It is my belief that psychedelics are the best tool we have at our disposal to deal with the various issues we now face as individual human beings and as a species.

Our present day culture is hyper-consumptive, aggressively militaristic, routinely bigoted and oppressive, and roundly intolerant of differing worldviews. As a society, our highest values are material wealth and status, though we spend great amounts of time paying lip service to abstractions like “enlightenment values” and “democratic ideals”. We are also more depressed, more anxious, more fearful, suicidal, psychotic, and generally psychologically unwell than at any other point in history. Our sciences have been used against us, turned into powerful engines for programs of environmental destruction and the creation of illegitimate theories of race, identity, psychology and false images of mankind. We think of ourselves as “economic actors”, “rational actors”; all the while ignoring the very real and very human, irrational, and un-economic traits we all display on a day to day basis.

This kind of a cultural environment is profoundly delusional, lending itself to forms of narcissistic self-justification and grandiose mythologies of exceptionalism on the part of the individual, the corporation, the nation, the faith, the party; and so on. The basic assumptions of the Christian universe; that man is the head of nature and therefore its owner, have not been unseated by scientific advancement, rather they have been codified into a more powerful set of assumptions and propagated into such developments as the atomic bomb, chemical warfare, mass deforestation, industrial fishing and the extraction of rare resources. Similarly, the Christian terror of apocalypse and the associated flight out of the world of matter and into the sacralized realms of the high heavens has snuck its way into the technologic century under the guise of Futurism, it’s proponents singing the hymnals of the transcendence of the dense world of sinful material and the emergence of the human spirit into realms of light and bliss.

All this is conducted under a naivety of self-reflection, an incapacity to see the glaring madnesses that lurk at the foundations of these now top heavy and wobbling ideals and programs. It relies on people staying within their lanes, so to speak, on normal individuals going about business as normal and questioning only that which is suggested for them to question. The whole edifice of control and abuse upon which the palaces of the oligarchs of Gotham are built, runs on boundaries. Without these artificial prisons of gender, race, class, faith, ideology and so on, we are faced with the uncomfortable fact that we are all basically akin, human; and responsible for not only the present moment and our own affairs but also the yawning future into which we travel. None of us knows what’s going on here. We are part of an astounding mystery that beggars all belief, an unfolding of cosmic harmony and pattern of unimaginable proportions.

The experience presented by the psychedelics, and why they may be our best hope to overcome our present woes, is one of boundary dissolution. The usual modes of behaviour and thought fall away, the mind become strange and lucid, and one is transported out of the familiar and into the realms of the bizarre, the unknown, the terrifyingly beautiful, the ancient and the yet-to-come. Traveling through alien vistas of light and magic, where language builds boats to take one across the river of the stars, the notion of subjection of one’s thoughts and affairs to another human primate becomes immediately and laughably absurd. It is seen for what it is: a hoax, a shell-game, a slice of nonsense, a bill of goods, utter and complete bullshit. In the face of such incomprehensible complexity, looking into the face of the odd, what being would choose such a banal form of slavery?

The suppression of this explosive experience has been the prerogative of governments and organizations of every sort, from so-called scientific institutes to the Catholic church, from Islamic theocracies to First-World secular democracies. Anyone with a vested interest in the earthly power game has some rap about how these things turn you insane, or make you an immoral person, or give you brain injuries or chromosomal defects. Of course, a good portion of these people rape children and finance resource wars, so to be frank and short; fuck their opinion on the matter. The wise do not take advice on the nature of their own minds from the ethically bankrupt purveyors of deathtraps for other beings. Flies ought not to pay heed to the tales spun by spiders.

All this suppression should tell you something rather obvious about the psychedelic experience: it’s real. It’s not a hoax. It’s not an ideology, or a theory, or a religious narrative. There’s no giant leap of faith to make, no convenient foundational myth you need to swallow before it makes sense to you: all that is required is that you ingest enough of the material to elicit the effect. In this sense then, the psychedelic experience stands alone, above and away from our other efforts and enterprises to come to the nature of reality, to see ourselves, to find the mind or the self, or to understand the meaning of life. It is not abstract, symbolic, as are all these other systems and myths, science included. It is direct, first-hand, and experiential.

This is why governments, churches and mobs of monkeys with vested interests in a narrative all agree that these things are not for you. They shame everything else in town! What Bible or Manifesto or Treatise can stand next to a direct confrontation with one’s own innermost reality?

They empower the individual to make sense of their world on their own terms. They provide the raw datum from which intelligence and coherence can be forged. They destroy the prisons of belief and accepted fact that distort and limit our perceptions of reality, and open us to new ways of thinking, feeling and doing. Through this process of boundary dissolution, the psychedelics clear away the dead wood of our bad habits and allow us an opportunity to reform as more fully integrated and cohesive beings.

Currently, boundaries between liberals and conservatives, gays and straights, blacks and whites, capitalists and socialists, nationalists and globalists and so on are making the world an increasingly dangerous and unstable place. These imaginary lines between people, abstract definitions grossly grafted onto the eternally uncategorizable phenomenon of the human being, are driving some very strange and very anti-social behaviour. People have become so attached to these boundaries, these linguistic definitions of who, what and why they are what they think they are, that they are willing to kill for them. And of course, this is nothing new, but perhaps the range of groups and sub-groups who are willing to go to these extremes is. What is clear is that without some rather hasty intervention, this situation will get dangerously out of hand. We are too close to the precipice of our own extinction to allow such courting of disaster to go unchecked.

So, I propose that the single most valuable political, social, intellectual and individual act a person can undertake in 2019 is to take a high dose of psilocybin, alone, in silent darkness. I suggest psilocybin because it has a long history of human use and is next to impossible to overdose on. This is the one action that will get to the root causes of our social, environmental and political issues; the premature certainty, the false images of mankind, the hubris of technological solutionism, the faith in god, gun or grand idea. It will allow us to reach down past the floor of our culture and into the seldom seen and labyrinthine basement and to dredge up from there that which is basic and universal to us. It will give us new eyes with which to appraise our situation of considerable malaise. No other program can do it. We have tried everything else. Religious solutions, political solutions, economic solutions, technological solutions: all have brought us closer to the brink, all have exposed us to greater dimensions of risk with comparatively little reward to show for it. And I believe this is because these methods are all fundamentally abstract, so far up the chain of causality that to attempt to stymie the flow of events by acting from them as a base is akin to attempting to plug the leaks in a cracking dam wall; it is never going to work.

We have to get in on the ground floor, at the fundamental level where perceptions, thoughts, experience, identity, embodiment, mind, nature and reality all interweave. We must peer into the foundations of consciousness itself, and attempt to appreciate the mystery insofar as we are able to. Without this source of data, without accounting for these experiences in our physics, our biology, our psychology and so on, we can at best give our hypotheses about the nature of reality the title of clever stories. They will always lead us astray, as we have thought to have begun at the beginning when in reality we have started the process of our explanation some two thirds of the way through the story.

The basic justifications for our ways of doing things, for our ideas about the nature of reality and so on, all fall down under even the most basic examination from a psychedelic perspective. Nothing is as it seems, and nothing is self-evidently justified. The common illusion of normality is seen as an elaborate fiction, placed into the minds of children for the purposes of convenience, to make the usually unpredictable human predictable, so that they may be ordered and set to task by self-appointed masters of mankind who believe their lofty aims to be adequate justification for the enslavement of their own.

What floats to the surface of consciousness in this destruction of the common-sense narrative are values that stretch back into prehistory and millennia into the future, values which honor and raise humanity. We see ourselves, when we have taken off the lead blanket of culture, identity, the normal and the known; as fundamentally related to and perhaps made of love, as participants in a great and mysterious experience of growth and change, as co-creators with the intelligence of the universe. We come to know ourselves as the inheritors of billions of years of evolutionary successes, as the unspeakably strange experiencers of the here-and-now. We see the perfection and the preciousness of our consciousness, our form, our body, and this universe, this world and its nature. We feel deeply and intimately responsible and connected to this life, and filled with a newfound respect and warmth towards all living beings and that from which they emerge.

In such a state of consciousness, the false assumptions and delusions that give rise to belief systems of isolation, in-group/out-group identification, national pride, religious zealotry, call-out cultures and so on become simply untenable: they are seen for the absurdly partial and incomplete notions they are, and discarded accordingly.

This is why it is better to sit in your room, alone, on a head full of mushrooms, than it is to go out and wave a sign in someone’s face at a rally. No minds are changed through ideological warfare in the streets. Political action is toothless when conducted from a place of partiality, when there are “sides” involved and people taking them seriously. The true activist is a psychedelic activist, a person who sees through the illusory dualisms of the political sphere and acts right over the top of them, right through them to speak to that which is fundamentally human in all those present. When we act from this place, take this consciousness to the streets, then we may have a chance of creating lasting change. We are more united than the smiley gladhands selling toxic ideas of division and difference would have us believe.

So, munch, then march. Swallow, don’t follow. And most of all, think for your damn self. Touch the mystery directly, and ignore the hysterical salesmen with their pet theories and their organizations. The fate of the species is in your hands, you may as well enlist a helping stem, cap, or two.