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.
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.
It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political 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.
I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage.
I'm fascinated by hallucinations. I mean, to me that is the sina qua non that you're getting somewhere.
In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.
The 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.
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!
So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It's not my friend. It's a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions.
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 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.
Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants
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.
This is the nature of going forward into being: A series of self-transforming ascents of level.
What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.
It is the people who are 'far out' who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.
The felt presence of immediate experience-- this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor.
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.
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.
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.
What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy.
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.
These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.
Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we're working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of.
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