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It’s all B.S.

This book is dedicaded to those of my cosmic global family who first taught me how to be G∞D, to speak, to fold my hands, to bow before an authority, to sing praise, to commune, to make silence, to memorize a word, and above all that Approved Workmen Are Not Ashamed.

WARNING! DO NOT READ THIS BOOK! THIS IS B.S.

Before reading any further please take this bookmark as a constant symbol of saftey and security to ward off any and all B.S. you encounter in reading this book. If you are reading this with friends, please pass the bookmark around and feel free to make copies.

From the moment you looked at this book I have been putting thoughts in your head. I perceived your future. I knew that YOU didn’t care whatsoever to keep this book fully hidden from your all-seeing eye. Even though I told you: DONT READ THIS BOOK, you are still doing it. You may ask, “Why am I reading this? Well, because some people know how to “advert-eyes”. You are probably even scrutinizineering my ɡrimˈwär/ at this very moment. How G∞d of you. However, you are still letting me penetrate ideas into your brain because you are curious about the content of this B.S. Humans are trained. We are trained to do all sorts of things. Even correcting ɡrimˈwär/s. We have to “Set laws” and ‘kill the bull.’ Some of us are taught to read from (<) to (>) and some from (>) to (<). You see, I am guiding you down a line of symbols placed together in little groups. We have been taught to interpret these symbols a certain way and to read them left to right down this line. We call these pictures, these ‘types’ we put-together, ‘words’. ‘Eye no u kan reed mie words eefin iph eye right mie words weerd.’ I also know you like what you are accustomed to so I made sure to spell ‘words’ correctly for emphasis. It gives it a different feel because of this training. So make sure to be firmly grounded on a side and stand your ground. That’s exactly what you should do. “Im banking on it, the way a MAGICIAN ‘banks’ on you thinking that ‘perception is reality’. I already Annuit cœptis,on this in which you, in legal terms, “commerse”. Here, I will regulate the currency onto any brain that resembles a tree, in the only moment there ever was or ever will be. I scribe-el down this symbol-grouping with a wand of black stone and holy wood, that some people (whom are properly trained alumni), know how to recognize this is just a run-on sentence and word-salad-non-sense showing that EL Author King has a creepy kind of psychological agenda to create followers for is own Novus Ordo Seclorum”. Look and see that you will read this B.S.

Ta·boo

Pronunciation: /təˈbo͞ o,taˈbo͞ o/ Noun:

a social or religious custom prohibiting or forbidding discussion of a particular practice or forbidding association with a particular person, place, or thing

Adjective: social practice that is prohibited or restricted: Origin:

“speaking about sex is a taboo in his country.”

Tongan tabu

Con·spir·a·cy

Pronunciation: /kənˈspirəsē/ Noun:

a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful

Origin:

“a conspiracy to destroy the government”

Latin conspirare

ALAN MOORE Author

Magician

ABRACADABRA ABRACADABR ABRACADAB ABRACADA ABRACAD ABRACA ABRAC ABRA ABR AB A There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Shaman.

I believe that all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally, all of the faucets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or sciences, were the province of the Shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy. At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment.

Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable.

TAT TVAM ASI

In all of magic there is an incredibly large linguistic component.

The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries; then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity. Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic.

AB SARAW

TIAM MTHAT IIAM

In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.

BRAHMA WATI

Es·o·ter·ic

Pronunciation: /ˌesəˈterik/ Adjective: intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest: Origin:

“not all must necessarilly be divulged”

Greek esōterikos

The

Ancient Mysteries and

Secret Societies Which Have Influenced Modern Masonic Symbolism an excerpt from

The Secret Teachings of All Agres Manly Palmer Hall 33ยบ Scottish Rite Freemason Author and Mystic

WHY SECRETS? When confronted with a problem involving the use of the reasoning faculties, individuals of strong intellect keep their poise, and seek to reach a solution by obtaining facts bearing upon the question. Those of immature mentality, on the other hand, when similarly confronted, are overwhelmed. While the former may be qualified to solve the riddle of their own destiny, the latter must be led like a flock of sheep and taught in simple language. They depend almost entirely upon the ministrations of the shepherd. The Apostle Paul said that these little ones must be fed with milk, but that meat is the food of strong men. Thoughtlessness is almost synonymous with childishness, while thoughtfulness is symbolic of maturity. There are, however, but few mature minds in the world; and thus it was that the philosophic-religious doctrines of the pagans were divided to meet the needs of these two fundamental groups of human intellect—one philosophic, the other incapable of appreciating the deeper mysteries of life. To the discerning few were revealed the esoteric, or spiritual, teachings, while the unqualified many received only the literal, or exoteric, interpretations.

In order to make simple the great truths of Nature and the abstract principles of natural law, the vital forces of the universe were personified, becoming the gods and goddesses of the ancient mythologies. While the ignorant multitudes brought their offerings to the altars of Priapus and Pan (deities representing the procreative energies), the wise recognized in these marble statues only symbolic concretions of great abstract truths. In all cities of the ancient world were temples for public worship and offering. In every community also were philosophers and mystics, deeply versed in Nature’s lore. These individuals were usually banded together, forming seclusive philosophic and religious schools. The more important of these groups were known as the Mysteries. Many of the great minds of antiquity were initiated into these secret fraternities by strange and mysterious rites, some of which were extremely cruel. Alexander Wilder defines the Mysteries as “Sacred dramas performed at stated periods. The most celebrated were those of Isis, Sabazius, Cybele, and Eleusis.� After being admitted, the initiates were instructed in the secret wisdom which had been preserved for ages. Plato, an initiate of one of these sacred orders, was severely criticized because in his writings he revealed to the public many of the secret philosophic principles of the Mysteries.

Every pagan nation had (and has) not only its state religion, but another into which the philosophic elect alone have gained entrance. Many of these ancient cults vanished from the earth without revealing their secrets, but a few have survived the test of ages and their mysterious symbols are still preserved.

Much of the ritualism of Freemasonry is based on the trials to which candidates were subjected by the ancient hierophants before the keys of wisdom were entrusted to them. Few realize the extent to which the ancient secret schools influenced contemporary intellects and, through those minds, posterity.

Ω Å

JOHN 10: 30-34 The Jews picked up stones again to stone Him. Jesus answered them, “I showed you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you stoning Me?” The Jews answered Him, “For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy; and because You, being a man, make Yourself out to be God.” Jesus answered them, “Has it not been written in your Law, ‘I said, YOU ARE GODS’?

ABRACADABRA I fell through a hole into a cosmic plinko. What did I have to do with this? Is it my choice where I birthe? Should I be ‘proud’? Mother-ship’s water broke and my -ship went through the canal to where the deliveries are made. Mother -ship brought the product and got tied up at the Doc.

The Doc slapped my backside as I came to be. My mother was seperated from me. They took my sole on paper and handed my mother a birthing certificate. MANIFEST! “A perfect baby in every way shape and form! Now hand me a sharp stone, so I may do the work of The Lord� This things laid the foundation for Branding my Persona

BRAND PERSONA Ideology

CLASS

Colors

EMBLEMS

FLAG

Before I reached, I had to go to school. The Black Robed figure came out to a podeum with their book of laws. They preached the rules set from a ruler. under a brand and a mascot. Ruled over the hemispheres and so I walked 12 steps around this wheel. Against other schools. “GO! FIGHT! WIN! BE AGGRESSIVE!� To get a Scarlet Letter Grade. How much will I get paid?

Scape·goa·t

Pronunciation: /ˈskāpˌɡōt/ Noun:

(in the Bible) a goat sent into the wilderness after the Jewish chief priest had symbolically laid the sins of the people upon it (Lev. 16)

Before I realized, I had to go to Court The Black Robed figure came out to a podeum with his book of laws. They preached the rules set from a Ruler. under a brand and a mascot. Ruled over the hemispheres I walked past a gate, up to the Judge who ruled for the river’s ‘bench’ and if I didnt properly pass ‘the bar’ then I was in ‘hot water’ and needed to be “bailed’ out with currency. Who will get paid?

Holo·caust

Pronunciation: /ˈhäləˌkôst/ Noun: destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire or nuclear war Noun:

a Jewish sacrificial offering that is burned completely on an altar

Origin:

Greek holokauston

The Republic made Monarchy The Black Robed figure came out to a podeum with his book of laws. They preached the rules set from a Ruler. under a brand and a mascot. Ruled over the hemispheres I walked up to an altar, up to the Judge who ruled for the ‘EL’der and if I didnt swear allegience, I would burn forever. So I needed to be “bailed’ out by dunking me in water. Who will get paid?

Mazzaroth

Pronunciation: /ˈmazərɒθ/ Noun:

the twelve signs of the zodiac (treated as plural)

As·tro·the·ology

Pronunciation: /ˌastrəʊθɪˈɒlədʒi/ Noun: theology founded on observation or knowledge of the celestial bodies

Horus of Egypt The legends of Horus go back thousands of years, and he (or Osiris) shares the following in common with Jesus: • Horus was born of the virgin Isis-Meri on December 25th in a cave/manger, with his birth being announced by a star in the East and attended by dignitaries or “wise men.” He was a child teacher in the Temple or “House of the Father” and was baptized when he was 30 years old. Horus was also baptized by “Anup the Baptizer,”who becomes “John the Baptist.” He was also the “Way, the Truth, the Light, the Messiah, God’s Anointed Son, the Son of Man, the Good Shepherd, the Lamb of God, the Word,” etc. He was “the Fisher,” and was associated with the Lamb, Lion and Fish (“Ichthys”) Horus’s personal epithet appears to have been “Iusa,” the “everbecoming son” of “Ptah,” the “Father.” Horus (or Osiris) was called “the KRST,” long before the Christians duplicated the story. Numerous ancient artifacts depict the baby Horus being

AQUARIUS

PISCES

ARIES

TAURUS

We went to the

The Sun now

The Sun then

It was then the

The Sun moved

The Sun at the

man bearing the

enters into the

traveled through

Sun reached the

into the house

sign of the Crab

pitcher of water

house of Pisces

Aries as the

golden bull of

of the twins of

will start to walk

and went into

where he starts

flocks now

Taurus. During

Gemini where

backwards as it

the house where

collecting his

begin to bear

this time, Father,

it’s dual nature is

crosses over the

he entereth in.

followers

lambs in the

up in the

revealed and has

solstice and

Here, the Sun is

starting with the

fields as the Sun

heavens and

divided it’s

descends down

at the 30th

two fish.

passover the

with a voice of

kingdom.

the arc.

degree where it

equator at

thunder, Springs

starts its

the Spring

and impregnates

ministry. So the

Equinox.

Mother Earth

Sun plunged

with his rain

into Aquarius’

turning the

water and was

water into

lifted out being

grapes for wine.

GEMINI

CANCER

Born Again and rising 1 degree per day into the New Year.

F E D C B A

LEO

VIRGO

LIBRA

SCORPIO

SAGITTARIUS CAPRICORN

On the first day

The Sun is now

Now in the

The Sun then

Riding on this

On Dec 21st the

of summer, The

In the sign of

house of the

passes over the

white horse,

first day of

Sun, the lion of

the Virgin Virgo,

scales, The Sun

follower Scorpio

The Sun

Winter starts.

the tribe, was

who carries a

finds that the

who betrays the

encounters The

From December

Most High at this

sheath of wheat

trees no longer

sun in a sting

Archer who

22, 23, and 24

degree. The

for our bread

bear fruit so

with it’s kiss of

pierces the Sun

the Sun no

days are now

when the Sun

they are cursed

death. It is fall

with his arrows.

longer falls or

longest and

enters this

to die as The

and The Sun is

The Sun is now

rises by a single

hottest while

house five signs

Sun passover

now falling to

coming to the

degree.

Leo tramples

from the two

the Autumn

it’s death in

end of its

Therefore, it was

the sign of the

fish.

Equinox.

winter.

journey in

Dead For 3 Days

Capricorn.

on this same

snake Hydra.

degree. But we knew The Sun would rise again when we saw

GH

the 3 KINGS of Orion’s Belt

I

Follow Sirius,

J

K L

The Brightest Star in the East

to the birth of GODS SUN on December 25th.

En·the·o·gen

Pronunciation: /enˈthēəˌjen/ /-jən/ Noun: chemical substance, typically of plant origin, that is ingested to produce a nonordinary state of consciousness for religious or spiritual purposes Origin: Greek

JESUS AND QUMRAN: THE DEAD SEA SCOLLS by John M, Allegro. English archaeologist and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar

Allegro received his Honours degree in Oriental Studies at the University of Manchester in 1951. This was followed in 1952 by a masters under supervision of H. H. Rowley. While engaged in further research in Hebrew dialects at Oxford under Godfrey Driver in 1953, Allegro was invited by Gerald Lankester Harding to join the team of scholars working on the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem, so he spent a year in Jerusalem working on the scrolls.

THE SCROLLS How then, on such a long view, can the Scrolls help us to understand the person of Jesus of Nazareth? Well, not much, I think. In those early heady days after the public became aware that caves in the Judaean wilderness had turned up really ancient Jewish documents dating from around the supposed time of Christ, popular speculation centered on the person of the man Jesus and his relationship to the Essenes. Had he perhaps been a member of the Qumran community at some time? Had those ‘forty days’ in the wilderness been spent in the monastery by the Dead Sea? Were the parallels between some aspects of his teaching and Essene thought due to such direct contact, or came they by way of that mysterious prophet of the wilderness, John the Baptist?

Jesus in the Scrolls? Alas, the Scrolls make no mention of the Nazarene Teacher by name. Indeed, the whole gospel tradition of a wine-bibbing associate of whores, pimps, and Quislings, a friend of Roman officers and an advocate of paying taxes to the enemy, has no parallel at all in what little we can glean from the Scrolls about the manner of life of Jesus’s Essene counterpart, the so-called Teacher of Righteousness. But then, the Qumran writings have no literary parallel to the synoptic Gospels, nor do the Essenes seem to have shown any real interest in recording events in such narrative form. For them the experience of their forefathers chronicled in the Bible was all the history they needed; their own situation was but a repetition of what had gone before. In taking up their station on the outskirts of the Promised Land, they believed they were reenacting the events of Joshua more than a millennium earlier, when he led the Chosen People across the Jordan to prepare themselves for their entry into the land God had promised them. The Essene sojourn in their so-called House of Exile was for these latterday Covenanters merely the turn of the circle, the foreordained rehearsal for the establishment of the New Israel and the institution of God’s Kingdom on earth. In other words, where there are parallels in the Scrolls to the Christian story they are, for the most part, more likely to be in the nature of a common mythology; and to seek in the documents detailed correspondences of time, place, and persons is to misunderstand the nature of the Qumran texts and their authors’ attitudes to history.

The events that had affected them in their past were significant only so far as they could be related to biblical prophecy: they then served as ‘signs of the times’. To be noted, sometimes–though rarely–recorded, and then interpreted by their seers to determine their place in the eschatological time scale, factors in the cosmological almanac by which men of understanding could recognize the proximity of the end-time and the appearance among of them of the Messiah, or Christ, ‘him who is to come’. The question we have now to ask is whether the New Testament traditions, despite their easily read narrative style, are not to be understood similarly: whether our onion-peeling in search of the kernel of the historical Jesus is not itself misconceived. I believe it to be so. Even if there was a sectarian Jewish Teacher living in Palestine during the first part of the first century called Joshua, or Jesus, he had nothing at all to do with the crucified Christos of Paul’s theology, and thus had no part to play in the formation of that distinctive amalgam of faiths that eventually swept the world.

The cover story I believe that the innocent collection of tales and sayings which was apparently allowed to pass freely among the beleaguered cells of believers, in hourly danger of discovery and execution, was but a cover story. From that highly improbable account of a gentle rabbi, friend of little children, Roman tax-collectors, and ladies with gynecological problems, could be distilled by skilled interpreters, well versed in The ART of rabbinic exegesis as well as the abracadabra of gnostic mysticism, secret passwords and sayings, the formulae for medicaments and ha1lucinatory drugs, the therapeia in practice and prescription which had earned them their reputation and name of ‘Asayya’, Essenes, ‘physicians’. In the stories and adventures of the Master and his followers may also be found more day-to-day reminders of communal regulative disciplines, and of the titles, qualifications, selection, and duties of their administrators, the bursars, presbyters and bishops. As I have tried to show in my recent book, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth, the stories of Peter in particular are nothing but a dramatized mnemonic of the credentials and responsibilities of the Essene Mebaqqer, Guardian. Peter’s activities can be paralleled at practically every point by the regulative manuals among the Scrolls. The Guardian of the Scrolls community was early on recognized by scholars as the exact counterpart in name and function of the church’s episkopos, bishop’

EXEGESIS “PARDES”

“Pardes”refers to (types of) approaches to biblical exegesis in rabbinic Judaism or to interpretation of text in Torah study. The term, sometimes also spelled PaRDeS, is an acronym formed from the same initials of the following four approaches:

Remez (‫)זֶמֶר‬ “surface” (“straight”) or the literal (direct) meaning. “hints” or the deep (allegoric:

Peshat (‫)טָׁשְּפ‬ hidden or symbolic) meaning beyond just the literal sense.

Derash (‫)ׁשַרְּד‬ from Hebrew darash: “inquire” (“seek”) — the comparative (midrashic) meaning, as given through similar occurrences.

Sod (‫)דֹוס‬ “secret” (“mystery”) or the esoteric/mystical meaning, as given through inspiration or revelation.

The small parchment scrap from the Fourth Cave, whose editio princeps I publish in an appendix to that book, seems to me to offer the first real evidence we have yet seen for the technical meaning of the title Cephas, ‘physiognomist’, ‘scrutineer’, by which alone Paul refers to the first pillar of the Jerusalem Church. And that in turn helps us understand the underlying significance of the story in Matthew Sixteen of Peter’s power of spiritual discernment by which he could recognize the Master’s messianic status and special relationship to God. That art to ‘Christ’, ‘Son of the living God’. That story alone should have given us pause before dismissing similar verbal puns and ‘nicknames’ in the gospel narratives as examples of the trivial banter to be expected among friends, particularly when, as in the case of the brothers ‘Boanerges’, the name is accompanied by a patently false ‘translation’, “sons of thunder”. We have been too ready to shrug off such solecisms as mere faults in transmission by linguistically incompetent scribes. And once we begin to treat those ‘onion skins’ more seriously, we shall begin to recognize beneath their surface other meaningful concepts, and to find their source in key biblical texts whose manner of interpretation is now explicable in terms of the Essene pesharim, or commentaries, from the Qumran library.

Esoteric Christinity In my recent books, in particular The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth, and the forthcoming Physician, Heal Thyself, I have tried to demonstrate something of the multilayered structure of the gospel narratives and teachings. Their ‘decipherment’ is difficult and was intended to be so, just as the Essene secrets were not for the eyes of the uninitiated: even their written works were wrapped up and hidden in caves or, in the final emergency, simply wrenched apart ad thrown into a secret underground chamber. Their most vital mysteries were never committed to writing, as Josephus makes clear, but passed only by word of mouth under awful oaths of silence, and we have found fragmentary documents among their scrolls, which were encoded in cyphers of their own devising. Similarly, the inner councils of the Church were aware of secret writings which were not to be promulgated, even among the faithful. As the second century Church Father, Clement of Alexandria, said in a letter recently recognized and published by Professor Morton Smith, “not everything that is true needs necessarily to be divulged to all men.” That was in connection with part of the Marcan Gospel whose circulation the Church’s elders had deemed wisest to restrict to “those who had been initiated into the great mysteries.” It had to do with the story in the Second Gospel of the rich young man who approached Jesus and whom we now learn was initiated by the Master into “the mystery of the Kingdom of God” during the course of a secret nocturnal ceremony.

“not everything that is true needs necessarily to be divulged to all men .”

it's a me

Once we can bring ourselves to admit that early Christianity, like Essenism, was an esoteric faith offering access to the divine mysteries, and never the open, evangelistic Gospel of the church’s defensive propaganda, we can begin more realistically to probe the depths of the New Testament writings, and to set the faith in its proper historical and religious perspective. As far as the gospel narratives of Jesus are concerned, we may free ourselves forever from the need to lay bare a reality on which to base a more historically convincing portrait of a first-century Teacher who, in three short years, was supposed to have founded a new religion, or so transformed an existing messianic faith that it could become almost immediately acceptable to a gentile world. We are dealing Mr. Chairman with myth, not history.

JESUS! “Thousands of years before Christianity, secret cults arose which worshipped the sacred mushroom the

AMANITA

MUSCARIA which, for various reasons (including its shape and power as a drug) came to be regarded as a symbol of God on earth. When the secrets of the cult had to be written down, it was done in the form of codes hidden in folk tales. This is the basic origin of the storiesin the New Testament. They are a literary device to spread the rites and rules of mushroom worship to the faithful.” - John Marco Allegro

The logos, the word The question we have now to ask is, what was the nature and purpose of that myth? And for the answer we must turn our attention away from the more immediately comprehensible and popular accounts of the Synoptics, to the abstruse interpretations offered by the Fourth Gospel, and the related Johan nine works. And it is significant that it is just here that we come closest to Qumran, as was very early on recognized by scholars. The Dead Sea Scrolls have completely upset the accepted view of the place in Christian tradition of the Johannine witness. Far from it’s being thought the least representative of early Christian thought and the most alien to the Palestinian homeland, we have had to recognize that it is among the earliest, and firmly rooted in native soil. For the writer of the Fourth Gospel, Jesus was the Logos, the Word (1:l). And when he has John the Baptist proclaim, “Behold, the lamb of God” (1:29), he symbolizes, in what is probably the most significant verbal pun in the New Testament, the whole essence of the transformation of the Jewish substitutive ritual of the Passover sacrifice and the concept of the Messiah, into the self-immolation of the Saviour-god of the Hellenistic mystery cults and Pauline Christianity. And that was the faith that won the allegiance of the western world. The pun itself was no more than the inter-dialectal homonym of the Hebrew ‘imerah ‘word’ with the Aramaic — ‘immera’, ‘lamb’. Its graphic representation assumes the nature of the bizarre, when the Apocalyptist has the Lamb marrying the Church (19:7-9), leading the white-robed martyrs as a shepherd to the Throne of Grace (7: 13-1 7 ), having seven horns and seven eyes (5:6), able to break open documentary seals (6:l), and to terrify the world’s rulers with its wrath (7:16), and so on. But the myth’s imagery is no more important than the stories of Jesus’s conjuring tricks with water and wine, or his demonstrations of water-walking and levitation.

What is vital to our understanding of the Christian revelation was that the Jewish Passover victim was identified in this extraordinary mixture of traditional Judaism and Hellenistic mysticism with the Logos, Divine Wisdom, the Essene and Christian ‘Knowledge of God’, whose mysteries initiates were invited to share in the secret rituals of the gnostic cults.

The Crucifixion The second element in the Jesus myth, his crucifixion, was equally significant. Now whether there ever was a Jewish messianic pretender named Joshua or Jesus who was crucified at the instigation of his fellow countrymen in the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate, we shall probably never know. It hardly matters. For the ‘Christ crucified’ of Pauline theology has little to do with the fate of some poor wretch in or about AD 33. The highly developed theology expounded by Paul on the theme of the crucified Saviour was surely the fruit of much longer pious speculation than the intervening decade or two allowed by traditional chronology, and the product of a continuing school of thought rather than the inspired deliberation of one man. If we seek a more suitable point of historical reference, it might be a century or so earlier, when the hated Jewish priest-king Alexander Jannaeus took a terrible revenge against the Jews who had rebelled against him ad had some hundreds of them crucified in Jerusalem. An Essene commentary on Nahum refers specifically to that revolt and its terrible outcome, and this seemed to me particularly significant when I first published the manuscript some thirty years ago. I suggested then that such an unusual historical reference in Essene literature implied some very special eschatological interest in the event, and that this could best be explained if the community’s own beloved Teacher of Righteousness had been caught up in that rebellion and had shared the fate of the other victims of the so-called Lion of Wrath.

“Its essential feature was that it exposed the body of the victim to the elements and clearly goes back to a very old fertility concept of substitutionary sacrifice to the creator god .”

Be that as it may, it is important to note that the later Essene commentator shows himself fully aware of the theological significance of that particular form of execution when he speaks of the victim as “the one hanged alive upon a tree”, a clear reference to the Deuteronomic curse that the hanged man shall be “accursed of God” (21:22-233, and one that is taken up in the New Testament (Galatians 3:13). When we examine the history of the practice in the Old Testament its theological importance becomes clear. For ‘hanging before the Lord’ was not just another barbaric form of execution: it was regarded as a propitiatory offering to the deity to allay the divine displeasure that had manifested itself in same inexplicable natural calamity or other affliction. Its essential feature was that it exposed the body of the victim to the elements and clearly goes back to a very old fertility concept of substitutionary sacrifice to the creator god. So, to bring an end to a punitive famine, the Gibeonites requested that the seven sons of King Saul be given them “so that we may hang them before the lord“ and they were duly put to death“ in the first day of the harvest, at the beginning of the barley harvest.” (11 Samuel 21:6,9).

The Israelites on their journey to the Promised Land had flirted with local cults encountered on their way and suffered plagues as a result. In an expiative ritual Moses had the tribal chiefs, as representatives of the nation, executed by exposure to the sun’s heat, “that the fierce anger of the Lord might turn away from Israel” (Numbers 25 :4). The Hebrew word used in these passages means properly ‘dislocate, be tom away’ and is variously translated in the ancient versions as ‘impale’, ‘expose (in the sun)’, ‘make an example of’, ‘ put to shame’, or ‘crucify’. The execution of the Teacher might have been viewed by his followers at first as a mere tragic accident, a temporary set-back to the progress of the movement, but later reflection must have brought home to their interpreters its theological significance, particularly when, as would appear from their use of common titles, the idea suggested itself to them that the historic Teacher of Righteousness, the Priest, the Law Interpreter, would reappear at the End-time as the Messiah that second Joshua/Jesus who was to lead his people to the New Jerusalem. It was but a step then for their Christian successors to identify that messianic figure who had once been offered as a propitiatory sacrifice to God by the crucifixion ritual, with the self-immolated Saviour-god of gnostic theology, who afforded the means by which the initiate could mystically apprehend the Knowledge of God, or Logos, or, as Paul puts it, “be crucified with Christ” and thereafter have the Christ “live within him” (Galatians 2:20).

If, then, we project the Essenism of Qumran forward in time and place from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the New Testament, we can see a clear line of theological speculation which transformed an exclusive Jewish sectarianism into a Hellenistic mystery religion which could attract the allegiance of all men, Jew or Gentile, bond or free. But the kind of Christianity we arrive at is not that of a faith committed to the historicity of Jesus and the gospel tradition, and the imposition of a single canon and a tyrannical Creed, but that gnostic “heresy” whose essential individualism was so abhorred by the so-called Great Church and which became the target of a persecution no less ruthless than that of the movement’s first political and religious enemies. And to judge from the church’s subsequent history as well as the illegitimacy of its claims to primacy, one cannot help feeling that the wrong side won.

Somewhere in the Northern hemesphere in the not too distant past , there were shamans Whom , throughout the year, would pick a red and white mushroom which then possibliy was filtered through a reindeers digestion , became a food of the Gods. The mushroom was only found in an ecosystem of pine trees and would be placed in its branches to dry and be gathered later. Every winter solstice they would ride throught the snow on a sleigh to deliver the sacred plant . Then by dropping in through the peoples only door: the chimney hole, he would leave them to stay dry in a stocking by the fire.

And I’m glad they’re against the law, ‘cause you know what happened when I took ‘em? I laid in a field of green grass for four hours, going

“My God , I love everything!” The heavens parted, God looked down and rained gifts of forgiveness onto my being,

healing me on every level: psychically, physically, emotionally. And I realized ...

our true nature is spirit, not body, that we are eternal beings, and God’s love is unconditional and there’s nothing we can ever do to change that.

It is only our illusion that we are separate from God , or that we are alone. In fact the reality is we are one with God and He loves us. Now, if that isn’t a hazard to this country!

Do you see my point? How are we gonna keep building nuclear weapons, you know what I mean? What’s gonna happen to the arms industry..... when WE realize we are all one. It’s gonna fuck up the economy! The economy that’s fake anyway! - Bill Hicks

Alan Watts

THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL So this goes very deep into us. It goes deep, deep, deep into a problem we have about guilt. I wonder often if there’s any relationship between guilt and gold - that the love of money is the root of evil. It’s a very true saying. Because you see, the difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money, with the sole purpose of making money. And there are plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to do and that therefore they will pay someone to do it. There is essentially less and less of that, that kind of work because of mechanization. But if you do a job, if you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd. Because if money becomes the goal, and it does when you work that way, you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness - or with pleasure. Yes, one can take a whole handful of crisp dollar bills and practically water your mouth over them. But this is a kind of person who is confused, like a Pavlov dog, who salivates on the wrong bell. It goes back you see to the ancient guilt that if you don’t work you have no right to eat; that if there are others in the world who don’t have enough to eat, you shouldn’t enjoy your dinner even though you have no possible means of conveying the food to them. And while it is true that we are all one human family and that every individual involves every other individual... while it is true therefore we should do something about changing the situation....

THE OBSTACLE And one of the reasons that our technology is impeded and prevented from feeding the world properly is the failure of one of our networks. It’s an information network and it’s called money, about which we have the most unbelievable superstitions and psychological blocks, which have been gone into at some length by Freud who equates our valuation of money with our attitude to excrement, and a very complicated lot of complexes grow up around that. But money and our psychological attitude to money is a major obstacle to a proper development of technology enabling it to do what it is supposed to do - that is to save labor, and to produce goods, services, and so on adequately.

“THE GREAT BANKS” So I must introduce this with a story which is entirely legendary, indeed quite apocryphal. The great banks of the world at one time got absolutely sick of the expense and security measures involved in shipping consignments of gold from one bank to another So they decided that all the chief banks of the world would open offices on a certain island in the South Pacific which was balmy and comfortable and there they would store all the gold in the world. And they put it in great subterranean vaults, reached by deep elevator shafts. Then, all they had to do when one bank or one country owed gold to another was to trundle it across the street. And this was very efficient. It went on beautifully for five or six years. And then the presidents of the world banks got together and said, “Let’s have a convention out on this island and take our wives and families.”

So about seven years from the date of opening, all those presidents and their wives and families went out to this Pacific island and they inspected the books. And everything was beautifully in order. Then the children said, “Oh Daddy can’t we see the gold?” They said, “Of course you may see the gold.” And they said to the managers, “Let’s take our children down to the vaults and show them the gold.” And the manager said, “Well it’s a... it’s a little bit inconvenient at this time and perhaps the children would not really be very interested, after all it’s just only old plain gold.” And the president said, “Oh no, no, come now, they’d be thrilled. Let’s go down and see.” And there was further humming and hawing and delays and finally it came out that a few years before there had been a catastrophic subterranean earthquake and all the vaults had been swallowed up and all the gold had disappeared. But so far as the bookkeeping was concerned everything was in perfect order.

What this means then is that money is nothing but bookkeeping. It is figures. It is a way of measuring what you owe the community and what the community owes you. It is of course as you all know a substitute for barter. If you worked on a farm and the farmer paid you in terms of ears of corn, onions, cabbages, and other vegetables, and yet you wanted a pot and pan of some kind, then you took a few vegetables over to the man who so made pots and pans and you swapped. Some people used cowry shells to stand for money so that you wouldn’t have to barter and carry around all these inconvenient loads of goods and then of course gold was used because gold was rare and because gold was supposed to have a constant value.

“all the vaults had been swallowed up and all the gold had disappeared�

DEBT? You might ponder the question when a banker buys gold with what does he pay for it? The answer is a mystery called credit. Credit is bookkeeping and as the economy of the Western world developed it was found that there was not enough gold around, if it were to remain constant in value, to exchange goods and services. You could of course have changed the picture by putting down the price of goods and services to keep pace with the amount of gold in circulation, but nobody will ever put down the price. There’s something in our psychology whereby prices always tend to go up. But at the same time therefore, because the amount of gold in the world did not provide an adequate channel for the circulation of goods and services, all great industrial nations went heavily into debt. They created a thing called the national debt which year by year gets bigger and bigger and bigger to the horror and consternation of old-fashioned Republicans who pay their bills.

But the reason for the increase of the national debt is extremely obvious. It is that with an expanding gross national product there needs to be more and more money, that is to say tokens of exchange, in order to circulate the amount of goods produced, which is ever increasing. Now I’m not an economist, and I can refer you to the work of those who really are, but any fool can see certain extremely fundamental principles about this whole situation. And I’m speaking of the thought today of a man called Robert Theobald who sort of ties in with the general picture of people like McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller in having very farout thoughts and very adventurous thoughts about what we should do about money. But he is in the following of a man like Frederick Soddy, who was a Nobel Prize chemist, who was one of the first people to think really freshly about economics. Or people like Silvio Gesell in Austria and Major Douglas in England, he’s in that following. And the proposition that he puts forward is very simple–that money is a circulation of information and in itself has no value. Gold of course has some value. It has some value for industry and some value for dentistry and some value for jewelry. But as a means of exchanging the goods and services of the world it is as primitive as post horses for carrying the mail.

YOU THINK MONEY IS REAL We must recognize then that money is a pure abstraction. I was on a television show a little while ago with Ted Sorensen and Raymond Moley and they were having a long, long discussion which sounded like something that goes on in a smoke-filled backroom of party bosses, where they were talking about the prospects for Republican-Democratic parties in 1968.

And then they got onto the question of automation and the problems of unemployment that it was making and the difficulties of transferring workers from this to that when they were only trained for this. Finally I said, “The trouble with you gentlemen is you still think money is real.” And they looked at me and sort of said, “Oh ha ha ha, someone who doesn’t think money is real. Cause everybody knows money is money and it’s very important.”

“But it just isn’t real at all because it has the same relationship to real wealth, that is to say to actual goods and services, that words have to meaning–that words have to the physical world. And as words are not the physical world, money is not wealth. It only is an accounting of available energy–economic energy.”

“And as words are not the physical world , money is not wealth”

Now what happens then when you introduce technology into production? You produce enormous quantities of goods by technological methods but at the same time you put people out of work. You can say, “Oh but it always creates more jobs. There will always be more jobs.” “Yes, but lots of them will be futile jobs. They will be jobs making every kind of frippery and unnecessary contraption, and one will also at the same time have to beguile the public into feeling that they need and want these completely unnecessary things that aren’t even beautiful. And therefore an enormous amount of nonsense employment and busy work, bureaucratic and otherwise, has to be created in order to keep people working, because we believe as good Protestants that “the devil finds work for idle hands to do”. But the basic principle of the whole thing has been completely overlooked, that the purpose of the machine is to make drudgery unnecessary. And if we don’t allow it to achieve its purpose we live in a constant state of self-frustration. So then, if a given manufacturer automates his plant and dismisses his labor force and they have to operate on a very much-diminished income, (say some sort of dole), the manufacturer suddenly finds that the public does not have the wherewithal to buy his products. And therefore he has invested in this expensive automatized machinery to no purpose. And therefore obviously the public has to be provided with the means of purchasing what the machines produce. People say, “That’s not fair! Where’s the money going to come from? Who’s gonna pay for it?” The answer is the machine. The machine pays for it, because the machine works for the manufacturer and for the community.

“THATS COMMUNIST!” This is not the statist or communist idea that you expropriate the manufacture and say you can’t own and run this factory anymore, it is owned by the government. It is only saying that the government or the people have to be responsible for issuing to themselves sufficient credit to circulate the goods they are producing and have to balance the measuring standard of money with the gross national product. That means that taxation is obsolete – completely obsolete. It ought to go the other way. Theobald points out that every individual should be assured of a minimum income. Now you see that absolutely horrifies most people. “Say all these wastrels, these people who are out of a job because they’re really lazy see... ah giving them money?” Yeah, because otherwise the machines can’t work. They come to a blockage. This was the situation of the Great Depression when here we were still, in a material sense, a very rich country, with plenty of fields and farms and mines and factories...everything going. But suddenly because of a psychological hang-up, because of a mysterious mumbo-jumbo about the economy, about the banking, we were all miserable and poor–starving in the midst of plenty. Just because of a psychological hang-up. And that hang-up is that money is real, and that people ought to suffer in order to get it. But the whole point of the machine is to relieve you of that suffering. It is ingenuity. You see we are psychologically back in the 17th century and technically in the 20th.

Suddenly because of a psychological hang-up, because of a mysterious mumbo-jumbo about

And here comes the problem. So what we have to find out how to do is to change the psychological attitude to money and to wealth and further more to pleasure and further more to the nature of work. And this is a formidable problem. It requires the best brains in public relations, in propaganda, in all that kind of thing, in all the media: television, radio, newspapers, everything...to try to get across a message to the vast general public about what money is. You see the difficulty is this. When the public suspects that the money that is being issued, the dollar bills being issued by the government are only paper, and stand only for paper, they start putting up prices so you get an inflationary situation where the more paper money there is, the higher and higher and higher the prices go–which is a very stupid psychological maneuver.

E·phem·er·al·i·zation

Pronunciation: /əˈfem(ə)rəl/ ĭ-zā′shən/ a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller, is the ability of technological advancement to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing”

BUCKMINSTER FULLER

The Crisis Humanity is moving ever deeper into a crisis which has no precedent. It is a crisis brought about by evolution being intent on completely integrating differently colored, differently cultured, and intercommunicating humanity, and by evolution being intent on making integrated humanity able to live sustainedly at a higher standard of living for all than has ever been experienced by any. Probably ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to make it ; we do. It can only be accomplished, however, through a Design Science Revolution.

Do you realize? Those in supreme power, politically and economically, aren’t yet convinced that our Planet Earth has anywhere nearly enough life support for all humanity. They assume it has to be either you or me, that there is not enough for both. Those with financial advantage reason that selfishness is necessary and fortify themselves even further. That’s why the annual military expenditures of the USSR, representing socialism, and the U.S., representing private enterprise, have averaged over two hundred billion dollars. This makes a total so far, of six trillion, four hundred billion dollars to develop the ability to kill the most people at the greatest distance in the shortest amount of time. Neither the great political or financial powers of the world nor the population in general realize that the engineeringchemical-electronic revolution now makes it possible to produce many more technical devices with ever less material. We can now take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever known. It does not have to be “you or me,” so selfishness is unnecessary and war is obsolete. This has never been done before.

Only twelve years ago technology reached the point where this could be done. Since then it has made it ever so much easier to do. With the highest aerodynamic engineering facilities in the world redirected from weapons-delivery production, all humanity now has the option of becoming enduringly successful. The capability has come through the continual dealing with the invisible world of electronics, of alloys. But you have to know what you are doing. Weighing only fifty-five pounds, with a wing span of a hundred ninetysix feet, the human-powered Gossamer Albatross was able to fly across the English Channel because the structure of the materials with which it was built had enormous tensile strength, sixty times stronger per unit of weight than the strongest structural material available to Leonardo da Vinci. This enabled us to finally realize the design of his human-powered flying machine. To give another example, a quarter-ton communications satellite is now outperforming the message carrying capacity and transmission fidelity of one hundred seventy-five thousand tons of transatlantic copper cables. Human-powered pedal airplanes and communications satellites are only two of the hundreds of thousands of examples of technologies which can now accomplish much greater performance with much less material. You have to understand this. This is not a visible revolution and it is not political . You’re dealing with the invisible world of technology.

“It does not have to be “you or me,” so selfishness is unnecessary and war is obsolete.”

Politics Politics is absolutely hopeless. That’s why everything has gone wrong. You have ninetynine percent of the people thinking “politics,” and hollering and yelling. And that won’t get you anywhere. Hollering and yelling won’t get you across the English Channel. It won’t reach from continent to continent; you need electronics for that, and you have to know what you’re doing. Evolution has been at work doing all these things so it is now possible. Nobody has consciously been doing it. The universe is a lot bigger than you and me. We didn’t invent it. If you take all the machinery in the world and dump it in the ocean, within months more than half of all humanity will die and within another six months they’d almost all be gone; if you took all the politicians in the world, put them in a rocket, and sent them to the moon, everyone would get along fine. There is more recognition now that things are changing, but not because there is a political move to do it. It is simply a result of the information being there. Our survival won’t depend on political or economic systems. It’s going to depend on the courage of the individual to speak the truth, and to speak it lovingly and not destructively. It’s saying what you really know and feel is the truth, in all directions.

Our greatest vulnerability lies in the amount of misinformation and misconditioning of humanity. I’ve found the educations systems are full of it. You have to examine each word and ask yourself, ” Is that the right word for that?”- the integrity and the courage of the individual to speak his own truth and not to go along with the crowd, yet not making others seem ignorant. After a while, if enough human beings are doing it, then everybody will start going in the right direction.

It’s going to depend on the courage of the individual to speak the truth , and to speak it lovingly and not destructively .

Are things changing? Most of this change is going on invisibly, technologically. Take all of the people working with computers; we don’t really know all that’s going on. By the time something gets into the newspaper it’s often ten years old. There’s something enormous going on. It means housecleaning all around the world, getting rid of the misinformation that we’re all exposed to. It’s a daring attitude that you can’t let up. You have to do it twenty-four hours a day. For example, almost all of academic science is today operating on mathematical systems the universe is not using. Academic science doesn’t know what it’s talking about. At times when I’ve been invited to speak to important scientific bodies I’ve asked any scientist in that audience who does not see the sun going down in the evening to please raise his or her hand: no one did. I said “For five hundred years we’ve known that the sun is not going to go down. There is no such thing as ‘down.’ The sun’s not doing anything – the earth obscures the sun.” But what are we doing about this kind of error? Nothing. We’re not just dealing in willingness. Humanity has to qualify to survive. You have to have some confidence. We’re all born naked, with no external equipment and no experience. Therefor we’re terribly ignorant. We’re hungry and thirsty, driven to find food by trial and error. So we’re designed to live by trial and error. Don’t worry about making mistakes. Study your mistakes; admit them, study them, and be terribly excited about them too. If this isn’t true, what is true?

Weapons As for weapons, there’s no sense in weapons. But we have had to learn by making mistakes. If I thought, “There’s not enough to go around,” then I have to say, “How come God put me here?” and “Maybe I have to do away with you because there’s not enough to go around.”

“What kind of competition is there in your body? Suppose your brain said “I’m the most important organ!” and the liver said, “I am, and I want to go in a free enterprisesystem!’

My responsibility is to me. I could under those circumstances rationalize my response selfishly. I could say, “My family is a little more devout than other families; my family is better than yours.” That’s the kind of rationalization we’ve been doing.

You would rot away in a month, if every organ of your body, were out for itself.” - Jacque Fresco Industrial Designer Social Engineer

ENERGY I find that through a proper understanding of the basic principles of the universe there is ample to go around. I know this is so, not intuitively but by actual knowledge of the figures involved. So we come back to the question of the weapons: weapons are invalid if there is enough life support to go around. Since there is ample to go around, I don’t talk about weapons because they are obsolete tools. Now as far as using atomic energy, I say, “Nature has already given us all we need – which is the sun.” Big government, big business, and big religion don’t see any way to put a meter between the people and the sun, so they don’t do anything serious about developing solar energy. These organizations are predicated on people not having enough to go around and they still have to have big money to survive.

All ideas coming from these organizations are based on the idea of humanity’s being a failure and that everyone should be in pain and suffering. Their business is “Come down and get a turkey dinner from us and we’ll get you into heaven.” There is enough to go around, but the church is not interested in that because it would put them out of business. The Roman Catholic church, for example, is terribly rich. They have an enormous amount of real estate all around the world. Big businesses too are at the top of the heap. They’d all have to go out of business if humanity is a success. There’s a built-in resistance to letting humanity be a success. Each one claims that their system is the best one for coping with inadequacy. We have to make them all obsolete. We need to find within technology that there is something we can do which is capable of taking care of everybody, and to demonstrate that this is so. That’s what geodesic domes are about and that’s what my whole life has

“Nature has already given us all we need – which is the sun .”

Terence mckenna An American ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and an advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. He was called the “Timothy Leary of the ‘90s”, “one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism”, and the “intellectual voice of rave culture”.

So, just to bring it all around here... The great exhibit which we must always keep in front of ourselves and our critics, is the mystery of the human mind and body. No one knows how it is that I can command my hand to make a fist and that it will do that. I mean, that’s mind over matter: that’s the violation of every scientific principle in the book. And yet it is the most trivial experience any of us have; we expect to command our body. We expect the mental will to order the monkey flesh into action, and it will follow.

Selling your body The body is the nexus of the mystery of life. And our culture takes us out of the body, and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us. That’s why it’s called escape, because it’s escape from HBO, from walking the mall, from seeing what’s on the tube, from consuming trash media, it’s escape from all of that, into the authenticity of the body. This is why sexuality is so edgy in this society. They’d make it illegal if they could but figure out how. It’s the one drug they can’t tear from our grip, and so they lay a guilt trip about it.

This is why sexuality is so edgy in this society . They’d make it illegal if they could but figure out how.

GAIAN MIND But sexuality and psychedelics are carrying us back to an authentic sense of the body. They are carrying us back to the domain of authentic values. And more and more, the message that people are getting as they avail themselves of the psychedelic experience is that: it is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bardos of our chaotic civilization; it’s a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind, that the Earth is a coherent whole: It is a thinking, feeling, intending, being, that in terms of our value structures, it would be foolish to imagine as anything other than female. And when cultural values created by male dominance and science and linearity and so forth and so on. When those values are dissolved, what is waiting there is this incredibly poignant experience of the matrix. What James Joyce called the Mama Matrix Most Mysterious: nothing more than our bodies and the earth out of which our bodies came.

The real ISSUE History, as we have lived it in the West, has been a turning of our back on that and now history has failed. Western cultural institutions, having become global institutions, now show themselves to be inadequate to inspire, lead or carry anyone into a future worth living in. At this moment, then, this reconnecting to the Gaian mind becomes a kind of moral imperative. So this whole drug issue is not an issue even about criminal syndicates or about untaxed billions, or about the mental health of our youth, or any of that malarkey. I mean, God, the most destructive drug that’s known to the species is peddled on every street corner, without restriction. The real issue is what kind of mental world shall people inhabit? What kinds of hope shall be permitted? What kind of value systems shall be allowed? And the value systems that aggrandise the possession of things, the tearing up of the Earth, competition, classism, racism, sexism, have led us to the brink of catastrophe. Now, I think we have to abandon Western cultural values and return to the deeper wisdom of the body in connection with the plants. That’s the seamless web that leads us back into the heart of nature; and if we can do this, then this very narrow neck of cultural crisis can be navigated. Very little of the past can be saved. The architectonics, the machines, the systems of monetary exchange and propaganda, the silly religions, the asinine aesthetic canons, very little of that can be saved. But what can be saved is the sense of love and caring, and mutuality, that we all put into and take from the human enterprise.

A cultural Test You know, there’s a Grateful Dead song that says, “You can’t go back and you can’t stand still. If the thunder don’t get you, then the lightning will.” And we now hold, through the possession of these psychedelics, catalysts for the human imagination of sufficient power that if we use them we can deconstruct the lethal vehicle that is carrying us toward the brink of apocalypse. We can deconstruct that vehicle and redesign it into a kind of starship that would carry us and our children out into the broad starry galaxy we know to be awaiting us.

But it’s a cultural test. Nature is pitiless. Intelligence is a grand experiment upon which a great deal has been writ; but if it proves inadequate, nature will cover it over with the same kind of cool impunity that she covered over the dinosaurs and the trilobites and the crossopterygian fishes, and all those other folks that came before. So what we must do, I think, is see our future in the imagination. Catalyse the imagination. Form symbiotic relationships with the plants. Affirm archaic values. And spread the good news that what is out of control, what is in fact dying, is a world that had become too top-heavy with its own hubris, too bent by its own false value systems, and too dehumanised to care about what happened

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