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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.

-Terence McKenna

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The War On Drugs

Terence McKenna

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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.

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The Felt Presence Of Immediate Experience-- This Is All You Know. Everything Else Comes As Unconfirmed Rumor.

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

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.

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

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

I'm Not An Advocate Of Drugs. I'm An Advocate Of Psychedelics.

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.

Culture Is Your Operating System.

Operating Systems

...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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

And What We're Looking Toward Is A Moment When The Artificial Language Structures Which Bind Us Within The Notion Of Ourselves Are Dissolved In The Presence Of The Realization That We Are A Part Of Nature. And When That Happens, The Childhood Of Our Species Will Pass Away, And We Will Stand Tremulously On The Brink Of Really The First Moment Of Coherent Human Civilization.

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

Our Culture Takes Us Out Of The Body And Sells Our Loyalty Into Political Systems, Into Religions, Into Inanimate Objects And Machines, Collections, So Forth And So On. The Felt Experience Of The Body Is What The Psychedelics Are Handing Back To Us.

Inanimate Objects

Cultures Are Virtual Realities Made Of Language.

People Are Concrescences Of Ambiguity.

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

The Major Adventure Is To Claim Your Authentic, True Being, Which Is Not Culturally Given To You. The Culture Will Not Explain To You How To Be A Real Human Being. It Will Tell You How To Be Banker, Politician, Indian Chief, Masseuses, Actress, Whatever, But It Will Not Give You True Being.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

What We Represent Is The Nexus Of Concrescent Novelty That Has Been Moving Itself Together, Complexifying Itself, Folding Itself In Upon Itself For Billions And Billions Of Years. There Is, So Far As We Know, Nothing More Advanced Than What Is Sitting Behind Your Eyes. The Human Neocortex Is The Most Densely Ramified Complexified Structure In The Known Universe.

Although Whenever You Have Intelligent Life In The Presence Of Large Explosions, A Safe Bet Is That The Intelligent Life Is Responsible For The Large Explosion.

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.

Obviously, It's Some Kind Of Freely Commanded Modality In The Psyche With Which We Can Have A Relationship If We Will But Evolve A Control Language And A Dialogue. And It Remains Mysterious.

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.

I Finally Realized That This 'place' That I Kept Bursting Into [on A Psychedelic Experience] Was Somebody's Idea Of A Playpen.

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.

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

This Is A General Law Of The Universe, Overlooked By Science, That Out Of Complexity Emerges Greater Complexity. We Could Almost Say That The Universe, Nature, Is A Novelty-conserving, Or Complexity-conserving Engine.

Even A Billion People Is Too Much. There's No Way Back To The Simplicity We Once Knew, But There May Be A Way Forward To The Simplicity That We Once Knew.

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.

I'm Not An Advocate For Everything That Rolls Out Of The Laboratory. I'm An Advocate For Things Sanctioned By Millennia Of Usage.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

There Will Be Difficult Moments In A Five-gram Trip, But On The Other Hand Certain Questions Will Be Solved Forever For You, Because You Will Validate The Existence Of This Dimension. You Will See What Your Relationship To It Is.

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

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

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.

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

[dmt] Raises All The Questions In A Hurry. It's So Intense And So Oriented Toward The Other And The Visual And The Hallucinogenic That It Isn't Really Like A Drug. It's More Like An Event That You Ran Into. You Just Came Around A Corner And There Was The Unspeakable.

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.

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.

It's No Big Deal About How You Get Language To Evolve. You Cause Language To Evolve By Saying New And Intelligent Things To Each Other.

We Can Understand First Of All That What Is Happening In The World Of Becoming, The World We All Experience As Beings, Is That Novelty Is Entering Into Being, And It Is Changing The Modalities Of The Real World Toward Greater And Greater Levels Of Integration.

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

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

Psychedelics Are Not Flashlights Into The Chaos Of The Freudian Unconscious, They Are Tools For Mathematically Unpacking Your Mind Into A Higher Dimensional Space. In The Newtonian And Print Created Space That We Are Walking Around In You, Are Like A Self Extracting Archive, That Hasn't Self Extracted Itself Yet.

The Traditional Manner Of Taking Psilocybin Is To Take A Very Healthy Dose, In The Vicinity Of 15 Mg. On An Empty Stomach In Total Darkness.

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.

Psychedelic Telepathy Is You 'see' What I Mean.

In Cyberspace Things Are Built Out Of Light.

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.

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

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 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.

To My Mind This Is What Shamanic Training Must Really Be, Is Mnemonic Training. If You Want To Bring The Stuff Back You Have To Train Yourself To Bring It Back.

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

History Is Rooted In The Future

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Cultural Conditioning Is Like Bad Software. Over And Over It's Diddled With And Re-written So That It Can Just Run On The Next Attempt. But There Is Cultural Hardware, And It's That Cultural Hardware, Otherwise Known As Authentic Being, That We Are Propelled Toward By The Example Of The Shaman And The Techniques Of The Shaman. ... Shamanism Therefore Is A Call To Authenticity.

We Need A Pharmacological Intervention On Anti-social Behavior Or We Are Not Going To Get Hold Of Our Dilemma.

Social Behavior

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

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

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

My Hope Is That I May Bear Witness To The Fact That There Is A Great Mystery Calling To Us All, Beckoning Across The Landscape Of Our History, Promising To Realize Itself And To Give Real Meaning To What Is Otherwise Only The Confusion Of Our Lives And Our Collective Past.

We Are Part Of A Symbiotic Relationship With Something Which Disguises Itself As An Extra-terrestrial Invasion So As Not To Alarm Us.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The Human Brain Is The God Of Technological Innovation.

Our Destiny Is To Become What We Think, To Have Our Thoughts Become Our Bodies And Our Bodies Become Our Thoughts.

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.

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

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

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.

This Is What Magic Is. It's Being Able To Speak In A Voice Which Makes Things Happen, Being Able To Speak In A Voice Which Causes Facts To Be Beheld By Groups Of People In A Way That Has Been Purged From Profane Language, For Us Relegated To Poetry And That Sort Of Thing.

I Have A Skeptical And Cranky Side, And I'm Forever Puzzled Why People Believe The, Seeming To Me, Dumb Things That They Choose To Believe.

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.

And So, These Are The Things, The Exploration Of Which, The Singing About Of Which, Makes Us Human Beings. The Exploration Of The Universe Of The Unseen Is The Business Of Human Beings.

To My Mind This Makes Psychedelics Central To Any Political Reconstruction, Because These Are The Only Force In Nature That Actually Dissolve Linguistics Structures; Lets The Mechanics Of Syntax To Be Visible, Allows The Possibility For Rapid Introduction And Spread Of New Concepts; Gives Permission For New Ways Of Seeing; And This Is What We Have To Do, We Have To Change Our Minds.

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.

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

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.

Drugs Are About Dulling Perception, About Addiction And About Behavioral Repetition...what *psychedelics* Are About Is Pattern- Dissolving Experiences Of An Extraordinarily High Or Different Awareness. They Are The Exact Opposite Of Drugs. They Promote Questioning , They Promote Consciousness, They Promote Value Examinations, They Promote The Reconstruction Of Behavioral Patterns.

...situations Evolve As Matter Responds To The Conditioning Of Time And Space...if You Know What Is Contained In Time From Its Beginning To Its End You Are Somehow No Longer In Time. Even Though You Still Have A Body And Still Eat And Do What You Do, You Have Discovered Something That Liberated You Into A Satisfying All-at-oneness.

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

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

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

Impossible Becomes Possible

It Is No Coincidence That A Rebirth Of Psychedelic Use Is Occuring As We Acquire The Technological Capability To Leave The Planet. The Mushroom Visions And The Transformation Of The Human Image Precipitated By Space Exploration Are Spun Together. Nothing Less Is Happening Than The Emergence Of A New Human Order. A Telepathic, Humane, Universalist Kind Of Human Culture Is Emerging That Will Make Everything That Preceded It Appear Like The Stone Age.

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

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.

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

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

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

What You Call Man Is Time.

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

The Psychedelic Universe, Whatever It Is, Is The Major Datum Of Experience. It's Larger Than This Planet. Nobody Knows How Large It Is. The Further In You Go The Bigger It Gets. We Don't Know What To Make Of Something Like That. It's The Reverse Of Our Expectations.

Thinkers Are Not A Welcome Addition To Most Social Situations.

Ego Is A Structure That Is Erected By A Neurotic Individual Who Is A Member Of A Neurotic Culture Against The Facts Of The Matter. And Culture, Which We Put On Like An Overcoat, Is The Collectivized Consensus About What Sort Of Neurotic Behaviors Are Acceptable.

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.

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.

What We Now Have Is The Freedom Which Attends Decadence, Or The Decadence Which Attends Freedom.

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.

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

Mind Conjures Miracles Out Of Time.

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.

Memory Training Is Great Psychedelic Training.

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.

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

Human Experience

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.

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

For Unknown Reasons, There Is A Tremendous Concentration Of Psychoactive Plants On The South American Continent. The South American Continent Has More Known Hallucinogens Than The Rest Of The Planet Combined.

Alchemy Is About The Generation Of A Psychic Construct, A Wholeness, A Thing Which Has Many Properties, Which Is Paradoxical, Which Is Both Mind And Matter, Which Can Do Anything.

The Imagination Is A Dimension Of Nonlocal Information

If Reality Is Code, Then It Can Be Hacked In Some Way That We Had Not Suspected Before.

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

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

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.

For Talking Monkeys To Speak Of Truth Is Hubris Of The Highest Degree. Where Is It Writ Large That Talking Monkeys Should Be Able To Model The Cosmos? If A Sea Urchin Or A Racoon Were To Propose To You That It Had A Viable Truth About The Universe, The Absurdity Of That Assertion Would Be Self-evident, But In Our Case We Make An Exception.

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

Our Theories Are The Weakest Part Of What We Say. What We're Working From Is The Fact Of An Experience Which We Need To Make Sense Of.

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.

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

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.

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

The World Which We Perceive Is A Tiny Fraction Of The World Which We Can Perceive, Which Is A Tiny Fraction Of The Perceivable World.

The 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Only Psychos And Shamans Create Their Own Reality

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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'.

Worrying Is Betting Against Yourself.

The Overriding Problems Are Brought On By The Existence Of The Ego, A Maladaptive Behavioral Complex In The Psyche That Gets Going Like A Tumor. If It's Not Treated - If There's Not Pharmacological Intervention - It Becomes The Dominant Constellation Of The Personality.

No One Knows Enough To Worry.

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

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.

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

The Bigger You Build The Bonfire, The More Darkness Is Revealed.

Knowledge, Or Verbal Facility, Is No Proof That You Know What You're Talking About.

Marcel Eliade Took The Position That Hallucinogenic Shamanism Was Decadent, And Gordon Wasson, Very Rightly I Believe, Contravened This View And Held That Actually It Was Very Probably The Presence Of The Hallucinogenic Drug Experience In The Life Of Early Man That Lay The Very Basis For The Idea Of The Spirit.

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

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.

'drugs' And Psychedelics Are Not Two Members Of A Family, They Are Antithetically Opposed To Each Other. The Pro-psychedelic Position Is An Anti-drug Position.

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.

We Have To Claim Anarchy And Realize That Systems Have A Life Of Their Own That Is Anti-humanist. There Is Definitely An Anti-humanist Tendency In All Systems.

You Are An Explorer, And You Represent Our Species, And The Greatest Good You Can Do Is To Bring Back A New Idea, Because Our World Is Endangered By The Absence Of Good Ideas. Our World Is In Crisis Because Of The Absence Of Consciousness.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Ayahuasca, Unlike Mushrooms And All These Other Things Is Only As Good As The Person Who Made It. . . . The Ayahuasca Is A Combinatory Drug, And So It Brings The Human Interaction And The Lore Of It Into A Much More Central Position.

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

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.

Astonishment Is The Proper Response To Reality.

The Imagination Is The Golden Pathway To Everywhere.

Ninety Percent Of The Difficulty In Your Intellectual Life Would Never Have Happened If You Just Had Better Taste.

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

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

We Have Wandered Into A State Of Prolonged Neurosis Because Of The Absence Of A Direct Pipeline To The Unconscious And We Have Then Fallen Victim To Priestcraft Of Every Conceivable Sort.

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

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

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