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[Psychedelic
Thinking and the Dawn of Homo Cyber — continued]
Guerilla
tactics for evolutionaries
There is an old cliché that says, “It
is always darkest just before the dawn.” While I question
the correctness of that statement, I think we can all agree
that the forces of darkness seem to be running things with
a firm hand at the moment. For example, in Washington we now
have two former oil company executives in charge of our nation’s
energy policy. Not only have they refused to restrict our
greenhouse gas emissions, they actually intend to give federal
subsidies (in other words, your tax money) to oil companies
to help them build more refineries. And where do you suppose
they are going to get the crude oil to process in these new
refineries? They intend to pillage it from the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge, currently the most pristine land the U.S.
taxpayers own. These masters of the Big Lie are telling us
we must despoil our ecological treasures to solve California’s
energy crises. Yet they obscure the fact that only 0.02% of
California’s electricity comes from oil. In fact, only 3%
of the electricity in the entire country comes from oil.
What is more, these swashbuckling industrial
pirates are acting as if the voting public gave them a mandate
to despoil our land, water, and air. Already they have forgotten
that not only did it take a divided Supreme Court to place
them in power, they didn’t even receive the majority of the
popular vote. Darth Vader has conquered Washington. Now how
are we going to take it back?
I once heard Ken Kesey say that one of
the most important things he learned from the Sixties was
that there is no reason to go head on with a dumb guy carrying
a gun. That seems quite wise to me. In fact, I believe we
should take that advice to an even higher level. Not only
should we not go head to head with these dumb guys with guns,
we should not even engage them in guerilla skirmishes. The
mistake that was made by some activists in the 1960s was to
try to ferment a revolution. Revolutions seldom bring true
and lasting change to the daily lives of most citizens. What
is required, if the human species is to have any chance whatsoever
for long-term survival, is evolution, conscious evolution.
Homo cyber is an evolutionary, not a revolutionary.
It is not our government that must be overthrown, it is our
culture that must be recast to value sustainable living and
to consider the Earth as a whole when making decisions that
impact the biosphere.
Our job as psychedelic thinkers is to
do everything we can to nudge our culture into a more Gaian
state of mind. It is up to us, the prototypes of Homo cyber,
to remain steadfast and to stand up and be counted whenever
we encounter the Big Lie. For some of you this is not going
to be easy. I know this because not long ago I, too, was a
modern mummer, working under deep cover in a Fortune 100 company.
It is not always safe when you are so deep behind enemy lines.
For example, when someone at work reinforces a Big Lie by
saying MDMA burns holes in you head, what do you do? Do you
simply keep your mouth shut for fear of blowing your cover,
or do you directly confront your co-workers with the truth?
As I said at the beginning of this presentation,
a psychedelic thinker is also a person of action. Psychedelic
thinkers are people who are willing to stand up and be counted.
This doesn’t mean they have to throw open the door to their
boss’s office and shout, “I’m mad as hell about drug testing,
and I’m not going to take it any more!” My suggestion is to
maintain at least some of your cover. Remember, one in every
four adult Americans is now ready to accept the truth about
our environmental crises and the War on Drugs. These people
are everywhere, yet they mistakenly believe their numbers
are few. This is why it is important to have as many psychedelic
thinkers as possible infiltrate every nook and cranny of our
society. We already have the critical mass necessary to act
as a catalyst for the transformation of the consciousness
of our entire species. Let’s not miss this unique opportunity
to propel consciousness to its next level.
Before I leave you with my guerilla tactics
for psychedelic thinkers, I would like you to do a little
time travelling. Come with me, if you will, to the year 2301,
and imagine that we are in a natural history museum of the
time. Visualize yourself looking at an exhibit of ancient
humanoids similar to exhibits we see in natural history museums
today. This exhibit shows cave men and their families gathered
around a fire. Now let’s move to the next exhibit, which shows
another stage of human development. The title of this exhibit
is “Prototypes of the species Homo cyber as they appeared
in the year 2001.” One of the wax figures would be intently
using a laptop, another looking at her pager, while several
others would have wires coming out of their ears and connected
to cell phones on their hips. Of course, there is a poster
from this conference in the background to show that these
people are psychedelic thinkers.
Got the picture?
Now I would like you to shift your attention
from the exhibit and focus on the form of being you are
as you look at these wax figures of your ancestors. Do you
see yourself in the meta-human form of Homo cyber,
or do you see yourself as a form of Borg? My guess is that
almost everyone here sees themselves as Homo cyber.
Such a positive outcome, of course, is not assured. During
this jump time between ages in which we now find ourselves,
many outcomes are possible. The only thing we can be sure
of is that the next 25 years promise to be the most significant
period of time our species has yet encountered.
The lines are now being drawn for the
final battle in the War on Consciousness. The battle that
is going to determine the future of consciousness on this
planet for the next millennium is the one that will be waged
over the soul of Homo cyber. Will the species Homo
cyber remain pure, always a product of psychedelic thinking,
or will the species mutate and become cybernetic slaves of
primitive minds like the ones that now control this country?
The answer to that question is up to the psychedelic thinkers
alive today. Do we really have what it takes to stand up against
the forces of darkness that threaten to stifle our inner lives?
Until recently, the reemergence of psychedelic
thinking has been primarily an underground phenomenon. Even
today, with the exception of news about conferences like this,
mainstream American culture remains largely unaware that a
subculture of psychedelic thinkers even exists. If you ask
them, some moderns and almost all traditionals will tell you
that a single toke of marijuana will cause you to go insane.
Believe it or not, a significant percentage of our population
still believe “Reefer Madness” to be the final scientific
word on psychedelic substances. Ignorance on such a massive
scale is difficult to overcome.
A new variable has entered the equation,
however. A third subculture has evolved, and the people in
this group are ready to accept the truth about psychedelic
thinking. With such an audience now numbering in the tens
of millions, the day has arrived for psychedelic thinkers
to become more vocal. This is not a call to the barricades,
for psychedelic thinkers are not revolutionaries. Psychedelic
thinkers are evolutionaries, and their mission is to
accelerate the evolution of consciousness on the planet Earth.
Even if the time is not right for all psychedelic thinkers
to drop their mummers masks in public, they can put them aside
at home and transform themselves from mummers into memers.
As you know, Richard Dawkins coined the
word “meme” to mean a replicator that was to culture what
the gene is to biology. He settled on “meme” to convey the
idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.(15)
The way I look at memes is to think of them as the DNA of
consciousness. It is still not clear why one meme grows more
quickly and stronger than another, but there is little question
about a meme’s power to influence a culture. Thus we have
a powerful, but unpredictable, tool for psychedelic thinkers
to use as guerilla activists on the front lines of the evolution
of consciousness.
The memes I am about to suggest are far
from final form. Frankly, they aren’t succinct enough to catch
on. My purpose in putting them forward right now is only to
give you an idea of the kind of action psychedelic thinkers
can promote if they plant the right meme in the right mind.
Here are some examples of memes that may interest psychedelic
thinkers:
- Rather than reducing our taxes so we can use that money
to pay higher gasoline prices, why not nationalize the oil
companies and reduce prices by eliminating their obscene
profits?
- Each time you email an elected official about an issue,
send a copy of your message to world
leaders who might agree with your point of view. It
was reported that last year over 55 million pieces of email
to the White House and Congress went unread. Wouldn’t it
have been interesting, when the German Chancellor flew to
Washington to harangue Bush for abandoning the Kyoto Treaty,
if the Chancellor had copies of a million emails from U.S.
citizens who supported his position?
- If you are in a position at work or school where an honest
discussion of these issues would compromise you in some
way, print a copy of this talk, or something from MAPS or
the Erowid site and leave it in a conference room, or on
a friend’s desk.(16)
- Promote a “vote against the incumbents” campaign for the
next national elections. Imagine, if you will, that it is
election day 2004. Now think what it would mean if every
incumbent for a federal office was voted out. What a powerful
message this would send to our political leaders.
- Refuse to work for a company that does drug testing. Simply
remove your mind from service to the military/prison/industrial
complex. This is not so easy to accomplish these days. In
my own case, it took almost three years from the day I made
my decision to not work for drug testers until I made my
actual escape from that world.
- Whenever possible, don’t purchase products or services
from companies that do drug testing.
These are only rough approximations of
the kind of memes psychedelic thinkers need to inject into
our culture. While most new memes will arrive stillborn, occasionally
one will live, and our culture will begin to evolve in yet
another new direction. As I said earlier, our job as psychedelic
thinkers is to do everything we can to nudge our culture into
a more Gaian state of mind. Fortunately, we now have ways
to influence our culture without engaging in the confrontational
politics that failed us in the past.
So what is it going to be, the best of
times or the worst of times? I firmly believe that the answer
to that question lies in the hands of today’s psychedelic
thinkers. It is clear that a small but very committed minority
can make a significant impact on the course of history. If
you have spent some time in entheospace you already know
the truth. Hold fast to that knowing, for it will surely set
you free.
Today, as our species inches its way
up the beautiful mountain called consciousness, it is the
psychedelic thinkers who are the advance scouts. Although
we are far from the pinnacle, we have reached a ledge that
is high enough for us to see that we have already made much
progress. The choice we now face is whether to continue our
climb, slide back down the mountain, or hew out a life on
this ledge. I believe that by being here today, your choice
is clear. You have elected to continue the climb. I cannot
tell you where to find your next handhold. Some of you may
decide to make the conscious decision to begin your evolution
into Homo cyber. Others may continue their work as
modern day mummers, working under deep cover and writing their
own lines. We must all choose the path that is best for us.
What is important is that psychedelic thinkers the world over
end their silence. The day has arrived for us to stand up
and be counted.
The noosphere is now intensifying its
focus within the structure of the Internet. Human history
is about to enter a new age. We find life accelerating at
an ever-increasing pace and our species dancing on the edge
of chaos. Yet this is precisely where evolution does her best
work. The choice is up to us. Do you take the blue pill and
go back to sleep, or do you take the red pill and accept the
challenge of consciously evolving to a higher state of being?
Borg or Homo cyber, which will it be?
I am quite sure that most of the people
in this audience have already taken the red pill. That is
why you are here today instead of following the mainstream
cultural traditions of this holiday weekend. As if by magic,
that little red pill you took has released you from being
a lowly creature crawling on the ground, and transformed you
into a beautiful butterfly that finds itself flying along
the edge of chaos. Perhaps it will be your wings that
cause a disturbance that propels human consciousness to its
next level. You have chosen to take your place as an evolutionary,
operating on the front lines of consciousness.
As they say in the movies, “May the force
be with you.”
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