If anybody, with argument, could do to you what DMT does to you, you’d embrace it in a hurry.
All boundaries are dissolving. That’s what the end of the millennium means. It means that the tribes of the Amazon basin, the tribes of the New Guinea Islands, the tribes of Oxford and Cambridge—everything is dissolving, and humanity is reaching a kind of plural consensus.
A single human viewpoint is sort of coming into existence: a viewpoint that values nature, values natural resources, and tries (however, clumsily) to make some kind of peace out of the whole human mess that we’re now mixed up in.
If we were having this discussion thirty years ago, we would not be talking about ayahuasca. We’d be talking about mushrooms and their potential, and the… you know? So I think the plants change, the drugs change, but the challenge stays the same. And the challenge is to build a humane and human world without doing damage to the humanity that’s already in it.
If we have not learned anything from the twentieth century, we should have learned that wars of ideology are hopeless and just bring incredible grief and loss of life. So I’m hoping that what the twenty-first century can mean is movement beyond ideology, and an actual rational—and I think it is—rational approach to integrating the irrational into how we think about society, city planning, social management, and all the rest of it.
Once you get the idea that a mushroom can talk to you in your native language and propose various things, life never looks quite the same again.
Following your own curiosity is a better method for exploring the world than any of the methods offered.
