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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.

-Terence McKenna

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I Think The Real

Terence McKenna

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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.

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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.

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.

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

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?

I’ll Try To Be Around And About. But If I’m Not, Then You Know That I’m Behind Your Eyelids, And I’ll Meet You There

People Are Concrescences Of Ambiguity.

For All We Know, We Know Nothing.

To Me It Begins And Ends With These Psychedelic Substances. The Synergy Of The Psilocybin In The Hominid Diet Brought Us Out Of The Animal Mind And Into The World Of Articulated Speech And Imagination.

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.

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

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.

The Most Beautiful Things In The Universe Are Inside The Human Mind.

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

The Bigger You Build The Bonfire, The More Darkness Is Revealed.

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.

Drugs Induce Paranoia And Psychosis In People Who Have Never Taken Any.

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.

What Is Needed, Is An Awakening.

The Good News About Psychedelics Is That They Are Incredibly Democratic. Even The Clueless Can Be Swept Along If The Dose Is Sufficient.

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

The Mind Is A Far Bigger Domain Than We Ever Imagined.

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

All Time Is Is How Much Change You Can Pack Into A Second.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Other Night I Searched (the Web) For 'self-transforming Elf Machines.' There Were 36 Hits! It Surprised Me. I Sort Of Use The Search Engine Like An Oracle. I've Used The Phrase For Dmt, 'arabian Hyperspace.' So I Thought Of This, And Then I Searched It, 'arabian Hyperspace,' In Quotes. And It Took Me Right To A Transcript Of The Talk In Which I'd Said The Thing! You Can Find Your Own Mind On The Internet. I'm Very Grateful To The People Who Type Up My Talks And Then Post Them At Their Websites.

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.

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

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.

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

The Imagination Is A Dimension Of Nonlocal Information

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.

What We Call Three Dimensional Space, And What We Call The Imagination Actually Have A Contiguous And Continuous Transformation From One Into The Other, ... And This Is Big News!

Reality Itself Is Not Static. This Is One Of The Things That The Psychedelic Is Trying To Put Across, That The Reality We're Embedded In Is Itself Some Kind Of An Organism And Is Evolving Toward A Conclusion.

Culture Is A Plot Against The Expansion Of Consciousness.

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

Position Of Power

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

Unanswered Questions

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

Impressionism Is Simply Twenty Minutes Into Lsd.

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.

Transformation Of Language Through Psychedelic Drugs Is A Central Factor Of The Evolution Of The Social Matrix Of The Rest Of The Century.

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.

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

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

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

This Is A General Law Of The Universe, Overlooked By Science, That Out Of Complexity Emerges Greater Complexity. We Could Almost Say That The Universe, Nature, Is A Novelty-conserving, Or Complexity-conserving Engine.

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.

Culture As We're Practicing It Is Causing A Lot Of Pain.

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

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

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

The Central Figure In The Archaic Revival Is The Shaman.

Skywalker Is A Direct Translation Of The Word Shaman Out Of The Tungusic, Which Is Where Siberian Shamanism Comes From. So These Heroes That Are Being Instilled In The Heart Of The Culture Are Shamanic Heroes. They Control A Force Which Is Bigger Than Everybody And Holds The Galaxy Together.

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

History Is The In-rushing Toward What The Buddhists Call The Realm Of The Densely Packed, A Transformational Realm Where The Opposites Are Unified.

Culture Is A Simplification And A Lie. It's The Currency By Which Fools Navigate The World. Smart People Get Beyond It.

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.

A Birth Is A Death. Everything You Treasure, And Believe In, And Love, And Relate To Is Destroyed For You When You Leave The Womb. And You Are Launched Into Another Modality, A Modality That Perhaps You Would Not Have Chosen But That You Cannot Do Anything About.

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

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

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 Institutions Will Inevitably Substitute A Rite Or A Ritual For The Authentic, For The Real Mccoy, Because Then Priests Can Control The Pipeline To God, And The Parishioner Can Approach With Offerings. But If Everybody Can Have A Pipeline To Deity, Why Then The Whole Priest Scam Is Put Out Of Business.

Culture Is Another Dimension.

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.

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.

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.

Thinkers Are Not A Welcome Addition To Most Social Situations.

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.

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.

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'.

Well, Certainly The Voynich Manuscript Is The 'limit Text' Of Western Occultism. No One Can Read It. It Is Truly An Occult Book.

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

Our Medium Is Meat, But We Are Made Of Information.

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.

My Voice Speaking Is A Monkey's Mouth Making Little Mouth Noises That Are Carrying Agree-upon Meaning, And It Is Meaning That Matters. Without The Meaning One Has Only Little Mouth Noises

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The Real Justification For Psychedelics Is That They Feed New Data Into Your Model.

Psychedelics Are Actually A Kind Of Miraculous Reality That Can Stand The Test Of Objective Examination.

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

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

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!

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

Information Processing

We Live In Condensations Of Our Imagination

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

Modernity Is A Desert, And We Are Jungle Monkeys. And So New Evolutionary Selective Pressures Are Coming To Bear Upon The Human Situation, New Ideas Are Coming To The Fore. Psilocybin Is A Selective Filter For This. The Wish To Go To Space Is A Selective Filter For This. Just The Wish To Know Your Own Mind Is A Selective Filter For This.

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.

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.

Culture Is Your Operating System.

Operating Systems

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.

And Psychedelics Now, As We De-condition Ourselves From The Post-medieval World, They Are Present To Hand As Tools.

Part Of What Being Involved In The Psychedelic Experience Is About Is Reclaiming Your Own Experience.

Psychedelic Experience

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

The 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 I Like To Talk About, And What I Have Very Little Competition In Terms Of Talking About, Is The Content Of The Psychedelic Experience.

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.

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.

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?

Hallucinogenic Plants Act As Enzymes Which Stimulate Imagination.

We Get To The Point Then With Modern Science Where You Could Almost Say That Modern Science Is The Art Of Describing Those Systems So Crude In Their Structure That They Are Not Subject To Temporal Variables.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I Have A Skeptical And Cranky Side, And I'm Forever Puzzled Why People Believe The, Seeming To Me, Dumb Things That They Choose To Believe.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Half The Time You Think Your Thinking You’re Actually Listening

Who Is To Say What Is Real And What Is Not?'real' Is A Distinction Of A Naïve Mind.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

End Of The World

Why Does Mathematics Describe Nature. That's A Deeper Question Than Most.

By Manipulating Queuing, By Manipulating Expectation, You Can Lead People To A Fundamental Confrontation, Not Only With Themselves, But With The Other.

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.

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

It Is Slowly Becoming Understood That The Modality Of Being Is The Modality Of Mind.

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

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

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

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

I Think Transcending Our Cultures Is Going To Be Extraordinarily Necessary For Our Survival. I Don't Think We Can Carry Our Cultures Through The Keyhole Of The Stretch Of The Next Millennium

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

When Your Time Is Turned Into Money, The Felt Presence Of Immediate Experience Is Analogous To Being Enslaved. I Mean, Let's Be Frank About It, It Is Enslavement.

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.

Shamanism Is Just Show Business And Philosophy Is Just A Branch Of That Vaudevillian Impulse.

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.

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!'

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 Have Wandered Into A State Of Prolonged Neurosis Because Of The Absence Of A Direct Pipeline To The Unconscious And We Have Then Fallen Victim To Priestcraft Of Every Conceivable Sort.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

We Are Part Of A Symbiotic Relationship With Something Which Disguises Itself As An Extra-terrestrial Invasion So As Not To Alarm Us.

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.

The Reason For The Emphasis On Shamanism And On Other Techniques Is, You Will Need Techniques If You Go Into The Deep Water. And They Can Make Your Life Very Simple And Save You From Unnecessary Suffering. Not All Suffering Is Necessary. Maybe No Suffering Is Necessary.

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

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.

The Only Evil That Associates Itself With Mushrooms Is Taking Too Little.

Our World Is In Crisis Because Of The Absence Of Consciousness

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

Ideology Always Paves The Way Toward Atrocity.

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.

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

The Thing That Is So Powerful About The Psychedelics Is That They Perform On Demand, Which Almost In Principle You Cannot Expect Of A Mystical Experience Because That Would Be Essentially Man Ordering God At Man's Whim, Which Is Not How It's Supposed To Work.

Mystical Experiences

In Our Own Time, Through Integrative Sciences Like Ecology And Animal Behavior And Psychology We Have Re-understood What Was Forgotten During The Reduction Centuries Of Modern Science. We've Re-understood That The World Is One Thing, And It's A Living Thing. It's A Thing With An Intent And A Spirit Within It, And This Is The Key Concept.

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

We Are The Damaged Heirs Of A Damaged Cultural Style Which Has Been Practiced Now For About Seven Thousand Years.

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

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.

I Think What's Really Happening Is That A Dialogue Opens Up Between The Ego And These Larger, More Integrated Parts Of The Psyche That Are Normally Hidden From View.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

In Cyberspace Things Are Built Out Of Light.

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.

Our Destiny Is To Become What We Think, To Have Our Thoughts Become Our Bodies And Our Bodies Become Our Thoughts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

History Is Rooted In The Future

Chaos Is Roving Through The System And Able To Undo, At Any Point, The Best Laid Plans.

Best Laid Plans

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.

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