What does it mean to come down, to hit baseline? The time when you have already stopped rising, the plateau falls out from beneath, and you crash right back down. Is this a metaphor of cosmic proportions? Will the vibration of the universe begin to wane? The big bang theory tell us that the universe is one big explosion, and as the universe explodes it seems we are moving to higher orders of complexity (I will warn the reader this theory has little to do with Darwinism). However the explosion cannot last forever, and as the energy wanes, and the universe begins implode, will we then move to lower orders of complexity?
I cannot escape considering the Roman Empire as a grand metaphor representing us today. After all, the overriding hegemony dictates implicitly that the Greeks begat the Romans, begat the Americans. Like the Romans, a grand culture stepping into decay is the vision springing forth from my brow when I consider our present culture. Decay is easy to see – when you see parents feeding their kids fast food and handing them off to professionals when start cutting themselves as a result of low self esteem and imbalanced emotions resulting from ill physical, emotional and spiritual health – here, take my mess. We are the richest 
country in the world yet we are the most obese and unhealthy. Consider our socio-political system, brokered by corrupt politicians and affluent yet cynical and poorly educated masses hedging the present against the future. We know that decay has set in. The United States, modern “western culture”, the emerging “global culture”…on one level it seems so advanced and grand and I believe at its core the people ultimately mean well. However, they are misguided in much of their efforts as we move further from freedom and knowledge.
In essence our culture is the beginning of a singular civilization, the likes of which have not been seen since the Roman Empire. I am not sure how many people realize how truly advanced the Romans were, and the Greeks before them, and Egyptians before them, and the Indus valley before them. It is no surprise that the lasting legacy that our ancient cultures have left us have not been scientific handbooks and material gadgets, but spiritual methods and ancient medicines. But why is it that these great civilizations had to fall? Did they fail to understand something fundamental for their survival, or was it inevitable? Perhaps time is truly cyclical as the ancients believed. Perhaps the rise and fall of civilizations is a micro metaphor for macro pattern of the rise (explosion) and fall (implosion) of the universe itself. Regardless, the loss of the civilizations, their peoples, and their way of life is tragic. But on a cosmic scale, what really matters is the loss of information. We have only begun to scratch the surface of the knowledge that Roman’s had and I doubt we can even comprehend how much they might have known at one time. Much of this knowledge was in the library at Alexandria, which was burned to the ground many times. How much more advanced would we be today if we still had this knowledge?
There are forces within each and every one of us that do not want us to advance, forces embodied in the ancient barbarians and modern information monopolies that destroy and withhold information. I’m heartened by the way the internet has allowed all types of information to be collected and distributed, because all information is on some level extremely valuable for the evolution of the species. But is the internet model good enough? A single meteor could destroy human civilization, kill billions of humans, and destroy our data infrastructure. Will the surviving few have access to the information that our civilization has went to great pains to collect, divine, interpret, store and distribute? If they do, will they value it enough to keep it, to maintain it, and to resist those who would rather equate ignorance with bliss and forsake common distributed knowledge for an individual amassment of power? We cannot let these issues remain unanswered with the specter of singular civilization, geopolitical fallout, and the possibility of climate change (just a few among many risks we face in the fall of our civilization).
While we can do what we want to improve humanity, if civilization collapses it will be a return to primal. 
Civilization is fragile – as fragile as the logic of a society that values the status quo. We need to focus research on data storage, distribution and ensure that all the knowledge our civilization has amassed can be distributed to and understood by any individual. With this thought in mind, the imminent singularity, and the inevitable need for biological machine solutions one must wonder, what is the hallucinogenic plant experience? I will present an idea is admittedly out there, as out there as McKenna’s space alien shrooms. However, bear with me, for despite the incredulity of my model, even if it is false, it can be adopted as a model for the future.
What if the age old axiom that history repeats itself is correct and that the plant hallucinogens are in fact highly advanced genetically engineered species for the sole purpose of data distribution, remnants of an ancient highly advanced culture that understood the imperative for extremely long term data storage, distribution and parsing/display system? Just use the already developed and purely natural plant or fungi distribution network and engineer the plant to release the data right into the mind. So now this idea begs the question, is this data stored in the chemical/plant? Or perhaps what this hypothetical civilization realized is that the mind already has the capability to ask all the questions and find all the answers and the “drug” they engineered just unlocked our capability to ask and answer. No doubt the perception of the average being of this hypothetical civilization is far different from ours, like the perceptions of our world we have today is different than that of a tribesman living in a remote area of South America. So how does one introduce data from one perceptual model into another that is completely different?
I do not think that the hypothetical ancient civilization adequately answered this question. The flaw of this hallucinogen data system is that it doesn’t always work. Most people who take these drugs get some visuals and crazy thought trains and end up thinking the equivalent of: “hey, we got fucked up on shrooms last weekend, wanna get drunk next weekend?” And sometimes they get some data about the universe or the self (which to some spiritualist may be the same thing) that they cannot handle and this causes a great deal of mental discomfort. However, to bring back the internet model, I could use the internet to play video games and watch porn (for recreation), but I can also use it to learn new thing, research ideas and generate new ones (for progress). This is the beauty of the internet: it allows us a full range of experience. And perhaps the plant hallucinogens do as well. We may only find answers in the experience if we look for them.
Nonetheless, we stand here today with the necessary task of developing an extremely long term data storage, distribution and parsing/display system. We could model a data storage (or “release”, if in fact the 
data is all in our heads) and distribution system, but it needs to be better than the hallucinogen model. Our system needs to be capable of quickly creating a network similar to a peer to peer system so that the products of this data can be shared and it needs to be capable of being more pragmatic and less mentally shocking than the hallucinogen model. We are now brought back to the question I asked earlier: how does one introduce data from one perceptual model into another that is completely different (without completely shocking or destroying the psyche of the individual)? We’d want the ideas developed in the networked data experience to stay forever, but the perception of this new world cannot hold forever. The individual has to go back to the consensus reality of his or her society and share these ideas to help develop back to a higher state. Assuming there is a fall and an individual in the lesser primal society joins this network, he or she cannot exist functionally in the lesser society with the mindset of the advanced society unless the entire society joins in this network together and simultaneously share ideas and advance. But if this entrance into the network is pursuit of only daring and radical individuals (as the hallucinogen model seems to indicate), then this individual cannot exist in the higher perceptual state forever or risk being severely disconnected from the consensus reality of their society. Therefore, there has to be a comedown in some sense. Of course this comedown is necessitated only if society has fallen and lost all its bearings and now we return to the metaphoric question, is the fall or the comedown, inevitable.
“To be high forever and to keep rising higher…” Its not the disturbing vision of a drug addled headcase, it is the collective vision of humanity: to keep advancing, to be happier, more prosperous and more knowledgeable. I do not want to see society comedown, but we have to plan for the possibilities that the cosmos might throw at us. We must create a networked distribution system that will last. Once we know how it ought to function I am sure we can find a way to build it. If we take the hallucinogen as the model of our possible data distribution system, it is somewhat flawed. It can be abused without results, it can derive negative results, and pragmatic data is not always obtained. The data our system creates should be pragmatic and less metaphysical and should pertain to the current state of the individual. As the individual or society advances, the system should begin to unveil more pertinent data. Ultimately, it should be a dynamic experience, until of course society reaches the point at which the networked system was created, in which case it should show how best to recreate this data distribution system, and ideas and brainstorming from the time it was created on how to improve it with more research along with a vision by the creator society of where to go from here. This system will greatly accelerate progress and ensure that even if civilization sees demise, intelligent, human-like species shall be able to rapidly rebuild a socio-eco-politico-spiritual framework – the people, infrastructure, and technology necessary to push further ahead into our cosmic destiny. Right now it seems as if our society employs employ a god-driver to push innovation and this is possibly re-enforced by or created by the hallucinogen experience, which is definitely a data discovery tool, regardless of its potential as a data distribution system. However, we stand at a 
critical time where it’s necessary to erect new gods and I am sure that in the future, we can find a model better than the god-driver somewhere in both the human consciousness and unconscious to drive future innovation. And this model can then be employed in our networked data distribution system. Of course the best way to preserve data is to ensure that our species and our collective knowledge is networked and distributed throughout the entire universe, and I am hoping it does not take any hard crashes before we get that high.
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