Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.
This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being you can't be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.
Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.
We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.
One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available.
Liberate yourself from the illusion of culture. Take responsibility for what you think and what you do.
In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture.
It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.
So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It's not my friend. It's a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions.
Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial.
Culture as we're practicing it is causing a lot of pain.
Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.
I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.
Culture is your operating system.
Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies.
Culture is another dimension.
I think transcending our cultures is going to be extraordinarily necessary for our survival. I don't think we can carry our cultures through the keyhole of the stretch of the next millennium
I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.
