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Leonardo Silva Reviewer

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After six 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'd 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

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as the single most important step forward

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in the evolution of human behaviour

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is intimately associated with the emergence

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of the great and transcendent rock and cave art all around the world.

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And over the last 30 years,

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researches led by Professor David Lewis Williams

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at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa,

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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

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by our ancestors' encounters with visionary plants,

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and the beginning of shamanism.

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If you analyse the cave art,

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there's not time to go into the details here,

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but there are so many details that make it clear

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that this was an art of altered states of consciousness, of visions,

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and that plants like the Amanita muscaria mushroom,

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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 mystery,

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I went down to the Amazon,

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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 closely related at the molecular level to psilocybin.

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Now, normally, DMT cannot be activated orally.

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When we encountered it in the West, it's generally smoked.

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There's an enzyme in our stomachs called monoamine oxidase,

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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 monoamine oxidase 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 married together

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and cooked in water to be absorbed orally

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and takes us on a four-hour journey 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 you're sweating, that you're feeling nauseous.

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

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So, you know, nobody's 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.

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But what draws people to ayahuasca again and again to brace themselves for this experience,

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and you do have to brace yourself, 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

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in the paintings of ayahuasca shamans from Peru,

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like the paintings of Pablo Amaringo here, those richly saturated colors,

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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

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which communicate with us telepathically.

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Now, I'm making no claim one way or another

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as to the reality status of these entities we encounter.

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Simply, that phenomenologically, in the ayahuasca experience,

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they are encountered by people all over the world.

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And most frequently of all, the spirit of ayahuasca herself,

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Mother Ayahuasca, who is a healer.

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And although she's 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,

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to want us to be the best that we can possibly be,

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to correct errors and mistakes in our behavior

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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

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in getting people off harmful addictions to hard drugs,

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such as heroin and cocaine.

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Jacques Mabit at the Takiwasi clinic in Peru

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brings heroin and cocaine addicts out there for a month,

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gives them 12 ayahuasca sessions,

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and they have encounters with Mother Ayahuasca during those sessions

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that lead them not to wish to take heroin or cocaine anymore,

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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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And the same incredible healing work was being done in Canada by Dr. Gabor Mate

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until the Canadian government intervened 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.

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I have not been addicted to heroin or cocaine,

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

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And 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 being stoned.

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And I felt that it helped me with my work as a writer,

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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,

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and almost immediately ayahuasca started giving me messages

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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 up

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did actually get worse and worse.

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I don't want to put down cannabis,

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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.

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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.

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I often made the life of my beloved partner, Santa, a misery.

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And when I went down from my regular encounter with ayahuasca in October 2011,

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I was given the most unbelievable kicking by Mother Ayahuasca.

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And I was put through an ordeal.

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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.

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And I was shown that if I came to death and what awaits us after death,

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without having corrected the mistakes that I was making in my life,

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that it would be a very bad thing to meet for me.

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And actually, 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 terrible place,

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and a little like the place that the ancient Egyptians called the Judgment Hall of Osiris,

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where our souls are weighed in the scales 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 Judgment,

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

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So perhaps not surprising that when I came back to England later in October 2011,

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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 others' use of cannabis,

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it's as though a monkey has been lifted off my back.

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I'm liberated in incredible ways.

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Far from my creativity being inhibited,

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I find myself writing much more productively,

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much more creatively,

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much more focused,

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and much more efficiently as well.

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And I've begun to be able to address those negative aspects of my behavior,

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which cannabis had revealed.

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And hopefully to make myself slowly,

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it's a long progress into a more nurturing,

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more loving,

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more positive person.

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And this whole transformation,

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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,

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what is death?

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Our materialist science reduces everything to matter.

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Materialist science in the West says that we are just meat,

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we're 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,

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there is no soul,

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we just rot and are gone.

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But actually,

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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.

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Could be that the brain generates consciousness

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the way a generator makes electricity.

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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 neuroscience rules it out,

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that the relationship is more like the relationship

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of the TV signal to the TV set.

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And in that case, when the TV set is broken,

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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,

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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

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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

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who put their best minds to work for 3,000 years

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on the problem of death,

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and on the problem of how we should live our lives

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to prepare for what we will confront after death.

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And the ancient Egyptians expressed their ideas

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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,

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and that we will be held accountable for every thought,

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

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So we better take this precious opportunity

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to be born in a human body seriously

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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 imaginations.

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They highly valued dream states,

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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, dimethartryptamine,

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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

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from 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,

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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 bureaucracies

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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,

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sometimes for years,

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for possessing even small quantities of psilocybin

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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, as we now know, a natural brain hormone.

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We all have it in our bodies,

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and it's just that its function remains unknown for lack of research.

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And it's not as though our society is opposed, in principle,

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to altered states of consciousness.

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I mean, billions are being made

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by the unholy alliance of psychiatrists and big pharma

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in overprescribing drugs to control so-called syndromes

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like depression 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,

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despite the terrible consequences that it often has.

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And, of course, we love our stimulants, our tea, our coffee,

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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

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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,

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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

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over-monopolistically based upon this state of consciousness

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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 that urgently we need to find something to replace it.

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The vast problems of global pollution

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that have resulted from the single-minded pursuit of profit,

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the horrors of nuclear proliferation,

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the spectre of hunger that millions every night go to bed starving,

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that 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,

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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 cattle so that we can all eat hamburgers.

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Only a truly insane global state of consciousness

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could allow such an abomination to occur.

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And I did a back-of-an-envelope calculation during the Iraq War.

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It seems to me that six months' expenditure on the Iraq 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

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so that 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, 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 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,

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you're going to bring the whole house of cards 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 travelling throughout the West, offering the brew, often under the radar,

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often at personal risk, 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 without being deeply and profoundly affected by this message.

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And let's 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 alteration of consciousness.

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It's recently been shown by scholars that the kaikion used in the Eleusinian mysteries in ancient Greece was almost certainly a psychedelic brew,

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that the soma of the Vedas may well have 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 that's designed to help us find balanced harmony.

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The ancient Egyptians would have called it mart with the universe,

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and to remain mindful that what we're here to undertake on Earth while immersed in matter

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is fundamentally a spiritual journey 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-won 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 our consciousness.

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

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by allowing this 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.

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Thank you.