The really important thing that can be done with psychedelics in a generalized sense is that they are inspiration for ideas, and that when you sail out into the psychedelic dimension you’re sailing out onto an ocean of ideas. And you can lower your nets—and there are many minnows and few whales—but the goal is to bring up something middle-sized that is both astonishing but non-lethal that you can wrestle into your intellectual life.
Novelty is something which knits the world together and creates new emergent properties out of the densification of previous states of existence. Novelty is the force which caused stars to condense out of a primal cloud of energy, caused planets (or this planet) to evolve life, caused life to leave the oceans, caused humanity to emerge out of animal organization, high culture out of previous culture, so forth and so on. And it’s a morally neutral force. It isn’t good, it isn’t bad, it just is a tendency in the universe to conserve complexity and to build ever more complex phenomena by incorporating lower levels of complexity into higher levels of organization.
Can the human entelechy be downloaded into circuitry? Can we somehow have an existence (that we would recognize as an existence) without a body? And do we want that, and what is that like, and what does it say about our souls if we choose that? You know, these are pretty strange questions. What is human nature in the absolute absence of nature?
I think that the future of humanity must be in the imagination; that somehow the imagination is a place, it’s a world, it’s a straw being extended by the overmind to a drowning person. And we have to somehow marshal our wherewithal to march off into the imagination, because it’s the only safe haven there is. What we are can not be unleashed on the surface of a planet without destroying that planet. I mean, we’ve only possessed serious technology for a hundred years. You know, before that, nobody had nothin’! It was a big chore to melt metal and stuff like that. The big guns of being able to push matter and energy around on any significant scale have only been in our hands since 1945. And look: the planet is a complete mess.
Imaging ourselves as this omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, all-knowing, centrally controlled entity has given a stamp of cultural approval to the ego that has left us in a very difficult position vis-à-vis the feminine, intuition, the Earth, and any kind of ability to feel our situation.
In capitalism no planning extends beyond four, five years. In American democracy no planning extends beyond four years. Everybody has their nose right up against it, and yet they’re sailing along at a thousand miles an hour toward a brick wall that’s just ahead.
Somehow the grassroots good sense, the common sense of ordinary people, needs to be reflected. And what that means is an abandonment of ideology. Ideology is something imposed from above, and it’s a filter. Then only certain solutions are allowed through.
I praise chaos, because I think the main thing working to recreate a new world is the impossibility of controlling the old world. I love it when they say it’s moving too fast. I love it because I know it means that they cannot get a hold on it. I mean, can you imagine trying to be the CIA and trying to control the situation in East Germany? I mean, you just throw up your hands and walk away—which is what we want you to do—and then, lo and behold, it flowers according to its own dynamics. Right now the world is moving faster than the meddlers can meddle, and that’s why it has this wonderfully fecund and optimistic aura to it.