Hi, I thought the video was worth sharing.
"I didn't get into this business by being an airhead or a screwball. My attitude was always, if it's real it can take the pressure. You don't have to pussy foot around the real thing. If they're telling you, "Oh, you must lower your voice and avert your gaze," then you're probably in the presence of crap, because the real thing is real. It doesn't demand that you adjust your opinion to suit it. It's real! That means that it's pre-eminent. That means it sets the agenda.
And I studied yoga, I wandered around in the East, I was fast shuffled by beady-eyed little men in dotes. I know the whole spiritual supermarket and rigmarole, and I find nothing there to interest me on the level of, you know, five grams of psilocybin mushrooms in silent darkness. That's where the pedal meets the metal. That's where the rubber meets the road.
And the inspiration for me to get up and talk to an audience like this simply comes from the fact that I cannot believe that this could be kept under wraps the way it has. I mean, I kidded with you earlier that they would make sex illegal if they could. Well, they can't, so it isn't. But the psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness as having sex, or having a child, or having responsibilities, or having hopes and dreams, and yet it is illegal. We are somehow told, we are infantilized.
We are told, you know, you can wander around within the sanctioned playpen of ordinary consciousness, and we have some intoxicants over here; if you wanna mess yourself up, we've got some scotch here and some tobacco and red meat and some sugar and a little TV, and so forth and so on. But these boundary-dissolving hallucinogens that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature are somehow forbidden. This is an outrage! It's a sign of cultural immaturity, and the fact that we tolerate it is a sign that we are living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past.
My thing is not about my opinion or what I saw in Africa or anything like that. This is — get it straight — this is about an experience, not my experience, your experience. It's about an experience which you have, like getting laid, or like going to Africa. You must do the experience, otherwise it's just whistling past the graveyard.
And we're not talking about something like being born again, or meeting the flying saucers, or something like that, where good works and prayer are the method. No. If you take a sufficient dose of an active compound, it will deliver itself to you on the money. If it doesn't work, take more! [Audience Laughter]
Nobody is in a position to dismiss this just because it didn't work for them on one or two tries. This is an art. It's an art. It's something you coax into existence. I mean, you have to learn to make love, you have to learn to speak English. Anything worth doing is an art that is acquired. This is part of our birthright, perhaps the most important part of our birthright. These substances will deliver.
It is the confoundment of psychology and science, generally, and that's why it's so touchy for cultural institutions, but you are not a cultural institution. You are a free and independent human being, and these things have your name written on them in big gold letters.
The way I think of these psychedelics — or a different way — is that they're catalysts for the imagination. Catalysts to say what has never been said, to see what has never been seen, to draw, paint, sing, sculpt, dance, and act what has never before been done. To push the envelope of creativity and language. And what's really important is, I call it, "the felt presence of direct experience," which is a fancy term, which just simply means we have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture.
Don't watch T.V.. Don't read magazines. Don't even listen to NPR. Create your own road show. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of the universe. And if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton, or somebody else, then you are dis-empowered. You're giving it all away to icons, icons, which are maintained by an electronic media. So that, you want to dress like X, or have lips like Y - this is shit brained, this kind of thinking.
That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends, and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told, no, we're unimportant, we're peripheral. "Get a degree," "get a job," get a this, get a that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play in that game.
You want to reclaim your mind, and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron, consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world." - Terence McKenna.
