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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.'

-Terence McKenna

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If You Sit Down

Terence McKenna

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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.'

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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.

Nature Is Not Our Enemy, To Be Raped And Conquered. Nature Is Ourselves, To Be Cherished And Explored.

The Main Thing To Understand Is That We Are Imprisoned In Some Kind Of Work Of Art.

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

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.

Eros Is An Ego-overwhelming, Boundary Dissolving, Breakthrough Creating Force Scripted Into Human Life That Is Pretty Intrinsically Psychedelic.

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.

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

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?

Impressionism Is Simply Twenty Minutes Into Lsd.

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

The Western Mind, Because Of It's Unique History, Is The Most Sensitive Mind To The Impact Of Psychedelics.

Cyberspace Is The Human Transition Into A Mathematical Super Space Where We As A Collectivity Become Optionally A Single Point Of View.

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.

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

It Is Not Easy To Measure The Ocean, But We Can Be Measured By It, Confront It, And Be In It.

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

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.

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!

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.

No One Knows Enough To Worry.

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.

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

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

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

History Is A Series Of Approximations Of The Final Singularity.

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

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.

Tribalism Is A Social Form Which Can Exist At Any Level Of Technology. It's A Complete Illusion To Associate It With Low Levels Of Technology. It Is Probably, In Fact, A Form Of Social Organization Second Only To The Family In Its Ability To Endure.

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

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.

I'm Not An Advocate For Everything That Rolls Out Of The Laboratory. I'm An Advocate For Things Sanctioned By Millennia Of Usage.

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.

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

The Drug May Not Be Toxic, But You May Be Self-toxic, And You May Discover This In The Drug Experience.

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.

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.

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

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

Only Psychos And Shamans Create Their Own Reality

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

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.

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

Culture Is A Perversion. It Fetishizes Objects, Creates Consumer Mania, It Preaches Endless Forms Of False Happiness, Endless Forms Of False Understanding In The Form Of Squirrelly Religions And Silly Cults. It Invites People To Diminish Themselves And Dehumanize Themselves By Behaving Like Machines.

Animals Are Something Invented By Plants To Move Seeds Around. An Extremely Yang Solution To A Peculiar Problem Which They Faced.

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

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

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

Our Task Is To Create Memes... Launch Your Meme Boldly And See If It Will Replicate.

Astonishment Is The Proper Response To Reality.

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

Pursuit Of Happiness

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

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

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.

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

The Same Organizational Principles Which Called Us Forth Into Self-reflection Have Called Forth Self-reflection Out Of The Planet Itself. And The Problem Then Is For Us To Suspect This, Act On Our Suspicion, And Be Good Detectives, And Track Down The Spirit In Its Lair. And This Is What Shamans Are Doing. They Are Hunters Of Spirit.

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.

It's Clearly A Crisis Of Two Things: Of Consciousness And Conditioning. We Have The Technological Power, The Engineering Skills To Save Our Planet, To Cure Disease, To Feed The Hungry, To End War; But We Lack The Intellectual Vision, The Ability To Change Our Minds. We Must Decondition Ourselves From 10,000 Years Of Bad Behavior. And, It's Not Easy.

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.

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.

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 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.

Only Responsible Human Beings Can Exist In An Anarchistic Society.

Now, Through The Catalytic Interaction With Technology, The Human Species Is Getting Set To Redefine Itself.

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

It Is The Imagination That Argues For The Divine Spark Within Human Beings. It Is Literally A Decent Of The World's Soul Into All Of Us.

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.

Thinkers Are Not A Welcome Addition To Most Social Situations.

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

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

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

Culture Is Your Operating System.

Operating Systems

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

The Planet Has A Kind Of Intelligence, It Can Actually Open A Channel Of Communication With An Individual Human Being. The Message That Nature Sends Is, Transform Your Language Through A Synergy Between Electronic Culture And The Psychedelic Imagination, A Synergy Between Dance And Idea, A Synergy Between Understanding And Intuition, And Dissolve The Boundaries That Your Culture Has Sanctioned Between You, To Become Part Of This Gaian Supermind

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.

I Think That What These Psychedelics Do, Is They Actually Do Connect You To The Whole Circle. You Stand Outside Of The Moment From Which You Embarked On Your Psychedelic Experience, And You See Eternity Like A Vast Landscape Deployed In Front Of You. So What I Think Psychedelics Are Is They're About Time, And They Somehow Make All Time Co-present.

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

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

So The Conclusion That I Reach, Visa Vie The Individual And Civilization, Is This: Culture Is Not Our Friend. Culture Is Not Your Friend. It's Not My Friend. It's A Very Uncomfortable Set Of Accommodations That Have Been Hammered Out Over Time For The Convenience Of Institutions.

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.

The Message Of Psychedelics Is That Culture Can Be Re-engineered As A Set Of Emotional And Spiritual Values Rather Than Products. This Is Terrifying News.

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

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

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.

I Really Think There Is A Very Large Distinction Between Synthetic And Naturally Occurring Drugs. ... I Think That These Plants 'take People' As Much As People Take The Plants. ... When You Take One Of These Ancient, Ancient Hallucinogens You Are Locking In To The Morphogenetic Fields Of All The People Who Ever Took It.

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

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

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

All Psychedelic Explorers Should Be Aware Of The Concept Of What Is Called A Cognitive Hallucination. The Is A Much More Insidious Phenomenon. This Is, Quite Simply, An Out-and-out Delusion.

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

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

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.

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.

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 Mind Is The Cutting Edge Of The Evolving Event System.

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.

History Is The Siren Song Of The Soul.

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

The Human Brain Is The God Of Technological Innovation.

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.

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.

The Real Nature Of Our Predicament Is Completely Opaque To Us.

Ecstasy Is Not Simply Joy. Ecstasy Is An Emotion Of Great Complexity That Hovers Almost On The Edge Of Terror Sometimes.

Flying Saucers Are Nothing More Than Miracles, And They Occur Essentially To Bedevil Science.

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.

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

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

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.

It's Our Machines And Our Technologies That Are Now The Major Evolutionary Forces Acting Upon Us. It's Not Our Political Systems.

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

The Terror Of Drugs Is A Terror Of Giving Up Control. This Is What People Are Most Alarmed About By Psychedelics, Is The Giving Up Control.

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.

Ideology Always Paves The Way Toward Atrocity.

In The Silence, In The Darkness, Swept Away By These Alien Alkaloids And The Plant-mind Behind Them, You Find Out A Truth That Can Barely Be Told. And Most Of It Can't Be Told.

We Must Look To The Native Healers All Over The World And Study Their Methods... Their Methods Are Chemical And Personal. It's A Combination Of Care, Attention, Intention And Chemistry That Allows Consciousness To Be Made Malleable And Recast In Other Forms.

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.

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

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.

The Major Adventure Is To Claim Your Authentic, True Being, Which Is Not Culturally Given To You. The Culture Will Not Explain To You How To Be A Real Human Being. It Will Tell You How To Be Banker, Politician, Indian Chief, Masseuses, Actress, Whatever, But It Will Not Give You True Being.

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

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.

It Seems To Me Far More Likely That An Advanced Civilization Would Communicate Inter Dimensionally And Telepathically.

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.

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

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.

Hallucinogenic Plants Act As Enzymes Which Stimulate Imagination.

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

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!'

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

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

Ultimate Novelty Must Be A Situation Where All Boundaries Are Dissolved.

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.

Nobody Is Smarter Than You Are. And What If They Are? What Good Is Their Understanding Doing You?

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

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

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

It 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.

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

The Imagination Is A Dimension Of Nonlocal Information

Ninety Percent Of The Difficulty In Your Intellectual Life Would Never Have Happened If You Just Had Better Taste.

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.

You Know What, I'm Stoned, And I'm Proud.

The Purpose Of Life Is To Familiarize Oneself With This After-death Body So That The Act Of Dying Will Not Create Confusion In The Psyche.

Standing Outside The Cultural Hysteria The Trend Is Fairly Clear. It Is A Trend Toward Temporal Compression And The Emergence Of Ambiguity.

If We Could Feel What We Are Doing To The Earth, We Would Stop Immediately.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

I Think It's The Sheer Power Of The Hallucinogens That Puts People Off. You Either Love Them Or You Hate Them, And That's Because They Dissolve World Views. And If You Like The Experience Of Having Your Entire Ontological Structure Disappear Out From Under You, If You Think That's A Thrill, You'll Probably Love Psychedelics.

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

I'm Not An Advocate Of Drugs. I'm An Advocate Of Psychedelics.

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.

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

There Is No Dualism In The World Of Light. The Conventions Of Relativity Say That Time Slows Down As One Approaches The Speed Of Light, But If One Tries To Imagine The Point Of View Of A Thing Made Of Light, One Must Realize That What Is Never Mentioned Is That If One Moves At The Speed Of Light There Is No Time Whatsoever... One Exists In Eternity, One Has Become Eternal... One Is Then Apart From The Moving Image; One Exists In The Completion Of Eternity.

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.

The Reason I Am So Passionately Committed To The Psychedelic Thing Is Because I See It As Radical, And If This Is Not The Moment For Radical Solutions, What Is?

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.

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.

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

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.

How Do We Fight Back? By Creating Art.

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

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.

If The World Is Made Of Language, Then You Can Hack It In The Sense That You Can Hack Code.

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

To 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

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.

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

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

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

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.

For All We Know, We Know Nothing.

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

Information Processing

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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E. F. Schumacher

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