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February 1994

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Language About the Unspeakable

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February 1994

Maui, Hawaii

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Global Perspectives and Psychedelic Poetics

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Global perspectives and psychedelic poetics is what it says in the, uh, in the propaganda, which I assume is simply permission to rave about whatever comes to mind.


Global perspectives... I guess what, uh, I could say about this from a psychedelic perspective, the thing that is, uh, different for psychedelic people, looking at the global dilemma that we’re in and that increases, that continues to deepen around us, is that it’s, uh. From my point of view permission to hope rather than despair, because I think that, uh, processes, institutions that for a thousand years or more have been building toward some kind of symmetry-break, some kind of definitive self-revealing moment that we now are, uh, turning final as pilots say. We’re now deeply embedded in the pattern, we can see enough of what’s ahead of us to begin to actually feel the texture of the end of human history. It’s no longer an abstraction. Even the straight people who own the world with their, uh, long-term and short-term projections; looking at population growth, spread of greenhouse gases, disappearance of the ozone hole, uh, rising third world expectations so forth and


hole, uh, rising third world expectations so forth and so on. When you propagate all these trends, it seems very clear that business as usual is no longer an option. Nobody’s talking about that. So, we’re either in some kind of final fatal meltdown of the values of western civilization, revealed now after a thousand or two thousand year run to essentially be bankrupt. Or, we’re going to transform ourselves unrecognizably. There really isn’t any middle ground. The most radical and least likely, uh, future of all, it seems to me, is the future in which we continue just to stumble forward, as we have been since the industrial revolution. That’s no longer an option. And, so then the question becomes sort of a gnostic conundrum. Yea-, is this the final act of some kind of great cosmic tragedy in which intelligence rises out of the slim, is shown to be inadequate and sinks back into the slime, or is this, uh, you know, a


slime, or is this, uh, you know, a tale of, uh, difficulty overcome and heroism won. And are we going to be able to shed the monkey nature, and shed the ego and actually move up to some kind of shining ideal. Eh, you know it’s, uh, if you think of us as the descendants of the angels this is a pretty tacky circumstance we’ve come to rest in. On the other hand if you think of us as the descendants of shit-hurling apes screeching through the treetops, then it’s pretty amazing, [audience laughs], what has been accomplished here. Uhm, we-eh, you know one of the dilemmas that I feel very strongly, and I’m just sort of talking off the top of my head here, because whenever a crowd is small enough I sort of feel like I’m in my own living room, we don’t have to have the pretense of knowing-lecturer and, uh, you know eager-to-be-educated-audience. Uhm, the real,


know eager-to-be-educated-audience. Uhm, the real, the real challenge, I think, is trying to decide what is baggage, and what is ballast that’s going to have to be dumped. Can the future be a celebration of humanness as we have known it? Meaning in the animal body, with all its, uh, uh, you know, joys and pains, with all its frailty and, uh, potential for ecstasy. Or, is what we call human nature somehow transcendental and did we only rest for a moment in the monkey body as once the cutting of evolution must have rested in the great reptiles and at some earlier phase in history rested in the fish and so on. Is consciousness something uniquely human, and must we keep the animal body with us? Is our destiny to become gardener/caretakers of a revivified earth or is the earth like a placenta of some sort, that we have literally sucked all the nutrition and potential out of, because we’re on our way


and potential out of, because we’re on our way to some grander, higher domain of being? I don’t have the answer to these kinds of questions. I feel it very poignantly. It’s very poignantly focused in the psychedelic - in the experience of psychedelic plants and psychedelic shamanism, because, e-, you know, as any of you who have followed my ideas on this know, I’ve spent a lot of time in the Amazon basin with human populations that seem to have struck some kind of dynamic balance with the earth. And yet the paradox of that dynamic balance is that when you take the sacraments, the hallucinogenic plants of these people, you’re propelled into a worlds of, uh, science-fiction-like strangeness. Transcendental dimensions of titanic implication. And then, at least I personally have come to the realization that this is how those cultures have chosen to deal with the faustian impulse in human beings. It’s been somehow confined in the domain of the imagination.


somehow confined in the domain of the imagination. We, meaning we who trace our, uh, our ancestry back to Europe are part of a different style. A different strain of human being, if you will. We are the idea-excreters. Not ca- not, uh, satisfied to have a canoe, a net, five fish hooks and, uh, a bowl. But instead we take matter, we, western civilization, western technology, and we impress upon matter ideas. Millions of ideas; cities like Manhattan, uh, high performance weaponry, uh, enormous works of art. All of this is is a kind of impulse, very strong in western human beings to bring the ideas out of the domain of mind and to somehow solidify them in matter. Permanence, the cult of the west is permanence. Ye-, I always feel that when you can find the obsessive center of a society you probably have put your finger on its, uh, on its central neurosis as well. I remember when I spent time in India; India


I remember when I spent time in India; India is rife with talk of shakti. Shakti is energy, conceived of in various ways; it can be sexual energy, or it can actually be electricity flowing through wires is called shakti. And I realized being in India that the Indian obsession with shakti was a consequence of there not being any, that this was a society where energy had become the hardest commodity to encounter. And I think in the West permanence is the thing - is our great bugaboo, because we, uh, are born into the realization that everything is slipping through our fingers at the very moment that it comes into existence. The hardest psychedelic truth to assimilate, and you don’t have to take psychedelics to assimilate this, if you just live this will be hammered in on you again and again, and it’s not , uh. Well, uh, it’s a cause for exaltation, it’s a cause for despair, it’s that nothing lasts. Nothing


cause for despair, it’s that nothing lasts. Nothing lasts. You know, not your fortune, not your misfortune, not your lovers, your enemies, your children. Ultimately, not even your own life and body. Everything fades. And so the western response to this is the attempt to create something permanent; civilizations, enduring ideas, enduring institutions. All this is doomed to failure. And, I see this western, uh, obsession with the cult of permanence as a consequence of the western obsession with ego. Ego, to my mind, is the very thing, that if you had to, somehow, meld each problem into the next problem to try and reduce all problems to one, what you would eventually come to is the realization that ego is what is destroying us. Our inability to displace our loyalty away from the unique locus of space and time represented by our own bodies. You know, community, communalism, these are the things that we fear, that we repress, and that we at the same time struggle


repress, and that we at the same time struggle to realize. I mean, the collapse of communism on one level was the collapse of a repressive nightmarish paranoid social system, but the dream which lay behind that was a dream of community, of unity, of sisterhood and brotherhood. And the great concern now is that with the collapse even the, uh, a pretense of that position, that we are further fragmented, further atomized into individual competing microbes of greed and need, and this is precisely the attitude which will push us, uh, ever closer to species-extinction and to global ruin. Well, when you look at thousands and thousands of psychedelic experiences, you, to my mind what you come away with is the notion that, you know, no matter who you are; Amazonian shaman, Hasidic rabbi, n-n-nuclear physicist, the psychedelic will dissolve boundaries. It will dissolve your boundaries, and force you to realize the commonality of the flesh. You


to realize the commonality of the flesh. You know, it’s, a-, a startling thing to realize that what you represent is nothing more than a point of view, and that we each are such a point of view triangulating perception through what is essentially simply a nexus of our past history. We always are talking about “the past”, and “the future”, but it’s worth noticing that we all managed to get here this morning, this place, this time, and not one of us has the same past as any other of us. This moment, like any moment, is not a confluence of the past, it is a confluence of many pasts, and these many pasts come into a nexus of connection, and then move on to become many, many futures.


The reason I’m interested in the psychedelic potential, and willing to speak about it, is because I think that our, the myth of our separateness, which was the glory of our institutional accomplishments; parliamentary democracy, individual rights, uh, uh, liberation of various classes, and so forth, has now turned somewhat sour. There has got to be something more to it, than just turning people loose to loot the planet so that everyone can pile up more and more up stuff. Stuff which doesn’t satisfy anyway. And, I think, n-, in talking about the future what we somehow have to do is dematerialize the future, and there are several ways or many ways to do this. Uh, people have preached voluntary simplicity, and some people are into this, uh, however it’s hypocritical to preach this in the third world to people who have nothing. You know, we have everything so we have seen the fallacy of condominiums and Mercedes so then we preach this in


and Mercedes so then we preach this in Bangladesh. Th-this is a bit disingenuous. Uh, the dematerializing of culture, uh, somehow, you see, what we have to recognize in the wake of the collapse of communism is that capitalism as well is a system with a fatal flaw that is set against human nature. Capitalism assumes an endlessly exploitable frontier of resources. This we have got not. So, capitalism is now essentially, unless it can be radically retooled an anti-human philosophy, it’s literally chewing up the ground we’re standing on. But there’s nothing in the, uh, the basic notion of capitalism that says we have to be thing-dealers. This is simply the style of capitalism that we have fallen into. Somehow we have to dematerialize existence, and I don’t know whether that means virtual reality, some of you have heard me say that my vision of a perfect future is, you know, 25% of the world population, living in ecological balance, living in an apparently


living in ecological balance, living in an apparently primitive, naked, aboriginal state, but when you step into the minds of those people and look behind their closed eyelids there are menus hanging in bio-tele-electronic space. Culture, you see, can be downloaded into a chip, installed behind the eyelids, so that is, you know, freely commandable, as an experience in the imagination. But, if we insist on continually extracting resources from the earth and fashioning our dreams out of the stuff of earth, then our dreams are destined to turn to nightmare. It can’t be any other way. So that’s one thing about the future, the future needs to be dematerialized. Uh, u-, and then, you know, since people always accuse me of being a hairbrained dreamer, uh, I’ve tried to come up with something approaching a practical suggestion, and I, I took this need to the feet of the mushroom-gods, a-being, having been challenged by somebody at a talk like


having been challenged by somebody at a talk like this, they said, “Well, you’re always saying these mushrooms speak, why don’t you ask them, uh, uh, how to save the world?”, and I thought this was kind of disingenuous, but, uh, the next time I had the telephone to hyperspace in my hot hand I did make the inquiry. And, uh, the suggestion which came back I think is at least food for thought. The suggestion was, “You wanna save the world? You wanna overcome male-dominance, the momentum of consumerism, so forth and so on? Uh, every woman should bear only one natural child”. This is an interesting idea, whether you take it seriously as program or not. If every woman were to commit herself to bearing only natural child, the population of the earth would fall by 50% in 40 years without war, or famine, or epidemic disease. If this program were continued for another 40 years the population would fall by half again. This means in 80


population would fall by half again. This means in 80 years the population of the planet could be reduced 75%. Why have we not heard anything about this? Even for it to be denounced, I’m not saying it has to be embraced, but why is it a tiny fanatical minority advocating this? I think it’s because, uh, it’s inconceivable in this society to try and practice capitalism in a situation of retreating demographics. It also would be, a s-, a solution which would place enormous power in the hands of women. Women are often heard to complain about their powerlessness, yet here is a plan which requires very little input from white guys. Uh, I took this idea to demographers and said, “What about it? This seems so simple, most people think there are no solutions, here’s a very simple solution, what about it?”, and they said, “Yes, well, it’s more startling than you realize, because women in upper class high-tech western society, uh, a woman, say, on the


western society, uh, a woman, say, on the upper east side of Manhattan, or Malibu, or the sea cliffed district of San Francisco. A child born to that woman will have eight hundred to a thousand times more negative impact on the earth than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh. If you were to go to Bangladesh and meet a woman in the back streets of Dhaka who told you that her ambition in life was to have nine hundred children you’d think you were dealing with some kind of sociopath, a kind of, [audience laughter], a kind of typhoid Mary of the demographic scene. And yet, every child born into moderately well off yuppie families in high-tech societies is in that position. We prefer to not to think of it, this way. I think it’s very interesting that one could make a case to, uh, women in western societies, you could say, “How would you like vastly increased leisure time. How would you like increased disposable


leisure time. How would you like increased disposable income? And how would you like to, uh, take upon yourself a truly heroic social role?” This is what’s being offered with this suggestion to limit reproduction to one natural child. No more heroic, no more politically correct can be taken. And, interestingly, the women you want to convince of this position are the women you are most likely to be able to convince; educated, white, uh, women, with, uh, above average incomes. So that’s a very practical suggestion. More likely to be implemented than my dream of, uh, lunar inoculations with psilocybin for the entire population, [audience laughs], to, uh, dissolve the calcareous ego formations that have sprung up in the bloodstreams since the last full moon. Which I also think would be, uh, a fine idea.


You see, boundary dissolution is what is needed here. Boundary dissolution of all type, our separateness is an illusion. There is a kind of human bedrock. That’s why I think that the world sweep toward democracy is far more than simply a political trend. Democracy is not exactly a style of government per se. Or, exclusively, democracy is something, is, a biological institution of some sort. Because, there is no theory, there is no abstraction, there is no ideology. I mean democracy is as close as you can get, uh, to anarchy, and still have any theory of organization at all. You know, I wrote a book, which is around and about, called “The Archaic Revival”, and that’s why my belief in the archaic revival is what brings me out to events like this. I mean I think the term new-age and some of these other terms are pretty trivializing and basically designed by the mavens of marketing to draw you in. uh. But there is an


to draw you in. uh. But there is an impulse throughout the 20th century, in freudianism, in abstract expressionism, in dada, psychotherapy, sexual permissiveness, psychedelic experimentation, jazz, rock’n’roll. These are all facets of an impulse toward the archaic, toward the primitive, the non-straight, the anti-bowtie, uh, the wish to blow up the stayed world created by the fine ladies and gentlemen of the 19th century with their christer-ethics and their long dresses and all of that business. There is an impulse toward the archaic. This is very healthy. This is what happens when a society seeks to revivify itself. When the medieval world exploded in the face of the Italian city states and the new classes that were emerging, uh, they. It reinvented classicism. It was actually the second time classicism had been rediscovered, it was also trotted out by the Arabs in the 9th century when they needed a stabilizing metaphor for the


when they needed a stabilizing metaphor for the Ummayad caliphate and those civilizations. Now, in the 20th century, we can’t go back to ancient Greece and Rome, or Babylon, a-and in a sense the new age, I think, is an effort to go back to a kind of, uh, Minoan/Egyptian world, which never existed except perhaps in the minds of certain menopausal theosophists. [Audience laughs] But, but the impulse is, uh, the impulse is laudable, however screwy the results. But I think we have to reach further back, that all of history is what our earth text, the bible, tells us it is. It’s a confusion, a kind of punishment, a wandering in the wilderness, and that where we really want to be is naked, singing in the rainforest, stoned, and exalted. Uh, one with the souls of the ancestors, one with the s-, gaian spirit of the planet. And I don’t mean to


spirit of the planet. And I don’t mean to imply that psychedelics ar-, simply act negatively; dissolving ego, dissolving social constructs, dissolving programming and neurosis. That’s all true, but what is left when all this dissolving has taken place is not simply a tabula rasa, a clean slate. What is left is, uhm, what we forgot, what we have been so long away from, which is a connection into the reality of the gaian mind. The great news that all shamanism can attest to, and is built on, is the news that there is a sentient, minded, caring entity that surrounds and holds the planet in its hands, in its heart. S-, beyond comprehending, I mean call it Gaia, call it God, call it the spirit of nature, it doesn’t matter what you call it. It transcends the natural apprehension of higher primates, and yet it is there. We know that our own peculiar form of self reflection emerged in just a couple


form of self reflection emerged in just a couple of million years, out of animal organization. Well, what we don’t know is how many other forms of mind there m-, are possible, and how many times in the two billion year history of life on this planet, uh, uhh, intelligence has been able to shed the dark chrysalis of matter and launch itself into nearby dimensions in which it finds completion and happiness. Uh, and I think that this is the great news that informs the shamanic religions, that we are not alone, and that The Other that we can make our way toward, is not, uh, you know, a galactarian intelligence from Beta Reticuli that is part machine-symbiote, part banana slug, or something like that, [audience laughs]. That, the, the coherent-minded entity that we make our way toward is actually a reflection of what is best in our hearts. That we carry in ourselves the seed of this thing, and that we are like, the, the peo-, the,


that we are like, the, the peo-, the, the guy in the story of the prodigal son. We have fallen into history, and out of this misfortune, out of this experience we can come gold. If we return to the fold of the ancestors, if we can, somehow, take what we’ve learned from history and fold it back into the experience of being truly human. And this is the challenge. And it faces us on the political level. Issues such as, you know, all kinds of community issues, such as racism, and sexism, and classism, these are community issues. And then issues between the human community and the planet. Our inability, you see, to emotionally connect with the consequences of what we’re doing. I mean, we as a species present a perfect picture of pathology, b-, uh, because what real psychotic behavior is, is behavior th-, that one cannot emotionally connect with the consequences of what is being done. And when you realize that we are literally, uh, looting the


realize that we are literally, uh, looting the cradle of future human life. That we have decided that we are not simply transient occupiers of this domain, but that it is ours to trash, to use up, to do with as we wish, leaving nothing for the future, then you realize the depth of our need for immediate and widespread, uh, therapeutic, indeed, pharmacological intervention on our state of mind. Because, we have wandered from anything like real human values and the reason psychedelics are so threatening in this society is because they immediately throw into high relief the internal contradictions of the dominator style of doing business, and this is must what happen. The momentum toward catastrophe, built up over centuries, is immense. The only antidote to that, that I’ve seen, extrapolating from what I’ve seen it do to single individuals, are the shamanic hallucinogens, because, when you cut right to the bone, what has to happen is; we must change


bone, what has to happen is; we must change our minds. If we don’t change our minds we are going to go down with this self-generated titanic called western civilization. And we have the power to change our minds, but it won’t come from hortatory preaching. If that would work then we would have turned the bend on the Sermon on the Mount. But as it is, I think we turn the bend, uh, sometime in the 20th century; either when Albert Hoffman invented LSD, or Gordon Wasson found the mushrooms of Huaca[?], or Richard Schultes brought back news of ayahuasca from the Amazon basin. You see, we have to humble ourselves, we have to give up the titanic ego-driven idea that we can do it by ourselves, as religions and yogins and all that beady-eyed crowd are into promising. The first step on the path of self-, real self-transformation, is the admission that you must humble yourself so thoroughly that you


you must humble yourself so thoroughly that you need to form a pact with an organism that begins its life in a mound of manure. You know, it’s a true alchemical journey. You return to the droth, and out of that which everyone has rejected; literally, the compost, uh, of s-, of being you find the jewel. And the jewel can be grown, cultivated, brought to fruition, internalized, globalized, shared, to create a transforming option, that, uh, does honor to a human experiment that has been going on far too many millennia for us to fumble the golden opportunity away.


Is there anybody who’s burning with their own agenda that i-, oh, here’s a “burning person”, yes.

Audience member: “I had a experience, about three years ago now, nearly four years ago, where I-, I was on a hallucinogenic. And, I had a feeling that I was talking to some people, and they were telling me that when we leave this planet we become stars! I was wondering what. Have you got any more on the outer space connection?”


Terrence: W-well, I-I mean, I think, you know, I mean... It’s funny for me to be talking at a, at a place like this because my, I am actually a rationalist, i-it’s simply that my experience has been very, very peculiar, and I thank God for it, because I think most rationalists actually live lives which reinforce their rationalism. Maybe because they don’t poke around enough in the edges of things. I mean, you know, we have orthodox ideology, I don’t know what it is now, free markets, democracy and physics or something, and then you press out a little bit to the fringes and, you discover that reality is not only not as you supposed it to be, but it’s not like anybody supposed it to be. The, the s-, the maps we have are largely based on, uh, conjecture and naive hope. The hope that there’s hiding woods, the hope that there’s nobody waiting behind the hill. Uh, uhh, when I


waiting behind the hill. Uh, uhh, when I first started talking psychedelics it all ran pretty much according to hoil[?], uh, LSD, it seemed like a tremendous tool for insight into the structure of the personality, kind of high-powered, turbocharged self-directed psychotherapy, you know? Uh, which is certainly useful, illuminating, but n-, doesn’t violate the laws of physics, or threaten the, uh, the foundations of western science and philosophy. W-what has interested me, and become the focus of my personal life, I guess, are these tryptamine hallucinogens; DMT; psilocybin, and then ayahuasca, which is a, simply a strategy for making DMT orally active. And, you know, one could accept, I think, insights into one’s upbringing, uhh, insights into the structure of philosophy or mathematics or something like that. But what is hard to accept, are, uh, you called them “gibberish people”, I call them self-transforming elf-machines, or


people”, I call them self-transforming elf-machines, or tyches, or fairies. And, t-to my mind, this i-, this is confounding, this is no mere extension of the models of the psyche that we inherit from Freud and Jung. It begins to look as though, uh, that, uh, you know, the mind is not even in the brain. There’s some kind of extended landscape of possibility, and I, uh, I speak as, uh, somebody who’s been there, who’s seen this stuff, but who doesn’t, I don’t have an agenda, I’m, uhm. In a sense I’m sort of chicken-shit, because the motivation for my public career is to get a whole bunch of people to march with me, in there, to check again, because, uhh… Y-you know, u-, well, I-I talk in the book I wrote for Bentham, Food of The Goods, about DMT, because I think, it’s, in a sense, the, uhm, the case where all the issues are most intensely


the case where all the issues are most intensely brought together. Uh, it’s a naturally occurring neurotransmitter, indigenous in the human brain, it also is very fast-acting, it clears your system very quickly, Not only clears your system, but leaves no trace whatsoever. You can’t even n-, feel that you have done some kind of substance a half hour after you do this stuff. Nevertheless, the content of the experience itself is absolutely paradigm-challenging, and the chief reason is because there are these entities in there, and on psilocybin you hear them; they speak to you. What you were describing, it’s almost as though this is some kind of, uh, of a mandala of pharmacological approaches to the mystery, and DMT lands you right in the center of the bullseye. I mean, thirty seconds after smoking DMT you confront these things, which look like, I-I mean, it’s very hard to force language into these dimensions, and then e-, bring it back, but what they


and then e-, bring it back, but what they look like to me is self-transforming, self-dribbling basketballs, or something, I mean, they come bounding forward. When you enter into the space there’s a kind of a cheer, you know, “Hooray!”, and suddenly you’re there. And this is not the cumulative eff-, effect of spirulina or hanging out at finned horn[?] or imbibing any of these ideologies that permit this kind of thing. I mean, I come out of, uh, u-, you know Jean Genet, and existentialism, and Sartre and m-, very much more mainstream, down, dreary, western approach. These things do not require belief to sustain their existence. You may doubt, you may deny, and yet there they are. And they, un-, it is not, uhm, it’s not some kind of neutral panorama, like window shopping. It’s an encounter, it’s a situation in which you see them, they see you, and the, uhh, uhh, relationship between you and


and the, uhh, uhh, relationship between you and them is very rapidly evolving. They seem to have been waiting, and the impression I get is, well it’s not an impression I get, it’s what they say. They say, “Here you are again, how wonderful!”, it’s not exactly in English, you understand… And they have, uhm, e-, you know, they’re not made of matter. The questions, you know, what is the ontos of these things, what is their exact ontological status, and as far as I can tell, they’re made of language. They’re, they are not composed of DNA, sinew, tissue and blood, they’re composed of syntax. They are like self-articulating sentences, or language with the, that has no requirement for a speaker. It is its own self-generating system of meaning, and, in, you know, the immediate impression you have, is, if you’re a sane person, is, you know, “My God, what is this?”, and then, “Is it okay? Am


is this?”, and then, “Is it okay? Am I, number one, am I still alive?” And you check through, you know, take a quick inventory; breathing, normal, blood pressure, normal, heart, normal, but what you’re seeing is a complete replacement of the ordinary world. And these things which are not enough like elves, gnomes and fairies, it’s almost as though, you know, you’d look to folklore to, uhm, uh, to, uh, b-, provide evidence for the existence of these things, but the elves, gnomes and fairies of folklore are a little too predictable, a little too humanoid, a little too disneyesque for what you’re dealing with. These things actually appear to be as alien a form of life as it would be possible for a human being to imagine and still cognize that it’s alien intelligence at all. And, they are performing an extraordinary activity in that place. Which is; they possess a language that can be seen, with the eyes. And this is fascinating to


with the eyes. And this is fascinating to me, I really think that there’s something to be learned here. This is what they want you to learn, they s-, they come forward, they utter statements. Which, remember, you don’t hear with your ears, but which you see as condensed sculptural objects, which are like Fabergé eggs or beautifully tooled machines of glass, shell, and crystal, except these things are in motions. They’re opening up in front of you, and they’re, they’re pressing in, there’s a kind of frantic intensity to this kind of an encounter; it’s like a Bugs Bunny cartoon running backwards at twice normal speed. I mean, stuff is just flying all over, and they’re saying “Don’t abandon yourself to amazent. Don’t just go ga-ga with disbelief. Try and focus on what we’re doing.” And then, if you are able, you can moderately to focus on what they’re doing. What they’re doing is they’re offering you these objects, and


doing is they’re offering you these objects, and they’re saying “Look at this! Look at this!” As is it is passed you before you, as you look into it you have a very strong, and I believe, genuine, impression that this thing that you’re being shown, though it’s no larger than a kaiser roll is somehow absolutely confounding to the principles and assumptions of this world. That, in other words, if I could condense this thing into my hand right now I wouldn’t have to convince you, I wouldn’t have to preach to you, I could just show you. Hey, look at this! And in the visual confrontation with this thing it’s self-evident that this is impossible. Matter like, th-, they don’t behave this way. It’s as though you’ve brought back a chunk of another dimension. And, and then what they’re saying about these things is, uh, “You can do this. Do what we are doing”, and then the urgency becomes almost strident, they


and then the urgency becomes almost strident, they say, “Do what we’re doing! Do it now!” And you say, “Wha-, ho-?”, and, and then you feel, or I felt, at any rate, an upwelling in myself, like a calling forth. Then out of my mouth comes language, or at least, syntax, but without meaning. Some kind of glossolalia where the modality of language is preserved, but the meaning is not. It’s a kind of an ecstasy, it’s sounds gibberish in three-dimensional space, but in that space it seems to be the key to u-u-unlocking a world made out of syntax and meaning. And I, you know, I come before you with all of this stuff unfinished. This is not a teaching or a system or an anything; it’s an eyewitness account of a hyperdimensional automobile accident or something. We’re not saying what the conclusions are; we don’t know what the conclusions are, but this is big news. And when I first encountered this kind


big news. And when I first encountered this kind of stuff I was, uh, I was a-a young art historian at the University of California, and I assumed that any motif, no matter how [french phrase?], or bizarre you would be able to look at the painting, folklore and sculpture of somebody on this planet and find, uh, uh, a trace. And it didn’t, it seemed as though this defeated that idea. It was almost counter the idea of the collective unconscious, because it argued that you, Joe Anybody, Sally Somebody, can break through on your own, an ordinary person, to a place that Verrocchio never saw, Michelangelo didn’t anticipate it, Yates didn’t know, Blake hadn’t a clue, Melville wasn’t briefed, and yet there it is, you know. And this is, uh, a-a-, to me, as an intellectual, was very confusing, because, I think, as intellectuals we always assume that progress will be built on the b-, on the shoulders


will be built on the b-, on the shoulders of the giants that have preceded us. The idea of something actually one hundred percent brand new and unexpected is pretty daunting, and, and here, here it was, thirty seconds away, uh, uhh, simply by the act of ingesting this natural neurotransmitter. Well, those of you who’ve been there know exactly what I’m talking about, those of you who haven’t been there I can’t imagine how you can even sit through this kind of thing [laughter], because, you know, it makes the folks from the Pleiades and all that other stuff out there seem mundane by comparison. The other thing is, we’re not talking about camping out in cornfields night after freezing with your eyes glued to the stars in one hope. This is a no-fail method for plunging deeper into these spiritual, uh, realms than the tantric yogas or the practitioners of x, y, or z dare scarcely suppose. It’s repeatable, it’s


dare scarcely suppose. It’s repeatable, it’s on demand, it does not depend upon the state of your moral purity or, uh, uh, you know, tantric accomplishment. It’s something that is our birthright, as much as our sexuality, our language, our eyesight, our appreciation of music. It’s, uh, an innate human thing. And a-, you know, to try and return to the premises of your question; I tried to formulate theories about what could this be. Well, the first impression that I had based on a reading of how weird this all was, was this must be a parallel a continuum á la Philip K. Dick and like that. That just apparently over some kind of neurological energy-barrier that’s all around us all the time, these things are there. And they are not made of matter, so the laws of physics don’t apply. And, hmm, you know, like that. And then, and then I entertained different possibilities, o-, and I still entertain numerous


different possibilities, o-, and I still entertain numerous possibilities because I haven’t got it figured out yet. One possibility is that these are things are actually human beings from the future. I mean if you take the content of the experience seriously and say, “I am apparently in contact with diminutive English-speaking creatures of some sort,” well then, they have got to be either intelligent beings from another part of the universe or humans from, uh, some extraordinarily advanced future world where human beings are now made of language and are only two and a half feet, so I would put it rather far in the future. Or, and I just simply offer this in the spirit of, uh, of, intellectual completeness, uh. If you ask a shaman, or a sh-, or, uh, what these things are, they don’t hesitate, they just say, “Oh, well, those are the ancestor-spirits”, uh, this is what it’s all about is ancestor-spirits. Well, it takes a while for the implications of


Well, it takes a while for the implications of this to sink in. They’re talking about dead people, that’s what an ancestor-spirit is. They’re suggesting that the dearly departed do not evanesce into sunlight or something cheerfully nonspecific like that, but that this actually is, uh, simply one level of, a cosmic system of some sort where birth and death are transitions from level to level. Well, this is just exactly the kind of thing that I’m intellectually set up to doubt, and to feel a kind of scorn for. 50:48


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Megatripolis club

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1994

Megatripolis Club, London, United Kingdom

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Axiom Production

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September 1994

Maui Hawaii

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State of the Stone

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October 1995

Whole Life Expo, San Francisco, CA

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The Grammar of Ecstasy - the World Within the Word

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15 May 1995

Maui

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Evolving Times

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29 April 1995

Sacramento, California

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Google Collaboration Sheet

[0:00:00]

Terence:Can you hear?

Audience:Yes.

Terence:Everybody can hear? Good. Well, I like to lead with good news, so, uh, let me assure that at no point this evening will I read from, or quote, the poet Rumi.

[audience laughter]

[0:00:30]

Uh ... It’s a pleasure to be in Sacramento, it’s a pleasure to be in California. I lived here about 30 years before moving out about 8 months ago – lived over in Occidental – so, I sort of feel like this is a hometown congregation.

You may have seen the story in The Bee this morning, uh, it was a reasonable detailing of my theory of evolution

[0:01:00]

. I noticed that one expert wouldn’t even give his name to allow his “no comment” to have attribution. [audience laughter] [laughing] Gentlemen, this is no way to behave in the face of an ideological revolution. Anyway, uhm ...— and, plus, it isn’t even my weirdest idea, [audience laughter] but that was left unmentioned

[0:01:30]


[0:01:30]

, thankfully, in the article. But, since the article dealt so specifically with evolution, and because that probably is my best candidate for entre into any kind of respectability, something I crave intensely in [audience laughter] every atom of my body, i thought I would discuss it with you this evening and try and make it

[0:02:00]

seem a little less absurd than, uh, than my critics might make it seem. First of all, let me lay out for you the, uh, [phone starts ringing] the nature of the problem – right now, the nature of the problem is finding the damn phone and shutting it off! [audience laughter] [laughing] No, the nature of the problem is that, uh, evolutionary

[0:02:30]

theory tells us that we are some kind of advanced animal, of some sort, and science has waged a noble struggle over the past 150 years to secure this position against all attacks by orthodox religious thinking, and yet, there is...after it’s all said and done, the sense that if we are an animal, we are a very, very

[0:03:00]

peculiar sort of animal, indeed – a unique animal. An animal capable of language and coordinated planning, an animal not bound to a particular social or sexual style – we have monogamous human societies, polygamous societies – this is very different from animals. We have poetry, we have mathematics, we

[0:03:30]

have drama, a whole spectrum fo effects that is far from anything that we find in animal organisation. And this problem has fascinated me for a long, long time as it’s fascinated a lot of people, uh, because obviously it’s a great embarrassment to the theory of evolution that it can’t account for human consciousness,

[0:04:00]


[0:04:00]

because after all human consciousness produced the theory of evolution [audience laughter]. So, you see, it’s a significant failure there. So, uh, obviously if you accept the basic rules of the evolutionary game, which are that there is random mutation, which means gene drift, mixing of genes through sexual reproduction, uh,

[0:04:30]

cosmic rays which cause birth defects and mutations, this sort of thing, and natural selection. And, these two factors, natural selection and, uh, and mutation, are sufficient to account for praying mantises, chipmunks, tropical rainforests, but no us. And the reason is that we emerged too quickly

[0:05:00]

from the background of the rest of ordinary nature. Uh, in the space of about two billion years, the human brain doubled in size, and Lumholtz, who is an orthodox evolutionary biologist, calls this the most dramatic transformation of the—of a major organ of a higher animal, in the entire history of life

[0:05:30]

, and it happened to us. It happened to that very organ that is responsible for the theory of evolution. So, what extraordinary confluence of, uhm, factors could have come together there to take a, uh, essentially an arboreal monkey, an ape of some sort, that had been at an evolutionary climax in the canopy

[0:06:00]

of the rainforest for a couple of million years, what extraordinary set of factors could then set that creature marching down the road toward, you know, Elvis, the Internet, Bill Clinton, and, uh, all the rest of it?

[Transcript by Frank Bronson]


Well, I imagined when I first started thinking about this, that there must be some huge edifice of established theory, that we have to go up in there and blow up, surely somebody has stated up this ground and made some kind of an argument about human consciousness. Well, in terms of science, not; or almost not. I mean, in term of religion it simple, I mean: god made us from the clay of the earth. In terms of science, the best shot is pretty weak soup from my point of view. Here’s what science is telling us; that when you throw something, you have to plan, because once you let go of whatever it is you are throwing: you can no longer control it. And so because we were small, and weak and hunted in packs, we learnt to throw like hell: at very large,onrushing, wholly fellow mammals of various sorts. And you had to plan your throw. Consequently, we developed brain capacity to do this and have enough left over


brain capacity to do this and have enough left over to invent quantum physics , paint the Mona Lisa , invent the phonetic alphabet , philosophy, religion and all the rest of it. In other words, it was the coordination of the hand and the eye, to the throwing arm. This is what the orthodox folks tell us, that gave us this extra brain capacity. That we sort of then managed into human civilization. Well, notice that this would make the pinacle of the evolutionary ladder, the gum-chewing big league baseball pitcher. Because you know, he can put that pill right across the plate at high speed, time after time. As somebody who learned everything they know about sadomasochism in PE class, I'm not really ready to embrace this theory, it definitely runs against my paradigm: so I’ve built another story, and to my mind, it meets the objections, answers the questions of where did consciousness come from. But instead of doing it very nicely and neatly: it


of doing it very nicely and neatly: it raises in the very act of answering this question , other questions. Maybe more closer to home. Questions that reflect on our social organization, our politics , how we treat each other in the here and now, even with implications for the future. We’ll get to that, for the moment let me just run through this for you . There's a sort of a basic situation that all theories of evolution have to come to terms with, and this is, that our remote, protohominid, primate, ape, ancestors; lived and developed in Africa. If you have a non-african theory of human origin, and there are such things, the evidence is strongly against you. If it were stock, I’d sell. The evidence is pretty strong, that whatever happened that brought us out of the animal-body, it happened in Africa. Well, all animals, and plants for that matter, tend to reach evolutionary climax and occupy a niche and stabilize in that


and occupy a niche and stabilize in that niche. Cockroaches,ants achieved this hundreds of millions of years ago, and have not changed greatly since. Most of biology is this iterative occupation of a climax niche. Very little of biology, is the pushing forward into radical new forms, new species, still rare, new genera. For that, there has to be disruption of some sort, of the environment and it can be the meandering of a river, or an asteroid strike, the retreat of a glaciar, something which creates open land. Well, for five-six million years now, the African continent has been slowly drying and three million years ago it was covered by rainforest at the equator from east to west. And that was the environment of human ancestor types. They were canopy dwelling, they were fruit eating, they ate some percentage of insects composed their diet, they had a pack signaling repertoire that was fairly complicated by animal standards ….


[Transcript by

Javier Alonso

….And there they were happily living in the canopy. But Africa began to dry up.

And they came under nutritional pressure. Now, simpler animals - insects for example - when their food source is withdrawn, they usually buy the farm. They don’t have much flexibility of diet. If you’ve ever tried to raise caterpillars into butterflies for your children, you know that if you give the caterpillars the wrong leaves, they just can’t make any sense out of it, and they die.

Uh - more advanced animals when confronted with dietary pressure or disappearance of ordinary food supplies, before they give up the ghost, they will - uhh - experiment, with other food sources in the environment.

Now the reason this isn’t normally done, is thought - the reason animals are conservative in their food choices - it’s thought to be a way of avoiding - ah - mutational influences in the form of tertiary chemicals, toxins, viruses, and things like this that would be in fo- in unusual foods.

One of the things that accompanies our acquisition of consciousness is gastronomy - the appreciation of flavor - the approach to food that makes it an art. Animals don’t do this - they’re just trying to get enough protein to keep the old engines running. The notion of flavouring is counter-intuitive to animals. And flavoring’s probably in part a mutagenic influence to our diet.


When our remote ancestors came under environmental pressure, their environment was shrinking, the rainforest was being replaced by grasslands, and nutritional pressure - their ordinary diet of fruit and insects was being restricted - they began exploring this new environment of the grasslands, and this is the era of knuckle-walking, turning into bipedalism. It’s the era of the coordination of binocular vision, so forth and so on. There was a paper published recently which anticipates my point but I can’t wait to hit you with it. A paper published recently about canopy-dwelling monkeys who only leave the canopy for the acquisition of one particular food. And the food they will come to the ground for, and risk predation, is mushrooms.

So, it seems perfectly reasonable to suggest that our remote ancestors, exploring the new environment of the grasslands, would have encountered, as you would if you were to go to the - to the tropics, ahh, psilocybin containing mushrooms, growing in the dung of cattle, many dung-growing, so-called coprophilic- coprolitic mushrooms produce psilocybin, among them stropharia cubensis, which is one of the largest and pandemically distributed of these mushrooms.


I’m sure that our early ancestors also tested other kinds, of food, they were testing everything. They were digging for corms with pointed sticks - ahh - and I’m sure there were many uhrhr ecological and medical disasters as a consequence of this. For instance ah, the birth control steroids in modern birth control pills are produced by dioscorea vines, grown on plantations in Mexico. Well dioscorea is the family of ahhhh sweet potatoes. Imagine-uh a hungry band of primates that come up on a patch of sweet potatoes that are heavy in these steroids. It would raise holy havoc with their reproductive cycle - it would interfere with menstruation, ovulation, lactation, fertility, and uh, y’know, human genetic history is the story of many such - uh - encounters - with mutagenic influences in the environment - most of them catastrophic, detrimental, lethal. But in some few cases, there would have been uhh - salutary results - advantages conferred upon the, animals that accept these new foods into their food chain.

breath* And - and I want to particularly emphasise psilocybin because I believe it’s the key. You see we’re looking for some kind of factor, which could have exploded, the human brain size, at a rate ten times faster than evolution, normally takes place. So it’s going to be an unusual situation - perhaps the need to throw a boulder at distance accurately, or perhaps contact with an unusual food item or drug-containing plant. But it was something unusual - if it weren’t unusual, it wouldn’t have taken this planet….

[Transcript by

Kurt Robinson

[18:00]

...a billion and a half years to bring forth its first intelligent species.

Well, so let’s look at psilocybin then in a little more detail.


Well, so let’s look at psilocybin then in a little more detail.

It has a number of properties, not specifically related to its psychoactivity that make it an ideal candidate for a catalyst for the emergence of consciousness and an advanced animal. First of all, and at the early stage of human invasion of this new grassland environment - proto-hominid invasion I should say - ahh, we were testing foods, we would certainly have tested this food. I’ve seen these things the size of dinner plates in the Amazon after a rain, and they are silvery with blue and purple shading, they are the most dramatic thing in the environment, whether you know anything about them as, as, uhm, psychoactive agents or not. Certainly they would have been tested for food; I’ve seen chim-, uhm, baboons in Kenya investigating cow pies and flipping them over, because beetle grubs nestle underneath them. So cow pies are a natural vector for hungry baboons, so that everything is in place, it’s- it’s trivial to, uh, suggest otherwise, I would maintain.


OK. The first quality of psilocybin, which isn’t specifically related to its psychoactivity, is that in small doses - doses that are the kind you might obtain if you would just sort of eating it along with little roots, grassroots, small bugs, um, you know, so forth and so on - visual acuity is improved. Specifically, edge detection is improved. Well, now, it seems to me, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that if you’re in a highly competitive evolutionary environment, in grassland, an environment characterised by large predators, hunting cats, and also characterised by small ungulate prey, that having an increased sensitivity to edge-movement might make the difference between whether or not you live to tell the tale or you become somebody’s dinner, or it would certainly make the difference between going home empty handed, and taking dinner home with you. So, a factor which enhanced edge-detection on those animals accepting that food supply into their food chain, they would have, uhh, a slightly increased chance of evolutionary success as opposed to the non-psilocybin members of their group, and this increased hunting, uhh, success, would tend to outbreed the non-psilocybin-using members of the group.


At slightly higher doses, uhh, in highly sexed animals like primates, uh, all alkaloids are what are called CNS stimulants - central nervous system stimulants - that means that they produce arousal, and in sexually extremely active animals like primates, arousal means, uhh, erection, usually in the male, usually followed by hanky-panky, what anthropologists and primatologists call successful instances of copulation. [*audience laughs*] Well, again, what is this? It’s a second factor tending to outbreed the non-psilocybin-using members of the population. They’re now definitely moving to the rear of the parade; they don’t have as much hunting success, they don’t have as much food for themselves and their offspring, they’re not having as much sex so they’re not having as many offspring, and, you know, in terms of, of rising and falling numbers, those that have some allergy prejudice or fear of, uh, of a mushroom, are, are just being shunted out of the breeding population.


Well, at still higher doses, approaching effective doses of 20 milligrams or more, in other words 4 grams dried and up, or 45 grams wet and up, uhh, hunting is out of the question [*audience laughs*], sex is something you can consider [*audience laughs*] but it’s out of the question, and you are basically nailed to the ground in a state of mind which we for all of our sophistication, our logical positivism, our superconducting supercolliders and all the rest of it, haven’t a clue as to what it is, what it means, what its implications are - the full blown psychedelic experience of which we can only speak in, in terms of, uh, religious hierophany, epiphany, apocatastasis, and all those other great greek words, uhh, ataraxia, you know - in other words, we like it; but we don’t understand it. And it is therefore, uh, the basis for religion.

Well… *swallows*, uhh, so right there…

[24:00]

[Transcript by Adnan Zahirovic]


….You have a three step process, driven by nothing more than hunger and curiosity, that leads remote primate ancestors to a confrontation with, what Rudolf Otto called the Holy Other, The Holy, The Numinous, The Transcendental. And aah, aah, you know this is on slightly less firm ground but in my own personal experience and having collected psychedelic experiences life long I feel confident in saying that at high doses psilocybin causes glossolalia. Glossolalia is syntactically structured language like behavior in the absence of meaning. Aah, speaking in tongues is what christian fundamentalists call it, but they don’t have, aah, mo, monopoly on it. It’s ancient it occurs in all cultures, It’s shamanic, and what it is it is a kind of neurological seizure where linguistic organization spontaneously is verbalized. No animal does this, It must have something to do with the acquisition of language by human beings, and what I think is going on


human beings, and what I think is going on is that probably language was, aah, entertainment long before it was meaning, that is a kind of tuneless singing, and that having discovered that we could make an almost endless repertoire of small mouth noises, we did this, for each other, for amusement, for, to, aah, pass the time I mean, god knows there was a lot of it *audience laughs*, and It, It probably was very late in the evolution of this ability that some very tight ass rational type said, you know, we could attach a specific meaning to a specific sound and then every time I’ve made that sound you’d know what I meant, and then you can go and get it for me, *audience laughs* you see. It’s a sort of, it, it’s the “as long as you’re up get me a Grant’s” theory of language, aah. So, so that’s the basic idea, and, I, I really believe that, sometime in the last fifty thousand


believe that, sometime in the last fifty thousand years before twelve thousand years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence. A situation in which man and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land, aah, all were in dynamic balance, and not in any primitive sense at all. Aah, language was fully developed, poetry may have been at its climax, dance, magic, poetics, altruism, aah, philosophy. There is no reason to think that this things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today. And it was under the aegis of the boundary dissolving influence of psilocybin. We were nomadic, we were breeders and, and caretakers of katle, we worshiped a great goddess, we followed a yearly round in a vast grassland cut by crystal streams that were washing down out of the, the higher altitudes, and we were probably black as your hat, for that matter. Aah, and it was great, well if it


Aah, and it was great, well if it was so great, what happened, well, ahh, the very forces which created this situation, and you all recall what it was, it was the drying of the African continent forcing us out of the trees, forcing us to change our diet, forcing us to accept a dung growing mushroom, ahh, and there were other factors forcing us into consciousness as well. When we became omnivorous, the first form of consciousness is having the point of view of your prey, predatory animals have the highest form of animal consciousness, big cats, but it’s a consciousness of the exterior world. Psilocybin forced us beyond that, into consciousness of the imaginal world, the world of the imagination inside our heads. What happened was, aah, the mushroom faded, the climate changed, what had been everywhere became seasonal, moved into the rain shadows of mountains, aah, became the prerogative of a special class of people called shamans, who


of a special class of people called shamans, who were like the, the designated hitters for dealing with the hyperspace of the mythos. Ahh, and in other words, over millennia, the, the, the, connection went from available to everyone all the time, to ever more tenuous, ever more tenuous, finally faded out entirely. It’s even more complicated than that because surely people….


[Transcript by

Lobo Noble

[00:30:00]

Terence: …. would have, as they saw this happening, make attempts to preserve the mushroom, and in a world without refrigeration, the only effective way to do this is preservation in honey. You can dry mushrooms, but in a world without hermetically sealed peanut butter jars, drying is a very short-term strategy for preservation. The only thing which will really work is preservation in honey. The problem there is that honey itself, especially aboriginal honeys – which have a lot more water in them than what you get in those little plastic bears at the A&P [audience laughter]– uh, aboriginal honeys are very runny, and so what do they do? They themselves have the capacity for turning into a psychoactive substance: alcohol. But alcohol promotes a completely different set of cultural values and attitudes than psilocybin. Uh, psilocybin is a boundary dissolving hallucinogen, uh, mead alcohol, uh, gives an enhanced, uh, sense of verbal acuity in the presence of lowered sensitivity to social cues. In other words, uh, one can make an ass of oneself [audience laughter].


But now I want to backtrack for a minute, I will return to this thing about the loss of the mushroom, but there’s something that I wanna go over with you that’s really important in all this, to me, and that is: this isn’t simply the story of how an intoxicant promoted consciousness and then we fell into history but losing that intoxicant and went into other intoxicants, with consequences to be evaluated, it’s that, but it’s more, because psilocybin had a very, very peculiar effect, over and above what I’ve mentioned so far, and it’s this over and above effect that makes my theory so controversial, and so, uh, and academics so phobic of it, because it rips open a whole can of worms, and this is the problem: all primates, clear back to squirrel monkeys and old world monkeys, all primates form dominance hierarchies. This means that the sharp fanged, hard bodied young males control everybody else: the women, the elderly, the sick, the children, homosexuals – everybody finds their place somewhere in this dominance hierarchy run by these dominant alpha males. We are no different. We also, as we sit here this evening, operate under this kind of a social organisation. I mean, we complain about, we analyze it, we are aware of it, but we live under it, it’s how it is. So, here is my suggestion: that, what psilocybin did was it changed behaviour, it interfered with primate behaviour. Specifically, it interfered it interfered with this tendency to form monogamous pairs and dominance hierarchies, and so the ordinary tendency of the primates to organise themselves that way

[00:34:00]


[00:34:00]

was interrupted, medicated out of existence, if you like, vaccinated against, if you like, by the presence of psilocybin in the diet. And, uh, this, oversec—this, this overemphasizing or chemical accentuation of sexuality occasioned by the arousal of psilocybin, was sufficient to dissolve

[00:34:30]

the ordinary tendency toward monogamy, and replace it with an orgiastic sexual style, or they coexisted simultaneously, I mean who knows, we weren’t there, it's sort of, the way I imagine it, is that at every new and full moon there were group mushroom parties which basically, simply got out of hand [audience laughter[, regularly. And—and, so, the monogamous

[00:35:00]

pair bond would be under pressure if not completely eliminated. Many cultures have this even to this day, I mean, in a sense, mardi gras is a festival where the rules are dissolved, and nobody is supposed to go to their spouse the monday after and say, “You know, was that you I saw dressed as Marie Antoinette and, uh”...[audience laughter] because, you know, the rules are—there is permission to break the rules, and many societies

[00:35:30]

do this. Uh, the result of an orgiastic style like that, is, uh, men cannot trace lines of male paternity, and so there is a tremendous social glue, a tremendous, uh, force for the cohesion of community. Men don’t then think in terms of “MY children”, they think in terms of “our children”, the children

[00:36:00]

of the group.

[Transcript by Frank Bronson]


of the group.

[Transcript by Frank Bronson]

….And under the aegis of this group, this polymorphis.. (polymorphic), sexual style, group -uh- childcare, and -uh- and extended family rearing, we produced everything that we think of as human; that we value. Our art, our music, our philosophy, our sense of each other’s worth, -uh- body painting, tattooing, piercing, all the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn’t have a mind that that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.

[37:00]

We became human beings in this other.. World of - of values and psychological attitudes. The problem is, as I say, ‘the mushroom faded,’ but by the time it had faded -uh- we were no longer the wordless symbionts of cattles, the, the barely sentient hunters of, of the African plain. By the time we were finished with the mushrooms we had language, we had social institutions, and - but what we began to lose was, you know, - you can get as wet eyed as you want about it but.. respect for each other; a sense of each other’s individuality. A sense of love, a sense of community. And it must of been, though it happened over a long period of time, very much like what we’re living through now.

[38:00]


[38:00]

A sense that people are, you know, no damn good and getting worse. A sense that, you know, ‘Why can’t we be as we once were?’ ‘Where is our sense of each other?’ ‘Where is our ability to care for each other?,’ so forth and so on. I wrote a book called -uhm- ‘Food of the Gods’, in which I tell this story in the first third of the book that I have just told you, and then I show that, what history is essentially, is, is a careening, out of control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance. One of the things that marks us as humans that is unique is our obsessions with drugs; our ability to addict.

[38:57]

We addict not only to substances, we addict to each other, we addict to ideologies (Marxism, Christianity, pff..Skinkism as practiced in Washington, *audience laughter* -uh- whatever). And we addict to each other. You know? I mean I am a romantic -uh- with the best of them but I can’t help noticing that a broken heart and a heroin withdrawl show very similar presentations. *audience laughter* Really! Insomnia, sweating, sense of diminished self-esteem, hysteria, -uh uhm- you know, it’s, it’s very very similar. We- so, a psychologist looking at a person with an addictive syndrome will say, “Well you were damaged in childhood, there’s some trauma there that you’re, you’re trying to compensate. You’re trying to compensate.”

[40:04]


[40:04]

Well i’m not that keen on all this psychologizing, but I do think that we could apply this model to ourselves on a grand scale. We were essentially torn from the giain womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism, and all the rest of it. And -uh uh- we have searched the planet for substances which would asswage our sense of pain. And there are things out there, you know.. Alcohol, the whole morphine family, so forth and so on. But these things always have consequences. There’s a price to be paid.

[41:00]

Uh- The very knowledge of psilocybin was lost to the entire planet, except for some tribes in the Mexican mountains, -uh- for several millennia until Valentina and Gordon Wasson went in the -uh, uhh- early nineteen-fifties and found these mushrooms and brought them out and then Albert Hoffman, who had earlier discovered LSD, synthesized the compound and made it available. That was ‘55. Well by ‘66 all human research with these things had been forbidden. We have- It’s not that science “mowed this field and moved on.” It’s that -uh- science has never really been here. -Uh- we haven’t looked at the implications of diet on early human evolution.

[Transcript by Nigel Millegan]

[42:00]


[Transcript by Nigel Millegan]

[42:00]

We don’t have a theory for the evolution of consciousness of any consequence, and yet, you know, the factors I’ve laid out for you - increased visual acuity, a-, impact on sexual and social behaviours, uh, triggering of glossolalia-like phenomena in the presence of a boundary dissolving psychedelic experience - these are catalysts efficiently dramatic that inculcated into a cultural style, I think they explain a great deal about where we came from and who we are.

Now, the, [*looks at watch*] the irony of all of this is, uh, that we live in a society that has made p-, all practically, any discussion of this, illegal. Certainly if I were to end this lecture by handing out doses of psilocybin, [*audience laughs*] I would be gently taken by the elbow and led away forever. [*audience laughs*] Uhh…


Uhh, the western mind is particularly phobic of this, uhh, of this subject, I mean, we have bent our laws so that people can jump out of airplanes in the pursuit of thrills, so they bungee-cord off major highway bridges and freeway overpasses; be-, so concerned are we to fulfill society’s need for thrills, uh, but this, is something else. It provokes all kinds of alarmed reactions and perhaps you believe unfairly. I think that when you examine the situation, it’s possible to understand very clearly why this is such a social issue; because what these things do, if you look - and now I’m slightly broadening my wrap to include other psychedelics besides psilocybin, but psilocybin is certainly true in all cases - what these things do, if you had to generalize a hundred-thousand psychedelic experiences - the ones where people thought they were god, the ones where people had to be taken to the ER room and have their stomach pumped, all of them - if you generalize what the-, what these substances do, is they dissolve boundaries. They dissolve boundaries. If you love it, you’ll love it. If you hate it, you’ll hate it. But that’s what they do; they dissolve boundaries.


Now, the reason this provokes a lot of social anxiety is because all societies are about the maintenance of boundaries. It doesn’t matter whether you’re, you know, a stockbroker in New York, a zen monk in Kyoto, a hasid in Jerusalem, your society is held together by boundaries, and definitions, and anything which dissolves those boundaries and introduces, uh, relativity into cultural modeling, is felt to be threatening. Because we like to believe that our reality is somehow sanctioned, that this is how it should be. But in fact, you know, that’s just, uh, cultural judgement; all cultures think that their culture represents a sanctioned reality. It doesn’t. It just represents the current download of, uh, their linguistic enterprise. [*audience laughs silently*]

Uhm… The- At the core of the western anxiety about boundaries is something that we are very proud of, that we believe we invented. We call it the ego. Sometimes we call it the democratic individual. Uhh, we say no we- wu-, no eastern society could have produced this. We took this from the Greeks, we perfected it through the Romans, we brought it up through the medieval period; John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes, and all those folks fixed it up for us in the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson ironed out the wrinkles, and modern America is the shining example of, uh, what you can do if you empower the ego, the citizen, the individual. We want nothing of tribalism, still less of collectivism, and God forbid [*in mockingly stern voice*] nothing whatsoever to do with communism! See, all these- all these things, uh, set us going. Uhh…


But in fact, the ego is appropriate only to a certain point. I mean, yes, we need egos, so that you take someone to dinner at a reasonable restaurant, you place food in your mouth, not their mouth. [*audience laughs*] This is-, this is what the ego is for. It tells you who pays. [*audience laughs*] [*clears throat*] Uhm, but in fact, what the ego is, is the return to consciousness of this psychic structure related to the patterns of dominance. And the way I think of the ego is it’s like a cyst, or a calcareous growth, or a tumor, [*audience laughs periodically throughout the sentence*] that gets going in the personality, and if not treated, it becomes chronic, and then there is no cure. There can only be, you know, a certain amount of maintenance, and….

[48:00]

[Transcript by

Adnan Zahirovic

[0:48:00] ...medication of it but it’s it’s incurable except unless we resort to not only non-prescription drugs but uh drugs currently illegal. In other words, the psychedelics through this boundary dissolving function dissolve that boundary as well. And so they promote a larger sense of the world than the values of capitalism, [0:48:30] competitiveness, object fetishism, property acquisition and the bottom line, empower.

So the -the issue as was always since, since the sixties forward i think is not simply uh an issue of religious freedom or an issue of an eccentric minority social practice [0:49:00] being tolerated by the majority, the way they tolerate handing out pamphlets in the airport or something like that, the -the issue is in fact what kind of people shall we be? And then what kind of society shall we put in place?


And that’s why my theory of evolution is not simply a dry [0:49:30] footnote on uh an issue that involves anthropologists, primatologists and biologists, but it turns into a political issue because our unhappy, addicted, ego-driven condition has become not simply the source of our own unhappiness, that was bad enough but now it’s the source of great discomfort and dislocation [0:50:00] for all life and human society on the planet. We -we are out of control, we are basically severely addicted to things, and cannot stop ourselves. Uhh and we know, or we should know, that there is not enough petroleum, heavy metal so forth and so on [0:50:30] in the planet to give all the thing addicts all the things that we know they must have in order to be happy.

We have spread this intellectual virus from pole to pole, to Turkmenistan and Borneo, to the upper amazon to the Tajiks , everybody wants kids, you know? Everybody wants the pause that refreshes, uhh, [0:51:00] what are we going to do about this? Well so far we've been treating it like an endless garden party, there's no serious plan on the table to deal with this at all.

Uhh uh i think that the momentum of human history is pushing us inexorably toward some kind of day of reckoning and in which we are going to have to turn [0:51:30] consciously toward brutality and selfishness and say we’ll let India go. Let Bangladesh go. Triage. Costs too much. Can’t possibly fix the problem in order to maintain our locked compounds and our 50 channels of television and the endless availability of arugula (*audience laughs*) we have to let India go.


We’re going to have to [0:52:00] turn that way in other words each consciously participate in a choice to brutalize the human enterprise or we’re going to have to uhh seriously talk about very major restructuring of our society and i don’t really know how we do that.

I was living in northern california a couple years ago when they wanted to close an airbase near here and the [0:52:30] newspapers were filled with weeks for weeks with analysis whether western civilization could absorb this hammer blow at the very heart of its institutions of closing one frickin airbase for crying out loud. (*audience laughs*) That’s not my idea of major change. You know?

We may have to give up some of our pretty things. We may have to discipline some of the irresponsible [0:53:00] uh social philosophies that run amuck among us and no i don’t mean the advocacy of psychedelic plants i mean the roman catholic church on population control in the third world. I mean the germans take quite a knock for the holocaust but the catholic church manages to push more people into death disease and degradation every year [0:53:30] than the holocaust manages in its entire show and it’s thought rather crass to even mention the fact. It seems to me that as long as these catholic bishops can show their face in public that we are - uhh in complicity with mass murder. It’s not pleasant news, but what are you going to do about it. Islamic fundamentalism, [0:54:00] another bunch of not-heads with an anti-human agenda, what are we going to do about this?

[Transcript by Jonathan Laliberte]


[Transcript by Jonathan Laliberte]

Are we going to go gently into that good night of planetary chaos, extreme distortion of class structure, defence of what we have at any cost against those who have nothing? There doesn’t seem to be any other plan on the horizon.


Arthur Koestler - who probably never thought he would be quoted by Terence McKenna, [*audience laughs*] a very conservative character, you’ll recall he was a marxist who turned on marxism and led a very interesting intellectual life - he wrote a book thirty years ago called “The Ghost in the Machine”, and he made a case similar to mine, but a little simpler. He observed: human beings are hardwired for homicide. [*audience chuckles*] This is what we do best, because this was something we had to do, apparently, at some point in our past, at least in Koestler’s view, he didn’t believe in a mushroom paradise. But he reached the same conclusion that I have, which is, we need a pharmacological intervention on antisocial behavior, or we are not going to get hold of our, uh, our dilemma. And, uh, I-, I-, you know, there have been dystopias based on drug intervention on aggressive behavior; you all remember “Brave


intervention on aggressive behavior; you all remember “Brave new world”, where every time anybody raised their voice, they were given a, a gram of soma, and told a “gram is better than a dam”(?). And so, nobody ever had the thought in their head. Well, that’s a terrible drug, let’s not introduce that. O-oh, the bad news is, we’ve had it for decades, it’s called television, [*audience laughs*] you know. We have millions of people in larval low-awareness lives, in their little condominium apartments, just ladling this garbage into their minds. The average American watches five and a half hours of TV a day, so imagine how much these people watch. I mean, to- to think of that as human at all... If that were a drug, we’d be up in arms. You know, if people were loaded at home with that level of mental condition, [*audience laughs*] day after day after day, we would-, we would do something about it. [*clears


would-, we would do something about it. [*clears throat*]


So, my, uh, you know, I don’t ha-, I can’t propose a grand solution, but I do think that it is, uhh, uh, pregnant with implication that here at the end of the 20th century, with all of this problems hammering down on us, the news comes from the rain forests, and the deserts, that these aboriginal people - while we made the descent into history, and got the top quark, and planted the flag on the Moon, and all that - they kept the faith. And they have… [*pauses, swallows*] a “materia medica”, a toolbox, that can carry us back into connection, uh, with the planet. Now, the question might be asked: w-, why-, why do y-, do you have such overwhelming faith in, what is after all a substance, a drug? I mean, don’t psychedelics just cause you to see pretty pictures and patterns, and tally up your gains and losses, and then you come down, and that’s it? And the answer


you come down, and that’s it? And the answer is: no. What is mysterious here - and I mentioned this in the early part of my talk - what is mysterious here, is this thing we call the psychedelic experience. Those people nailed to the ground around the campfires fifty thousand years ago, they didn’t know what it was. And when we go in there, armed with our Heidegger, and our Husserl, and our… Wittgenstein, and our Merleau-Ponty, we don’t know what it is either. There has been no progress in sixty thousand years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them. Well, what is that? As secular people, uh, we rarely experience religious awe, especially of the uncontrollable sort. Uhh, I believe that, what makes the psychedelic experience so central, is the that it is, uh, a connection into a larger modality of


uh, a connection into a larger modality of organisation on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying, it connects you up to the mind of Nature herself. The planet is not, uh, uh, just a hodgepodge of competing species, that’s the old evolutionary model. That’s been obsolete for decades. The new evolutionary model is, that, where we see species… Nature sees only ge- a gene swarm. Genes moving at various speeds, being transferred around - a large percentage of them by sexual propagation.


[1:00:00]

[Transcript by Adnan Zahirovic]

But a large percentage of them by asexual and vegetative propagation. And still others by more exotic -uh- methods of propagation such as [what] go on in the fungi and the bacteria. Uh, the world is a gene swarm, and people like Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock have been suggesting for years that the Earth is a kind of thermostatic self-regulator. Well, if you carry that idea far enough, thermostatic self-regulator is a way of saying [it’s] a kind of computational engine; a kind of computer; a kind of mind! A kind of of mind; The Gaian Mind. The reason those mushroom eating, orgiastically-behaving people worshipped a great horned goddess, the reason they imaged the numinous other as feminine [1:01:00], was because they had a connection into a kind of overarching intelligence that they instinctively and intuitively felt to be feminine.

And we retain this in our languages as the idea of mother nature, and the femininity of the land and so forth and so on, but it’s just become a distant metaphor to us. I think ous. I think our intelligence is, is a source of toxicity to nature and discomfort to ourselves unless our values are based on planetary values; are linked to the values of the rest of nature. And that means we need to -uh- fit ourselves more appropriately into the scheme of things by limiting our numbers, [1:02:00] by -uh- limiting our extraction of natural resources and toxification of the environment.


Uh, we uh, we need to realize that there is a hegemony of life on the planet, not necessarily a hegemony of intelligence. Intelligence is not a licence to trample. Th- the proper role of intelligence in a planetary ecology is that of gardener, caregiver, and uh, uh, maintainer of balance. Well.. so where do we go and how- what do psychedelics have to say about that? Well, I- I believe that psychedelics show us something which -uhm- [1:03:00] which capitalist, consumer fetish oriented society doesn’t want us to know.

What psychedelics show us, is the incredible richness of our minds. That- that you, little you, can produce more art in a 20 minute burst of hallucinatory intoxication than the western mind has produced in the last 500 years. Our socially created space is incredibly impoverished. You know? We have Picasso's contribution and Pollock’s contribution and everybody’s contribution but it all together is as nothing compared to the richness that resides in each one of us a half inch behind your eye brows.

[1:04:00]


[1:04:00]

We are told, you know, ‘oh well if you want beauty you have to own a lexus.’ Or -uh- you know, if you want a sense of satisfaction then you need a triple car garage. [And] on and on. Th- this is absolutely -uh- not true. These are substitute addictions that will never satisfy for the genuine article, and the genuine article is a connection into the Gaian Mind. Well I don’t believe or expect for a moment that ever again, naked, tattooed, and joyous we will herd our cattle across the grasslands of Africa. *audience laughter* I mean there are six million (billion?) of us that chance has been blown. Uh, but, but, what- what can we do to make- to ameliorate our situation? Well I have always been an optimist, i’m more optimistic right now [1:05:00] then I have been for a long time because sometimes when you’re an optimist, you’re an optimist simply on principle, you believe it’s going to turn out alright but you don’t see how it possibly could.

I’m beginning to see how it possibly could turn out alright, and -uh- my notion is - first of all I- I follow my thinking about shamanism and I follow the great historian of religion Mircea Eliade, who got it almost all right except that he never embraced psychedelics. He thought they were decadent. But that was just his French/European education and he came to early. But anyway, Eliade wrote a book called ‘Shamanism,’ and then he subtitled it ‘The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.” Now he wrote the book in French. In French . . .

[Transcript by Douglas Salguero]


….technique has a connotation that it doesn’t have in english. It means both a way to do things, and it means technology. Later, the french sociologist Jacques Ellul wrote a book called ‘Propaganda’ and the little banner under which his book flew which is printed right on the front of his piece, is he says, ‘there are no political solutions, only technological ones. The rest is propaganda.’ And then he spends 200 pages explaining what he means by political solutions, technological solutions, and propaganda. By Ellul’s understanding, I agree. I think ideology is toxic. All ideology. It’s not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking. I mean, if you adopt some ideology, Lenninism, Mormonism, it doesn’t matter, then you have all the answers. You just go and look in the catechism. Well I don’t know why they issued you a brain, they could have


know why they issued you a brain, they could have just given you the catechism. *laughs* Uhhm. Technology as the counterpoint to, uhh, ideology is a very different animal. Now right now we’re going through a technophobic phase because people think technology means exploding nuclear power plants and uhh irradiated food and tv. But all technology really means in the Mclewin sense is the extensions of man, the extensions of man. And, so language is a technology, shamanism is a technology, psilocybin is a technology, and certainly the internet is a technology. It’s, slowly I think, dawning on a number of people that if we, if we’re talking about hallucinogens as consciousness expanding drugs, than the only difference between a drug and a computer is that one is slightly too large to swallow, and our best people are working on that problem, even as we speak. The drugs of the future will be much more like computers. The computers of the future will be much more like


The computers of the future will be much more like drugs. And I think what we have to recognize is that we are in a very brief and low energy technical phase in technology, basically we’re at the tail end of the petro-chemical steam era and where we are headed is toward the solid state, fiber optic, global community of the internet. And uhh, when I was in San Francisco two weeks ago, the buzz was all about VRML, the virtual language markup… the Virtual reality markup language whose protocols are being set now so that we will be able to build websites on the net that you can put on your helmet and walk around in. Sun Microsystems is about to introduce something called Hot Java which will let you build and interact with your website without going through your server. Bandwidth is broadening as we speak. Uh the whole world is being brought into the domain of electricity. And you may not know it but Marshall Mclewin thought that this was descent of the holy ghost as


that this was descent of the holy ghost as a convert to christ- to catholicism, he sort of went the opposite direction as me. As a convert to catholicism, he decided that the descent of the third person of the trinity and the worldwide spread of electricity were the same event. So I think that uh what we have to do is dematerialize culture in every way possible. And that means pharmacologize culture, computerize culture, network culture, virtualize culture, and uh, make of it, thereby, uh a tool for the production of our poetic flights, a technology for the putting in place of our dreams as exhibits that we can show each other. This is what it is, this is what technology can be in the service of boundary dissolution. In the service of boundary maintenance, you get hydrogen bombs and seran. In the service of boundary disillusion, you get psychoactive substances, and the Internet, and uh, sexual experimentalism, social justice, tolerance, and community, and the, the


justice, tolerance, and community, and the, the choice is to be made on an individual level by each and every one of us. I don’t advocate a mass outbreak of psychedelic use, I think these things are a private matter. They are, the only thing comparable to them in our human experience is our sexuality, and that’s a private matter.


[Transcript by Christian Haas]

[1:12:00]

How we define it, how we express it, how we act it out, who we do it with, what we think about it and what we choose to say in public about it is all, uh, in our hands. I do not think that, uh, the government, under the guise of some phony alarmist pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realise that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster. If there is any way to raise consciousness - diet, drug, machine, sexual practice, mantra, yantra, whatever it is - we should be furiously exploring and applying it. Because if we should fumble the ball, if we should actually, uh, where our ancestors over thousands of generations did not fail, if we are to fail, the magnitude of the tragedy will be immense, because failure is not inevitable, it is not inevitable that we should fail. There are ideas, personalities, technologies, uh, available right now that which, if honestly explored and- and implemented, could rescue the human enterprise from the disgrace that hovers over us. We don’t want this to end in a toxified garbage pit ruled by nazis, which is, you know, the way we may well be headed. Uh, the Gaian mind has always been there.


Nature, originally through the plants and shamanism, provided the tools for us to access this incredible natural database through the vicissitudes of history, previous generations lost the key in western society. Since the 1960s the key has been re-found. It's a matter of great social controversy, it's a matter of… of- of great risk of those who take it, how they will be viewed by their peers but there is no longer.... ignorance is no longer an excuse. Anthropology in the last 100 years has laid at our doorstep the tools necessary for an archaic reconstruction of a society and, uh, human values within that society. It's inconceivable that Western industrial capitalism could run on another 500 or a 1000 years. Uh, it- it will not continue as it has, it will deteriorate under the pressure of resource scarcity. And what few democratic values we have obtained, what little space for reasoned discourse has been created will be the first to be swept away, so


will be the first to be swept away, so it's- it’s very, very important that people take back their minds and that people analyse our dilemma in the context of the entire human story. From the descent onto the grassland to our potential destiny as citizens of the galaxy and the universe, we are at a critical turning point. And as I say, the tools, the- the data that is... holds the potential for our salvation is now known, it is available, it is among us. But it is misrepresented, it is slandered, it is litigated against and it’s up to each one of us to relate to this situation in a fashion that will allow us to answer the question that will surely be put to us in a some point in the future, which is "What did you do to help save the world". Well, I'll knock off now, I'll sign books, we'll take, like, a 10-minute break and then we'll come back and do questions. Thank you very much for


come back and do questions. Thank you very much for your attention! [Applause]


[Dis]...aster and that in fact what we're involved with here at the end of the 20-th century is some kind of, uh, accelerated forward escape into transformation. And I- when I lecture that subject I more or less imply that it's inevitable. In other words, that it's not that we have to to X, Y or Z, that it's on track. I think it is on track but I also think there is a place for this kind of politics we discuss this evening because, as the world gets crazier and crazier, a lot of people are going to get very, very anxious. This thing in Oklahoma City is an example of people getting anxious. Uh- so, what needs to be done is to spread [1:18:00] the idea that anxiety is inappropriate.

[Transcript by

Demeter Bogoev

It- it’s sort of like w-we who are psychedelic have to function as sitters for society [audience laughs], because society is going to thrash, and resist, and think it’s dying, and be deluded, and, uh, regurgitate unconscious material, and so forth and so on. And the goal

(1:18:30)

and the role, then, for psychedelic people, I think, is to try and spread calm.

I’m very convinced that things are going to get a lot nuttier than they are, and they are a lot nuttier now than they have been for a while [audience snickers]. But, it- it isn’t -- it isn- doesn’t mean the bad people are winning, or that we are going to fumble the ball, or anything.

The mushroom said to me once, it said, “This is what it’s like when a species departs for the stars.”

(1:19:00)


(1:19:00)

It’s a birthing. It’s complicated. Uhm, if you had never seen a human birth, and you came around the corner of a building in your daily round, and it was happening - it vibrates medical emergency. I mean, blood is being shed, tissues stretched. It doesn’t - you really have to have your chops together to step back and say, “How wonderful! New life coming into the world!”

(1:19:30)

[audience laughs] Because, uh, you know, that’s not the vibe of it. [audience continues laughing] And, I think that’s the circumstance that we’re in. This is the birth canal to a new order. And, at the moment, it looks like suffocation, constriction, limitation, possible death.

But, uh, we need to inform ourselves, and get a big perspective.

(1:20:00)

And, there’s no way to get a big perspective like education and psychedelic experiences. If we can see history for what it is, it’s a- it’s a twenty-five-thousand year, nearly instantaneous, transition from one state of being to another. And, yes, there are fifteen-hundred generations of people who live in that paper thin transition time.

(1:20:30)

But, when it’s over...it’s over, and we will leave history behind the way you dump a used placenta, I’m sure.

Yeah? [Points to audience member with a question]

Audience Question -

Um, I wondered, is there any reliable information on the relationship between psychedelics and early, uh, Christianity?

T.M. -

Reliable information on psychedelic use in early Christianity? The answer is no. I mean, there - there is a book by John Allegro,

(1:21:00)


(1:21:00)

called The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross. He was a very respected Dead Sea scholar ‘til he wrote that book, [audience laughs] uh, and that basically finished his career as a classicist. He says some incredibly provocative things in that book. To judge whether he’s right or wrong you would have to be, uh, an Assyrian philologist - about which I know nothing.

(1:21:30)

So, to the layperson, it seemed to be quite an impressive book, but, apparently to his specialist colleagues it was sloppy thinking, and a travesty, and reason to deny tenure. [Audience laughs]

Uhm, St. Augustine was a Montanist before he - no, he was a Manichaean before he converted to Christianity. And, uh,

(1:22:00)

he mentions that Manichaeans forbade the use of mushrooms - the eating of mushrooms, it doesn’t say the use of mushrooms.

But, the ancient middle-east - we don’t know very much about psyc- uh -- psychedelic sacramentalism. It may have been there. It may not have been there. Absence of reference is not proof of absence, because of cult secrecy, and- and other factors like that.

(1:22:30)

We do know that the - or we feel we are on firmer ground in saying that the Greek mystery religions, emphatically, probably were psychedelic. Especially, the- the Ele- Eleusinian mysteries. The mysteries that were practiced on the plain outside of Athens every year for over two-thousand years. And, everybody who was anybody in the ancient world made the journey to Eleusis

(1:23:00)