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Yes, I know. Now I see it beginning to happen. Timothy here, instead of wearing his old—whatever it was that he used to wear—has now got a white tunic on with gold and colorful gimp on it.
Gimp? Gimp. Yes.
And it’s very beautiful, and he’s wearing a necklace and all that kind of thing, and color is at last coming into the scene. Well, okay. Let’s get back— That’s going back before the Roundheads, and before Cromwell.
Yes, it is. Let’s get practical here. I think we’re all concerned about the increasing number of people who are dropping out and wondering where to go from there.
Now let’s come up some practical suggestions which we might hope could unfold in the next few months. There’s three categories: wilderness, rural, and urban. Yeah.
Like, there’s gonna be bush people, farm people and city people. Bush tribes, farm tribes, and city tribes. Beautiful.
I… that makes immediate sense to myself. How about beach people? I wouldn’t agree with that, no.
No, there’s all kinds of non-evil technologies. Like, neolithic obsidian flaking is non-evil technology. Yes, but what you mean, I think, is this: When you go back to the great myths about the origin of evil… actually, the Hebrew words which say good and evil as the knowledge of good and evil being the result of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
These words mean advantageous and disadvantageous and they’re words connected with technical skills. And the whole idea is this—which you find reflected in the Taoist philosophy—that the moment you start interfering in the course of nature with a mind that is centered, and one-pointed, and analyzes everything, and breaks it down into bits—the moment you do that you lose contact with your original know-how by means of which you now color your eyes, and breathe, and beat your heart. And for thousands of years mankind has lost touch with his original intelligence, and he has been absolutely fascinated by this kind of political, godlike, controlling intelligence where you can go ptt-ptt-ptt-ptt-ptt and analyze things all over the place, and he has forgotten to trust his own organism.
Now the whole thing is that everything is coming to be realized today. Not only through people who take psychedelics, but also through many scientists. They’re realizing that this linear kind of intelligence cannot keep up with the course of nature.
It can only solve trivial problems when the big problems happen too fast to be thought about in that way. And so those of us who are in some way or other—through psychedelics, through meditation, through what have you—are getting back to being able to trust our original intelligence are suggesting an entirely new course for the development of civilization. Well, it happens that civilization develops with the emergence of a specialization in labor.
Yes. And the emergence of a class structure. A class structure can’t survive, or can’t put across its principle, and expect people to accept it if they believe in themselves.
If they believe—individually, one by one—that they are in some way godlike, or Buddha-like, or potentially Illuminati. So that it’s almost ingrained in civilization. And Freud said this—you know, “Civilization as a Neurosis”—that part of the nature of civilization is that it must put down the potential of every individual development.
And this is the difference between that kind of society which we call civilized, and that much more ancient kind of society which is still viable and still survives—which we call primitive—in which everybody is potentially a chief and which everybody—like the Comanche or the Sioux—everybody in the whole culture was expected to go out and have a vision one time in his life. To—in other words—to leave the society to have some transcendental experience, to have a song and a totem come to him which he need tell no one, ever, and then come back and live with this double knowledge in society. In other words, through him having had his own isolation, his own loneliness, and his own vision, he knows that the game rules of society are fundamentally an illusion.
And the society not only permits that, the society is built on it! Is built on that, right! But now that— And everybody has one side of his nature which has been out of it.
—that society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality. And no one who ever came into contact with the Plains Indians didn’t think they were men! Didn’t think what?
Right. They were men. They were men.
Yeah. Every record of American Indians—from the cavalry, the pioneers, the missionaries, the Spaniards—says that everyone one of these people was men. In fact, I learned something just the other day.
Talking about the Uroc Indians, an early explorer up there commented on their fantastic self-confidence. He said, “Every Indian has this fantastic self-confidence. And they laugh at me,” he said, “they laugh at me and they say: Aren’t you sorry you’re not an Indian?” “Poor wretched Indians!” this fellow said.
Well, that is because every one of them has gone out and had this vision experience, has been completely alone with himself, and face to face with himself, and has contacted powers outside of what anything the society could give him. And society expects him to contact powers outside of society, in those cultures. Yes, every healthy culture does.
Every healthy culture provides for there being non-joiners. Sannyasi, hermits, drop-outs too. Every healthy society has to tolerate this.
Now, this is the next step. See, a society like the Comanche or the Sioux demands that everybody go out there and have this vision, and incorporates and ritualizes it within the culture. Then, a society like India, a step more civilized, permits some individuals to have these visions but doesn’t demand it of everyone.
We often wonder why some people are more ready to drop out than others. It may be explained by the theory of reincarnation. The people that don’t want to drop out can’t conceive of living on this planet outside the prop television studio are just unlucky enough to have been born into this sort of thing, maybe the first or second time.
They’re still entranced by all of the man-made props. But there’s no question that we should consider how more and more people, who are ready to drop out, can drop out. If there is value in being a drop-out—that is to say, being an outsider—you can only appreciate and realize this value if there are, in contrast with you, insiders and squares.
The two are mutually supportive. Yeah, if someone says to me, “I just can’t conceive of dropping out,” I can say, “Well, you’re having fun with this go around. Fine!” Yes!
Because we’ve all done it many times in the past. But the two groups, the insiders and the outsiders— The whole thing is too big because it doesn’t say drop out of what, precisely. What everybody is dealing with is people—it’s not dealing with institutions.
It’s dealing with them but also dealing with people. Working with and including the police. You have to be able to—if you’re going to talk this way—you have to be able to specifically say to someone in Wichita, Kansas, who says, “I’m going to drop out.
How do you advise me to stay living around here in this area which I like?” Yeah. Right. Let’s be practical.
Let’s be less historical now for a while and let’s be very practical about ways in which people who want to find the tribal way, how can they do it, what do you tell them? Well, this is what I’ve been telling to kids all over Michigan and Kansas. For example, I tell them first of all: “Do you want to live here, or do you want to go someplace else?” Good.
All right, they say, “I want to stay around where I am.” I say, “Okay, get in touch with the Indian culture here. Find out what was here before. Find out what the mythologies were.
Find out what the local deities were.” You can get all of this out of books. Go and look at your local archaeological sites. Pay a reverent visit to the local American Indian tombs, and also the tombs of the early American settlers.
Find out what your original ecology was. Is it short grass prairie, or long grass prairie here? Go out and live on the land for a while.
Set up a tent and camp out and watch clouds, and watch the water, and watch the land, and get a sense of what the climate is here. Because, since you’ve been living in a house all your life, you probably don’t know what the climate is. Beautiful.
Then decide how you want to make your living here. Do you want to be a farmer, or do you want to be a hunter and food gatherer? You know, you start from the ground up, and you can do it in any part of this country today, cities and all.
For this continent I took it back to the Indians. Yeah, I agree with you completely. Find out what the Indians were up to in your own area.
Whether it’s Utah, or Kansas, or New Jersey. That is a stroke of cellular revelation and genius, Gary. That’s one of the wisest things I’ve heard anyone say in years.
That’s exactly how it should be done. I do see the need for transitions, though, and you say that there will be city people as well as country people and mountain people. I would suggest that, for the next year or two or three, which are gonna be nervous, transitional, mutational years—where things are gonna happen very fast, by the way—the transition could be facilitated if every city set up little meditation rooms, and little shrine rooms, where the people in transition, dropping out, could meet and meditate together.
It’s already happening at the psychedelic shop, it’s happening in New York. I see no reason, though, why there shouldn’t be ten or fifteen or twenty such places in San Francisco. There already are.
Yeah, I know, but let’s encourage that. I was just in Seattle and I was urging the people there. Hundreds of them crowd into coffee shops, and there is this beautiful energy.
They are liberated people, these kids, but they don’t know where to go. They just need—they don’t need leadership, but they need, I think, a variety of suggestions from people who have thought about this, giving them the options to move in any direction. Well, I’d like to see the— Just a minute, here.
The different meditation rooms can have different styles. One can be Zen, one can be macrobiotic, one can be bhante chanting, once can be rock and roll psychedelic, one can be lights. If we learn anything from our cells, we learn that God delights in variety.
They’ve got to meet each other and form these tribal—I would say—reincarnation groups. Because the people who are ready to drop out and turn on will come to these centers, and they’ll wander around, and they’ll form natural cellular groups, and they’ll leave the city. I would suggest a practical step number two: that the Human Be-In, in San Francisco, be a model.
We’ve all tried different models of summer schools at institutes, and research projects with individual drop-outs, psychedelic celebration, and so forth. I would say that the human Be-In was a tremendously important thing in the consciousness of San Francisco. Now, that thing could happen in every large city in the country.
And again, the beautiful thing about the Be-In was: it had no leadership, it had no big financing, it would just grow automatically. Yeah, but we’re accused of being leaders. What are we doing up on the [???]?
There were 50 people on that platform; every one of them was a leader. So were the people in the audience. The reason was that nobody came out and said we are the leaders.
No, nobody said that. But I remember sitting up there— —every time they say you’re a leader— Well, now, look here— But I do that anyway. Yeah, I know.
But the press has a leadership complex. Yeah. But you keep calling everyone disciples.
Oh, they want to find a ring leader, because— [???] One of the four philosophical questions is: “Who started it?” And whenever the police or the press barge into a situation they want to know who started it. In other words, because they’re still thinking about God and the first cause, and they want to know who started it, who’s in charge, and so on.
Right, exactly. Let’s get back to a fundamental thing. I think that what you are really—all of you—are having the courage to say is that the absolutely primary thing is that there be a change of consciousness in the individual: that he escape from the hallucination that he is a separate ego in an alien universe, and that we all come to realize, primarily, that each one of us is the whole works.
That each one of us is what is real and has been real for always and always and always and always and will ever be. And although the time language may not be appropriate here, but nevertheless, we are that, and to the extent that it can be spread around that that’s what you and I are, and we lose our anxieties, and we lose our terror of death, and our terror of unimportance, and all that kind of thing—that this is the absolutely essential ingredient which (if we get hold of that point) all the rest will be added on to you, you know? In the sense of “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added to you.” Isn’t that what you’re saying?
I mean, isn’t that absolutely basic that, even if this is only realized from a statistical minority, nevertheless it’s immensely powerful? It affects consciousness. It affects everybody.
I would add to practical step number two that more celebrations be set up over the—or more Be-Ins— The practical—it just occurred to me—the practical details. The model of it is something like the maha-lila. Like, you’re asking how is it going to work.
Well now, the maha-lila is a group of about three different families who have sort of pooled their resources, none of which are very great. But they have decided to play together and to work together and to take care of each other. And that means all of them are doing—have ways of getting a small amount of bread, which they share.
And other people contribute a little money when it comes in. And then they work together on creative projects. Like, they’re working together on a light show right now for a poetry reading that we’re going to give.
And they consider themselves a kind of extended family or clan. And like, when they went to the Be-In, they had a banner which said maha-lila—like, that was their clan banner. I saw that.
Yeah. That’s the model. That’s the model.
And the model for the time is that breaking out of the smaller family organization, we work in slightly larger structures—like clan structures—in which people do work at various jobs and bring in whatever bread they can from various jobs. But they’re willing to pool it and share it, and they learn how to work and play together. And then they relate that to a larger sense of the tribe, which is also loose.
But for the time being everybody has to be able—from time to time—to do some little job. But the reference is—the thing that makes it different—is that you don’t bring it home to a very tight individual or one monogamous family unit, but you bring it home to a slightly larger unit where the sharing is greater. I think that’s where it starts.
Oh, I think that’s very important. Extended family is the key. The extended family, I think, is where it starts.
And my own particular hobby horse on this is that the extended family leads to matrilineal descent. And when we get matrilineal descent, then we’ll have group marriage, and when we have group marriage we’ll have the economy licked. Because with the group marriage, capitalism is doomed and civilization goes out.
Practical step number three, which I’d like to see [???] I think we should encourage extended families everywhere. Well, it’s very practical to encourage extended families because the present model of the family is a hopeless breakdown because, first of all, the family is an agrarian cultural institution which is not suited to an urban culture.
Because all the family consists in is a dormitory where a wife and children are located, and the husband—who engages in a mysterious activity in an office or a factory, in which neither the wife nor the children have any part nor interest, from which he brings home an abstraction called money. And where there are lots of pretty secretaries in the scene in which he actually works, exactly. And so they have no relation whatsoever to what he does, and furthermore, the awful thing about the family as it exists at the moment, is that the husband and the wife both feel guilty about not bringing up their children properly, and therefore they live for their children instead of living out their own lives and doing their own interesting work, in which the children would automatically become interested as participants and watchers on the side.
As it is, they were doing everything. They say, “We live. We work.
We earn our money for you, darlings.” And these poor darlings feel all these things thrown at them, and they don’t know what to do with it. And then they are sent away to school—shrilled off to school, as Dylan Thomas put it—and to be educated for everything and nothing. By strangers.
By strangers. Who are dubious… Who would teach them all sorts of purely— …moral, spiritual, intellectual, and sexual characteristics. Right.
Abstract formulations and things they’ll learn, and the family has no reality. And the greatest institution today—in the American family—is the babysitter: someone to just take the children out of our consciousness while we enjoy ourselves. And the death-sitter; exactly!
Yes. The—courtesy of the mortician. Yes.
A good death is no longer possible, practically. So— I have a four-stage thing. American Indian technologies… Practical, now.
…meditation centers, group marriage, and periodical gatherings of the tribes. I don’t agree with group marriage. We are a tribal people.
You cannot have infidelity in a tribe. Sexual freedom… Infidelity is defined as going outside the tribe. …is anonymous.
Impersonal, anthill sexuality. Every woman… Now wait a minute—but I said… …let me finish. Every woman is all women.
If you can’t find all women in one woman, it’s your problem. I do think it’s possible for some of us to have found all women in one woman. I want to get back at something.
Just let me say something with him. Infidelity means denying your commitments. Now, if your commitments are within a group marriage, then fidelity is being true within your group marriage.
And infidelity is being untrue or dishonest outside of that. Now, there are some cultures in South America in which all forms of marriage are permitted. There are group marriages, polyandrous marriages, polygamous marriages, and monogamous marriages.
By group marriages—just a moment—let’s get a question of definition here. Okay. Group marriage is where a number of people—as a group, whatever the number is—announce (a marriage is a social announcement of commitment) announce that we will be responsible for the children we produce and for each other.
In other words, all males and all females in this group can be in mutual intercourse with each other? Yeah. Not outside the group.
Outside the group— You make rules to take care of that. You’ve got to bring in— I’m not making the rules. I’m just telling you what the anthropological precedences are in these things.
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. It happens that—in this South American culture—that the majority of the marriages are monogamous, but it also happens that there are some polyandrous, some polygamous, and a few group ones.
And I think that what we can allow is people to combine in whatever combinations they wish. Oh, I certainly would agree with that. When people—just as Lao-Tzu said—when the great Tao was lost there came talk of duty to man and right conduct.
And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. That actually, the only possible basis for two beings—male and female—to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom and say “I don’t put any bonds on you, you don’t put any bonds on me. Because I want you.
I love you the way you are. And I want you to be that.” The minute you start making contracts, and bonds, and signing on the dotted line, you are wrecking the whole relationship. And you just have to trust the fact that human beings should be legally allowed to trust each other, and to enter into a fellowship that does not involve a contractual arrangement.
I think we all agree with that. You know, because if you don’t do that, you’ll kill it! In primitive cultures marriage is not a contractual arrangement, but what it is is: it’s a public announcement.
It’s a relationship which is made public. What was your fourth point, Gary? Occasional gatherings of the tribe.
Tribes. That wasn’t a point, it was an activity. Well, I—it seems to me, then— Say, rather than group marriage, extended families.
Extended cooperation structures, in other words. American Indian technologies, meditation centers, extended cooperative clan-type or extended family-type structures—with much more permissiveness in the nature of the family structure than is permitted, say, in Judeo-Christian tradition—and gatherings of the larger tribes periodically. The practical suggestion number six: I suggest that we have meetings in cities April 21st.
I suggest we have, say, national meetings—or one national meeting, perhaps—June 21st, and that we start moving through Europe to the East so that we would, on September 21st, on the door between India and China, with as many Indians or Westerners or people we’ve picked up on the way, I think that’s the quickest way to end racial prejudice and the war in Vietnam. Some cultures aren’t going to understand this. You’ve got to get more than 20,000 people.
And that was done anyway, all the way around. And that was done anyway by Shankara [??? ], and he got stopped at the border of Burma.
[???] when the Indians were upset. There’s a social and historical problem here.
One is that California is one of the places ready for that problem. Yeah. Like, you couldn’t do this in Japan.
Well, it’s already done that. Now let’s— No, but you can’t do it yet. It hasn’t done it yet.
A great percentage of the world is going to have to [???] through the drama of Western culture and technology in some accelerated way. Therefore, they’re ready for this.
Like, America’s [???] culture in which a number of people have seen through it and are able to move beyond it. Japan isn’t ready to, for example.
It would be incredibly eccentric to them. Nobody’s ready to try it. I question that.
I think that if you look at the spread of American ideology, France is just now starting to get super-drugstores. Yeah. You must not fail to realize the authentic, deep American spirit behind this, and I think that if it’s taken 50 years for France to accept the super-drugstore, why not six months to accept the Be-In in San Francisco?
Well, because… The way they spread drugs, or Pepsi-Cola, or Coca-Cola, was they—when Coca-Cola first showed up in the Grand Canal in Venice, or Coca-Cola first showed up in Pakistan—it was an eccentric. But Pepsi-Cola can do it. The energy and the cellular activity which started here can move much more quickly because it’s talking to deeper things in a human being than Pepsi-Cola.
I think But these people are—some of these people in Africa and Asia are caught up in the drama of progress. This is really—this is part of the paradox. We can tell them!
I feel the same way about the problem with the American Negro. Does he have to become a middle-class White before he can then go on and leave that? I don’t think we have to go through these historical periods.
Anything’s possible, but move it faster. And to jump. Well I hope it’s possible to accelerate it.
But you can’t take it around the world this year or next year. Yeah. Like, the drama is changing.
What people are interested in is not things, it’s states of mind. That’s the cultural shift. Now this is a very important statement, this.