We’re finding a world made out of mind rather than stuff.
The ego is in the business of creating, maintaining, and defending boundaries. So, I really see the psychedelics as directly intervening in the core process which is running us over the edge, which is: our inability to emotionally connect with the consequences of what we’re doing. If, for a single moment, we could feel what we’re doing, we would stop.
That’s the whole quality of compassion. It has that boundarylessness to it. It’s that your suffering is my suffering, and your joy is mine, and you are me, and here we are. And if you hurt, I’m responding to your hurt not because I’m a good guy and you’re needful, but just because this is suffering and this is the response to suffering. And we’re both part of the same thing.
The first mistake was idealism. The first mistake. And the mistake was thinking that, because you had seen it, you could just go like that and everybody else would see it. And you could just say, “It’s all love,” and then everybody would love. I mean, it was a naïveté. It was naïveté. It was not working on ourselves deeply enough to be without the clinging of mind that made us try to use it. It was our lurking righteousness that got in our way.
We had produced the “they” by being so busy being “we.”
What’s happening is that people have a very strong local sense of place—loyalty—and then they are forming a planetary loyalty. But in a way, all the levels in between are dissolving. So people don’t think of themselves as Americans, they think of themselves as Northern Californians and Earthlings.
