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The Way Out Then Is Personal Responsibility, New Operating Systems Downloaded From Outside Of Culture, Which Means From The Deeper Wisdom Of The Psychedelic Plants And Then A Commitment To Community And A Motto Of "to The Future, Without Fear!" Without Fear!

-Terence McKenna

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The Way Out Then

Terence McKenna

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The Way Out Then Is Personal Responsibility, New Operating Systems Downloaded From Outside Of Culture, Which Means From The Deeper Wisdom Of The Psychedelic Plants And Then A Commitment To Community And A Motto Of "to The Future, Without Fear!" Without Fear!

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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.

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?'

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It’s Pretty Simple, The Ethical Life. It’s Just Demanding.

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.

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.

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

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.

Our World Is In Crisis Because Of The Absence Of Consciousness

Certainly Neo-platonism, Plotinus And Porphyry And That School Are Psychedelic Philosophers. Their Idea Of An Ascending Hierarchy Of More And More Rarefied States Is A Sophisticated Presentation Of The Shamanic Cosmology, Which Is The Cosmology That One Experientially Discovers When They Involve Themselves With Psychedelics.

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.

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

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

Language Betrays, In Order To Mean.

Think About This For A Moment, We Grow So Inured To These Religious Forms, Think About The Notion Of Instituting At The Center Of Your Religion A Rite Where You Eat Your God Is Probably A Memory Of A Relationship To Some Kind Of A Psychedelic Experience Of Some Sort.

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.

The Surface Of Things Is Not Where Attention Should Rest.

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.

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.

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

We Are Like Caterpillars Contemplating Pupation.

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

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 Purpose Of Life Is To Familiarize Oneself With This After-death Body So That The Act Of Dying Will Not Create Confusion In The Psyche.

Nature Is Not Our Enemy, To Be Raped And Conquered. Nature Is Ourselves, To Be Cherished And Explored.

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.

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.

The Sine Qua Non For Obtaining A Psychedelic Experience Is Humbling Yourself To The Point Where You Admit That You Must Submit To The Experience Of The Plant Or The Drug. This Act Of Surrender Is The Major Technical Function You Will Be Called Upon To Perform During The Psychedelic Trip.

Psychedelics Are Actually A Kind Of Miraculous Reality That Can Stand The Test Of Objective Examination.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

How Do We Fight Back? By Creating Art.

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.

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

In Other Words, All These Things You Might Cling To, Catholicism, Democratic Ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, All Of These Things Are Exposed [through Use Of Psychedelics] As Simply Quaint Cultural Artifacts, Painted Masks And Rattles Assembled By People Of Good Intent But Clearly Not Great Grasp Of The Situation.

Democratic Ideals

Earth Is A Place Where Language Has Literally Become Alive. Language Has Infested Matter; It Is Replicating And Defining And Building Itself. And It Is In Us.

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.

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

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

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

Everything Will Come True In Cyberspace. That's The Whole Idea. What Cyberspace Is, On One Level, It's Simply The Human Imagination Vivified, Hardwired.

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

I Think That's The Job Of Each Of Us - To Show Our Best Toys And Our Best Tricks That Lift Us And Our Friends To Higher And Higher Levels. There Is No End To This Bootstrapping Process. The Future Of The Human Mind And Body And The Future Of Humans Together Is Endlessly Bright.

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

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

The Psychedelic Experience Is Not A Journey Into The Human Unconscious, Or Into The Ghost Bards Of Our Human Civilization. It's A Journey Into The Presence Of The Gaian Mind.

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

The State In The Matter Of Drugs Should Not, Any More Than In The Matter Of Sex, Act As The Secret Agent For The Agenda Of The Church.

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.

Worrying Is Betting Against Yourself.

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.

The Psychedelic Experience Is Simply A Compressed Instance Of What We Call Understanding, So That Living Psychedelically Is Trying To Live In An Atmosphere Of Continuous Unfolding Of Understanding, So That Every Day You Know More And See Into Things With Greater Depth Than You Did Before. This Is A Process Of Education.

What Is Always Left Out Of Descriptions Of The Psychedelic State, The Deep Psychedelic State, Is How Weird It Is.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Ideology Always Paves The Way Toward Atrocity.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Culture Is Your Operating System.

Operating Systems

I'm Fascinated By Hallucinations. I Mean, To Me That Is The Sina Qua Non That You're Getting Somewhere.

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.

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

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 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

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

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

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

When We Really Understand Time Travel We May Find Out It's As Common As Dirt And Has Been Going On All Around Us Is All Kinds Of Physical Processes.

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.

Psychedelic Telepathy Is You 'see' What I Mean.

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.

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

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

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.

Notice That The Whole Story Of Eden Is The Story Of The Struggle Over A Woman's Relationship To A Psychoactive Plant.

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

The Reason I Am So Passionately Committed To The Psychedelic Thing Is Because I See It As Radical, And If This Is Not The Moment For Radical Solutions, What Is?

The Real Secret Of Magic Is That The World Is Made Of Words, And That If You Know The Words That The World Is Made Of You Can Make Of It Whatever You Wish.

We Are Like Coral Animals In A Vast Reef Of Excreted Technological Material That Is Wired For Solid State Data Transfer.

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

Time Is A Topological Manifold. It Is A Surface. Events Flow Across It Like Water Over Land And Like Water Flowing Over Land, When The Land Is Flat, The Water Becomes Reflective And Moves Slowly. When The Landscape Becomes Disrupted, The Water Moves Faster And Chaotic Attractors Appear And New Kinds Of Activity Emerge And Out Of That New Activity, There Comes The New States That Define The Future.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Nature Loves Courage. You Make The Commitment And Nature Will Respond To That Commitment By Removing Impossible Obstacles. Dream The Impossible Dream And The World Will Not Grind You Under, It Will Lift You Up. This Is The Trick. This Is What All These Teachers And Philosophers Who Really Counted, Who Really Touched The Alchemical Gold, This Is What They Understood. This Is The Shamanic Dance In The Waterfall. This Is How Magic Is Done. By Hurling Yourself Into The Abyss And Discovering Its A Feather Bed.

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

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

I See The Psychedelic Experience As Both The Centerpiece Of Prehistoric Life And Destined To Be The Centerpiece Of Any Future That We Want To Be Part Of.

In The Silence, In The Darkness, Swept Away By These Alien Alkaloids And The Plant-mind Behind Them, You Find Out A Truth That Can Barely Be Told. And Most Of It Can't Be Told.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The Central Figure In The Archaic Revival Is The Shaman.

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.

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.

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

'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.

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

The Psychedelics Are This Immense Tool For The Inspection Of Our Own Nature.

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

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.

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?

What I'm Talking About Is Actually Is The Mystery Of Being As Existential Fact. That There Is Something That Haunts This World That Can Take Apart And Reduce Every Single One Of Us To A Mixture Of Terror And Ecstasy, Fear And Trembling. It Is Not An Idea, That's The Primary Thing To Bear In Mind. It's An Experience.

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

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.

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

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.

Don't Worry. You Don't Know Enough To Worry. . . . Who Do You Think You Are That You Should Worry, For Cryin' Out Loud. It's A Total Waste Of Time. It Presupposes Such A Knowledge Of The Situation That It Is, In Fact, A Form Of Hubris.

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

My Normal Lectures Deal With The Psychedelic Experience As A Generalized And Historical Phenomenon, But This Effort At Communication Is Slightly More Personal In That It's An Effort To Impart [just] One Idea That Came Out Of An Involvement With Psychedelic Substances.

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

What Is Revealed Through The Psychedelic Experience, I Think, Is A Higher Dimensional Perspective On Reality. And I Use 'higher Dimensional' In The Mathematical Sense.

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

And Certainly When I Reached La Chorerra In 1971 I Had A Price On My Head By The Fbi, I Was Running Out Of Money, I Was At The End Of My Rope. And Then “they” Recruited Me And Said, “you Know, With A Mouth Like Yours There's A Place For You In Our Organization“. And I've Worked In Deep Background Positions About Which The Less Said The Better. And Then About 15 Years Ago They Shifted Me Into Public Relations And I've Been There To The Present.

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

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

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

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

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.

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'

All Psychedelic Explorers Should Be Aware Of The Concept Of What Is Called A Cognitive Hallucination. The Is A Much More Insidious Phenomenon. This Is, Quite Simply, An Out-and-out Delusion.

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

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.

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

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

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

Impossible Becomes Possible

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

In 1948, Television Was Introduced, And Millions And Millions Of People Lead Larval, Low-awareness, Warehoused Lives Mainlining An Electronic Drug Straight Into Their Brains.

The 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?

History, Call It 15,000 Or 25,000 Years Of Duration, Is The Story Of An Animal, Some Kind Of Complex Animal, Becoming Conscious.

Plants Seem Like An Excellent Model For The Kind Of Future That We Should Be Building.

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.

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

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

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

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

It's Our Machines And Our Technologies That Are Now The Major Evolutionary Forces Acting Upon Us. It's Not Our Political Systems.

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’ll Try To Be Around And About. But If I’m Not, Then You Know That I’m Behind Your Eyelids, And I’ll Meet You There

It Is The Imagination That Argues For The Divine Spark Within Human Beings. It Is Literally A Decent Of The World's Soul Into All Of Us.

No One Knows Enough To Worry.

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.

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

The Most Beautiful Things In The Universe Are Inside The Human Mind.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Memory Training Is Great Psychedelic Training.

The Real Justification For Psychedelics Is That They Feed New Data Into Your Model.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Part Of What The Psychedelic Point Of View Represents Is Living A Certain Portion Of Your Life Without Answers. Just Accepting That Certain Dilemmas Will Never Resolve Themselves Into Some Kind Of A Complete Answer. That's Why Psychedelics Are So Different From Any System Being Sold, From One Of The Great Elder Systems Like Christianity, To The Latest Cult Out Of Los Angeles.

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

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.

Chaos Is Roving Through The System And Able To Undo, At Any Point, The Best Laid Plans.

Best Laid Plans

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

Pursuit Of Happiness

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