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The Artist’s Task Is To Save The Soul Of Mankind; And Anything Less Is A Dithering While Rome Burns. Because Of The Artists, Who Are Self-selected, For Being Able To Journey Into The Other, If The Artists Cannot Find The Way, Then The Way Cannot Be Found.

-Terence McKenna

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The Artist’s Task Is

Terence McKenna

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The Artist’s Task Is To Save The Soul Of Mankind; And Anything Less Is A Dithering While Rome Burns. Because Of The Artists, Who Are Self-selected, For Being Able To Journey Into The Other, If The Artists Cannot Find The Way, Then The Way Cannot Be Found.

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The Reason For The Emphasis On Shamanism And On Other Techniques Is, You Will Need Techniques If You Go Into The Deep Water. And They Can Make Your Life Very Simple And Save You From Unnecessary Suffering. Not All Suffering Is Necessary. Maybe No Suffering Is Necessary.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Question Is Being Asked, 'are We Alone?' And Though We Now Focus On That Question We Need To Think Beyond That To What If We're Not Alone? Then What Becomes The Next Imperative Question?

Psychedelic Experiences Are Beyond The Reach Of Cultural Manipulation, And Discovering This And Exploring It Is Somehow The Frontier Of Maturity. Culture Is A Form Of Enforced Infantilism. It's The Last Nursery, And Most People Never Leave It.

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.

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

What They [psychedelics] Cause Is What I'm Advocating, A Fundamental Revaluation Of Cultural Values, Because Culture As We're Practicing It Currently Is Causing A Lot Of Pain To A Lot Of People, And Animals, And Ecosystems, None Of Whom Were Ever Allowed To Vote On Whether They Wanted This Process To Go In This Direction.

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.

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.

Democratic Ideals

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

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

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.

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.

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

The Artist’s Task Is To Save The Soul Of Mankind; And Anything Less Is A Dithering While Rome Burns. Because Of The Artists, Who Are Self-selected, For Being Able To Journey Into The Other, If The Artists Cannot Find The Way, Then The Way Cannot Be Found.

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.

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

The 20th Century Mind Is Nostalgic For The Paradise That Once Existed On The Mushroom Dotted Plains Of Africa Where The Plant-human Symbiosis Occurred That Pulled Us Out Of The Animal Body And Into The Tool-using, Culture-making, Imagination-exploring Creature That We Are. And Why Does This Matter? It Matters Because It Shows That The Way Out Is Back And That The Future Is A Forward Escape Into The Past. This Is What The Psychedelic Experience Means. Its A Doorway Out Of History And Into The Wiring Under The Board In Eternity.

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

So I Submit To You That What We Represent Is A Fifth Column, A Fifth Column That Represents The Best Aspirations That Human Community Is Capable Of, A Fifth Column That Is Willing To Look At The Structure Of The Psyche In Contrast To The Mess Of Society, And Willing To Dream.

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

Cultures Are Virtual Realities Made Of Language.

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

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.

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!

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

The Real Truth Is Splintered And Spread Throughout Time.

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.

That's What A God Is. Somebody Who Knows More Than You Do About Whatever You're Dealing With.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Where Psychedelics Comes Together With That Is That It's Going To Require A Transformation Of Human Language And Understanding To Stop The Momentum Of The Historical Process, To Halt Nuclear Proliferation, Germ Warfare, Infantile 19th Century Politics, All These Things. It Cannot Be Accomplished Through A Frontal Assault Upon It By Political Means.

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

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

The Sine Qua Non For Obtaining A Psychedelic Experience Is Humbling Yourself To The Point Where You Admit That You Must Submit To The Experience Of The Plant Or The Drug. This Act Of Surrender Is The Major Technical Function You Will Be Called Upon To Perform During The Psychedelic Trip.

I Do Not Think That The Government, Under The Guise Of Some Phony, Alarmist, Pseudo-scientific Rhetoric, Should Attempt To Control The Evolution Of Consciousness. After All, If These Things Truly Are Consciousness-expanding, It Doesn't Take Too Much Intelligence To Realize That It Is The Absence Of Consciousness That Is Causing Our Flirtation With Extinction And Planetary Disaster.

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

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.

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.

When Your Time Is Turned Into Money, The Felt Presence Of Immediate Experience Is Analogous To Being Enslaved. I Mean, Let's Be Frank About It, It Is Enslavement.

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

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 Tryptamine Molecule Has This Unique Property Of Releasing The Structured Self Into The Over-self.

People Are Concrescences Of Ambiguity.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 Possibility Seems To Be That What We Call Styles, Or What We Call Motifs, Are Actually Categories In The Unconscious.

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.

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

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

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.

And The Psychedelics, I Believe, Are The Key To Moving From Wearing Culture Like Cloths To Recognizing That Culture Is This Intensifying Reflection Of An Aspect Of The Self And Integrating It Into The Self.

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.

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.

Everything Appears To Me To Be Authored, In Some Strange Way. And I Wonder If This Is Not The Spreading Assumption Of The Psychedelic Illusion/delusion/revelation That Life Is In Fact Art.

What I Always Hoped For Out Of The Psychedelic Voyaging Was To Bring Back Something. I Always Felt, And Still Feel, That That Is The Attitude With Which You Should Go Into These Things.

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

Psychedelics Are Illegal Not Because A Loving Government Is Concerned That You May Jump Out Of A Third Story Window. Psychedelics Are Illegal Because They Dissolve Opinion Structures And Culturally Laid Down Models Of Behaviour And Information Processing. They Open You Up To The Possibility That Everything You Know Is Wrong.

Information Processing

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.

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.

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.

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.

Eschaton Comes From The Greek Word 'echatos', Which Just Means The End.

If Psychedelics Are, On Any Level, To Be Taken Seriously As Catalyzers Or Expanders Of Consciousness, Then We Need Them, Because It's An Absence Of Consciousness That Is Making This Historical Transition So Excruciating.

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

If You Play The Cultural Game, It's Like Playing Only With Clubs Or Something, Or Playing Only With The Red Marked Cards. You Have To Play With A Full Deck, And That Includes This Pre-linguistic Surround In Which We Are Embedded.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

We Are Consciousness. We May Not Always Be Monkeys.

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

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.

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.

If You Go To Paris You Know More About Reality Than People Who Don't. If You Smoke Dmt You Know More About Reality Than People Who Don't.

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.

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.

Nature Loves Courage. You Make The Commitment And Nature Will Respond To That Commitment By Removing Impossible Obstacles. Dream The Impossible Dream And The World Will Not Grind You Under, It Will Lift You Up. This Is The Trick. This Is What All These Teachers And Philosophers Who Really Counted, Who Really Touched The Alchemical Gold, This Is What They Understood. This Is The Shamanic Dance In The Waterfall. This Is How Magic Is Done. By Hurling Yourself Into The Abyss And Discovering Its A Feather Bed.

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.

There's Something In The Western Mind That Gets Very Nervous When You Try To Talk About The Bedrock Of Ontology.

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

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.

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.

Inform Yourself, Inform Your Children, Talk To Your Friends! And Let's Try To Make A Better, Stonier World Than The One We Inherited!

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.

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

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

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

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

We Are An Intelligent Species Caught In An Historical Process. No Generation Which Proceeded Us Knew What Was Going On, And There Is No Reason To Assume That We Know What's Going On Or That The Generation Which Follows Us Will Know What's Going On. And What Kind Of Trip Is It Anyway To Insist On Knowing What's Going On?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Small Minds.

Even As The Nineteenth Century Had To Come To Grips With The Notion Of Human Descent From Apes, We Must Now Come To Terms With The Fact That Those Apes Were Stoned Apes.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

We Are Led By The Least Among Us - The Least Intelligent, The Least Noble, The Least Visionary. We Are Led By The Least Among Us And We Do Not Fight Back Against The Dehumanizing Values That Are Handed Down As Control Icons.

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.

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.

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.

This Is What I Believe: That We Are Not Pushed From Behind By The Casual Unfolding Of Historical Necessity, But That We Are In The Grip Of An Attractor Of Some Sort, Which Lies Ahead Of Us In Time.

History Was An Incredibly Damaging Experience, And Now It's Over . . . In A Sense.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Astonishment Is The Proper Response To Reality.

...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.

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

There’s Light At The End Of The Tunnel. The Problem Is That Tunnel Is In The Back Of Your Mind. And If You Don’t Go To The Back Side Of Your Mind You Will Never See The Light At The End Of The Tunnel. And Once You See It, Then The Task Becomes To Empower It In Yourself And Other People. Spread It As A Reality. God Did Not Retire To The Seventh Heaven, God Is Some Kind Of Lost Continent In The Human Mind.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Psychedelic Experience

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

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

The Problem Is We Have To Transcend Cultural Languages And Fall Into A Phase With The Communication Systems That Nature Has Placed All Around Us.

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.

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.

For Me, What All These Years Of Psychedelic Taking Came To Was A New Model Of How Reality Works, A New Model Of What The World Is.

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.

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 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.

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

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

What Is Revealed Through The Psychedelic Experience, I Think, Is A Higher Dimensional Perspective On Reality. And I Use 'higher Dimensional' In The Mathematical Sense.

Anything Which Must Be Understood By Millions Of People Is So Hopelessly Divorced From How It Is That It Becomes A Form Of Fiction.

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 Are Like Caterpillars Contemplating Pupation.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Modernity Is A Desert, And We Are Jungle Monkeys. And So New Evolutionary Selective Pressures Are Coming To Bear Upon The Human Situation, New Ideas Are Coming To The Fore. Psilocybin Is A Selective Filter For This. The Wish To Go To Space Is A Selective Filter For This. Just The Wish To Know Your Own Mind Is A Selective Filter For This.

The Psychedelic Experience Is Simply A Compressed Instance Of What We Call Understanding, So That Living Psychedelically Is Trying To Live In An Atmosphere Of Continuous Unfolding Of Understanding, So That Every Day You Know More And See Into Things With Greater Depth Than You Did Before. This Is A Process Of Education.

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

We're Not Mere Spectators, Or A Cosmic Accident, Or Some Sideshow, Or The Greek Chorus To The Main Event. The Human Experience Is The Main Event.

Human Experience

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

We Live In Condensations Of Our Imagination

One Way To Think About What Psychedelics Are Is As Catalysts For Language Development. They Literally Force The Evolution Of Language. You Cannot Evolve Faster Than Your Language Because The Language Defines The Culture Of Meaning. So If There's A Way To Accelerate The Evolution Of Language Then This Is Real Consciousness Expansion And It's A Permanent Thing. The Great Legacies Of The 60's Are In Attitudes And Language. It Boils Down To Doing Your Own Thing, Feeling The Vibe, Ego-trip, Blowing Your Mind.

The 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.

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.

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.

History, Call It 15,000 Or 25,000 Years Of Duration, Is The Story Of An Animal, Some Kind Of Complex Animal, Becoming Conscious.

The Numinous Depth Of The Mystery That Seems To Have Called Us Out Of The Animal Mind Is Completely Impenetrable To Modern Analysis.

Capitalism Is Not A Human Being. Capitalism Is A Moloch, A God, A God Of Bloody Sacrifice That Sees Human Beings As Ants

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

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

Collective Effort

It's Getting Funnier Because Everybody's Categories Are Disintegrating, And The Cult Of Political Correctness Dictates That We Never Point Out That Other People Don't Make Sense.

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.

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.

The Central Figure In The Archaic Revival Is The Shaman.

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.

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

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.

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

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

And That We Cannot Go To Space With Our Feet In The Mud. Nor Can We In Fact Turn Ourselves Into An Eco-sensitive Hallucinogenic-based Culture On Earth Unless We Fuse These Dichotomous Opposites. It Is Only In A Coincidencia Oppositorum, A Union Of Opposites, That Does Not Strive For Closure, That We Are Going To Find Cultural Sanity. And This Is The Thing That The Entheogens, The Hallucinogens, Deliver With Such Clarity And Regularity. They Raise Paradox To A Level Of Intensity That No One Can Evade.

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