417 - Earth Mind and Monkey Mind

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Alcohol could hardly be more different than psilocybin in terms of the social values that it promotes.”

“Warfare is the natural consequence of agriculture.”

“I really see psilocybin as a kind of inoculation against the primate nature.”

“Noting on Earth is as much like a man as a woman. We tend to forget this. And ego is not now a male problem. We are all completely infected by ego.”

“We do not have group values. The reason the planet is dying is because we cannot place the good of the group above our own desires, consistently.”

“The big news is that the rise of the ego has suppressed a portion of reality, which is that nature is an animate and minded thing of some sort.”

“Culture is the condensation of language.”

“Every society is based upon a lie of some sort.

“Drug smuggling is like assassination, if the government isn’t involved it never seems to really happen.”

Previous Episode §

416 - McKenna_ Psychedelics Are The Way Out

Next Episode §

418 - Death By Astonishment

Similar Episodes §

• 382 - The Psychedelic Option - score: 0.82551
• 504 - We Are Descendent’s of Stoned Apes - score: 0.82444
• 459 - Apes shouting at the monolith - score: 0.82410
• 390 - Monogamy, Marriage, and Neurosis - score: 0.82039
• 221 - McKenna_ Evolving Times - score: 0.81624
• 416 - McKenna_ Psychedelics Are The Way Out - score: 0.81051
• 594 - The Edge Runner Part 1 - score: 0.81003
• 372 - The Intentionality of Meaning - score: 0.80754
• 528 - History Ends In Green – Part 5 - score: 0.80524
• 564 - Plants and Mind (Part 2-Chimpanzee or Bonobo) - score: 0.80479

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic

00:00:22 ► §

salon.

00:00:24 ► §

And today is Monday, October 6th, 2014.

00:00:28 ► §

Now, the reason that I mention this is that one week from today, Monday the 13th,

00:00:33 ► §

is when my friend Bruce Dahmer will be a guest on the Joe Rogan Podcast.

00:00:38 ► §

And as you most likely know, Joe records his podcast live and streams it on ustream.tv.

00:00:44 ► §

And while you’ll be able to both watch and listen to it after the fact,

00:00:47 ► §

I find it much more fun to watch Joe live.

00:00:51 ► §

And it should be fun to watch, as I think Bruce is going to bring along

00:00:55 ► §

a few of the interesting little gadgets he has in the Digibarn Computer Museum

00:01:00 ► §

that he curates in his spare time.

00:01:04 ► §

Now, last week I told you that since the

00:01:06 ► §

boys of the playa still haven’t had a chance to dust off a few Planque Norte talks to send to me,

00:01:12 ► §

that I was going to play another Terrence McKenna talk, which I did. Well, today’s program was

00:01:17 ► §

slotted to be sourced by our women friends, but alas, other duties called them first. And so,

00:01:24 ► §

once again, you and I are going to hear a few more thoughts from Terrence McKenna.

00:01:28 ► §

In fact, we’re going to pick up where we left off last week

00:01:31 ► §

with now the Saturday morning session of a weekend with Terrence McKenna

00:01:36 ► §

that was held back in February of 1992.

00:01:40 ► §

I found it interesting that one of the questions that comes up during this talk

00:01:45 ► §

is from a woman who asks if there are any differences in how men and women use these sacred medicines.

00:01:52 ► §

And Terrence’s answer I found quite interesting,

00:01:55 ► §

particularly in light of the fact that now, well, more than 20 years later,

00:01:59 ► §

us guys are slowly waking up to the fact that ever since the psychedelic resurgence began in the 60s, well, it’s been for the most part a good old boys game.

00:02:10 ► §

So pay attention when you hear that question asked and see what you think about his reply.

00:02:15 ► §

Now, we start off with Terrence’s description of women’s role in creating language during the time that he calls a partnership paradise and the time when he believes human beings were the most human.

00:02:28 ► §

Now, this comes in the first few minutes of the talk,

00:02:30 ► §

and I highly suggest that you pause this recording at that point

00:02:34 ► §

and give a little thought to the fact that, materially and technologically,

00:02:39 ► §

we simply aren’t going to be able to go back to the way things were 10,000 years ago.

00:02:45 ► §

That’s simply not going to happen, at least not while you and I are still walking around.

00:02:49 ► §

But it may be worth your time to pause right there and give a little thought to

00:02:54 ► §

what could be done to bring an archaic balance back into our lives,

00:02:58 ► §

even though, for the most part, we’re all living in crowded cities.

00:03:02 ► §

How can we get back to some kind of a partnership

00:03:05 ► §

paradise? That’s the real question. And if you could see the smile on my face right now,

00:03:13 ► §

you’d probably guess that I’m thinking about Burning Man. And you’d be right. You know,

00:03:18 ► §

if a society like Burning Man can be allowed to self-organize in one of the most inhospitable places on the planet,

00:03:26 ► §

well, then there’s no question in my mind about our ability to create partnership paradises

00:03:31 ► §

and more comfortable surroundings.

00:03:34 ► §

Give it some thought, why don’t you?

00:03:36 ► §

And now let’s rejoin Terrence McKenna and a few of his friends

00:03:40 ► §

on a Saturday morning in the month of February, 1992.

00:03:44 ► §

I am answering your question about agriculture, but stick with me here.

00:03:53 ► §

So then this is, to my mind, the partnership paradise of prehistory

00:04:00 ► §

in which the feminine was honored, men and women existed in equilibrium,

00:04:08 ► §

child caring was shared, men because of the strong upper body and different physical

00:04:17 ► §

characteristics were assigned the hunting, and also because women had babies clinging to them all the time

00:04:25 ► §

and were not so mobile.

00:04:27 ► §

So there was an early division of labor.

00:04:31 ► §

And I think, although I wouldn’t argue this to the death,

00:04:34 ► §

but it seems reasonable to me,

00:04:36 ► §

that women are probably the inventors of language.

00:04:42 ► §

And for this we can both thank them and, you know, wonder about the

00:04:49 ► §

consequences of it. Now, why would women be the inventors of language? It’s because hunting is a

00:04:56 ► §

fairly generalized concept where great emphasis is placed on stoic waiting and physical strength.

00:05:06 ► §

You need to be able to keep your mouth shut for hours and hours at a time,

00:05:10 ► §

sitting stock still, waiting,

00:05:12 ► §

and then when the moment comes, just wail on whatever it is that’s running by.

00:05:19 ► §

The position of the…

00:05:21 ► §

What’s the description of hunting, everybody?

00:05:21 ► §

The position of the… What’s the description of honey, however?

00:05:24 ► §

Well, the gatherer is an entirely different problem,

00:05:30 ► §

and the women took the gathering.

00:05:32 ► §

What gathering is all about is fine distinctions.

00:05:37 ► §

You want to be able to say,

00:05:40 ► §

when someone says to you,

00:05:42 ► §

where did you find these wonderful roots?

00:05:46 ► §

You want to be able to say they are down near the sulfur spring

00:05:50 ► §

they grow in the ground underneath the plant

00:05:54 ► §

with the small yellow flowers

00:05:55 ► §

and the serrated leaf edge with the furry underneath

00:05:59 ► §

in other words it’s a tremendous problem

00:06:02 ► §

of location linguistically.

00:06:05 ► §

And if any of you are botanists, you know that until the invention of photography,

00:06:11 ► §

botany created a whole special language for itself called taxonomic description,

00:06:17 ► §

where you would say, well, this plant is sespitose with crenelate leaves and trichomes are present.

00:06:27 ► §

And what this is is an excruciatingly detailed physical description.

00:06:33 ► §

And women also were socialized more than men because they shared child care,

00:06:39 ► §

they spent time together in food preparation, and food preparation is part of it as well.

00:06:47 ► §

You have to be able to not only tell where the plant came from,

00:06:50 ► §

you have to create a linguistic machine

00:06:53 ► §

for conveying how it is to be used.

00:06:57 ► §

Well, I think that this partnership paradise

00:07:01 ► §

was really the moment

00:07:05 ► §

when human beings were most

00:07:08 ► §

human

00:07:09 ► §

most at peace within

00:07:11 ► §

and without between men

00:07:14 ► §

and women, between adults

00:07:15 ► §

and children, between the human

00:07:17 ► §

family and the environment

00:07:19 ► §

because we were nomadic

00:07:22 ► §

our populations

00:07:23 ► §

were kept small,

00:07:29 ► §

and I think that the sexual style of these early human beings

00:07:38 ► §

that we can reconstruct it by looking at phenomenon like the pygmy chimpanzees

00:07:45 ► §

and then looking at sexual and social styles among aboriginal people like in the Amazon.

00:07:52 ► §

And the chief thing that comes out of that is group values predominate.

00:07:59 ► §

So consequently, the great tension that drives our society, which is the tension of mate claiming and holding, which we call, you know, maintaining and breaking relationships, really wasn’t there.

00:08:29 ► §

In that hunter-gatherer quasi-nomadic situation, the natural style would have been orgiastic.

00:08:34 ► §

And orgy has a very interesting social consequence.

00:08:41 ► §

It makes it impossible for men to trace lines of male paternity.

00:08:49 ► §

This is very important. In other words, the children in an orgiastic society are society’s children. Women know who their children are because they see them come out of

00:08:56 ► §

their bodies, and unless they put them down and forget where they put them, they will always be able to go back to their children because the act the sex act and the

00:09:08 ► §

fact of birth are separated by nine months it took a long long time for the role of the

00:09:14 ► §

the specific male to dawn on these societies once male paternity becomes an issue, there’s tremendous tension because the orgiastic style is appealing on one level to everybody, I think. orgy, you want to control women and in fact you begin to think of them as my women

00:09:46 ► §

and your women and I have nothing to do

00:09:49 ► §

with your women and you have nothing to do with my women

00:09:51 ► §

so women become a source of great anxiety

00:09:55 ► §

in this situation

00:09:57 ► §

I want to make it clear, this is not to say

00:10:01 ► §

that we fell from grace

00:10:04 ► §

from a state of grace that was

00:10:07 ► §

laid on to us by nature

00:10:09 ► §

because the style of

00:10:12 ► §

all monkeys is

00:10:13 ► §

male dominance

00:10:15 ► §

even if you go back to

00:10:17 ► §

the primitive primates, the

00:10:19 ► §

squirrel monkeys and like that

00:10:21 ► §

male dominance hierarchies

00:10:23 ► §

are always what’s happening.

00:10:25 ► §

So I think that the admission of psilocybin into the proto-hominid diet

00:10:31 ► §

actually corrected, if you want to use that word,

00:10:35 ► §

corrected a social style that had been present in the monkeys for millions of years.

00:10:41 ► §

And just for maybe 50 or 100,000 years,

00:10:47 ► §

the tendency to form male dominance hierarchies

00:10:50 ► §

was suppressed by this cult of psilocybin use

00:10:55 ► §

on the plains of Africa.

00:10:57 ► §

Well then, the very forces which created this situation,

00:11:01 ► §

which were the drying up of the African continent,

00:11:04 ► §

which shrank the great rainforests, broke up this partnership paradise because the mushrooms became, instead of being abundant all year long on these rainy grasslands, the rains became less frequent.

00:11:28 ► §

The distance between water holes became greater.

00:11:31 ► §

The mushrooms became seasonal.

00:11:36 ► §

The orgies, which had probably been lunar at first,

00:11:38 ► §

become more stretched out.

00:11:41 ► §

Maybe they’re equinoctial and solsticial, and finally annual, and finally occasional,

00:11:47 ► §

and finally they don’t happen at all.

00:11:49 ► §

Now, while this is going on, people are aware that the mushroom is getting harder to access.

00:11:57 ► §

And so, for the first time,

00:11:59 ► §

they begin thinking of strategies of preservation.

00:12:04 ► §

And in a world without refrigeration,

00:12:07 ► §

the obvious strategy is drying or preserving in some medium.

00:12:14 ► §

Drying of mushrooms is not an effective strategy

00:12:18 ► §

unless you have hermetically sealed peanut butter jars

00:12:21 ► §

and Ziploc baggies and stuff which we presume they didn’t have.

00:12:28 ► §

So then your only choice is some method of preservation.

00:12:33 ► §

And what I see in the archaeology of the ancient Near East

00:12:37 ► §

is a supplanting of the mushroom cult

00:12:42 ► §

by a cult of honey.

00:12:44 ► §

planting of the mushroom cult by a cult of honey.

00:12:52 ► §

And honey is a very excellent antiseptic preserving medium.

00:12:55 ► §

And in many cultures it’s used that way.

00:12:58 ► §

In Mexico to this day, in the Mexican Indian villages,

00:13:01 ► §

they put the mushrooms and stir them into honey and then they can preserve them for many months that way.

00:13:06 ► §

There’s a problem here though

00:13:08 ► §

which is that honey itself

00:13:12 ► §

can become an intoxicating substance.

00:13:16 ► §

Honey ferments into mead

00:13:18 ► §

which is a crude form of alcohol.

00:13:22 ► §

Well, alcohol could hardly be more different than psilocybin

00:13:27 ► §

in terms of the social values that it promotes.

00:13:32 ► §

Alcohol promotes an inflated sense of ego,

00:13:40 ► §

an inflated sense of one’s linguistic skill,

00:13:44 ► §

an inflated sense of one’s linguistic skill,

00:13:50 ► §

and a lowering of sensitivity to social cueing.

00:13:54 ► §

You see this in any singles bar, you know.

00:13:57 ► §

The guys become boorish, they hit on the women,

00:14:01 ► §

because now finally they have the courage to hit on the women, and the whole thing gives rise to the fairly unhappy cultural situation

00:14:06 ► §

of which we’re the heirs

00:14:08 ► §

I mean most women

00:14:10 ► §

I don’t know how true it is

00:14:11 ► §

of the women in this room under 30

00:14:13 ► §

but most women

00:14:15 ► §

their early sexual imprinting

00:14:19 ► §

goes on in an ambiance of alcohol

00:14:21 ► §

use and abuse

00:14:23 ► §

and that’s then lifelong

00:14:25 ► §

because it steals

00:14:29 ► §

one’s nerves for love and battle

00:14:33 ► §

or love or battle

00:14:35 ► §

this is what was always said about alcohol

00:14:38 ► §

so the women

00:14:41 ► §

who were the gatherers of this hunting and gathering equation environment and they were nomads

00:15:05 ► §

and what nomadism means in this African context is that you follow the great

00:15:12 ► §

herds of cattle around on a yearly cycle as they move from waterhole to waterhole

00:15:19 ► §

and you camp for a few weeks and then you move on following the herds.

00:15:25 ► §

The problem with this is in the discard of these camps, in the middens of these camps,

00:15:33 ► §

there would inevitably be seeds discarded as waste.

00:15:39 ► §

Well, at a certain point, women noticed that the middens the dumps of their of last

00:15:48 ► §

year’s camp was a great place to find

00:15:51 ► §

food because it seemed to concentrate in

00:15:54 ► §

those places and it was because the seeds

00:15:57 ► §

were being discarded there so at some

00:16:00 ► §

point a lady Einstein of the high

00:16:03 ► §

Paleolithic put it together.

00:16:06 ► §

And it’s interesting, this has to do with the conquest of the temporal dimension in terms of cause and effect.

00:16:15 ► §

In other words, at the same time that the guys were figuring out,

00:16:20 ► §

oh, if you have sex with this woman, then nine months later there will be a child.

00:16:27 ► §

The women were figuring out, oh, if we throw food away here and bury it,

00:16:34 ► §

twelve months later there will be food growing on this very spot.

00:16:39 ► §

Well, at that point, this huge database of information on plants that could be gathered was dumped.

00:16:49 ► §

And the women said, we don’t have to do that anymore. Let’s just take what we know about

00:16:57 ► §

emmer wheat, rye, oats, and a couple of other cereal grains,

00:17:09 ► §

and we will grow those, and we don’t have to gather anymore.

00:17:13 ► §

Or gathering can decline in importance tremendously.

00:17:17 ► §

But in order to care for the emir wheat and the rye and the oats,

00:17:24 ► §

the sedentary lifestyle displaced the nomadic lifestyle.

00:17:27 ► §

And I talked a little bit last night about the consequences of the invention of agriculture.

00:17:30 ► §

The first consequence was surplus,

00:17:34 ► §

something the human race had never dealt with before

00:17:37 ► §

because in the hunter-gatherer situation,

00:17:40 ► §

once you’ve gathered enough, you stop working.

00:17:44 ► §

Agriculture is a process where you sort of push a button

00:17:48 ► §

and lo and behold here comes abundance

00:17:51 ► §

more abundance than you know what to do with

00:17:54 ► §

so you have a new problem

00:17:56 ► §

the problem is not getting enough food

00:17:59 ► §

now the problem is preserving it and defending it

00:18:03 ► §

and both of these problems can be solved by ceasing to wander and beginning to build walls.

00:18:12 ► §

And so this is what was done.

00:18:14 ► §

The most advanced structure, human structure on this planet 10,000 years ago was the grain tower at Jericho.

00:18:24 ► §

And it was specifically built

00:18:26 ► §

for agricultural surplus

00:18:29 ► §

and it was built with walls around it

00:18:31 ► §

to defend itself.

00:18:32 ► §

Around 10,000,

00:18:34 ► §

10 to 11,000 years ago,

00:18:36 ► §

in the archaeological record,

00:18:38 ► §

all across Europe,

00:18:39 ► §

the ancient Middle East and North Africa,

00:18:41 ► §

we get the appearance of what’s called

00:18:43 ► §

the Tanged Point Technocomplex

00:18:46 ► §

what this means

00:18:48 ► §

is

00:18:49 ► §

in older strata

00:18:52 ► §

than the strata

00:18:54 ► §

of the Tanged Point Technocomplex

00:18:56 ► §

when you find an arrowhead

00:18:58 ► §

you find one

00:19:00 ► §

arrowhead

00:19:01 ► §

it was lost by some

00:19:04 ► §

Paleolithic hunter in the pursuit

00:19:06 ► §

of game

00:19:07 ► §

12,000 years ago what you suddenly

00:19:10 ► §

find are

00:19:11 ► §

huge concentrations of arrowheads

00:19:14 ► §

in one place

00:19:16 ► §

this means

00:19:18 ► §

these are not hunting sites

00:19:20 ► §

these are sites where somebody

00:19:22 ► §

laid siege to somebody

00:19:24 ► §

else’s scene in order to grab their women and their food supply and their animals. In other words, warfare is the natural consequence of agriculture. We see in the ancient Middle East is a pattern of walled cities, kingship, suppression of women, slavery, and bronze-tipped warfare.

00:19:53 ► §

All the progenitors of our own curiously twisted cultural adaptation are set in place there.

00:20:03 ► §

This is a point which may be only important to me, but

00:20:06 ► §

you know, what you’re saying is that

00:20:10 ► §

really once the first woman or group of women

00:20:14 ► §

or whoever it was, made this temporal connection and saw

00:20:19 ► §

that, you know, we shit the seeds out or whatever happens, we almost say there’s more food,

00:20:22 ► §

we don’t have to wander around so much. And once that happened, the die was cast, you know, for McDonald’s

00:20:29 ► §

and the military industrial complex, in effect. And that once some tribe or bunch of people

00:20:37 ► §

have a lot more than they could use and it’s there, then it becomes tempting and in a way

00:20:43 ► §

adaptive for other people to say,

00:20:46 ► §

you know, why wander around out here, screw around, let’s just go kill these people and take their shit.

00:20:51 ► §

And that’s a lot easier.

00:20:53 ► §

Right.

00:20:54 ► §

And also what you’re saying is that nobody noticed that this was fucked up at the time.

00:20:58 ► §

Well, it happened over a very long period.

00:21:02 ► §

And the other thing that I’m saying is…

00:21:04 ► §

Go ahead.

00:21:04 ► §

Oh, go ahead. No, I mean, is… Go ahead. I’ll go ahead.

00:21:05 ► §

No, I mean, to me, that seems to be an important point.

00:21:08 ► §

In other words, there was a major maladaptive cultural development

00:21:11 ► §

that happened over a lot of time.

00:21:14 ► §

Yeah.

00:21:15 ► §

At the time, nobody else was noticing that this was bad.

00:21:19 ► §

And it was driven by weather, see.

00:21:22 ► §

It was driven by the fact that things were just getting drier

00:21:24 ► §

and people were trying to find a solution to the drying problem.

00:21:31 ► §

Nobody thought to say, you know, if we don’t store up all this stuff,

00:21:36 ► §

these other people won’t be trying to kill us.

00:21:38 ► §

Right, nobody could conceive of how to return to the nomadic style.

00:21:44 ► §

And, of course, once people started agriculture,

00:21:47 ► §

then in some cases to be a nomad

00:21:50 ► §

meant you would have to move through these people’s areas

00:21:53 ► §

and their fields,

00:21:54 ► §

and then they would be waiting for you with rocks and clubs

00:21:57 ► §

because they don’t want your herds

00:21:59 ► §

tromping through their fields.

00:22:02 ► §

But the real key factor,

00:22:04 ► §

which straight anthropology doesn’t acknowledge, tromping through their fields. But the real key factor,

00:22:07 ► §

which straight anthropology doesn’t acknowledge, is that the slow fading of the use of psilocybin

00:22:12 ► §

is what permitted all of this,

00:22:15 ► §

because the boundary-dissolving quality of psilocybin

00:22:23 ► §

is the most important quality.

00:22:25 ► §

And it changed us from monkeys into these shamanic, feminine primate patterns, the reestablishment of human history the human being had been perfected

00:23:10 ► §

and by that i mean human beings means people able to express affection and care for others

00:23:19 ► §

people filled with a sense of group cooperation and group destiny and so forth and so on,

00:23:28 ► §

and that really we should see psilocybin as an inoculation against the formation of ego.

00:23:35 ► §

Ego is the psychic component which is the fly in the soup. Once, and the ego, it’s a maladaptive attitude

00:23:47 ► §

which changing conditions

00:23:50 ► §

made into an adaptive attitude.

00:23:53 ► §

It went from being a form of pathology

00:23:57 ► §

to being the only game in town

00:24:00 ► §

as the nature of the situation changed.

00:24:05 ► §

Ego is dissolved by hallucinogens,

00:24:10 ► §

and so the hallucinogens kept this egoless society

00:24:14 ► §

in a kind of stasis for a long, long time.

00:24:17 ► §

But when the presence of the mushroom weakened and disappeared,

00:24:22 ► §

then these older primate patterns flowed in

00:24:26 ► §

and dominated the situation.

00:24:29 ► §

In the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis,

00:24:37 ► §

you essentially get this message,

00:24:41 ► §

except it’s told from a dominator point of view.

00:24:48 ► §

I mean, a careful reading of Genesis will show this is the story of history’s first drug bust

00:24:51 ► §

and it’s a woman who’s in trouble

00:24:55 ► §

what she does is she eats a forbidden fruit

00:24:59 ► §

it’s forbidden to her by a male

00:25:01 ► §

by Yawa

00:25:03 ► §

and she also corrupts her roommate.

00:25:07 ► §

And if you read in the older recensions,

00:25:14 ► §

like the Q document,

00:25:16 ► §

it’s very clear.

00:25:18 ► §

It says that their eyes were opened.

00:25:22 ► §

The issue is not that this is a poisonous plant

00:25:25 ► §

at one point in the story

00:25:27 ► §

Yahweh walking in the garden

00:25:29 ► §

mumbles to himself

00:25:31 ► §

if they eat of the fruit of the

00:25:34 ► §

tree of life they will become

00:25:36 ► §

as we are

00:25:37 ► §

the issue was one

00:25:39 ► §

of a striving

00:25:42 ► §

for equality on the part of the

00:25:44 ► §

human beings and a suppression of that desire for equality

00:25:48 ► §

by this gardener, this keeper of the garden,

00:25:51 ► §

whoever this guy was.

00:25:53 ► §

And so then in the story, they’re tossed out of Eden

00:25:59 ► §

and it says an angel was set at the eastern gate of Eden

00:26:03 ► §

with a flaming sword

00:26:05 ► §

so that they could never make their way back in to Eden.

00:26:09 ► §

To my mind, this is simply the African sun drying up this partnership paradise.

00:26:17 ► §

About 10,000 BC, people begin to settle in the Nile Valley.

00:26:23 ► §

Before that, people didn’t live in the Nile Valley.

00:26:26 ► §

It was an unhealthy place.

00:26:28 ► §

It was a boggy, malarial lowland,

00:26:31 ► §

and people lived in what we call the Sahara Desert,

00:26:36 ► §

but which was then the Saharan grassland.

00:26:39 ► §

It was only when the grassland turned to desert

00:26:42 ► §

that people moved out of the grassland

00:26:44 ► §

and then settled near the river.

00:26:46 ► §

And those are the proto-dynastic civilizations of the Egyptian archaeological record. 7,000 to 15,000 years old that show shamans with mushrooms

00:27:05 ► §

sprouting out of their bodies

00:27:08 ► §

and being held, hands full of mushrooms.

00:27:11 ► §

They’re reproduced in my book here.

00:27:14 ► §

So I think part of what is happening

00:27:17 ► §

in the 20th century

00:27:20 ► §

is we’re making our way back

00:27:22 ► §

into deep time and we’re making our way back into deep time and we’re

00:27:26 ► §

discovering our own

00:27:27 ► §

childhood and what we’re discovering

00:27:32 ► §

is a pattern of abuse and

00:27:35 ► §

trauma. The reason human beings

00:27:37 ► §

are so given to addiction

00:27:40 ► §

and so restlessly uncomfortable

00:27:43 ► §

with being

00:27:45 ► §

is because we, every single one of us,

00:27:48 ► §

are the victims of a dysfunctional relationship

00:27:51 ► §

and a trauma that occurred in the childhood of our species.

00:27:56 ► §

We were meant to be the mushroom-using monkey.

00:28:01 ► §

We were meant to be, to have a balanced relationship between the masculine and the

00:28:07 ► §

feminine we were meant to be the caretakers of the earth but when the connection to the mushroom

00:28:13 ► §

was broken then we turned to building grain silos forging spears building walled cities, establishing the mythology of kingship, slave classes, so forth and so on. because we have now been at this male dominator linear culture

00:28:47 ► §

for about 7 or 8 thousand years, depending on how you want to measure it,

00:28:52 ► §

and it has pushed us to the brink of extinction.

00:28:57 ► §

Not only us, but the entire planet is now threatened with upheaval, mass extinction, toxification.

00:29:05 ► §

Because of our maladaption to being, we don’t know how to behave.

00:29:12 ► §

Yeah, Paul.

00:29:13 ► §

I just want to question another longer-term scenario here.

00:29:16 ► §

There’s some evidence that humans have consistently wiped out.

00:29:23 ► §

For example, we may have wiped out the Neanderthals,

00:29:26 ► §

who may have been, despite what has been said in the past,

00:29:30 ► §

peaceful, evolved species.

00:29:33 ► §

And then earlier on, we may have wiped out, as more monkeys,

00:29:36 ► §

wiped out some of the other pre-humans.

00:29:41 ► §

And then what about the great mammoths and other animals,

00:29:44 ► §

which seem to get wiped out

00:29:45 ► §

just at the time when humans were

00:29:47 ► §

developing this real hunting trick?

00:29:50 ► §

Yeah, I mean, I think this is true.

00:29:52 ► §

There was a big

00:29:53 ► §

paleontological conference in Canada

00:29:55 ► §

a few years ago

00:29:57 ► §

devoted to studying

00:29:59 ► §

the ice age extinctions

00:30:01 ► §

of the great mammals,

00:30:03 ► §

and the conclusion was it had to be human beings.

00:30:07 ► §

Because, I mean, they had been through many cycles of Ice Ages.

00:30:10 ► §

Why should they suddenly disappear in the last Ice Age?

00:30:14 ► §

Yes, I think…

00:30:15 ► §

Except the humans were driven into this hunting.

00:30:16 ► §

Very early we began making this kind of impact on the Earth.

00:30:22 ► §

I want to ask you if you believe there’s a distinction between appropriate use of these drugs then

00:30:29 ► §

and now between men and women.

00:30:32 ► §

You mean a different way to do it?

00:30:33 ► §

Yeah, appropriate use.

00:30:37 ► §

Hmm, nobody’s ever asked me that question before.

00:30:40 ► §

And addiction concerns.

00:30:43 ► §

You mean…

00:30:44 ► §

Even though we don’t work questions?

00:30:45 ► §

Yeah, what was the question?

00:30:46 ► §

Well, the question over here was,

00:30:48 ► §

is there a different protocol

00:30:50 ► §

or should there be a different protocol

00:30:52 ► §

for men and women using mushrooms

00:30:55 ► §

or using psychedelics?

00:30:57 ► §

And the question over here was…

00:31:00 ► §

I’m just adding to that,

00:31:01 ► §

in present day and addiction concerns

00:31:04 ► §

because we seem to have such a problem with addiction in terms of, you know,

00:31:08 ► §

abusing all these drugs that can really help us.

00:31:12 ► §

So how do we…

00:31:14 ► §

Well, I think what we have to do is we have to bring this issue into consciousness,

00:31:21 ► §

which is never done in a cultural context.

00:31:24 ► §

I mean, why do we take drugs is the real

00:31:28 ► §

question and i think that um you know the answer i mean why do we take why do we take bad drugs

00:31:36 ► §

let’s ask that question i think it’s because we haven’t we want to scratch a certain itch, and we can’t figure out how to get at it.

00:31:47 ► §

And so people, they addict to sex, to money, to drugs, to having the morning paper delivered on time.

00:31:55 ► §

I mean, myself, I’m threatened with falling into a hysterical rage if I get up and there are no eggs.

00:32:08 ► §

I have to consciously take hold of myself

00:32:11 ► §

and say, you’re not going to die

00:32:13 ► §

if you have to drive into town and buy a dozen eggs.

00:32:16 ► §

So don’t let it spoil your entire day.

00:32:22 ► §

The question about a protocol for men and women,

00:32:25 ► §

I think it is true that men have more of a problem with drugs than women,

00:32:32 ► §

and more of a problem,

00:32:34 ► §

it’s because they have more of a problem with the surrender issue.

00:32:40 ► §

Women, by virtue, and it’s not so true of modern women,

00:32:44 ► §

but modern women are a very recent phenomenon on the scene, women are biologically scripted for these boundary-dissolving experiences because they will, in a traditional society, give birth, usually many, many times in their life. And every single time, it’s a complete boundary-dissolving tremendum.

00:33:10 ► §

A man, if he’s careful, can go from birth to the grave

00:33:14 ► §

without ever getting into a tight spot like that.

00:33:33 ► §

is that these drugs help to balance this male-dominating tendency for quite a while,

00:33:42 ► §

and certainly now in its resurgence, it seems to be a real wonderful way to explore a much greater harmony. so you’re talking about

00:33:46 ► §

letting go the ego, especially the male ego

00:33:48 ► §

so I wondered, is there not

00:33:50 ► §

a place there for the woman

00:33:52 ► §

or the female of the species

00:33:54 ► §

to explore that

00:33:56 ► §

or a need

00:33:58 ► §

no need, no obligation

00:34:00 ► §

no, no, there is a need

00:34:02 ► §

because you see

00:34:03 ► §

nothing on earth is as much like a man as a woman.

00:34:10 ► §

We tend to forget this.

00:34:13 ► §

And ego is not now a male problem.

00:34:18 ► §

We are all completely infected by ego, because it’s a tradition.

00:34:26 ► §

I mean, even the rhetoric of feminism in some cases is a rhetoric of ego strengthening.

00:34:32 ► §

They say, you know, be assertive.

00:34:34 ► §

Don’t take this stuff anymore.

00:34:36 ► §

Stand up for what you are.

00:34:38 ► §

Well, that’s all very good except that it isn’t the feminine that you are always standing up for.

00:34:46 ► §

Sometimes it’s just sheer assertiveness, which is an ego kind of thing.

00:34:52 ► §

I think that women have a slight jump on men,

00:34:59 ► §

but at this late stage in the game, everybody has to do work on this problem

00:35:06 ► §

because we have made ego such a cultural value.

00:35:10 ► §

Now, the reason men may have stronger egos generally than women

00:35:15 ► §

goes back, I think, to that hunting-gathering dichotomy again.

00:35:21 ► §

Women, when they went gathering, would go two or three women with their babies on their

00:35:29 ► §

backs and while they were gathering you know in all primitive societies you always hear about the

00:35:34 ► §

chatter of the women women do chatter as the masters of language they exist in a sea of this kind of communication guys don’t talk to each other

00:35:47 ► §

you know i mean it’s very rare and if if in your life you were repeatedly over and over again

00:35:56 ► §

told okay you stay here on this point and you watch all day long and we will drive the game by at evening and then you

00:36:07 ► §

make the kill i’ve been in that situation because i was forced through these male initiations in the

00:36:14 ► §

meathead society i grew up in and i it’s if you’re a if you’re a 10 year old 14 year old kid and they

00:36:22 ► §

set you up on what they call a point a hunting point they give you a gun and they set you up on what they call a point, a hunting point.

00:36:25 ► §

They give you a gun and they set you up on a point and they say, wait here five hours.

00:36:31 ► §

The major struggle is to not become, to not be dissolved into the environment, to not become frightened.

00:36:40 ► §

Or it’s called Wendigo psychosis, you psychosis it’s to hold the wilderness

00:36:46 ► §

at bay and so you have

00:36:48 ► §

to have rituals of ego

00:36:50 ► §

empowerment to do that

00:36:52 ► §

and the hunter is

00:36:54 ► §

the exemplar of ego

00:36:56 ► §

personified

00:36:58 ► §

so I think just these different cultural

00:37:00 ► §

styles made men

00:37:02 ► §

more

00:37:03 ► §

egotistical

00:37:05 ► §

and also they didn’t have,

00:37:07 ► §

women are naturally hormonally scripted

00:37:11 ► §

to transfer loyalty and self-identification to their children.

00:37:16 ► §

It’s a much more abstract thing for a male

00:37:19 ► §

to put his child first.

00:37:23 ► §

For a woman, it’s unthinkable that it could be any other way.

00:37:27 ► §

For a man, it’s a consciously argued decision.

00:37:33 ► §

Ego is our problem.

00:37:36 ► §

I mean, you can talk about nuclear waste

00:37:39 ► §

or nuclear proliferation,

00:37:41 ► §

but it all gets back to

00:37:44 ► §

we are not willing to set aside our desires

00:37:48 ► §

for big houses and many cars and tremendous comfort.

00:37:56 ► §

And we do not have group values.

00:37:58 ► §

The reason the planet is dying is because we cannot place the good of the group above our own desires consistently.

00:38:07 ► §

We know the earth is dying, and yet, you know, who recently has made a voluntary act of simplification of their life or something like that?

00:38:21 ► §

or something like that.

00:38:25 ► §

We’re aware of the problem, but we can’t, some do,

00:38:29 ► §

but a vanishingly small amount compared to the people who are just out there striving like crazy to get theirs.

00:38:32 ► §

And sadly, the dissolution of communism,

00:38:38 ► §

which certainly had its problems,

00:38:40 ► §

they’re there for everybody to see,

00:38:43 ► §

but the rhetoric of communism was collectivism

00:38:46 ► §

you know care for the collectivity in the absence of anybody saying that now we just have a dog eat

00:38:54 ► §

dog world and the devil take the hindmost and it looks like the devil will take the hindmost

00:39:00 ► §

problems with ego is that it’s one of those words that mean all things to all people.

00:39:06 ► §

And I think we need to say that even in the societies where mushrooms were plentiful and

00:39:13 ► §

a boundary dissolution took place, people came down eventually. And necessarily so, because

00:39:21 ► §

you need an ego in development. I think you were the one who once said that you need an ego,

00:39:28 ► §

so if you’re in a restaurant, you take your fork and put it in your mouth instead of somebody else’s.

00:39:35 ► §

So now development is saying it’s a scaffold in which you build personality.

00:39:40 ► §

Well, I think our primate, our millions of years of primate existence,

00:39:47 ► §

give us a pretty strong ego.

00:39:53 ► §

And then it was just this brief interlude with psychedelic plants that changed it.

00:39:56 ► §

And let me say a little bit more about that.

00:40:00 ► §

It sounds sort of clinical to say that it’s ego dissolving.

00:40:03 ► §

It’s like we’re dissolving a cyst or something.

00:40:07 ► §

And that’s a good metaphor as far as it goes but why is the ego dissolving is a good question what is it about psilocybin that

00:40:15 ► §

causes the ego to dissolve well i think what it is is it shows you the true size of the world. And in the presence of the true size of the world,

00:40:27 ► §

you finally figure out how important you are.

00:40:30 ► §

And you aren’t important.

00:40:33 ► §

You don’t matter a jot or a tittle in the big picture.

00:40:37 ► §

You know, you get a picture of 10 million years

00:40:40 ► §

and 10 local light years of space

00:40:45 ► §

and then you say well how important is

00:40:48 ► §

it what I think and then it’s

00:40:49 ► §

humbling it’s not disempowering

00:40:51 ► §

it’s humbling you see aha

00:40:53 ► §

I should get with the program

00:40:55 ► §

I only have meaning if I get

00:40:57 ► §

with the program if I’m sailing against

00:41:00 ► §

the program it’s like an

00:41:01 ► §

ant railing against God

00:41:04 ► §

I mean who who cares?

00:41:05 ► §

what difference does it make?

00:41:09 ► §

I’ve always thought that the supreme expression of ego

00:41:13 ► §

in western literature

00:41:15 ► §

is Captain Ahab of Moby Dick

00:41:18 ► §

I mean, this is ego unchained

00:41:22 ► §

ego raised to the status of deity

00:41:24 ► §

it’s a losing battle

00:41:27 ► §

but well

00:41:29 ► §

but at one point I think in chapter

00:41:32 ► §

53 the quarter deck

00:41:34 ► §

the first mate

00:41:36 ► §

Starbuck who

00:41:38 ► §

represents Christian right reason

00:41:40 ► §

says

00:41:41 ► §

they’re talking about Moby Dick

00:41:43 ► §

he takes the animal rights position and he says

00:41:47 ► §

to Ahab he says captain to seek revenge on a dumb brute seems blasphemy and Ahab turns on him in

00:41:57 ► §

fury and he says blasphemy Starbuck speak not to me of blasphemy. I would strike out the sun

00:42:06 ► §

if it insulted me.

00:42:08 ► §

For could it do that,

00:42:10 ► §

then could I do the other,

00:42:12 ► §

since there is ever a sort of fair play.

00:42:16 ► §

The ego believes that

00:42:18 ► §

it’s on a level playing field

00:42:20 ► §

with God Almighty.

00:42:23 ► §

What could be more egotistical than that?

00:42:26 ► §

You know?

00:42:27 ► §

So,

00:42:28 ► §

psychedelics, whatever they do

00:42:32 ► §

for us in our personal lives

00:42:34 ► §

as a societal

00:42:36 ► §

force, they

00:42:37 ► §

dissolve

00:42:40 ► §

the ego, and what is it that they

00:42:41 ► §

dissolve it into? Why is it so

00:42:43 ► §

wonderful to dissolve the ego? This now it that they dissolve it into? Why is it so wonderful to dissolve

00:42:45 ► §

the ego? This now comes to the sort of, we’ve been talking evolution and so forth and it

00:42:52 ► §

all makes sense and I don’t think it frightens anybody because it’s all happening on safe

00:42:56 ► §

ground. But in fact, what lies behind all this, what you find when you dissolve the ego is this mind, this intelligence, which seems to be distributed through nature,

00:43:13 ► §

and which, if you’re really alienated, you will call the alien, because you don’t know what else to call it.

00:43:21 ► §

If you’re a woman in touch with what that means you will call it gaia if you’re

00:43:29 ► §

an aspiring shaman you will call it the spirit helpers but the big news is that the rise of the

00:43:39 ► §

ego has suppressed a portion of reality which is that nature is an animate and minded thing of some sort.

00:43:51 ► §

And this breaks the rule. I mean, it’s okay to say it’s animate.

00:43:58 ► §

You have the Gaia hypothesis, and everybody congratulates themselves on what a leap forward that is, and it is.

00:44:06 ► §

But it’s quite another step to realize that it is not that the earth is alive.

00:44:13 ► §

It’s that the earth is intelligent.

00:44:16 ► §

The earth is some kind of mind.

00:44:20 ► §

And before we throw up our hands and say, well, how could that be?

00:44:25 ► §

How could a planet have a mind?

00:44:27 ► §

is it any less peculiar that a monkey could have a mind?

00:44:31 ► §

you know?

00:44:32 ► §

how do monkeys have minds?

00:44:34 ► §

that’s the miracle

00:44:35 ► §

a planet is a very large system

00:44:38 ► §

probably able to pull many tricks out of the bag

00:44:42 ► §

it’s our portion of mind that is so puzzling.

00:44:47 ► §

And what shamanism is about,

00:44:50 ► §

psychedelic shamanism,

00:44:53 ► §

is connecting back into this Gaian mind.

00:44:59 ► §

And I confess,

00:45:01 ► §

you can’t take the measure of a thing like this to say, is it a god or a goddess?

00:45:09 ► §

Is it an extraterrestrial that has somehow lodged in the ecosystem of this planet and

00:45:16 ► §

permeates it somehow as a distributed mind?

00:45:20 ► §

We can’t know what it is, but its presence has something to do with our presence here

00:45:28 ► §

what stabilizes shamanic and aboriginal societies

00:45:36 ► §

and what stabilized those paleolithic societies

00:45:39 ► §

was this direct pipeline to the mind of the goddess. And she, it, told human beings how to behave, what to do, how to live.

00:45:54 ► §

Isn’t this what Castaneda is claiming for psychedelics?

00:45:59 ► §

They show you the right way to live.

00:46:02 ► §

And in the absence of this connection,

00:46:06 ► §

you can’t figure it out.

00:46:08 ► §

You know, I mean, you can sort of figure

00:46:10 ► §

it out, but we have lost

00:46:12 ► §

touch with our mentor.

00:46:14 ► §

We were

00:46:15 ► §

literally wrenched from

00:46:17 ► §

the teaching breast of

00:46:19 ► §

the Gaian mother too

00:46:21 ► §

soon. And so

00:46:23 ► §

we became dysfunctional,

00:46:26 ► §

turned to warfare, city building,

00:46:29 ► §

resource extraction, and propaganda.

00:46:32 ► §

Terence, can you tie in the,

00:46:35 ► §

you were talking about the rate of evolution of the brain

00:46:39 ► §

and the biological process that that went through

00:46:44 ► §

and the time frame for that?

00:46:46 ► §

And do you think that the shape of the brain

00:46:49 ► §

or the predominance of different parts of it at different stages

00:46:53 ► §

have anything to do with this idea of ego

00:46:57 ► §

or shared experience through an evolving brain?

00:47:02 ► §

The mushroom that sounded like you were talking about

00:47:04 ► §

was the triggering, was the catalyst for it

00:47:07 ► §

well I think what the mushroom is the catalyst for

00:47:11 ► §

is language

00:47:11 ► §

language is a very mysterious

00:47:16 ► §

activity

00:47:17 ► §

in all of nature

00:47:21 ► §

if you were to look for the thumbprint of God,

00:47:25 ► §

this is the best candidate.

00:47:29 ► §

Language represents a fundamental break

00:47:32 ► §

with all other forms of natural organization.

00:47:37 ► §

And, you know, there may be people here

00:47:39 ► §

who are fond of the mumblings of dolphins

00:47:42 ► §

or the, you know, there is communication

00:47:46 ► §

in the natural world,

00:47:49 ► §

but it’s a long way from the brightest dolphin

00:47:52 ► §

who ever lived to Paradise Lost or Hamlet.

00:47:56 ► §

I mean, we are creatures of language

00:47:58 ► §

on a level that is not met anywhere else.

00:48:03 ► §

And we, our language flows out into three-dimensional space.

00:48:09 ► §

You see, culture is the condensation of language.

00:48:14 ► §

This building is an idea that we have then wrought in stone and wood.

00:48:21 ► §

Esalen is an idea.

00:48:24 ► §

San Francisco is an idea. The United States is an idea San Francisco is an idea

00:48:26 ► §

the United States is an idea

00:48:28 ► §

means they are

00:48:29 ► §

things which begin originally

00:48:32 ► §

in the domain of language

00:48:33 ► §

and then we draw them down

00:48:36 ► §

into matter

00:48:38 ► §

and you know

00:48:40 ► §

the fact that you can

00:48:41 ► §

recognize instantly

00:48:43 ► §

millions of sentences that you’ve never heard before.

00:48:51 ► §

Chomsky and his school has spent a lot of time trying to understand this.

00:48:56 ► §

So language is like the privileged vehicle by which human beings relate to the world.

00:49:05 ► §

And interestingly enough, psychedelics, especially psilocybin, triggers language-like activity.

00:49:16 ► §

It causes what’s called glossolalia, speaking in tongues.

00:49:21 ► §

Speaking in tongues is simply language in the absence of sanctioned meaning,

00:49:28 ► §

you know. It means you’ve got words, you’ve got declension, you’ve got grammar, but you just

00:49:34 ► §

didn’t bother to have meaning. And I think that, you know, we tend to believe language is for the conveyance of meaning. But I think that’s just because we came late

00:49:48 ► §

to thinking about the problem.

00:49:50 ► §

Obviously, it seems to me,

00:49:53 ► §

people were indulging in language-like activity

00:49:56 ► §

for a long, long time before there was meaning.

00:50:01 ► §

It was a form of entertainment.

00:50:03 ► §

It’s a form of amusement. It’s something people did

00:50:07 ► §

around the fire at night for each other. All, you know, the original languages were all abstract.

00:50:15 ► §

The marriage of language to naive realism is probably less than 15,000 years old and has to

00:50:23 ► §

do with agriculture and the rise of all this other stuff.

00:50:26 ► §

Is that what you were doing at the end of the experiment at Paloma?

00:50:31 ► §

You mean that funny stuff?

00:50:34 ► §

The thing I did?

00:50:35 ► §

Yes.

00:50:36 ► §

The nying mai huaxi kipi tut nem vidi kipi utek ne tam kwa haxi kipi pin.

00:50:55 ► §

See how there’s emotion and there’s intentionality and there’s anticipation, but there’s no meaning.

00:50:59 ► §

Meaning is just the cherry on the cake. It comes very, very late in that process.

00:51:03 ► §

becomes very, very late in that process.

00:51:08 ► §

And one of the strange things about us as a species is our absence of an emotional vocabulary.

00:51:13 ► §

You know, we have 10,000 words to describe the process of binding a book,

00:51:19 ► §

for crying out loud.

00:51:20 ► §

But when it gets down to emotion, we have, i love you i hate you and i’m not sure

00:51:28 ► §

and uh and yet if you pay attention to your mind the subtlest and most kaleidoscopic

00:51:40 ► §

dimension of your being is the shifting screen of your emotions

00:51:45 ► §

and yet we can

00:51:47 ► §

convey only the tiniest part

00:51:50 ► §

of that to each other

00:51:52 ► §

a place like Esalen is built

00:51:54 ► §

on trying to open

00:51:56 ► §

the valve to emotional

00:51:58 ► §

language so that people

00:52:00 ► §

can say what they feel

00:52:02 ► §

most people including

00:52:04 ► §

myself I’m sure,

00:52:05 ► §

have not the clue as to how you begin to say what you feel.

00:52:12 ► §

The psychedelic experience is a good place to begin

00:52:16 ► §

because these feelings are so unusual

00:52:18 ► §

that you can sort of attempt to language them

00:52:23 ► §

without feeling you’re going too far out on a limb with your personal being.

00:52:28 ► §

But when you start talking to somebody about, you know, what is that poem?

00:52:32 ► §

Is it by Robert Browning?

00:52:34 ► §

How do I love thee?

00:52:35 ► §

Let me count the ways.

00:52:37 ► §

To say to someone, how do I love thee?

00:52:39 ► §

Let me count the ways.

00:52:41 ► §

And then to actually try to compose your own list in real time,

00:52:45 ► §

it’s too, quote-unquote, embarrassing, whatever that means.

00:52:51 ► §

It means we don’t want to go that way.

00:52:54 ► §

We want to mask ourselves.

00:52:55 ► §

We feel reluctance to push in to that domain.

00:53:01 ► §

And I assume this is because this was what happened to language

00:53:05 ► §

well no

00:53:07 ► §

it may have always been that way

00:53:09 ► §

it is a thing of surfaces

00:53:11 ► §

I mean it’s tremendously easy

00:53:13 ► §

to use language to describe

00:53:15 ► §

a plant

00:53:16 ► §

very hard to use it to describe

00:53:19 ► §

a mood

00:53:20 ► §

maybe this is because you can eat plants

00:53:22 ► §

and not moods

00:53:24 ► §

and so it’s ultimately a tool

00:53:26 ► §

a survival skill

00:53:28 ► §

but our poetry

00:53:31 ► §

our art

00:53:32 ► §

the places where we rise

00:53:35 ► §

toward the perfection of our humanness

00:53:37 ► §

are usually in the domain of language

00:53:39 ► §

married to emotion

00:53:41 ► §

you see

00:53:42 ► §

yeah

00:53:43 ► §

question about the place of pecking order

00:53:47 ► §

and all this that you’re talking about.

00:53:49 ► §

In most animals, you see a pecking order emergence.

00:53:55 ► §

And my feeling, from my own experiments,

00:53:59 ► §

is that as far as psilocybin mushrooms,

00:54:05 ► §

when I was in Palenque, where the Mayan civilization is,

00:54:10 ► §

the people who lived there don’t use those mushrooms.

00:54:14 ► §

The people who, I got a strong feeling that the people who were

00:54:17 ► §

in the Mayan civilization at the time did not use them.

00:54:23 ► §

But the priests did. And that perhaps way

00:54:29 ► §

back, when you’re talking way back in the early evolution of things, that whoever was

00:54:36 ► §

on the top of the pecking order either got the best mushrooms or kept the mushrooms for themselves or away from the people.

00:54:46 ► §

That the knowledge that this could bring to normal people

00:54:50 ► §

was antithetical to the needs and desires of the ones who were higher up in the peasantry.

00:54:58 ► §

Yeah, I think you’re quite right.

00:55:01 ► §

The scenario you sketch out is what’s called the Grand Inquisitor scenario.

00:55:06 ► §

You all remember in the Brothers Karamas of the story that Ilya or one of them tells

00:55:15 ► §

about how during the Inquisition Christ miraculously appears on earth

00:55:22 ► §

and he visits, he goes to visit

00:55:25 ► §

the Grand Inquisitor

00:55:26 ► §

and then this conversation

00:55:28 ► §

takes place between them

00:55:30 ► §

and the Inquisitor

00:55:32 ► §

and Christ says, do you know who I am?

00:55:36 ► §

and the Inquisitor says, yes, I know who you are

00:55:39 ► §

we don’t want it

00:55:40 ► §

we’ve got it worked out

00:55:43 ► §

we don’t need Galilean troublemakers we’re

00:55:48 ► §

we’ve moved beyond that stage and this

00:55:55 ► §

is a similar sort of situation I think

00:55:58 ► §

priest you see it’s a it’s a long slide from shamanism into priestcraft.

00:56:08 ► §

And the way it happens, I think, is when the psychedelic becomes no longer accessible or understood,

00:56:17 ► §

then priestcraft gets going with a vengeance.

00:56:19 ► §

There’s always a tendency or a tension in religion between the irrational force of revelation

00:56:29 ► §

and the desire to institutionally organize.

00:56:38 ► §

Early Christianity was a victim of this.

00:56:41 ► §

For the first 120 years after the crucifixion, Christians were useless to anybody

00:56:49 ► §

because they just stood around waiting for the end of the world. And then after 120 years of this,

00:56:56 ► §

some people, Tertullian, Origen, Justinian, that crowd, said, you know, shouldn’t we be investing in real estate and getting a

00:57:08 ► §

little something together here, this waiting for the end of the world? Hell, who knows, you know?

00:57:14 ► §

And so then the institutionalized church sprang into being. Another place in cultural history where this happened is in the mystery that surrounds Soma.

00:57:27 ► §

Soma was some kind of psychedelic plant.

00:57:31 ► §

Nobody knows for sure what it was, but the whole of the Rig Veda,

00:57:38 ► §

which is the earliest stratum of the Hindu literature,

00:57:43 ► §

the whole of the Rig Veda is hymns to Soma

00:57:46 ► §

these incredibly

00:57:48 ► §

extravagant praise

00:57:50 ► §

for this intoxicant

00:57:52 ► §

of some sort which the people

00:57:54 ► §

were using well if it was

00:57:56 ► §

so wonderful how could

00:57:58 ► §

it ever be lost

00:58:00 ► §

how could you ever lose

00:58:02 ► §

it would be like our civilization

00:58:04 ► §

losing the secret of how to make Coca-Cola how could you ever lose it would be like our civilization losing

00:58:05 ► §

the secret of how to make Coca-Cola

00:58:08 ► §

it’s almost impossible to imagine

00:58:11 ► §

an upheaval so thorough going

00:58:14 ► §

that we would forget how to make Coca-Cola

00:58:18 ► §

and so then we would collect Coke bottles

00:58:20 ► §

and say you know this represents the vanished

00:58:23 ► §

sacrament if only we knew the only way

00:58:27 ► §

you can lose a secret with that kind of cultural import is if uh prior to the loss of it knowledge

00:58:37 ► §

of it has been restricted what they want it’s the same with pups and most any kind of animal. So why would it be different for humans?

00:58:48 ► §

I think that the humans who got a little bit on top

00:58:51 ► §

decided that this was not a good thing for others to have.

00:58:55 ► §

Well, what I’m saying is it would only be true in the case of humans

00:58:59 ► §

if they were using psilocybin.

00:59:02 ► §

In other words, in the absence of psilocybin,

00:59:10 ► §

human beings will behave like kittens, calves, and pups,

00:59:14 ► §

but that psilocybin actually erodes the ego.

00:59:19 ► §

And this is what’s put against a lot of psychedelics. They say, well, these stoners, they don’t even come, they don’t punch the time clock.

00:59:27 ► §

And when you threaten to fire them, it seems to have no effect on them.

00:59:31 ► §

I don’t know how you reach these people.

00:59:34 ► §

Well, the way you reach them is you appeal to something other than the ego.

00:59:39 ► §

The modern industrial civilization has very skillfully promoted certain drugs and suppressed others. A perfect example is caffeine. Caffeine, I you but a lifestyle built around caffeine is not going

01:00:07 ► §

to you’re not going to live to be a hundred years old or even 70 unless you are statistically in the

01:00:14 ► §

improbable group why is caffeine not only tolerated but exalted because boy you can spin those widgets onto their wrinkles just endlessly without a

01:00:28 ► §

thought on your mind it is the perfect drug for modern industrial manufacturing why do you think

01:00:37 ► §

caffeine a dangerous health destroying destructive drug that has to be brought from the ends of the earth is enshrined in every labor contract

01:00:47 ► §

in the western world

01:00:49 ► §

as a right

01:00:51 ► §

the coffee break

01:00:52 ► §

if somebody tried to take away the coffee break

01:00:56 ► §

you know

01:00:57 ► §

the masses would rise in righteous fury

01:01:00 ► §

and pull them down

01:01:02 ► §

we don’t have a beer break

01:01:04 ► §

we don’t have a beer break.

01:01:07 ► §

We don’t have a pot break.

01:01:13 ► §

I mean, if you suggested, well, we, you know, we don’t want a coffee break.

01:01:15 ► §

We want to be able to smoke a joint at 11 in the morning.

01:01:19 ► §

He would say, well, you’re just some kind of, you’re a social degenerate,

01:01:22 ► §

a troublemaker, a mad dog, a criminal.

01:01:29 ► §

It would be, and yet the cost, the health benefit, the cost-health-benefit ratio of those two drugs,

01:01:30 ► §

there’s no comparison.

01:01:33 ► §

Obviously pot would be the better choice.

01:01:36 ► §

The problem is then you’re going to be standing there dreaming rather than spinning the widgets onto the nuts.

01:01:40 ► §

What do you think of coca leaves?

01:01:42 ► §

Coca leaves would be very good.

01:01:46 ► §

I suspect in the future we may see the legalization of coca

01:01:52 ► §

as a sop to the mentality that wishes to see cocaine.

01:01:58 ► §

Andy Wild, who’s a good friend of mine, we don’t agree on everything,

01:02:02 ► §

but a few years ago he had great enthusiasm for a

01:02:06 ► §

coca chewing gum and i never got on the bandwagon because i didn’t see that we needed another

01:02:15 ► §

high focus industrial stimulant on the market but coca would be great, and certainly in the Amazon, if you’re a patron, you encourage your workers to chew coca.

01:02:30 ► §

I mean, they’re worthless without coca.

01:02:33 ► §

Give them coca and put a machete in their hands and they will just flail for hours at the bush.

01:02:43 ► §

another example that’s interesting that shows how blinded and unaware we are

01:02:47 ► §

of how drugs have shaped our society.

01:02:51 ► §

We all know that slavery ended in the United States

01:02:55 ► §

in the Civil War.

01:02:57 ► §

And most people, if you question them,

01:03:00 ► §

think that slavery existed before the Civil War

01:03:04 ► §

in many places back into ancient times.

01:03:09 ► §

This is not true at all.

01:03:12 ► §

Slavery died in Western civilization

01:03:15 ► §

with the collapse of the Roman Empire.

01:03:18 ► §

During the Dark Ages and the medieval period,

01:03:22 ► §

if you owned a slave,

01:03:27 ► §

you owned one slave,

01:03:30 ► §

it was the equivalent of owning a Ferrari or a Lamborghini.

01:03:32 ► §

It was an index of immense wealth

01:03:37 ► §

and social status.

01:03:39 ► §

And that slave would be a house boy

01:03:42 ► §

or a cook or something like that.

01:03:48 ► §

Someone close into you, taking care of you it was inconceivable to use slave labor in the production of an agricultural product

01:03:57 ► §

until europe acquired an insatiable desire for sugar and Now let’s think about sugar for a moment.

01:04:06 ► §

Nobody needs sugar.

01:04:09 ► §

You can go from birth to the grave

01:04:11 ► §

without ever having a teaspoonful of white sugar.

01:04:15 ► §

You will never miss it.

01:04:19 ► §

Throughout the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages,

01:04:22 ► §

sugar was a drug a medicine

01:04:25 ► §

it was used to pack wounds

01:04:27 ► §

to keep wounds septic

01:04:30 ► §

and it was very expensive

01:04:31 ► §

and there was very little of it

01:04:33 ► §

nobody even knew where it came from

01:04:35 ► §

it was called

01:04:36 ► §

it was called

01:04:38 ► §

cane honey

01:04:40 ► §

because they knew it came from some kind of

01:04:44 ► §

jointed grass but nobody had a clear picture

01:04:47 ► §

of what sugar was well when you extract sugar from sugar cane it requires in pre-modern technology

01:04:56 ► §

a temperature of about 130 degrees you cannot free men will not work sugar.

01:05:07 ► §

It’s too unpleasant.

01:05:08 ► §

You faint.

01:05:10 ► §

You die from heat prostration.

01:05:12 ► §

You have to take prisoners and you have to chain them to the sugar vats.

01:05:16 ► §

And so before the discovery of America,

01:05:20 ► §

in the 50 years before the discovery of America,

01:05:24 ► §

they began growing sugar cane in the East Atlantic Islands, Madeira and the Canary Islands. And they brought Africans and sold them into slavery specifically for sugar production.

01:05:43 ► §

Now, when we get American history,

01:05:45 ► §

they tell you that slaves were used to produce cotton and tobacco.

01:05:49 ► §

In fact, this is not quite the truth.

01:05:52 ► §

They had to find things for slaves to do

01:05:56 ► §

because they brought so many slaves

01:05:58 ► §

to the New World to work sugar,

01:06:01 ► §

and they had so many children

01:06:02 ► §

that then they just expanded

01:06:04 ► §

and said well

01:06:05 ► §

we’ve used slaves to work sugar we might as well use them in cotton and in

01:06:10 ► §

tobacco production in 1800 every ounce of sugar entering England was being

01:06:19 ► §

produced by slave labor of the most brutal and demeaning sort.

01:06:26 ► §

And there was very little protest

01:06:27 ► §

over this. It was just

01:06:30 ► §

accepted.

01:06:32 ► §

And to this day

01:06:33 ► §

sugar cultivation

01:06:35 ► §

in the third world is a kind

01:06:37 ► §

of institutionalized slavery.

01:06:40 ► §

Christian,

01:06:41 ► §

you know, the popes,

01:06:44 ► §

the kings of Europe

01:06:45 ► §

all of Christian civilization

01:06:47 ► §

acquiesced in the bringing back

01:06:50 ► §

of a practice that had been discredited

01:06:53 ► §

during the fall of Rome

01:06:55 ► §

in order to supply the insatiable need

01:06:59 ► §

for sugar

01:07:00 ► §

it was an addiction

01:07:02 ► §

it had no cultural defense whatsoever.

01:07:05 ► §

Yeah?

01:07:06 ► §

Why do you suppose honey didn’t ascend to the prominence

01:07:10 ► §

that sugar did in society?

01:07:12 ► §

I just think you can’t produce enough of it.

01:07:16 ► §

You know, I mean, look at the price of a pound of sugar today

01:07:19 ► §

versus the price of a pound of honey.

01:07:21 ► §

Isn’t honey five to ten times more expensive

01:07:24 ► §

than granulated

01:07:25 ► §

white sugar? I imagine this

01:07:27 ► §

is always the case.

01:07:30 ► §

I don’t

01:07:31 ► §

agree with something. You know,

01:07:34 ► §

it may be a matter of definition,

01:07:36 ► §

but I don’t think slavery

01:07:37 ► §

died out. I think it was

01:07:39 ► §

serfs were bound to the land.

01:07:42 ► §

The duke had the right to take

01:07:43 ► §

the woman he wanted. The people belonged to him. Well you had the right to take the woman you wanted the people belonged to him

01:07:46 ► §

well you’re right

01:07:48 ► §

that serfdom replaced slavery

01:07:50 ► §

but in a way serfdom was a much

01:07:52 ► §

more humane system

01:07:53 ► §

first of all you could not

01:07:56 ► §

be separated from the land

01:07:58 ► §

serfs

01:08:00 ► §

were

01:08:00 ► §

and families were not separated

01:08:04 ► §

it was a kind of bondage

01:08:06 ► §

to the land

01:08:07 ► §

but the separating of families

01:08:09 ► §

the selling of people at auction

01:08:11 ► §

and this kind of

01:08:13 ► §

yeah

01:08:14 ► §

so you’re right that serfdom persisted

01:08:18 ► §

but you see in late Roman times

01:08:19 ► §

they had what was called the Latifundia

01:08:22 ► §

and these were

01:08:23 ► §

essentially agricultural concentration camps

01:08:27 ► §

where people grew agricultural products

01:08:30 ► §

under the lash for Roman markets

01:08:33 ► §

and that disappeared

01:08:35 ► §

until the 1440s in the West

01:08:39 ► §

anybody else have something?

01:08:43 ► §

yeah

01:08:43 ► §

you might want to say this too

01:08:45 ► §

but following this gentleman’s question

01:08:47 ► §

I wonder if the

01:08:49 ► §

psychedelic experience of psilocybin

01:08:52 ► §

and its ego dissolving properties

01:08:54 ► §

and everything

01:08:55 ► §

what happens that an elite would control that

01:08:58 ► §

and keep it from everyone else

01:09:00 ► §

if it were truly ego dissolving

01:09:02 ► §

and unified

01:09:02 ► §

so many people are saying yeah this must be an important point. I didn’t

01:09:08 ► §

understand it. What is it again?

01:09:10 ► §

What happens to make an elite few control a property that’s unifying and ego-dissolving

01:09:17 ► §

and keep it for themselves and away from the populace?

01:09:21 ► §

Well, I think it’s because these things have another quality

01:09:26 ► §

which we haven’t talked too much about,

01:09:29 ► §

which is the psychedelics

01:09:30 ► §

are the source of special information.

01:09:34 ► §

And these hierarchies

01:09:36 ► §

want to control the information.

01:09:38 ► §

I mean, in other words,

01:09:39 ► §

it’s the pipeline to God problem.

01:09:43 ► §

And, you know,

01:09:44 ► §

the Protestant Reformation

01:09:45 ► §

was a whole effort to overthrow

01:09:47 ► §

the papal claim that you couldn’t just pray.

01:09:51 ► §

You had to have theologians

01:09:53 ► §

interpret scripture and dogma

01:09:56 ► §

and they would gently guide you

01:09:58 ► §

toward the right understanding.

01:10:01 ► §

But that you weren’t supposed to have

01:10:02 ► §

a direct relationship to spirit you were

01:10:06 ► §

supposed to leave that to experts so i think that’s another issue that the psychedelics empower

01:10:14 ► §

with gnosis true information and every society is based on a lie of some sort.

01:10:30 ► §

So having people going around the official lie and getting in touch with reality

01:10:33 ► §

turns them into social dissidents,

01:10:36 ► §

and you have to control that.

01:10:38 ► §

I mean, that was exactly what happened in the 1960s.

01:10:42 ► §

I mean, we can talk about it a little bit,

01:11:06 ► §

but what happened was too many people were getting stoned and then checking out of the official canon of the culture. And people just said, you know, you can take that job and shove it. And this was very alarming. Now, every society can tolerate a certain amount of this.

01:11:11 ► §

You always have people who just aren’t playing the game. But what happened in the 1960s was that LSD entered the picture.

01:11:20 ► §

And LSD is different from all other psychedelic drugs in one tremendously important quality.

01:11:29 ► §

And that is a single skilled chemist in a small apartment with about $40,000 worth of equipment in a single long weekend can produce 40 to 60 million hits of a drug.

01:11:48 ► §

40 to 60 million hits.

01:11:52 ► §

This is a loaded gun at the head of society.

01:11:57 ► §

Now, I wrote a book on growing mushrooms,

01:12:00 ► §

and years ago, years ago, goad mushrooms quite a bit.

01:12:07 ► §

And I can tell you an absolutely dedicated mushroom grower

01:12:12 ► §

working his ass off for six months

01:12:15 ► §

can produce maybe four or five thousand hits of mushrooms.

01:12:20 ► §

In other words, it’s entirely a neighborhood phenomenon. It doesn’t affect the dials that measure the fate of society.

01:12:30 ► §

But you produce 40 million hits of a drug.

01:12:34 ► §

You have entered the realm of global politics.

01:12:38 ► §

You now probably have more power.

01:12:40 ► §

You and your friends probably now have more power to affect the fate of the world than, let’s say, the government of Switzerland.

01:12:48 ► §

Well, no, not Switzerland.

01:12:50 ► §

They have the banks.

01:12:51 ► §

But the government of Finland, let’s say.

01:12:55 ► §

You have just shoved Finland out of the way and taken your place in the hiring.

01:13:01 ► §

So no government would put up with that for a moment.

01:13:04 ► §

It’s analogous to splitting the hierarchy. So no government would put up with that for a moment. It’s analogous to splitting the atoms.

01:13:06 ► §

Yeah, they don’t allow you to assemble nuclear warheads

01:13:10 ► §

in your basement, and they’re not going

01:13:11 ► §

to allow you to manufacture LSD

01:13:13 ► §

in your basement either for the same reasons.

01:13:16 ► §

In a way, it sounds like

01:13:17 ► §

the LSD

01:13:18 ► §

could be…

01:13:21 ► §

LSD related to psilocybin

01:13:23 ► §

is like cocaine related to coca in a way.

01:13:26 ► §

If you look at it, it’s too easy to get.

01:13:29 ► §

Well, it’s not, you see,

01:13:30 ► §

it’s not that there’s something wrong with LSD.

01:13:33 ► §

Here we have one hit of LSD.

01:13:35 ► §

There’s nothing wrong with it

01:13:37 ► §

compared to one hit of psilocybin.

01:13:40 ► §

The problem is that you can,

01:13:42 ► §

it’s just like agriculture.

01:13:46 ► §

Overproduction. It changes you from a tripper

01:13:48 ► §

into somebody who thinks they should buy

01:13:50 ► §

machine guns because you now have

01:13:52 ► §

5 million dollars shoved under

01:13:54 ► §

your mattress and everybody

01:13:56 ► §

knows, god you wouldn’t dare

01:13:58 ► §

take LSD in a situation like that

01:14:01 ► §

the presence of so much LSD

01:14:03 ► §

has turned you into a defensive

01:14:04 ► §

paranoid now you must defend of so much LSD has turned you into a defensive paranoia.

01:14:06 ► §

Now you must defend your fortune.

01:14:08 ► §

Forget LSD.

01:14:09 ► §

It’s changed from a vehicle of spiritual enlightenment

01:14:13 ► §

into a commodity that must be defended at all costs.

01:14:18 ► §

The cost in terms of what the government thinks of this,

01:14:23 ► §

I mean, you look at what the government’s doing

01:14:24 ► §

with drug sentences now,

01:14:27 ► §

and just in Hawaii, marijuana growing is a minimum 10-year sentence.

01:14:36 ► §

And in that, a federal law for possession of nuclear weapons is a maximum of 12 years.

01:14:44 ► §

So if you have a joint, you get 10 years.

01:14:48 ► §

If you’re growing, you get 10 years.

01:14:50 ► §

If you have a 10 megaton thermonuclear device…

01:14:54 ► §

You could get probation.

01:14:57 ► §

Well, that shows you where the alarms are sounding, doesn’t it, folks?

01:15:04 ► §

You see, the hidden issue,

01:15:07 ► §

and it need not be hidden among us,

01:15:09 ► §

the hidden issue,

01:15:11 ► §

the government always tries to paint itself

01:15:14 ► §

as the mother hen,

01:15:15 ► §

concerned about her errant chicks.

01:15:19 ► §

And so to keep you from crashing into other people

01:15:23 ► §

on the freeway,

01:15:24 ► §

to keep you from leaping out of buildings or committing suicide.

01:15:28 ► §

We have to control these drugs.

01:15:31 ► §

As a matter of fact, you know, this is absurd.

01:15:33 ► §

More people die because of alcohol than all illegal drugs combined in a given year.

01:15:41 ► §

The government is not your friend on this issue.

01:15:45 ► §

The government is very concerned

01:15:48 ► §

to control the mass mind.

01:15:52 ► §

And marijuana,

01:15:55 ► §

my God,

01:15:56 ► §

since the British Commission on Hemp,

01:15:59 ► §

which was in 1889, I believe,

01:16:02 ► §

the British East India Company

01:16:06 ► §

commissioned a study of hemp.

01:16:09 ► §

They have spent millions and millions and millions of dollars

01:16:12 ► §

to find something, anything, you name it,

01:16:16 ► §

wrong with cannabis.

01:16:18 ► §

There is nothing wrong with cannabis.

01:16:20 ► §

It is the most thoroughly tested,

01:16:22 ► §

pawed over and examined drug in human history

01:16:25 ► §

and they just come up with the lamest

01:16:28 ► §

stuff, I mean they tell you

01:16:30 ► §

you know, you’re going to have tits

01:16:32 ► §

give me a break

01:16:34 ► §

they say you won’t be

01:16:36 ► §

motivated in your job

01:16:38 ► §

like your job is supposed

01:16:40 ► §

to be the sine qua non

01:16:42 ► §

against which all things are

01:16:44 ► §

to be measured stop when I against which all things are to be measured

01:16:45 ► §

stop when I get a training break

01:16:47 ► §

yeah right

01:16:48 ► §

and I think

01:16:53 ► §

people on our side of this

01:16:55 ► §

question have been tremendously

01:16:57 ► §

naive because people just

01:16:59 ► §

think we just have to

01:17:01 ► §

convince them that it’s harmless

01:17:03 ► §

it ain’t harmless.

01:17:05 ► §

It is a knife poised at the heart of dominator values.

01:17:11 ► §

It would make the modern industrial assembly line,

01:17:15 ► §

political loyalties,

01:17:18 ► §

the macho image projection,

01:17:21 ► §

all of these little tricks that they’re running

01:17:24 ► §

are severely eroded by cannabis.

01:17:27 ► §

And they will stop at nothing

01:17:29 ► §

to eradicate it.

01:17:31 ► §

Look at the budget of the DEA.

01:17:34 ► §

What are they doing?

01:17:35 ► §

They’re giving 65%

01:17:38 ► §

is dedicated to cannabis eradication.

01:17:41 ► §

Heroin gets 20%

01:17:43 ► §

and coke gets all the rest.

01:17:46 ► §

It’s demonstrably absurd

01:17:48 ► §

the way the money is spent

01:17:50 ► §

unless you have a secret

01:17:52 ► §

agenda of some sort.

01:17:54 ► §

And if your agenda is

01:17:56 ► §

to suppress the evolution

01:17:57 ► §

of unwanted social attitudes

01:17:59 ► §

in the American public, then

01:18:02 ► §

you have to keep your eye on cannabis

01:18:04 ► §

very, very closely.

01:18:05 ► §

To get even more diabolical,

01:18:07 ► §

we won’t waste a lot of time on this,

01:18:09 ► §

but I mean, there’s another agenda there,

01:18:10 ► §

which is, if you were in the business

01:18:14 ► §

of making lots and lots of money

01:18:17 ► §

off of illegal drugs,

01:18:19 ► §

it would be very much in your interest,

01:18:22 ► §

very much, to be sure

01:18:24 ► §

that those drugs remain illegal.

01:18:26 ► §

And expensive.

01:18:27 ► §

And expensive.

01:18:28 ► §

Are you talking to Proctor?

01:18:30 ► §

I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

01:18:33 ► §

I mean, it may be true in some regards.

01:18:36 ► §

It’s a different level of…

01:18:38 ► §

Well, but Steve, the guy, the new guy who heads the war on drugs,

01:18:44 ► §

Martinez, this guy,

01:18:45 ► §

I heard him on NPR this week,

01:18:48 ► §

and his most passionate moment in the half-hour interview

01:18:52 ► §

was he said,

01:18:53 ► §

we have pushed the price of an ounce of cannabis

01:18:56 ► §

past the price of an ounce of gold,

01:18:59 ► §

and we’re going to keep it that way.

01:19:03 ► §

Nothing about eradication.

01:19:05 ► §

Talk about keeping the price high.

01:19:08 ► §

I mean, as far as the government’s concerned,

01:19:10 ► §

I mean, they’re spending billions of dollars a year

01:19:13 ► §

to prosecute and incarcerate drugs,

01:19:18 ► §

and specifically marijuana,

01:19:20 ► §

not to mention the lost revenue

01:19:23 ► §

that they could obtain by simply taxing it,

01:19:27 ► §

which they would if it were available to those people who didn’t have the wherewithal to

01:19:31 ► §

grow it themselves.

01:19:33 ► §

Right.

01:19:33 ► §

The fact that they refuse to tax it when they’re starving for revenue shows that there must

01:19:39 ► §

be a secret agenda.

01:19:41 ► §

It doesn’t make any kind of sense.

01:19:43 ► §

There’s something else going on there, too, is that if you have a government which needs to do many, many things

01:19:49 ► §

which are untraceable, as soon as you put money into it, it’s traceable.

01:19:55 ► §

But drugs provide a really nice source of untraceable money.

01:19:58 ► §

Yeah, that’s another level, and we might as well say a little bit about that.

01:20:04 ► §

When I wrote this book, I did a lot of research about an area I didn’t know that much about,

01:20:11 ► §

which is, let’s say, from 1500 to the present, drugs of addiction.

01:20:16 ► §

And what I discovered is drug smuggling is like assassination.

01:20:23 ► §

If the government isn’t involved, it never seems to really happen.

01:20:29 ► §

And governments have been using drugs for centuries as forms of secret revenue.

01:20:38 ► §

This whole sugar thing that I laid out to you, those were decisions made by the crown heads of Europe in collusion with the Pope.

01:20:46 ► §

It wasn’t common people who set those policies in place.

01:20:51 ► §

During the 1960s,

01:20:54 ► §

when the black ghettos began to come apart,

01:21:00 ► §

suddenly, number three, China white heroin

01:21:03 ► §

was cheaper and more available

01:21:05 ► §

than it had ever been at any time in the history of the heroin problem in the United States.

01:21:11 ► §

Why? Because the CIA saw, you know,

01:21:15 ► §

all these black guys are getting up a bunch of uppity niggers, as the government calls them.

01:21:20 ► §

You just smother it in heroin.

01:21:23 ► §

Get everybody either hooked

01:21:25 ► §

or making money,

01:21:27 ► §

and they’re not…

01:21:28 ► §

I mean, it’s absolutely brilliant.

01:21:29 ► §

That’s your agenda.

01:21:31 ► §

There’s no better way to go about it.

01:21:33 ► §

It’s just like you could invent

01:21:34 ► §

a better drug than crack.

01:21:36 ► §

That’s right.

01:21:37 ► §

You could distract these people

01:21:38 ► §

and just have them killing each other

01:21:39 ► §

and not messing with, you know,

01:21:41 ► §

the real…

01:21:42 ► §

And they don’t care, really,

01:21:44 ► §

about the effect of drugs.

01:21:46 ► §

And one group, one faction will work against another.

01:21:50 ► §

For example, I’m a great aficionado of hashish.

01:21:56 ► §

And hashish became very hard to get in the United States in the late 70s. But as soon as the Russians invaded Afghanistan,

01:22:11 ► §

suddenly there was massive amounts

01:22:14 ► §

of excellent Afghani hashish

01:22:17 ► §

at prices that nobody had seen for 15 years.

01:22:21 ► §

The reason was the CIA knows

01:22:24 ► §

that hashish is not really a problem. years. The reason was the CIA knows that

01:22:25 ► §

hashish is

01:22:26 ► §

not really a problem

01:22:29 ► §

but what they wanted is they wanted an income

01:22:32 ► §

for the Mujahideen

01:22:33 ► §

and they had to pay

01:22:35 ► §

for all these weapons so they just started

01:22:38 ► §

bringing this in wholesale

01:22:39 ► §

and it wasn’t even a smuggling operation

01:22:42 ► §

I mean I received reports

01:22:44 ► §

from people who said smuggling? They even a smuggling operation I mean I received reports from people who said

01:22:45 ► §

you know smuggling, they’re not smuggling

01:22:47 ► §

they’re unloading it on pier 39

01:22:50 ► §

with the stevedore union local 1030

01:22:55 ► §

is taking off you know 500 pound blocks of hashish

01:22:59 ► §

by the tens of thousands

01:23:00 ► §

and the day the Afghan war ended

01:23:04 ► §

they staged

01:23:05 ► §

an enormous series of interlocking

01:23:08 ► §

busts on their own infrastructure

01:23:10 ► §

and they closed it down

01:23:11 ► §

and they pulled it to pieces

01:23:13 ► §

when Khomeini

01:23:16 ► §

kicked out the Shah

01:23:18 ► §

the

01:23:19 ► §

Iranian heroin business

01:23:21 ► §

then fell under the control of the

01:23:23 ► §

mullahs and at that point, suddenly, cocaine emerges as a major problem in the United States

01:23:32 ► §

because we just switched our supply lines.

01:23:35 ► §

We could no longer depend on Iranian heroin

01:23:39 ► §

because we couldn’t depend on these screwy Islamic fundamentalists,

01:23:43 ► §

depend on these screwy Islamic fundamentalists. So we just turned toward all of these company assets

01:23:48 ► §

in Honduras and Ecuador and Colombia.

01:23:53 ► §

Very, very cynical.

01:23:54 ► §

You know, it’s only been 120 years

01:23:57 ► §

since the so-called opium wars.

01:24:00 ► §

Very few people know what the opium wars,

01:24:04 ► §

what was the issue in the opium wars

01:24:07 ► §

well it turns out the British government

01:24:10 ► §

wanted to deal opium in China

01:24:12 ► §

and the Chinese emperor told them to get lost

01:24:16 ► §

and they flipped

01:24:17 ► §

and they sent naval units

01:24:20 ► §

and they laid siege to several Chinese cities

01:24:24 ► §

and they forced the Chinese imperial court

01:24:28 ► §

to agree that they could deal as much opium as they wanted

01:24:31 ► §

on the wharves of Shanghai and Chuson.

01:24:35 ► §

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:24:37 ► §

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:24:42 ► §

So what did you think about what Terrence was saying about what he

01:24:46 ► §

calls deep time,

01:24:48 ► §

and his thought that

01:24:49 ► §

during the childhood of our species,

01:24:52 ► §

our ancient ancestors were

01:24:54 ► §

actually victims of abuse and trauma.

01:24:57 ► §

Collectively, that is.

01:24:58 ► §

It’s an interesting thought, but

01:25:00 ► §

to be honest, it isn’t something that I know

01:25:02 ► §

enough about in order to have any

01:25:03 ► §

kind of an opinion about it. And since we’re in that area right now, here isn’t something that I know enough about in order to have any kind of an opinion about it.

01:25:06 ► §

And since we’re in that area right now, here’s something else that I know next to nothing about,

01:25:11 ► §

but which hasn’t prevented me from beginning to form an opinion about it.

01:25:15 ► §

So let me start with full disclosure.

01:25:17 ► §

I know next to nothing about biology.

01:25:19 ► §

Only what few bits and pieces float by from time to time and grab my attention.

01:25:24 ► §

Only what few bits and pieces float by from time to time and grab my attention.

01:25:30 ► §

About a year ago or so, I read that it was reported that some experiments indicate that,

01:25:37 ► §

contrary to popular opinion, neurons in our brains can, in some cases, regenerate themselves.

01:25:40 ► §

But I understand that the jury is still out on that.

01:25:43 ► §

Which brings us to the commonly accepted theory that,

01:25:45 ► §

when we are born, our brains already contain all of the neurons they’re ever going to have. I’m told that a full 60% of a baby’s energy

01:25:52 ► §

goes to powering the brain, but that drops down to 20% of an adult’s energy requirement.

01:25:58 ► §

Although I know some people that probably aren’t using more than about 1 or 2%.

01:26:01 ► §

So I shouldn’t have said that, should I?

01:26:05 ► §

I’m sorry.

01:26:07 ► §

But I’m also told that during infancy,

01:26:09 ► §

what is taking place in a baby’s brain

01:26:12 ► §

is basically a large-scale pruning operation.

01:26:16 ► §

In essence, as I understand it,

01:26:18 ► §

upon birth, our brains begin to eliminate

01:26:21 ► §

unnecessary connections between neurons.

01:26:24 ► §

Use it or lose it, in other words.

01:26:26 ► §

And I can almost hear the biologists here in the salon

01:26:30 ► §

scratching their fingernails on a blackboard to get me to quit being so simplistic.

01:26:35 ► §

Unfortunately, I only possess the most basic and simple understanding of what I’m talking about here.

01:26:41 ► §

So, in the tradition of Terence McKenna, well, I’ll continue.

01:26:46 ► §

Oh, I’m in a good mood today, aren’t I? Anyway, I’ve read that our personalities are basically

01:26:51 ► §

fixed by the time we are six or seven years old, which seems to run parallel to this concept of

01:26:57 ► §

eliminating unused neural connections during the early years of life. Could it be that in this

01:27:03 ► §

debate over which is more important, nature or nurture,

01:27:07 ► §

that ultimately the environment in which a child finds itself

01:27:10 ► §

during the years in which the brain is developing,

01:27:13 ► §

that children, all children everywhere, are having their brains hardwired

01:27:17 ► §

by only retaining neural connections that make sense in the family, religion, and culture

01:27:23 ► §

in which it finds itself?

01:27:25 ► §

As I said, I’m barely qualified to even ask these questions,

01:27:28 ► §

but hopefully they’ll spark some interest in a few of our scholastic fellow salonners

01:27:33 ► §

who maybe can explore further the question of how much of a society’s collective behavior

01:27:38 ► §

is actually a result of its members’ brains being hardwired to respond in a particular way to a given

01:27:46 ► §

circumstance. And if that is found to be the case, well, don’t you think that it would be a good

01:27:51 ► §

argument in favor of reinstating psychedelic rituals as ways to dissolve the unhealthy parts

01:27:58 ► §

of our egos and rewire the anger and hate that has been hardwired in so many of our brains,

01:28:06 ► §

the anger and hate that has been hardwired in so many of our brains, and thus to ultimately make our societies more human. It’s just a thought. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing

01:28:13 ► §

off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.