Mushrooms, Evolution and the Millenium

I think of this talk as the 'Mushrooms and Evolution' talk, and uh, we will rove and scan over that subject, but it also has- it arborizes into many other areas of concern. It's not simply a revisioning of anthropology or primatology or evolution. It is all those things, but more importantly it's a revisioning of those concerns that then carries a political and social implication for the moment, and for how we all lead our lives. And....it's basically a variation on the hero's journey, and I'm very indebted, uh, to a brilliant women anthropologist. I've never met her, but her book had a great influence on me. Miss Sia Landau. She recently wrote a book called Narratives of Evolution, and she pointed out something that I think has needed to be pointed out for a long time, which is that science is simply campfire stories in another guise. And you'll see what I mean as I get into this because I want to tell you a campfire story about a poor but humble primate who came from, uh, the fringes of the action- a minor member of the flora and fauna of this planet who embarked on a long and arduous journey into time and had many adventures along the way, and had many allies along the way and overcame great challenges to attain the gift difficult to come upon, the grail, if you will, or the Self. I mean all fans of Joseph Campbell are familiar with this metaphor of the hero's journey. And what's interesting is we have actually made that hero's journey. We are, all of us tonight, sons and daughters of the ancestral heroes who overcame drought, glaciation, disease, famine, earthquake, migration, you name it, they didn't drop the ball and thanks to them we're here tonight.

And normally this is, uh, the beginnings of this great journey are completely cloaked in mystery. It's taught in orthodox anthropology courses 'no one knows the factors which impelled human beings to leave, uh, the primate existence in the canopies of the great forests of Africa and to adopt new styles of life in the grasslands, uh, new diets, trading in vegetarianism for being omnivores, trading in, uh, a life of fruititarian luxury for a life of hunting, struggle, migration, and uh, natural selection in an extremely harsh environment. I believe that the reason that this seems so mysterious to straight primatologists and anthropologists is because they have been unwilling to look carefully at the role that plants played in this adventure, particularly the role that psychoactive plants may have played, and then, most appropriately for this gathering tonight, the role that certain species of psychoactive mushrooms must have played in this evolutionary adventure. And so tonight I would like to go through it with you in fairly close detail because I haven't had that many original ideas in my life and most of what I do is book reviews and regurgitation of other peoples' ideas. But this one, uh, they handed over to me, and I've been told by evolutionary anthropologists that I'm welcome to it. So if I don't make the case, who will? And if not now, when? And if not here, where?

The great mystery of natural life on this planet is ourselves. We stand out in the natural order of things as something completely unique, unexpected, unpredictable. You could not calculate forward from the pinnacle of the age of mammals, some thirty thousand years ago, you could not calculate forward to a world such as we have today, a world of enormous cities globally dispersed, linked instantly by electronic media, a world of art, warfare, neurosis, vision, religious yearning, hope, despair, all of these things are the unique contribution made to reality existence if you will, by the existence of the qualities in us which we call humanness, which set us aside from the rest of organic existence. I mean, I know that dolphins discuss arcane matters among themselves and bees dance the directions to the flowers and animal communications occurs among pack hunting dogs of various sorts, but clearly we are something of another order. And accounting for this other order of being that is so present in us has been the major concern of both what we call religion and what we call, uh, science in the sense not of physics and chemistry but of biology, anthropology, and psychology. How to account for the uniqueness of our species and then the uniqueness that is present as a moment to moment fact in each one of us?

You have to go back to the origin scenario. Look at the other theories in place, and then look at the possibilities for theory-making that are offered. If we're willing to include the presence of a psychedelic substance in, uh, the experience and diet of hum- of early human beings. For several million years the, the great apes had been evolving into tighter and tighter niches in the climax tropical rainforests of both the new and old world. And at a point it's very difficult to place because it's locked in to the gradually shifting dynamics of climate on this planet. These forests began to retreat. They began to diminish because of ec- of absence of rainfall over very long periods of time. And we know that many primate lines went extinct at that point, but one primate line, the anthropoid apes, were able to evolve a new lifestyle in the grasslands, which were evolving as the forests retreated.

Now, some anthropologists have argued, to my mind very convincingly, that there is no such thing as a natural grassland, that grasslands are caused by fire, human burning. The argument is very easy to understand; it's that all the species of plants that you find in the grasslands, you also find in the understory of the forests on the borders of the grasslands, but you don't find, uh, you find only a small number of the forest species represented in the cleared areas. For an evolutionary botanist, this clearly means that the grasslands are extraordinarily recent. Wherever they occur all over the earth. And this includes the high-altitude grasslands that are called savannahs.

I think that the, the missing link in evolution is probably food. Somebody once accused me of trying to recover the lost history of mankind and I said no, simply the lost menu of mankind. Well, what was that menu, and how did it impact upon us? First of all, before we discuss psilocybin mushrooms specifically, I'd like you think about the ways in which we differ from other primates. We are, um, we maximize what is called neoteny. Neoteny is this, uh, phenomenon in which juvenile characteristics are retained into adulthood, and this a particularly, um, uh, effective strategy in any situation where you're up against a kind of evolutionary, uh, bump in the road or barrier of some sort. Many species show, uh, a tendency toward neoteny, but it's very strongly expressed in human beings. For example, our hairlessness, we are like infants. All primates are born pretty much hairless, but we retain this hairlessness throughout life. The ratio of our skull size to body size is an infantile ratio. Compared to other primates, we look like the juvenile form; we never lose that.

The extreme length of human childhood and adolescence is a kind of strategy so that a lot of developmental goings-on can occur outside the womb. And you probably know that a deer or a calf is able to stand within hours of being born. A human infant, this is something they struggle to acquire in the first 18 months of life. What was it that promoted this neoteny? What was it that promoted our upright gait? What was it that promoted our acquisition of language? This is critical, and I'll talk more about this later. Language is the great divide between us and other species. Where it exists at all as a tendency in other species, it exists as a very rudimentary, unschooled tendency. In us it has become almost the raison d'etre of our being. Uh, physical evolution ceased in the human species when we began to elaborate, uh, languages and the technologies that follow upon them. We have designed a way around the slower-than-glaciers modification of species that exists where you have random mutations being acted upon by natural selective forces in the environment. Until the invention of epigenetic, meaning, non-genetic forms of coding, which means language, dance, theater, myth-telling, so forth and so on, until that great leap was made, we were as much an animal as any other animal, uh, on this planet.

So, what happened was this. The, the forests retreated, these environments where food had been very abundant became, uh, nutritionally stressed, the diet had to be expanded, the choice was simple, expand your diet or die! Well now, it's interesting, most animals have a very narrow range of foods which they will accept. This reaches its greatest expression in insects, which, some of you may have learned as children that ifyou find a caterpillar walking around on the ground and you just put it on the nearest plant and by chance you chose the wrong plant, it will die rather than eat that plant. Insects are very very food-specific. Most animals are. Now, why is this? You would thing that it would be a better strategy to be able to eat a lot of things. The answer is foods are chemically extraordinarily complex, and chemical complexity is another way of saying potentially toxic or mutagenic. And mutation is the undoing of any species or any adaptation. So there is an effort, uh, by organisms to avoid, uh- it isn't an- it isn't a conscious effort, it's enforced by natural selection. There is a tendency to mitigate against animals with broad food tastes because they are exposed to so many mutagens, things which split chromosomes and, uh, and damage genetic material.

However, if you're faced with extinction, your back is already to the wall. You can see the grim reaper drawing near. So at that point, expanding the diet becomes a perfectly credible strategy for survival. And that is what happened to these formerly arboreal apes now descended onto the grasslands. They began to experiment with their diet. And in addition to the fruit that they had always eaten they began to eat insects, they became carnivores, they began to evolve a hunting style. And I have personally observed in Kenya the food-testing behavior of baboons, and I assume that it is very much analogous to the food-testing behavior that went on in early, uh, protohominids and early human beings. The baboon will approach something, a potential food source, sniff it, look at it, place it in the mouth but not swallow, sometimes for as much as a minute, and then either spit it out or swallow a small amount of it and then wait. And then if there's no immediate negative feedback from this, like vomiting or burning throat or constriction of mucus production in the throat or something like that, the food will begin to be accepted.

In this grassland, which was nutritionally fairly tightly drawn- there wasn't an overabundance of food supply, there was, however, a parallel evolutionary event going on to the primate evolution, and that was the evolution of various forms of large ungulate mammals, primitive cattle, gazelle-type animals, wildebeasts, horned animals, hoofed animals of all sorts. And many of these animals had a style of existence in which they congregated in herds. Well, these herds of animals clearly represented the major, um, uh, concrescence or deposit of available protein in this environment. I mean, if you could kill a two or three hundred boss primitive-ogensis, or something like that, there was more nutrition represented in that than in several hundred acres of the gathering of corms or the raiding of anthills or something like that. So the pressure was intense to, uh, become carnivores to focus on these ungulate mammals and quite naturally, what evolved was a kind of, uh, nomadic pastoralism based on following along behind these large herds of animals.

The other thing was happening, that was happening was there were very large and efficient carnivores on the scene- the equivalent of today's lions and the sabre-tooth tiger, and the hunting cats of the panther type. And many, um evolutionary biologists believe that the suppression of our sense of smell has to do with our actually passing through a phase where we, uh, predated on carrion. This is not a very pleasant thought, but what we were doing was letting the lions do the work and then we were coming along with throwing sticks and rocks and things like this, driving the lions and the panthers off these fresh kills, and then eating this available meat, but it was pretty ripe in many cases, so there was pressure to suppress, uh, olfactory sensitivity.

Now, in fairness to these complex issues I should tell you that another school believes that it was our bipedal gait- that once we lifted up off our knuckles and literally got our nose off the ground, then there was, uh, a kind of atrophication of the olfactory senses, so these two theories compete. But whatever was going on, there was interest in, uh, these large herds of ungulate mammals moving across this grassland environment. And a whole host of animals were relating to them as the central source of protein. Not only, uh, the large cat predators, but also the wild dogs of many types up to and including, uh, you know, the great timber wolf that has been extinct since the last glaciation and down to dingoes, jackals, hyenas, uh, this sort of thing. So, everybody was interested in these large herds of mammals. Well, a consequence of large herds of ungulate mammals are plenty of manure. Anybody who has been around cattle knows this. And here's where we begin to draw the circle of the plot tighter, because manure- food that has passed through the double stomach of these kinds of animals, is the favorite medium for certain kinds of mushrooms. Mushrooms which are called coprophilic or coprolytic, meaning dung-loving mushrooms. This is the preferred medium for them to carry out their life cycle in. And again, based on my observations of bam- of baboons in Kenya, I've seen them approach, uh, cow pies, is the gentle term for these deposits of fecal material, approach a cow pie and flip it over. What they're doing is they're looking for grubs, beetles or immature beetle larva. They understand, then, that the, the manure deposit is a vector for insect protein in this environment, and having a limited amount of energy, they look for food in the place where it's likely to be.

However, by a marvelous coincidence or superb planning on the part of the extraterrestrials who rule the galaxy [laughter], you can sort of, choose your poison. Ah, the, the lunatic fringe is not unrepresented, good, good- of which I number myself, uh, among them.

Uh, yes, so, these, these coprophitic mushrooms, particularly stropharia cubensis, which is the one that is pandemic, meaning occurs worldwide. I have seen them in the Amazon the size of dinner plates, I mean, you can't miss this thing. It is the most astonishing object in the grassland environment, and after a period of rains to walk out into a grassland environment and see these things by the dozens and then by the hundreds, and always vectored in on the same cow pies that are of interest to these foraging baboons. You see then that by design or destiny, the mushroom was placed directly in the path of the foraging protohominids. Well, uh, and would certainly have been tested for its food value in the same way that, uh, uh, I describe baboons testing other, uh, plants. Well, aside from the fact that stropharia cubensis, uh, contains psilocybin, it is delicious. It is delicious in the fresh form. Well, 'delicious' is just a monkey's way of saying that it's good food. If you find something delicious you will overrule almost all other signals coming off of it to chow down on it. So the mushroom is delicious. Well, what then are the possible consequences of the inclusion in the human diet of a psychoactive compound like psilocybin? Well, it, uh, has three consequences, and I believe that this simple three stage process answers this supposed unanswerable question about the origin of human cognition and human value systems and language, and it's very simple, it's easy to understand, it doesn't require a leap to faith. Let's hope I can remember it.

The first consequence of allowing psilocybin into the diet of a foraging hungry protohominid of that type is an increase in visual acuity. I don't think this is widely known. Since psilocybin is called a hallucinogen, people might imagine that, you know, it distorts reality or you can't see what's really in front of you. Well, that may be true on a dark night on a high dose, but that's not what I'm talking about. i'm talking about an animal which is foraging, eating insects, eating roots, eating whatever it finds and including in that a small amount of randomly, uh, contacted psilocybin mushrooms. Roland Fischer, a psychologist, physiologist at the national institute of health in the early '60s gave psilocybin to thousands and thousands of people and he studied the effect of low doses on vision, and he built an experimental apparatus which had two, uh, metal bars which were ordinarily, uh, in parallel. And by turning a crank out of sight of the graduate student or the person being tested, uh, he could deform the, uh, relationship of the bars so that they would slowly slip out of their parallelism and into a skewed mode. And this is very straightforward psychology 1 perceptual kind of experiment, and he showed very conclusively with thousands of people that on small amounts of psilocybin people could pick this up much more quickly. They were asked to push a buzzer when they thought the two bars were no longer parallel. And the people who were very lightly stoned were consistently able to do this, to grok this more efficiently than the, uh, people who had been given placebo. And Fischer, who was kind of a gnome himself, said to me about this, he said, "So you see, here's a case where taking a drug actually gives you better information about reality than if you hadn't taken a drug." Incontrivertible proof, scientific experiment, beyond argument, and though it may have no consequence if you're dealing with a group of 25 graduate students in a class on graduate psychology, visual acuity is the thread by which life and death are hung if you are foraging primates in a nutrition-poor environment. If you can't see the food you're looking for, the gentle hand of natural selection is going to quietly move you toward extinction [audience laughter]. So, uh, to give you an idea of the power of that chemical in that situation, think of it as chemical binoculars. It doesn't take- you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that if you're handed a pair of chemical binoculars in a hunting situation, you're going to be a more effective hunter. So, on that first level, a level highly unconscious, a level where these protohominids are simply trying to get enough to eat, those that were willing to accept psilocybin into their diet had a slightly enhanced probability of survival through an enhanced supply of nutrition than those who didn't. This is the first level on which the use of psilocybin would tend to outbreed the population that was not, uh, accepting it into the diet.

Ok. As we all know, there's more to psilocybin than increased visual acuity. At slightly higher levels, still well below the level of an overt mind-boggling psychedelic experience, uh, psilocybin causes, uh, what's called CNS arousal. Central nervous system stimulation, horniness is another way of putting this because what CNS arousal is is a kind of restlessness, a kind of where's-the-action mentality, a kind of desire to go out and mix it up a little, and the ability to carry through on that in a fairly convincing style to your partner. [audience laughter] In the, in the dry parlance of primatology we call this 'increased frequency of copulation' and 'increased frequency of copulation' means, uh, increased frequency of impregnation. I don't see how you could have that without the first. I mean, oven-basters aside.

So, uh, increased frequency of impregnation means more offspring are being born to the population which is accepting the psilocybin into its diet, and more offspring is the key to evolutionary success and to running your evolutionary competitors right off the road into the ditch. That's the key thing. He who outreproduces his competitors or she, of course, who out-reproduces competitors is going to find itself, uh, the dominant species in a given environment. So, there's a two-step process where the first step reinforces the second step. We have more successful hunting, more frequent sexual activity, more food for the offspring, and the offspring are being raised by parents who have already accepted the mushroom as an item of diet and will pass that habit on to their children. So, I'm sure, as you can see, it's beginning to push in a certain direction. Well, so fine, mushroom-eating increases the success of protohominids, but how does it account for the emergence of the higher function of the human cerebral cortex, language, dance, art, poetry, song, symbolic activity of all sorts? What's going on there? Well, it is simply that if we now advance from the slight dose, we've advanced now to the moderate dose, if we now go on and imagine that people enjoyed this arousal, this social ambiance that attended upon including this item in the diet. There surely would have been reckless souls among them who would've followed Dr. Leary's advice that, when in doubt, double the dose, right?

Well, when you double the dose, uh, uh, profound things happen which are not easily calculated from the previous state of mind which was just simply a state of uh, sleeplessness and restlessness. Hallucination and stimulation of the area of the brain that is called Broca's area, and that we now associate with the formation of language- spontaneous glossolalia is a phenomenon of high-dose psilocybin use. Glossolalia is, uh, linguistic activity that seems to be not willed by the ego but that is just simply an upwelling from the dynamics and architecture of the organism. Uh, and in our society, we're familiar with it as a, uh, phenomenon that has been appropriated by Pentecostal Christianity as a proof of the indwelling of the spirit. But in fact, uh, this phenomenon occurs in most societies throughout the world and most societies associate it with an indwelling of spirit, whether they be Christian, Muslim, Animist or what have you, this spontaneous vocalizing of language-like activity is seen to be, uh, a sign of special characteristics, what anthropologists call 'election'. Shamanism, in other words, magic, the ability to cast spells, the ability to weave story. It's all tied in to language, and I- it's just my personal opinion, but I would bet you, I don't know how we'd ever settle the bet, but I would bet you that language existed a long time before meaning because it is intrinsically some kind of neurological release of the organism.

And there can be syntax in the absence of language. Uh, as an example, um, me dingwao huadyavangalpaikec texi me tichiki putong agmo way zambofwa pakti me din dijiki pihut! What this is is instant art, you see, abstract art [audience laughter] because the human organism is, uh, brilliantly wired for small mouth noises. This is something that we can do for hours [laughter]with very litle- I'm the living proof of it [more laughter]. I want to beat you to the punch, uh, before someone points this out.

Small mouth noises are special provence, and with it we weave meaning, we convey emotion, uh, we convey anger, and eventually we recreate the entire world of our imaginations. I mean, this is culture is, is a kind of coaxing into reality of the structures of the human imagination through the medium of language, and it begins as poetry and it ends as, you know, structural engineering on the scale of the Golden Gate Bridge or something like that. Language. Language, then, sets us apart. And so it seems to me there is a direct, linear descent through the use of this one particular psychedelic. It has to have been a grassland plant. It cannot require any preparation, even boiling or something like that, because we're talking about a level of human culture that is more naive than these processes that were added late. So it has to be commonly met with plant, a plant of the grasslands, a plant requiring no, uh, preparation other than that you eat it, and then it has to put in place a series of self-reinforcing positive feedback loops that lead to self-reflection.

I think this is it folks. I think this is where humanness came from. And when you realize that the straight people who've had the field all to themselves since Darwin, their best idea is that it was the coordination of the throwing arm, that it's the baseball pitcher who is the highest examplar of what it is to be a human being because, as soft-bodied weak primates it was very important to us to keep our distance from these large animals as we stoned them to death. You know, you didn't want to get within the sweep of tusk or claw as you were attacking these things.

Well, you know, I'm as fond as the lump-cheeked hayseed on the mound as anybody else, but I don't see him as, uh, as the exemplar of humanity's march toward the unspeakable mystery of being. Uh. [clapping] Not when you think about the truly titanic dimensions that are easily accessible to any one of us on psilocybin. And we have, you know, 10,000 years of human history, philosophy, art, science and literature behind us, and when we come up against, uh, 5 dried grams in silent darkness, it's as awesome, as appalling, as mind-boggling and as impossible to process as it must have been for those folks 25, 35, 55 thousand years ago. It is a true mystery. None of our science, none of our language has given us a leg up on understanding that phenomenon. So, that was the vector that called us forward. That was the great attractor that this humble monkey heard the call and set off across the plains of geological time seeking and finding this tremendous mystery.

And I believe that this story has tremendous implications for our own lives, uh, because we are highly dysfunctional as a society. Violence, sexism, racism, classism, linear thinking, reductionism, denial of the spirit, all this messes with our heads and our happiness. And I, I think that it is not necessarily so, but that we- it was a narrow window that opened for us because I am not suggesting that monkeys make fine company, uh, back as you look through the geological record the fact of the matter is male dominance hierarchies occur in primates right back to the squirrel monkey type. The primate style is a style of male dominance, but some time- let's say a hundred thousand years ago, to, let's say, twelve or ten thousand years ago- there was a chemical fix. There was an intervention in the ordinary hierarchy-forming tendency of these evolving primates, and we actually created not a matriarchy, not a shifting of one master for another, but a partnership society. We were actually able, by forming a kind of quasi-symbiotic relationship to these mushrooms- and it was a very interesting incipient symbiosis, you see. It was a symbiosis of protohominids, cattle, grasslands and mushrooms. It was a three-species, at least three-species symbiosis we were able to create a partnership style of existence which is the, uh, genesis point of our myths of paradise. This is why we have a nostalgia for paradise, a feeling that we fell into history, that there was once a golden age of balance and gender, uh, you know, reasonable gender dynamics. And, uh, community, and, uh, religion that was not simply moral prescriptions that cause neurosis, but an actual relationship to the living spirit of the planet. And this was achieved, uh, through psilocybin and through the lifestyle that it reinforced because, recalling my little three-step process, the psychedelic aspect and the sexual arousal aspect were simply two ends of the same experience.


The style of these early, uh, nomadic pastoralists into cattle was orgiastic, meaning everybody got together at the new and full moon and flopped in a heap. And these were, these were groups of 70 or 80 people. Small human groups. Now what this was doing, this tendency toward group sexual activity and orgy provided by the psilocybin in the diet. What it was doing was interfering with the tendency to stress male lines of paternity because you can't know- in a society that has institutionalized, uh, orgiastic sexuality, men cannot know who their children are. Women know who their children are because they see the children come out of their bodies, and there's a bonding, but for men the children are community property. And this, I think, was the link, and in the absence of psilocybin, you get a recursion back to the previous, uh, mode of primate organization, which is a turf-guarding, territorial, egoistic style. And this is the point I really want to make, that psilocybin is a kind of innoculation against the formation of ego. It dissolved the primate ego and it kept it dissolved until factors which I'll discuss in a minute, factors limited the availability of the psilocybin, and then this atavistic tendency, the existence of the ego, returned with a tremendous vengence.

So, what I- the implication of what I'm saying is that the ego, which grows like a calcareous tumor or an abnormal growth in the dynamics of the psyche, can actually be dissolved by repeated exposure to this boundary-dissolving psychedelic compound. Well, so then if things were so wonderful, why didn't it just last forever? Why did we fall into history? What happened? ....tape distorts...


patriarchy, turf-consciousness, warfare, city building and so forth and so on. Well, th- it's a no-blame story. It's that the very dynamic processes which drove the arboreal apes out of the trees and into this paradisical symbiosis on the grasslands which lasted twenty-five, thirty thousand years. The very forces which created that ambiance, which were climatological forces, the drying of the planet, destroyed that equilibrium paradise because the drying process did not halt. It continued, it accelerated. And as we all know, uh, today the Sahara desert is one of the most inhospitable climates on earth. I mean, it's a land of endless sand and fantastical high temperatures and no vegetation whatsoever to speak of. Nevertheless, there are archaeological site out there which are the best evidence for this theory that I am putting forward. Because in Southern Algeria on the Tasili plateau there are, uh, rock paintings dated from twelve to fifteen thousand years old that show shamans with mushrooms sprouting out of their bodies. Unambigous, because they're not simply being held in that hand. In some cases, when a mushroom-like object is held in the hand, some anthropologists and art historians want to call it a chopper. But what do you do when there are mushrooms sprouting out of the body by the dozens? I mean, the, it becomes incontravertible. So the archaeological evidence is there. The, uh, primate behavior provides evidence for this, and what happened I think is that these orgies which originally, at the heyday of this, uh, partnership society, these, uh, group get-togethers were probably at the new and full moon. Well then, as the drying accelerated they became merely lunar, every twenty-eight days instead of fourteen days. And then ultimately seasonal, or associated with only certain areas. The rainfall became sparser and there became, uh, strategies had to be developed then to spread fewer and fewer mushrooms over a wider and wider area. And I believe, uh, that we can even spec- as long as we're loose in the realm of speculation, we might as well go full hog- I think that what might have happened, based on a careful reading of the archaeological record out there, was that honey emerged as a very important part of the story. Because you see, if you don't have refrigeration you can use honey to preserve delicate foods. And to this day, there are parts of Mexico where mushrooms are mixed into honey and then they, they don't, uh, decay and can be used for many months.

Now, the problem with this is that honey itself has the potential to undergo chemical change and turn itself into a psychoactive substance. But a psychoactive substance with a very different character than psilocybin. In, in other words mead, alcohol, crude alcoholic beverages probably began with the fermenting of honey and fruit juices. Well, that puts you firmly in the domain of the messed up culture that we're in because I told you what the qualities of psilocybin were- to promote visual acuity, sexual activity, religious experience, language. What are the qualities of alcohol? What does it do if viewed as a psychedelic drug. Well, it does two things. It lowers sensitivity to social cueing and it empowers, uh, aggressive behavior. In other words, it makes you into a jerk and, uh, you know, time spent in a busy singles bar on a friday evening will convince you of the truth of this. And in a way it's no joke, I mean I think probably for a thousand years nobody got laid in Western civilization unless they were swacked because, uh, you know, people were so uptight on the natch, having imbibed this whole monotheistic moral trip that unless they took a powerful drug which dissolved social inhibitions and empowered aggressive behavior, they weren't able to make a move.

How many women, how many women can think back to their first sexual imprinting and realize that it occured in an atmosphere of aggressive use of alcohol. I mean, this is almost the standard model, maybe not so much anymore but throughout the first five decades of this century I think that would be a pretty fair statement. So you see, drugs are like the invisible lenses through which we view reality, and no culture has been without them, it's just cultures accept some and repress others according to their particular, the particular cultural values which are trying to be conserved. The reason this is not simply armchair speculation among anthropologists is because we now are the inheritors of a planet which is dying under anaesthesia. Our entire cultural crisis is predicated on the fact that we cannot feel or connect with the consequences of our history, that we have behaved very badly, we of the high-tech societies. We have trashed gender relationships, we have trashed aboriginal societies, we have cut down the rainforest, uh, we have robbed our own children of a future as rich as the future that we expect ourselves to enjoy. Uh, there isn't even a name for this sin, where you destroy the opportunity of your own children, I mean no society has been that perverse. And we're doing it under a mass infusion of alcohol laced with monotheistic moral propaganda. [audience clapping]

Well, what is the antidote to this? Well, it's what I call the archaic revival. It's something that's been going on throughout most of the 20th century but with increasing depth and urgency. It's that we must reach back into the past to the last sane moment that we ever knew and figure out what was going on then and get with the program and attempt to recover some amount of cultural equilibrium and balance. And I believe that, you know, using the broad brush of generalization, we could say all our problems can be traced down to ego. Ego lies behind private property, it lies behind the domination of women by men, it lies behind dollar chasing, it lies behind all of the maladaptive behaviors, the arms race, the whole thing, it lies behind all of the maladaptive behaviors that are pushing us toward planetary toxification and species armageddon. Uh, I'm not advocating a return to the style- the religious style that includes orgy. I mean, I wish I could [audience laughter], but we are not, you know, nomadic pastoralists of, uh, 70 individuals. We're a global society of five million- five billion shot through with epidemic diseases and contagion and so forth and so on. We can't adapt the orgiastic style on a mass scale without severe social consequences, but we can look back at the use of psilocybin and at least construct a social alternative where small groups of people are using this to, um, uh, diminish ego and build community. Build communities of like-minded people and diminish the almighty sense of ego

and psilocybin does this very effectively in two ways. First of all, it dissolves boundaries between people, and another way of saying 'ego' is that I strongly distinguish between you and me, you know. That's what ego tells you, is who you are and how important you are and how you're not her or him or that or that, you're this! Psilocybin tends to dissolve that language-reinforced misperception. And the other thing it does is it shows you that behind your eyebrows is a world richer by far than any of the crap that's being peddled on Rodeo Drive or 5th avenue in New York City or anywhere else. In other words, it shows you the pathetic nature of materialism by reintroducing you to the reality of the spirit not as a religious abstraction that's used to beat you over the head to follow somebody's moral recipe, but as a felt experience of the indwelling of an extreme power that, a power that connects you to all the life of the past on this planet, to the planetary future, to the universe at large. So really, it's a rediscovery of our birthright as human beings. History is a bad deal. It's, uh, it's a mass of potage. It's broken machines and broken dreams because we have projected our value system out into matter, and matter has not responded in a satisfying way, and so we're then dysfunctionally neurotic, always seeking, never finding. The answer is to go within using the classical tools of, uh, self-redefinition, transformation, and ego-diminishment. We can reinoculate ourselves against the ills of civilization by simply availing ourselves to the shamanic tools that were available before the fall into history.

And, uh, you know, the fact that this has- poses some problem for the currently constituted constabulary is, uh, of no concern to anybody who is thinking on a scale of millenia. That's just a kink in the social machinery brought on by stupidity and anxiety. It isn't sufficient reason to turn away from a reasonable program that would carry us toward a group psychology that would then allow us to turn toward the real threats that face us as a species and as a planet and do something about it.

I put this before you this evening because I think in the absence of this theory, the psychedelic community has no strong argument to lay before society at large as to why these things are so important. But if in fact these are the catalysts, these psychedelic compounds, are the catalysts for everything that we call humanness, for the very basis of the notion of caring, altruism, civilization, community, if what lies behind these notions is a symbiotic relationship to, uh, psychedelic plants present in the environment, then the sooner we return to that mode, the sooner we can overcome the historical dysfunction that otherwise is a death sentence upon us.

So, I don't advocate this because I think it's easy or because It has a high probability of being accepted and implemented. I advocate it because I think it's the only answer. And that it would be gross malfeasance on my part believing that to not lay the cards on the table. That's all that I can do, and I hope that if you find this argument convincing, you will find further arguments to buttress it and we can get this phenomenon out of the closet and in to, uh, the general theater of debate about the fate of global civilization so that we can begin to make real positive changes because the clock is ticking, folks. This is not a test. I mean, we have to either create some fantastically brilliant forward escape out of the closing grinding jaws of history, or we will be history.

Thank you very much. [audience clapping] Thank you.

Well, it's nice to be here. It's great to see so many people turned out for Los Angeles Mycological society [audience laughter, Terence laughs, audience clapping]. The people who put this thing together worked very hard at it, uh, putting to death once and for all the rumor that mycologists only do it spore-atically...so, are there-is that groaning I hear? [laugher]

The organization that I'm associated with, which is Botanical Dimensions, it's a parallel agenda to the LA Mycological society. What Botanical Dimensions does is collects and preserves plants with a history of shamanic and medicinal usage worldwide. Not only the plants, but the information about them. As I'm sure you're all aware, the rainforests are disappearing at an alarming rate, and with them is disappearing twenty five or thirty thousand years of very painfully gar-garnered medical information that these aboriginal peoples have preserved up until the present moment. But unfortunately for these peoples, the present moment contains, uh, social challenges like nothing they've ever dealt with before and the shamanic gnosis is not being handed on. Young men and women who would ordinarily have become shamans are learning outboard motor repair and how to wait tables in tourist traps and this sort of thing, and this medical information which is the basis of most of the drugs sold as prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs today, much of that information, uh, will be lost. So, uh, my partner Kat and I run a botanical garden in Hawaii and, uh, we're a non-profit organization able to accept your donations if you are so inclined.

Well this is a talk that I've wanted to give for a long time, and some of you may wonder why I say that because you may have heard it before [audience laughter] but you have, you have never heard it under the auspices of a prestigious scientific organization such as has chosen to sponsor me tonight, and that was my fantasy, to take this idea, notion, theory, and actually launch it in a venue of great respectability and scientific veracity, and certainly the Los Angeles mycological society, uh, provides that.

It's obvious that I can only touch a tiny number of these questions, and many of them seem very good, if not prolix. Um, I see a short one here. How many people here are under 25? Alright! [audience claps] That's great! That's great. Oh, here's a cheerful question, a troublemaker in the group.

Q: If the mushroom played a large part in the development of the mystical side of man, do you think it also played a pivotal role in the emergence of human sacrifice? [audience amusement]

T: Um. Well, human sacrifice on a mass scale is something more typical of the Mesoamerican civilization which certainly used mushrooms: the Maya, and then later the Aztecs. Uh, but this was a much later stage of cultural development with mathematics and, uh, written language in place and so forth and so on. And I'm not saying that it didn't, I'm just saying a fair answer would be we don't really understand the genesis of human sacrifice in the New World civilizations, but it didn't appear to play a major role, uh, in the, in the evolution of the early civilizations that I'm, uh, that I've been talking about. I don't see why it should have. There doesn't seem to me an obvious strong connection.

Uh, let's see here [looking through question cards]. Here's a question, um.

I don't claim to have more than a feeble understanding of man's ultimate destiny. I'm unclear of what your message is. You seem to advocate leaving earth for destinations unknown. [audience cheers] Isn't this agenda too premature to promulgate as we need very much to focus our human potential on the global environmental interpersonal interspecies crisis rather than focusing on scenarios which imply the disposability of the planet.

Good question. [audience laughter] Um, you know, it seems to me the kindest thing we could do at this moment is sever our connection to the planet, for the planet's sake. I'm less sure what good it would do for us. Uh, it's certainly true that the planet is the cradle of humanity. The question is, do you remain in the cradle forever? And I've had a hard time figuring out a scenario that would keep us on this planet and retain any kind of society that anyone would want to live in simply because of the acceleration of our population. I, actually I'm loath to get into this subject so late in the evening, but in the interest of fairness and honesty I put this question to the mushroom: "How can we save the planet?" and without hesitation it replied "Every woman should bear only one natural child." That's not my answer, that's, uh, stropharia cubensis speaking. It would create a demographic collapse that would cut the population of Earth in half without war, disease, or forced migration in less than 40 years. It would also slice the population in half again in the next 40 years.

We tend to think that there are no solutions, and yet here's a solution that requires the responsible action of female individuals, a group that has not yet, uh, waded in to this set of historical problems that we have inherited from the past. So if there is a tendency for men to stand in the way of solutions, and I'm not saying they do or they don't, uh, here is a program that can be put in place that would have a radical impace on, uh, on human destiny on this planet. I discussed this with demographers after the mushroom made this suggestion, and I learned an amazing fact. Some of you may know this. I certainly had never thought of it this way. A woman on the upper east side of Sanhattan or in Malibu or in Scottsdale- in other words, one of these white, upper class, college-educated, wealthy communities, a woman in that situation, if she has a child, that child will be between 800 and 1000 times more destructive of the resources of the earth than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh or Pakistan or Zaire. We tend to think of the population problem as a population problem. It's a resource abuse problem, and the main resource abusers are the citizens of the high-tech societies. So if you have a house full of kids and you're buying them all $140 pairs of running shoes, you know, you go on the list of major social criminals.

Uh, I'm guilty, I'm guilty, so I'm not trying to lay a trip on you, but we tend not to think of our problem that way. We think it's all those beastly little brown people on the other side of the world breeding furiously. Well, I've got news for you, we have met the enemy and it is us! You know, if we could get the honkies to slow down their consumption of resources, we wouldn't, uh, have the gun to our head in quite the same way, but I digress, um. [audience laughter]

Q: Within the last 25 years there has been a quantum increase in the strength of cannabis. Has there been a corresponding intensification in psilocybin? Is today's insight into the present future more powerful?

TM: Um, probably not, because, uh, fungal genetics is notoriously tricky stuff and as an ex-mushroom grower and the author of psilocybin mushroom growers guide, I think what we call strain selection for psilocybin is a pretty rule-of-thumb kind of thing. While the cannabis botanists among us have worked a miracle on the scale of Luther Burbanks' wilder endeavors. And we should take our hats off to them, uh. [audience laughter and applause]. The same arguments that I made here tonight for psilocybin, in a slightly modified form and at a slightly later stage of cultural history, I think cannabis was the major, uh, pharmacological habit of human beings, retarding, uh, patriarchy, male dominance, urbanization, propaganda, so forth and so on. Cannabis is really not given its due, uh, it's been a tremendous bulwark against the values of dominator culture and, uh, I certainly hope it continues to function that way.

Is psilocybin conducive to art activity?

TM: Does the pope live in Rome?

How do you recommend we use this information in an applied way in our personal lives?

Well, and there are other questions which relate to this, like 'how can you tell if mushrooms have been contaminated by other compounds' and so forth and so on. I think that the most enlightened thing, uh, a person can do, or one of the most enlightened things, is to cultivate mushrooms. This completely goes around the possibility of criminal syndicalism, adulteration, degradation through aging, contamination by bacterial parasites, and there are all kinds of problems which are overcome by cultivation. Sometimes people say to me how do you, what can you do to get ready for a big psilocybin trip if you've never had any psychedelic experience? Well, I think the best advice is grow the mushroom. Those of you who have done that know that it teaches all the virtues that you will need to have when you get out there in the billows. It teaches, uh, cleanliness, punctuality, attention to detail, focus, uh, so forth and so on. The things that will serve you invaluably, not only in the psychedelic experience, but in life. And it's a tremendous- you can really feel the force of a possible symbiosis if you cultivate mushrooms, because it's so efficient. I mean, you take a 13 dollar, 25 pound bag of rye and you can turn it into 4 or 5 hundred hits. The conversion rate is an astonishing 12% dry weight of rye to dry weight of psilocybin. I mean, it's like an industrial process, it's awesome to see this stuff at work. I mean, it is such a workhorse for humanity. Uh, I used to say that it was alchemy, and the formula was, uh, uh, rye to mold and mold to gold! So, it's a very short step, and, uh, teaches you all these values that you may have, uh, overlooked in your own, uh, toilet training.

What do you say when your four-year-old asks if you do drugs?

Well, what you say is, uh, that you do some drugs and then explain which ones. I mean, I have two children, I've been through this. I think it's really weird, people who say 'oh, we can't get stoned til' the kids go to bed'. I mean, what kind of malarkey is this? In the first place, the kids know, so then you're exposed as some kind of half-wit, and, uh, as totally dishonest, totally not at peace with your own habits. I had habits which'll remain unnamed, which I abandoned because I wasn't comfortable explaining them to my children, so I just dropped those things out of my life. Mushrooms and cannabis were certainly not numbered among them. Uh, so, I mean, you...[audience applause]...you have to be honest with your children.

Hm. If psilocybin promotes language and diminishes ego, also a form of language, don't we then have something dest-uh, destroying what it creates or creating what it destroys? Is this a contradiction?

Well, I'm not sure I buy in to the notion that ego is a form of language, however there is a- I sense the point in this question because it's been suggested that language was created to lie, and is that really what we want to do, uh, with each other. But, um, I think that that's- I don't really take that seriously. I think that truth-telling and truth-withholding are a very delicate, uh, matter. You know, Winston Churchill said once "the truth is so precious that she must be accompanied everywhere by a bodyguard of lies" and uh, I, I think that captures some of the paradoxical nature of language.

Um. Have you read the theoretical work by Julian James, The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. What do you think of it?

For those of you who haven't read it, this is a theory that until very recently what we called the ego was actually a psychic function that had not yet been integrated in the Jungian sense into consciousness. So that as recently as 3,000 years ago, if somebody got into a tight spot, suddenly a voice would switch on in their head and say the equivalent of, you know "get your ass out of there!" and people interpreted this as the voice of God, or a god. It was a higher function in the psyche that was only triggered by extreme stress. Well then, we actually assimilated this, um, uh, psychic function that had been evolved to respond to extreme danger, and we, as it were, layered it in to the lower levels of the personality, and so what had been God became ego, and this has happened in James' opinion around 1000 B.C. just at the time when the last mother religions, the last goddess religions were dying out. And, uh, on the Greek mainland, Mycenian[?] piracy was taking over from Minoan partnership and mother goddess worship. So yes, I mean this may definitely, uh, be part of it. What makes James' book so frustrating is here is a book, I think it has over 630 pages in it, it's a book on the cultural impact of hallucinations, and there is one reference to psychedelic drugs. It's a reference to mescaline in a footnote. So James either through lack of information or intellectual queasiness didn't make use of the massive body of information associated with hallucinogenic shamanism that he might have made use of to make his case.

It's incredible how, how pharmaphobic academic speculation has been. I mean, people just don't want to get near it, and yet obviously drugs of all sorts have, have shaped every aspect of our lives. I'm doing a book for Bantam that will be out next spring sometime about the cultural impact of drugs- psychedelic and non-psychedelic. And one of the things I learned that just had never occured to me was slavery died with the fall of the Roman Empire. It absolutely died. I mean, during the medieval period, if you owned slaves, you owned one slave. It was like owning a Duesenberg [?] or something. It was the absolute proof that you were a person of immense wealth. And then the slave would serve your food or something like that. But the use of slave labor in agriculture was something that was brought back in the 14th century, uh, by Christian-the Christian gentlemen of Europe specifically for the production of sugar. No other reason. The stuff which came later, the tobacco and the cotton and all that, that was simply because there was an over-supply of slaves, and so there was a need to soak up all this slave labor.

Why sugar? Because it was an addicting drug. Nobody needs white sugar. You can go from birth to the grave and never get near it and never miss it, but it was, uh- sugar is made in open vats in the primitive, you know, the way it was done 500 years ago, at a temperature of 135 degrees. No free person will work sugar. You have to chain people to the machinery. You literally have to chain them to the machinery, and then they die in short order from, uh, from heat prostration. In 1800, every ounce of sugar entering England was produced by slave labor, and Western civilization barely had a thing to say about it. And we don't even think of sugar as a drug unless we're very highly sensitized to these issues. But you know, if you have small children, you know, you just might as well lay out railers of blow [audience laughter] if you're gonna turn them loose with cho-those Pepperidge Farm chocolate chip cookies, I mean my god! So, I just offer that as an example of our naivety about drugs and our naivety about our own cultural history. I mean people say well slavery, they got rid of it with Lincoln, but it had been going on for thousands of year- uh uh, no no, not at all. It had been dead for a thousand years, and then it was brought back by the drug trade. And how many steps backward in the process of trying to define and honor the human spirit have occurred because of drugs like sugar, opium, tea, coffee. Look at the caffeine drugs, the only drugs on earth that modern industrialists recognize to the point that they write them into contracts with workers. The coffee break. This isn't because they love workers, this is because it makes workers work! Caffeine and the demands of linear industrialism made a marriage in hell which exists right up to this day with untold consequences in the form of stomach cancer, anxiety, aggressive behavior, you name it.

Well, we're over the time. We have piles of questions. I love you all. Stay happy, take it easy, but take it! [applause]