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The Shaman Is A Very Peculiar Figure. He Is Critical To The Functioning Of The Psychological And Social Life Of His Community, But In A Way He Is Always Peripheral To It. He Lives At The Edge Of The Village. He Is Only Called Upon In Matters Of Great Social Crisis. He Is Feared And Respected. And This Might Be A Description Of These Hallucinogenic Substances.

-Terence McKenna

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The Shaman Is A

Terence McKenna

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The Shaman Is A Very Peculiar Figure. He Is Critical To The Functioning Of The Psychological And Social Life Of His Community, But In A Way He Is Always Peripheral To It. He Lives At The Edge Of The Village. He Is Only Called Upon In Matters Of Great Social Crisis. He Is Feared And Respected. And This Might Be A Description Of These Hallucinogenic Substances.

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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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

If The Ego Is Not Regularly And Repeatedly Dissolved In The Unbounded Hyperspace Of The Transcendent Other, There Will Always Be Slow Drift Away From The Sense Of Self As Part Of Nature’s Larger Whole. The Ultimate Consequence Of This Drift Is The Fatal Ennui That Now Permeates Western Civilization.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Language, Thought, Analysis, Art, Dance, Poetry, Mythmaking: These Are The Things That Point The Way Toward The Realm Of The Eschaton.

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.

If You Charge Off With Some Political Agenda That Is Not Informed By Clarity, You Are Going To End Up With Business As Usual. The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions But It Is Not Paved With Clarity.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

You See, A Secret Is Not Something Untold. It’s Something Which Can’t Be Told.

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

Well, Certainly The Voynich Manuscript Is The 'limit Text' Of Western Occultism. No One Can Read It. It Is Truly An Occult Book.

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

Time Is A Series Of Fluctuating Variables.

I Can't Think Of A Society On Earth Where People Don't Take Drugs That Any Of Us Would Want Anything To Do With.

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

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

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

No One Knows Enough To Worry.

Culture Is Another Dimension.

By Manipulating Queuing, By Manipulating Expectation, You Can Lead People To A Fundamental Confrontation, Not Only With Themselves, But With The Other.

What Is Needed, Is An Awakening.

There Is A Spiritual Obligation, There Is A Task To Be Done. It Is Not, However, Something As Simple As Following A Set Of Somebody Else's Rules

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

Mind Conjures Miracles Out Of Time.

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

Skywalker Is A Direct Translation Of The Word Shaman Out Of The Tungusic, Which Is Where Siberian Shamanism Comes From. So These Heroes That Are Being Instilled In The Heart Of The Culture Are Shamanic Heroes. They Control A Force Which Is Bigger Than Everybody And Holds The Galaxy Together.

The Leading Edge Of Reality Is Mind, And Mind Is The Primary Substratum Of Being.

Shamanism Is Essentially A Living Tradition Of Alchemy That Is Not Seeking The Stone But Has Found The Stone.

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

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

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.

It's The Impossible Become Possible And Yet Remaining Impossible.

Impossible Becomes Possible

Nature Is Actually The Goal At The End Of History.

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

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.

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.

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.

Ecstasy Is A Complex Emotion Containing Elements Of Joy, Fear, Terror, Triumph, Surrender, And Empathy. What Has Replaced Our Prehistoric Understanding Of This Complex Of Ecstasy Now Is The Word Comfort, A Tremendously Bloodless Notion. Drugs Are Not Comfortable, And Anyone Who Thinks They Are Comfortable Or Even Escapist Should Not Toy With Drugs Unless They’re Willing To Get Their Noses Rubbed In Their Own Stuff.

We Have To Recognize That The World Is Not Something Sculptured And Finished, Which We As Perceivers Walk Through Like Patrons In A Museum; The World Is Something We Make Through The Act Of Perception.

We Are Like Caterpillars Contemplating Pupation.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

We Don't Have To Look Far For Miracles Because They're All Around Us. Everything Is Astonishing. The Universe On It's Surface Is Alive With Mystery.

Drugs Induce Paranoia And Psychosis In People Who Have Never Taken Any.

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

Science Works Its Miracles By Turning Its Enterprise Into A Kind Of Parlor Game Confined To The Category Matter And Energy.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Culture Is Your Operating System.

Operating Systems

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

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.

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.

Nature Is Not Mute, It Is A Man Who Is Deaf.

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.

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?'

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

The Current Operating System [culture] Is Flawed. It Actually Has Bugs In It That Generate Contradictions. We're Cutting The Earth From Beneath Our Own Feet. We're Poisoning The Atmosphere That We Breathe. This Is Not Intelligent Behaviour. This Is A Culture With A Bug In Its Operating System That's Making It Produce Erratic, Dysfunctional, Malfunctional Behaviour. Time To Call A Tech! And Who Are The Techs? The Shamans Are The Techs.

What We Drug People Have, That You Don't, Is Repeatability.

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

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.

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

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.

Buddhism Is A Heresy On Hinduism. It Was Hinduism That Did The Dirty Work For Buddhism, By The Time Buddha Came Along Priest-craft Was An Ancient Tradition In India.

The Idea Of Psychedelic Societies Is Something New. And It Doesn't Necessarily Mean That Everyone Takes The Drug. It Merely Means That The Complexity And The Mysteriousness Of Mind Are Centered In The Consciousness Of The Civilization As The Mystery Which It Comes From And Which It Must Relate To In Order To Be Relevant.

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.

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

We Are Consciousness. We May Not Always Be Monkeys.

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

As A Society We Cannot Seem To Make Peace With Nature. As Individuals, It's Hard For Us To Be At Peace With Ourselves.

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

It's As Though A Certain Level Of Intoxication With The Mushroom Is The Precondition For Being Able To Communicate, But Is Not Itself Enough.

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

A Birth Is A Death. Everything You Treasure, And Believe In, And Love, And Relate To Is Destroyed For You When You Leave The Womb. And You Are Launched Into Another Modality, A Modality That Perhaps You Would Not Have Chosen But That You Cannot Do Anything About.

We Must Look To The Native Healers All Over The World And Study Their Methods... Their Methods Are Chemical And Personal. It's A Combination Of Care, Attention, Intention And Chemistry That Allows Consciousness To Be Made Malleable And Recast In Other Forms.

The Planet Has A Kind Of Intelligence, It Can Actually Open A Channel Of Communication With An Individual Human Being. The Message That Nature Sends Is, Transform Your Language Through A Synergy Between Electronic Culture And The Psychedelic Imagination, A Synergy Between Dance And Idea, A Synergy Between Understanding And Intuition, And Dissolve The Boundaries That Your Culture Has Sanctioned Between You, To Become Part Of This Gaian Supermind

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Television Is, To My Mind, The Most Insidious Drug That The 20th Century Has Had To Deal With.

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

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

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.

If You Don't Have A Plan, You Become Part Of Somebody Else's Plan.

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

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

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've Painted Ourselves Into A Corner Where The Only Choice Is Real Nightmare - Triage, Epidemic Disease, Famine, Fascism, The Collapse Of Human Rights - Or A Leap To An Entirely Different Level. We've Taken Business-as-usual Off The Menu. Now Only The Extreme Possibilities Loom.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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].

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

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

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?

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

Our World Is In Crisis Because Of The Absence Of Consciousness

History Is A Series Of Approximations Of The Final Singularity.

[this Legendary Amazonian Substance Is] A Cybernetic Transdimentional Medium Of Some Sort That Is Generated Out Of The Mysteries Of The Physiology Of The Human Body.

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

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 Imagination Is The Golden Pathway To Everywhere.

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

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.

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

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

Science Is The Exploration Of The Experience Of Nature Without Psychedelics. And I Propose, Therefore, To Expand That Enterprise And Say That We Need A Science Beyond Science. We Need A Science Which Plays With A Full Deck.

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

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

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

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

The 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.

Psilocybin, Tryptamine, Is In My Opinion The Means To Eliminating The Future By Becoming Cognizant Of The Architecture Of Eternity, Which Is Modulating Time And Causing History, Essentially.

You Will Ride The Tao Toward The Concrescence And Will Be Able To Live In The Light Of Its Anticipation.

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

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

Apparently There Is A Great Discovery Or Insight Which Our Culture Is Deliberately Designed To Suppress, Distort, And Ignore. That Is That Nature Is Some Kind Of Minded Entity. That Nature Is Not Simply The Random Flight Of Atoms Through Electromagnetic Fields. Nature Is Not The Empty, Despiritualized , Lumpen Matter That We Inherit From Modern Physics. But It Is Instead A Kind Of Intelligence, A Kind Of Mind.

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.

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

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.

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.

So The Idea Is To Triangulate A Sufficiently Large Number Of Data Points In Your Set Of Experience That You Can Make A Model Of The World That Is Not Imprisoning. That's Why, Second To Psychedelics, I Think Travel Is The Most Boundary-dissolving, Educational Enterprise That You Can Get Mixed Up In.

The Same Organizational Principles Which Called Us Forth Into Self-reflection Have Called Forth Self-reflection Out Of The Planet Itself. And The Problem Then Is For Us To Suspect This, Act On Our Suspicion, And Be Good Detectives, And Track Down The Spirit In Its Lair. And This Is What Shamans Are Doing. They Are Hunters Of Spirit.

If 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.

Cyberspace Is The Human Transition Into A Mathematical Super Space Where We As A Collectivity Become Optionally A Single Point Of View.

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

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

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.

Let's Not Underrate Cannabis, For Cryin' Out Loud. Cannabis Should Be The Glue Of The Community.

Nobody Is Smarter Than You Are. And What If They Are? What Good Is Their Understanding Doing You?

It's A Product Of The Fractal Laws That Govern The World At An Informational Level. There Is No Deeper Truth.

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.

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.

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.

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

Culture As We're Practicing It Is Causing A Lot Of Pain.

History Is The In-rushing Toward What The Buddhists Call The Realm Of The Densely Packed, A Transformational Realm Where The Opposites Are Unified.

Time Will Perfect Matter.

The Message Of Psychedelics Is That Culture Can Be Re-engineered As A Set Of Emotional And Spiritual Values Rather Than Products. This Is Terrifying News.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

No One Is In Charge Of This Process, This Is What Makes History So Interesting, It's A Runaway Freight Train On A Dark And Stormy Night.

Our World Is Endangered By The Absence Of Good Ideas

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.

The Central Point About The Psychedelic Experience Is The Content Of The Experience. And This Has Been Occluded Or Obfuscated By The Behavioral And Statistical And Scientific Methods That Have Been Brought To Bear To Study Hallucinogenic Experience.

Scientific Method

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.

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

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.

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

The Main Thing To Understand Is That We Are Imprisoned In Some Kind Of Work Of 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 Date, The Enterprise Of Thinking Has Moved Us Radically Away From Understanding Anything.

I Believe Reality Is A Marvelous Joke Staged For My Edification And Amusement And Everybody Is Working Very Hard To Make Me Happy.

Working Very Hard

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

Nothing Is As Boundary Dissolving, Except For Psychedelic Compounds, As Travel. Travel Is Up There.

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

But A Mature Humanity Could Get Into A Place Where We No Longer Required These Metaphysical Spankings From Messiahs And Flying Saucers That Come Along Every Thousand Years Or So To Mess Up The Mess That Has Been Created And Try And Send People Off On Another Tack. And The Way To Do This Is To Look At The Abysses That Confront Man As Species And Individuals And Try To Unify Them. And I Think That Psilocybin Offers A Way Out Because It Allows A Dialogue With The Over-mind. You Won't Read About It In "scientific American" Or Anywhere Else. You Will Carry It Out.

We Are All Cells Of A Much Larger Body, And Like The Cells Of Our Own Body It Is Hard For Us To Glimpse The Whole Pattern Of The Whole Of What Is Happening, And Yet We Can Sense That There Is A Purpose, And There Is A Pattern.

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

In Cyberspace Things Are Built Out Of Light.

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

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.

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

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

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