Behaviorally speaking, what dominance hierarchies mean is a behavioral nexus of ego that is permitted and encouraged within the personality of members of the group. And you can almost say that ego is like a calcareous growth.
Seen against the background of ordinary nature—plants, and animals, and rainforests, and glaciation, and the formation of river estuaries, and volcanic eruptions, and this sort of thing—we represent something completely different, of a completely different order. And without going soft-headed on you, I would say if you’re looking for the thumbprint of deities on this planet, it surely must rest in us. We are the anomaly.
How can those of us who don’t want to just follow orthodox religion into its conclusions and guilt trips, but also feel the inadequacy of the scientific reductionist model, what can we—can there be a secular apocalypse? Can there be a kind of transcendence without moral retribution? I hope so—for my own sake, if nothing else.
I would like to believe that you get into heaven by figuring out reality—rather than, you know, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked. I mean, I think that’s all very fine, but eventually reality is some kind of a conundrum. It’s a puzzle. The filter is very narrow. Of course, this is just a playground intellectual plotting cosmic revenge on all the idiots who used to lean on me.
The consequences of accepting the idea that history is not being pushed by the errors of the past, but is actually being drawn toward an attractor, is that it empowers the human experience. The scientific model of what we’re about is that we’re about zip. I mean, we’re lucky to have gotten an observer’s chair on the cosmic drama in the scientific story of things, and yet it denies our uniqueness.
We create these societies which are always approximations of some divinely intuited image or model. I mean, we are haunted—every one of us, every civilization, every moment—with the possibility of the transcendent. And this process of coming to meet, of encounter, with this transcendent Other is accelerating faster and faster in our own time.
Psilocybin is causing psychotic behavior in those who have taken it not. And the whole of human history is summed up in that “not.” We have fallen into a state of deep neurosis. Why are you neurotic if you don’t take psilocybin? What’s so great about it? It connects you up to a totality—and not a cheerful, squeaky clean, Jungian totality, all about how you’re going to mature in middle age. Nothing so cheerfully mundane. It connects you up to (for want of a better word) something which we have to call the Gaian mind. The intentionality of the planet is a real thing.
The boundary dissolution that we’re really talking about is the dissolution of the distinction between organic and inorganic existence entirely.
We announce the end of nature. This is the big news that is stamped all over us: human history is a millisecond of geological time that precedes the full emergence of the transcendental object. And the transcendental object is both object and organism, being and idea. I mean, we have to run back to these Jesuits to get a full picture of what this is. It is the union of spirit and matter that has haunted alchemical dreaming since at least the sixteenth century. We are migrating toward each other, toward union with the planet, toward dissolution of boundary, toward an ending of this sojourn in this domain of limited existence.
Outside the confines of the reality sanctioned by the tribe there is a tremendous dimension of transcendental affection for humanity. And my supposition is that soon we will meet there. Soon we will be subsumed into this, and it will have a paradoxical effect of putting the imprimatur of truth on both the most extravagant religious conceptions of what is going on, and a more reason than rational reading of what is happening. It’s simply that we invert our cosmology so that, instead of the big bang, what we have is the big surprise. And the big surprise comes soon. The end is always, I hope, a surprise.
