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.
We need a metaphor that can contain the daemon of the future that we have conjured into being.
Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.
It’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
I’m proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.
For all we know, we know nothing.
We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual.
As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.