You are not a fully matured human being in touch with the potential of reality unless you have had a psychedelic experience.
These are the most powerful agents for uncovering the structure and potential of the human mind there are.
What is important is that it knows more about one than one knows about one’s self and, consequently, it is a source of stability, a source of gnosis, a source of information, and this is what most people lack. They are only superficially in touch with their own destiny, their own birth, their own death.
We need to again reconnect with the next level of the overmind—this globally conscious, ecologically sensitive, balanced, humane, caring kind of consciousness, which we can access only with considerable effort, through self-discipline, psychotherapy, psychedelics, this kind of thing.
People need to be empowered, and you’re not empowered by placing your spiritual development in the hands of a guru. You’re spiritually empowered by taking responsibility for your spiritual development, by looking around and seeing what can be done.
The issue finally comes down to: the citizen versus the self. The citizen is an extremely limited definition of human potential. The self is a definition of human potential so broad that it threatens the obligations of the citizen.
What life looks like is extremly hopeful. The human potential is so vast. We don’t have nay problems that we can’t solve by applying ourselves to them with open minds. Now, you see, the current theory of problem-solving is that we must solve all our problems with solutions that make the buck. Well, it just may not be possible to solve the problems of the 20th century and make a buck at the same time. But if we’re willing to put aside the notion, then the human future appears endlessly bright, because the human mind appears to be a much more open pipeline to God than anyone who is outside the psychedelic experience could ever imagine.
Now, why should taking a natural psychedelic drug compound like psilocybin give you hope? It’s because it connects you up with the real network of values and information inherent in the planet, the values of biology, the values of organism rather than the values of the consumer.
The cultural institutions will not reach for the emergency brake until things are really cracking to pieces. Because, you know, the present forms of civilization represent a sinking ship.
The reality we’re embedded in is itself some kind of an organism.
We are not alienated and outside of nature; we are somehow the cutting edge of it. And this vast output of building and highways and all the things that characterize the modern world is actually a feature of the natural world. Similarly, the evolution of technical intelligence on the surface of the planet, while new, is not unnatural.
What we take to be our creations, which are these computers and technology, are actually another level of ourselves.
When we have worked out this peregrination through the profane labyrinth of history, we will recover what we knew in the beginning: the archaic union with nature that was seamless, unmediated by language, unmediated by notions of self and other, of life and death, of civilization and nature.
All our religions were pale imitations of the mystery itself.
Look at something like the phenomenon of language in our species. How probable was that before it existed? It represents some kind of intersection of the monkey species with a transcendental force of some sort. And yet, once it came into existence, it is seen to be inherent in our biological organization.
The transcendental object, which has been well-described since the 16th century, is the union of spirit and matter. It is entirely spirit and it is entirely matter. The transcendental object is matter that behaves like thought, and it is a doorway into the imagination. This is where we’re all going to live. This is why the psychedelic experience is so important, because it anticipates a life lived entirely in the imagination.
Suppose a way were found to integrate human and machine intelligence to create a culture in which man and machine were indistinguishable. This would allow us to influence the dimensions of that interaction. Well, if we’re creating another dimension, it might as well be paradise.
The two concepts, drugs and computers, are migrating toward each other.
We are stretching the envelope as we approach, not the sound barrier, but the… call it the “mind barrier,” the “social barrier.” We will not disintegrate when we reach it and fall out of the sky. Instead, if we’ve designed our space ship correctly, we will slip right on through into an infinite realm of potential human becoming.
No culture, so far as I’m aware, has ever consciously tried to evolve its language with the awareness that evolving language was evolving reality.
The strange thing about psilocybin, my career, this conversation, is that it has to do with the empowerment of language. That’s what gives me my cachet, that people say, “You say things that nobody else ever says,” “You speak clearly.” The social consequences of the psychedelic experience are clear thinking—which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech.
In the post-transition world, it’s possible that there will appear to be only ego, and there will actually be only Tao. And that’s a good working definition of what a telepathic society would be like: appropriate activity. It’s nothing more than that.
Imagine if every problem were solved appropriately, if every relationship evolved appropriately, if every act were an appropriate one. That alone would be the kingdom of heaven. And that is, I think, what we’re pushing toward. Not cosmic fireworks or the descent of alien beings in flying saucers, but simply appropriate activity—empowered, felt, experienced—and the abandonment of the illusion of separateness.