Psychedelics so challenge cultural values that a society has to be incredibly confident of its first premises to allow its citizens to habitually and regularly explore altered states of consciousness. That’s a level of democratic dialogue that would rip this society asunder.
No human being has greater insight into your circumstance than you do. If you’ve somehow managed to convince yourself that this is not the case, you need to seriously think it through. Because our perspectives are unique. We can generalize from one person to another, but no one is in a position to claim leadership. It’s unnecessary. The dynamic of the situation is larger than any single human being. And anyone who says “I understand,” “I know,” “Follow me,” is certainly not to be invited home to dinner or tithed to.
No one knows. It is a mystery. And a mystery is not an unsolved problem. This is what science has led us to assume: all mysteries—you hire people, they gather data, the mystery goes away. Only the trivial edges of the mystery can be illuminated in that fashion. The core of being is pure contradiction. Life is death. Death is life. The past is the future. The present is eternity. And comprehending this is not to become some kind of ivory tower intellectual. Comprehending this is to move past intellectual concepts to actually embrace love. Love is what waits beyond abandoning the search for closure. Love is not closure, love is challenge, emotion, being—in the purest sense: not becoming. This is the realm of becoming. And it is always striving, and it is always incomplete. Love is the realm of true being. And it lies beyond the prison of culture, beyond the prison of ideology, beyond the prison of self-defined limitations.
The presence of tool-using, language-using, culture-building animals on this planet is the intimation of the approach of the Other. We are the outer edge of the shockwave of eschatology. Nature has pulled us forth out of being as simple witnesses to a much more complex phenomenon still to come, of which we will be a part.
Nature loves complexity. We are, in our hood, the most complex game around. Therefore, nature loves us. And immediately an ethic is implied: that which preserves and advances complexity serves the universal purpose. That which degrades, betrays, and destroys complexity serves the negentropic tendency that nature (at least organic nature, but I maintain all nature) is struggling to overcome. So this is very exciting to me: that we could uncover an ethical vector in the universe and align ourselves with it.
