Eros and the Eschaton

What I wanted to talk about tonight, simply because it’s the thing
that is moving me to the edge of my chair at the moment. I called the
talk Eros and the Eschaton, and what I could have called it was eros
and the eschaton was science forgot. Because somebody asked me
recently, “Is there any permission to hope, more specifically, is there
any permission for smart people to hope. I mean its easy to hope if
your stupid, but is there any basis for intelligent people to hope, and I
wanted to deal with that because I think so. To me it was a shocking
question because I live in an aura of hope because I live in a twilit
world of my own self-generated cannabinated fantasy, and I forget that
not everyone is so fortunate, and that there is a lot of despair and
uncertainty out there. So, I wanted to talk about this.
Eros and the Eschaton these are the two areas that I think
compromise the old paradigm and give permission to hope and
strangely neither of these words is that well known, which gives you a
measure of how completely the dominator position has squelched,
subverted, and down played any opposition to its world view. Eros we
know about in some kind of devalued schticky kind of glitzy way
because we get it in the eroticization of media, and society, but really
what eros means in the Greek sense is a kind of unity of nature a kind
of all pervasive order that bridges one ontological level to another this
is not permitted in the official world view of our civilization which is
science. The world of inorganic chemistry is not thought to make nay
statement about the organic world and the organic world is not
thought to be extrapolateable into the world of culture and thought.
There are imagined to be clear breaks in these categories. I has a
biologist tell me once, “If genes aren’t involved it aint evolution.” So,
that means you can’t talk about the evolution of the earth as a
physical body. You cant talk about the evolution of human social
institutions. Evolution is, somehow, a word appropriate to biology and
appropriate nowhere else. And this brings me then to the first factor
easily discerned by anybody who has their eyes open that
compromises and erodes the hopeless existential view of the world
that we are getting from science, and that is the idea that nature is in
fact across all scales and all levels of phenomena a unity. Its not a
coincidence that electrons spinning around an atomic nucleus and
planets going around a star, and star clusters orbiting around the
gravitational center of a galaxy, its no coincidence that these systems
exhibit the same kind of order on different scales and yet science
would say that is a coincidence. You know P. W. Bridgman who was a
philosopher of science defined a coincidence as what you have left
over when you apply a bad theory. It means that you have overlooked
something, and what jumps out at you as a coincidence is actually a
set of relationships whose casuistry whose relationships to each other
are simply hidden from you. And what I have observed, and I think it is
fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I have
observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of
complexity. This is a great general natural law that your own senses
will confirm for you, but that has never been allowed into the canon of
science. What I mean by, nature builds on complexity is the following.
When the universe was born in the dubious and controversial
circumstance called the big bang. It was at first simply a pure plasma
of electrons. It was the simplest that it could possibly be. There were
no atoms. There were no molecules. There were no highly organized
systems. There was simply a pure plasma of expanding energy. And as
the universe cooled simply cooled new kinds of phenomena, we say
emerged out of the situation. As the universe cooled atomic nuclei
could form. And electrons could settle into stable orbits. As the
universe further cooled, the chemical bond became a possibility. Still
later the hydrogen bond, a weaker bond, which is the basis of biology.
So as the universe aged it complexified. This is so obvious that its
never really been challenged, but on the other hand its never really
been embraced as a general and dependable either. Follow it through
with me, out of atomic systems come chemical systems out of
chemical systems comes the covalent hydrogen bond the carbon bond,
complex chemistry that is prebiotic or organic, out of that chemisty
come the macrophysical systems that we call membranes gels charge
transfer complexes, this sort of thing. These systems are the chemical
preconditions for life. Simple life the life of the prokaryotes the life of
naked enucleated dna that characterized primitive life on the planet.
Out of that life come Eukaryotes, nucleated cells and then complex
colonies of cells, and then cell specialization leading to higher animals,
leading to social animals, leading to complex social systems, leading to
technologies, leading to globe girdling electronically based information
transfer oriented cultures like ourselves. Someone said, what’s so
progressive about media it’s the spreading of darkness at the speed of
light.

It can be it can be well so this is very interesting that apparently the

way the universe works is that upon a platform of previously achieved
complexity chemical electrical social biological, whatever new forms of
complexity can be built that cross these ontological boundaries. In
other words, what I mean by that is that biology is based on complex
chemistry but it is more than complex chemistry social systems are
based on the organization that is animal life and yet it is more than
animal life. So, this is a general law of the universe that is overlooked
by science. That out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We
could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty conversing or
complexity conserving engine. It makes complexity and it preserves it,
and it uses it as the bases for further complexity. Now, there is more to
this that simply that. I think we all observationally could agree that
what has been said so far. The added wrinkle or an added wrinkle is
that each advancement into complexity into novelty proceeds more
quickly than the stage that preceded it. This is very profound because
it, if accepted as a serious first principle, it ends the marginalization of
our own species to the level of spectator status in a universe that
knows nothing of us and cares nothing for us this is the most advanced
positions that modern science will allow us, spectators to a dharma we
didn’t write, shouldn’t expect to understand and cannot influence but I
say if in fact novelty is the name of the game if in fact the conservation
and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for then
suddenly our own human enterprise previously marginalized takes on
an immense new importance we are apparently player in the cosmic
drama, and in this particular act of the cosmic drama we hold a very
central role we are at the pinecal of the expression of the
complexification in the animal world and somehow this complexity
which is concentrated in us has flowed over out of the domain of
animal organization and into this mysterious domain which we call
culture language consciousness higher values each stage of
advancement into complexity occurs more quickly that the stage which
preceded it. After the initial big bang there was a period of billions of
years when the universe cooled stars condensed, planetary systems
formed and then the quickening process crossed an invisible Rubicon
into the domain of animal and biological organization. Well, you see
since the rise of western monotheism the human experience has been
marginalized we have been told that we were unimportant in the
cosmic drama but we now know from the feedback that we are getting
from the impact of human culture on the earth that we are a major
factor shaping the temperature of the oceans the composition of the
atmosphere the general speed and complexity of speciation on the
planet so forth and so on. A single species ourselves has broken from
the ordinary constraints of animal nature and created a new world an
epigenetic world meaning a world not based on gene transfer and
chemical propagation and preservation of information, but a world
based on ideas, on symbols, on technologies, on tools, on ideas
downloaded out of the human imagination and concretized in three
dimensional space as choppers, arrow points, particle accelerators,
gene sequencers, space craft, what have you, all of this
complexification occurring at a faster and faster rate. And this brings
me then to the second quality or phenomena that science has
overlooked which his the acceleration of complexification that the early
history of the universe proceeded with excruciating slowness then life
took hold in the oceans of this planet a quickening of process in
evolution, but still things proceeded on a scale of tens of millions of
year to clock major change. Then the conquest of the land higher
animals, higher exposure to radiation, faster change, species following
species one upon another, then fifty thousand a hundred thousand a
million years ago, anyway, recently the cross over into the domain of
culture, tool making, mythmaking, dance, poetry, song, story, and that
set the stage for the fall into history. The incredibly unusual and self
consuming process that has been going on for the past fifteen or
twenty thousand years, a biological snap of the finger, and yet in that
time everything that we call human, everything that we associate with
higher values, has been adumbrated, elaborated set in place by one
species ourselves this acceleration of time or complexity shows no sign
of slowing down in fact within the fabric of our own lives we can almost
daily hourly by the minute feel it speeding up taking hold. It’s a cliché
that time is moving faster and faster; a cliché of the mass media. But I
want to suggest that this is not a perceptual illusion or a cultural
mirage that this is actually happening to the space time matrix that
time is in fact speeding up that history in which we are embedded
because our life of fifty to eighty years is do infemeral on a scale of ten
to fifteen thousand years but nevertheless history is a state of
incredible destabilization it’s a chaostrophy? In the process of
happening it begins with animals kept in balance by natural selection
and it ends with a global internet of electronic information transfer and
a language using species hurling its instruments towards the stars.
There is no reason for us to suppose that this process of acceleration is
ever going to slow down or be deflected it has been a law of nature
from the very beginning of nature that this acceleration was built in.
What posses a problem to us, as thinking individuals, is that the speed
of involution toward concrescence is now so great that we can feel the
tug of it within the confines of our own lives. There has been more
change since nineteen sixty than in the previous several thousand
years. There has been more change since nineteen ninety two than in
the previous thousand years change is accelerating, invention,
connection, adumbration of ideas, mathematical algorithms,
connectivity of people social systems, this is all accelerating furiously,
and under the control of no one, no the catholic church, the communist
party, the IMF, no one is in charge of this process. This is what makes
history so interesting it’s a run away freight train on a dark and stormy
night. This is why I am not particularly sympathetic to conspiracy
theory because I can’t make the leap to faith that would cause you to
believe that anyone could get hold of the beast enough to control it. I
mean conspiracies of course we have conspiracies up the kazoo but
none of them are succeeding they are all being swept away,
compromised, astonished by new information, and endlessly agonized.
So, two factors relating to eros, the movement into complexity and the
fact that that movement goes ever faster, and the second quality the
acceleration of the movement into novelty leads me to the third point,
which is I suppose more controversial, and I am frankly willing to admit
that my sensitivity to this third point is based on my psychedelic
experience. I mean science is the exploration of the experience of
nature without psychedelics. And, I propose therefore to expand that
enterprise, and say we need a science beyond science we need a
science which plays with a full deck and the reason the psychedelic
experience is so important is not some nandy-pandy(?) notion that it
expands consciousness or it makes you more perceptive or something
like that. That is all true, but it isn’t strongly enough put. A cultural
point of view is like a crystal. You have an amorphous culture medium,
which at certain temps will form a crystal of cultural convention, if you
will, and within the geometry of that crystal certain things make sense
and certain things are excluded from making sense. Science is a
condensed cultural point of view that is a rigid crystal of interlocking
assumptions, assumptions such as matter is primary, mind is tertiary,
causality works from the past into the future, so forth and so on… What
psychedelics do in terms of their on the psychical brain and organism
of human beings is they withdraw cultural programming. They dissolve
cultural assumptions. They lift you out of that reassuring crystalline
matrix of interlocking truths which are lies, and instead that throw you
into the presence of the great who knows, the mystery, the mystery
that has been banished from western thought since the rise of
Christianity and the suppression of the mystery religions. Now, the
model that attracts me to the psychedelic experience is not that it
makes you smarter, a kind of simple minded idea paradoxically, or the
idea that its some kind of magnifying glass into the personal
unconscious, your traumas, your childhood memories, the satanic
abuse your parents laid on you, so forth and so on, the model which I
like is a geometric model, and says simply that since the rise of the
Greek alphabet, print, linear thinking, and science, we have become
imprisoned in a causal universe of material connectivity and that this is
a cultural myth as much as believing that we are the sons and
daughters of the great father who got out of his canoe at the second
waterfall to take a leak. I mean these are just cultural myths.

What is revealed through the psychedelic experience is a higher

dimensional perspective on reality, and I use higher dimensional in the
mathematical sense. Literally, you are lifted out of the plane of cultural
assumptions and can look down with a kind of god like understanding
that one obtains when one flies in an airplane over a landscape
previously only viewed from the ground. In other words from the
vantage point of the psychedelic experience the cultural landscape is
seen more nearly in its correct perspective seen as historically
bounded, spatially and intellectually bounded. Now it’s no coincidence
that if you analyze biology, what it is, it’s a kind of conquest of
dimensionality. The earliest forms of life were probably slims of some
sort stabilized on a clay surface, immobile, unable to perceive light,
with no sense of time, merely a finger nail or a toe hold in existence,
and then if you look at the entire fossil record what you see is the
evolution of senses, sensory preceptors and organs of locomotion. The
preceptors, the eye, the hand bring into the cognitive field the sense of
things at a distance, and then language provides models for these
things at a distance. Similarly, fins, legs, so forth, means of locomotion
carry us through space. This is a journey of dimensionality, and
essentially what animals are that plants are not are life forms mobile in
a very conscious way in the spatial dimension. This is why, from the
point of view of the evolutionary biologist, animals are somehow more
advanced than plants. Well if conquest of dimensionality is the criteria,
then notice that we again occupy a special and privileged position in
nature because we can not only run with the best of them, see with the
best of them, but we can remember and anticipate like crazy, and
other animals are not doing this, other animals may imprint past
situations of danger or opportunity, but they do not analyze experience
and extrapolate it toward the hidden domain of the future, and
consciousness is the generalized word that we use for this
coordination of complex perception to create a world that draws from
the past and builds a model of the future, and then suspends the
perceiving organism in this magical moment called the “Now”, where
the past is coordinated for the purpose of navigating the future.
McLuhan? called it driving with the rear view mirror, and the only thing
good about it is that its better than driving with no mirror at all.

What this conquest of dimensionality comes to be in the

presence of psychedelics is an anticipation of the future. We can
anticipate the future we know within microseconds when the sun will
rise, we know within a few percentage points where the prime rate will
be in six months. Somethings we can predict fairly closely somethings
with less precision, but the perception of the future is very important to
us. When we marry the need to perceive the future with the
psychedelic experience, I believe we come up with data that is very
very difficult for science to come to terms with, and this is the third, or
really the second, item in the list of what science forgot. It is what I call
the eschaton. Now, eschaton is rare word, until very recently unheard
outside schools of theology, which I understand were a dying
enterprise. Eschaton comes from the Greek word esch, which just
means the end. The eschaton is the last thing, the final thing, and it is
very important to science to eliminate from its thinking any suspicion
that this eschaton might exist because if it were to exist it would
impart to reality a purpose, you see. If the eschaton exists then it’s like
a goal, or an attraction point, or an energy sync toward which historical
process is being moved, and science is incredibly hostile toward the
idea of purpose. If you are not involved in the sciences this may come
as somewhat of a surprise to you, if you are a workbench scientist or a
theoretician you know that this is what’s called the problem of
teleology. It is because modern science defined itself in the nineteenth
century when the raining philosophy was deism, and deism was the
idea that the universe is a clock made by god, and god wound this
clock, and has walked away from it and the clock will eventually run
down. That theological construct was poisonous to evolutionary theory
in the nineteenth century, and so they said we must create a theory of
reality that does not require a goal, does not require a purpose
everything must pushed from the past nothing must be pulled toward
the future. The problem with this is that it does not fulfill our intuitions
about reality. We can see that evolution, biological evolution, has built
on chemical systems, we can see that social and historical systems
build on biology as people with open minds, or as open as they can be
inside this culture we never the less have this intuition of purpose, and
it is dramatically underscored by the psychedelic experience which
takes the raw material of your life, your culture, your history, and tells
you this is not an existential mishmash to be lived out with dignity
because there’s nothing else to be done with it, some kind of
komusian(?) why not affirmation. It says no. It says your reality is a
coherent cosmos, and embedded in your own sense of identity,
embedded in your own sense of purpose is a microscopic reflection of
the larger purpose that is built into the universe. Now, this is not just
blowing smoke in the sense of it’s a nice idea, or its like a religious idea
like saying Jesus loves you and so feel alright about yourself. IT isn’t
like that. It’s a theory about reality that has teeth because reality is
actually following the script that this particular version of reality
dictates. Reality is accelerating towards an unimaginable omega point.
We are the inheritors of immense momentum in our social systems our
philosophical and scientific and technological approaches to the world.
Because we’re driving the historical vehicle with a rear view mirror, it
appears to us that we’re headed straight into a brick wall at a
thousand miles an hour. It appears that we are destroying the earth,
polluting the atmosphere, wrecking the oceans, dehumanizing
ourselves, robbing our children of a future, so forth and so on. I believe
what is in fact going on is that we are burning our bridges one by one;
we’re burning our bridges to the past. We cannot go back to the
mushroom dotted plains of Africa, or the canopied rainforest of five
million years ago, we cant even go back to the era of Kiuse(?) and
sixshooter(?) of two hundred years ago. We have burned our bridges.
We are preparing for a kind of cultural forward escape. And this
question is there cause for optimism, it depends on where you placed
you bets. If you placed you bets on male dominated institutions based
on consumer fetishism, propaganda, classism, and materialism, then
God help you, you should call your broker. If on the other hand you’ve
recognized that a lifeboat strategy is involved here that what is really
important is empowering personal experience, backing off from
consumer object fetishism, freeing the mind, empowering the
imagination then in that case I think you can feel pretty good about
what is going on. You know there is a lot of talk about cultural death
and disenfranchisement and its usually couched in terms of some
happy naked people in the rainforest or Tanjekestan(?) making their
rugs or milking their camels, or something, and isn’t it to bad that their
culture is being blown up and traded in for mall culture and shopping
by remote, but in fact all culture is being destroyed, all culture is being
sold down the river by the sorts of people who want to turn the entire
planet into an international airport arrival concourse. That’s not the
victory of somebody’s culture over somebody else’s culture. Nobody
ever had a culture like that. That’s just the victory of
schlockmeisterism and crapola over good taste and good sense. If I
were dependent on the notion that human institutions are necessary to
pull us out the ditch than I would be very despairing, as I said, nobody
is in charge, not the IMF, the pope, the communist party, the Jews no
no no nobody has there finger on what’s going on. So then why hope,
isn’t it just a runaway train out of control? I don’t think so. I think the
out of controlness is the most hopeful thing about it. After all, whose
control is it out of? You and I never controlled it in the first place. Why
are we anxious about the fact that its out of control? I think if it’s out of
control then our side is winning.

To me the most confounding datum of the psychedelic

experience is this thing, which I call the eschaton, and I want to talk
about it a little bit this evening because I think it’s the hardest thing for
people to grasp about my particular rap, and you know sometimes I’ve
talked to many of you about psychedelic plants, shamanism,
techniques, chemistry, approaches, so forth and so on. I’m
approaching this, this evening, as a graduate seminar. I figure
everybody has their little mojo kit and their particular way of
approaching these things. And then the question is, what kind of
conclusions can we draw? The conclusion I draw is, and this sort of
pulling together what I said before, we are central to the human
drama, and to the drama of nature and process on this planet. The
opposition, which is science, well first let me say this. Every model of
the universe has a hard swallow. What I mean by a hard swallow is a
place where the argument cannot hide the fact that there’s something
slightly fishy about it. The hard swallow built into science is this
business about the big bang. Now lets give this a little attention here,
this is the notion that the universe for no reason sprang from nothing
in a single instant. Well now before we dissect this notice that this is
the limit test for credulity, whether you believe this or not. Notice that
it is not possible to conceive of something more unlikely or less likely
to be believed. I mean I defy anyone. It’s just the limit case for unlikely
hood that the universe would spring from nothing in a single instant for
no reason. If you believe that, my family has a bridge across the
Hudson River that we’ll give you a lease option for five dollars. It
makes no sense. It is in fact no different from saying and God said, “Let
there be light”. And, what the philosophers of science are saying is
give us one free miracle, and we will role from that point forward, from
the birth of time to the crack of doom. Just one free miracle, and then it
will all unravel according to natural law and these bizarre equations,
which nobody can understand, but which are so holy in this enterprise.
Well, I say then if science gets one free miracle then everybody gets
one free miracle, and I perceive that it is true that when you build
these large scale cosmogonic theories that you have to have a kind of
umbilical cord, or a point to start from that is different from all other
points in the system. So, if we have to have a singularity in our
modeling of what reality is, lets make it as modest and as none unlikely
a singularity as possible. The singularity that arises for no reason in
absolutely empty space instantly is the least likely of all singularities.
Doesn’t it seem more likely, if we have to have a singularity, that it
occurs in a domain with a rich history, with many causal streams
feeding into the situation that nurtures the complexity. In other words,
to put it simply, if you have to have a singularity doesn’t it make more
sense to put it at the end of a cosmogonic process than at the
beginning. I think this is the great break through of psychedelic
shamanism that science got it absolutely wrong. The universe didn’t
begin in a singularity. Who knows how the universe began or would
even presume to judge? But the universe ends in a singularity. It has
been growing more singular, more complex, more unique, more novel
every passing moment since it burst into existence, and if that’s true
than we represent a kind of concrescence of universal intent. We’re not
mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek
chorus to the main event. The human experience is the main event.
The coordination of perception, of hope, of dream, of vision that occurs
inside the human heart-mind-body interface is the most complex
phenomenon in the universe. Now, even the physicalists will agree that
the human neocortex represents the most densely ramified matter
known to exist in the biological world, and you don’t have to be a
rocket scientist to see that human society, human history, human art,
human literature represent things for which there is know analogue in
the world of wasps, ground hogs, killer whales, and so forth and so on.
In our species complexity has turned inward upon itself, and in our
species time has accelerated. Time has left the gentle ebb and flow of
gene transfer and adaptation that characterizes biological evolution,
and instead historical time is generated, and so I believe that science
and its reluctance to deal with the psychedelic experience and the way
in which science has used then law to suppress its rival in this case
arises out of a profound discomfort on the part of science about this
future state of this complexification that is clearly the grail, the dwell
point, the end point of the human historical process. No one of us, I
think, can imagine that history could go on for another thousand years.
What would it look like? At the current rate of population growth,
spread of epidemic disease, rate of invention, connectivity, depletion
of resources, the atmosphere it is impossible to conceive of another
thousand years of human history. History then is ending. History is a
kind of gestation process. It’s a kind of metamorphosis. It’s an episode
in the life of a species. If you think of the simple example of
metamorphosis, that of caterpillar to butterfly, we all know that there
is this intermediate resting stage where the caterpillar is, for all
practical purposes, enzymatically dissolved and then reconstituted as
an entirely different kind of organism with different physical structures,
different eyes, different legs, a different way of breathing with wings
where no wings were before, with a different kind of feeding apparatus
this is what’s happening to us. History is a process of metamorphosis.
It’s a pupation stage. It begins with naked monkeys and it ends with a
human machine planet girdling interface capable of releasing the
energy that light the stars, and it lasts about fifteen or twenty
thousand years, and during that period the entire process hangs in the
balance. It’s a period of high risk. It’s like what a butterfly is doing in a
cocoon or what is happening to a child in the womb. It’s a gestation
process where one form of life is being changed into another. Well, this
would all happen naturally and with a great deal of anxiety I imagine,
as history builds to its ever more climactic and horrifying crescendo,
and we would all be ignorant or very baffled about what’s going on
were it not for the institution of psychedelic shamanism. Remember, I
said that what is dissolved are the crystalline structures. Well, one of
the strongest symmetries in our cultural crystal is the symmetry that
gathers around the concept of past and future. The shaman actually
rises into a domain where past and future are different areas on the
same topological manifold. This is not a metaphor. It’s what’s really
going on. If you think about shamanism in its classical guise for a
moment, it is about predicting weather, predicting game movement,
and curing disease. If you had a prescient or extraordinary
understanding of the future each one of us would be able to do these
things. Predicting the weather, you just look into next week and there it
is. Predicting the movement of game, same deal. Curing the sick
actually involves very judicious choice of your patients, with a
preknowledge of who will get well and who will not get well. So, its as
though the members of the culture are imprisoned in linear time, and
the shaman is not. And, why not, because the shaman has perturbed
the brain states sanctioned by the culture, sanctioned by its
educational processes, its habits, its attitudes, and into that vacuum,
created by that perturbation of these cultural values, rushes the raw
unanalyzed datum of reality. This is what Aldous Huxley called
“Removing the reducing valve of consciousness.” And, suddenly
culture is seen to be a relative phenomena, the stockbroker no
different from the rainforest shaman each somewhat similar to the
Trobian(?) islander, or the Eskimo. Culture is simply clothing upon the
human experience, but the human organism outside the confines of
culture, in a direct relationship to nature, transcends time and space.
This was a fact, I believe, that was known in prehistory, and, in fact,
was the source of Paleolithic values, which were not material, not
linear, not surplus oriented, not class oriented, not power oriented, but
rather oriented toward a kind of egalitarian partnership in an
environment of great material simplicity. Human beings lived like that
for probably a half-a-million years with poetry, with dance, with
mathematics, with magic, with story, with humor, but not with the
paralyzing and toxic artifacts of the late evolving, machine
worshipping, monotheistic, linear, phonetic alphabet, tight ass straight
culture that we are a part of. So now, at a kind of moment of great
cultural challenge and dynamic for western civilization, which has for a
thousand years called all the shots and shoved itself down everybody’s
throat whether they liker it or not. In the last hundred years through
the science of Anthropology and Ethnography and Ethnomedicine and
Botany the news has arrived that these “primitive people” are in fact
master technicians of journeying into the world of the neurological
imagination, a world we didn’t even know existed, world that is as
distant to us as the world at the heart of the atom is from the rain
forest fisherman. And, because our own cultural values seem a little
shoddy at this moment those on the fringes of western civilization have
begun to seek alternatives, begun to look at alternative religion – yoga,
tantra, Buddhism, Zen, whatever-, alternative approaches to diet
vegetarianism, macrobiotics, so forth and so on, and alternative
approaches to authentic experience, which means psychedelics. In the
early stage of psychedelic involvement everyone was sort of flying
under the banner of hands on Freudianism, or hands on Jungianism.
You know we’re gonna see those archetypes, we’re gonna confront
those sexual repressions, we’re gonna journey into those traumatic
childhood memories. Now, it’s understood, I think, that those
metaphors were fairly inadequate, and that actually, we stand on the
brink of an unexplored landscape of planetary size. The world of the
high Paleolithic, which is a Gaian world, a world of feeling not analytical
intellectual constructs, but a world of empowered feeling, empathy and
intuitive understanding, an understanding that doesn’t arise in a
context of Greek logic, but in a context of animal knowing in the
authentic mode of the body. So just to bring it all around here, the
great exhibit which we must always keep in front of ourselves and our
critics is the mystery of the human mind and body. No one knows how
it is that I can command my hand to make a fist, and that it will do
that. I mean, that’s mind over matter. That’s the violation of every
scientific principle in the books, and yet, it is the most trivial
experience any of us have. We expect to command our body. We
expect the mental will to order the monkey flesh into action, and it will
follow. The body is the nexus of the mystery of life, and our culture
takes us out of the body, and sells our loyalty into political systems,
into religion, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth
and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are
handing back to us; that’s why it’s called escape because it’s escape
from HBO, from walking the mall, from seeing what’s on the tube, from
consuming trash media. It’s escape from all of that into the
authenticity of the body. This is why sexuality is so edgy in this society.
They’d make it illegal if they but could figure out how. It’s the one drug
they can’t tear from our grip, and so they lay a guilt trip about, but
sexuality and psychedelics, by carrying us back to an authentic sense
of the body, carry us back to the domain of authentic values, and more
and more the message that people are getting as they avail
themselves of the psychedelic experience is that it is not a journey into
the human unconscious or into the ghost bardos of our chaotic
civilization. It’s a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind, that the
earth is a coherent whole; it is a thinking, feeling, intending, being that
in terms of our value structures it would be foolish to image as
anything other than female, and when cultural values created by male
dominate, and science, and linearity, so forth and so on, when those
values are dissolved what is waiting there is this incredibly poignant
experience of matrix, what James Joyce called mama matrix most
mysterious, nothing more than our bodies and the earth out of which
our bodies came. History as we have lived it in the west, has been a
turning of our back on that, and now history has failed. Western
cultural institutions, having become global cultural institutions, now
show themselves to be inadequate to inspire, lead, or carry anyone
into a future worth living in. At this moment then, this reconnecting to
the Gaian mind becomes a kind of moral imperative. So this whole
drug issue is not an issue even about criminal syndicates, or about
untaxed billions, or about the mental health of our youth, or any of that
malarkey. I mean my god the most destructive drugs to this species
are peddled on every street corner without restriction. The real issue is
what kind of mental worlds shall people inhabit, what kinds of hope
shall be permitted, what kind of value systems shall be allowed and the
value systems that aggrandize the possession of things, the tearing up
of the earth, the competition, classism, racism, sexism, have led us to
the brink of catastrophe. Now, I think, we have to abandon western
cultural values and return to the deeper wisdom of the body in
connection with the plants. That’s the seamless web the leads us back
into the heart of nature, and if we can do this then this very narrow
neck of cultural crisis can be navigated. Very little of the past can be
saved- the architectonics, the machines, the systems of monetary
exchange, and propaganda, the silly religions, the asinine aesthetic
canons very little of that can be saved, but what can be saved is the
sense of love and caring and mutuality that we all put into and take
from the human enterprise. You know there’s a Grateful Dead song
that says, “You can’t go back, and you can’t stand still. If the thunder
don’t get you then the lightin will”, and we know hold, through the
possession of these psychedelics, catalysts for the human imagination
of sufficient power that if we use them we can deconstruct the lethal
vehicle that is carrying us toward the brink of apocalypse. We can
deconstruct that vehicle and redesign it into a kind of star ship that
would carry us and our children out into the broad starry galaxy we
know to be waiting us. But it’s a cultural test. Nature is pitiless.
Intelligence is a grand experiment upon which a great deal has been
risked, but if it proves inadequate nature will cover it over with the
same kind of cool impunity that she covered over the dinosaurs and
the trilobites, and the crossopterygian fishes, and all those other folks
who came before. So, what we must do, I think, is see our future in the
imagination. Catalyze the imagination. Form symbiotic relationships
with the plants. Affirm archaic values and spread the good news that
what is out of control, what is in fact dying is a world that had become
too top-heavy with its own hubris, too bent by its own false value
systems, and too dehumanized to care about what happens to its own
children. So, I say good riddance to it. Bring on the archaic revival and
lets create a new world. That’s it. If this wasn’t perfectly clear I am sure
the questions and answers will make it so. Let’s take a half-hour break.
I’ll sign books if anybody wants me to, and then we’ll get together here
for the hardcore. Thank you very very much.

Let’s pull it together. So we can get on to the fun part here. Okay,
well I trust that that was all perfectly clear, before the break. This is the
part I like the most because I am not into the white guy in the front of
the room with all the answers trip. It’s just unfortunate that I have the
body I do. I am actually a lesbian trapped in a man’s body, but I have
done the very best with that that I could, which hasn’t been bad let me
tell you.

Question- Can I take about the relationship of advanced

mathematics to modeling of consciousness in laymen’s terms?

Answer- One of the great mysteries still to be addressed by

philosophy is that why is it that numbers, which are after all constructs
of the human mind, why is it that numbers are so incredibly powerful
for the description of nature? Nature after all is somehow given, we
find it all around us, and number arise in the depths of human
ratiocination. So, what is the relationship of these things to each other?
This may appear to be an easy question. It’s such a difficult question
that it wasn’t even asked in philosophy, until the twentieth century. It’s
very puzzling, and I think it indicates a fundamental congruency
between processes that are mental and the structure of the world
itself. This is why I didn’t get into it too much tonight in a popular
lecture like this but I am the inventor or purveyor of a mathematical
theory of consciousness, and I believe that more powerful than any
atom smasher, more subtle than any space telescope is the human
mind. The human mind is the most subtle and superb of all
instruments for the study and measurement of nature. When we look
into ourselves we discover the same patterns that we discover in the
birth and death of a species, the flow of a river, the collapse of a
corporation, or the flowering of a love affair. It’s that process is
somehow under the egis of a kind of universal equation of description.
So, it doesn’t matter whether it’s the birth and death of your hope, or
the rise and fall of the Assyrian Empire, or the evolution of the Pacific
Ocean, processes always occur in the same way, and this is why there
is congruence between the mental world of human beings and the
world of abstract mathematics and the world of nature. These things
are, as it were, simply different levels of condensation of the same
universal stuff. This is why the concept of truth can have some
meaning. When you think about it, truth, why should it even be
possible for us as monkeys to entertain that notion? Where is it writ
large that mammals traveling in packs should have any relationship to
truth whatsoever? And yet, the faith is that somehow thinking means
something. It’s not just something we do, it means something, it
means something because there is sufficient freedom within the
human system to be both right or wrong, and this right or wrong lays
upon us the obligation of mirroring nature in models, which we build in
our own minds. Now the old idea, in science, was that these
mathematical models of nature were if fact laws, truths, eternal
platonic truths that were being teased out. In the twentieth century
slight epistemological sophistication leads to this word models where
we say we’re modeling reality, and our model is only as good as we
need it to be. If we’re trying to model the flight of an artillery shell, the
model needs to be only good enough to get the artillery shell to its
target. We don’t need to understand the essence of lead or the nature
of motion there. We simply need the model to kick out the data that
interests us, and in the twentieth century it’s been understood that all
knowledge is dependent upon the question asked, and the relationship
of mathematics to nature is one of the profound indicators, I think, that
truth can be known maybe not the truth, but I always think of the
positivist philosopher Wittgenstein(?) who was once asked in a
classroom situation about a certain proposition, is it the truth? And, he
said, well, it’s certainly true enough. That’s where we are with our
modeling of the world and with our mathematics. It is the truest truth
we know. It is true enough.
 The question is from a stage magician, and the question is, what
is the nature of magic or what is magic or the wonder that it evokes.
There are two theories, I mean magic is not a trivial issue at all, there
are two theories about how the world works, and each one depends on
a fundamental assumption about what the world is. There’s the
scientific theory, which says the world is tiny packets of matter
squealing along through empty space at close to the speed of light,
and subject to a certain set of interlocking laws. That’s what science
tells us the world is. Another theory is, and to my mind a much more
appealing and intuitively correct theory is the world is language. The
world is made of language. We can say that the world is composed of
little demons doing calisthenics each one the size of a pissant’s
eyebrow, or we can say the world is made out of wave mechanical
packets of matter flying along at the speed of light, but notice that
what we get each time is words. Our model of what the world is, is
made of words, and the world is composed of description. Now in the
era before science, scientists like to say people were more
epistemologically naïve. What they mean by that is they didn’t have a
clear understanding of the division between the inside and the outside,
between what we imagine and what actually is. But, if you live long
enough I think you discover, what we imagine and what actually is, are
very close to the same thing. Now whenever you say the world is made
of language, the positivists object by saying then why isn’t the way we
say it is. I didn’t say it’s the way we say it is. I said its made of
language, and part of the inspiration for my career is the realization
that you could get up in front of audiences and say how the world is,
and to a small degree, for a limited time, in a limited space, it
shimmers and recasts itself and becomes the thing that we say that it
is. The mind is some how a co-creator in the process of reality through
acts of language, and language is very very mysterious. I mean it is
true magic. People run all over the place looking for paranormal
abilities, but notice that when I speak if your internal dictionary
matches my internal dictionary that my thoughts cross through the air
as an acoustical pressure wave and are reconstructed inside your
cerebral cortex as your thought, your understanding of my words.
Telepathy exists. It’s just that the carrier wave is small mouth noises.
All so-called primitive people know that the world is made of language;
that you sing it into existence, that what you say it is, is what it is, that
it is maintained in existence by an act of rational apprehension, and its
only science, which has taken this very weird approach and said no no
the world is somehow independent from the act of description, and this
is not a situation where we have two separate points of view both open
hearted and trying their best to work hard for you. Science carried out
its analysis of nature to the point where it shot itself in the foot.
Science carried out an analysis that went to such depth that it
discovered that nature doesn’t exist, except as an object of
description, that there are no little objects winging their way through
empty space. There is only a situation describable by multileveled fishy
formula, and when you drop a mind into that situation the fishy formula
condense out into a little particle, which can be measured. Mind is
necessary for the world to undergo the formality of existing. This is
what quantum physics teaches. Unfortunately, this news has not
reached the other sciences. This is a real failure on the part of science.
You see throughout the nineteenth century, physics was the
paradigmatic science. It was the science everybody envied. It’s not
unusual in physics for theory, and experiment to be congruent to three
decimal points of accuracy. That just causes scientist to go wild. They
love that when theory and measurement fall into congruency like that,
and so, everyone wanted to be like physics, Chemistry sought that,
Sociology, Psychology, Biology. Meanwhile, Physics, while pursuing the
matter, broke through to a domain where matter ceased to be
definable, ceased to even exist in any ordinary way, seemed to behave
in incredibly strange ways. Time flows backward. Energy crosses
barriers without ever going through them like tunneling through them
in some way. Modern Biology is still afflicted with Physics envy.
Meanwhile, Physics has gone onto a realm of such exotic and surreal
uncertainty that it’s, at this point, to the left of Psychology in the
precision of its metaphors. So, science has undercut itself and now
exists in a state of unrecognized crisis that hopefully the psychedelic
experience will exacerbate to the point where this will arrive on the
plate of every experimentalist and observer of nature.

(A new question is asked. I can’t make out what the questioner is

asking, and Terence does not repeat the question. His response follows
below.)

People don’t take enough. That’s all. People are confused about
what’s going on. First of all, taking psychedelics has a certain measure
of sheikness(?) about it. Well everybody wants to be sheik(?), and you
can get into the club by merely saying you took it, but you don’t want
to lie like a dog. So, the way to get into the club without paying your
dues is to take some pissant(?) amount, and then run around raving
about that. So when we talk about the psychedelic experience, it’s not
clear we’re all talking about the same thing. It’s sort of like talking
about France, and you have the people who change planes in the
airport, and the people who moved there for thirty years, and learned
the literature, and got a job, and married the locals. So, the way to do
psychedelics is, I believe, at higher doses than most people are
comfortable with, and rarely, and with great attention to set and
setting. This social use of psychedelics in the club scene or at rock and
roll concerts, and so forth. I mean when I go to those kinds of scenes I
just smoke pot. I don’t, because I want to be part of what’s going on I
want to have a good time, but you would be nuts to take a major
psychedelic in that circumstance. Socially dense environments filled
with light and noises are a strategy for coming down, you know. I mean
if you took a drug you didn’t like the smartest thing to do would be to
jog around the block ten times and then chop a bunch of wood, very
similar to dancing your ass off in other words. So, the way I
recommend doing psychedelics is in silent darkness, and with as little
input from other people as possible. I mean, I say alone, if you are
experienced, if you’re really confident just alone for cryin out loud. If
that gives you pause and you must have a sitter, and let’s use the
word sitter not guide my god nobody is guiding you anywhere. They
have no more notion than where you are than we know where Judge
Carter is at this point. So, the sitter, and my idea of the perfect sitter is
you know you have a little Tibetan bell by your side, and the sitter is
sitting three rooms away, and if you need the sitter you ring the bell.
They stick there head in the room, and say it’s cool, lay down, do that.
As long as this question was brought up, and so much of the lecture
was high toned, let me get into this for a minute. There are thousands
of altered states. We know them, orgasm, indigestion, two
cappuccinos, where tequila takes you, endless altered states, and I am
not really interested in them more or less anymore than you are they
are a part of life, but what I’m interested in, as an experimentalist, as a
connoisseur of nature-somebody who loves fossils, butterflies,
rainforest, that kind of thing is this family of compounds called the
indole hallucinogens. They cause hallucination, and some people say
that I’m a fetishist about this that who cares or that there are other
things beside hallucination. Yes, I know, maybe, and of course, but the
reason I am so fascinated by hallucinations is because to my mind
when you’re hallucinating you have an absolutely clear proof that you
are not generating this material. It’s not funny ideas, it’s not racing
thoughts, it’s not insight into what your boyfriend really meant
yesterday that kind of thing we all can generate by just inspecting our
own minds, but a hallucination is to be in the presence of that which
previously could not be imagined, and if it previously could not be
imagined then there is no grounds for believing that you generated it
out of yourself. We should each know our own inventory. You know
what’s in your cupboard; you know what’s in your chest of drawers for
god’s sake you ought to know what’s in your mind. Well then if
something comes forward and you say that’s not mine that’s not in my
inventory then you have a kind of perfect proof that this is coming from
somewhere else, and then the question becomes where, and we can
set off into that, opinions differ and nobody has God’s truth on it. A
reductionist, somebody who didn’t like these substances, would say oh
well it’s just neurological chaos. You have just interrupted the normal
functioning of good brain chemicals, and evil brain chemicals are now
giving a sense of chaos. Well, that just doesn’t cut the mustard. That
kind of stuff may work if you’re talking to the troops, but not if you’re
talking to anybody who’s ever been there. I know what a neurological
chaos would look like. It would look like bright lights, moving patterns,
colored this, something that. It would not be ruins, landscapes,
machines, paintings, works of art, building plans, weapons, bits of
manufactured technological detritus. These things are too coherent.
They’re objects in some kind of superstructure of the mind, and for me
this was the revelation. I didn’t get into this business by being an
airhead or a screwball. My attitude was always if it’s real it can take the
pressure. You don’t have to pussy foot around the real thing. If they’re
telling you, oh you must lower your voice, and avert your gaze, then
you’re probably in the presence of crap because the real thing is real. It
doesn’t demand that you adjust your opinion to suit it. It’s real. That
means that it’s preeminent. That means it sets the agenda. And, I
studied yoga, I wandered around in the East, I was fast shuffled by
beady eyed little men in dotes(?), I know the whole spiritual
supermarket and rigmarole, and I find nothing there to interest me on
the level of five grams of psilocybin mushrooms in silent darkness.
That’s where the pedal meets the metal. That’s where the rubber
meets the road. The inspiration for me to get up and talk to an
audience like this simply comes from the fact that I cannot believe that
this could be kept under wraps the way it has. I mean, I kidded with
you earlier that they would make sex illegal, if they could. Well they
cant so it isn’t, but the psychedelic experience is as central to
understanding your humanness as having sex or having a child or
having responsibilities or having hopes or dreams, and yet it is illegal.
We are infantilized. We are told you can wander around with the
sanctioned playpen of ordinary consciousness, and we have some
intoxicants over here if you wanna mess your self up we’ve got some
scotch here and some tobacco and red meat and some sugar and a
little T.V. and so forth and so on. But, these boundary dissolving
hallucinogens that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and
nature are somehow forbidden. This is an outrage. It’s a sign of cultural
immaturity, and the fact that we tolerate it is a sign that we are living
in a society as oppressed as any society in the past.

My thing is not about my opinion or what I saw in Africa or

anything like that. This is, get it straight, this is about an experience
not my experience your experience. It’s about an experience, which
you have like getting laid, or like going to Africa. You must do the
experience otherwise it’s just whistling past the graveyard, and we’re
not talking about something like being born again, or meeting the
flying saucers, or something like that where good works and prayer are
the method, no. IF you take a sufficient dose of an active compound it
will deliver itself to you on the money. If it doesn’t work take more.
Nobody is in a position to dismiss this just because it didn’t work for
them on one or two tries. This is an art. It’s something you coax into
existence. I mean, you have to learn to make love, you have to learn to
speak English, and anything worth doing is an art that is squired. This
is part of our birthright, perhaps the most important part of our
birthright. These substances will deliver. It is the confoundment of
psychology and science generally, and that’s why it’s so touchy for
cultural institutions, but you are not a cultural institution. You are a free
and independent human being, and these things have your name
written on them in big gold letters.

(A question is asked, and like before, I cannot make out what is

asked and Terence does not repeat it.)

Well, clairvoyance, all forms of paranormal activity, I think, are

part of a five percent leakage around normal culturally sanctioned
brain function. If you read Stan Grof’s books about LSD, which is one
case history after another, virtually every paranormal phenomenon
ever cataloged has occurred under the influence of LSD, seeing this at
a distance, recovering past lives where then you could check the data
and it happened, knowledge of things going on at a distance. I think
that we are caged by our cultural programming, and that this is the
most powerful imprisoning factor in our lives. That if we could train
ourselves simply to remember our dreams, psychedelics would become
obsolete, if we could train ourselves simply to pay attention to our
ordinary states of consciousness as we live through our days and
nights. Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the
mass hallucination you see it for what it is worth. Language is partially
the key here. We cannot move into a reality that we cannot describe. If
we can’t describe a world we can’t be there, and so the interesting
place to be is at the cutting edge of language. It’s interesting that the
legacy of the nineteen sixties is a legacy of language evolution. I mean
concepts like ego trip, vibe, bummer, so forth and so on. We sneer at
these concepts but there was no word for these things before. Once
there is a word, then that word is like a stepping-stone out into the fog,
and as long as we let the establishment set the language agenda we
will be imprisoned in the tiny rather pedestrian world of consumerism
and schlocko values that the establishment has prepared for us. So,
the way I think of these psychedelics, or a different way, is that they’re
catalyst for the imagination. Catalysts to say what never been said, to
see what has never been seen, to draw paint sing sculpt dance and
actwhat has never before been done, to push the envelope of creativity
and language. And what’s really important is, I call it, the felt presence
of direct experience, which is a fancy term, which just simply means
we have to consuming our culture. We have to create culture. Don’t
watch T.V. Don’t read magazines. Don’t even listen to NPR. Create
your own road show. The nexus of space and time where you are now
is the most immediate sector of the universe, and if you’re worrying
about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else then you are
disempowered. You are giving it all away to icons, icons, which are
maintained by an electronic media. So that, you want to dress like x or
have lips like y, this is shit brained this kind of thinking. That is all
cultural diversion, and what is real is you, and your friends, and your
associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your
fears. And, we are told no, we are unimportant, we’re peripheral, get a
degree, get a job, get a this, get a that, and then you’re a player. You
don’t even want to play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind,
and get out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn
you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that is being
manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. Where is that at?

(Again, I cannot make out the new question, and Terence does
not repeat it.)

Well, religion is simply the word we use to describe our intuition

that there is something outside the realm of culture and the three
dimensional surfaces of things; that there is a hidden dimension to
reality. Call it a plan, a purpose, a loving God, a cosmos instead of a
chaos, and psychedelics, I believe, reveal a greater order than the
order of the human world. This is why the way I do them is either in
darkness, which means surrounded by the body, my body which is part
of nature, or in nature itself, in the mountains, at the beach, in the
jungle. Because what we are lacking existentially is any sense of order,
meaning, and beauty in the world because the society we are living in
has no order or beauty or meaning. It’s just a scam in a rat race. But if
you take these in the contexts where the culture and its artifacts are
suppressed, then you connect up to the greater whole. The questions
of God, meaning in Milton’s phrase “The god who hung the stars like
lamps in heaven” I don’t think psychedelics can address that
definitively, but there is another god, a goddess, the goddess of
biology, the goddess of the coherent animal human world, the world of
the animals the oceans the atmosphere and the planet, in short, our
world, the world that we were born into, that we evolved into, and that
we came from. That world the psychedelics want to connect us up to
because our individuality as people and as a species is an illusion of
bad language that the psychedelics dissolve into the greater feeling of
connectedness that underlies our being here, and to my mind that’s
the religious impulse. It’s not a laundry list of moral dos and don’ts, or
a set of dietary prescriptions or practices. It’s a sense of
connectedness, responsibility for our fellow human beings and for the
earth you walking around on, and because these psychedelics come
out of that plant vegetable matrix they are the way back into it.
 How do we emancipate people from the foolishness of the drug
war, or how do we as a community, as a pint of view, gain legitimacy?

This is a really important question. If you look around yourself

tonight, you don’t see the uneducated, the unhealthy, the demented,
or the deluded, and yet this is the stereotype of our subculture.
Instead, what you see are well-dressed creative people holding down
positions in society-the parents of children, the heads of departments,
the authors of books, the painters of paintings. You may not have
noticed but in this society they’re not handing out rights. Ask black
people. Ask any member of any sexual minority. They don’t hand out
rights in this society, and we, meaning we psychedelic people by and
large, this isn’t always true but we tend to be white and middle-class. A
translation into those two terms into gutless would not be
inappropriate. We have the most to lose, and so we’re not given to
hurling ourselves into the breach, or building barricades in the streets
to hurl our bodies against the machine. Nevertheless, if you don’t claim
your political birthright it will never be given to you. And black people,
and gay people, and Native Americans, all of these people have
learned that you don’t go on bended-knee to petition the official
culture for your rights. You have to take them, and people ask me, how
can you stand up and say the things you do, why don’t they take you
away? They don’t take me away because they are more chicken shit
than you think. They are more off-balance than you think. They’re more
uncertain of themselves than you think. The legitimacy of this point of
view is established in their minds. The reasons drugs are illegal and
suppressed and blah blah is because you can make a shit load of
money off them in that context. It’s a money issue. Do you think a
loving government is trying to keep you from jumping out of third-floor
windows, and that’s why LSD is illegal? I mean, give me a break, for
cryin out loud! If this government felt strongly enough about certain
issues all of us between eighteen and twenty-six would be sent off to
die for that policy decision. So, the government is not interested in
your health. The government is artificially in inflating the prices of
certain substances in order to create a focus for clandestine money
that is used then to destabilize unfriendly governments, murder labor
union leaders, kill and blackmail the editors of left-wing newspapers, so
forth and so on. Drugs are enormous big business, and not psychedelic
drugs. The only one that ever amounted to anything, as a financial
enterprise, was Cannabis, and Cannabis is many things besides
psychedelic. The deep dramatic psychedelics, which are all schedule
one the most repressed the schedule, don’t produce great amounts of
money at all. What they do produce is questioning minds. They cause
people to ask questions. They cause people to ask for clarification.
They cause people to challenge cultural values because they
decondition you. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Hassid, a
communist apparatchik, a rainforest shaman, if you take psychedelics
you will question your first premises, and that is a business that all
governments- right, left, middle- are in the business of repressing.
They don’t want to have to explain why things are done as they are,
but if we don’t being asking for that explanation they’re going to run
this planet right into ruin, and we are the generation responsible. You
are the generation that is responsible. You can’t claim that you grew up
in a village in Nigeria, and that you didn’t know. You can’t claim that
you’re the child of poor Bangladeshi parents and had opportunity. The
responsibility rests upon the educated, and the financially capable of
doing something about it, and by that measure you and I are probably
in the upper three percent of people on this planet, and if we don’t
take responsibility then that responsibility will devolve to others,
beaded eyed others with an agenda that would stand your hair on end.
The question is, schizophrenia involves, basically, a breaking
with ordinary value systems, and how does is relate to the psychedelic
state and people who have schizophrenic relatives in their family tree
how should they relate to the psychedelic experience and so forth. I’m
extrapolating, but that’s the basic thing.

Well there are different things to be said about this. First of all,
how many psychiatric residents, who are the people who come most in
contact with schizophrenics whatever that means, how many
psychiatric residents have ever seen an undrugged schizophrenic? Very
very few, because the very first that happens is, for the convenience of
physicians and the nursing staff, some outlandish drug is brought into
the picture, which then deflects this healing process from ever
reaching any kind of natural conclusion. Schizophrenia is just a catchall
term for forms of mental behavior that we don’t understand. In the
nineteenth century there was a term, melancholia, which we would
now call bipolar depression, so forth and so on, but all forms of
sadness, unhappiness, maladaptation, were poured into this label
melancholia. Now, schizophrenia is a similar thing. I can remember an
experience I had year ago. I was in the Tolman(?) library at the
University of California, which is the psych library. I was looking up
some drug or something, and I just saw a book and pulled it off the
shelf. A book about schizophrenia, and it said the typical schizophrenic
lives in a world of twilight imagining. Marginal to his society, incapable
of holding a regular job, these people live on the fringes content to drift
in there own self created value system. I said, That’s it! That’s it! Now I
understand. We have no tradition of shamanism. We have no tradition
of journeying into these mental worlds. We are terrified of madness.
We fear it because the western mind is a house of cards, and the
people who built that house of cards know that, and they are terrified
of madness. Tim Leary once said, or I gave him credit for saying he
later told me he never said but whoever said it this was a brilliant
statement, someone once said, “LSD is a psychedelic substance, which
occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken
it.” And I would bet you, that more people have exhibited psychotic
behavior from not taking LSD, but just thinking about it then ever
exhibited it from taking it. Certainly in my family, I watched my parents
both go psychotic from the mere fact that LSD existed. They would
never have taken it. There is a great phobia about the mind. The
western mind is very queasy when first principles are questioned.
Rarer than corpses in this society are the untreated mad because we
just can’t come to terms with that. A shaman is someone who swims in
the same ocean as a schizophrenic, but the shaman has thousands and
thousands of years of sanctioned technique and tradition to draw upon.
In a traditional society if you exhibit “schizophrenic” tendencies you
are immediately drawn out of the pack, and put under the care and
tutelage of master shamans. You are told, you are special, your abilities
are very central to the health of our society, you will cure, you will
prophecy, you will guide our society in its most fundamental decisions.
Contrast this with what a person exhibiting schizophrenic activity in our
society is told. They’re told you don’t fit in, you are becoming a
problem, you don’t pull your own weight, you are not of equal worth,
you are sick, you have to go to the hospital, you have to be locked up,
you re on a par with prisoners and lost dogs in our society. So that
treatment of schizophrenia makes it incurable. Imagine if you were
slightly odd, and the solution were to take you and put you, lock you
into a place were everyone was seriously mad. That would drive
anyone mad. If you have ever been in a mad house, you know that it’s
an environment calculated to make you crazy, and to keep you crazy.
This would never happen in an aboriginal or traditional society.

I wrote a book called the Archaic Revival. The idea there is that
we have gone sick by following a path of rationalism, male dominance,
attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottomlineism.
We have gone very very sick, and the body politic, like any body when
it feels itself to be sick it begins to produce antibodies or strategies for
overcoming disease, and the twentieth century is an enormous effort
at self healing. Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing,
psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental
dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless. What do all these
things have in common? They represent various styles of rejection of
linear values. The society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival
by a reversion to archaic values. So when I see people manifesting
sexual ambiguity, or scarifying themselves, or showing a lot of flesh, or
dancing to syncopated music, or getting loaded, or violating ordinary
canons of sexual behavior I applaud all of this because it’s an impulse
to return to what is felt by the body, what is authentic, what is archaic,
and when you tease apart these archaic impulses at the very center of
all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical
empowerment of feeling. And at the center of that impulse is the
shaman stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers,
dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking a world of
conscious living mystery. That’s what the world is. The world is not an
unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living
mystery. Our birth, our death, our being in the moment, these are
mysteries. They are doorways opening onto unimaginable vistas of
self-exploration, empowerment, and hope for the human enterprise,
and our culture has killed that, taken it away from us, made us
consumers of shoddy product and shoddier ideals. We have to get
away from that and the way to get away from it is by a return to the
authentic experience of the body, and that means sexually
empowering ourselves, and it means getting loaded exploring the mind
as a tool for personal and social transformation. The hour is late. The
clock is ticking. We will be judges very harshly if we fumble the ball.
We are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully
lived lives and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the
natural world. Now the challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet
to be born may have a place to put there feet, and a sky to walk under,
and that’s what the psychedelic experience is all about is caring for,
empowering, and building a future that honors the past, honors the
planet, and honors the power of the human imagination. There is
nothing as powerful as capable of transforming itself and the planet as
the human imagination. Let’s not sell it straight. Let’s not whore
ourselves to know-whit ideologies. Let’s not give our control over to the
least among us. Rather, claim your place in the sun, and go forward
into the light. The tools are there the path is known. You simply have to
turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get
with the program of a living world and a empowerment of the
imagination. Thank you very very much!