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We [psychonauts] Are All Going To Go Into The Books As Pioneers, Because It's Too Early For Us To Be Anything Else. There's No Map, No Finished Database, Just Anecdotes Of The Crazy, Crazy Stuff That Goes On. That's Why It's So Important To Try And Share [our Stories].

-Terence McKenna

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We [psychonauts] Are All

Terence McKenna

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We [psychonauts] Are All Going To Go Into The Books As Pioneers, Because It's Too Early For Us To Be Anything Else. There's No Map, No Finished Database, Just Anecdotes Of The Crazy, Crazy Stuff That Goes On. That's Why It's So Important To Try And Share [our Stories].

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

History Is Just This Froth Of Artifact Production That Has Appeared In The Last Ten To Fifteen Thousand Years. It Spread Across The Planet Very Quickly. But That Mind In Man Just Goes Back And Back Into The Darkness.

The Psychedelic Species Of Visual Beauty Is Something We Don't See In Our Furniture Styles And Our Architecture. It Seems To Be Coming In, Literally, From Another Dimension, And Yet It Is Undeniably Moving. It's Beautiful.

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

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

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.

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.

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

A Singularity Is A Place Where The Rules Are Broken. A Miracle Is A Singularity.

I Think The Cybernetic Matrix Is A Tremendous Tool For Feminizing, And Radicalizing, And Psychedelicizing The Social Matrix. I See Computers As Entirely Feminine.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The Data Stream Has Been Corrupted, Return To First Principles.

There Is No Knowledge Without Risk Taking.

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

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.

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

Time Will Perfect Matter.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

Psychedelics Are Probably Responsible For Every Aspect Of Human Evolution Apart From The Decline In Bodyhair.

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

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.

So What Needs To Be Done Is To Spread The Idea That Anxiety Is Inappropriate. It's Sort Of Like We Who Are Psychedelic Have To Function As Sitters For Society, Because Society Is Going To Thrash, And Resist, And Think It's Dying, And Be Deluded, And Regurgitate Unconscious Material, And So Forth And So On. And The Role Then, I Think, For Psychedelic People Is To Try And Spread Calm.

Having Lived Long Enough To Go At Least Once Or Twice Around The Block, I'm Noticing That The Strangeness Is Not Receding The Strangeness Seems To Be Accelerating.

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

Animals Are Something Invented By Plants To Move Seeds Around. An Extremely Yang Solution To A Peculiar Problem Which They Faced.

Perhaps, You Know, New Laws, New Domains Of Potential Openness Are Occurring As The Universe Ages, And Complexity Previously Disallowed Is Now Possible, And We Are That Complexity. We Are Nature Moving Out Of Its Genetic Phase - A Phase Under The Control Of Chemical Genes, Which Are Physical Structures, In To An Epigenetic Phase, A Phase Of Culture Ruled By Codes, Transformable Culturally Confined Codes - Mathematics, Religion, Philosophy, Art, Dance, Humor.

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

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.

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

It Doesn't Matter What Your Cultural Conditioning Is, It Falls Into Question Under The Influence Of The Psychedelic. And For Most People That's Frightening.

The Germans Take Quite A Knock For The Holocaust, But The Catholic Church Manages To Push More People Into Death, Disease, And Degradation Every Year Than The Holocaust Managed In Its Entire Show. And It's Thought Rather Crass To Even Mention The Fact. It Seems To Me That As Long As These Catholic Bishops Can Show Their Face In Public That We Are In Complicity With Mass Murder.

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

The World Could Be Anything, You Know, It Could Be A Solid State Matrix Of Some Sort. It Could Be An Illusion. It Could Be A Dream. I Mean It Really Could Be A Dream.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Right Here And Now, One Quanta Away, There Is Raging A Universe Of Active Intelligence That Is Transhuman, Hyperdimensional, And Extremely Alien... What Is Driving Religious Feeling Today Is A Wish For Contact With This Other Universe.

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

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

Unanswered Questions

All Of You Who Have Been Through High Dose Psychedelic Experiences Know That It's Very Hard To Carry Stupid Baggage Through That Keyhole. In Fact You're Lucky If You Just Get Your Soul And Yourselves Through And Intact.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

National Governments Are Under Paid, Under Staffed, And Under Talented.

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.

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

But What I Really Am Interested In Is Not The End Of The World But Everything Which Precedes It.

End Of The World

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

We Are, In Fact, Hyper-dimentional Objects Of Some Sort Which Cast A Shadow Into Matter, And The Shadow In Matter Is The Body. And At Death, What Happens Basically, Is That The Shadow Withdraws, Or The Thing Which Cast The Shadow Withdraws, And Metabolism Ceases, And Matter Which Had Been Organized Into A Dissipative Structure In A Very Localized Area, Sustaining Itself Against Entropy By Cycling Material In And Degrading It And Expelling It, That Whole Phenomenon Ceases, But The Thing Which Ordered It Is Not Affected By That.

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.

It Seems To Me That Information Is The Thing Which Uses Matter, Uses Light, Uses Spirit, Uses Whatever It Can Put Its Hands On To Organize Itself Into Higher And Higher Levels Of Self-reflection.

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

Inside The Boundaries Of The Old Paradigm There's No Hope, There's No Way Out Of The Box Of Capitalism, Monogamy, Consumer Fetishism, Egoism, Money Worship, No Way Out. No Way. No Way Out!

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

There's Something In The Western Mind That Gets Very Nervous When You Try To Talk About The Bedrock Of Ontology.

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

Basically, For Me The Psychedelic Experience Was The Path To Revelation. It Actually Worked On Somebody Who Thought Nothing Would Work.

It Seems To Me Far More Likely That An Advanced Civilization Would Communicate Inter Dimensionally And Telepathically.

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.

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 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 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.

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

Nature Is Not Our Enemy, To Be Raped And Conquered. Nature Is Ourselves, To Be Cherished And Explored. Shamanism Has Always Known This, And Shamanism Has Always, In Its Most Authentic Expressions, Taught That The Path Required Allies. These Allies Are The Hallucinogenic Plants And The Mysterious Teaching Entities, Luminous And Transcendental, That Reside In That Nearby Dimension Of Ecstatic Beauty And Understanding That We Have Denied Until It Is Now Nearly Too Late.

It Seems To Me That It Is Psyche In A Way That Has Become Occluded By The Perverse Development Of Language.

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.

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.

So You Know What We Have To Do Is Stop Looking For Leadership From The Top, Because The Least Among Us Make Their Way Into Those Positions Of Power... So What We Have To Do Is Knock Off This Fantasy Of Being Citizens Inside A Democratic State, I Mean, What We Are, Are The Propagandized Masses Inside A Fascist Dictatorship.

Position Of Power

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

We Are Reaping The Fruits Of Ten Thousand, Fifty Thousand Years Of Sowing Of The Fields Of Mind. And It Is Being Dropped Into Our Laps For Us To Create Human-machine Interfacing, Control Of Genetic Material, Redefinition Of Social Reality, Re Engineering Of Languages, Revisioning Of The Planetary Ecology, All These Things Fall Upon Us.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Part Of What Is Wrong With Our Society, And Hence With Ourselves, Is That We Consume Images, We Don't Produce Them. We Need To Produce, Not Consume, Media.

The Mind Is The Cutting Edge Of The Evolving Event System.

This Is The Message Of Your Life And My Life - It’s That Nothing Lasts. Heraclitus Said It: Panta Rhei. All Flows, Nothing Lasts. Not Your Enemies, Not Your Fortune, Not Who You Sleep With At Night, Not The Books, Not The House In Saint-tropez, Not Even The Children - Nothing Lasts. To The Degree That You Avert Your Gaze From This Truth, You Build The Potential For Pain Into Your Life. Everything Is This Act Of Embracing The Present Moment, The Felt Presence Of Experience, And Then Moving On To The Next Felt Moment Of Experience. It’s Literally Psychological Nomadism Is What It Is.

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

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.

It's As Important To Be Well Informed In This Area, If You're Going To Do It, As It Is To Be Well Informed About Procedures In Skin Diving And That Sort Of Thing If You're Going To Do That.

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

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.

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

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

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 Mystery Is In The Body And The Way The Body Works Itself Into Nature.

...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.

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

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.

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

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.

When Your Time Is Turned Into Money, The Felt Presence Of Immediate Experience Is Analogous To Being Enslaved. I Mean, Let's Be Frank About It, It Is Enslavement.

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

Certainly The Central Platonic Idea, Which Is The Idea Of The Ideas, These Archetypal Forms Which Stand Outside Of Time Is One Which Is Confirmed By The Psychedelic Experience.

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

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?

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.

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

There Has Been No Progress In 60,000 Years In Reducing The Psychedelic Experience To A Known Quantity. It Is As Terrifying, As Awesome, As Ecstatic, As Irreducible To Us As It Was To Them.

Just Because You Have A Nut Theory It Doesn't Mean That You Agree With Other Nut Theories. In Fact, It Often Makes You Very Hostile To Them. After All, There's A Limited Pool There That We're All After.

I Discovered Early In Life A Stunning Truth That's Made My Life Very Complicated In Its Wake, But That I Still Think Is True, And It's That People Are Very Easy To Love.

The Immediate Future Of Man Lies In The Imagination And In Seeking The Dimension Where The Imagination Can Be Expressed. The Present Cultural Crisis On The Surface Of The Planet Is Caused By The Fact That This Is Not A Fitting Theater For The Exercise Of Imagination. It Wrecks The Planet. The Planet Has Its Own Eco-systemic Dynamics, Which Are Not The Dynamics Of Imagination.

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?

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.

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

The World Is Not An Unsolved Problem For Scientists Or Sociologists. The World Is A Living Mystery.

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.

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

There Is Nobody Who Is So Enlightened That They Don't Need To Work On Themselves.

And I Want To Thank All The Women That Support Me. I Have Wonderful Support Systems From Women Of All Types Who Seem Dedicated To The Notion That Terence Mckenna Can Always Be Improved. I'm Extremely Grateful For That. The Frontiers Are Enormous In That Dimension.

Support Systems

The 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.

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

It [culture] Invites People To Diminish Themselves, And Dehumanize Themselves By Behaving Like Machines, Meme Processors Of Memes Passed Down From Madison Avenue, And Hollywood, And What Have You.

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

Even As The Nineteenth Century Had To Come To Grips With The Notion Of Human Descent From Apes, We Must Now Come To Terms With The Fact That Those Apes Were Stoned Apes.

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

Anything Which Must Be Understood By Millions Of People Is So Hopelessly Divorced From How It Is That It Becomes A Form Of Fiction.

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

‎the Way You Understand And Investigate Time Is By Moving Inward, Into Metabolism. The Human Body Is A Knot In Time.

Culture Is Another Dimension.

The World Is Made Up Of Language. We Can Say That The World Is Composed Of Little Demons Doing Calisthenics, Each One The Size Of A Pissant's Eyebrow.... Or We Can Say The World Is Made Of Tiny Wave Mechanical Packets Of Matter Hurling Through Space At Near The Speed Of Light.... But Notice That What We Get Each Time Are Words.

I Think It's The Sheer Power Of The Hallucinogens That Puts People Off. You Either Love Them Or You Hate Them, And That's Because They Dissolve World Views. And If You Like The Experience Of Having Your Entire Ontological Structure Disappear Out From Under You, If You Think That's A Thrill, You'll Probably Love Psychedelics.

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

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

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

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

Social Behavior

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.

The Good News About Psychedelics Is That They Are Incredibly Democratic. Even The Clueless Can Be Swept Along If The Dose Is Sufficient.

We Live In Condensations Of Our Imagination

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

The Human Imagination, In Conjunction With Technology, Has Become A Force So Potent That It Really Can No Longer Be Unleashed On The Surface Of The Planet With Safety.

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

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.

This Is What They Have Suppressed So Long. This Is Why They Are So Afraid Of The Psychedelics, Because They Understand That Once You Touch The Inner Core Of Your Own And Someone Else's Being You Can't Be Led Into Thing-fetishes And Consumerism. The Message Of Psychedelics Is That Culture Can Be Re-engineered As A Set Of Emotional Values Rather Than Products. This Is Terrifying News.

Impressionism Is Simply Twenty Minutes Into Lsd.

The Long Night Of Human History Is Drawing At Last To Its Conclusion.

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

Science Is The Special Province Of The Ego. And Magic And Art Are The Special Province Of Something Else. I Could Name It, But I Won't. It Prefers To Be Unnamed

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

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

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

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

I Connect The Psychedelic Dimension To The Dimension Of Inspiration And Dream.

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

I Have Never Felt That The Primary Use Of These Things Was To Cure What Is Called In Modern Parlance Neurosis, What I Call Unhappiness. It Isn't For That.

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!

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

The Psychedelic Inner Astronaut Sees Things Which No Human Being Has Ever Seen Before, And No Other Human Being Will Ever See Again. But In Fact This Has No Meaning Unless It Is Possible To Carry It Back Into The Collectivity.

The Future Holds No Terrors For A Person Who Knows How Process Inevitably Unfolds. They Are Always Right And With It Each Moment.

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

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.

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.'

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

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.

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.

The Imagination Is The Goal Of History. I See Culture As An Effort To Literally Realize Our Collective Dreams.

Collective Effort

Television, Introduced At The Close Of World War Ii, Has Become A Form Of Electronic Heroin, And It Isn't Even Your Trip. They Don't Even Let You Go On Your Own Trip, You Get A Trip Designed By Madison Avenue.

The Whole Of The Amazonian Narcotic Complex, As It's Called In The Old Literature, Is Based On Activation Of Dmt By One Strategy Or Another.

The '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.

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

Our Medium Is Meat, But We Are Made Of Information.

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

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.

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.

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