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Nature Loves Courage. You Make The Commitment And Nature Will Respond To That Commitment By Removing Impossible Obstacles. Dream The Impossible Dream And The World Will Not Grind You Under, It Will Lift You Up.

-Terence McKenna

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Nature Loves Courage. You

Terence McKenna

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Nature Loves Courage. You Make The Commitment And Nature Will Respond To That Commitment By Removing Impossible Obstacles. Dream The Impossible Dream And The World Will Not Grind You Under, It Will Lift You Up.

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

Capitalism Is Going To Deal Itself Out Of Existence, But Before It Does That, You're Gonna Pay $50 For A Latte, Because Inflation Is Going Impoverish All Of Us Before People Get Pissed Off Enough To Realize That All Of The Last Hundred Years Of Economic Progress Was Actually A Shell Game To Create Billionaires, While The Great Masses Of People Saw Their Standard Of Living Eroded And Destroyed.

The 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The Imagination Is The Golden Pathway To Everywhere.

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.

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

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

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.

What Is Needed, Is An Awakening.

The Sensory Ratios That Are Being Reinforced By The New Electronic Technology Are Like The Sensory Ratios That Were In Place Fifteen Thousand Years Ago. . . . Print Imposes A Condition On Human Mind Which Is Now Lifting.

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

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

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 Culture Cannot Evolve Faster Than The Language. The Language Is The Flashlight That Shows The Path.

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.

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

Psychedelics Are Probably Responsible For Every Aspect Of Human Evolution Apart From The Decline In Bodyhair.

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

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.

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.

The Testimony Of Dmt, For Me, Is That There Is A Nearby Dimension, Teeming With Intelligences, That From One Of The More Conservative Perspectives Seems Like An Ecology Of Souls.

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.

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.

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

One Thing That These Buddhists Have Certainly Gotten Right Is That Attention To Attention Is The Key To Taking Control Of Your Mental Life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Matter Is Simply A Concept. The World Is Made Of Language.

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

And I Don't Mean This Metaphorically. I Want To Be Taken Seriously As Proposing That The Ennui Of Modernity Is The Consequence Of A Disruptive Symbiotic Relationship Between Ourselves And Vegetable Nature.

The Intellectual Tension That Seems To Work Its Way Through This Society Almost Like Fat Through Meat Is The Tension Between Scientific Reductionism And The Deeply Felt Intuition Of Most People That There Is A Spiritual Dimension, Or A Hidden Dimension, Or A Transcendental Dimension.

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.

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

No Culture On Earth Is As Heavily Narcotized As The Industrial West In Terms Of Being Inured To The Consequences Of Maladaptive Behavior. We Pursue A Business-as-usual Attitude In A Surreal Atmosphere Of Mounting Crises And Irreconcilable Contradictions.

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

Inside The Boundaries Of The Old Paradigm There's No Hope, There's No Way Out Of The Box Of Capitalism, Monogamy, Consumer Fetishism, Egoism, Money Worship, No Way Out. No Way. No Way Out!

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.

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

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

What I Think Is Going On Is That Probably Language Was Entertainment Long Before It Was Meaning. It's A Kind Of Tuneless Singing.

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.

What The Psychedelics Are For Us As A Species, Rather Than For Each One Of Us As An Individual, What They Are For Us As A Species Is An Enzyme That Catalyzes The Language-making Capacity.

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

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

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.

Lsd Burst Over The Dreary Domain Of The Constipated Bourgeoisie Like The Angelic Herald Of A New Psychedelic Millennium. We Have Never Been The Same Since, Nor Will We Ever Be, For Lsd Demonstrated, Even To Skeptics, That The Mansions Of Heaven And Gardens Of Paradise Lie Within Each And All Of Us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Shaman Is The Figure At The Beginning Of Human History That Unites The Doctor, The Scientist And The Artist Into A Single Notion Of Care-giving And Creativity.

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

Because This Is The World That Science Built, With The Henchmen Of Capitalism And Christianity.

I See The Psychedelic Experience As A Birthright, And We Can't Have A Free Society Until People Are Free To Explore Their Own Mind.

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.

I Really Think That The Psychedelic Realm Is The Realm Of Ideas, And That Ideas Which Change The World Come First From That Place.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

In 1948, Television Was Introduced, And Millions And Millions Of People Lead Larval, Low-awareness, Warehoused Lives Mainlining An Electronic Drug Straight Into Their Brains.

Perhaps, You Know, New Laws, New Domains Of Potential Openness Are Occurring As The Universe Ages, And Complexity Previously Disallowed Is Now Possible, And We Are That Complexity. We Are Nature Moving Out Of Its Genetic Phase - A Phase Under The Control Of Chemical Genes, Which Are Physical Structures, In To An Epigenetic Phase, A Phase Of Culture Ruled By Codes, Transformable Culturally Confined Codes - Mathematics, Religion, Philosophy, Art, Dance, Humor.

It’s Pretty Simple, The Ethical Life. It’s Just Demanding.

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.

Time Will Perfect Matter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

My Hope Is That I May Bear Witness To The Fact That There Is A Great Mystery Calling To Us All, Beckoning Across The Landscape Of Our History, Promising To Realize Itself And To Give Real Meaning To What Is Otherwise Only The Confusion Of Our Lives And Our Collective Past.

It's The Only Hallucinogen I Know, Where If It's Made Right, The Next Day, Or The Day After The Experience, You Actually Feel Better Than If You Hadn't Done It.

If Psychedelics Are Exopheromones That Dissolve The Dominant Ego, Then They Are Also Enzymes That Synergize The Human Imagination And Empower Language. They Cause Us To Connect And Reconnect The Contents Of The Collective Mind In Ever More Implausible, Beautiful, And Self-fulfilling Ways.

For Talking Monkeys To Speak Of Truth Is Hubris Of The Highest Degree. Where Is It Writ Large That Talking Monkeys Should Be Able To Model The Cosmos? If A Sea Urchin Or A Racoon Were To Propose To You That It Had A Viable Truth About The Universe, The Absurdity Of That Assertion Would Be Self-evident, But In Our Case We Make An Exception.

I See The Psychedelic Experience As Both The Centerpiece Of Prehistoric Life And Destined To Be The Centerpiece Of Any Future That We Want To Be Part Of.

The Truth For Sure, When It Arrives, Will Make You Smile. If It Doesn't, You Should Seek A Deeper Truth.

The Central Figure In The Archaic Revival Is The Shaman.

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.

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.

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

Although Whenever You Have Intelligent Life In The Presence Of Large Explosions, A Safe Bet Is That The Intelligent Life Is Responsible For The Large Explosion.

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

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.

The World Is Made Up Of Language. We Can Say That The World Is Composed Of Little Demons Doing Calisthenics, Each One The Size Of A Pissant's Eyebrow.... Or We Can Say The World Is Made Of Tiny Wave Mechanical Packets Of Matter Hurling Through Space At Near The Speed Of Light.... But Notice That What We Get Each Time Are Words.

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.

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.

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

And Yet My, Not Only My Faith, But My Experience Has Led Me To Believe That The World Is Not A Construction Of Space And Time And Matter And Energy. That That Mapping Is Insufficient. That The World Is Instead Some Kind Of A Linguistic Construct. It Is More In The Nature Of A Sentence, Or A Novel, Or A Work Of Art Than It Is In The Nature Of These Machine Models Of Interlocking Law That We Inherit Out Of A Thousand Years Of Rational Reductionism.

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 Reaping The Fruits Of Ten Thousand, Fifty Thousand Years Of Sowing Of The Fields Of Mind. And It Is Being Dropped Into Our Laps For Us To Create Human-machine Interfacing, Control Of Genetic Material, Redefinition Of Social Reality, Re Engineering Of Languages, Revisioning Of The Planetary Ecology, All These Things Fall Upon Us.

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.

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

Information Processing

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'

For All We Know, We Know Nothing.

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.

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

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

We Have Changed. We Are No Longer, As I Said, Bipedal Monkeys. We Are Instead A Kind Of Cybernetic Coral Reef Of Organic Components And Inorganic Technological Components.

It Seems To Me That Right Under The Surface Of Human Neurological Organization Is A Mode Shift Of Some Sort That Would Make Language Beholdable.

Well, You Could Almost Say, I Suppose, That The Scientist Seeks What Is Similar Between Any Two Days, Or Bluebirds, Or Glaciers. And The Poet Seeks What Is Different. The Artist Seeks To Celebrate The Unique.

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

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.

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

Meaning Lies In The Confrontation Of Contradiction - The Coincidencia Apositorum. That’s What We Really Feel, Not These Rational Schemes That Are Constantly Beating Us Over The Head With The “thou Shalts” And “thou Should”, But Rather A Recovery Of The Real Ambiguity Of Being And An Ability To See Ourselves As At Once Powerful And Weak, Noble And Ignoble, Future-oriented, Past-facing.

What Is The Psychedelic Experience? What Promise Does It Hold For A Sane Future For Our Planet And Our Children? And What Is It About It That Kindles The Kind Of Loyalty That I Feel Coming From The People In This Room This Evening? And I Submit To You That It Is Nothing Less Than The Rebirth Of A Voice That Has Been Silent For At Least A Thousand Years, The Still Small Voice Of The Logos Of The Planet.

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

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

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.

The Way Out Then Is Personal Responsibility, New Operating Systems Downloaded From Outside Of Culture, Which Means From The Deeper Wisdom Of The Psychedelic Plants And Then A Commitment To Community And A Motto Of "to The Future, Without Fear!" Without Fear!

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

The Psychedelic Experience Is The Beginning Of The Spiritual Path. That's Why It's Not Important That Yogas' Claim That They Can Deliver You The Psychedelic Experience, Because It Begins With The Psychedelic Experience, And Then You Go From There.

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

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

The Imagination Is A Dimension Of Nonlocal Information

No One Knows Enough To Worry.

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

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

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.

The Psychedelic Species Of Visual Beauty Is Something We Don't See In Our Furniture Styles And Our Architecture. It Seems To Be Coming In, Literally, From Another Dimension, And Yet It Is Undeniably Moving. It's Beautiful.

The 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.

This Is The Message Of Your Life And My Life - It’s That Nothing Lasts. Heraclitus Said It: Panta Rhei. All Flows, Nothing Lasts. Not Your Enemies, Not Your Fortune, Not Who You Sleep With At Night, Not The Books, Not The House In Saint-tropez, Not Even The Children - Nothing Lasts. To The Degree That You Avert Your Gaze From This Truth, You Build The Potential For Pain Into Your Life. Everything Is This Act Of Embracing The Present Moment, The Felt Presence Of Experience, And Then Moving On To The Next Felt Moment Of Experience. It’s Literally Psychological Nomadism Is What It Is.

Worrying Is Betting Against Yourself.

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.

It Is Now Very Clear That Techniques Of Machine-human Interfacing, Pharmacology Of The Synthetic Variety, All Kinds Of Manipulative Techniques, All Kinds Of Data Storage, Imaging And Retrieval Techniques - All Of This Is Coalescing Toward The Potential Of A Truly Demonic Or Angelic Kind Of Self-imaging Of Our Culture... And The People Who Are On The Demonic Side Are Fully Aware Of This And Hurrying Full-tilt Forward With Their Plans To Capture Everyone As A 100% Believing Consumer Inside Some Kind Of A Beige Furnished Fascism That Won't Even Raise A Ripple.

The Gaian Process Is More Than A Process. It Is S Self-reflecting Entelechy Of Some Sort.

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.

Mind Conjures Miracles Out Of Time.

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.

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.

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.

I Have Nothing But Scorn For All Weird Ideas Other Than My Own.

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

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.

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

Culture Is Your Operating System.

Operating Systems

Escape Into The Dream. Escape, A Key Thing Charged Against These Drugs, That They Are For Escapists. I Think The People Who Make This Charge Hardly Dare Dream To What Degree They Are Escapist.

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

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

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.

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.

We Are Led By The Least Among Us - The Least Intelligent, The Least Noble, The Least Visionary.

A Lot Of People Pass Through The Thinking I'm A Guru And Take Enough Trips To Understand That No, I Was Just A Witness. I Was Just A Witness.

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?

The Real Truth That Dare Not Speak Itself, Is That No One Is In Control, Absolutely No One... Nobody Is In Control. This Stuff Is Ruled By The Equations Of Dynamics And Chaos. Now, There May Be Entities Seeking Control - The World Bank, The Communist Party, The Rich, The Somebody-or-others - But To Seek Control Is To Take Enormous Aggravation Upon Yourself... It's Like Trying To Control A Dream.

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

We Cannot Evolve Faster Than Our Language. The Edge Of Being Is The Edge Of Meaning, And Somehow We Have To Push The Edge Of Meaning. We Have To Extend It.

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.

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.

We're Not Dropping Out Here, We're Infiltrating And Taking Over.

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

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.

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

What We Call Reality Is In Fact Nothing More Than A Culturally Sanctioned And Linguistically Reinforced Hallucination.

The Data Stream Has Been Corrupted, Return To First Principles.

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

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.

Shamanism, On The Other Hand, Is This World Wide, Since Paleolithic-times, Tradition Which Says That You Must Make Your Own Experience The Center Piece Of Any Model Of The World That You Build.

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

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

Don't Worry. You Don't Know Enough To Worry. . . . Who Do You Think You Are That You Should Worry, For Cryin' Out Loud. It's A Total Waste Of Time. It Presupposes Such A Knowledge Of The Situation That It Is, In Fact, A Form Of Hubris.

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.

I Believe That The Totemic Image For The Future Is The Octopus. This Is Because The Squids And Octopi Have Perfected A Form Of Communication That Is Both Psychedelic And Telepathic; A Model For The Human Communications Of The Future. In The Not-too-distant Future Men And Women May Shed The Monkey Body To Become Virtual Octopi Swimming In A Silicon Sea.

We Are Told No, You're Unimportant, You're Peripheral - Get A Degree, Get A Job, Get A This, Get That, And Then You're A Player. You Don't Even Want To Play That Game. You Want To Reclaim Your Mind And Get It Out Of The Hands Of The Cultural Engineers Who Want To Turn You Into A Half-baked Moron Consuming All This Trash That's Being Manufactured Out Of The Bones Of A Dying World.

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

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.

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

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

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

You Are A Divine Being. You Matter, You Count. You Come From Realms Of Unimaginable Power And Light, And You Will Return To Those Realms.

We Were Essentially Torn From The Gaian Womb, Thrust Into The Birth Canal Of History, And Expelled Sometime Around The Fall Of The Roman Empire Into The Cold Hard World Of Modern Science, Existentialism And All The Rest Of It.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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?'

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.'

This Is What Magic Is. It's Being Able To Speak In A Voice Which Makes Things Happen, Being Able To Speak In A Voice Which Causes Facts To Be Beheld By Groups Of People In A Way That Has Been Purged From Profane Language, For Us Relegated To Poetry And That Sort Of Thing.

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.

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

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.

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Johannes Brahms

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