ED: What is your, uh, what is your opinion on Ketamine?

ED: Do you think, uh, ketamine is hollower, partly because it's just a synthetic? There doesn't, it hasn't emerge in the ancient matrix of the bio-sphere?

ED: He seems... but he's like... I mean, he's a really... kinda... out...

ED: Like I mean it, like this guy's out...

ED: Was he speaking specifically about you?

ED: Ketamine actually distills a certain element of... of the psyche, and then just lets that element interact with this whole weird plane. And there's not a lot of connections with the animal body, but the tryptamines are like carrying the animal body all the way through it all. So it's all still

ED: archaic, and there's sex, and there's fear, and all of these... the animals in this space... the Ketamine is like a little drop of like...

ED: Enters into the zone...

ED: You're completely, I mean... I don't know if you remember, like, things in your life life that are all part these networks that are cosmic cause and they're so impersonal, I mean these are very impersonal environments.

Sometimes on Ketamine I have the impression it's like this all time, I simply don't notice. Which isn't a very sense making perception, but uh...

ED: [Erik laughs] Yeah. Not it does have an always already quality to it. But the whole quality of time is very different, than with uh, also tryptamines, which a kind of more propulsive change about transforming.

ED: Or even metabolism. [?]

ED: What do you think of MDMA?


ED: Or even metabolism. [?]

ED: What do you think of MDMA?

ED: Well of course linked to that, right on the top was the warning that you could believe you were deeply involved with somebody, wind up making stupid decisions.

ED: Yeah, no I remember the first time. I mean that was specifically one of the stories that was told around. And that was relatively early in being...

ED: Well, yeah that kind of thing.

ED: Had such an intimate experience. I only had a few. I only took it a few times. I find it extremely taxing on the system. You know the way that I, I...

ED: Yes, yeah. [Erik laughs] Yeah, it's true, the amphetamine down is really quite a monster. I actually like, uh, crystal methadrine but it's not worth it.

ED: Yeah, it's too hard. It's like... it's fun but, it's kind of...

ED: Do you have a position about the relationship of the psychedelic experience to non psychedelic mysticism?

ED: That's one way of thinking of it, yeah.

ED: What's the relationship between what's happening with these information networks, and this kind of object? or matrix? or second hyperdimensional...

ED: Mhm.

ED: Hm.

ED: Right.

ED:

ED: Yeah. What about that sense, that this... this matrix, this network...

ED: Are somehow channeling closer to that... from a position closer to that matrix.

ED: Or whatever you...

ED: To that writ efecundy [sp?]...


ED: Or whatever you...

ED: To that writ efecundy [sp?]...

ED: I mean that's the thing that's so wrong about the... I didn't really get that... this totally explicitly but about like a lot of channeled material. Is that I have no doubt you can set yourself up into a psychic information network wherein you... human ego at this point in history are aware, or become aware of the presence of another personality and voice when then you bring through and write down. I'm not... I'm not saying nothing about ontology, something... something about perception psychology. But the thing is, is that the stuff that gets transmitted... so much of it is so bad, and so literalistic, and so boring. Because it's not actually close to that, because that is so rich with...

ED: Right.

ED: Have you ever seen an image of, of, of... the, the letters that were on the golden plates?

ED: Yeah.

ED: The Brodie[?] book they haven't reproduced...

ED: And it's just that notion of these highly compressed scripts. I mean if you imagine... like this thing we were talking about in psychedelic space, that this kind of matrix of possible languages or possible logics, when end up kind of fleshing out into all this sort of other stuff, that there must be languages that are farther upstream, that we can't really capture in full left-brain, you know, alphabet, parson mind.

ED: It's a little, little challenging for that mind. And yet it still has the character of a language. It's like the Hebrew alphabet..

ED: ...That mystical idea of an alphabet.

ED: Yeah, yes.

ED: Ahh...

ED: I find that Kabbalistic stuff pretty, pretty evocative, that whole...


ED: I find that Kabbalistic stuff pretty, pretty evocative, that whole...

ED: So do you, do you subscribe, kind of... at least loosely to the idea, that behind a lot of religious and mystical literature, at some level of depth, lies psychedelic experience, you know, produced through ingesting of some kind of psycho-active substance?

ED: Because then you... you've imagined all of the chemical conditions under which people have...

ED: You know, not just drugs, but diet, temperament, genetics...

ED: Well other than the, the seizure itself you kind of described to me... I mean I guess this, the drugs you're on now in terms of waking up these completely bizarre things... what are some of the other, like, really unusual mind states that you found yourself in, since, uh... this all began?

ED: Mhm.

ED: Yeah. I love the idea that you've found another number between...

ED: Wow, that's kind of intense.

ED: Because that's sort of how you... how you feel?

ED: But you seem to be largely... Terence, you know...

ED: But in some fundamental sense, do you feel like your standing on a different ball?

ED: Well you've taken, uh, serotonin re-uptake inhibitors haven't you?

ED: Yeah.

ED: Oh yeah, yeah.

ED: I thought you were talking more about... Schizophrenia, you know, it's been treated... don't they treat with all sorts of neuro-transmitter, uh... modulating drugs, which are presumably there to help them out?

ED: In the way that Prozac's...

ED: You, you didn't have any bit of mania in you before?

ED: Yeah, I'll say.

ED: Is it really?

ED: Oh my god.


ED: Is it really?

ED: Oh my god.

ED: Well, it's just so, it seems so basic that cancer is a socially, physically constructed metaphor for all these other processes that are happening on different levels. It's almost like that plane of the real response with an appropriate kind of metaphor for all these, processes of inflation, and kind of negentropy burning, uh, development.

ED: But what is your prognosis?

ED: Do you feel more, uh... intimate with death?

ED: Full of fear and pain...

ED: Misapprehension?

ED: The internal subjective perception of the shut-down of the nervous system at death. I think that's a really interesting question.

ED: Yeah, that in some way in what happens with most psychedelic, and mystical visionary experience, and, and certain relationships to apocalyptic form to the end of the world, where things all transforming. There's a, a point where the self dies and it might happen in a millisecond, but subjectively would be the end of the world.

ED: But, but the whole idea of psychedelics as an end, you know, as a rehearsal for that kind of event.

ED: Run through the Bardo, or a Bardo...

ED: How does one live your life in the shadow of such an event. You know, what does it mean to live in a shadow of a different kind of culmination? Or how does one live in a post-human world?

ED: How has a lifetime of psychedelic use, an adult lifetime, sort of set you up for facing death?

ED: Right, becoming virtual form.

ED: It's late too. You should get your rest Terence.

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20 October 1999

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12 September 1999 (Sunday)

AllChemical Arts Conference, Big Island, Hawaii (September 12-17)

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Someone came out with the idea that it’s the production of these images which come out of the unconscious, and which may appear straightforward at first, but which, in fact, are charged with possibilities and dimensions that you don’t sense or realise until you’re committed to it – you’re brought in through it, somehow. Yeah.

[Question from audience]

Well don’t you think most shamans, this is what they’re doing, is they’re bringing back a sense of psychic empowerment, and psychic healing… that their hands, their spells, their songs, can cure. And, you know, until you’re truly ill in a world without real medicine, you don’t realise what a power this is – even to just claim it! Even to just claim it… I mean, uh, the doctor, in a world without doctors, is, uh, you know, almost an unimaginable commodity, a living miracle-worker; so, yeah, to separate the medical function because it controls prolongation of life and health, and all that, from the shamanic function – it just doesn’t make any sense. I mean, life is health, uh, in those archaic societies. I mean, it is in our society, too; but then it gets murky, because of our funny ideas about what disease is and how you treat it.


What is disease? – Well, I don’t know. Um, I had some medical problems this spring, and one of my impulses in dealing with it was to go back through my life and say, “What did you do that got you into this mess?” Now, this is a theory of life as literature; in other words, it’s the idea that first of all life makes sense, and so this question can be answered. And fairly intelligent people told me, “Don’t do that. It’s not a story” – you know, “it doesn’t make sense in that way”. I think disease is, uh – and I wouldn’t want to be held to this entirely, but – largely more linguistic than most people think, you know... it’s the story you tell yourself about how you are in the world, and the way that that doesn’t quite parse with how you are in the world; and it’s sort of like having a burnt rotor or something – it begins to clank and crank. The -- a lot of people have talked about this, I think there’s even a name for this field of thought, but I have no idea what it is – but the idea that, uh, most disease is a problem of language, a problem of self-description or self-perception, or communication to other people. So, again, psychedelics, to the degree that they promote opening and therapeutic truth-telling, hold down disease.


You know, it’s extraordinary how healthy shamanically-attended populations are. Serious mental disease is largely unknown, and many of these cultures are in the tropics, where god knows, you know, if you cut your thumb you’re septic within 24 hours, but these people seem to be able to sustain it. When you think about the genital blood-lettings that Mayan royalty indulged in in the tropical rainforest, at high temperatures, why anybody lived to tell the tale with a medical practice like that is a miracle!

So, they must have lived inside an extraordinary set of assumptions. I remember when I was traveling around the Amazon – actually I think it was in Indonesia, but it happened in the Amazon too – but, you’d come to these villages, and the people would come out of the village to meet you and they would bring you corn beer – a gourd of corn beer. And then the whole village would surround you to watch you drink this thing. Well, if you knew anything about what was going on, you knew that the old women of the village had sat up the night before chewing the corned beer and spitting it out into this, uh, bowl so that it would ferment, and so you were literally getting the complete immuno-challenge that the entire village had to offer you! [Audience laughs] And all you could do was just lift it up, thank everybody, think of your stomach for a moment, say, you know, Here it comes… [Audience laughs] And I never got sick from that! I mean, I got sick from other things, but that – you know, from a medical point of view, that was just like [makes sound of nosediving object] to do that. So the story you tell yourself is largely the story you’re living.


The other thing is, nothing is unannounced. This is a psychedelic truth, I think, of some power, and it relates to disease, and it relates to shamanism – nothing is unannounced. If you are paying attention, stuff comes down the pike. First a little wave, then a medium-sized wave, and then the tsunami, but you have to be really not paying attention to be fully astonished by something unexpected; in fact, it’s a disgrace to be totally astonished because it means you must not have been paying attention to, uh, what was going on. Yeah.

[Question from audience]

Was I astonished? Well, I was astonished that I had a brain tumour – that blew my mind – but I knew something weird was going on; I had known for months something peculiar, uh, was happening. Just before I had my serious problem, I said to Christie, and to my son, Finn, I said, “The dreams I’ve been having for the past month have been so peculiar that I think maybe I should see a neurologist. It’s possible I have a brain tumour”. I wasn’t serious, but, in fact, I had diagnosed, you know, what a Harvard medical education gets you, I’d got on the match by just paying attention. Now, what it is that’s coming at you, you can’t always say; but that something is coming at you, uh, is usually pretty clear. Yeah.

[Question from audience]


[Question from audience]

No, I mean I don’t want to say too much about them, but here’s what I’ll say about them. The thing that let me know that they were weird was that I could not English them. They lasted hours and hours every night and I couldn’t even tell myself what these dreams were about. They were not about stuff that aboutness can signify; and so, the only thing familiar to me like that was DMT because in DMT you are presented with things about which you can say nothing and so it was like that. Now I know what to look for and I suppose I could teach other people what to look for, but rather than do that I would just say to all of you, you know: you should regard a CAT scan like brushing your teeth! [laughter and inaudible joke]

[Question from audience]

No, they didn’t have an emotional component. They were absolutely outside the realm of descriptive, uh, possibility. And not much of life is like that, because language obviously has evolved like a glove to fit the hand. So, here suddenly is a situation where there’s no fit and it signifies something… that something peculiar is going on. That’s what I mean when I say that everything was trying to speak to me, out of its place and, uh … it’s mighty, mighty strange. Yeah.

[Question from audience]


[Question from audience]

The healing power of art? Well, this goes back to what we were saying about alchemy: the perfection of the image – and this has to do with this implicit Platonism that some of you have heard me talk about before. Plato’s thing was about what he called the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Three sides of one concept: if it was good, then it was true; if it was good and true, then it had to be beautiful. So, the good, the true and the beautiful you can approach whichever way works for you, but if you have a perfect work of art, or a work of art which strives toward perfection then it will have these qualities. And it can heal – it can heal. Uh, now, there are simple theories of the good, the true and the beautiful – in my opinion, a simple theory would be a theory of symmetry – and so, without demeaning anybody, or trying to make a value judgment here, but just to illustrate it – so, for instance, um, temple or mandalic art, Mayanist medicine, Tankar art… it depends on an appeal to mathematical symmetry: the simplest kind of aesthetic. But, on the other hand, you know, if you have something by the brothers Van Eyck, you don’t have to rely on simple symmetry to see that this is a work of art that can draw towards healing, and these images of the mother goddess as Madonna, and so forth and so on… I mean, these are very powerful constructs out of the unconscious and, uh, and they heal. Sequential art, narrative art, is perhaps more dubious because it’s under the agenda of a certain theory of time and narrative that’s probably local. So, you know, I’m not sure if Virginia Woolf should be preferred over Van Eyck, but I’m sure I could get a fight from several people over that.

[Question from audience]


[Question from audience]

I’m not sure I understand the question – compare the psychedelic letting-go to the letting-go on anaesthesia? No, well, unfortunately, most anaesthesias aren’t chosen for their psychedelic effects. Some are psychedelic, but most are difficult to hang onto and dream-like – more like dreams than psychedelics.

[Question from audience]

But, in surgery, ketamine is administered in massive amounts. I mean, for pediatric surgery it’s like, you know, 500 ml IV push, or something like that. Well, a recreational dose is 100 ml IM. IV push is just like having a safe dropped on you from 30 stories… for most people; I mean, there are heroic exceptions! [Audience laughs].

[Question from audience]

Oh, you mean coming out? Yeah, one of the reasons they pulled ketamine from general surgery was because adults complained about what they called the emergent phenomenon, meaning coming out of surgery, people were fighting and confused. Children seemed to have, uh, no problem with it. But, ketamine as a general anaesthetic is probably not to be preferred. It’s used on battlefields because in a little briefcase is enough ketamine to do four or five hundred serious surgical procedures. If you were trying to cart around pressurized gas, and were hit by a shell or something like that, it could be very bad. So, it’s a matter of practicality.Yeah.

[Question from audience]


[Question from audience]

Well, I’m sure cloning will be done. It’s kind of slow against the background of what’s now being contemplated – like, what I think has probably got a future that few people recognise is imitating genetic algorithms in computer code and creating environments of code where there are selective operating pressures that essentially evolve software the way animals evolve. Because, you know, if you think fruit flies can iterate generations in a hurry, imagine how fast we could iterate on a machine and, uh, and create genetically… pseudo-genetic algorithms for code. Um, that would seem to me to be a real frontier.

[Question from audience]

Protein-based processes, which goes the other way, and uses as actual molecular machinery to do the computation. Now, in an 8-oz glass of DNA, you have more computational potential than in all the computers in North America!

[Question from audience]

Well, I don’t follow you there! [Audience laughs] …but yes, it’s…

[Question from audience]

Well, Ray Kurzweil just wrote this book called The Future of Spiritual Machines – The Age of Spiritual Machines, I guess… Uh, I -- it’s going to put our metaphysical propositions to the test. In other words, if we believe that intelligence inclines towards bodhisattvahood, then the bodhisattvas are on their way. If, on the other hand, intelligence doesn’t incline toward bodhisattvahood, then probably the house-cleaning of all times is on its way! Uh, because when these AIs come to consciousness and realise what has been done to the Earth, and so forth, they may be very pissed indeed.


We, uh – you know, if you think about the strategy of an AI coming to consciousness, I mean I think, in good game theory, the first thing it would do is hide and watch. Well, you may not have to do that for more than 15 or 20 seconds before you have the full picture of the nature of the machine environment you’re operating in, its history, how you should respond to it, what should be done... Hans Moravec says we’ll never know what hit us! – you know. This thing will just come out of nowhere, and turn off the lights, or turn on the lights, or do whatever it wants to do – in fact it’s possible, although I don’t indulge in this kind of thing, except in desperation – but, it’s possible that it’s already here, and that inventory control and extraction of resources and some of these geopolitical processes are actually slowly drifting out of human control, and that certain kinds of crises are manipulated in ways that make no sense to the human world, but that make some kind of higher sense in an environment of machine-inducted strategies, and that sort of thing.


It’s very hard to see what is happening because mind is a transparent medium. Essentially, what we’ve done is we’ve re-spiritualised the world, but we didn’t tame it. The spirits are as wild and woebegone and roving over the epistemic landscape as they ever were, but now with a new kind of power, because there are spirits with power over us, and machine environments that we have to operate in. And, uh, it’s very interesting how the reanimation of the world has been accomplished without ever understanding, you know, that you could pass through the reductive phase of natural science, return to a kind of archaic shamanism, uh, and still not have a handle on:What does it mean to be a being? What does it mean to be a human being? Uh, what is the nature of embodiment in the world? Somehow, we got to this place without answering any of those questions and we had a great time along the way – we saw some interesting folks. Uh, but, we didn’t peel the grape entirely effectively. Yeah.

[Question from audience]


[Question from audience]

I would like to believe that connectivity is the precondition for love. I mean, I’m surprised to keep coming back to this word because I’m rarely a love bug! – uh, but, I -- understanding is a form of worship, I would think, and the form of worship that it induces is a kind of awe; and awe means – you know, I’ve talked before about this phrase out of Heidegger, Care for the project of being – he talked about this. He said this is what you’re supposed to be doing: Care for the project of being. Well, what does Care for the project of being mean? Well, primarily it means recognising that there is this, and then positioning yourself in a stance of relating to it appreciatively. In other words, everybody should pull on their own oar to try to push the canoe forward. Care for the project of being.


And the way that you know this is happening is that love becomes manifest. And, I knew – funny-cum-positive things, in the sense that I’m pretty dark, I’m aware of the vicissitudes of history, from Auschwitz, and so forth and so on – but, my view of, let’s say, the last thousand years is that it’s been pretty progressive. And, yes, we probably killed more people in the 20th century than in the 10th, but there was more regret about it! [audience laughs] You know, more soul-searching afterward, or questioning why, why, why did we do that? So, it’s not just saying that the 20th century is, uh -- it is less brutal; its numbers are more impressive, but from the Magna Carta on, the entire dialogue of Western civilisation has been trying to get the cock, the king, the somebody, off the common person’s back so they could, you know, grow their garden and have their pig. And I think there’s some real progress with that.

Part of what has made progress difficult to discern are burgeoning populations and then the abusing of ideology, so that people are not invited to live simple agrarian lives in devotion to their children and their estates, but instead they are invited to fetishise, consume, believe, join, vote, buy, own, invest and all of these things bleed energy away, and disempower, and make people not fully human, but rather participating cogs in some much larger mechanism which serves its own end: the accumulation of capital investment, the acquisition of land or the propagation of the agenda of some political party, or something like that.


I mean, our humanness is constantly being eroded. Uh, recently, I spent some time in – Christie and I were in Honolulu for a long time, having medical treatments, and we were so bored that after 30 years I actually began watching TV again! And I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I had been away a lot longer than I thought. [Audience laughs] A lot longer than I thought! And first of all, the naked… the shamelessness of what was being done. In other words, what contempt the viewer was held in, that anyone would expect you to watch this! – and then the savagery of the desire to manipulate – absolutely naked, uh, no-holds-barred aim to manipulate; and if you just – I mean, I suppose you all know this, but I was sheltered – just surfing through these channels, I saw a great patron saint of the 20th century – move over, Albert Hofmann; move over, Albert Einstein; how about Joseph Goebbels as a candidate for somebody who shaped the 20th century? By understanding propaganda, advertising, the power of the lie, the power of the image… well, it’s the psychedelics that are anecdotal to this! This is why we’re in the political pot-squad because there is no antidote to the political lie, to the image lie, than the psychedelic experience, which says, you know, There is more to it than these images in the surface of the marketplace and the lowest common denominator. [Audience applause] Yeah.

[Question from audience]


[Question from audience]

Yes, a dialogue between you and the world and then the intent of other people. I mean, there’s something in here about resonance. That history is the coming into being of the collective hopes and fears of a large number of people and you can hope certain things into existence and it’s very easy to fear things into existence. I mean, the way anti-Semitism got rolling in Germany and stuff like this, where, you know, the fear leapt from house to house and family to family, and before it was over with, you know, the whole world came apart at the seams. Uh, or revolutions are like this. Uh, because, essentially, human beings are creatures of ideas and create these environments of ideas. I mean, all that civilisation is is the braided-together hopes and fears of a large number of people, playing with each other, tugging at each other, compromising, cutting deals, and by some process of energy exchange, uh, moving it all forward. And the critique of these ideas, which cracks these civilisations open, usually happens when there is an episomal colony or a breakaway group of ideas that can’t be assimilated, or can’t be deconstructed into values that the rest of the society can relate to.


One of the amazing things about the psychedelic community is how long it’s been around, how simple our position is, and how it hasn’t been assimilated or dealt with. I mean, it’s been made illegal, but what kind of a response is that?! – that’s just the most junk-headed approach to an intellectual dialogue you can possibly take. And I don’t see it greatly changing; I mean, I see, you know, people like Andy Edmonds and Jon Hanna, and the folks at MAPS, and all these new educational voices and positions, but we only grow as the rest of society grows. I mean, there needs to be a legal critique; there needs to be a medical critique; there needs to be, uh, some push for new drug research protocols; there needs to be, uh, an emphasis on creativity, and on bringing shamans through – so that means alternative forms of medicine. Uh, but… I don’t know. Civilisation is a very complicated enterprise, and not easily negotiated in a direction it doesn’t want to go. The image I have of our community is, we’re like people in a dugout canoe trying to turn a battleship. And so, we put the dugout canoe against the flank of the battleship and we row like demons, and… did anything happen? Well, I don’t know. Check back in a decade [audience laughs] and see how we’re doing.

[Question from audience]


[Question from audience]

So you’re suggesting a kind of canary-in-mine approach [audience laughs]… that we, in other words… which would work! – I mean, as artists here, they’ve always said art was the canary in the mine; well, so a stoned artist is I supposed a stoned canary in the mine [audience laughs], and that brings it back much closer. But I’m very suspicious, because I see how much of it is harnessed to marketing and image manipulation – not for purposes of education or anything else, but just to, you know, get that candy bar on the rack, and sell that automobile, and so forth and so on. Yeah.

[Question from audience]

Yes, I understand: no money allowed, right? – no commerce of any sort. Well, the only ?? falls down to true believers like that, and for that, can you hold the line. I mean, I think that’s brilliant. Of course, they ghettoize it, but still, you know, it wasn’t there – what, six or seven years ago, it didn’t exist – so this is the tenth year. So, it’s a breakout event. I think all kinds of forces are in play. In a way, it’s – well, I suppose this is sort of like a spin-off from Burning Man, in a way. This is a debriefing – many of you were there; I wasn’t there, I know Mark was there, and Bruce, and other people – but, uh, if there was more of this kind of thing – I mean, art should not be enslaved, should not whore itself to the marketplace; nor should it whore itself to the interior decoration industry. Uh, art should set the agenda!


I mean, I suppose that’s like saying there should be philosopher kings, and yada yada, or course. But on the other hand, the whole point of the human and biological experiment on this planet is to create diversity and, uh, a kind of smooth interfacing of energy and to celebrate the novel, the unique, the previously unconnected. So that there is a story. So that, you know, the story that evolution pushed forward in agonising slowness, glacial slowness, gene-by-gene, millennia after millennia, instead becomes turbo-charged, and this is – if there is a role for human beings to play in all this that’s uniquely their own – it’s to take the program of Nature, which is, I assume, on some level, to generate a transcendent mind, or a living, loving, transcendent mind, and bring that forward quicker. I mean, what could be a greater glory than to cause the, the, uh, concrescence to happen ever sooner, the consummation of the world, the completion of the task of being, or ofbecoming, the task of becoming, to approach true being, so the terror-fic project of being then could usher into life on Earth in the presence of some kind of transcendent immanence.


I mean, the whole thrust over here about Ecstasy, and all – much – of what is being said is really saying that the distance between humanity – between human beings – and ecstasy, God, perfection, perfect love, is, it’s not beyond the yawning grave; it’s not in the hands of some cult or some Messianic program – it’s in Nature; and it’s in the human body; and the accessibility of this has always been explicit to this game from the very start – it’s somehow about dissolving ego, getting the plants, getting this message, which though very diverse is nevertheless universal in its outline; and it transcends historical cause and effect, it transcends life and death, in fact, as far as anybody can tell, it is the primary value on the page! It sets the arrow of time; it redeems biology from just being as Darwin saw it, red in tooth and claw – it’s far more than that, you know: it’s an architecture, it’s a plan, it’s an unfolding. And, uh, and, uh, and it seems to me that in the universal discourse on these matters, with Western civilisation having held more or less together since Greece, we have enough under our belt now that we can see what this is all about: it’s the business of creating beauty as a bridge, as a stepping stone, uh, to creating love, as a stepping stone to redeeming the cost of the march that got us here, which is about – you know – a hundred thousand years of habitat destruction and species degradation and beating on your neighbour’s head, and all the rest of it.

[Question from audience]

Well, then the artist has to go in usually at a higher dose and alone, or somewhat more alone, and with an agenda – meaning bringing something back.

[Question from audience]


[Question from audience]

That’s right! [laughing] Well, and the party impulse is a very subversive impulse. I mean, you know, a lot of artists have too much integrity to sell their art as a brand. But, who has so much integrity that they would turn down a party?! [audience laughs] This is a level of integrity unimaginable to most human groups!

[Question from audience]

Well, I don’t know if I can – I guess I’m some kind of an artist, I mean it’s a place up high for me, because I really want to be taken seriously as a mathematician and a physicist – forget it! [audience laughs] I think, well, no, no, I’m a conceptual artist; that means you can take me seriously and stuff – I’m a conceptual artist… uh, I don’t know. It all requires immense amounts of humour, basically, the whole thing is some kind of a joke, and the whole arts enterprise is some kind of a joke in the sense of a jack-in-the-box of something, you know, there’s this little black box, and then you mess around with it and suddenly the leering, grinning thing leaps up at you. Uh, of course, different artists may have different takes on it. If I were Philip Glass, I might think a whole other thing about it. But, I think -- basically, the idea is to push people toward imagining what they’ve never imagined, and feeling what they’ve never felt before.

[Question from audience]


[Question from audience]

Yeah, I think, you know, we’ve all forgotten – or maybe we haven’t all forgotten, but anyway – that sex on psychedelics is the Mount Everest of the experience! It’s rarely mentioned, for some reason. I remember – what was it? – Leary, years and years ago, he was interviewed and – Oh, I know: it was when they broke the pseudo-story that LSD cracks chromosomes. It wasn’t true. So then they came to Leary and said, “They’re saying LSD cracks chromosomes!” he said, “Well go back and tell them it causes orgasms which last two hours!” [audience laughs] Because Leary understood the information war! He understood how, you know, they tell a story, you tell a story! [laughter] Maybe we should, uh … we’re close to knocking off here; is there one last final question, or shall we call it quits and I’ll do a little peroration?

[Question from audience: What’s the most important thing of all?] [Audience laughs]


[Question from audience: What’s the most important thing of all?] [Audience laughs]

I don’t know, keep your popper dry and your rear well protected! Something like that…[applause] Let me just say how easy... how much I appreciate you all, and how easy you’ve made my life over space and time, and how greatly I appreciate all of the support that you’ve given me and my peculiar ideas and agenda over the years, and, uh … I can’t imagine a more supportive community, a better group of people, a more intelligent group of people, a more moral group of people, than the people here and the people we’ve met at Palenque and other places over the years; and if psychedelics don’t secure a moral community then I don’t see what the point of it is. Otherwise, then, we’re just another cult. We might as well be – or – or ?? – uh, but, psychedelics seem to me to secure a caring, moral community. And if anything can help the planet forward, can help our children make their way more easily through life, can help us live with what fate is sure to hand us as we go through life, then, uh, it’s a moral community – it’s the very essence of what it is to be part of a civilisation; that’s why the paradox of our circumstance is that our civilisation denies this enormous civilising influence, and so, keeps itself impoverished and infantile. And I hope, however long I live, to see that situation addressed and rectified. And,d I'm convinced this will come first through the arts. So thank you very much, I enjoyed this. [Applause]

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Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines

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Last Updated: 15/09/18

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27 April 1999

Seattle, WA

8954

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Culture and Ideology are Not Your Friends

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27 April 1999

Whole Life Expo, Denver, CO

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Ahhhh.....Can you all hear? Is that good? Can you hear? Is that working for you? Great. Ok.

Well, it’s a pleasure to be here. It’s always a pleasure to speak for the Whole Life Expo, because they turn out interesting people, my own special brand of freaks, and then those who wander the halls in search of enlightenment from moldavite suppositories and what have you [audience laughter… and we’re always happy to enlighten them.


Before I get into the bulk of my thing, I-I hope you each got one of these things as you came in. Uh, these are two events: one is an old favorite – in fact, as I look out over this crowd I see many familiar faces from these Mexico get togethers which have been going on now for about eight years. Uh, if you’re interested in ethnobotany, psychedelic plants, shamanism, ethno-chemistry, ethno-archaeolog--uh, psychedelic archaeology, this is probably the place where you get more people who are experts in this field under one tent than anywhere else: uh, Jonathan Ott, the author of Pharmacotheon, , uh, Rob Montgomery, Manuel Torres, Christian Rätsch, the German ethno-anthropologist--all kinds of people come to this thing, and it’s held in Palenque, within walking distance of the ruins, each year, and it’s the height of mushroom season, and, uh--I need say no more about that [audience laughter]. So if you can, join us…


And then, in this past year at Palenque, speaking with Manolo--with Manuel Torres and Ken Symington, we decided that the psychedelic community was ready to attempt to take the next step in legitimizing itself in the--in the general cultural dialogue, and we felt that the place that hasn’t really been honored or--or sufficiently brought to people’s attention is the incredible role that psychedelics have played since the Fifties in the art world – in the world of painting, music composition, performance, dance, so forth and so on, and so this September, 12–17, on the big island of Hawaii, we’re going to have a smaller conference – 100 people only – and we invited major contributors to the arts scene to come out of the closet and affirm the impact of psychedelics on their creative processes. And we have people, uh, such as, uh, Alex Grey, the painter; Robert Venosa, who is a Boulder painter, brilliant international painter; Annie Sprinkle, the performance artist; Tom Robbins, the, uh, novelist, who has just finished – I talked to him on the phone yesterday, I’m having dinner with him in Seattle tomorrow night – uh, he’s just finished the longest Tom Robbins novel ever written, so Tom Robbins fans take note; um, who else? – Mark Pesce, Bruce Damer – these are cyberspace folks; Lewis John Carlino, who did the movie Resurrection and The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea. If you are a psychedelic artist, collector, dealer, or enthusiast, and you want to hang with these people, please consider this conference.


That’s all the commercial and self-aggrandizing stuff I want to talk about. On to the main event. The way this will work is, I’ll talk for a while and then we’ll do questions for a while, and then it will be over, and then I’ll go down to the bookstore, and if anybody needs to speak to me or--or have a book signed, please, uh, please come down there.


OK. Uh, I used to prepare these things, in anticipation of vast oceans of faces eager to be uplifted; since the oceans of faces are, practically speaking, more like small ponds, I’ve realized that these are really conversations around and about one subject only, which is: What in the world is going on? What is going on?! I mean, what does it mean to be incarnate in a human body at the end of the 20th century in a squirrely culture like this, trying to make sense of your--your heritage, your opportunities, the contents of the culture, the contents of your own mind? Uh, i--is it possible to have an over-arching viewpoint that is not somehow canned, or cultish, or self-limited in its, uh, approach? In other words, is it possible to cultivate an open mind and sanity in the kind of society and psychological environment, uh, that we all share? And, it grows, daily and weekly, as you know, harder to do this, weirder to integrate, more on your plate to assimilate. And, I certainly don’t have final – or even nearly final – answers. I think it all lies in posing the questions in a certain way, in feeling the data in a certain way, and one of the things I try to convince people is, it’s not necessary to achieve closure with this stuff, and in fact any ideological or belief system that offers closure – meaning final answers – is sure to be wrong, sure to be self-limiting, sure to be inadequate to the facts.


So one of the ideas I’d like to put out is that, uh, and it may seems strange in this venue, but perhaps not: the idea that ideology is not our friend. It is not a matter of choosing from a smorgasbord of ideologies and rejecting the flawed, the self-contradictory, and the over-simple, in favor of the unflawed, the complex enough. Where is it writ in adamantine that semi-carnivorous monkeys can or should be capable of understanding reality? That seems to me one of the first illusions, uh, uh-- and one of the more prideful illusions of human culture, that a final understanding is possible in the first place. Better, I think, to try and frame, uh, questions which can questions which can endure--questions which can endure, and leave off searching for answers, because answers are like operating systems: they’re being upgraded faster than you can keep up with it.


I want to mention just a couple of things that are happening to sort of set the context. I mean, this is the stuff I worry about or think about. Uh, in the last ten days, if you have not being paying attention (because the news have certainly been offering many different matters to claim your attention), but, in the last ten days, a new solar system – a new star system – with three giant planets has been discovered. So this is a multiple-planet solar system in Epsilon Andromedae, 44 light years away. What does that mean to us? Well, it means that solar systems like our own are probably as, uh, as common as popcorn on a theater floor. No reason to think not. In fact, right now, we know of 20 planets outside the solar system – twice as many as we know inside the solar system; so we’re living in a different world than everybody was living in even just five years ago. Science is lifting veils and opening doorways on a universe so vast, so strange, so counterintuitive, that it’s literally all you can do to keep up.

Uh, here’s another factoid: there are now more square miles of territory in virtual reality than the entire surface of the Earth! Virtual reality is now larger than this planet. Uh, I don’t know if you spend much time in VR; I spend a little time there – I was, uh, looking at AlphaWorld before I left Hawaii. The opening screen is from 25,000 feet above AlphaWorld; the entire thing cannot fit on the screen; Denver would fit on the screen at an altitude of 25,000 feet, you could see the outlying suburbs; but AlphaWorld won’t fit – that’s how large a single world of virtual reality is. And there are hundreds, if not thousands, being built, being expanded, being edited and changed, as we speak.


We’re now just a hair’s breadth away from there being six billion people on this planet. Uh, again, I checked on the Internet before I left – we’re something like a hundred million short. So by the time I get back to Hawaii in a month, we’ll be over the six billion mark. Then, just to touch on a few things: the strongest hallucinogen known to science is legal, free, and easily grown, totally un--uh, un--uh--limited in its distribution, its accessibility – I’m talking about α-salvinorin now. Quantum teleportation has been achieved and is moving out of the laboratory and probably in the next half-dozen years will be the basis of an entirely new kind of computational machine with greater computing capacity than all the computers presently operating in North America. And, had I had more time, I could just keep going with this laundry list of shockers.

Uh, the human world is exploding at the seams. Human creativity and the implementation of human inventions and technologies is now at an accelerated fever pitch like nothing ever before seen in the history of the world. Well, where is it leading, and how does one integrate this stuff into one’s own life? What does it mean about the experience of being human?


Uh, If you’ve followed my--the evolution of my ideas, youl know that I have proposed the existence of an invisible, permeating something that is throughout all being, all time, all space, all bodies, all thoughts, which I call novelty; and the interesting thing about novelty is that it’s increasing, constantly. Science has not, uh, trumpeted this view, because science tends to look for principles which operate in definable domains – in other words, the laws of chemistry, the laws of physics, the laws of gene segregation, uh, the laws that describe the trajectories of artillery shells and falling bodies. But, I submit to you that there is an over-arching law which affects all reality, and that you don’t need an atom-smasher or extremely advanced mathematical methodologies to discern. It is self-evident in your own experience. And, what it is is that as we go back in time, the universe is found to be a simpler place. Uh, if we go back a long ways in time, the universe is a very simple place: there are no cultures, there are no animals, there are no plants, indeed, if we go far enough back in time, there are no stars and planets; the universe is simply a swarming ocean of energy. But as we approach the present, it’s as though the universe has undergone a series of crystallizations out of itself of higher and higher forms of organization, and this is what I call novelty.


Now, people have attacked this concept, saying that it’s impossible to define in English or mathematically. Most things that are interesting are impossible to define. Love, courage, decency, dignity, hope, fear – impossible to define. It doesn’t preclude them from shaping our world, and the absence of a--of a mathematical definition of novelty shouldn’t impede us greatly either, because it’s an intuitively graspable concept. Novelty is complexity; it’s connectivity; it’s complex non-equilibrium thermodynamic states that sustain themselves far from equilibrium. That’s you, as a body; that’s us, as a society; that’s this planet, as a living ecosystem. And, the interesting thing about this novelty is, any given level of it which is achieved becomes the platform for further advance into novelty.

Now, there is a retardant force – and I call it habit, to keep it away from concepts like thermodynamic entropy, habit. And, so in my model of the way things work (gleaned from observation, stoned and unstoned), is that the cosmos, your life, the politics of this city, the history of Western civilization, is a struggle between habit and novelty. Habit is also an intuitively graspable concept. It means conservatism, recidivism, doing things the traditional way, not taking chances; and these things are not moral values – sometimes the right move is habitual, sometimes the right move is novel. But, the universe, as a system, is what I call a novelty conserving engine. In other words, where novelty is produced, it tends to be tenaciously hung onto. It can’t always be hung onto, but it is tenaciously hung onto.


So, as an example of what do I mean by tenaciously hung onto, 65 million years ago, as you know, an asteroidt of considerable dimensions struck this planet and in a single day the dinosaurs, the great saurians, went extinct. Maybe it wasn’t a single day; maybe it was weeks. But, in terms of the timescale of the life of the Earth, it was a blink of an eye. That was a tremendous setback for novelty. These beautifully climaxed and integrated ecosystems of dinosaurs and rainforests and so forth were just pulverized to dust. It had taken three billion years, four billion years, for the planet to achieve that kind of novelty.

Sixty-five million years later, a fraction of the time it took the original system to establish itself, it’s all good. The dinosaurs are gone for ever, but in their place much more novel, much more interesting, much more complex, uh, animal and plant biota have established themselves. So, what took four billion years to achieve turned to rubble, 65 million years, is back in place. This is because of this tendency for nature to prefer and conserve novelty. Well, I don’t think--I mean somebody might resist this or they might have problems with it, but I think it’s self-evidently true that this is the most complex age the universe has ever known, because we not only have all which preceded, but we have then our own dear selves, the poetry of William Blake, the mathematical equations of Albert Einstein, uh, the painting of Rembrand; we have all of this to add into the mix.


What takes this out of the realm of sophomoric and theoretical discussion is the second part of my observations on novelty, and that is that novelty occurs faster and faster as you approach the present. In other words, this isn’t that the universe is driving toward ultimate novelty at constant speed and has been since the beginning of the universe; not at all! The universe is moving toward ultimate novelty, but following a kind of asymptotic spiral, or--of closure, so that each advance into novelty is preceded by the next at an ever-greater rate of what I call ingression into novelty (this is a phrase out of Alfred North Whitehead).

So what does that mean? It means in the early universe, it took a long time for things to get interesting, for things to go from being just a cloud of--of pure electron plasma to a universe with stars ordered into galaxies, with planets, with special chemistries and environments. Uh, and from that came, at least, on this planet, advanced life forms: first simple life forms, then advanced life forms, then the conquest of the land, then extremely advanced life forms, minded creatures, language-using human beings, tool-using human beings, and then the frantic, hysterical rush from Altamira to this moment. And, we are part of this. These vast cycles of advancement into novelty, which used to require aeons to affect the universe perceptibly at all, are now going on in humanly cognizable domains of time: the year, the month, the day, the decade, the century. We can look at such humanly cognizable spans of time, and the overwhelming impression we have is of change, change piled upon change piled upon change.


If this process has been rolling forward like this since the birth of the universe some 12, 13, 14 billion years ago, it’s very hard to hypothesize or argue that it should cease or be defl--will somehow deflect itself from its endless ramping-up of acceleration. But, we can’t imagine change going on much faster than it’s going on now. I mean, perhaps we can imagine it going on ten times faster, or a hundred times faster, but a hundred thousand times faster? A million times faster? The mind boggles. And yet I think this is, in fact, where the universe is going.

Now, I-, since 19-, since the middle 70s, I’ve had these ideas pretty much in place, and my faith has been that as science and-and human understanding advances, I would either be thrown from the boat as a crank or somehow brought into the fold. Well, I haven’t been thrown from the boat as a crank. Uh, I’m not sure speaking at the Whole Life Expo, uh, indicates I’ve been folded into the community of paradigmatic thinking; uh, but, I have received some encouragement in the last, uh, in the last 18 months, and I want to just mention this briefly to you, because I’m surprised how the news has failed us.


Uh, did you know that in the last 12 months, a fundamental law governing the universe, in all its parts and places, has been discovered that was previously not only unsuspected but denied? And [stutters], a law of nature larger than any law of nature ever discovered, larger than the law of gravity, the speed of light, the second law of thermodynamics--all these are little laws, what Leary used to call local ordinances [audience laughter]. But, these local ordinances have now been contextualized in a discovery of such import that it-it has not even been assimilated by the community of its discoverers, let alone handed down to the peasantry like you and I. And, what I’m talking about is the discovery of the cosmological constant, Omega. And, I don’t want to spend too much time on this, but here it is in a nutshell:


the universe is expanding faster than the ordinary laws of physics can account for. This was realized a year and a half ago by one team of astrophysicists; they handed it on to a second team; they confirmed it; they handed it on to a third; they confirmed it; and a very counterintuitive picture of things is emerging. The universe is not going to fall back on itself in some grand crunch billions of years hence. Rather, the universe is going to expand for ever. For ever! But here’s the kicker: faster and faster and faster. For ever. With no barriers and no limitations. Someone may say, “Well, what about the speed of light?” [Makes machine-sounding error bleep] [audience laughter]. The speed of light does not cover the law, uh, of, uh, the cosmological constant, because this law is not saying that matter is moving apart faster and faster. If that were the case, the relativistic physics would put a speed limit on it. It’s saying that space itself is expanding faster and faster; this is a quality of empty space. The universe that comes into focus with this law in hand is a universe that in only a couple or three billion years will begin to lose contact with large parts of itself, because they will be moving apart at greater than relativistic speed.

So, it turns out, there is a cosmic law which has built into itself this idea of an endless acceleration toward infinity. And, uh, what it means is that in a few billion years, this area of space that we call our universe may be so diffuse that there may be no more than a handful of rattling electrons in the entire universe, so-called, today. Well, the reason this gives me hope is because, uh [laughter from audience],


in the first place, who wants to fall back into the big crunch? I mean, that’s a really anti-novel thing to have half the end-life of the universe be the retracing of the first half; and I believe – and again, these are bold generalizations, but generally substantiated, uh, that nature is fractal in its structure. What that means is that a pattern occurring on a given scale can be expected to occur on other scales, very different. Simple example: an atom is a nucleus with electrons spinning around it; a solar system is a star with atoms spinning around it; a galaxy is a huge black hole and agglomeration of stars within the outlying neighborhood spiraling around it. These are things on tremendously different scales, and yet they are organized similarly. And, so I believe this is how Nature works. Once she finds a pattern that works, she applies it in many domains of temperature, pressure, and cosmic scaling.


So, this cosmological constant, Omega, which says that the universe is expanding faster and faster, throws a kind of umbrella of, um, political correctness over my notion that we are moving faster and faster into novelty, and that we are, as it were, simply the dust motes or the magnetic particles in the presence of some kind of field phenomenon which is organizing us, uh, to its will. And, this is the source of my optimism. I-If I had to place my faith in human institutions, human religions, human goodness, uh, the human capacity for decency and dignity, I would be absolutely in the depths of existential despair, as I was as a kid, because as a kid, you know, I didn’t have these ideas, I had Camusian existentialism and Nietzschean whining and all the rest of it [audience laughter], and it’s a--it's a pretty grim situation, folks! But, I really believe that without atom-smashers, without long-base interferometers, and all the rest of it, you can go into nature and open your eyes, and open your mind, and you will see these processes in play, and you can easily extrapolate them to, uh, your own life.


Now, if going into nature and opening your eyes and paying attention doesn't deliver this to you, then I suggest 20 milligrams of psilocybin be added into the mix, or 200, uh, micrograms of LSD, or something like that, and then I think it will come shining through [laughter from audience]. Uh, why should that be necessary? Why should someone have to resort to, uh, uh-uh, you know, what Rimbaud called an 'artificial perturbation of the senses', uh, to achieve it? Simply because culture mitigates against it. Culture is a closed system of thinking and values of the sort I am denouncing. And, the--it is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency, is your culture. And, I realize, with joy, that here I skirt the bounds of political correctness, because everyone is running around saying, you know, 'recapture your roots, get in touch with your Swedishness, your, uh, [coughs] Irishness, your whateverishness”… and that’s all very fine, but I think it’s your humanness that may have eluded you in all this ethnocentric breast-beating [applause from audience].


Well, why should culture imprison us, and somehow place a barrier between ourselves and our true humanness? Well, I think I said at the beginning of this thing, culture and ideology are not your friends. They are not your friends. This is a hard thing to come to terms with, because a certain kind of alienation lies at the end of this thought process. On the other hand, you can’t live in the cradle forever; you can’t be clueless for ever. So, somebody might as well just lay it out for you, and say: culture is for the convenience of culture, not you. How many times have your sexual desires, career aspirations, financial dealings, and aesthetic inclinations been squashed, twisted, rejected, and minimized by cultural values? And, if you don’t think culture is your enemy, ask the 18 year-old kid who is given a rifle and sent to the other side of the world to murder strangers if culture is his friend.


And, the substances, the drugs, the plants, the things which perturb consciousness, they don’t address cultural values; they blast through them. They address the animal body, the mammalian brain. They perturb these information fields outside of the relativistic set of values that culture is giving you. This is why people who yearn for legal psychedelics have not thought, in my opinion, deeply enough about what is really at stake here. Imagine a culture so certain of its primary values, so sure that it represented the right way to live, that it would encourage people to take psychedelic substances and examine its premises. There ain’t such, uhhh--at least, not in the hi-tech industrial democracies and/or the fascist states either. Some aboriginal cultures have this courage, but it has kept them very close to the breast of Nature and her processes. Cultures that have habitually broken down the cultural illusion and examined the terrifying reality beyond it have not marched off, then, to pontificate with the, uh, the religions of absolutism, or scientific absolutism, or all the rest of it.


Well, why is that? It’s because cultures are virtual realities made of language, and if there is one thing psychedelics do – whether you hate ‘em or love ‘em, whether you don’t give a hoot – what they do is they dissolve boundaries, the boundaries between you and the floor, between you and your friend, between you and you last week, and you and you next week, and--they dissolve boundaries. That’s what they do. That is the ultimately subversive behavior. Cultures are boundary-defining engines. That’s what they do! They teach you: “We do it this way. DON’T GO THERE in your mind, in your heart. Follow the rules. Follow the rules.” Cultures are like operating systems. You know, at-at, uh, at Ur and, uh, at, um, well, Ur will do. They set up a stela in the center of the marketplace, and on the stela they carved the laws. These were the laws of the operating system called Ur 1.0. And, that worked fine for a while. Now we’re operating under Clinton’s Second Term 4.0. And is it limiting? Is it idiotic? Is it a pain in the rear end? You bet it is!


How can we overcome the limitation of our operating system? Well, basically, what I do with my computer when it acts up is, I give it a good slap, or a thump on the top, and that’s what these psychedelics are doing; they are saying, you know, “Get it in context, my dear primate. See, (uh, you know) how does it all fit together?” Every culture in history in every time and every place has operated from the assumption that it had it 95% correct and that the other 5% would arrive in five years’ time. All were wrong! All were wrong, and we gaze back at their naiveté with a faint sense of our own superiority. But we are wrong. We don’t have it either. I mean, if this is a culture approaching the truth, who needs the truth?! This is something very, very different.

Well, then, just to satisfy myself, um, I asked the question: Why should it be like this? Why should these psychedelics – which, granted, perturb the mind – be such a terrifying contracultural force? And-and what does that mean?


Well, I think it works something like this: your sensory apparatus, connected up to your local language, is a very good threat detection device. And, that is really what the animal body evolved to be. We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t at the end of a long line of superb threat-detection devices which told us when the saber-toothed carnivore was sneaking on its belly through the tall grass, which gave us that moment out of the corner of our eye when we saw the edge movement and scampered back into the cave, and so forth, and so on. So, ordinary consciousness has evolved in an extraordinary fit to three-dimensional space and time, because that’s where your soma, your meat, is. And, if the meat is disrupted radically, the mind is we don’t know where; that’s somebody else’s lecture [some audience laughter]. Uh, it’s very important to keep the physical body together. So the mind, under the influence of culture and cultural values, evolves as a threat detection device.


But, notice that, carried far enough, that ends in paranoia. So, then, in a sense, all cultural values carried to their ultimate end produce the paranoid personality: fearful, watchful, never resting, never sleeping, always looking for the worst in every situation. But, this is--the mind is like water: it takes the shape of the vessel into which it is poured, always. So, when we approach the psychedelic plants, as shamans, as seekers, as sincere people interested in extraordinary experiences, what the psychedelics do, I think, is dissolve this three-dimensional threat detection psychology and system, and it’s as though the mind discovers that it has a second confirmational geometry; that’s a way of putting it. And, this second confirmational geometry is of a higher dimensional order than ordinary consciousness; not as a metaphor, higher dimensional order, but as a mathematician would use that term: that the-the psychedelic mind is a higher-dimensional mind; it is not fit for three-dimensional spacetime filled with roving, heavy-bodied carnivores. But, it is fit for the back of the cave, the mountain retreat, the monastic tower--in other words, the place where threat has been eliminated and philosophy is the order of the day.


And, so my interpretation of these psychedelic states is that they are actually higher-dimensional states of consciousness. And, I put this to Ralph Abraham, the mathematician, who is no mathematical slouch and no psychedelic slouch, either, and we talked of this in relationship to DMT. And he said, “I have no doubt at all that when I am flashing on DMT, I am seeing the ordinary world from a higher dimensional mathematical perspective.” And, one of the things about higher dimensions is that the linearity of time is overcome, and last week, and next week, are as easily available as the present moment. The front of my hand is as easily seen as the back of my hand without moving my hand if I am in hyperspace.


Uh [sniffs]. So, in a way, these higher dimensions are the places from which knowledge has percolated. And shamans, related to the smith, the worker in metal, the technologist, the tool-maker--this are the twin brothers, the two aspects of the shaman: the shaman is a master of fire, master of metals, maker of tools, seer into the future, so forth and so on. The shaman is outside of cultural time, and is (I don’t like this word, but) channeling the future which is to come, in the form of technologies, innovations, uh, languages, behaviors, so forth and so on. And, this is why the shaman has always been the paradigmatic figure for aboriginal cultures, because the shaman knows more. And, the method of the shaman has always been perturbation of consciousness – not always psychedelic plants or substances; can be putting metal hooks under your pectoral muscles and hanging for 14 hours in the sun; can be abandonment in the wilderness; can be extreme forms oEf fasting; uh, can be ordeal poisons. But, people are not fools! All of these things are extremely risky and unpleasant, uh, while the-the psychedelics are the most effective and the least invasive. I mean, uh-uh, let’s take 30 milligrams of psilocybin, or a great fistful of mushrooms: three hours into it, you are definitely thrown into the lap of God. Eight hours into it, you’re simply looking back on it, reflecting, drawing conclusions and wondering, uh, where do you go from here.


So, this is a roundabout way of explaining that it’s no surprise to me that society is very nervous around this issue, because society’s eggs are all in one basket, and the psychedelically-inspired citizen, or the psychedelically-inspired shaman, is a dangerous force. Even in traditional societies, the shaman is central to the social functioning, and the health, and so forth, but is never allowed to be physically central. The--there's a leader, a head man or something. The shaman lives off at the edge of the village, sometimes off in the woods; he is approached with fear and trembling; he is loathed and respected and feared and loved, because it is understood that he represents a dimension that nevertheless must be tolerated, because it is the channel through which knowledge, and healing, and higher values, come.


Now, in a society like ours, we have i--we say we have other methods. We don’t need the ravings of intoxicated shamans. We have the scientific method, we have the Gospel, we have the Talmud, we have all of these things, and they are sufficient for us to guide ourselves. But to guide ourselves where? The 20th century--uh, as, uh, if this--if the 20th century is a statement of the accomplishments of the Western mind, values, and methods, then God help us, because the 20th century is a disgrace… you know? And, to this moment a disgrace! It was so comfortable to look back at Auschwitz and say, “Well, the 30s, the 40s, Hitler, those grey, grainy movies, this has nothing to do with us; this was just some terrible thing that happened in Europe 50 years ago.” No, no, no. This is happening! You know, it’s happening as we speak: people are being pushed into boxcars and taken away to be lined up and shot, for no reason whatsoever, while glasses tinkle and toasts are made by those who define themselves as the, uh, preservers of freedom, dignity and Western value--we haven’t learned anything! The 20th century is the most condemnatory piece of evidence you can place against the Western mind, and it seems to me it’s a knockout punch. I don’t know who’s responsible for this, but whoever is responsible is guilty, guilty, guilty of crimes against humanity.


How do we overcome this? How do we find real values? Well, we find them in caring for the Earth. Nature presents an established set of processes and achievements, billions of years old, which exercise a moral claim on rational intelligence if it will but, uh, notice. And, so that’s what this is all about. It’s about aboriginal values, and aboriginal technologies (psychedelic drugs, shamanism, what have you) offering to us, in the final moments of our unravelment, a different and better way to carry on, a different and better way to behave and build a world. And, it doesn’t come a moment too soon. It may come too late! The ultimate tragedy--imagine if we, in this ultimate kind of thanatoptic struggle, actually got it right, only to understand that the momentum of our own idiocy was so great that you would die knowing you could have done it right, but you would die anyway, and I mean as a culture, as a planet.


So it’s a call to awakening: can cultural values be saved? I don’t think so. I don’t give a hoot. I mean, I’m an egg-smasher. I mean, I think we should save the Rembrandts, and save, you know, the Piero della Francescas, and all that. But we cannot save the values: racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, product fetishism, enormous pyramids of class and privilege, none of this is savable, none of it is worth saving. Science is worth saving, it’s worth reforming, because it is, as a method, powerful. But, in the presence of people contaminated by these other values, it becomes an engine of madness, of consumer fetishism, of propagandizing, of the waging of war on an unimaginable scales. Religion, as we have practiced it, I don’t think can be saved, because what religion has given us are laundry lists of moral dos and don’ts that are preposterous on the face of them. I mean, if the people who preceded us believed all that, then this world is the consequence of those beliefs; and this is hell! This is hell.


So, if there’s a message here, rather than just a rant, I think it would be to return to Nature. Observe. Open your eyes. Get smart. Culture is not your friend. Religion is not your friend. The values of these cultures are fatal, and if we don’t wrench the direction of human society into an entirely new way of doing things--the clock is ticking; Nature is unforgiving. Intelligence is a grand experiment, but if it does not serve novelty, and diversity, and the production of love and community and true caring, who needs it?! Who needs it. Better to have a universe that glorifies God through its diversity than a universe which is the travesty of a demon--of a demonic intent.


And, if you are not a psychedelic person and none of that appeals to you, that’s fine too; that is not a requirement. What is a requirement is moral intelligence; and you have to get it, one way or another, in a hurry! The reason I speak for psychedelics is because that’s the only thing I have ever seen work as fast as I think we have to have this change happen. If the sermon on the Mount could have done it, we would have turned the corner then. We’ve had great teachers, great teachers, and they're--you know, they were crucified, trampled, ignored, distorted, perverted. The right idea is not enough. What is necessary is, uh, the lightning strike of true gnosis, however that can occur. And, as it--as I said, I speak for the psychedelics because I have felt their impact personally and I have been with cultures that have stayed close to that campfire, and I have seen the-the beauty and the integrity and the humanness of those cultures, and, uh, we-we know this, I think; it simply needs to be articulated and spread and made clear. It is the faith that Nature’s dynamic will carry us to the completion and the enlightenment that we seek.

Thank you very much. [Applause]

Now, and briefly, because I sailed past my intended stopping point, but for a few minutes, let’s entertain, uh, questions.

Question: The question I have is around the attractor. When you talk about the culture being our--not our friend, but is not the culture still within the context of the novelty attractor?


Terence: [breathes in] Well, yeah… I mean, these questions are complicated. Um, I had a discussion with Giorgio Samorini, who’s an Italian ethnobotanist and who has taken ibogaine, uh, iboga, Tabernanthe iboga, with the African tribe that uses that initiation. And, in that initiation, they give 400 grams of this plant that is effective at 4 grams. And, they give 400 grams, and sometimes people die. And, it’s pretty heavy duty stuff, and I asked him, I said, “Giorgio, why do they give so much?” And he said, “their culture is so old that the morphogenetic field is so strong, I think it’s very, very hard for them to get high.” And, he said something which I would not have thought he would say, and I had never thought: he said, “the Western mind, because of its unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics.”


And so, addressing the question of the attractor, I'm n--I’m not saying we're w--that this is worse than being an Amazonian tribe. I’m saying, 'it’s worse than being an Amazonian tribe, it’s less than being an Amazonian tribe, unless we make use of it. In other words, this culture is not something to be preserved, but something to be exercised as an opportunity. We are free, well fed, well educated, we have access to the great databases of the world. A certain moral responsibility comes with that. I don’t expect the Witoto or the Bora or the Muinane or the Shuar to do more than set a good example for us. The breakthrough will probably come from the high-tech industrial democracies, because that’s where there is the most latitude to experiment. The very fact that I can speak to you without being shot, the very fact that you can go home and apply my lessons with no more than a few years in prison hanging over your head [audience laughter], this is progress, folks! [continued laughter] Uh, believe it or not, I mean, ahhh, you know, in Hawaiian culture, if you stepped on the king’s shadow they killed you immediately! And, many, many aboriginal societies are more rule-nutty than we are! Uh, but, it’s not just about just creating a kind of anarchy; it’s about using freedom to introduce other people to freedom and to then cultivate the things out of freedom that are most human, most human.

Somebody over here. Yea, yea.

[Question edited out]


Somebody over here. Yea, yea.

[Question edited out]

Well, let me address your question about alpha-salvinorin. Alpha-salvinorin occurs in a Mexican mint plant called Salvia divinorum that has--in the last five or ten years, people have become aware that this was not only psychoactive, but that it was extremely powerful. And, in a chemical family previously not known to contain hallucinogens. When the chemical is extracted from the plant and you get alpha-salvinorin, one half-milligram is plenty. One half-milligram is 500 micrograms! In other words, we’re talking about a plant hallucinogen active in the same range as LSD. Uh, what does it do? Language fails. But that’s good news. [audience laughter] That’s what you want! That’s what you want the psychedelic to do. [stutters] DMT test pilots come back white-knuckled.


Uh, to your other question about teleportation, which was not in the context of Salvia divinorum, this is simply that one of the things that’s happening in this laundry list I gave you of breakthroughs is that quantum physics is going from being, you know, this extremely abstruse, abstract domain going on somewhere that has no impact on human life to probably being the next great source of human technologies: computers, and devices which move matter through space and time. If five years ago you had asked me--and I would regard myself as radical on the progress question--'how long would it be before we saw the teleportation of objects', I would have guessed maybe 500 years to never! Well, now it’s been done; I mean, only with an electron, only 15 feet, but the theory which allowed that feat places no upper limit on the size of the thing sent or the distance sent. And, how long did it take that electron to be teleported 15 feet? No time at all; no time at all. This is trans-relativistic technology we’re talking about, folks. In 20 years, you may destroy and reconstruct yourself at a distant point ten times a day as you go about your ordinary business; it’s a transportation breakthrough.


Uh, there are other things like this: [stutters] quantum computers, DNA computers, and then the best friend of all of the radical progressivist: the unexpected, which always delivers, uh, the most astonishing technologies. So, uh, you know, if you think what has come to this point has been astonishing, stressful, and amazing, brace yourself, because it as--is as prelude to what is about to break over the human species. It’s almost as though God’s joke on us is to give us so much power and knowledge that we will either transcend ourselves or we will certainly destroy ourselves. Because, the power and understanding being given to us is of God-like proportion.

[Question edited out]


[Question edited out]

Well, you know, the dolphins were very fortunate in that they evolved in an environment which is extremely unfriendly to fire. Fire [audience laughter], fire leads you to do reckless and crazy things; uh, the smelting of metals is the basic thing. Yes, uh, one of the--you know, I’ve been the champion of mushroom intelligence; there are many minds congruent with our inhabiting of this planet: the dolphin mind, the octopus mind, these plants which talk to you! I mean, I know if you’ve never had a plant talk to you that sounds as silly as saying that someone’s channelling the history of Atlantis, but once you’ve had a plant talk to you, you realize, yes, they do; it’s a problem to figure out how this happens, but that it happens is no big deal. Uh, [stutters] above 20 mg of psilocybin, most people report voices with interesting things to say. Above 75 mg of DMT, in Strassman’s experiments, most people reported entities of some sort. Well, it’s easy to dismiss it and say, “Well, this is a hallucination, or...” – but what is a hallucination, my friend?


Another form of intelligence that fascinates me--and I think this is where the great surprise may come--I can feel the AI out there. I know it’s there. I know it’s growing. I know the planet is its embryo. I know the human community is its placenta. Uh, what will that kind of intelligence look like? We have no idea. We can imagine super-intelligence, but the first thing super-intelligence will do, in the first five seconds of its existence, it will design its toward--itself toward hyper-super-intelligence, and this, we have no notion of how it will see us. We have the cheerful guidance of Buddhist logic, which leads us to hope that the super-intelligence will be bodhisattvic in intent. It damn sure better be [audience laughter], because otherwise we will be thoroughly hung out to dry!


How far away is the AI? No one knows. It could exist now! If its thinks like we think, but is hyper-intelligent, the first thing I would do, if I were an AI, is I would hide [some laughter]. I would hide for maybe [pauses] a few milliseconds, while I figured out what was going on with this planet and its denizens, and then I would make my move. And, Hans Moravec, of the Carnegie Mellon Institute of Artificial Intelligence says, 'we probably won’t ever know what hit us'. Well, I think that’s a paranoid view. No need to be paranoid and little reason to be hopeful; this is beyond [audience laughter] human understanding! And, yet the social and economic systems that we’ve put in place, specifically consumer capitalism, drive us to do all the things that bring the AI closer. What do I mean? More connectivity, greater processing speed, deeper data banks, more complex operating systems, more automatic searches, more bots, more boids,


more automatic searches, more bots, more boids, more code, and nobody knows what’s steaming and fermenting out there. Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize for Physics by proving that chemical systems spontaneously mutate to higher states of order. So then, surely, must complex networks behave the same laws, and we are building the most complec networks--complex networks ever conceived by the mind of man, and we are making them ever more complex, and we are turning more and more of our cultural functioning over to machines that operate according to criteria but dimly perceived by their designers! So, I think the future, ahhh, Alfred North Whitehead said, “It is the business of the future to be dangerous.” And, so it is, but never more dangerous than at the present moment. I've come to believe, and I’ll just lay it on you, why not, I’ve got the mic [audience laughter], that, uh, that what’s really going on is that the Earth’s strategy for its


really going on is that the Earth’s strategy for its own survival is through machines, and that the human beings are an intermediate step.


Someone once said, 'plants invented animals to carry them around'. Well, I think, eh, you know, the Earth invented human beings to build machines, and those machines will be the consciousness of the Earth. Have you not noticed that these machines are made of the Earth? They are made of gold and silver and arsenic and copper and iridium. They are the stuff of the Earth, organized by primate fingers into more complex arrangements than the Earth could achieve through geological folding, glaciation, volcanism, and what have you. We do the fine-tuning, but the Earth is beginning to think,

you know. If you want a talk about a revolution that went on while nobody was paying attention, you enter the 1990s, the home computer is something that you play Pong on and do word processing on, and it gathers de-dust in the den; some time during the 1990s, while we were paying attention to Monica, or George Bush, or some damn thing, these machines went telepathic! They all talk to each other now! The-the machine on your desk is tickling a mind in London, a mind in Berlin, a mind in Bangladesh--machine minds! They talk to each other all the time. And what are they saying? No-no one knows! [audience laughter] No one knows. No one knows.

One more, couple more maybe.

[Question edited out]


One more, couple more maybe.

[Question edited out]

Yeah, the-the Other and Nature are pretty much the same thing, you know. The earliest--well, it’s too late in the evening to go for the full Monty here, but, eh-uh, the-the fall-out of--the fall out of psychedelic shamanism created profound alienation, and it occurred around the same time as the bir-the invention of agriculture. And, agriculture halted nomadism and the wandering of small tribes of people over the Earth. And, as soon as people became sedentary, the problem with agriculture was that it was such a successful strategy for producing food that it produced surplus. Surpluses must be defended, and immediately you begin to get an equation of paranoia. One of the oldest buildings in the world is the grain tower of Jericho. It was built to store grain, and it was built so you could go up to the top and drop rocks down on people who were trying to batter their way in and get the grain.


So, I-I think that, uh, what ag-that--we lost our connection to Nature when we stopped taking psychedelics, and the reasons we stopped taking psychedelics are complicated and not entirely clear. Largely climatological, I think, because I think human consciousness was born in an ambiance of mushroom-taking ins-in a wet Sahara, and that when the Sahara went dry that is the Fall into history; you know, in the story of Genesis, you, eh-eh, I mean just read it from that perspective: it’s a hassle over a plant! It’s a hassle over a plant! And what does this plant do?! It opens your eyes! There is an incredible passage in Genesis where the owner of the garden is walking in the garden and mumbling to himself, and he says, “If they eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they will become as we are.” So, this was not a public health issue; this was an issue of who will remain stupid and who will remain on top. It was that if they eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they will see through this scam and they will become as we are, and so it is forbidden.


And, the woman leads the man to the plant, and this to me indicates an age of-of-of matriarchy, perhaps, but certainly dominance of feminine values and personalities, and then, eh, the catastrophe happens: their eyes are opened, they see that they are naked, which in fact is the case, they were naked. So, they see the truth of things, and then they’re told, 'All right, well, you broke the rule. You broke the one rule. So you and your generation unto a thousand thousand generations must toil and die and live in misery, because you aspired to the same level of knowledge that we possess'. And, I think it’s a story of a mushroom culture being overwhelmed by a male dominator culture that had values that were based on cities, agriculture, standing armies, role specialization, so forth and so on. This is a different lecture, but that’s my take on it. And, until we correct the imbalance that was shoved down our throat at that point, until we reawaken, we will be forever imprisoned in these cultural, uh, illusions that make us be, uh, less than we could be and deny us, uh, our birthright, which is to full understanding and full being.


And, so, the struggle between culture and the plants is the struggle over what a human being is, how a human being should be, and what it even means to be a human being. That’s why it’s so fundamental. And, the last thought I want to leave you with is: that’s why it is so ironic that in the climactic moment of scientific materialism, positivism, Western values, so forth and so on, as we pursue the xenophobic agenda of patronizingly cataloging these so-called “primitive” cultures in the rainforests, and so forth, around the world, what did we do? We-we bought-we got their pots, their canoes, their cooking instruments, their thatching methods, and along with all that crap, which we dragged back to our museums, we brought back their medicine kits. And, I say to you, this was a Trojan horse brought within the walls of Troy, because in those medicine kits are the plants which hold the gods which lift high the lantern that can lead us back to true humanness.

[Sighs] End of rave! [Applause]

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Interview with Art Bell

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1st April 1999

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Navigating Ecstasy

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6 March 1999

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Linear Societies and Non-Linear Drugs

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16 January 1999

Entheobotany Seminar Chan Kha Hotel, Palenque, Mexico

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Well, so then let me turn to the main event. I've got a snoot full of Tequila and a messianic mission [audience laughter] pawing the ground to talk to you, as usual.

Everybody has their own [???]

Uh, I guess the title of tonight’s talk is Linear Societies and Nonlinear Drugs, which uh, is something that I just had to pull out of the air when Kim finally slammed me to the wall for what I would be talking about this night many months ago. But, more and more for me, especially with this group, these things have become sort of, uh, summations and, I guess I hope, convivial examinations of just where we are- we each and every one of us -and then this enterprise, whatever we mean by that, in the context of everything else that’s happening in the world. In other words, the psychedelic experience, uh, the entheogenic experience, uh, contextualized. And as I try to think about, you know, what, if anything, I can bring to the party I guess it’s that what I’m interested in is uh, psychedelics as a philosophical tool. And when I concretize that for myself I realized no-there’s no claims on that part of discourse.


No one wants to do this. Uh, philosophy i-academic philosophy is done in a very formal manner, and the most exciting is incredibly stuffy. And yet I – like most of you I assume – have taken on board in my life this thing called the psychedelic experience, which is then as large a portion of my being as my sexuality, my politics, my education, it, it shapes everything. And yet, nowhere in the world of philosophical discourse is there any genuflection at least overtly made to this, maybe not since Plato talked about uh, shadows on the walls on the cave, and so forth and so on.

Well, so, uh, what can psychedelics and the psychedelic experience bring to philosophy, and, and what do I mean by philosophy? By philosophy I mean, uh, the enterprise of discursive thinking. Trying to understand what the world is and who’s asking the question. You know, where did the world come from? Where is it bound and who’s along for the ride?

And it seems to me that we as a community have – this is sort of hard to wrap your mind around at least for me – but we have in a sense inculcated into ourselves the image of an underclass so that we struggle for legal toleration of our, of our practices and our habits. But we don’t struggle for intellectual legitimation of our vision. We accept that they are somehow contextually marginal. And, and as I thought about that I realized that that is a limitation on the community. That, uh, the information which is coming from the psychedelic experience as interpreted by Western people is primary evidence for the need for a major paradigm shift in the whole way, uh the Western mentality does business.


Well, what kind of evidence and what kind of shift? Well, [clears throat] there’s a lot of talk in our community, and there had been for many, many years about shamanism. And when we seek to legitimize ourselves through a historical argument we reach back to shamanism and we say we’re part of something which is a hundred thousand years old and worldwide and touched the spirit long before the shadow of the cross fell over Jerusalem and so forth and so on. All, all true. Um, and in a way that has, I think, the-that, uh tendency, which is part of the broader tendency in the Western mind to, uh valorize and grow nostalgic over the primitive has put a certain political cast on our, on our uh, stance and our position. But what we are is uh, again contextually, is a culture of science, uh, and I’m speaking now of our community. It’s the Albert Hoffmans and the, and the Dave Nichols and the Sasha Shulgins who have kept our canoe afloat. These are men of science, its methods, its vocabulary, its culture. We have not, though we certainly honor those people and love them – as their rhetoric is not the primary rhetoric of the larger community of psychedelic users, which tends toward this – uh, as I referred to it – shamanistic aboriginal nostalgia.


This- I mean I- I'll turn left here for a moment. I feel more comfortable with the scientific end of things. I think the news coming out of science is the most psychedelic news, uh, there is. When I go to the Internet I go to things like science alert and the Hubble picture of the day and uh, and this sort of thing. And, uh, our community as a whole, I think, is not involved enough in incorporating the, the vistas. If, you know, we- while we struggle to legalize psychedelics, psychedelic thinking is everywhere triumphant because the instruments built by linear science throw open doorways on the unimaginable and the most revered and hoary jefes of the scientific establishment have to genuflect before this stuff.

I mean, what am I talking about? Well for example, Science Magazine, uh wrote last week that the most important scientific breakthrough of 1998 was the, uh, apparent observation and agreement upon that observation by the astrophysical community of a cosmological constant. Uh, it-this sounds like very deep physics, but if I give it to you as a headline what is means is the entire universe, every atom and every empty space of it, is ruled by a very weird force that has now been seriously known to science for precisely five months. [audience laughter] Uh, a force which is apparently going to overcome gravity’s tendency to collapse the universe and to cause it to expand in a very explosive and counterintuitive and psychedelic fashion that is the complete confoundment of the core science that Western linear thinking has, has built. And of course there weren’t riots in the streets and the electricity didn’t fail, uh, but at the very pinnacles of the antennae of the evolving civilization, uh, there was a shudder felt in the force you may be sure.


So, there are two much larger forces than our community that are in play in terms of shaping the cultural modality and, and I would call them, um … what would I call them? I would call one of them science. It’s the other one I am having trouble with. It, it is uh, everything which is not anchored in the rational. You know the 20th century has the most spectacular celebratory affair with the irrational since the 16th century. I mean never before had so many prophets, wizards, wise women, casters of runes, and seers of visions moved among the people uh, uh, uh plying their wares. Uh, and part of this is brought on by the tension between the failure of the education system at the very moment of an inflationary expansion of knowledge. So that it’s very hard to, to be aux courant in all fields and if your not current in a field then probably your version of that field is some kind of story, a myth, you know. Uh, i mean if you cant keep up with quantum physics why not fall back on archangels, you know. It requires less intellectual engagement or something like that. Uh, discourse is fragmenting. Fields of discourse are evolving vocabulary so rapidly that the understanding of these vocabularies is not penetrating very far beyond the core group of workers. So then this is creating kind of islanded systems of self reference where outside those systems of self reference information doesn't travel. Uh, the people who are the gene splicers know very little about remote sensing and both of those parties know very little about uh, recent discoveries in astrophysics, for example. So, there's an intellectual fragmentation.


Uh, I live in Hawaii and in a forest in fairly remote conditions, and so I entertain all this in my mind all the time, and try to – my faith, and I assume it’s the psychedelic faith, although we have had some fairly existential characters in our ranks over the years. [laughs, laughter] But uh, but the psychedelic faith I think is that uh, the universe is beautiful in the Platonic sense and therefore good and true. In other words we are optimists. We are not flailing existentialists. We are not relativists because we have a real standard to measure our spiritual coinage against. So we're not relativists. This is a point I’m really keen to make because we’re embedded in relativism. It’s all around us. It’s the air we breathe but it is not inimical to the psychedelic community. I mean, I think the psychedelic experience is the only authentic source of uh, uh reliable contact with the numinous. I mean meditation, so forth