arousal is just what it sounds like. Its not only restlessness and alertness but its also a kind of horny, diffuse energy. It inclineth ones thoughts to the boudoir 20 this is what Im trying to say here. And so you get what primatologists and anthropologists charmingly describe as more frequent instances of successful copulation. What successful copulation means is again, a factor feeding in to more children of the psilocybin using animals reaching reproductive age themselves. And then finally and thirdly, beyond visual acuity, beyond sexual arousal, is the full-blown psychedelic tremendum, the full-blown religious revelation that goes with the mushroom experience. A revelation of such depth and breadth that we,

20

boudoir, noun chiefly historical or humorous, a womans bedroom or private room. Origin: late 18th cent.: French, literally sulking place.

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twenty thousand years later, with all our epistemic sophistication and our parallel processing computers and all this other malarky are completely in awe of, completely unable to come to terms with. Well, this higher dose of psilocybin was usually experienced in the context of the middle range dose of psilocybin, so it went on in an atmosphere of group religious ecstasy and orgy. I mean thats just how it happened, folks. Orgy was a part of human sexuality before the invention of agriculture. Im absolutely convinced of it. You see, the growth of the human intellect over evolutionary spans of time is a kind of conquest of dimensionality. And the conquest of dimensionality that gave us agriculture unfortunately gave us male dominance and patriarchy. And the reason for this is not far to seek. A new intellectual horizon of cause and effect was being explored. Women, who were the gatherers in the hunter/gathererequation, were realizing for the first time the causal relationship that exists between burying a half eaten meal over here and coming back a year later on your annual nomadic peregrination and discovering food plants growing where you buried your uneaten meal of a year ago. In other words, women came to understand the relationship between the act of planting and the appearance of usable food plants sometime later. At the same time that this was going on, men were making the connection between the fact that the sex act had something to do with the fact that nine months later a woman would bear a child. And in a way this was the beginning of the straight lockstep march into hell. [laughter] Because once men had this notion of male paternity, male paternity, it became more important to know who your children were than it was to participate in the orgiastic group minded bonding that had previously occurred. And once you have the notion of my child, my child, then it moves naturally to my woman, my weapons, my food, my hunting ground, my everything. [51:52] The recognition of male paternity gave permission for the growth of ego, and ego and this was all a continuous thought those of you who doubt it, this was all a continuous thought ego is our problem. And we always had it when we were squirrel monkeys, howler monkeys, proboscis monkeys, and all that. We only lost it in that very brief window of opportunity maybe twenty, maybe thirty, forty thousand years long, when, as we evolved into the grassland we included in our diet essentially a drug, which corrected our primate nature. A drug which suppressed the expression of male dominance. A drug which promoted an orgiastic sexual style that promoted group values. Because you see and this is the point, to my mind, about psychedelics what they do not, you know, my trip or your trip, which we can spend hours trading stories about but when you try and talk about what is the effect of the psychedelic experience not one or two of them, but a hundred thousand of them what generalizations can we make? The generalization that I have found most powerful is: the psychedelic experience dissolves boundaries. Thats what it does. And boundaries are what chain, diminish, define and degrade us. And we are always creating them and we are always struggling with dissolving them. And the ultimate boundary is this belief in the sanctity of the ego versus everything else in the cosmos. And I believe that the ego arose in a context of language, culture, religion, and so forth simply because we evolved in the African grassland and the climate itself underwent changes that eventually placed the mushroom out of reach. And this is why the fall into history. This is what that genesis story that I call historys first drug-bust this is what its about. I mean, isnt it a bit peculiar that the Urmyth of our culture opens with a drug bust? Its the story of a woman right? Those bad women a woman who corrupts her roommate and then they both get kicked out they break the leafs essentially and they both get kicked out. And where they get kicked out of is into history. And I believe that the genesis story definitely told and created at a time when patriarchy was on a roll is a memory of this break with this orgiastic, goddess centered, nomadic, cattle oriented, mushroom using form of human pastoralism. [55:33]

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Now notice in this scenario there are no villains per se. The planet began to get dry and thats what broke up that papaya-oriented paradise in the tree tops where everybody was male dominated and mindless as a tomato, but having a good time, the drying of the African continent broke that party up, created a mixed ecology of forest and grassland into which the primates then evolved this fascinating relationship with the cattle, you see. And much of what I say here is orthodox evolutionary theory. Its just the part about psilocybin that nobody else will touch with a ten foot pole. But, moving out into the grassland, testing foods, accepting psilocybin into the diet and then creating, based on the interruption of the natural natural tendency toward male dominance, it was fixed fifty thousand years ago. A pharmacological intervention on the entire species created then a situation of partnership. The women were the gatherers, the men were the hunters. This had to do with promotion of different body types that was already well established in these primates. I mean, you get this throughout the primates, the large male, barrel chested, the more diminutive female. And the females largely more social than the male. The males hunt and in the proto-hominid situation this was certainly true. And hunting, as you know, if youve ever done it, places a great premium on stoic waiting. Thats the hunters job, is to sit down and keep your mouth shut and watch silently until its time to make your move and then move ruthlessly, without question, you know, with attention. Women had a completely different set of pressures and constraints on them. As gatherers it was very important for women to be able to communicate extraordinarily subtle aspects of the material world to each other. So that a woman needs to be able to say when she comes into camp with an apron full of nuts: I got these near the waterfall by the bush with the small yellow leaves with the waxy flowers and the red berries that has the dry grass underneath it. In other words, for a gatherer there is tremendous premium put on being able to describe your environment. You must be able to communicate because a woman who makes a food find can only bring back to camp as much as she can carry. But if she can communicate to her sisters what is going on, then no problem. So language, I believe, largely evolved as a prerogative of women and this stoicism and ability to tolerate uncomfortable conditions was evolved by men. [59:48] All of this, I think, would have been fine, it could have gone on for millions of years in this climaxed situation. The orgies were lunar, meaning they probably occurred every two weeks or at most every 28 days. That means every twenty eight days every member of this society was completely dissolving any psychic structures that may have arisen in the previous twenty eight days and then everybody was just jumping on each others bones in a big heap. And you can imagine the boundary dissolving impact that something like that would have. Why then, if it was so wonderful, didnt we just stick with it? Why the descent into, you know, the hell of Pee-wee Herman 21 and Richard Nixon and all of this stuff? Well, the same culprit that created that happy story destroyed that happy scenario. And that is the continued drying up of the planet. And thats what we get in that genesis story. Remember the end of the genesis story, it says And God set an angel at the eastern gate of Eden with a flaming sword so that Adam and his children could not find their way back into paradise. Thats the memory of the Saharan sun, scorching off the African veld and forcing those mushroom using pasturalists to settle in the Nile valley and set up permanent settlements and begin thinking about kingship, large scale agricultural projects and so forth and so on. [1:01:40]

21

Pee-wee Herman is a comic fictional character created and portrayed by American comedian Paul Reubens. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pee-wee_Herman

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And what happened it was not as simple as that may have made it seem, you see, this is really the theme of this book that I wrote for Bantam 22 is the theme that cultures wear drugs like clothing and theyre never aware of it. They just feel naked without their particular drug. And the clothing may differ. You know, one culture feels fully dressed in penis sheaths and war paint, another culture isnt fully dressed unless the gown is by Dior. So there are different styles of clothing and there are different styles of mental clothing in the form of drugs. And these drugs promote different kinds of cultural values. And what happened in this African situation was a tragedy that in a way we have seen enacted in microcosm in our own society. It was that at a certain point everything was perfect: the monthly orgies, the suppression of ego, the group values. The recent invention of language was making food gathering easy for women. The abundant game was making hunting easy for men, so forth and so on. But this drying of the African continent didnt halt there. It continued and pretty soon there were problems. Less game, less to be gathered, and most important for my theory fewer mushrooms. And when there became fewer mushrooms, then there were two possibilities. You could have your mushroom orgies less frequently, or you could create some kind of technology for preserving the mushrooms so that when you found a lot of them you could save some of them for dry spells, literally, for dry spells. Now, the problem with this strategy is that in a world without refrigeration, the strategy which aboriginal people in Australia in the Amazon basin, the strategy which aboriginal people tend toward when they want to preserve some delicate food is, they invariably go for honey, honey. This is why some of you may know that the Romans ate hummingbirds tongues pickled in honey. It isnt because honey is the preferred medium for pickeling hummingbirds tongues it is because thats a way for preserving delicate food. The problem with honey is, honey itself can ferment into a psychoactive compound. Honey changes into mead. Mead is a form of crude alcohol. The impact on a goddess worshipping, orgiastic, nonhierarchical, non-male dominant culture of switching over to the use of alcohol is absolutely devastating. In the same way that I told you what psilocybin did improves visual acuity, promotes sexual activity, delivers a religious experience we can talk about what alcohol does. It lowers sensitivity to social cueing, at the same time that it gives an empowered sense of ego. In other words, it makes you into a jerk. [laughter] It gives you the courage to say and do what, if you are a decent person, you would otherwise never say and never do. It turns each one of us into a Clarence Thomas. This is not whats needed. [mixed reaction of audience] Boo , yes , no , who knows , who is Clarence Thomas, anyway? [laughter]. And time and time again in history these kinds of synergies have been enacted. Well, I wan to say more about it. That isnt the whole story. That could be the whole story. I mean there is enough in it to be the whole story. In other words, if its true that the mushroom, you know, suppresses male dominance, if it in fact promotes communal values and so forth, and what a wonderful thing it must be, and we can leave it there. But thats only a small part of the story. The real story is, what is so wonderful about it? Since its a mental experience, what is so wonderful about it that it could halt the human tendency to devolve into these counterproductive forms and lifestyles? Well, what is so great about it is, that it is nothing less than half of the intellectual universe. It is what I call the connection to the Gaian Mind. In other words, to this point what Ive said could be imputed to be just talk about a superb psychedelic drug. And so theyre saying, Oh well, so this guy advocates the use of a superb psychedelic drug. It seems reasonable or unreasonable depending on where you went to church but its not that paradigm challenging. But what is paradigm challenging is the content of the experience.

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T. McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, 1992, Bantam.

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The content of the experience is completely mind boggling, completely befuddling. I dont know what were gonna do with the content of the experience. Because fully gotten out and fully discussed and fully realized, its not going to leave one brick upon another in the cheerfully nave edifice that our half-baked civilization has erected as universal truth. Science is not going to be able to survive the encounter with the psychedelic experience. Because it is not an encounter with the Freudian, you know, the repressed memories of your miserable and battered childhood or whatever issue you went through, and it isnt even an encounter with the miserable memories of the battered childhood of the human species, that we all went through la Carl Jung. That is all there. But thats in the hallway where you hang your hat, in the antechamber where they take your coat. The main event, folks, doesnt even have anything to do with the psychology of human beings. The main event is another dimension. A dimension so bizarre, so titanically peculiar, so strange, so unanticipated by our language, our history, our literature, that it is literally like the discovery of another world. [1:09:50] And theres life in that world. Now a funny thing about discovering new worlds is that you usually, when you get the new world all mapped out, you usually discover that there is somebody living there. And for them its not the new world at all. And, you know, you havent discovered anything, youve just shown up in the middle of their scene with a distorted rap sort of like Christopher Columbus. And this is what we find with the psychedelics. And this is why shamanism becomes, to my mind, the bridge to understanding what this archaic revival is all about. The shamanic hallucinogens are the meat of the thing, the pith essence, the center of the mandala. But the bridge into that is the effects that these things have, the content, the experiences that we can language and tell each other about. And what we are discovering through shamanism, through looking at it not through the condescending eyes of the white man, who is just impressed by the incredibly droll quaintness of whatever these brown-skinned people have dreamed up not that but through a realization that we are sick and no doctor can cure us because were not that kind of sick. Its soul-sickness. I mean it has to be soul-sickness. When you see stuff like Chernobyl,23 or the Kuwaiti oil fields or the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington,24 when you realize what this really means, then you realize, you know, this is a mad species, this is a terminally depraved species. And what is required is a return to a model that can heal. And this is what shamanism has always been about. And we have not recognized it, because the part of the human being which shamanism addresses, which is the soul and the spirit we have a five hundred year old tradition that denies that there are such things. So for us its absurd shamanism. It is, you know, painted rattles, guys dancing around in the middle of the night, blowing perfumed water around and

Direct casualties 1989-2004: > 950,000. Ninehundredfiftythousand and counting. See: Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, and Alexey V. Nesterenko. Consulting Editor Janette D. Sherman-Nevinger. Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, Annals of The New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 1181, December 2009; http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Annals/Detail.aspx? cid=f3f3bd16-51ba-4d7b-a086-753f44b3bfc1 24 The Hanford Site is a mostly decommissioned nuclear production complex on the Columbia River in the U.S. state of Washington, operated by the United States federal government. Established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project in the town of Hanford in south-central Washington, the site was home to the B Reactor, the first fullscale plutonium production reactor in the world. Plutonium manufactured at the site was used in the first nuclear bomb, tested at the Trinity site, and in Fat Man, the bomb detonated over Nagasaki, Japan. The Hanford site represents two-thirds of the nations high-level radioactive waste by volume. Today, Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States and is the focus of the nations largest environmental cleanup. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
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smoking too much tobacco. Thats shamanism for us, because we cannot see with the eyes that understand. When we do, what we realize is, that half of our mind has been taken away from us. That yes, the human body protrudes into profane space as a 120 to 350 pounds of meat somewhere in the universe. But that isnt the domain of humanness. The true domain of humanness is inclusive of that and much, much more. Because the true domain of humanness is a domain that honors the mind as self and as landscape. I mean, you are a creature loose in a landscape of meaning and you are that landscape of meaning. And by loosing contact with this we have become essentially pathological, very needy. This is a typical pattern in a person with an abused childhood. They become very, very needy, very thing-oriented, very security conscious, very anxious. This is a picture of us and our psychology. And we are so deep in to the historical nightmare that we cant ever remember any other way of doing business. We know were messed up, we know were unhappy but whats to be done, you know? I mean we have a million minor fixes and people peddling all of these things I mean, youve just been through the aisles, you know what Im talking about. But somehow salvation itself becomes an impediment to salvation. I mean, once you see five hundred forms of salvation being sold at prices you cant afford, the very notion of salvation becomes obscene, you know. It becomes one more layer in the obscene layering that takes meaning out of life and disempowers us and turns us into a subscription customer. That seems to be how we always are being forced to end up. [1:15:30] Well, the only way out of this, I think, is to it takes courage, because you have to turn your back on your culture in the most profound sense there is cause there are many ways to turn your back on your culture. I mean if everyones wearing grey, you can wear green. Thats one way to turn your back on a culture. But another way is to break its laws. Now thats a little more serious and, you know, brings in big philosophical issues. But in fact the culture is an enormous arrow pointing Go this way! And you know what lies that way? Impoverishment, madness, degradation and death. Thats where the culture is pointing. You can see it. You can see it, just look where were headed. If everyone on earth aspires to the kind of lifestyle that you people can enjoy by virtue of having payed the money to being at a scene like this, there isnt enough glass, metal and plastic in the planet to make that many Celicas and Jaguars and Bluebirds and Snowbirds and all the rest of this crap. So, what is needed is an anwakening. Now, I mentioned earlier in this talk that in the 50s before they interfered with LSD-research they were curing chronic alcoholism with a single five hundred gamma dose of LSD. Well now for heavens sake, nobody is suggesting that LSD is a cure for alcoholism. That, to me, is absurd. Its not a cure for alcoholism. Its a cure for stupidity. [laughter] And a person who is killing themselves by drinking themselves to death takes 500 mics of LSD and says: What a stupid person I am. Im killing myself. And so then they look at their behaviour and they cease that behaviour. [1:17:55]

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And this is what has to be done on a societal scale. And it is not as difficult as we may whish to be assured by the establishment. The whole falderal and whoop-dedoo about the 1960s was, that the cryptofascist bullshit agenda was damn near overthrown by a bunch of nineteen and twenty year olds on campusses scattered around the hightech world. The male dominant agenda is so fragile that any competitor is felt as a deadly foe. And the fact that these ideas will not die, in spite of the fact that, you know, theyve raised the price of an ounce of weed from 15 dollars to 500 dollars, theyve made the pinch for growing weed from a slap on the wrist to loose everything you ever owened or dreamed of owning. And they cannot push it into extinction. Its because its so much older than their con-game.25 Theve invented their con-game post-Sphinx or something and were talking about a reality that reaches back 15, 25, 30 thousand years. And its a reality so far Ive only spoken I keep trying to get at the subject but I wont let myself for some reason so far Ive spoken of it as boundry dissolving, promoting group sexuality, this and that and the other thing, but those are like generalizations. What is really interesting about the psychedelic experience is, it shows you a mental universe that you not only never suspected existed but that you could not have suspected existed. I dont think theres another way to it. I mean, Im not ready to categorically say theres no other way to it and occasionally, especially at gatherings like this people grab me and assure me there are other ways to it. And they say: You know, if you just I want you to meet Babaji. Hes as good as psilocybin. Oh really? I want to meet this man. [laughter] Because, because, I mean, I let me say a little bit more about this. I would like to believe that in principle you could get to theese places on the natch.26 Only in principle, however, because if some people say, Well you know, these things you describe on DMT and psilocybin, I can show you how to do that naturally. No thank you, are you kidding? Thank God I have the drug as a kind of a marker so that I know when Im getting close to that stuff. If I woke up one morning in that place and I couldnt tell myself Id taken mushrooms, I would define myself as seriously discombobulated 27 and wait to see what happens, you know. And people say: Well dont you think you ought to be able to do it by yourself? And I love this question, because the answer is: you cant do it by yourself. Thats the entire message of the last ten thousand years of human history. The self is insufficient. The ego will not suffice. The only way youre ever going to get anywhere is, you must humble yourself to the point where you admit that you cant do it unless you have help from someone whos idea of home is a cow flop. [laughter] If youre willing to humble yourself to that degree, then maybe we can get somewhere. [1:22:27] The content of the psychedelic experience is, I believe relating to that is the sum total of our humanness. And I think, based on experience, that there is a certain amount of leakage from the future backward into the past. And that many of the phenomena that are being interpreted as past lives, and reincarnation, and channeling, and regression this, and clairvoyant that, all this has to do with the misunderstanding about how causality actually works. That all of the impressions upon which people are building these models channeling, and spirit guides,

A confidence trick is an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence. A confidence artist is an individual working alone or in concert with others who exploits characteristics of the human psyche such as dishonesty and honesty, vanity, compassion, credulity, irresponsibility, naivety and greed. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con_game 26 on the natch = free of drugs; natural and straight. Ex.: I have been on the natch for almost a year. 27 discombobulate, verb [ trans. ] humorous, disconcert or confuse (someone): this attitude totally discombobulated Bruce | [as adj. ] ( discombobulated) he is looking a little pained and discombobulated. Origin: mid 19th cent.: probably based on discompose or discomfit.
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and reincarnation and so forth the material upon which these models are being built is real but the models that are being built are tremendous compressions of the reality of the situation. I mean, when someone tells me that they experienced a past life regression and that they were a butcher in 13th century Florence, I always think to myself: but you were a butcher in 13th century everywhere, and you were a butcher in 14th century everywhere. I mean, once the connection is opened, the connection is not particular. The connection is general. It is, all reality is who you are. All reality is where you are and where youve been and where you will be. And two things, two things are operating in the hidden dimension of the human mind. One of them is what I call the Gaian Mind. And this is being imaged in this society as the rebirth of a kind of Goddess. People are realizing on different levels and at different levels of sophistication that the energy of being can be imaged as a female entelechy.28 An enclosing, nurturing, caring, forgiving kind of entelechy. And this is what psychedelic shamanism has always been about. Its about a connection to the Gaian Mind. And this gives you, obviously, a tremendous sense of being embedded in a larger coherency than merely the coherency of your own small life. And thats very empowering. But its not the general sense of things that this Gaian Mind imparts that is really to me the interesting part. Its that the Gaian Mind is a real mind. It has information. It can tell you things of the most specific and personally important sort. This is it tells you where the game has gone, it tells you who poisoned the well, it tells you who raped so and so, it tells you why person X is ill and unable to get well. In other words the Gaian Mind is the database that all shamans seek to connect to in the act of curing. In the act of functioning as doctors for their society they get a connection to the Gaian Mind. And again, at this point, I feel like I have to remind you I come to this as a skeptic, as a sneerer. I mean, I have no time for this stuff unless its real. It happens to be real. You have to take psilocybin, as far as I can tell, to encounter it, at least if you have the kind of lumpen neurophysiology that I have. I mean, Ive never been with the etheric crowd, you know. But this Gaian empowerment is what allowed these societies to live without technology, without modern medicine, without remote sensing devices, without any of the appurtenances of technology that we take for granted. And we have lost this connection. We cant even imagine it. If someone were to begin talking about how the earth was speaking to them, and giving them messages about how to live, you instinctively consense, this is something to be very, very careful with. You give that rap to the wrong person and thell drop a net over you and youll find yourself stuffing envelopes for a convalescent home or something. Okay, so thats part of it. The Gaian Mind and it is this feminine, nurturing, enfolding thing. Its the mind of nature itself. It is really our own mind, but extending then away from this possessive notion of our mind back into the general concept of mind itself. [1:28:55] And then the other pole or the other motif encountered in this situation is trickier to envision. I call it The Transcendental Object at the End of Time. This, if we were, you know, fanatically symmetrical model makers then we would assign a kind of masculin value to this but Im not particularly into that. I just see it as The Transcendental Object at the End of Time. But what it is, is, its a kind

28

Entelechy, in Greek entelcheia, was coined by Aristotle and transliterated in Latin as entelechia. According to Sachs (1995, p. 245): Aristotle invents the word by combining entels (complete, full-grown) with echein (= hexis, to be a certain way by the continuing effort of holding on in that condition), while at the same time punning on endelecheia (persistence) by inserting telos (completion). This is a three-ring circus of a word, at the heart of everything in Aristotles thinking, including the definition of motion. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiality_and_actuality

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of attractor. And were not accustomed to thinking of the historical situation as being under the influence of an attractor. We inherit our belief that history is being pushed rather then pulled. We inherit this idea from the 19th century. When the theory of evolution was elaborated these 19th century British atheists who were creating the theory of evolution were so horrified by the power of deism meaning the belief in God per se that they constructed a theory of evolution where everything is pushed from behind. In Darwinian evolution there is no purpose. A good Darwinist never lets the word purpose cross his lips. A good Darwinist knows that things just happen randomly and then natural selection makes its selection and then you get whatever you get. And this is understandable in the intellectual atmosphere of the 19th century that they would want to get away from that. The problem is we have matured now beyond this simple atheism of the 19th century and it is now very reasonable, sanctioned by mathematics and dynamics and so forth and so on, it is now very reasonable to speak of an attractor. And this is a Im also a little nervous to talk about this, because part of what I do is I popularize. I tell you things which you should know yourself or which you could know yourself if you would but go to a decent medical library and spend the time to look up all this botanical and pharmacological data. So Im like a clearing house. But then theres another thing which I do, which Im a little more nervous and touchy about, which is, I tell you what I think and its just what I think. It has exactly that much weight behind it, which is like zip, you know. I mean, you dont have to believe this. Why should you? But based on 25 years of fiddling with this stuff and then doing a lot of reading and head scratching Ive come to the conclusion that there is a Transcendental Object ahead of us in time. You can call it God, you can call it Jesus, you can call it Her, you can call it flying saucers from Zeta reticuli, or the Pleiades I wanna get all factions here or Zubenelgenubi, my favourite stellar origin point.29 But whatever you call it, its an attractor. It lies ahead of us in the future and all of human history is being channelled toward it, pulled toward it. And I see the entire history of the universe as a history of a journey across a landscape of energy and matter toward union with this Transcendental Object. And I have a theory of history. Not the mathematical one dont bolt for the door, no, this will be a cocktail party version of the theory of history. I have a theory of history which is, the universe is a novelty producing and conserving engine of some sort. Thats what were inside folks, a novelty making machine. Now what do I mean by novelty? People mean, say, you mean like little plastic bugs and puzzles inside plastic capsules. Is that what you mean by novelty? No, you idiot, of course not. [laughter]. By novelty I mean something that has never been seen before, something unique, the new connection. I always think of the symbolist poet Lautramont,30 who said: I am fascinated by the kind of beauty that arises when a bicycle meets a sowing machine on an operating table. Now thats novelty, folks, cause you just dont get that every day. So, the universe is a novelty producing engine. It not only produces novelty, but it then preservers it and builds upon it. So, if we now look at the story which science tells us and its an interesting story by the way if you think I say things which are highly unlikely notice that I do not ask you to believe that the universe sprang from a point of matter smaller than a proton in a single instant. This is the position of science. This is the limit case for credibility.

Zubenelgenubi is Alpha Librae; The names of Libras two brightest stars are derived from Arabic. Zubenelgenubi means the Southern Claw (of the Scorpion) and Zubeneschamali means the the Northern Claw. see: http://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/zubenelgenubi-alpha-star-of-libra-the-scales, and http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap040514.html. 30 Comte de Lautramont (4 April 1846 24 November 1870), an Uruguayan-born French poet. His only works, Les Chants de Maldoror and Posies, had a major influence on modern literature, particularly on the Surrealists and the Situationists. He died at age 24. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lautramont
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I mean if you can believe that what in the world would you balk at for cryin out loud? I mean, that is the limit case for credibility. [1:35:36] So, science tells us that the universe sprang from nothing in a single instant and that it was very hot very hot! So there were no molecules such as you and I are made out of, there were no atoms such as lead and gold and water are made out of. There was only a pure plasma of electrons. That was all. And the physics of that universe were incredibly simple. There were the pure plasma physics unhindered by any other fields of any sort. Well, the universe then cooled and as it cooled, lo and behold, at a certain point, electrons were able to fall into stable orbits around atomic nuclei. And at that point, atomic systems formed and a whole new kind of chemistry comes into being. Further cooling, millions of years pass. Then we get the carbon molecule, cooked out of new stars. It has a six valence structure,31 so that we get organic molecules. Well then, quickly, we get long chain polymers. Very quickly then long chain polymers that can copy themselves. And that becomes primitive life. And at that point you then get complex life. And then sexuality, meaning gene mixing, as opposed to the previous thing which was vegetative, like making cuttings from plants. Well, do you see whats happening? At each successive stage the previous level of complexity is not only retained but used to build upon toward the next level of complexity. Well, the wonderful thing about this cosmology is, that instead of human beings being like mute witnesses to the grandeur of Jehovas creation or some kind of trip like that, instead you discover, Aha!, human beings are important. We are more novel than anything else in nature. And we 20th century human beings are more novel, more interconnected, more complex and in possession of more and different kinds of knowledge than most notice most of people who preceeded us. So this growing toward complexity seems to be what the universe is all about. Now, it doesnt go on for hundreds of millions of years into the future. Because, as you can see, each successive stage has proceded more quickly than the stage befor it. So now we are in, what I call, the short epochs. We are in periods of time where more change goes on in a ten year period than went on in a million year period near the birth of the universe. We are living in a complex, novel end of things. And that complexity and that novelty which we experience as a tremendous stress in our lives ushers into The Transcendental Object at the End of Time not that far in the future. And we, as psychedelic people, have an obligation upon ourselves, to anticipate and to help realize this future. It is upon us, every Messiah, every religious ontology, every manager of every booth at this exhibit is reflecting a distorted scintilla of the spiritual reality of The Transcendental Object at the End of Time. Every one of us is a particularized and distorted image of this Transcendental Object, into which we are being dissolved, into which global culture is being dissolved. So, uh , ha! well, so what! [laughter]. So we can cut into this cycle at any point. We can become aware of it. We can become part of it. We can deny it. There is no loss in the circuit. There is no blame. Becoming then what psychedelic means is, it means claiming this dimension as your own. You know, Plato 32

The carbon atom has the atomic number 6 and a tertravalent (4-valence) structure. It has 2 electrons in the lower energy K-orbital and 4 electrons in the L-orbital, the next higher energy level, which are its 4 valence electrons (1s2 2s2 2p2). In total 6 electrons and a symmetrical arrangement of 6 protons and 6 neutrons in its nucleus. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon 32 Plato (424/423 BC 348/347 BC), was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato
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said: Time is the moving image of eternity. That moving image of eternity can be beheld in the silent darkness of the mind on 5 grams of psilocybin.33 And if you think the universe is mundane, if you think there are no more frontiers to cross, no more adventures to be head, I am telling you, you can turn your living room into the bridge of Magellans ship on a long saturday evening with 5 grams of psilocybin in silent darkness. We are living in the most empowering age in human history because all of the energy of the ancestors not only the human ancestors, but our animal, our primate ancestors all of that energy pours into, is focussed into this moment. We are transition generation. We have one foot in matter and one foot in hyperspace. And we can redeem the trust of thousands of years. All of the horror of history can be redeemed, if we dont drop the ball. Every pogrom, every instance of racial, sexual or minority persecution can be redeemed if we give the human adventure meaning. And we give it meaning by discovering the totality within ourselves and then exemplifying it for each other. And this dissolves boundries, empowers the weak, enlightens the strong and brings hope to all. And it can only be done, if we accept the gifts which nature has offered us. Thank you very, very much. [applause]

33

meaning 5 grams of dried mushroom, which could yield approximately 20-30 mg of psilocybin.

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