Terence Mckenna's Non-Ordinary States Through Vision Plants. "We'replaying with half a deck as long as we tolerate that the cardinals ofgovernment and science should dictate where human curiosity canlegitimately send its attention and where it cannot. It's anessentially preposterous situation. It is essentially a civil rightsissue because what we're talking about here is the repression of areligious sensibility. In fact not "a" religious sensibility, thereligious sensibility. Not built on some con game spun out byeunichs, but based on the symbiotic relationship that was in placefor our species for 50,000 years before the advent of history ridingpriestcraft and propaganda. So it's a clarion call to recover abirthright, however uncomfortable that may make us. A call to realizethat life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience thatprimordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied,life enslaved to the ego and its fear of dissolution in thismysterious mama matrix which is all around us and which apparentlyextends to infinity and where our historical future actually lies.This is the other thing.. It is now very clear that techniques ofmachine-human interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, allkinds of manipulative techniques, all kinds of data storage, imagingand retrieval techinques, all of this is coalescing toward thepotential of a truly demonic or angelic kind of self-imaging of ourculture. And the people who are on the demonic side are fully awareof this and hurrying fulltilt forward with their plans to captureeveryone as a 100% believing consumer inside some kind of beigefurnished fascism that won't even raise a ripple. The shamanicresponse in this situation I think is to PUSH THE ART PEDAL THROUGHTHE FLOOR." "Years and years ago before the term "psychedelic" wassettled on there was just a phenomenological description. Thesethings were called "consciousness-expanding" drugs. I think that's avery good term. Think about our dilemma on this planet. If theexpansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future,what kind of future is it going to be? To my mind the psychedelicposition is most fundamentally threatening when fully logicallythought out because it is an antidrug position, and make no mistakeabout it, the issue is "drugged." How drugged shall you be? Or to putit another way: consciousness. How conscious shall you be? Who shallbe conscious? Who shall be unconscious? Imagine if the Japanese hadwon World War II, taken over America, and introduced an insidiousdrug which caused the average American to spend six and a half hoursa day consuming enemy propaganda. But this is what was done. Not bythe Japanese but by ourselves. This is television. Six and a halfhours a day! Average! That's the average! So there must be people outthere hooked on twenty-four hours a day. I visit people in L.A. whohave one set on in every room so they're racking up a lot of time forthe rest of us. You see what is needed is an operational awareness ofwhat we mean by "drug." A "drug" is something which causesunexamined, obsessive habituated behavior. You don't examine yourbehaviour, you just do it, you do it obsessively. You let nothing getin the way of it. This is the kind of life we're being sold on everylevel: to watch, to consume, to buy. The psychedelic thing is off inthis tiny corner, never mentioned and yet it represents the onlycounter flow toward a tendency to just leave people in designerstates of consciousness, not their designers, but the designers ofMadison Avenue, the Pentagon, so forth and so on. This is reallyhappening. It's only a matter of how tight you draw the metaphor thatyou realize it. I've been coming and going from Los Angeles a lotrecently and when the plane swings out over the eastern part of thecity looking down is like looking at a printed circuit. All thesecurved driveways and cul-de-sacs with the same little modules
Leave a Comment