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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.

-Terence McKenna

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Could Any Symbol Be

Terence McKenna

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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.

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Having Lived Long Enough To Go At Least Once Or Twice Around The Block, I'm Noticing That The Strangeness Is Not Receding The Strangeness Seems To Be Accelerating.

The Psychedelic Experience Is Not A Journey Into The Human Unconscious, Or Into The Ghost Bards Of Our Human Civilization. It's A Journey Into The Presence Of The Gaian Mind.

Life Must Be A Preparation For The Transition To Another Dimension.

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.

A Singularity Is A Place Where The Rules Are Broken. A Miracle Is A Singularity.

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.

What I've Observed, And I Think It's Fair To Give Credit To The Psychedelic Experience For This, What I've Observed Is That Nature Builds On Previously Established Levels Of Complexity.

If You Don't Have A Plan, You Become Part Of Somebody Else's Plan.

What I Think Is Going On Is That Probably Language Was Entertainment Long Before It Was Meaning. It's A Kind Of Tuneless Singing.

Our World Is In Crisis Because Of The Absence Of Consciousness

What Good Is A Theory Of How The Universe Works If It’s A Series Of Tensor Equations That, Even When Understood, Come Nowhere Tangential To Experience? The Only Intellectual Or Noetic Or Spiritual Path Worth Following Is One That Builds On Personal Experience

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.

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.

There Is Not The Newtonian Universe Deployed Throughout The Parsecs And Kiliocosms Of Physical Space And The Interior Mental Universe. They Are The Same Thing.

We Are Going Through The Eye Of The Needle; Make Sure You Leave What You Don't Need Behind

This Is Where I Think The Psychedelics Come In Because They Are Anticipations Of The Future. They Seem To Channel Information That Is Not Strictly Governed By The Laws Of Normal Causality. So That There Really Is A Prophetic Dimension, A Glimpse Of The Potential Of The Far Centuries Of The Future Through These Compounds.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Question Is Being Asked, 'are We Alone?' And Though We Now Focus On That Question We Need To Think Beyond That To What If We're Not Alone? Then What Becomes The Next Imperative Question?

People Are, In The Confines Of Their Own Apartments, Becoming Magellans Of The Interior World And Reaching Out To This Alien Thing And Beginning To Map It And Bring Back Stories That Can Only Be Compared To The Kind Of Stories That The Chroniclers Of The New World Brought Back To Spain At The Close Of The 15th Century.

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

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.

To Contact The Cosmic Giggle, To Have The Flow Of Casuistry Begin To Give Off Synchronistic Ripples, Whitecaps In The Billows Of The Coincidental Ether, If You Will. To Achieve That, A Precondition Is A Kind Of Unconsciousness, A Kind Of Drifting, A Certain Taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, A Certain Assumptions That Things Are Simpler Than They Are, Almost Always Precedes What Mircea Eliade Called ‘the Rupture Of Plane’ That Indicates That There Is An Archetypal World, An Archetypal Power Behind Profane Appearances.

But Technology Is The Real Skin Of Our Species. Humanity, Correctly Seen In The Context Of The Last Five Hundred Years, Is An Extruder Of Technological Material. We Take In Matter That Has A Low Degree Of Organization; We Put It Through Mental Filters, And We Extrude Jewelry, Gospels, Space Shuttles. This Is What We Do. 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. That Tool Is The Flying Saucer, Or The Soul, Exteriorized In Three-dimensional Space.

The Social Consequence Of The Psychedelic Experience Is Clear Thinking -which Trickles Down As Clear Speech. Empowered Speech.

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.

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

Spaceflight Is Nothing Less Than The Exterior Metaphor For The Shamanic Voyage. In Other Words, In Our Terms, The Hallucinogenic Experience. This Is The Way Engineers Get High. They Go To The Moon!

The Miracle Of Our Predicament Is Not How Long Everything Has Been In Place But How Brief It All Has Been.

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.

So Part Of What Being Psychedelic Means, I Think, Is Relentlessly Living With Unanswered Questions.

Unanswered Questions

And Yet My, Not Only My Faith, But My Experience Has Led Me To Believe That The World Is Not A Construction Of Space And Time And Matter And Energy. That That Mapping Is Insufficient. That The World Is Instead Some Kind Of A Linguistic Construct. It Is More In The Nature Of A Sentence, Or A Novel, Or A Work Of Art Than It Is In The Nature Of These Machine Models Of Interlocking Law That We Inherit Out Of A Thousand Years Of Rational Reductionism.

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.

The World Is Made Up Of Language. We Can Say That The World Is Composed Of Little Demons Doing Calisthenics, Each One The Size Of A Pissant's Eyebrow.... Or We Can Say The World Is Made Of Tiny Wave Mechanical Packets Of Matter Hurling Through Space At Near The Speed Of Light.... But Notice That What We Get Each Time Are Words.

The Things I Encounter That I Call Elves Or Gnomes, It's Just A Gloss. I Mean, They're Small, And They Have The Archetype. They're More Like Leprechauns, And This Maybe Raises A Racial Issue.

For All We Know, We Know Nothing.

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.

And I Want To Thank All The Women That Support Me. I Have Wonderful Support Systems From Women Of All Types Who Seem Dedicated To The Notion That Terence Mckenna Can Always Be Improved. I'm Extremely Grateful For That. The Frontiers Are Enormous In That Dimension.

Support Systems

The Immediate Future Of Man Lies In The Imagination And In Seeking The Dimension Where The Imagination Can Be Expressed.

Cultures Are Virtual Realities Made Of Language.

It's Getting Funnier Because Everybody's Categories Are Disintegrating, And The Cult Of Political Correctness Dictates That We Never Point Out That Other People Don't Make Sense.

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.

I Have Never Felt That The Primary Use Of These Things Was To Cure What Is Called In Modern Parlance Neurosis, What I Call Unhappiness. It Isn't For That.

It Seems To Me That It Is Psyche In A Way That Has Become Occluded By The Perverse Development Of Language.

We're Not Going To Save The Monkey Unless We Can Shed The Monkey. And The Greatest Impetus, The Greatest Inspiration To The Expression Of Our Higher Selves Comes In The Confrontation With Psyche That Occurs In The Psychedelic Experience.

We Are, In Fact, Hyper-dimentional Objects Of Some Sort Which Cast A Shadow Into Matter, And The Shadow In Matter Is The Body. And At Death, What Happens Basically, Is That The Shadow Withdraws, Or The Thing Which Cast The Shadow Withdraws, And Metabolism Ceases, And Matter Which Had Been Organized Into A Dissipative Structure In A Very Localized Area, Sustaining Itself Against Entropy By Cycling Material In And Degrading It And Expelling It, That Whole Phenomenon Ceases, But The Thing Which Ordered It Is Not Affected By That.

If You Take Psychedelics And The Internet And Music And Put All Of That Together You Have The Basis For A New Community That Is Wider And Deeper Than You Know. The People Who Are Building The New Machines, Who Are Designing The New Circuitry, Who Are Writing The New Code Are All Freaks. They Work For Capitalist Dogs, Of Course, Because We All Do, But The Creative Thrust Of These Technologies Is Being Driven By People Just Like You And Me.

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.

The Problem Is Not To Find The Answer, It's To Face The Answer

You Can Stand Back And Look At This Planet And See That We Have The Money, The Power, The Medical Understanding, The Scientific Know-how, The Love, And The Community To Produce A Kind Of Human Paradise.

People Without Plants Are In A State Of Perpetual Neurosis, A State Of Existential Wanting.

Dmt Is A Reliable Method For Crossing In To A Dimension That Human Beings Have Debated The Existence Of For 50.000 Years. Is There An Invisible Nearby World Inhabited By Active Intelligences With Which Human Beings Can Communicate? You Bet. And If You Don't Think So, Then Tell Me You Don't Think So After You've Smoked 75mg Dmt. Otherwise We Just Don't Have Anything To Talk About.

Let's Not Underrate Cannabis, For Cryin' Out Loud. Cannabis Should Be The Glue Of The Community.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Obligation On Us Is To Communicate The Truth So That It Is Understood. The Belief Will Take Care Of Itself.

History Is The Siren Song Of The Soul.

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.

Ultimately, I Think, What The Psychedelic Experience May Be Is A Higher Topological Manifold Of Temporality.

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.

I Think That A Lot Of People Are Making A Lot Of Money Spreading Anxiety. Anxiety Sells.

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.

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.

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.

This Is What Magic Is. It's Being Able To Speak In A Voice Which Makes Things Happen, Being Able To Speak In A Voice Which Causes Facts To Be Beheld By Groups Of People In A Way That Has Been Purged From Profane Language, For Us Relegated To Poetry And That Sort Of Thing.

Nature Is Not Mute, It Is A Man Who Is Deaf.

History Is A Series Of Approximations Of The Final Singularity.

But A Mature Humanity Could Get Into A Place Where We No Longer Required These Metaphysical Spankings From Messiahs And Flying Saucers That Come Along Every Thousand Years Or So To Mess Up The Mess That Has Been Created And Try And Send People Off On Another Tack. And The Way To Do This Is To Look At The Abysses That Confront Man As Species And Individuals And Try To Unify Them. And I Think That Psilocybin Offers A Way Out Because It Allows A Dialogue With The Over-mind. You Won't Read About It In "scientific American" Or Anywhere Else. You Will Carry It Out.

There Is No Mundane Dimension Really, If You Have The Eyes To See It, It Is All Transcendental.

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

If Psychedelics Are Exopheromones That Dissolve The Dominant Ego, Then They Are Also Enzymes That Synergize The Human Imagination And Empower Language. They Cause Us To Connect And Reconnect The Contents Of The Collective Mind In Ever More Implausible, Beautiful, And Self-fulfilling Ways.

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

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 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.

The Leading Edge Of Reality Is Mind, And Mind Is The Primary Substratum Of Being.

What Blinds Us, Or What Makes Historical Progress Very Difficult, Is Our Lack Of Awareness Of Our Ignorance.

Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Small Minds.

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

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.

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

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

What We Drug People Have, That You Don't, Is Repeatability.

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

Thinkers Are Not A Welcome Addition To Most Social Situations.

This Is What They Have Suppressed So Long. This Is Why They Are So Afraid Of The Psychedelics, Because They Understand That Once You Touch The Inner Core Of Your Own And Someone Else's Being You Can't Be Led Into Thing-fetishes And Consumerism. The Message Of Psychedelics Is That Culture Can Be Re-engineered As A Set Of Emotional Values Rather Than Products. This Is Terrifying News.

The Central Figure In The Archaic Revival Is The Shaman.

We're Not Mere Spectators, Or A Cosmic Accident, Or Some Sideshow, Or The Greek Chorus To The Main Event. The Human Experience Is The Main Event.

Human Experience

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.

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.

What We Need To Change Is Our Minds, That's The Part That's Doing Us Dirt And Dragging Us Under. How Can We Change Our Minds.

And Certainly When I Reached La Chorerra In 1971 I Had A Price On My Head By The Fbi, I Was Running Out Of Money, I Was At The End Of My Rope. And Then “they” Recruited Me And Said, “you Know, With A Mouth Like Yours There's A Place For You In Our Organization“. And I've Worked In Deep Background Positions About Which The Less Said The Better. And Then About 15 Years Ago They Shifted Me Into Public Relations And I've Been There To The Present.

The Only Difference Between A Drug And A Computer Is That One Is Slightly Too Large To Swallow. ... And Our Best People Are Working On That Problem, Even As We Speak.

And The Psychedelics, I Believe, Are The Key To Moving From Wearing Culture Like Cloths To Recognizing That Culture Is This Intensifying Reflection Of An Aspect Of The Self And Integrating It Into The Self.

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.

The Real Truth That Dare Not Speak Itself, Is That No One Is In Control, Absolutely No One... Nobody Is In Control. This Stuff Is Ruled By The Equations Of Dynamics And Chaos. Now, There May Be Entities Seeking Control - The World Bank, The Communist Party, The Rich, The Somebody-or-others - But To Seek Control Is To Take Enormous Aggravation Upon Yourself... It's Like Trying To Control A Dream.

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.

The Intellectual Tension That Seems To Work Its Way Through This Society Almost Like Fat Through Meat Is The Tension Between Scientific Reductionism And The Deeply Felt Intuition Of Most People That There Is A Spiritual Dimension, Or A Hidden Dimension, Or A Transcendental Dimension.

Fine Tuning The Institutions Built By Powdered Wig Guys Two Hundred Years Ago Is A Long Shot At Holding The Whole Thing Together.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

Ecstasy Is A Complex Emotion Containing Elements Of Joy, Fear, Terror, Triumph, Surrender, And Empathy. What Has Replaced Our Prehistoric Understanding Of This Complex Of Ecstasy Now Is The Word Comfort, A Tremendously Bloodless Notion. Drugs Are Not Comfortable, And Anyone Who Thinks They Are Comfortable Or Even Escapist Should Not Toy With Drugs Unless They’re Willing To Get Their Noses Rubbed In Their Own Stuff.

History Was An Incredibly Damaging Experience, And Now It's Over . . . In A Sense.

One Has, You Know, A Window Of Opportunity Somewhere Between Zip And A Hundred To Solve, Or Understand, Or Penetrate, Or Appreciate, Or Come To Terms With The Conundrum Of Being, This Amazing Circumstance In Which We Find Ourselves, Both Individually And Collectively.

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

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.

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

Matter Is Simply A Concept. The World Is Made Of Language.

Capitalism Is Going To Deal Itself Out Of Existence, But Before It Does That, You're Gonna Pay $50 For A Latte, Because Inflation Is Going Impoverish All Of Us Before People Get Pissed Off Enough To Realize That All Of The Last Hundred Years Of Economic Progress Was Actually A Shell Game To Create Billionaires, While The Great Masses Of People Saw Their Standard Of Living Eroded And Destroyed.

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.

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.

The Monkey Body Has Carried Us To This Moment Of Release, But We Are Coming More And More To Exist In A World Made By The Human Imagination.

Western Civilization Is A Loaded Gun Pointed At The Head Of This Planet.

Memory Training Is Great Psychedelic Training.

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

I Don’t Know What Life Is Like Without Cannabis, I Hear There Is Such A Thing.

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 Are All Cells Of A Much Larger Body, And Like The Cells Of Our Own Body It Is Hard For Us To Glimpse The Whole Pattern Of The Whole Of What Is Happening, And Yet We Can Sense That There Is A Purpose, And There Is A Pattern.

This Is How Magic Is Done. By Hurling Yourself Into The Abyss And Discovering Its A Feather Bed.

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

I'm Not Trying To Sign People Up To A Creed, I'm Much More Interested In The People That Disagree. These Ideas Are Powerful But This Isn't Mysticism In The Ordinary Sense To Be Protected By Mumblings About Faith And All That. This Is The Real Thing.

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.

Buddhism Is A Heresy On Hinduism. It Was Hinduism That Did The Dirty Work For Buddhism, By The Time Buddha Came Along Priest-craft Was An Ancient Tradition In India.

The Engineers Of The Future Will Be Poets.

‎the Way You Understand And Investigate Time Is By Moving Inward, Into Metabolism. The Human Body Is A Knot In Time.

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

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

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

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

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.

We Are Like Caterpillars Contemplating Pupation.

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.

The Real Truth Is Splintered And Spread Throughout Time.

Ayahuasca Loves To Take Prideful People And Rub Their Nose In It. I Mean It Can Make You Beg For Mercy Like Nothing. You Have To Really Approach It Humbly.

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.

The Momentum Now Is Inevitable. Now It's About Each Of Us Individually Arranging The Furniture Of Our Own Mind To Deal With What Has Become Inevitable.

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

The Party Impulse Is A Very Subversive Impulse. I Mean, You Know, A Lot Of Artists Have Too Much Integrity To Sell Their Art As A Brand; But Who Has So Much Integrity That They Would Turn Down A Party?

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.

We Have Outlived This Embryo, This Human Cradle, And Now It's Time To Be Up And About The Great Business Of Becoming Citizens Of The Galaxy And At Home With Our Own Heart.

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.

The Overriding Problems Are Brought On By The Existence Of The Ego, A Maladaptive Behavioral Complex In The Psyche That Gets Going Like A Tumor. If It's Not Treated - If There's Not Pharmacological Intervention - It Becomes The Dominant Constellation Of The Personality.

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.

For Unknown Reasons, There Is A Tremendous Concentration Of Psychoactive Plants On The South American Continent. The South American Continent Has More Known Hallucinogens Than The Rest Of The Planet Combined.

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

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

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

Don't Worry. You Don't Know Enough To Worry. . . . Who Do You Think You Are That You Should Worry, For Cryin' Out Loud. It's A Total Waste Of Time. It Presupposes Such A Knowledge Of The Situation That It Is, In Fact, A Form Of Hubris.

No One Yet Understands The Mysterious Intelligence Within Plants Or The Implications Of The Idea That Nature Communicates In A Basic Chemical Language That Is Unconscious But Profound. We Do Not Yet Understand How Hallucinogens Transform The Message In The Unconscious Into Revelations Beheld By The Conscious Mind.

If We Were To Place Our Power At The Service Of Our Imaginations Rather Than Our Primate Politics We Would Create A Civilization Worthy Of The Name.

There Is A Spiritual Obligation, There Is A Task To Be Done. It Is Not, However, Something As Simple As Following A Set Of Somebody Else's Rules

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

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

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.

I Believe Reality Is A Marvelous Joke Staged For My Edification And Amusement And Everybody Is Working Very Hard To Make Me Happy.

Working Very Hard

Every Step Into Freedom Contains Within It The Potential For Greater Bondage.

We Are Consciousness. We May Not Always Be Monkeys.

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

Drugs Are About Dulling Perception, About Addiction And About Behavioral Repetition...what *psychedelics* Are About Is Pattern- Dissolving Experiences Of An Extraordinarily High Or Different Awareness. They Are The Exact Opposite Of Drugs. They Promote Questioning , They Promote Consciousness, They Promote Value Examinations, They Promote The Reconstruction Of Behavioral Patterns.

In Cyberspace Things Are Built Out Of Light.

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.

We Are Led By The Least Among Us - The Least Intelligent, The Least Noble, The Least Visionary. We Are Led By The Least Among Us And We Do Not Fight Back Against The Dehumanizing Values That Are Handed Down As Control Icons.

The Psychedelic Species Of Visual Beauty Is Something We Don't See In Our Furniture Styles And Our Architecture. It Seems To Be Coming In, Literally, From Another Dimension, And Yet It Is Undeniably Moving. It's Beautiful.

If You Sit Down With A Person, Or A Watermelon For That Matter, When You're Stoned And Sing Into It, The Quality Of The Hallucination Is Such That There Is A Way Of Thinking About It Where You Could Say, 'this Is An Acoustical Hologram Of The Interior Of Their Body.'" I Don't Say That.i Just Say, "my Goodness Isn't It Strange That I Seem To Be Able To See Inside Of The Watermelon When I'm Doing This.'

Look At The Reputation They Gave Him. [giordano] Bruno Without The Pyre Is A Whiskey Priest Laying Waste To The Maids Of Umbria.

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.

Behind Us: The Unknown. Before Us: The Secret.

The Thing Is That It Is Incredibly Frustrating To Anyone Who Would Control It, Because You Can't Predict The Impact Of Any Technology Before You Put It In Place.

I Think Our Intelligence Is A Source Of Toxicity To Nature And Discomfort To Ourselves Unless Our Values Are Based On Planetary Values, Are Linked To The Values Of The Rest Of Nature. Intelligence Is Not A License To Trample. The Proper Role Of Intelligence In A Planetary Ecology Is That Of Gardener, Caregiver And Maintainer Of Balance.

Cultivate An Ongoing Stream Of Self-description, Telling Yourself What Is Happening. Get Used To The Idea That Mind Can Penetrate The Immediate Surface Of Being And Reveal The Tactile Density Of It As A Manifold Whose Measure Cannot Be Immediately Taken By The Eyes, That It's Deep, It's Connected, It's Complex. Everything Holds Within Itself The Anticipation And The Memory Of Everything Else.

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.

The Smart People Who Are Straight Are Involved In Simply The Media Management Of What Has Turned Into A Slow Apocalypse, Spreading Starvation, Exacerbated Class Differences, Toxified Agriculture, So Forth And So On. I Don't Believe The Establishment Thinks There Are Solutions. Their Policy Is Basically The Management Of Panic, Which Is Hardly A Forward Moving Approach To The Adventure Of Human Civilization.

I Think That The Whole Thing, The Crux Of The Whole Psychedelic Issue, Is That It Accentuates Personal Responsibility By Making People Take Their Own Experiences Seriously.

I Think Ideology Is Toxic, All Ideology. It's Not That There Are Good Ones And Bad Ones. All Ideology Is Toxic, Because Ideology Is A Kind Of Insult To The Gift Of Human Free Thinking.

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.

We Are Like Coral Animals In A Vast Reef Of Excreted Technological Material That Is Wired For Solid State Data Transfer.

Right Here And Now, One Quanta Away, There Is Raging A Universe Of Active Intelligence That Is Transhuman, Hyperdimensional, And Extremely Alien... What Is Driving Religious Feeling Today Is A Wish For Contact With This Other Universe.

We Have To Recognize That The World Is Not Something Sculptured And Finished, Which We As Perceivers Walk Through Like Patrons In A Museum; The World Is Something We Make Through The Act Of Perception.

Being Imposes Some Kind Of Obligation To Find Out What's Going On.

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.

Alchemy Is About The Generation Of A Psychic Construct, A Wholeness, A Thing Which Has Many Properties, Which Is Paradoxical, Which Is Both Mind And Matter, Which Can Do Anything.

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

Nothing Is As Boundary Dissolving, Except For Psychedelic Compounds, As Travel. Travel Is Up There.

Because This Is The World That Science Built, With The Henchmen Of Capitalism And Christianity.

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.

Beauty Is Self-defined, Perceived And Understood Without Ambiguity. It's The Stuff That Lies Under The Skins Of Our Individual Existences.

We Can Begin The Restructuring Of Thought By Declaring Legitimate What We Have Denied For So Long. Lets Us Declare Nature To Be Legitimate. The Notion Of Illegal Plants Is Obnoxious And Ridiculous In The First Place.

I Do Not Think That The Government, Under The Guise Of Some Phony, Alarmist, Pseudo-scientific Rhetoric, Should Attempt To Control The Evolution Of Consciousness. After All, If These Things Truly Are Consciousness-expanding, It Doesn't Take Too Much Intelligence To Realize That It Is The Absence Of Consciousness That Is Causing Our Flirtation With Extinction And Planetary Disaster.

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

Science Works Its Miracles By Turning Its Enterprise Into A Kind Of Parlor Game Confined To The Category Matter And Energy.

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 1948, Television Was Introduced, And Millions And Millions Of People Lead Larval, Low-awareness, Warehoused Lives Mainlining An Electronic Drug Straight Into Their Brains.

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

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