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.
I think that a lot of people are making a lot of money spreading anxiety. Anxiety sells.
Don’t diddle the dose. Once you have done your homework, go for it.
I don’t believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.
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.
Psychedelics can carry you farther and faster than most people care to go. Once you get to psychedelics, it’s no longer a matter of seeking the answer, you have found the answer. Now the issue changes dramatically, you must face the answer.
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.
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.
Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super space where we as a collectivity become optionally a single point of view.
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.
This is the nature of going forward into being: A series of self-transforming ascents of level.
Spaceflight is nothing less than the exterior metaphor for the shamanic voyage. In other words, in our terms, the hallucinogenic experience. This is the way engineers get high. They go to the moon!
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.
If I can paraphrase Teilhard de Chardin for a moment, he said, or I will paraphrase in this way, ‘When the human race understands the potential of the hallucinogenic drug experience, it will have discovered fire for the second time.’
Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.
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.
The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist and the artist into a single notion of care-giving and creativity.
The traditional manner of taking psilocybin is to take a very healthy dose, in the vicinity of 15 mg. on an empty stomach in total darkness.
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.
And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings.