Evolutionary theory tells us that we are some kind of advanced animal of some sort, and science has waged a noble struggle over the past 150 years to secure this position against all attacks by orthodox religious thinking. And yet, there is—after it’s all said and done—the sense that, if we are an animal, we are a very, very peculiar sort of animal indeed.
The first form of consciousness is having the point of view of your prey. Predatory animals have the highest form of animal consciousness; big cats. But it’s a consciousness of the exterior world. Psilocybin forced us beyond that, into consciousness of the imaginal world; the world of the imagination inside our heads.
If I were to end this lecture by handing out doses of psilocybin I would be gently taken by the elbow and led away forever. The Western mind is particularly phobic of this subject. We have bent our laws so that people can jump out of airplanes in the pursuit of thrills, so that they can bungee-cord off major highway bridges and freeway overpasses—so concerned are we to fulfill society’s need for thrills. But this is something else. It provokes all kinds of alarmed reactions.
If you had to generalize 100,000 psychedelic experiences—the ones where people thought they were God, the ones where people had to be taken to the ER room and have their stomach pumped; all of them—if you generalize what these substances do, is: they dissolve boundaries. They dissolve boundaries. If you love it, you’ll love it. If you hate it, you’ll hate it. But that’s what they do: they dissolve boundaries.
All societies are about the maintenance of boundaries. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a stockbroker in New York, a Zen monk in Kyoto, a Hasid in Jerusalem—your society is held together by boundaries and definitions. And anything which dissolves those boundaries and introduces relativity into cultural modeling is felt to be threatening, because we like to believe that our reality is somehow sanctioned; that this is how it should be. But, in fact, that’s just a cultural judgment. All cultures think that their culture represents a sanctioned reality. It doesn’t. It just represents the current download of their linguistic enterprise.
We are out of control. We are, basically, severely addicted to things and cannot stop ourselves. And we know—or we should know—that there is not enough petroleum, heavy metal, so forth and so on in the planet to give all the thing-addicts all the things that we know they must have in order to be happy. We have spread this intellectual virus from pole to pole, to Turkmenistan and Borneo, to the upper Amazon and to the Tajiks. Everybody wants kids, you know? Everybody wants the pause that refreshes. What are we going to do about this?
I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet—which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature herself.
The world is a gene swarm. And people like Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock have been suggesting for years that the Earth is a kind of thermostatic self-regulator. Well, if you carry that idea far enough, “thermostatic self-regulator” is a way of saying a kind of computational engine; a kind of computer; a kind of mind! A kind of mind—the Gaian mind.
Our intelligence is a source of toxicity to nature and discomfort to ourselves—unless our values are based on planetary values, are linked to the values of the rest of nature. And that means we need to fit ourselves more appropriately into the scheme of things by limiting our numbers, by limiting our extraction of natural resources and toxification of the environment. We need to realize that there is a hegemony of life on the planet—not necessarily a hegemony of intelligence. Intelligence is not a license to trample. The proper role of intelligence in a planetary ecology is that of gardener, caregiver, and maintainer of balance.
Psychedelics show us something which capitalist, consumer-fetish oriented society doesn’t want us to know. What psychedelics show us is the incredible richness of our minds. That you—little you—can produce more art in a twenty-minute burst of hallucinatory intoxication than the Western mind has produced in the last 500 years. Our socially created space is incredibly impoverished. You know? We have Picasso’s contribution and Pollock’s contribution, and everybody’s contribution—but it, all together, is as nothing compared to the richness that resides in each one of us a half inch behind your eyebrows.
Ideology is toxic. All ideology. It’s not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.
All “technology” really means—in the McLuhan sense—is: “the extensions of Man.” The extensions of Man. And so, language is a technology, shamanism is a technology, psilocybin is a technology, and, certainly, the Internet is a technology. It’s—slowly, I think—dawning on a number of people that, if we’re talking about hallucinogens as consciousness-expanding drugs, then the only difference between a drug and a computer is that one is slightly too large to swallow—and our best people are working on that problem even as we speak! The drugs of the future will be much more like computers. The computers of the future will be much more like drugs.
Bandwidth is broadening as we speak. The whole world is being brought into the domain of electricity.
What we have to do is dematerialize culture in every way possible. And that means pharmacologize culture, computerize culture, network culture, virtualize culture, and make of it, thereby, a tool for the production of our poetic flights; a technology for the putting in place of our dreams as exhibits that we can show each other. This is what it is. This is what technology can be in the service of boundary dissolution. In the service of boundary maintenance you get hydrogen bombs and sarin. In the service of boundary dissolution you get psychoactive substances, and the Internet, and sexual experimentalism, social justice, tolerance, and community.
It’s inconceivable that Western industrial capitalism could run on another 500 or 1,000 years. It will not continue as it has. It will deteriorate under the pressure of resource scarcity. And what few democratic values we have obtained, what little space for reasoned discourse has been created, will be the first to be swept away. So it’s very, very important that people take back their minds, and that people analyze our dilemma in the context of the entire human story—from the descent onto the grassland to our potential destiny as citizens of the galaxy and the universe. We are at a critical turning point.
There’s no way to get a big perspective like education and psychedelic experiences. If we can see history for what it is—it’s a 25,000-year, nearly instantaneous transition from one state of being to another. And, yes, there are 1,500 generations of people who live in that paper-thin transition time. But when it’s over, it’s over. And we will leave history behind the way you dump a used placenta, I’m sure.
We’re going to have to decide how much of the monkey we want to take with us into the future. We don’t want to take the homicidal killer, we don’t want to take the male dominator—but it would probably be a mistake to leave the body entirely behind. After all, the body gives us our orientation in the world, and our sense of ourselves as somehow coextensive with animal life. But how much of what we call human is really human is going to be major topic for discussion from here to the end of time.
We’re moving toward a time when our technology is indistinguishable from us.
Almost literally overnight you can build a website and begin to point at other websites, and bring resources into yours. This is a technology which is going turn out to not be what people think it is. It’s going to be a technology for showing each other the inside of our heads; for showing each other our dreams.
The cultural enterprise is an effort to turn ourselves inside out: we want to put the body into the imagination and we want the imagination to replace the laws of physics. With these technologies we can probably do that.
