A Generation Z Communicado
PDF

Anquises Gabacho: Good evening from Barcelona — it is currently 2:00 AM here (when we wrote this). Thank you for responding so quickly to our message, and please excuse us if we are being bothersome. We also apologize for any mistakes in our English; we are still trying to improve it. We would like to ask you several questions that we have gathered among our friends. We apologize for the large number of questions. We ask them sincerely because, as young people, we are deeply concerned about the future and about the kind of world we are inheriting. Thank you in advance — A group of Hispanics in the city of Barcelona

As members of Generation Z, we feel that the psychological and social problems young people face today are very different from those experienced by previous generations. We believe that people today live more monitored, more isolated, and more anxious than in the past. Even so, we trust that people who have lived longer than we have may be able to offer us valuable advice and perspective.

Chris: It is really important for older generations to be conscious of the younger and future generations. Greta Thunberg was right when she said the older generation was robbing future generations of their planetary heritage. I've tried to answer just enough about the questions you asked that I feel really matters, from my own experience of life.

Greta and the view from the Mellow showing how high we had to climb pulling a heavy trolley, with me on crutches.

We love Barcelona, but had a slightly horrific experience in 2010 because I was travelling with a broken hip joint after getting mugged and robbed and shoved in front of a bus in a hit and run in Quito Ecuador and then traveled through South and Central America overland and through 20 countries and we had to carry 100 pounds of luggage on trolleys through the subways of Barcelona, which still hadn’t built escalators in the key stations to and from the airport, which were labyrinthine to make cross connections. To make matters worse our backpacker Mellow was up a mountain in the suburbs, followed by a headlong rush through the subway to the airport in the morning. 

With that in mind, we would like to know:

* What gives life meaning to you, and how do people arrive at that meaning?

My meaning in life is that I want to make sure as a living being that conscious life in all its diversity freely unfolds in the universe. I am creating meaning as I write. Life is sacred and the foundation of conscious existence. Not God, not AI or anything else. All the visions of religions were experienced by living sages who were biological organisms. Consciousness is of the biota. We are living in the best of all possible worlds, in paradise on the cosmic equator in space-time. We are mortal because the universe is entropic, but sexual recombination makes life perennially immortal. Once we realise this, we can enjoy naked lunch on the grass as long as we seek to reflower life throughout the universe, through our lives and loves, but for me a second thing happened on psychedelics, in a near-death-like experience from which I realised that subjective consciousness really does have the ability to affect the physical universe. It’s not just our brains doing this and causing our consciousness to believe we have agency and it brings a new sense of ultimate responsibility for the fate of life on Earth, because we all become personally responsible for what goes on – our fate and the world’s fate are entwined. We are not powerless and need to act with coordination to save life as a whole.

* What do you think are the greatest real and current challenges our generation will face in adulthood?

Keeping our blue green planet alive and fertile, avoiding Fermi extinction by mutually assured destruction. We are at an apocalyptic inflection point cusp, both myself and all of you. Those alive in these generations will make it or break it. Do not trust anything any former generation may claim. We have to stand as the guardians of all life to survive and our own lives are on the line.

* What are your thoughts on the migration that many young people are forced either to undertake or to endure within their own countries?

Migration is a balance between having a sense of cultural and natural grounding and the endless wandering that all nomadic peoples have done and which our life journey entails, both through curiosity, seeking food and the trials of war and displacement. I have wandered through all the continents apart from Antarctica and into wild and dangerous places to discover the secrets of existence. Climate crisis and war due to degrading economies and resources may cause major migrations.

We and our friends have some wild sacred land that we are trying to protect in perpetuity for our offspring to live in future as a wilderness community. It was only $700 for each of 16 people in 1970 and is 120 Hectares, but now it is worth millions and was once a native Maori reserve. Our collective decision-making causes us endless trouble because we have to decide everything by democratic consensus, which can be more difficult than a simple majority, but it protects each individual and it gives us a feeling of belonging to the land as flesh and blood.

* What do you think about the growing social and sexual loneliness affecting many people today?

It’s tragic but remediable. All our intellectual pretensions are futile, although consciousness is unfathomably deep. We are not ships passing in the night. We all come from eggs and sperm so that life can be renewed. We are born to love and be loved, with the ecstasy of togetherness. Our erogenous zones are key to our sense of belonging and incarnate mystery in the natural world. When I was 21, oral contraceptives were only just invented and hard to access for female students. Young women were yearning to find a good partner and get pregnant asap as fertile nubile beings. We were in the flood of psychedelic free love. There was no HIV. Sexual love is a truly extraordinary journey of two minds entwined, if we embrace it with sincere devotion. It can also be a meeting of true minds, as visionary voyagers on an endless journey of discovery across the tracts of space and time, although we are also fallible sentient beings with moods like tropical storms.

Our societies are still struggling to emerge from patriarchal oppression of the female sex. There is a figure below in Symbiotic Existential Cosmology that shows the catastrophic collapse of Y-chromosome diversity. It’s a discovery involving the male homicide of whole clans, killing the men and taking the women as hostage brides. It’s the mark of Cain on our human genome that says that if we want to survive as a species, we need to recognise how violent men can become and how dangerous to human survival their attempts to gain power can be.

 A human reproductive bottleneck in Y-chromosome diversity began about 10,000 years ago and continued for several millennia. Insets (top-left) confirming European evidence and (lower-right) 11 areas of primal agriculture discovered.

Then we get stoning for adultery and female genital mutilation. Men are lovely and can be very good lovers, but all men have paternity uncertainty as male mammals, even in the age of genetic testing. Women who get naturally pregnant and give birth to live young know their children are their own. Men fear their mortality and will kill to perpetuate their seed. Women are natural long-term investors who have to risk their life to produce offspring, and span their investment over several slow maturing infants. Back in our gatherer-hunter origins, super intelligence arose from astute female choice of male sexual partners bearing smart single X genes who were resourceful hunters and dedicated lovers and played good music and told hilarious jokes round the camp fire.

Nisa, a then elderly San woman who had many lovers, despite the disapproval of the male elders said: 

When the gods gave people sex, they gave us a wonderful thing.

Sex is food: just as people cannot survive without eating,

hunger for sex can cause people to die. !Kung saying - Nisa.

* How do you view declining fertility rates, environmental destruction, and the loss of privacy?

Environmental destruction is a disaster, both from climate crisis and wild habitat destruction, let alone nuclear holocaust. Humanity survives dependent on the biosphere for food, medicines and to preserve species diversity from a mass extinction of life which could include our own species from misadventure or self-destructive warfare.

Forest destruction Amazon (New Scientist).

Privacy is essential to be whole. We need to be able to put the demands of society at arm's length or we go slightly mad. We need to escape the cities into the natural wilderness and find private urban spaces where we are off the grid. We need the sound of silence and to hear the chirping of small grasshoppers in the bushes in the evening and lie in the long grass in the moonlight. We dont need to be indexed by mass surveillance to be alive and to exist.

The world’s population needs to come down, to save the fertility of the biosphere, for future generations of life to survive, but fertility dysphoria is hitting developed populations in a dangerous whiplash boom and bust. Humanity needs to revere sexual fertility as the source of life but not be selfish about flagrant reproduction. Generally when women get a degree of autonomy over their lives with adequate child care support, they make good long term decisions about pregnancy.

* What are your thoughts on the rise of political extremism, both on the left and the right?

Democracy in a patriarchal society, particularly in first past the post, becomes a male reproductive combat myth, often to the death even when dominant women are occasionally in power. Nevertheless democracy is the best of all bad but workable solutions. Even proportional representation is tyranny of the majority, but populist extremism is tyranny of a strategic minority against the majority and leads back to totalitarianism and oppression. Those who seek political extremism cannot pretend to be trustworthy individuals acting for the good of society s a whole, or for nature and life.

* What do you think about the gradual disappearance of long-standing cultures and traditions?

San Bushmen, Biaka Pygmies

Cultures are a really important trace of human history and conscious experience. European cultures remain diverse and each has its language and music. We need to keep cultural diversity alive as sacred creative traditions. But culture is more unstable than human sexual evolution and memes are the non-sexual all-or-nothing replication of ideas, that can entrap and bind us. All major cultures have been influenced by religious doctrines which can be, and are, repressive and technological culture is a run-away process that has immanent dangers for humanity, because it is brittle and unstable and people become, by degrees, more and more dependent on food supply chains, don't actually know how to survive and feed themselves and depend on supermarkets and profligate use of unsustainable non-renewable resources to survive, which could cause urban crisis and catastrophic civilisational collapse if they fail.

It really concerns me that our oldest cultures like the Bushmen and Pygmies who have held the keys to human survival under stressful environments are being repressed and worse still “civilised” and dependent on commercial products. Cultural ascendancy is not enlightenment, unless it respects the individual autonomy that has been the basis of verifiable trust over the last 150,000 years, in which women have been using cosmetic ochre and stringing necklaces of seashells and talking about their sexual relations when out gathering 85% of the diet, while the men crept silently in the undergrowth, seeking good prey with strong arrow poisons, hoping for sexual favours in the evening firelight round the camp site.

* How should we think about humanity’s increasing dependence on technology?

Technology, including AI, cannot reproduce itself. It is not alive. It is not conscious. Humans have lived for millennia upon millennia, playing music, telling jokes, sharing stories round the camp fire, making love and caring for their families amidst recurrent strife of clan warfare and the ensuing clash of civilisations. We began as animists who saw everything in terms of living psyches, including wild animals, other humans, and the spirits of storm, fire and flood. This is where religious beliefs all came from. We are gradually losing these key features of living reality, the more we simply relate to machines, to computation and the flashy images they produce.

The scientific revolution is essential to understand nature and to improve human health and quality of life. Technology needs to be a servant not an insidious master. But we are mammals and will always be mammals, although we aspire to be gods incarnate and control vast fame and fortunes. Men don’t give birth, so they see accumulating world power as a means to gain reproductive power now confused as material power.

* In Europe and the Americas, what are your thoughts on the growth of religions or ideologies that some people believe conflict with individual freedoms, including Islam?

Islam is particularly problematic because its founding prophet committed a genocide in the souk of Medina. I can't accept shooting women in the eye for crying "women, life, freedom", or stoning for adultery, or death for apostasy. This is not enlightenment, but endarkening. But Yeshua also brought martyrdom in favour of God into the world and we have the crusades and witch hunts. We imagine spirits because we are evolutionary animists in a wild jungle of life and then we called them gods and then made them to rule over us because we thought it was the only way we could keep society together. But then the gods became moral punishers who advocated death and oppression and we lost the autonomy that all wild creatures possess to care for the future generations of their flesh and blood. Religions need to be held to account for their oppressive doctrines. I use natural entheogens because they provide visionary mystical enlightenment without any ideology, except that of protecting the sanctity of all life. The key is that the visionary plants and fungi are sacraments without doctrine that teach us how to merge with nature and have the deep visionary experiences of the mystics.

* How do you think personal growth and maturity should occur?

By going to the ends of the Earth and as deeply as possible into the abyss of conscious existence. By seeking those who we love and loving them dearly as a life-defining  exploration of what it is to be love incarnate even if it later comes to an end and by cherishing and replenishing the Earth as long as life lasts. 

* Should people love earthly life and seek happiness within it?

Life is like carefully sailing down Hardanger Fjord

Earthly life is the only real, verifiable, existential conscious life we have. As living organisms, we are transient beings, harbouring the flame of eternal consciousness as a stream, that passes through everyone like a breeze in the night. We cannot seek happiness in illusory transcendent eternal heavens, nor in hells, nor in technological utopias, which will enslave us, turn brittle and fall into one another like statues made of matchsticks.

* Are there any books, poems, philosophers, or songs that you would recommend to young people today?

Read widely, seek deeply. Don't settle for anything people tell you, or believe anyone, even Symbiotic Existential Cosmology, which I swear to you is the truth that I see before me. Try to make every discovery and decision yourself, as someone coming upon it for the first time. Be true to your instincts, but don't trash the life of the living Earth, or burn the unrenewable candle at both ends.

* What are your thoughts on the use of certain substances? Do you believe people should produce or cultivate them themselves?

There is a section in Symbiotic Existential Cosmology that deals with psychoactive molecules. I grow and eat cannabis butter and revere and grow psilocybes and other sacred species as a duty of care. Although I only take them occasionally, I see the natural classic psychedelics as sacraments and an essential route to consciousness saving the planet. My life is like sailing down a great fjord, like Hardanger, and I sometimes take psychedelics at a cusp point when my life gibes. Psychedelic entheogens are the natural sacraments of the Western tradition, transcending the Christian soma and sangre of the Eucharist. They have been used since time immemorial. Many psychoactive molecules are essential medicines, but some of them, like opium and synthetic stimulants and opiates like fentanyl, can be seriously habit forming and lethal misadventure. So there is a very wide spectrum between synthetic methamphetamine, which is out to get you and visionary psychedelics, which are a key to enlightenment. People who want to use entheogens need to form a protective circle and ensure everyone is cared for safely. If they are taken with care and the support of others, to ensure one's welfare, scientific studies demonstrate their ability to illuminate even those facing terminal conditions.

* In such a turbulent and uncertain world, how should we approach love, sex, and marriage?

Approach it and celebrate it with style, grace and compassion! Be patient! I have had over forty sexual partners, tres ménages à trois, and I and my partner Christine have been together for 55 year,s through all this and I still love my childhood sweetheart with whom I had two of my children (above).  On the peyote quest, the Huichols are supposed to confess their sexual infidelities to free themselves form the past, but the centenarian Mara’akame Don Jose Matsuwa said no rope was long enough to tie all his knots.

Maria Sabina during a mushroom Velada. The Huichol Nierika or psychedelic portal to the spirit world. Don Jose Matsuwa on Peyote.