Alan Watts and Terence McKenna talk about our need for a collective consciousness as our solvable global issues get neglected, causing us to become enemies of our planet and each other. Video produced by the Omega Point
What I am involves what you are, the problem is you see… We haven’t been taught to feel that way.
The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it–aliens. And we are, I think, quite urgently in need of coming to feel that we ARE the eternal universe, each one of us.
– Alan Watts, The Nature Of Consciousness
It comes out of a personal act of courage made by the individual. An act of courage which involves Surrender. Surrender is the opposite side of the coin of Ego. The central issue of our times is the inability to surrender to what we KNOW is right.
We have the ability to feed the hungry, we have the ability to educate our children, to clean up our environment, to eliminate sexism, to eliminate racism. The question is: CAN WE CHANGE OUR MINDS FAST ENOUGH?
– Terence McKenna, MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) Conference 1990
It’s the pyramid again, some billions of transactions creating an “I” that looks out from the apex of the pyramid. If one sinks into that near boundless babble of actions with an organized or inspired paradigm, then pattern after pattern emerges. It looks like chaos, but something of a higher order is driving it. Those who manage to achieve shamanic stability can remain in that whirlwind of input and yet function with astonishing efficaciousness on the everyday sunlit plane. Psychedelics grant the neophyte a moment in that creative storm, but only a very few can remain … and usually only with training. I thank McKenna for his travels there and I applaud his marvelous language display, but I am not at all sure that his is the path to what I might call enlightenment or sainthood.