Most of reality is illusory. It’s just that we do each other the courtesy of not pointing this out.
Mind is a kind of iridescence upon metabolism.
You are actually a monkey with a brain full of mush trying to sort out what’s right in front of you.
If you were to meet a termite who stated that his or her goal in life was the perfect modeling of the cosmos, you would think it was quite a comic undertaking. And yet, how different are we that we should presume to more than a shadow of the truth?
Psychedelics stretch and pull and melt and recast the illusion-producing machinery of language. I mean, I think that if you had to say the one thing that psychedelics do for everyone—whether they have a good trip or a bad trip, because it’s up to them to interpret what they make of this—is: it shows you the relativity of your cultural viewpoint. It’s just your point of view. You inherited it from a geographical area, a culture, a set of parents. It has no relationship whatsoever to anything anchored in some kind of metaphysical superspace. It’s just your cultural point of view.
Washington is convulsed over the possibility of closing an air base near Sacramento. So how can we even conceive of this government making an impact on the real problems? It is still government by flimflam. And that would be all very well if we had five hundred years to dig ourselves out of this dilemma. But if a radical political alternative is not opened up in this country, then we are essentially, I think, going to amuse and entertain ourselves into extinction. The ordinary orthodox system has failed. What Bill Clinton exists to prove—at best!—is that people of good will make no difference in those institutions, because they are compromised and corrupted from the very beginning. It’s just the way it is. Those institutions are set up for business as usual. Business as usual (at this point) is a death sentence on the human race.
What has to be done is a tribalizing of culture, an ecstatisizing of culture, a dissolving of hierarchy. That means self-empowerment through claiming the new information technologies, through deconditioning from propaganda, through deconditioning from the pharmaphobia that holds everyone within the preprogrammed molds that are being handed down from Madison Avenue and Hollywood. It means actually realizing that your life is your own. Your destiny is your own. It isn’t within the confines of the culture, because the culture is dissolving. And to the degree that the word is put out, that phenomenon will accelerate. We are in an extraordinary transition. Everything that has worked now doesn’t—meaning: global economic systems, control of the spread of epidemic disease, and so forth and so on. All these systems are breaking down, and yet the new systems are not yet in place. So this is a situation of extraordinary malleability, and a situation in which people of great vision and great ego can make tremendous impact. So it’s a very dangerous situation.
I am into psychedelics not because I think it’s a sure thing, but because I think it is the only game in town. In other words: it’s the only thing I’ve ever seen change an individual on a timescale similar to the timescale that we have if we’re going to make a difference. I’ve seen over and over again—I’m sure many of you have—people go into a psychedelic as jerks and come out halfway decent human beings eight hours later.