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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.

-Terence McKenna

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In The Silence, In

Terence McKenna

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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.

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I Think The Real Test Of Psychedelics Is What You Do With Them When You're Not On Them, What Kind Of Culture You Build, What Kind Of Art, What Kind Of Technologies... What's Lacking In The Western Mind Is The Sense Of Connectivity And Relatedness To The Rest Of Life, The Atmosphere, The Ecosystem, The Past, Our Children's Future. If We Were Feeling Those Things We Would Not Be Practicing Culture As We Are.

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

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.

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.

Marcel Eliade Took The Position That Hallucinogenic Shamanism Was Decadent, And Gordon Wasson, Very Rightly I Believe, Contravened This View And Held That Actually It Was Very Probably The Presence Of The Hallucinogenic Drug Experience In The Life Of Early Man That Lay The Very Basis For The Idea Of The Spirit.

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

Part Of What 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.

Cultures Are Virtual Realities Made Of Language.

Time Is A Topological Manifold. It Is A Surface. Events Flow Across It Like Water Over Land And Like Water Flowing Over Land, When The Land Is Flat, The Water Becomes Reflective And Moves Slowly. When The Landscape Becomes Disrupted, The Water Moves Faster And Chaotic Attractors Appear And New Kinds Of Activity Emerge And Out Of That New Activity, There Comes The New States That Define The Future.

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

The Truth Doesn't Need Your Cooperation To Exist. All Forms Of Cult, All Forms Of Hype, All Forms Of Delusion Do Require Your Participation In Order To Exist. I've Looked Into Marginal Areas Of Human Experience -historical And Otherwise- With A Rational Mind, And What I've Found Is That Doorways Into The Miraculous Are Far Fewer Than The Publicists Of The New Age Would Have Us Believe. On The Other Hand, They Are Not As Rare As The Proponents Of Radical Reductionism And Materialism Would Have Us Believe. There Are Doorways Out Of The Mundane.

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.

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.

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.

We Have Outlived This Embryo, This Human Cradle, And Now It's Time To Be Up And About The Great Business Of Becoming Citizens Of The Galaxy And At Home With Our Own Heart.

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.

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

It Is True That When You Smoke Dmt, For Example, At A Sufficiently High And Prepared Dose, You Get Elves, Everybody Does. All You Need Do, Is Inhale Deeply Three Times, And You Know... You Want Contact? You Want Elves? You Want Alien Contact? You'll Have That!

The Real Truth Is Splintered And Spread Throughout Time.

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

I Regard These People Who Are Peddling Angst And Peddling Pessimism And All That Stuff As So 'two Minutes Ago'.

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.

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

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

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

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

What's Popularly Known As The Evolution Of Consciousness, In Other Words That The Expansion Of Cognitive Repertoire That Occurs In Human Beings, Which Has Always Been A Great Puzzle To Evolutionary Theory, I Believe, Occurred In The Presence Of A Kind Of Catalyst For The Human Imagination.

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

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.

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.

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.

Behind Us: The Unknown. Before Us: The Secret.

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

Our Culture Takes Us Out Of The Body And Sells Our Loyalty Into Political Systems, Into Religions, Into Inanimate Objects And Machines, Collections, So Forth And So On. The Felt Experience Of The Body Is What The Psychedelics Are Handing Back To Us.

Inanimate Objects

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

Closure Is A Neurotic And Infantile Demand To Make Upon Reality, Other People, Or Language.

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.

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.

We Love To Congratulate Ourselves On The Forward-leaning Liberal Society That We Live In, And The Truth Is It's A Bunch Of Rattle Snake-handling Fundamentalists That Are Much Closer To Stalin Than They Are To Fdr Or Anybody Else Like That.

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.

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

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.

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

Knowledge, Or Verbal Facility, Is No Proof That You Know What You're Talking About.

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.

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.

The Overriding Problems Are Brought On By The Existence Of The Ego, A Maladaptive Behavioral Complex In The Psyche That Gets Going Like A Tumor. If It's Not Treated - If There's Not Pharmacological Intervention - It Becomes The Dominant Constellation Of The Personality.

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.

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 Party Impulse Is A Very Subversive Impulse. I Mean, You Know, A Lot Of Artists Have Too Much Integrity To Sell Their Art As A Brand; But Who Has So Much Integrity That They Would Turn Down A Party?

Safety Is Really A Concern Of Mine, And What I've Been Telling People Recently Is That Until There's Animal And Human Data On A Drug It Should Probably Be Looked At Very Carefully.

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.

Everything Will Come True In Cyberspace. That's The Whole Idea. What Cyberspace Is, On One Level, It's Simply The Human Imagination Vivified, Hardwired.

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

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.

When We Really Understand Time Travel We May Find Out It's As Common As Dirt And Has Been Going On All Around Us Is All Kinds Of Physical Processes.

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

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

We Are Consciousness. We May Not Always Be Monkeys.

The Thing Is That It Is Incredibly Frustrating To Anyone Who Would Control It, Because You Can't Predict The Impact Of Any Technology Before You Put It In Place.

Inevitably Out Of The Psychedelic Experience Emerges Not Despair, Not Self-indulgence, But Wild-eyed Idealism, That's The Inevitable Product Of Any Psychedelically Driven Social Process.

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

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.

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.

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.

History Is A Series Of Approximations Of The Final Singularity.

Human History Is A Gaian Dream.

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.

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

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

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

We Are, In Fact, Hyper-dimentional Objects Of Some Sort Which Cast A Shadow Into Matter, And The Shadow In Matter Is The Body. And At Death, What Happens Basically, Is That The Shadow Withdraws, Or The Thing Which Cast The Shadow Withdraws, And Metabolism Ceases, And Matter Which Had Been Organized Into A Dissipative Structure In A Very Localized Area, Sustaining Itself Against Entropy By Cycling Material In And Degrading It And Expelling It, That Whole Phenomenon Ceases, But The Thing Which Ordered It Is Not Affected By That.

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

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

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

The Only Real Experience That Counts, Is Your Own.

I Mean Everybody Knows There's Something Wrong With The World And If You Read Left Wing Politicians Or Deconstructionists Or Thoughtful Historians They Will Offer Thoughtful Critiques Of Our Situation. But The Question Is, You Know, The Tolstoyian Question; 'what Is To Be Done?'

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.

One Of The Things That People Don't Do Enough Of When They Do Psychedelic Work Is Spend Time In The Library.

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

We Have The Tools, The Intellect, The Will To Create A Caring Global Culture. It Isn't Going To Come Without A Recognition Of The Power Of The Psychedelic Experience. The Psychedelic Experience Is The Birth Right Of Every Human Being On The Planet. It Is As Much A Basic Part Of Each And Every One Of Us As Our Sexuality, Our National Identity, Our Consciousness Of Self. And Any Society Which Attempts To Hold Back Or Impede This Dimension Of Self-expression, When The History Of That Society Is Written, It Will Be Called Barbarous.

The Word 'self' Is As Great A Mystery As The Word 'other'. It's Just A Polarity Between Two Mysteries.

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

You're Immortal As Long As You Live.

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

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.

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.

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

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 Plants Are The Pipeline Into The Gaian Intention. It's Just Not A Coincidence That These Plants Carry This Immense Spiritual Message. They Are The Pipeline Of Gaian Intentionality.

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

I Think There Is A Global Commonality Of Understanding Coming Into Being. And It Is Not Necessarily Fostered By Institutions.

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

Ayahuasca Loves To Take Prideful People And Rub Their Nose In It. I Mean It Can Make You Beg For Mercy Like Nothing. You Have To Really Approach It Humbly.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I'm Fascinated By Hallucinations. I Mean, To Me That Is The Sina Qua Non That You're Getting Somewhere.

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

History Is The Siren Song Of The Soul.

I Sort Of See [cannabis] As The Pilot Light Of Gian Consciousness.

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.

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.

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 Quality Of Rhetoric Emanating From The Psychedelic Community Must Improve Radically. If It Does Not, We Will Forfeit The Reclamation Of Our Birthright And All Opportunity For Exploring The Psychedelic Dimension Will Be Closed Off.

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

Our World Is In Crisis Because Of The Absence Of Consciousness

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.

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.

In The Absence Of Good Scientific Data About The Effects Of Artificial Hallucinogens It's Good To Stick To The Natural Ones.

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.

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.

When We Look Within Ourselves With Psilocybin, We Discover That We Do Not Have To Look Outward Toward The Futile Promise Of Life That Circles Distant Stars In Order To Still Our Cosmic Loneliness. We Should Look Within; The Paths Of The Heart Lead To Nearby Universes Full Of Life And Affection For Humanity.

We Are Going Through The Eye Of The Needle; Make Sure You Leave What You Don't Need Behind

The Immediate Future Of Man Lies In The Imagination And In Seeking The Dimension Where The Imagination Can Be Expressed. The Present Cultural Crisis On The Surface Of The Planet Is Caused By The Fact That This Is Not A Fitting Theater For The Exercise Of Imagination. It Wrecks The Planet. The Planet Has Its Own Eco-systemic Dynamics, Which Are Not The Dynamics Of Imagination.

It's No Big Deal About How You Get Language To Evolve. You Cause Language To Evolve By Saying New And Intelligent Things To Each Other.

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.

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

Ideology Always Paves The Way Toward Atrocity.

The Only Difference Between A Drug And A Computer Is That One Is Slightly Too Large To Swallow. ... And Our Best People Are Working On That Problem, Even As We Speak.

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.

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.

Ego Is A Structure That Is Erected By A Neurotic Individual Who Is A Member Of A Neurotic Culture Against The Facts Of The Matter. And Culture, Which We Put On Like An Overcoat, Is The Collectivized Consensus About What Sort Of Neurotic Behaviors Are Acceptable.

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.

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.

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

...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.

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.

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

The 'public' Has No History, Has No Future, Lives In A Golden Moment Created By Credit, Which Binds Them Ineluctably To A Fascist System That Is Never Criticized. This Is The Ultimate Consequence Of Having Broken Off This Symbiotic Relationship With The Vegetable, Feminine, Maternal Matrix Of The Planet.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

If You Take Psychedelics And The Internet And Music And Put All Of That Together You Have The Basis For A New Community That Is Wider And Deeper Than You Know. The People Who Are Building The New Machines, Who Are Designing The New Circuitry, Who Are Writing The New Code Are All Freaks. They Work For Capitalist Dogs, Of Course, Because We All Do, But The Creative Thrust Of These Technologies Is Being Driven By People Just Like You And Me.

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'

An Interesting Thing About Drugs Is Often, When A New Drug Is Discovered, It Takes A Long Time To Figure Out How Do You Do It.

I Believe In Extraterrestrials, But I Believe That Real Extraterrestrials Are So Peculiar That The Job Is To Recognize Them.

Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Small Minds.

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

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

When We Free Ourselves We Are Not Freed Into A Void. When We Free Ourselves We Are Freed Into A Dimension In Which Art Is An Obligation.

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

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

Human Populations That Do Not Have Contact With The Psychedelic Tremendum Are Neurotic Because They Are Male Ego Dominated.

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!'

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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!

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

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

The World Which We Perceive Is A Tiny Fraction Of The World Which We Can Perceive, Which Is A Tiny Fraction Of The Perceivable World.

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

The Imagination Is The Golden Pathway To Everywhere.

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

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.

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

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.

Our World Is Endangered By The Absence Of Good Ideas

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!

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

Unanswered Questions

I Believe That Great Weirdness Stalks The Universe. That's Not The Issue With Me, But It Is Not Tacky. It Is Not Tacky.

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

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

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.

People Are Concrescences Of Ambiguity.

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.

I Started Out In Psychedelic Drugs, And People Said It Was A Flight From Reality. It Still Is A Flight From Reality, But I Think Reality Is Now A Bit More Scary Than The Drugs We Used To Fly From It, So Long Ago.

I'm Proposing On One Level That Hallucinogens Be Thought Of As Almost As Social Pheromones That Regulate The Rate At Which Language Develops, And Therefore Regulate Human Culture Generally.

The Human Imagination, Which Is Our Great Glory, Has Grown So Powerful That We Can Barely Unleash It On The Surface Of The Planet.

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 Not The Newtonian Universe Deployed Throughout The Parsecs And Kiliocosms Of Physical Space And The Interior Mental Universe. They Are The Same Thing.

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.

The Tension In The World Is The Tension Between The Ego And The Feminine, Not Between The Masculine And The Feminine.

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

You May Miss The End Of The World, But You Definitely Are Going To Have A Front Row Seat For The End Of Your World.

The Imagination Is The Goal Of History. I See Culture As An Effort To Literally Realize Our Collective Dreams.

Collective Effort

Look At The Reputation They Gave Him. [giordano] Bruno Without The Pyre Is A Whiskey Priest Laying Waste To The Maids Of Umbria.

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.

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.

Once You Have The Psychedelic Tool In Hand Then Some Real Choices Have To Be Made.

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.

We Are Caught Inside A Mystery, Veiled In An Enigma, Locked Inside A Riddle

'drugs' And Psychedelics Are Not Two Members Of A Family, They Are Antithetically Opposed To Each Other. The Pro-psychedelic Position Is An Anti-drug Position.

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

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

What Blinds Us, Or Makes Historical Progress Very Difficult, Is Our Lack Of Awareness That Our Beliefs Have Grown Obsolete And Should Be Put Aside.... This Is I Think Much Of The Problem Of The Modern Dilemma: Direct Experience Has Been Discounted, And In Its Place All Kinds Of Belief Systems Have Been Erected.... If You Believe Something, You Are Automatically Precluded From Believing Its Opposite; Which Means That A Degree Of Your Human Freedom Has Been Forfeited In The Act Of Committing Yourself To This Belief.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Craig T. Nelson

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