Many of you have heard me quote William Blake. It’s always worth repeating. He said: “If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.” In other words: understanding compels belief. You don’t have to hammer on somebody. Your task is to refine your message into an understandable form, and then let the dynamics of intellectual competition decide what is the best model to follow.
My analysis of what psychedelics do—if you think not about my trip or your trip, but thousands, tens of thousands of these experiences—what can we say that would be true of every high-dose psychedelic experience? What can we say that would be a general truism? What you could say is that psychedelics dissolve boundaries. That’s what they do. The boundary between nature and society, between mind and body, between self and other. They dissolve boundaries. And this is what love does when it is working right. I mean, you are able to place yourself in the second position for a child, for a lover, for a cause, for whatever it is, you know? You take second position. So I see them essentially as aphrodisiacs of a strange sort. They empower not genital prowess, but real caring by showing that all differences are illusions; that what is real is the unbroken, seamless plenum of being.
We developed language, symbolic representation, dance, theater, so forth and so on, and we acquired and empowered the tremendous imagination that has allowed us to build the cultures that we see around us. That kind of power is only safe in the hands of collective community-minded creatures, and in the hands of ego-driven creatures it leads straight to Auschwitz and the hydrogen bomb—as it did.
Our world is getting uglier and meaner and more mean-spirited by the moment, because those who have are so anxious about the fact that they might be asked to share it.
What we have to do is teach people to care for each other as a primary value—not something you do after you pay for your Mercedes and all that, but as the primary value. We have to have community. It’s very simple. We don’t have community. We have a free-for-all where the devil takes the hindmost, the most brutal and most ruthless among us rise to the top, and everybody else has a foot on their neck. We are now in a hell of a fix, because we’ve waited so long to address these problems. There is not now enough gold, aluminum, iron, so forth, in the planet to raise everyone to a middle-class standard as it’s enjoyed in southern California. And yet, we have unleashed these expectations in everyone by flagellating people with images of material wealth and comfort.
Analyze what normal ordinary communication is: I want to communicate with you. I consult my internal dictionary and I carefully choose words out of my dictionary, and I string them together according to the rules of English syntax. I then activate—if I’ve done things in the right order—I then activate my vocal apparatus. I impart a vibration, an acoustical wave, unto the surrounding medium, which is air. This vibration moves across space. It enters through the holes on both sides of your head as a pressure wave. You then, analyzing this incoming waveform, rush to your dictionary, and you break up this incoming wave signature and attempt to map it to words in your dictionary. Now, if your dictionary and my dictionary are the same, then you will—lo and behold—reconstruct my thought in the confines of your brain-mind system. But notice the caveat that was slipped in there: if your dictionary and my dictionary are the same. But they never are! I mean, maybe they are if you ask, “Can you tell me what time it is?” or “Would you please turn down the stereo?” But if you’re talking about anything of interest, depth, ambiguity, or complexity, then chances are your dictionary and my dictionary only generally assimilate to congruency with each other. So then, ambiguity creeps in. You think you understand. I think you understand. And on that shaky foundation we begin to build further semi-understandings. And then we drift off in the general direction of misapprehension eventually.
Let all ideas compete on a level playing field, and the correct points of view, I think, will emerge eventually.