The dream is eschatological. The dream is zero time and outside of history. We wish to escape into the dream. Escape is a key thing charged against those who would experiment with plant hallucinogens. The people who make this charge hardly dare face to the degree to which hallucinogens are escapist. Escape. Escape from the planet, from death, from habit, and from the problem, if possible, of the Unspeakable.
At death the shadow withdraws—or the thing that casts the shadow withdraws—and metabolism ceases. Material form breaks down, ceasing its organization as a dissipative structure in a very localized area sustained against entropy by cycling material in, extracting its energy, and degrading and expelling it. But the thing which ordered it is not affected.
Both the psychedelic dream state and the waking psychedelic state acquire great import because they reveal a task to life: to become familiar with this dimension that is causing being, and to be familiar with it at the moment of passing from life.
From the time of the awareness of existence of the soul until the resolution of the apocalyptic potential, there are roughly 50,000 years. In biological time, this is only a moment, yet it is five times the entire span of history. In that period, everything hangs in the balance, because it is a ma rush from monkeydom to starshiphood. In the leap across those 50,000 years, energies are released, religions are shot off like sparks, philosophies evolve and die, science arises, magic arises, all of these concerns that control power with greater and lesser degrees of ethical constancy appear. There is the possibility of aborting the species’ transformation into a hyperspatial entelechy.
We are closing distance with the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter—the freeing of life from the dark chrysalis of matter.
Sometime in the last 50,000 years, with the invention of culture, the biological evolution of humans ceased and evolution became an epigenetic, cultural phenomenon. Tools, languages, and philosophies began to evolve, but the human somatype remained the same. Hence, physically, we are very much like people of a long time ago.
Technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last 500 years, is an extruder of a technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All of our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool.
Man may be dirigible by turning himself inside out. In other words, the body must become an interiorized holographic object embedded in a solid-state, hyperdimensional matrix that is eternal, so that we each wander through Elysium in this body.
Psychedelics will show us that the modalities of appearance and understanding can be shifted so that we can know mind within the context of the One Mind. The One Mind contains all experience of the Other. There is no dichotomy between the Newtonian Universe, deployed throughout light-years of three-dimensional space, an the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.
Cognitive activity is the defining fact of humanness. Language, thought, analysis, art, poetry, myth-making: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton. That is what Joyce means when he says man may be dirigible. In other words, we humans may be released into a realm of pure self-engineering. The imagination is everything. This was Blake’s perception. This is where we come from. This is where we are going. And it is only to be approached through cognitive activity.