The only barrier to the solution of our problems are intellectual barriers—barriers in our own mind. We have the money, the technology, the mass communications, the scientific expertise, the remote sensing telemetry. What we don’t have is the will to self-direct all of this technical apparatus toward a rational solution of our problems.
The problem with human beings is that we ride very close to a kind of bifurcation point in terms of whether our loyalty is transferred to the group or to the individual. And this can be sent either way. I mean, if there were to be landslides at both ends of highway 1 and a food shortage, we would coalesce marvelously into a survival machine where we would all place group values higher than our own needs—and nobly so. This would happen. But in situations of abundance and non-scarcity, it’s like a slime mold without the formality of coherency. We just then dissolve into this sort of every-man-for-himself egocentric style.
Ideology, to my mind, is the denial of the obvious and the substitution for something else.
This small-group, group-minded, sexually amorphous psychology—the psychology, not the model itself—is what we have to recover, I think, in order to survive.
The philosophy of science around L. L. Whyte and people like that have pointed out that, if you use as your index complexity, then you suddenly discover that human beings have moved back to the very center of the universe: that the most complex physical material in the universe in terms of density of connectedness is the human cerebral cortex. That if novelty and density of connectedness is what is being conserved, then somehow we are central.
If you notice what it is: it’s small mouth noises; rapidly modulated small mouth noises. And it’s a highly conventionalized style of behavior which allows transduction of thought. It’s a form of telepathy; a striving toward a crude telepathy.
We’re in a state of enforced infantilism about the capacity of our minds; that the culture we are living in is an infantile culture.
Our inability to get a grip on our global problems has to do with this immaturity about our mental state.
The real message that I try to leave with people in these weekends is the primacy of direct experience. That, as people, the real universe is within your reach, always. Everything not within your reach is basically unconfirmed rumor. And we insert ourselves like ants or honeybees into hierarchies of knowledge. So we say: “Well, what’s going on in the world?” Well, turn on CNN. You know? And then, somehow, we’re ordered. Then we say, “Aha. Okay. It’s 85 degrees in Baghdad and the wind is out of the northeast at 15 miles an hour,” and we feel somehow better now because we’re getting the information. But what we have done is sold out direct experience. And all institutions require this of us: that we somehow redefine ourselves for the convenience of the institution, and this redefinition always involves a narrowing, a denial.
There’s nobody around who has the right plan. So it isn’t about how we need to locate the people with the right plan, and then give them a lot of money and get out of their way. It doesn’t work like that. The right plan will emerge almost simultaneously in everybody’s mind at the same moment, and in the meantime we all are going to have this sort of half-baked plan that we can’t articulate, that we can’t quite bring out. It’s a quality of the time.
You don’t learn what electrons really are until you get just one of them off by itself somewhere in a magnetic field in a vacuum, and then you see what electrons are. If you have millions of electrons, then you have an electrical current. And an electrical current operates according to laws and rules and constraints completely different from an electron. And what we have done very perversely as a society is taken the laws of large numbers—how a million people act, how ten million people act—and then we have applied it back to ourselves as individuals and said: well, why am I not happy? You know, seventy percent of everybody does X, and I don’t, and I’m not happy then—you know, trying to redefine yourself as against a very large body of statistical data. All of this is dehumanizing, all of this is bad mental hygiene.
Something is plotted, something is working itself out in us. We are the cells of a much larger body. And like the cells of our own body, it’s very hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern, the whole of what is happening.
The place where evolution is going to be visible is in consciousness, because this is where the chemistry is most delicately poised to augment or suppress function.
Other than that it’s day and night, nature doesn’t say much to us. We pursue our activities all inside a construct of culture that comes out of language.
That puts a whole different light on the spiritual quest, because it means that we’re holding it back rather than lashing it forward to ever greater exertion. And I think that’s the proper attitude, because the depth of spirit is infinite, and in its benevolence towards suffering humanity it has made itself available in infinite amounts. So then it’s for us to somehow come to terms with this. It’s like having a living religion—it is having a living religion, because it’s having an infinite source of gnosis, of understanding, available.
Do psychedelics always make people kinder and gentler? Do they make us kinder and gentler? Well, it’s an interesting question. I mean, as I get older, I ask it slightly differently of myself. I ask the question: if this stuff is so great, what is so great about us that we’re any different from anybody else? Or are we just like holy rollers and Taoists and Hasidic Jews and everybody else who thinks they’ve found the final answer? What is so great about it?
The cultural group must take the psychedelic frequently enough that the ego does not form.
What we’re talking about here is an outlandish singularity. Well, they say the singularity sprang from empty space. Seems to me the least likely medium for a complex singularity to emerge from is a high vacuum. More likely that a singularity would emerge from a teeming world of human beings and machines and psychedelic drugs and jungles and ecosystems, and that, in a super-rich informational matrix like that, something might suddenly crystallize out that would be absolutely improbable and fulfill the need for an attractor; a vector for novelty.
The fact that ayahuasca—which makes possible this visual language that seems to me the evolutionary compass for language and culture—the fact that the compounds which allow that occur in the ordinary brain suggests, you know, that we could be as close as a one-gene mutation away from different styles of neuro-processing. And we don’t know to what degree technology pushes these things around. Did the people of manuscript culture have the same serotonin ratios as we have? How much, to what degree, is culture a chemical feedback mechanism operating on us as a species? I mean, we’re like fish trying to discover water. These are fairly subtle issues. But the payoff is being able to design our way toward a more humane culture.
Worry is preposterous. You don’t know enough to worry, you know? Do liver cells worry? Do skin cells worry? It’s just a complete waste of metabolic energy. The better thing is to function well in place, and then to wonder, you know? Wonder is sort of worry without animal anxiety, but it’s living in the light of non-closure. We’re not going to get this thing wrestled into a box. Not positivism, not Islam, not the Kabbalah. No, no—all these things are very good tries, nice efforts. We set them on their pedestals in a long row in the museum of noetic good tries, but it isn’t in that. It’s in the moment; in the recapturing of direct experience.
Take back your mind. Because we have transferred our loyalty to mythical structures—you know, structures about sexual politics, about what a man is supposed a be, what a woman is supposed to be, how much money a person is supposed to have, how much art they’re supposed to produce, how many times a week they’re supposed to get laid. We have all these images that we’re supposed to live up to; very complex, all being sold down to us through a culture whose motivations are very murky and highly suspect. I mean, culture is not your friend. All these people who want you to smell good and drive the right car and have your extra facial hair removed and all that—these are not your friends, these people! It pays to remember that, you know? That there’s a struggle on for loyalty; that you look much better to the institutional structure if you work hard, consume quietly, choose from the political menu without a lot of fuss, and that sort of thing. But, in fact, this kind of business as usual has led to the sort of lethal crisis we’re in.
The reason human society is haunted by messiahs and tin-horn visionaries preaching on every corner and people waving little books of different colors is because there is no full development of the individual. There’s this kind of arrested, prolonged adolescence—and it’s created through institutions. Institutions are a demonic force in human life, because they give permission for us to cease developing and to put our loyalty behind some weird creed that has been worked out (usually by a bunch of guys wearing dresses), and then they hand it down to the rest of us.
There is going to be some kind of fusion of technology, spirit, and mind. I mean, the drugs of the future will be more like computers, the computers of the future will be much more like drugs.
Is the psychedelic agenda somehow the preservation, nurturing, caring for, and completion—and even reconstruction and recovery—of what we have destroyed and ravaged and mauled to get where we are at this moment? Or are we stuff of a different nature, and is our destiny to weave webs that hang between the stars, and leave forever behind this small, wet, humble, life-infested place, and go and live in the constructs of our imagination forever in silicon, and so forth and so on?
I feel very torn. I don’t like the gnostic Manichean need to say, well, there must be a total split; that man and nature cannot coexist. Man, for the sake of humanity and for the sake of nature, must go into our own dimension; that the imagination is our cosmos and we are to inhabit it.
What do we do with the human monkey body? Is it a monkey animal body that drags us down into territoriality and violence, or is it somehow the glory and the purpose? Where do you put the body in a psychedelic value system? If we’re talking about more and more ephemeralization, depersonalizaiton, decentralization, electronic diffuseness, well, then where is sexuality in all that? Still more, where is biology in all that?
We are the generation of people who actually will take the reigns of the human dream in a way that it’s been never been taken before. As recently as a single generation ago, there were insoluble problems of a technological and resource-delivery type. Now it’s basically—I think I began this weekend by saying this—all problems have become problems of human psychology. Everything can be done, it’s all about: how do you convince people in a democracy to pay for it, how do you convince people in a whatever to follow along? All problems have achieved a human dimension. The state of the atmosphere: it’s a human problem. The temperature of the ocean: human problem. Everything has to do with changing and reengineering the human mind.
Somehow, part of the package of being a living, thinking being is that you get a universe inside of you. You get a galaxy-sized object inside you that you can access. And there there are the mountains, the rivers, the jungles, the dynastic families, the ruins, the planets, the works of art, the poetry, the sciences, the magics of millions upon millions upon millions of worlds. And this is apparently who we each are. We’re a little bit of eternity sticking into three-dimensional space, and for some reason occupying time in a monkey body.