What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.

The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.

The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity.

Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.

I believe that the totemic image for the future is the octopus. This is because the squids and octopi have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic; a model for the human communications of the future. In the not-too-distant future men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea.

The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don't see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It's beautiful.

History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.