now schizophrenia is a similar thing i can remember an experience i had years ago i was in
the tolman library at the university of california
which is the psych library and i was looking up some drug or something but and i just saw
a book and i pulled it off the shelf a book about schizophrenia and it said the typical
schizophrenic lives in a world of twilight imagining marginal to his society incapable
of holding a regular job these people live on the fringes content to drift in
their own self-created value system i said that's it that's it now i understand um
we have no tradition of shamanism we have no tradition of uh men of journeying
into these mental worlds we are terrified of madness it we fear it because the western mind
is a house of cards and the people who built that house of cards know that and they are terrified of
madness uh tim leary once said or i gave him credit for saying he later told me he never
said it but whoever said it this was a brilliant statement someone once said lsd is a psychedelic
substance which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it right
and i would bet you that more people have exhibited psychotic behavior from not taking lsd
but just thinking about it than ever exhibited it from taking it certainly in my family i i watched
my parents both go psychotic from the mere fact that lsd existed they would never have taken it
there is a great phobia about the mind the western mind is very queasy when first principles
are questioned rarer than corpses in this society are the untreated mad because
we we just we can't come to terms with that a shaman is someone who swims in the same ocean
as a schizophrenic but the shaman has thousands and thousands of years of sanctioned technique and
tradition to draw upon in a traditional society if you exhibit quote-unquote schizophrenic tendencies
you are immediately drawn out of the pack and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans
you are told you are special your abilities are very central to the health of our society
you will cure you will prophesy you will guide our society and its most fundamental decisions
contrast this with what a person exhibiting schizophrenic activity in our society is told
they're sold you don't fit in you are becoming a problem you don't pull your own weight
you are not of equal worth to the rest of us you are sick you have to go to the hospital
you have to be locked up you are on a par with prisoners and lost dogs in our society so that
treatment of schizophrenia makes it incurable imagine if you were slightly odd
and the solution were to take you and put you lock you into a place where everyone was seriously mad
that would drive anyone mad if you've ever been in a mad house you know that it's an
environment calculated to make you crazy and to keep you crazy this would never happen in in an
aboriginal or traditional society i wrote a book i mean this has to be the wrap up because we're
over time but i wrote a book called the archaic revival i signed it tonight for some of you
the idea there is that we have gone sick by following a path of untrammeled rationalism
male dominance attention to the visible surface of things practicality bottom lineism we have gone
very very sick and the body politic like anybody when it feels itself to be sick
it begins to produce antibodies or strategies for overcoming the condition of disease and the
20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing phenomena as diverse as surrealism body piercing
psychedelic drug use sexual permissiveness jazz experimental uh dance rave culture tattooing
the list is endless what do all these things have in common
they represent various styles of rejection of linear values the society is trying to cure itself
by an archaic revival by a reversion to archaic values so when i see people manifesting sexual
ambiguity or scarifying themselves or showing a lot of flesh or dancing to syncopated music
or getting loaded or violating ordinary cannons of sexual behavior i applaud all of this because it's
an impulse to return to what is felt by the body what is authentic what is archaic and when you
p when you tease apart these archaic impulses at the very center of all these impulses is
the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling and at the center of
that impulse is the shaman stoned intoxicated on plants speaking with the spirit helpers
dancing in the moonlight and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious living mystery
that's what the world is the world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists
the world is a living mystery our birth our death our being in the moment these are mysteries they
are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration empowerment and hope for the
human enterprise and our culture has killed that taken it away from us made us consumers of shoddy
products and shoddier ideals we have to get away from that and the way to get away from it is by a
return to the authentic experience of the body and that means sexually empowering ourselves
and it means getting loaded exploring the mind as a tool for personal and social transformation the
the hour is late the clock is ticking we will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball
we are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived lives and successful
adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world now the challenge passes to us
the living that the yet to be born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under
and that's what the psychedelic experience is about is caring for empowering and building a
future that honors the past honors the planet and honors the power of the human imagination there is
nothing as powerful as capable of transforming itself and the planet as the human imagination
let's not sell it straight let's not [ __ ] ourselves to nitwit ideologies let's not give our
control over to the least among us rather you know claim your place in the sun
and go forward into the light the tools are there the path is known you simply have to
turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead and get with the program
of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination thank you very very much
thank you thank you
you