The truth does not require your belief. The truth is real! You can beat it on the ground, you can rip it apart, you can look inside it. Nobody needs to guard the truth from inspection. Nobody needs to tell you that, you know, you can’t look behind the stage.
All spiritual disciplines that I know, except for psychedelics, put a great deal of emphasis on putting the pedal to the metal. Push, push, push! You know? Meditate! Make offerings! Do Mantrayana! Do Pranayama! Do Pusha! Push, push, push! With psychedelics, suddenly there is a very deep interest in “And where are the brakes?” You see? You’re no longer pushing. Once you get to the psychedelics, seeking is an attitude which ill becomes you. You have found it! You have found it. Now what in the hell are you going to do with it?
We live in a realm of abstraction, excuses, incredible wealth. Incredible levels of pampering and softness lie between us (the upper five percent of the intellectual and material elite on the planet) and the problems. I mean, how many of us have been to Bosnia, or Rwanda, or Somalia? These things are only images on a dehumanizing screen. If we could feel what we are doing, we would awaken to the mystery of each other.
I talk to all kinds of people who I see as part of my community. But it stretches from virtual reality, to the radical gay movement, to the house movement, to the pagan movement, to the younger molecular pharmacologists, to the radical art historians and psychotherapists. All of these communities are fragmented and suspicious of each other, and this is precisely what orthodoxy enjoys. If all of these counter-cultural impulses could make common cause, we would probably discover that we’re 65–70 percent of the population. And so what is needed is a spirit of boundary dissolution between individuals, between classes, sexual orientations, rich and poor, man and woman, intellectual and feeling-toned types. If this can happen then we will make a new world. And if this doesn’t happen—nature is fairly pitiless and has a place for us in the shale of this planet where so many have preceded us.
You see, the idea that we have inherited from Western religion and science is the idea that things should be stable. This is a very male-dominant notion—the wish for stability, eternity—when, in fact, the message life hands you over and over again is: nothing lasts. Nothing lasts! Not what you love, not what you hate, not your enemies, your friends, not even your dear, dear self. Nothing lasts. And the ego goes mad in the presence of that truth. It can’t swallow it. And so we have anxiety of death, need to dominate people, need to possess property, terror of illness, resentment of fate—because we are not in the flow.