“Some kind of dialog is now going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge and…nothing can stop it.”

“If you don’t smoke cannabis, you may spend your evening balancing your checking account. If you do smoke cannabis you may spend your evening contemplating the causes of the Greek Renaissance.”

“If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.”

“

The plant-human relationship has always been the foundation of our individual and group existence in the world. What I call the Archaic Revival is the process of reawakening awareness of traditional attitudes toward nature, including plants and our relationship to them. The Archaic Revival spells the eventual breakup of the pattern of male dominance and hierarchy based on animal organization, something that can not be changed overnight by a sudden shift in collective awareness. Rather, it will follow naturally upon the gradual recognition that the overarching theme that directs the Archaic Revival is the idea/ideal of a vegetation Goddess, the Earth herself as the much ballyhooed Gaia—a fact well documented by nineteenth-century anthropologists, most notably Frazer, but recently given a new respectability by Riane Eisler, Marija Gimbutas, James Mellaart, and others.

The closer a human group is to the gnosis of the vegetable mind—the Gaian collectivity of organic life—the closer their connection to the archetype of the Goddess and hence to the partnership style of social organization. The last time that the mainstream of Western thought was refreshed by the gnosis of the vegetable mind was at the close of the Hellenistic Era, before the Mystery religions were finally suppressed by enthusiastic Christian barbarians.

“

Television … is a drug. It has a series of measurable physiological parameters that are as intrinsically its signature as the parameters of heroin are its signature. Sit somebody down in front of a TV set and and turn it on. Twenty minutes later come back, sample their blood pressure, their eye movement rate, blood is pooling in their rear end, their breathing takes on a certain quality, the stare reflex sets in; They are thoroughly zoned on a drug.

When you think about the fact that the average American watches 6 1/2 hours of tv a day… Imagine if a drug had been introduced in 1948 that we all spent six and one-half hours per day, on average, watching. And the thing about drugs, in their defense, is that it’s very hard to diddle the message. A drug is a mirror, but television isn’t a mirror. Television is a billboard, and anybody who pays their money can put their message into the trip.

This is an extraordinarily insidious situation.

“It is as though Plato’s metaphor were true- that time is the moving image of eternity. The tryptamine ecstasy is a stepping out of the moving image and into eternity, the eternity of the standing now, the nunc stans of Thomas Aquinas. In that state, all of human history is seen to lead toward this culminating moment. Acceleration is visible in all the processes around us: the fact that fire was discovered several million years ago; language came perhaps thirty-five thousand years ago; measurement, five thousand; Galileo, four hundred; then Watson Crick and DNA. What is obviously happening is that everything is being drawn together. On the other hand, the description our physicists are giving us of the universe- that it has lasted billions of years and will last billions of years into the future— is a dualistic conception, an inductive projection that is very unsophisticated when applied to the nature of consciousness and language. Consciousness is somehow able to collapse the state vector and thereby cause the stuff of being to undergo what Alfred North Whitehead called, “the formality of actually occurring.” Here is the beginning of an understanding of the centrality of Human Beings. Western societies have been on a decentralizing bender for five hundred years, concluding that the earth is not the center of the universe and man is not the beloved of God. We have moved ourselves out toward the edge of the galaxy, when the fact is that the most richly organized material in the universe is the human cerebral cortex, the densest and richest experience in the universe is the experience YOU ARE HAVING RIGHT NOW. Everything should be constellated outward from the perceiving self. That is the primary datum.”

“In conclusion, Terence McKenna was a scientist turned gypsy spokesperson for the shamanic realms. His claim is that by ingesting certain plants we come into contact with an objective reality that has a message for us. That message is about returning to a way of living that is more conscious of the Earth as personality, rather than a resource to tap. It is Terence’s contention that the plant spirits are trying to tell us this and that it is imperative to tune in to their frequency. “Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored. Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies. These allies are the hallucinogenic plants and the mysterious teaching entities, luminous and transcendental, that reside in that nearby dimension of ecstatic beauty and understanding that we have denied until it is now nearly too late.”