Background Image

...

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.

-Terence McKenna

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

We're Not Going To

Terence McKenna

...

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.

Views: 8

Topic

More From Terence McKenna

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.

It's Clearly A Crisis Of Two Things: Of Consciousness And Conditioning. We Have The Technological Power, The Engineering Skills To Save Our Planet, To Cure Disease, To Feed The Hungry, To End War; But We Lack The Intellectual Vision, The Ability To Change Our Minds. We Must Decondition Ourselves From 10,000 Years Of Bad Behavior. And, It's Not Easy.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 Imagination Is The Golden Pathway To Everywhere.

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.

There Is A Morphological Enfoldment Occurring On This Planet. It Is Bringing Forth Some Entirely New Order Of Being. We Are A Privileged Part Of This.

We Can't Sell Short The Spiritual Power Of Cannabis, Especially When Eaten.

Spiritual Power

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

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

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.

Once You Get To This Place On What We Might Metaphorically Call Your Spiritual Quest, Once You Get To The Place Where You Hear About Psychedelics, The Issue Is No Longer Then About Where Is The Gas Peddle On The Spiritual Vehicle. The Issue Suddenly Becomes, Where Is The Brake? Because This Is The Fuel To Go Where You Want To Go. This Is The Power To Lift You Where You Want To Be Lifted.

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.

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.

I Think That The Whole Thing, The Crux Of The Whole Psychedelic Issue, Is That It Accentuates Personal Responsibility By Making People Take Their Own Experiences Seriously.

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.

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.

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.

What The Psychedelics Are For Us As A Species, Rather Than For Each One Of Us As An Individual, What They Are For Us As A Species Is An Enzyme That Catalyzes The Language-making Capacity.

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.

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

And That We Cannot Go To Space With Our Feet In The Mud. Nor Can We In Fact Turn Ourselves Into An Eco-sensitive Hallucinogenic-based Culture On Earth Unless We Fuse These Dichotomous Opposites. It Is Only In A Coincidencia Oppositorum, A Union Of Opposites, That Does Not Strive For Closure, That We Are Going To Find Cultural Sanity. And This Is The Thing That The Entheogens, The Hallucinogens, Deliver With Such Clarity And Regularity. They Raise Paradox To A Level Of Intensity That No One Can Evade.

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.

We Need A Metaphor That Can Contain The Daemon Of The Future That We Have Conjured Into Being.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Thinkers Are Not A Welcome Addition To Most Social Situations.

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

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

I'm Meeting My Obligations, Somehow, Always Have, Without Ever Truly Working, Without Ever Putting My Shoulder To The Wheel For The Man. Of Course I Had To Deal Dope To Do This!

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Best Laid Plans

Well, You Could Almost Say, I Suppose, That The Scientist Seeks What Is Similar Between Any Two Days, Or Bluebirds, Or Glaciers. And The Poet Seeks What Is Different. The Artist Seeks To Celebrate The Unique.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

These Things Which Are Made Of Light And Grammar And Sound That Come Chirping And Squealing And Tumbling Toward You. 'hooray! Welcome! You're Here!', And In My Case, 'you Send So Many And You Come So Rarely!'

For Me It's An Issue Of Are We Afraid Of Ourselves? And We Inherit A Huge Bunch Of Idealogical Baggage, Not Only Christianity, But Freudianism, And Marxism . . . We Inherit All Kinds Of Idealogical Baggage Designed To Make Us Fear Ourselves.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Culture Is Your Operating System.

Operating Systems

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.

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

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

The 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.

Memory Training Is Great Psychedelic Training.

Think About Our Dilemma On This Planet. If The Expansion Of Consciousness Does Not Loom Large In The Human Future, What Kind Of Future Is It Going To Be?

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

There Is No Knowledge Without Risk Taking.

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.

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.

Our Self Discoveries Make Us Each A Microcosm Of The Larger Pattern Of History. The Inertia Of Introspection Leads Toward Recollection, For Only Through Memory Is The Past Recaptured And Understood. In The Fact Of Experiencing And Making The Present, We Are All Actors.

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

Culture Is More And More Consciously Becoming A Project Carried Out In The Domain Of Language By, For Instance, Propaganda Both Governmental And Commercial.

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.

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

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.

You Could Almost Describe Psychedelics As Enzymes For The Activity Of The Imagination.

The Apocalypse Is The Millennium, And The Psychedelics Move You Into The Future.

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.

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

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

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

We Live In Condensations Of Our Imagination

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The Way I Think Of The Psychedelics Is, They Are Catalysts To The Imagination.

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

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.

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'.

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

The 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.

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

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

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

In Shamanism And Certain Yogas, Taoist Yoga, Claim Very Clearly That The Purpose Is To Familiarize Yourself With This After-death Body, In Life, And Then The Act Of Dying Will Not Create Confusion In The Psyche. You Will Recognize What Is Happening. You Will Know What To Do. And You Will Make The Clean Break.

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

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.

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

If We Were To Place Our Power At The Service Of Our Imaginations Rather Than Our Primate Politics We Would Create A Civilization Worthy Of The Name.

This Is How Magic Is Done. By Hurling Yourself Into The Abyss And Discovering Its A Feather Bed.

We Are Consciousness. We May Not Always Be Monkeys.

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.

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

We Get To The Point Then With Modern Science Where You Could Almost Say That Modern Science Is The Art Of Describing Those Systems So Crude In Their Structure That They Are Not Subject To Temporal Variables.

You Can Stand Back And Look At This Planet And See That We Have The Money, The Power, The Medical Understanding, The Scientific Know-how, The Love, And The Community To Produce A Kind Of Human Paradise.

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

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.

Television, While Chemically Non-invasive, Nevertheless Is Every Bit As Addicting And Physiologically Damaging As Any Other Drug.

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

Within The Context Of The Alchemical Vocabulary, The Psychedelic Experience, As Brought To Us Through Plants Long In The Possession Of Aboriginal People, Appears To Be The Identical Phenomena.

Experientially There Is Only One Religion, And It Is Shamanism And Shamanic Ecstasy.

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

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

Social Behavior

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.

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.

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

The Momentum Now Is Inevitable. Now It's About Each Of Us Individually Arranging The Furniture Of Our Own Mind To Deal With What Has Become Inevitable.

I Think The World Is Growing More Psychedelic Every Day. I'm Completely Hopeful. . . . This Is How It Should Be. This Is What It's Like When A Species Prepares To Depart For Hyperspace.

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.

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

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

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

We Have Outlived This Embryo, This Human Cradle, And Now It's Time To Be Up And About The Great Business Of Becoming Citizens Of The Galaxy And At Home With Our Own Heart.

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

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

No Culture On Earth Is As Heavily Narcotized As The Industrial West In Terms Of Being Inured To The Consequences Of Maladaptive Behavior. We Pursue A Business-as-usual Attitude In A Surreal Atmosphere Of Mounting Crises And Irreconcilable Contradictions.

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.

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.

Capitalism Is Not A Human Being. Capitalism Is A Moloch, A God, A God Of Bloody Sacrifice That Sees Human Beings As Ants

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

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

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.

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

Human Populations That Do Not Have Contact With The Psychedelic Tremendum Are Neurotic Because They Are Male Ego Dominated.

It's My Belief That One Of The Unconscious Reasons Which Underlies The Odd Attitude Of The Establishment Toward Hallucinogens Is The Fact That They Bring The Mystery To The Surface As An Individual Experience. In Other Words, You Do Not Understand The Psychedelic Experience By Getting A Report From Time Magazine Or Even The Economist. You Only Understand The Psychedelic Experience By Having It.

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].

I Do Not Think That The Government, Under The Guise Of Some Phony, Alarmist, Pseudo-scientific Rhetoric, Should Attempt To Control The Evolution Of Consciousness. After All, If These Things Truly Are Consciousness-expanding, It Doesn't Take Too Much Intelligence To Realize That It Is The Absence Of Consciousness That Is Causing Our Flirtation With Extinction And Planetary Disaster.

It's The Only Hallucinogen I Know, Where If It's Made Right, The Next Day, Or The Day After The Experience, You Actually Feel Better Than If You Hadn't Done It.

This Unique Strategy That The Advanced Primates Created, The Strategy Of Using Language To Bind Time, Is What The Process We Call 'civilization' Has Been All About.

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.

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.

What Is Needed, Is An Awakening.

Fine Tuning The Institutions Built By Powdered Wig Guys Two Hundred Years Ago Is A Long Shot At Holding The Whole Thing Together.

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.

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.

You're Immortal As Long As You Live.

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

This Is The Key. If You Get Into Deep Water With These Substances, This Is True Of Psilocybin As Well, You Don't Want To Clench, You Don't Want To Assume The Fetal Position And Stop Breathing. You Want To Sit Up Straight And Breathe, And Sing, And Sing It Back, And It Will Step Back. You Can Take Control Of Your Situation ... Most Of The Time.

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

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

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

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

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

The Party Impulse Is A Very Subversive Impulse. I Mean, You Know, A Lot Of Artists Have Too Much Integrity To Sell Their Art As A Brand; But Who Has So Much Integrity That They Would Turn Down A Party?

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

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

The Only Real Experience That Counts, Is Your Own.

One Way To Think About What Psychedelics Are Is As Catalysts For Language Development. They Literally Force The Evolution Of Language. You Cannot Evolve Faster Than Your Language Because The Language Defines The Culture Of Meaning. So If There's A Way To Accelerate The Evolution Of Language Then This Is Real Consciousness Expansion And It's A Permanent Thing. The Great Legacies Of The 60's Are In Attitudes And Language. It Boils Down To Doing Your Own Thing, Feeling The Vibe, Ego-trip, Blowing Your Mind.

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

All The Accoutrements That Distinguish Us From Animal Existence Were Put In Place When We Had A Different Kind Of Mind Than We Have Now. We Didn't Have A Mind That Favored Role Specialization, And Male Dominance, And Anxiety Over Female Sexual Activity Related To Feelings Of Male Ownership. That All Came Later.

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

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

There Is No Contradiction Between Technology And Spirit. There Is No Contradiction Between The Search For Intellectual Integration And Understanding And The Psychedelic Experience. There Is No Contradiction Between Ultra-advanced Hyperspacial Cyber Culture And Paleolithic Archaic Culture. We Have Come To The End Of Our Sojourn In Matter. We Have Come To The End Of Our Separateness.

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

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.

The Shaman Has Access To A Superhuman Dimension And A Superhuman Condition, And By Being Able To Do That He Affirms The Potential For Transcendence In All People. He Is An Exemplar, If You Will.

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

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.

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.

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.

Lsd Is Different. Lsd Is Like Psychoanalytical Drano. It's Not A Personality.

The Real Truth Is Splintered And Spread Throughout Time.

The Cost Of Sanity In This Society, Is A Certain Level Of Alienation

The Engineers Of The Future Will Be Poets.

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

The Psychedelic Mind Is A Higher Dimensional Mind, It Is Not Fit For Three Dimensional Space Time.

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.

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.

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

Trending Author

Paddy Chayefsky

Douglas Hofstadter

Category