Life is an Opportunity

This illustration represents the host of natural phenomena which collectively have created life as we know it. Life apparently requires a solar system having a planet with "suitable" conditions such as liquid water, nutrients, and sources of energy. Interactions between various substances and energy yielded the autocatalytic systems capable of passing information from one generation to the next, and the thread of life began.

This thread, which has been maintained by DNA molecules for much of its history, is shown weaving its way through the primitive oceans, gaining strength, and gradually acquiring the lineages of organisms whose descendants populate our modern biosphere. Plants and animals then moved onto the land, where more advanced forms, including humanity, ultimately arose.

Finally, assisted with a technology of its own making, life has reached back out into space to understand its own origins, to expand into new realms, and to seek other living threads in the cosmos.

You have to have a personal experience of something to worship, and this is what has been lacking. What the churches are peddling is high abstraction and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention.

The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience. It’s accessible -- in a way we are like Calvinists not in our ethics or our restraint on behavior but in our insistence on a direct personal relationship with the mystery.

This is something very new we have really accepted the idea that truth be sensed through hierarchies, basically from Newsweek, Time and the Washington Post, down to us as consumers of these various images of what is going on. The notion that you might know more about reality than the combined editorial board of Scientific American and the Journal of Foreign Affairs is startling stuff, we always give ourselves away. We don't realize it depends on you -- to believe that at Cornell or down at SRI people understand the universe...is not helpful. YOU must understand the universe, and if you don't know partial differential calculus....then your model of how the universe works must do it without partial differential calculus.

In other words it's not read anywhere where one model will work, and in fact I think all abstract models should be highly suspect.

It's an opportunity, you have to view life as an opportunity, what are you doing with it? -- are you afraid of it? Some people live their lives, apparently what they are doing is arranging their deathbed scene, and they want it to take place in a large baronial house with clipped green lawns -- acres in surround. They want the room in which they die to be filled with fine art. They want their loving heirs to be beautifully assembled while they pass out the finalism.

They spend their entire life creating the dramatic scenario of their passage. Of course you have to work hard to make the money to buy that house, you have to sire all these children and educate them into your values so they won't be stabbing you in the back and misbehaving in this situation. You have to create loyalty, possession, power -- all of these things and then you won't die in the ditch, unknown and abandoned.

But on the other hand what was the quality of that life?

Life is an opportunity, how much pressure should you put on it? How many places should you go? How many drugs should you take? How many sexual configurations should you experiment with? How many professionals should you have? How seriously do you take it? Do you just think life is a lark, and it's fine with you that you’re going to go into a pine box and be forgotten for all eternity?

I think of it as a telephone booth being filled with water and you can see that when the water reaches the top of the telephone booth you’re going to be dead as a doornail. And, so you have 30 years to figure it out --we are alive; there is no contest about that.

Do you have some inner consolation that won't happen, and that your going to go off and be with all those who have ever died?

It's extremely improbable that we should be alive, that we should be here thinking, feeling, sharing. The fact that we are alive, throws open the whole game and means anything is probably possible.

I doubt if it's easy, I bet you have to be very, very smart to figure out what's going on and get it right.

I guess I have a sort of private religion of intelligence. It isn't how good you are, it's how wily you are, which was the Greek virtue of Odysseus, which was always his epitaph – that he was Wily Odysseus.

Reality is some kind of maze; it isn't to the swift that the race goes. It's to the thoughtful, the careful, and the one who can tease it all apart.

For puzzle solving, the psychedelic is this tremendously powerful tool, because it extends the domain of mind, and that’s what is necessary to make it go.

"If one leaves aside the last three hundred years of historical experience as it unfolded in Europe and America, and examines the phenomenon of death and the doctrine of the soul in all its ramifications - Neo-Platonist, Christian, dynastic-Egyptian, and so on, one finds repeatedly the idea that there is a light body, an entelechy that is somehow mixed up with the body during life and at death is involved in a crisis in which these two portions separate. One part loses its raison d’être and falls into dissolution; metabolism stops.

The other part goes we know not where. Perhaps nowhere if one believes it does not exist; but then one has the problem of trying to explain life. And, though science makes great claims and has done well at explaining simple atomic systems, the idea that science can make any statement about what life is or where it comes from is currently preposterous." -- Terence McKenna

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