“History is ending because the
dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the
inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every
time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for
the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on
the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned
Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and
property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before,
before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of
the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth
century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that
gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll
and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise
that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human
symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the
tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why
does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that
the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic
experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the
board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands
what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to
streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new
myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the
universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and
when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed
and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the
materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth
of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and
nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator
culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but
that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly
myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we
discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there
are Niagras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the
self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a
psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It
means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the
body and the way the body works itself into nature. What the Archaic Revival
means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three
enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony,
monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators
sweating folks, because that means your getting it all reconnected, and getting
it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition
through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian
mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. Its
an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without
that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that
experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring
out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic
dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is
what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.”
― Terence McKenna
