-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">
</A> -Cui Bono?-
> [O]nce you've been exposed to the psychedelic mindscape of the
> man referred to as 'the Timothy Leary of the Nineties' (by Leary
> himself!), your worldview may never be the same ever again....
>
> CLASSIC Terence McKenna... This article will shred your mind.
> A must. -- Richard Metzger
> <http://www.disinfo.com/disinfo?p=folder&title=Terence+McKenna>
oops... had half a dozen windows open in my browser, mostly McKenna pages
from the above disinfo.com link. Because the Mondo 2000 interview and the
following page both had an olive-green background, and were from deoxy.org,
I mistakenly sent the wrong file. Here's the article Metzger was referring
to as "a must". Sorry....
----
from:
Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness
by Terence McKenna <http://www.deoxy.org/t_thc.htm>
A talk given at the Lilly/Goswami Conference on Consciousness and Quantum
Physics at Esalen, December 1983. It was to be the first of many lectures
at Esalen Institute on the Big Sur Coast of California. (Included as
written word because this edited transcription appears in print as part of
his book The Archaic Revival - dimitri)
There is a very circumscribed place in organic nature that has, I think,
important implications for students of human nature. I refer to the
tryptophan-derived hallucinogens dimethyltryptamine (DMT), psilocybin, and
a hybrid drug that is in aboriginal use in the rain forests of South
America, ayahuasca. This latter is a combination of dimethyltryptamine and
a monoamine oxidase inhibitor that is taken orally. It seems appropriate to
talk about these drugs when we discuss the nature of consciousness; it is
also appropriate when we discuss quantum physics.
It is my interpretation that the major quantum mechanical phenomena
that we all experience, aside from waking consciousness itself, are dreams
and hallucinations. These states, at least in the restricted sense that I
am concerned with, occur when the large amounts of various sorts of
radiation conveyed into the body by the senses are restricted. Then we see
interior images and interior processes that are psychophysical. These
processes definitely arise at the quantum mechanical level. It's been shown
by John Smythies, Alexander Shulgin, and others that there are quantum
mechanical correlates to hallucinogenesis. In other words, if one atom on
the molecular ring of an inactive compound is moved, the compound becomes
highly active. To me this is a perfect proof of the dynamic linkage at the
formative level between quantum mechanically described matter and mind.
Hallucinatory states can be induced by a variety of hallucinogens and
diassociative anesthetics, and by experiences like fasting and other
ordeals. But what makes the tryptamine family of compounds especially
interesting is the intensity of the hallucinations and the concentration of
activity in the visual cortex. There is an immense vividness to these
interior landscapes, as if information were being presented
three-dimensionally and deployed fourth-dimensionally, coded as light and
as evolving surfaces. When one confronts these dimensions one becomes part
of a dynamic relationship relating to the experience while trying to decode
what it is saying. This phenomenon is not new - people have been talking to
gods and demons for far more of human history than they have not.
It is only the conceit of the scientific and postindustrial societies
that allows us to even propound some of the questions that we take to be so
important. For instance, the question of contact with extraterrestrials is
a kind of red herring premised upon a number of assumptions that a moment's
reflection will show are completely false. To search expectantly for a
radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture bound a
presumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant. And yet,
this has been chosen as the avenue by which it is assumed contact is likely
to occur. Meanwhile, there are people all over the world - psychics,
shamans, mystics, schizophrenics - whose heads are filled with information,
but it has been ruled a priori irrelevant, incoherent, or mad. Only that
which is validated through consensus via certain sanctioned
instrumentalities will be accepted as a signal. The problem is that we are
so inundated by these signals - these other dimensions - that there is a
great deal of noise in the circuit.
It is no great accomplishment to hear a voice in the head. The
accomplishment is to make sure it is telling the truth, because the demons
are of many kinds: "Some are made of ions, some of mind; the ones of
ketamine, you'll find, stutter often and are blind." The reaction to these
voices is not to kneel in genuflection before a god, because then one will
be like Dorothy in her first encounter with Oz. There is no dignity in the
universe unless we meet these things on our feet, and that means having an
I/Thou relationship. One say to the Other: "You say you are omniscient,
omnipresent, or you say you are from Zeta Reticuli. You're long on talk,
but what can you show me?" Magicians, people who invoke these things, have
always understood that one must go into such encounters with one's wits
about oneself.
What does extraterrestrial communication have to do with this family
of hallucinogenic compounds I wish to discuss? Simply this: that the unique
presentational phenomenology of this family of compounds has been
overlooked. Psilocybin, though rare, is the best known of these neglected
substances. Psilocybin, in the minds of the uninformed public and in the
eyes of the law, is lumped together with LSD and mescaline, when in fact
each of these compounds is a phenomenologically defined universe unto
itself. Psilocybin and DMT invoke the Logos, although DMT is more intense
and more brief in its action. This means that they work directly on the
language centers, so that an important aspect of the experience is the
interior dialogue. As soon as one discovers this about psilocybin and about
tryptamines in general, one must decide whether or not to enter into this
dialogue and to try and make sense of the incoming signal. This is what I
have attempted.
I call myself an explorer rather than a scientist, because the area
that I'm looking at contains insufficient data to support even the dream of
being a science. We are in a position comparable to that of explorers who
map one river and only indicate other rivers flowing into it; we must leave
many rivers unascended and thus can say nothing about them. This Baconian
collecting of data, with no assumptions about what it might eventually
yield, has pushed me to a number of conclusions that I did not anticipate.
Perhaps through reminiscence I can explain what I mean, for in this case
describing past experiences raises all of the issues.
I first experimented with DMT in 1965; it was even then a compound
rarely met with. It is surprising how few people are familiar with it, for
we live in a society that is absolutely obsessed with every kind of
sensation imaginable and that adores every therapy, every intoxication,
every sexual configuration, and all forms of media overload. Yet, however
much we may be hedonists or pursuers of the bizarre, we find DMT to be too
much. It is, as they say in Spanish, bastante, it's enough - so much enough
that it's too much. Once smoked, the onset of the experience begins in
about fifteen seconds. One falls immediately into a trance. One's eyes are
closed and one hears a sound like ripping cellophane, like someone
crumpling up plastic film and throwing it away. A friend of mine suggests
this is our radio entelechy ripping out of the organic matrix. An ascending
tone is heard. Also present is the normal hallucinogenic modality, a
shifting geometric surface of migrating and changing colored forms. At the
synaptic site of activity, all available bond sites are being occupied, and
one experiences the mode shift occurring over a period of about thirty
seconds. At that point one arrives in a place that defies description, a
space that has a feeling of being underground, or somehow insulated and
domed. In Finnegans Wake such a place is called the "merry go raum," from
the German word raum, for "space." The room is actually going around, and
in that space one feels like a child, though one has come out somewhere in
eternity.
The experience always reminds me of the twenty-fourth fragment of
Heraclitus: "The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls." One not only
becomes the Aeon at play with colored balls but meets entities as well. In
the book by my brother and myself, The Invisible Landscape, I describe them
as self-transforming machine elves, for that is how they appear. These
entities are dynamically contorting topological modules that are somehow
distinct from the surrounding background, which is itself undergoing a
continuous transformation. These entities remind me of the scene in the
film version of The Wizard of Oz after the Munchkins come with a death
certificate for the Witch of the East. They all have very squeaky voices
and they sing a little song about being "absolutely and completely dead."
The tryptamine Munchkins come, these hyperdimensional machine-elf entities,
and they bathe one in love. It's not erotic but it is open-hearted. It
certainly feels good. These beings are like fractal reflections of some
previously hidden and suddenly autonomous part of one's own psyche.
And they are speaking, saying, "Don't be alarmed. Remember, and do
what we are doing." One of the interesting characteristics of DMT is that
it sometimes inspires fear - this marks the experience as existentially
authentic. One of the interesting approaches to evaluating such a compound
is to see how eager people are to do it a second time. A touch of terror
gives the stamp of validity to the experience because it means, "This is
real." We are in the balance. We read the literature, we know the maximum
doses, the LD-50, and so on. But nevertheless, so great is one's faith in
the mind that when one is out in it one comes to feel that the rules of
pharmacology do not really apply and that control of existence on that
plane is really a matter of focus of will and good luck.
I'm not saying that there's something intrinsically good about
terror. I'm saying that, granted the situation, if one is not terrified
then one must be somewhat out of contact with the full dynamics of what is
happening. To not be terrified means either that one is a fool or that one
has taken a compound that paralyzes the ability to be terrified. I have
nothing against hedonism, and I certainly bring something out of it. But
the experience must move one's heart, and it will not move the heart unless
it deals with the issues of life and death. If it deals with life and death
it will move one to fear, it will move one to tears, it will move one to
laughter. These places are profoundly strange and alien.
The fractal elves seem to be reassuring, saying, "Don't worry, don't
worry; do this, look at this." Meanwhile, one is completely "over there."
One's ego is intact. One's fear reflexes are intact. One is not "fuzzed
out" at all. Consequently, the natural reaction is amazement; profound
astonishment that persists and persists. One breathes and it persists. The
elves are saying, "Don't get a loop of wonder going that quenches your
ability to understand. Try not to be so amazed. Try to focus and look at
what we're doing." What they're doing is emitting sounds like music, like
language. These sounds pass without any quantized moment of distinction -
as Philo Judaeus said that the Logos would when it became perfect - from
things heard to things beheld. One hears and beholds a language of alien
meaning that is conveying alien information that cannot be Englished.
Being monkeys, when we encounter a translinguistic object, a kind of
cognitive dissonance is set up in our hindbrain. We try to pour language
over it and it sheds it like water off a duck's back. We try again and fail
again, and this cognitive dissonance, this "wow" or "flutter" that is
building off this object causes wonder, astonishment and awe at the brink
of terror. One must control that. And the way to control it is to do what
the entities are telling ine to do, to do what they are doing.
I mention these "effects" to invite the attention of
experimentalists, whether they be shamans or scientists. There is something
going on with these compounds that is not part of the normal presentational
spectrum of hallucinogenic drug experience. When one begins to experiment
with one's voice, unanticipated phenomena become possible. One experiences
glossolalia, although unlike classical glossolalia, which has been studied.
Students of classical glossolalia have measured pools of saliva eighteen
inches across on the floors of South American churches where people have
been kneeling. After classical glossolalia has occurred, the glossolaliasts
often turn to ask the people nearby, "Did I do it? Did I speak in tongues?"
This hallucinogen induced phenomenon isn't like that; it's simply a brain
state that allows the expression of the assembly language that lies behind
language, or a primal language of the sort that Robert Graves discussed in
The White Goddess, or a Kabbalistic language of the sort that is described
in the Zohar, a primal "ur sprach" that comes out of oneself. One discovers
one can make the extradimensional objects - the feeling-toned,
meaning-toned, three-dimensional rotating complexes of transforming light
and color. To know this is to feel like a child. One is playing with
colored balls; one has become the Aeon.
This happened to me twenty seconds after I smoked DMT on a particular
day in 1966. I was appalled. Until then I had thought that I had my
ontological categories intact. I had taken LSD before, yet this thing came
upon me like a bolt from the blue. I came down and said (and I said it many
time), "I cannot believe this; this is impossible, this is completely
impossible." There was a declension of gnosis that proved to me in a moment
that right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of
active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely
alien. I call it the Logos, and I make no judgements about it. I constantly
engage it in dialogue, saying, "Well, what are you? Are you some kind of
diffuse consciousness that is in the ecosystem of the Earth? Are you a god
or an extraterrestrial? Show me what you know."
The psilocybin mushrooms also convey one into the world of the
tryptamine hypercontinuum. Indeed, psilocybin is a psychoactive tryptamine.
The mushroom is full of answers to the questions raised by its own
presence. The true history of the galaxy over the last four and a half
billion years is trivial to it. One can access images of cosmological
history. Such experiences naturally raise the question of independent
validation - at least for a time this was my question. But as I became more
familiar with the epistemological assumptions of modern science, I slowly
realized that the structure of the Western intellectual enterprise is so
flimsy at the center that apparently no one knows anything with certitude.
It was then that I became less reluctant to talk about these experiences.
They are experiences, and as such they are primary data for being. This
dimension is not remote, and yet it is so unspeakably bizarre that it casts
into doubt all of humanity's historical assumptions.
The psilocybin mushrooms do the same things that DMT does, although
the experience builds up over an hour and is sustained for a couple of
hours. There is the same confrontation with an alien intelligence and
extremely bizarre translinguistic information complexes. These experiences
strongly suggest that there is some latent ability of the human brain/body
that has yet to be discovered; yet, once discovered, it will be so obvious
that it will fall right into the mainstream of cultural evolution. It seems
to me that either language is the shadow of this ability or that this
ability will be a further extension of language. Perhaps a human language
is possible in which the intent of meaning is actually beheld in
three-dimensional space. If this can happen on DMT, it means it is at
least, under some circumstances, accessible to human beings. Given ten
thousand years and high cultural involvement in such a talent, does anyone
doubt that it could become a cultural convenience in the same way that
mathematics or language has become a cultural convenience?
Naturally, as a result of the confrontation of alien intelligence
with organized intellect on the other side, many theories have been
elaborated. The theory that I put forth in Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom
Grower's Guide, held the Stropharia cubensis mushroom was a species that
did not evolve on earth. Within the mushroom trance, I was informed that
once a culture has complete understanding of its genetic information, it
reengineers itself for survival. The Stropharia cubensis mushroom's version
of reengineering is a mycelial network strategy when in contact with
planetary surfaces and a spore-dispersion strategy as a means of radiating
throughout the galaxy. And, though I am troubled by how freely Bell's
nonlocality theorem is tossed around, nevertheless the alien intellecton
the other side does seem to be in possession in a huge body of information
drawn from the history of the galaxy. It/they say that there is nothing
unusual about this, that humanity's conceptions of organized intelligence
and the dispersion of life in the galaxy are hopelessly culture-bound, that
the galaxy has been an organized society for billions of years. Life
evolves under so many different regimens of chemistry, temperature, and
pressure, that searching for an extraterrestrial who will sit down and have
a conversation with you is doomed to failure. The main problem with
searching for extraterrestrials is to recognize them. Time is so vast and
evolutionary strategies and evironments so varied that the trick is to know
that contact is being made at all. The Stropharia cubensis mushroom, if one
can believe what it says in one of its moods, is a symbiote, and it desires
ever deeper symbiosis with the human species. It achieved symbiosis with
human society early by associating itself with domesticated cattle and
through them human nomads. Like the plants men and women grew and the
animals they husbanded, the mushroom was able to inculcate itself into the
human family, so that where human genes went these other genes would be
carried.
But the classic mushroom cults of Mexico were destroyed by the coming
of the Spanish conquest. The Franciscans assumed they had an absolute
monopoly on theophagy, the eating of God; yet in the New World they came
upon people calling a mushroom teonanacatl, the flesh of the gods. They set
to work, and the Inquisition was able to push the old religion into the
mountains of Oaxaca so that it only survived in a few villages when
Valentina and Gordon Wasson found it there in the 1950s.
There is another metaphor. One must balance these explainations. Now
I shall sound as if I didn't think the mushroom is an extraterrestrial. It
may instead be what I've recently come to suspect - that the human soul is
so alienated from us in our present culture that we treat it as an
extraterrestrial. To us the most alien thing in the cosmos is the human
soul. Aliens Hollywood-style could arrive on earth tomorrow and the DMT
trance would remain more weird and continue to hold more promise for useful
information for the human future. It is that intense. Ignorance forced the
mushroom cult into hiding. Ignorance burned the libraries of the
Hellenistic world at an earlier period and dispersed the ancient knowledge,
shattering the stellar and astronomical machinery that had been the work of
centuries. By ignorance I mean the Hellenistic-Christian-Judaic tradition.
The inheritors of this tradition built a triumph of mechanism. It was they
who later realized the alchemical dreams of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries - and the twentieth century - with the transformation of elements
and the discovery of gene transplants. But then, having conquered the New
World and driven its people into cultural fragmentation and diaspora, they
came unexpectedly upon the body of Osiris - the condensed body of Eros - in
the mountains of Mexico where Eros has retreated at the coming of the
Christos. And by finding the mushroom, they unleashed it.
Phillip K. Dick, in one of his last novels, Valis, discusses the long
hibernation of the Logos. A creature of pure information, it was buried in
the ground at Nag Hammadi, along with the burying of the Chenoboskion
Library circa 370 A.D. As static information, it existed there until 1947,
when the texts were translated and read. As soon as people had the
information in their minds, the symbiote came alive, for, like the mushroom
consciousness, Dick imagined it to be a thing of pure information. The
mushroom consciousness is the consciousness of the Other in hyperspace,
which means in dream and in the psilocybin trance, at the quantum
foundation of being, in the human future, and after death. All of these
places that were thought the be discrete and separate are seen to be part
of a single continuum. History is the dash over ten to fifteen thousand
years from nomadism to flying saucer, hopefully without ripping the
envelope of the planet so badly that the birth is aborted and fails, and we
remain brutish prisoners of matter.
History is the shockwave of eschatology. Something is at the end of
time and is casting an enormous shadow over human history, drawing all
human becoming toward it. All the wars, the philosophies, the rapes, the
pillaging, the migrations, the cities, the civilizations - all of this is
occupying a microsecond of geological, planetary, and galactic time as the
monkeys react to the symbiote, which is in the environment and which is
feeding information to humanity about the larger picture. I do not belong
to the school that wants to attribute all of our accomplishments to
knowledge given to us as a gift from friendly aliens - I'm describing
something I hope is more profound than that. As nervous systems evolve to
higher and higher levels, they come more and more to understand the true
situation in which they are embedded, and the true situation in which we
are embedded is an organism, an organization of intelligence on a galactic
scale. Science and mathematics may be culture-bound. We cannot know for
sure, because we have never dealt with an alien mathematics or an alien
culture except in the occult realm, and that evidence is inadmissible by
the guardians of scientific truth. This means that the contents of shamanic
experience and of plant-induced ecstasies are inadmissible even though they
are the source of novelty and the cutting edge of the ingression of the
novel into the plenum of being.
Think about this for a moment: If the human mind does not loom large
in the coming history of the human race, then what is to become of us? The
future is bound to be psychedelic, because the future belongs to the mind.
We are just beginning to push the buttons on the mind. Once we take a
serious engineering approach to this, we are going to discover the
plasticity, the mutability, the eternal nature of the mind and, I believe,
release it from the monkey. My vision of the final human future is an
effort to exteriorize the soul and internalize the body, so that the
exterior soul will exist as a superconducting lens of translinguistic
matter generated out of the body of each of us at a critical juncture at
our psychedelic bar mitzvah. From that point on, we will be eternal
somewhere in the solid-state matrix of the translinguistic lens we have
become. One's body image will exist as a holographic wave transform while
one is at play in the fields of the Lord and living in Elysium.
Other intelligent monkeys have walked this planet. We exterminated
them and so now we are unique, but what is loose on this planet is
language, self-replicating information systems that reflect functions of
DNA: learning, coding, templating, recording, testing, retesting, recodong
against DNA functions. The again, language may be a quality of an entirely
different order. Whatever language is, it is in us monkeys now and moving
through us and moving out of our hands and into the noosphere with which we
have surrounded ourselves.
The tryptamine state seems to be in one sense transtemporal; it is an
anticipation of the future, It is as though Plato's metaphor were true -
that time IS the moving image of eternity. The tryptamine ecstasy is a
stepping out of the moving image and into eternity, the eternity of the
standing now, the nunc stans of Thomas Aquinas. In that state, all of human
history is seen to lead toward this culminating moment. Acceleration is
visible in all the processes around us: the fact that fire was discovered
several million years ago; language came perhaps thirty-five thousand years
ago; measurement, five thousand; Galileo, four hundred; then Watson-Crick
and DNA. What is obviously happening is that everything is being drawn
together. On the other hand, the description our physicists are giving us
of the universe - that it has lasted billions of years and will last
billions of years into the future - is a dualistic conception, an inductive
projection that is very unsophisticated when applied to the nature of
consciousness and language. Consciousness is somehow able to collapse the
state vector and thereby cause the stuff of being to undergo what Alfred
North Whitehead called "the formality of actually occurring." Here is the
beginning of an understanding of the centrality of human beings. Western
societies have been on a decentralizing bender for five hundred years,
concluding that the Earth is not the center of the universe and man is not
the beloved of God. We have moved ourselves out toward the edge of the
galaxy, when the fact is that the most richly organized material in the
universe is th human cerebral cortex, and the densest and richest
experience in the univese is the experience you are having right now.
Everything should be constellated outward from the perceiving self. That is
the primary datum.
The perceiving self under the influence of these hallucinogenic
plants gives information that is totally at variance with the models that
we inherit from our past, yet these dimensions exist. One one level, this
information is a matter of no great consequence, for many cultures have
understood this for millennia. But we moderns are so grotesquely alienated
and taken out of what life is about that to us it comes as a revelation.
Without psychedelics the closest we can get to the Mystery is to try to
feel in some abstract mode the power of myth or ritual. This grasping is a
very overintellectualized and unsatisfying sort of process.
As I said, I am an explorer, not a scientist. If I were unique, then
none of my conclusions would have any meaning outside the context of
myself. My experiences, like yours, have to be more or less part of the
human condition. Some may have more facility for such exploration than
others, and these states may be difficult to achieve, but they are part of
the human condition. There are few clues that these extradimensional places
exist. If art carries images out of the Other from the Logos to the world -
drawing ideas down into matter - why is human art history so devoid of what
psychedelic voyagers have experienced so totally? Perhaps the flying saucer
or UFO is the central motif to be understood in order to get a handle on
reality here and now. We are alienated, so alienated that the self must
disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the
truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses. When we can love the alien,
then we will have begun to heal the psychic discontinuity that has plagued
us since at least the sixteenth century, possibly earlier.
My testimony is that magic is alive in hyperspace. It is not
necessary to believe me, only to form a relationship with these
hallucinogenic plants. The fact is that the gnosis comes from plants. There
is some certainty that one is dealing with a creature of integrity if one
deals with a plant, but the creatures born in the demonic artifice of
laboratories have to be dealt with very, very carefully. DMT is an
endogenous hallucinogen. It is present in small amounts in the human brain.
Also it is improtant that psilocybin is 4-phosphoraloxy-N,
N-dimethyltryptamine and that serotonin, the major neurotransmitter in the
human brain, found in all life and most concentrated in humans, is
5-hydroxytryptamine. The very fact that the onset of DMT is so rapid,
coming on in forty-five seconds and lasting five minutes, means that the
brain is absolutely at home with this compound. On the other hand, a
hallucinogen like LSD is retained in the body for some time.
I will add a cautionary note. I always feel odd telling people to
verify my observations since the sine qua non is the hallucinogenic plant.
Experimenters should be very careful. One must build up to the experience.
These are bizarre dimensions of extraordinary power and beauty. There is no
set rule to avoid being overwhelmed, but move carefully, reflect a great
deal, and always try to map experiences back onto the history of the race
and the philosphical and religious accomplishments of the species. All the
compounds are potentially dangerous, and all compounds, at sufficient doses
or repeated over time, involve risks. The library is the first place to go
when looking into taking a new compound.
We need all the information availaable to navigate dimensions that
are profoundly strange and alien. I have been to Konarak and visited
Bubaneshwar. I'm familiar with Hindu iconography and have collected
thankas. I saw similarites between my LSD experiences and the iconography
of Mahayana Buddhism. In fact, it was LSD experiences that drove me to
collect Mahayana art. But what amazed me was the total absence of the
motifs of DMT. It is not there; it is not there in any tradition familiar
to me.
There is a very interesting story by Jorge Luis Borges called "The
Sect of the Phoenix." Allow me to recapitulate. Borges starts out by
writing: "There is no human group in which members of the sect do not
appear. It is also true that there is no persecution or rigor they have not
suffered and perpetrated." He continues,
The rite is the only religious practice observed by the sectarians. The
rite constitutes the Secret. This Secret...is transmitted from generation
to generation. The act in itself is trivial, momentary, and requires no
description. The Secret is sacred, but is always somewhat ridiculous; its
performance is furtive and the adept do not speak of it. There are no
decent words to name it, but it is understood that all words name it or
rather inevitably allude to it.
Borges never explicitly says what the Secret is, but if one knows his other
story, "The Aleph," one can put these two together and realize that the
Aleph is the experience of the Secret of the Cult of the Phoenix.
In the Amazon, when the mushroom was revealing its information and
deputizing us to do various things, we asked, "Why us? Why should we be the
ambassadors of an alien species into human culture?" And it answered,
"Because you did not believe in anything. Because you have never given over
your belief to anyone." The sect of the phoenix, the cult of this
experience, is perhaps millennia old, but it has not yet been brought to
light where the historical threads may run. The prehistoric use of ecstatic
plants on this planet is not well understood. Until recently, psilocybin
mushroom taking was confined to the central isthumus of Mexico. The
psilocybin-containing species Stropharia cubensis is not known to be in
archaic use in a shamanic rite anywhere in the world. DMT is used in the
Amazon and has been for millennia, but by cultures quite primitive -
usually nomadic hunter-gatherers.
I am baffled by what I call "the black hole effect" that seems to
surround DMT. A black hole causes a curvature of space such that no light
can leave it, and, since no signal can leave it, no information can leave
it. Let us leave aside the issue of whether this is true in practice of
spinning black holes. Think of it as a metaphor. Metaphorically, DMT is
like an intellectual black hole in that once one knows about it, it is very
hard for others to understand what one is talking about. One cannot be
heard. The more one is able to articulate what it is, the less others are
able to understand. This is why I think people who attain enlightenment, if
we may for a moment comap these two things, are silent. They are silent
because we cannot understand them. Why the phenomenon of tryptamine ecstasy
has not been looked at by scientists, thrill seekers, or anyone else, I am
not sure, but I recommend it to your attention.
The tragedy of our cultural situation is that we have no shamanic
tradition. Shamanism is primarily techniques, not ritual. It is a set of
techniques that have been worked out over millennia that make it possible,
though perhaps not for everyone, to explore these areas. People of
predilection are noticed and encouraged.
In archaic societies where shamanism is a thriving institution, the
signs are fairly easy to recognize: oddness or uniqueness in an individual.
Epilepsy is often a signature in preliterate societies, or survival of an
unusual ordeal in an unexpected way. For instance, people who are struck by
lightning and live are thought to make excellent shamans. People who nearly
die of a disease and fight their way back to health after weeks and weeks
of an indeterminate zone are thought to have strength of soul. Among
aspiring shamans there must be some sign of inner strength or a
hypersensitivity to trance states. In traveling around the world and
dealing with shamans, I find the distinguishing characteristic is an
extraordinary centeredness. Usually the shaman is an intellectual and is
alienated from society. A good shaman sees exactly who you are and says,
"Ah, here's somebody to have a conversation with." The anthropological
literature always presents shamans as embedded in a tradition, but once one
gets to know them they are always very sophisticated about what they are
doing. They are the true phenomenologists of this world; they know plant
chemistry, yet they call these energy fields "spirits." We hear the word
"spirits" through a series of narrowing declensions of meaning that are
worse almost than not understanding. Shamans speak of "spirit" the way a
quantum physicist might speak of "charm"; it is a technical gloss for a
very complicated concept.
It is possible that there are shamanic family lines, at least in the
case of hallucinogen-using shamans, because shamanic ability is to some
degree determined by how many active receptor sites occur in the brain,
thus facilitating these experiences. Some claim to have these experiences
naturally, but I am underwhelmed by the evidence that this is so. What it
comes down to for me is "What can you show me?"
I always ask that question; finally in the Amazon, informants said,
"Let's take our machetes and hike out here half a mile and get some vine
and boil it up and we will show you what we can show you."
Let us be clear. People die in these societies that I'm talking about
all the time and for all kinds of reasons. Death is really much more among
them than it is in our society. Those who have epilepsy who don't die are
brought to the attention of the shaman and trained in breathing and plant
usage and other things - the fact is that we don't really know all of what
goes on. These secret information systems have not been well studied.
Shamanism is not, in these traditional societies, a terribly pleasant
office. Shamans are not normally allowed to have any political power,
because they are sacred. The shaman is to be found sitting at the headman's
side in the council meetings, but after the council meeting he returns to
his hut at the edge of the village. Shamans are peripheral to society's
goings on in ordinary social life in every sense of the word. They are
called on in crisis, and the crisis can be someone dying or ill, a
psychological difficulty, a marital quarral, a theft, or weather that must
be predicted.
We do not live in that kind of society, so when I explore these
plants' effects and try to call your attention to them, it is as a
phenomenon. I don't know what we can do with this phenomenon, but I have a
feeling that the potential is great. The mind-set that I always bring to it
is simply exploratory and Baconian - the mapping and gathering of facts.
Herbert Guenther talks about human uniqueness and says one must come
to terms with one's uniqueness. We are naive about the role of language and
being as the primary facts of experience. What good is a theory of how the
universe works if it's a series of tensor equations that, even when
understood, come nowhere tangential to experience? The only intellectual or
noetic or spiritual path worth following is one that builds on personal
experience.
What the mushroom says about itself is this: that it is an
extraterrestrial organism, that spores can survive the conditions of
interstellar space. They are deep, deep purple - the color that they would
have to be to absorb the deep ultraviolet end of the spectrum. The casing
of a spore is one of the hardest organic substances known. The electron
density approaches that of a metal.
Is it possible that these mushrooms never evolved on earth? That is
what the Stropharia cubensis itself suggests. Global currents may form on
the outside of the spore. The spores are very light and by Brownian motion
are capable of percolation to the edge if the planet's atmosphere. Then,
through interaction with energetic particles, some small number could
actually escape into space. Understand that this is an evolutionary
strategy where only one in many billions of spores actually makes the
transition between the stars - a biological strategy for radiating
throughout the galaxy without a technology. Of course this happens over
very long periods of time. But if you think that the galaxy is roughly
100,000 light-years from edge to edge, if something were moving only one
one-hundredth the speed of light - now that's not a tremendous speed that
presents problems to any advanced technology - it could cross the galaxy in
one hundred million years. There's life on this planet 1.8 billion years
old; that's eighteen times longer than one hundred million years. So,
looking at the galaxy on those time scales, one sees that the percolation
of spores between the stars is a perfectly viable strategy for biology. It
might take millions of years, but it's the same principle by which plants
migrate into a desert or across an ocean.
There are no fungi in the fossil record older than forty million
years. The orthodox explaination is that fungi are soft-bodied and do not
fossilize well, but on the other hand we have fossilized soft-bodied worms
and other benthic marine invertebrates from South African gunflint chert
that is dated to over a billion years.
I don't necessarily believe what the mushroom tells me; rather we
have a dialogue. It is a very strange person and has many bizarre opinions.
I entertain it the way I would any eccentric friend. I say, "Well, so
that's what you think." When the mushroom began saying it was an
extraterrestrial, I felt that I was placed in the dilemma of a child who
wishes to destroy a radio to see if there are little people inside. I
couldn't figure out whether the mushroom is the alien or the mushroom is
some kind of technological artifact allowing me to hear the alien when the
alien is actually light-years aways, using some kind of Bell nonlocality
principle to communicate.
The mushroom states its own position very clearly. It says, "I
require the nervous system of a mammal. Do you have one handy?"
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
