"McKenna - Jun 15 1992" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKenna Terence)

The Camden Centre Talk 15/6/92
by Terence McKenna
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Well, it's a pleasure to be here. I want to thank Evolution Records for, once again, making an event like this possible. It's always a pleasure to return to England. Let me see if I can get my act here and make an event of it.
What I thought I would talk about tonight, since I figure we did our homework during my last visit, is how the psychedelic experience which we have as individuals relates to the global future that we can feel the world being swept toward and how this relates to our planetary paths. I think we can make some sense out of the human condition if we're willing to look at psychedelic plants not as simply tools for individual spiritual transformation, but actually as tools and forces which transformed us as a species in the distant past, and I'll just give it to you very briefly.

As you may or may not know, all primates -- and we certainly are primates -- have what are called 'male dominance hierarchies'. This means that the longest-fanged, meanest s.o.b. in a monkey tribe takes control of the group resources, the females, the weaker males, and this character runs the show, and this is pretty much how we do it today. But my belief, based on 25 years of working with and taking psychedelic plants and substances, has led me to -- well, certainly to the brink of hubris -- to make an adjustment to evolutionary theory and suggest that these psychedelic substances are not private, peripheral, ancillary, cultish, esoteric, meaningless, self-indulgent, narcissistic, or obscure; they are in fact central to understanding how what we call 'human-ness' actually came to be in the first place. I really believe that the reason we have language and notions like community, altruism, loyalty, brotherhood, hope -- the reason we have these qualities, which are the qualities that we embrace as most human and most ennobling to us, is because for a period of roughly a hundred thousand years we self-medicated ourselves and suppressed the poisonous presence of the calcareous tumour of ego. Ego is the psychological structure which is propelling us to hell in a handbasket. The problems which beset the modern world and which continue to go unaddressed and unresolved can all be traced to ego, to our inability to emotionally connect with the consequences of what we are doing to ourselves, to each other, to the world. Our newspapers are filled with data on dissolving ozone holes, planktonic life in the ocean is endangered, toxic wastes are accumulating -- you all know the litany. But in trying to trace it to a root problem, I see it as ego -- the inability of the individual to get with the programme of group values. And I believe that we have this problem because we have fallen into an historical and cultural style that suppresses, denies and ignores the powerful potential of psychedelic plants to transform personalities, to erase boundaries, and to fuse people into a single thinking organism. This is what the nomadic tribalism of the past was all about.

Well, how is this done, or how can this be? If you've had a psychedelic experience, you know that each one is incredibly unique, addressed to the individual, and seemingly as private a matter as one could possibly conceive. But when, as a clinician or a person in my position, you have an opportunity to listen to accounts of dozens, hundreds, of psychedelic experiences, you begin to see the general outline of what these things are doing. And my analysis of it is they dissolve boundaries, they erase differences, they introduce you to the notion that reality is, in the wonderful phrase of Gregory Bateson, 'A seamless web', that we are not atomic entities forever imprisoned in our own private Idahos, we are in fact part of some kind of field. It's almost as though what the psychedelics are attempting to do for sociology and psychology is what was achieved by quantum physics from matter in the 1920s and '30s. Matter, during that period, was re-analyzed and found to be not tiny hard billiard ball-like particles whizzing through space carrying spin and electric charge, but that there was another level, a lower layer, and that other level, that other description, revealed an interactive wave system where individual points of concrescence are merely statistical rather than real, everything dissolves into a kind of soup of multi-leveled, multi-dimensional connectedness, and this is what the psychedelic experience is. I believe that one way of thinking about life is -- biology I mean -- is that it is a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminism to such a degree that freedom, true freedom, shimmers into existence at the macrophysical level -- the level that we, as thinking, suffering, striving, dreaming organisms, actually occupy, and that the amplification of quantum mechanical indeterminacy that allows for freedom then allows evolutionary processes to reflect the forces which are impinging upon them.

Now, orthodox science hands you a universe that is characterised by a forward-flowing casuistry where every event is somehow dependent in its existential completeness upon the moment which came immediately before it. And I believe that we can extract, as it were, from the psychedelic experience and return with an entirely different notion of time, space and causality. Probably most of you are familiar from your mathematics classes in school with the idea that they teach you in trigonometry that all possible ellipses can be obtained by sectioning a cone and we can build up a picture of a cone by examining thousands and thousands of elliptical sections of that cone and then reasoning backward to the higher-dimensional object which that cone represents. Well, I believe that every psychedelic journey is a sectioning of a higher-dimensional object of some sort, and that we ourselves, in our individual lives, also represent a sectioning of this higher-dimensional object.

So, then, the intellectual quest, the spiritual quest, becomes one of empowering the felt presence of experience, both psychedelic experience and the normal day-to-day experience of living, and noticing that that is the primary stuff of which reality is made. Reality is not make of quarks and mu-mesons and z-particles. Reality is made of language. Whatever we think reality is, it is an entirely private matter until we describe it -- either linguistically, mathematically, through painting, through dance, through innuendo -- whatever it is, reality then undergoes the formality of actually occurring when it is languaged, and what I've noticed about these psychedelics is that they are catalysts for language. They are, as it were, an enzyme operating in the human body politic propelling us to what's called 'stretch the envelope', stretch the design perimeters of the human experience.

Now, I don't think that many people actually realise how literally I take and intend what I'm saying. I encountered the language issue on psychedelics about 22 years ago when one evening a friend of mine stopped by and he had a little vial of an orange substance and he said 'would you like to try something new?' And I had done my LSD graduate work some few months before, and I only asked him one question, I said 'How long does it last?' And he said 'It lasts about 10 minutes', and I said, 'Well, bring it on then my friend!' This was dimethyltryptamine, DMT, and I smoked it and I saw -- I had a feeling of slight anesthesia in my body -- I saw a swirling, floral mandala form behind my closed eyelids, and as I moved toward this mandala, I realised I was going to penetrate beyond it, and I burst through into a kind of other dimensional superspace, and my... I had expected a kind of instant psychoanalysis or perhaps swirling colours or moving geometric plains of light, perhaps a dancing canary or a little candies doing two-steps in a row -- this is what's called hypnogochia in the medical literature, and it is essentially trivial hallucination. Instead, what happened was there was an encounter with what can only be described as an elf hive, a colony of self-transforming, hyperdimensional machine creatures that came bounding forward with joyful squeaks to dribble themselves like self-transforming jeweled basketballs on the floor in front of me, and I was dumbstruck with amazement. Occasionally people ask me 'Is DMT dangerous?', and I think the honest answer is 'only if you fear death by astonishment'. Well, I was astonished, -- I mean, I was an intellectual of the Hegel/Camus crowd when I went through that violet scintillating doorway, and I came out a true believer. Because these creatures in this place are filled with a kind of zany, affectionate, reckless humour and a desire to communicate with human beings, or at least with me in that moment. And what they were doing and how they were communicating was by generating, through their songs, objects, so that what I was surrounded by was a crowd of diminutive, self-transforming blobs of intentionalised ectoplasmic material, and they were producing out of their bodies objects which looked like Faberge eggs or exquisitely-tooled machines made of ivory, glass, and gemstone that were themselves undergoing some kind of transformation, emitting musical sounds, condensing liquid metal out of the air and causing it to rain down on us. Well, my reaction to this was to go into a kind of shock of amazement and, you know, it raises fairly profound questions, like number one, 'Surely I must be dead, surely no-one can have this experience and return intact'. I mean, because, you see, it exceeds imagining, it is beyond your imagining -- even when you're looking at it, you attempt to pour the salutary waters of description over these transdimensional objects and it runs, language runs off them like water off a duck's back. And the emotional content of this kind of encounter is tremendously intense.

These things are attempting to communicate a new dispensation of the Logos. They are holding out the possibility that language need not be processed by the ears, that language can become, under certain radical situations of neurological perturbation, visible, that literally the word condenses into visible space, and they were urging me to do this. They were urging me to experiment with my voice and I discovered years later, taking Ayahuasca in the Amazon jungles, tribes of Indians that have actually mastered this art, and that saturate their bodies with DMT and harmaline, and then sing. But for them this singing is not a musical exercise, it's a pictorial exercise. They see what they intend. This is a kind of telepathy.

Well, it's humbling, it's transformative, it's astonishing to realise that shamans all over the world for time uncountable have been accessing this appalling, complex, ontologically challenging, scientifically impossible, reality. This means that culturally we are living out some kind of schizophrenic delusion, because we live our lives totally ignorant of these possibilities, or perhaps only glimpsing them at the edge of anesthesia, or something like that, unless, of course, we have the courage to be counter-cultural heads. But even then many people confine themselves in the private world of their own reflection because social pressure and, indeed, social legislation make it very touchy to talk about these things. But I say to you, this is part of the human birthright. This is as much a part of the game as birth, sex and dying.

Now, it may well be that there are kiliachasms(?) of time and that each individual is reincarnated time after time after time, but I prefer to suppose not, and to entertain the idea that this life represents an enormous and improbable opportunity that is to be used for something, and the something that it is to be used for is to go out to the edge and explore. You know, you can stay within the conjured circle of scientific rationalism and ho-hum, mundane, secular, yuppiehood, but the method that worked for me was to adore, pursue and obsess on the bizarre, the peculiar, the outre. Somewhere there's an alchemical text which says 'The highest mountains, the widest deserts, the oldest books, there you will find the stone', and what I would like to suggest to you is that of all the methods, tools, points of view, ideologies, and so forth that you will meet when you begin your catalogue of the edge material, the psychedelic dimension is the ne plus ultra of that dimension. Most spiritual seeking is done with the accelerator pressed to the floor. Once you encounter psychedelics you have found the answer. Now the name of the game changes. No longer the ever-eager ingenue hanging on the guru's latest iron whim. Now you have to face the answer. It's not a matter of blithely seeking, it's a matter of screwing your courage to the sticking point, because the tool has been placed into your hand that will work, that will deliver the goods. You know, people tend to complain there's no adventure left in the world, the world is devoid of challenge. I say to you 'five grams in silent darkness in the confine of your own apartment on a rainy Sunday evening an you'll feel that Ferdinand Magellan should take a back seat'.

We tend, you see, to always imagine the challenge rests with someone else. We have been made spectators to life by a disempowering view of ourselves carried to us by science and mass media. You know, you're supposed to identify with Madonna or Elvis or somebody, but the richness -- the inner richness -- of one's own being, because it cannot be bought and sold, is deemed worthless by the culture. We actually live in a de-humanising culture and, as you know, the consequences of a couple of thousand years of this kind of alienation are that now we face the potential death of the planet. We have invented a sin for which there isn't even a word in English that I am aware of, it's the sin of stealing the future from your own children.

How, then, faced with a mounting panoply of facts, studies and statements that point to imminent collapse of our ecosystem, our atmosphere and our social support system, how can we change our minds? If hortatory preaching could do it, then the Sermon on the Mount would have been the turning point. If horrifying displays of military stupidity could have done it, then Hiroshima would have been the turning point. We have to pharmacologically intervene. This is not a test. This is not a game. We do not have 500 years, we do not have a hundred years, we must awaken, and jolly quick, or evolution and planetary dynamics will write "finis" to our fragile effort to build a transcendent vehicle that would move us away from, you know, the mute present of the animal mind and into the realm of spirit, poetry, art, love and transcendence. The only thing that I am aware of that can work quickly enough to make this change are psychedelic substances. They are the only things I've ever seen turn somebody a hundred per cent around in the space of about five hours. On a global scale, this is the kind of remedy that we are seeking. Well, why then can we simply not apply it? The answer is that our problem arises out of our pathological commitment to ego, and ego is what is put at risk by psychedelic compounds. I believe Tim Leary once said -- although he denies it, but it's so brilliant it's worth repeating -- that LSD is a substance which occasionally causes psychotic behaviour in people who have not taken it. This is the problem we're dealing with. These psychedelic substances cause hysterical psychoses in people who have not taken them, and how then do you talk them down out of their tree and attempt to convince them that this is all well and good? Well, it isn't easy. It isn't going to come from the upper echelons of the establishment, this revolution in thinking, it's going to come from youth, it's going to come from people who stand outside the system and can see its contradictions.

Well, is it simply a political evolution, revolution, a desire for more freedom, less entanglement with bureaucracy and restriction of civil rights? I don't think so. I think that when we analyze carefully the content of the psychedelic experience we have to leave our previous models behind. The psychedelic experience is far more than instant psychotherapy or instant regression to infantile traumatic situations, far more than simply a kind of super-aphrodisiac, far more than simply an aid in formulating ideas or coming up with artistic concepts. What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy. It turns out, if we can trust the evidence of the psychedelic experience, that we are not the only intelligent life forms on this planet, that we share this planet with some kind of conscious mind -- call it Gaia, call it Zeta Reticulians who came here a million years ago, call it God Almighty, it doesn't matter what you call it, the fact of the matter is that the claims of religion that there is some kind of higher power can be experientially verified through psychedelics. Now this is not, in Milton's wonderful phrase 'The God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven' -- it doesn't have to do with that, in my opinion -- it isn't cosmic in scale, it's planetary in scale. There is some kind of disincarnate intelligence. It's in the water, it's in the ground, it's in the vegetation, it's in the atmosphere we breath, and our unhappiness, our discomfort, arises from the fact that we have fallen into history and history is a state of benighted ignorance concerning the real facts of how the world works.

You see, minded human beings existed for a hundred thousand years before what we call history. I believe that in the Saharan plains of Africa, through the use of psilocybin mushrooms -- at first unconsciously and then with conscious intent -- boundaries were erased. The previous several million years of primate hierarchy and male dominance were chemically medicated out of existence and men and women lived in relationships of respect and balance with each other, with their children, with the earth, with other human groups, and that this is the memory of paradise that accounts for our deep nostalgia for the past. It isn't a psychological mirage, it's real, there was a great mystery and it was lost, and we are the impoverished children who have inherited this situation of loss and abandonment, because you see the very forces which created the mushroom paradise in the grasslands of Africa, that same force which was the climatological drying out of the African continent and much of the rest of the planet, eventually turned those grasslands to desert and at that point, under nutritional pressure and with mushrooms a fading memory, agriculture was invented, paternity -- male paternity -- was discovered. And once male paternity is discovered there is tremendous anxiety on the part of males to control the behaviour of females and, as you know, this is not easy, and so consequently social discord arises. You see, what happened was for perhaps as long as two hundred thousand years, the presence of psilocybin in the diet and the environment suppressed ego and so a human relationship to the earth and to other people was possible, and during that time religion, altruism, sense of community, loyalty, all these things I mentioned, came to be. When the mushroom faded, those suppressed atavistic animal behaviours returned, men became territorial, women became property, children became chattel, and the unifying mushroom celebrations and the great lunar orgiastic ceremonies that accompanied the worship of the Goddess -- that all was suppressed and we marched off into history, a nightmare journey, that carries us to today.

And so you see, I see this whole business of the twentieth century as having the psychedelic experience as its centrepiece, as a cultural icon, but surrounding that are all the other impulses to the archaic that surround us now. It begins as far back as impressionism, which deconstructs the realistic image of the romantics, and then you get Freud's discovery of the unconscious, he points out that we are not victorian ladies and gentlemen but dark thoughts split behind our eyelids, that we are obsessed with sexuality, with fecal matter -- you know the list. Following Freud comes Jung, who carries it a step further, introduces the notion of a race mind, racial consciousness, archetypes. Working in a slightly different area, people like Picasso journey to Africa and return to Paris with the masks of tribal peoples which then begin to feed into the theories of analytical and synthetic cubism. Simultaneously, the quantum physicists are announcing that the orderly billiard ball world of the Hamiltonian atom has to be replaced with wave mechanical functions of excruciating complexity, then you get, you know, in short order, I don't know, abstract expressionism, rock and roll, the outbreak of communal lifestyles of the 1960s -- you see, I think all of these cultural phenomena can be placed under the umbrella of what I call 'an archaic revival'. This is what house music is, this is what the psychedelic rebirth is, this is what the new cyber-tribalism is, and at the centre of this the sparkplug, the necessary element, the sine qua non, if you will, is the psychedelic experience, because it's not an ideology, it's not something that you get from Baba if you clean up around the ashram for a few years, it doesn't come to you from some beady-eyed roshi, rishi, geshe, or guru. It's a direct relationship between you and the plant, between you and nature, and when you open yourself up to this you discover that this is the secret that was lost and how they keep the lid on this I really haven't the faintest idea.

This is the biggest news around. I mean, if flying saucers were to land on the front lawn of Buckingham Palace tomorrow, it would be less interesting than your next DMT trip -- to you -- because the DMT trip happens to you. The other, the Guardian or the Economist conveys it to us, and I suppose most of us imagine this is how the news of transformation will arrive. I don't think so. It's not going to come over the tele, it's going to come up from the toes, out of the earth, through your groin, into your heart and up to your brain. This is where the empowerment comes from, and until we begin to decondition ourselves from the images that we are obtaining from the dominator culture we will always be its creatures and it keeps us in a state of infantile delusion. I mean, we are not playing with a full deck unless we integrate into our psychology the presence of the psychedelic experience. Is it terrifying? You bet it's terrifying. Will it change your life forever? You bet, you'll never be the same. The analogy I like to make is to sexuality because the idea of someone going from birth to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience is to me a notion that makes me as edgy as the idea of someone going from the birth to the grave without ever having a sexual experience. It means you never really rolled up your sleeves and played in the game. You were a spectator, you were a silent witness, you slid through, and you then did not empower yourself to act to reclaim the historical process, because the reclamation of the historical process comes through a commitment to a return to the atavistic through the direct transformation of experience, you see. This is not an ideology, there is no dogma, there are no rules, this is not a menu of moral prescription, this is something that happens between you and this transcendental reality.

Now, I believe that what shamans, including modern cyber-shamans, see when they ascend to the psychedelic heights is actually the viewpoint that we would have if we could penetrate into another dimension -- and I use the word in the mathematically formal sense. You know, Plato said 'Time is the moving image of eternity'. Well, I believe that what the shaman sees is the End, and that this gives the shaman a tremendous self-confidence, a tremendous existential validity, so that he or she can then return and take their place among the rest of us and be a source of inspiration, of a transcendent exemplar.

Well, what is the nature of this End which is seen? Well, mmm, this is where we part company with orthodoxy, if you think we hadn't already -- I think we have entirely misunderstood the character of time. We are not being pushed by the force of causal necessity, we, we human beings, are reacting to the siren song of the transcendental object at the end of time. We are on a collision course with an event for which there is hardly language. We are on a collision course with a temporal vortex of some sort. It has become a cliche of modern parlance and journalism that time is speeding up, that history is moving faster and faster. I take this perception very seriously, because I actually take all perception very seriously. I would always prefer a direct perception than a theoretical construct, and so I would like to suggest to you that what is happening on this planet is that time is being speeded up in our species, we are under the influence of a kind of strange attractor which is moving us through the temporal medium at an ever-faster accelerating rate. This is a law of the universe, though not one recognised by science. (Hopefully, I will change that sad state of affairs.) Because you can see that the early universe immediately after the hypothesised 'Big Bang', was an incredibly simple place. There were no organisms, there were no molecules, there were not even atoms, there was only a pure plasma of electrons and as the universe cooled, levels of complexity crystallised out successively, each one building on the previous level of complexity, so eventually the temperature in the universe dropped low enough that electrons could settle into stable orbits around atomic nuclei. Well, in that case, then you get atomic physics. Those atoms condensed into stars and eventually the temperature and pressure in the centre of those stars was sufficient to trigger fusion and heavier elements, like iron and sulphur and carbon, are then cooked out of these stars. Well, then once you have carbon, with it's four-valent quality, you have the possibility of molecular complexity, an entirely new domain of complexification. Well, not to belabour the point, but quickly out of molecules come highly complex polymers, out of highly complex polymers come early replicating molecules, from them prokaryotes (the earliest living cells, non-nucleated), then the nucleated cells, the eukaryotes, then clusters of colonies, colonies of cells, the earliest organisms, then more complex organisms, eventually higher animals. Out of them, binocular, bipedal primates with an opposable thumb. Out of them, language-using, mushrooms-using, orgiastic humans. Out of them, history, cities, warfare, hierarchies, writing, mathematics, music, and in the twentieth century this all knits together into some kind of global organism. Now, the horror of science is that it denies the importance of this phenomenon... [END SIDE 1]

... this phenomenon at all. For science, the most important phenomenon in the universe is the move toward heat-death and entropy. They barely notice that life represents an amazing and persistent exception to the rule that all thermal dynamic systems run down, life has achieved the miracle of a stability far from entropy through the miracle of metabolism.

Well, notice that in this little scenario I sketched out where complexity emerges out of simpler states, that each ascent to the next order occurs more quickly than the process before it so that we are in a kind of tightening spiral, one of William Butler Yates's gyres, we are wrapping ourselves around a cosmic endpoint of some sort, and this is what I call the transcendental object at the end of time. It beckons across the dimensions, it throws an enormous shadow over the enterprise of human history. This is what drives the guru to make his statement, this is what kindles the messiah to his mission, this is what inspires the painter and the dreamer and the musician, it's that there is this enormous source of affection and concern for humanity that is calling us toward it, across the planes of lower-dimensional time and space. And the miracle is that through perturbing our neurochemistry in ways which shamans have always done, we can turn to the last page, as it were, and we can see then that all this process was actually toward a good cause. We are moving toward the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter. We are about to witness the freeing of life from the chrysalis of matter. This is what our privilege and our destiny is, is to be the final generation of people with one foot in the material realm of the battered primate and one foot on the ladder to godhood.

And I asked the mushroom once about the social chaos at the end of history, and the mushroom said 'No worry, bro. This is what it's like when a species departs for hyperspace." There's a little shimmy in the landing zone as we take off. So the metaphor that I have created to try and calm people and to make it possible for us to go into this future with dignity and hope -- which I think is the only appropriate response -- is the metaphor of birth. If you had never heard, if no one had ever informed you, of the facts of life, and you were suddenly to come around the corner and encounter a woman in the act of giving birth, this situation vibrates medical emergency -- blood is being shed, clearly there's a great deal of physical pain and agony, pleading, a sense of helplessness, it looks as though an enormous tumour is metastasizing out of someone's body. It would be a real leap of faith and understanding to be able to contemplate that for the first time and to know or to guess that this is how nature does it, this is how we move to the next higher level, this is what is happening to us. Matter and the human body is the placenta of the soul and it is certainly true that the earth is the cradle of the human race, but no infant remains in the cradle forever. Again, to harp back to the birth metaphor, if it's time for birth to occur and it doesn't occur, then you do have medical emergency, what's called toxemia sets in, dangerous to the mother, fatal to the foetus, the two must be medically parted jolly quick or there will be permanent repercussions. This is why we must aid this birth process, because it is painful, life is sculpted out of death and the feeling that we as a species have in this moment is the feeling that the foetus has, I think, as it moves into the narrowest neck of the birth canal. Gone forever are the endless amniotic oceans of peace and tranquillity when we could rape and pillage and burn and explore to our heart's content because the earth seemed infinite in extent. Now, we have the same feeling that the foetus has as it starts down the birth canal -- we can't breath, there's no oxygen, we can't get food, we appear to be ... the walls are moving in to crush us.

What we have to understand is that this is the narrow neck that we have been trained for, this is our destiny, nine times in the last two million years the ice has moved southward from the poles, miles deep. Your ancestors, my ancestors, were there, they didn't drop the ball, and they didn't have antibiotics and advanced medical technology to see them through. Think of how much suffering and how much nobility and how much love has gone in to getting you to this moment. You represent an unbroken chain of responsible, intelligent, coherent people and it ends in us, and so then Tolstoy's question 'What is to be done?'

What is to be done? What we have to do is swallow hard, in a similar way that the Russians had to swallow hard, and admit we did it wrong, we did it wrong, and now the only way out is back, we must return to the archaic world of shamanism, mutual respect among men and women, a sense of seamless cohesion with the living world. If this is not done, then the experiment fails. Blake talks about falling from the golden spire into eternal death. This is a real possibility. This is the realm of existential decision, and it's not about confronting the government with massive force or publishing hortatory tracts or any of that, it's about doing larger doses more frequently and discussing it with one's friends. Perhaps this will develop into a much larger movement than it is, I'm not really interested in that, I'm interested in deepening the experience of the core peerage and that's the people who are here tonight -- none of us are loaded enough, at least I haven't met anybody who is and I certainly am not -- we must live the faith that we are trying to promulgate because it is done, as every shaman knows, by example, and therefore I would like to suggest to you, since we look pretty much like everybody else or a slice of everybody else wandering around in London today, that you look around at the people in this room, this is your peer group, you know, we are not of the same class, of the same colour, we have not originated from a particular line, but we are an affinity group and in the same way that every affinity group, every coherent social entity has had to claim its place in the sun, we have to claim our place in the sun. They're not handing out freedom to anybody, they're not handing out social respect to anybody -- ask black people, ask gay people -- the only way you get respect in this respect in this society is you take it, and I think this is the cusp upon which the psychedelic community now teeters. We were here before in the '60s and when they came with machine guns we just melted into the woodwork, nobody was ready for that, so now there must be a new strategy by stealth, by worming from within, we're not dropping out here, we're infiltrating and taking over because it's our world and our children's world and we're not going to see it run over the edge by a bunch of constipated gentlemen -- that's not the plan.

Well, I think I've run over here a bit, not too much, but I just want to reiterate to you because it puzzles me and it's the compass of my existence. This is not shut and jive, this is not another Swami or Baba or anything like that, those of you who doubt me I'd like to point out to you that DMT only lasts 10 minutes and I think it would be obligatory on anyone who thought they were going to carry out a critique of this position to just get that experience under their belt and once that is done rather than carry on a critique, I think most people will join up, because this is incontrovertible evidence, incontrovertible evidence of the presence of the transcendental in our lives. That's what I was seeking, never dreaming that I would find it. By the time I was on the threshold of it, I didn't believe in it, you know, I had accepted all that marxist crap and all that existential stuff and the reductionism of science and the rules of evidence and all this stuff they hurl at you, that's all malarkey. The thought I would like to leave you with tonight, which you can verify for yourself in the confines of your own flat later, is the world is not only stranger than you suppose, it is stranger than we can suppose, and I tell you that gives a lot of permission for supposing.