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Friday, November 02, 2007

"Think of the psychedelics as Google's biggest trade secret"

From the Reality Sandwich blog:

This here and now is the frontier. Round two for the monkeys playing with fire. Round one with wood-burning fire was fun. Scary. Awesome when it rips through the forest. Delicious when it leaves a roast pig in the ashes. But how to use and control fire—warmth, protection, metallurgy, better spears, pottery, roast pig on demand—took a lot of experimenting, accidental discoveries, and risk before it became an evolutionary catalyst. Ditto for the psychedelic fires. Seeing the tsunami of evolutionary change as it approaches—and you can see it from altered states, as you know, noetically, grokkingly—this changes everything.

I have the advantage of hindsight, but I’ve noticed even the best-traveled psychonauts, the navigators and pilots of the interdimensional transport systems, the manufacturers and distributors of the fuel, have trouble holding the knowledge that this changes everything—in baseline consciousness. The findings are orthogonal to baseline paradigms of history and evolution, or a baseline sense of scale, or baseline perceptual settings. It’s just too big. Few have grokked the cognitive, creative, and ethical advantages conferred by the psychedelics. Those that have are already implementing the findings, and, well, taking over the world.

Take Google snagging Larry Brilliant to run Google.org. What do you get when you hire a phormer phreak, a Neem Karoli Baba spiritual guy who worked to eradicate smallpox with the WHO, later a Seva Foundation founder and doctor bringing sight to the blind in Nepal with his wife and Ram Dass and Wavy Gravy? Brilliant was on “The Bus,” for gawd sakes, and he brings, quoting the San Francisco Chronicle article, “ his pursuit of humanitarian goals and his longtime obsession with the technology business, particularly the potential for technology to connect people with each other and with information” [emphasis mine].

Think of the psychedelics as Google’s biggest trade secret.

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