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Biology Seems To Be A Chemical Strategy For Amplifying Quantum Mechanical Indeterminacy So That It Leaves The Subatomic Realm And Can Be Present In A Hundred And Forty Five Pound Block Of Meat.

-Terence McKenna

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Biology Seems To Be

Terence McKenna

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Biology Seems To Be A Chemical Strategy For Amplifying Quantum Mechanical Indeterminacy So That It Leaves The Subatomic Realm And Can Be Present In A Hundred And Forty Five Pound Block Of Meat.

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The Shaman Is A Very Peculiar Figure. He Is Critical To The Functioning Of The Psychological And Social Life Of His Community, But In A Way He Is Always Peripheral To It. He Lives At The Edge Of The Village. He Is Only Called Upon In Matters Of Great Social Crisis. He Is Feared And Respected. And This Might Be A Description Of These Hallucinogenic Substances.

History, Call It 15,000 Or 25,000 Years Of Duration, Is The Story Of An Animal, Some Kind Of Complex Animal, Becoming Conscious.

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.

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.

All The Accoutrements That Distinguish Us From Animal Existence Were Put In Place When We Had A Different Kind Of Mind Than We Have Now. We Didn't Have A Mind That Favored Role Specialization, And Male Dominance, And Anxiety Over Female Sexual Activity Related To Feelings Of Male Ownership. That All Came Later.

Basically, For Me The Psychedelic Experience Was The Path To Revelation. It Actually Worked On Somebody Who Thought Nothing Would Work.

Only Psychos And Shamans Create Their Own Reality

Don't Diddle The Dose. Once You Have Done Your Homework, Go For It.

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.

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

The Central Figure In The Archaic Revival Is The Shaman.

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.

The Possibility Seems To Be That What We Call Styles, Or What We Call Motifs, Are Actually Categories In The Unconscious.

Part Of What Is Wrong With Our Society, And Hence With Ourselves, Is That We Consume Images, We Don't Produce Them. We Need To Produce, Not Consume, Media.

My Normal Lectures Deal With The Psychedelic Experience As A Generalized And Historical Phenomenon, But This Effort At Communication Is Slightly More Personal In That It's An Effort To Impart [just] One Idea That Came Out Of An Involvement With Psychedelic Substances.

One Of The Things That People Don't Do Enough Of When They Do Psychedelic Work Is Spend Time In The Library.

The 'public' Has No History, Has No Future, Lives In A Golden Moment Created By Credit, Which Binds Them Ineluctably To A Fascist System That Is Never Criticized. This Is The Ultimate Consequence Of Having Broken Off This Symbiotic Relationship With The Vegetable, Feminine, Maternal Matrix Of The Planet.

The Lack Of A Sense Of History Makes Us Really Prey To Manipulation.

To Carry Language From Two Dimensions Into Three Is The Task Of The Poets, And The Rebels In The 20th Century.

No One Is In Charge Of This Process, This Is What Makes History So Interesting, It's A Runaway Freight Train On A Dark And Stormy Night.

Thinkers Are Not A Welcome Addition To Most Social Situations.

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.

The Creative Act Is A Letting Down Of The Net Of Human Imagination Into The Ocean Of Chaos On Which We Are Suspended, And The Attempt To Bring Out Of It Ideas.

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

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

I Think Really What Unites Psychedelic People Is The Faith In The Power Of The Imagination.

The World Is Not An Unsolved Problem For Scientists Or Sociologists. The World Is A Living Mystery.

The "just Say No" Campaign At This Point Is A Lot Like Drawing Sea-monsters Over Certain Unexplored Areas Of The Map And Expecting People To Stay Away. It May Work For Some, But Explorers Live For This Kind Of Thing.

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.

It Doesn't Matter What Your Cultural Conditioning Is, It Falls Into Question Under The Influence Of The Psychedelic. And For Most People That's Frightening.

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.

It's Possible To See The Whole Human Growth Movement Of The 1970s As A Wish To Continue The Inward Quest Without Having To Put Yourself On The Line In The Way You Had To When You Took 250 Gamma Of Lsd. And I Think All These Other Methods Are Efficacious, But I Think It's The Sheer Power Of The Hallucinogens That Puts People Off.

The Cost Of Sanity In This Society, Is A Certain Level Of Alienation

Each Stage Of Cosmic Development Proceeded More Quickly Than The Stage Which Preceded It.

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.

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.

If In Fact The Conservation And Complexification Of Novelty Is What The Universe Is Striving For, Then Suddenly Our Own Human Enterprise, Previously Marginalized, Takes On An Immense New Importance.

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

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

History Is A Series Of Approximations Of The Final Singularity.

The Whole Of The Amazonian Narcotic Complex, As It's Called In The Old Literature, Is Based On Activation Of Dmt By One Strategy Or Another.

We Cannot Evolve Faster Than Our Language. The Edge Of Being Is The Edge Of Meaning, And Somehow We Have To Push The Edge Of Meaning. We Have To Extend It.

The Psychedelic Experience Is Simply A Compressed Instance Of What We Call Understanding, So That Living Psychedelically Is Trying To Live In An Atmosphere Of Continuous Unfolding Of Understanding, So That Every Day You Know More And See Into Things With Greater Depth Than You Did Before. This Is A Process Of Education.

You Could Almost Describe Psychedelics As Enzymes For The Activity Of The Imagination.

Astonishment Is The Proper Response To Reality.

We Don't Have To Look Far For Miracles Because They're All Around Us. Everything Is Astonishing. The Universe On It's Surface Is Alive With Mystery.

I Have Nothing But Scorn For All Weird Ideas Other Than My Own.

So When You Look At The Eschaton What You See, Strangely Enough, Is Your Own Face.

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.

We Need A Metaphor That Can Contain The Daemon Of The Future That We Have Conjured Into Being.

The Thing That Seemed To Me So Important About The Psychedelic Experience Was That It Happened To Me. I Wasn't Reading John Chrysostom Or Meister Eckhart. And So I Assumed That I Am A Very Ordinary Person, Therefore, If It Happened To Me It Could Happen To Anyone.

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

And What Is Shamanism But Philosophy With A Hands-on Attitude. Philosophy Not Made Around The Camp Fire, But Philosophy Based On The Acquisition Of Extreme Experience. That's How You Figure Out What The World Is, Not By Bicycling Around In The Burbs, But By Forcing Extreme Experience.

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

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.

As The Bonfires Of Knowledge Grow Brighter, The More The Darkness Is Revealed To Our Startled Eyes.

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.

We Are Alienated, So Alienated That The Self Must Disguise Itself As An Extraterrestrial In Order Not To Alarm Us With The Truly Bizarre Dimensions That It Encompasses.

You Aren't An Object. You're A Process Of Some Sort.

You Put Two Egos Together And You've Either Got A Conflict, Which Is Always Interesting, Or Better Yet, A Love Affair.

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.

Belief Is A Toxic And Dangerous Attitude Toward Reality. After All, If It's There It Doesn't Require Your Belief- And If It's Not There Why Should You Believe In It?

Language Is Something That Springs From The Biological Matrix, And The Neurological Matrix, Within Us.

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.

There Will Be Difficult Moments In A Five-gram Trip, But On The Other Hand Certain Questions Will Be Solved Forever For You, Because You Will Validate The Existence Of This Dimension. You Will See What Your Relationship To It Is.

This Is The Message Of Your Life And My Life - It’s That Nothing Lasts. Heraclitus Said It: Panta Rhei. All Flows, Nothing Lasts. Not Your Enemies, Not Your Fortune, Not Who You Sleep With At Night, Not The Books, Not The House In Saint-tropez, Not Even The Children - Nothing Lasts. To The Degree That You Avert Your Gaze From This Truth, You Build The Potential For Pain Into Your Life. Everything Is This Act Of Embracing The Present Moment, The Felt Presence Of Experience, And Then Moving On To The Next Felt Moment Of Experience. It’s Literally Psychological Nomadism Is What It Is.

We Are Like Coral Animals Embedded In A Technological Reef Of Extruded Psychic Objects...all Our Tool-making Implies Our Belief In An Ultimate Tool.

The Future Holds No Terrors For A Person Who Knows How Process Inevitably Unfolds. They Are Always Right And With It Each Moment.

Culture Is A Plot Against The Expansion Of Consciousness.

The Problem Is We Have To Transcend Cultural Languages And Fall Into A Phase With The Communication Systems That Nature Has Placed All Around Us.

One Reaches Through To The Continents And Oceans Of The Imagination, Worlds Able To Sustain Anyone Who Will But Play, And Then Lets The Play Deepen And Deepen Until It Is A Reality That Few Would Even Dare To Entertain...the Human Imagination Is The Holographic Organ Of The Human Body, And We Don't 'imagine' Anything. We Simply See Things So Far Away That There Is No Possibility Of Validating Or Invalidating Their Existence.

I Finally Realized That This 'place' That I Kept Bursting Into [on A Psychedelic Experience] Was Somebody's Idea Of A Playpen.

There Is Nobody Who Is So Enlightened That They Don't Need To Work On Themselves.

Man Was Not Put On This Planet To Toil In The Mud. Or The God Who Put Us On This Planet To Toil In The Mud Is No God I Want To Have Any Part Of. It's Some Kind Of Gnostic Demon. It's Some Kind Of Cannibalistic Demiurge That Should Be Thoroughly Renounced And Rejected.

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.

Escape Into The Dream. Escape, A Key Thing Charged Against These Drugs, That They Are For Escapists. I Think The People Who Make This Charge Hardly Dare Dream To What Degree They Are Escapist.

Earth Is A Place Where Language Has Literally Become Alive. Language Has Infested Matter; It Is Replicating And Defining And Building Itself. And It Is In Us.

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.

Memory Training Is Great Psychedelic Training.

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.

Is There A Necessary Succession In Style, Or Are These Things Pure Chance?

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

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.

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.

One Way Of Assessing The Toxicity Of A Drug Is How Do You Feel The Next Day?

What Is Needed, Is An Awakening.

Once You Have The Psychedelic Tool In Hand Then Some Real Choices Have To Be Made.

It Puts People Who Are Into This Psychedelic Thing In An Entirely Different Stance From All Other Spiritual Seekers, Because All Other Spiritual Seekers Are Furiously Seeking. Psychedelic People Are Holding It Back With All Their Power, Because They Are In The Presence Of The Mystery. And Then The Trick Is To Get A Spigot On It So That It Can Be Turned On And Off Rather Than Coming At You Like A Tidal Wave A Mile High And Twenty Miles Wide.

And I Don't Mean This Metaphorically. I Want To Be Taken Seriously As Proposing That The Ennui Of Modernity Is The Consequence Of A Disruptive Symbiotic Relationship Between Ourselves And Vegetable Nature.

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.

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

We Are Consciousness. We May Not Always Be Monkeys.

[dmt] Raises All The Questions In A Hurry. It's So Intense And So Oriented Toward The Other And The Visual And The Hallucinogenic That It Isn't Really Like A Drug. It's More Like An Event That You Ran Into. You Just Came Around A Corner And There Was The Unspeakable.

It Seems To Me That Right Under The Surface Of Human Neurological Organization Is A Mode Shift Of Some Sort That Would Make Language Beholdable.

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

We Are Reaping The Fruits Of Ten Thousand, Fifty Thousand Years Of Sowing Of The Fields Of Mind. And It Is Being Dropped Into Our Laps For Us To Create Human-machine Interfacing, Control Of Genetic Material, Redefinition Of Social Reality, Re Engineering Of Languages, Revisioning Of The Planetary Ecology, All These Things Fall Upon Us.

Without Sounding Too Cliché, The Internet Really Is The Birth Of Some Kind Of Global Mind.

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

Well, You Could Almost Say, I Suppose, That The Scientist Seeks What Is Similar Between Any Two Days, Or Bluebirds, Or Glaciers. And The Poet Seeks What Is Different. The Artist Seeks To Celebrate The Unique.

It's A Product Of The Fractal Laws That Govern The World At An Informational Level. There Is No Deeper Truth.

To My Mind This Is What Shamanic Training Must Really Be, Is Mnemonic Training. If You Want To Bring The Stuff Back You Have To Train Yourself To Bring It Back.

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.

Because I Believe Psychedelics Are A Kind Of Higher Dimensional Sectioning Of Reality, I Think They Give The Kind Of Stereoscopic Vision Necessary To Hold The Entire Hologram Of What's Happening In Your Mind. The Old Paradigm Is Gone.

So I Submit To You That What We Represent Is A Fifth Column, A Fifth Column That Represents The Best Aspirations That Human Community Is Capable Of, A Fifth Column That Is Willing To Look At The Structure Of The Psyche In Contrast To The Mess Of Society, And Willing To Dream.

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.

The Movement Of A Single Atom From One Known Position To Another Known Position Changes An Experience From Nothing To Overwhelming. This Means That Mind And Matter At The Quantum Mechanical Level Are All Spun Together.

I Believe That Great Weirdness Stalks The Universe. That's Not The Issue With Me, But It Is Not Tacky. It Is Not Tacky.

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.

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

If I Can Paraphrase Teilhard De Chardin For A Moment, He Said, Or I Will Paraphrase In This Way, 'when The Human Race Understands The Potential Of The Hallucinogenic Drug Experience, It Will Have Discovered Fire For The Second Time.'

Mind Conjures Miracles Out Of Time.

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.

The History Of Man That You Don't Know Is What Your Unconscious Is Made Out Of.

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.

The Shaman Is Not Merely A Sick Man, Or A Madman; He Is A Sick Man Who Has Healed Himself.

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.

Certainly The Central Platonic Idea, Which Is The Idea Of The Ideas, These Archetypal Forms Which Stand Outside Of Time Is One Which Is Confirmed By The Psychedelic Experience.

Belief Is A Form Of Infantilism. There Is No Ground For Believing Anything.

Your Memories Are Eroding Away. The Futures You Anticipate, Will Mostly Not Come To Pass, And The Real Richness Is In The Moment. And It's Not Necessarily Some Kind Of 'be Here Now' Feel-good Thing Because It Doesn't Always Feel Good. But It Always Feels. It Is A Domain Of Feeling. It's Primary.

Culture Is The Greatest Barrier To Your Enlightenment, Your Education, And Your Decency.

There Is A Sort Of Fair Play, And If You Can Get In Touch With That In Your Life, If You Can Have That Perception, The World Will Begin To Work For You, It Will Begin To Move Toward You... Nature Loves Courage, And It Shows You That Loves Courage Because It Will Remove Obstacles.

Obviously, It's Some Kind Of Freely Commanded Modality In The Psyche With Which We Can Have A Relationship If We Will But Evolve A Control Language And A Dialogue. And It Remains Mysterious.

What The Psychedelic Thing Can Be Seen As, When It's Done With Plants, As A Return To Gaia, An Immersion In The Feminine.

Alcoholism Isn't A Disease. It's A Failure Of Self-image.

Without An Understanding And A Familiarity Of The Psychedelic Experience You Should Be Sued For Fraud If You're Practicing Psychotherapy.

The Human Imagination, Which Is Our Great Glory, Has Grown So Powerful That We Can Barely Unleash It On The Surface Of The Planet.

This Is The Key. If You Get Into Deep Water With These Substances, This Is True Of Psilocybin As Well, You Don't Want To Clench, You Don't Want To Assume The Fetal Position And Stop Breathing. You Want To Sit Up Straight And Breathe, And Sing, And Sing It Back, And It Will Step Back. You Can Take Control Of Your Situation ... Most Of The Time.

We Can Will The Perfect Future Into Being By Becoming Microcosms Of The Perfect Future.

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.

We Are So Much The Victims Of Abstraction That With The Earth In Flames We Can Barely Rouse Ourselves To Wander Across The Room And Look At The Thermostat.

...the Mind Is More Powerful Than Any Imaginable Particle Accelerator, More Sensitive Than Any Radio Receiver Or The Largest Optical Telescope, More Complete In Its Grasp Of Information Than Any Computer: The Human Body- Its Organs, Its Voice, Its Powers Of Locomotion, And Its Imagination- Is A More-than-sufficient Means For The Exploration Of Any Place, Time Or Energy Level In The Universe.

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

Think About Our Dilemma On This Planet. If The Expansion Of Consciousness Does Not Loom Large In The Human Future, What Kind Of Future Is It Going To Be?

I Think The Cybernetic Matrix Is A Tremendous Tool For Feminizing, And Radicalizing, And Psychedelicizing The Social Matrix. I See Computers As Entirely Feminine.

Death Is The Black Hole Of Biology. It's An Event Horizon, And Once You Go Over That Event Horizon, No Information Can Be Passed Back Out Of The Hole.

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

Safety Is Really A Concern Of Mine, And What I've Been Telling People Recently Is That Until There's Animal And Human Data On A Drug It Should Probably Be Looked At Very Carefully.

This Rising Global Humanism Is, In Fact, The Rising Into Consciousness Of A Tribal God Similar To The Kind Of Tribal God That Functioned In These Pre-hellenic Societies.

The 'person' Is Not An Interchangeable Part. The 'citizen' Is. ... The Person Is Harking Back To A Pre-print Model. It's What The Hippies Were.

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].

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

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!

I Discovered Early In Life A Stunning Truth That's Made My Life Very Complicated In Its Wake, But That I Still Think Is True, And It's That People Are Very Easy To Love.

To My Mind This Makes Psychedelics Central To Any Political Reconstruction, Because These Are The Only Force In Nature That Actually Dissolve Linguistics Structures; Lets The Mechanics Of Syntax To Be Visible, Allows The Possibility For Rapid Introduction And Spread Of New Concepts; Gives Permission For New Ways Of Seeing; And This Is What We Have To Do, We Have To Change Our Minds.

If The Words 'life, Liberty, And The Pursuit Of Happiness' Don't Include The Right To Experiment With Your Own Consciousness, Then The Declaration Of Independence Isn't Worth The Hemp It Was Written On.

Pursuit Of Happiness

We Are The Inheritors Of A Million Years Of Striving For The Unspeakable.

Shamanism Is Not Some Obscure Concern Of Cultural Anthropologists. Shamanism Is How Religion Was Practiced For Its First Million Years. Up Until About 12,000 Years Ago There Was No Other Form Of Religion On This Planet. That Was How People Attained Some Kind Of Access To The Sacred.

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.

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.

There Is No Liberation To Compare With Freeing Oneself From The Illusions And Delusions Of The Age In Which One Lives.

Notice That The Whole Story Of Eden Is The Story Of The Struggle Over A Woman's Relationship To A Psychoactive Plant.

Even As The Nineteenth Century Had To Come To Grips With The Notion Of Human Descent From Apes, We Must Now Come To Terms With The Fact That Those Apes Were Stoned Apes.

The Human Brain Is The God Of Technological Innovation.

No One Knows Enough To Worry.

The Psychedelic Experience Is The Beginning Of The Spiritual Path. That's Why It's Not Important That Yogas' Claim That They Can Deliver You The Psychedelic Experience, Because It Begins With The Psychedelic Experience, And Then You Go From There.

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. This Is The Trick. This Is What All These Teachers And Philosophers Who Really Counted, Who Really Touched The Alchemical Gold, This Is What They Understood. This Is The Shamanic Dance In The Waterfall. This Is How Magic Is Done. By Hurling Yourself Into The Abyss And Discovering Its A Feather Bed.

If You Play The Cultural Game, It's Like Playing Only With Clubs Or Something, Or Playing Only With The Red Marked Cards. You Have To Play With A Full Deck, And That Includes This Pre-linguistic Surround In Which We Are Embedded.

For Me, What All These Years Of Psychedelic Taking Came To Was A New Model Of How Reality Works, A New Model Of What The World Is.

What The Churches Are Peddling Is High Abstraction, And You Really Have To Work Yourself Up Into A Lather To Be Able To Accept That As Worthy Of That Kind Of Attention. The Psychedelic Subset Of Society Is Into An Experience, And It's Accessible.

What's Popularly Known As The Evolution Of Consciousness, In Other Words That The Expansion Of Cognitive Repertoire That Occurs In Human Beings, Which Has Always Been A Great Puzzle To Evolutionary Theory, I Believe, Occurred In The Presence Of A Kind Of Catalyst For The Human Imagination.

Biology Seems To Be A Chemical Strategy For Amplifying Quantum Mechanical Indeterminacy So That It Leaves The Subatomic Realm And Can Be Present In A Hundred And Forty Five Pound Block Of Meat.

You See, A Secret Is Not Something Untold. It’s Something Which Can’t Be Told.

What Is Revealed Through The Psychedelic Experience, I Think, Is A Higher Dimensional Perspective On Reality. And I Use 'higher Dimensional' In The Mathematical Sense.

The Sensory Ratios That Are Being Reinforced By The New Electronic Technology Are Like The Sensory Ratios That Were In Place Fifteen Thousand Years Ago. . . . Print Imposes A Condition On Human Mind Which Is Now Lifting.

The Psychedelic Sets You At The Beginning Of The Path, And Then People Do All Kinds Of Things With It.

The Main Thing Going On In The 20th Century Is A Dissolving Of Boundaries, All The Boundaries That Historical Civilization Put In Place.

Dmt Seems To Argue, Convincingly I Might Add, That The World Is Made Entirely Of Something, For Want Of A Better Word, We Would Have To Call Magic.

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.

One Of The Things That's So Striking About Shamanism In The Native Context Is The Absence Of Mental Illness.

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

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

The Plants Are The Pipeline Into The Gaian Intention. It's Just Not A Coincidence That These Plants Carry This Immense Spiritual Message. They Are The Pipeline Of Gaian Intentionality.

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 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.

It Is No Coincidence That A Rebirth Of Psychedelic Use Is Occuring As We Acquire The Technological Capability To Leave The Planet. The Mushroom Visions And The Transformation Of The Human Image Precipitated By Space Exploration Are Spun Together. Nothing Less Is Happening Than The Emergence Of A New Human Order. A Telepathic, Humane, Universalist Kind Of Human Culture Is Emerging That Will Make Everything That Preceded It Appear Like The Stone Age.

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 We Now Have Is The Freedom Which Attends Decadence, Or The Decadence Which Attends Freedom.

The Drugs Of The Future Will Be Computers. The Computers Of The Future Will Be Drugs.

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.

The Psychedelic Issue Is A Civil Rights And Civil Liberties Issue. It Is An Issue Concerned With The Most Basic Of Human Freedoms: Religious Practice And The Privacy Of The Individual Mind.

If You Charge Off With Some Political Agenda That Is Not Informed By Clarity, You Are Going To End Up With Business As Usual. The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions But It Is Not Paved With Clarity.

I Think That's The Job Of Each Of Us - To Show Our Best Toys And Our Best Tricks That Lift Us And Our Friends To Higher And Higher Levels. There Is No End To This Bootstrapping Process. The Future Of The Human Mind And Body And The Future Of Humans Together Is Endlessly Bright.

Science Is The Exploration Of The Experience Of Nature Without Psychedelics. And I Propose, Therefore, To Expand That Enterprise And Say That We Need A Science Beyond Science. We Need A Science Which Plays With A Full Deck.

Experientially There Is Only One Religion, And It Is Shamanism And Shamanic Ecstasy.

Shamanism, On The Other Hand, Is This World Wide, Since Paleolithic-times, Tradition Which Says That You Must Make Your Own Experience The Center Piece Of Any Model Of The World That You Build.

Time Is A Series Of Fluctuating Variables.

We Are Somehow The Children Of The Planet, We Are Somehow Its Finest Hour; We Bind Time, We Bind The Past, We Anticipate The Future - We Are Going Hyper-spatial; We Are Claiming A Whole New Dimension For Biology That It Never Claimed Before. We Are Actually Becoming A Fourth-dimensional Kind Of Creature. Our Future Is Somehow With Us, As We Seem To Be Able To Move Through Metamorphosis Into Our Own Imaginations - A Super Civilization Spread Throughout Space And Time. Our Future Is A Mystery, Our Destiny Is To Live In The Imagination.

We Are Told No, You're Unimportant, You're Peripheral - Get A Degree, Get A Job, Get A This, Get That, And Then You're A Player. You Don't Even Want To Play That Game. You Want To Reclaim Your Mind And Get It Out Of The Hands Of The Cultural Engineers Who Want To Turn You Into A Half-baked Moron Consuming All This Trash That's Being Manufactured Out Of The Bones Of A Dying World.

The Discs Which Haunt The Skies Of Earth Indicate That The Unconscious Cannot Be Kept Waiting Forever. These Things Are Going To Have To Be Dealt With.

My Technique Is Don’t Believe Anything. If You Believe In Something, You Are Automatically Precluded From Believing Its Opposite.

My Idea Of Enlightenment Is When Ego And Tao Are Fused, And Tao Is Perceived As Ego. Then Everything Happens With Complete Appropriateness.

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

All Information Is Everywhere. Information That Is Not Here Is Nowhere.

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.

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

We Can Move No Faster Than The Evolution Of Our Language, And This Is Certainly Part Of What The Psychedelics Are About: They Force The Evolution Of Language.

The Central Point About The Psychedelic Experience Is The Content Of The Experience. And This Has Been Occluded Or Obfuscated By The Behavioral And Statistical And Scientific Methods That Have Been Brought To Bear To Study Hallucinogenic Experience.

Scientific Method

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

Only Responsible Human Beings Can Exist In An Anarchistic Society.

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