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unclaimable hectares near Florencia in southern Caquetá, but I would have to wrestle with <cocanieros> and M19 and several other factions to even, uh, be even able to walk that land. So, over the years the idea sort of was fallow, and then about six years ago, Kat and I decided that our nine acres of land that we owned in Hawaii could be turned into a nonprofit foundation and put towards this project. And we did that, and we organized, um, to buy nine and a half additional adjacent acres. So what we have is a project in Hawaii of 19 acres of rainforest land--that's land at about 2200 feet
feet with 80 inches of rainfall a year--and 2200 feet in Hawaii at 19 degrees north latitude is roughly equivalent to 7000 feet in the Andes at zero. Which means it quite nicely approximates what's called the montane or cloud rainforest of the Amazon. So we found that we could bring plants there, and propagate them and they would survive, and this is what we've been doing. Nichole was someone that I met in, let's see, 1980, when I was down there on a joint Harvard University British Columbia expedition that was getting my brother his PhD. We knew Nichole's books, her book,
uh, but in the course of bringing in all these plants from the bush, and spending time with her at UNAF--the botanical facility there that Francisco Ayala runs--uh, her knowledge, her enthusiasm for all of this stuff, her conviction that there really was a medically important dimension to all these plants spurred us onward. Well, now, um, the foundation has been up and running for several years; many of you are contributors to it and generously support it. Those of you who are not aware of it, I call it to your attention. It seems pretty clear that the destruction of the rainforest, the war against drugs, the issue of higher consciousness, the issue of the first world's relationship to the third world--all of these disparate socio-political concerns are somehow spun together. The issue has to do with plants, people, land, resources and the future. If the botanical ethno-medical heritage in the warm tropics is not preserved in the next 30 years, it will just be lost forever. And this is not only a South America problem. The forests of Africa are even more heavily impacted by human usage and unsound extraction processes. The forests of eastern Indonesia are next, I'm sure. And in each case, the whole... you know, they say there can be a technological fix
for almost anything. But once a species becomes extinct, that's it for all eternity. That particular genome, that particular solution to life's vicissitudes will never be expressed again. So what we're trying to do is save that which is literally priceless. No price can be put upon it. Now the argument is being made that, uh, sound extraction processes are more profitable than clear-cutting and turning rainforests into pasturage. This is certainly true, but we can't be certain that this message is going to be heard. Also, uh, and this is a particular focus of our concern, rapid as the destruction of the rainforest is, even more rapidly the human knowledge is fading, because these people are being absorbed into a global capitalist economy. They don't become shamans, they become outboard motor repairmen, tour guides, hotel managers, uh, this sort of thing, they work in sawmills. Uh, if this knowledge is lost, the presence of the plants doesn't really mean anything in terms of its impact on human health and quality of life. So, and then the area where this is most acute, most controversial, most subject to manipulation by dominator philosophies is the hallucinogens, the lynchpin of the shamanic ability to access these higher dimensions of information. And as we know, governments are extremely concerned to suppress any sort of chemical strategy that dissolves, uh, social conditioning. And shamanism is precisely this in its hallucinogenic incarnation. So one of the things Botanical Dimensions has stressed is the collection of the magical plants: the plants which have psychoactivity, the plants which are allowing these people to stretch the envelope of what is possible in the domain of cognitive activity. And I will argue I'm sure sometime before this, uh, meeting is over, that this is very important: that the archaic revival (which is this larger umbrella phenomenon under which the entire twentieth century is operating) the archaic revival is going to include the revivification of these shamanic forms. In a way, human history for the past several thousand years is nothing more than an awakening to the power of the archaic revival. You know, it's a cliche of social dynamics that you never appreciate something till you lose it. And some people think that this is what first marriages are for. History is a kind of horrified realization that something has been lost, that there is an itch hard to scratch in the civilized context. That we have, out of fear really, descended into patterns of domination of each other, of the environment, of our children, of our social relations with exogamous groups. We have descended into a dominator pattern which is basically based on clutching, on fear. And I'm sure most of you have heard me argue that this is the consequence of ceasing basically to do enough hallucinogens in the diet. That in fact, what human beings were flirting with over many many tens of millennia, let's say from 100,000 years ago to 15,000 years ago, human beings were in a flirtatious situation with a symbiotic relationship with this mind resident in vegetable nature. Now you all know what classic symbiosis is in biology. It's where, let's take the example of the little fish who lives in the sea anemone and big fish don't bother it. It gains protection, the sea anemone gains access to larger prey which come to investigate the little fish. That kind of symbiosis is genetically locked in, and if you take the little fish away from the anemone, and put it let's say in an aquarium without anemones, it doesn't die, it doesn't go into an immediate
thousand years ago, human beings were in a flirtatious situation with a symbiotic relationship with this mind resident in vegetable nature. Now you all know what classic symbiosis is in biology. It's where, let's take the example of the little fish who lives in the sea anemone and big fish don't bother it. It gains protection, the sea anemone gains access to larger prey which come to investigate the little fish. That kind of symbiosis is genetically locked in. And if you take the little fish away from the anemone, and put it let's say in an aquarium without anemones, it doesn't die, it doesn't go into an immediate physiological crisis. No, what happens is simply has a low body weight and a short life span. In other words, it is under stress. And I believe--I hope I'm not deluding myself--but I believe that the lost secret of human emergence, that the undefined catalyst that took a very bright monkey and turned that species into a tormented self-reflecting poet dreamer, that catalyst has to be sought in the tertiary alkaloids in the food chain that were catalyzing higher states of intellectual activity. And I pointed out to you ad nauseum I'm sure, the reciprocal feedback relationship that was working there in the case of the mushroom in the veldt situation in Africa, it was promoting at low doses visual acuity, which was feeding back into the hunting and gathering process, making those animals with this increased visual acuity more adaptively successful, hence more reproductively successful, hence they're outbreeding their competitors. At higher doses, psilocybin actually causes a generalized arousal which includes sexual arousal; again it becomes a catalyst for increased reproductive success. More instances of copulation in a situation like that lead to more successful births of those into family structures where the alkaloid has been accepted into the food chain. Well, this would be only an obscure topic of interest to primatologists were it not for the fact that it is a crisis in consciousness which confronts us globally Consciousness is the commodity that if we do not have enough of it, do not produce it fast enough, then the momentum of the processes we set in motion in our ignorance is going to sterilize the planet and do us all in. So we have to have consciousness. Well, then you look at the smorgasbord of ethnographic possibilities, and you discover this institution of shamanism. It is the institution of planner, of visionary, of manager, of life system coordinator, that's what it's about. You call it magic on one level, you call it curing, you call it um, folk psychiatry or weather prediction. Shamans have been involved in all of these things. But as Nicole was made so eloquently the point last night, to these deep forest people, it is ordinary. It is ordinary. They live in a different cultural dimension than we do: dimensions which to use are completely value dark, are to them completely transparent. And dimensions which to us are extremely rich and complex--the inner world of the nucleus of the atom, let us say--are to them totally value dark. They don't even cognize the possibility of asking the question. But nevertheless, the specialization in these various domains is not something where one is as good as another. Consciousness is the domain of immediate experience. How are we going to save this planet? How are we going to take the lethal cascade of toxic, technological and ignorance-producing habits that are loose on this planet and channel them toward some kind of a sane and livable world? Well, the answer is emerging in culture out of the collectivity of global consciousness; it is what I call the archaic revival. It is this very large
asking the question. But nevertheless, the specialization in these various domains is not something where one is as good as another. Consciousness is the domain of immediate experience. How are we going to save this planet? How are we going to take the lethal cascade of toxic, technological and ignorance-producing habits that are loose on this planet and channel them toward some kind of sane and livable world? Well, the answer is emerging in culture out of the collectivity of global conscousness. It is what I call the archaic revival. It is this very large turnover in the mass mind. Some people call it a paradigm shift. It's an effort to recover the sensory ratios, the feelings, and the attitudes of fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, before fear, before ego, before male dominance, before hierarchy, hoarding, warfare, propaganda, child abuse, all of these things. And the answer lies, as was indicated last night, in integration into the dynamics of nature. Well, so far as my analysis gives it to me, the only way you can abandon yourself to the dynamics of nature is to break through the language shell. You must cut through the aura of programming and cultural assumption that surround us from the moment we are able to speak. The only way this can be done is by dissolving the boundaries of ego. Ego is the structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, culture is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable. Now I don't know... so, you see what I see going on in the Amazon is a very radical psycholytic therapy where they are dissolving the boundaries of self, culture and ego assumption. And then what you discover is not the white light, or what William James calls the blooming buzzing confusion, although in the first few minutes it can be like that, but what you really discover is sentient, organized, living, loving nature. That nature is a force, nature is a mind, a personality organized with intentionality. Organized with feeling, humor, grace and conviction. Conviction. And if you can get right with that conviction, then that's the secret of dancing in the waterfall. That's the secret of the shaman's apparent transcendence of the rules of mundane statistics. Because that's what it is, the shaman doesn't violate physics, he just, he or she just knows how to push the improbable to its greatest extent. And in eastern philosophy this is called the Tao. You know, abandonment to the flow. Fitting of the small pattern into the larger pattern. Well, I think these things are very important because I think that psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, it's a good idea but it will never reach any kind of operational effectiveness until we look to these native healers all over the world and study their methods. And their methods are, uh, chemical. And personal. It's a combination
combination of care, attention, intention, and chemistry that allows consciousness to be made malleable and then recast, uh, in other forms. So, uh, I find myself this weekend explaining myself. That's what I feel like I'm doing. Why does someone who extols the self-transforming elf-machines of the DMT space also claim to be a conservationist, also, you know, have a mathematical dog and poodle show? Well, it's because all of these things emerge out of the concrescence of consciousness: it's intention toward its own transformation. Nature is the answer. It's not enough to be like Wordsworth. It's not enough to, uh... this is not, you know... Mao Tse Tung said the revolution is not a dinner party. And certainly the ecological revolution is not a dinner party. Poetic sensitivity to the death of the planet is not what we're striving for here. What we're striving for is to halt, overturn and back out of the impending death of the planet. It is very clear now that consciousness will decide that the planet... there are not rosy futures of suburban housing and ratatouille to be extended endlessly into the future. We are approaching a bifurcation where it is either going to become heaven or hell, one or the other. And I think that this archaic intuition, which I see reaching clear back to the birth of the 20th century and the 19th century, back to people like Alfred Jarry, and Guillaume Apollinaire and the pataphysicians, the surrealists, the physicists around Einstein, Freud, modern art, modern dance, jazz, uh, all of this stuff is an effort to reclaim the primitive. To reclaim the archaic, to reject all that powdered-wig algebra that comes down through the French-English-German tradition of constipated male dominance, and instead you know, uh, intuit--that's what it is in Freud and Jung and the new age--intuit our way out. But now, the intuition is rising to the surface. We no longer have to, uh, operate without uh, the presence of the goal firmly in hand. The goal can now be stated: what this is all about is a return to archaism, with the lessons learned in history. That's where we were happy. The fall was a fall into a veil of tears, into a world of limitation and pain and suffering and infectious disease and so forth and so on. It's a prodigal journey into a lower dimension that can now be ended by a collective cultural decision to commit to this Taoist, shamanistic, feminized, cybernetic, caring, aware, present kind of being. It's nothing more than what each of us is in our very best moments. But we have to extend those very best moments to fill whole lifetimes. Uh, you know, think of the number of people who suffered and died that we could sit under this tree this morning. I mean, in the last million years, nine times the glaciers have ground south from the poles, freezing the world into ice and confining human populations to subtropical valleys and the warm tropics. Nine times the inter-glacial periods have come, and human populations have spread out over the earth. They had... uh, they didn't have radio, they didn't have antibiotics, contraception, statistical analysis or the partial differential equation. And yet, somehow they managed to get us here. Are we then, as the heirs of that wavefront
wavefront of the inheritors of a billion-year process? Are we, in one generation, to turn it into a massive potage? I think not; I certainly hope not. I'd like to believe that we could make that, uh, leap to conscious awareness that would allow us to take hold. Now, the problem was easy the first ten years that I sat before you, because what we were doing was getting to know each other. To verify that we in fact existed; that I wasn't crazy, you weren't crazy... so forth and so on. Now, what looms ahead is the mess of politics. And this I'm sure you have no stomach for. I certainly don't. I'd rather be stoned and rocked in the arms of the goddess. But as a matter of fact, this dominator thing is not going to be unhooked and put to bed without a struggle. Everyone is going to have to be counted. I've talked to you in recent months about memes--memes being the smallest potential units of ideas. They're like genes. We are the nucleus of a mutant meme. The meme of plant consciousness, hallucinogenic consciousness, shamanistic consciousness. We have to refine this meme, replicate it through repetition and spread it through society. In the same way that a plant sheds seeds into an ecosystem, the idea will compete. The idea, if a good one, it's adaptive, it's clever, it's tough, it's invasive, it can make use of many contexts to promote its own existence. But it can't do any of that if we don't replicate it and get it out. So, uh, I see these kinds of meetings as an opportunity for building community, as an opportunity for people to look around themselves and connect with the other people who are here. We cannot be told from the rest of the population unless we self-select and gather together at a single point in space and time. When we do that, we recognize each other. When this meeting is concluded we will merge back into the larger stream of the body politic. But carrying this meme of the Gaian resurgence, the Gaialanic wave that must come. I mean, people say it's so wonderful that you articulate these feminist ideas and so forth; I do it because I don't want to be dead. I do it because I don't want my children to have no world to live in. There's no choice. Its uh... the walls are high and the current is moving very fast. What we need to do is merely keep our spirits high and learn to sing the song. That's just, um, something or other.
Nicole, Would you like [offers Nicole the microphone].
Nicole Maxwell: Very daunting
Terence: Well, don't be daunted, here, let me give you the... would you like the little [microphone]?
Nicole Maxwell: I've got one
Terence: Well, but I, does that do this [amplify through PA system]?
Nicole Maxwell: [to someone offscreen] Does it?
[offscreen]: No
Terence: Here you are, my dear, do you want to hold this, or do you want to bellow?
Nicole Maxwell: Thank you. Perhaps I'd be better off without it because whereas you see a very large... you see it all... I have seen a very small piece of it. And I've seen that little bit up close. And uh, it's not a bit that's been in everyody's window. They don't have it at Macy's. And um, but I've learned a lot from it. I've learned that we're only a small part of a very great unity. As you were pointing out. As a matter of fact, our feminism, so many of our ideas are really only... they've been held by these so-called primitives, but I guess they are primitives means they came first.
and, uh, so many of our odd ideas, for example: I am convinced that theirs was originally a feminist society, because you find traces of it everywhere. A woman in the Amazon is a chattel they say. But I've so often tried to buy some native artifact from a man and he'd say I have to ask my wife. On the other hand, it shows up... the reverse shows up in many ways, like where the [doctor] was talking about couvade this morning. Couvade is an Amazonian method employed by many--or rather, system--which is employed or enforced in many tribes. When mama's going to have a baby, she simply goes the edge of the river, possibly with a friend, another woman, and has it. And that's it. She comes back after washing up a bit and papa gets in his hammock and he is a sick man for anything from two days to two weeks, depending on which tribe it is. And she takes care of him. Now, is that... is that really subservience, or is it a sort of dominance, female dominance? I've never been able to decide. But it is not one that we could put over in our society.
And you find traces of an ancient, ancient mother-worship all through it. They'll speak of the--as you know, they are animists--which seems pretty reasonable when you're amongst them because trees have spirit, rivers have spirit, they are entities, they are personalities and they have a will of their own, according to native belief and sometimes mine. And that power is described as residing in the mother. The mother of the tree, the mother of the river; the spirit of it is the mother. Well, the mother, all through Amazonian tribes and cultures, as far as I know, the system is that mother has a quiet authority, usually over the girls for a long time, but over the boys only when they're very small. When they're bigger they'd go out and they'd hunt, fish with papa, and they'd get initiated. The initiation for the girls is somewhat more peculiar. The Ticuna, for example, when a girl reaches marriageable age, which can be any time she reaches puberty, they give a great fiesta after keeping her locked up for six months in a little circular hut built in the center of the big communal residence. And then, at the end of that , she's brought out and there's a very great and very drunken fiesta with all the men wearing elaborate masks. The girl is beautifully dressed with feathers and paint. But the men wear these hideous masks and they chase her around, supposedly scaring her to death. And then, at the end of it, she is seated at dawn, on a tapir skin, and two old women will pull out every hair in the poor girl's head. It's called the pelazon, the [peeling]. And that is to teach her that matrimony is no bed of roses. The girl goes back and she is immediately available for marriage. That doesn't sound very matriarchal. But maybe there are the seeds there because when the hair grows out it's almost like a rebirth. Her beauty is reborn, her interest is reborn, and hair in some civilizations has a certain mystical property, a certain power.
Nothing like the power of the name, of course. The power of the word we hear a lot about in our bibles, and so forth, and in a lot of courtrooms. But, eh, the power of the name
the power of the name is even greater in the Amazon, and for example if you know the name of people in some times, a private name, you have power of him, a mystical power. And no amount of force can break that power, but that is why it is very, very bad manners amongst the Witoto to say, "what is your name." If you ask him his name he will give you a Spanish name like "Augustin" or "Lucia", but never the Witoto name. And it is a great hon- I have had the great honor of being given a name in Shipibo because I have had a great- a lot of time with that tribe and they are good friends. And my name is Kai-uz-na which means "Widely Scattered". They also get a secret name, now that's the name that the other members of the tribe will use, but then you get a secret name which only the shaman and you will know. And I unfortunately wrote it in a notebook which I lost. It's so secret that I don't know it myself, but the, the name I have, when I go into a tribe and I say- a group of Shipibos or Okoni, because the languages are almost the same, that I am Kai-uz-na, I am immediately accepted as one of them, as if I say "I'm Nicole." I'm an outsider. The name has power. Now, a part of that power is something that is very important when you're dealing with, as a shaman, with people. It's quite, I think, rather important for them to know the real name because your name is your soul. Many different tribes are of course are very rigid and in some areas they still keep the ayahuasca ceremony very secret from outsiders, not secret amongst themselves of course, because it is an entrance into the real world as they say it. Terence can explain that to you. Because- and in that you can see, other shaman would see for you where you lost such and such a thing or where you- who is your ene- secret enemy, or if somebody's sick who is the witch doctor who sent the dart that made him sick, or even killed him because no death, strangely enough in the times I know, no death is ever knowable. Death is not accepted as a natural thing. It is an act. It is something that is put upon you by another person, a witch doctor, or of course it's not now, though much- there used to be a great deal of killing in wars. War is mostly for honor, revenge killings. Honor is such a big thing with them, and it is so closely associated with revenge that some of the tribes, the warrior tribes, would die young. There were almost no able-bodied males left over forty in the Aguaguna