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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.
-Terence McKenna
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What Is Happening Here

Terence McKenna
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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.

Understanding the Quote: "what is happening here is we are living past the age, by..."

This quote by Terence McKenna reflects deeply on the theme of past. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Past, Age, Happenings, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Terence McKenna interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna is celebrated for insightful thoughts on past and age. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Past
Age
Happenings
More From Terence McKenna
We Can't Sell Short The Spiritual Power Of Cannabis, Especially When Eaten.
Spiritual
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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.
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Our Culture Difinitely Takes An Egocentric Dominator View. The Fear Of The Psychedelic Experience Is Quite Literally The Fear Of Losing Control. Dominator Types Today Don't Understand That It's Not Important To Maintain Control If You Are Not In Control In The First Place.
Losing Control
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Important
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.
Long
World
Possibility
Time Is A Series Of Fluctuating Variables.
Variables
Series
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.
Hallucinations
Psychedelic
Should
You Aren't An Object. You're A Process Of Some Sort.
Process
Objects
The Long Night Of Human History Is Drawing At Last To Its Conclusion.
Night
Drawing
Long
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.
Our World
Ideas
Dmt
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.
People
Hierarchy
Environment
So Part Of What Being Psychedelic Means, I Think, Is Relentlessly Living With Unanswered Questions.
Mean
Thinking
Unanswered Questions
I Think The Cybernetic Matrix Is A Tremendous Tool For Feminizing, And Radicalizing, And Psychedelicizing The Social Matrix. I See Computers As Entirely Feminine.
Thinking
Tools
Computer
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.
Spiritual
Emotional
Mind Blowing
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.
Responsibility
Mind Blowing
Understanding
What Is The Psychedelic Experience? What Promise Does It Hold For A Sane Future For Our Planet And Our Children? And What Is It About It That Kindles The Kind Of Loyalty That I Feel Coming From The People In This Room This Evening? And I Submit To You That It Is Nothing Less Than The Rebirth Of A Voice That Has Been Silent For At Least A Thousand Years, The Still Small Voice Of The Logos Of The Planet.
Loyalty
Children
Years
What We Drug People Have, That You Don't, Is Repeatability.
People
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Culture Is Another Dimension.
Culture
Dimensions
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.
Differences
People
Drug
Mind Conjures Miracles Out Of Time.
Miracle
Mind
The Drug May Not Be Toxic, But You May Be Self-toxic, And You May Discover This In The Drug Experience.
Self
Drug
Toxic
The Psychedelic Sets You At The Beginning Of The Path, And Then People Do All Kinds Of Things With It.
People
Path
Psychedelic
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.
Talking
Ideas
Mind
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.
Animal
Anxiety
Feelings
If We Could Feel What We Are Doing To The Earth, We Would Stop Immediately.
Earth
Feels
Ifs
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.
Real
Adventure
Giving
I Think The Real Test Of Psychedelics Is What You Do With Them When You're Not On Them, What Kind Of Culture You Build, What Kind Of Art, What Kind Of Technologies... What's Lacking In The Western Mind Is The Sense Of Connectivity And Relatedness To The Rest Of Life, The Atmosphere, The Ecosystem, The Past, Our Children's Future. If We Were Feeling Those Things We Would Not Be Practicing Culture As We Are.
Life
Art
Children
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.
Miracle
Looks
Alive
One Way Of Assessing The Toxicity Of A Drug Is How Do You Feel The Next Day?
Next Day
Drug
Way
This Is How Magic Is Done. By Hurling Yourself Into The Abyss And Discovering Its A Feather Bed.
Mind Blowing
Magic
Bed
There's Something In The Western Mind That Gets Very Nervous When You Try To Talk About The Bedrock Of Ontology.
Mind
Trying
Ontology
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.
Self
Talking
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In A Sense, Sexuality Is The Built-in Psychedelic Experience That Only A Very Few People Manage To Evade.
People
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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?'
Mean
Thoughtful
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The Mind Is The Cutting Edge Of The Evolving Event System.
Cutting
Mind
Events
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.
Mushrooms
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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.
Pain
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Ecosystems
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.
Ocean
Unique
Thinking
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.
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Ideas
Mushrooms
The Problem Is Not To Find The Answer, It's To Face The Answer
Mind Blowing
Answers
Faces
Worrying Is Betting Against Yourself.
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Betting
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.
Caring
Self
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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!
Mean
Commitment
Responsibility
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.
Community
Mind Blowing
Understanding
The Tryptamine Molecule Has This Unique Property Of Releasing The Structured Self Into The Over-self.
Unique
Self
Molecules
I Sort Of See [cannabis] As The Pilot Light Of Gian Consciousness.
Light
Pilots
Consciousness
I Think Transcending Our Cultures Is Going To Be Extraordinarily Necessary For Our Survival. I Don't Think We Can Carry Our Cultures Through The Keyhole Of The Stretch Of The Next Millennium
Thinking
Survival
Culture
Human Beings Are Co-partners With Deity In The Project Of Being. This Is The Basis Of All Magic.
Life
Magic
Paganism
The Psychedelic Mind Is A Higher Dimensional Mind, It Is Not Fit For Three Dimensional Space Time.
Space
Mind
Three
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.
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Drug
Brain
The Way I Think Of The Psychedelics Is, They Are Catalysts To The Imagination.
Thinking
Imagination
Way
It's No Big Deal About How You Get Language To Evolve. You Cause Language To Evolve By Saying New And Intelligent Things To Each Other.
Intelligent
Causes
Language
The Shaman Is Not Merely A Sick Man, Or A Madman; He Is A Sick Man Who Has Healed Himself.
Men
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Mind Blowing
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.
Ayahuasca
Mushrooms
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
Art
Names
Ego
Ego Is A Structure That Is Erected By A Neurotic Individual Who Is A Member Of A Neurotic Culture Against The Facts Of The Matter. And Culture, Which We Put On Like An Overcoat, Is The Collectivized Consensus About What Sort Of Neurotic Behaviors Are Acceptable.
Ego
Mind Blowing
Culture
I Think That A Lot Of People Are Making A Lot Of Money Spreading Anxiety. Anxiety Sells.
Thinking
People
Anxiety
Astonishment Is The Proper Response To Reality.
Reality
Astonishment
Response
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.
Religious
Issues
Rights
The Terror Of Drugs Is A Terror Of Giving Up Control. This Is What People Are Most Alarmed About By Psychedelics, Is The Giving Up Control.
Giving Up
People
Drug
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.
Self
Mind
Desert
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.
Home
Heart
Citizens
Ultimate Novelty Must Be A Situation Where All Boundaries Are Dissolved.
Novelty
Boundaries
Situation
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.
Attitude
Facts
Hallucinogens
You Are The Cutting Edge Of A Thirteen Billion Year Old Process Of Defining Novelty. Your Acts Matter. Your Thoughts Matter. Your Purpose? To Add To The Complexity. Your Enemy? Disorder, Entropy, Stupidity, And Tastelessness.
Cutting
Years
Stupidity
It Is Slowly Becoming Understood That The Modality Of Being Is The Modality Of Mind.
Mind
Becoming
Understood
The Reason For The Emphasis On Shamanism And On Other Techniques Is, You Will Need Techniques If You Go Into The Deep Water. And They Can Make Your Life Very Simple And Save You From Unnecessary Suffering. Not All Suffering Is Necessary. Maybe No Suffering Is Necessary.
Simple
Deep Water
Suffering
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.
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Real
Lying
The Logos Is A Voice Heard, In The Head. And The Logos Was The Hand On The Rudder Of Human Civilization For Centuries, Up Until, In Fact, The Collapse Of The Ancient Mystery Religions And The Ascendancy Of Christianity To The Status Of A World Religion.
Voice
Hands
World Religions
Shamanism Is About Shape Shifting. Shamanism Is About Doing Phenomenology With A Tool Kit That Works.
Tools
Phenomenology
Shapes
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.
Art
Way
Facts
The Drugs Of The Future Will Be Computers. The Computers Of The Future Will Be Drugs.
Drug
Computer
No One Yet Understands The Mysterious Intelligence Within Plants Or The Implications Of The Idea That Nature Communicates In A Basic Chemical Language That Is Unconscious But Profound. We Do Not Yet Understand How Hallucinogens Transform The Message In The Unconscious Into Revelations Beheld By The Conscious Mind.
Ideas
Profound
Mind
I'm As Against Restricting Access To Drugs As I Am To Burning Books. It Offends Me In The Same Way.
Book
Drug
Burning
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.
Rising
Facts
Kind
It Puts People Who Are Into This Psychedelic Thing In An Entirely Different Stance From All Other Spiritual Seekers, Because All Other Spiritual Seekers Are Furiously Seeking. Psychedelic People Are Holding It Back With All Their Power, Because They Are In The Presence Of The Mystery. And Then The Trick Is To Get A Spigot On It So That It Can Be Turned On And Off Rather Than Coming At You Like A Tidal Wave A Mile High And Twenty Miles Wide.
Spiritual
People
Twenties
We Love To Congratulate Ourselves On The Forward-leaning Liberal Society That We Live In, And The Truth Is It's A Bunch Of Rattle Snake-handling Fundamentalists That Are Much Closer To Stalin Than They Are To Fdr Or Anybody Else Like That.
Snakes
Truth Is
Bunch
It Seems To Me Far More Likely That An Advanced Civilization Would Communicate Inter Dimensionally And Telepathically.
Civilization
Communicate
Seems
And Yet My, Not Only My Faith, But My Experience Has Led Me To Believe That The World Is Not A Construction Of Space And Time And Matter And Energy. That That Mapping Is Insufficient. That The World Is Instead Some Kind Of A Linguistic Construct. It Is More In The Nature Of A Sentence, Or A Novel, Or A Work Of Art Than It Is In The Nature Of These Machine Models Of Interlocking Law That We Inherit Out Of A Thousand Years Of Rational Reductionism.
Art
Believe
Space
Culture Is Your Operating System.
Culture
Programming
Operating Systems
Alchemy Is Really The Secret Tradition Of The Redemption Of Spirit From Matter.
Inspirational
Life
Secret
We Need A Pharmacological Intervention On Anti-social Behavior Or We Are Not Going To Get Hold Of Our Dilemma.
Needs
Social Behavior
Dilemma
The Message Coming Back At All Of Us Is: Live Without Closure.
Messages
Closure
Coming Back
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.
Children
Moving
Past
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.
Moving
Believe
Reflection
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.
Real
Taken
Hippie
So When You Look At The Eschaton What You See, Strangely Enough, Is Your Own Face.
Looks
Faces
Enough
Ninety Percent Of The Difficulty In Your Intellectual Life Would Never Have Happened If You Just Had Better Taste.
Intellectual
Taste
Ninety
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.
Smart
Moving
Believe
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.
Fall
Empires
World
Basically, For Me The Psychedelic Experience Was The Path To Revelation. It Actually Worked On Somebody Who Thought Nothing Would Work.
Path
Psychedelic
Revelations
At The Interface Of The Say-able And The Unsay-able Is The Novel, The New, The Never Before Seen, Said Or Done. And That's What I Think It's Important To Try And Bring Out, Ideas. Because I Think We Are The Animals That Bring Back Ideas.
Animal
Thinking
Ideas
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.
Thinking
Worry
Waste
All Information Is Everywhere. Information That Is Not Here Is Nowhere.
Information
The Fungi Became, Or Is For Some Mysterious Reason Still To Be Discovered, A Pipeline Into A Mind, An Entelechy, Which We Can Only Image As Feminine And Can Only Associate Somehow To The Environment, To The Ecosystem. This Is The Gaian Mind. This Is What The Goddess Really Is. The Goddess Is A Network Of Connective Intelligence That Is Operating On This Planet.
Ecosystems
Mind
Pipeline
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.
War
Engineering
Years
The Imagination Is The Golden Pathway To Everywhere.
Imagination
Pathways
Golden
There Is An Angel Within The Monkey Struggling To Get Free, And This Is What The Historical Crisis Is All About.
Struggle
Angel
Historical
Safety Is Really A Concern Of Mine, And What I've Been Telling People Recently Is That Until There's Animal And Human Data On A Drug It Should Probably Be Looked At Very Carefully.
Animal
Data
People
You Put Two Egos Together And You've Either Got A Conflict, Which Is Always Interesting, Or Better Yet, A Love Affair.
Two
Interesting
Ego
If You Actually Look At The Etymology Of The Word 'hallucination', What It's Come To Mean In English Is A Delusion. But What It Really Means In The Original Language Is To Wander In The Mind. That's The Meaning Of 'hallucination', To Wander In The Mind.
Mean
Mind
Looks
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.
Moving
Eye
Years
Thinkers Are Not A Welcome Addition To Most Social Situations.
Thinking
Welcome
Social
Ayahuasca Is Driven By Sound, By Song, By Whistling. And Its Ability To Transform Sound, Including Vocal Sound, Into The Visual Spectrum Indicates That Some Kind Of Information Processing Membrane Or Boundary Is Being Overcome By The Pharmacology Of This Stuff. And Things Normally Experienced As Acoustically Experienced Becomes Visibly Beheld, And It's Quite Spectacular.
Song
Information Processing
Ayahuasca
My Idea Of Enlightenment Is When Ego And Tao Are Fused, And Tao Is Perceived As Ego. Then Everything Happens With Complete Appropriateness.
Ideas
Ego
Enlightenment
Culture Is A Simplification And A Lie. It's The Currency By Which Fools Navigate The World. Smart People Get Beyond It.
Lying
Smart
People
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.
Running
Organization
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.
People
Political
Categories
It Was The Fall Into History That Enslaved Us To The Labor Cycle, To The Agricultural Cycle. And Notice How Fiendish It Is.
Fall
Labor
Cycles
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.
Touching
Would Be
Able
The Real Nature Of Our Predicament Is Completely Opaque To Us.
Real
Opaque
Predicaments
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.
Years
Progress
Psychedelic
I Connect The Psychedelic Dimension To The Dimension Of Inspiration And Dream.
Dream
Inspiration
Dimensions
It Seems To Me That It Is Psyche In A Way That Has Become Occluded By The Perverse Development Of Language.
Development
Way
Language
As The Bonfires Of Knowledge Grow Brighter, The More The Darkness Is Revealed To Our Startled Eyes.
Eye
Darkness
Bonfire
What Is Always Left Out Of Descriptions Of The Psychedelic State, The Deep Psychedelic State, Is How Weird It Is.
Psychedelic
States
Description
Marcel Eliade Took The Position That Hallucinogenic Shamanism Was Decadent, And Gordon Wasson, Very Rightly I Believe, Contravened This View And Held That Actually It Was Very Probably The Presence Of The Hallucinogenic Drug Experience In The Life Of Early Man That Lay The Very Basis For The Idea Of The Spirit.
Believe
Men
Views
I Really Think There Is A Very Large Distinction Between Synthetic And Naturally Occurring Drugs. ... I Think That These Plants 'take People' As Much As People Take The Plants. ... When You Take One Of These Ancient, Ancient Hallucinogens You Are Locking In To The Morphogenetic Fields Of All The People Who Ever Took It.
Thinking
People
Drug
This Is A Very Central Part Of The Psychedelic Attitude Toward The World, To Entertain All Possibilities But To Never Commit To Belief. Belief Always Being Seen As A Kind Of Trap, Because If You Belief Something You Are Forever Precluded From Believing Its Opposite.
Attitude
Believe
Opposites
The World Is Not Made Of Anti-mu Mesons, Quarks, And Photons, And Electromagnetic Fields. Reality Is Made Of Words.
Reality
World
Fields
Now, Through The Catalytic Interaction With Technology, The Human Species Is Getting Set To Redefine Itself.
Technology
Interaction
Humans
The Cost Of Sanity In This Society, Is A Certain Level Of Alienation
Dmt
Mind Blowing
Cost
Psychedelics Are Probably Responsible For Every Aspect Of Human Evolution Apart From The Decline In Bodyhair.
Dmt
Psychedelic
Evolution
I Don't Believe That Shamanism Without Hallucinogens Is Authentic Shamanism Or Comfortable Shamanism.
Believe
Hallucinogens
Shamanism
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.
Cycling
Shadow
Body
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.
Moving
Play
Perception
People Are, In The Confines Of Their Own Apartments, Becoming Magellans Of The Interior World And Reaching Out To This Alien Thing And Beginning To Map It And Bring Back Stories That Can Only Be Compared To The Kind Of Stories That The Chroniclers Of The New World Brought Back To Spain At The Close Of The 15th Century.
People
Spain
Stories
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.
Community
Peculiar
Substance
The Obligation On Us Is To Communicate The Truth So That It Is Understood. The Belief Will Take Care Of Itself.
Care
Belief
Obligation
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
People
Might
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.
World
Tiny
Fractions
You Could Almost Describe Psychedelics As Enzymes For The Activity Of The Imagination.
Imagination
Enzymes
Activity
You Will Ride The Tao Toward The Concrescence And Will Be Able To Live In The Light Of Its Anticipation.
Light
Able
Tao
The Word 'self' Is As Great A Mystery As The Word 'other'. It's Just A Polarity Between Two Mysteries.
Self
Two
Mystery
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.
Real
Past
Giving
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.
Lying
Exercise
Men
Language Is Something That Springs From The Biological Matrix, And The Neurological Matrix, Within Us.
Spring
Language
The Earth Itself Is Stepping In To Aid In The Agenda Of Cultural Transformation. There Are Too Many Doorways In Nature That Lead To Heaven, There Are Too Many Paths To The Mystery For Any Institution Or Social Policy To Be Able To Thwart The Intent Of The Human Species To Evolve.
Heaven
Agendas
Earth
The Only Frontier Now Left To Exploit Is Not A Frontier In Space But A Frontier In Time. We Steal The Future From Our Children By Plunging Massively Deeper And Deeper Into Debt.
Children
Space
Debt
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.
Spiritual
Issues
Might
Impressionism Is Simply Twenty Minutes Into Lsd.
Twenties
Lsd
Minutes
This Is A General Comment That You Should Take A Committed Dose Of Whatever It Is You're Taking So That There Is No Ambiguity, Because There's Nothing Worse Than A Sub-threshold Psychedelic Experience.
Psychedelic
Should
Threshold
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.
Games
Play
Cards
The Felt Presence Of Immediate Experience-- This Is All You Know. Everything Else Comes As Unconfirmed Rumor.
Rumor
Knows
Felt
We Cannot Evolve Faster Than Our Language. The Edge Of Being Is The Edge Of Meaning, And Somehow We Have To Push The Edge Of Meaning. We Have To Extend It.
Language
Faster
Evolve
The Mystery Is In The Body And The Way The Body Works Itself Into Nature.
Life
Nature
Dmt
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.
Real
War
Mean
Who Is To Say What Is Real And What Is Not?'real' Is A Distinction Of A Naïve Mind.
Real
Mind
Psychedelic
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.
Government
Information Processing
Dmt
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.
Voice
People
Magic
Culture Is The Greatest Barrier To Your Enlightenment, Your Education, And Your Decency.
Enlightenment
Culture
Barriers
Western Civilization Is A Loaded Gun Pointed At The Head Of This Planet.
Future
Gun
Civilization
We Are Living In A State Of Constant Scientific Revolution. There Is Not A Single Area That You Can Name That Is Now Seen As It Was Seen A Hundred Years Ago. Nothing Is Left Of The World View Of One Hundred Years Ago.
Views
Years
Names
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.
Believe
Communication
Swimming
And Psychedelics Now, As We De-condition Ourselves From The Post-medieval World, They Are Present To Hand As Tools.
Hands
Tools
World
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.
Maturity
People
Lasts
When We Look Within Ourselves With Psilocybin, We Discover That We Do Not Have To Look Outward Toward The Futile Promise Of Life That Circles Distant Stars In Order To Still Our Cosmic Loneliness. We Should Look Within; The Paths Of The Heart Lead To Nearby Universes Full Of Life And Affection For Humanity.
Stars
Loneliness
Heart
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.
Fall
Reality
Engineering
And What Is Shamanism But Philosophy With A Hands-on Attitude. Philosophy Not Made Around The Camp Fire, But Philosophy Based On The Acquisition Of Extreme Experience. That's How You Figure Out What The World Is, Not By Bicycling Around In The Burbs, But By Forcing Extreme Experience.
Attitude
Philosophy
Fire
'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.
Two
Drug
Psychedelic
What History Is, Essentially, Is A Careening, Out-of-control Effort To Find Our Way Back To This State Of Primordial Balance.
Effort
Balance
Way
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.
Weed
Pursuit Of Happiness
Marijuana
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.
Believe
Thinking
Gnosis
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.
Hands
Forever
Dimensions
You're Immortal As Long As You Live.
Long
Immortal
It Is The People Who Are 'far Out' Who Are Gaining Advantage In The Evolutionary Jostling For Efficacious Strategies.
People
Strategy
Advantage
The Thing Is That It Is Incredibly Frustrating To Anyone Who Would Control It, Because You Can't Predict The Impact Of Any Technology Before You Put It In Place.
Technology
Impact
Frustrating
Let's Not Underrate Cannabis, For Cryin' Out Loud. Cannabis Should Be The Glue Of The Community.
Community
Glue
Cannabis
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.
Opposites
Feet
Space
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.
Dream
Mean
World
The 20th Century Mind Is Nostalgic For The Paradise That Once Existed On The Mushroom Dotted Plains Of Africa Where The Plant-human Symbiosis Occurred That Pulled Us Out Of The Animal Body And Into The Tool-using, Culture-making, Imagination-exploring Creature That We Are. And Why Does This Matter? It Matters Because It Shows That The Way Out Is Back And That The Future Is A Forward Escape Into The Past. This Is What The Psychedelic Experience Means. Its A Doorway Out Of History And Into The Wiring Under The Board In Eternity.
Mean
Animal
Past
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.
People
Hollywood
Culture
Our Assumptions Are The Edges Of Our Worlds.
Our World
World
Assumption
Culture Is A Plot Against The Expansion Of Consciousness.
Expansion
Plot
Culture
Eros Is An Ego-overwhelming, Boundary Dissolving, Breakthrough Creating Force Scripted Into Human Life That Is Pretty Intrinsically Psychedelic.
Creating
Ego
Psychedelic
History Is The In-rushing Toward What The Buddhists Call The Realm Of The Densely Packed, A Transformational Realm Where The Opposites Are Unified.
Buddhist
Opposites
Rushing
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.
Mean
Ayahuasca
People
Art's Task Is To Save The Soul Of Mankind.. Anything Less Is A Dithering While Rome Burns.
Inspirational
Life
Art
Transformation Of Language Through Psychedelic Drugs Is A Central Factor Of The Evolution Of The Social Matrix Of The Rest Of The Century.
Drug
Psychedelic
Evolution
I'm Not An Advocate Of Drugs. I'm An Advocate Of Psychedelics.
Drug
What We Now Have Is The Freedom Which Attends Decadence, Or The Decadence Which Attends Freedom.
Decadence
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.
Issues
Baggage
Kind
Only Responsible Human Beings Can Exist In An Anarchistic Society.
Responsible
Humans
Human Beings
Don't Diddle The Dose. Once You Have Done Your Homework, Go For It.
Done
Homework
Dose
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.
Children
Philosophy
Men
Chaos Is Roving Through The System And Able To Undo, At Any Point, The Best Laid Plans.
Best Laid Plans
Roving
Able
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.
Powerful
Real
Ideas
The Social Consequence Of The Psychedelic Experience Is Clear Thinking -which Trickles Down As Clear Speech. Empowered Speech.
Thinking
Speech
Psychedelic
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.
Personality
Ego
Problem
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.
Eyebrows
Space
Light
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.
Faith
Believe
Mean
Ultimately, I Think, What The Psychedelic Experience May Be Is A Higher Topological Manifold Of Temporality.
Thinking
May
Psychedelic
If Psychedelics Are, On Any Level, To Be Taken Seriously As Catalyzers Or Expanders Of Consciousness, Then We Need Them, Because It's An Absence Of Consciousness That Is Making This Historical Transition So Excruciating.
Taken
Historical
Transition
Our World Is Endangered By The Absence Of Good Ideas
Our World
Ideas
Dmt
We're Not Mere Spectators, Or A Cosmic Accident, Or Some Sideshow, Or The Greek Chorus To The Main Event. The Human Experience Is The Main Event.
Greek
Events
Human Experience
And What We're Looking Toward Is A Moment When The Artificial Language Structures Which Bind Us Within The Notion Of Ourselves Are Dissolved In The Presence Of The Realization That We Are A Part Of Nature. And When That Happens, The Childhood Of Our Species Will Pass Away, And We Will Stand Tremulously On The Brink Of Really The First Moment Of Coherent Human Civilization.
Civilization
Childhood
Passing Away
Television, While Chemically Non-invasive, Nevertheless Is Every Bit As Addicting And Physiologically Damaging As Any Other Drug.
Drug
Television
Nevertheless
The Leading Edge Of Reality Is Mind, And Mind Is The Primary Substratum Of Being.
Reality
Mind
Primaries
There Is A Belief That There Is A Hyperobject Called Overmind, Or God, That Casts A Shadow Into Time. History Is Our Group Experience If This Shadow. As One Draws Closer And Closer To The Source Of The Shadow, The Paradoxes Intensify, The Rate Of Change Intensifies. What Is Happening Is That The Hyperobject Is Beginning To Ingress Into Three-dimensional Space.
Space
Shadow
Groups
Plants Seem Like An Excellent Model For The Kind Of Future That We Should Be Building.
Kind
Building
Excellent
The Imagination Is The Goal Of History. I See Culture As An Effort To Literally Realize Our Collective Dreams.
Life
Dream
Collective Effort
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