Terence Mckenna
Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 –
April 3, 2000) was an American philosopher, psychonaut, author ,
explorer , researcher, teacher, lecturer and writer on many subjects,
such as human consciousness, language, psychedelic drugs, the evolution
of civilizations, the origin and end of the universe, alchemy, and
extraterrestrial beings.
McKenna, the founder of Novelty Theory,
graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a
distributed major in Ecology, Resource Conservation and Shamanism. After
graduation he traveled extensively in the Asian and New World Tropics,
becoming specialized in the shamanism and ethno-medicine of the Amazon
Basin. With his brother Dennis, he is the author of The Invisible
Landscape and Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Growers' Guide. A study of
the impact of psychotropic plants on human culture and evolution Food of
the Gods has recently been published by Bantam, and a book of essays
and conversations, The Archaic Revival quickly followed from Harper San
Francisco. Most recently a group of discursive chats, Trialogues at the
Edge of the West, with mathematician Ralph Abraham and British biologist
Rupert Sheldrake, has been published in English, German, French and
Spanish editions. His latest book is, True Hallucinations, a narrative
of spiritual adventure in the jungles of the Colombian Amazon. He
recently appeared on a number of CDs and live performances with musical
groups such as The Shamen and Zuvuya in England and Space/Time in San
Francisco. Other titles and CD releases are also being planned. Terence
McKenna has spent the last twenty-five years in the study of the
ontological foundations of shamanism and the ethno-pharmacology of
spiritual transformation. McKenna currently lives in Hawaii, where he
divides his time between writing and lecturing. His most recent
interests include web site building and multimedia modeling of
historical processes using Novelty Theory, a branch of fractal dynamics
invented by McKenna.
NOTE: Terence McKenna expired on April 3rd, 2000. May he rest in peace.
Re-Evolution by Terence McKenna
If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.
Human history represents such a radical
break with the natural systems of biological organization that preceded
it, that it must be the response to a kind of attractor, or dwell point
that lies ahead in the temporal dimension. Persistently Western
religions have integrated into their theologies the notion of a kind of
end of the world, and I think that a lot of psychedelic experimentation
sort of confirms this intuition, I mean, it isn't going to happen
according to any of the scenarios of orthodox religion, but the basic
intuition, that the universe seeks closure in a kind of omega point of
transcendance, is confirmed, it's almost as though this object in
hyperspace, glittering in hyperspace, throws off reflections of itself,
which actually ricochet into the past, illuminating this mystic,
inspiring that saint or visionary, and that out of these fragmentary
glimpses of eternity we can build a kind of map, of not only the past of
the universe, and the evolutionary egression into novelty, but a kind
of map of the future, this is what shamanism is always been about, a
shaman is someone who has been to the end, it's someone who knows how
the world really works, and knowing how the world really works means to
have risen outside, above, beyond the dimensions of ordinary space,
time, and casuistry, and actually seen the wiring under the board,
stepped outside the confines of learned culture and learned and embedded
language, into the domain of what Wittgenstein called "the
unspeakable," the transcendental presense of the other, which can be
absanctioned, in various ways, to yield systems of knowledge which can
be brought back into ordinary social space for the good of the
community, so in the context of ninety percent of human culture, the
shaman has been the agent of evolution, because the shaman learns the
techniques to go between ordinary reality and the domain of the ideas,
this higher dimensional continuum that is somehow parallel to us,
available to us, and yet ordinarily occluded by cultural convention out
of fear of the mystery I believe, and what shamans are, I believe, are
people who have been able to de-condition themselves from the
community's instinctual distrust of the mystery, and to go into it, to
go into this bewildering higher dimension, and gain knowledge, recover
the jewel lost at the beginning of time, to save souls, cure, commune
with the ancestors and so forth and so on. Shamanism is not a religion,
it's a set of techniques, and the principal technique is the use of
psychedelic plants. What psychedelics do is they dissolve boundaries,
and in the presence of dissolved boundaries, one cannot continue to
close one's eyes to the ruination of the earth, the poisoning of the
seas, and the consequences of two thousand years of unchallenged
dominator culture, based on monotheism, hatred of nature, suppression of
the female, and so forth and so on. So, what shamans have to do is act
as exemplars, by making this cosmic journey to the domain of the Gaian
ideas, and then bringing them back in the form of art to the struggle to
save the world. The planet has a kind of intelligence, that it can
actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being.
The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a
synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a
synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and
intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned
between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind, I mean I think it's
fairly profound, it's fairly apocalyptic. History is ending. I mean, we
are to be the generation that witnesses the revelation of the purpose
of the cosmos. History is the shock wave of the eschaton. History is the
shock wave of eschatology, and what this means for those of us who will
live through this transition into hyperspace, is that we will be
privileged to see the greatest release of compressed change probably
since the birth of the universe. The twentieth century is the shudder
that announces the approaching cataracts of time over which our species
and the destiny of this planet is about to be swept.
If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.
The emphasis in house music and rave
culture on physiologically compatible rhythms and this sort of thing is
really the rediscovery of the art of natural magic with sound, that
sound, properly understood, especially percussive sound, can actually
change neurological states, and large groups of people getting together
in the presence of this kind of music are creating a telepathic
community of bonding that hopefully will be strong enough that it can
carry the vision out into the mainstream of society. I think that the
youth culture that is emerging in the nineties is an end of the
millenium culture that is actually summing up Western civilization and
pointing us in an entirely different direction, that we're going to
arrive in the third millenium, in the middle of an archaic revival,
which will mean a revival of these physiologically empowering rhythm
signatures, a new art, a new social vision, a new relationship to
nature, to feminism, to ego. All of these things are taking hold, and
not a moment too soon.
Terence McKenna Land
The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension
The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension
Novelty Waves
Conversations At The Edge Of Magic (1994)
~Starwood Festival
One of three talks given at Starwood in '94 along with 'Packing For The Long Strange Trip' & 'Rap Dancing Into The 3rd Millennium'
In this talk he lays out his 'Stoned Ape' theory of evolution & language.
Image: A still from Will Carsola's animation 'Stoned Ape Theory' which you should check out here...
http://vimeo.com/25568812
Also here's a downloadable PDF of Jim Rug's 2004 comic...
'The Stoned Ape Theory of Evolution by Terence McKenna'
http://commondense.tumblr.com/post/1229132787/the-stoned-ape-theory...
Image: A still from Will Carsola's animation 'Stoned Ape Theory' which you should check out here...
http://vimeo.com/25568812
Also here's a downloadable PDF of Jim Rug's 2004 comic...
'The Stoned Ape Theory of Evolution by Terence McKenna'
http://commondense.tumblr.com/post/1229132787/the-stoned-ape-theory...
The Last Interview: November, 1999 (Terence McKenna)
Terence McKenna's Last Trip
The "altered statesman" emerged from Leary's long shadow to push a magical blend of psychedelics, technology, and revelatory rap. He had less time than he knew.
By Erik Davis
In May 1999, the psychedelic bard Terence McKenna returned to his jungle hideaway on Hawaii's Big Island after six weeks on the road. He was relieved to be home. Since claiming the mantle of Tripster King from Timothy Leary, McKenna has earned his keep as a stand-up shaman on the lecture circuit, regaling groups of psychonauts, seekers, and boho intellectuals with tales involving mushrooms, machine consciousness, and the approaching end of history. Weird stuff, and wonderfully told. But the teller was getting tired of the routine. A recluse at heart, McKenna wanted nothing more than to surf the Web, read, polish up some manuscripts, and enjoy the mellow pace of Hawaii with his new girlfriend, Christy Silness, a kind young woman he had met the year before at an ethnobotanical conference in the Yucatán.
Soon after McKenna arrived home, however, he was hit with ferocious headaches. He'd long suffered from migraines, but nothing in his 52 years could match the ice picks now skewering his skull. On May 22, after dragging himself to the john to vomit, McKenna's mind exploded. Hallucinations cut in like shards of glass; taste and smell were bent out of shape; and he was swallowed up by a labyrinth that, as he later put it, "somehow partook of last week's dreams, next week's fears, and a small restaurant in Dublin." Then his blood pressure dropped and he collapsed, the victim of a brain seizure.
When McKenna came to, he was flat on his back, staring at the ceiling as his extremely agitated girlfriend called 911. Then he swooned again. In addition to being much younger than McKenna, Silness is also much shorter, but somehow she managed to load his lanky, 6'2" frame into their truck and drive down the mountain to meet an ambulance. To keep McKenna awake, she coaxed him into reciting a poem his grandfather used to chant, "The Cremation of Sam McGee." But then a grand mal hit, and McKenna was out cold.
The ambulance guys knew McKenna's rep and were convinced he had OD'd. But a CAT scan in Kona revealed the presence of a walnut-sized tumor buried deep in McKenna's right frontal cortex. The growth was diagnosed as a glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most malignant of brain tumors. To McKenna's amazement, his doctor described the thing as a "fruiting body" that sent "mycelia" throughout the surrounding tissue - mycological lingo straight out of theMagic Mushroom Grower's Guide that McKenna had published in 1975 with his brother, Dennis, an ethnobotanist. The rest was less amusing: Without treatment, McKenna would die within a month. With treatment, the prognosis was six months. "No one escapes," said the doctor.
McKenna was facing something that no shaman's rattle or peyote button was going to cure. With barely time to breathe, he had to choose from among chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and the gamma knife - a machine that could blast the tumor with 201 converging beams of cobalt radiation.
At the same time, friends and comrades were stalking more ethereal treatments. On the Big Island, Hali Makua, a Grand Kahuna of Polynesia, hiked up the side of the Mauna Loa volcano. He meditated about McKenna and was illuminated with a handful of Hawaiian power words, words that he later phoned in to his ailing friend.
From the wilds of Nevada, paranormal radio jock Art Bell was planning a different kind of intervention. Bell went on the air and asked his 13 million listeners to participate in "great experiment no. 8." At 2 pm Pacific time on Sunday, May 30, Bell's listeners sent McKenna a mass blast of good vibrations. "It's not something I really believe in," says McKenna. "But I am much more sympathetic to the idea of a huge morphogenetic field affecting your health than the idea that one inspired healer could do it."
Even after he went under the gamma knife, McKenna couldn't quite believe what was happening to him. "There are only about 1,000 of these GBMs a year, so it's a rare disease. I never won anything before - why now?" Like everybody else, he suspected a lifetime of exotic drug use may have been to blame.
"So what about it?" he asked his doctors. "You wanna hammer on me about that?" They assured him there was no causal link.
"So what about 35 years of daily dope smoking?" he asked. They pointed to studies suggesting that cannabis may actually shrink tumors.
"Listen," McKenna told them, "if cannabis shrinks tumors, we would not be having this conversation."
The "altered statesman" emerged from Leary's long shadow to push a magical blend of psychedelics, technology, and revelatory rap. He had less time than he knew.
By Erik Davis
In May 1999, the psychedelic bard Terence McKenna returned to his jungle hideaway on Hawaii's Big Island after six weeks on the road. He was relieved to be home. Since claiming the mantle of Tripster King from Timothy Leary, McKenna has earned his keep as a stand-up shaman on the lecture circuit, regaling groups of psychonauts, seekers, and boho intellectuals with tales involving mushrooms, machine consciousness, and the approaching end of history. Weird stuff, and wonderfully told. But the teller was getting tired of the routine. A recluse at heart, McKenna wanted nothing more than to surf the Web, read, polish up some manuscripts, and enjoy the mellow pace of Hawaii with his new girlfriend, Christy Silness, a kind young woman he had met the year before at an ethnobotanical conference in the Yucatán.
Soon after McKenna arrived home, however, he was hit with ferocious headaches. He'd long suffered from migraines, but nothing in his 52 years could match the ice picks now skewering his skull. On May 22, after dragging himself to the john to vomit, McKenna's mind exploded. Hallucinations cut in like shards of glass; taste and smell were bent out of shape; and he was swallowed up by a labyrinth that, as he later put it, "somehow partook of last week's dreams, next week's fears, and a small restaurant in Dublin." Then his blood pressure dropped and he collapsed, the victim of a brain seizure.
When McKenna came to, he was flat on his back, staring at the ceiling as his extremely agitated girlfriend called 911. Then he swooned again. In addition to being much younger than McKenna, Silness is also much shorter, but somehow she managed to load his lanky, 6'2" frame into their truck and drive down the mountain to meet an ambulance. To keep McKenna awake, she coaxed him into reciting a poem his grandfather used to chant, "The Cremation of Sam McGee." But then a grand mal hit, and McKenna was out cold.
The ambulance guys knew McKenna's rep and were convinced he had OD'd. But a CAT scan in Kona revealed the presence of a walnut-sized tumor buried deep in McKenna's right frontal cortex. The growth was diagnosed as a glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most malignant of brain tumors. To McKenna's amazement, his doctor described the thing as a "fruiting body" that sent "mycelia" throughout the surrounding tissue - mycological lingo straight out of theMagic Mushroom Grower's Guide that McKenna had published in 1975 with his brother, Dennis, an ethnobotanist. The rest was less amusing: Without treatment, McKenna would die within a month. With treatment, the prognosis was six months. "No one escapes," said the doctor.
McKenna was facing something that no shaman's rattle or peyote button was going to cure. With barely time to breathe, he had to choose from among chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and the gamma knife - a machine that could blast the tumor with 201 converging beams of cobalt radiation.
At the same time, friends and comrades were stalking more ethereal treatments. On the Big Island, Hali Makua, a Grand Kahuna of Polynesia, hiked up the side of the Mauna Loa volcano. He meditated about McKenna and was illuminated with a handful of Hawaiian power words, words that he later phoned in to his ailing friend.
From the wilds of Nevada, paranormal radio jock Art Bell was planning a different kind of intervention. Bell went on the air and asked his 13 million listeners to participate in "great experiment no. 8." At 2 pm Pacific time on Sunday, May 30, Bell's listeners sent McKenna a mass blast of good vibrations. "It's not something I really believe in," says McKenna. "But I am much more sympathetic to the idea of a huge morphogenetic field affecting your health than the idea that one inspired healer could do it."
Even after he went under the gamma knife, McKenna couldn't quite believe what was happening to him. "There are only about 1,000 of these GBMs a year, so it's a rare disease. I never won anything before - why now?" Like everybody else, he suspected a lifetime of exotic drug use may have been to blame.
"So what about it?" he asked his doctors. "You wanna hammer on me about that?" They assured him there was no causal link.
"So what about 35 years of daily dope smoking?" he asked. They pointed to studies suggesting that cannabis may actually shrink tumors.
"Listen," McKenna told them, "if cannabis shrinks tumors, we would not be having this conversation."
alien dreamtime with terrence mckenna and spacetime continium
The following pages contain the words to
the Space Time Continuum / Alien Dreamtime album. Recommended to
discontinue further reading of these pages if you have not first
listened to the album.
You have been warned.
Alien Dreamtime was a multi media event recorded live on February 26th/27th 1993 at the Transmission theater, San Francisco, Ca. A video of this event produced by Rose-X media house is available through Amazon.com. The didgeridoo is played with the greatest respect for all the aboriginal people of Australia and the spirit of all first world people. All tracks published by Space Monkey.
You have been warned.
Alien Dreamtime was a multi media event recorded live on February 26th/27th 1993 at the Transmission theater, San Francisco, Ca. A video of this event produced by Rose-X media house is available through Amazon.com. The didgeridoo is played with the greatest respect for all the aboriginal people of Australia and the spirit of all first world people. All tracks published by Space Monkey.
Archaic Revival
Allright... tonight, for your edification
and amusement... three raves, two interregnums. Visions by Rose X.
Didgeredoo, Stephen Kent. And sound by Space Time. Words and ideas by
Terence McKenna. Rap one: The Archaic Revival.
History is ending, because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley. And as the inevitable chaostrophe approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble, it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa, 15,000 years ago, rocked in cradle of the great horned mushroom goddess before history. Before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism. Before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us. Because the secret faith of the 20th century is not modernism. The secret faith of the 20th century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the Paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock and roll, and Catastrophe Theory. 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 chose 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. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together, the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace. Because what we need is a new myth. What we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe. And that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology and that when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience, the ego is suppressed. And the suppression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of feeling immediate experience. And nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience. But that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace, what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body-- in the body-- there are Niagara of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life.
I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience, like going to the grave without having sex. It means that you never figured out what it was all about. The mystery is in the body, and the way the body works itself into nature. What the archaic revival means is shamanism, ecstasy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people, and the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy, and monotony. And if you get them on the run, you have the dominators sweating, folks. Because that means that youre getting it all reconnected, and get it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind. And the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet, and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies, but with that experience, the compass of the self can be set. And that's the idea, that we're figuring out how to reset the compass of the self, through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, intelligence-- intelligence... this is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.
Im gonna take five here, and uh, well be back and chat some more.
History is ending, because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley. And as the inevitable chaostrophe approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble, it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa, 15,000 years ago, rocked in cradle of the great horned mushroom goddess before history. Before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism. Before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us. Because the secret faith of the 20th century is not modernism. The secret faith of the 20th century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the Paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock and roll, and Catastrophe Theory. 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 chose 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. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together, the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace. Because what we need is a new myth. What we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe. And that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology and that when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience, the ego is suppressed. And the suppression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of feeling immediate experience. And nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience. But that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace, what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body-- in the body-- there are Niagara of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life.
I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience, like going to the grave without having sex. It means that you never figured out what it was all about. The mystery is in the body, and the way the body works itself into nature. What the archaic revival means is shamanism, ecstasy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people, and the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy, and monotony. And if you get them on the run, you have the dominators sweating, folks. Because that means that youre getting it all reconnected, and get it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind. And the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet, and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies, but with that experience, the compass of the self can be set. And that's the idea, that we're figuring out how to reset the compass of the self, through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, intelligence-- intelligence... this is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.
Im gonna take five here, and uh, well be back and chat some more.
Alien Love
Hello... so, that was like an
introduction, ha ha! Now for some preaching to the choir on the subject
of: How come it is that the further in you go, the bigger it gets? I
remember the very, very first time I smoked DMT. It was sort of a
benchmark, you might say. And I remember that this friend of mine that
always got there first, visited me with this little glass pipe, and this
stuff which looked like orange mothballs. And since I was a graduate of
Dr. Hofmann's, I figured there were no surprises. So the only question I
asked was how long does it last? And he said, About five minutes. So, I
did it. And...
There was uh, something like a flower. Like a chrysanthemum in orange and yellow that sort of spinning. Spinning. And then, it was like I was pushed from behind and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place that didn't seem like a state of mind. It seemed like another place. And what was going on in this place (aside from the tastefully soffited indirect lighting and the crawling hallucinations along the domed wall), what was happening was that there were a lot of beings in there, a lot of what I call self-transforming machine elves. Sort of like jeweled basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they had faces they wouldve been grinning at me, but they didn't have faces. And they assured me that they loved me, and they told me not to be amazed, not to give way to astonishment. And so I watched them, even though I wondered if maybe I hadnt really done it this time! And what they were doing, was they we're making objects come into existence by singing them into existence.
Objects which looked like Faberge eggs from Mars, morphing themselves with Mandaean alphabetical structures. They looked like the concrescence of linguistic intentionality put through a kind of hyperdimensional transform into three-dimensional space. And these little machines offered themselves to me. And I realized when I looked at them, that if I could bring just one of these little trinkets back, nothing would ever be quite the same again.
And I wondered where am I? And what is going on? And it occurred to me that these must be holographic viral projections from an autonomous continuum that was somehow intersecting my own. And then I thought, a more elegant explanation would be to take it at face value, and realize that I had broken into an ecology of souls, and that somehow I was getting a peek over the other side. Somehow, I was finding out that thing, that you cheerfully assume you can't find out... but it felt like I was finding out. And it felt... and then I can't remember what it felt like because the little self-transforming tikes interrupted me and said, Don't think about it. Don't think about who we are-- think about doing what we're doing. Do it! Do it now. Do it!
There was uh, something like a flower. Like a chrysanthemum in orange and yellow that sort of spinning. Spinning. And then, it was like I was pushed from behind and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place that didn't seem like a state of mind. It seemed like another place. And what was going on in this place (aside from the tastefully soffited indirect lighting and the crawling hallucinations along the domed wall), what was happening was that there were a lot of beings in there, a lot of what I call self-transforming machine elves. Sort of like jeweled basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they had faces they wouldve been grinning at me, but they didn't have faces. And they assured me that they loved me, and they told me not to be amazed, not to give way to astonishment. And so I watched them, even though I wondered if maybe I hadnt really done it this time! And what they were doing, was they we're making objects come into existence by singing them into existence.
Objects which looked like Faberge eggs from Mars, morphing themselves with Mandaean alphabetical structures. They looked like the concrescence of linguistic intentionality put through a kind of hyperdimensional transform into three-dimensional space. And these little machines offered themselves to me. And I realized when I looked at them, that if I could bring just one of these little trinkets back, nothing would ever be quite the same again.
And I wondered where am I? And what is going on? And it occurred to me that these must be holographic viral projections from an autonomous continuum that was somehow intersecting my own. And then I thought, a more elegant explanation would be to take it at face value, and realize that I had broken into an ecology of souls, and that somehow I was getting a peek over the other side. Somehow, I was finding out that thing, that you cheerfully assume you can't find out... but it felt like I was finding out. And it felt... and then I can't remember what it felt like because the little self-transforming tikes interrupted me and said, Don't think about it. Don't think about who we are-- think about doing what we're doing. Do it! Do it now. Do it!
Speaking in Tongues
And what they meant was: use your voice
to make an object. And as I understood I felt a bubble kind of grow
inside of me. And I watched these little elf tikes jumping in and out of
my chest (they liked to do that to reassure you), and they said, Do it!
And I felt language rise up in me that was unhooked from English and I
began to speak like this:
Eeeoo ded hwauopsy mectoph, mectagin dupwoxin, moi phoi wops eppepepekin gitto phepsy demego doi aga din a doich demoi aga donc heedey obectdee doohueana.
(Or words to that effect). And I wondered then what it all meant, and why it felt so good (if it didn't mean anything). And I thought about it a few years, actually, and I decided, you know, that meaning and language are two different things. And that what the alien voice in the psychedelic experience wants to reveal is the syntactical nature of reality. That the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you make of it, whatever you wish!
Eh moi dea doi phegenheggo...
And one of the things that I learned about DMT, was that, if you ever had it, even just once, then you can have a dream. And in this dream somebody will pull out a little glass pipe, and then it will happen. It will happen just like the real thing. Because theres a button somewhere inside each and every one of us that gives you a look into the other side. And that's the button that resets the compass that tells you where you want to sail. Good luck!
Eeeoo ded hwauopsy mectoph, mectagin dupwoxin, moi phoi wops eppepepekin gitto phepsy demego doi aga din a doich demoi aga donc heedey obectdee doohueana.
(Or words to that effect). And I wondered then what it all meant, and why it felt so good (if it didn't mean anything). And I thought about it a few years, actually, and I decided, you know, that meaning and language are two different things. And that what the alien voice in the psychedelic experience wants to reveal is the syntactical nature of reality. That the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you make of it, whatever you wish!
Eh moi dea doi phegenheggo...
And one of the things that I learned about DMT, was that, if you ever had it, even just once, then you can have a dream. And in this dream somebody will pull out a little glass pipe, and then it will happen. It will happen just like the real thing. Because theres a button somewhere inside each and every one of us that gives you a look into the other side. And that's the button that resets the compass that tells you where you want to sail. Good luck!
Timewave Zero
Hello, all right. Have you ever noticed
how, um, there's this quality to reality, which comes and goes and kind
of, ebbs and flows. And nobody ever mentions it, or has a name for it.
Except that some people call it a bad hair day or they say, Things are
really weird recently. And I think we never notice it and we never talk
about it because we're embedded in a culture that expects us to believe
that all times are the same, and that your bank account doesn't
fluctuate, except according to the vicissitudes of your own existence.
In other words, every moment is expected to be the same, and yet this
isn't what we experience. And so what I noticed was that, running
through reality is the ebb and flow of novelty. And some days, and some
years, and some centuries are very novel indeed. And some ain't. And
they come and go on all scales, differently, interweaving, resonantly.
And this is what time seems to be.
And science has overlooked this, this most salient of facts about nature, that nature is a novelty-conserving engine. And that from the very first moments of that most improbable Big Bang, novelty has been conserved, because in the very beginning there was only an ocean of energy pouring into the universe. There were no planets, no stars, no molecules, no atoms, no magnetic fields. There was only an ocean of free electrons. And then, time passed. And the universe cooled. And novel structures crystallized out of disorder. First, atoms. Atoms of hydrogen and helium. Aggregating into stars. And at the center of those stars, the temperature and the pressure created something which had never been seen before, which was: fusion. And fusion, cooking in the hearts of stars, brought forth more novelty. Heavy elements, iron, carbon, four-valent carbon. And as time passed, there not only then, elemental systems, but because of the presence of carbon and the lower temperatures in the universe, molecular structures and out of molecules come simple subsets of organisms, the genetic machinery for transcripting information, aggregating into membranes, always binding novelty, always condensing time, always building and conserving upon complexity and always faster and faster and faster... and then, we come to ourselves. And where do we fit into all of this?
Five million years ago, we were an animal of some sort. Where will we be five million years from tonight? What we represent is not a sideshow, or an epiphenomenon, or an ancillary something-or-other on the edge of nowhere. What we represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself, for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified and complexified structure in the known universe. We are the cutting edge of organismic transformation of matter in this cosmos. And this has been going on for awhile. Since the discovery of fire, since the discovery of language, but now, and by now, I mean for the last 10,000 years, we've been into something new: not genetic information, not genetic mutation, not natural selection, but epigenetic activity. Writing, theatre, poetry, dance, art, tattooing, body-piercing, and philosophy. And these things have accelerated the ingression into novelty so that we have become an idea-excreting force in nature that builds temples, builds cities, builds machines, social engines, plans, and spreads over the earth, into space; into the microphysical domain; into the macrophysical domain. We, who five million years were animals, can kindle in our deserts and if necessary upon the cities of our enemies, the very energy which lights the stars at night.
Now, something peculiar is going on here. Something is calling us out of nature and sculpting us in its own image. And the confrontation with this something is now not so far away. This is what the impending apparent end of everything actually means. It means that the denouement of human history is about to occur and is about to be revealed as a universal process of concrescing and expressing novelty that is now going to become so intensified that it is going to flow over into another dimension.
You can feel it. You can feel it in your own dreams. You can feel it in your own trips. You can feel that we're approaching the cusp of a catastrophe, and that beyond that cusp, we are unrecognizable to ourselves. The wave of novelty that has rolled unbroken since the birth of the universe has now focused and coalesced itself in our species. And if it seems unlikely to you that the world is about to transform itself, then think of it this way: Think of a pond and think of how, if the surface of the pond begins to boil, that's the signal that some enormous protean form is about to break the surface of the pond and reveal itself. Human history is the boiling of the pond surface of ordinary biology. We are flesh, which has been caught in the grip of some kind of an attractor that lies ahead of us in time, and that is sculpting to its ends. Speaking to us, through psychedelics, through visions, through culture and technology. Consciousness, the language-forming capacity in our species is propelling itself forward, as though it were going to shed the monkey body and leap into some extra-surreal space that surrounds, but that we cannot currently see.
Even the people who run the planet, the World Bank, the IMF, you name it, they know that history is ending. They know by the reports which cross their desks, that the disappearance of the ozone hole, the toxification of the ocean, the clearing of the rainforests, what this means is that the womb of the planet has reached its finite limits, and that the human species has now, without choice, begun the descent down the birth canal of collective transformation toward something right around the corner, and nearly completely unimaginable.
And this is where the psychedelic shaman comes in. Because I believe that what we really contact through psychedelics is a kind of hyperspace, and from that hyperspace, we look down on both the past and the future and we anticipate the end. And a shaman is someone who has seen the end. And therefore is a trickster, because you don't worry if you've seen the end. If you know how it comes out, you go back and you take your place in the play and you let it all roll on without anxiety. This is what boundary dissolution means; it means nothing less than the anticipation of the end-state of human history. A return to the archaic mode, a rediscovery of the orgiastic freedom of the African grasslands of 20,000 years ago. A techno-escape into a future that looks more like the past than the future, because materialism, consumerism, product fetishism, all of these things will be eliminated and technology will become nanotechnology and disappear from our physical presence. If-- if-- we have the dream. If we allow the wave of novelty to propel us toward the creativity that is inimical to the human condition.
This is what we're talking about here-- psychedelics as a catalyst to the human imagination, psychedelics as a catalyst for language, because what cannot be said, cannot be created by the community. So that we need then, is the forced evolution of language, and the way to do that is to go back to agents that created language in the very first place. And that means, the psychedelic plants, the Gaian Logos, and the mysterious beckoning extraterrestrial minds beyond. Hooking ourselves back up, into the chakras of the hierarchy of nature, turning ourselves over to the mind of the Totally Other that created us and brought us forth out of animal organization. We are somehow part of the planetary destiny. How well we do determines how well the experiment of life on earth does. Because we have become the cutting edge of that experiment. We define it, and we hold in our hands the power to make or to break it.
This is not a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse. This is not a pseudo-millennium. This is the real thing, folks. This is not a test. This is the last chance before things become so dissipated that there is no chance for cohesiveness. We can use the calendar as a club. We can make the millennium an occasion for establishing an authentic human civilization, overcoming the dominator paradigm, dissolving boundaries through psychedelics, recreating a sexuality not based on monotheism, monogamy, and monotony. All these things are possible. If we can understand the overarching metaphor which holds it all together, which is the celebration of mind as play, the celebration of love as a genuine social value in the community. This is what they have suppressed so long, this is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being, you can't be led into thing fetishism and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be reengineered as a set of emotional values, rather than products. This is terrifying news. And if we are able to make this point, we can pull back, we can pull back and we can transcend. Nine times in the last million years, the ice has ground south from the poles, pushing human populations ahead of it, and those people didn't fuck up. Why should we, then? We are all survivors. We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the Unspeakable. And now, with the engines of technology in our hands, we ought to be able to reach out and actually exteriorize the human soul at the end of time, invoke it into existence like a UFO, and open the violet doorway into hyperspace and walk through it, out of profane history and into the world beyond the grave, beyond shamanism, beyond the end of history, into the galactic millennium that has beckoned to us for millions of years across space and time. This is the moment. A planet brings forth an opportunity like this only once in its lifetime. And we are ready, and we are poised, and as a community we are ready to move into it, to claim it, to make it our own. It's there -- go for it! And thank you!
And science has overlooked this, this most salient of facts about nature, that nature is a novelty-conserving engine. And that from the very first moments of that most improbable Big Bang, novelty has been conserved, because in the very beginning there was only an ocean of energy pouring into the universe. There were no planets, no stars, no molecules, no atoms, no magnetic fields. There was only an ocean of free electrons. And then, time passed. And the universe cooled. And novel structures crystallized out of disorder. First, atoms. Atoms of hydrogen and helium. Aggregating into stars. And at the center of those stars, the temperature and the pressure created something which had never been seen before, which was: fusion. And fusion, cooking in the hearts of stars, brought forth more novelty. Heavy elements, iron, carbon, four-valent carbon. And as time passed, there not only then, elemental systems, but because of the presence of carbon and the lower temperatures in the universe, molecular structures and out of molecules come simple subsets of organisms, the genetic machinery for transcripting information, aggregating into membranes, always binding novelty, always condensing time, always building and conserving upon complexity and always faster and faster and faster... and then, we come to ourselves. And where do we fit into all of this?
Five million years ago, we were an animal of some sort. Where will we be five million years from tonight? What we represent is not a sideshow, or an epiphenomenon, or an ancillary something-or-other on the edge of nowhere. What we represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself, for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified and complexified structure in the known universe. We are the cutting edge of organismic transformation of matter in this cosmos. And this has been going on for awhile. Since the discovery of fire, since the discovery of language, but now, and by now, I mean for the last 10,000 years, we've been into something new: not genetic information, not genetic mutation, not natural selection, but epigenetic activity. Writing, theatre, poetry, dance, art, tattooing, body-piercing, and philosophy. And these things have accelerated the ingression into novelty so that we have become an idea-excreting force in nature that builds temples, builds cities, builds machines, social engines, plans, and spreads over the earth, into space; into the microphysical domain; into the macrophysical domain. We, who five million years were animals, can kindle in our deserts and if necessary upon the cities of our enemies, the very energy which lights the stars at night.
Now, something peculiar is going on here. Something is calling us out of nature and sculpting us in its own image. And the confrontation with this something is now not so far away. This is what the impending apparent end of everything actually means. It means that the denouement of human history is about to occur and is about to be revealed as a universal process of concrescing and expressing novelty that is now going to become so intensified that it is going to flow over into another dimension.
You can feel it. You can feel it in your own dreams. You can feel it in your own trips. You can feel that we're approaching the cusp of a catastrophe, and that beyond that cusp, we are unrecognizable to ourselves. The wave of novelty that has rolled unbroken since the birth of the universe has now focused and coalesced itself in our species. And if it seems unlikely to you that the world is about to transform itself, then think of it this way: Think of a pond and think of how, if the surface of the pond begins to boil, that's the signal that some enormous protean form is about to break the surface of the pond and reveal itself. Human history is the boiling of the pond surface of ordinary biology. We are flesh, which has been caught in the grip of some kind of an attractor that lies ahead of us in time, and that is sculpting to its ends. Speaking to us, through psychedelics, through visions, through culture and technology. Consciousness, the language-forming capacity in our species is propelling itself forward, as though it were going to shed the monkey body and leap into some extra-surreal space that surrounds, but that we cannot currently see.
Even the people who run the planet, the World Bank, the IMF, you name it, they know that history is ending. They know by the reports which cross their desks, that the disappearance of the ozone hole, the toxification of the ocean, the clearing of the rainforests, what this means is that the womb of the planet has reached its finite limits, and that the human species has now, without choice, begun the descent down the birth canal of collective transformation toward something right around the corner, and nearly completely unimaginable.
And this is where the psychedelic shaman comes in. Because I believe that what we really contact through psychedelics is a kind of hyperspace, and from that hyperspace, we look down on both the past and the future and we anticipate the end. And a shaman is someone who has seen the end. And therefore is a trickster, because you don't worry if you've seen the end. If you know how it comes out, you go back and you take your place in the play and you let it all roll on without anxiety. This is what boundary dissolution means; it means nothing less than the anticipation of the end-state of human history. A return to the archaic mode, a rediscovery of the orgiastic freedom of the African grasslands of 20,000 years ago. A techno-escape into a future that looks more like the past than the future, because materialism, consumerism, product fetishism, all of these things will be eliminated and technology will become nanotechnology and disappear from our physical presence. If-- if-- we have the dream. If we allow the wave of novelty to propel us toward the creativity that is inimical to the human condition.
This is what we're talking about here-- psychedelics as a catalyst to the human imagination, psychedelics as a catalyst for language, because what cannot be said, cannot be created by the community. So that we need then, is the forced evolution of language, and the way to do that is to go back to agents that created language in the very first place. And that means, the psychedelic plants, the Gaian Logos, and the mysterious beckoning extraterrestrial minds beyond. Hooking ourselves back up, into the chakras of the hierarchy of nature, turning ourselves over to the mind of the Totally Other that created us and brought us forth out of animal organization. We are somehow part of the planetary destiny. How well we do determines how well the experiment of life on earth does. Because we have become the cutting edge of that experiment. We define it, and we hold in our hands the power to make or to break it.
This is not a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse. This is not a pseudo-millennium. This is the real thing, folks. This is not a test. This is the last chance before things become so dissipated that there is no chance for cohesiveness. We can use the calendar as a club. We can make the millennium an occasion for establishing an authentic human civilization, overcoming the dominator paradigm, dissolving boundaries through psychedelics, recreating a sexuality not based on monotheism, monogamy, and monotony. All these things are possible. If we can understand the overarching metaphor which holds it all together, which is the celebration of mind as play, the celebration of love as a genuine social value in the community. This is what they have suppressed so long, this is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being, you can't be led into thing fetishism and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be reengineered as a set of emotional values, rather than products. This is terrifying news. And if we are able to make this point, we can pull back, we can pull back and we can transcend. Nine times in the last million years, the ice has ground south from the poles, pushing human populations ahead of it, and those people didn't fuck up. Why should we, then? We are all survivors. We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the Unspeakable. And now, with the engines of technology in our hands, we ought to be able to reach out and actually exteriorize the human soul at the end of time, invoke it into existence like a UFO, and open the violet doorway into hyperspace and walk through it, out of profane history and into the world beyond the grave, beyond shamanism, beyond the end of history, into the galactic millennium that has beckoned to us for millions of years across space and time. This is the moment. A planet brings forth an opportunity like this only once in its lifetime. And we are ready, and we are poised, and as a community we are ready to move into it, to claim it, to make it our own. It's there -- go for it! And thank you!
Terence McKenna - The Message
Terence Mckenna: Psychedelic advice
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