Nature is the great visible engine of creativity against which all other creative efforts are measured.
The universe is almost what we would have to call an art-making machine: an engine for the production of ever more novel forms of connectedness, ever more exotic juxtapositions of disparate elements.
Until very recently, utility is only a secondary consideration. The real notion is a kind of seizure by the tremendum, by the Other, which then forces us to take up matter (clay, bone, flint) and put it through a mental process where we then excrete it as objects that have lodged within them ideas. This seems to be the special, unique, transcendental function of the human animal: is the production and condensation of ideas.
Language has made us more than a group of pack-hunting monkeys. It’s made us a group of pack-hunting monkeys with a dream.
Art is this endeavor to leave the animal domain behind, to create another dimension orthogonal to the concerns of ordinary history.
The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before and no other human being will ever see again. But, in fact, this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.
We want to catalyze consciousness. We want to move it faster toward its goals, whatever those goals are.
A meme is the smallest unit of meaning of an idea. Ideas are made of memes. And I think the art community might function with more efficiency in the production of visionary aesthetic breakthroughs if we would think of ourselves as an environment modeled after the natural environment, where we as artists are attempting to create memes which enter an environment of other memes that are in competition with each other, and out of this competition of memes ever more appropriate, adapted, and suitable ideas can gather and link themselves together into higher and higher organisms.
Right there, in the beginning of the Western story in Genesis, what you get is: it’s the story of history’s first drug bust. It’s the story of a woman who follows her own mind and makes a decision about consciousness alteration. And then it works! I mean, [it] says, “And they were naked and she perceived them as naked.” In other words: she got true information about the situation. But you have Yahweh there, mumbling to himself as he wanders around the garden in an old bathrobe, and he’s saying, “If they eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, they will become as we are.” That was always the issue, you see: it wasn’t a health issue, it wasn’t an abuse issue. It’s about who finds out what’s really going on and who doesn’t.
All nature is watching this drama. The life of our star is finite. The life of the planet is finite. But potentially, self-reflecting understanding may be, in fact, immortal. And yet, it is breaking out of the trappings of matter. And this is a process so large, so strange, that I don’t think a single mind can encompass it within a single moment.
