I know that you think that I am saying you need to take drugs but to be honest you kind of got it all wrong. These aren't drugs they're natural organic substances taken from mushrooms, cactus, bark and various other natural sources. These things were part of the human food chain to begin with.

Were the misunderstanding comes is with the label-these are "drugs" and "drugs" are a red flag word. We are hysterical over the subject of drugs. Our whole society seems to be dissolving under the onslaught of criminally syndicated drug distribution systems. What we are going to have to do if we are to come to terms with this is to become more sophisticated in our definitions. I believe what we really object to about drugs is that we are alarmed by unexamined, obsessive, self-destructive behaviour. When we see someone acting in this way we draw back that is what an addiction to a drug like cocaine or morphine results in. However, psychedelics actually break habits n patterns of thought they actually cause individuals to inspect the structures of their lives and make judgements about them. Now, what psychedelics share with "drugs" is that they are physical compounds, often pressed into pills, and you do put them in your body, but I believe that a reasonable definition of drugs would have us legalize psilocybin and outlaw television!

Imagine if the Japanese had won world war II and had introduced into American life a drug so insidious that thirty years later the average American was spending five hours a day "loaded" on this drug. People would jus view it as an outrageous atrocity, and yet, we do this to ourselves and the horrifying thing about the "trip" that television gives u is that its not your trip, its a trip that comes down through the values systems of a society who's greatest god is the almighty dollar. So television is the opiate of the people I think the tremendous governmental resistance to the psychedelic issue is not because psychedelics aren't multi million-dollar criminal enterprises-they are trivial on that level. However, they inspire examination of values, and that is the most corrosive thing that can happen.

Drugs and religion

What I have found is that all of these systems that have been offered as spiritual paths work splendidly in the presence of psychedelics. If u think mantras are effective or meditation, try it on twenty milligrams of psilocybin and see what happens. All sincere religious motivation is illuminated by psychedelics to put it perhaps in a trivial way, the religious quest is car but psychedelics are the petrol that runs it you go nowhere without the fuel no matter how finely crafted the upholstery.

I can give it to you in a nutshell:-

There are three questions you should ask yourself about a drug you're considering taking.

1. Does it occur naturally in a plant or an animal? Because nature has use-tested these compounds over millions of years. Something that was synthesized in a lab 10 years ago-who knows? So it should be a natural compound.
2. Does it have a history of human usage Mushrooms do, Mescaline does, lsd doesn't [50/50 on this one] ecstasy doesn't.
3. And most important! It should have some affinity to brain chemistry. It shouldn't be like landing on the moon it should be related to what drives ordinary consciousness. That last point is the most narrow b/c mescaline won't get through that one lsd either you see I think that drugs should be as non-invasive as possible, and I know I'm on the right track because the strongest psychedelic compound there are are the ones that last the least amount of time. Now that means within a few min your brain can recognize the compound and completely neutralizes it.

Nature is the guide:-

Nature is the great guide in all of this. The natural chemistry of the brain the natural history of the planet, the naturally evolved shamanic institutions of small groups of human beings that are still in touch with reasonable social values. I don't consider myself to be a fully self-realized person, but to me life looks extremely positive. Human potential is so vast; we do not have any problems we can't solve by applying ourselves to them with open minds. Now, you see, the current theory of problem solving is that we must solve all our problems with solutions that make a buck. But if we're willing to put aside that notion, then the human future appears endlessly bright, because human mind appears to be a much more open pipeline to god than anyone who is outside the psychedelic experience could ever imagine. And god appears to be much more benevolent and involved force in human affairs than the kind of image that we have inherited from western religions.

Now, why should taking a natural psychedelic drug compound like psilocybin give u hope? It's because it connects you with the real network of values and information inherent in the planet, the value of biology, the value of organism, rather than the values of consumers.

I think that the task of history is what I call turning ourselves inside out. The body is to be internalised and the soul externalised as a living golden disc.

YEATS put it this way in "sailing to Byzantium"

"sailing to Byzantium"
O sages standing in god's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of the wall,
Come from the holy fire, erne in a gyre,
And be the singing masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gathers me
Into the artifice of eternity

The phrase "the artifice of eternity" evokes a strangely mechanistic yet spiritualistic future. Over the course of ten thousand years, Humanity is becoming a Tran planetary creature; it is as H G wells said of history "a race between education and catastrophe" increasingly more destructive chemical and atomic processes are being released forcing the species to realize that its aspirations are alien to the ecology of the planet and that it and the planet must part of the transformation of humanity into a space-fairing, perhaps time-fairing race.

The coming of agriculture and urbanization are minor compared to what is going to happen to this species, to these monkeys, as they leave the planet with their computers and their dreams.