Drugs are about dulling perception, about addiction and about behavioral repetition...What *psychedelics* are about is pattern- dissolving experiences of an extraordinarily high or different awareness. They are the exact opposite of drugs. They promote questioning , they promote consciousness, they promote value examinations, they promote the reconstruction of behavioral patterns.

Culture is another dimension.

For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.

The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination.

And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.

At still higher doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision. Psilocybin may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic organization out of primitive protohuman animals. It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst.

If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.