If you can imagine a hunting-gathering tribe of thirty people moving through a vast rainforest with their children and their elders, the notion of the super-expressed individual that we take for granted is not really there. There is more a sense of the unity of the group.
Language has not been examined enough, it seems to me. All the argument over man’s place in nature and that sort of thing doesn’t take cognizance of the fact that, if you want a miracle, then language is the thing to look at. Because we know that our genetic component is only 3% or something removed from chimpanzees, and this and that, but this thing that we do with sound and meaning is of an ontologically different order. And I am not sympathetic with the people who want to blur the distinctions and say that dolphins talk, ants talk, bees talk. They may communicate, but this is a very different thing; what man is able to do.
The cultural momentum of the last five hundred years has made the Gnostic myth a reality. In other words, we have become a menace not only to ourselves but to the planet, and the only way that both parties can save themselves is by a separation. And this, on one level, is the greatest crisis that biology has faced since animals left the ocean for the land. On another level, it appears inevitable in the present social context that we are going to go to space. But the birth pangs of doing this are very destructive.
Civilization is a 10,000-year dash to space with the potential to destroy yourselves. History is the departure of a species for the stars. But it takes 10,000 to 15,000 years—a moment of biological and geological time. But in that 10,000 to 15,000-year period, if you happen to be unlucky enough to be born somewhere in there, it’s going to look like it’s all up for grabs. We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed.
Within a century of the discovery of DNA, any species which makes that discovery takes possession of its own form. And we are going to do that in the next fifty years. We are going to design the kind of people that we want to be. And if we don’t want to be people, we will design that out of the picture.
What it sees is an animal which takes in raw material and excretes it in ideological moles. That’s what we do. We turn ideas into facts on all levels. And this cannot go on any longer on the surface of the planet with the levels of energy and control that we have brought to bear, because we are now in a position to destroy the whole Earth, or to sculpt, to turn it into a Disneyland—which is a kind of destroying of the Earth. So we have become a toxic force in planetary biology. We feel it and the planet feels it.
All appetition for the future is an appetition for this modality of super freedom that comes from transcending the limitations of dimension.
That’s why we are so riddled with apocalyptic mythology: because we really do have a prescience about what is going to happen to us. We really do sense at a very deep level that the linear extrapolation of our historical and cultural tendencies does not give a true picture of the future; that the major factor which will shape the future is uncertainty, and that we have never yet created a method for integrating that uncertainty and planning for it.
The planet is simply a precursor of what we will project outward when we have the ability to do so.
What we’re talking about when we’re talking about the advancement of human evolution is the evolution of the human mind and these drugs. And before the argument was whether it should be called a hallucinogen or a psychedelic or an entheogen, they were just called “consciousness-expanding drugs.” And that really, as a phenomenological description, is more useful than these other things. They expand consciousness. Well, therefore, we should be really bearing down on them, because the problem is we don’t have enough consciousness, and we don’t know how to direct it and sculpt it and orient it toward our own salvation. So we can’t just take our mental states as given and somehow sacrosanct, and therefore not to be tampered with. We have to actually begin to engineer them.
We need now to think in terms of the collective consciousness of the race, which is not passive. It’s not just the storage place of old memories and myths and that kind of thing, it is more like an entelechy. It guides, it opens avenues to certain choices and precludes avenues to other choices.
Arthur Koestler, I think it was in The Ghost in the Machine, said very clearly that he felt there was no hope for the human species without chemical intervention; that we cannot be the sharp-fanged monkey and the possessor of atomic weapons, and that we are going to have to chemically intervene to mute the monkey proclivities.
Someone got the idea that you could assign a meaning to a certain mouth noise, and everybody would agree that that’s what that noise meant, and then you could discuss things.
It isn’t culture that’s changing and carrying everything with it. It’s language that’s changing, and it carries culture with it. Culture lags far behind. But the evolution of language is the evolution of reality. This is a cliché, but the challenge of the cliché is to make it operational so that, like God, when you utter a word, it becomes so.
Technology has a weird way of always escaping the intentions of those who are working with it.