For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.
Wherever we press beyond the thin curtain of rationalist culture, we discover the incredibly rich, erotic, scary, promising presence of this intelligent Other, that beckons us out of history, and says, you know: ‘The galaxy lies waiting.’
The “just say no” campaign at this point is a lot like drawing sea-monsters over certain unexplored areas of the map and expecting people to stay away. It may work for some, but explorers live for this kind of thing.
Culture is a simplification and a lie. It’s the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it.
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...
Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.
The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.
You’re immortal as long as you live.
Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.
As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes.
What is needed, is an awakening.
Worrying is betting against yourself.
We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle.
Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.
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.
We are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.” -.
The real truth, that dare not speak itself, is that no one is in control. Absolutely no one.
Things are pretty strange in this world and people do it many ways and you are just an atom in a galaxy of possibilities and your opinions and your science and ‘What I think’ and all that, is just so much noise in a very complex and busy world. And its that same humbling perception that comes out of psychedelics. It just shows you, you’re very parochial.
You don’t go on bended-knee to petition the official culture for your rights. You have to take them.
Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality.