Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Date this lecture was recorded: April 1993
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I think the great overlooked factor in any model of human evolution, and indeed of evolutionary models of many other species, is we have not given enough emphases to diet.”
“What seems to me to be one of the most centrally interesting questions to be asked of this world, and that is: What is human consciousness? Where did it come from? And why does it exist at all?”
“It still is a very challenging thing to dissolve your ordinary state of consciousness, and abandon yourself to the dynamic of the larger mind that we find ourselves embedded in.”
“I think this is a frightening thing to contemplate, but the earliest cities, I will argue, were pens for human beings. That’s what a city is. They’re a pen for human beings.”
“What is the plant hallucinogen experience in all times and all places for all people? I don’t know if you can be that general, but it’s important to try. What it is, is it’s an experience of boundary dissolution. It’s an experience of having categories obliterated, of having previously defined boundaries and differences eliminated.”
“History is a progressive de-humanizing of the human experience.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
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salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And I’d like to begin today by giving you an update on the new, well, what I call the Psychedelic Salon Monday Nights,
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which is a group get-together in Zoom.us.
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For now, as you know, I’m working out the details of hosting these conferences,
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with a view to opening them up to everybody here in the salon.
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But first we’ve got to work out a few details, and to do that, for now at least,
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I’m keeping these initial video conferences to just those who are supporting me on Patreon.com,
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because it’s a much smaller group, and once we work out the best ways to handle larger crowds, I’ll set about organizing a bigger conference.
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Now, last Monday night, a week ago today, 5% of my patrons joined me for our first chat.
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Now, if 5% of the salon joined us here, we would be, well, it’d be quite literally thousands of participants. Obviously, there’s still much work to be done to figure out how to host larger free events
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for you to use here in the salon.
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And by the way, that 5% of my patrons added up to exactly three people.
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There were three people in the conference, which is a much easier group to work with initially.
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And what struck me as quite interesting about our little
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group of four, counting me, was that way back before podcasting was even invented,
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I was hosting an online conversation. And so it was in July of 2001 that I registered the
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psychedelicsalon.com URL. And we held our talks back then under that little banner.
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Now, at first, it was myself, Wild Bill, Dr. Tom, and Nick Sand, and we would just catch up with
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one another’s recent activities each week and generally just shoot the psychedelic breeze.
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Now, over time, several others joined us as well. So, last Monday, for me at least, brought back some pleasant
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memories of the true beginning of the psychedelic salon. And hopefully a few more will join us
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tonight for our second online gathering of fellow salonners, and I’ll keep you informed of our
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progress. Now for today’s podcast, we’re about to listen to the beginning of a course that Terence McKenna gave sometime in 1993.
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My copy of the tape of this talk only had the year and the name McKenna on it.
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But, as you will hear in just a moment, it is Terence’s in-depth explanation of his stoned ape hypothesis.
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of his stoned ape hypothesis.
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And while I’ve heard bits and pieces of this idea in many other talks,
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I really don’t remember any other instance where he spent so much time going into the in-depth details that led him to come up with this idea.
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And for what it’s worth, even though I am aware of criticisms of the stoned ape hypothesis,
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well, it still seems to ring true to me.
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Of course, maybe that’s because I’m just a stoned ape myself.
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Well, enough of that.
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Let’s join Terrence for the first of what will be a multi-week podcast series of this course.
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course. Basically, this is a workshop to discuss the interaction between plants and human beings,
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specifically the psychological and mental interpenetration of these two very different life forms. I think of this course as plants and mind, and the way I like to ignite the whole thing and it will have then a dynamic of its own.
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We could discuss these matters for two days, five days, ten days or as I’ve done for about 40 years, 35 years, there is no end to it.
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And very few areas of human endeavor dissolve the disciplinary boundaries of Western academia
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as thoroughly as the study of human and psychoactive plant interactions do.
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There are important issues here in biology and botany, in biogeography, in ethnography and ethnology,
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in psychology and neurophysiology, in the study of symbols.
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The number of disciplines that have to be brought to bear on this subject
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is, I think, a central clue to how important it is to understanding our humanness.
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And I represent a radical
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point of view
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on these matters
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and I don’t imagine I was invited
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here to dumb it down
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so
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if you had Darwin you’d get
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natural selection, if you had Freud
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you’d get sexual repression
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so you’ve got McKenna
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so you’re going to get
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psychoactive catalysis of consciousness,
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because that’s basically why I think these ideas are so important.
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But before we get to that, let me just lay out some of the field.
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the field. Human beings began their career, well, we can trace it back to the primordial slime, I suppose, but our animal career was a career of insectivorous, vegetarian, and and fruititarianism lived out in the arboreal canopies of tropical rainforests.
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And all animal species, indeed all life, tends to occupy an evolutionary niche
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and then stabilize itself in that niche.
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and then stabilized itself in that niche.
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Termites, cockroaches, these sorts of organisms found their niche hundreds of millions of years ago and filled it to perfection and have occupied it ever since.
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Generally, nature is not progressive in its particulars.
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Overall, nature is progressive, but its particulars. Overall, nature is progressive,
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but its particulars seek equilibrium.
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And so it would have been in the case of our primate ancestors.
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They achieved a dynamical balance,
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as I said, a diet of insects and fruit,
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a canopy habitat,
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language of pack signaling designed to convey danger and information about food sources and so forth and so on.
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And there they would have remained had it not been for the larger ecodynamics of the planet, ecodynamics which are still shaping
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human habitat in Africa.
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Because what has been going on in Africa for at least 5 million years is a slow drying
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of the continent.
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drying of the continent and it disrupted this rainforest ecology so that about two to four million years ago, I mean these are vast spans of time we’re talking about, the rainforest
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began to island itself and to be restricted to the wetter areas of Africa and into the new environment,
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the more xerophitic or arid environment that was coming into being,
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a very diminished plant community took hold,
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a community of opportunistic grasses, annuals, heavy seededars, this sort of thing.
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Now, we know that the rainforest was primary because the rainforest,
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just to give you a broad notion, might consist of over 100,000 plant species.
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The grassland ecosystem might well consist of under 500 species, and all 500 grassland species can be found as rare members of the flora of the rainforest.
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survivors of a process of clearing.
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And there is argument among botanists about this,
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but Carl Sauer, who was a great geographer and thinker on these matters,
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held that there is no such thing as a natural grassland, that grasslands are the earliest artifacts of human impact on the planet.
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Grasslands are created by burning.
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They promote the growth of cereals
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and so feed in to the human food chain.
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So our primate ancestors’ ecological adaptation to arboreal life was interrupted by this process.
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And key to my thinking about all this, and those of you who are going to have careers in all this,
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I hope some of you will take it up and adumbrate it,
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I think the great overlooked factor in any model of human evolution, and indeed in evolutionary models of many other species,
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is we have not given enough emphasis to diet. When we talk about natural selection of an animal species, we tend to think that the genome expresses a physical type,
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and the phenotype is then subject to selection by natural environment.
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Some biologists have seen the thinness of this understanding.
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L.L. White wrote a book called Internal Factors in Evolution,
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in which he pointed out that the womb is itself an environment
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that makes a very heavy selection
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before an organism is ever born into the theater of Darwinian selection.
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So it isn’t a tabula rasa that you’re born into the theater of natural selection.
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You have been subject to natural selection from the very earliest moments of the existence of the zygote.
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So that’s one factor.
00:11:59 ►
But what I have emphasized is diet.
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But what I have emphasized is diet.
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Diet is an input of potentially mutagenic factors into the body that can have enormous consequences on the health of an individual
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or the general evolution of a population. And I’ve used the toolbox of ideas
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that I’m going to put forward here today and tomorrow
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to try and address what seems to me to be
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one of the most centrally interesting questions
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to be asked of this world.
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And that is, what is human consciousness?
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Where did it come from?
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And why does it exist at all?
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And I believe that we can, by thinking about psychoactive plants, diet,
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and the early human evolutionary situation, we can make a lot of progress on this question. And we can illuminate
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some of our political dilemmas that persist to this day. The gender friction that typifies
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human society, the hierarchy structures and the tensions they create, so forth and so on. So let me run through this and get it off my chest, and then we can talk about the larger
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materia medica of psychoactive change relative to plants. As the rainforest retreated, our remote primate ancestors came under nutritional pressure, obviously, most animal species are very particular about their food intake.
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And if you’ve ever tried to raise butterflies or something for your children,
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you know that if you capture a caterpillar in the wild but don’t pay close attention to the plant you find it on.
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You can’t just put grass in a peanut butter jar with a caterpillar and expect great success.
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Animals are highly specialized in their choice of foods.
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Why is this?
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Well, as near as we can tell, eating all kinds of foods from an evolutionary point of view
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is a very reckless move indeed because plants represent chemical smorgasbords of various types
00:14:59 ►
that have accumulated over time in the genome of a particular organism.
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over time in the genome of a particular organism. If you have a very broad-based diet,
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you are exposing yourself to many different kinds of mutagenic influences.
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As a strategy for survival of a species, this is not good.
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Much better to specialize, to evolve special enzymatic pathways to deal with toxins.
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So, for instance, we know certain animals can eat things that other animals would become ill from or even die.
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And this is the way it’s done.
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And all animal species tend to evolve toward these very bland monodiet.
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Now, what happens when there is an upheaval in an environment,
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a geomagnetic reversal, a volcanic eruption, a drought, something like that,
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and ordinary sources of nutrition become restricted?
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Then an organism has basically two choices.
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It can go extinct, starve itself out of existence,
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or if it has more flexible behaviors,
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it can begin to experiment with previously rejected potential foods in the environment,
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rejected probably because of strong taste or something like that,
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which are clues to the presence of marginally acceptable chemical compounds of some sort.
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Our remote canopy living ancestors, as I mentioned, were fruititarian insectivores.
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They,
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under nutritional pressure,
00:16:50 ►
began to expand their
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repertoire of foods.
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They also began to explore
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the grassland environment.
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And I mentioned
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that the grassland environment
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is much poorer in
00:17:04 ►
total number of plant species than the rainforest.
00:17:08 ►
Thus, and logically, the potential number of food sources is also limited.
00:17:15 ►
Baboons and chimpanzees will dig with sticks for the corms, the swollen roots of grasses.
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the swollen roots of grasses.
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So as our remote ancestors began to explore this new environment of the grasslands,
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they also began to explore new dietary items.
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And one of the items that they would surely have observed are coprophytic mushrooms, mushrooms which prefer dung as their environment.
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Coprophilic or coprophytic is the word for this.
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Many of these species of coprophytic mushrooms elaborate psilocybin, which as I assume you know is one of the major psychoactive alkaloids.
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Psilocybin occurs in many species of mushroom.
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It’s unknown outside of the fungi. But I maintain that in a sense psilocybin is the best model for human interaction with the psychedelic
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or that all other psychoactive plant usages are an effort to duplicate, return to,
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or somehow evoke the original human relationship to psilocybin.
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And it is not simply its psychoactive properties that make psilocybin a potential catalyst for human consciousness.
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It is its psychoactive properties in combination with certain other properties that make it uniquely suited to carry out the role of catalysis of consciousness in a higher animal?
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What are these unique characteristics?
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Well, first of all, in very low doses, psilocybin increases visual acuity.
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If you want to go back into the literature,
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Roland Fisher in the middle 60s took graduate students
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and gave them small amounts of psilocybin or placebo,
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and he built an apparatus where two parallel strips of metal could be deformed by winding a crank.
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And he asked people to push a button when the two strips seemed to them to cease to be parallel, and he demonstrated that edge detection is enhanced by small amounts of psilocybin.
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Well, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that edge detection is at a very high premium
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in any grassland situation where predation is taking place. The lion moving in the grass 300 yards away as it creeps upon your camp
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or the gazelle trying to slip away through the tall grass from your hunting party.
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Edge detection is the key to success or failure in hunting in that kind of a situation. And it’s extraordinary that we can statistically demonstrate this improved visual acuity
00:20:53 ►
occurring in the presence of psilocybin.
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What it would have done, you see, is these proto-hominids who would accept the psilocybin into their diet
00:21:07 ►
would have a slightly enhanced success in hunting.
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That slightly enhanced hunting success would mean more nutritional resources
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available for them and their offspring,
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offspring presumably inculcated into the habit of also eating the mushroom.
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So what we have here is a slight favoring then of those animals in the population that would accept psilocybin into the diet.
00:22:07 ►
the diet. At slightly higher levels, psilocybin is, like all CNS stimulants, causes arousal. And arousal is simply a feeling of so feeling. Sleep is impossible. Hands are busy at small tasks.
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One is aware of one’s sphere of awareness extends out somewhat further.
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And in highly sexed animals like primates, arousal means erection in the male.
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And this is very important for this theory because we not only have to account for human consciousness, but we have to account for the peculiar dislocation that human consciousness
00:22:33 ►
seems to carry with it, that we are both of nature, yet not of nature, somehow creatures
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with one foot in nature and one foot in heaven, and how does this come about?
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I believe, and I’m willing to argue it against all comers,
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that a key element to understanding our sociology and our sexual politics and all that is to realize that psilocybin had two effects
00:23:10 ►
in the early human populations that were using it.
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One, we’re very familiar with if we’re psychedelic sophisticates ourselves.
00:23:20 ►
It’s the psychedelic experience, the boundary-dissolving, hallucinatory, shamanic apotheosis that occurs with psilocybin.
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But the other effect is to medicate the tendency to form dominance hierarchies.
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And this is very controversial.
00:23:43 ►
In other words, what I’m saying is that all primates form dominance hierarchies. And this is very controversial. In other words, what I’m saying is that all primates form dominance hierarchies. And what that means, just to remind you, is that the hard-bodied, long-fanged, young males, they order the old, the homosexual, and the young.
00:24:07 ►
Everybody is under their thumb.
00:24:11 ►
And part of our dilemma as a global society is that though we claim great sophistication,
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we still live under male dominance hierarchies.
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we still live under male dominance hierarchies.
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Corporations, universities, family structures, you know,
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long fanged males are still ordering around the elderly, the weak and the female among us.
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And as we are conscious beings and reflect upon this,
00:24:49 ►
it creates great social dislocation and political unhappiness and tension in relationships and so forth and so on.
00:25:05 ►
I believe that our unique position in the animal world arose as a consequence of a chemical suppression of a natural behavior pattern. The pattern of male dominance,
00:25:07 ►
of forming dominance hierarchies,
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was interrupted by an item in the diet,
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psilocybin.
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And into this chaos,
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this egalitarian chaos,
00:25:23 ►
which resulted was a situation in which everything about us that we treasure and hold up as human was put in place.
00:25:30 ►
In other words, theater, language, dance, story, altruism, ethics, metaphysics, did I say poetry?
00:25:44 ►
Ethics, metaphysics, did I say poetry?
00:25:53 ►
Everything that makes us human came into being roughly 100,000 in the last,
00:25:58 ►
well, from 100,000 to about 15,000 years ago.
00:26:04 ►
People lived in balance with the earth, with the larger biome in which they were embedded.
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There was not product fetishism ushering into enormous toxic processes involving the smelting of metals or the extraction of rare elements from the earth.
00:26:21 ►
Now, you could object and say,
00:26:23 ►
well, but they just simply weren’t sophisticated enough to do those things.
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I maintain that our technical sophistication is a very specialized form of cultural adaptation,
00:26:34 ►
and that comparing us and finding us favorably compared to the civilization of Homer or Chattahoochee or Altamira is simply a form of cultural chauvinism.
00:26:50 ►
Okay, but psilocybin had other effects besides this suppression of male dominance that I mentioned
00:26:59 ►
and this increased sexual thing, which I did mention, but I didn’t draw the correct conclusion there.
00:27:05 ►
If you have something in your food, which is, to put it crudely, acting as an aphrodisiac,
00:27:12 ►
then it is reasonable to expect that you will have more pregnancies,
00:27:17 ►
and reasonable to expect that you will therefore have, again,
00:27:22 ►
a tendency to outbreed the non-silocybin-using members of the population.
00:27:28 ►
So we have two factors here.
00:27:30 ►
Increased visual acuity, which gives greater food-gathering capacity.
00:27:37 ►
Increased sexual activity, which tends to outbreed the non-psilocybin-imbibing members of the group.
00:27:46 ►
And then, on top of all this, you have this ecstatic internal state
00:27:54 ►
for which we, with all our cultural and epistemic sophistication,
00:28:01 ►
are still unable to come to terms.
00:28:04 ►
The mystery of the psychedelic experience.
00:28:09 ►
Now, these things taken together with other factors working in parallel created, I think,
00:28:18 ►
the dilemma and the glory and the opportunity of humanness.
00:28:25 ►
Once we began, under nutritional pressure, to expand our diet,
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we were delicately poised on the edge of omnivorousness.
00:28:39 ►
Because recall in the canopy situation, we were insectivores, our remote ancestors.
00:28:45 ►
We were not simply vegetarians. we were insectivores, our remote ancestors. We were not simply vegetarians.
00:28:47 ►
We were insectivores.
00:28:48 ►
In the grassland environment, we began probably to,
00:28:53 ►
originally to follow along behind lion kills and that sort of thing and eat carrion.
00:29:04 ►
lion kills and that sort of thing and eat carrion.
00:29:10 ►
One evolutionary theory says that our suppressed olfactory apparatus,
00:29:13 ►
the fact that we have a very limited sense of smell,
00:29:19 ►
is because there was a period in our evolution when we did a lot of rooting around in carcasses.
00:29:26 ►
This is not the noble image we might have wished, but there it is.
00:29:29 ►
If you need a countervailing theory because you don’t like that one, the other theory is, no, we lost our sense of smell because when we stood upright,
00:29:35 ►
we got our faces up off the ground, and that’s where the smells are anyway,
00:29:40 ►
so it all sort of became useless equipment, and we dropped it.
00:29:45 ►
A point that I’ve become convinced of in the last couple of years
00:29:49 ►
but is definitely not PC is that I’ve noticed,
00:29:55 ►
and my attention was called to it by Philippe de Vauchelet,
00:30:00 ►
who’s a friend of mine,
00:30:03 ►
carnivores are the most conscious of animals.
00:30:09 ►
Cows have very little interest in the habits of chipmunks or birds or anything else.
00:30:18 ►
All they do is munch grass.
00:30:20 ►
Carnivores, on the other hand, have an acute interest in the behavior of other animals.
00:30:26 ►
And in fact, I’m on the brink of willing to argue that the earliest consciousness was not self-consciousness.
00:30:37 ►
It was consciousness of how dinner thought.
00:30:45 ►
because if you can think like your dinner,
00:30:53 ►
you can go out and plant yourself in its path of behavior and have dinner, you see. And if you will look at the difference between, oh, I don’t know, a gerbil and a house cat,
00:31:00 ►
the intelligence level is striking.
00:31:03 ►
the intelligence level is striking. And I think that this attention to the behavior of other animals
00:31:09 ►
on the part of an emerging habit of carnivorous behavior
00:31:15 ►
is going to have to be taken into consideration.
00:31:21 ►
It’s interesting that shamanism,
00:31:30 ►
it’s interesting that shamanism, which is in a sense the earliest intellectual pursuit,
00:31:38 ►
emerges in its early phase as a technique for identifying with animals.
00:31:51 ►
Hunting magic is what we’re talking about here. And so I think that there was a very interesting mix of factors and players in the early human evolutionary situation.
00:31:54 ►
First of all, a canopy-dwelling primate with a pack signaling repertoire
00:32:00 ►
is forced into a grassland environment where psilocybin mushrooms occur,
00:32:09 ►
where small and large animals are predating upon each other,
00:32:14 ►
and where nutritional options are highly restricted.
00:32:19 ►
And as this animal makes its adaptive choices,
00:32:24 ►
it moves deeper and deeper into the realm of mind.
00:32:29 ►
First, the modeling of the behaviors of other animals and the behaviors of plants,
00:32:35 ►
because in a hunting-gathering situation, when plants produce fruit, what environments they prefer,
00:32:42 ►
what other plants they grow in association with, what soil types they prefer, what other plants they grow in association with,
00:32:45 ►
what soil types they prefer.
00:32:47 ►
All of these things are cofactors feeding into an image of the world.
00:32:53 ►
And this image of the world, by its accuracy or falsity,
00:32:58 ►
decrees life or death upon those who carry it.
00:33:04 ►
upon those who carry it.
00:33:12 ►
The omnivorousness forced us into an awareness of other animals. That made us, that put us on the level of intelligence of a hunting cat
00:33:19 ►
or something like that.
00:33:21 ►
But the psilocybin experience at higher doses, and obviously by this time inculcated for sexual and ritual and hunting purposes into the society, magical world that is, to use a Jungian term, highly numinous,
00:33:46 ►
highly charged with the energy of the archetype, of the archetypal world.
00:33:53 ►
And, as I said, to this day, we are not able to come to terms with this.
00:33:58 ►
No matter how much Derrida or Husserl or Wittgenstein you’ve imbibed,
00:34:03 ►
or Husserl or Wittgenstein you’ve imbibed,
00:34:10 ►
it still is a very challenging thing to dissolve your ordinary state of consciousness and abandon yourself to the dynamic of the larger mind that we find ourselves embedded in.
00:34:20 ►
For a long time, therefore, up, let’s say, I mean, numbers are numbers,
00:34:27 ►
but let’s say from 50,000 years ago to 12,000 years ago,
00:34:33 ►
there was a kind of paradise on this planet.
00:34:38 ►
Poetry coexisted with a balanced ecosystem.
00:34:44 ►
with a balanced ecosystem.
00:34:53 ►
Observational sciences, astronomy, botany, biology, taxonomy,
00:34:58 ►
the observational sciences coexisted with the natural world.
00:35:05 ►
And then the same factors which created this Edenic situation,
00:35:06 ►
which remember what they were,
00:35:09 ►
it was the drying of the African continent that caused the rainforest retreat.
00:35:12 ►
That same process had been going on
00:35:15 ►
slowly, inevitably, endlessly,
00:35:19 ►
and about between, well, after the last glacial melt,
00:35:24 ►
which began 20,000 to 17,000 years ago,
00:35:27 ►
Africa went dramatically dry, and the Sahara Desert began to form,
00:35:34 ►
where there had been a vast grassland dotted by sandstone pinnacles, cut by rushing streams,
00:35:42 ►
and crowded with vast herds of game.
00:35:48 ►
And that was the theater of human emergence.
00:35:51 ►
But when it began to go dry, it went dry rather dramatically.
00:35:55 ►
These ice cores coming out of Iceland make this clear.
00:35:58 ►
Nevertheless, as late as Roman times, the Roman historian Pliny referred to North Africa
00:36:06 ►
as the breadbasket of Rome
00:36:08 ►
because they were growing wheat
00:36:10 ►
in vast amounts in North Africa
00:36:13 ►
as recently as 2,000 years ago
00:36:15 ►
in areas now where there is nothing.
00:36:19 ►
Well, this paradisical African
00:36:23 ►
psilocybin matriarchal partnership,
00:36:28 ►
psychedelic, shamanic, archaic, whatever you want to call it,
00:36:33 ►
society was then pushed into crisis.
00:36:37 ►
And a number of things happened.
00:36:39 ►
First of all, migrations of people out of Africa.
00:36:44 ►
This happens every time there’s a glacial melt.
00:36:48 ►
Human populations were trapped, or proto-hominid populations get trapped during the glacials,
00:36:52 ►
because the last glacial period, the glaciers came as far south as northern Israel.
00:37:01 ►
So human populations get trapped, and then in the interglacials
00:37:05 ►
during the melt, they radiate
00:37:08 ►
outward.
00:37:09 ►
People began leaving
00:37:11 ►
the Sahara, settling in the
00:37:13 ►
Nile Valley, and
00:37:15 ►
the use, this
00:37:18 ►
shamanic use of psilocybin
00:37:20 ►
was disrupted
00:37:21 ►
because the environment which made it
00:37:24 ►
possible was disrupted.
00:37:26 ►
And when that happened, and this I’m closing the loop here for you.
00:37:31 ►
Few of my raps are so sustained.
00:37:35 ►
When that happened, the pattern of male dominance,
00:37:41 ►
the pattern that was genetically never removed, but which had been pharmacologically
00:37:48 ►
suppressed for over 100,000 years, perhaps, reasserted itself with a vengeance. It was always
00:37:55 ►
there. It had never been bred out. And it must have been an era of enormous brutality, when people’s sense of things was that people were turning bad.
00:38:08 ►
Suddenly, we get a whole bunch of things come at once.
00:38:14 ►
An end to nomadism, the beginnings of sedentary agriculture, city building, standing armies, slavery, male kingship, dominance.
00:38:32 ►
All of these things appear just almost overnight.
00:38:36 ►
They spring up.
00:38:37 ►
And I maintain they are what a monkey would build as a civilization if suddenly all of its worst behavioral tendencies came to the forefront with a vengeance. And that’s precisely what happened. In the period when we were self-medicating ourselves with psilocybin, we passed from being an animal into being the peculiarly spiritual entity that we are.
00:39:07 ►
We elaborated observational techniques, theories of magic, language.
00:39:15 ►
But when the psilocybin was withdrawn, these tools, which had been our glory, became instead our curse.
00:39:24 ►
which had been our glory became instead our curse because instead of using them to produce theater and dance and ecstatic social interaction,
00:39:31 ►
we began to use them to support the new and older agenda of male dominance.
00:39:41 ►
And it’s a frightening thing, you know, to think.
00:39:41 ►
of male dominance.
00:39:44 ►
And it’s a frightening thing, you know, to think.
00:39:48 ►
People following their cattle across the African plain,
00:39:51 ►
eating the mushrooms,
00:39:56 ►
seeing the mushrooms as part of the output of the cattle in the same way that meat and milk and manure were output of the cattle.
00:40:02 ►
A mother goddess religion, a religion of the land that moves lightly over the soil,
00:40:09 ►
no evidence of intergroup conflict, so forth and so on.
00:40:14 ►
And somehow then this process, which took a long time of domesticating cattle,
00:40:22 ►
because I’m sure you can see how it all worked,
00:40:26 ►
how these factors were disparate, and then they flowed together.
00:40:30 ►
Human beings followed cattle because they were following kills of lions.
00:40:40 ►
You follow the cattle in the same way that the jackals follow the cattle
00:40:45 ►
to deal with the lion kills made by large predators.
00:40:50 ►
Well, then, in the course of this, you encounter weakened animals or abandoned infant animals,
00:40:59 ►
and you care for them.
00:41:01 ►
And over 20,000 years, this turns into domestication of animals, husbandry of cattle.
00:41:09 ►
But you take away the psilocybin, and I think this is a frightening thing to contemplate.
00:41:16 ►
The earliest cities, I will argue, were pens for human beings.
00:41:24 ►
That’s what a city is. It’s a pen for human beings. That’s what a city is.
00:41:26 ►
It’s a pen for human beings.
00:41:28 ►
Some of these dominant males said,
00:41:30 ►
well, we control cattle.
00:41:32 ►
Why shouldn’t we control human beings in the same way?
00:41:37 ►
Why shouldn’t a king order his people with the same impunity
00:41:42 ►
that he orders the slaughter and the movement of herds of goats and cattle.
00:41:48 ►
And all of the institutions that we labor under came into being at this moment of transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic,
00:42:02 ►
to the agricultural situation.
00:42:07 ►
The reason for this, I believe, can be traced to the evolution of consciousness.
00:42:14 ►
I mean, consciousness is a double-edged sword.
00:42:18 ►
One of the factors, I think, that contributed to the reemergence of male dominance
00:42:25 ►
was that at some point human intellectual capacity reached the point
00:42:30 ►
where a distant cause could be connected to an effect,
00:42:37 ►
and the effect and cause that were being observed was the sex act.
00:42:42 ►
At some point, men and women presumably
00:42:45 ►
but men must have understood
00:42:47 ►
that an act of copulation
00:42:50 ►
if carried out successfully
00:42:52 ►
and in the right
00:42:53 ►
rhythm to the moon
00:42:56 ►
will result in a child
00:42:58 ►
nine months later
00:42:59 ►
if you don’t have that understanding
00:43:02 ►
you have no sense of male paternity.
00:43:06 ►
So you have a very tight social bond because for men, the children are our children, the children of the group.
00:43:14 ►
Once you have a sense of male paternity, then you have ownership.
00:43:19 ►
And this then becomes very problematic.
00:43:22 ►
This then becomes very problematic. At the very moment that men were figuring this out, women were noticing that in the yearly round of following the cattle,
00:43:34 ►
when they would return to the kitchen middens and fire pits abandoned a year previously,
00:43:45 ►
abandoned a year previously, that there would be food in those areas,
00:43:52 ►
an abundance of food plants from cast-off kernels of cereals and so forth and so on. So then there is this awareness.
00:43:55 ►
If we bury food, if we bury food sources, then food will come out of the ground.
00:44:02 ►
The problem with agriculture in the early phase is that it’s hideously efficient.
00:44:09 ►
And what it does is it immediately creates such a surplus that you have to stop moving.
00:44:16 ►
Nomadism has to be abandoned.
00:44:18 ►
You till fields and you overproduce,
00:44:29 ►
fields and you overproduce and then you must store and defend your overproduction against less fortunate human groups in the area.
00:44:33 ►
The most advanced building on this planet in 10,000, 8,000 BC was the grain tower at
00:44:43 ►
Jericho.
00:44:44 ►
And what was it?
00:44:45 ►
It was a grain storage tower,
00:44:47 ►
and it had a staircase so that you could carry large rocks up onto the parapet
00:44:52 ►
so that you could drop them onto the heads of enemies
00:44:56 ►
who were trying to batter their way into your grain tower.
00:45:01 ►
So I’ve spent some time on this
00:45:03 ►
because this could be taught, this course,
00:45:08 ►
without any reference to our contemporary dilemma,
00:45:12 ►
and by that dilemma I mean the dilemma of gender difference, male dominance,
00:45:20 ►
underutilization of females in society, underutilization of feminine points of view in society.
00:45:29 ►
But obviously there is a lot of tension in our society around the issue of psychedelic intoxication,
00:45:37 ►
around the issue of these shamanic plants,
00:45:41 ►
though there is a growing awareness among sophisticated people that the case is
00:45:47 ►
almost entirely emotional.
00:45:49 ►
In other words, we tolerate outlandishly toxic drugs, alcohol, tobacco.
00:45:58 ►
We’re willing to make a trade-off of 70,000 deaths a year in this country for the privilege
00:46:04 ►
of driving the automobile, so forth and so on.
00:46:08 ►
We tolerate very toxic practices if they are seen to be somehow supportive
00:46:15 ►
of the agenda being handed down from the top.
00:46:19 ►
Psychedelics are not, and they are seen as tremendously disruptive,
00:46:25 ►
and yet, as the ethnographic and pharmacological data comes in,
00:46:31 ►
they are among the most benign substances in the world,
00:46:38 ►
and their history of human usage is almost universal.
00:46:42 ►
of human usage is almost universal. And then the question is, do these intoxications limit the spectrum of consciousness and allow
00:46:51 ►
hierarchical models to be handed down and brainwashed into the doubters?
00:46:58 ►
Or do these states of consciousness dissolve cultural assumptions and cast the individual into an ocean of existential perplexity
00:47:10 ►
out of which they have to build their own model of how the world works.
00:47:16 ►
Well, I believe the reason for this tension in our society and anxiety and suppression,
00:47:27 ►
tension in our society and anxiety and suppression, furious suppression of these things, is because we sense that this addresses origins in the same way that it took a long time to overcome
00:47:35 ►
our queasiness about discussing sexuality.
00:47:40 ►
There’s something about the origin subjects that make us very, very nervous.
00:47:48 ►
Okay, so that’s a very linear discussion of theically positioned to play that role in human consciousness.
00:48:12 ►
Now, the contemporary situation worldwide is that we find many forms of shamanism,
00:48:22 ►
from the Arctic to the rainforest to tropics.
00:48:25 ►
And shamanism always depends, for its efficacy, on a dislocation or a transformation of ordinary consciousness.
00:48:38 ►
And we see this achieved in many different ways, through fasting, through ordeal, meaning abandonment in the wilderness or flagellation,
00:48:52 ►
through elaborate theatrical effects, special effects, through the use of substances in plants.
00:49:06 ►
And there has been a controversy in anthropology, never resolved over the past 40 years,
00:49:14 ►
what is the authentic shamanism?
00:49:19 ►
And those of you who are anthropologists know that Mercilliard,
00:49:23 ►
who was one of the great experts in this field,
00:49:29 ►
claimed he called use of plants in a shamanic context decadent.
00:49:35 ►
He called the use of such plants narcotic.
00:49:39 ►
Well, first of all, the use of the word narcotic in that context shows you don’t know what you’re talking about in terms of pharmacology.
00:49:48 ►
That’s a totally obsolete and silly category and not true to boot.
00:49:54 ►
Psychedelics are in no sense narcotic.
00:50:09 ►
And Gordon Watson, on the other hand, who was a brilliant amateur and the discoverer of the psilocybin cult in Mexico,
00:50:35 ►
along with his partner and wife, Valentina wilderness, abandonment, so forth and so on. This is the derivative, late-arising, decadent shamanism.
00:50:41 ►
In fact, this is shamanism on its way to turning into religion of the ordinary sort.
00:50:48 ►
And in fact, if we look at religion of the ordinary sort, we see that it does have a place for fasting.
00:50:55 ►
It does have a place for self-flagellation. It does admit those techniques, but no organized religion of any size tolerates the use of psychedelics in consciousness-transforming amounts.
00:51:12 ►
And that little parenthetical phrase is there, because one of the things that you should know and remember
00:51:19 ►
and keep always in front of you is that if you wish to control someone
00:51:26 ►
or if you want to brainwash somebody,
00:51:29 ►
the way you do it is with small amounts of drugs
00:51:33 ►
and large amounts of your message, whatever it is.
00:51:40 ►
But if you give people large amount of a psychedelic, your message will take its place in the parade of ideas and find its relative importance.
00:52:06 ►
cult or a group or an individual using psychedelic substance, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are on a path of spiritual and shamanic transformation.
00:52:10 ►
It may be that they just are self-enforcing some private Idaho of illusion in which they
00:52:17 ►
choose to live.
00:52:19 ►
But if large doses are being taken, and by large I simply mean effective, full-spectrum doses.
00:52:29 ►
One of the wonderful things about these substances is that the effective dose is a long ways away from a dangerous dose.
00:52:38 ►
The LD50, in other words, is very favorable.
00:52:42 ►
In other words, it’s very favorable.
00:52:46 ►
The boundary dis… Well, so then let me talk for a minute about the character of this experience generally.
00:52:51 ►
What is the plant hallucinogen experience in all times and all places for all people?
00:53:00 ►
I mean, I don’t know if you can be that general, but it’s important to try.
00:53:04 ►
What it is, is it’s an experience of boundary dissolution.
00:53:09 ►
It’s an experience of having categories obliterated,
00:53:15 ►
of having previously defined boundaries and differences eliminated.
00:53:22 ►
eliminated.
00:53:25 ►
The enterprise of being and the enterprise of language
00:53:26 ►
is basically an enterprise
00:53:28 ►
of defining boundaries.
00:53:31 ►
I am myself.
00:53:33 ►
You are you.
00:53:34 ►
This is now.
00:53:36 ►
That was then.
00:53:37 ►
We are here.
00:53:38 ►
They are there.
00:53:40 ►
These are provisional distinctions
00:53:44 ►
about reality that are necessary for us to keep track of and manipulate our animal body as a machine in Newtonian space.
00:53:57 ►
But when a shaman takes a psychoactive plant at an effective dose, he or she falls into trance, becomes immobile,
00:54:07 ►
and then the geometry of consciousness, if you wish, is melted and recast in a different geometry.
00:54:23 ►
in a different geometry.
00:54:27 ►
And I use these mathematical terms because I really sincerely believe
00:54:30 ►
that at some hypothetical future date
00:54:33 ►
when this is all sorted out,
00:54:35 ►
what we’re going to realize about the psychedelic experience
00:54:38 ►
is that it is the experience of the fact of
00:54:43 ►
the higher geometry of the universe in which we live.
00:54:49 ►
In other words, it’s very easy to see that ordinary consciousness evolved to,
00:54:57 ►
well, let me put it this way, it’s a wonderful aphorism.
00:55:00 ►
Consciousness takes the contours of the vessel into which it is poured. It’s like water.
00:55:08 ►
It always takes the shape of the vessel into which it is
00:55:12 ►
poured. And so what are we? We are
00:55:15 ►
on the large scale
00:55:19 ►
we are animals in three-dimensional space
00:55:24 ►
given to hunting and given to being hunted.
00:55:28 ►
So what has consciousness done?
00:55:30 ►
It has evolved into a kind of threat, anticipation, detection, and avoidance machine.
00:55:41 ►
The purpose of consciousness, the purpose of your eyes, the coordination of your
00:55:46 ►
sense is to
00:55:47 ►
navigate you through the world without
00:55:50 ►
dying, without
00:55:51 ►
being ripped apart by predators
00:55:53 ►
or being caught in landslides
00:55:55 ►
or rushing rivers, so forth
00:55:57 ►
and so on. And consciousness
00:55:59 ►
fills that need,
00:56:02 ►
ordinary consciousness, very
00:56:03 ►
well. But because the body has a locus in three-dimensional space,
00:56:11 ►
consciousness of the ordinary sort tends to surround the body as an object of concern.
00:56:21 ►
In other words, if you’re worried about being hit by traffic, you’re not worried
00:56:27 ►
about being hit by traffic in Berkeley. You’re worried about being hit in traffic in San
00:56:32 ►
Francisco because that’s where you happen to be. So consciousness of the ordinary sort
00:56:38 ►
tends to cluster around the physical body. But when consciousness is dissolved of that concern
00:56:46 ►
and dissolved of the programming in language that that concern has built up over ages,
00:56:56 ►
it recrystallizes in a higher dimension, literally a kind of hyperspace.
00:57:08 ►
And if you will think for a moment about shamanism,
00:57:16 ►
I think you’ll see how literally we can take this mathematical metaphor of the psychedelic experience.
00:57:22 ►
What is a classic shaman expected to do and be?
00:57:28 ►
Well, shamans predict hunting.
00:57:31 ►
They see where the game will be.
00:57:35 ►
Shamans predict weather.
00:57:40 ►
They can tell what the weather will be.
00:57:47 ►
Shamans are brought in to mediate complex social hassles of the who is sleeping with my woman,
00:57:51 ►
who stole the chicken,
00:57:54 ►
who shat in the stream kind of social hassles.
00:57:58 ►
Shamans are brought in for these kinds of purposes.
00:58:01 ►
And then finally and most importantly,
00:58:04 ►
shamans cure.
00:58:05 ►
They cure sometimes.
00:58:09 ►
Well, now, these things, predicting the weather, seeing where the game went, curing,
00:58:16 ►
and having a deep insight into social interaction, these are things which become completely non-mysterious
00:58:25 ►
if we hypothesize that the shaman has a hyperspatial point of view.
00:58:32 ►
You know, if you went into a mathematical hyp…
00:58:34 ►
If we had a safe here and we could go into hyperspace,
00:58:40 ►
we would discover that the safe is open,
00:58:47 ►
that there is a words are difficult here
00:58:49 ►
but there is a side of the safe
00:58:52 ►
or let’s say a dimension to the safe
00:58:54 ►
which isn’t locked
00:58:56 ►
in the same way that if a hyperspatial entity
00:59:00 ►
were looking down on San Francisco
00:59:03 ►
it could reach into this room without coming through the door and rearrange things.
00:59:09 ►
In other words, everything that we call magic,
00:59:13 ►
seeing the future, seeing into locked boxes,
00:59:16 ►
knowing what is going to happen, becomes utterly non-mysterious
00:59:21 ►
if you hypothesize that consciousness can unfold itself under this peculiar pharmacodynamic
00:59:29 ►
situation into a higher dimensional space.
00:59:33 ►
And that becomes important in the modern context more than in the archaic context, because the collective future has become for us a focus of major anxiety.
00:59:52 ►
We need to know where we’re going.
00:59:56 ►
You know, Marshall McLuhan said,
00:59:58 ►
the way we run our societies is like driving an automobile using only the rear-view mirror.
01:00:04 ►
Well, in shamanically guided societies, they actually turn on the headlights.
01:00:11 ►
Running by the rearview mirror means you only have past experience to guide you.
01:00:18 ►
Running with the headlights on means you actually have an insight into the forward dimension into which you’re moving.
01:00:29 ►
Okay, so that is sort of a broad sketch of how one plant, psilocybin,
01:00:40 ►
may have catalyzed, shaped, impacted human consciousness,
01:00:46 ►
how the abandonment of that archaic shamanic style through climatic change created the fall into history,
01:00:57 ►
how the fall into history is the absence of this hyperdimensional point of view.
01:01:04 ►
is the absence of this hyperdimensional point of view.
01:01:10 ►
And then what we’ll talk about when we come back after the break is how can we utilize the botanical and ethnographic and pharmacological data
01:01:18 ►
that we have garnered in the last hundred years to recapture, revivify, and explore this dimension of human potential
01:01:31 ►
in such a way that we can actually inject some hope into our political circumstances.
01:01:38 ►
I don’t believe if we remain as we are, half angel, half monkey, ruled by dominant hierarchies,
01:01:49 ►
ruled by the most ruthless among us, that we have much of a future on the evolutionary stage.
01:01:57 ►
But I think that if we can recapture the lost symbiosis with these psychoactive plants, that we will in fact be recovering a lost portion of ourselves,
01:02:13 ►
that history is a progressive dehumanizing of the human experience,
01:02:19 ►
and we have now in the 20th century reached the level of dehumanizing where you’ve got the Holocaust, potential thermonuclear war, Bosnia, Rwanda, you name it.
01:02:33 ►
I mean, the scale of brutality, brutalness, bruteness in the 20th century indicates to me that the struggle for the soul of humanity
01:02:46 ►
is reaching an incredibly intense crescendo.
01:02:52 ►
And I really believe that the path forward is backward,
01:02:57 ►
that we need an archaic revival,
01:02:59 ►
and that central to that revival will be the personality and the technology of shamanism.
01:03:06 ►
And when we analyze that technology for its effectiveness,
01:03:11 ►
we will discover that the most interesting things in the shamanic toolbox
01:03:15 ►
are the plants which directly intervene in the functioning of human consciousness.
01:03:23 ►
So let’s just take a stand-up five-minute break.
01:03:28 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:03:31 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:03:35 ►
I find it interesting at how intense Terence sounded
01:03:39 ►
as he was talking about the state of the world
01:03:42 ►
reaching a historical crescendo of some sort.
01:03:46 ►
And need I remind you that he made that statement 25 years ago?
01:03:51 ►
Well, as my mother often said, everything’s different, but nothing’s changed.
01:03:57 ►
However, it does seem to me to be a good question that the Bard McKenna asks when he says,
01:04:03 ►
How can we recapture the lost symbiosis with these
01:04:07 ►
psychoactive plants, so as to steer our species back on the path that most of us, deep down, want
01:04:15 ►
to be following? Well, it seems to me that in many ways, the worldwide psychedelic community is now
01:04:22 ►
doing exactly that. And I’m thinking here of the dance and festival communities
01:04:27 ►
as well as all of the psychedelic research that’s now taking place in many countries.
01:04:33 ►
While much of the news these days can bring a dark cloud over our mind,
01:04:38 ►
we need to remember that there is much more good news than bad.
01:04:42 ►
It just doesn’t sell papers, as the old saying goes.
01:04:46 ►
I don’t know if you caught this just a bit ago,
01:04:49 ►
because, well, it went by rather fast.
01:04:51 ►
But at one point, when Terence was talking about
01:04:54 ►
the essence of a psychedelic experience,
01:04:57 ►
he said, and I quote,
01:04:59 ►
It still is a very challenging thing
01:05:02 ►
to dissolve your ordinary state of consciousness
01:05:06 ►
and abandon yourself to the dynamic of the larger mind that we find ourselves embedded in.
01:05:15 ►
End quote.
01:05:16 ►
Have you ever heard Terence talking about being embedded in another mind before?
01:05:22 ►
I’ve heard many of his metaphors, but I can’t remember him talking about
01:05:26 ►
being either in or a part of a larger mind,
01:05:30 ►
if talking about the size of a mind even makes sense.
01:05:34 ►
So I’m going to have to go back
01:05:36 ►
and re-listen to that again right now
01:05:38 ►
and give it a little more thought.
01:05:39 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:05:44 ►
Be well, my friends.