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In Other Words, All These Things You Might Cling To, Catholicism, Democratic Ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, All Of These Things Are Exposed [through Use Of Psychedelics] As Simply Quaint Cultural Artifacts, Painted Masks And Rattles Assembled By People Of Good Intent But Clearly Not Great Grasp Of The Situation.

-Terence McKenna

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In Other Words, All

Terence McKenna

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In Other Words, All These Things You Might Cling To, Catholicism, Democratic Ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, All Of These Things Are Exposed [through Use Of Psychedelics] As Simply Quaint Cultural Artifacts, Painted Masks And Rattles Assembled By People Of Good Intent But Clearly Not Great Grasp Of The Situation.

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Democratic Ideals

More From Terence McKenna

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.

In A Way, This Is A Definition Of Shamanism. A Shaman Is A Person Who By Some Means Has Gotten Out Of Their Own Culture.

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.

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.

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.

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

There Is No Hierarchy Of Elder Knowledge In My Social Region Of Things. There Are Only People Learning And Sharing In A Very Complex Environment.

I Can't Think Of A Society On Earth Where People Don't Take Drugs That Any Of Us Would Want Anything To Do With.

What Happens With Dmt Is You Leap Over All The Barriers In The First Few Seconds. Unlike Mushrooms Where Over Hours And Hours On A High Dose You Might Navigate Yourself To The Center Of The Mandala, Dmt Is Like Being Struck By Metaphysical Lightening.

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.

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

We Tend To Disempower Ourselves. We Tend To Believe That We Don’t Matter. And In The Act Of Taking That Idea To Ourselves We Give Everything Away To Somebody Else, To Something Else.

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.

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

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.

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

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

We Need A Metaphor That Can Contain The Daemon Of The Future That We Have Conjured Into Being.

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.

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

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'.

What Civilization Is, Is 6 Billion People Trying To Make Themselves Happy By Standing On Each Other's Shoulders And Kicking Each Other's Teeth In. It's Not A Pleasant Situation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Art's Task Is To Save The Soul Of Mankind.. Anything Less Is A Dithering While Rome Burns.

Our Culture Difinitely Takes An Egocentric Dominator View. The Fear Of The Psychedelic Experience Is Quite Literally The Fear Of Losing Control. Dominator Types Today Don't Understand That It's Not Important To Maintain Control If You Are Not In Control In The First Place.

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

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.

There Has Been No Progress In 60,000 Years In Reducing The Psychedelic Experience To A Known Quantity. It Is As Terrifying, As Awesome, As Ecstatic, As Irreducible To Us As It Was To Them.

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.

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

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

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.

We Are Living In A State Of Constant Scientific Revolution. There Is Not A Single Area That You Can Name That Is Now Seen As It Was Seen A Hundred Years Ago. Nothing Is Left Of The World View Of One Hundred Years Ago.

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

Within The Context Of The Alchemical Vocabulary, The Psychedelic Experience, As Brought To Us Through Plants Long In The Possession Of Aboriginal People, Appears To Be The Identical Phenomena.

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.

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.

Niagaras Of Beauty Are Flowing By Untapped By Ordinary Consciousness. . . . Would That We Could Send Robots Who Could Film These Psychedelic Realities. . . . The Presence Of So Much Beauty Is An Argument To Me That Truth Cannot Be Far Away.

That's The Core Puzzling Experience, When You Meet The Other Organized As A Speaking Mind.

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

I'm Not An Abuser. It Takes Me A Long Time To Assimilate Each Experience. And I Never Have Lost My Respect For It. I Mean I Really Feel Dread. It Is One Of The Emotions I Always Feel As I Approach It, Because I Have No Faith That My Sails Won't Be Ripped This Time.

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.

History Is Just This Froth Of Artifact Production That Has Appeared In The Last Ten To Fifteen Thousand Years. It Spread Across The Planet Very Quickly. But That Mind In Man Just Goes Back And Back Into The Darkness.

The Human Brain Is The God Of Technological Innovation.

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

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.

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

Spiritual Power

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.

Terror Of The Future Can Be Put Out To Pasture With Psychedelic Shamanism.

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

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

Obviously, It's Some Kind Of Freely Commanded Modality In The Psyche With Which We Can Have A Relationship If We Will But Evolve A Control Language And A Dialogue. And It Remains Mysterious.

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

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.

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

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.

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

What Was Created By The Era Of The Proper Gentleman Was Excellent Table Manners And Genocide Over Most Of The Surface Of The Planet.

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?

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

The Psychedelics Are This Immense Tool For The Inspection Of Our Own Nature.

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.

And Science, When It Examines Psychedelics, As It Will And Must, Is Going To Discover A Revolution, I Believe, That Will Put All The Previous Revolutions In Perspective.

Only Psychos And Shamans Create Their Own Reality

There Is No Contradiction Between Technology And Spirit. There Is No Contradiction Between The Search For Intellectual Integration And Understanding And The Psychedelic Experience. There Is No Contradiction Between Ultra-advanced Hyperspacial Cyber Culture And Paleolithic Archaic Culture. We Have Come To The End Of Our Sojourn In Matter. We Have Come To The End Of Our Separateness.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

And So, These Are The Things, The Exploration Of Which, The Singing About Of Which, Makes Us Human Beings. The Exploration Of The Universe Of The Unseen Is The Business Of Human Beings.

What Is Needed Is A Spirit Of Boundary Dissolution, Between Individuals, Between Classes, Sexual Orientations, Rich And Poor, Man And Woman, Intellectual And Feeling Toned Types. If This Can Happen, Then We Will Make A New World. And If This Doesn't Happen, Nature Is Fairly Pitiless And Has A Place For Us In The Shale Of This Planet, Where So Many Have Preceded Us.

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 Cost Of Sanity In This Society, Is A Certain Level Of Alienation

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

I Think The Entire Message Of The Psychedelic Experience, Which Is Basically The Sine Qua Non Of The Rebirth Of Alchemical Understanding, The Very Basis Of That Understanding Is That Nature Seeks To Communicate.

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

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 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.

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

History Is Rooted In The Future

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

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.

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.

The Surface Of Things Is Not Where Attention Should Rest.

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

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

To My Mind This Is What Shamanic Training Must Really Be, Is Mnemonic Training. If You Want To Bring The Stuff Back You Have To Train Yourself To Bring It Back.

Life Lived In The Absence Of The Psychedelic Experience Upon Which Primordial Shamanism Is Based Is Life Trivialized, Life Denied, Life Enslaved To The Ego.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

At Still Higher Doses Psilocybin Triggers This Activity In The Language-forming Capacity Of The Brain That Manifests As Song And Vision. Psilocybin May Have Synergized The Emergence Of Higher Forms Of Psychic Organization Out Of Primitive Protohuman Animals. It Can Be Seen As A Kind Of Evolutionary Enzyme, Or Evolutionary Catalyst.

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.

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 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.

Our World Is Endangered By The Absence Of Good Ideas

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.

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.

We Now Know Enough To Fantasize Realistically About What The Alien Would Be Like, And I Think That This Then Sets Up Polarities In The Collective Psyche That Previously We Have Only Seen At The Level Of The Individual.

I Believe That The Place To Search For Extraterrestrials Is In The Psychic Dimension.

Psychedelics Are Not Flashlights Into The Chaos Of The Freudian Unconscious, They Are Tools For Mathematically Unpacking Your Mind Into A Higher Dimensional Space. In The Newtonian And Print Created Space That We Are Walking Around In You, Are Like A Self Extracting Archive, That Hasn't Self Extracted Itself Yet.

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

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

We Are Somehow The Children Of The Planet, We Are Somehow Its Finest Hour; We Bind Time, We Bind The Past, We Anticipate The Future - We Are Going Hyper-spatial; We Are Claiming A Whole New Dimension For Biology That It Never Claimed Before. We Are Actually Becoming A Fourth-dimensional Kind Of Creature. Our Future Is Somehow With Us, As We Seem To Be Able To Move Through Metamorphosis Into Our Own Imaginations - A Super Civilization Spread Throughout Space And Time. Our Future Is A Mystery, Our Destiny Is To Live In The Imagination.

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

The World Is Mental In Some Way That We Do Not Yet Understand, But That Which We're Edging Toward Understanding. And The World Is Made Of Language. I Can't Say That Enough. Whenever We Get Into These Discussions About Reality, Or Effects In Space And Time, We Are Operating Outside This Assumption That The World Is Made Of Language.

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.

What People Notice About [when They Are On] Lsd Is Either What's Right Or Wrong With Themselves Or How Freaky The World Is.

The Imagination Is A Dimension Of Nonlocal Information

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

What We Call Imagination Is Actually The Universal Library Of What's Real. You Couldn’t Imagine It If It Weren’t Real Somewhere, Sometime.

This Rising Global Humanism Is, In Fact, The Rising Into Consciousness Of A Tribal God Similar To The Kind Of Tribal God That Functioned In These Pre-hellenic Societies.

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.

This Is In Fact What Shamanism Is All About, What The End Of History Is All About, What Psychedelic Drugs Are All About, We Are Edge-walking On An Ontological Transformation Of What It Means To Be Human.

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

Support Systems

The 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.

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

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.

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

At The Interface Of The Say-able And The Unsay-able Is The Novel, The New, The Never Before Seen, Said Or Done. And That's What I Think It's Important To Try And Bring Out, Ideas. Because I Think We Are The Animals That Bring Back Ideas.

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.

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

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

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.

Part Of What The Psychedelic Point Of View Represents Is Living A Certain Portion Of Your Life Without Answers. Just Accepting That Certain Dilemmas Will Never Resolve Themselves Into Some Kind Of A Complete Answer. That's Why Psychedelics Are So Different From Any System Being Sold, From One Of The Great Elder Systems Like Christianity, To The Latest Cult Out Of Los Angeles.

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.

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.

Because I Believe Psychedelics Are A Kind Of Higher Dimensional Sectioning Of Reality, I Think They Give The Kind Of Stereoscopic Vision Necessary To Hold The Entire Hologram Of What's Happening In Your Mind. The Old Paradigm Is Gone.

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.

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

Human Beings Are Co-partners With Deity In The Project Of Being. This Is The Basis Of All Magic.

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

You Have To Take Seriously The Notion That Understanding The Universe Is Your Responsibility, Because The Only Understanding Of The Universe That Will Be Useful To You Is Your Own Understanding.

The Pro-psychedelic Plant Position Is Clearly An Antidrugs Position. Drug Dependencies Are The Result Of Habitual, Unexamined, And Obsessive Behavior; These Are Precisely The Tendencies In Our Psychological Makup That The Psychedelics Mitigate. The Plant Hallucinogens Dissolve Habits And Hold Motivations Up To Inspection By A Wider, Less Egocentric, And More Grounded Point Of View Within The Individual.

We Are Like Coral Animals Embedded In A Technological Reef Of Extruded Psychic Objects...all Our Tool-making Implies Our Belief In An Ultimate Tool.

Astonishment Is The Proper Response To Reality.

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.

Without An Understanding And A Familiarity Of The Psychedelic Experience You Should Be Sued For Fraud If You're Practicing Psychotherapy.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

All Of You Who Have Been Through High Dose Psychedelic Experiences Know That It's Very Hard To Carry Stupid Baggage Through That Keyhole. In Fact You're Lucky If You Just Get Your Soul And Yourselves Through And Intact.

No More Do We Create Cultural Artifacts That Are Simply Our Furniture, But Now It's Our Thoughts, Our Values, Are Embodied In This [digital] Stuff.

One Reaches Through To The Continents And Oceans Of The Imagination, Worlds Able To Sustain Anyone Who Will But Play, And Then Lets The Play Deepen And Deepen Until It Is A Reality That Few Would Even Dare To Entertain...the Human Imagination Is The Holographic Organ Of The Human Body, And We Don't 'imagine' Anything. We Simply See Things So Far Away That There Is No Possibility Of Validating Or Invalidating Their Existence.

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.

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

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.

I Think The Cybernetic Matrix Is A Tremendous Tool For Feminizing, And Radicalizing, And Psychedelicizing The Social Matrix. I See Computers As Entirely Feminine.

The Earth Itself Is Stepping In To Aid In The Agenda Of Cultural Transformation. There Are Too Many Doorways In Nature That Lead To Heaven, There Are Too Many Paths To The Mystery For Any Institution Or Social Policy To Be Able To Thwart The Intent Of The Human Species To Evolve.

Shamanism Is Not Some Obscure Concern Of Cultural Anthropologists. Shamanism Is How Religion Was Practiced For Its First Million Years. Up Until About 12,000 Years Ago There Was No Other Form Of Religion On This Planet. That Was How People Attained Some Kind Of Access To The Sacred.

The 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.

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

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

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.'

Nature And The Imagination Seem To Be The Precursors To Involvement In The Psychedelic Experience.

And The Whole Schtick Of The Psychedelic Experience, I Think, Is Reclaim Immediate Experience, Realize That You Out Vote All Parliaments, Police Forces, And Major Newspapers On The Planet Because, Who Knows, They May Be Illusions.

Apparently, In The Avesta Classical Period No One Would Have Dreamed Of Having A Spiritual Experience Without Resort To Drugs.

The Psychedelic Issue Is A Civil Rights And Civil Liberties Issue. It Is An Issue Concerned With The Most Basic Of Human Freedoms: Religious Practice And The Privacy Of The Individual Mind.

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

How Do We Fight Back? By Creating Art.

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.

A History-stopping Archetype Is Being Released Into The Skies Of This Planet, And If We Are Not Careful It Will Halt All Intellectual Inquiry In The Same Way That The Christos Archetype Halted Intellectual Inquiry In The Hellenistic Age.

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

Think About This For A Moment, We Grow So Inured To These Religious Forms, Think About The Notion Of Instituting At The Center Of Your Religion A Rite Where You Eat Your God Is Probably A Memory Of A Relationship To Some Kind Of A Psychedelic Experience Of Some Sort.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The Thing That Seemed To Me So Important About The Psychedelic Experience Was That It Happened To Me. I Wasn't Reading John Chrysostom Or Meister Eckhart. And So I Assumed That I Am A Very Ordinary Person, Therefore, If It Happened To Me It Could Happen To Anyone.

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

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

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