Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.
There is something deep and profound moving in the mass psyche, driven by historical forces long in the process of unfolding, but now exacerbated and focused by new communications technologies that are essentially prostheses: extensions of the human mind and body of enormous and unpredictable power, or with unpredictable consequences.
History—call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration—is the story of some kind of complex animal becoming conscious and staring out, then, into a kind of universe of infinite possibilities based on what consciousness can do in the realm of energy, matter, light, time, and space.
It seemed to me that the psychedelic state was, then, like a predictive model for what human history wanted to do. Human history wants to break through all boundaries, to somehow have a realized collective relationship with deity or that which orders nature, or some fairly large concept like that.
We shouldn’t seek for closure. Part of what the psychedelic point of view represents is: living a certain portion of your life without answers. Just accepting that certain dilemmas will never resolve themselves into some kind of a complete answer.
Somehow, this all-and-everything, this teeming multiplistic universe that is revealed, seems to carry a message of ecstatic and transcendental import.
The magical ideal that these things fertilize and support is the idea that humanity is somehow the co-partner, a full partner, in creation, and that what God has brought into being the human imagination can perfect.
You can go into the rocks of this planet and discover life and a continuous fossil record 4.83 billion years deep. The stars that you see when you look out at the Milky Way at night—the average star lasts 500 million years. So we just happen to be in orbit around a very stable, slow-burning type of star. But, in fact, life on this planet has already proven that it is more tenacious than the stars themselves by five times. So you can’t discount biology. Biology is clearly a player on a cosmic scale in this universal game of capturing energy and resisting entropy.
What’s happening is that so much power is being given to man (or taken by man) from the universe through the power of scientific understanding that we are becoming the masters of the planetary destiny whether we want to be or not.
You can then propagate that process forward to say: well, then what would satisfy this drive? Well, nothing less than a complete conquest of time itself. In the same way that, as we look back in the history of biology, we see these other dimensional barriers were crossed: from stationary, from in-situ existence, to motility, to a sense of light, to coordination of three-dimensional space, now coordination of fourth-dimensional space. And to make this leap to the full coordination of 4D it requires some kind of machine symbiosis, it requires prostheses, it requires that we redesign and extend our nervous system over the entire planet, and that we undergo some kind of metamorphosis and become (instead of semi-cannibalistic primates) machine-tenders of global nervous system, some of which is gold and copper and glass and some of which is flesh and DNA and neurons. And so this whole thing is in a state of self-designing foment.
Somehow, our being in the world means that the world process is approaching some kind of definitive cusp in its development. In other words, that human history is the shockwave of some greater event about to emerge out of the order of nature. That human history (25,000 years is all it is) is like a shimmer, an aura, something which flashes across animal nature in the geological millisecond before the thing goes cosmic.
Nothing I say or little that anybody has said about cyberspace, about the meltdown of humanity into some electronic collectivity, has been surpassed by Teilhard de Chardin. He had this idea that human beings were on this Earth, and that they would generate what he called the noösphere. And the noösphere was simply the atmosphere of electronic and radar and radio and telegraphic and television signals which surround the Earth. That we would build a new atmosphere, as it were; a technosphere of information.
I wouldn’t say complete control of the world of matter and energy is coming into being, but a leap forward is being taken, and all under the aegis of this key concept of information. Information is more primary than time and space, more primary than light and electromagnetism. Information is the stuff of being. It’s all you will ever know, it’s all you can ever know. The rest are ghostly hypotheses to explain the behavior and the presence of information. And it’s almost as though it has a syntactical life of its own. It’s almost as though it’s a virtual life form of some sort that is running on a primate platform.
The mind (through the body) is an extension into the world.
The Internet looks to me like the backbone of the emergent thing. I mean, the Internet is a huge and not fully comprehended cultural step that we have now totally committed ourselves to. It’s nothing less than the building of a thinking nervous system the size of the entire planet.
We represent the greatest step in organizational realignment and redesign since life left the oceans.
We see that the way to be a successful species, the way to survive, is to make yourself indispensable to your neighbors. Then, instead of attempting to push you down and extinguish you, if you can cut deals with everybody in your neighborhood (providing various chemicals or energy supplies or other affects in the environment), then everybody will begin to pull your way. So, in fact, cooperation is what is maximized among species. And a huge complex organic system like a coral reef or a rainforest is actually attempting to come to an equilibrium of balance that is the point of greatest benefit for the greatest number of organisms and species in the system.
For one human being to seek enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach to seek enlightenment from another.
There are no answers at this point. Part of growing up is to live without answers.
Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is candy which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.
We need to expand the concept of “syntax” from “the rules which govern the grammar of a spoken language” to “the rules which govern the behavior of any complex system.”
It seems to me the most unlikely future scenario is one which assumes things will stay more or less the same.
The story of the universe is that information (which I call novelty) is struggling to free itself from habit (which I call entropy), and that this process which informs the whole history of the universe on all scales—chemical, biological, cultural, et cetera—is accelerating, speeding up. And it seems as if what wants to happen is: the whole cosmos wants to change into information. Or, put another way in a geometric model: all points want to become connected. The thing is achieved through connectivity. The path of complexity to its goals is through connecting things together. Well, if that’s true, then you can imagine that there is an ultimate end state of that process. It’s the moment when every point in the universe is connected to every other point in the universe. And if that’s what the universe is trying to do to overcome its dissipate state, its spread-out state, and somehow function as a unitary monad, then this point does not lie too far ahead of us in time, given the acceleration rates of all these technical processes—at least locally.
The human adventure has become the cutting edge of cosmic destiny.
I think we wished for transformation, Western civilization built it into its cultural agenda, science delivered far more than we ever dreamed in terms of understanding of matter and energy and space and time, and now, under the aegis of market capitalism where everything is in a state of furious competition, somebody is going to put something together that is just going to completely redefine and rewrite the nature of reality itself. And my bet is: it will be some kind of a technology. It could be a drug, it could be a machine. It would be nice to think that it might be a technique or a teaching. But just looking at the history of the human race, I’ll bet you it’s some kind of technology/drug type thing that is just going to be plugged into us and our consciousness and our aspirations.
What can you do, what do you do, if you can do anything? I mean, that’s really the question at the end of history: once you have overcome all limitation, what is the human agenda?
The essence of understanding time lies in understanding organism.
What would ultra-intelligence look like? In other words, what would a global mind actually have to say, or would it have to say anything? And more importantly, what would it do with its fingers on the world resource extraction apparatus, research and development facilities, stock markets, world price of gold, platinum, iridium?
We’ll find out if there are overarching moral dimensions to the universe. If it can go from paramecium to beyond the human stage in hours, presumably it could achieve bodhisattvahood within a matter of further hours. And at that point, hopefully, it would achieve the parinirvāṇa, and all sentient beings would be liberated from the illusion of saṃsāra, and we would realize that this was what it was. It was Buddha 4.0 booting up, you know?
I think all psychedelics have this ability. It’s not that ibogaine is a magic bullet for heroin addiction, it’s that: if you take a strong psychedelic, and you’re an alcoholic or a junkie or an abuser or fucked up in some way, it’s going to be very hard to go through that trip without confronting this. And then you just say, you know, “I’m killing myself,” or “I’m making the people around me unhappy and killing myself.” And it’s hard, once you actually say these words to yourself, not to form what good Catholics call a purpose of amendment—you know: to try and do better.
We talk about virtual realities, designer drugs, downloading ourselves into circuitry, travel through time, disincarnate bodies, cloned identities, gender shifting, point of view shifting—all of these things, this is all about the rules of mind overwhelming the rules of physics. The rules of physics say you are a body, you are on a planet, you have weight, you have momentum, you have specific gravity, you must behave like this and like this and like this, and mind says: no, I want to be pure unleashed conceptuality, I want to be a thought blown in a hyperdimensional wind, I want to move from planet to planet with the twink of an eye, I want to know everything, see everything, be everything, feel everything.
Life is beautiful without psychedelics. Psychedelics simply make you aware of that primarily, and then secondarily lead you deeper into it. The affirmation of psychedelics is not the affirmation of an ideological position or a moral point of view, it’s the affirmation of the existence of beauty itself. The pursuit of psychedelics is the pursuit of beauty. The taking of psychedelics is a religion of platonic beauty: to know that it exists and to live one’s life in the shadow of that knowing is transformative, and carries us and the rest of evolution forward.
