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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.

-Terence McKenna

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In A Sense, What's

Terence McKenna

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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.

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What Foods Are, Essentially, Are Idea-neutral Drugs.

What We Really Are Is A Community Of Mind, Knitted Together By Codes And Symbols, Intuitions, Aspirations, Histories, Hopes - The Invisible World Of The Human Experience Is Far More Real To Us Than The Visible World, Which Is Little More Than A Kind Of Stage Or Screen On Which We Move.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

The Psychedelic Universe, Whatever It Is, Is The Major Datum Of Experience. It's Larger Than This Planet. Nobody Knows How Large It Is. The Further In You Go The Bigger It Gets. We Don't Know What To Make Of Something Like That. It's The Reverse Of Our Expectations.

National Governments Are Under Paid, Under Staffed, And Under Talented.

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.

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

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

Television Is By Nature The Dominator Drug Par Excellence. Control Of Content, Uniformity Of Content, Repeatability Of Content Make It Inevitably A Tool Of Coersion, Brainwashing, And Manipulation.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Television Is, To My Mind, The Most Insidious Drug That The 20th Century Has Had To Deal With.

For All We Know, We Know Nothing.

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.

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

People Have A Right To Get Stoned. They Have A Right To Think And Explore Their Own Minds. This Is As Intimate A Part Of Their Being As Their Sexuality. Any Culture Which Mitigates That Is Clearly Afraid Of A Full And Fair And Open Dialogue About What Reality Is And What Real Human Values Ought To Be.

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

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.

Alchemy Is Really The Secret Tradition Of The Redemption Of Spirit From Matter.

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.'

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

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

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.

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 No Knowledge Without Risk Taking.

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

We Can't Sell Short The Spiritual Power Of Cannabis, Especially When Eaten.

Spiritual Power

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

The Gaian Mind Is What Were Calling The Psychedelic Experience. Its An Experience Of The Living Fact Of The Entelechy Of The Planet - And Without That Experience We Wander In A Desert Of Bogus Ideologies. But With That Experience The Compass Of The Self Can Be Set.

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.

Just Because You Have A Nut Theory It Doesn't Mean That You Agree With Other Nut Theories. In Fact, It Often Makes You Very Hostile To Them. After All, There's A Limited Pool There That We're All After.

Our Ability To Destroy Ourselves Is The Mirror Image Of Our Ability To Save Ourselves.

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

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

If You're Truly Psychedelic The Difference Between Living And Dying Is Quite Immaterial. No Pun Intended.

Our World Is In Crisis Because Of The Absence Of Consciousness

The Central Figure In The Archaic Revival Is The Shaman.

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.

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.

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

Best Laid Plans

This Is The Nature Of Going Forward Into Being: A Series Of Self-transforming Ascents Of Level.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

What You Call Man Is Time.

Psilocybin, Tryptamine, Is In My Opinion The Means To Eliminating The Future By Becoming Cognizant Of The Architecture Of Eternity, Which Is Modulating Time And Causing History, Essentially.

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

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!

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.

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

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

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

Ayahuasca, Unlike Mushrooms And All These Other Things Is Only As Good As The Person Who Made It. . . . The Ayahuasca Is A Combinatory Drug, And So It Brings The Human Interaction And The Lore Of It Into A Much More Central Position.

Our World Is Endangered By The Absence Of Good Ideas

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.

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

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.

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

The 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?

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.

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

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

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.

Culture Is A Plot Against The Expansion Of Consciousness.

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

The Long Night Of Human History Is Drawing At Last To Its Conclusion.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Television, While Chemically Non-invasive, Nevertheless Is Every Bit As Addicting And Physiologically Damaging As Any Other Drug.

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.

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.

The World Is Not Made Of Anti-mu Mesons, Quarks, And Photons, And Electromagnetic Fields. Reality Is Made Of Words.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Notion Of Illegal Plants And Animals Is Obnoxious And Ridiculous.

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 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.

The Danger Is [in Using Psychedelic Drugs], Just To Put It Out There, Is Madness.

The Way I Think Of The Psychedelics Is, They Are Catalysts To The Imagination.

Clearly, What Is Happening, I Think, Is There Is A Kind Of Global Emergence Of A New Mental Order.

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.

It Is Curious That What These Psychedelics Do, On A Scale Of A Community, Is They Release New Ideas. . . . And That This Is How Culture Moves Forward. That Culture Is A Phenomenon Dependent On The Generation Of Ideas, Plans, Notions, Connections. So This Is Precisely What These Compounds Are Doing.

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.

In The Way That The 15th Century Discovered The New World, The 20th Century Discovered The Parallel Continuum.

Our Assumptions Are The Edges Of Our Worlds.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

These Religions That Are So Freighted With Their Own Pomposity Are No Better Than Inspired Guesses.

The Real Secret Of Magic Is That The World Is Made Of Words, And That If You Know The Words That The World Is Made Of You Can Make Of It Whatever You Wish.

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

It Was The Fall Into History That Enslaved Us To The Labor Cycle, To The Agricultural Cycle. And Notice How Fiendish It Is.

[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.

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

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.

This Is A Very Central Part Of The Psychedelic Attitude Toward The World, To Entertain All Possibilities But To Never Commit To Belief. Belief Always Being Seen As A Kind Of Trap, Because If You Belief Something You Are Forever Precluded From Believing Its Opposite.

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.

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

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

Since The Very Beginning Of Culture, What We Seem To Be Are Animals Which Take In Raw Material And Excrete It Imprinted With Ideas.

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

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

The Race Isn't To The Swift, It's To The Thoughtful.

It's The Impossible Become Possible And Yet Remaining Impossible.

Impossible Becomes Possible

A Great Turning Point Is In The Offing. The World Is Changing. It's Changed Before, But Not For A Long Time In Our Lives, Not Since Before Our Lives. But Now It's Changing, And There Are Many Many Possibilities.

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.

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.'

You Are An Explorer, And You Represent Our Species, And The Greatest Good You Can Do Is To Bring Back A New Idea, Because Our World Is Endangered By The Absence Of Good Ideas. Our World Is In Crisis Because Of The Absence Of Consciousness.

One Has Attained A Very Fortunate Incarnation, I Think, To Be In A Culture, In A Place, In A Time When Psychedelic Knowledge Is Available.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Our Theories Are The Weakest Part Of What We Say. What We're Working From Is The Fact Of An Experience Which We Need To Make Sense Of.

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.

The State In The Matter Of Drugs Should Not, Any More Than In The Matter Of Sex, Act As The Secret Agent For The Agenda Of The Church.

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.

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

What I'm Talking About Is Actually Is The Mystery Of Being As Existential Fact. That There Is Something That Haunts This World That Can Take Apart And Reduce Every Single One Of Us To A Mixture Of Terror And Ecstasy, Fear And Trembling. It Is Not An Idea, That's The Primary Thing To Bear In Mind. It's An Experience.

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

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

Psychedelic Experience

People Are Concrescences Of Ambiguity.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Technique To Me Is A Kind Of A ... I'm Reluctant To Talk About It Because It Seems So Obvious To Me What Good Technique Is. I Mean, You Sit Down, You Shut Up, And You Pay Attention Is Basically The Good Technique. And Then The Footnotes Add; On An Empty Stomach, In A Dark Room, Feeling Comfortable.

I Often Like To Think That Our Map Of The World Is Wrong, That Where We Have Centered Physics, We Should Actually Place Literature As The Central Metaphor That We Want To Work Out From. Because I Think Literature Occupies The Same Relationship To Life That Life Occupies To Death. A Book Is Life With One Dimension Pulled Out Of It. And Life Is Something That Lacks A Dimension Which Death Will Give It. I Imagine Death To Be A Kind Of Release Into The Imagination In The Sense That For Characters In A Book, What We Experience Is An Unimaginable Dimension Of Freedom.

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

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

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.

It Is The People Who Are 'far Out' Who Are Gaining Advantage In The Evolutionary Jostling For Efficacious Strategies.

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.

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

The Engineers Of The Future Will Be Poets.

Nature Is Not Our Enemy, To Be Raped And Conquered. Nature Is Ourselves, To Be Cherished And Explored. Shamanism Has Always Known This, And Shamanism Has Always, In Its Most Authentic Expressions, Taught That The Path Required Allies. These Allies Are The Hallucinogenic Plants And The Mysterious Teaching Entities, Luminous And Transcendental, That Reside In That Nearby Dimension Of Ecstatic Beauty And Understanding That We Have Denied Until It Is Now Nearly Too Late.

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

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

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.

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

Science Is The Special Province Of The Ego. And Magic And Art Are The Special Province Of Something Else. I Could Name It, But I Won't. It Prefers To Be Unnamed

The Surface Of Things Is Not Where Attention Should Rest.

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

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

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.

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

History Is The Siren Song Of The Soul.

We've Painted Ourselves Into A Corner Where The Only Choice Is Real Nightmare - Triage, Epidemic Disease, Famine, Fascism, The Collapse Of Human Rights - Or A Leap To An Entirely Different Level. We've Taken Business-as-usual Off The Menu. Now Only The Extreme Possibilities Loom.

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

The Mystery Is In The Body And The Way The Body Works Itself Into Nature.

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

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

The Imagination Is A Dimension Of Nonlocal Information

Shamanism Is Essentially A Living Tradition Of Alchemy That Is Not Seeking The Stone But Has Found The Stone.

The Psychedelic Mind Is A Higher Dimensional Mind, It Is Not Fit For Three Dimensional Space Time.

...situations Evolve As Matter Responds To The Conditioning Of Time And Space...if You Know What Is Contained In Time From Its Beginning To Its End You Are Somehow No Longer In Time. Even Though You Still Have A Body And Still Eat And Do What You Do, You Have Discovered Something That Liberated You Into A Satisfying All-at-oneness.

Ideologies Are Cultural Memes. They Are The Most Confining Of The Cultural Memes. That's Where Culture Gets Real Ugly. It Is When You Rub Up Against Its Ideologies.

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

You Are The Cutting Edge Of A Thirteen Billion Year Old Process Of Defining Novelty. Your Acts Matter. Your Thoughts Matter. Your Purpose? To Add To The Complexity. Your Enemy? Disorder, Entropy, Stupidity, And Tastelessness.

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

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

Astonishment Is The Proper Response To Reality.

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Francis Ford Coppola

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