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And What We're Looking Toward Is A Moment When The Artificial Language Structures Which Bind Us Within The Notion Of Ourselves Are Dissolved In The Presence Of The Realization That We Are A Part Of Nature. And When That Happens, The Childhood Of Our Species Will Pass Away, And We Will Stand Tremulously On The Brink Of Really The First Moment Of Coherent Human Civilization.

-Terence McKenna

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And What We're Looking

Terence McKenna

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And What We're Looking Toward Is A Moment When The Artificial Language Structures Which Bind Us Within The Notion Of Ourselves Are Dissolved In The Presence Of The Realization That We Are A Part Of Nature. And When That Happens, The Childhood Of Our Species Will Pass Away, And We Will Stand Tremulously On The Brink Of Really The First Moment Of Coherent Human Civilization.

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So The Idea Is To Triangulate A Sufficiently Large Number Of Data Points In Your Set Of Experience That You Can Make A Model Of The World That Is Not Imprisoning. That's Why, Second To Psychedelics, I Think Travel Is The Most Boundary-dissolving, Educational Enterprise That You Can Get Mixed Up In.

I'm Meeting My Obligations, Somehow, Always Have, Without Ever Truly Working, Without Ever Putting My Shoulder To The Wheel For The Man. Of Course I Had To Deal Dope To Do This!

Actually, The Highest Form Of Human Organization Is Not Realized In The Democratic Individual. It Is Realized In A Dimension None Of Us Have Ever Penetrated, Which Is The Mind Of The Species, Which Is Actually The Hand At The Tiller Of History. . . . It Is An Organized Entelechy Of Some Sort, And Human History Is Its Signature On The Primates.

It Seems To Me That Information Is The Thing Which Uses Matter, Uses Light, Uses Spirit, Uses Whatever It Can Put Its Hands On To Organize Itself Into Higher And Higher Levels Of Self-reflection.

What We Call Reality Is In Fact Nothing More Than A Culturally Sanctioned And Linguistically Reinforced Hallucination.

The Psychedelic Inner Astronaut Sees Things Which No Human Being Has Ever Seen Before, And No Other Human Being Will Ever See Again. But In Fact This Has No Meaning Unless It Is Possible To Carry It Back Into The Collectivity.

But What I Really Am Interested In Is Not The End Of The World But Everything Which Precedes It.

End Of The World

So What Needs To Be Done Is To Spread The Idea That Anxiety Is Inappropriate. It's Sort Of Like We Who Are Psychedelic Have To Function As Sitters For Society, Because Society Is Going To Thrash, And Resist, And Think It's Dying, And Be Deluded, And Regurgitate Unconscious Material, And So Forth And So On. And The Role Then, I Think, For Psychedelic People Is To Try And Spread Calm.

I Think There's A Shamanic Temperament, Which Is A Person Who Craves Knowledge, Knowledge In The Greek Sense Of Gnosis. In Other Words, Knowledge Not Of The Sort Where You Subscribe To Scientific American, And It Validates What You Believe, But Cosmologies Constructed Out Of Immediate Experiences That Are Found To Be Always Applicable.

Inevitably Out Of The Psychedelic Experience Emerges Not Despair, Not Self-indulgence, But Wild-eyed Idealism, That's The Inevitable Product Of Any Psychedelically Driven Social Process.

There Is An Angel Within The Monkey Struggling To Get Free, And This Is What The Historical Crisis Is All About.

This Is What I Believe: That We Are Not Pushed From Behind By The Casual Unfolding Of Historical Necessity, But That We Are In The Grip Of An Attractor Of Some Sort, Which Lies Ahead Of Us In Time.

Although Whenever You Have Intelligent Life In The Presence Of Large Explosions, A Safe Bet Is That The Intelligent Life Is Responsible For The Large Explosion.

I Don't Believe Consciousness Is Generated In The Brain Any More Than Television Programs Are Made Inside My Tv. The Box Is Too Small.

We've Painted Ourselves Into A Corner Where The Only Choice Is Real Nightmare - Triage, Epidemic Disease, Famine, Fascism, The Collapse Of Human Rights - Or A Leap To An Entirely Different Level. We've Taken Business-as-usual Off The Menu. Now Only The Extreme Possibilities Loom.

Time Will Perfect Matter.

No More Do We Create Cultural Artifacts That Are Simply Our Furniture, But Now It's Our Thoughts, Our Values, Are Embodied In This [digital] Stuff.

Time Is A Series Of Fluctuating Variables.

It's Meanings That We Need To Coax Into Our Lives.

The Germans Take Quite A Knock For The Holocaust, But The Catholic Church Manages To Push More People Into Death, Disease, And Degradation Every Year Than The Holocaust Managed In Its Entire Show. And It's Thought Rather Crass To Even Mention The Fact. It Seems To Me That As Long As These Catholic Bishops Can Show Their Face In Public That We Are In Complicity With Mass Murder.

What People Notice About [when They Are On] Lsd Is Either What's Right Or Wrong With Themselves Or How Freaky The World Is.

The 20th Century Mind Is Nostalgic For The Paradise That Once Existed On The Mushroom Dotted Plains Of Africa Where The Plant-human Symbiosis Occurred That Pulled Us Out Of The Animal Body And Into The Tool-using, Culture-making, Imagination-exploring Creature That We Are. And Why Does This Matter? It Matters Because It Shows That The Way Out Is Back And That The Future Is A Forward Escape Into The Past. This Is What The Psychedelic Experience Means. Its A Doorway Out Of History And Into The Wiring Under The Board In Eternity.

Our Culture Takes Us Out Of The Body And Sells Our Loyalty Into Political Systems, Into Religions, Into Inanimate Objects And Machines, Collections, So Forth And So On. The Felt Experience Of The Body Is What The Psychedelics Are Handing Back To Us.

Inanimate Objects

For Me It's An Issue Of Are We Afraid Of Ourselves? And We Inherit A Huge Bunch Of Idealogical Baggage, Not Only Christianity, But Freudianism, And Marxism . . . We Inherit All Kinds Of Idealogical Baggage Designed To Make Us Fear Ourselves.

We Tend To Disempower Ourselves. We Tend To Believe That We Don’t Matter. And In The Act Of Taking That Idea To Ourselves We Give Everything Away To Somebody Else, To Something Else.

In A Sense, Sexuality Is The Built-in Psychedelic Experience That Only A Very Few People Manage To Evade.

A Hallucination Is A Species Of Reality, As Capable Of Teaching You As A Videotape About Kilimanjaro Or Anything Else That Falls Through Your Life.

I Think What We Have To Do Is Convince People That Matter Is Tacky.

Lsd Burst Over The Dreary Domain Of The Constipated Bourgeoisie Like The Angelic Herald Of A New Psychedelic Millennium. We Have Never Been The Same Since, Nor Will We Ever Be, For Lsd Demonstrated, Even To Skeptics, That The Mansions Of Heaven And Gardens Of Paradise Lie Within Each And All Of Us.

One Way To Think About What Psychedelics Are Is As Catalysts For Language Development. They Literally Force The Evolution Of Language. You Cannot Evolve Faster Than Your Language Because The Language Defines The Culture Of Meaning. So If There's A Way To Accelerate The Evolution Of Language Then This Is Real Consciousness Expansion And It's A Permanent Thing. The Great Legacies Of The 60's Are In Attitudes And Language. It Boils Down To Doing Your Own Thing, Feeling The Vibe, Ego-trip, Blowing Your Mind.

Television, Introduced At The Close Of World War Ii, Has Become A Form Of Electronic Heroin, And It Isn't Even Your Trip. They Don't Even Let You Go On Your Own Trip, You Get A Trip Designed By Madison Avenue.

On These Matters Of Specific Fact, Like Is The Mushroom An Extraterrestrial And That Sort Of Thing, I Haven't The Faintest Idea. The Mushroom Itself Is Such A Mercurial, Elusive, Zen Sort Of Personality That I Never Believe A Word It Says. I Simply Entertain Its Notions And Try And Sort Through Them, And I Found That To Be The Most Enriching Approach To It.

Apparently, In The Avesta Classical Period No One Would Have Dreamed Of Having A Spiritual Experience Without Resort To Drugs.

History Is The Siren Song Of The Soul.

It's As Important To Be Well Informed In This Area, If You're Going To Do It, As It Is To Be Well Informed About Procedures In Skin Diving And That Sort Of Thing If You're Going To Do That.

It Was The Fall Into History That Enslaved Us To The Labor Cycle, To The Agricultural Cycle. And Notice How Fiendish It Is.

Dmt Is The Most Powerful Hallucinogen There Is. If It Gets Stronger Than That I Don't Want To Know About It.

A Great Turning Point Is In The Offing. The World Is Changing. It's Changed Before, But Not For A Long Time In Our Lives, Not Since Before Our Lives. But Now It's Changing, And There Are Many Many Possibilities.

Inside The Boundaries Of The Old Paradigm There's No Hope, There's No Way Out Of The Box Of Capitalism, Monogamy, Consumer Fetishism, Egoism, Money Worship, No Way Out. No Way. No Way Out!

Where Psychedelics Comes Together With That Is That It's Going To Require A Transformation Of Human Language And Understanding To Stop The Momentum Of The Historical Process, To Halt Nuclear Proliferation, Germ Warfare, Infantile 19th Century Politics, All These Things. It Cannot Be Accomplished Through A Frontal Assault Upon It By Political Means.

The Felt Presence Of Immediate Experience-- This Is All You Know. Everything Else Comes As Unconfirmed Rumor.

The Only Real Experience That Counts, Is Your Own.

Ayahuasca Is Driven By Sound, By Song, By Whistling. And Its Ability To Transform Sound, Including Vocal Sound, Into The Visual Spectrum Indicates That Some Kind Of Information Processing Membrane Or Boundary Is Being Overcome By The Pharmacology Of This Stuff. And Things Normally Experienced As Acoustically Experienced Becomes Visibly Beheld, And It's Quite Spectacular.

Information Processing

Human Beings Are Co-partners With Deity In The Project Of Being. This Is The Basis Of All Magic.

We [psychonauts] Are All Going To Go Into The Books As Pioneers, Because It's Too Early For Us To Be Anything Else. There's No Map, No Finished Database, Just Anecdotes Of The Crazy, Crazy Stuff That Goes On. That's Why It's So Important To Try And Share [our Stories].

What Is Needed, Is An Awakening.

We Live In Condensations Of Our Imagination

What Is The Psychedelic Experience? What Promise Does It Hold For A Sane Future For Our Planet And Our Children? And What Is It About It That Kindles The Kind Of Loyalty That I Feel Coming From The People In This Room This Evening? And I Submit To You That It Is Nothing Less Than The Rebirth Of A Voice That Has Been Silent For At Least A Thousand Years, The Still Small Voice Of The Logos Of The Planet.

So You Know What We Have To Do Is Stop Looking For Leadership From The Top, Because The Least Among Us Make Their Way Into Those Positions Of Power... So What We Have To Do Is Knock Off This Fantasy Of Being Citizens Inside A Democratic State, I Mean, What We Are, Are The Propagandized Masses Inside A Fascist Dictatorship.

Position Of Power

I'm Not An Abuser. It Takes Me A Long Time To Assimilate Each Experience. And I Never Have Lost My Respect For It. I Mean I Really Feel Dread. It Is One Of The Emotions I Always Feel As I Approach It, Because I Have No Faith That My Sails Won't Be Ripped This Time.

Life, Carefully Examined, Is Actually A Form Of Allegorical Literature With A Very Tight Constructural Grid Laid Over It.

The Way I Think Of The Psychedelics Is, They Are Catalysts To The Imagination.

To Me, The Most Amazing The Most Amazing Transformation In My Lifetime Is Not The Revolution Of The Sixties But The Counter Revolution Of The Seventies, Where They Managed To Put The Cuckoo Clock Back Together Again

The 'hard Swallow' Built Into Science Is This Business About The Big Bang. ... This Is The Notion That The Universe, For No Reason, Sprang From Nothing In A Single Instant. ... Notice That This Is The Limit Test For Credulity. . . . It's The Limit Case For Likelihood.

The Shaman Is The Figure At The Beginning Of Human History That Unites The Doctor, The Scientist And The Artist Into A Single Notion Of Care-giving And Creativity.

The Culture Cannot Evolve Faster Than The Language. The Language Is The Flashlight That Shows The Path.

Ego Is A Structure That Is Erected By A Neurotic Individual Who Is A Member Of A Neurotic Culture Against The Facts Of The Matter. And Culture, Which We Put On Like An Overcoat, Is The Collectivized Consensus About What Sort Of Neurotic Behaviors Are Acceptable.

The Human Imagination, In Conjunction With Technology, Has Become A Force So Potent That It Really Can No Longer Be Unleashed On The Surface Of The Planet With Safety.

The Data Stream Has Been Corrupted, Return To First Principles.

Science Does Not Deal With Subjective Experience... Well That's Too Bad Because That Is All Any Of Us Ever Have.

To Me, The Psychedelic Experience Is The Experience Of Trying To Make Sense Of Reality.

Even A Billion People Is Too Much. There's No Way Back To The Simplicity We Once Knew, But There May Be A Way Forward To The Simplicity That We Once Knew.

I Think What Electronic Culture Permits Is Incredible Diversity, And What The Print-created World Demanded And Created Was Tremendous Suppression Of Diversity.

Nature Has An Economy, An Elegance, A Style, That If We Could But Emulate It We Could Rise Out Of The Rubble We Are Making Out Of The Planet

There Is No Knowledge Without Risk Taking.

The Surface Of Things Is Not Where Attention Should Rest.

As I See It, Being, The Cosmos, Whatever You Want To Call It, Is A Struggle Between Two Implacable Forces: Novelty On The One Side And Habit On The Other Side.

I Think With The Work We Do With These Drugs We Are The Earliest Pioneers In What Over The Next 100 Years Will Lead To An Understanding Of Consciousness Almost As A Thing Apart From The Monkey Body And Brain.

There’s Light At The End Of The Tunnel. The Problem Is That Tunnel Is In The Back Of Your Mind. And If You Don’t Go To The Back Side Of Your Mind You Will Never See The Light At The End Of The Tunnel. And Once You See It, Then The Task Becomes To Empower It In Yourself And Other People. Spread It As A Reality. God Did Not Retire To The Seventh Heaven, God Is Some Kind Of Lost Continent In The Human Mind.

The Imagination Is The Golden Pathway To Everywhere.

This Unique Strategy That The Advanced Primates Created, The Strategy Of Using Language To Bind Time, Is What The Process We Call 'civilization' Has Been All About.

The Psychedelic Viewpoint Is Becoming More And More Legitimate, But Psychedelic Drugs Are Not. That's The Odd Paradox Of It.

If You Go To Paris You Know More About Reality Than People Who Don't. If You Smoke Dmt You Know More About Reality Than People Who Don't.

If Psychedelics Are, On Any Level, To Be Taken Seriously As Catalyzers Or Expanders Of Consciousness, Then We Need Them, Because It's An Absence Of Consciousness That Is Making This Historical Transition So Excruciating.

History Is Just This Froth Of Artifact Production That Has Appeared In The Last Ten To Fifteen Thousand Years. It Spread Across The Planet Very Quickly. But That Mind In Man Just Goes Back And Back Into The Darkness.

One Has Attained A Very Fortunate Incarnation, I Think, To Be In A Culture, In A Place, In A Time When Psychedelic Knowledge Is Available.

The Apocalypse Is Not Something Which Is Coming. The Apocalypse Has Arrived In Major Portions Of The Planet And It’s Only Because We Live Within A Bubble Of Incredible Privilege And Social Insulation That We Still Have The Luxury Of Anticipating The Apocalypse.

I Think The Experience Over The Past Thousand Years Is That Ideology Is Poisonous. . . . The World Seen Through The Lens Of Ideology Is A Very Limited World.

What Is Happening, I Think, It's Really Bigger Than Psychedelics, It's Bigger Than Human Evolution. We Are Not Making The Waves In This Ocean. We Are Corks, Riding The Waves Of The Ocean. But We Are Privileged, By Perhaps Chance Alone, To Occupy A Unique Moment In The History Of The Universe. A Moment When The Universe Goes Through Some Kind Of Self-transforming, Evolutionary, Inflationary Expansion. That's What's Happening.

For Me, The Glory Of The Human Animal Is Cognitive Activity.

The Gaian Mind Is What Were Calling The Psychedelic Experience. Its An Experience Of The Living Fact Of The Entelechy Of The Planet - And Without That Experience We Wander In A Desert Of Bogus Ideologies. But With That Experience The Compass Of The Self Can Be Set.

My Hope Is That I May Bear Witness To The Fact That There Is A Great Mystery Calling To Us All, Beckoning Across The Landscape Of Our History, Promising To Realize Itself And To Give Real Meaning To What Is Otherwise Only The Confusion Of Our Lives And Our Collective Past.

Claim Your Place In The Sun And Go Forward Into The Light. The Tools Are There; The Path Is Known; You Simply Have To Turn Your Back On A Culture That Has Gone Sterile And Dead, And Get With The Programme Of A Living World And A Re-empowerment Of The Imagination.

Psychedelics Are Probably Responsible For Every Aspect Of Human Evolution Apart From The Decline In Bodyhair.

There Is A Belief That There Is A Hyperobject Called Overmind, Or God, That Casts A Shadow Into Time. History Is Our Group Experience If This Shadow. As One Draws Closer And Closer To The Source Of The Shadow, The Paradoxes Intensify, The Rate Of Change Intensifies. What Is Happening Is That The Hyperobject Is Beginning To Ingress Into Three-dimensional Space.

What The Psychedelic Experience Really Is, Is Opening The Doorway Into A Lost Continent Of The Human Mind, A Continent That We Have Almost Lost All Connection To, And The Nature Of This Lost World Of The Human Mind Is That It Is A Gaian Entelechy.

A Global Society Is Coming Into Being, A Global Society That Is Made Out Of Information That Was Not Intended To Be Ours, But Is Ours, By The Mistaken Invention Of Computers And The Printing Press, Information Is Power, And Information Has Spilled By The Clumsy Hands Of The Dominator Culture So That The Information Is Everywhere, Never Before Has The Situation Been So Fluid, We Might Be Able To Finally Have A Crack At This

Information Is Power

Astonishment Is The Proper Response To Reality.

The Entire Drug Phenomenon Of The 1960s Happened Without The Concept Of Shamanism To Help It Along.

Inwardness Is The Characteristic Feature Of The Vegetable Rather Than The Animal Approach To Existence. The Animals Move, Migrate And Swarm, While Plants Hold Fast. Plants Live In A Dimension Characterised By Solid State, The Fixed And The Enduring. If There Is Movement In The Consciousness Of Plants Then It Must Be The Movement Of Spirit And Attention In The Domain Of Vegetal Imagination. (...) This Is The Truth That The Shamans Have Always Known And Practiced. Awareness Of The Green Side Of Mind Was Called Veriditas By The Twelfth Century Visionary Hildegard Von Bingen.

I Think Psychedelics Are Sort Of Like Doing Calisthenics In Preparation For The Marathon At The End Of Time.

There Is This Persistent Theme In All Of These Notions That Death Is Made More Easy, Whatever That Means, If You've Learned The Territory Before You Get There. And You Know, In The Mahayana Buddhist Situation It Even Becomes As Extreme As Saying; 'life Is Essentially A Preparation For Death, A Studying Of The Maps Of A Learning Of The Skills A Packing Of Your Picnic Basket So That When You Get Out There And Demons Are Sniffing You Up One Side And Down The Other You Don't Bungle Your Mantras'.

How Do We Fight Back? By Creating Art.

Liberate Yourself From The Illusion Of Culture. Take Responsibility For What You Think And What You Do.

Terror Of The Future Can Be Put Out To Pasture With Psychedelic Shamanism.

We Are Living In A Very Pivotal Time. The Time That We Inherit From Science Is A Time To Humble You, To Dwarf You. It Tells You That The Sun Will Not Fluxuate For Another Billion Years, That Species Come And Go, And, In Other Words, On A Temporal Scale You Don't Matter. And That Now Doesn't Matter. But When You Look At The Release Of Energy, The Asymptotic Speeding Up Of Processes, We Tend To Be Xenophobically Oriented Toward The Human.

Ultimately What We're Touching Is The Invisible, All-pervasive Intelligence That Surrounds Us And Penetrates Us. It Is Grooming Us To Be Able To Tolerate Its Splendor. It Can't Just Reveal Itself Openly Because We Would Be Forfeited; We'd Never Know What Hit Us.

Science Is The Special Province Of The Ego. And Magic And Art Are The Special Province Of Something Else. I Could Name It, But I Won't. It Prefers To Be Unnamed

We Can Understand First Of All That What Is Happening In The World Of Becoming, The World We All Experience As Beings, Is That Novelty Is Entering Into Being, And It Is Changing The Modalities Of The Real World Toward Greater And Greater Levels Of Integration.

This Is A General Comment That You Should Take A Committed Dose Of Whatever It Is You're Taking So That There Is No Ambiguity, Because There's Nothing Worse Than A Sub-threshold Psychedelic Experience.

There's Only The Integrity Of Doing And Having Done.

The Only Frontier Now Left To Exploit Is Not A Frontier In Space But A Frontier In Time. We Steal The Future From Our Children By Plunging Massively Deeper And Deeper Into Debt.

A History-stopping Archetype Is Being Released Into The Skies Of This Planet, And If We Are Not Careful It Will Halt All Intellectual Inquiry In The Same Way That The Christos Archetype Halted Intellectual Inquiry In The Hellenistic Age.

Psychedelic Experiences And Dreams Are Chemical Cousins; They Are Only Different In Degree.

Within The Context Of The Alchemical Vocabulary, The Psychedelic Experience, As Brought To Us Through Plants Long In The Possession Of Aboriginal People, Appears To Be The Identical Phenomena.

An Interesting Thing About Drugs Is Often, When A New Drug Is Discovered, It Takes A Long Time To Figure Out How Do You Do It.

Psychedelics Are Illegal Not Because A Loving Government Is Concerned That You May Jump Out Of A Third Story Window. Psychedelics Are Illegal Because They Dissolve Opinion Structures And Culturally Laid Down Models Of Behaviour And Information Processing. They Open You Up To The Possibility That Everything You Know Is Wrong.

Information Processing

We Are Creatures Of Information And The Imagination. The Monkey We Are Already Beginning To Transform And Shed. We Don't Look Like The Other Monkeys, And We Look Less Like Them All The Time.

We Have Been To The Moon, We Have Charted The Depths Of The Ocean And The Heart Of The Atom, But We Have A Fear Of Looking Inward To Ourselves Because We Sense That Is Where All The Contradictions Flow Together.

And That We Cannot Go To Space With Our Feet In The Mud. Nor Can We In Fact Turn Ourselves Into An Eco-sensitive Hallucinogenic-based Culture On Earth Unless We Fuse These Dichotomous Opposites. It Is Only In A Coincidencia Oppositorum, A Union Of Opposites, That Does Not Strive For Closure, That We Are Going To Find Cultural Sanity. And This Is The Thing That The Entheogens, The Hallucinogens, Deliver With Such Clarity And Regularity. They Raise Paradox To A Level Of Intensity That No One Can Evade.

I Believe In Extraterrestrials, But I Believe That Real Extraterrestrials Are So Peculiar That The Job Is To Recognize Them.

Culture Is More And More Consciously Becoming A Project Carried Out In The Domain Of Language By, For Instance, Propaganda Both Governmental And Commercial.

The Fungi Became, Or Is For Some Mysterious Reason Still To Be Discovered, A Pipeline Into A Mind, An Entelechy, Which We Can Only Image As Feminine And Can Only Associate Somehow To The Environment, To The Ecosystem. This Is The Gaian Mind. This Is What The Goddess Really Is. The Goddess Is A Network Of Connective Intelligence That Is Operating On This Planet.

The Truth Doesn't Need Your Cooperation To Exist. All Forms Of Cult, All Forms Of Hype, All Forms Of Delusion Do Require Your Participation In Order To Exist. I've Looked Into Marginal Areas Of Human Experience -historical And Otherwise- With A Rational Mind, And What I've Found Is That Doorways Into The Miraculous Are Far Fewer Than The Publicists Of The New Age Would Have Us Believe. On The Other Hand, They Are Not As Rare As The Proponents Of Radical Reductionism And Materialism Would Have Us Believe. There Are Doorways Out Of The Mundane.

Life Lived In The Absence Of The Psychedelic Experience Upon Which Primordial Shamanism Is Based Is Life Trivialized, Life Denied, Life Enslaved To The Ego.

Worrying Is Betting Against Yourself.

Ayahuasca, Unlike Mushrooms And All These Other Things Is Only As Good As The Person Who Made It. . . . The Ayahuasca Is A Combinatory Drug, And So It Brings The Human Interaction And The Lore Of It Into A Much More Central Position.

What We Really Are Is A Community Of Mind, Knitted Together By Codes And Symbols, Intuitions, Aspirations, Histories, Hopes - The Invisible World Of The Human Experience Is Far More Real To Us Than The Visible World, Which Is Little More Than A Kind Of Stage Or Screen On Which We Move.

What Blinds Us, Or Makes Historical Progress Very Difficult, Is Our Lack Of Awareness That Our Beliefs Have Grown Obsolete And Should Be Put Aside.... This Is I Think Much Of The Problem Of The Modern Dilemma: Direct Experience Has Been Discounted, And In Its Place All Kinds Of Belief Systems Have Been Erected.... If You Believe Something, You Are Automatically Precluded From Believing Its Opposite; Which Means That A Degree Of Your Human Freedom Has Been Forfeited In The Act Of Committing Yourself To This Belief.

I See The Psychedelic Experience As Both The Centerpiece Of Prehistoric Life And Destined To Be The Centerpiece Of Any Future That We Want To Be Part Of.

I Think The Real Test Of Psychedelics Is What You Do With Them When You're Not On Them, What Kind Of Culture You Build, What Kind Of Art, What Kind Of Technologies... What's Lacking In The Western Mind Is The Sense Of Connectivity And Relatedness To The Rest Of Life, The Atmosphere, The Ecosystem, The Past, Our Children's Future. If We Were Feeling Those Things We Would Not Be Practicing Culture As We Are.

What Is Always Left Out Of Descriptions Of The Psychedelic State, The Deep Psychedelic State, Is How Weird It Is.

What Civilization Is, Is 6 Billion People Trying To Make Themselves Happy By Standing On Each Other's Shoulders And Kicking Each Other's Teeth In. It's Not A Pleasant Situation.

Psychedelic Experiences Are Beyond The Reach Of Cultural Manipulation, And Discovering This And Exploring It Is Somehow The Frontier Of Maturity. Culture Is A Form Of Enforced Infantilism. It's The Last Nursery, And Most People Never Leave It.

I Spend As Many Hours A Day As I Possibly Can Smoking Cannabis

How Can We Know Who Is The Other Until We Know Who Is The Self?

Cultural Conditioning Is Like Bad Software. Over And Over It's Diddled With And Re-written So That It Can Just Run On The Next Attempt. But There Is Cultural Hardware, And It's That Cultural Hardware, Otherwise Known As Authentic Being, That We Are Propelled Toward By The Example Of The Shaman And The Techniques Of The Shaman. ... Shamanism Therefore Is A Call To Authenticity.

You Are Some Kind Of A Mystery Suspended Between Two Eternities. And In That Moment, When A Mind Looks Out At A World And Asks The Question, ‘what Is It?’ In That Moment Art Can Be Created.

It Is Curious That What These Psychedelics Do, On A Scale Of A Community, Is They Release New Ideas. . . . And That This Is How Culture Moves Forward. That Culture Is A Phenomenon Dependent On The Generation Of Ideas, Plans, Notions, Connections. So This Is Precisely What These Compounds Are Doing.

Our Assumptions Are The Edges Of Our Worlds.

If You're Truly Psychedelic The Difference Between Living And Dying Is Quite Immaterial. No Pun Intended.

The Pro-psychedelic Plant Position Is Clearly An Antidrugs Position. Drug Dependencies Are The Result Of Habitual, Unexamined, And Obsessive Behavior; These Are Precisely The Tendencies In Our Psychological Makup That The Psychedelics Mitigate. The Plant Hallucinogens Dissolve Habits And Hold Motivations Up To Inspection By A Wider, Less Egocentric, And More Grounded Point Of View Within The Individual.

We Do Not Birth Our Children Into The World Of Nature. We Birth Our Children Into The World Of Culture.

In The Way That The 15th Century Discovered The New World, The 20th Century Discovered The Parallel Continuum.

A Glacier Rattles In The Cupboard, The Desert Sighs In The Bed, And The Crack In The Teacup Opens A Door To The Land Of The Dead. The Maya Call This Xibalba (shibalba), The Road To The Dimension Of The Dead.

I Think That Understanding Man's Place In Nature Is Going To Require Integration Of The Psychedelic Experience.

Psychedelics Can Carry You Farther And Faster Than Most People Care To Go. Once You Get To Psychedelics, It's No Longer A Matter Of Seeking The Answer, You Have Found The Answer. Now The Issue Changes Dramatically, You Must Face The Answer.

What I Always Hoped For Out Of The Psychedelic Voyaging Was To Bring Back Something. I Always Felt, And Still Feel, That That Is The Attitude With Which You Should Go Into These Things.

Every Click Of The Cosmic Clock Brings Us Closer To The Process For Which The Planet Called Us Into Existence.

Plants Seem Like An Excellent Model For The Kind Of Future That We Should Be Building.

And What Is The Primary Datum? It's The Felt Presence Of Immediate Experience. In Other Words, Being Here Now Is The Primary Datum.

Knowledge, Or Verbal Facility, Is No Proof That You Know What You're Talking About.

In Other Words, All These Things You Might Cling To, Catholicism, Democratic Ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, All Of These Things Are Exposed [through Use Of Psychedelics] As Simply Quaint Cultural Artifacts, Painted Masks And Rattles Assembled By People Of Good Intent But Clearly Not Great Grasp Of The Situation.

Democratic Ideals

What They [psychedelics] Cause Is What I'm Advocating, A Fundamental Revaluation Of Cultural Values, Because Culture As We're Practicing It Currently Is Causing A Lot Of Pain To A Lot Of People, And Animals, And Ecosystems, None Of Whom Were Ever Allowed To Vote On Whether They Wanted This Process To Go In This Direction.

I Don't Believe That Shamanism Without Hallucinogens Is Authentic Shamanism Or Comfortable Shamanism.

Patanjali Specifically Says That There Are Three Paths To The Goal Of Yoga. And They Are, Control Of The Breath, Control Of Posture, And Light-filled Herbs. It Says It Right There. Stanza 6 Of The Yoga Sutras Of Patanjali.

Chaos Is What We've Lost Touch With. This Is Why It Is Given A Bad Name. It Is Feared By The Dominant Archetype Of Our World, Which Is Ego, Which Clenches Because Its Existence Is Defined In Terms Of Control.

The Notion Of Illegal Plants And Animals Is Obnoxious And Ridiculous.

The Shaman Is A Person Who Is Able To Transcend The Dimensional Confines Of Cultural Existence. They Know More Than The People They Serve. The People They Serve Are Like Children Within The Game Of Culture. Only The Shaman Knows That Culture Is A Game. Everyone Else Takes It Seriously. That's How He Can Do His Magic.

Nature Is Actually The Goal At The End Of History.

It's A Relationship Like To A Crusty Zen Master, Or Something Like That. And It Is Really Like Another Entity Because You Cannot Predict The Answers.

There's Something In The Western Mind That Gets Very Nervous When You Try To Talk About The Bedrock Of Ontology.

Lsd Is Different. Lsd Is Like Psychoanalytical Drano. It's Not A Personality.

The Gaian Process Is More Than A Process. It Is S Self-reflecting Entelechy Of Some Sort.

Sometime In The Last 50,000 Years, Before 12,000 Years Ago, A Kind Of Paradise Came Into Existence. A Situation In Which Men And Women, Parents And Children, People And Animals, Human Institutions And The Land All Were In Dynamic Balance And Not In Any Primitive Sense At All. Language Was Fully Developed, Poetry May Have Been At Its Climax, Dance, Magic, Poetics, Altruism, Philosophy. There's No Reason To Think That These Things Were Not Practiced As Adroitly As We Practice Them Today And It Was Under The Boundary Dissolving Influence Of Psilocybin.

History Is Anomalous, And There Is No Way To Get Used To It.

Nature Loves Courage. You Make The Commitment And Nature Will Respond To That Commitment By Removing Impossible Obstacles. Dream The Impossible Dream And The World Will Not Grind You Under, It Will Lift You Up.

We Can No Longer Have Forbidden Areas Of The Human Mind, Or Cultural Machinery. We Have Taken Upon Ourselves The Acquisition Of So Much Power That We Now Must Understand What We Are. We Cannot Travel Much Further With The Definitions Of Man That We Inherit From The Judeo-christian Tradition. We Need To Truly Explore The Problem Of Consciousness.

History Is Like Self-reflection Through The Medium Of Language Propelling Itself Into Self-recognition.

No One Knows Enough To Worry.

At Still Higher Doses Psilocybin Triggers This Activity In The Language-forming Capacity Of The Brain That Manifests As Song And Vision. Psilocybin May Have Synergized The Emergence Of Higher Forms Of Psychic Organization Out Of Primitive Protohuman Animals. It Can Be Seen As A Kind Of Evolutionary Enzyme, Or Evolutionary Catalyst.

Closure Is A Neurotic And Infantile Demand To Make Upon Reality, Other People, Or Language.

We're Not Dropping Out Here, We're Infiltrating And Taking Over.

In Shamanism And Certain Yogas, Taoist Yoga, Claim Very Clearly That The Purpose Is To Familiarize Yourself With This After-death Body, In Life, And Then The Act Of Dying Will Not Create Confusion In The Psyche. You Will Recognize What Is Happening. You Will Know What To Do. And You Will Make The Clean Break.

The Message Coming Back At All Of Us Is: Live Without Closure.

What I'm Talking About Is Actually Is The Mystery Of Being As Existential Fact. That There Is Something That Haunts This World That Can Take Apart And Reduce Every Single One Of Us To A Mixture Of Terror And Ecstasy, Fear And Trembling. It Is Not An Idea, That's The Primary Thing To Bear In Mind. It's An Experience.

Shamanism Is About Shape Shifting. Shamanism Is About Doing Phenomenology With A Tool Kit That Works.

The Truth For Sure, When It Arrives, Will Make You Smile. If It Doesn't, You Should Seek A Deeper Truth.

What History Is, Essentially, Is A Careening, Out-of-control Effort To Find Our Way Back To This State Of Primordial Balance.

The Shaman Has Access To A Superhuman Dimension And A Superhuman Condition, And By Being Able To Do That He Affirms The Potential For Transcendence In All People. He Is An Exemplar, If You Will.

No Culture On Earth Is As Heavily Narcotized As The Industrial West In Terms Of Being Inured To The Consequences Of Maladaptive Behavior. We Pursue A Business-as-usual Attitude In A Surreal Atmosphere Of Mounting Crises And Irreconcilable Contradictions.

The World Could Be Anything, You Know, It Could Be A Solid State Matrix Of Some Sort. It Could Be An Illusion. It Could Be A Dream. I Mean It Really Could Be A Dream.

What Was Created By The Era Of The Proper Gentleman Was Excellent Table Manners And Genocide Over Most Of The Surface Of The Planet.

Marcel Eliade Took The Position That Hallucinogenic Shamanism Was Decadent, And Gordon Wasson, Very Rightly I Believe, Contravened This View And Held That Actually It Was Very Probably The Presence Of The Hallucinogenic Drug Experience In The Life Of Early Man That Lay The Very Basis For The Idea Of The Spirit.

A Long Long Time Ago I Took An Oath To Tell All Secrets That Came My Way. Don't Tell Me A Secret, I Won't Keep It. I'm Against Secrets, I'm Against Hierarchies, Lineages, All Assumption Of Special Knowledge On The Part Of Anyone In The Presence Of Anyone Else Is Abhorrent To Me. I Mean, I Am A True Anarchist First And Foremost.

We Want Freedom. We Want Freedom From The Constraints Of The Cycles Of The Sun And The Moon. We Want Freedom From Drought And Weather, Freedom From The Movement Of Game, The Growth Of Plants, Freedom From Control From Mendacious Popes And Kings, Freedom From Ideology, Freedom From Want. This Idea Of Freeing Ourselves Has Become The Compass Of The Human Journey.

We Have The Tools, The Intellect, The Will To Create A Caring Global Culture. It Isn't Going To Come Without A Recognition Of The Power Of The Psychedelic Experience. The Psychedelic Experience Is The Birth Right Of Every Human Being On The Planet. It Is As Much A Basic Part Of Each And Every One Of Us As Our Sexuality, Our National Identity, Our Consciousness Of Self. And Any Society Which Attempts To Hold Back Or Impede This Dimension Of Self-expression, When The History Of That Society Is Written, It Will Be Called Barbarous.

Psychedelic Telepathy Is You 'see' What I Mean.

For Talking Monkeys To Speak Of Truth Is Hubris Of The Highest Degree. Where Is It Writ Large That Talking Monkeys Should Be Able To Model The Cosmos? If A Sea Urchin Or A Racoon Were To Propose To You That It Had A Viable Truth About The Universe, The Absurdity Of That Assertion Would Be Self-evident, But In Our Case We Make An Exception.

Human History Is A Gaian Dream.

There Is A Morphological Enfoldment Occurring On This Planet. It Is Bringing Forth Some Entirely New Order Of Being. We Are A Privileged Part Of This.

We Are Like Caterpillars Contemplating Pupation.

Inform Yourself, Inform Your Children, Talk To Your Friends! And Let's Try To Make A Better, Stonier World Than The One We Inherited!

Because The Planetary Culture Is Becoming Ever More Closely Knitted Together All Its Parts Are Becoming Co-dependent.

What The Psychedelics Are For Us As A Species, Rather Than For Each One Of Us As An Individual, What They Are For Us As A Species Is An Enzyme That Catalyzes The Language-making Capacity.

In The Absence Of Good Scientific Data About The Effects Of Artificial Hallucinogens It's Good To Stick To The Natural Ones.

Only Psychos And Shamans Create Their Own Reality

As A Society We Cannot Seem To Make Peace With Nature. As Individuals, It's Hard For Us To Be At Peace With Ourselves.

The Current Operating System [culture] Is Flawed. It Actually Has Bugs In It That Generate Contradictions. We're Cutting The Earth From Beneath Our Own Feet. We're Poisoning The Atmosphere That We Breathe. This Is Not Intelligent Behaviour. This Is A Culture With A Bug In Its Operating System That's Making It Produce Erratic, Dysfunctional, Malfunctional Behaviour. Time To Call A Tech! And Who Are The Techs? The Shamans Are The Techs.

The Apocalypse Is The Millennium, And The Psychedelics Move You Into The Future.

And So, These Are The Things, The Exploration Of Which, The Singing About Of Which, Makes Us Human Beings. The Exploration Of The Universe Of The Unseen Is The Business Of Human Beings.

I Believe That The Place To Search For Extraterrestrials Is In The Psychic Dimension.

The State In The Matter Of Drugs Should Not, Any More Than In The Matter Of Sex, Act As The Secret Agent For The Agenda Of The Church.

You Are Not Naked When You Take Off Your Clothes. You Still Wear Your Religious Assumptions, Your Prejudices, Your Fears, Your Illusions, Your Delusions. When You Shed The Cultural Operating System, Then Essentially You Stand Naked Before The Inspection Of Your Own Psyche.

The Internet Is The Global Brain, The Cyberspacially Connected, Telepathic, Collective Domain That We've All Been Hungering For.

The Content Of The Dialogue With 'the Other' Is A Content That Indicates That Man's Horizons Are Infinitely Bright, That Death Is In Fact, Well, As Thomas Vaughn Put It, 'the Body Is The Placenta Of The Soul'

Once You Get To This Place On What We Might Metaphorically Call Your Spiritual Quest, Once You Get To The Place Where You Hear About Psychedelics, The Issue Is No Longer Then About Where Is The Gas Peddle On The Spiritual Vehicle. The Issue Suddenly Becomes, Where Is The Brake? Because This Is The Fuel To Go Where You Want To Go. This Is The Power To Lift You Where You Want To Be Lifted.

Could Any Symbol Be Any More Appropriate Of The Ambiguity Of Human Transformation? What Mushroom Is It That Grows At The End Of History? Is It Stropharia Cubensis, Or Is It The Creation Of Edward Teller? This Is An Unresolved Problem.

I'm As Against Restricting Access To Drugs As I Am To Burning Books. It Offends Me In The Same Way.

To Date, The Enterprise Of Thinking Has Moved Us Radically Away From Understanding Anything.

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