Culture is Not your Friend / HACKING REALITY

"What civilization is is six billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation. And yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us, the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are lead by the least among us, and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.

This is something—and I don't really want to get off on this tear because it's a lecture in itself, but: Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people's convenience, and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture, and yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the rights of the individual, we understand the felt presence of experience is what is most important, but the culture is a perversion. It fetishises objects; it creates consumer mania; it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanise themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue and Hollywood and what have you."

"If any of you have read the late works of Philip K. Dick, you know that he became convinced that from AD 69 until approximately 1948 no time had actually passed. Instead, a false history had been inserted by the Demiurge, and what we call Western civilization is a kind of holographic projection laid over authentic reality. Dick believed that the Logos had begun dissolving this illusion and that certain people were beginning to remember the true state of affairs. Whether one accepts this literally or not, it is one of the most extraordinary metaphysical hypotheses ever proposed by a modern writer."

"For Dick the Logos was not simply God in the theological sense. It behaved almost like an alien intelligence, a self-organizing field of information capable of entering history through language, dreams, books and symbols. This is remarkably close to what psychedelics seem to reveal: an autonomous intelligence that is not human yet communicates through meaning rather than through matter."

"Dick's intuition was that reality is fundamentally informational. Once you entertain that possibility, history ceases to be merely a sequence of events and becomes a process of memory, encoding and decoding. Consciousness itself may be the place where reality is continually rewritten."

"There seems to be an informational ghost of this universe which is somehow co-present at all points within the matrix... And that's what the psychedelic experience shows you. It shows you a hologrammatic space of information where, by sitting still in your room and sending the mind, you can cross the universe in an instant. And the question 'Is this real?' is in bad taste, because it violates the two ontological categories."

"The substances—the drugs, the plants, the things which perturb consciousness—they don't address cultural values; they blast through them. Cultures are virtual realities made of language. If there is one thing psychedelics do, they dissolve boundaries. Cultures are boundary-defining engines. They teach you: 'We do it this way. Don't go there—in your mind, in your heart. Follow the rules.' Cultures are like operating systems."

"What psychedelics do, if you look at thousands of these experiences, is: they dissolve boundaries. They dissolve boundaries between you and your past, you and the part of your unconscious you don’t want to look at, between you and your partner, between you and the feminine (if you’re masculine) and vice versa, between you and the world. All the boundaries that we put up to keep ourselves from feeling our circumstance are dissolved. And boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society. People get very—“people” meaning government institutions—become very nervous when people begin to talk to each other."

(T. MCKENNA)

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