Any intelligent life form which achieves a certain level of understanding of nature and technical proficiency will take control of its own physical appearance, its own form. In other words: truly civilized lifeforms are self-designed.
I see the answer to our problems—I put it very generally last night—as the dissolving of ego, and that we need to return to this collectivized state of caring. But I didn’t spell out what the modality of doing that is. The modality of doing it is to transform language from something heard with the ear to something seen with the eyes.
What the evolution of electronic culture is, to my mind, is the concrescence of language into a visible form. This is how we can transform the way we relate to each other.
I really see technology as having a role in all of this. I don’t see it as demonic. The only purpose of history—if it has a purpose—must have been the acquisition of technology. Because it’s the only advantage that we’ve gained, if it is an advantage. And I really believe it is. I think that we must transform ourselves. We are not in control of our destiny. A planetary birthing process is underway. This planet will be unrecognizable in a hundred years. And so it’s not about managing or controlling this process, it’s simply about submitting to it.
What is our destiny? I believe it lies in the imagination in some way that is very hard to articulate at this cultural level. It lies in the imagination—through psychedelics, through art, through technology, through the design process, through psychotherapy, through all of these things which knit together and unite and dissolve barriers of time and space and personality. We’re preparing to decamp into the imagination.
Mind is the cutting edge of the planetary design process, and we have done about as much as we can do in the present form. And the fact that the technologies to remake ourselves are now in place signals the approach of this transition of epochs.
You can’t do high doses if you’re at least not living a life of self-examination. It doesn’t mean you have to be a saint. But if you’re not asking yourself, “Am I being an asshole?” “Am I fulfilling my obligations to other people?” you can’t take psychedelics, because it will slam you too hard. It will burn you. And I know people who have very strong personalities who are terrified of mushrooms, and I know why they’re terrified: because it slams them. They cannot release the ego and relate to it.
All these people who hang around ashrams and all that stuff, if you want that—if you want to leave everything behind, if you want to become incomprehensible to everyone who ever loved you, if you want to rise up into that imperium up on cold mountain—there’s nothin’ holding you back. It’s there to be done. People think the spiritual quest is a chore and a journey. It is till you get to this stuff. Then it’s all about putting your foot on the brakes, slowing everything down, holding it back. You have found the answer. Now the question is: how the hell do you face the answer? People say, “I want transcendence. I want knowledge. I want to rise up and speak to the archetypes outside of space and time.” Fine! The line forms to the left. Are you ready for that? I’m not.
Suddenly, all this pressure to succeed on the spiritual advancement circuit can fade out. You say, “My God, we have arrived. This is the alchemical quintessence. This is the golden key. Rumored, sought, lost, and now found.” Now what are you going to do with it? What can one do with it? How do we make ourselves better people and stay recognizable to ourselves and each other? It’s huge.
The entire species could take a turn into the mist and walk out on material existence, machinery, money, biology. It’s unlimited. We have found the edge of the world in the search for freedom, and now there’s nothing left to do but soar.
The mushroom doesn’t just gently move you into a place where you have a deeper appreciation of life, love, and so forth. It says, you know, “There is a program. Wake up to what’s going on. A program of planetary transformation is in place. You’re being recruited. Knock, knock! We need a few good men and women. Are you ready?” And this whole thing.
I think this is part of the fear that attends it. This is why professional people won’t get near this stuff—because what would you do? How would you return to your job in arbitrage if, on a Saturday night, you had a revelation of the real meaning of money? You know, you could blow the whole apple cart. You could have to change your life, God forbid. People are afraid of this.
This country has gone far down the road toward ruin. I mean, I don’t know if it’s reversible. What happened—the way I analyzed the sixties was: a generation became of university age that had actually been raised within the confines of a system of universal public education that worked. I mean, I don’t know about you. I went to public high schools my whole life. And we studied Beowulf. We memorized passages from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. We read Chaucer. I mean, I was educated. I have an excellent liberal education because of the colleges and high schools that I went to. It’s all been trashed since 1965. I am cynical enough to think that a decision was actually made somewhere in the corridors of power, saying: “This universal public education stuff is for the birds. Educating people makes them critical, thoughtful, and politically demanding upon the leadership. We don’t need this. Let’s turn the universities into trade schools, and put everybody on to video games, and give them no higher aspiration than a BMW, and then we’ll get the situation under control.” And this is what has been done. The universities are trade schools. There is no life of the mind. And if we cannot raise the level of public dialogue, then we’re just doomed.
Caffeine is a drug which causes stomach ulcers, miscarriage, so forth and so on—easily abused, easily addicted to, so forth and so on. Caffeine is the only drug in history that has ever been enshrined in a labor contract. And it’s enshrined in every labor contract signed in this country. You have what’s called the “coffee break.” Can you imagine a heroin break? A marijuana break? A DMT break? No. But the coffee break makes perfect sense. Why? Because it serves the interests of the dominator society: to get people to perform repetitious actions. Notice how the rise of manufacture from standardized parts, or the rise of the modern office environment, parallels the introduction of caffeine into industrial societies. Tea, coffee, chocolate—these are the drugs of the new industrialism. They took a folk population and made them into workers.
The way you make somebody trustworthy is: you trust them. And I think this has a lot to say about the drug problem. The way you make people trustworthy is: you trust them. We cannot have a devil theory of our own populace. That is a house divided against itself.
There’s plenty of signs on the horizon that the same forces that destroyed the Communist Party and the Soviet Union are perfectly capable of destroying the Democrato–Republican fascist oligarchy that runs this country. Because central control is breaking down: populations cannot be controlled. Information cannot be controlled. Everybody whose game ran on a kind of sleight of hand prestidigitation “we know more than you know” has just been put out of business.
What is language? Strangely enough, we are made of language. If you analyze what DNA is, the whole thing is just a meat computer for the purpose of expressing an abstract code. The code is abstract. The nucleotide sequences that associate to the amino acids have no chemical relationship to the amino acids. It’s a symbolic relationship. Well, God, this was all perfected and in place 500 million years before the stirrings of self-reflection. It’s as though language is seeping into reality from some other dimension toward its own destiny. But what is it?
Everything flows. Nothing lasts. Your lovers and your enemies will go down into the ground, and so will you. Nothing lasts. And a society that denies that is set on a seriously neurotic course.
History is a tremendous state of temporary disequilibrium. History lasts 15,000 years. It’s a dash from munching mushrooms around the campfire to walking up the beryllium ramp into the starship. And it’s just like… that! One moment you’re in Africa, scrabbling for grubs under cow pies, and the next moment you’re setting a course for Alpha Sagittarius with a fleet behind you that represents the population of the planet. There was just a moment, a hesitation, a kind of defocusing and refocusing, and then we find ourselves there. Unfortunately, we—microbial creatures of such brevity—for us, we experience it as an unending eternity: the fall into history, the hellish march toward self-reclamation and self-recognition. But in the life of the planet it’s literally no more than a blink, and where there stood monkeys, there now stand the collective cybernauts of hyperspace.
We have to play this prodigal role, leave the fragile cradle of our biology, leave the fragile cradle of our unconscious, and actually recognize ourselves as a major player in a cosmic drama.
We don’t know how many times in the universe self-reflecting consciousness has arisen. There’s ample reason for pessimism, and equally ample and convincing data for optimism. Until we know that the universe teems with life, until we know that civilizations come and go like snowflakes in a whirlwind, we have to entertain the possibility that we’re it: that we represent some kind of tremendous cosmic experiment in the intensification of novelty, that we are part of a cosmic system.
We have no need for religions if we have a real understanding of what biology is. Biology is the religion, necessarily, of life. It couldn’t be otherwise.
If you believe that the universe is a novelty-producing and -conserving machine, then suddenly anthropocentrism is back with a vengeance. Because we are the most complex phenomenon on this planet. We embed within ourselves all the complexity of biology, all the complexity of societal existence (as we find it in bees and ants and termites), and then onto that we add philosophy, art, emotion, poetry, hopes, dreams. Within us resides the residuum of the greatest complexity yet achieved within the cosmos.
This is what being psychedelic means: it means you’re more than a surface. You have more to say than “Have a nice day.” You’re there, you know? And a lot of people aren’t. They’re just fulfilling sociological algorithms that are imposed from the top.
One way of thinking about novelty is that it travels in knots called organisms, and that an organism represents a higher-order nexus of novelty.