What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It’s a kind of tuneless singing.
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.
The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.
I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain.
The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.
Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.
Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.
What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.
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.
And what is the primary datum? It’s the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.
For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.
Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.
These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.
I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe. That’s not the issue with me, but it is not tacky. It is not tacky.
Inevitably out of the psychedelic experience emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism, that’s the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process.
The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.
It seems to me that it is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language.
Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity.
Nature is actually the goal at the end of history.
Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination.