Well, the theme that unites these lectures is creativity and the techniques by

which the artist can refine his or her vision, expand the vision, communicate the

vision. And before I get into that issue, I thought I would talk just a little bit

about my notion of creativity per se. What is it, in and of itself? And when I think like that of course I cast my mind back to nature. Nature is the

great visible engine of creativity, against which all other creative efforts are

measured. And creativity in nature has a curious distribution. Its something

which accumulates through time. If we stand back and look at the universe, we

see that at its earliest moments, it was very simple. It was a plenum. It was

without characters or characteristics. It was what is called in Hindu mythology

the Toriah, which is described as attribute-less. And naturally if something is

without attribution, you cant say much about it. It takes a while for it to undergo

a declension into more creative realms. And these creative realms are

distinguished as domains of difference. The precondition for creativity is, I think,

disequilibrium. What mathematicians now call chaos. And through the light of

the universe, as temperatures have fallen, more and more complex compound

structures have arisen. And though theres been many a slipping back in this

process, over very large spans of time we can say that creativity is conserved.

That the universe becomes more creative. And out of that state of creative

fecundity, more creativity is manifest. So from that point of view, the universe is

almost what we would have to call an art-making machine. An engine for the

production of ever-more novel forms of connectedness ever-more exotic

juxtapositions of disparate elements. And out of this, I believe, arises implicitly, a

set of principles we can then apply to the human artist in the human world. Natures creativity is obviously the wellspring of human creativity. We emerge

out of nature almostand this idea I think was fairly present close to the surface

of the medieval mindwe emerge out of nature almost as its finest work of art.

The medieval mind spoke of the productions of nature. This is a phrase you hear

as late as the 18th century. The productions of nature. And human creativity

emerges out of that, whether you have a model of the Aristotelian great ladder of

being, or a more modern evolutionary view where we actually consolidate

emergent properties and somehow bring them to a focus of self-reflection. Now, Im sure that we couldnt carry out a discussion of this sort without

observing that the prototypic figure for the artist, as well as for the scientist, is the

shaman. The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites

the doctor, the scientist and the artist into a single notion of care-giving and

creativity. And I think that, you know, to whatever degree art, over the past

several centuries, has wandered in the desert, it is because this shamanic function

has been either suppressed or forgotten. And weve different images of the

artist have been held up at different times: the artist as artisan; the artist as

handmaiden of a ruling class or family; the artist as designer for the production

of integrated objects into a civilization. This notion of the artist as mystical

journeyer, as one who goes into a world unseen by others, and then returns to tell

them of it, was pretty much lost in the post-medieval and renaissance conception

of art. Up until the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, where,

beginning with the Romantics, there is a new permission to explore the irrational. This really is the bridge back to the archaic, shamanic function of the artist.

Permission to explore the irrational. The Romantics did it with their elevation of

titanic emotion, of romantic love specifically. The symbolists, in the mid-19th

century, did it by a reemphasis on the emotional content of the image and a

rejection of the previous rationalism, and that emphasis on the image and on the

emotions set the stage, then, for what I take to be the truly shamanic movements

in art, which begin really with Alfred Jarry, in the late 1880s and early 1890s.

Jarry you may remember was the founder of something called the Ecole du

Pataphysique1the Pataphysical College. Jarry announced pataphysics is the

science. Problem was, no one could understand what it meant or what it stood

for, including Jarry. Jarry was tight with Montremont, who you may recall said: I

am fascinated by that kind of beauty that arises when a sewing machine meets a

bicycle on an operating table. See, this was a true effort to bend the boundaries of

art, to create new permission permission really for the unthinkable. And this

again reinforces the shamanic function. 1 And writer of the play Ubu-Roi What do we mean when we say the unthinkable? We mean the envelope of that

which can be conceived. And for at least 200 years, the ostensible mission of the

artist has been to test the conceptual and imagistic envelope of what the society is

willing to tolerate. This has taken many forms: the deconstruction of imagery

that we get with abstract impressionism going back into impressionism and the

pointillists. Or the permission for the irrational imagery of the unconscious;

surrealism and German expressionism make use of this permission. Always the

idea being to somehow destroy the idols of the tribe, dissolve the conceptual

boundaries of ordinary expectation.

Well, in order to do this, it seems to me there is a precondition for the creation of

art which I call understanding. And I dont mean this in an intellectual sense; I

mean it in the sense that Alfred North Whitehead intended when he defined

understanding as the apperception of pattern as such. As such. Theres

nothing more to it than that. You see, if we were to look at this room, and we

were to squint our eyes (and Im doing this right now) and I see that the room

divides itself into people dressed in red and people dressed in blue. This is a

pattern and it tells me something about what Im looking at. Now I shift my

depth of field. Now Im looking at where men are sitting and where women are

sitting. This is a different pattern and it tells me more about what I am looking

at. The number of these patterns theoretically present in any construction is

infinite. That says to me, then, that the depth of understanding cannot be known.

It cannot be known. Everything is imminent. William Blake makes this point,

you know, that you can see infinity in a grain of sand. So, understanding, then, is a precondition for creativity. And this understanding

is not so much intellectual as it is visual. Visual. And in thinking about this, I

realized what an influence on my own ideas in this area Aldus Huxley was. Not

the Huxley that we might ordinarily associate with my concerns, the Huxley of

The Doors of Perception and of Heaven and Hell, but the Huxley of a very

modest book that he wrote in the early 50s that he called The Art of Seeing. The

Art of Seeing. And in that book, he makes the point that a good art education

begins with a good drawing hand. That to be able to coordinate the hand and eye

and to see in to natureto see into the patterns present as suchis the

precondition for a kind of approach to the absolute. Now, out of this process of

seeing, which Im calling understanding, the creative process ushers in novelty.

And many of you have heard me speak of novelty in another context: in the

context of nature being a novelty-producing engine of some sort. And ourselves,

almost as the handiwork of nature. But this same handiwork of nature which we

represent, we also internalize and re-express through the novelty of the human

world. Well, now, if we take seriously the shamanic model as a basis for our

authentic art, then certainly in the modern context, what we see missing from the

repertoire of the artist are shamanic techniques. And its for the discussion of

these shamanic techniques, I believe, that I was brought here this evening. I want you to cast your mind back to a great seminal moment, germinal moment,

in the history of human thought, which was about 25,000 years ago. The great

glaciers that had covered most of the Eurasian land mass began to melt. And

human populations that had been islanded from each other for about 15

millennia began to re-contact each other and reconnect. Out of this comes what

is called the Magdalenian Revolution, from 18,000 to 22,000 years ago. And

what it is, is nothing less than a tremendous explosion of creativity and aesthetic

self-expression on the part of the human species. We find for the first time, bone

and antler technology takes its place alongside stone technology. Musical

instruments appear over a wide area. And cave paintingssome paintings so

remote from the surface of the ground that it takes several hours to reach them

are painted and set up in dramatic tableaus specifically designed to bring

together sound, light and dance in hierophonies. Extravaganzas of aesthetic

output that invoke a kind of transcendent other, that human beings, for the first

time, are trying to come to grips with and make some kind of cultural statement

about. And this pulling into matter of the ideas of human beingsfirst, you

know, in the forms of beadwork and chipped stone and carved bonewithin

twenty thousand years, ushers into the kinds of high civilizations that we see

around us, and points us toward the kind of extra-planetary mega civilization that

we can feel operating on our own present like a kind of great attractor. Now, this whole intellectual adventure in exteriorization of ideas is entirely an

aesthetic adventure. Until very recently, utility is only a secondary consideration.

The real notion is a kind of seizure by the tremendum, by the other, that forces us

to take up matterclay, bone, flintand put it through a mental process where

we then excrete it as objects that have lodged within them ideas. This seems to be

the special unique transcendental function of the human animal; the production

and the condensation of ideas. And what made it possible for the human animal

is language. If youre seeking the thumbprint of the transcendental on the myriad

phenomena that compose life on this planet, to my mind the place to look is

human language. Human language represents an ontological break of major

magnitude with anything else going on, on this planet. I mean yes, bees dance

and dolphins squeak and chimpanzees do what they do, but its a hell of a step

from there to Wallace Stevens, let alone William Shakespeare. Language is the unique province of human beings, and language is the unique

tool of the artist. The artist is the person of language. And Ive, you know, given

a lot of thought to this because the work that Ive done with psilocybin

mushrooms and the observations of psychedelic plant use in the Amazon

centered around ayahuasca lead me to the conclusion that it is the synergy and

catalysis of language that lies behind not only the emergence of human

consciousness out of animal organization, but then its ability to set a course for a

transcendental dimension and pursue that course against all the vicissitudes of

biology and history over ten or fifteen thousand years. Language has made us

more than a group of pack-hunting monkeys; its made us a group of pack-

hunting monkeys with a dream.

And the fallout from that dream has given us our glory and our shame. Our

weaponry, our technology, our art, our hopes, our fears. All of this arises out of

our own ability to articulate and communicate with each other. And I use this in

the broad sense. I mean, for me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive

activity. Song, dance, sculpture, poetry all of these cognitive activities when

we participate in them, we cross out of the domain of animal organization and

into the domain of a genuine relationship to the transcendent. As you know,

shamans in all times and places gain their power through relationships with

helping spirits, which they sometimes call ancestors, which they sometimes call

nature spirits. But somehow the acquisition of a relationship to a disincarnate

intelligence is the precondition for authentic shamanism. Now, nowhere in our

world do we have an institution like thatthat we do not consider pathological

except in the now very thinly spread tradition of the muse. That artistsalone

among human beingsare given permission to talk in terms of my inspiration,

or a voice which told me to do this, or a vision that must be realized. The thin

linethe thin thread of shamanic descent into our profane worldleads through

the office of the artist. And so, if society is to somehow take hold of itself at this

penultimate moment, as we literally waver on the brink of planetary extinction,

then the artist like Ariadne following her thread out of the labyrinth, is going to

have to follow this shamanic thread back through time. And you know one of the

most dis-empowering things that has been done to us by the male-dominant

culture is to brush out our footprints into the past. We dont have a clue as to

how we got here. Most people cant think back further than the first Nixon

administration, let alone, you know, the arrival of the Vikings, the fall of Catal

Huyuk, the melting of the glaciers, so forth and so on. We have been dis-

empowered by a rational tendency to deny our irrational roots, which are kind of

an embarrassment to science, because science is the special province of the ego.

And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it,

but I wont. It prefers to be unnamed, I think. So, how seriously then, are we to take this, um, Ill call it an obligation to follow

this shamanic thread back into time? Well, I think that it is a matter of saving our

own souls. That this is the real challenge. You know, I love to dig at the Yogans

by saying nobody ever went into an Ashram with their knees knocking in fear

over the tremendous dimension they knew they were about to enter through

meditation. Still truer, and more sad, is the notion that very few of us pick up

our sculpting tools or our airbrush with our knees knocking with fear because we

know we are invoking and acting with the muse at our elbow. And somehow, I

think the artists need to recover this sense of mystery. One of the most

depressing thing to me about the art sceneand I had a chance to reconnect with

this because I was just in New Yorkis that it now has a kind of directionless

quality. You can go into a gallery and you cannot tell whether it is 1990, 1980,

1970 or 1960. Because a kind of eschatological malaise has settled over art. All

notion of any forward movement toward a transcendental ideal has been put

aside for the exploration of idiosyncratic vision. And I grant you this is a

tensionand perhaps in the question period we can talk about thisthere is a

tension between the individual vision and the notion of an attractor or a collective

vision which wants to be expressed. But to my mind this is the same

dichotomous tension that haunts the individual in his or her relationship to Tao.

You know, we dont want to be lost in ego, but on the other hand, if we completely

express the Tao, we have no sense of self. The ideal seems to be a kind of

coincidencia positorum a kind of literalizing of a paradox where what we have

is Tao, but we perceive it as ego. And in the application of this notion to the art

problem I would say what we need is a situation where schoolingif you want to

put it that wayor a tendency toward a coherent vision expressed by many

artistsis spontaneous. Each artist imagines that they are pursuing their own

vision. Yet obviously, they are in the grip of an archetype which is rising through

the medium of the unconscious. Now, the last time we saw this in American art

was in abstract impressionism. Which was probablyin terms of the values in

terms of tension and the amount of emotional gain between one artistic moment

and anotherthe break between abstract impressionism and what preceded it

was the most radical break in American art in this century. Abstract

expressionism actually carried us into a confrontation with what the quantum

physicists were telling us. That the universe is field upon field of integrated

vibration. But there is no top level, there is no bottom level. That the ordinary

structures of space-time are simply that. That if we can rise out of the human

dimension, then we discover these larger, more integrated dimensions where

mind and nature somehow interpenetrate each other. A vision like that, a

coherent vision, has yet to announce itself here in the post-history pre-apocalypse

phase of things. Well, I guess I have a kind of reactionary side when I think about the creative

endeavor. I believe that the psychedelic experience, as encountered by each of

you in the privacy of your own mind, or as encountered by a pre-literate society

somewhere in the world, that that psychedelic experience is in a way the Rosetta

stonenot only for understanding the encryption that our own lives represent,

each to ourselvesbut its also a Rosetta stone for uncoding the historical

experience. Art is this endeavor to leave the animal domain behind. To create

another dimension, orthogonal to the concerns of ordinary history. And this

orthogonal domain, to my mind, is glimpsed most clearly in the psychedelic

experience. The psychedelic experience shows you more art in an hour and a half

than the human species has produced in fifteen or twenty thousand years. Now,

this is an incredible claim. This is why I make it. The energy barrier which

separates us from this tremendous repository of transcendental imagery is very

low. You know, its a matter of a little personal commitment and the substances

which make the transition possible. The perturbation of brain chemistry is easily

done. What is not so easily done is the assimilation of the consequences of this

act. Ordinarily, we assume that consciousness is channeled between

tremendously deep walls. That there is no way to force a confrontation with the

other or the transcendent or the unconscious. We tend to assume that were

going to have to do double-duty at the Ashram for three decades before were

vouchsafed even a glimpse into these places. This is not true. Cultureand this is my message to artist and anyone else who cares to noticeis

a plot against the expansion of consciousness. And this plot prosecutes its goals

through a limiting of language. Language is the battleground over which the fight

will take place. Because what we cannot say, we cannot communicate. And by

say, I mean dance, paint, sing, mean. What we cannot say, we cannot

communicate. We can conceive of things that we cannot communicate. And I

think every one of us here has done that. And thats a thrilling thing. Thats the

deep homework. The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human

being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in

fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.

And what motivates me to talk to groups like this is the belief that we do not have

centuries of gently unfolding time ahead of us in which to gently tease apart the

threads of the human endeavor and create a bright new world. Thats not our

circumstance. This is a fire in a madhouse. And to get a hold on the situation, I

think we are going to have to force the issue. One way of forcing the issue, or a

chemical definition of forcing the issue when youre talking about a chemical

reaction, is catalysis. We want to catalyze consciousness. We want to move it

faster toward its goals, whatever those goals are. Well, I believe that to the

present moment, language again in the broadest sense: speech, dance, musical

composition language has just been allowed to grow like topsy. Its been a kind

of every-man-for-himself situation. Now, what we really need, as we see

ourselves moving from one species among tens of thousands of species on this

planet, over the past ten thousand years, we have redefined ourselves. And now,

like it or not, we are the custodians of the destiny of this planet. Our decisions

affect every life form on the planet. And yet, we are still communicating with

each other with the extremely precise medium of small-mouth noises mediated by ignorance and hate. This doesnt seem like the way to do business as we

approach the third millennium. What Im hopeful for, and what I actually see happeningI mean, I think were

on the right trackthe birth of a new kind of humanity is going to take place. But

there are still a lot of decisions to be made. How violent shall this birth be, what

toll shall it take upon our mother the earth, what shape shall the baby be in when

it is finally delivered these are the decisions that artists can mediate and

control. Most people are afraid of the unconscious. This is why you can have a

psychedelic compound like DMT, which is very much like ordinary brain

chemistry, appears completely physiologically harmless, only lasts ten minutes,

extremely powerful, and generally in this society you have no takers. This is

because there has been a failure of moral courage. And the failure of moral

courage is perhaps most evident in our own community: the community of the

artist. In a way, its the poets who have failed us. Because they have not provided

a song or sung a vision that we could all move in concert to. So now we are in the

absurd position of being able to do anything, and what we are doing is fouling our

own nest and pushing ourselves toward planetary toxification and extinction.

This is because the poets, the artists have not articulated a moral vision. The

moral vision must come from the unconscious. It doesnt have to do, I believe,

with, you know, these post-meaning movements in art: deconstructionism, and

this sort of thing. But that arts task is to save the soul of mankind. And that

anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because if the artists, who are

self-selected for being able to journey into the other if the artists cannot find

the way, then the way cannot be found. Ideology is extremely alien to art. Political ideology, I mean. And if you will but

notice it is political ideology that has been calling the shots for the last seven or

eight hundred years. We can transcend politics if we can put some other program

in place. You cannot transcend politics into a void. And I believe that a world

without ideology could be created, if what were put in place of ideology were the

notion or the realization of the good, the true and the beautiful. You know, the

three-tiered canon of the Platonic aesthetic. Reconnect the notion of the good,

the true and the beautiful; then, use psychedelics to empower the artist to go into

this vast dimension that surrounds human history on all sides to an infinite

depth, and return from that world with the transcendental images that can lift us

to a new cultural level. The muse is there. The dull maps that rationalism has

given us are nothing more than whistling past the graveyard by the bad little boys

of science. You only have to avail yourselves of these shamanic tools to

rediscover a nature which is not mute, as Sartre said in a culmination of the

modern viewpoint. Nature is not mute; it is man who is deaf. And the way to

open our ears, open our eyes, and reconnect with the intent of a living world is

through the psychedelics. Now, as you know, biology runs on genes. And genes are the units of meaning of

heredity. But we could make a model of the informational environment that is

represented by culture. And in fact, this is done. A word has been invented:

meme. A meme is not the smallest unit of heredity; a meme is the smallest unit

of meaning of an idea. Ideas are made of memes. And I think the art community

might function with more efficiency in the production of visionary aesthetic

breakthroughs if we would think of ourselves as an environment modeled after

the natural environment, where we as artists are attempting to create memes

which enter an environment of other memes that are in competition with each

other, and out of this competition of memes, ever-more appropriate, adapted and

suitable ideas can gather and link themselves together into higher and higher

organisms. Now, in order for this to happen, there is an obligation on each one of us to carry

our ideas clearly. Because in the same way that a gene must be copied correctly

to be replicated or it will cause some pathological mutation, a meme must be

correctly replicated or it will cause a pathological mutation. For instance, I would

say what the Nazis did to Frederick Nietzsches philosophy was a miscopied

meme [that] became a toxic mutation inside a culture. So, I would suggest to the

people in this room tonight, that you take a good look around at whos here.

Artistic people, psychedelic people, look pretty much like everybody else out in

society. But we have come here tonight, self-selected for our interest in the

empowering capacity of psychedelic plants and the empowering capacity of art.

So we represent an affinity group; a population with the potential for mutagenic

impact on the ideological structures on the rest of society. So, look around.

Someone here has what you need. And if you can only figure out who it is, you

can make a novel connection to move them into a new level of creativity. Well, what is this new level of creativity? Some of you may be familiar with the

theme that is very big in medieval religious art, which is the apocalypse of St.

John or of somebody; there are a number of these apocalypses. And I think that

many of us may come out of a secular background or have not given this kind of a

religious idea too much consideration. But my idiosyncratic conclusion, based on

trying to be honest about the content of the psychedelic experience, is that

human history really is on a collision course with a transcendental object of some

sort. It is not going to be business as usual into the endless unfolding confines of

the future. The very fact that human history is occurring on this planet; the very

fact that a primate has left the ordinary pattern of primate activity and gone into

the business of running stock markets and molecular biology labs and art

museums indicates to me the nearby presence in another dimension of a kind of

hyper organizing force, or what I call the transcendental object. And I believe

that this transcendental object is casting an enormous shadow over the human

historical landscape. So that if youre back in ancient Judea, you have an

anticipation of the Messiah. If you are at Eleusis, at the height of the practice of

the Eleusinian mysteries, you have an anticipation of the dark god. These anticipations of an unspeakable transcendent reality, that are always

clothed in the assumptions of the individual artist and the society in which he or

she is working, are in fact genuine. You dont have to give yourself over to

fundamentalist religion to connect with the fact that human history is an

adventure. This adventure has a number of startling reverses and sudden plot shifts that are

very difficult to anticipate, and that we are coming up on one of those. The

civilization that was created out of the collapse of the medieval world has now

shown its contradictions to be unbearable. And though no one of us knows what

the shape of the new civilization will be, somehow in the singing of the ayahuasca

songs in the rainforests, in the tremendous hypermetallic transcendental off-

planetary flash of psilocybin, in the teaching of the self-transforming machine

elves that seem to dwell in the DMT dimension, we see that the ordinary linear

expectations of history are breaking down, and that the truth of the imminence of

the mystery is breaking through all the structures of denial of the male-

dominator paradigm that has been in place so long. The way to make this birth process smooth, the way to bring it to a conclusion

that will not betray the thousands and thousands of generations of people who

suffered birth and disease and migration and starvation and lonely death so

that we could sit here this evening the redeeming of the human enterprise all

lies, then, in helping this thing come to birth. And each artist is an antenna to the

transcendental other, and as we go with our own history into that thing, and then

create a unique confluence of our uniqueness, and its uniqueness, we collectively

create an arrow. An arrow out of history, out of time, perhaps even out of matter,

that will redeem, then, the idea that man is good. Redeem the idea that man is

good. This is the promise of art, and its fulfillment is never more near than the

present moment. Thank you very much. From a talk in Port Heuneme, CA, sponsored by Carnegie Museum of Art, early

1990s. Transcribed from Palenque Norte podcast 123 (7:18 - 58:03).

