00:00

McKenna

Monogamy represents a deepening of bonding into a kind of lifelong project that is entirely spiritual. Not that it doesn’t have a physical and an ecstatic and an erotic side, but it all goes together to create something that should not be expected of adolescence and should not be preached as the ideal at all stages of life. And this is pretty much how it’s handled in a number of non-literate societies. Marriage is taken very seriously, but before marriage a different set of rules obtains. So that’s not a solution for those of us who are already into middle age or beyond, but it certainly gives indication of how we might think about it in raising our own children.

01:05

Eisler

I want to add something, if I may. I think the objectification of women—which is not unique, it’s only just marketed and packaged so very expertly in the West—but the making women commodities really completely messes up the whole deal. Because if it is just an exchange of commodities, I mean, why stick with one commodity? And that is not just the Western thing, but it’s just a collection of body parts, like the pin-up girl or boy, right, which is a way of getting into that. And I think that it really hinges—but it’s very much the woman who’s been, you know, the objectified one. Joan, you know, I mean, the other one was sort of a kind of a blip of reaction in this transitional time. And I think that’s something we have to kind of get through before we can really work that out.

01:56

McKenna

It’s very hard to realize the power of woman as commodity in this society until you are away from it. I remember—well, this happens every time—but I remember particularly in the Amazon, we had been about three weeks up this river, a group of about six of us, women and men. And we came to this village, and there was the obligatory meeting with the head man of the village to let them know that we would be collecting plants in their area and so forth and so on. And we had been away from Iquitos by now, I guess, a month. And we came into the maloca, and it was dimly lit, and then he lit a little kind of a candle. And there was a girly calendar of the most innocuous sort. I mean, the kind that a spark plug company produces in the United States, you know. Very mild. And I was trying to deal with this guy, and I was absolutely riveted. I could not tear my eyes from it. And I was even thinking—it came upon me: was it conceivable that, without blowing everyone’s mind, especially the fellow members of my party, could I get this away from this guy? And then, of course, you know, other things happened and time passed, and then later I was back in Iquitos and I came upon this same calendar in a libraria there. And it had no power whatsoever, because in Iquitos I was saturated in these images, just the news vendors on the street. And this is very mild stuff, you know. It’s a Latin Catholic country. But the power of this image is why it’s used to sell everything from cigarettes to debenture bonds. And it is dehumanizing. It is dehumanizing because it takes us to—literally—to the surface. Everything is flattened. This is again this flattening of the primacy of experience: reducing everything to a sensation empty of emotional content. And if you can do it with women, you can do it with anything.

04:48

Eisler

I want to stop on that, because if you take just that away with you, as I think I said sometime either last night or today, that what my work indicates is something that once you articulate it, it sounds obvious, but somehow it’s overlooked. And it’s very simply this: that the way that a society structures that most fundamental of all relations, the relations between the female and the male half of humanity (because that’s what women and men are), that that profoundly affects everything. It doesn’t just affect our individual life choices and roles as women and men, which we of course experience, you know, very clearly. And now we’re very aware of it. But it affects every one of our social institutions. And that’s really the objectification of women. The domination of women is the template, it’s the model. Because if you can do that to your female twin, if you can do that to the person with whom you have the most intimate relationship, then why not do it to somebody whose difference is not one of sex, but of color or of hairdo or of politics or religion? It’s the template, it’s the model.

And so what I really want to say to you is that these issues that we have been so thoroughly socialized to think of as “just women’s issues” are the central core issues that we better start paying attention to. And I am very definitely making a statement here that I passionately want to share with you. That I just—because it’s so obvious, you know, if you really think about it, but we’ve been so conditioned not to. And of course the reason that we’re so conditioned to think of it that way is because if once we start thinking of this way, then we are challenging the very basis, the very foundation, of the dominator system, and it extends into everything.

And I really want to say this one thing, and it’s about language—because you’ve spoken about language. I never used to be aware of anything, I think. I mean, I think that’s really the only way one can describe my former state. But anyway, but I certainly was not aware. I was aware of a slight sense of discomfort. Well, one was slight, when I went to college and everything was the study of man and mankind, and all of the examples were male centered because the message was very clear. I was here, but I really had no business being here. None of this was really directed to me. But it was so, you know, washed away, and I thought I was uncomfortable because I hadn’t found the right guy or wasn’t wearing the right blouse or, you know, I mean, I had no consciousness.

But now it’s very clear to me that the whole use of male exclusive language, the term “man” instead of “human,” the term “mankind” instead of “humankind,” the term “he” instead of “she or he” or “we,” that that’s a way of really linguistically almost short-circuiting. It’s really a way of short-circuiting any partnership circuitry in our head, okay? And it’s tremendously important.

07:54

Eisler

You know, I was thinking about that because the title of this is the past history. I think how about our story? Because I kind of like to look from prehistory to history to our story.

08:52

Eisler

No, I think that’s a very, very good thing. This is how we’re all beginning to notice these things. And it’s fun. It’s a little uncomfortable, but it’s much more fun than that.

09:20

McKenna

Oh, wonderful!

09:30

Eisler

I think experiencing it really makes a difference. David, do you want to add something? Okay. No, you have to get up.

11:47

Eisler

Thank you for sharing that.

11:51

McKenna

David at once, I think—to address this issue of dualism—he talked to me earlier.

11:56

Eisler

Oh, good.

15:28

Eisler

Well, I left when you earlier came and posed that question and said that your intuition was that the basic partnership really started within us. And I agree with you because it’s the whole thing of seeing ourselves as part of a larger whole. And honoring our body and honoring our spirit and honoring the fact that they’re the same. They’re just different aspects of the same. So I see it like a prison where you just see different facets of it in different ways. And yeah, the smallest unit I think is every one of us. So I thank you for that.

16:15

McKenna

Don’t you think that—there’s been talk about ego. Well, it seems to me ego inflation is what happens when, within the partnership of the individual, a dominator model is applied. Because the manifestation of ego is the denial of intuition, which is a feminine function. So people who are strongly egocentric are living in the self-created hell of a dominator society of one.

16:55

Eisler

Yes, you are.

17:40

McKenna

Well, they are the bearers of the patriarchic standards. They their lineage reaches right back to Pharaoh, and they see it being threatened. Secularism, which began five hundred years ago, was threatening them at every step of the way. That’s why I said last night I consider this monotheistic tradition to be the single most reactionary force in human history. Their bailiwick is threatened. The energy that they put into destroying the pagan world was tremendously ferocious. It took them centuries. In fact, they never completely succeeded in dismantling the previous world of pagan sensibilities. And theirs is, I believe, not a natural position.

Riane said this morning you can do anything you want to partnership. It keeps springing up. It keeps coming back. It has a natural ability to recreate itself. I don’t believe this is true of the dominator culture. I believe that it is fragile and frightened and feels itself always being eroded by the simple processes that reside in nature. So it is an untenable position. And if you have an untenable position, you have a siege mentality.

19:17

Eisler

Now, I really want to—just to take that to a very personal sense. I think that it is fear and pain that really are the mainstream. And these are the most damaged people: are the ones that really are the most imprisoned. Because we’re all in prison to some extent by the dominator model. But in these people, the grip is so fierce, and the pain and the fear are so great, that it—because these things happen on various levels. One is the systems level. You know, systems like—all societies are living systems. They tend to maintain themselves. That’s just how we know from systems theory. But just on the very individual motivation level. For example, a lot of these women who are so horribly, I mean, who can go around chanting when they wanted this for aging just, you know, Supreme Court justice to die. Do you remember they were, you know, what was his name? I forgot him now. I beg your pardon. Brennan. Yeah, they were chanting. You know, they were chanting for death for Brennan, and it was all in the name of we were pro life—and it was: wait a minute! I mean, what kind of distortion in these women? Well, it’s terror, it’s fear, it’s pain, and they lash out.

And that’s exactly you see the whole lashing out process. You mutilate a child from childhood on to be in pain, you know, be it really through genital mutilation or be it through child beating or be it through psychological battering, you know, all of these ways. And that’s, I think, you know—I mean, if you’re asking in terms of the mechanics of it, it’s very complex. But I think on the individual level, that’s really—and it relates to your point about the enemy is: if there is an enemy, it is us. I mean, it is what has become part of us, but we can leave it behind the pain. And the whole thing that we’re talking about now is healing, healing ourselves. Yeah?

24:00

Eisler

I’d like to really reiterate this issue of the selective deadening of empathy. Because I think that empathy, this awareness that we’re talking about, is so much part of this unique miracle that is our species. And the dominator model is so fascinating, because here’s this gift we’ve been given, and institution after institution, practice after practice, is then ingeniously developed to deaden that gift of empathy in us. And, hey, but I think that that’s really one of the things. But you can’t really kill it off, you see. No, no, you’re right. You’re right about that.

25:12

Eisler

But see, I think the incarceration image is a very apt one. I spoke about Theodore Roszak, and he spoke of how the nineteenth century wave of feminism really was one of the first really historic frontal challenges to the dominator system, to what he called patriarchy. And he said that the reaction to it was one of terror, you know. But the greatest thing was we had to keep imprisoned not only, you know, the women and the so-called inferior people, and the enemy, but the woman that every man, as he put it, keeps locked inside his psyche. And I think that’s a very apt image.

But of course women, too, can be very cruel. And I think it’s really very important that we disabuse ourselves of this whole idea that we’re talking about, you know, women are terrific and men are, you know, I mean, forget it. Because the dominator model distorts both women and men. It is true that the caring—I mean, that’s one of the ironies. You know, really, the most important work in the society, which is the caring and the nurturing work of the society, has been relegated to the inferior group: you know, to women. And then we wonder why we can’t have social priorities that are more caring if those very people are excluded from power, right? I mean, talk about Catch 22 here. So we’re back to the quote women’s issues, aren’t we?

27:00

Eisler

—but if you look at some of Minoan frescoes, it’s very easy. They’re beautiful and I wish I had some of them. The role of the man—well, I mean, you see a fresco of a man was fish: he fishes. Alright, I mean, you know, in other words, it’s a productive role. You see the so-called young prince, which is really fascinating. It’s mostly the recovered Minoan single figures have been a tribute to the goddess, with a female priestess as the representative. But they find this one figure of a man, and they decide he’s the young prince, right? Which is very, very interesting, because [???] not a trace of any, you know, king in Minoan culture. But nonetheless, he is a beardless youth, and he has flowers, you know, and flumes, and he’s walking through a garden. I mean, it’s hardly your macho warrior image. I mean, there are other things that men can do. Men did the bull leafing, and that was very interesting because it was a partnership with the women. If you look at the bull leaf alfresco. So they obviously just did all kinds of things. They just didn’t happen to specialize in killing.

Is it time already? Oh my goodness, yes, I think that we should—yes, please.

28:51

Eisler

I’m so glad you brought that up, because that makes a wonderful, wonderful place for something that I really felt that I want to very much address. What I’d like to suggest is that we look at technology as something that is really a human function, a human capacity. From day one, language is a technology of communication, isn’t it? The stick that even chimpanzees use to help them dig up plants and what have you—that’s a technology. It’s a tool. Our tool-making capacity is really an extension of natural functions. I mean, an airplane does something that a bird does, but we’ve built it. So I look at technology neither as the villain or as the savior. I look at technology as something that we—I mean, other species have some technology. I think dolphins and whales probably would if they had hands, you know, because they seem to have a high intelligence. But they don’t. So we have this tremendous capacity for making tools—you know, all the way to the most extraordinary things that we’re getting today. That, I think, is a wonderful thing. And it can also be a terrible thing.

And we’re right back to the issue of technology using the template of a partnership or a dominator model of society. I’d like to suggest to you that the invention of machines per se did not have to result in these dehumanized assembly lines, where people themselves became cogs in the machine. I would like to suggest to you that if this prehistoric shift had not happened, that maybe the machines would have been used in a very, very different way. I would like to suggest to you that the great breakthroughs in technology actually came in what we may call more of a partnership-oriented era. In fact, all the basic technologies on which civilization is built came out of that era. They weren’t as glitzy as what we’ve got today—although, you know, and Crete had the first paved roads in Europe, it had [???], it had indoor planning. I mean, it got lost again. You know, we don’t find it again until much later. But, I mean, they were what we would call—well, they compare very much more high technologies in a lot of the so-called developing worlds today. Okay?

So let’s look at technology in terms of this template. But the dominator system… I’ve divided technology really—and that’s a whole new session, okay?—by trying to categorize it in terms of different types of technologies. And one is technologies of domination, of destruction. And I’d like to suggest to you that technologies of domination and destruction—be it the use of the greater musculature and the development of this, you know, of the brawn to kill of the so-called classical warrior or the missile—that that’s built into the dominator system. And that really doesn’t have that much to do with technology at all. And so that the issue for us isn’t: let’s throw out the baby with the bathwater here.

I mean, I don’t want to go back technologically. I mean, I think that we don’t want to do that. What we want to do is to use the most advanced modern technology, and it almost takes us immediately back to the whole issue of how we use the hallucinogens. Because we’re right back there. I mean, you know very well that there have been experiments, not with some of the synthetic drugs, to use them for mind control. I mean, that’s the ultimate dominator technology, isn’t it? I mean, “Thou shalt not eat of the tree of knowledge, ” because I’ve just given you in your water supply, you know, the chemical that makes you sort of, you know, completely pliable.

32:36

Eisler

Well, I’m saying—no, no, no, no, no. I made the distinction between hallucinogens and drugs, you know, and pharmaceutically produced drugs. And there are experiments with that. But I’m saying that: let’s think of technology with those two templates. And I really like to leave that as my summation.

33:24

Eisler

Well, there would be degrees—well, it’s somewhat oversimplified, but certainly a more equitable distribution of wealth, wouldn’t you say?

33:37

McKenna

And an abandonment of the notion of private property.

34:07

McKenna

Oh, I thought we just had this [???].

34:14

McKenna

Well, it seems we moved around this afternoon. There’s a great concern as to how to realize this in the here and now, one-on-one, which is encouraging because otherwise it remains an abstraction. Bringing these models forward into the present isn’t easy, because the context for over a thousand or more years has been set by the dominator culture. Nevertheless, what we have going for us is that the partnership way of thinking is really scripted into the bones of the planet. This is how it’s always been done. This is how nature does it. The Darwinian model of nature that we’ve inherited from the nineteenth century is simply another dominator fiction used to reinforce dominator mechanisms. The fact is that what nature really maximizes is cooperation, integration, and mutuality of support and relationship.

What we’re really trying to do—what becoming post-historical means, I think—is: removing the veil between ourselves and nature that the historical experience has raised. Because the historical experience has been an alienating experience, has caused our perceptions to rise to the mere surfaces of things, and our feelings to be completely undercut and invalidated. And what we have to do is see more deeply into the context of being and the situation in which we find ourselves, and to see that we are of it. It’s a seamless web. The dynamics that rule the biological and natural world are the dynamics that are going to work for us. We didn’t fall here out of the sky. We weren’t made by a jealous God who set us loose in a kind of reservation. We are of the stuff of this place, and its dynamics can be our dynamics. The problem is one of awareness, realization, recovery of this perception, sharing it, revivifying it, and realizing it. That’s all.

36:57

Eisler

I have [???] to clarify something. I really have a need to clarify the private property issue, because I really don’t equate the partnership model with the abolition of private property. And I want to really clarify that. I think that it’s much more complex than that. And that—as I speak in The Chalice and the Blade—that what is going to be emerging, I hope, is a whole new economic model where we put in central value the caring work. That has traditionally, of course, been relegated to women and to so-called effeminate men. And we have that opportunity now as we move from industrial to post-industrial society, because we have to redefine what is productive work. And I really wanted to leave it with this idea that I think we’re going into a post-capitalist and post-socialist era. And just forgive me. I don’t need to have the last word, but I did want to say that.

38:02

McKenna

Well, I’ll have the first word tomorrow.

38:10

McKenna

Shall we take up where we left off or start somewhere else? Yes. Well, as I recall, at the close of the morning, what we had come to was talking about the primacy of the shamanic experience and where it fell as a causal factor into the genesis of partnership society and its dissolution into dominator society. To me, that’s tied up with—and I indicated this at the end of the morning—with the issue of the primacy of personal self experience. And that this is the cultural domain over which the turf war is fought between the dominator and the partnership way of thinking about things. Empowering ourselves through immersion in the felt moment is the partnership way of being. It is immediate. It is emotional. It is trans-linguistic. And it feeds itself. It nourishes.

The other way of relating to experience is through a set of canonical abstractions that are the unique property of a professional class that speaks a special language that the rest of us don’t understand. And for millennia, at least beginning with classical Greece, this has been how we in the West have done it. The mistake, you see, was when the Greeks stopped being fishermen and pulled their boats up on the sand and began to talk philosophy. That cut them off from the felt presence of immediate experience. Are you agreeing or do you need help?

So partnership is revivifying immediate experience. Well, then what are the limits of immediate experience? And this leads, in my mind, directly to the question of the psychedelic plant. It is possible to go from birth to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience. But it’s also to possible to make that same pilgrimage and never have a sexual experience. Well, since the center of my ethos is empowering the felt presence of the immediate, to me, those things are abominations—that withholding of involvement in the parameters of what one can know, but more importantly, what one can feel.

And this is a hard thing to put across in the present milieu because, believe it or not, very few people have had the psychedelic experience: the shamanically centered, thousand-volt center of the mandala experience. And it isn’t about who has taken drugs and who has not. I constantly talk to people where, by careful questioning, you can satisfy yourself that though they’ve taken ten different kinds of drugs multiples of times, they never actually touched the pith essence of the experience. Because the drugs, the plans are not a sine qua non. They are necessary, but not sufficient. What is also necessary is a good heart, clear intention, and a setting which reinforces and focuses what is being attempted.

But to me the big news—I wonder if the back will go next. Last time I didn’t mention it, and then I swore, I should mention it, your world is falling apart all around you, and you just keep going. Anyway, to me the really big news is that there is this dimension of reality that is accessible to 90% of everyone in some form or another, but that is secret because of the need in this culture to preserve sort of this flat earth myth. It isn’t a flat earth, but a mute nature. That’s the myth that the dominator culture must keep in place. Sartre actually said this. He said nature is mute. Therefore, the world gives no compass for the formation of human ethics. This is psychosis, this kind of talk, because nature is not mute. You need only have ears to hear. And the ears to hear the message of nature are the practices and techniques of ecstatic shamanism, which is still alive and well in the Amazon, Indonesia, in Southeast Asia. It has only been lost to us as we’ve made this peregrination into a dominance fantasy about nature.

I mean, Riane mentioned this this morning: the conquest of space, smashing the atom, all of these metaphors of violence and unrestrained domination, as though somehow nature has to be violated to be understood. My brother—whom some of you know, I’m sure; is a brilliant neurochemist and biochemist—said something to me once which has stuck with me. He said they build enormous atom smashers and instruments for studying high energy in nature, but it’s perfectly obvious that the most interesting things in nature go on at voltages considerably below that of a flashlight battery—in leaves, in organs, in fertilized eggs and spurns and spores. These are the subtle processes in nature. What 2,000 years of pursuing a dominator theory and trying to understand nature has brought us to is the potential for nuclear armageddon and an inability to solve the three-body problem. Which means essentially we have remained in an extremely infantile situation with regard to the living state. And the living state is the precondition of our being.

This is why I think Rupert’s work is so important. He offers a new understanding of the living state. And upon that new biology—that new empowering of life to be perceived as what it is—I think there will be a new sociology that will empower us to see ourselves as we are and as we can be. So that’s why I think the psychedelic experience is so important: because it sets the parameters of possible immediate experience. And it’s been sold back to us in vitiated form by every tinhorn guru since the last glaciation. What they’re selling is their interpretations, their metaphors, their poetry imposed upon it.

And Riane has brought me close to seeing this; that the real news is that it is within us. That we need not genuflect to these hierarchies which actually play havoc with the truth that is there to be perceived. It’s not a matter of seeking the answer, it’s about facing it. And this means nature—which is the goddess, which is the feminine, which is the symbiotic and partnership ground out of which humanity comes; men and women. You might respond to that.

48:06

Eisler

You’re like fireworks. I told you that yesterday. You just illuminate so many things so quickly and then cast from one to the other. But I will do it in my own nonlinear fashion. I guess since you ended with the goddess, I would like to begin with the goddess. I had requested that somebody bring a book. Do we have it here, The Chalice and the Blade? You have a copy. Because on the cover is a picture. And sometimes a picture can speak louder than a thousand words. This is this one of thousands and thousands and thousands of figurines. Not all of them look like this. I want to make that very clear. But she happens to manifest something that I think is very important in terms of our conversation and our celebration here. Because once she, if you look at her, I think you can see her because of the great contrast with the red. If you first look at her, you can see of course the breasts and, you know, that—female. But actually the shape is phallic, isn’t it? So she’s androgynous, isn’t she? And then the other thing that you see if you look at her very closely: she has a beak. She’s a bird goddess. She’s part animal. Of course, the angels are the descendants of the bird goddess.

49:29

Eisler

Not in this picture. And that’s a very interesting thing because, as a matter of fact, there are many inscriptions and many of the—and early language, early writing, if you will. I guess one of my favorites is the cross. I want to tell you about the cross, because we’re talking about different meanings of different things, of different basic symbols, including the symbol of shamanism, depending on which of these two possibilities for us, these two models, which [???].

It’s very interesting because many of the early figures of the goddess had inside in them the cross. But it was in the, very often it was like the X form of the cross. And what it stood for of course was the unity, the various points of the compass. Because these people were very sophisticated astronomically, as you probably have surmised. Any of you who have looked at Stonehenge reproductions, for example. But even if you go back way into the Paleolithic 20,000 years ago, they were already into some really remarkable record-keeping. Some of it may have been, as a matter of fact, begun with women’s menstrual cycles. I think that arresting fact that the life-giving blood comes, must have really inspired some women to sort of figure out when was this, essentially supernatural event, be experienced again.

But I want to stay with the cross. Then, later on, in Egyptian hieroglyphics, the cross is still a symbol of life. But when you move into the dominator era, what you begin to find—and you find it way before the Romans and way before the crucifixion—you find that the Assyrians had this lovely habit of impaling people on crosses. You see, [???], this whole panorama of the whole city practically impaled. I mean, just brutality.

So the cross became what? It became not a symbol of life and regeneration, but it became a symbol of brutal death. And, of course, then comes the early Christianity Jesus preaching a partnership spirituality, associating freely with women, violating—even in the official gospels you find this, of course—his disciples marveling that he associates with women, and with no one else present, like the woman at the [???]. You know, I mean, [???] probably get killed for doing that. And so it was in this very rigidly male dominant, you know, very hierarchic, violent society that he was, you know, challenging. And he broke those taboos and he preached partnership.

And, of course, what we do in these hybrid societies: the women are ignored, basically, and ridiculed and forget it, but the men are usually crucified and canonized. And so, well, you kill them. And then you say, oh, weren’t they wonderful? Martin Luther King, Gandhi, you know. I mean, all of—so that’s, you know, so of course, you know, he gets crucified on a cross, but early Christianity tries to again revive the old symbolism, doesn’t it, of the cross as a symbol not only of lying on this awful thing, but the old symbolism of life and regeneration, rebirth. Rebirth.

And of course Christianity, obviously, is a very direct descendant of the old religion, only a very interesting thing happened along the way, folks, which is that the great mother—you know, the goddess? Well, at first he was dropped completely. And then when the Troubadour movement, this was a time of tremendous partnership resurgence. And we don’t have time for it, but it’s very, very fascinating because the Troubadour courtly love has some relationship to tantric yoga, and we won’t go into that. But, I mean, I just want to leave you with that, because it’s really extraordinary, the commonalities we begin to see.

But the Troubadour introduced this thing called mariology, which the church authorities say this is unheard of. It has never been heard of. Well, nonsense! It was a revival of the ancient worship of the goddess. And the people danced in the streets of Lyon, you know, when the church finally co-opted it and said, okay, folks, we’ll accept it. But! She is now the only mortal figure in the Holy Family. So we’ve got this real absurdity of a Holy Family with a divine father and a divine son and some parvenue, you know: this woman who just happens to come along. Right? So we maintain the dominator character.

And of course that went along with what then the cross again becomes: the cross as a symbol of the crusade of the Inquisition. It again really truly becomes a symbol not of life and the love of life and of regeneration, but of death and the Ku Klux Klan, with its white cross is a very, very good modern illustration.

And the reason I think I went through this with you is not only because intrinsically it’s so interesting to really reclaim some of our basic and ancient symbols. Because all of these symbols can have so many meanings is what I’m really trying to say, depending on what prism we use for it. But to really lead into perhaps a look at shamanism from that perspective, because I have sort of a sense about the shamanic experience that we’re talking about a number of experiences. And I feel sort of the need to say again that I feel that there are many paths to what—I don’t even know that we need to call it the shamanic experience, because shamanism per se, as you pointed out, is the healer. That is the healing function. And it may mean not only physical healing, but spiritual healing, which we are now rediscovering, folks. It’s related. The ancients kind of understood that.

But now we’re beginning to understand, with holistic medicine, that the two go together, that nature and spirituality are related. Perhaps we can speak about it as the ecstatic experience; the experience of gnosis. And I would say that there are many paths to the experience of gnosis. That the use of nature involves not only the use of plants, but the use of even our own breath, which is a way, you know, through meditation. It involves sexual—you know, tantric yoga has the remnants of what I think was a view of sex as sacrament, still in it. But of course, it’s become very male centered. You know, everything is he gets access to the to shakti, which is of course, you know, the creative force of the goddess, through the woman. But somehow she’s become this passive agent of the whole thing. Go ahead. I’m sorry.

56:14

Eisler

And isn’t that amazing? Because, you see, shakti, of course, the whole concept is that you have access—well, look, I mean, the vulva, the vagina was sacred in the Paleolithic. You see what we call the inverted triangle. And it’s sacred. And you see that in Indian iconography. So yes, I mean, this was, you know, the idea that this is a cunt, you know -- our worst and most contentious swear word—would have been such blasphemy, as it should be again. To us. We have to reclaim, really, the spirituality of our sexuality. But I think the sexual experience can be—not always, you know, I mean, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be very serious and solemn all the time, but it can also be another avenue that is a natural avenue.

So I would like to perhaps put this in the context of larger paths. And of course, we all know about the path of having that a-ha experience of the oneness—through fasting, through chanting, through all kinds of hypnotic things. But there’s no question in my mind that the plant experience is one of the quickest and one of the most powerful avenues. But the real issue—and I want to really talk about it. I was talking to you earlier. I want to put it in the modern context in the sixties. Because that’s a very important case history for us, and we must learn. If we don’t want to learn from the past, we really are in deep trouble.

What happened in the sixties, as you know, was that, yes, that the use of hallucinogens was part of this awakening—you know, the flower children, the counterculture. But then some really dreadful things happened. And what happened, of course, was the co-option of the drug culture as, again, the opiate of the people. The politics, the true politics in the sense of transformation—not Republican, Democrat, or, you know, Reagan, or, you know, whatever—but the true politics of transformation from the dominated to the partnership society got completely co-opted in this through the drug experience.

And historically, the use of opiate, for example, in China is a very vivid example—but hashish, you know, you name it, you’ve got it—has literally been a way to get people to accept the most miserable, the most virulent, the most brutal of oppressions from their overlords. So I think that it’s so important, if we’re talking about this as a technology, that it can be a technology of domination just as easily as it can be a technology of actualization. And I’m not going to dispute that what you’re saying, that some of the natural plants are less likely to be used that way, that it’s mostly the chemical ones. But I’m not a hundred percent sure, because look at the opium.

59:03

McKenna

Well, I don’t think opium was really a problem, number one, until the British as a matter of state policy manipulated opium production in the Far East, and then secondly, until the invention of morphine and the family of synthetics. Opium use, as you mentioned, goes back to Minoan times and probably earlier. No, we have a remarkable ability to pervert. And I think it was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, one of the founders of general systems theory, who said people are not machines, but in every situation where they are offered the opportunity to behave like machines, they will so behave.

We have to be—this maybe brings up something we should talk about because it was requested and it seems to remain here. And this is the problem of addiction and habit. And addiction is merely a special type of habit. And I think we can agree that habit in all forms kills what we want to bring to flower in life. Because, as a habit sets in, attention can go elsewhere. And then that part of life is somehow on automatic. It has become a machine-like function.

So we are now being told that we’re in the midst of a tremendous political crisis that goes under the banner of the drug problem. But the drug problem is an addiction problem. And the addiction is in my mind the addiction of intelligence agencies to vast amounts of untraceable money. This is the addiction that drives the global drug problem.

But of course it is true that there are chemical dependencies. And this is a very interesting thing about human beings. Something—and I’ll talk about this a bit more tomorrow—but something about our ability to be omnivorous, to eat all kinds of things, has laid us open to, perhaps manipulation is too strong a word, but certainly to evolutionarily selective pressures that are not ordinarily present. Because most animals eat a few foods. Many animals eat only one food. Our ability to be omnivorous has exposed us over the last four or five million years to a vast number of mutagenic and synergistic compounds that may have been responsible for such things as the prolongation of adolescence in our species, the way in which lactation occurs. A number of physiological factors in our makeup that we take for granted may be fairly recent acquisitions having to do with our omnivorous diet.

And drugs come into this at some point, too. Because, for instance in the case of psilocybin, very small amounts of psilocybin in the diet are not detectable at all as a psychological impression. But tests have shown that very small amounts of psilocybin in the diet can spur increased visual acuity. Well, you don’t have to have studied too much evolutionary biology to know that if you have a population of animals and something in the food chain is increasing the visual acuity of some of them, those animals are going to have a more successful reproductive strategy than their competitors, and that trait will be reinforced and strengthened.

So we have been sculpted by nature through our foraging habits. And Riane stressed the notion of template, and I think that’s very important. Human beings are templated out of nature. We have been shaped by unusual evolutionary forces. And when you look at us, we clearly play an unusual evolutionary role. We are some kind of trigger species for mode shifts that affect the entire planet. And if you take the notion of Gaia seriously and don’t simply think of Gaia—if you don’t simply replace the old man with the long white beard with a beautiful young woman as an abstraction, but actually try to ask: what is Gaia? Gaia is the set of integrated informational control systems which regulate and maintain and stabilize all life and all biological processes on this planet. And the way this is done is through chemical messengers, enzymes, stimulants, depressants, enhancers. All of these things push and pull on the morphogenetic field in which everything on the planet is bound. To me the great miracle on this planet is us. We are the great unlikelihood. If this planet were as it was even five million years ago, Darwinian mechanics (properly modified) would be sufficient to account for what was present: natural ecosystems, animals in competitive and adaptive relationship. But we really are as alien as an alien spacecraft would be. We are the great imponderable here. And I think that nature is at play with itself, and is calling out of the primates a gene swarm that is in self-reflection of what is otherwise a planetary intent. And that’s why we feel why our hearts are so open to these ineffable emotions about destiny and transformation.

And someone this morning asked about history and what was it good for. It’s the long turn of the spiral. The prodigal sun is somehow in a better position for having made the peregrination, the journey into alienation, and then returns enriched to the tribal encampment. I think of European civilization as a prodigal phenomenon, but a prodigal phenomenon that will be redeemed when we return to the tribal societies we split away from six, seven thousand years ago—but return now with a tremendous empowering knowledge of how to realize the shamanic dream. But I don’t see this as a product of ego, of decisions made by far-seeing men and women. It’s much more like a dance. It is a dance to which we respond in our souls. And often we don’t understand why we do the things that we do. But ultimately, as Riane said, it’s the unweaving and reweaving of a tapestry into a finer, clearer pattern.

And to return this to the subject of addiction and how it fits in: addiction is falling away from clarity, falling away from the felt presence of the moment. And everything addicts, and everything must therefore be viewed with a certain amount of wry suspicion. I think we didn’t get where we were by making unfounded assumptions. We got to this place by being very careful where we put our attention. And I think we’ve done rather well. There’s the kind of denigration of the historical process, but that’s if you come from the school that believes we’re fallen angels. If you come from the school that believes we’re risen apes, then we haven’t done too badly.

1:08:26

McKenna

That’s exactly it. And culture is an addiction. That’s why I maintain in the question of the psychedelics: we have to define these things operationally. And really, the psychedelics are the enzymes which dissolve habitual behavior patterns and return us to a tabula rasa, where then new instructions can be etched in and new pathways explored. That’s the reason that the psychedelics are so unsettling to the establishment. Because they are not part of the “drug problem,” because they involve very small numbers of people and very small amounts of money, but very big ideas and very large willingness to question the idols of the tribe. And that’s much more unsettling than a few illicit millionaires.

1:11:00

McKenna

Is it to me?

1:11:03

McKenna

Well, maybe we both have something to say. Riane mentioned the sixties as a less than ideal situation as it turned out. If you look back at the literature of the underground in the sixties, certain things that we take completely for granted are totally absent. One of them is: any sense of the historical context of hallucinogenic and shamanic ecstasy. There is no talk of shamanism. There is a little bit of talk about peyote. But no real awareness that—those people in the 1960s thought they were discovering something brand new, not the oldest religion in the world.

The way we create a context—to address your question—is by creating a community. We can advance no faster than the envelope of language in which we are embedded. And the material manifestation of our linguistic sphere is our affinity group, our community. That’s why I think one of the most important things about these kinds of get-togethers is for you people to see and recognize each other. Because the awareness of these things is still a very closely held thing. And you should recognize in each other your affinity group. You’re self-selected by yourselves to be here today.

And in the spirit of the partnership and ignoring the hierarchy, it is not—I abhor all this guru worship and all this stuff, because it is just a bunch of crap. Nobody knows anything more than anybody else. Transformation is a community project. It can’t be anything else. But Riane, you might want to say something else.

1:13:05

Eisler

Yes, I do want to say—well, I of course agree with you completely that the creation of community is essential. But I would define community more broadly in the sense that it is not enough that we have our little islands, if you will. Because in order to survive in the “real world” we either change that world, or we’re constantly being pulled into dominator modes of thinking and of rationalizing what we do and of behaving. So that’s the first point.

I would like to say that there are some very clear strategies that I think are very, very important. One of them has been until now been generally seen sort of being sort of impractical. So it relates to this whole idea of education, but education on a far deeper level than what we’ve often talked about. And of course it also relates to this whole notion of morphogenetic fields, of a kind of a telepathic kind of thing that happens with images.

Now, I think that one of the most important tasks that we have before us now—and we are all creative people. I mean, our creativity—really, the dominator model and creativity are antithetical to each other, so the image of the starving artist is very appropriate for the dominator model. It’s very inappropriate for a society that values the creativity that would be more of a partnership society is for us to create images that are not just—I think the age of protest, you know? Of being against.

I met a lovely young woman, a sixteen-year-old young woman, and she said, “When I read The Chalice and the Blade, I go to a school where”—because they’re always protesting against everything—“And I suddenly realized that what they’re protesting against is the dominator system. And that what we really have to do is to move beyond that, and to begin to create the images that are appropriate to a partnership society.” So I’m turning in terms of ideas, in terms of visual images, in terms of course of media, the arts, to begin to replace. Because if you go into—this is one of the things with the use of, you know, what is in your imagination? If your imagination is so overcrowded with dominator images, are you really going to be able to surface, you know, and have this transformation? So I think that’s a very practical thing. Those of you who are in the media: take it very, very seriously, please. And it’s fun, anyway, to work this way. And I think if some of you are in the media—I spent an evening with some of the Hollywood people recently. Basically, what we were talking about was this idea that now is the time. Because people at a certain point of addiction get the saturation. And the addiction to violence and to depersonalized, you know, mechanical sex. And, you know, I mean, I think we’ve gotten to the point where people are just sort of like, oh my God, they’re hungry for something else. This is our moment. This is our opportunity. So images are extremely important.

And I don’t mean—because we live by stories. That’s another thing. People live by stories. We don’t—I mean, science tells us stories, too. And the selfish gene story, which is an upstate, of course, of original sin, you know. I mean, what else is new? You know, now it isn’t us, but it’s the gene, somehow, the selfish thing. We live by these stories. So it’s up to us to bring out new stories. And the stories can be from science. It’s very important that they be from science. Stories from biology that are showing us that in the body, for example, there’s, if you will, much more partnership, much more cooperation going on, than there is hierarchy, you know, for the organism. You know, the liver and the heart, I mean, they’re not just by themselves. It all sort of interconnects and interrelates.

1:16:54

Eisler

Well, the oxygen goes to the brain. But is the brain in charge, or is the brain part of a large neurological system that really is a transmitter and also an imager for us? I mean, I think that there’s much more than the brain being, you know, the general in charge here. That’s the picture we’ve been given, of course, right? Because it fits with the pyramid model. But is it the brain or just the—I mean, we’ve been talking about, really, gnosis; knowledge. Is that really coming from the brain? Or is that something else? Another receptor that we have? Is the brain perhaps a receptor that can use a converter, a creative agent, rather than a general? I prefer that image, and I think it’s more accurate. And I think if you talk to people today who are doing the work with the brain, they’ll probably move more towards, you know, the reality of that second image.

And the other thing, I hate to say it to you people, but we do have to talk about economics. I mean, it’s all very well to talk about the mystical experience and about imagery. But we have to restructure. We have to restructure. And we have to restructure the whole darn planet so that it’s more of a partnership. And that doesn’t mean that there won’t be some people who have more and some people who have less, but it’s absolutely inexcusable with our level of technological development, including birth control technologies, to have the kind of idiocy. But, you see, the lunacy is part of the dominator system, because it’s not by accident that the most rigidly dominator systems are the ones who are so rabidly against family planning, who are so rabidly against reproductive freedom for women, who are so rabidly against any other role for women, any other definition for women, other than basically male-controlled technologies of reproduction. You know, breeders. Breeders, preferably, of men’s sons. I mean, that doesn’t have to be, right?

So it’s really—I mean, using the most advanced technologies to move into a partnership era is one of the most extraordinary challenges. And I think that that’s really what this is about. It is not just to sit and contemplate ourselves, but to actually use this in an action mode, too. And putting out important ideas is very important, too. I’m not—that’s part of the action. I’m sorry, yes.

1:20:17

Eisler

And I’m glad you made that distinction, because clearly all of us who lived through the sixties knew that the use of grass and the use of the hallucinogens, it was a community building. It was really, to a very large extent, the building of partnership. And that is not what I meant. What I meant was that—part of it was the cocaine coming in, but part of it was also LSD, I think. I mean, it was just the whole idea of shifting from drug as a revelation experience, as a transformation experience, to one that has a terrific function in the dominator society, which is the addiction, which is to keep you right there without taking any action. That is what I meant, and I’m glad you clarified that.

1:21:02

McKenna

Yes, I think what reared its ugly head and shot down the 1960s was profit. And the fact that the—I have no problem with LSD per se, but it has one quality which really flaws it. And that is that a single chemist in his basement can produce millions and millions of doses. That immediately raises it to the level of a social menace. Because when you talk about millions of doses of a deconditioning agent, it means you’re going head to head with the tough guys. And also, when you’re talking about being a single person being able to make millions of doses, then you’re talking about multiple millions of dollars. And immediately the possibility of keeping things from getting out of hand is, I think, really diminished. The key is plant compounds and substances which have inherent trickle factors in them, where you can never get too much together at any one time, and nobody can ever get too rich, and then the mystery stays—the plants are like this, and this keeps them going.

But I wanted to say something more about this context, and sort of not in great detail, and semi-tongue in cheek, but to show you how context works and how dominator society both insidiously invades our conception of things and also might be equally insidiously plotted against. One of the things that we take utterly for granted, I think, is the calendar. We live in a calendar of 365 days. It’s a solar calendar. That means that, relative to the fixed stars, the equinoctial and solsticeal points are fixed. And this is a lie, or it perpetuates a misconception. It perpetuates the conception that things endure and that flux is an illusion. The solar calendar has built into it deep propagandistic assumptions in favor of the dominator model.

And to see what I mean, just imagine, however seriously you care to, that we changed the calendar to a calendar with a day length of 384 days, so that our year was 13 lunations, and had 19 more days in it than the solar year. If we were to adopt a calendar like this, all holidays and great festivals would do what is called precessing: they would move 19 days a year. So that, when you were a child, you would recall Christmases in winter, but you would recall that in your adolescence Christmas fell in summer, and so forth. And every 19 years the great festivals would return to where they had been relative to the fixed stars.

Well, this may seem fairly abstract and removed from common experience, but in fact, because this is sort of the great frame in which all the other little frames are suspended, we operate at a tremendous disadvantage, because we are embedded in a patriarchal solar calendar which reinforces the false notion of permanence and stability. The I Ching hexagram 49 is the hexagram Revolution, and you might turn to it expecting a treatise on courtly politics or something like that. But what you actually read there is the news that the magician is a calendar maker. A strange notion, but it’s precisely addressing what I’m trying to say: that this is one of the ways in which we might revision our world to accentuate flux, and flow, and change, and the transience, and the coming to be, and the falling away, rather than this constipated, death-denying, paternalistic solar kind of point of view.

So that’s one notion of how context might change. And it’s an interesting idea. It’s not illegal to advocate to calendrical reform. It’s probably not occurred to anyone, but believe me, in prehistory and in early Chinese history, tremendous battles were fought, and these were issues of great importance. Because the founders of new dynasties understood that the way to establish their reign was to sweep away all previous calendrical conceptions and establish a zero year, and then create in that context all the sub-context of their political agenda.

1:26:29

Eisler

It’s the new order. And I think that that’s so interesting, because we are, of course, many of us (and I’m sure many of us here) are going back to the celebration of some of the most ancient festivals—the nature festivals, the solstices, the equinoxes, the full moon, the young moon. These were the most ancient holy days, because they were congruent with the rhythm of nature. And I think you’re quite right. What the solar calendar did, it sort of nullifies that whole cyclic, spiral quality of life.

But I want to get back in a moment, in that context, to the issue of the use of psychedelics. Because the use of them as a medium, carefully thought through and reconstituted, certainly going back to some of its ancient roots—as we’re doing here, you know, with some of the music—but also adapting it for today and for tomorrow. That really relates to the whole issue of calendar too. I mean, to the issue of when: when are the times of the year when you do this. Because regardless of anything else, if we are to engage in this practice on a random and very frequent basis, we’re not going to have a very productive economy. I mean, it’s just a very simple equation. You know, because it’s sort of easy to wash away, then, and to really not be creative. You know, so it’s an issue, I think we have to address that issue, don’t we? And it goes with the issue of calendar, it goes with the issue of ritual. I mean, these things are interconnected.

1:28:08

McKenna

Yes, your remarks make me think of something Omer Stewart said, who was a botanist and anthropologist. And I don’t know how serious he was, but he felt that the great transition in plant consciousness came with the invention of agriculture: that the hunting peoples could take the ecstatic hallucinogens because you could sleep in the next day. But once you got into agriculture, corn became the important plant, and there was no more getting stoned because everybody had to get up early and just get out there and grow the corn.

1:28:49

Eisler

Well, of course we don’t have to get up early and grow the corn today, but it’s good.

1:28:52

McKenna

Does that mean we can get stoned?

1:28:57

Eisler

There is something, there is something to be a holy thing. And that’s a sacramental thing. And that really relates to holy days, and to this whole notion of it being done within a context that we have to create. I mean, we have to do nothing more or less than to create a culture. But fortunately we have a lot of the strength to work with.

1:29:19

McKenna

Yes, a successful psychedelic trip absolutely kills the desire to do it again very soon.

1:29:28

Eisler

So it’s a self-limiting experience.

1:29:30

McKenna

Yes, it’s a self-limiting experience. And the way to know whether you’re doing it correctly or not is: if what you’re doing doesn’t make you afraid, you’re not doing it right.

1:29:48

McKenna

Wonderful. Wonderful.

1:30:02

McKenna

So we thought for this closing session this afternoon that we would hope to hear from you, and I vow to give shorter answers.

1:30:14

Eisler

We’ve made a pact here. Because we could just go on. So we want to hear from you.

1:31:05

McKenna

Well, I’ll start. I am in a committed long-term relationship. Many of you know my partner, Kat. We’ve been together since 1975. We met in 1967 in Jerusalem, actually. But we were on different paths and didn’t really see each other for nine years. And we have two children—Finn, a boy, ten, and Clea, a girl, seven. And Riane said yesterday that partnership is preferable because it’s fun. It certainly is fun. It’s also a great challenge. It is the challenge, I think.

There’s a wonderful saying that addresses the problem of ego in the dominator situation. It’s Uzbekistani, this saying. It’s that “a man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he’s married.” So partnership is a wonderful opportunity for humility and for seeing oneself as others see them. And… well, it’s everything. I can’t say enough about it. It’s the coniunctio. It’s the great challenge. It drives one to distraction. It is perhaps the transcendental object that is most personally experienced by each of us.

I think it’s fair to say that in our individual lives where magic is most present is in the matter of forming partnerships and bonding. I mean, you know, a typical example is that you can see a woman across the crowded room—speaking as a man—and something passes between you. And then later you find out that, well, she’s the daughter of the corporation president or the university chancellor and doesn’t speak English, and is already married to a French count, and so forth and so on. But, lo and behold, circumstances evolve, and she divorces the French count, she learns to speak English, she gets an apartment across the hall, and this falls into place. Like magic—in fact, magic. And so we can summon this power to the things we care about most. And what we care about most is, I think, falling into this, the dyad. I really think that people come in two pieces, and you sort of have to put the pieces together, and then you get a curious beast indeed that can maybe ride a longer distance, I’m not sure. What’s your story?

1:34:34

Eisler

My story I’d like to share with my partner; with David. Do you want to go first, David, or should I? Okay, I’ll go first. Okay. I started off my partnership with David only eleven years ago. And it was a miracle is what it was. I had a prior marriage, and that was really a terrific learning experience, I guess, once I was out [???] unpleasant thing. But it was a classic dominator relationship and we were both miserable. I mean, I was really getting pretty good at manipulating, actually, which is what you have to get to if you’re in a dominator relationship. And it really brings out the worst in everybody. You know, the guy who’s supposed to be the—who never, you know, I mean, he never apologizes. He always, you know, he knows! I mean, by golly, you know, his ego. And of course he knows that this isn’t working, and so he’s very tense about the whole thing, you know, as he leaves his laundry for you to pick up on the floor. And you hate it, and you begin to hate him. And so you start manipulating. And so after a while, you know, you’re both miserable.

I mean, that’s really the classic pattern, isn’t it? And people stay. And the whole difference between dominator relationships, it’s like, you know, heterosexual long-term relationships and partnership relationships. It’s a bonding, and one is really coercion. I mean, it used to be, you know, the story of Don Jose killing Carmen. I mean, if you dare leave this guy for somebody else, he’ll kill you. That’s a pretty good motivation not to go right there. But a lot of it, of course, more recently has been economic, you know, especially for the women. They just couldn’t get out of this rotten situation. So they kidded themselves and everybody else.

So now we’re starting from scratch, right? And we’re all saying, wait a minute, this old stuff has made everybody literally ill. And so I was so blessed. I found David, and David found me, and we met, and he came over for lunch, and he never went home. But actually he did go home, because I had an appointment with an accountant that afternoon, and I had chosen that I was going to go to a movie that evening. And he said to me, “You really have to go to that movie.” And I said, “No, I don’t have to go to that movie.”

So he came back. And I have to share something with you which is sort of funny. I was so scared of getting married again, because getting married, you know, especially in my generation, you carry that dominator luggage of wife/husband, you know, and that programming. So we waited ten years and we finally got married. And it was wonderful, because it was the three of us—we were married by a woman, which was really a terrific experience. I mean, just the three of us, and she was a gorgeous, wonderful woman wearing this beautiful robe, these colorful robes, and we all cried, and David read me his politely, and I read him my vows, and it was a sacred moment for us. And so we do have arguments. I mean, in case you’re interested—and partnership doesn’t mean perfect either. But we also have to [???] techniques for working them out sometimes.

1:38:12

Eisler

That would be fair.

1:38:47

Eisler

I think there’s a difference.

1:43:22

Eisler

It comes out as reevaluate and co-counseling, and you start off by saying what’s new and good, which really brings you to the here and now.

1:45:20

Eisler

Usually you know. Because it’s the person who’s really ready to… rah!

1:45:33

Eisler

Exactly, David.

1:47:16

Eisler

But say why, because you had a relationship where they were discussed on both sides, you know, ambivalence towards the mother from David, and—

1:49:43

Eisler

If I had known that I would be tested! I had not a clue.

1:50:15

Eisler

I love you. Well, you know, I think that the issue relates to this whole question of coercive versus voluntary bonding. The dominator model, it—well, think of the whole idea, you know, of the sixth form of slavery that we have archaeologically documented was actually the enslavement of women from conquered communities, even in the Bible. You know, it says that—the wonderful directions, always supposedly from Jehovah: “Kill all the women who have known a man,” but, you know, kill everybody, as a matter of fact, but only those girls, children, who have not known a man, you keep for yourself, right? I mean, that’s supposed to be God’s command to you.

But anyway, so it was a very coercive kind of situation if you look at it, you know, from that perspective; if women are seen as property. And a lot of what we’ve seen has been the coercive bonding. But I’m also convinced that, given the tremendous bonding that comes from mutually satisfying affection through sexual relationships, the sharing of the peak experience, and the friendship, that is impossible. I mean, how can you have friendship, as a matter of fact, in a model and a dominator marriage where the women live in complete apartheid? I mean, good morning, you know, let’s go and, you know, do it for a few minutes, maybe you’ll give me a son, and then, goodbye. I mean, that’s not very conducive to voluntary bonding, is it?

So I’m very convinced that this whole issue of monogamy or not monogamy really can only be looked at in terms of these two situations. That’s not to say that that kind of positive reinforcement—you know, as Skinner would say of the sexual bonding, of the affection, of the friendship—that would motivate you to want to stick around with that one person quite a lot; that that would necessarily be an exclusive union. I don’t know that. But I think that there’s a lot that, in a partnership kind of relationship, would really bring people to want to stick around with each other, because it’s just more fun, and because there are advantages to a partnership for all kinds of reasons—bringing up children. But again, if we have more of a clan situation where there are more parents for each child, so to speak, that exclusivity no longer becomes the issue.

I think it’s a very complex issue. And the issue is becoming a very real one today with the AIDS epidemic. And I want to say something about AIDS which may strike you as being rather strange. But if you think about it, it’s very much a product of trauma, traumatization, a tearing of tissue, which is really a dominator form of sex. And the rapid spread of it through the homosexual community, of course, was largely due to this, and the fact that it’s spreading like wildfire in certain parts of Africa, it has to be related to the genital mutilation and the scarring and the weakness of the tissue that that builds in, as well as some of the really brutal kind of sexual practices.

So it’s almost like nature giving us some feedback here: that what the sexual revolution is about is not brutal, mechanical, screw everybody and everything inside, that it’s about something about maybe beginning to reclaim sex with sacrament a little bit, and friendship and bonding. And that’s not a moral position, it’s just simply a way of looking at it from a perspective that may be more congruent with what we all kind of would enjoy. So that’s my answer. It’s not an absolute answer.

1:53:46

McKenna

Well, naturally, I think—like everyone who’s in a committed relationship—I’ve given this considerable thought, and it seems to me what the tension about monogamy in modern society can be traced to, or the sense of perhaps dissatisfaction with monogamy, can be traced to a distortion and betrayal of adolescence, and that the problem begins in adolescence by repressing adolescent sexuality. And this, then, creates a sense of irrecoverable loss, and this weird sort of haunting feeling that you didn’t get it right, and so life is not being fair to you. And then a multitude of sexual encounters is looked to as an answer to this. But I think that monogamy represents a deepening of bonding into a kind of lifelong project that is entirely spiritual. Not that it doesn’t have a physical and an ecstatic and an erotic side, but it all goes together to create something that should not be expected of adolescence and should not be preached as the ideal at all stages of life.

1:55:23

Eisler

What would you like to do? Would you like to ask questions? Yes?

1:55:55

Eisler

I’ll take that first and then you can say something. You put your finger on a very, very important, essential element of the system: of how the dominator system maintains itself. Regardless of how it really came about—and we talked a little about that yesterday, and maybe we’ll talk about it more today—what happened subsequently was that the ways of maintaining the system became institutionalized. They became habitual. And one of the ways of maintaining the system, which may have started with privation—with promise, if you will; with the kind of thing that life called, you know, things you need for character-armoring—it may have started from natural reasons, you know, environmental reasons, but then it became part of child-rearing. And it’s not accidental that so many of the most warlike of these tribal societies that we still see today practice very barbaric forms of genital mutilation, because that’s a way of traumatically beginning already, very, very early—you know, these genital mutilations of women. I don’t know how many of you know that millions of women in Africa and in many of the Muslim nations have their clitorises cut off. I mean, we don’t like to talk about it, and yet I must talk about it, because we must understand that these are not just quaint ethnic customs. Neither was it a quaint ethnic custom, you know, the foot-binding that’s performed, you know, and it really mutilated the foot of Chinese women. These are all practices that become institutionalized in a dominated system of society, and we must recognize them as such. But of course it was also for males. The original circumcision of males in many of these cultures is really horribly painful.

So yes, from these very extreme forms to less extreme forms, and the fact that today—look, a tremendous partnership trend as Alice Miller, by the way. Any of you know the work of Alice Miller? She is fabulous. And she put her finger on it, because what she talks about is the institutionalization of dominator ways of child-rearing and—beg your pardon?

1:57:56

Eisler

And birth. Well, that’s another subject. I mean, what we’ve done with birth. But, you see, these are all the ways that we’ve done it very cleverly to maintain the system, which is killing us. But there’s time to leave them behind. But the thing that happened is that today—look, we no longer say, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” We call it child abuse. That is a very powerful partnership trend.

1:58:29

Eisler

Alright, I find that so fascinating, because again, it’s emerging. And you know where it’s emerging most visibly? You’re going to laugh. It’s in the corporate literature. Pick up Fortune magazine, and you find these big articles saying: what we need is a new type of leader. And what do we need specifically? Well, we don’t need this guy anymore, you know? The model of the manager as the cop, as the controller. But they’re finally discovering that that inhibits creativity. And productivity, thereby. What do we need? We need a leader that can inspire other people to work together in teams.

I mean, it’s very, very interesting. Obviously this is preparing the kind of leadership that can provide leadership in a partnership society. But I really want to say that the two images from the title of my book, The Chalice and the Blade, to be most visibly and dramatically conceptualized is two very different styles of leadership. You know, the blade is a leadership through fear. You will enjoy this, or else! You better obey, or you’ll be punished. And the challenge has from remote antiquity been the symbol of spiritual leadership, hasn’t it? Of regeneration, of creativity, of transformation, of illumination; of bringing forth in us, eliciting in every one of us, our greatest creativity, our greatest potential. That is the symbol of that kind of leadership.

2:00:18

Eisler

Well, you know, that would take another hour probably to really go into it, but there is a fascinating work by a man called Theodore Rojak, who basically put his finger on what some of these periods of warfare are really about. And he talked about World War I, and it was really a resurgence of the masculine, close masculine. Okay, I really have to say masculinity and femininity. Even what we associate in Jungian terms with the Yin and the Yang, are very much proud of, of dominators’ stereotypes. And as we unravel and we weave, we have to leave behind this idea that the feminine is passive and cold and dark, I mean considerate for a moment, doesn’t sound very good. And that the masculine is the active. As a matter of fact, in many of the earlier symbologies, it’s quite the opposite, so we have to untangle the symbols. But the point of it is that Rojak points out, as have others, that it was the resurgence of the masculine ethos, and contempt for women, contempt for the feminine. And so the Victoria era, of course, you know, being a predecessor of that, but it’s much more complicated in the Victorian era, because in the Victorian era some of the rejection by women of sex was also a rejection of servitude. Just as women going into convents in the middle ages, was a rejection of a form of family organization, where they were really male chattel, you know, they were sexual and economic property. So it’s very complicated. I won’t go into a lot of detail. Yes. Last night a woman brought up about the condition of women as single parents, and I was thinking in terms of the partnership shift and changing mode, what would you comment on the tendency of women to give up almost entirely on having a male partner, and for parents at least in America, male parents, to give up on the idea of continuing to nurture their children, or starting to nurture them, and to separate from their mothers? The hours is a period, I think, that you’ll agree with me, parents of conditions. It’s a period that we would call a period of tremendous systems, disequilibrium. And we know in terms of our own personal histories, that for parents that have been very, very rigid to change, we have to go through a very painful time, very often, as the old patterns begin to disintegrate, so that they can reform into something new. And I see a lot of what’s happening with the family as fitting into that. There are both trends towards partnership and still trends towards, you know, a dominator society. I mean, you know, it’s a constant tension between the two right now, but getting specifically to the issue of the single mother, I don’t think that it’s accidental that so many of the young men who have come out in this newer generation, who are rejecting the old male stereotype to varying degrees, came out of single mother homes, single family homes, single parent homes, because they did not have that, you know, if you cry, your father’s going to beat you kind of thing. That’s just one part of it, you see. But the real problem, you know, where are the good men? I mean, that’s really, the issues, well, the good men are in every man, but they have a tremendous struggle coming out at this time. And of course the eighties were a tremendously important period of hammering back in again the ideal of masculinity as the dominator. So it was a setback in very, very real ways, not just legal, but on the mythopoetic. And we live by stories. Those stories really set us back. So I think what I’m saying to you is that this is part of the dislocation that we’re seeing. I think that there’ll be some kind of regrouping as we move. There will continue to be family, but it won’t be procreation-oriented, male-headed, so-called patriarchal family. We’re going to be seeing much more partnership families. And these units will not only be units of women and men, it will be also of men and men and women and women of old people. In other words, family will be redefined in more terms of the clan of the extended family, but again, not the patriarchal clan. That’s as long as we do our work and we make it move in this direction, because obviously the choice is up to us. It’s not going to happen by chance. Karen, do you want to say something on this? Is the right question important to that? Well, I think you’re right. The clan motif is what is gaining ground. I think the nuclear family was such a theater of violence for the male ego to exercise itself. Every man a king, this is the banner under which the nuclear family flies. Certainly the people in the Amazon that I’m most familiar with, there are extreme dominators societies in the Amazon, and then there are societies that seem to have a more equitable arrangement. And it always seems to involve a larger social grouping than the family. As early as the 1950s, Marshall McLuhan was talking about what he called electronic tribalism. And this I think is coming to be, the nuclear family, as it is glorified in the 20th century, is largely an economic unit created out of 17th and 18th century forces. So it is not written as a man team. It is not in the genes. It’s a very temporary arrangement while the other, the clan arrangement, does have a morphogenetic field of millennia. And so I agree with that entirely. You have many more. I was curious when you were talking about the invasion of the North, why was it that they didn’t look at the partnership model and say, well that looks better than what we have, less integrate? And so I have a feeling there’s something very insidious in the domino model that makes it blind to the benefit of change. I think you’ve answered your own question. Yes? Can I say something about that? I recently have asked this very same question and I have an idea which I’ll try out on you, which is I think that the trigger event in this scenario that you’re asking about was the domestication of horses. And that that happening at that time, which is known that it did happen at that time, changed the relationship of these peripheral nomadic peoples and they suddenly saw opportunity, easy pickings, and so they mounted horses. It was an extension of the hunting psychology and began to be predatory upon these societies. Before the domestication of the horse, it was unthinkable because populations could not be rapidly transported and attacked and successfully overwhelm sedentary population. We’re going to talk more about technology, but that’s just one of the early instances where it was definitely technology that tilted events in favor of the dominator as against the partnership society. I think that’s a very important element and I’d like to expand it further to suggest that if we talk technology, we think of the first technology really after foraging is gathering and hunting, because animals forage, but gather is a hunter’s doot door. They have containers and they share, which is very, very human of course. But then you get this bifurcation, don’t you, of people who become primarily agrarian, although they do domesticate some animals and others who become in the more less hospitable area, but still sustainable to a certain extent. They become pastoralists and it’s a pity to me that there may be something about the dependence on meat in a pastoral society where you raise little animals that you kind of like, because they’re so cute and loving, but you know that you’re going to kill them. That’s the whole purpose of the whole exercise here, that that in itself may be part of the process. And there’s so many parts of the process of the character armoring of the deadening of empathy, but I would suggest that maybe in that technology itself there are, and I’m one, as we discussed yesterday, I don’t see one cause. I’m not a biological determinist or an environmental determinist or a listener, that determinist. I see a multiplicity affected, because complex systems, you always have a multiplicity affected. But I would suggest that that’s another fact. How do we help us to help the northern religions in a sore, liking, stronger violence? I don’t know that much about you, but doesn’t seem like they are very close to those forced invaders. I don’t know how they got that. Well, those are later, I mean, the, most of the societies about which we have written history are, that all of the societies about which we have written history, I could almost say, are already infected by what I think of as the Dominator Virus, which is spread by war. I mean, war really spreads it. It’s like a virus that spreads the Dominator System. And so that again is a, you are the one who asks all these marvelously three-hour questions. I love it. It’s a very complex thing, but I do have to tell you that, for example, in Finnish folklore, I haven’t to know this because I’ve traveled to Finland several times and have, in fact, my book, The Jalissand of Lades in a Choir for Publication, it will be published in Finnish. It’s been a Choir for Publication in Germany, France, Italy, Finland and also Brazil by now. It’s been marvelous. It’s been really extraordinary. But the thing about Finland is that there’s earlier folklore there, indicating very definitely an earlier partnership tradition with overlays then of the other thing. So it’s very complex. When you talk about history, history, I always think of history as being the period where you have written the record of written history. And when you link history, therefore, with the Dominator Theory, is there some, or the Dominator Model, is there some link you feel between the process of writing and the Dominator? No. Was that merely a question? Well, let me answer that question by giving you some information. The evidence now is, again, a UCLA archaeologist, Nalja Gimbutas, has, well, she has discovered it. Some of these were Vincatablets, which were thought to be classical Greek colonies and some obscure, you know, scripts. She has discovered that there is a language, a written language, a symbology, if you will, of writing, that emanitates Sumerian, you know, supposedly started in Sumer about 3,200 years ago. I could never understand that because, you know, it was found in a temple, which was still a temple dedicated to the goddess, and the priestesses. But presumably, the priestesses did the writing to keep mercantile records. And I could never understand why we as a species were still our first writing, just to figure out how many parts of something we own. It didn’t make sense, you know? And of course, what this earlier writing was, was a mythical poetic, symbolic, symbolic sacred language, which she is trying to decipher. But the most important example of a historical society, which still maintains its orientation primarily to the partnership model is Minoan Creek. And a Greek archaeologist, Nicholas Slayton, who excavated Minoan civilization on the island of Crete and Tantorini and surrounding areas, very, very extensively for over 50 years, they’re suggesting that the legend of Atlantis, the legend of this ancient civilization that was far more advanced than that, was sank into the sea. Then again, it’s based on the garbled folk memory of this earlier civilization, which, if we have time, I can tell you a little about because it’s so extraordinary. But because you see, there were in that time, at the end of Minoan civilization, which by then had already, which, which, by then shifted into Mycenaean, which is the, you know, the hybrid society, which was used in Vader and the earlier one, there were tremendous cataclysmic events, tremendous volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, enormous tidal waves, and literally like in this little island, what left of it is little Tantorini, because about two-thirds of the island was literally swallowed by the sea. And the first one to suggest this theory was Pira da Marinata, who was the head of the Greek archaeological service. So it’s tremendous detective work that we’re doing. And of course, that’s what archaeology is about. It’s really, I think of it as a state journey into our past, but also into our future because of the implications. You know, like, it’s like time travel into our past, but really the importance is for our future. Yes, can you speak about how the choosing of homosexuality for men given the history in many different societies where the initiation rights were so painful that men would choose to be another man’s second wife or would not go through into being initiated into a man because of the dominator society. Can you speak about homosexuality? Why don’t you say it’s your choice to avoid loudly because I don’t want to put a phrase in your language. I’m just curious about the choices that men have made into homosexuality because of dominator societies and not being able to express themselves in a feminine way, having a relationship with the goddess perhaps, and also in history how different tribal societies, the initiation rights were so painful that oftentimes like in Native American societies and in Africa in different places they would choose to be a man’s second wife rather than be initiated into the domineering, controlling all powerful male in the society. And I just wonder how that relates to homosexuality in society today and to AIDS. Well, that’s a four hour question. But I’m going to try to answer it in these terms. I think clearly just as we have completely distorted heterosexual sexuality into either calling it simple and something that you only do for one reason folks and that’s to impregnate a woman. I mean not for pleasure, not for bonding, how that puts a barrier to communication. Because of course lack of communication is the sine qua non, it’s the stuff of which dominator society is made. So all of the institutions are designed to prevent it or to equate what we’ve done. We see it so much in the modern pornography industry which is again a resurgence really of dominator models, the erotization of dominance. I mean so heterosexuality has been completely distorted by the dominator model and we’re trying to reclaim it. Homosexuality equally so. And you have really, by getting the examples that you did have pointed out some other ways in which people’s men have been pushed into it in some tribes. But of course as Genet, the French writer pointed out, the classical if you will, the traditional homosexual relationship is a parody. It’s a caricature, an exaggerated caricature of the male-female dominance subservience, the satomastochistic relationship that is supposed to characterize the male-female relationship. And what I want to suggest to you is that the misogyny, you know, that is part of the culture. And it’s not only part of the homosexual community, it’s part of the whole dominator system. All of these things interweave in a complex way to make us confuse sex which is an act of giving pleasure and taking pleasure with an act of giving pain and receiving pain. I mean it’s an amazing thing and the thing I want to end with is the Greeks. Now you know classical Greeks were the hybrid society. There’s a chapter in the callus and the blade on the Greeks. And I’ve had some very, very interesting feedback from some classical scholars who have said, wow, you know, I mean, that really, the archaeological data bringing it together this way really explains a lot of what was happening there. But consider homosexuality in Greece. And it’s a so-called trail of democracy where women lost their votes. Did you know, as a term, I have to die for this. I have to have it. St. Augustine tells a story which is a wonderful clue. He says that the way that Athens got its name was that there was this contest where they were going to either name it after the, you know, Pluto, the god of the underground, you know, the god of the underground, or Athene. I think of course it’s a direct descendant of the goddess except she now has become this insane combination of the goddess of wisdom and war, which you know only the dominated system can do that. Okay. And apparently the women, and there was one more woman, they voted for Athene. So in punishment, now listen, in punishment St. Augustine relates that women lost the right to vote. And we’re told that Athens is the cradle of democracy. And of course that’s very interesting because half the population in Athens were women, right? And they were literally house, under house arrest. I mean, the apartheid was so great, you know, they were segregated into the women’s quarters. And 90% of both men and women were slaves. So we have this, you know, very free society, right, which is sort of a joke. But it’s a hybrid society between some of the earlier, you know, the no one, very definitely. I mean, as Swain points out, you know, the no one tradition flourished still, you know, in the beautiful art. And in many of, but we don’t have time for the whole thing. But the thing that I wanted to tell you was about homosexuality, which is so fascinating, the accepted norm for homosexuality, and the only way it was tolerated, was if it was between an older man. There’s so, yes. Terence mentioned this idea of a northern people is mounting on horses and coming back and dominating the cradle cultures. Could you talk about the fact that these people were essentially the sons of those that had been exiled from the culture in the first place? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no and that created a different psychology and then when they found the vehicle, they came back and essentially destroyed the culture that had it some point earlier rejected them and thrown them out. And that’s always like the return of the Pratik Anumagda’s time. But you know that’s a very interesting theory that you propose. Unfortunately, I don’t have any data. It’s very difficult. I mean, we can hypothesize on what happened and how it happened. But the hard data just isn’t there yet. The hard data that we have is what happened when they came in. That we are beginning to acquire. And I think with time we’ll also get more and more clues. But I think you have been spinning some very interesting theories there. Yes? This speaks to a fact that about thousands discriminate between true partner and partner that is fostered by the dominant society to gain economic profits. And I can go back to the true... Again, the Indian countries worked in work pause years ago. And I think we looked upon it without any sense of being threatened by the Japanese to the same thing. And now it’s a key element of industrial complex to duplicate them because we’re threatened by them economically. Well, again, that’s a very interesting question, especially the Japanese phenomenon, which is such a mix of the really very paternalistic and very dominated and yet a basic partnership understanding. And I don’t even know how to begin to answer that except to say that we have to be very careful with the terms that we’re trying to reclaim. I mean, I’m trying to reclaim for us the term partnership. And you’re quite right. We need to make distinctions between the way that it’s been used conventionally. And also, we want to reclaim terms like family and traditions. These traditions are much, much older. Okay? And they lasted for much, much longer. So I mean, this is part of our reclamation work. But the second part of what you’re saying, which is the issue of economic competition. The dominated system artificially creates scarcity. And that’s an area that I explore in some of the later chapters of the tellers and the blade. But I think it’s something that we really need to understand very, very clearly. See, all of these things are tremendous opportunities for work. Tremendous amount of research. Once we see that there is what the dynamics are of the dominated system, then we can begin to also create the alternative and to come out of it. So I would have to leave it, you know, in these very general terms. Yes, David. Oh, thank you. This, by the way, I did introduce David and that’s David. I just want to talk quickly to your point, because I’m both a social psychologist and I’m a refugee from the business world. No. Right. And from the viewpoint of a social psychologist, that one was a much better thing. It was the work by one of the great geniuses, Kurt Lohan, in studying participatory work within the work, or context group discussion. I mean, instead of the hierarchical thing, the leader tells the workers what to do. The workers gather together and discuss and with the leaders, and they come up with the consensus. And then he found the power of that work. And that went into a lot of literature that went from the corporate world. And there were a lot of training groups, a lot of consultants, made their living for many years. Going into the corporate world, they were hired by the hierarchy to go in there and in the sense, there was the illusion in the corporate world that it was all a team. You know, boy, you’ve got to say in this, you’ve got to avoid from this decision where we’re going and so on. But unfortunately, everybody knew, including the consultants themselves, that it was a sham. Because when you really got down to the core, it was still Mr. Big falling the shot, and you got fired and hired. No 60-day notice for a plant bloating is just quack. It’s overnight, the whole partnership thing could be thrown out. The interesting thing that’s happened, you mentioned Japanese, the interesting thing that’s happening now is because the Japanese have this system that on one point has a lot of hierarchy, but also has a lot of this teamwork stuff in a general way. Because that system is now present economically, so deeply, at last the corporate world is being worked beyond. And the consultants now can go out there and sell in what amounts is the partnership way of thinking in the corporate world with some hope that it may catch on. And that’s because the people up there and the people that invest in all these industries are really scared. They can see they’re going down the drain unless they become true, unless they really make this partnership thing work. That’s why it’s very, very exciting in the business. You respond just a little first, or a little first bounce, and respond to your initial question. Do you stand up? Yeah. Do you respond to your initial question? I think there might be just a slight, well, much danger, maybe, but a problem. And there would be a difference between the true partnership type of society, which goes on, and it’s economically sound for itself, and doesn’t seek to exploit another party, you know, a bunch of people for that type of economic gain. And now it might be just a little insidious if such typically male dominant societies, the Dominary Society can bring women into its domination philosophy and incorporate what was, what used to be a very powerful and good partnership type of society into a Dominary Society and just use those, the aspects of the partnership to exploit other people in the same way that the male dominant society has done for so long. It would be not working as that where it happens. You’ve brought up the whole problem of co-option, and that’s really the danger. And that’s why the clarity is so very, very important for us at this time, so that we can understand that it’s not enough to give it lip service. We have to live it. And you know, it’s not easy because every one of us, I mean, people say to me, are you a liberated woman? And I, you know, I mean, nobody in my generation that I can think of could even remotely make such a claim. We all care. Tremendous amount of dominating stuff in us. And so that, you know, our main task is, well, it’s not our main task. We have to do everything. People say, what do we have to do? The answer is everything. We certainly have to work on ourselves a great deal in order to do that. Yes. Some calls that I see is in schools, you see a lot of teachers actually starting to go overseas, trying to teach co-operation, and trying to preserve and honor children’s self-esteem. And I think that’s a significant thing. Because that wasn’t the model of humiliation and authority in schools, and that quickly, quickly fades into... And I think that’s a very important element, because the dominated system strives on this idea that I’m just grumbling. It’s no accident that most of the world’s religions, which are dominated, you know, they have tremendous partnership elements in them, but they also have this tremendous overlay of dominated stuff that you literally grumble before the deity. I mean, I’m just poor worm, and you know, forgive me my sins, and... And that’s really where I think that the shamanistic experience is such an important element to sort of really reconnect with our innate worth. Yes, it’s a dignified religion. But it’s interesting what you were saying about our being formed by our past. We need to recall and define ourselves, I think, all of us as the adult children of male chauvinists, and perhaps create support groups. I think we’re all trying to disentangle ourselves. I’m just looking at Siddhartha Kallshan, who’s sitting in the audience, and who sent me a wonderful manuscript trying to understand from a different perspective some of the things that we’ve been talking about. When we look at our past, and I think this is the real empowering aspect of this new knowledge, this very old knowledge, really, of our past is that we can then look at the past. I think there are two people way in the back, yes. Can you stand, Robin, because it’s almost impossible to hear unless you stand. It’s a ready way that we are going to get beyond the dualism in this, between the dominant and the partner, just the bad guy and the good guy. The attiduation of all of our ancestors for the last 3,000 years, as having taken the two-dash with current, to get us to our destruction, and that we are the only people who are going to be in 3,000 years of this. Well, that whole issue of not throwing out the baby with the bath water is how I think about it. I guess that’s sort of a very... I think that the dualism is only a dualism of possibilities. It’s an issue of free choice in the open sense, I think. That as a species, we’re very flexible. And we have... I would say we have these two basic choices. We have many, many, many other choices. And these two basic choices are very, very complex. So I’m not in the least bit suggesting... This is, I’m not suggesting that this is an issue of women against men. I mean, I always stress this in my work. That it isn’t. It’s the question of the kind of organization, the kind of vision and the kind of actualization of the vision, the kind of structure that we choose. I don’t think it’s an issue of pointing the finger, Robin, and saying, look at the terrible things that you did to us, because it’s the terrible things we did to ourselves. And we all know that there is this shadow part of us. And I mean, if you want to take it to that level, sure, there’s always that other possibility. We have a choice of being very cruel. We have a choice of being very kind. But what we’re discovering is that these are not just personal choices. That these are choices that are very, very, very much related to our social structure, social environment. And this whole idea of healing ourselves, you know, trying to heal yourself in a dominated society is sort of like growing up on a down escalator. So that’s what we’re talking about. It’s not a question of finger pointing and of, you know, of saying, this is a, you know, this is bad. In fact, the whole attraction of partnership is that it offers a positive path or rather many positive paths, because it is a pluralistic. I think that’s really what I want to stress. It’s a pluralistic path. And you had a... Yeah. I’m curious if you know of many others that would support the notion that the shamanic or sacramental use of psychedelic plants is in any way related to whether or not a civilization or society becomes, you know, more toward the partnership or something, or something that is particularly for predominant emigration. Well, that is of course one of... No, that is not good. One of Farron’s arguments. And I would say this, that... Well, let me first clarify something. What I just said is that I see many paths, and so I see many paths to shamanism. And I see the shamanic experience in, as not an elite experience. I see the shamanic experience as something that every one of us is capable of. And demonstrably so. And I see many paths to that spiritual mystical knowing, the real knowing of our oneness with one another and with the world. Now I think that there’s absolutely no question that the plants do provide a very powerful avenue to that. And however my sense about the plants providing a powerful avenue, as I told you, and maybe we can talk about that some more, is that it has to be also in the context of a number of social support systems. Because our imagination, having been so filled with dominator images, can through the hallucinogens also go in some pretty horrific, you know, non-healing paths. Now to specifically answer your question, there’s no scarce evidence. Because after reading Hiroshi’s work, and he lights as eloquently, well not quite as eloquently, because it speaks like a physician, but you’re not so eloquently. I was, I really start looking at it with new eyes, which was such a gift from you. And of course I saw among some of the Bulgarian artifacts, you know, the Balkans, some mushrooms. Absolutely no question. You know, there are the statuaries on these mushrooms. And we know that most of the imagery of the art of Lakeria is sacred, religious. So there was no question, but it was an isolated instance. It was just one. I know that the know-it-me-know-it-me-know-it views the poppy. The probably know-and-as-you-will-I think from here, the poppy does not necessarily confirm hallucinatory. You have to do a lot of treating of it. So one could say that maybe, you know, that’s an indication that they use, you know, for the traumatic experience. And your favorite example, I should really let you talk about this. You’re doing well. I’m also very fascinated by the early Neolithic, actually the African, those are your most hope arguments. Well, please talk about this. You can talk about the pharmacogenesis and the high-prime. Yes, well, I will talk in detail about this. I’ll maybe just say a little bit now. It ties back, I enjoy your exegesis of genesis, the smarming. But the one symbol that you didn’t dwell on or mention was the fact that the issue was an issue about plant use. That Eve was tossed out of the garden because she ate of the fruit of the Tree of Life and involved Adam in that. The serpent was the minion, as you said, of the goddess. And the serpent said, if you eat of this plant, you will become equal to Yawa. And Yawa apparently agreed with this assessment that the plant was a true rival. That the union of the plant and the woman was a worthy rival to his suzerainity in this situation. And the expulsion into history was essentially removal from access to the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. And it’s very interesting and ties in with what we said last night about monotheism. That monotheism gives permission for this image of the ego, which is powerful not to be questioned, paternalistically domineering, etc. Even, and perhaps unconsciously, in Riane’s choice of symbols, the chalice is the symbol of partnership and transformation and unity. But it is quite simply a utensil for holding something which you drink, a sacrament. The chalice without the sacrament is simply a vessel. So I will talk probably tomorrow a lot about this and of the scenario of the emergence of human self-reflection in Africa and how it relates to mushrooms in the partnership with society and the goddess. My argument, and I’ll just say this here, against the absence of overwhelmingly convincing physical evidence, is first of all that the truly central mystery of a religion is never portrayed or spoken of. It always is only symbolically indicated, and to my mind, the coincidence in the ancient Middle East of goddesses with cattle, they’re always mixed up together. Well, the third and secret term in that trinity is the mushroom. The goddess and the cattle are linked in association with the mushroom, which is never mentioned. So we’ll talk more about that, but at, for instance, Millard’s site, you pronounce it so well. Yes. Actually it’s called CATAL, but it’s called subtle. Chateau-Villeuch, the overwhelming motif is of cattle, lovingly and beautifully portrayed. 16,000 years earlier at Altamira, the motif is cattle, lovingly and beautifully portrayed. In the Tiseli frescoes in the central Sahara, it’s cattle. And I think the cow is the fusion symbol both for the goddess and the mushroom, because it is the caring attitude, the gentleness, the giving of milk and of nurturing and all of this that makes the cow and the cow goddess. The major symbol carrying this thing in the Neolithic. I’m writing saying that you’re a magician with words, because you do present a very, very potent argument. I would still say that I believe that while I have no doubt that the use of plants, so much was lost of the knowledge of plants. We were yesterday talking about how some of the last vestiges of that in the West were burnt with the witches, the so-called witches, the wise women, who were burnt at the stake. Not at the church, of course, was going into the medicine business, but it was much more complicated than that. They were actually healing people with these old methods. And so much of this lore has been lost. I have no question that plants, that our evolution and the intimate symbiotic relationship with the plant world are evaporating, and yet to really recount the story. And you are one of the main killers of that story. But I would still say that there are many paths in my estimation through the traumatic experience, through the gnosis, through the knowledge, and that the ancients used many of these paths, that it was not exclusive to the use of the plant. And I would also really want to stress this point that it is tremendously important, I think, for us to understand that when the ancients used the plant, and specifically the hallucinatory, revealing the plant, not as addictive. You can see, so much of the dominated system requires escape through addiction. So it’s tremendous. It’s such a miserable reality. So you know, you escape through addiction to alcohol, or to mechanical sex, or to bulimia, or to lanorexia, or to opium, you know, the opium of the people, or to religions, etc. So it’s very dangerous at this point, I think, to really not understand that it has to be very carefully embedded in rituals that is geared to partnership. And that that is the key. And I would hope that perhaps you can explore that to some measure, because I am convinced that when the ancients used these incredible plants, you know, that suddenly we’ve come into another, another universe, another reality which was much more real than, you know, the experiential one, and that they really sort of had very highly developed helicastic and other abilities, because they found all these sites, you know, that are safe with and so on, that we now know have some power too. So that this was deeply, deeply embedded in rituals, very carefully, very deliberately, and that if we are to use the plant again, then it has to be done by again very carefully, very deliberately, and most importantly, very lovingly, very carelessly developing the rituals. Yes, I think... Psychoactive drugs exist along a spectrum of effects, and to talk deeply about drugs we’re going to have to share everything that we’ve been educated in the matter, which is a kind of blurring of distinction in order to empower a general condemnation. As sociologists or as people looking at how these things affect culture, what you want to pay attention to is the operational effect, and the spectrum runs from total addiction to a total dissolving of all behavioral patterns. And some compounds reinforce a narrowing of the focus of consciousness, unexamined machine-like activity related to the acquisition of the drug. And then at the other end of the spectrum there are compounds and plants which dissolve machine-like unexamined activity, dissolve behavior patterns, and which expand the focus of consciousness tremendously. And the truth that is hard to hear is that human beings have never existed independently of the effects of one group or the other. In other words, the idea of a drug-free society is an utter fiction, and always has been, because we are symbiotic creatures with the vegetable kingdom, or kingdom. And this symbiotic relationship is most apparent to us as self-reflecting entities in the subtler effects of what we might very broadly call foods. So that when you look back through history you’re looking at opium, sugar, coffee, tobacco, hallucinogens, and these are all pushing and pulling us along the spectrum of addiction and constricted consciousness versus dissolving of social programming and reconnection to the larger natural surrounds. And so there are dominator drugs and dominator use patterns, and there are partnership drugs and partnership use patterns that reinforce open-endedness and creativity and this sort of but what is not available as an option is the notion of the drug-free society because foods themselves impinge on the neurological functioning and the level of neurotransmitters and the degree of alertness and attention and this sort of thing. I found myself a couple of weeks ago seeing a person who does not take drugs is like a computer that does not use software. It doesn’t do anything. And so then the question is not a kind of moralistic pontification against drugs, but an intelligent awareness of choices and options based on historical experience. Well that’s all I really want to say about that, but that it’s important to make that point because we are going to have to increase the sophistication of our own understanding of the drug. Oops, problem. Because part of the articulation and implementation of the partnership society is going to revolve around this issue of reconnecting with these shamanic tools and re-realizing how to what a truly intense degree we are a symbiotic creature. If we do not maintain our connections to the vegetable world, to that source of gnosis, then we wander in alienation and existential self-doubt. That’s why there is, as you doubtless picked up, this difference between Rihanna and I on this point. She is more, in this case, the sociologist and I am more the biological determinist because I really think the embedding in nature is far more real and strong and intense than we know because we are, of course, the apex of a long process of alienation. You are talking to me and you are saying that it sounds like I am saying this is the mechanism by which it happened and therefore I am closing out other options. Well, I am a frank propagandist for this point of view. Nobody was saying it till I was saying it. I think it is fine if one person says it. I am interested in seeing it demolished. The way to, the truth, you don’t have to be, you don’t have to fear to test truth. If it is true, it can withstand any sort of onslaught. Perhaps Dr. Mollus has to multiply. What does it multiply literally? Softened. Softened and penetrated by another maybe. That’s why I am saying it. Yeah, yeah. I love that metaphor. I would like to suggest that maybe this afternoon when we talk about technology, we can think of that as technologies and how their use really differs. Definitely. It is the template of the partnership and the dominated society because I think that really to a very large extent that we have to address that issue to really emulsify. Let me ask you an obvious question here. When you are starting to get into the dominator drug versus the partnership drug, I am beginning to get very excited. Am I right in this filming that at some point, this afternoon and tomorrow, you are going to say, okay, here it is. I am blocking it out and listing one person. I think this is an extremely valuable contribution because in my own experience with the whole application of the dominator partnership model, it takes every area, politics, economics, child raising, and so on. You apply this model and all of a sudden, by being able to switch things into that camp or that camp, you gain a tremendous clarity. I think that this would move forward the whole controversy about the drug thing. Yes. Well, if not this afternoon, certainly tomorrow, but it is on my agenda for sure. I am interested in what both of you are saying and I am thinking as I am sitting here and I really want to talk about the drug possibility or getting caught up in the dogma of any kind, the ability for people to be inducted by those people who carry the vibration in their central nervous system, for instance in perhaps, in ritual patient groups where they hung out as perhaps not necessarily the girl who dominated the idea, but that could be a person that shall shoot, but who carries the vibration which is an induction into the energy field, which would do exactly the same thing as a psychedelic experience and that it is possible for hanging out with people in ancient times where they, I always think of the serpent in terms of the final central nervous system, which of course the Egyptian had this way, which and the mask on the feminine marriage, which is the partnership. So, you know, if you’re interested in anything you can have to say about that, also, you know, about the central trauma. Well, I think shamanism is the institution that you’re indicating. I mean, it is, we forget in the modern presentation of shamanism that the really central motif of it is curing, which is transferring energy from one person to another and leading people to higher states of adaptive activity. It is the exploring of the invisible world, which is stressed in psychedelic shamanism, is not simply an academic concern of the shamans. They are doing this in order to acquire power and the purpose for acquiring the power is to heal. That’s the end result of the whole thing. And I think as this archaic revival moves along and as the partnership notion becomes better understood, the shamanic model as a characterological map for each of us will make more and more sense because it is an empowering of direct and immediate experience, which is what the dominator thing sucks away from us. We are turned into citizens who are kind of sociological placeholders who receive their orders from the organs of media that pass it on from the establishment. The dominator thing to function must undercut the notion of the uniqueness and the freedom of the individual. And shamanizing works in the here and now to empower felt experience. And so that causes me to think that those sensitivities, those ratios of feeling are what are going to be engendered in the new people who will live in and perpetuate the post historical partnership society. In my experience of shamanism, there is such a range, an extraordinary range of how shamanism manifests itself. And I think one of the best examples is the contrast that Michael Harner drew between the Hivaro culture or the shwar culture and the amawaka. They used the same major psychedelic, banisteriapsis copies, but where the social behaviors of these two groups who live in a relatively proximate situation is highly contrasted. The amawaka being much more partnership oriented and the hivaro or the shwar being much more dominator oriented. And I think she’s one of many, many examples. We got to borrow another good example. Whereas the use of maybe 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 different kinds of cultivated hallucinogens doesn’t seem to abrogate behaviors, which are quite dominator based. So, you know, my question is, it’s like drawing an idealistic, misodian picture of the Neolithic. It’s my usual, and I have some experience of shamanism personal and direct in terms of my past 20 years in the area to just say that it’s really, I think, dangerous to characterize the Neolithic idealistically as it is to characterize the range of behaviors found in shamanic cultures idealistic, but rather to look realistically and discerningly at these particular trends that arise within these great ranges of cultures that we’re talking about here. And then from the dark mirrors or from these problems that we perceive, the moral and ethical problems about interrelatedness or the lack thereof that do occur, for example, in some shamanic cultures, that we need to, you know, be discerning. Yes, well, when you do field work, the first thing you discover is that all academic categories are artificial. What dealing with shamans is about is dealing with individuals. And some of you may know F. Bruce Lam’s book, The Rio Tigre and Beyond, where a essentially urban mestizo shaman involved in rosewood gathering expeditions in extremely remote areas of the Amazon comes upon an extremely unassimilated, uncontacted people and takes ayahuasca with them and discovers that they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know how to make it right. And he makes it for them. And so she don’t do it that way. You do it this way and it knocks their socks on. So this is a case where that illustrates your point that if you are romantic about these things, if you have synthetic notions of what constitutes cultural purity and that sort of thing, you’re going to get into trouble. Shamanism from the inside is very much in attitude like the very best attitudes that you need in scientific research. It is a desire to know, to find out. OK, we’ll do 30 then. We also need to get to some of the very important questions you raise yesterday in Horde. Can you all hear what I’m saying? Yes. Before I tell you the story that I came here to tell, I will talk a little bit about the practical side of what we’ve been discussing. We’ve been discussing in the past couple of days as an impact on the life of my partner and myself. We’re going to talk a lot this morning about plants and it will be about plants as they were used thousands of years ago and in places far distant from here. But implicit in what I’m saying is very real world work that we’re doing in Hawaii to preserve plants with a history of human and shamanic usage. Because our focus of interest is the Amazon and shamanism, we’ve concentrated in that area. But throughout the world there are, as you know well, very fragile ecosystems on the brink of disappearing forever. But even more fragile than these natural ecosystems is the web and legacy of human understanding that has been gathered through the millennia by the native peoples in these areas. And throughout the warm tropics, especially the impact, is very great. The young men and women are not apprenticing themselves to the elder shamans. The men go off to work in sawmills, the women become waitresses. They are being sucked into the engine of world capitalism. And in a single generation, this legacy of plant information that reaches back 20,000, 50,000 years will in large measure be lost. We’re seeing this in the Amazon much has already been lost. So Kat and I and Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard and Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, Ralph Metzner, Frank Barr, a number of people have gathered together and formed a nonprofit foundation whose showcase project is a 19 acre botanical garden in Hawaii that preserves these plants and supports native collectors in Peru and other places so that this botanical material can be preserved with no real plan for it other than its preservation. It is there available to psychotherapists, biochemists, homeopathists, anyone who has a legitimate angle on these things. So I want to mention that to you this morning because we always are soliciting support, not only financial support, but donations of time and equipment. And if you come to the Hawaiian Islands, you could put us into your loop at times when we’re there and we would be happy to show you around. The garden is at about 2200 feet above sea level with 70 inches of rainfall a year, which at 19 degrees north, which is what it is, approximately duplicates what’s going on in the montane rainforest of the equator at about 8500 feet. Which is the so-called cloud forest. So it’s a beautiful place. It’s a highly charged place because magical plants from throughout the world are growing there. And I mentioned it to show that we don’t entirely live in our heads in these matters. The Big Island. The Big Island of Hawaii. The Big Island is larger than all the other Hawaiian Islands combined and it has fewer people than any other island. It’s where if Old Hawaii lingers on at all, it’s probably in the desolate districts of the Big Island. Well, so that’s enough of that. Now I want to address the concerns that we’ve been dealing with over the past two days and from my perspective. We sort of designed this weekend with the notion of showcasing Rihann’s thought, and I think we’ve done that very well. And for those of you who haven’t had a chance to hear her, she very kindly has promised to join me this afternoon. She didn’t originally intend that. But we have a very fertile kind of dialogue going among all the people who have been here over the past two days. And so we will return to that. To put what I’m going to say this morning in context, I just wanted to briefly review the basis of her theory. It is quite simply that the absence of patriarchy does not imply matriarchy. The natural and most long-running form of human organization is what Rihann has named Partnerships Society. Partnerships societies were the norm up until pick a number 4,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, in any case eventually falling with the fall of Minoan Creek to Myphanian invaders around 1,000 BC. And that set us into the era of dominator cultures, which she believes, and I agree with her, is a temporary, I won’t say aberration, a temporary necessary adaptation, but one that we can now move beyond. My Rihann’s approach is basically to say what happened, that there was Partnerships Society and then she’s very insistent that there was a confluence of factors which caused the shift from the Partnerships Society to the Dominator Culture. I being cast more in the fanatical mode, prefer to think that there was one major cause and that its ad-embrations can be explicated by the methods of archaeology, good logic and a little visionary imagining. And so I want to tell you the story this morning. Remember I said yesterday the best idea will win. And so we’re sort of in a contest in the manner of the great Celtic poetry contest of old where the person who can dream up the best idea will have the satisfaction of seeing it realized. And if you want to do that kind of total revisioning of the position of human beings in the world, I think you have to take at first a deconstructionist approach and take away everything that impedes the construction of the new point of view. So I want to take away a number of notions and just get rid of them. One notion is that nature is a competition of tooth and claw and that the swiftest, the fiercest, the meanest will always come out on top. This is just a notion that was attractive to a Victorian gentleman who happened to be in charge of a world screwing empire. Any modern biologist will tell you that what is being maximized in biological systems is cooperation, integration, mutual reinforcement and mutual meeting of need. Obviously if an organism can insinuate itself into the energy loop of another organism, it will have more of its own energy to play with. And this is the strategy that is operating especially on the microbial level in the earth around the roots of plants. You know there are micro-risal relationships, fungi that surround the roots of plants, mediate and buffer the liquids passing into the plants and in turn have a release of nutrients that supports them. We see symbiosis in all kinds of situations in nature. What has never been really even suggested, let alone researched, is that perhaps the unique qualities that attend our own species are somehow reinforced and stabilized by our own symbiotic relationship. That we are also symbiotic of some sort to other organisms in nature. Now a symbiotic relationship can be broken apart. The little fish which live in the protection of the tentacles of anemones and thereby draw larger fish in for the anemones to feed upon can live in the absence of the anemone. But when they do they produce smaller individuals that experience a shorter life span and the population is generally more limited. So when a creature that has evolved a symbiotic relationship is through catastrophe or design separated from the other member of the pair, life goes on. But there is a sense of burden, a sense of moving against the flow, a sense of abandonment. Well this sense of abandonment being moved against the flow is a very good description of the psychological set we inherit at the beginning of our history. Because as we discussed a little bit yesterday our history begins with us being tossed out of a garden by Jehovah as Narc because the woman had exercised her right to conscious self-exploration and awareness by eating of the fruit of the tree of life. It suggests to me that it was the relationship with the fruit of the tree of life that made early human beings somehow co-equal with the dragon god who was the keeper of the garden so that the fall into history is a mythological way of saying that we were separated very early from something very dear to us. It was rent away from us and inevitably the image that must come into all our minds is the image of a child being separated from its mother. Well in the present dialogue within the new age we’ve gotten to the point of sharing the notion that we have become separated from the mother or earth. But it operates at the level of a kind of poetic notion or a reassuring abstraction. I mean how do we reconnect to our mother the earth by talking about it? By how is it done through agriculture or is that a violation of the mother? How is it to be done? Well what I’m going to say this morning is sort of a blend of myth, mania and science where we take the best from each category and try to weave together an argument that would convince a skeptic. So those of you who have heard me do this before bear with me. It grows in my mind by adembrate detail. It has to be made tighter and tighter and ever more convincing. Because the goal is if we can change the myths about our origins we can change the expectation about our future because the future, the post-historical future is somehow going to be a revivifying of the myth of origin. So if we go into it with the wrong myth we may get in trouble. And I think a patriarchal egocentric, apollonian, solarian myth that would send us sort of as insect robots to the stars and spaceships the size of Manhattan needs is unbalanced. A certain leavening. Okay so enough with prologue. Here is the story. The story begins a long time ago and it really has no beginning because at its inception it’s locked into the geological and geophysical mechanics of the planet. It begins somewhere in the last four million years with a slow drying trend across the northern southern hemisphere of the planet affecting especially the tropical forests of Africa which at this time are unbroken from north to south. And over the next million and a half years Africa grows progressively drier, not desert. It was not even desert as recently as Roman times. So Pliny describes the Sahara Desert as the breadbasket of Rome. But over a million and a half years Africa grew drier and the great tropical forests were replaced by a lush grassland environment. A grassland environment broken by enormous OACs of remnant rainforest. And in this remnant rainforest the arboreal primates that lie far back on our family tree began to respond to environmental pressure and began to shift from a fruit eating large almost entirely fruit and insect eating diet to a more omnivorous diet because of the limitation of protein. They also began to experiment with descending from the trees to hunt small rodents and small animals that were inhabiting the grasslands which were rich with evolving cereals of different sorts. Now while all of this was going on, ungulate animals, animals like bison and cattle and buffalo and wildebeest and ibex and antelope were evolving in great numbers on the African Veldt. So this drying trend was creating the savannas of the world. There never before had been savanna land on this planet. But it was coming into being in the interior of Sumatra across the African Veldt and in parts of India. And this special ecology of ungulate animals was evolving. Now the primates who had been living in the trees already had a highly evolved pack signaling system. As you know if you’ve observed howler monkeys or woolly monkeys in the jungle, they have a language of chirps and squeaks and shouts that is fairly dense at least in the existential moment. Meaning they’re not talking philosophy. They’re tending to business. So attending this exploration of the surface, this leaving of the trees, was a tendency toward bipedalism which reinforced the already existent tendency to binocular vision that had evolved in the arboreal environment. So you see there’s a kind of confluence here of factors, bipedalism, omnivorousness, binocular vision, a repertoire of pack signals, a social mode of existence already very old. And into this situation comes the opportunity to evolve in the grasslands into a larger pack hunting group that is now including meat in its diet and that is competing with these animals of the vell. There was a very interesting conference held a couple of years ago in which very straight paleontologists concluded that the great wave of extinction of the giant mammals that went on about three million years ago was actually a human induced phenomenon and this is why the woolly mammoth and dimetrodon and the giant tree sloth and the giant armadillo and these huge, huge, the Irish elk, these huge animals that used to roam the planet no longer exist. The human impact was already happening that far back. Rheons Baileywick seems to be sort of from the invention of agriculture to the atomic bomb. The area that I’m interested in has that embedded in it. I’m interested in sort of the time from the last glaciation to the first starship, whatever that may be. And okay, to make a long story slightly shorter, the critical factor that enters in when you look at the evolution of human beings is a sudden and unexplained doubling in brain size about 50,000 years ago. Before that time, the human brain had enlarged itself only about 12% in the previous two and a half million years. But suddenly, 50,000 years ago, the brain size doubled. At the same time, the Neanderthal flowering came to an end and they began to fade. The last Neanderthal skeleton that we have is 20,000 years old. So over a period of 20,000 years, these two species shared the planet. The X factor, the thing which changes everything, is in my opinion, the fact that these pack hunting baboon-like proto-homonoid primates encountered in the process of trailing behind these large mammalian herds that had evolved in the grassland, they encountered the manure of these creatures. And in this manure were the copper-phytic psilocybin-containing mushrooms, specifically stropharia cubensis. And I have observed the habits of baboons in East Africa, and it is they are creatures of the belt. They are omnivorous. They scramble around, and every time they come to a cow pie, they flip it over because they’re looking for grubs and bugs which make up a major part of their diet. And they sniff. They’re great sniffers and food testers. Well, the mushroom in this kind of environment is an extremely noticeable, Audio call, transcript. Audio call, transcript. This is a case where intoxication on a drug actually gives a truer picture of reality than the absence of the drug. And it was true, it was empirically so. You see better. Well, you don’t have to know a lot about evolutionary theory to know that if there is a food or in the food chain of a population of animals that can confer increased visual acuity, and this animal is a hunting animal, then those individuals of the species that have this enzyme, alkaloid, steroid, whatever you want to call it, in their diet are going to have a selective adaptive advantage and their reproductive strategy will try and so forth and so on. So this was astonishing to me because this is an argument which is very appealing to the straightest kind of evolutionary biologist. And then I began thinking about the ignored role of foods in evolution and the fact that we are omnivorous through what appears to be a series of chance events, which I just discussed. This omnivorous habit lays us open to tremendous numbers of mutagens, stimulants, depressants, quasi-steralizing agents, spermicides, ovicides, neurological enzymes of all sorts. And so really this is a great untapped area for evolutionary biology to look at. Is it possible that the unexplained extension of adolescence in humans was somehow in effect synergized by steroids in the diet? What about the fact that women have a hidden ovulation, unlike other primates? There are a lot of questions about our sexuality and lactation, menstruation, all of these enzyme-controlled processes that might be very suggestively able to make one, studying the effect of steroids, alkaloids, halosanogens and whatnot in the proto-human diet. I don’t know how many of you know, but the birth control pill is made from diascorean, which is yams. Thousands of papers of Mexican land are in these steroid-rich diascorean yams from which, I forget the names of the pills, is it orthonovum, but whatever they are, if may. Well, yams, sweet potatoes, are a stable of human populations in the tropics. And yet when you look at them chemically, there’s an agradian from food to powerful reproduction-affecting drugs. And if primitive populations were not aware of this, or perhaps were aware of it, then they would have been using these effects or being subject to these effects. So this is a rich area. Leave alone the subject of the halosanogens. I mean, you could look at stimulants and neurotoxins and all these other things I mean. But of course, my special interest was the halosanogens, because what I was interested in was the emergence of consciousness and this doubling of brain size. How could it have happened so quickly? Well, the scenario that I’m left with is that once this visual acuity thing was being reinforced in these pack-hunting primates, the next level of discovery, and I suppose all these discoveries I’m going to talk about were made almost simultaneously, was that twice the dose that increases visual acuity makes sexual activity extremely interesting, prolonged, variegated, and unusual. And it’s fairly clear that these primates, looking at all the other primate species and their social activity and carrying on, I mean, we don’t call it monkey business. So here you have this thing impacting so far in two critical areas. Number one, survival. You can see better to hunt your food and flee your enemy. Number two, it’s an aphrodisiac and the stimulant. This will have an even more intense thriving effect on the reproductive strategy of those individuals that are using it quite simply. They have sex more often, so naturally they have the reproductive gene pool is advanced. But neither of these things, fascinating though they are, is to my mind the major stimulus that put this thing so sensitive stage in calling us out of the monkey body and toward angelhood. Because after all, it’s good for monkeys to see better and monkeys do enjoy sex. But the way in which we differ from monkeys is our free command of mental constructs not present in the immediate environment. In other words, memory. Memory is the key to culture, I think. You have to have memory as a precondition for language, because if you don’t have memory, what good is language? You have nothing to say. Memory is the precondition for writing, for all forms of epigenetic coding, etc. So to my mind, what’s interesting about these vision enhancing, sexually stimulating alkalines in the food chain is their impact on consciousness, at yet higher doses. At conscious doses, four or five times that which affects visual acuity, you are suddenly conveyed into the realm of, for want of a better word we would have to call it the holy or the tremendous or the mystery or the mysterious. And at this point, suddenly the historical experience of the last 10,000 years falls away and is practically useless. We are no better position to understand the thing encountered on high doses of plant hallucinogens than we’re the people of the late Neolithic. It remains utterly overwhelmingly incomprehensible. It remains, you know, a living, breathing mystery experienced in the here and now. And so, as Gordon Wasson and others were quick to point out, it becomes the compass for the religious quest and the understanding of that mystery and abiding in that mystery becomes then the compass of the historical and prehistorical religious quest of human beings. And in this culture, this comes as news, I guess, because for over 2,000 years, we have been the victims of a dominator culture that left no stone unturned in trying to stamp out and suppress direct access to the logos, which was what these psychedelic sacraments that haunt prehistory were all about. What was happening at Elusis, what was happening at Delphi, what was happening in the pagan mystery religions of the proto-Hellenic period was all the technological groping toward an accessing of the mystery. Eden, I believe, was this world of the African grasslands of 12 to 25,000 years ago when, in great pinnacles of wind-cut stone that rose above the desert, a partnership society based on human equilibrium in the gender question, pastoralism in terms of a lifestyle, and access of the goddess through her gift of the mushroom, that was this war-fairless, Edenic, paradisical time. And it persisted until fairly recently. It persisted until 4,000, 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 B.C. Then the desertification of the Sahara became really serious, and those people, those Neolithic people, moved east and became the Neolithic free dynastic civilization in the Nile Valley, and then still further in the Tigris Euphrates draining the tribal people who, by a thousand years, preceded the civilizations that we know so much about, Sumer, Ur, and so forth. And they carried with them a goddess religion that was, I am willing to suggest, was where the central mystery was the mushroom. Now the psychological dominance of the ego is something that came to be in the wake of these disruptive migrations out of the home range of the people who lead to a search for all kinds of substitutes, probably the invention of asceticism, the, and the rise of a priestly class, the shaman in the absence of the sacrament that is truly living becomes a theologian and a dogmatist and begins to put in place precepts and prohibitions. And suddenly nature is no longer friendly and supportive. Suddenly nature must be dealt with through a system of taboos and sacrificial efforts to propitiate this sort of thing. This is indicative of alienation, even though we find it at very primitive levels of society that we might at first brush be willing to embrace as expressions of a pure lifestyle. But I really don’t think so. I just been written about by Freud and Zimmer and all kinds of people already indicate an uncertainty about our relationship to this other that previously, you know, we were her children, we were entirely embedded in her, her rhythms, her needs, her energy flows. And the reason why I think all this is important other than being an academic argument among primatologists and anthropologists is because of what I’ve called the archaic revival, the fact that we are trying to grope toward a new model of how to be in the world. And if you this is not the first time a society has been slammed to the wall, and if you are a student of history, you know that when societies reach great crises points, their reflex is inevitably conservative and to pull back. And the form this pulling back takes when the situation is truly desperate is to look back into the past for a stabilizing model that worked once before. And the last time this happened in a context that we’re probably all familiar with is when the medieval world began to crack the pieces because of those spices that were being brought in from the things that have a real need to put pepper on their steaks. There may have been more than spices in those via in those genuine cargo boats. But anyway, at the end of the medieval world, the Christological eschatology began to crack apart. The Jews were turned loose to be bankers. The Italian city states were turned loose to make money. And towns began to spring up. The lost platonic corpus was translated into European languages. And a whole new world came into being. And the feeling of alienation and uncertainty and anxiety was assuaged by looking back into the past and saying, we need a model and the medieval Gothic model won’t work. We will become like Rome at its most grandulous. We will become like Greece at its most clear and philosophically brilliant. This is called classicism. It was invented in the 1400s, you know, 2000 years after Plato taught suddenly it was decided in Europe that a platonic society would be created. And we are the inheritors of that society. We live under Roman law and Greek aesthetics and so forth and so on, because people who were sick of the medieval world decreed that it should be so. And the model worked up until the late 19th century when the Greek analytical method met the instrumentalities of the Industrial Revolution. And we began to get the new science, or the big science, the science that was not about a country gentleman making notebook scratchings on the warblings of birds and the flow of streams, but where you actually say, my God, we can go for it, we can understand, we can extract the energy from the stars, we can light the fires of heaven and the deserts of our planet, this whole Faustian kind of science, where suddenly it isn’t about understanding, it’s about power and about calling this power down upon your enemy. So we are now 80 to decades in to this era of mastery of energy and tremendous Faustian power. And we need a new model. And I think that the new model is such a huge form emerging onto the historical stage that we shouldn’t be deluded that it’s something which has come about since the early 70s, or that it was invented in the 60s. It reaches at least back to the late 19th century. I mean, people like Alfred Jaurie and René Clair and Marcel Duchamp and these people, they were enunciating long before Freud and Jung, the presence of the unconscious as a frontier into which the locomotive of Marxist history looked like it was headed with no return ticket inside. And that’s actually what happened. And the dreams of 19th century rationalism, the utopian schemes of Bellamy and Marx and all these people ran smack into the world of the unconscious, the world of the shaman, the world of the psychedelic experience of modern art, of sexual liberation, of the stream of consciousness, novel, cubism, futurism, spaceflight, all of these things. And these are, well, it’s interesting to see, for instance, how modernism was invented by Picasso in some tellings of the story, but he couldn’t do it until he had studied all these primitive masks from the coast of West Africa. And this was what everybody who was anybody in Paris in 1915 was decorating their apartments with were these images of the primates. So we are, I think, returning to the archaic mode. That’s at least what is the shining hope. And what opposes it is the momentum of historical society, which is linear and cares to extend itself centuries into the future, male dominated, technocratic object worshiping, and superficial in the most unsuperficial sense of the word. I mean, we have raised banality to an archetype. Ha-na-ren wrote a book called The Banality of Evil. Well, I agree with the conclusions of the book, but if evil is banal, what is not? This is a kind of pulling of energy out of the felt moment. So Marshall McLuhan saw it, Tim Leary saw it, Bucky saw it, probably everybody in there dog saw it coming. What is happening is a kind of meltdown of print-created values and a kind of release into a new cultural space. But it’s a cultural space that is new only to us. It is easily recognized as the cultural space in which shamans of great ability and courage have been operating for the past 50,000 years. They can show us the way. We can find our own way by following very example. The big news is that orthogonal, that means at right angles too, orthogonal to the entire historical process is another thing. We are called to hire things and are passing through a series of bootstrapping self-transitions that are synergized by the psychedelic plants in our environment and whose end state is anticipated in each of us as a microcosm when we surrender our egos and submerge ourselves in the great raging mystery of being that is all around us all the time, everywhere. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. We have a little time. That’s awesome. Wait, let me try and see somebody. I can’t remember that you were referring to. Yes. Sorry, earlier on, you mentioned the people who are doing work with ayahuasca exactly now and actually, I guess therapeutic being an awful lot of it is different. DJ, who are they? How would you go about it? Okay, the question is that I mentioned that there is therapeutic work going on with ayahuasca. It’s very much underground and hush hush because the legal status of these things has never been defined. Let me make that clear. They should be, but ayahuasca is neither illegal nor legal. There has never been a case involving it in the United States, so it’s in a kind of limbo and we should all be discreet about it and let these therapists do their work. Eventually, of course, it will be defined. If you’re interested in more information about that kind of thing, why write me, but I will say about it that there’s no preconception here of the psychoanalytical theory. What I really respect in these therapists is that they are doing it as closely to the way that it’s done in the Amazon as they can. And really, often in the Amazon, the brew is watered or they pull punches on the dosage because they don’t want crazy gringos running amok and blowing their blinds. So the search for ayahuasca can be pursued, perhaps now in North America with the even greater hope of success than in South America, but we always have to be referenced back to the shamanic forms because that’s the only guidance we have. I mean, they may not know everything about it, but they do have a thousand or more years of tradition that can be our guide. Now, when you actually deal with these ayahuascaros, you discover they’re not like priests, they are not dogmatic, they’re open to experimentation too, and you can suggest things, and they know that chemicals lie behind this, they’re not naive, but they also know that the spirit lies within it. They are also not naive in the way that we are naive. So it’s a tremendously fertile partnership to deal with these shamanic. They will share their knowledge, and we need not come to them as inferiors or uninitiated people. What they really respect are peers, and this is what everybody really respects. This is why I think that the guru-chela relationship is so damaging because in the first place, nobody knows enough to be a guru, and nobody knows so little that they should define themselves as a follower. It just doesn’t work that way. Back to the point. That’s fine. I think earlier, Friday, Saturday, it was about to be political, and I’m wondering if that needs to be really tried to work within the system that now exists, whether there’s any effort to legalize these ideas and keep these kind of clashes up. And basically, it’s now buying what needs to work. Well, my political agenda is much more modest than that. I am just interested in keeping the dialogue going, meeting with groups of people like this, and knowing, because we have the support of institutions like Ovi, that we can meet and discuss this, there does seem to be, apparently, this drug issue is going to be a big deal and lies directly in front of us. And what we’re being asked to decide in this presidential election upcoming is, do we want to go full steam ahead into total fascism in order to solve the drug problem? Or are we willing to think of, God forbid, legalizing some of these things and feasting to beat upon each other because of the issue of drugs? I think that the whole thing, which is holding back legalization, is the Judeo-Christian uncomfortableness with the notion that somebody might have fun in a way that you disapprove of, because drugs like heroin and cocaine are certainly a social surge. But on the other hand, so is Valium and alcohol. And to hold your nose at one and condone the other is just total cultural schizophrenia. So I think what we need to do, and this may be coming out of necessity, is entirely disconnect the drug issue from morality. The notion that people who do certain drugs are bad and people who do or do not do certain other drugs are good is infantile and preposterous. What needs to be done, I think, is to, first of all, legalize all plants. That’s very simple. Legalize all plants. Okay, then what are we going to do about these synthetic, addictive, hard drugs like heroin, cocaine, alcohol, so forth? They should be decriminalized. And if we’re going to sell alcohol in this society, if we’re going to pedal Valium, then we should sell all the rest and tax them very highly. And if there’s a price to pay in addiction, as we go through the process of educating people, the taxes from these substances will be used to pay for that education and those addiction centers. Because the cost in destroyed lives and ruined societies will be far less, far less. COCA was no problem in South America for centuries. Now the COCA trade is just screwing up everything. I cannot go to my favorite areas of the Amazon and Botanized because missionaries who grow cocaine have given orders to their Indian slaves to shoot anybody who comes into those areas. This is a totally culturally corrupting force and it is money, not drugs, money that is corrupting it. And the major problem is, as I said a couple of days ago, the addiction on the part of governments and intelligence agencies to funny money. That’s what’s going on. The whole Vietnam War was a front for a junk running scheme. A junk running scheme which made a huge amount of money for a lot of creeks which destroyed the political will of the ghettos to seek social justice in America. That all just fizzled out. They killed Martin Luther King and everybody else and then flooded the ghetto with junk. The cocaine thing is a direct replay. Ronald Reagan is tiptoeing around whether or not he should be friends with Mikhail Gorbyshov when look who he is friends with. The utter stum of the earth, the most outrageous rag tag band and fascist gangster you’ve ever seen. Real subhumanist. They call it, they call them authoritarian regimes and make a distinction between them and communism and say, well these authoritarian regimes at least they’re not communist. Well, I’m telling you, it’s just a scam to addict a whole bunch of people to drugs and then get the money to support wars in isolated and forgotten parts of the world. So, and very noticeable in my own area was for years we couldn’t get hashish in the Bay Area or when somebody had it, you know, it was a crumb. And suddenly about seven years ago there was all the hashish you wanted and people were quoting prices on tons and then made it tons. Well, this doesn’t mean some hippies broke through. This means, you know what it means? It means that the Mujahideen needed money to support a war of national liberation against the Soviet occupation and they had no hard currency. All they had was hash and so the hash shifts were allowed to unload the megatimes of hash and the money was turned into weapons, the weapons buyers, the weapons dealers from Israel and South Africa and the United States cashed in and made fortunes. And perhaps it was a just war in Afghanistan. I love hash. I’m not a nobody. transcript. transcript. transcript. transcript. transcript. transcript. transcript. transcript. transcript. transcript. transcript. transcript. transcript. transcript. transcript. transcript. transcript. transcript. This is KPFK Los Angeles. We have been listening to Terence McKenna and with him, we have Ryan Eisler, the author of the Chalice and the Blade in a June 1988 seminar at the Ojai Foundation in Ojai. If you didn’t hear the whole thing that we have just concluded, it’s on five cassettes and you can get the five cassettes for $40 from the Wild Store at the Ojai Foundation. Again, the seminar is entitled Man and Woman at the End of History with Terence McKenna and Ryan Eisler and that’s available from the Wild Store, box 1620. Multicolored, highly polished, contorting, filled with intent, never previously seen and profoundly other. And yet, isn’t it interesting, this is the commonest of all the hallucinogens in nature. This is the one that is most like what is happening in the metabolism of the ordinary human brain. So to me DMT is a very interesting and profound kind of thing because it’s like a super convincer. This is for people who think that people who talk about the power of psychedelics are soft-headed. You can invite any critic to invest five minutes in informing themselves about the facts of the matter. I mean they may have an excuse for why they can’t spend nine hours with you but five minutes. Well, whenever you ask someone a question like this, what you’re going to hear is a subjective answer. The question was how does five MEO, five methoxy DMT, differ from DMT? I’ve seen people using five MEO DMT therapeutically go through what must have been extremely profound inner dynamical fluxes. My own experience with five MEO is it’s exactly like DMT except that you don’t hallucinate, which is like saying it was exactly like an Italian dinner except there was no Italian dinner. So what you have with five MEO DMT is you have this enormous emotion. I think it’s called boundary dissolution. All boundaries dissolve and there is this enormous emotion of relief, of acceptance, of melting into some kind of unspeakable unitary state. But that’s all. It may be enough, it may be enough. It makes sense that if you’re great for the onslaught of the tidal wave of alien hallucinations you may be sort of, what? Because that large emotion comes and goes, it blows through you like a wind. I am interested in five MEO, there’s a fact and since it’s a fact, I think I should share it with you, that you should know about five MEO, which is when you give it to sheep, they drop dead. And so I guess the moral of that is if you’re a sheep you better not do this. Are we sheep or are we men? Are we sheep or are we men? But you know, staggers is the thing that ranchers, sheep ranchers have to be aware of because they come upon their sheep with their little cloven hooves in the air trembling. Well that’s from eating phalaris arundinaceae, which is a range grass that contains five MEO DMT. And these tryptomines are highly psycho and physiologically active. It’s thought that it’s tryptomines that control heart rate, not psychoactive tryptomines, but an entire other family of tryptomines that are being secreted in the neurospinal fluid. So there’s a lot about this that isn’t understood and work goes forward, but not on the psychedelic tryptomines. That is of course a no-no. One of my gripes that I don’t know if I got around to in this weekend is the fact that science prides itself on its open-minded impartiality and yet psychedelic research is uttered in a truly forbidden. You can research any horrible thing you want, how much Ethel Xylene it takes to create tumors and rats and all this horrible stuff, but there’s no human research being done by or on human beings on this planet to speak of because it’s professionally the kiss of death to become involved with this. To my mind this is like possessing the telescope and refusing to reform astronomy. We come upon these things, they are gifts of knowledge and we need to integrate them into our growing paradigm or else our paradigm will become just another story. Back here, yes. Does the Agency of the CIA have 20% of data on the study of the galaxy? Does the CIA have extensive data on the surgic acid? Well they had a program in the 50s and 60s called MKUltra. They amassed vast amounts of detail and data on these compounds, but we don’t really know what they concluded. I think that the psychedelics are surprisingly slippery in the hands of the managers of dominator institutions. So nobody can get information from them. And then they decided, you know, that it was neither, and it was this, and it was that. I have asked this question, because I’m concerned about it, of the voice in the mushroom. The question being, what if these things fall into the hands of people who are not well-intended? And I can only tell you what the mushroom said. It’s not entirely satisfying to me as a paranoid rationalist. But what it said was, this is not your concern. These things are of the good, and the good, the light cannot be corrupted by the darkness. The darkness passes right through it. It’s as though it didn’t even exist. And I think there’s truth to that. People are always asking me, why is it that I’m not dragged away, kicking and screaming? It’s because it’s utterly unimportant what I’m doing from the point of view of anybody in any position of authority. We are all labeled flakes. We are all seriously deluded people. But as long as we remain less than 5% of the total population, there is no problem. You know, I mean, democracy is very tolerant. It tolerates all kinds of cults, belief systems, sexual orientations, and so forth. As long as we don’t threaten the power structure in ways that it can recognize. That’s not the truth. As long as we don’t threaten the power structure in ways that it can recognize, I don’t think there’s any problem. And I ask you not to worry. Yes? I’m not sure that that pay-o-d is a problem. I don’t really have any doubt about what you’re saying. That is to talk about pay-o-d a little bit. Well, I mean, this is safe. Pardon me? You mean what are they doing? What is it all about? Well, wherever there’s plant, hallucinogenic plant use in a traditional culture, there’s shamanism. The shamanism of the American Southwest is a complicated study. It’s not clear how old the use of pay-o-d is. We might like, without examining the facts, to think that it’s millennia old. But the evidence seems to be that thousands of years ago, the hallucinogen or the impathogen of choice was Sephora secundifolia, which comes closer to being an ordeal poison. If you’re not familiar with the concept of an ordeal poison, there are traditional groups of people in the world whose path of transformation leads them not through hallucinogens, but through plants that you take them and you think you’re going to die. And you have all the convincing symptoms of the immediate onset of death. And then you don’t die. And you’re so damn relieved that you straighten out your life and behave like a decent person. So this is the ordeal poison approach. And it’s very highly evolved in Madagascar and Malaysia and places like that. Sephora secundifolia was a kind of ordeal poison. And apparently in the last thousand years, which isn’t that long, it has been replaced by pay-o-d, probably coming out of the Tarahumara, who carried it then to the plains Indians generally. If you’re interested in this, a major landmark in ethnobotanical publishing in the last two months was the publication of Omar Stewart, who’s an old botanist, very well thought of guy. Omar Stewart’s life work, The Pay-O-D Religion, has just been published by the University of Oklahoma Crest. Beautiful book. I urge you to take a look at it. What? It’s called The Pay-O-D Religion by Omar Stewart. Yes. I’m interested in... I remember the experiences having these very deep insights and then coming back into my life and doing them and just bail for this, just making this film. And having this insight and the awareness of the insight into my life. And I’m wondering how you talk about that or a process in your current work in film and psychedelics. So the question, as I understand it, is how do you hang on to what you learn in these peak experiences? Or give it up. What? Or give it up, gracefully. Well, or give it up gracefully. Although I’m more in sympathy with the questioner. Yeah, yeah. I’ve always thought of the psychedelic experience as like ocean fishing from a boat. And the idea is to let down your net and to bring up something useful. And the nights spent on the empty ocean are beautiful, but if you return with empty nets, then what have you done for your tribe? But on the other hand, sometimes you let down your nets and something the size of a freight train. And you best just row for shore. But there are the intermediate catch. And I think that this question that you ask is very important. That this, and I don’t really have an answer. I have techniques. But the goal is always to bring back as much as possible because at the peak of say a six or seven gram mushroom trip, you cannot believe what you’re seeing. And you cannot, even in the act of beholding it, you cannot imagine what you’re seeing. I mean, finally it actually goes off the scale. And you say, you know, all veils have been ripped away. All truths revealed. This is it. You wanted it. You’ve got it. You have to work your way down from that summit over hours and bring back snapshots of it. And the only thing I can say is it’s a matter of repetition and persistence and using every trick you can think of, including voice operated tape recorders. Note taking. And when I really have what I think is a slam bang inside, I repeat it to myself like every 20 minutes for the next few hours as I navigate through successively diminished states of higher consciousness until finally I emerge. And I still have understood the mystery of why my little finger exactly fits my nostril. In the back. Scream. What is it? You never heard of it? Well, I’m not... I don’t know what it is. I understand that it’s a secret sauce. Oh, it’s a drug. Well, touch my mouth. To be public humiliate. How many times in my life will this happen before I finally shuffle off the stage? It’s too CB. Oh, it’s too CB. Okay. Well, first of all, to your question about ayahuasca, which requires some explanation for some of the other people here. Ayahuasca is a fascinating, combinatorial, hallucinogenic substance that is made in the Amazon over a very wide area. And what it is is it’s the monoamine oxidase inhibiting harmine from a very large woody vine combined with the DMT that occurs in the Cotria viridis. So it’s interesting immediately because it’s a combinatorial shamanic hallucinogen. There are very few of these in the world. Notice that with peyote, de’tura, mushrooms, ibogae, morning glory seeds, it’s one plant and the process is to eat it. But with ayahuasca, it’s two plants. And the first thing is they must be correctly combined and cooked in certain proportions by a person of good heart and clear intent. So unlike any of these other things, they bear very intimately upon themselves the stamp of the human being who created them. And it’s a very intense experience because it not only is a full-fledged visionary hallucinogen, but it’s also a strong, purgative and emetic so that you are being cleaned from stem to stem while you are watching these videos. It’s just a roll-by. And it’s taken in the upper Amazon in a ritual setting on a weekly basis among the mestizo populations there. And when made right, it’s extremely powerful, lovely experience. It’s interesting to contrast it with the mushrooms because the mushrooms have this eerie, we came from outer space kind of global science fiction overview. Ayahuasca is entirely of the mother. It is grounding. It is of the earth, the flowing rivers, the dark banks, the jungle, the people, the small malocas. It just carries you out into the world of the earth and the people upon it. But the hallucinations can build so that they have a quality of intensity and contriteness so that you would swear that you had smoked DMT. It’s just that it took you three or four hours of careful manipulation of breath and attention to reach where DMT puts you whether you want it or not in about 30 seconds. But this is perhaps a better way to go at it. I’m very interested in ayahuasca and how it has formed culture and civilization in the Amazon. And it’s unusual that you ask the question even because so few people have heard of it. But it is beginning to be used in psychotherapy in this country in a ritual context very discreetly. And I think it holds out great promise. The reports coming out of these small groups of people who take it reverently and ritually are of tremendous healings and reorientations of neurotic personality structures and that sort of thing, which is exactly how it works in the context of the Amazonian situation. Over here. By the revelations of Philip K. Dick, do you mean the incidents that happened to him and that spawned books like Vailas and the Divine Invention? Well, I won’t spend too much time on this because I don’t know how many people know who Philip K. Dick is. I think it was Robert Anton Wilson who coined the term chapel perilous. This is when something happens in your life and it all begins to fit together and make sense. Too much sense because it’s coming from the exterior and it seems to either mean that you’re losing your mind or you are somehow the central focus of a universal conspiracy that is leading you towards some unimaginable breakthrough. I don’t know what that’s about. I’ve experienced it. Maybe anyone who leads a long and eccentric life has these periods where they seem to have caught the wave and are being carried toward unimaginable revelations and situations quite beyond their will. This is what happened to Dick and the explanation for these kinds of things would lead us quite far afield. I would just say briefly and bravely that I think vortexes of connectedness seem to haunt time like ghosts and they’re not material objects. So they’re too subtle for science to pick up. There’s something known to shamans, poets, gamblers, people like that. And these vortexes of coincidence and connectedness can work either for or against us. And if you don’t have a model, you can’t do it. That contains the possibility of these things, then when they come upon you, you will become highly agitated and think you’re losing your mind or you’re being contacted by aliens or something like that. I call it, and I don’t think I’m the first, but I call it the cosmic giggle. And you know, it comes after you sometimes. And you just have to be rep- that. You just have to be able to wrestle with that particular angel and it turns up on your doorstep. Yes, the slave. Can you see people that might be able to talk to you, try to experience it, try to learn to explain it as well as, you know, to be able to talk to you, to be able to talk to you. And then, you know, you can be enlightened or enlightened in terms of experiencing this outburst. And the second part of my question is, is it possible to have, to run into anyone who’s so sensitive to substances, like a feeding, hallucinogenic substance, if they just plant food, or something, if they’re sad, how they can’t tolerate what would be way over the mark, because it’s a way to change the country. Oh yes, absolutely. I mean, you make people who are extremely delicately paused. And there are people who, you know, well, consciousness can be just synergized into all kinds of tizzies by things other than these over-palacenogens. I am somewhat thankful that I’m cut from more lumpen stock, because I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I began to have a hallucinogenic experience, not in the presence of a hallucinogen. The states of mind that I’m interested in that come out of these shamanic plants are so radically different from ordinary states of consciousness that I wouldn’t care to access them, except through the technology of the plants. And I often get asked this question, are there other ways to do it? Certainly claims abound, you know, and you meet people who say, I don’t need drugs. I’m seeing little dancing mice and I close my eyes. Congratulations. I’ve never been entirely convinced, you know, it’s really hard to convince yourself that we’re all talking about the same thing. That’s why I perhaps rattle on more than I should. I’ve had the unsettling experience of, and I won’t use any names, but meeting someone who had done research on psychedelics for 20 years and given it to over 500 people who had taken it over 150 times. And I said, we discussed the possibility that they were professional, so they had always had off-the-shelf chemicals. And I said, well, you should try fresh mushrooms and see if you think there’s a difference. And he did the 1960s in large measure with their rhetoric about psychedelic drugs. So I had no idea. And so we have to keep leaning on each other. We have to keep comparing notes and make sure we’re talking about the same thing. We’re not talking about, I mean, on the way to the mystery, along the way to the mystery, lie the realms of loving everybody, moving fields of geometric color, past lives, you name it. But these are just milestones on the way. And when you finally get to the thing, the way you will know that you’ve arrived is that you will be struck dumb with wonder, that you will say, my God, this is impossible. This is inherently impossible. This is what impossible was invented to talk about. This cannot be. And it’s then we’re in the ballpark. Then we’re in the presence of the true coincidencia of positorum. There are all kinds of drugs and techniques and hot water and massage and this and that and vitamin therapy that moves you all over the map, makes you feel all kinds of different ways. And you see people experience all kinds of personal breakthroughs under massage and rebirthing and all these things. But I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about. I think we’re talking about something profoundly other, that it is very hard to get this thing out into the mainstream, because literally words fail us. It is a translinguistic object. It is if a flying saucer were to land in Central Park tomorrow, it would be not as mysterious and challenging to our conception of ourselves as this psychological state is, which lies at the center of all this shamanic dancing around and probing. There is something profoundly bizarre, accessible to us here and now. And it’s a complete puzzle to me why there is so little talk about it. We live in a society completely obsessed with sensation. You know, people shoot cocaine, jump out of airplanes, go on tiny rafts across the Pacific, cross the North Pole on a roller skate, whatever it is. And yet, all in the name of adventure. Well, you know, by God, if you want adventure, there’s adventure out there. There’s adventure that will sink you to your knees with tears of joy streaming down your face. It isn’t far away. It isn’t for people you never heard of or universities, so you don’t need a lot of funding. You don’t have to be a professional. All of this stuff. I mean, everybody talks about the mystery within and how it’s all right here, but I don’t think people realize how literal all this stuff is. The world is not only stranger than we suppose, it’s stranger than we can suppose. The weirdest, wildest, most bizarre and earthly thing you can imagine in your most demented state of fantasy falls far short of the beginnings of the truth. I don’t know. Sure. The question is, how do you do it right? And you talk about shelf life. I’ve talked to people recently. I said, if you’re taking five grams of mushroom, yeah, I walked around a dead show and saw a cartoon. No one has said yes except for one thing. Yes, I saw voices. Yes, I saw an alien landscape. Well, I think the way to do it right and this is self-serving advice, but nevertheless, if not me, who? Is to grow it, to grow your sacrament, because then a whole bunch of imponderables are removed. The bad karma of dealing with some form of criminal syndicalism, the uncertainty of not knowing what it is you actually have on your hands, how old it is, what conditions of care and attention it was created under, plus the discipline, and now I’m speaking of mushrooms, which is what I know very well, the discipline of growing mushrooms will itself prepare you to take them. If you can grow them, you need be a lot less concerned about whether or not you can take them than the person who simply buys them and takes them, because to grow them, you must be clean, conscientious, punctual, attentive, self-disciplined, cheerful, able to face adversity, willing to take chances, full of courage. These are qualities necessary to grow the mushrooms. And never leave home. Sentientary, permanent life, in love with isolation, perfectly content. So if you’re all those things and you will not succeed in growing mushrooms unless you are, well then you’ve already passed through a great initiation. And anyway, the living world, the satisfaction of working this alchemy, I call it the changing of Ryan to mold, and cynical souls have suggested yes, and from mold into gold, but I wouldn’t advocate that step. What you don’t use, you can give to your friends, but the growing is a real partnership. You will be amazed at the productivity of this organism. What a workhorse. You give it 112 grams of rye in a jar, and it will produce close to 45 dried grams of mushrooms. That’s a conversion rate of close to 30%. That’s an unheard of level of efficiency in a biological process. This stuff loves to work with four human beings, and it’s a tremendous insight into natural processes. If you’re alienated from mold, and people say, oh well, it’s terribly technical and this and that, it isn’t technical, it’s no more technical than canning jam. It’s about at that level. Living falls hot water, pressure cookers, gas heat, standing around, that kind of thing. But it is the reenactment, it’s a real shamanic empowering. It’s a calling forth of the ally before your eyes, and then you see it, and then you have it, and then you’ll be pulled into no one. Plus you’ve empowered yourself by learning that you could do this thing. Someone who has it over here. That was actually the question I wanted to ask more or less, but shorter than that. Are there other ways not growing up yourself that you can properly prepare yourself for them? I mean, I gather shamanistic cultures have a long experience of proper preparation. Well, that was the question, how do you obtain it in good karma? You’re asking the question, how do you take it in good karma? The advice is pretty straightforward and simple. First of all, obviously you have to have an intent to use it properly for spiritual growth and self-exploration. I think that goes without saying in talking to a group like this. But then the practical and operational question is how do you do it? Well, here’s how you do it. You take it on an empty stomach in silent darkness in a place where you are comfortable. Now, people don’t like this advice. It’s very simple advice. And the number of people who will come to me and say, I remember what you said, but I took it at 9 o’clock in the morning and I wanted to listen to Mozart. And there were people moving around in the house, forget Mozart. You know, Mozart is great without the adjunct of these things. Mozart can stand on his own. My notion of what you’re trying to do when you take one of these things is you want to see the quintessence of what it is. You want to see what it is. So put darkness behind it so that everything you see is only it. Put silence behind it so that everything you hear is only it. And then pay attention and sit still. And that’s all there is to it. Sit and watch the back of your closed eyelids with the expectation of seeing something. I mean, you’ve all meditated. Oh, God, that’s the most boring thing on earth. This is exactly like meditation. This is exactly like meditation, except instead of that dark, ochre background that settles in with the little phosphines floating by, instead of that is a Niagara of transcendental imagery. So I would say that meditation is a great model for it. You know, sit down, shut up, breathe deeply, and look with the tension at the back of your closed eyelids. And I guarantee you it will come. It will manifest. I don’t know. I feel like everybody should get a chance. Bertie, you haven’t asked a question. Yes, good question. One of the mystique of ayahuasca is that there are certain very tightly defined motifs that occur in it. And these are being swallowed by an enormous serpent and then somewhat unpredictably, since it’s a South American drug, the presence of black people and the jaguar motif, those three. The serpent, the jaguar, and the black person. And the answer is yes, very strongly, not only myself but other people. This is really interesting to me because I’m interested in where are these images. That’s what I’ve always asked. That’s why I’m so interested in the hallucinations. You see, people, you’ll hear spiritual teachers say, well, hallucination is a distraction, and that’s all lower bardo stuff, and you quickly get past hallucination. Not me. I’m fascinated by hallucination because I want to know where it’s coming from. How can it be that in sitting in silent darkness by myself for a half an hour, I can see more art than the human race has produced in 15,000 years? That’s not trivial. You can’t dismiss that as an impediment to spiritual progress. That’s a mystery and a miracle. Where are these images coming from? If they’re coming from us, why don’t we recognize them? Why is the main quality about them something which astonishes? We say, I could never have thought of that, and yet you’re seeing it, it’s filling your head. I wonder about the images in Iowa. Are they in our bones and our genes? Or is it a morphogenetic field of the local area? Where do these things come from? Naranjo referred to him in her question. Did experiments with urban Chileans who had never been to the jungle? They also got jaguars, black people, and giant serpents. I’ve taken Iowa skin in Northern California, and the blackness is the most puzzling to me because the jaguar and the serpent, these are power animals. But why blackness? And not blackness as honky as imaginative. I’m convinced it’s blackness as black people experienced it. I mean, it’s this wonderful, it’s very alien to an Irish lad like myself. I mean, it’s like going to the Apollo. It’s what it’s called. It’s like being at the Apollo. It’s this tremendously warm, open, funny, smart, savvy thing. Why? Why should it be there embedded in that experience over and over again? I don’t know. Why should the experience of the alien be embedded in the psilocybin experience? The sense of this thing which can communicate but which is not human and from another whole order of nature and with an entirely different conception of time and destiny and history. Who are these, what are these channels out there? It’s a very interesting question. To me it implies what I talked about this morning. The existence of another dimension, a dimension so vast that it will completely dissolve the concerns of industrial, male-dominated scientific civilization. We’ve gone as far as we can with that. And we’re coming back now to really facing the mystery with the things we learned on the Peregrination through history. And we’re better equipped than ever before to understand these things. But nevertheless, as the thing begins to lift the veils, you realize that it is still as mysterious as it ever was. Here. In the 60s, MDA was thought to maybe help enhance community. Can any of these drugs that you’re talking about be used as a tool to help accelerate the partnership spirit in family and community and in larger groups? Good question. Do these natural hallucinogens, can they be used to facilitate the formation of partnerships and partnerships societies? Well, the answer is certainly. Iowaska is a good case in point. The way Iowaska is used in the Amazon among the very traditional off-river tribes is it’s used to create states of group mindedness among the elders of the tribe to make social decisions for the group. In other words, before when Iowaska was first encountered, the chemical in it was named telepathy. This is what these European chemists named it. Later it was discovered that it was the same compound as had already been isolated from the giant Syrian roux called harming. So the rules of nomenclature meant that harming would be preferred over telepathy. But these states of group mindedness are very, very real and they occur on psilocybin in my experience as well. I didn’t talk about it too much this morning. I’m not running in my anthropological graph, but you can imagine the power that a kind of group telepathy would have in ensuring the survival and cohesion of a primitive group experiencing great pressure from the environment. So in a sense, that’s what these things may be good for. It’s possible to suggest that our ability to use language was something originally synergized out of our animal organization by environmental pressures in the presence of hallucinogens. There is something about communication, and I think this leads me to a favorite subject of mine. I think that the ways in which we communicate with each other are still evolving and still can gain energy from being explored with psychedelic compounds. Some of you, I’m sure, know my notion about what I call visible language, and I referred to it this morning when I said how many could see what I was saying. Visible language is the notion that language need not be something heard through the ears. Language sufficiently empowered might be beheld with the eyes. This is what great poets are able to do, and great singers of song and tellers of stories. They’re able to use language so creatively that without noticing that anything has happened to you, the listener, you begin to see what is intended rather than to hear it. And I take this very seriously because on psilocybin, I have actually both beheld the intent of other people and also been able to cause them to behold my intent. It’s what Phylogedias called the more perfect logos. He said the more perfect logos is a logos which goes from being heard by the ear to being seen by the eyes without ever crossing over a quantized moment of transition. So imagine how much we always think that telepathy would be a situation in which I would think something and you would hear what I was thinking. But what if telepathy were that I would say something and we both would see what I mean and could just walk around and look at it? And I think we unconsciously anticipate this in the ways in which we talk about communication because we say she spoke very clearly. I see what you mean. He painted a picture for us. In other words, we always reach into the domain of the visual metaphor when we wish to indicate a higher order of clarity in speech. And I think from taking ayahuasca in the Amazon with these shamans that what we take to be beautiful shamanic songs are for the people who are intoxicated on the hallucinogen, not songs at all, but works of visual arts that are seen, that are looked at. We again, the visual metaphor, we talk about a tapestry of sound. These really are these icaros, these magical songs. They really are tapestries of sound. And when you use psilocybin, you can experiment with your own voice and discover that a certain sound is actually the color violet. And another sound is chartreuse shading into lemon yellow. I mean, in a way, I’m trivializing it because it’s much more complex than this. But what you discover is that sound can be seen and that thought can be beheld. I think the evolution of our brain chemistry hovers just under the threshold of this thing becoming explicit. And it’s a hard thing to talk about, obviously, because we’re talking about speech and communication intent itself. But again, by looking back into the past, we can obtain an image which maybe helps us. How did language, as we know it and as I am using it at this moment, come to be? Must this not have been something which was for thousands and thousands of years just under the surface of our ability to take hold of it and cognize? And then suddenly it geled. There was a phase transition and people got the idea that you could signify with sound, that you could cause an image of a thing not present to come into the mind of your hearer by naming it. And this is a tremendous, almost miraculous ability. And people talk about gorillas and dolphins and chimpanzees and there is language there. But the miracle of human language, the things that we can do, the way that poetry can set armies marching and the way Messiahs take control of the destiny of whole millennia is people. It’s all through the spoken word. It’s all through the power of images beheld in the privacy of the individual mind, somehow linked to little mouth noises. And these little mouth noises go across space and enter through the ear of the hearer. The hearer consults his or her dictionary and reconstructs a blueprint of the intended thought. And this very crude process is what holds us together, our religions, our governments, our hopes, our fears. So a transformation in the linguistic domain would create a great cohesion. And I believe that the proper view of these psychedelic compounds is as enzymes, if you want, catalyst. Now what is a catalyst? A catalyst is a compound which causes a certain chemical reaction to progress at a faster rate without the catalyst itself being consumed. In other words, it drives the chemical process and these hallucinogens in the natural surround drive and catalyze and synergize the process of consciousness in our species. And what it comes down to in practical terms is the synergy of language emergence. We cannot move into the future any faster than the rate at which we transform our language. And language transformation and evolution has up until the present moment been left pretty much to find its own way. There has never been really a culture with a conscious intent of transforming its language. Yes, here. I agree with you and I think there is another aspect of it that I have observed in communication and that is there is a sort of like listening to buttons to puller is an interesting process for me. I’ve listened to lots of times from my early childhood and sometimes when I just, I don’t try to understand its words. I switch into another mode. I’ve had time for what I could understand everything we’ve said without understanding its words, its own words. I think there is a lot of communication that goes on in that other place that I think we all have to develop to get beyond the words. I agree in the realm of sound. Sometimes people criticize me and say you use too many big words. You would communicate with more people if you use simpler words. Well, first of all, I love words and second of all, it’s always been my faith that if you pronounce the word clearly, it will be understood, you know? And I don’t know if it’s working for you or not, but it’s how I learned all these big words is somebody said them to me and I knew exactly what they meant. So I think we need to fully empower language. We get along in day-to-day affairs on probably 10,000 words. English has 500,000 that we would all probably recognize. So we really need to experience and experiment with empowered speech and what it can do. Isn’t it interesting that we have millions and millions of words for things like leptons and quarks and ratchets and these kinds of things? We have about five words for emotions. We have love, hate, disgust, and then a few others. But if you will still your mind for a moment and direct your attention to your heart, you will see that your heart is as busy giving out complex vibrations as your mind is. The vibration, the complex vibrations given out by your mind, you can usually transduce into speech and start saying, I want, I think, I know, I know, this and that. But when you turn your attention to your heart, most of us are totally in articulate and even the most articulate among us in matters of the heart still inherit a tremendously impoverished vocabulary. It’s very hard to say what you really mean when you’re talking about your feelings because there’s such feathery, delicate creatures and the words that convey them are such sledgehammers of statistical averaging and real misunderstanding. So this is another dimension, you know, out of the sixties come concepts which are always ridiculed by the orthodox. Concepts like the vibes and laying an ego trip. And what this is is the first faulting stance toward creating a new language about emotion and feeling. And it’s too bad that it was broken off or that it didn’t proceed at the rapid rate at the end because we cannot, really the way I see moving into the future, it isn’t a matter of time passing, it’s a matter of stretching the envelope of language. We can only progress as quickly as we can describe to each other where it is we want to go. This is again like restating the idea that the best idea will win. What we need to do is all hone our ideas, clarify our thoughts and then dialogue with each other. This was the Greek technique which created the first philosophical breakthroughs that were the entire basis for our culture, our culture and much of the rest of world culture. So it’s always about stretching the envelope of language, seeking to say yet more clearly what we mean, to adenbrae and refine and indicate nuance with ever greater clarity. That is what communication is and when it’s done perfectly, it becomes a true partnership in art. One example you used before, Terence, is the octopus that you were mentioning changes its body and communicates physically without verbal connection. As a dancer I appreciate that and I thought maybe you can make a comment on that. This is the part of the evening where we start requesting a favorite song. The octopus blues briefly. I talked about visible language a little earlier and John reminds me of a wonderful metaphor and insight into all of this, which is nature always provides models for what we want to do no matter how advanced or unadvanced nature always provides the model. So I had this idea about visible language years and years ago, but in the past couple of years I’ve discovered everybody seems to discover mind in the water. For Lily it was dolphins, for other people it’s dimwales. For me it was octopi, cephalopods, and I’ll talk about them a little bit. First of all they have extremely well evolved eyes. They have eyes as good as human eyes and in fact it’s always held up as a great example of parallel evolution that these two utterly unrelated organisms could have eyes that on the dissecting table you cannot tell a human eye from an octopus eye unless you’re an anatomist. So, but who would want to? Octopi are cephalopods, they’re mollusks, they’re related to estar go and banana slugs, the evolutionary distance between them and us is tremendous. I mean their line and our line divided about 780 million years ago compared to dolphins. Dolphins are like the boy and girl next door compared to this organism. This is an alien organism. Okay, so it’s been known for a long time that these octopi could change color and it was always thought that this was simple camouflage. That they change colors and match their background but observation being the key to scientific advance. People notice that but they don’t match their background. They generate polka dots and traveling bars and what are called blushes and striping and all of this sort of thing. So then it was realized they are communicating with each other. This is how octopi communicate. They are actually almost like creatures turned inside out because they have a tremendously advanced nervous system which is on the surface of their skin. And this nervous system controls these specialized cells called chromatic bores which change color. So that what an octopus thinks is how an octopus looks. In other words they are their own thoughts. They are like a naked nervous system. They are pure linguistic intent and when you see them they not only are able to change their color but because they are soft bodied they can fold and unfold and reveal. So they are like a sematopore. They are pure linguistic intent. And I think where this reaches its most psychedelic extreme is in the benthic octopi, the very rare deep water octopi that lived below 1500 meters in the deep ocean where no light ever penetrates. And how have they continued their dialogue into this abyssal darkness? It’s by evolving light organs all over their bodies equipped with eyelid like membranes so that if you see films of these things they are psychedelic idea complexes. Transforming themselves, lighting themselves, sending traveling lines of lights and stripes and dots. Well to me this is a model for the human future of communication. If you think of the way we seem to require titular animals, for instance the titular animal of 19th century industrialism was the horse. Realized as the locomotive which was measured in thousands and thousands of horse power. That was very impressive to the 19th century mentality. The 20th century mentality realizes its titular animal which is I think the hawk, the soaring raptor which is definitely a dominator symbol is realized in quite performance fighter aircraft. That is to be like a gigantic bird of prey. The titular model, the titular animal for the future is I would suggest the octopi because it is probing the frontiers of communication and self reflection. In fact the octopus may contain the hint of what this great phase transition we’re approaching is to be. It is actually I think an effort to turn ourselves inside out to objectify the mind so that it can be beheld and freely seen so that we can each see the soul of the other and then to interiorize the body so that it is a freely commanded object in the imagination. That’s I think what we’re headed toward and it is anticipated by the psychedelic state and will be hardwired through the feminization of cybernetics and it will release from us the tremendous pressure of limits. That’s what we really feel is limits and we sense that in the imagination there are no limits. We just don’t know how you get a 145 pound or 220 pound body into the imagination. Well I think the process is a historical one. It’s a cultural transformation. We have to exteriorize our minds, interiorize our bodies and create a psychedelic cybernetic partnership collectivity that lays the basis for a new self image of what humaneness can be. This is what I call shedding the monkey. We are destined for grander and higher things. The promise has always been there in the orgasms which we experience in distinction to most other animals, in the religions which we generate in distinction to most other animals, in the great collective works of art and social dreams that we generate in distinction to most other animals. We are called to higher things and are passing through a series of bootstrapping self transitions that are synergized by the psychedelic plants in our environment and whose end state is anticipated in each of us as a microcosm when we surrender our e-