Well, um, 'The World and Its Double' is how we styled this. Uh, this is simply uh-a high-visibility, flashy way of reminding people whose eyes fall upon that text that, uh, the world has a double. The world is not entirely or completely what it seems to be. Culture – and by culture, I mean any culture, anywhere, any time – um, gives you the message that, uh, everything is humdrum, everything is normal. In other words, culture denies experience. You know, we all have had, and even a population of non-psychedelic people have had, uh, prophetic dreams, intimations, unlikely strings of coincidences, uh, all of these sort of things. These are experiences which cultures deny. Cultures put in place –uh, I’m sure you've heard this word – a paradigm, and then what fits within the cultural paradigm is, uh, accentuated, uh, stressed, and what doesn't fit inside the cultural paradigm is denied, marginalized, argued against; and we live at the end of a thousand-year binge, uh, on the philosophical position known as materialism in its many guises. And the basic message of materialism is that the world is what it appears to be: a thing of- composed of matter, and, uh, pretty much confined to its surface. The world is what it appears to be.
Now, this, on the face of it, is a tremendously naïve position, because what it says is the animal body that you inhabit, the eyes you look through, the fingers you feel through, are somehow the ultimate instruments of metaphysical conjecture… which is- is highly improbable.
