WEBVTT 00:00:11.532 --> 00:00:23.065 After 6 million years of boredom, 00:00:23.065 --> 00:00:27.704 the evolutionary ascent of our species 00:00:27.704 --> 00:00:30.774 from the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee, 00:00:30.774 --> 00:00:34.502 something extraordinary happened to us less than 100.000 years ago, 00:00:34.502 --> 00:00:38.196 which by the way, is long after we've become anatomically modern. 00:00:38.888 --> 00:00:42.627 It was a kind of emergence into consciousness 00:00:42.627 --> 00:00:46.727 less than 100.000 years ago, really less than 40.000 years ago, 00:00:46.834 --> 00:00:49.825 when we became fully symbolic creatures. 00:00:50.532 --> 00:00:53.703 And this great change has been defined as 00:00:53.703 --> 00:00:56.943 the single most important step forward in the evolution of human behavior, 00:00:57.143 --> 00:01:01.183 is intimately associated with the emergence of the great and transcendant 00:01:01.183 --> 00:01:05.202 rock and cave art all around the world. 00:01:05.848 --> 00:01:10.664 And over the last 30 years researchers led by prof. David Louis Williams, 00:01:10.664 --> 00:01:14.743 at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, and many others, 00:01:14.743 --> 00:01:18.300 have suggested an intriguing and radical possibility 00:01:18.623 --> 00:01:22.729 which is that this emergence into consciousness was triggered by 00:01:22.852 --> 00:01:26.525 our ancestors encounters with visionary plants 00:01:26.679 --> 00:01:29.066 and the beginning of Shamanism. 00:01:29.958 --> 00:01:33.907 If you analyze the cave art - there's no time to go into the details here, but there are 00:01:33.907 --> 00:01:38.487 so many details that make it clear that this was an art of altered states of consciousness, 00:01:38.487 --> 00:01:40.223 of visions 00:01:40.223 --> 00:01:47.984 and that plants like the Amanita muscaria mushroom, or Psilocybin mushrooms, 00:01:47.984 --> 00:01:54.583 appear to have been directly connected with this sudden and radical change. 00:01:54.583 --> 00:01:58.943 So to investigate this possibility when I got interested in this mistery, 00:01:58.943 --> 00:02:04.935 I went down to the Amazon, where there are still surviving shamanistic cultures today, 00:02:05.412 --> 00:02:09.742 and where they drink the powerful visionary brew Ayahuasca, 00:02:09.742 --> 00:02:13.654 of which the active ingredient is Dimethyltryptamine, DMT, 00:02:13.654 --> 00:02:18.348 which is actually closelly related at the molecular level to Psilocybin. 00:02:18.440 --> 00:02:25.507 Now normally DMT cannot be activated orally when we encountered it in the West, 00:02:25.507 --> 00:02:27.532 where it is generally smoked. 00:02:27.532 --> 00:02:31.462 There's an enzyme in our stomachs called monoaminoxidaze 00:02:31.477 --> 00:02:35.465 which switches off DMT on contact. 00:02:36.003 --> 00:02:38.787 But in the Amazon they've got round this problem. 00:02:38.911 --> 00:02:42.505 And they say it was the spirits that taught them how to do it. 00:02:42.567 --> 00:02:45.746 The DMT in the Ayahuasca brew is contained in these leaves 00:02:45.746 --> 00:02:49.145 from a plant that they call Chacruna in the Amazon. 00:02:49.145 --> 00:02:52.551 And there they mix it together with this vine, 00:02:52.551 --> 00:02:56.464 and out of the 150.000 different species of plants and trees in the Amazon 00:02:56.464 --> 00:03:00.744 this is the one that contains a monoaminoxidaze inhibitor, 00:03:00.744 --> 00:03:04.743 which switches off that enzyme in our stomachs 00:03:04.743 --> 00:03:08.905 and allows the DMT in the leaves when the two are maried together and cooked in water 00:03:08.905 --> 00:03:14.468 to be absorbed orally, and takes us on a 4 hour journey 00:03:14.468 --> 00:03:17.261 into extraordinary realms. 00:03:17.261 --> 00:03:21.304 Now it's no joke to drink Ayahuasca. 00:03:21.719 --> 00:03:26.873 The Ayahuasca brew has a foul taste. 00:03:26.873 --> 00:03:29.582 Really, really hideous and a dreadful, dreadful smell. 00:03:30.689 --> 00:03:34.625 And after you've drunk your cup, you'll find within 45 minutes or so 00:03:34.625 --> 00:03:37.622 that your sweating, that you're feeling nauseous. 00:03:37.622 --> 00:03:40.423 Pretty soon you may well be vomiting, you may well having diarrhea. 00:03:40.423 --> 00:03:44.170 So, nobody is doing this for recreation. 00:03:45.247 --> 00:03:50.501 And I'd like to add that I don't think any of the psychedelics should be used for recreation. 00:03:50.501 --> 00:03:56.173 They have much more serious and important mission with humanity. 00:03:56.450 --> 00:04:00.583 So we're not doing this for fun. But what draws people to Ayahuasca again and again 00:04:00.583 --> 00:04:03.869 to brace themselves for this experience - and you do have to brace yourself - 00:04:03.869 --> 00:04:07.263 is its extraordinary effects at the level of consciousness. 00:04:07.263 --> 00:04:10.415 And one of those effects has to do with creativity. 00:04:10.415 --> 00:04:14.784 And we can see the creative cosmogenic impulse of Ayahuasca in the paintings 00:04:14.784 --> 00:04:19.344 of Ayahuasca Shamans from Peru, like the paintings of Pablo Amaringo here - 00:04:19.344 --> 00:04:24.347 those richly saturated colors, the amazing visions that they reproduce - 00:04:24.347 --> 00:04:29.868 and this creative impulse has also spread to western artists. 00:04:29.868 --> 00:04:33.672 Many western artists now have been deeply influenced by Ayahuasca 00:04:33.749 --> 00:04:36.464 and are also painting their visions. 00:04:36.464 --> 00:04:40.782 And as these paintings show, another universal experience of Ayahuasca 00:04:40.782 --> 00:04:47.264 is the encounter with seemingly intelligent entities which communicate with us telepathically, 00:04:47.264 --> 00:04:51.902 and I am making no claim one way or another as to the reality status of these entities we encounter. 00:04:51.902 --> 00:04:56.504 Simply that phenomenologically, in the Ayahuasca experience they are encountered 00:04:56.504 --> 00:04:59.351 by people all over the world, and most frequently of all, 00:04:59.351 --> 00:05:06.922 the spirit of Ayahuasca herself - Mother Ayahuasca - who is a healer 00:05:06.922 --> 00:05:10.583 and although she is kind of the mother goddess of the planet 00:05:10.583 --> 00:05:15.023 she seems to take a direct personal interest in us as individuals, 00:05:15.023 --> 00:05:19.703 to heal our ills, to want us to be the best that we can possibly be, 00:05:19.703 --> 00:05:25.467 to correct errors and mistakes in our behavior that may be leading us down the wrong path. 00:05:25.467 --> 00:05:30.382 And this is perhaps why, and it's an untold story, really - 00:05:30.382 --> 00:05:37.305 Ayahuasca has been fantastically successful in getting people off harmful addictions to hard drugs 00:05:37.305 --> 00:05:43.103 such as heroine and cocaine. Jacques Mabit at the Takiwasi clinic in Peru, 00:05:43.103 --> 00:05:46.090 brings heroine and cocaine addicts out there for a month, 00:05:46.090 --> 00:05:50.037 gives them 12 Ayahuasca sessions and they have encounters with Mother Ayahuasca 00:05:50.037 --> 00:05:55.223 during those sessions that lead them not to wish to take heroine and cocaine any more, 00:05:55.223 --> 00:05:58.063 and more than half leave completely free of their addiction, 00:05:58.063 --> 00:06:01.341 never return to it and don't even have withdrawal symptoms. 00:06:01.341 --> 00:06:05.592 The same incredible healing work has been done in Canada by doctor Gabor Mate 00:06:05.592 --> 00:06:09.822 until the Canadian Government interviened and stopped his healing practice 00:06:09.822 --> 00:06:14.106 on the grounds that Ayahuasca itself was an illegal drug. 00:06:15.121 --> 00:06:20.583 Now I have some personal experience of this. I have not been addicted to heroine or cocaine, 00:06:20.583 --> 00:06:24.151 but I had a 24 years non-stop cannabis habit. 00:06:24.151 --> 00:06:30.646 This started off smoking the herb and laterally vaporizing it, 00:06:30.646 --> 00:06:36.541 but the basic truth is that for 24 years I was pretty much permanently stoned. 00:06:36.541 --> 00:06:44.945 And I enjoyed it, being stoned and I felt that it helped me with my work as a writter and 00:06:44.945 --> 00:06:48.704 perhaps at some point it did, but when I first encountered Ayahuasca 00:06:48.704 --> 00:06:52.302 I had already been smoking cannabis for 16 years and almost immediatelly 00:06:52.302 --> 00:06:57.567 Ayahuasca started giving me messages that this was no longer serving me, 00:06:57.567 --> 00:07:02.383 that it was leading me to behave in negative and unhelpful ways towards others, 00:07:02.383 --> 00:07:05.664 and of course I ignored those messages for years and years 00:07:05.664 --> 00:07:09.425 and went back to being stoned 16 hours a day. 00:07:09.425 --> 00:07:15.829 But that negative behavior that Ayahuasca was pointing out did actually get worse and worse. 00:07:15.829 --> 00:07:19.402 I don't want to put down cannabis and I believe it's the sovereign right of every adult 00:07:19.402 --> 00:07:21.983 to choose to smoke cannabis if they wish to do so, 00:07:21.983 --> 00:07:26.465 but I think I was overusing it, I think I was abusing it, not using it responsibly. 00:07:26.465 --> 00:07:31.584 And I became more and more paranoid, jealous, possessive, suspicious, 00:07:31.584 --> 00:07:36.504 I was subject to irrational rages, I often made the life of my beloved partner, Santha, 00:07:36.504 --> 00:07:41.583 a misery, and when I went down for my regular encounter with Ayahuasca, 00:07:41.583 --> 00:07:48.523 in October 2011, I was given the most unbelievable kicking by Mother Ayahuasca. 00:07:48.523 --> 00:07:54.663 And I was put through an ordeal. It was a kind of life review 00:07:54.663 --> 00:07:59.603 and it's not an accident that Ayahuasca is the vine of the dead. 00:07:59.603 --> 00:08:04.556 I was shown my death, and I was shown that if I came to death 00:08:04.556 --> 00:08:09.423 and what awaits us after death without having corrected the mistakes that I was making 00:08:09.423 --> 00:08:14.064 in my life, that it would be a very bad thing for me, and actually 00:08:14.064 --> 00:08:17.695 Mother Ayahuasca literally took me to hell. 00:08:17.695 --> 00:08:22.952 And that hell was a little like this "Hell" painted by Hieronymus Bosch. 00:08:22.952 --> 00:08:26.822 A truly horrible place. And a little like the place that 00:08:26.822 --> 00:08:30.063 the ancient Egyptians called the Judgement Hall of Osiris, 00:08:30.063 --> 00:08:33.890 where our souls are weighed in the scale in the presence of the Gods 00:08:33.890 --> 00:08:38.224 against the feather of truth, of justice, of cosmic harmony. 00:08:38.224 --> 00:08:41.184 And I was shown that the path I was walking, 00:08:41.184 --> 00:08:45.743 my abuse of Cannabis and the behavior associated with it 00:08:45.743 --> 00:08:49.765 was going to lead me to be found "wanting" in the judgement 00:08:49.765 --> 00:08:54.026 and that I might face annihilation in the world beyond death, 00:08:54.026 --> 00:08:58.144 so perhaps not surprising, but when I came back to England, 00:08:58.144 --> 00:09:01.831 later in October 2011, I gave up Cannabis 00:09:01.831 --> 00:09:05.100 and I've never smoked it again since then. 00:09:05.100 --> 00:09:08.467 And actually and again I'm speaking only personally with no comment on 00:09:08.467 --> 00:09:13.063 other uses of Cannabis. It's as though a monkey has been lifted off my back. 00:09:13.063 --> 00:09:17.616 I'm liberated in incredible ways. Far from my creativity being inhibited, 00:09:17.616 --> 00:09:21.384 I find myself writing much more productively, much more creatively, 00:09:21.384 --> 00:09:26.303 much more focused and much more efficiently as well, 00:09:26.303 --> 00:09:29.536 and I began to be able to address those negative aspects of my behavior 00:09:29.536 --> 00:09:32.824 which Cannabis had revealed and hopefully to make myself slowly - 00:09:32.824 --> 00:09:37.454 it's a long progress - into a more nurturing, more loving, more positive person 00:09:37.454 --> 00:09:42.621 and this whole transformation - it really has been a personal transformation for me - 00:09:42.621 --> 00:09:47.457 was made possible by this encounter with Death that Mother Ayahuasca gave me. 00:09:47.457 --> 00:09:50.745 And you know, that leads me to ask what is Death? 00:09:50.745 --> 00:09:54.125 Our materialist science reduces everything to matter, 00:09:54.125 --> 00:09:57.752 and materialist science in the West says we are just meat, we are just our bodies, 00:09:57.752 --> 00:10:00.903 so when the brain is dead that's the end of consciousness, 00:10:00.903 --> 00:10:02.823 there is no life after death, there is no soul, 00:10:02.823 --> 00:10:05.827 we just rot and are gone. 00:10:06.027 --> 00:10:09.890 But actually many honest scientists should admit 00:10:09.982 --> 00:10:12.778 that consciousness is the greatest mystery of science 00:10:13.039 --> 00:10:15.543 and that we don't know exactly how it works. 00:10:15.543 --> 00:10:17.343 The brain is involved in it in some way, 00:10:17.343 --> 00:10:21.322 but we're not sure how. Could be that the brain generates consciousness 00:10:21.522 --> 00:10:24.891 the way a generator makes electricity, if you hold to that paradigm, 00:10:24.983 --> 00:10:27.018 then of course you can't believe in life after death. 00:10:27.018 --> 00:10:29.184 When the generator is broken consciousness is gone, 00:10:29.184 --> 00:10:30.904 but it's equally possible that the relationship - 00:10:30.904 --> 00:10:32.931 and nothing in neuro-science rules it out - 00:10:32.931 --> 00:10:36.955 that the relationship is more like a relationship of the TV signal to the TV set. 00:10:36.955 --> 00:10:41.794 And in that case, when the TV set is broken, of course the TV signal continues. 00:10:41.794 --> 00:10:45.686 And this is the paradigm of all spiritual traditions, 00:10:45.686 --> 00:10:50.184 that we are immortal souls, temporarily incarnated in these physical forms, 00:10:50.184 --> 00:10:53.624 to learn and to grow and to develop. 00:10:53.624 --> 00:10:56.183 And really if we want to know about this mystery 00:10:56.183 --> 00:10:59.184 the last people we should ask are materialist - reductionist scientists. 00:10:59.184 --> 00:11:01.264 They have nothing to say on the matter at all. 00:11:01.264 --> 00:11:04.823 Let's go rather to the ancient Egyptians who put their best minds to work 00:11:04.823 --> 00:11:06.742 for 3000 years on the problem of death, 00:11:06.742 --> 00:11:10.464 and on the problem of how we should live our lives to prepare 00:11:10.464 --> 00:11:12.693 for what we will confront after death. 00:11:12.693 --> 00:11:18.023 And the ancient Egyptians expressed their ideas in transcendent art 00:11:18.023 --> 00:11:20.527 which still touches us emotionally today 00:11:20.527 --> 00:11:23.146 and they came to certain very specific conclusions, 00:11:23.146 --> 00:11:26.985 that the soul does survive death, and that we will be held accountable for 00:11:26.985 --> 00:11:32.196 every thought, every action, every deed that we have lived through in our lives, 00:11:32.196 --> 00:11:35.862 so we better take this precious opportunity - to be born in a human body - 00:11:35.862 --> 00:11:38.506 seriously and make the most of it. 00:11:38.506 --> 00:11:41.143 And in these inquiries into the mystery of death 00:11:41.143 --> 00:11:44.113 the ancient Egyptians weren't just exercising their imagination. 00:11:44.113 --> 00:11:49.945 They highly valued dream states, and it's now known that they used visionary plants - 00:11:49.945 --> 00:11:53.623 like the hallucinogenic blue Water lily, 00:11:53.623 --> 00:11:56.824 and it's interesting that the ancient Egyptian tree of life 00:11:56.824 --> 00:12:00.384 has recently been identified as the Acacia nilotica, 00:12:00.384 --> 00:12:05.422 which contains high quantities of DMT - Dimethyltryptamine 00:12:05.422 --> 00:12:09.024 the same active ingredient that we find in Ayahuasca. 00:12:09.024 --> 00:12:12.584 Now it's difficult to imagine a society more different from 00:12:12.584 --> 00:12:15.223 the society of ancient Egypt than our society today. 00:12:15.223 --> 00:12:17.463 We hate visionary states in this society. 00:12:17.463 --> 00:12:21.744 In our society, if we want to insult somebody, we call them a dreamer. 00:12:21.744 --> 00:12:23.706 In ancient societies that was praise. 00:12:23.706 --> 00:12:28.142 And we have erected huge apparatuses of armed burocracies 00:12:28.142 --> 00:12:30.902 who will invade our privacy, who will break down our doors, 00:12:30.902 --> 00:12:34.263 who will arrest us, who will send us to prison, sometimes for years, 00:12:34.263 --> 00:12:39.223 for possessing even small quantities of Psilocybin or substances like DMT, 00:12:39.223 --> 00:12:42.916 whether in its smokable form or in the Ayahuasca brew 00:12:42.916 --> 00:12:46.664 and yet ironically DMT is - we now know - a natural brain hormone. 00:12:46.664 --> 00:12:49.785 We all have it in our bodies and it's just that its function 00:12:49.785 --> 00:12:52.347 remains unknown for lack of research. 00:12:52.347 --> 00:12:56.584 And it's not as though our society is opposed in principle to altered states of consciousness. 00:12:56.584 --> 00:13:04.109 I mean billions are being made by the unholy alliance of psychiatrists and big pharma 00:13:04.109 --> 00:13:09.864 in over prescribing drugs to control so called syndromes like depression, 00:13:09.864 --> 00:13:13.704 or attention deficit disorder in teenagers. 00:13:13.704 --> 00:13:18.365 And we have a love affair in our society with alcohol. 00:13:18.365 --> 00:13:24.910 We glorify this most boring of drugs at the spite that there are terrible consequences 00:13:24.910 --> 00:13:26.580 that it often has. 00:13:26.580 --> 00:13:30.705 And of course we love our stimulants: our tea, our coffee, our energy drinks, our sugar, 00:13:30.705 --> 00:13:35.767 and huge industries are built around these substances, 00:13:35.767 --> 00:13:38.863 which are valued because of the way they alter consciousness. 00:13:38.863 --> 00:13:42.787 But what all these approved altered states of consciousness have in common 00:13:42.787 --> 00:13:47.769 is that none of them contradict or conflict with the basic state of consciousness valued by our society, 00:13:47.769 --> 00:13:50.445 which I would call "the alert problem solving state of consciousness", 00:13:50.445 --> 00:13:53.822 which is good for the more mundane aspects of science. 00:13:53.822 --> 00:13:57.865 It's good for the prosecution of warfare, it's good for commerce, it's good for politics, 00:13:57.865 --> 00:14:03.824 but I think everybody realizes that the promise of a society over monopolistically based 00:14:03.824 --> 00:14:06.985 upon of this state of consciousness has proved hollow. 00:14:06.985 --> 00:14:10.757 And that this model is no longer working. 00:14:10.879 --> 00:14:14.325 That it's broken in every possible sense that a model can be broken. 00:14:14.372 --> 00:14:18.343 And urgently we need to find something to replace it: 00:14:18.343 --> 00:14:25.059 the vast problems of global pollution that have resulted from the single minded pursuit of profit, 00:14:25.059 --> 00:14:29.182 the horrors of a nuclear proliferation, 00:14:29.567 --> 00:14:32.428 the specter of hunger 00:14:32.428 --> 00:14:34.903 that millions every night go to bed starving. 00:14:34.980 --> 00:14:37.282 And we can't even solve this problem 00:14:37.282 --> 00:14:40.138 despite our alert problem solving state of consciousness. 00:14:40.138 --> 00:14:45.899 And look what's happening in the Amazon - the lungs of our planet, this precious home of biodiversity - 00:14:45.899 --> 00:14:51.253 the old growth rainforest being cut down and replaced with soya bean farms 00:14:51.253 --> 00:14:54.736 so we can feed cattles so that we can all eat hamburgers. 00:14:54.736 --> 00:15:01.933 Only a truly insane global state of consciousness could allow such an abomination to occur. 00:15:01.933 --> 00:15:06.622 And I did a back of an envelope calculation during the Irak war. 00:15:06.622 --> 00:15:10.179 It seems to me that 6 months expenditure on the Irak war 00:15:10.179 --> 00:15:13.018 would have solved the problem of the Amazon forever. 00:15:13.018 --> 00:15:16.270 Would be sufficient to compensate the peoples of the Amazon so that 00:15:16.270 --> 00:15:19.491 no single tree ever needed to be cut down again, 00:15:19.522 --> 00:15:22.011 to garden and look after that amazing resource. 00:15:22.011 --> 00:15:25.955 But we can't make that decision as a global community. 00:15:25.955 --> 00:15:28.715 We can spend countless billions on warfare, 00:15:28.715 --> 00:15:31.509 on hatred, on fear, on suspicion, on division, 00:15:31.509 --> 00:15:36.780 but we can't get together the collective effort to save the lungs of our planet. 00:15:36.780 --> 00:15:38.818 And this is perhaps why 00:15:38.818 --> 00:15:43.658 Shamans from the Amazon are now mounting a kind of reverse missionary activity. 00:15:43.658 --> 00:15:47.941 When I've asked Shamans about the sickness of the West they say it's quite simple: 00:15:47.941 --> 00:15:51.785 "You guys have severed your connection with spirit. 00:15:51.785 --> 00:15:58.218 Unless you reconnect with spirit and do so soon, you're going to bring the whole house of cards 00:15:58.218 --> 00:16:00.697 down around your heads and ours." 00:16:00.697 --> 00:16:05.538 And rightly or wrongly they believe that Ayahuasca is the remedy for that sickness. 00:16:05.538 --> 00:16:08.977 And many now are being called to the Amazon to drink Ayahuasca 00:16:08.977 --> 00:16:11.461 and Ayahuasca Shamans are traveling throughout the West, 00:16:11.461 --> 00:16:14.898 offering the brew, often under the radar, often at personal risk 00:16:14.898 --> 00:16:17.620 to bring about consciousness change. 00:16:17.620 --> 00:16:20.326 And it's true that the message of Ayahuasca, the universal message, 00:16:20.326 --> 00:16:26.279 is about the sacred, magical, enchanted, infinitely precious, nature of life on Earth, 00:16:26.279 --> 00:16:29.155 and the interdependence of material and spiritual realms. 00:16:29.155 --> 00:16:31.339 And it's impossible to work with Ayahuasca for long, 00:16:31.339 --> 00:16:35.103 without being deeply and profoundly affected by this message. 00:16:35.103 --> 00:16:38.218 And lets not forget that Ayahuasca is not alone. 00:16:38.218 --> 00:16:44.136 That it's part of an ancient worldwide system of the targeted, careful, responsible 00:16:44.136 --> 00:16:45.737 alteration of consciousness. 00:16:45.737 --> 00:16:51.137 It's recently been shown by scholars that the Kykeon used in the Eleusinian mysteries 00:16:51.137 --> 00:16:54.575 in ancient Greece was almost certainly a psychedelic brew 00:16:54.575 --> 00:17:00.061 that the Soma of the Vedas may well of been a brew based upon the Amanita muscaria mushroom. 00:17:00.061 --> 00:17:04.774 We have the DMT in the ancient Egyptian tree of life, 00:17:04.774 --> 00:17:08.742 we have the whole global cultures of surviving shamanism. 00:17:08.742 --> 00:17:10.987 And what it's all about is a state of consciousness 00:17:10.987 --> 00:17:13.297 that's designed to help us find balanced harmony. 00:17:13.297 --> 00:17:16.900 The ancient Egyptians would have called it Maât with the Universe, 00:17:16.900 --> 00:17:20.186 and to remain mindful that what we're here to undertake on Earth, 00:17:20.186 --> 00:17:23.740 while immersed in matter, is fundamentally a spiritual journey 00:17:23.740 --> 00:17:26.158 aimed at the growth and perfection of the soul, 00:17:26.158 --> 00:17:30.859 a journey that may go back to the very origins of what made us human in the first place. 00:17:30.859 --> 00:17:35.747 And I stand here invoking the hard one right of freedom of speech 00:17:35.854 --> 00:17:40.160 to call for and demand another right to be recognized, 00:17:40.160 --> 00:17:42.943 and that is the right of adult sovereignty over consciousness. 00:17:42.943 --> 00:17:46.344 There's a war on consciousness in our society 00:17:46.344 --> 00:17:49.271 and if we, as adults, are not allowed to make sovereign decisions 00:17:49.271 --> 00:17:53.377 about what to experience with our own consciousness while doing no harm to others, 00:17:53.377 --> 00:17:58.524 including the decision to use responsibly ancient and sacred visionary plants, 00:17:58.524 --> 00:18:00.940 then we cannot claim to be free in any way. 00:18:00.940 --> 00:18:05.700 And it's useless for our society to go around the world imposing our form of democracy on others 00:18:05.700 --> 00:18:08.740 while we nourish this rot at the heart of society 00:18:08.740 --> 00:18:12.057 and we do not allow individual freedom over the consciousness. 00:18:12.057 --> 00:18:17.865 It may even be that we are denying ourselves the next vital step in our own evolution 00:18:17.865 --> 00:18:20.629 by allowing the state of affairs to continue, 00:18:20.890 --> 00:18:24.818 and who knows, perhaps our immortal destiny as well. 00:18:25.125 --> 00:18:28.114 Thank you ladies and gentlemen. 00:18:28.468 --> 00:18:30.407 Thank you. 00:18:30.576 --> 00:18:36.151 Thank you.