Wake Up & Let Go

The Nexus

         

          New York City…until recently, I had only looked upon this place as the backdrop to many films I watched, or the comics I grew up with as a child.   Of course, everyone in the country recognizes New York for many different reasons.  Recent history gives us all a different picture of the Big Apple, of course I refer to the events that transpired 11 years ago with the destruction of the World Trade Center.  I can’t say that I am much different anymore.  Talking to natives about the city on that day helps me have a well rounded perspective.  This took place 3 weeks after my brother’s death.   I was already infused into a chaotic grief with his suicide.  On August 20^th, my world changed…forever.  On September 11^th, I knew the entire planet was changed, and would never be the same again. 

            On September 18^th, 2012 Zak and I entered the city.  I could fee the energy from across the Hudson, or maybe I was just dumbfounded by the sheer enormity of the place.   Of course it is sweltering with energy, there’s 8 million+ people living in confined quarters.  Still, there wasn’t the hostility that the rest of the country associates with New York.  I never found myself in a situation with a New Yorker where I felt they were being rude.  I’m sure they have their share of assholes, in a city that dense, it’s impossible not have too.  What I am saying is, I never experienced any.

            What I did find was that the average New Yorker is just extremely busy.  It isn’t considered a rude gesture when they don’t pay you any mind.  Their busy people, they have shit to do; places to go and people to see.  After spending an after noon with my homestay in New York, she pointed out the obvious foreign nature of my behavior.  For starters, I held the door open for most people.  This isn’t entirely strange, but it isn’t a natural phenomenon for you average citizen to do.  Most city folk leave the door open wide enough for the next person to grab, me, I held the damn thing wide open and let a flow of street traffic file in.

The last morning in the city, while sitting on the front stoop, I pronounced a good morning to an elderly woman who was walking buy.  She reciprocated, and I followed with a how are you doing?  She gave me an odd look and stopped.  “Do I know you?”, she asked.  “Not at all.  I just wanted you to know I cared.”  She continued her inquisitive stare as she began to walk away.  I don’t consider this behavior to be rude.  Like I said before, these people are busy folk.  It’s a highly condensed city in such a small area with a plethora to do. 

            It seems to be part of the cities energy and ethos.  So much diversity of people tightly condensed into such a small brew.  It is a beautiful melody ot the chaotic order of alchemical magic.  Ok, taking it to far, but New York is a living entity, with each individual person being a singular cell.  Now I have never been to Tokyo or Beijing, but I am gonna go out on a lim and assume that said cities are not nearly as diverse as New York.  I will allow you, the viewer, to decide if I am incorrect.  In the small amount of time I have spent in New York, I was witness to a wide range of culture.  Never before in all my life, have I been in the midst of such extreme diversity.   New York City is an ecstatic place with a highly potent energy about it.

            I don’t know if I could live in the city.  It isn’t the pace of the place, more so than the high density of it all.   The energy of the city can be quit intoxicating, but power that permeates through the city is not just confined to the area of the city in and of its self.  There is something that brews in the area.  While concentrated by the masses in New York, the trail continues up the Hudson valley.  Perhaps it was what was waiting for me, or it’s simply the energy of the isolated natural world that lives outside of the metropolis.

My Dark Wilderness of Blinding Light

           

           The RISE journey is coming to an end.  Everyday we move closer to COSM: The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.  As the scenery has changed, expectedly, so have I.  In the beginning, I was so amped.  Filled with adrenaline, excitement, and the wonder of the infinite possibility that awaited me.  Each new day I reveled at the American landscape, and I have marveled at its amazing diversity.  As the countryside changed, so did the season as did the culture.  It has been a blessing to be a witness to this land I have known as home.  As everything has been in a constant state of metamorphosis that I am now accustomed too, I have become aware of the most important change:  The revolution within.

            Allowing the constant change of the outer world to become the norm, I am no longer as distracted by it as I have been for so many months.  This has allowed the appropriate space in my mind to take the leap inward.  For the past three or four weeks, I have finally reached the point of welcoming the silence.  It is still quit unsettling, and takes time to relax into.  It also brings a new layer to the tour itself.  I have kept to myself as much as I possibly can.  Sure, I fall into old habits and continue to distract myself.  Scanning the Internet, looking for people to talk to on the Facenet, or watching old episodes of LOST.  As time begins to move on, I am taking the time to go for walks.  During most of these walks, I have also refrained form listening to my ipod.  Just take a stroll and allow myself to integrate the ambiance of what ever may be in the environment.

            This has allowed me to have more conversations with myself.  Asking those tough question and peal away those layers that hide my many paradoxical truths.  Its not always the most fun or entertaining exercise.  Truth be told, it can be down right frightening.  The more I peal away, the more questions I ask, I begin to realize a simple truth…there are no definitive answers.  There is only the feeling of flow.  I know you’d like to have a more thorough explanation.  I don’t have one.  How does one explain an abstract?  There seems to be no sufficient language for feelings, only a feeble attempt for understanding.   If you need a better description, I would ask you to think of gravity, or to watch a flowing river.  Sit in silence and just observe it as it is:  the water, the rocks within and on the banks, and the life that dwells with the flow.  Watch every aspect and how it all interacts.

            As humans in an industrialized world, we have become so hardwired for stimulation.  We are constantly searching for gratification of the pleasure centers in our brains, that we have become distracted.  Maybe it’s just me, and it is my issue alone, but it’s as if we have lost the connection of self and the divinity of the living moment.  The journey inward takes time, attention, and courage to let go of attachment.   The path can be a dark, cold, and murky wilderness, but there is a silver lining.  The light is just above the dense canopy.  It splinters between each massive tree and thick brush to show the way.  The way isn’t a universal map.  It is dramatically different for each and every one of us, but its there nonetheless.

It has taken five to six months to transition into this new method on this journey, and as the tour winds down, soon I will have more time for solitude and self reflection.  This is a process that I do not intend to rush.  My journey home is still one that is in constant motion, and I am not married to anyone way on how to go about it.  I am willing to take what comes at me, what ever that is.  While I have many ideas, I am allowing myself to be without schedule and up for what ever change the flow decides for me.  All I can do is initiate the navigational coordinates of my intention, and through the power of will, I will be taken where I need to be. 

The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors

COSM:  The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors is the destination for the RISE bicycle tour.  I invite you to watch the film below to learn more about the Chapel.  You can decide for yourself, why we chose to end in such a magical place.

Worlds Collide

As long as I can remember, I have been accused of over thinking.  All too often I allow the supposed rational logical perception of my mind to over analyze a situation or subject to no end.  My simple human mind desperately fights for understanding.  We all do it, I happen to be one of those individuals that have found myself in a self deprecating habit, when I dig to far down the rabbit hole, I make myself sick.  Sure, an analytical mind is needed for problem solving and innovation, but when emotions are swept up into the equation, it becomes volatile recipe.

I usually find myself in this self inflicted agony when thrusting into the maze of mind while contemplating the matters of my heart.  I seem to have found myself near the edge of the very tempest of said confusion.  Why haven’t I fallen in, to be emotionally swept away into the madness?  History.  At long last I feel I may be learning something from my past.  Time will tell, but at this moment in time I still have my feet firmly planted beneath me.

What is the meaning for all this confusion?  What clutter of thoughts has my mind all jammed up?  Not to sound cliché or simply submit to some age old archetype, but when a heterosexual male usually finds himself twisted and contorted mental or emotionally, its usually a safe bet that a woman isn’t far behind.   It’s not what you think.  Having ones mind congested isn’t always a bad thing.  In fact, the answer I would be searching for has already revealed itself to me, and continues to do so.  I’ll get back to that in a moment.  I sense you would like finer detail.  You want the meat and potatoes.  I get it…no one likes to be jerked around.

What is the source for all my confusion…well, it’s me.  The inspiration for the source is a woman who I am quit fond of.   Her name is Jessica, the woman who took us in for almost a week while we stayed in Austin, TX.  As I have mentioned before(in an earlier blog), I met her briefly six years earlier.  I was extremely intrigued, but was dating another woman.  The depth of my intrigue was so great, I knew I would surely brew up trouble if I followed my curiosity, so I never perused even in friendship. 

Time turns, and as it does, it tend to bring up things from the past.  For whatever reason, this time around there was no excuse to disengage.  Upon my arrival to her home, my intrigue once again was in abundance.  She was easy to talk to and talk we did.  We resonate on many levels in the human experience.  Love, artistic self expression, passion for the world and it’s inhabitants, and with a gentleness and compassion that leaves space and desire to understand that which is foreign to us.

You might be asking yourself, “what’s the problem?’  Well, despite our many similarities, there is one dramatic rift.  A divide that is much too wide to reconcile, while we both stand at opposite ends of the spectrum.  The issue:  I am into monogamous paring, while Jessica is very much into Polyamory.   Still wondering why I am confused?  Yeah…so am I.  Its not really confusion as it is acceptance…or lack there of.  We are both very fond of one another, but there is no way for it to work.  In the end, the differences of our needs are far to vast.  Though I must admit, I did delve into the idea of a polyamory lifestyle.  My conclusion?  Well…it’s just not me.  Not at this moment in time.

  Sure, I’ve had my share of conditioning in this life.  Being monogamous wasn’t an issue my initial programming.  Need more…this isn’t the venue for painstaking detail, so I’ll keep it simple.   Polyamory doesn’t compute in my operating system.  First, I have my own strange idea about vulnerability.  I don’t see myself capable of being %100 vulnerable with another human being if I have plan B, C, D, & E waiting in the wing.  Second, who has the time…those who do…fantastic, but I don’t.  I’m a busy man out on a crusade…ok, not that busy.  You get the point.

Alas, the obviousness of the truth is so loud it is defining.  It had been there all along, only I chose to ignore it.  It’s what happens when you let those chemicals flow in the brain and run boldly into the oasis of emotions.  The honest truth:  There is no Jessica & Thomas romantic partnership.  Friends…yes, but not lovers…not anymore.  For me, Jessica was a part of the RISE tour, a very special aspect.  I will cherish my experience, and what I learned in the time that we had.  In this moment, that’s all there is left to do.  

No Direction But To Follow What You Know...

I have never been gone from the physical territory that I would call home.  The RISE tour is near the 6 month anniversary.  I am tired, my body it breaking down, and I’m emotionally drained.  I guess it would be safe to say that I am feeling a bit homesick.  The last cross country adventure I participated in, I had a love waiting for me back home.  This time it’s different.  Part of my heart resides in Austin, TX, but that’s another story for another time.  I like to joke around and say that all I really miss back home is the smell of my pillow.  Of course, that sentiment is a sad attempt at expressing my inner comedian.  Truth be told, there is far more about the place in the southwest that I call home.

To be totally honest, I do have a love/ hate relationship with the Phoenix area.  It’s far to spread out, and the transit system is brutally lacking.  There is a brewing culture of infuse art/activism, but it never felt as if it was interconnected.  Maybe it was just me.  Perhaps I was the one that disconnected.  I wouldn’t doubt that.  The more I did venture out of my cave as the RISE tour drew near, I began to discover what I felt I never had before, a community I truly call home.  As usual, completely segregated from on another.  With all my frustration for the city, it has such great potential.  Like each and every one of us, it’s a work in progress.

Outside of my personal opinions with the lay out of the city and its vast culture, I have those personal relationships that keep me very connected to the place.  For far too long I locked myself away from so many amazing people.  Sure I would surface from time to time & connect with people, but for the last 6 years it has been too few, and much to far between.  I always have some plan for the future, and I act like some dictator architect, not allowing anyone in my way.  To bad, I can’t stop myself from being the one in the way.  Sure, determination is needed to fulfill ones blissful goals, but balance is needed.  Balance was a foreign term to me.  As the RISE tour drew near, I relaxed enough to engage these amazing people that I love dearly. 

                                

       

If there is on place about home that I miss, it has to be Sedona and the surrounding Verde Valley.  When I finally created space, this Eden in the high desert provided sanctuary for me to heal and recharge.  Of all the places that I have been to in this country, there is no other that resonates so deeply with my soul.  It is a majestic landscape from red rocks to crystal clear streams, with some areas in the valley being covered with vineyards.  The culture vibes with new age healers, crazed artists, country folk, and metropolitan escapes convicts of corporate America. 

Like many others, I have discovered my connection to Sedona and the great Verde Valley.  Say what you will, but it may be the closest relationship that I have in Arizona.  The very thought of putting more distance between the high desert and me, brings an overwhelming anxiety.       

 Still, the time will come when I must move on.  Nothing is written in stone.  Perhaps I end up in Austin with Jessica, or by myself.  Maybe I’ll find myself in Portland.  Maybe the fates would be so gracious to have me land in Sedona.  The possibilities are endless.  The trick is to not fight the flow. 

No matter where I find myself, my heart will always swell with AZ love.  Arizona was my first home.  Sedona and the Verde Valley will always be my first love.  I won’t ever forget the experiences I’ve had and the moments that shaped me.  Born a desert rat, I was nurtured in the heat of the valley of the sun.  For as long as I live, I will be a sun worshiper.  This fact, I shall never forget.

MeKenna's Plan

Plan/Plant/Planet
by Terence McKenna

Our present global crisis is more profound than any previous historical crises; hence our solutions must be equally drastic. I propose that we should adopt the plant as the organizational model for life in the twenty-first century, just as the computer seems to be the dominant mental/social model of the late twentieth century, and the steam engine was the guiding image of the nineteenth century.

      This means reaching back in time to models that were successful fifteen thousand to twenty thousand years ago. When this is done it becomes possible to see plants as food, shelter, clothing, and sources of education and religion.

The process begins by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Let us declare nature to be legitimate. All plants should be declared legal, and all animals for that matter. The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.

      Reestablishing channels of direct communication with the planetary Other, the mind behind nature, through the use of hallucinogenic plants is the best hope for dissolving the steep walls of cultural inflexibility that appear to be channeling us toward true ruin. We need a new set of lenses to see our way into the world. When the medieval world shifted its worldview, secularized European society sought salvation in the revivifying of classical Greek and Roman approaches to law, philosophy, aesthetics, city planning, and agriculture. Our dilemma will cast us further back into time in search for models and answers.

      The solution to much of modern malaise, including chemical dependencies and repressed psychoses and neuroses, os direct exposure to the authentic dimensions of risk represented by the experience of psychedelic plants. The pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an anti-drug position. Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined, and obsessive behaviour; these are precisely the tendencies in our psychological makeup that the psychedelics mitigate. The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motivations up to inspection by a wider, less egocentric, and more grounded point of view within the individual. It is foolish to suggest that there is no risk, but it is equally uninformed to suggest that the risk is not worth taking. What is needed is experiential validation of a new guiding image, an overarching metaphor able to serve as the basis for a new model of society and the individual.

      The plant-human relationship has always been the foundation of our individual and group existence in the world. What I call the Archaic Revival is the process of reawakening awareness of traditional attitudes toward nature, including plants and our relationship to them. The Archaic Revival spells the eventual breakup of the pattern of male dominance and hierarchy based on animal organization, something that can not be changed overnight by a sudden shift in collective awareness. Rather, it will follow naturally upon the gradual recognition that the overarching theme that directs the Archaic Revival is the idea/ideal of a vegetation Goddess, the Earth herself as the much ballyhooed Gaia--a fact well documented by nineteenth-century anthropologists, most notably Frazer, but recently given a new respectability by Riane Eisler, Marija Gimbutas, James Mellaart, and others.

      The closer a human group is to the gnosis of the vegetable mind--the Gaian collectivity of organic life--the closer their connection to the archetype of the Goddess and hence to the partnership style of social organization. The last time that the mainstream of Western thought was refreshed by the gnosis of the vegetable mind was at the close of the Hellenistic Era, before the Mystery religions were finally suppressed by enthusiastic Christian barbarians.

      My conclusion is that taking the next evolutionary step toward the Archaic Revival, the rebirth of the Goddess, and the ending of profane history will require an agenda that includes the notion of our reinvolvement with and the emergence of the vegetable mind. That same mind that coaxed us into self-reflecting language now offers us the boundless landscapes of the imagination. Without such a relationship to psychedelic exopheromones regulating our symbiotic relationship with the plant kingdom, we stand outside of an understanding of planetary purpose. And an understanding of planetary purpose may be the major contribution we can make to the evolutionary process. Returning to the bosom of the planetary partnership means trading the point of view of the history-created ego for a more maternal and intuitional style.

      The widely felt intuition of the presence of the Other as a female companion to the human navigation of history can, I believe, be traced back to the immersion in the vegetable mind, which provided the ritual context in which human consciousness emerged into the light of self-awareness, self-reflection, and self-articulation: the light of the Great Goddess.

      What does it mean to accept the solutions of vegetable forms of life as metaphors for the conduct of the affairs of the human world? Two important changes would follow from adopting this assumption:

• The feminizing of culture. Culture would be feminized on a level that has yet to be fully explored. Green Consciousness means recognizing that the real division between the masculine and the feminine is not a division between men and women but rather a division between ourselves as conscious animals--omnivorous, land-clearing, war makers, supreme expression of the yang--and the circumglobal mantle of vegetation--the ancient metastable yin element that constitutes by far the major portion of the biomass of the living earth.
• An inward search for values. Inwardness is the characteristic feature of the vegetable rather than the animal approach to existence. The animals move, migrate, and swarm, while plants hold fast. Plants live in a dimension characterized by the solid state, the fixed, and the enduring. If there is movement in the consciousness of plants then it must be the movement of spirit and attention in the domain of the vegetal imagination. Perhaps this is what the reconnection to the vegetal Goddess through psychedelic plants, the Archaic Revival, actually points toward: that the life of the spirit is the life that gains access to the visionary realms resident in magical plant teachers. This is the truth thatshamans have always known and practiced. Awareness of the green side of mind was called Veriditas by the twelfth-century visionary Hildegard von Bingen.

      A new paradigm capable of offering hope of a path out of the cultural quicksand must provide a real-world agenda addressed to the escalating problems that the planet faces. There are several domains in which the rise of awareness of Veriditas might help stave offarmageddon:

Detoxification of the natural environment. The process of detoxification is naturally carried out by the combined action of the atmosphere, the biological matrix, and the oceans. This planetwide process was able to take care of even urban industrial waste, until modern industrial technology became a truly global phenomenon. Planting species of datura, the plants once a part of the religious rites of the Indians of Southern California, and other plants that leach heavy metals from the earth and sequester them in their cellular tissue are examples of a natural process that could help clean up our environment. Recognizing the many ways in which the biological matrix of the earth functions to avert toxification, recognizing that nature is working to sustain life, might go a long way toward building a political consensus to actively participate in saving that same life.

Connectedness and symbiosis. Like plants, we need to maximize the quality of connectedness and symbiosis. Plant-based approaches to modeling the world include awareness of the fractal and branching nature of community action. A treelike network of symbiotic relationships can now replace the model of evolution that we inherited form the nineteenth-century. The earlier model, that of the tooth-and-claw struggle for existence, with the survivor taking the hindmost, is a model based on naive observation of animal behaviour. Yet it was cheerfully extended into the realm of plants to explain the evolutionary interactions thought to cause speciation in the botanical world. Later, more sophisticated observers (C.H. Waddington and Erich Jantsch) found not the War in Nature that Darwinists reported but rather a situation in which it was not competitive ability but ability to maximize cooperation with other species that most directly contributed to an organism's being able to function and endure as a member of a biome. Plants interact with each other through the tangled mat of roots that connects them all to the source of their nutrition and to each other.

The matted floor of a tropical rain forest is an environment of great chemical diversity; the topology approaches that of brain tissue in its complexity. Within the network of interconnected roots, complex chemical signals are constantly being transmitted and received. Coadaptive evolution and symbiotic relationships regulate this entire system with a ubiquitousness that argues for the evolutionary primacy of these cooperative strategies. For example, mycirrhizal fungi live in symbiosis on the outside of plant roots and gently balance and buffer the mineral-laden water that is moving through them to the roots of their host.
Whole-system fine tuning. If the phenomena associated with biological harmony and resonance could be understood, then such large-scale systems as global banking or global food production could be more properly managed. The gaian biologists, Lovelock,Margulies, and others, have argued persuasively that the entire planet has been self-organized by microbial and planktonic life into a metastable regime favorable to biology and maintained there for over two billion years. Plant-based Gaia has kept a balance throughout time and space,--and in spite of the repeated bombardment of the earth by asteroidal material sufficient to severely disrupt the planetary equilibrium. We can only admire--and we should seek to imitate such a Tao-like sense of the planet's multidimensional homeostatic balance. But how? I suggest we look at plants--look more deeply, more closely, and with a more open mind than we have done before.
Recycling. Like plants, we need to recycle. On a cosmic scale we are no more mobile than plants. Until this point in history we have modeled our more successful economic systems on animal predation. Animals can potentially move on to another resource when they exhaust the one at hand. Since they can move to new food sources, they potentially have unlimited resources. Plants are fixed. They can not easily move to richer nutrients or leave an area if they foul or deplete it. They must recycle well. The fostering of a plant-based ethic that emulates the way in which the botanical world uses and replaces resources is a sine qua non for planetary survival. All capitalistic models models presuppose unlimited exploitable resources and labor pools, yet neither should now be assumed. I do not know the methods, but I suggest we start turning to the plant world to discover the right question to ask.
Photovoltaic power. Appreciation of photovoltaic power is part of the shift toward an appreciation of the elegance of solid state that plants possess. Plants practice photosynthetic solutions to the problems of power acquisition. Compared to the water or animal-turned wheels, which are the Ur-methaphors for power production in the human world, the solid-state quantum-molecular miracle that involves dropping a photon of sunlight into a molecular device that will kick out an electron capable of energetically participating in the life of a cell seems like extravagant science fiction. Yet this is, in fact, the principle upon which photosynthesis operates. While the first solid-state devices arrived on the human cultural frontier in the late 1940's, solid-state engineering had been the preferred design approach of plants for some two thousand million years. High efficiency photovoltaics could today meet the daily needs of most people for electricity. It is the running of basic industries on solar energy that has proved difficult. Perhaps this is nature's way of telling us that we aspire to too much manufacturing.
A global atmosphere-based economy. The approach of vegetational life to energy production is called photosynthesis. This process could be modeled by the creation of a global economy based on using solar energy to obtain hydrogen from seawater. Solar electricity could supply most electricity needs, but the smelting of aluminium and steel and other energy-intensive industrial processes make demands that photovoltaic electricity is unlikely to be able to meet. However, there is a solution; plants split atmospheric carbon dioxide to release energy and oxygen as by-products. A similar but different process could use solar electricity to split water to obtain hydrogen. This hydrogen could be collected and concentrated for later distribution. Plants have been very successful at finding elegant solutions based on materials present at hand; a hydrogen economy would emulate this same reliance on inexhaustible and recyclable materials.



 The notion is a simple one really; it has long been realized by planners that hydrogen is the ideal resource to fuel a global economy. Hydrogen is clean: when burned it recombines with the water it was chemically derived from. Hydrogen is plentiful: one-third of all water is hydrogen. And all existing technologies--internal combustion engines, coal-, oil-, and nuclear-fired generators--could be retrofitted to run on hydrogen. Thus we are not talking about having to scrap the current standing crop of existing power production and distribution systems. Hydrogen could be "cracked" from seawater at a remote island location and then moved by the already existing technology that is used for the ocean transport of liquid natural gas from its production points to market. The objection that hydrogen is highly explosive and that proven technologies for handling it do not exist has largely been met by the LNG industry and its excellent safety record. Hydrogen accidents could be extremely destructive, but they would be ordinary explosions--local, nontoxic, and without release of radioactivity. Like plant life itself, the hydrogen economy would be nonpolluting and self-substaining; burned hydrogen recombines with oxygen to again become water.
      An internal effort of extraordinary scope would be neccessary to begin to move toward a proof of concept demonstration of the feasibility of a hydrogen economy. Granted, there are many possible problems with such a scheme. But no plan for the production on energy sufficient to meet the demands of twenty-first century is going to be without difficulties.
Nanotechnology. The era of molecular mechanism promises the most radical of green visions, since it proposes that human-engineered quasibiological cells and organelles take over the manufacturing of products and culture. nanotechnology takes very seriously the notion that manufacturing techniques and methods of manipulating matter on the microphysical scale can affect the design process of the human-scale world. In the nanotech world, dwellings and machines can be "grown", and everything that is manufactured is closer to flesh than stone. The distinction between living and nonliving and organic and artificial is blurred in the electronic coral reef of human-machine symbiosis contemplated by the savants of nanotechnology.
Preservation of biological diversity. The life on this planet and the chemical diversity that it represents is likely to be the only source of biologically evolved compounds until the day that we discover another planet as teeming with life as our own. Yet we are destroying the living diversity of our world at an appalling rate. This must be stopped, not only through the preservation of ecosystems but also through the preservation of information about those ecosystems that has been accumulated over thousands of years by the people who live adjacent to them. It is impossible to underestimate the importance for human health of preservation of folk knowledge concerning healing plants. All the major healing drugs that have changed history have come from living plants and fungi. Quinine made conquest of the tropics possible, penicillin and birth control pills remade the social fabric of the twentieth century. All three of these are plant-derived pharmaceuticals. My partner Kat and I work in this area by managing Botanical Dimensions, a botanical garden in Hawaii that seeks to preserve the plants utilized in Amazonian shamanism, one of the many such systems of knowledge that are fast disappearing.
      The measures outlined above would tend to promote what might be called a sense of Gaian Holism, that is, a sense of the unity and balance of nature and of our own human position within the dynamic and evolving balance. It is a plant-based view. This return to a perspective on self and ego that places them within the larger context of planetary life and evolution is the essence of the Archaic Revival.Marshall McLuhan was correct to see that planetary human culture,the global village, would be tribal in character. The next great step toward a planetary holism is the partial merging of the technologically transformed human world with the archaic matrix of vegetable intelligence that is the Overmind of the planet.
I hesitate to call this dawning awareness religious, yet that is what it surely is. And it will involve a full exploration of the dimensions revealed by plant hallucinogens, especially those structurally related to neurotransmitters already present and functioning in the human brain. Careful exploration of the plant hallucinogens will probe the most archaic and sensitive level of the drama of the emergence of consciousness; it was in the plant-human symbiotic relationships that characterized archaic society and religion that the numinous mystery was originally experienced. And this experience is no less mysterious for us today, in spite of the general assumption that we have replaced the simple awe of our ancestors with philosophical and epistemic tools of the utmost sophistication and analytical power.

Our choice as a planetary culture is a simple one:
GO GREEN OR DIE.

From The Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna