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After 6 million years of boredom,

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the evolutionary ascent of our species

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from the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee,

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something extraordinary happened to us less than 100.000 years ago,

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which by the way, is long after we've become anatomically modern.

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It was a kind of emergence into consciousness

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less than 100.000 years ago, really less than 40.000 years ago,

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when we became fully symbolic creatures.

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And this great change has been defined as

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the single most important step forward in the evolution of human behavior,

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is intimately associated with the emergence of the great and transcendant

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rock and cave art all around the world.

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And over the last 30 years researchers led by prof. David Louis Williams,

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at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, and many others,

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have suggested an intriguing and radical possibility

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which is that this emergence into consciousness was triggered by

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our ancestors encounters with visionary plants

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and the beginning of Shamanism.

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If you analyze the cave art - there's no time to go into the details here, but there are

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so many details that make it clear that this was an art of altered states of consciousness,

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of visions

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and that plants like the Amanita muscaria mushroom, or Psilocybin mushrooms,

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appear to have been directly connected with this sudden and radical change.

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So to investigate this possibility when I got interested in this mistery,

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I went down to the Amazon, where there are still surviving shamanistic cultures today,

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and where they drink the powerful visionary brew Ayahuasca,

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of which the active ingredient is Dimethyltryptamine, DMT,

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which is actually closelly related at the molecular level to Psilocybin.

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Now normally DMT cannot be activated orally when we encountered it in the West,

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where it is generally smoked.

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There's an enzyme in our stomachs called monoaminoxidaze

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which switches off DMT on contact.

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But in the Amazon they've got round this problem.

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And they say it was the spirits that taught them how to do it.

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The DMT in the Ayahuasca brew is contained in these leaves

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from a plant that they call Chacruna in the Amazon.

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And there they mix it together with this vine,

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and out of the 150.000 different species of plants and trees in the Amazon

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this is the one that contains a monoaminoxidaze inhibitor,

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which switches off that enzyme in our stomachs

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and allows the DMT in the leaves when the two are maried together and cooked in water

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to be absorbed orally, and takes us on a 4 hour journey

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into extraordinary realms.

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Now it's no joke to drink Ayahuasca.

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The Ayahuasca brew has a foul taste.

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Really, really hideous and a dreadful, dreadful smell.

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And after you've drunk your cup, you'll find within 45 minutes or so

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that your sweating, that you're feeling nauseous.

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Pretty soon you may well be vomiting, you may well having diarrhea.

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So, nobody is doing this for recreation.

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And I'd like to add that I don't think any of the psychedelics should be used for recreation.

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They have much more serious and important mission with humanity.

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So we're not doing this for fun. But what draws people to Ayahuasca again and again

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to brace themselves for this experience - and you do have to brace yourself -

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is its extraordinary effects at the level of consciousness.

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And one of those effects has to do with creativity.

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And we can see the creative cosmogenic impulse of Ayahuasca in the paintings

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of Ayahuasca Shamans from Peru, like the paintings of Pablo Amaringo here -

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those richly saturated colors, the amazing visions that they reproduce -

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and this creative impulse has also spread to western artists.

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Many western artists now have been deeply influenced by Ayahuasca

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and are also painting their visions.

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And as these paintings show, another universal experience of Ayahuasca

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is the encounter with seemingly intelligent entities which communicate with us telepathically,

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and I am making no claim one way or another as to the reality status of these entities we encounter.

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Simply that phenomenologically, in the Ayahuasca experience they are encountered

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by people all over the world, and most frequently of all,

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the spirit of Ayahuasca herself - Mother Ayahuasca - who is a healer

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and although she is kind of the mother goddess of the planet

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she seems to take a direct personal interest in us as individuals,

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to heal our ills, to want us to be the best that we can possibly be,

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to correct errors and mistakes in our behavior that may be leading us down the wrong path.

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And this is perhaps why, and it's an untold story, really -

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Ayahuasca has been fantastically successful in getting people off harmful addictions to hard drugs

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such as heroine and cocaine. Jacques Mabit at the Takiwasi clinic in Peru,

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brings heroine and cocaine addicts out there for a month,

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gives them 12 Ayahuasca sessions and they have encounters with Mother Ayahuasca

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during those sessions that lead them not to wish to take heroine and cocaine any more,

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and more than half leave completely free of their addiction,

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never return to it and don't even have withdrawal symptoms.

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The same incredible healing work has been done in Canada by doctor Gabor Mate

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until the Canadian Government interviened and stopped his healing practice

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on the grounds that Ayahuasca itself was an illegal drug.

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Now I have some personal experience of this. I have not been addicted to heroine or cocaine,

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but I had a 24 years non-stop cannabis habit.

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This started off smoking the herb and laterally vaporizing it,

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but the basic truth is that for 24 years I was pretty much permanently stoned.

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And I enjoyed it, being stoned and I felt that it helped me with my work as a writter and

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perhaps at some point it did, but when I first encountered Ayahuasca

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I had already been smoking cannabis for 16 years and almost immediatelly

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Ayahuasca started giving me messages that this was no longer serving me,

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that it was leading me to behave in negative and unhelpful ways towards others,

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and of course I ignored those messages for years and years

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and went back to being stoned 16 hours a day.

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But that negative behavior that Ayahuasca was pointing out did actually get worse and worse.

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I don't want to put down cannabis and I believe it's the sovereign right of every adult

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to choose to smoke cannabis if they wish to do so,

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but I think I was overusing it, I think I was abusing it, not using it responsibly.

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And I became more and more paranoid, jealous, possessive, suspicious,

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I was subject to irrational rages, I often made the life of my beloved partner, Santha,

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a misery, and when I went down for my regular encounter with Ayahuasca,

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in October 2011, I was given the most unbelievable kicking by Mother Ayahuasca.

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And I was put through an ordeal. It was a kind of life review

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and it's not an accident that Ayahuasca is the vine of the dead.

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I was shown my death, and I was shown that if I came to death

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and what awaits us after death without having corrected the mistakes that I was making

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in my life, that it would be a very bad thing for me, and actually

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Mother Ayahuasca literally took me to hell.

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And that hell was a little like this "Hell" painted by Hieronymus Bosch.

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A truly horrible place. And a little like the place that

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the ancient Egyptians called the Judgement Hall of Osiris,

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where our souls are weighed in the scale in the presence of the Gods

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against the feather of truth, of justice, of cosmic harmony.

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And I was shown that the path I was walking,

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my abuse of Cannabis and the behavior associated with it

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was going to lead me to be found "wanting" in the judgement

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and that I might face annihilation in the world beyond death,

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so perhaps not surprising, but when I came back to England,

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later in October 2011, I gave up Cannabis

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and I've never smoked it again since then.

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And actually and again I'm speaking only personally with no comment on

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other uses of Cannabis. It's as though a monkey has been lifted off my back.

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I'm liberated in incredible ways. Far from my creativity being inhibited,

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I find myself writing much more productively, much more creatively,

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much more focused and much more efficiently as well,

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and I began to be able to address those negative aspects of my behavior

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which Cannabis had revealed and hopefully to make myself slowly -

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it's a long progress - into a more nurturing, more loving, more positive person

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and this whole transformation - it really has been a personal transformation for me -

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was made possible by this encounter with Death that Mother Ayahuasca gave me.

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And you know, that leads me to ask what is Death?

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Our materialist science reduces everything to matter,

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and materialist science in the West says we are just meat, we are just our bodies,

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so when the brain is dead that's the end of consciousness,

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there is no life after death, there is no soul,

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we just rot and are gone.

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But actually many honest scientists should admit

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that consciousness is the greatest mystery of science

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and that we don't know exactly how it works.

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The brain is involved in it in some way,

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but we're not sure how. Could be that the brain generates consciousness

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the way a generator makes electricity, if you hold to that paradigm,

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then of course you can't believe in life after death.

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When the generator is broken consciousness is gone,

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but it's equally possible that the relationship -

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and nothing in neuro-science rules it out -

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that the relationship is more like a relationship of the TV signal to the TV set.

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And in that case, when the TV set is broken, of course the TV signal continues.

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And this is the paradigm of all spiritual traditions,

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that we are immortal souls, temporarily incarnated in these physical forms,

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to learn and to grow and to develop.

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And really if we want to know about this mystery

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the last people we should ask are materialist - reductionist scientists.

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They have nothing to say on the matter at all.

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Let's go rather to the ancient Egyptians who put their best minds to work

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for 3000 years on the problem of death,

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and on the problem of how we should live our lives to prepare

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for what we will confront after death.

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And the ancient Egyptians expressed their ideas in transcendent art

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which still touches us emotionally today

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and they came to certain very specific conclusions,

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that the soul does survive death, and that we will be held accountable for

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every thought, every action, every deed that we have lived through in our lives,

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so we better take this precious opportunity - to be born in a human body -

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seriously and make the most of it.

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And in these inquiries into the mystery of death

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the ancient Egyptians weren't just exercising their imagination.

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They highly valued dream states, and it's now known that they used visionary plants -

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like the hallucinogenic blue Water lily,

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and it's interesting that the ancient Egyptian tree of life

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has recently been identified as the Acacia nilotica,

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which contains high quantities of DMT - Dimethyltryptamine

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the same active ingredient that we find in Ayahuasca.

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Now it's difficult to imagine a society more different from

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the society of ancient Egypt than our society today.

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We hate visionary states in this society.

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In our society, if we want to insult somebody, we call them a dreamer.

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In ancient societies that was praise.

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And we have erected huge apparatuses of armed burocracies

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who will invade our privacy, who will break down our doors,

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who will arrest us, who will send us to prison, sometimes for years,

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for possessing even small quantities of Psilocybin or substances like DMT,

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whether in its smokable form or in the Ayahuasca brew

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and yet ironically DMT is - we now know - a natural brain hormone.

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We all have it in our bodies and it's just that its function

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remains unknown for lack of research.

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And it's not as though our society is opposed in principle to altered states of consciousness.

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I mean billions are being made by the unholy alliance of psychiatrists and big pharma

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in over prescribing drugs to control so called syndromes like depression,

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or attention deficit disorder in teenagers.

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And we have a love affair in our society with alcohol.

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We glorify this most boring of drugs at the spite that there are terrible consequences

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that it often has.

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And of course we love our stimulants: our tea, our coffee, our energy drinks, our sugar,

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and huge industries are built around these substances,

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which are valued because of the way they alter consciousness.

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But what all these approved altered states of consciousness have in common

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is that none of them contradict or conflict with the basic state of consciousness valued by our society,

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which I would call "the alert problem solving state of consciousness",

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which is good for the more mundane aspects of science.

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It's good for the prosecution of warfare, it's good for commerce, it's good for politics,

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but I think everybody realizes that the promise of a society over monopolistically based

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upon of this state of consciousness has proved hollow.

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And that this model is no longer working.

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That it's broken in every possible sense that a model can be broken.

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And urgently we need to find something to replace it:

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the vast problems of global pollution that have resulted from the single minded pursuit of profit,

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the horrors of a nuclear proliferation,

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the specter of hunger

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that millions every night go to bed starving.

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And we can't even solve this problem

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despite our alert problem solving state of consciousness.

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And look what's happening in the Amazon - the lungs of our planet, this precious home of biodiversity -

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the old growth rainforest being cut down and replaced with soya bean farms

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so we can feed cattles so that we can all eat hamburgers.

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Only a truly insane global state of consciousness could allow such an abomination to occur.

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And I did a back of an envelope calculation during the Irak war.

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It seems to me that 6 months expenditure on the Irak war

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would have solved the problem of the Amazon forever.

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Would be sufficient to compensate the peoples of the Amazon so that

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no single tree ever needed to be cut down again,

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to garden and look after that amazing resource.

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But we can't make that decision as a global community.

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We can spend countless billions on warfare,

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on hatred, on fear, on suspicion, on division,

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but we can't get together the collective effort to save the lungs of our planet.

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And this is perhaps why

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Shamans from the Amazon are now mounting a kind of reverse missionary activity.

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When I've asked Shamans about the sickness of the West they say it's quite simple:

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"You guys have severed your connection with spirit.

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Unless you reconnect with spirit and do so soon, you're going to bring the whole house of cards

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down around your heads and ours."

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And rightly or wrongly they believe that Ayahuasca is the remedy for that sickness.

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And many now are being called to the Amazon to drink Ayahuasca

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and Ayahuasca Shamans are traveling throughout the West,

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offering the brew, often under the radar, often at personal risk

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to bring about consciousness change.

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And it's true that the message of Ayahuasca, the universal message,

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is about the sacred, magical, enchanted, infinitely precious, nature of life on Earth,

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and the interdependence of material and spiritual realms.

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And it's impossible to work with Ayahuasca for long,

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without being deeply and profoundly affected by this message.

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And lets not forget that Ayahuasca is not alone.

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That it's part of an ancient worldwide system of the targeted, careful, responsible

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alteration of consciousness.

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It's recently been shown by scholars that the Kykeon used in the Eleusinian mysteries

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in ancient Greece was almost certainly a psychedelic brew

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that the Soma of the Vedas may well of been a brew based upon the Amanita muscaria mushroom.

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We have the DMT in the ancient Egyptian tree of life,

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we have the whole global cultures of surviving shamanism.

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And what it's all about is a state of consciousness

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that's designed to help us find balanced harmony.

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The ancient Egyptians would have called it Maât with the Universe,

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and to remain mindful that what we're here to undertake on Earth,

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while immersed in matter, is fundamentally a spiritual journey

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aimed at the growth and perfection of the soul,

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a journey that may go back to the very origins of what made us human in the first place.

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And I stand here invoking the hard one right of freedom of speech

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to call for and demand another right to be recognized,

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and that is the right of adult sovereignty over consciousness.

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There's a war on consciousness in our society

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and if we, as adults, are not allowed to make sovereign decisions

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about what to experience with our own consciousness while doing no harm to others,

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including the decision to use responsibly ancient and sacred visionary plants,

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then we cannot claim to be free in any way.

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And it's useless for our society to go around the world imposing our form of democracy on others

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while we nourish this rot at the heart of society

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and we do not allow individual freedom over the consciousness.

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It may even be that we are denying ourselves the next vital step in our own evolution

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by allowing the state of affairs to continue,

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and who knows, perhaps our immortal destiny as well.

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Thank you ladies and gentlemen.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.