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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.

-Terence McKenna

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The Truth Doesn't Need

Terence McKenna

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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.

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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.

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.

What Good Is A Theory Of How The Universe Works If It’s A Series Of Tensor Equations That, Even When Understood, Come Nowhere Tangential To Experience? The Only Intellectual Or Noetic Or Spiritual Path Worth Following Is One That Builds On Personal Experience

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.

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.

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

I Think The Entire Message Of The Psychedelic Experience, Which Is Basically The Sine Qua Non Of The Rebirth Of Alchemical Understanding, The Very Basis Of That Understanding Is That Nature Seeks To Communicate.

At Still Higher Doses Psilocybin Triggers This Activity In The Language-forming Capacity Of The Brain That Manifests As Song And Vision. Psilocybin May Have Synergized The Emergence Of Higher Forms Of Psychic Organization Out Of Primitive Protohuman Animals. It Can Be Seen As A Kind Of Evolutionary Enzyme, Or Evolutionary Catalyst.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

Alcoholism Isn't A Disease. It's A Failure Of Self-image.

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.

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

There Is No Knowledge Without Risk Taking.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Only Psychos And Shamans Create Their Own Reality

Mind Conjures Miracles Out Of Time.

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.

Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Small Minds.

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

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.

Time Will Perfect Matter.

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.

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

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

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?

I Believe That The Place To Search For Extraterrestrials Is In The Psychic Dimension.

In A Sense, Sexuality Is The Built-in Psychedelic Experience That Only A Very Few People Manage To Evade.

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.

Dmt Is A Reliable Method For Crossing In To A Dimension That Human Beings Have Debated The Existence Of For 50.000 Years. Is There An Invisible Nearby World Inhabited By Active Intelligences With Which Human Beings Can Communicate? You Bet. And If You Don't Think So, Then Tell Me You Don't Think So After You've Smoked 75mg Dmt. Otherwise We Just Don't Have Anything To Talk About.

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

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

There Is This Persistent Theme In All Of These Notions That Death Is Made More Easy, Whatever That Means, If You've Learned The Territory Before You Get There. And You Know, In The Mahayana Buddhist Situation It Even Becomes As Extreme As Saying; 'life Is Essentially A Preparation For Death, A Studying Of The Maps Of A Learning Of The Skills A Packing Of Your Picnic Basket So That When You Get Out There And Demons Are Sniffing You Up One Side And Down The Other You Don't Bungle Your Mantras'.

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.

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

Information Processing

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

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!'

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.

The World Is Mental In Some Way That We Do Not Yet Understand, But That Which We're Edging Toward Understanding. And The World Is Made Of Language. I Can't Say That Enough. Whenever We Get Into These Discussions About Reality, Or Effects In Space And Time, We Are Operating Outside This Assumption That The World Is Made Of Language.

The Terror Of Drugs Is A Terror Of Giving Up Control. This Is What People Are Most Alarmed About By Psychedelics, Is The Giving Up Control.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

In Cyberspace Things Are Built Out Of Light.

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

A Glacier Rattles In The Cupboard, The Desert Sighs In The Bed, And The Crack In The Teacup Opens A Door To The Land Of The Dead. The Maya Call This Xibalba (shibalba), The Road To The Dimension Of The Dead.

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

A Global Society Is Coming Into Being, A Global Society That Is Made Out Of Information That Was Not Intended To Be Ours, But Is Ours, By The Mistaken Invention Of Computers And The Printing Press, Information Is Power, And Information Has Spilled By The Clumsy Hands Of The Dominator Culture So That The Information Is Everywhere, Never Before Has The Situation Been So Fluid, We Might Be Able To Finally Have A Crack At This

Information Is Power

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.

I'm Not Trying To Sign People Up To A Creed, I'm Much More Interested In The People That Disagree. These Ideas Are Powerful But This Isn't Mysticism In The Ordinary Sense To Be Protected By Mumblings About Faith And All That. This Is The Real Thing.

The Creative Act Is A Letting Down Of The Net Of Human Imagination Into The Ocean Of Chaos On Which We Are Suspended, And The Attempt To Bring Out Of It Ideas.

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.

What You Call Man Is Time.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

The Plants Are The Pipeline Into The Gaian Intention. It's Just Not A Coincidence That These Plants Carry This Immense Spiritual Message. They Are The Pipeline Of Gaian Intentionality.

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

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.

For All We Know, We Know Nothing.

Life Lived In The Absence Of The Psychedelic Experience Upon Which Primordial Shamanism Is Based Is Life Trivialized, Life Denied, Life Enslaved To The Ego.

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

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.

If You Sit Down With A Person, Or A Watermelon For That Matter, When You're Stoned And Sing Into It, The Quality Of The Hallucination Is Such That There Is A Way Of Thinking About It Where You Could Say, 'this Is An Acoustical Hologram Of The Interior Of Their Body.'" I Don't Say That.i Just Say, "my Goodness Isn't It Strange That I Seem To Be Able To See Inside Of The Watermelon When I'm Doing This.'

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.

Ideologies Are Cultural Memes. They Are The Most Confining Of The Cultural Memes. That's Where Culture Gets Real Ugly. It Is When You Rub Up Against Its Ideologies.

History Is The Siren Song Of The Soul.

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 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.

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

The Smart People Who Are Straight Are Involved In Simply The Media Management Of What Has Turned Into A Slow Apocalypse, Spreading Starvation, Exacerbated Class Differences, Toxified Agriculture, So Forth And So On. I Don't Believe The Establishment Thinks There Are Solutions. Their Policy Is Basically The Management Of Panic, Which Is Hardly A Forward Moving Approach To The Adventure Of Human Civilization.

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

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

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

The Content Of The Dialogue With 'the Other' Is A Content That Indicates That Man's Horizons Are Infinitely Bright, That Death Is In Fact, Well, As Thomas Vaughn Put It, 'the Body Is The Placenta Of The Soul'

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

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.

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.

What We Need To Change Is Our Minds, That's The Part That's Doing Us Dirt And Dragging Us Under. How Can We Change Our Minds.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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

The Engineers Of The Future Will Be Poets.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Cultures Are Virtual Realities Made Of Language.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

And What Is The Primary Datum? It's The Felt Presence Of Immediate Experience. In Other Words, Being Here Now Is The Primary Datum.

To Contact The Cosmic Giggle, To Have The Flow Of Casuistry Begin To Give Off Synchronistic Ripples, Whitecaps In The Billows Of The Coincidental Ether, If You Will. To Achieve That, A Precondition Is A Kind Of Unconsciousness, A Kind Of Drifting, A Certain Taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, A Certain Assumptions That Things Are Simpler Than They Are, Almost Always Precedes What Mircea Eliade Called ‘the Rupture Of Plane’ That Indicates That There Is An Archetypal World, An Archetypal Power Behind Profane Appearances.

A History-stopping Archetype Is Being Released Into The Skies Of This Planet, And If We Are Not Careful It Will Halt All Intellectual Inquiry In The Same Way That The Christos Archetype Halted Intellectual Inquiry In The Hellenistic Age.

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.

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!

The Problem Is Not To Find The Answer, It's To Face The Answer

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

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

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

The Tension In The World Is The Tension Between The Ego And The Feminine, Not Between The Masculine And The Feminine.

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

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.

Shamanism Is Not Some Obscure Concern Of Cultural Anthropologists. Shamanism Is How Religion Was Practiced For Its First Million Years. Up Until About 12,000 Years Ago There Was No Other Form Of Religion On This Planet. That Was How People Attained Some Kind Of Access To The Sacred.

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

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.

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

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

Nothing Comes Unannounced, But Many Can Miss The Announcement. So It's Very Important To Actually Listen To Your Own Intuition Rather Than Driving Through It.

What We Call Imagination Is Actually The Universal Library Of What's Real. You Couldn’t Imagine It If It Weren’t Real Somewhere, Sometime.

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

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.

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

You May Miss The End Of The World, But You Definitely Are Going To Have A Front Row Seat For The End Of Your World.

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.

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

Liberate Yourself From The Illusion Of Culture. Take Responsibility For What You Think And What You Do.

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

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

I Don't Think That Mass Drug Taking Is A Good Idea. But I Think That We Must Have A Deputized Minority, A Shamanic Professional Class If You Will, Whose Job Is To Bring Ideas Out Of The Deep Black Water And Show Them Off To The Rest Of Us And Perform For Our Culture Some Of The Cultural Functions That Shaman Perform In Pre-literate Cultures.

So When You Look At The Eschaton What You See, Strangely Enough, Is Your Own Face.

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.

Death Is The Black Hole Of Biology. It's An Event Horizon, And Once You Go Over That Event Horizon, No Information Can Be Passed Back Out Of The Hole.

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

I Think Transcending Our Cultures Is Going To Be Extraordinarily Necessary For Our Survival. I Don't Think We Can Carry Our Cultures Through The Keyhole Of The Stretch Of The Next Millennium

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.

You Put Two Egos Together And You've Either Got A Conflict, Which Is Always Interesting, Or Better Yet, A Love Affair.

History Is A Series Of Approximations Of The Final Singularity.

And Science, When It Examines Psychedelics, As It Will And Must, Is Going To Discover A Revolution, I Believe, That Will Put All The Previous Revolutions In Perspective.

Inwardness Is The Characteristic Feature Of The Vegetable Rather Than The Animal Approach To Existence. The Animals Move, Migrate And Swarm, While Plants Hold Fast. Plants Live In A Dimension Characterised By Solid State, The Fixed And The Enduring. If There Is Movement In The Consciousness Of Plants Then It Must Be The Movement Of Spirit And Attention In The Domain Of Vegetal Imagination. (...) This Is The Truth That The Shamans Have Always Known And Practiced. Awareness Of The Green Side Of Mind Was Called Veriditas By The Twelfth Century Visionary Hildegard Von Bingen.

We Are Creatures Of Information And The Imagination. The Monkey We Are Already Beginning To Transform And Shed. We Don't Look Like The Other Monkeys, And We Look Less Like Them All The Time.

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.

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

You're Immortal As Long As You Live.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Niagaras Of Beauty Are Flowing By Untapped By Ordinary Consciousness. . . . Would That We Could Send Robots Who Could Film These Psychedelic Realities. . . . The Presence Of So Much Beauty Is An Argument To Me That Truth Cannot Be Far Away.

Reality Itself Is Not Static. This Is One Of The Things That The Psychedelic Is Trying To Put Across, That The Reality We're Embedded In Is Itself Some Kind Of An Organism And Is Evolving Toward A Conclusion.

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 I've Observed, And I Think It's Fair To Give Credit To The Psychedelic Experience For This, What I've Observed Is That Nature Builds On Previously Established Levels Of Complexity.

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 Most Amazing The Most Amazing Transformation In My Lifetime Is Not The Revolution Of The Sixties But The Counter Revolution Of The Seventies, Where They Managed To Put The Cuckoo Clock Back Together Again

The Real Nature Of Our Predicament Is Completely Opaque To Us.

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.

Language Betrays, In Order To Mean.

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.

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.

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

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

What Civilization Is, Is 6 Billion People Trying To Make Themselves Happy By Standing On Each Other's Shoulders And Kicking Each Other's Teeth In. It's Not A Pleasant Situation.

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