Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality.
I think the cybernetic matrix is a tremendous tool for feminizing, and radicalizing, and psychedelicizing the social matrix. I see computers as entirely feminine.
It’s as important to be well informed in this area, if you’re going to do it, as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you’re going to do that.
One of the things that’s so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness.
Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage.
The psychedelic sets you at the beginning of the path, and then people do all kinds of things with it.
I’m fascinated by hallucinations. I mean, to me that is the sina qua non that you’re getting somewhere.
For unknown reasons, there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined.
Patanjali specifically says that there are three paths to the goal of yoga. And they are, control of the breath, control of posture, and light-filled herbs. It says it right there. Stanza 6 of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.
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.
Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.
The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system.
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.
In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can’t be told.
Culture as we’re practicing it is causing a lot of pain.
People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.
The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.
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.
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?
How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?