Follow it through with me: out of atomic systems come chemical systems. Out of chemical systems comes the covalent hydrogen bond, the carbon bond; complex chemistry that is prebiotic or organic. Out of that chemistry come the macro-physical systems that we call membranes, jells, charge transfer complexes, this sort of thing. These systems are the chemical preconditions for life—simple life; the life of the prokaryotes, the life of naked unnucleated DNA that characterized primitive life on the planet. Out of that life come eukaryotes—nucleated cells—and then complex colonies of cells. And then cell specialization, leading to higher animals, leading to social animals, leading to complex social systems, leading to technologies, leading to globe-girdling, electronically-based, information-transfer oriented cultures like ourselves.
Apparently, the way the universe works is upon a platform of previously achieved complexity—chemical, electrical, social, biological… whatever—new forms of complexity can be built that cross these ontological boundaries. In other words, what I mean by that is that biology is based on complex chemistry, but it is more than complex chemistry. Social systems are based on the organization that is animal life, and yet it is more than animal life.
It ends the marginalization of our own species to the level of spectator-status in a universe that knows nothing of us and cares nothing for us. This is the most advanced position that modern science will allow us: spectators to a drama we didn’t write, shouldn’t expect to understand, and cannot influence. But I say: if, in fact, novelty is the name of the game, if in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly, our own human enterprise—previously marginalized—takes on an immense new importance. We are apparently players in the cosmic drama, and in this particular act of the cosmic drama we hold a very central role.
Since the rise of Western monotheism, the human experience has been marginalized. We have been told that we were unimportant in the cosmic drama. But we now know—from the feedback that we’re getting from the impact of human culture on the Earth—that we are a major factor shaping the temperatures of the oceans, the composition of the atmosphere, the general speed and complexity of speciation on the planet, so forth and so on. A single species—ourselves—has broken from the ordinary constraints of animal nature and created a new world, an epigenetic world—meaning, a world not based on gene transfer and chemical propagation and preservation of information, but a world based on ideas, on symbols, on technologies, on tools, on ideas downloaded out of the human imagination and concretized in three-dimensional space as choppers, aeropoints, particle accelerators, gene sequencers, spacecraft, what have you. All of this complexification occurring at a faster and faster rate.
What psychedelics do—in terms of their impact on the physical brain and organism of human beings—is: they withdraw cultural programming, they dissolve cultural assumptions, they lift you out of that reassuring crystalline matrix of interlocking truths which are lies, and instead they throw you into the presence of the great “Who knows?” The Mystery. The Mystery that has been banished from Western thought since the rise of Christianity and the suppression of the mystery religions.
Consciousness is the generalized word that we use for this coordination of complex perception to create a world that draws from the past and builds a model of the future, and then suspends the perceiving organism in this magical moment called the “Now,” where the past is coordinated for the purpose of navigating the future.
Embedded in your own sense of identity, embedded in your own sense of purpose, is a microscopic reflection of the larger purpose that is built into the universe.
Nobody’s in charge. Not the IMF, the pope, the communist party, the Jews. No, no, no! Nobody has their finger on what’s going on. So then, why hope? Isn’t it just a runaway train out of control? I don’t think so. I think the out-of-control-ness is the most hopeful thing about it. After all, whose control is it out of? You and I never controlled it in the first place! Why are we anxious about the fact that it’s out of control? I think if it’s out of control, then our side is winning.
The universe didn’t begin in a singularity. Who knows how the universe began, or would even presume to judge! But the universe ends in a singularity. It has been growing more singular, more complex, more unique, more novel every passing moment since it burst into existence. And if that’s true, then we represent a kind of concrescence of universal intent. We’re not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience is the main event. The coordination of perception, of hope, of dream, of vision that occurs inside the human heart-mind-body interface is the most complex phenomenon in the universe.
This is what’s happening to us. History is a process of metamorphosis. It’s a pupation stage. It begins with naked monkeys and it ends with a human–machine planet-girdling interface capable of releasing the energies that light the stars.
The great exhibit which we must always keep in front of ourselves and our critics is the mystery of the human mind and body. No one knows how it is that I can command my hand to make a fist and that it will do that. That’s mind over matter. That’s the violation of every scientific principle in the books, and yet it is the most trivial experience any of us have.
What kind of mental worlds shall people inhabit? What kinds of hope shall be permitted? What kind of value systems shall be allowed? And the value systems that aggrandize the possessions of things, the tearing up of the Earth, competition, classism, racism, sexism, have led us to the brink of catastrophe. Now, I think, we have to abandon Western cultural values and return to the deeper wisdom of the body in connection with the plants. That’s the seamless web that leads us back into the heart of nature. And if we can do this, then this very narrow neck of cultural crisis can be navigated.
Notice that, when I speak (if your internal dictionary matches my internal dictionary), that my thoughts cross through the air as an acoustical pressure wave and are reconstructed inside your cerebral cortex as your thought, your understanding of my words. Telepathy exists—it’s just that the carrier wave is small mouth noises.
I kidded with you earlier that they would make sex illegal if they could. Well, they can’t, so it isn’t. But the psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness as having sex, or having a child, or having responsibilities, or having hopes and dreams. And yet it is illegal. We are infantilized. We’re told, “You can wander around within the sanctioned playpen of ordinary consciousness, and we have some intoxicants over here if you want to mess yourself up. We’ve got some scotch here, and some tobacco, and red meat, and some sugar, and a little TV,” and so forth and so on. But these boundary-dissolving hallucinogens that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature are somehow forbidden. This is an outrage. It’s a sign of cultural immaturity. And the fact that we tolerate it is a sign that we are living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past.
What’s really important is: I call it the “felt presence of direct experience,” which is a fancy term which just simply means we have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture. Don’t watch TV. Don’t read magazines. Don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own road show. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe. And if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you’re disempowered. You’re giving it all away to icons—icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y, or something. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion. And what is real is you, and your friends, and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we’re told: no, we’re unimportant. We’re peripheral. Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that, and then you’re a player. You don’t even want to play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. Where is that at?
Religion is simply the word we use to describe our intuition that there is something outside the realm of culture and the three-dimensional surfaces of things. That there is a hidden dimension to reality—call it a plan, a purpose, a loving God, a cosmos instead of a chaos.
What we are lacking, existentially, is any sense of order, meaning, and beauty in the world, because the society we’re living in has no order or beauty or meaning. It’s just a scam and a rat race.
The question of god—meaning, in Milton’s phrase, “The God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven”—I don’t think psychedelics can address that definitively. But there is another god; a goddess. The goddess of biology. The goddess of the coherent animal–human world, the world of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the planet. In short: our world, the world we were born into, that we evolved into, and that we came from. That world the psychedelics want to connect us up to. Because our individuality as people and as a species is an illusion of bad language that the psychedelics dissolve into the greater feeling of connectedness that underlies our being here. And to my mind that’s the religious impulse. It’s not a laundry list of moral dos and dont’s or a set of dietary prescriptions or practices. It’s a sense of connectedness, responsibility for your fellow human beings, and for the Earth you’re walking around on. And because these psychedelics come out of that plant/vegetable matrix, they are the way back into it.
Someone once said, “LSD is a psychedelic substance which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it.” Right? And I would bet you that more people have exhibited psychotic behavior from not taking LSD, but just thinking about it, than ever exhibited it from taking it.
The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery. Our birth, our death, our being in the moment—these are mysteries. They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration, empowerment, and hope for the human enterprise.