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The Fungi Became, Or Is For Some Mysterious Reason Still To Be Discovered, A Pipeline Into A Mind, An Entelechy, Which We Can Only Image As Feminine And Can Only Associate Somehow To The Environment, To The Ecosystem. This Is The Gaian Mind. This Is What The Goddess Really Is. The Goddess Is A Network Of Connective Intelligence That Is Operating On This Planet.

-Terence McKenna

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The Fungi Became, Or

Terence McKenna

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The Fungi Became, Or Is For Some Mysterious Reason Still To Be Discovered, A Pipeline Into A Mind, An Entelechy, Which We Can Only Image As Feminine And Can Only Associate Somehow To The Environment, To The Ecosystem. This Is The Gaian Mind. This Is What The Goddess Really Is. The Goddess Is A Network Of Connective Intelligence That Is Operating On This Planet.

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

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

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

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

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

But What I Really Am Interested In Is Not The End Of The World But Everything Which Precedes It.

End Of The World

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

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.

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.

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

Astonishment Is The Proper Response To Reality.

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.

Could Any Symbol Be Any More Appropriate Of The Ambiguity Of Human Transformation? What Mushroom Is It That Grows At The End Of History? Is It Stropharia Cubensis, Or Is It The Creation Of Edward Teller? This Is An Unresolved Problem.

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

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

I'm As Against Restricting Access To Drugs As I Am To Burning Books. It Offends Me In The Same Way.

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

Unanswered Questions

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

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?

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.

The Germans Take Quite A Knock For The Holocaust, But The Catholic Church Manages To Push More People Into Death, Disease, And Degradation Every Year Than The Holocaust Managed In Its Entire Show. And It's Thought Rather Crass To Even Mention The Fact. It Seems To Me That As Long As These Catholic Bishops Can Show Their Face In Public That We Are In Complicity With Mass Murder.

Belief Is A Toxic And Dangerous Attitude Toward Reality. After All, If It's There It Doesn't Require Your Belief- And If It's Not There Why Should You Believe In It?

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.

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.

The Monkey Body Has Carried Us To This Moment Of Release, But We Are Coming More And More To Exist In A World Made By The Human Imagination.

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.

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

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

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.

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

As I See It, Being, The Cosmos, Whatever You Want To Call It, Is A Struggle Between Two Implacable Forces: Novelty On The One Side And Habit On The Other Side.

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.

The Human Brain Is The God Of Technological Innovation.

Patanjali Specifically Says That There Are Three Paths To The Goal Of Yoga. And They Are, Control Of The Breath, Control Of Posture, And Light-filled Herbs. It Says It Right There. Stanza 6 Of The Yoga Sutras Of Patanjali.

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.

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

Psychedelic Experiences And Dreams Are Chemical Cousins; They Are Only Different In Degree.

What Is Happening, I Think, It's Really Bigger Than Psychedelics, It's Bigger Than Human Evolution. We Are Not Making The Waves In This Ocean. We Are Corks, Riding The Waves Of The Ocean. But We Are Privileged, By Perhaps Chance Alone, To Occupy A Unique Moment In The History Of The Universe. A Moment When The Universe Goes Through Some Kind Of Self-transforming, Evolutionary, Inflationary Expansion. That's What's Happening.

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

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

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

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 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.

It [culture] Invites People To Diminish Themselves, And Dehumanize Themselves By Behaving Like Machines, Meme Processors Of Memes Passed Down From Madison Avenue, And Hollywood, And What Have You.

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

No One Knows Enough To Worry.

Worrying Is Betting Against Yourself.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Nature Is Actually The Goal At The End Of History.

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

On These Matters Of Specific Fact, Like Is The Mushroom An Extraterrestrial And That Sort Of Thing, I Haven't The Faintest Idea. The Mushroom Itself Is Such A Mercurial, Elusive, Zen Sort Of Personality That I Never Believe A Word It Says. I Simply Entertain Its Notions And Try And Sort Through Them, And I Found That To Be The Most Enriching Approach To It.

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.

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

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.

The Mind Is The Cutting Edge Of The Evolving Event System.

The Shaman Is A Person Who Is Able To Transcend The Dimensional Confines Of Cultural Existence. They Know More Than The People They Serve. The People They Serve Are Like Children Within The Game Of Culture. Only The Shaman Knows That Culture Is A Game. Everyone Else Takes It Seriously. That's How He Can Do His Magic.

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.

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.

Information Is Just Simply Bootstrapping Itself To Higher And Higher Levels Of Self-reflection And Self-coordination Using Whatever Means Are Necessary.

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?

By Passing Into The Psychedelic Phase, The Space-faring Phase, The Entire Species Is Passing Into Adolescence.

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

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

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.

How Do We Fight Back? By Creating Art.

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

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

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

We 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

History Is Rooted In The Future

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

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

I Would Argue That It's Almost Better To Do Heroin Than To Watch Tv. At Least When You're Doing Heroin You're Responsible For Your Own Reveries And Thought Processes. When You're Mainlining Tv What Is It But Endless Messages To Fetishize Products?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Dmt Seems To Argue, Convincingly I Might Add, That The World Is Made Entirely Of Something, For Want Of A Better Word, We Would Have To Call Magic.

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

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

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

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.

Thinkers Are Not A Welcome Addition To Most Social Situations.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

If You Actually Look At The Etymology Of The Word 'hallucination', What It's Come To Mean In English Is A Delusion. But What It Really Means In The Original Language Is To Wander In The Mind. That's The Meaning Of 'hallucination', To Wander In The Mind.

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

Our Medium Is Meat, But We Are Made Of Information.

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

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

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.

If I Can Paraphrase Teilhard De Chardin For A Moment, He Said, Or I Will Paraphrase In This Way, 'when The Human Race Understands The Potential Of The Hallucinogenic Drug Experience, It Will Have Discovered Fire For The Second Time.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I Really Think There Is A Very Large Distinction Between Synthetic And Naturally Occurring Drugs. ... I Think That These Plants 'take People' As Much As People Take The Plants. ... When You Take One Of These Ancient, Ancient Hallucinogens You Are Locking In To The Morphogenetic Fields Of All The People Who Ever Took It.

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.

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].

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

I Believe That What Makes The Psychedelic Experience So Central Is That It Is A Connection Into A Larger Modality Of Organization On The Planet, Which Is A Fancy Way Of Saying It Connects You Up To The Mind Of Nature Herself.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

History Is A Series Of Approximations Of The Final Singularity.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

We Can Will The Perfect Future Into Being By Becoming Microcosms Of The Perfect Future.

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

The Momentum Now Is Inevitable. Now It's About Each Of Us Individually Arranging The Furniture Of Our Own Mind To Deal With What Has Become Inevitable.

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.

I'm Meeting My Obligations, Somehow, Always Have, Without Ever Truly Working, Without Ever Putting My Shoulder To The Wheel For The Man. Of Course I Had To Deal Dope To Do This!

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

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.

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.

If The Words 'life, Liberty, And The Pursuit Of Happiness' Don't Include The Right To Experiment With Your Own Consciousness, Then The Declaration Of Independence Isn't Worth The Hemp It Was Written On.

Pursuit Of Happiness

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.

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

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.

Time Will Perfect Matter.

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.

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

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 War On Drugs Was Never Meant To Be Won. Instead, It Will Be Prolonged As Long As Possible In Order To Allow Various Intelligence Operations To Wring The Last Few Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars In Illicit Profits From The Global Drug Scam; Then Defeat Will Have To Be Declared. "defeat" Will Mean, As It Did In The Case Of The Vietnam War, That The Media Will Correctly Portray The True Dimensions Of The Situation And The Real Players, And That Public Revulsion At The Culpability, Stupidity And Venality Of The Establishment's Role Will Force A Policy Review.

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.

Ideology Always Paves The Way Toward Atrocity.

All Time Is Is How Much Change You Can Pack Into A Second.

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.

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.

My Voice Speaking Is A Monkey's Mouth Making Little Mouth Noises That Are Carrying Agree-upon Meaning, And It Is Meaning That Matters. Without The Meaning One Has Only Little Mouth Noises

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

Spiritual Power

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

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.

We Are Like Caterpillars Contemplating Pupation.

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.

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

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.

To Me It Begins And Ends With These Psychedelic Substances. The Synergy Of The Psilocybin In The Hominid Diet Brought Us Out Of The Animal Mind And Into The World Of Articulated Speech And Imagination.

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.

What Is Happening Here Is We Are Living Past The Age, By The Millions, Living Past The Age Where Cultural Values Make Any Sense At All.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!'

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.

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

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.

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