Transcription
Have you ever stopped to consider how many people didn't screw up for you to be sitting here tonight? You know your ancestors. How many times were there opportunities for, you know, the saber-tooth tiger to strike back, or the hump to fail, or the fever to sweep through, or the breast to go dry? Or how many times were there opportunities that somebody had their eye on the ball? Somebody paid attention? You are the inheritor of that process.
There's a lot of talk in the New Age made about the Dow of the ancestors. Or Dow, like, what is the Dow with the ancestors mean? Except that you are the rearranged genetic component of your particular genetic stream, and your grandfather, your great-uncle, your grandmother, your great-aunt had ways of doing things: pitting peaches, planting beans, trimming flank steak. That's the Dow of the ancestors. But there's a way to do things, and that when you do things that way, that is the appropriate way for you to do it. And you can tell it's the appropriate way because there is very little energy loss. That's what the Dow is. It is appropriate activity.
And from a psychedelic point of view, when we analyze the state of the world, what we see is not that there are many problems: sexism, racism, air pollution, monotheism, you name it. Not that there are many problems, but that there's really just one problem. The problem is, well, it can be defined many ways, but it's basically that we are inappropriate to ourselves. We are ill with ego. We have a narcissism that we cannot put down. The thing that I learned in studying history and living life is that the thing that makes you happy eventually makes you unhappy. Everything flows, nothing lasts. And this is a hard truth to come to grips with, psychedelic or otherwise. Nothing lasts. Nothing lasts, not even yourself.
And I, I think that monotheism is appealing philosophically as a certain economy. One God, you know, that wraps it up nicely. But, you know, you've got to be a little more subtle than that. Let's take a Jungian perspective for a moment. Our gods are the images that we collectively empower ourselves to emulate. And if our God is omnipotent, omniscient, never wrong, always right, utterly unforgiving, this is a jerk who needs this. We don't need this. Our image, our deity is pathological. Our image of deity is the image of the cancerously unattained ego. And until we do something about this, we haven't got the prayer of a snowball in hell. Exhortation is not going to do it.
And now time is running out. Time is running out. The human story is not going to be allowed the luxury of being a comedy. You know what a comedy is? A comedy is when you've got no choice. This is going to be a tragedy because the cards are on the table. You know, if you drown because this boat is sinking, it's because you didn't bother to wander over and climb in the lifeboat. That's the kind of situation we're in. History is an absolute nightmare, and it can only be redeemed by us. This is this thing about the Dow of the ancestors, you know? Did all these people get freeze to death and stomped on by mastodons and eaten by saber-toothed tigers and ravaged by disease so you can blow it with your Mercedes and your 48-foot television set? That's lame, you know?
So, so then how does one? What is to be done? Right? The Tolstoy in question. You must establish a level of authenticity in yourself, visa V reality. And then you become a walking social catalyst, regulator, mean generator, whatever you want to put it. It's it's authentic understanding without ideology.
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