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[Psychedelic
Thinking and the Dawn of Homo Cyber — continued]
What
is at stake right now
Which brings us back to the 50 million
cultural creatives in the U.S. today and why they are so important.
It should be the mission of all psychedelic thinkers to rally
cultural creatives and encourage them to become prototypes
of Homo cyber. By definition, cultural creatives are
open to new ways of thinking and large numbers of them have
already experienced what it means to be in entheospace. They
should all be encouraged to return once again to that mystical
dimension. Simply by entering into entheospace we become deconditioned
from our culture. This decoupling from automatic responses
to our culture is absolutely essential if we are to create
new cultures. Of course, this is also why existing power structures
are so fearful of substances and techniques that launch our
minds into entheospace. To the existing order, any change
from the status quo is a potential threat.
Fortunately, it doesn’t take that many
people to move the consciousness of society to a higher plane.
In ancient Greece, a mere 15% of the free citizens were participants
in the mysterious rites of Eleusis, which provided the cognitive
foundation of their society. I have read estimates that 80
million Americans have used substances our current power
structure has declared to be illegal. Although not all of
these substances have psychedelic properties, it would be
an interesting historical coincidence if one-half of these
illegal substance users have used a psychedelic substance
at least once. If that is the case, then approximately 15%
of the U.S. population have now experienced a taste of the
rites of Eleusis, for they have ventured into the marvelous
realm of entheospace at least one time. What is needed is
for the more advanced explorers of entheospace, the psychedelic
thinkers, to contact those who were once familiar with this
territory and encourage them to return to the world of psychedelic
thinking and help us begin the difficult work of saving the
biosphere and all the life it sustains.
As I look at our culture today, I see
a society that is littered with souls who once held high ideals
and wanted desperately to make this world a better place.
Some of these people are former 1960s activists, some are
socially conscious conservatives. They come from all walks
of life and exist in all levels of our society. These time
bombs of idealism can be found on our factory floors and in
our boardrooms. They include farm workers and white collar
workers. No matter where we look, we can expect that one in
every four persons we see has changed their personal worldview
to that of a cultural creative. Many of these people are at
least passingly familiar with the power of psychedelic thinking.
It is now up to us, the psychedelic thinkers who are consciously
evolving into a new species, to be the ones who undertake
the work of arousing the rest of our species from sleep.
I would like to point out that it was
only a small fraction of the number of people who are in this
room today that signed the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
Think of it, there were only 56 signatures on the Declaration
of Independence, yet the combined spirit of those 56 people
had a profound effect on the entire world. I think it is fair
to say that our Founding Fathers were psychedelic thinkers.
Seeing as how both Washington and Jefferson grew hemp on their
farms, I suspect they, too, were familiar with entheospace.
With millions of people who have tried
psychedelics at least once, we have a unique situation in
our country, one that may have never occurred in a human culture
before. As a result of the popularity of LSD during the 1960s,
when it was still legal, millions of young people used it
at least once. From what I know of entheospace, seldom do
you return from it to this world with quite the same point
of view you had before you left. Often a memory from a voyage
into entheospace will return years later when sparked by a
scent or sound or word. In addition to the millions of people
who tried psychedelics during the 1960s are the millions of
others who at one point in time believed their lives held
a higher purpose than mere success at a job. Many of these
people are now cultural creatives, and they are slowly coming
awake. In a way, they bring to mind the medieval mummers in
Ireland.
During the Middle Ages, the power elite
in Irish villages converted the then current folk plays into
morality tales with which they brainwashed the masses into
subservience. These players, the mummers, always wore masks
while performing, and their performances took place in the
homes of the persons to whom a particular play’s message was
directed. Although the audience knew that the players were
their shopkeepers and town officials, they did not know the
actual identity of persons playing specific roles.
Today I see almost a mirror image of
the ancient mummers in our society. Instead of the power elite
donning masks and entering the homes of the citizens to enact
their morality plays, today’s mummer is a citizen who puts
on a mask and goes into the dens of the power elite. The only
thing that prevents this situation from being a true mirror
image of the ancient mummers is that the modern mummer has
forgotten that they are the ones who should be writing the
lines they deliver. Instead, we have a situation where 50
million mummers are evenly distributed throughout the land
but who are still speaking lines given to them by those in
power. One mission of Homo cyber should be to teach
these modern mummers that they must write their own lines.
Earlier, I discussed the fact that we
are now in a period of double exponential technological growth.
Both technological change and the rate of change are
growing exponentially. This means that in just 100 years,
sentient beings on this planet will be living in a world that
is as different from our world today as ours is from that
of a caveman. Such a tremendous amount of technological change
in so short a time may well approach a technological singularity.(7)
The promise of such rapidly accelerating technological change
should bring with it hope for an idyllic future for humankind,
and in many ways it does. But there is a dark cloud on the
horizon, one which casts a shadow over this exciting future.
This cloud is the cloud of war. [NOTE:
This speech was delivered in May 2001, less than four months
before the infamies of September 11th and the now-perpetual
state of war in the US capital.]
The other day I was walking on a beach
just south of a large Marine base where they were conducting
military exercises. In the distance I could hear the dull
thud of bombs and other ordnance exploding. What struck me
was the fact that none of the people who were also enjoying
the beach that day seemed to notice the sounds of the explosions.
Perhaps they didn’t realize what they were hearing. Had any
of them ever been in a battle, they would have realized that
they were hearing the sounds of war. And you hear the sounds
of war only when the front lines are very near.
As a child growing up in the 1950s, I
lived in constant fear of the outbreak of World War III. In
school, we conducted “duck and cover” drills where we would
hide under our desks and await that blinding white flash that
was sure to come. In those years, our schools also taught
us that if America lost the next world war, we would end up
living in a Soviet gulag. Now, almost fifty years later, I
realize that while the threat of a world war was real, we
were being misled as to who the enemy was. Today I find myself
living in an American gulag.
With 100 million fewer people than live
in the nations that make up the European Union, our country
has six times more citizens locked in jails than they
do. We are incarcerating over 1,600,000 people each year for
drug-related offenses, over one-half of whom are arrested
for merely possessing marijuana. That the War on Drugs is
totally insane is born out by the following facts:
Each year in the United States
- over 400,000 people die from tobacco-related illnesses
- over 150,000 people die from alcohol-related illnesses
(this does not count driving-related deaths)
- over 100,000 people die from prescription drugs
Tobacco, alcohol, and prescription drugs
are, of course, all legal.
And yet, in the same time frame, the
number of deaths from cocaine, crack, and heroin combined
was only 8,000. What is even more revealing is that there
has not been a single marijuana-related death in this country
in the last 50 years! What is wrong with this picture? Arresting
1.6 million citizens each year for using substances that are
orders of magnitude more safe than their legal alternatives
looks very gulag-like to me.
As Josh
Wickerham recently wrote:
The war on drugs is not a war on substances; it's a war
on states of mind. Entheogens(8)
are not illegal because a loving government is concerned
that you're going to hurt yourself by smoking pot or tripping
in your bedroom. Entheogens are illegal because they make
you question authority. They break down socially constructed
fables and cleanse the doors of perception. They make
you question the wrongs of society in a fundamental way,
making you dangerous. You're like Neo in The Matrix
when all of the illusions of reality have been irrevocably
stripped away.(9)
Although it began in the United States,
the War on Drugs has now become World War III. What makes
this world war so different from the previous ones is that
instead of pitting nation against nation, this time we see
the nations of the world pitted against their own citizens.
Recent polls show that a substantial majority of Americans
believe the War on Drugs is a total failure, yet our drug
warriors continue spending more and more money each year in
the insane belief that eventually they will see different
results. Just who are these people who want to continue waging
this war, and what are their true objectives?
One thing we know for sure is that the
War on Drugs is not about public safety. If it was, we would
see an expansion of the war to include the really dangerous
substances, like cigarettes and alcohol. What the drug warriors
are actually trying to do is to take away the freedom of specific
classes of people. Take a look at the statistics and you will
find that of the last 800,000 people arrested for possession
of marijuana, over one-half of them were Hispanic. Seven times
more African-Americans are put in jail than are Caucasians
arrested for the same drug possession offence. It is time
to come to terms with the fact that the War on Drugs is still
the race war it was when it began. However, the war has now
spread into the homes of white America as well.
Ask any DEA agent today what his biggest
problem is and he will most likely tell you that it is the
use of MDMA by affluent white children at raves. As any honest
scientist or doctor will tell you, there are no serious medical
consequences that follow from intelligent use of MDMA. Yet
our corporate owned and controlled media, including Trojan
horse outfits like MTV, are trying to convince people that
MDMA causes holes to develop in human brains. As you already
know, these reports are worse than mere misstatements. They
are bald-faced lies. Thankfully there are websites, such as
Erowid and the MAPS site, where you can go to learn the truth
about MDMA.(10)
What is it about this substance that
has the power elite so concerned? Maybe it is nothing more
than intellectual laziness, for it is much easier to believe
the lies of government shills who make a good living from
their bogus science than it is to dig up the facts for yourself.
Our leaders, however, may also recall the secret research
the government did on MDMA during the cold war. In these studies,
over 800 compounds were tested as chemical and psychological
warfare agents. When they got to MDMA they quickly discounted
it for the reason that using MDMA turned their test subjects
into pacifists. No wonder our government is afraid of it!
After all, how can a military empire survive if its citizens
are pacifists?
As World War III now enters its final
phase, we see that Gaia has not only enlisted Greens, New
Agers, and the cultural creatives on her side, she has also
begun to evolve a new meta-human species to take up her cause.
Interestingly, the new species Homo cyber is making
its appearance just as human history is about to enter what
Jean Houston calls “jump time.”(11)
Few people will deny that we are now
living in a period of unusually rapid change. At times our
news programs take on a surreal sheen, and fiction is hard
pressed to be as interesting as fact. This is the environment
into which we are delivering Homo cyber. In her book,
Jump Time, Jean Houston has this to say about the age
in which we are now living:
We are heirs to an extraordinary
speeding up of the evolutionary process. We jump to new
professions, partners, lifestyles, and religions seemingly
at will. Nothing, it seems, is impossible for us. Nature,
through us, seems to be entering a new epoch―not
so much biological evolution but conscious
evolution. We have become conscious of our capacity to
direct the next phase not only of our personal lives but
of the world’s destiny as well.(12)
I believe that it is of Homo cyber
Dr. Houston is speaking, for only beings with the power to
gather and process vast amounts of information will be in
a position to shape a future in which some semblance of human
life can survive. A benign symbiosis of living matter with
machines that gather and process information is perhaps the
inevitable result of the continuing evolution of consciousness
as it penetrates ever more deeply into matter. I am confident
that evolution places a high value on wisdom and intelligence,
and that higher forms of consciousness will ceaselessly continue
to evolve.
Many signs point to a major shift in
consciousness taking place in the not too distant future.
Over a thousand years ago, the Mayans prophesied a major alteration
in human consciousness that would take place in the year 2012.(13)
The Native American Hopi also saw significance in the year
2012, although their prophecies for that year are much more
dire than are those of the Mayan. This is the same year in
which Terence McKenna’s Timewave Theory forecast the end of
time as we know it. On the scientific front we have Vernor
Vinge, who has predicted that we will experience a technological
singularity sometime before 2030. The singularity Vinge foresees
is the creation of machine intelligence that exceeds the cognitive
abilities of humans.
In my book, The Spirit of the Internet:
Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness,
I expand on Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the noosphere,
and speculate on the possibility that the Internet is, in
fact, the mechanical infrastructure of this membrane of thought
encircling the Earth. When I look to the near future, I see
billions of people carrying around wireless devices that are
constantly connected to the Internet. Think about it for a
moment, billions of people are going to have continuous access
to unimaginably vast amounts of information. Already there
are serious researchers discussing the implications of creating
a global brain that is part massive database, part robotic
information-processing agents,
and part human. This is no longer the realm of science fiction,
this is serious science. And make no mistake about it,
the final battles in the war over freedom of thought are going
to be fought in cyberspace.
It is no secret that some of our best
minds are working overtime on the development of what can
be called digital drugs. This new generation of virtual
reality devices will be able to launch you into entheospace
just as effectively as does LSD today. The commercial availability
of these devices will most likely signal the beginning of
the last battle in the War on Drugs. Finally, we will be able
to reframe the issue into what it is really all about, the
right to control our own state of consciousness. The Alchemind
Society calls this “cognitive liberty” and defines it as “.
. . the right of each individual to think independently, to
use the full spectrum of his or her mind, and to engage in
multiple modes of thought and alternative states of consciousness.”(14)
When the first government hearings are held in an attempt
to ban these new silicon-based cognitive tools, the power
elite are going to be forced to confront the fact that it
is human thought they want to control. It is not the substances
that mainstream culture fears, it is the psychedelic thinking
these substances promote that is under attack.
The reason I am optimistic that Homo
cyber will ultimately become the dominant branch of the
human species is that Homo cyber possesses a weapon
of unequalled power, psychedelic thinking. We have reached
a point in the evolution of life on Earth at which the human
species has firmly established itself at the top of the food
chain. Unfortunately, our species is not intelligent enough
to live sustainably and without warring among ourselves. Into
this evolutionary chaos we now see the genesis of a new contender
for the top of the food chain. This time, however, consciousness
itself has taken a role in the processes of evolution. This
time, the evolutionary jump that is about to take place on
this planet is going to bring with it a quantum change in
consciousness itself. The changes we are about to witness
will be more than revolutionary. They are going to be evolutionary.
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