It seems to me that history has failed, and Western civilization has failed, and dominator-primate politics has failed, object-fetish consumerism has failed, the national security government has failed. And so then, where do we go from here? What kind of new world can we create? And what kind of guidelines are there that we can follow?
Back away from the linear, constipated world of print-head materialism that is what we inherit from the Western/European past. That style of thinking about life and human relations has essentially toxified the planet and allowed us to paint ourselves into a corner from which there is no escape.
The concept of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the documents upon which this nation of ours is supposedly founded. If the pursuit of happiness does not mean the right to experiment with your own state of mind, then those words aren’t worth the hemp they’re written on.
We are approaching the symmetry break where we shed the monkey, we shed the hardwired negative animal impulses that keep us chained to the Earth and deny us our dreams of completion.
We are moving, literally, into the realm of the imagination. This is where the human future lies.
We are like creatures caught in an interrupted embryogenesis: halfway to angelhood, the worst among us somehow got control of the social agenda, and we’ve been hammering on each other with monotheism, racism, sexism, materialism for the past 10,000 years.
Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that you’re gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going to impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.
We have the science, the technology, the money, the infrastructure, to do almost anything that we want to do. The problem is changing our minds. We have a hell of a time changing our minds. And yet, we must. There is no choice about it.
The reason I’m a psychedelic advocate is not because I think it’s easy, or because I think it’s a sure thing—I don’t think it’s easy or a sure thing. It’s simply that it’s the only game in town. Nothing else can change your mind on a dime like we are going to have to change our minds on a dime. If we had five hundred years to sort this out, we could maybe have a fighting chance without radical pharmacological intervention. As it is, if we don’t awaken, we are going to let it slip through our fingers.
You have to somehow give people an experience—an experience that is not somebody else’s experience; their experience, that radically recrystallizes their understanding of the world.
The absence of spirit permits the murder of the planet. But the cost of the denial of spirit is life empty of meaning.
If there is an iota of possibility that these substances enhance consciousness—and remember, they used to be called “consciousness-expanding drugs” (just a straight phenomenological description)—if there’s an iota of possibility that they augment consciousness, then we have to put the pedal to the metal in this matter. Because it is the absence of consciousness that is pushing us toward extinction, that is causing us to loot our children’s future, that is causing us to accept the elimination of thousands of species per month without pouring into the streets to loot and smash the institutions of those who allow these kinds of atrocities to go forward. I think the era of politeness has gone on just about long enough, and there’s going to have to come a moment where people stand up and are counted. We have seen our freedom taken away, we have seen our environment destroyed, we have seen our political dialogue polluted, and still we take it, and take it, and take it.
We can do political work ulcerated and clenched with terror and fear and always looking over our shoulders, or we can do that same work with a sense of play and lightheartedness. It’s the same work, so why not have a good time while we do it?
The issue with psychedelics is that they call into question the illusions of the masters. And I think it doesn’t matter who the masters are. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a fascist dictatorship, a high-tech industrial democracy, or a Third World banana republic—if you start taking psychedelics, you will start questioning the reality around you, and question-asking is not what the control freaks are interested in.
It may well be that there has to be some kind of neural correction on us. For one thing, we cannot tolerate the luxury of an unconscious mind. That belongs to a more primitive stage of human development. When you have hydrogen bombs and can deliver synthetic plagues by missile to the other side of the planet, then you cannot be driven by the agendas of animals and half-conscious human beings.
Tools are neutral things, you know? It’s the monkey wielding the tool that you have to keep your eye on. And so we are now challenged to apply the tools that have been created.
It’s okay to live like there’s no tomorrow if you’re at some primitive stage of culture with endless frontiers of exploitable resources in all directions. That’s not where we’re at. We have burned through all that, and yet still we party on.