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

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

Understanding the Quote: "i think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for..."

This quote by Terence McKenna reflects deeply on the theme of thinking. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Thinking, Preparation, Marathon, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Terence McKenna interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna is celebrated for insightful thoughts on thinking and preparation. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Thinking
Preparation
Marathon
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I Believe That Great Weirdness Stalks The Universe. That's Not The Issue With Me, But It Is Not Tacky. It Is Not Tacky.
Believe
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My Technique Is Don’t Believe Anything. If You Believe In Something, You Are Automatically Precluded From Believing Its Opposite.
Believe
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Mind Blowing
The Thing That Excites Me About These Informational Technologies Is I Think We Are Going To Be Able To Use Virtual Reality To Show Each Other The Insides Of Our Own Heads.
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[this Legendary Amazonian Substance Is] A Cybernetic Transdimentional Medium Of Some Sort That Is Generated Out Of The Mysteries Of The Physiology Of The Human Body.
Substance
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It's No Big Deal About How You Get Language To Evolve. You Cause Language To Evolve By Saying New And Intelligent Things To Each Other.
Intelligent
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The Immediate Future Of Man Lies In The Imagination And In Seeking The Dimension Where The Imagination Can Be Expressed. The Present Cultural Crisis On The Surface Of The Planet Is Caused By The Fact That This Is Not A Fitting Theater For The Exercise Of Imagination. It Wrecks The Planet. The Planet Has Its Own Eco-systemic Dynamics, Which Are Not The Dynamics Of Imagination.
Lying
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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.
Believe
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Our Culture Difinitely Takes An Egocentric Dominator View. The Fear Of The Psychedelic Experience Is Quite Literally The Fear Of Losing Control. Dominator Types Today Don't Understand That It's Not Important To Maintain Control If You Are Not In Control In The First Place.
Losing Control
Views
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If You're Truly Psychedelic The Difference Between Living And Dying Is Quite Immaterial. No Pun Intended.
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What Foods Are, Essentially, Are Idea-neutral Drugs.
Ideas
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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.
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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!
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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.
Self
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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.
Reading
Important
Ordinary
The Good News About Psychedelics Is That They Are Incredibly Democratic. Even The Clueless Can Be Swept Along If The Dose Is Sufficient.
Clueless
News
Democratic
If Reality Is Code, Then It Can Be Hacked In Some Way That We Had Not Suspected Before.
Reality
Way
Code
Nature Is Actually The Goal At The End Of History.
Goal
Ends
I Finally Realized That This 'place' That I Kept Bursting Into [on A Psychedelic Experience] Was Somebody's Idea Of A Playpen.
Ideas
Psychedelic
Bursting
What We Now Have Is The Freedom Which Attends Decadence, Or The Decadence Which Attends Freedom.
Decadence
Everything Appears To Me To Be Authored, In Some Strange Way. And I Wonder If This Is Not The Spreading Assumption Of The Psychedelic Illusion/delusion/revelation That Life Is In Fact Art.
Art
Way
Facts
We Are Like Caterpillars Contemplating Pupation.
Caterpillars
Contemplating
Part Of What The Psychedelic Point Of View Represents Is Living A Certain Portion Of Your Life Without Answers. Just Accepting That Certain Dilemmas Will Never Resolve Themselves Into Some Kind Of A Complete Answer. That's Why Psychedelics Are So Different From Any System Being Sold, From One Of The Great Elder Systems Like Christianity, To The Latest Cult Out Of Los Angeles.
Views
Different
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The Message Coming Back At All Of Us Is: Live Without Closure.
Messages
Closure
Coming Back
Perhaps, You Know, New Laws, New Domains Of Potential Openness Are Occurring As The Universe Ages, And Complexity Previously Disallowed Is Now Possible, And We Are That Complexity. We Are Nature Moving Out Of Its Genetic Phase - A Phase Under The Control Of Chemical Genes, Which Are Physical Structures, In To An Epigenetic Phase, A Phase Of Culture Ruled By Codes, Transformable Culturally Confined Codes - Mathematics, Religion, Philosophy, Art, Dance, Humor.
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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.
Personality
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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.
War
Goes On
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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.
Training
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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.
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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.
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Psychedelic Experiences And Dreams Are Chemical Cousins; They Are Only Different In Degree.
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Nothing Comes Unannounced, But Many Can Miss The Announcement. So It's Very Important To Actually Listen To Your Own Intuition Rather Than Driving Through It.
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What We Call Imagination Is Actually The Universal Library Of What's Real. You Couldn’t Imagine It If It Weren’t Real Somewhere, Sometime.
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Lsd Is Different. Lsd Is Like Psychoanalytical Drano. It's Not A Personality.
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The Idea Of Psychedelic Societies Is Something New. And It Doesn't Necessarily Mean That Everyone Takes The Drug. It Merely Means That The Complexity And The Mysteriousness Of Mind Are Centered In The Consciousness Of The Civilization As The Mystery Which It Comes From And Which It Must Relate To In Order To Be Relevant.
Mean
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These Things Which Are Made Of Light And Grammar And Sound That Come Chirping And Squealing And Tumbling Toward You. 'hooray! Welcome! You're Here!', And In My Case, 'you Send So Many And You Come So Rarely!'
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Sound
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How Can We Know Who Is The Other Until We Know Who Is The Self?
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Transformation Of Language Through Psychedelic Drugs Is A Central Factor Of The Evolution Of The Social Matrix Of The Rest Of The Century.
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As The Bonfires Of Knowledge Grow Brighter, The More The Darkness Is Revealed To Our Startled Eyes.
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If The Ego Is Not Regularly And Repeatedly Dissolved In The Unbounded Hyperspace Of The Transcendent Other, There Will Always Be Slow Drift Away From The Sense Of Self As Part Of Nature’s Larger Whole. The Ultimate Consequence Of This Drift Is The Fatal Ennui That Now Permeates Western Civilization.
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It Is Not Easy To Measure The Ocean, But We Can Be Measured By It, Confront It, And Be In It.
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When We Really Understand Time Travel We May Find Out It's As Common As Dirt And Has Been Going On All Around Us Is All Kinds Of Physical Processes.
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You See, A Secret Is Not Something Untold. It’s Something Which Can’t Be Told.
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History Is The Siren Song Of The Soul.
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We Are Consciousness. We May Not Always Be Monkeys.
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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.
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But What I Really Am Interested In Is Not The End Of The World But Everything Which Precedes It.
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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.
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Heart
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I Sort Of See [cannabis] As The Pilot Light Of Gian Consciousness.
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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?
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We're Not Dropping Out Here, We're Infiltrating And Taking Over.
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What Is Needed Is A Spirit Of Boundary Dissolution, Between Individuals, Between Classes, Sexual Orientations, Rich And Poor, Man And Woman, Intellectual And Feeling Toned Types. If This Can Happen, Then We Will Make A New World. And If This Doesn't Happen, Nature Is Fairly Pitiless And Has A Place For Us In The Shale Of This Planet, Where So Many Have Preceded Us.
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Without Sounding Too Cliché, The Internet Really Is The Birth Of Some Kind Of Global Mind.
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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.
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The Central Figure In The Archaic Revival Is The Shaman.
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Culture Is Your Operating System.
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The History Of Man That You Don't Know Is What Your Unconscious Is Made Out Of. Just As The History Of Yourself That You Don't Know Is What Your Personal Unconscious Is Made Out Of.
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And Psychedelics Now, As We De-condition Ourselves From The Post-medieval World, They Are Present To Hand As Tools.
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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?
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Why Does Mathematics Describe Nature. That's A Deeper Question Than Most.
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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.
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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.
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We Are Led By The Least Among Us - The Least Intelligent, The Least Noble, The Least Visionary.
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The Most Beautiful Things In The Universe Are Inside The Human Mind.
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What Is Always Left Out Of Descriptions Of The Psychedelic State, The Deep Psychedelic State, Is How Weird It Is.
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Nature And The Imagination Seem To Be The Precursors To Involvement In The Psychedelic Experience.
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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.
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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
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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.
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We Are An Intelligent Species Caught In An Historical Process. No Generation Which Proceeded Us Knew What Was Going On, And There Is No Reason To Assume That We Know What's Going On Or That The Generation Which Follows Us Will Know What's Going On. And What Kind Of Trip Is It Anyway To Insist On Knowing What's Going On?
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Human Populations That Do Not Have Contact With The Psychedelic Tremendum Are Neurotic Because They Are Male Ego Dominated.
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Apparently There Is A Great Discovery Or Insight Which Our Culture Is Deliberately Designed To Suppress, Distort, And Ignore. That Is That Nature Is Some Kind Of Minded Entity. That Nature Is Not Simply The Random Flight Of Atoms Through Electromagnetic Fields. Nature Is Not The Empty, Despiritualized , Lumpen Matter That We Inherit From Modern Physics. But It Is Instead A Kind Of Intelligence, A Kind Of Mind.
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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'.
Buddhist
Mean
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The Data Stream Has Been Corrupted, Return To First Principles.
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Principles
Firsts
Our Assumptions Are The Edges Of Our Worlds.
Our World
World
Assumption
It Is True That When You Smoke Dmt, For Example, At A Sufficiently High And Prepared Dose, You Get Elves, Everybody Does. All You Need Do, Is Inhale Deeply Three Times, And You Know... You Want Contact? You Want Elves? You Want Alien Contact? You'll Have That!
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Want
Example
There Is Nobody Who Is So Enlightened That They Don't Need To Work On Themselves.
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It Was The Fall Into History That Enslaved Us To The Labor Cycle, To The Agricultural Cycle. And Notice How Fiendish It Is.
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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.
Thinking
People
Growth
You May Miss The End Of The World, But You Definitely Are Going To Have A Front Row Seat For The End Of Your World.
Missing
World
May
Certainly Neo-platonism, Plotinus And Porphyry And That School Are Psychedelic Philosophers. Their Idea Of An Ascending Hierarchy Of More And More Rarefied States Is A Sophisticated Presentation Of The Shamanic Cosmology, Which Is The Cosmology That One Experientially Discovers When They Involve Themselves With Psychedelics.
School
Ideas
Ascending
There Is No Hierarchy Of Elder Knowledge In My Social Region Of Things. There Are Only People Learning And Sharing In A Very Complex Environment.
People
Hierarchy
Environment
The Artist’s Task Is To Save The Soul Of Mankind; And Anything Less Is A Dithering While Rome Burns. Because Of The Artists, Who Are Self-selected, For Being Able To Journey Into The Other, If The Artists Cannot Find The Way, Then The Way Cannot Be Found.
Artist
Journey
Self
Life, Carefully Examined, Is Actually A Form Of Allegorical Literature With A Very Tight Constructural Grid Laid Over It.
Literature
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For All We Know, We Know Nothing.
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The Main Thing Going On In The 20th Century Is A Dissolving Of Boundaries, All The Boundaries That Historical Civilization Put In Place.
Civilization
Historical
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Is There A Necessary Succession In Style, Or Are These Things Pure Chance?
Style
Chance
Succession
The Internet Is Light At The End Of The Tunnel. I Don't Care If It's Being Used To Peddle Pornography, I Don't Care If It's Being Trivialized In A Thousand Ways. Anything Can Be Trivialized. The Important Point Is That It Is Leveling The Playing Field Of Global Society. It Is Creating De-facto An Entirely New Set Of Political Realities. None Of The Constipated, Oligarchic Structures That Are Resisting This Were Ever Asked. Their Greed Betrayed Them Into Investing In This In The First Place Without Ever Fully Grasping What The Implications Of It Were For Their Larger Agenda.
Reality
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Light
The Logos Is A Voice Heard, In The Head. And The Logos Was The Hand On The Rudder Of Human Civilization For Centuries, Up Until, In Fact, The Collapse Of The Ancient Mystery Religions And The Ascendancy Of Christianity To The Status Of A World Religion.
Voice
Hands
World Religions
To Date, The Enterprise Of Thinking Has Moved Us Radically Away From Understanding Anything.
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Understanding
Enterprise
History Is Rooted In The Future
Historical
Rooted
I See The Psychedelic Experience As A Birthright, And We Can't Have A Free Society Until People Are Free To Explore Their Own Mind.
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Mind
Psychedelic
By Passing Into The Psychedelic Phase, The Space-faring Phase, The Entire Species Is Passing Into Adolescence.
Space
Phases
Psychedelic
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.
Opposites
Feet
Space
I Regard These People Who Are Peddling Angst And Peddling Pessimism And All That Stuff As So 'two Minutes Ago'.
Two
People
Stuff
I Don't Think That Mass Drug Taking Is A Good Idea. But I Think That We Must Have A Deputized Minority, A Shamanic Professional Class If You Will, Whose Job Is To Bring Ideas Out Of The Deep Black Water And Show Them Off To The Rest Of Us And Perform For Our Culture Some Of The Cultural Functions That Shaman Perform In Pre-literate Cultures.
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Thinking
Class
I'm Proposing On One Level That Hallucinogens Be Thought Of As Almost As Social Pheromones That Regulate The Rate At Which Language Develops, And Therefore Regulate Human Culture Generally.
Culture
Pheromones
Levels
The Notion Of Illegal Plants And Animals Is Obnoxious And Ridiculous.
Life
Animal
Ridiculous
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.
Fall
Teaching
Reality
Culture As We're Practicing It Is Causing A Lot Of Pain.
Pain
Culture
Nature Is Not Our Enemy, To Be Raped And Conquered. Nature Is Ourselves, To Be Cherished And Explored.
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Life
Nature
I Connect The Psychedelic Dimension To The Dimension Of Inspiration And Dream.
Dream
Inspiration
Dimensions
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.
Space
Shadow
Groups
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.
Touching
Would Be
Able
We Are Like Coral Animals In A Vast Reef Of Excreted Technological Material That Is Wired For Solid State Data Transfer.
Animal
Data
States
How Do We Fight Back? By Creating Art.
Inspirational
Life
Art
Western Civilization Is A Loaded Gun Pointed At The Head Of This Planet.
Future
Gun
Civilization
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.
Men
Toil
Want
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.
Pain
Animal
Ecosystems
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.
Life
Nature
Fall
Our Self Discoveries Make Us Each A Microcosm Of The Larger Pattern Of History. The Inertia Of Introspection Leads Toward Recollection, For Only Through Memory Is The Past Recaptured And Understood. In The Fact Of Experiencing And Making The Present, We Are All Actors.
Memories
Past
Discovery
Psychedelics Are Actually A Kind Of Miraculous Reality That Can Stand The Test Of Objective Examination.
Reality
Examination
Tests
Beauty Is Self-defined, Perceived And Understood Without Ambiguity. It's The Stuff That Lies Under The Skins Of Our Individual Existences.
Life
Lying
Self
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.
Mean
Animal
Past
We Have Changed. We Are No Longer, As I Said, Bipedal Monkeys. We Are Instead A Kind Of Cybernetic Coral Reef Of Organic Components And Inorganic Technological Components.
Monkeys
Coral Reefs
Kind
I'm Not An Advocate For Everything That Rolls Out Of The Laboratory. I'm An Advocate For Things Sanctioned By Millennia Of Usage.
Usage
Laboratory
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.
Mysterious
Language
Kind
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.
Thinking
Empathy
Joy
A Singularity Is A Place Where The Rules Are Broken. A Miracle Is A Singularity.
Broken
Miracle
Singularity
In A Sense, What's Happening Is That The Unconscious Mind Is A Luxury The Human Species Cannot Afford At This Point In Our Dilemma, And So The Unconscious Mind Is Simply Rising Into Consciousness By Being Hardwired Into This Global Infrastructure.
Luxury
Mind
Rising
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.
Real
Entering
World
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.
Struggle
Two
Cosmos
I Think The World Is Growing More Psychedelic Every Day. I'm Completely Hopeful. . . . This Is How It Should Be. This Is What It's Like When A Species Prepares To Depart For Hyperspace.
Thinking
Hopeful
World
What We Represent Is The Nexus Of Concrescent Novelty That Has Been Moving Itself Together, Complexifying Itself, Folding Itself In Upon Itself For Billions And Billions Of Years. There Is, So Far As We Know, Nothing More Advanced Than What Is Sitting Behind Your Eyes. The Human Neocortex Is The Most Densely Ramified Complexified Structure In The Known Universe.
Moving
Eye
Years
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.
Dream
Community
Looks
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.
Thinking
Giving
Credit
What I Think Is Going On Is That Probably Language Was Entertainment Long Before It Was Meaning. It's A Kind Of Tuneless Singing.
Thinking
Long
Singing
The Imagination Is A Dimension Of Nonlocal Information
Imagination
Information
Dimensions
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.
Dirty
Buddhism
India
Science Does Not Deal With Subjective Experience... Well That's Too Bad Because That Is All Any Of Us Ever Have.
Doe
Deals
Wells
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.
Attitude
Philosophy
Fire
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.
Psychics
Mind
Matter
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.
Running
Organization
Years
Don't Diddle The Dose. Once You Have Done Your Homework, Go For It.
Done
Homework
Dose
Eros Is An Ego-overwhelming, Boundary Dissolving, Breakthrough Creating Force Scripted Into Human Life That Is Pretty Intrinsically Psychedelic.
Creating
Ego
Psychedelic
Who Is To Say What Is Real And What Is Not?'real' Is A Distinction Of A Naïve Mind.
Real
Mind
Psychedelic
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.
Real
Past
Giving
You Could Almost Describe Psychedelics As Enzymes For The Activity Of The Imagination.
Imagination
Enzymes
Activity
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.
Emotional
Long
Culture
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.
Believe
Men
Views
You Will Ride The Tao Toward The Concrescence And Will Be Able To Live In The Light Of Its Anticipation.
Light
Able
Tao
So Part Of What Being Psychedelic Means, I Think, Is Relentlessly Living With Unanswered Questions.
Mean
Thinking
Unanswered Questions
Capitalism Is Not A Human Being. Capitalism Is A Moloch, A God, A God Of Bloody Sacrifice That Sees Human Beings As Ants
Sacrifice
Ants
Bloody
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.
Men
Years
Darkness
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.
Way Forward
People
Simplicity
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.
Flames
Mind Blowing
Looks
Wherever We Press Beyond The Thin Curtain Of Rationalist Culture, We Discover The Incredibly Rich, Erotic, Scary, Promising Presence Of This Intelligent Other, That Beckons Us Out Of History, And Says, You Know: 'the Galaxy Lies Waiting.'
Lying
Intelligent
Waiting
We Love To Congratulate Ourselves On The Forward-leaning Liberal Society That We Live In, And The Truth Is It's A Bunch Of Rattle Snake-handling Fundamentalists That Are Much Closer To Stalin Than They Are To Fdr Or Anybody Else Like That.
Snakes
Truth Is
Bunch
The Social Consequence Of The Psychedelic Experience Is Clear Thinking -which Trickles Down As Clear Speech. Empowered Speech.
Thinking
Speech
Psychedelic
Our Destiny Is To Become What We Think, To Have Our Thoughts Become Our Bodies And Our Bodies Become Our Thoughts.
Destiny
Thinking
Body
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.
Beautiful
Self
Imagination
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.
Ideas
Profound
Mind
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.
Miracle
Looks
Alive
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.
Civilization
Childhood
Passing Away
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.
Giving
Political
Mind
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.
Language
Faster
Evolve
Nothing Is As Boundary Dissolving, Except For Psychedelic Compounds, As Travel. Travel Is Up There.
Psychedelic
Boundaries
Compounds
Cyberspace Is The Human Transition Into A Mathematical Super Space Where We As A Collectivity Become Optionally A Single Point Of View.
Views
Space
Transition
The Race Isn't To The Swift, It's To The Thoughtful.
Thoughtful
Race
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.
Weed
Pursuit Of Happiness
Marijuana
I Think That Understanding Man's Place In Nature Is Going To Require Integration Of The Psychedelic Experience.
Men
Thinking
Understanding
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.
Ego
Mind Blowing
Culture
Liberate Yourself From The Illusion Of Culture. Take Responsibility For What You Think And What You Do.
Responsibility
Thinking
Culture
It Is Now Very Clear That Techniques Of Machine-human Interfacing, Pharmacology Of The Synthetic Variety, All Kinds Of Manipulative Techniques, All Kinds Of Data Storage, Imaging And Retrieval Techniques - All Of This Is Coalescing Toward The Potential Of A Truly Demonic Or Angelic Kind Of Self-imaging Of Our Culture... And The People Who Are On The Demonic Side Are Fully Aware Of This And Hurrying Full-tilt Forward With Their Plans To Capture Everyone As A 100% Believing Consumer Inside Some Kind Of A Beige Furnished Fascism That Won't Even Raise A Ripple.
Believe
Self
Data
The Traditional Manner Of Taking Psilocybin Is To Take A Very Healthy Dose, In The Vicinity Of 15 Mg. On An Empty Stomach In Total Darkness.
Healthy
Darkness
Psilocybin
What The Psychedelic Thing Can Be Seen As, When It's Done With Plants, As A Return To Gaia, An Immersion In The Feminine.
Done
Return
Psychedelic
There Is No Liberation To Compare With Freeing Oneself From The Illusions And Delusions Of The Age In Which One Lives.
Age
Illusion
Compare
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.
Order
Planets
Privileged
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?
Art
Integrity
Mean
History Was An Incredibly Damaging Experience, And Now It's Over . . . In A Sense.
Our Task Is To Create Memes... Launch Your Meme Boldly And See If It Will Replicate.
Tasks
Memes
Replicate
Ultimately, I Think, What The Psychedelic Experience May Be Is A Higher Topological Manifold Of Temporality.
Thinking
May
Psychedelic
I'm Not An Advocate Of Drugs. I'm An Advocate Of Psychedelics.
Drug
What You Call Man Is Time.
Men
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.
Technology
Years
Mind
It's My Belief That One Of The Unconscious Reasons Which Underlies The Odd Attitude Of The Establishment Toward Hallucinogens Is The Fact That They Bring The Mystery To The Surface As An Individual Experience. In Other Words, You Do Not Understand The Psychedelic Experience By Getting A Report From Time Magazine Or Even The Economist. You Only Understand The Psychedelic Experience By Having It.
Attitude
Facts
Hallucinogens
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.
Grateful
Support Systems
Dimensions
I Think What Electronic Culture Permits Is Incredible Diversity, And What The Print-created World Demanded And Created Was Tremendous Suppression Of Diversity.
Thinking
Diversity
Culture
It Is Slowly Becoming Understood That The Modality Of Being Is The Modality Of Mind.
Mind
Becoming
Understood
The Testimony Of Dmt, For Me, Is That There Is A Nearby Dimension, Teeming With Intelligences, That From One Of The More Conservative Perspectives Seems Like An Ecology Of Souls.
Dmt
Perspective
Soul
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.
Taken
Historical
Transition
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.
Moving
Believe
Reflection
The Psychedelic Mind Is A Higher Dimensional Mind, It Is Not Fit For Three Dimensional Space Time.
Space
Mind
Three
I Think That A Lot Of People Are Making A Lot Of Money Spreading Anxiety. Anxiety Sells.
Thinking
People
Anxiety
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.
Loyalty
Children
Years
Language, Thought, Analysis, Art, Dance, Poetry, Mythmaking: These Are The Things That Point The Way Toward The Realm Of The Eschaton.
Inspirational
Life
Art
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.
Mind
Momentum
Furniture
We Have To Claim Anarchy And Realize That Systems Have A Life Of Their Own That Is Anti-humanist. There Is Definitely An Anti-humanist Tendency In All Systems.
Anarchy
Realizing
Claims
Shamanism Is Just Show Business And Philosophy Is Just A Branch Of That Vaudevillian Impulse.
Philosophy
Branches
Shamanism
The Danger Is [in Using Psychedelic Drugs], Just To Put It Out There, Is Madness.
Drug
Psychedelic
Madness
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.
Use
Neurosis
Unhappiness
Reality Is, You Know, The Tip Of An Iceberg Of Irrationality That We've Managed To Drag Ourselves Up Onto For A Few Panting Moments Before We Slip Back Into The Sea Of The Unreal.
Reality
Sea
Moments
Meaning Lies In The Confrontation Of Contradiction - The Coincidencia Apositorum. That’s What We Really Feel, Not These Rational Schemes That Are Constantly Beating Us Over The Head With The “thou Shalts” And “thou Should”, But Rather A Recovery Of The Real Ambiguity Of Being And An Ability To See Ourselves As At Once Powerful And Weak, Noble And Ignoble, Future-oriented, Past-facing.
Powerful
Real
Lying
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.
Song
Animal
Psychics
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.
Beautiful
Moving
Style
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.
Doors
Land
Bed
The History Of Man That You Don't Know Is What Your Unconscious Is Made Out Of.
Men
Made
Unconscious
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.
Attitude
Real
Thinking
Closure Is A Neurotic And Infantile Demand To Make Upon Reality, Other People, Or Language.
Inspirational
Life
Reality
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