Places I Have Been

Well this talk, uh, how many of you were at the whole life expo yesterday? [pause] How many of you bought a quartz crystal there? [audience laughs; and applause]. Seeming to hold the line and have one each. One, one person one crystal, as I think, uh, a reasonable way to handle the destruction of the tropical rainforest that is going on to allow the airlifting chrysaline, uh, silicon malibu. So uh, [audience laughs], be aware that the trees die so that we, our coffee can find their way into our hands. Which reminds me that, and I'll remind you, this is a Botanical Dimensions benefit. Botanical Dimensions is a non-profit operation that Kat and I founded, and Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Metzner, and Ralph Abraham, and uh, oh, Leo Zeff, some of you may know Leo, he died recently, he was on our board. And what we do is, we preserve plants with a history of human usage, especially ceremonial usage, you understand what I'm saying? [audience laughs], okay, and no one else in the world is, uh, doing this at the moment. The World Wildlife Foundation and Earth First, and these very large conservation, uh, organizations, are, their approach to the ecological crisis in Latin America is to preserve huge tracts of virgin forest, which is a very laudable and, uh, necessary thing to do. But even more fragile than the rain-forest itself is the web of relationships and information that the traditional people living in the rain-forest have evolved within it. They have, uh, a medical knowledge and a pharmacopeia whose age has to be estimated in millennia, and if we do not act in the next twenty-five years to preserve this information and the plants that it is about, it will be lost forever. And uh, we're not, we're talking immune stimulators, antibiotics, uh, neuro-toxins, hallucinogens, flavorings, uh, foods, the entire gamut of, of uh, gifts from vegetable nature, many of them in the Amazon, are uh, in danger of being lost. Naturally the focus is largely on the plants of shamanic usage, because knowledge of their use is even more endangered because it rests in the hands of fewer people. These shamans are not training new generations of apprentices, largely. The younger men are going off to the sawmills, and uh, and to work in the large cities that have sprung up along the Amazon, and uh, if we don't preserve this information it will be lost. So, this is what your money is going toward, we have a nineteen acre site on the big island of Hawai'i, and there we gather plants from, uh, all over the world, uh, and grow them there with no [tape skip] plants and, that they be available then to, for people who want to do research, and that can be straight academic research, it can be homeopathy, it can be shamanism, it can be aromatherapy, we don't, [tape skip] not judgemental, we just want to make this biological material available.

So, Art's decided that we would call this, Places I Have Been, and uh, I immediately added the caveat, uh, hopefully that means both in my mind and on earth [audience laughs], and uh [clears throat], so maybe I'll, as an example of what Botanical Dimension does, which ties with, uh, the travel theme, I was, uh, on assignment for a magazine in January, and I went to southern Thailand, uh, in fact it's an amusing story, you may notice I'm wearing very trendy, yuppie rags from [more laughing], from the Banana Republic [more laughing]. Yeah well, clap fast because Banana Republic is being, uh, dissolved into the Gap, which is basically a, a ghetto cheater, [audience laughs], and uh, the uh, the genius behind Banana Republic wanted to have a travel magazine, and he decided, that, that he would call the travel magazine, Trips [more laughing], to my average smile [more laughing]. And he, he further decided, that uh, he would uh, have a monthly column which he wanted to call, Our Man in Nirvana, [audience laughs]. And believe it or not, I was asked if I wanted to be Our Man in Nirvana, well actually I said I have to think it over, and uh, said that, uh, that I was, uh, it was like a dream come true. Can you imagine, a situation where all expenses paid, you roved the world, looking for the most beautiful places, and when they published you get a dollar a word, and when they don't publish what you write, you get twenty-five cents a word, which is more than most magazines pay when they publish you. So uh, I went to southern Thailand on this assignment, that by the way, since the, this happened, the magazine's gone defunct, it had one issue and uh, [audience laughs]. But it's, it's not the first time that I have stowed away aboard a sinking ship [more laughter], but to, to the botanical point of the story, that shows you the kinds of adventures, and, and courage and dedication that Botanical Dimensions brings to bear on the task. Uh, I was in Thailand naturally, you access Thailand through Bangkok, and I had read in Richard Evan Schultes book, The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens, about a plant called, Kratom, Kra-tom, and uh, it said it was illegal in Thailand. Well friends, Thailand is the source of one third of the world's heroin. It is, uh, the destination of most of the sex tours that originate in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, places like that, in other words, they run a pretty loose scene, [audience laughs]. And, and, here this plant is illegal, and I thought well this is pretty amazing, uh, what's going on? So uh, I was with an art dealer friend, and he had a Thai wife, so I put the problem to her, and she said yes, oh yes, the, the most degenerate people know all about this [audience laughs], and knowing my friend I said, well then you must have several friends [more laughter over Terence's voice], that was the touchful bit, and uh, and so we put out the word, and uh, low and behold, uh, we got samples of this plant, root-stock, uh, and there was this very hush hush, and everyone was either giggling, or, or looking at us with thin, hard expressions as we, uh, scored this plant. And uh, we now have it, it is now growing in Hawai'i, it is available for, uh, certified bio-chemists and bio-chemical researchers, to determine what this thing is. What we learned as we made our way toward it, was why it's illegal. It's illegal because it inhibits and interferes with heroin addiction [audience gasps]. So, who knows, you know, if this is true, but say it were true, well that means, you know, this is ethno-botanically one of the great cues [sp?] of the decade, and it explains then why the tides are, of such a, ambivalent state of mind about it, because it's poised like a dagger at the heart of their economic life, uh, if it's real. So, this is the kind of thing that we're involved in, uh, I saw a review article recently on, uh, over a hundred and twenty plants of African origin that are, have immune stimulating properties. Well, in the age of AIDS, every clue, every claim concerning plants which stimulate the immune system should just be run to ground. I would think that would be a very reasonable strategy along with the millions that are being spent in other ways, uh, uh, to work on, uh, this problem. And in fact, uh, from my brother Dennis whose in NIMH, we've obtained seeds of a number of these immune stimulating plants, and are growing them out, uh, in Hawai'i. But the mention of Dennis cause me to think I, I should tell you, uh, Dennis and his wife Sheila had their first child just over a week ago [non decipherable], so the tradition will not die [audience laughs]. This is not yet a doomed house.

Uh, normally I, you hear me rail about psychedelics, and there will be a question and answer period, so you can probably bade me into that, but uh, I will actually treat seriously theme of, uh, Places Where I've Been. Because, uh, when I went to Thailand in January on this travel writing assignment, and I went on to Goa, south of Bombay, uh, I was shocked and disappointed really to see how few Americans are on the road. It is apparently something which is not happening for Americans the way it is for Europeans. The German mindset is completely tip-saving [sp?] on overseas traveling, everybody works like a dog, ten or eleven months of the year, and then they go as far away from Germany as they can get [audience laughs], they really go far. Uh, the island of Ko Samui, Goa, all of these places, and the Australians as well. And, my, uh, commitment to psychedelics, as I have had to define for myself, but speaking to groups like this, is really a commitment to the primacy of direct experience. I think we are endlessly ripped off and impoverished in this society by being denied the opportunity to validate our own felt presence, the immediacy of our own being. We sell it out to the t.v., we sell it out to the great life we're gonna have after we quite working sixteen hours a day, we sell it out to all kinds of ideals that, that turn us into their puppets. And of course, psychedelics mitigate that very strongly, they dissolve programming, break up habitual behavior patterns, but strangely enough, so does travel, and this may be why there are so many heads on the road. Maybe, because they're all in doubt of it, [audience laughs]. We have to be reasonable people. Nevertheless they seem to take very well to the road. And uh, when you go traveling in these exotic places, and then you return to the folks back home, one of the weirdest experiences you can have is for someone to say to you, oh, were, were you gone? And said, was I gone? [audience laughs]. I barely escaped having my head shrunk in the jungles of Sarawak [audience laughs; Terence voice not clear] I haven't seen you around, I guess you haven't been around. The point of the story being that, a body in motion, seems to stretch the temporal dimension incredibly. So that if you put yourself into a situation where every night, your head sees the pillow, uh, in a different place, your living at about ten times the speed of your office dwelling colleagues, back at home. And uh, you know it's, it's a, a cliche that travel is the best education, but it's really only a cliche to the people who stay at home [audience laughs], because it's actually, it's absolutely true. There is nothing which dissolves your behavior patterns and your assumptions, and [?] your bowels [audience laughs]. In a remote third world country, it is actualizing the metaphor of the quest, you see, it's actually taking upon yourself the heroic role as the Jungians define it, the role of the hero, and going out into three-dimensional space and time, on a mission, for a reason. As a traveling freak years ago, we always had great contempt for tourists, you know a tourist is ipsofacto a person who has 'I am irrelevant' written across their forehead, I mean it's a sappy notion basically, to be a tourist. So what you must be in the, in the travel adventure I think is, uh, an agent, on a mission. We always did it that way, we were always after something; plants, a tonka [sp?], a meeting with the beady eyed guru of some sort, a drug, you know, whatever, or an artefact of some sort, and uh, then you have this mission, you can behave in this wonderful cavalier way that sets you up for adventure. You arrive in the capitol city of country X, do you want to see the cathedral? No thank you. Do you want to see the national art gallery? No thank you. We just want to [pause] get whatever it is, and by moving that way, with a sense of high purpose and mission, uh, nature responds. One of the little aphorisms that, uh, the mushroom has passed along over the years, and I think it's true is, uh, uh, 'nature loves courage', it said it to me, 'nature loves courage', and I thought for a moment and I said 'how does nature respond to courage? And the answer came back immediately 'by removing obstacles'. That's how nature treats the courageous, by opening doorways, by moving the laws, the old fools rush in where angels fear to tread, uh, sort of idea.

So, uh, my travels began for me, uh, really seriously in nineteen-sixty-seven. It was fed up with America, uh, uncertain about the draft, and uh, I had it basically. I was living in Berkley, where they were beating on our heads every night, and the smell of teargas didn't leave the streets. And I, uh, was with a woman, and uh, we decided that we would emigrate to the Seychelles Islands [audience laughs]. We had a book called 'An Encyclopedia of the Islands of the World', and I knew what the requirements were, it had to be tropical, English had to be understood, and it had to be remote. And I had never heard of the Seychelles Islands, now they're a very cheechy [sp?] sort of travel destination, but at that time it was Mars. And so we set out, and uh, uh, she was Jewish, and uh, we were young, and so I received a summons from her father, uh, here in Los Angeles, who wanted to discuss our plans. And I was prepared for anything, but he is a wonderful person actually, a dear man. And uh, he said, I'm not going to put on you what you call a trip, [audience laughs], I just have one request, the Seychelles are on the other side of the world, therefore, you could via Hong Kong in the far east, or you could go via Europe and Israel, it is my wish that you go by way of Israel, I said, done, can I go now? [audience laughs]. And uh, this was, this was October of nineteen, uh, sixty-seven, uh, the war, the sixty-seven war was barely cooled. And I [skip in tape]. The plan was by the time we got to Israel, we had far less money than we thought we would ever have, and the government of Israel was so interested in promoting immigration at that
point, that they had a deal, where if you worked on a Kibbutz or a Moshav for six months, they'd give you an air ticket anywhere. So, Stephanie was decided would stay in Israel and go to, uh, Moshav on board, on the, uh, sea of Galilee, and follow me to the Seychelles in six months with the ticket that she would earn. So I went on to Africa, and uh, uh, she fell in love with the guy in the next bunk [audience laughs], and she forgot my name, and uh, [more laughter; someone in audience speaks but is not clear; Terence responds, absolutely; more laughter]. So uh, but it was very funny because I didn't want to linger in Israel, I was on a mission, you know. Everybody around me was caught up in, in Zionism and the aftermath of war, and this and that, and here I was an Irishman, and when people asked me where I was going, I said, the Seychelles Islands [audience laughs]. What does that have to do with it? Uh, and so I went to what my guidebook described as, Eilat, Israel's bustling southern port. Well I discovered that at that time, one full month of the Zim line, which was the Israeli state freight line came in there, and so I realized I was stuck there for awhile. And I discovered in the dry eeyores {sp?] washing down to the Red Sea, the most amazing collection of freaks [audience laughs], Colombians, Danes, fed up Kerputzniks [more laughter; unclear word] who had run away from that. All these people sitting in this place, dedicated to the notion that, uh, you should smoke as much hash every day as you possibly can [more laughter] and they had a wonderful technique which beats anything I've ever seen. You know in India you smoke a chillum, and it's a, it's a ceramic cylinder, and you, and you mix the hash and tobacco, stuff it in, hold it with a wet cloth, do this method. Okay, so what these guys were not into, was, you take a, preferably a Dr. Pepper bottle [audience laughs], you break it on a rock near, near the bottom, and then, at that time Israel's, uh, smallest denomination coin was called an 'Agarot', and it had, it was, uh, like a gear, it had deep indentations in from the edge. So you could take a one Agarot coin, drop it into the neck of this Coke bottle, or Dr. Pepper bottle, and then just work up a mass of stuff, about like this. So when you fired this thing across the surface, it had a burning surface [more laughter], the size of a small pancake [more laughter]. So uh, I did that for awhile [more laughter]. And by the time I got to Kenya, and made my way to Mombasa, which was the place where this boat was, which was going to take us to, uh, to take me to Seychelles, I thought maybe I should dry out a little, and uh, and uh, but I, I had scored in Mombasa from the shoeshine boys this outlandish black, uh, camper. But I took the boat to the Seychelles Islands and I was there a couple weeks, and I arranged a small house out on an island, which was almost like the island in the cartoons, the one tree island [audience laughs]. It wasn't quite that small, but there were about fifty families on this island, all spoke Creole, and, and there were coconut trees on this island. Every coconut tree had a number, painted on in white ink, and there were twenty-one-hundred and fifteen coconut trees on this island. So I was there to write a book, and to wait for Stephanie. So I decided, uh, that I, that I had been smoking much too much coming through Israel and down through Africa. So I took this lid and I nailed it above my kitchen door, and I said I won't, uh, smoke until I finish this book, and I will set myself a vision, and I will work everyday, and I did. I'd get up every morning, fry my eggs, feed the stray dog, be at the type-write at eight, I would work until two in the afternoon, come hell and high water, then I would, brew tea, and, amuse myself. And it was terrible, you know I was insomniac, I was, my dreams, I was both insomniac and my dreams states were completely out of control. And I wrote this book, and it was, uh, it was called, uh, called, uh, 'Crypto-Rap Meta-Electrical Speculations on Temporary Culture' so, [audience laughs]. And it ran to like two-hundred-twenty pages, so as I was closing in with the end of this book, I began to think, and I, I began to think about the lid nailed over the door, finally I decided that my gift to myself, would be, to uh, to get really stoned when the book was done, so uh, finally the book was done, the index was done, it was all done, it was just sitting there, and I had my little evening meal, and I rolled these enormous bombers, and I dragged my lawn chair out in the palm trees, and the lagoon was laughing out there, and uh, and I smoked a couple of these things in short order, I was just waiting for this wonderful sense of relief, and accomplishment and so forth to sweep over me. And this abyss began to grow in my mind, and I kept pushing it back, and saying, no relief [audience laughs], falling relief [more laughter] and it wouldn't, and finally I had to look at it, and it was a realization which grew over about fifteen seconds, from the faintest whisper of a suspicion, to an absolutely incontrovertible certainty, and it was the knowledge that this book I had written, was the most outlandish garbage [more laughter], sophomoric, self-congratulatory, prolapse, exalting, over-written, uh, just, and I was like frozen [more laughter], because, friends, this was true [more laughter]. So then I realized, you know your nuts to try and navigate about this stuff, because it just makes you, it, you know, uh, being straight makes you into a moron [audience laughs; applause].

There's, there's a whole family of uh, of one liners like that, uh, [more laughter], one is, uh, reality is for people who can't handle drugs [more laughter]. The, the, best version of that I ever heard was something which I thought Tim Leary had said but I asked him recently and he couldn't remember him saying it, of course he's brain dead [more laughter]. Tim once said, uh, "LSD is a drug, which has been known to cause psychotic behavior in people who don't take it [more laughter]. So that was really my first foray out into the world, uh, I went back to Bombay, and, and back to Berkley, and by that time is was early nineteen-sixty-eight, and I got back to Berkley just in time for the street uprisings of May, June and July of sixty-eight which really was the, you know that was the cauldron of my generation. And I don't know how many of you were there the night we burned the bank of America, you know these great home [?] [audience laughs; Terence's voice unclear]. When I, when I first started public speaking I had the illusion that you all were there. And that, and that I was talking to the same people and that we were that type, you know. Suddenly I realized, there are people in this room who weren't born, probably, the night that that went down. Anyway, I was in Berkley all that summer and fall, and some of you may remember S.I. Hayakawa, who twisted my finger, a traditional opportunist to, uh, at that time was cutting his way to power, uh, as president of San Francisco state, and there was a very radical strike action against San Francisco state throughout September, October, November, really at standoff. Everyday we would riot, everyday they would call out the tact squad, and, and then we'd do it the next day, and then take off two days on weekends, and finally ended it was just a technician [?] was never a resolution, but it was really a crazy [audience laughs], one of the most Orwellian things I had ever seen, because San Francisco state has a big quad with square cubicle buildings on all four sides of it. Well, the tact squad, intelligence people, the F.B.I. the C.I.A. film scoop, would put their observers up on these rooftops, and they were filming with telescopic cameras and all this, and obviously they also had closed-circuit t.v. because you could, you never saw high columns, you never saw them. But there were these huge loud speakers mounted on the corners of these buildings, and uh, they would hold rallies, and the Black Panthers would speak and some guy would get up and say now, "Ya'll know why we're here, we're here for business", and the business administration building was one of the belfries of "We're here for business". And the crowd would just begin moving toward the business administration building, meanwhile the cobblestone walkways were suddenly mobile [audience laughs], end of the crowd, and, and you could hear Hayakawa's voice saying "You're clearly escalating!, you're clearly escalating" [more laughter]. And then the tact squad would sweep in and so forth and so on, and uh. Finally, finally Christmas vacation ended that, and the next day as I was leaving my apartment in the hills behind Berkley, I noticed this guy in a car with a funny license plate, and a clipboard mounted on a little stand so he could write while he drove, and he seemed to be taking a lot of interest in my comings and goings. So I told my friend that I thought we had shot our wad, and reminded him that the first duty of a revolutionary is to survive, right? And so we, uh, bought air tickets to, uh, Luang Prabang, Laos, and then on to India, and then back to the Seychelles, uh, there was a possibility at that time of getting real estate in the Seychelles. And, it was really all that traveling in Asia, which pointed me toward, uh, my eventual interest in psychedelics and the Amazon. I, of course I knew about LSD because I went to Berkley in that decade but, but I didn't really understand that these things had been used for fifteen, twenty-five-thousand years, that there was this rich history that was in fact the world's oldest religion. It's interesting you know to me, the uh, press of the sixties, even the underground press like the San Francisco Oracle, and see what themes were not present in the sixties consciousness, that were either absent or rarely mentioned. The theme of shamanism was absent or rarely mentioned. Nobody had connected up the notion that there was this tradition like this. The notion that U.F.O.'s and, and dis-incarnate extra-terrestrial intelligence might have something to do with it. But remember how it was presented as an aesthetic experience by one school, that was the school where you listened to the Bach B. Minor mass, and uh, looked at paintings by Caravaggio and Rembrandt on these subjects, yeah. And then, uh, and then the other school was the psycho-analytic, this is good for you, we have an atheist school, which uh [audience laughter], no I think there was something to be said to that actually. But anyway, in the in-traveling around India, and keeping my wits about me, I became very very simple, and it, those of you who follow me very closely know, that I am no friend of the guru racket, that by, I think uh, if what we're out for is self empowerment and increasing our own felt authenticity, that the first step in the process is not give over your loyalty to some beady eyed weasel from Bengal [audience laughter; applause]. And I went to these guys, you know I was open minded, I, I took Yoga very seriously. I practiced it, I studied the Hindu meta-physics. The reason I was most in Asia, the longest was to study the Tibetan language, and so I was not, you know, I was not a no-nothing physician, but I always set the same question, "What can you show me?". And the best thing I ever, nobody could ever show me really anything, I said "Well, you're obsessed with materialistic effects" [audience laughs]. That's right uncle, and if you don't have any I'll be moving on [more laughter]. Because you know they have the idea that I 'd like to sweep the ashram courtyard for a few years before they lay on the skin. And the other thing was, I noticed, that you know, these guys were as dedicated to smoking hash as I was [more laughter], which clued me that they couldn't have cornered the market on transcendental consciousness too thoroughly. And, and so, I, well the most impressive thing I ever saw, and I respect, uh, uh, the Mahayana tradition very much, I think it's a deep psychological insight into what humanness is, but I don't think they have the doorway into hypser-space. I don't think anybody has the doorway into hyper-space except psychedelic shamans, uh, whether they live in Vedanta[?] beach, or Pucallpa, or central Africa. But uh, so then I, I realized that these traditions were simply that, they were vitiated tradition, and that all of this talk about paranormal abilities could be traced back to earlier strata, and the earlier strata always had the same word with them, Shamanism, that was it. The pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet, Shamanism. The roots of Daoism, Shamanism. The roots of the Vedic civilization, Shamanism. The ancient Hebrew civilization, arising out of Shamanism, so forth and so on. So then, I said well where in the world is shamanism happening today? Well the answer is, of many places, but in its most authentic and, uh, uh, intense forms, it's happening in the Amazon basin. And it based on the use of plants, to which an almost symbiotic relationship has been formed. And uh, as quickly as I could arrange it, and my brother's thinkings have all been along these same lines, uh, we found our way to South America. And uh, went to Pucallpa, went to Iquitos, went to Puerto Leguizamo in southern Columbia. And there, this same challenge that has caused so much discomfort to the Yogins, and the Vilkšus, and the Vilkšunis, and the Geishays, and the Rōshis, and the Rishis, didn't seem to bother these cats. I said, "What can you show me?", and he well look, "Let me put an edge on my machete, and we'll go out here half a mile and cut some vine, and brew it up, and then I've got this other plant growing in my dooryard, and my Grandfather showed me how to do this, and we'll just put it together", and there it was!

The thing which is our birthright as a species, but which, uh, the powers of profane secularism would deny us. I mean some of you may have heard me say yesterday, it's very clear, 'Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness'. Well that doesn't, we've interpreted that to mean, the right to run over the other guy on the way to getting your claws on your third Mercedes [audience laughs]. But that isn't really it, the untrammeled permission which we have given capitalism to cheapen our values, is not what the notion 'The Pursuit of Happiness' means. It means the pursuit of existential authenticity, it means the pursuit of meaning in the world. Well, it just so happens because we are the descendants of these primate, and proto-hominoid, and hominoid populations that have this symbiotic relationship with plants, and to vision, and saw that as the source of their spiritual mind. It, it is therefore not only our birthright, but it is the natural path for us to take. You see, this thing of, of drugs, is simply a language game, what we are, are omnivorous animals, and we are also sensual animals. Most animals are neither of these things, most animals pick one thing, or a few things, but to be an omnivorous animal, willing to eat; fruit, roots, meats, eggs, shellfish, nuts, so on, is extremely unusual. And then, to have an interest in flavoring, in shifting things, the way things taste for their own sake, this is a quality of consciousness, and we are unique in possessing it. And the current, uh, fixation with drugs that states it as a new phenomenon is completely misrepresenting what is going on. Throughout history, human populations have, had their societies, their religions, and indeed their entire cultural machinery, uh, sculpted, and created in response to the kinds of foods, spices, drugs and medicines that they were involved in. Think for example, of the impact of coffee on the evolution of modern world industrialism, how the office worker, and the coffee habit are mutually reinforcing activities where one could probably not function with the other, without the other. You know, when coffee first made it's appearance it was served in very sleazy bars [audience laughs], where loose women and pretentious intellectuals hung out together and, and criticized the enlightenment, and got so rattled that they would just talk all night [audience laughs]. That was the, that was coffee was, until it was understood that what it really is, is speed, and it lets you do a job, and then modern office culture came into being. Think of the manipulation of opium policy by the British East-Indian company in the far east. How many people are aware that the island of Java, which uh, has the densest population per square mile of any large area in the world, has that large population because the Dutch in the nineteenth century, payed people to have children, because the sugar industry was so labor intensive? So that, so in order that white sugar could grace the tables of upper class Europe, the demographics of an entire section in southeast Asia would just plunge into hell. Uh, the examples are endless, tobacco, uh, the influence of the Eleusinian mysteries on the development of Greek philosophy, uh, the way in which the C.I.A. used heroin in the nineteen-sixties to quell the revolt in the ghettos, so forth and so on. These are just, uh, uhm typical examples of this. Well, I digressed slightly, I mentioned it because it's important for us, as people with a core interest, to be as articulates, a spokesman, and a spokespeople as we can be. And because we are living through a kind of hysteria, the equivalent of the great red scare of nineteen-nineteen. What people need to realize, what this society needs to realize, is that the pro-psychedelic position, is an anti-drug position. Because drugs, as defined by the establishment; cocaine, heroin, amphetamines and so forth, reinforce un-examined, machine-like behavior patterns, obsession, and a narrowing of consciousness down to a single focus, the acquisition of the drug. This is the exact opposite in all cases [skip] psychedelics do. Psychedelics dissolve social programming, break up habitual behavior patterns, and incline you to the broadest sort of perspective possible. [audience member says; which they see as an even greater threat I think]. That's precisely why the psychedelics are swept up in the hysteria about the hard drugs. The government is making lots of money on hard drugs, and keeping a lot of people under it's thumb. The psychedelics, by being de-conditioning agents, are just like, uh, you know bringing in gasoline to a bonfire. You're absolutely right, that is the nature of the controversy. That it lifts you out of the ritual genuflection to the idols of the tribe; consumerism, uh, workaholic behavior patterns, duty, and well you know, the whole gamut bourgeois ideas that has made us such a, uh, a poverty stricken culture. So, uh [audience laughs]. Thank you very much, you were great [audience applause; music and host closing].