Into the aeon..

Greetings from the Andaman cusp,

I hope you are well; I am fine. It has been some time since I sent out a communication to the gene-swarm. Attached here are some things that concern me day-to-day.

Life is finely fruiting, I am content to be content in the kind of peace that is at hand here. I have a renewed sense of the preciousness of this tiny little life, this multiform, suffering something surrounding us.. I look forward to natural things like rising in the total absence of alarm clocks, like revelling in the death of seasons. Clouds purpled by collapsing evenings. We are presently coming to the end of durian season, which is something of a household tragedy..! The king of fruits is doing a Persephone for the next 6 months. In his place will be the rambutan, the punk, but we are still some time away from the much beloved yellow mango. My body is in excellent condition. I take in no inorganic chemicals, no tobacco, no alcohol. I am muscle, and fibre, and plasma, and skin, because I don't let the weasels in. I look around at the people here, the uniformly perfectly formed Thais, and I rage within at how our culture could undergo so ignorant a gastric perversion, that ready meals and refined sugars could take the place of human(e) sustenance at the average dinnertable. How simple the pleasure in folk food.

I can dream deeply over here. And I don't dream myself at work, enduring some base harangue from an idiot boss, as I did back in the old country. I dream about Thai olives - which taste exactly like baked apples, something I've long missed - or I dream about hunting foot-high mushrooms with Amp. There are often local characters, who speak to me in Thai, and sometimes I can respond. A few months ago I realised I was in a dream, and I looked up at the sky exalting in its own aqueous, tryptamine hue, looked around at this universe, folded within my skull, and so this suspicion I have not been able to shake: (William of Ockham said that hypotheses should not be multiplied unduly) and so is it not more efficient to suppose that the world is made of Mind, just as dreams are? That they are reflections of each other? The architecture, after all, is identical: There is landscape, music, tactility, emotion, and, most obviously, these landscapes are both inhabited. If this is so, you can never be anything but "in mind". Because a set of tensor equations will never make sense of the world, and will never make sense to you, I put it to you that cognising reality must be a personal responsibility; those tensor equations aren't going to help you during the last dance - the only dance you have to take alone. You have to ponder the possibility that you are here, now, in mind, and that you are here to stay. Death, I fear, could be a fabulously provincial notion: You have to be prepared for the shock of your potential ceaselessness.

Creation, then, a function of mind: The notion of mind as epiphenomenon hearkens back to the Enlightenment - interesting spiritual terminology, by the by - a movement wishing to align with pure reason after recanting spirit, God, church. Obviously, after a thousand years of religious, political and cultural persecution at the hands of puritan England, it is understandable that spiritualism would be dispensed with for the time being. But we are mature enough now to see that Reason unleashed in the absence of ethics, in the absence of Heart, is at least as demonic as it is angelic. It is undeniable that there is something wrong with the world, and I put it thus: We have severed a connection to spirit, and we are mired in a technological hell because of it: A world where monkeys are hurled into walls at 70 miles per hour that scientists might better understand the "nature" of traumatic injury; a world where microscopic cameras are inserted into plastic penises so biologists can fully come to terms with the discolouration of the vaginal wall as women approach orgasm. Verily, we are dedicated to truth in all its forms: But basic morality, ethics, love - they are not here anymore. They are not, after all, reasonable. There is something wrong with the world.

Looking at history, and I do, certain coincidences jump out. The most glaring of these is the perennial philosophy, the notion that we are in some sense downloaded into matter, that we temporarily vibrate between given frequencies, for a given period, until some sort of a nebulous something, something like a Soul, detaches and returns from whence it came. It is so persistent and so old a concept - indeed, the oldest surviving concept - that every society save our own set their greatest minds to the task of decoding it. (In observing just how perniciously widespread this is, I'm reminded of that inspired suggestion from someone or other which runs something like, "Coincidence is that which is left over following the application of a bad theory"..! Indeed, scientists will tell you that spiritual concepts are simply delusions, hopeful wanderings of the imagination. But I put it to you here that it's nothing to do with hope, and that the average scientist has never given proper weight to what is being proposed: There is nothing more terrifying than the knowledge that you are forever, that you can't get out of it, you can't rest: You are in for the long haul.) I'm reading Graham Hancock's Supernatural at the moment. He quotes - at approaching embarrassment's length - one David Lewis-Williams, a South African archaeologist who, having studied San rock art and having researched the inherited shamanic practices of their descendants, the bushmen of the Kalahari, came to the conclusion - one which is supported amongst cave art researchers - that we started painting our visions on the walls. We didn't send the hunters or the gatherers to traipse all the way into the treacherous dark: It was the shamans, the medicine men and women, the healers and visionaries, who commanded the ink. It was hallucination, visionary reality, they sought to transcribe onto rock, simultaneously birthing in the process both art and religion. These two totally unreasonable disciplines are the attributes of humanity - as well as language - which speak most of the great schism between our own hominid line and all lines preceding us. After all, you don't see newts preaching about the "kingdom of heaven [being] within you"; you don't attend galleries dedicated to the impressionist movement amongst monarch butterflies.

Evidence has recently surfaced that our own evolutionary path rewarded the ability to function on a diet incomparably wider than all previous lifeforms. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teWngGuTNRA) I've read somewhere that there are some 3 million foods amenable to the human stomach: You've likely seen on nature programs just how closely tied organisms are to strictly limited culinary options, usually one or two foods. (And we're back to the ready-meals again.) In our case, we chose to code instead for genes that would allow us to take in plant alkaloids - i.e. toxins - without detriment to the physical vehicle, thus increasing both genetic mutation and our feeding options on the baring savannahs of Afrika. In other words, we developed the capacity to take in vision-inducing foods. It was a novel evolutionary adaptation in response to a drying African continent - the drying that thrust us out of the trees. Faced with a new environment, humanity chose adaptation instead of extinction. And from the foods that intoxicated us we started painting on the walls, singing, dancing, seeking out knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and generally doing that which makes us human and life bearable.

Now look at our present situation in the west. It is legal, indeed encouraged, for people to eat microwavable shite off plastic. It is encouraged, even written to work contracts throughout the western world, to take in toxins, such as caffeine or alcohol, that are not so reliably vision-inducing. [Alcohol hospitalisation has shot up 70% in the last decade in the UK, but this (rightfully) remains a legal choice for the individual; but cannabis - a plant which "has appeared in every materia medica that has ever been written" (Dr. David Bearman, M.D.) - remains irrationally and pathetically demonised by the "authorities" everywhere.] It is, then, "illegal" (whatever that means) to indulge the senses in the very adaptation that made us human in the first place. It is illegal to probe your mind with the help of plant alkaloid complexes, and there is a very good set of reasons for this. I see as co-tangent society's illegitimisation of human ecstasy and the callous and mean-spirited fashion in which we have unleashed across the Earth our unrestrained Reason. Reason unrestrained.. The result of our faith in a science divorced from ethics: Rainforests, developing for 220 million years, mindlessly chopped for furniture. A sea full of oil and chemical dispersant instead of 90% of the big fish. Is it coincidence that the very rainforests we once inhabited are now a focus for our ignorance? No, there is no coincidence. We hate the forests for having abandoned us. And we most assuredly resent our visionary past because, should we reclaim it, no one would fail to notice just how far from the path we have wandered, intoxicated by an American Nightmare, exported to all.

Science maintains that creation has no direction, or motivation, no intention, no intelligence. Nature is a dumb animal, like all the other dumb animals. But another glance at history immediately dissolves this assumption. There is a directedness to things. There is a quickening underway, and you must have noticed it. It took billions of years for the plasmic oceans to cool sufficiently that the first electrons could fall into stable orbits about atomic nuclei; following that, molecular biology was born aeons later; and then more quickly we see poly-peptide chains and self-replicating proteins. And then its simple lifeforms, viruses, bacteria, all in a few hundred million years; and hot on their heels we see complex life in a fraction of the time. And then within a fraction of a fraction we see humanity climb out of the great ape line, and then in just a couple of millions of years its Fire, Culture, Language, Dance, thence leading us to the breakneck pace of our time where it's all about Space-flight, Yoghurt, Telephones, Parody, Internet, Doublethink, Mapping and Manipulation of the Human Genome, Time Travel, Social Networking, Supercomputers, Large Hadron Colliders and the Singularity. When something speeds up it means it has a direction, a goal. There is something attracting it, just as coins spiral ever faster towards the holes in the bottoms of charity boxes. You can't speed up unless some force is increasing around you. And so it will be seen with this universe: A universe, according to physics, which is experiencing itself as a "random fluctuation" - the only random fluctuation in nature, you'll notice. Random. That's another concept that is used by science to justify a bad theory: I mean, have you ever done anything randomly? (If this all seems too remote, well, one can always revert to the crass notion that everything sprang from nothing in a single instant for no reason. (And even if this theory is "accurate", who's to say that you'll die only for another universe to simply spring out of you, eh? Given sufficiently aeonic slabs of duration, nothing is an uncertainty.)

They want you to believe not only have they mapped the territory, but that you should adopt every one of their maps, and that you are incapable of observing the ontological and epistemological topology on your own. Well, which culturally-sanctioned maps shall we pick? Religious persecution? Chemical warfare? The gulag? Nuclear armament? Reason has so much for us to choose from, you see, that it's easy to make a good choice.

But the difficult choice - the choice to go it alone and find some real data, data that will be pertinent to your understanding - is always the most interesting. (The universe loves courage, after all: Just look where I ended up once I grew a bit of spine.) Institutions are forever certain of their prescience. Remember, for example, when they said that if you read The Bible in English you'd be damned eternally? But institutions have not historically been the centre of intellectual or moral advancement: That always comes from individuals, from conscious manipulation of consciousness. And an expansion of consciousness here is certainly required; if the future does not admit such an expansion, what kind of a future will it be?

There are a lot of ways to think about the world. Why pick the way of some government-endorsed school curriculum, or from the evening news? It's almost always wrong, and very often the reverse of the truth. Embrace the reality of immediate perception, keep the goggles polished, ignore the propaganda.

It's all for the taking.

"Every action and feeling is preceded by a thought."

- - As a Man Thinketh, James Allen

Love, pax.. Out for now,

Danno

Primacy of Mind

Where does the picture on your TV originate? Are there people living in the box making it shine? No, the box picks up a signal from an external source. Likewise, the brain could be a kind of antenna which reduces The Field into bite-sized human perception. If Mind were to originate separately in each individual, any kind of consensus on reality would be just astronomically coincidental: We'd more likely find ourselves living our own private dreamlets. In our isolation, it would be impossible to share our minds with each other; something clearly refuted every time you open a book, listen to a tune, have a conversation. Actually, your mind is a synthesis of those thoughts that have particularly tickled you. (My approach to tooth-brushing, for example, comes straight out of J's mind, which doubtless came out of some other mind, through another mind, ad nauseum.) Tooth-brushing, musical taste, language: All of these things are, at most, extrapolations from the human concert: Far from containing a mind, it appears I have no personal mind at all.

There are too many phenomena lurking inside this magnificent, suffering someThing surrounding us which brain-fabricated thought cannot explain. The psychedelic experience, for myself at any rate, is fairly conclusive evidence that, at least in the case of the monkey, the box is obviously too small to contain it all. J and I had a chat on the weekend and we were talking about shared mind: Everyday, my woman, Amp, finishes thoughts being beamed into my transducer; I'm sure anyone who has lived in someone else's pocket for any significant period will attest to this. How can this be explained save for the existence of some kind of Field into which we are all plugged.? Indeed, it's quite impossible to 'contain' one's mind - it's constantly spilling over into other minds: Look at mine pissing away all over the shop right now, for example, leaving dastardly images of the infinite in minds trickling throughout the Loop. I put it to you that you couldn't, for even five minutes, prevent your mind from driving the material world in some fashion.

Our culture's obsessive pecuniary interests require that we believe steadfastly in matter as the ground of being because it is engaged in chewing through every last granule on this planet in order to produce endless reams of material crassness that can then be hawked for profit. If we were to suddenly realise that we are all connected in and by the Big Mind it would be jolly tricky to keep up the pretense that, in raping the Big Mother, we are not raping ourselves.

A plant is a plant is a plant

Writing back to my sister regarding my family's position on the psychedelic experience.

Yo, thanks for the reply.

I wasn't going to bother writing back because, having read your second paragraph, it sounds like I haven't put my position across adequately, so what further use could words be, you know? However, I came across this portion of a very late Bill Hicks performance this afternoon (listen from 3:40-ish if you want - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XPYNiJApCs&NR=1) and found the parallel too uncanny. I was compelled to respond! If you don't want to bother with the video, he talks about the healing, visionary, mystical properties of the Mushroom and his frustration at his reactionary father for the topic:

Bill - Eternity and Peace and Heaven is our inheritance and all of us are going to make it there.
Bill's father - I'm not interested!

Please have a bit of respect for my argument. I have never advocated - and will never advocate - taking 'every drug under the Sun': I would never wish this on anyone, let alone my own kin. What you wrote was quite inaccurate, and frustrated me somewhat. I am concerned only with naturally occurring plants/fungi and their alkaloids. 'Drug' is not a word that enters the issue. A 'drug' is something that leaves you side-effect-ridden, or crippled, or both. A 'drug' is something that causes unexamined, destructive patterns of behavior.

The real topics of interest are cannabis sativa and mushrooms of the genus psilocybe. (Incidentally, factoid of the week: The word sativa is taken from the Latin for 'useful', because of the wide range of properties of cannabis - medicinal, commercial, spiritual and other.) The irony is that, you're totally right, there is nothing to say. There's nothing I expect said - I don't want you to rally, thoughtless, behind me for God's sake! But acknowledgment, on the other hand, is another matter altogether: Please consider this food for thought, that for years now I've been trying to bring some information to my family's attention and in each instance, without fail, I get nothing in reply. Nothing! I mean, I think I've found something worth devoting serious thought and energy to: From our evolutionary beginnings to our timespace conquest of the future, I might have found something that overshadows it all. And the people closest to me think.. Well, I don't know what you think - in simpler hours I assume you think me something of a twit, but seeing as I never hear anything back (save your e-mail) I'll never know!

If you had come within reach of something you suspected was the conscious human soul, would you not be making a bit of a stink? I really feel that if you look at the world, if you look at this dreadful, wonderful world, you can only concede that an injection of heavy soul could do our species some good.

I'm talking about having the ability - the technology - to probe some pretty dense topics here: Death? Time? Disease? God? Mind? World? Evolution? Society? It's all on the table awaiting review - if you only wish to be seated.

That's all I'm really trying to say about this stuff. I'm glad you found the Afghan article interesting. The Afghanistan/Opium-CIA/Cocaine information is important to look at because it goes a long way to show that the legislators behind the repression of the psychedelic experience actually have no qualms whatsoever with people ingesting substances - harmful or otherwise. They don't mind your getting sick. However, they certainly do mind your making forays into the Bright World, in case you return from it safe in the knowledge that you are, and you will always be. And there's nothing you can do, nothing you would do, to change this magnificent, suffering Something surrounding us.

Now, if that news isn't a hazard to society...

!

I'll leave you to it.

Always love,

Dan

My God! I love everything

Amp and I returned to the field, collected another basket of fruit and, on the Friday night of a 3-day-weekend, I filled my little belly. Not having any kind of scales, and the weather being too cool and humid to dry the mushrooms anyway, I settled upon eating as many as I could. I got through nearly two bowls, and had to stop for being full, which seemed to me a sensible marker. They ranged from about an inch to ten inches in size, and I probably ate upwards of 75. It was intense: Hadn't eaten all day; followed them down with a gargantuan spliff to still the stomach acids.

The (t)rip itself. I found myself in the presence of a female plant, slowly becoming aware of herself. Sweating in her opening. Flexing mechanisms inside her as she stirs. Then a scene from behind a house, a tiny inlet running behind a kitchen window, plants in bowls, hanging, and the distinct impression that some alien and mind-bogglingly broad data-gathering harddisk had summoned this for me. "We have this," it said, as if rounding up visions of our world for cosmic storage.

Being shown how indistinguishable It All Is when viewed from the perspective of an endless mushroom. And then, accompanied by massive bass tones, the camera pulls back yet further, and you're reeling, thinking, "Please don't show me anymore!" - the perspective becoming so wide that, far from the mind embracing it or no, the problem is comprehending it in its vast and terrible beauty in the first place. The first time I've fought my mind against incoming information. The first time I really felt my curiosity might disembowel me, leave my psychic viscera swaying beneath.

A being, some kind of hyper-complex poly-engine replete with faces, demons and a variety of machine tools, all of the features spinning and whirring away frantically. Close, very close, to the elves who scribble away at the frontier of mind, penning the next moment to be beheld by your perception. (I actually heard the pens scratching away.)

Inferring that 'enlightenment' is merely a choice: Open up your eyes and see that you have the means to fashion this Thing as you so wish. Or don't open up. I found myself on a chain - I felt like clothes hanging from a line, unable to do anything about it but observe: I got the impression that the only game there is is observation. I felt the engine running, felt myself pinned to it as the thing revolves on, going through its gigantic cycle. I was looking at all life from up there on the clothes line, with a mind that was not only perfectly functional, but perfectly aware of its primacy.

Primacy of mind: There is a joke that many people aren't in on. The whole of reality appears to come out of some understanding, some pact, that we don't mention the absurdity. That we ignore the initial friction that resulted in Thought. I watched Amp and I living a life together, becoming wise to this notion. I was shown that you can lend your support to the Illusion - the Illusion arising from this blinding friction - or you become part of the enriching process, that slowly awaking female plant from the beginning; examine how the energies you create feed the flanks of the Big Octopus we're all plugged into. As the mushroom showed me the absurdity I noticed how literally everything that arises in the Illusion - the friction that required mind in the first instance - becomes like an old piece of furniture: It all grows, decays. And those who truly come to enlightenment no longer complain about the frictions because, like scattered and aging fungi, all absurdity is to be expected here in timespace. Cackling about this, I noticed that the closer I came to accepting the Illusion of the world, the more the world tried to pull me back: So as soon as these thoughts came into my head the wind and rain outside suddenly started thrashing at the meshing, Amp suddenly started screeching at me to come back. All very eerie. Mind is primary.

Decay: Decaying - dying - is living. Those of us who have reconciled this rhythm of nature with our mayfly stories end up dancers, rock and rollers, and generally joyful: We have the terminal life rhythm inside us, and we flow with it. I experienced the growing and withering of a fungus, and how that withering Is you, and Is Life. Felt the withering rhythm hasten until it became a pulse, a vibe riffing. I felt that as 'the end' approaches, one's wisdom correspondingly increases. That no one dies in ignorance. That, in fact, the universe is rigged so that all beings may enjoy an endlessly increasing comprehension of the Profundity. And If you play the right cards, you can actually manipulate this into bliss, turn it into an asymptotic curve: A force that will infinitely and unceasingly rise, allowing you to create whole systems of worlds if it tickles you to do so.

Being inside a singularity. Indescribable really, memory being so fragmentary. Time spinning down; a freezing, silver, globular moment in which I came back; realised that, to an extent, a mushroom took me inside this place.

Outside, a gigantic, belching frog punctuates the jungle night. And, out of its throat, cascades of my hysterics.

"You're in the jungle yeah, kid!" the fungus reminds. The world is a jungle, there are so many lifeforms teeming for lebensraum. Try to get wise without getting infected. And there is an impression that viruses, and other kinds of software, are available, transmittable, in these spaces. I watch as an octopus-cum-leopard-come-spiderplant crawls into some kind of genetic wall. I think about symbiosis and fill out the next day being the leopard, the jungle cat. Lazing on my balcony during a thoroughly green day, gazing out of my introspection at impossibly high clouds, content to smoke only and ponder the small things.

I have tried to sum up a few of these visions; but getting information out of these places is fiendish. The business about consciousness arising from a certain friction and that most people are unaware that everything they whinge about must be a natural consequence of their being in the first place, this was so.. vivid.. so well implied by the mushroom's visions that it may as well have been presenting a lecture: The sequences of images were so meaningful.. But, I just can't grab back whatever it was that causes the friction in the first place: It's something to do with thought, subjectivity, the illusion of objects. And that once you start thinking you've got to be prepared to give everything up, because someone will have a harder time letting go of their mind than you will. Be ready to be charitable.

This is tiresome now, I'm sure. More practice is required translating these images. That's piece of news number one. Piece of news number two: The shamanic ecstasy delivered. It is both terrifying and electrifying; signs, as McKenna might say, of the enterprise's "existential validity."

Out for now.

Monkhood

In order to get to Infinity, the mind effectively must still - trance, unbrokenly: Emotion ought to linear out into contentment (submission/ex stasis/nirvana/bliss/ananda/contentment) of and with life and necessary experience. This is the only way to trick eternity into being - feeling - simultaneously indefatigable (lengthy) and instantaneous (blown out before you planned on:) Or, the Paradox we're all looking at, to and for.

We're talking about continually recognising the real worth in accepting and working with whatsoever experience hunts you. The only fucking open window there is.

On, like, God, and is there One, and stuff..

If I were an eternal personality, the most likely recourse would be distraction. Insofar as it might be possible, I would set about interspersing the vast continuity of my Self with other, playfully concocted and transient selves. In this way it would be possible to stave off the abject boredom the One may suffer inside endless, unperturbed Mind.

Put another way, would there be a difference between your current conception of the world and that of an infinite personality, disguising itself from itself? Ditch for a cosmic instant your indefatigable memory and become a goat, a dandelion, an oil slick - learn to marvel, cut off from your own certain immortality, inside the sheer inconsequence of it all. After all, how much housework are you going to get done if you're constantly reMinded how everywhere you very probably are..!

Every culture on Earth has persistently held the view that there is some kind of Mind somewhere that knows more than you do. (The religion of Psychiatry calls it the 'unconscious'. The most ill-fitting and naive moniker yet; almost as bad as so-called 'junk' DNA.) At the present time, I go with the majority - something I usually consider kind of despicable!

An excerpt from Monroe's Ultimate Journey. Waiting in line to offer gifts of Experience to the Source, he meets a gargantuan angel at the edge of TimeSpace, and is relayed the following:

There is no beginning, there is no end,

There is only change.

There is no teacher, there is no student,

There is only remembering.

There is no good, there is no evil,

There is only expression.

There is no union, there is no sharing,

There is only one.

There is no joy, there is no sadness,

There is only love.

There is no greater, there is no lesser,

There is only balance.

There is no stasis, there is no entropy,

There is only motion.

There is no wakefulness, there is no sleep,

There is only being.

There is no limit, there is no chance,

There is only a plan.

This is as we know it to be.

I would've capitalised the big nouns myself, but there we have it. Even the angels need some self-improvement.

!

Mushrooms on the Front Page..

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/science/12psychedelics.html?ref=todayspaper

If you don't want to read it, a pertinent quote from the early paragraphs of this story, which appeared on the front page:

"Today, more than a year later, Dr. Martin credits that six-hour experience [with psilocybin*] with helping him overcome his depression and profoundly transforming his relationships with his daughter and friends. He ranks it among the most meaningful events of his life, which makes him a fairly typical member of a growing club of experimental subjects."

*Psilocybin is a four-substituted indole (the only 4-substituted indole in nature, I might add); a tryptamine, it gets dephosphorolated in the gut to become the hallucinogen psilocin, the principle alkaloid in psychedelic mushrooms of the psilocybe family.

Bear in mind, folks, that these favorable comments come from the New York Times, a fabulously fascist US daily, by Chomsky's very convincing arguments, anyhow. Now, if these weasels have clambered on board the mushroom float, isn't it time to have a look into the matter yourselves?

Terence McKenna, a writer, ethnobotanist, shaman and public speaker I have great respect for, said the psychedelic experience is taboo because, like sex, it reveals something about where we come from. Indeed, with the exception of sex, no subject has been more flatly closed to public discourse than the psychedelic experience. Regarding where we come from, McKenna argues that, being commonly found on ungulate-inhabited grasslands - i.e. the cattle populated African landscape our ancestors spent the first million years - psilocybin mushrooms would surely have been tested for dietary applications by early man. After all, if your bountiful canopies have receded, the food source decimated, anything resembling food in the new habitat would have been systematically tested. And anything carrying the clout of a tryptamine revelation is not going to go unnoticed.!

It is undeniable, and I've seen it again here this very week, that these mushrooms fruit from the dung of grassland cattle. Prior to agriculture, early nomadic hominids would have followed the cattle herds as a food source for the meat and milk: Is it even worth arguing that these peoples never attempted to inculcate this new fruit, the coprophitic mushroom, into their diet, strewn in the wake of the herd as it was? Still not convinced? McKenna also noted that he had observed even modern era monkeys in arboreal environments to leave the safety of their trees for the ground, only to gather certain species of mushroom! They never seemed to leave the trees for any other purpose. (I've forgotten the species of ape, now, I'll try to look it up.) Now, as a monkey, you seemingly have everything you need in the trees - you are not likely to risk predation by jungle cat or snake for a bit of fungus, unless its importance to one's diet is undeniable. Are we to doubt that early man was less vigilant, less curious than monkeys who haven't even made it down from their branches yet? I think not.

The gentleman mentioned in the Times article, however, underwent a very different experience than mere increased visual acuity, enlivened colour perception, or somatic arousal - all of which would have been important to a hunting, gathering species, incidentally. No, this guy underwent the full-blown Mushroom frenzy. And that is what society ought to confront: In high enough doses, psilocybin brings about all kinds of interesting pertubations in consciousness: glossolalia (speaking in tongues), which arguably led to rudimentary language in our ancestors; but, more importantly, contact with what McKenna terms the Other. I'm not sure what my term would be. Christ has been popular for the last two thousand years; God for even longer; people talk about UFOs these days. McKenna himself suggested that the Mushroom was so Other that it amounted to the extraterrestrial contact many have been waiting for!

Here is an excerpt from McKenna's book True Hallucinations, in which he recounts the message conveyed to him via psilocybin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkqO9sdH6AQ

And here, a TED lecture from the mycologist Paul Stamets on other incredible properties of fungi. Worried about oil spills? Not anymore...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI5frPV58tY

Doubtless, you're thinking something along the lines of, "Okay, you can write quite persuasively, but ultimately we're talking about getting stoned here, right? What a waste of time!" Fair point, I suppose. But I put it to you that humankind uses and abuses every sensation under the Sun to positive effect and negative - why should chemical experiences be any different? That human history can be described in cultures' various and varying relationships to drugs over time is obvious, from the Soma rituals of the vedas, to the Eleusinian mysteries of the Greeks, to the bullying Brits' opium wars to control the east, to the methamphetamine markets of today's underground, culture is driven by it's approach to chemicals. Consider the age we live in now: Nearly every chemical experience is banned (and propagandised against), first of all. Well, does that seem particularly civilised? That a person could be prosecuted for eating a fucking mushroom!! No, clearly we are dealing with a deliberate repression, the reasons for which lie partly in the taboo outlined above, and partly, I contest, because once you've been through the total perspective vortex, the sitting on a till of some supermarket that you might help prop up this outmoded, malingering age of vampiric capitalism is an act surely to be left way behind in your slipstream.

Number 2: All tryptamine hallucinogens are banned, and placed in a control group comprising of dangerous addicting chemicals without medical value. Well, once again, this is proven pure rot: The linked Times article is yet another piece on psilocybin's interesting ability to give people perspective and comfort during terminal illness. Furthermore, have you ever heard of somebody undergoing mushroom withdrawal? LSD, the semi-synthetic tryptamine and structural cousin of serotonin, was shown in pre-ban trials to be curing chronic alcoholism - curing - after a single 500 gamma dose in 50% of test subjects. One dose! Does that not smack of medical value?

Now look at drug use in our culture: You are not only able but encouraged to work your life out in order to purchase, amongst things of total inconsequence, vast quantities of alcohol, tobacco and caffeine. Is it not strange to think that every work contract in the western hemisphere provides for the periodic pause in labour where one engages in the self-administering of an addicting, stimulant drug? The coffee break! I wonder if I will ever see a cannabis break signed in to law..? (Well, no, because cannabis is like a natural, feminising vaccine against the spirit-crushing game show that is a male-run, corporate world: Hardly a perpetuating strategy for a dominator culture.) Seriously, though: Why are we encouraged to indulge in a certain drug at work, and certain drugs outside of work? Well, obviously, caffeine, the stimulant, aids you in maintaining pace at boring, repetitive and trivial tasks for hours on end, day after day. And alcohol, of course, enables us to blot out the vast emptiness accrued from years spent wondering just why we continue to turn up to the same idiot workplace under the same idiot boss. Alcohol, as well as caffeine, also gives us the excuse we (nowadays) need to engage in social intercourse - Would you like to go out for a drink? Can you imagine just how lost young Britons would be of a weekend if they weren't able to get drunk and screw and forget it all again before Monday rolls back up, at which point stories of tremendously painful mornings after accompanied by backslappings can be traded? People wouldn't be able to communicate without their drugs of choice. And make no mistake, we are talking about drugs here: It is not a 'hangover', it is a period ofwithdrawal. You couldn't 'do' with a coffee, you are suffering a xanthine craving.

Terence McKenna very presciently observed that 'culture is not your friend'. And I think it's quite easy to prove this, without straying into the domains of American healthcare, bank bail-outs, the Caucasian war machine, or even the 'War On (some non-prescription) Drugs': For example, did you know that cigarettes are radioactive? I've managed to quit, but the last of the radioactivity won't be out of my system for another 21.4 years or something. Now, how easy is it to pick up a pack of cigarettes in England? Why are these downright evil things legal? Where is the medical value in putting into your body a radioactive drug more addictive than heroin? Ohhh! But it's part of our culture yeah! It's simply what one does yeah: There are certain sanctioned - poisonous - drugs, your use of which will not incur ridicule or rebuke from your peers, but will perversely raise you higher in their esteem (much higher, in the case of your social superiors); but you should not put naturally occurring, mystical, soul warming compounds into you, because we don't have the language or the maturity to deal with them. And frankly, that kind of behavior will do nothing less than bring about the utter dissolution of society as we know it, just as giving women the vote did - or, but, hang on...

The question is this: How conscious are you willing to be? Are you actually willing to go through life without ever entering into the presence of the psychedelic tremendum just because some gangsters tell you that it's evil and demonic and against everything we stand for? Well, what do we stand for? We are killing Mexico, for example: Because people can't grow marijuana on their windowsill without prosecution, massive criminal syndicates control an underground market for it instead. People are still going to get high, they just have to deal with psychopathic street crooks to get there. Two generations of feral children in Ciudad Juarez is still not enough to convince people to rally in support of these poor folks, who have no other means of employment, their cities having been gutted by the cartels (see Charles Bowden's work on this). In my opinion, life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience would be analogous to going through life permanently pre-pubescent, never having experienced sex. A perpetual caterpillar. Are you actually willing to let some coffee-drinking politician tell you that cannabis, for example, is a dangerous, addicting drug with 'no accepted medical value', in spite of wide anecdotal evidence of cannabis' efficacy in combating multiple sclerosis, glaucoma, nausea, rheumatism, chemotherapy side-effects, and even anger to name a few. What proportion of Saturday night town centre fights can be traced to cannabis intoxication, I wonder, in comparison to straight drunkenness? And yet, it's the same cannabis story in the 'paper every time, we've all seen it: Unequivocally, cannabis use results in schizophrenia. (In spite of no increase in schizophrenia cases over the last few decades despite a massive non-corresponding increase in cannabis' popularity.) I read the other day that cannabis actually alleviates schizophrenic symptoms, which makes sense - that's probably how the government linked this fabulous plant to the condition in the first place. Incidentally, you'll often hear Walters, the cuntish American drug 'czar' (what a socialist nightmare this truly is!) say that increasing numbers of young people are entering rehabilitation clinics for cannabis 'addiction' (!!) every year. In reality, when 754,600 or so Americans can be arrested for possession of a plant (for the year 2008) and then be offered the options of jail or clinic, the likelihood that all of the clinic's occupants actually have any interest in 'rehab' is pretty slim-jim. (89% of total arrests for cannabis were for simple possession in 2008 - not really going after the dealers, are they? One person every 41 seconds is arrested for cannabis in the USA. They're converting the next generation into a victimless-criminal underclass.) To quote an anonymous blogger on this topic: "America, without a doubt, is the war whore the Bible warns mankind to watch out for." The war is on choice, it is on Mind itself, it is a war on people, not drugs. If it were, they'd be locking up CEOs from every major pharmaceutical company on the planet.

Are you to settle for your own choices, or those of power grubbing barbarian liars? We are, after all, led by the least among us, and they do lie to you: Surely, you've picked that up by now. Well, theywere lying, at least. Maybe the New York Times is showing that cracks in the misery are beginning to appear.. If consciousness does not loom large in the immediate human future, what kind of future will this be? What kind of a mushroom is fruiting at the end of time - is it a hydrobomb cloud, or the beginnings of a doubt, that perhaps there really is such a thing as a 'magic' mushroom?

This picture dates to 5,000 B.C. and comes from the Tassili plateau in modern day Algeria; it's existence argues fairly convincingly that not only have we known about the otherness of the Mushroom for aeons, we used to worship that otherness, too: