I speak about the power of the psychedelic experience because I think people should be informed of their birthright, and I feel very antsy around the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience. It makes me as antsy as the notion that somebody might go from birth to the grave without having a sexual experience. It’s a strange kind of protective denial, or a kind of expression of fear. This is our birthright. This is part of what it means to be human.
If we psychologically analyze the effects of these psychedelics, what they do is: they dissolve boundaries. That’s all. I mean, if you interview ten thousand people who’ve had a psychedelic trip, each one has their own hierophany, their own hieros gamos, that unfolded for them, but the sum total of it is: boundaries dissolve. And then, whatever’s on the other side of your boundary comes flooding in to claim you, and to reshape and remake your psyche.
I see the entire illness of our civilization as an ego-inflationary illness. We have gone so sick with ego that we are literally murdering the planet rather than confronting the consequences of our psychic imbalance. And the psychedelics act to redress this. They are almost an inoculation against the ego.
The assumptions of the ego are the source of our neurosis, our disequilibrium.
Language is a miracle. I mean, make no mistake about it, I don’t think any amount of dissection of monkeys or human cadavers will give you an insight into language. Language is a behavior of some sort—so bizarre, so many orders of magnitude more complex than anything else we do, that for all practical purposes this is the thumbprint of God upon creation: human language. And it’s a self-transforming thing. It keeps bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels, and it creates for us the entire ambiance of reality.
All of nature is a seamless web of pheromonally mediated connections and interactions, and we are just not yet at a sufficient level of analysis and sophisticated observation to see this interconnected web. You know, our idea of nature is that it’s all tooth and claw: survival of the fittest and the devil takes the hindmost. The new version of evolution is entirely different. It says that the way you attain survival is by making yourself indispensable to everybody else. So it’s not by triumphing over the ecosystem, but by integrating yourself so thoroughly into it that it can’t function without you. Then you’re on your way to being a dominant species—not by crushing the opposition.
Psychedelics—one way of thinking of them is as a catalyst for cognition. The original description of psychedelic drugs was they were consciousness-expanding drugs. Well, if we take the idea that they are consciousness-expanding seriously for even a moment, then we have to put a lot of attention in on this, because it’s the absence of consciousness that is murdering us and our planet. We need all the consciousness we can get. We need to wring it out of computers, get it out of plants, raise it in ourselves and our children. Wherever we can get it, we need it.
In a hundred years the Earth will be empty, and whether that will be because we are extinct or because we found home is entirely up to us. But our story—the story of the errant monkey—is coming to an end. The final seconds of that story are ticking out. Is it to be followed by no more story or a new chapter, a new story? Well, this has to do with how much integrity, how much self-generated love, and how much intelligence we can bring to bear to the human dilemma.