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

-Terence McKenna

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The Quality Of Rhetoric

Terence McKenna

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

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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 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.

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

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

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

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.

Technique To Me Is A Kind Of A ... I'm Reluctant To Talk About It Because It Seems So Obvious To Me What Good Technique Is. I Mean, You Sit Down, You Shut Up, And You Pay Attention Is Basically The Good Technique. And Then The Footnotes Add; On An Empty Stomach, In A Dark Room, Feeling Comfortable.

The Apocalypse Is The Millennium, And The Psychedelics Move You Into The Future.

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.

We Can No Longer Have Forbidden Areas Of The Human Mind, Or Cultural Machinery. We Have Taken Upon Ourselves The Acquisition Of So Much Power That We Now Must Understand What We Are. We Cannot Travel Much Further With The Definitions Of Man That We Inherit From The Judeo-christian Tradition. We Need To Truly Explore The Problem Of Consciousness.

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.

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.

The Social Consequence Of The Psychedelic Experience Is Clear Thinking -which Trickles Down As Clear Speech. Empowered Speech.

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.

Psychedelic Drugs, Especially Psilocybin, Allow A Searchlight To Be Thrown On These Deeper Levels Of The Psyche, As Jung Correctly Stated. But It Is Not A Museum Of Archetypes Or Psychic Constructs, As He Seemed To Assume. It Is A Frontier Of Wholeness Into Which Any Person, So Motivated And So Courageous As To Wish To Do It, Can Go And Leave The Mundane Plane Far Behind.

I Think Psychedelics Are Sort Of Like Doing Calisthenics In Preparation For The Marathon At The End Of Time.

Language Betrays, In Order To Mean.

The Gaian Mind Is What Were Calling The Psychedelic Experience. Its An Experience Of The Living Fact Of The Entelechy Of The Planet - And Without That Experience We Wander In A Desert Of Bogus Ideologies. But With That Experience The Compass Of The Self Can Be Set.

The Internet Is Light At The End Of The Tunnel. I Don't Care If It's Being Used To Peddle Pornography, I Don't Care If It's Being Trivialized In A Thousand Ways. Anything Can Be Trivialized. The Important Point Is That It Is Leveling The Playing Field Of Global Society. It Is Creating De-facto An Entirely New Set Of Political Realities. None Of The Constipated, Oligarchic Structures That Are Resisting This Were Ever Asked. Their Greed Betrayed Them Into Investing In This In The First Place Without Ever Fully Grasping What The Implications Of It Were For Their Larger Agenda.

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!

How Can We Know Who Is The Other Until We Know Who Is The Self?

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

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

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

You Are Some Kind Of A Mystery Suspended Between Two Eternities. And In That Moment, When A Mind Looks Out At A World And Asks The Question, ‘what Is It?’ In That Moment Art Can Be Created.

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.

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

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

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.

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

What The Churches Are Peddling Is High Abstraction, And You Really Have To Work Yourself Up Into A Lather To Be Able To Accept That As Worthy Of That Kind Of Attention. The Psychedelic Subset Of Society Is Into An Experience, And It's Accessible.

The Real Truth Is Splintered And Spread Throughout Time.

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.

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

How Do We Fight Back? By Creating Art.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?'

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

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

Our World Is In Crisis Because Of The Absence Of Consciousness

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.

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.

A Long Long Time Ago I Took An Oath To Tell All Secrets That Came My Way. Don't Tell Me A Secret, I Won't Keep It. I'm Against Secrets, I'm Against Hierarchies, Lineages, All Assumption Of Special Knowledge On The Part Of Anyone In The Presence Of Anyone Else Is Abhorrent To Me. I Mean, I Am A True Anarchist First And Foremost.

There Is No Knowledge Without Risk Taking.

We Are So Much The Victims Of Abstraction That With The Earth In Flames We Can Barely Rouse Ourselves To Wander Across The Room And Look At The Thermostat.

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.

The "just Say No" Campaign At This Point Is A Lot Like Drawing Sea-monsters Over Certain Unexplored Areas Of The Map And Expecting People To Stay Away. It May Work For Some, But Explorers Live For This Kind Of Thing.

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.

One Of The Things That's So Striking About Shamanism In The Native Context Is The Absence Of Mental Illness.

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.

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

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?

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

I Think What Electronic Culture Permits Is Incredible Diversity, And What The Print-created World Demanded And Created Was Tremendous Suppression Of Diversity.

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.

Not To Know One's True Identity Is To Be A Mad, Disensouled Thing — A Golem. And, Indeed, This Image, Sick-eningly Orwellian, Applies To The Mass Of Human Beings Now Living In The High-tech Industrial Democracies. Their Authenticity Lies In Their Ability To Obey And Follow Mass Style Changes That Are Conveyed Through The Media. Immersed In Junk Food, Trash Media, And Cryp-tofascist Politics, They Are Condemned To Toxic Lives Of Low Awareness. Sedated By The Prescripted Daily Television Fix, They Are A Living Dead, Lost To All But The Act Of Consuming.

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.

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.

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

The 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.

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

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.

The Drugs Of The Future Will Be Computers. The Computers Of The Future Will Be Drugs.

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.

To Carry Language From Two Dimensions Into Three Is The Task Of The Poets, And The Rebels In The 20th Century.

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

All The Accoutrements That Distinguish Us From Animal Existence Were Put In Place When We Had A Different Kind Of Mind Than We Have Now. We Didn't Have A Mind That Favored Role Specialization, And Male Dominance, And Anxiety Over Female Sexual Activity Related To Feelings Of Male Ownership. That All Came Later.

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.

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.

I Think With The Work We Do With These Drugs We Are The Earliest Pioneers In What Over The Next 100 Years Will Lead To An Understanding Of Consciousness Almost As A Thing Apart From The Monkey Body And Brain.

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

I Think Ideology Is Toxic, All Ideology. It's Not That There Are Good Ones And Bad Ones. All Ideology Is Toxic, Because Ideology Is A Kind Of Insult To The Gift Of Human Free Thinking.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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

I 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.

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.

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.

We Want Freedom. We Want Freedom From The Constraints Of The Cycles Of The Sun And The Moon. We Want Freedom From Drought And Weather, Freedom From The Movement Of Game, The Growth Of Plants, Freedom From Control From Mendacious Popes And Kings, Freedom From Ideology, Freedom From Want. This Idea Of Freeing Ourselves Has Become The Compass Of The Human Journey.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

What You Call Man Is Time.

We Are Alienated, So Alienated That The Self Must Disguise Itself As An Extraterrestrial In Order Not To Alarm Us With The Truly Bizarre Dimensions That It Encompasses.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

What I Like To Talk About, And What I Have Very Little Competition In Terms Of Talking About, Is The Content Of The Psychedelic Experience.

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.

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.

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.

Ultimately What We're Touching Is The Invisible, All-pervasive Intelligence That Surrounds Us And Penetrates Us. It Is Grooming Us To Be Able To Tolerate Its Splendor. It Can't Just Reveal Itself Openly Because We Would Be Forfeited; We'd Never Know What Hit Us.

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 Only Frontier Now Left To Exploit Is Not A Frontier In Space But A Frontier In Time. We Steal The Future From Our Children By Plunging Massively Deeper And Deeper Into Debt.

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

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

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 Have Been To The Moon, We Have Charted The Depths Of The Ocean And The Heart Of The Atom, But We Have A Fear Of Looking Inward To Ourselves Because We Sense That Is Where All The Contradictions Flow Together.

We Live In Condensations Of Our Imagination

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.

For Me, The Glory Of The Human Animal Is Cognitive Activity.

The 'person' Is Not An Interchangeable Part. The 'citizen' Is. ... The Person Is Harking Back To A Pre-print Model. It's What The Hippies Were.

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.

Our Self Discoveries Make Us Each A Microcosm Of The Larger Pattern Of History. The Inertia Of Introspection Leads Toward Recollection, For Only Through Memory Is The Past Recaptured And Understood. In The Fact Of Experiencing And Making The Present, We Are All Actors.

I 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?

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

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.

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.

Nobody Should Be Allowed More Than Fifty Years To Get Their Act Together.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Wherever We Press Beyond The Thin Curtain Of Rationalist Culture, We Discover The Incredibly Rich, Erotic, Scary, Promising Presence Of This Intelligent Other, That Beckons Us Out Of History, And Says, You Know: 'the Galaxy Lies Waiting.'

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Each Stage Of Cosmic Development Proceeded More Quickly Than The Stage Which Preceded It.

Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Small Minds.

It Is Not Easy To Measure The Ocean, But We Can Be Measured By It, Confront It, And Be In It.

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

Worrying Is Betting Against Yourself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To Date, The Enterprise Of Thinking Has Moved Us Radically Away From Understanding Anything.

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

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.

What Is Needed, Is An Awakening.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Lack Of A Sense Of History Makes Us Really Prey To Manipulation.

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.

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 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 Things I Encounter That I Call Elves Or Gnomes, It's Just A Gloss. I Mean, They're Small, And They Have The Archetype. They're More Like Leprechauns, And This Maybe Raises A Racial Issue.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Memory Training Is Great Psychedelic Training.

The Surface Of Things Is Not Where Attention Should Rest.

The Imagination Is The Golden Pathway To Everywhere.

Nature Is Actually The Goal At The End Of History.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Unanswered Questions

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I Think Institutions Will Inevitably Substitute A Rite Or A Ritual For The Authentic, For The Real Mccoy, Because Then Priests Can Control The Pipeline To God, And The Parishioner Can Approach With Offerings. But If Everybody Can Have A Pipeline To Deity, Why Then The Whole Priest Scam Is Put Out Of Business.

The Imagination Is A Dimension Of Nonlocal Information

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

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

Ultimate Novelty Must Be A Situation Where All Boundaries Are Dissolved.

Who Is To Say What Is Real And What Is Not?'real' Is A Distinction Of A Naïve Mind.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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