New Maps of Hyperspace

Berkeley Institute for the Study of Consciousness, 1984

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Synopsis:

McKenna opens his talk with the assertion that “escape is a key thing charged against those who would experiment with plant hallucinogens. The people who make this charge hardly dare face the degree to which hallucinogens are escapist. Escape. Escape from the planet, from death, from habit, and from the problem, if possible, of the Unspeakable.” He regards the key to liberation as the fulfillment of our deepest “wish to escape into the dream,” a dream that is eschatological, zero time, and beyond history.

McKenna says that if one “examines the phenomenon of death and the doctrine of the soul in all its ramifications…one finds repeatedly the idea that there is a light body, an entelechy that is somehow mixed up with the body during life and at death is involved in a crisis in which these two portions separate.” While science provides no answers “in the matter of the fate or origin of the soul,” McKenna believes that psychedelics, as well as dreams, shed light on “the experience of the hyperdimension in which life and mind seem to be embedded.”

According to shamanic tradition, the dream state is regarded as a “parallel continuum,” which the shaman accesses through the use of “hallucinogens as well as with other techniques, but most effectively with hallucinogens. Everyone else accesses it through dreams.” McKenna asserts that “both the psychedelic dream state and the waking psychedelic state acquire great import because they reveal to life a task: to become familiar with this dimension that is causing being, in order to be familiar with it at the moment of passing from life.

McKenna calls attention to “the metaphor of a vehicle - an after-death vehicle, an astral body,” a reference found in various shamanic traditions and yogic practices that suggests “the purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.” To this traditional idea, McKenna adds another: that we are “in the final historical seconds of a crisis that involves the end of history, our departure from the planet, the triumph over death, and the release of the individual from the body. We are, in fact, closing distance with the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter -- the freeing of life from the dark chrysalis of matter. The old metaphor of psyche as the caterpillar transformed by metamorphosis is a species wide analogy. We must undergo a metamorphosis in order to survive the momentum of the historical forces already set in motion.”

McKenna contends that “what psychedelics encourage is the modeling of the after-death state.” In fact, “psychedelics may do more than model this state; they may reveal the nature of it.” His view is that “the psychedelic experience acts to resolve the dichotomy between the Newtonian universe and the interior mental universe,” which is the result of ‘the dualism built into our language.”

McKenna makes the supposition “that the waking world and the world of the dream have begun to merge” and that “the laws that operate in the dream, the laws that operate in hyperspace, can at times operate in three-dimensional space when the barrier between the two modes becomes weak.” He states that Jung called this synchronicity and made a psychological model of it, but it is really an alternative physics beginning to impinge on local reality.” McKenna goes on to explain that this “alternative physics is a physics of light. Light is composed of photons, which have no antiparticle. This means that there is no dualism in the world of light.” Theoretically, anyone “in possession of a vehicle that can move at the speed of light, can traverse from any point in the universe to any other with a subjective experience of time zero.”

McKenna is convinced that the work being done with hallucinogens has “an enormous potential for transforming human beings - not simply transforming the people who take it, but transforming society in the way that an art movement, a mathematical understanding, or a scientific breakthrough transforms society.” He believes “all that is needed to go beyond an academic understanding of the plant hallucinogens is the experience of the tryptamine- induced ecstasy. The dimethyltryptamine (DMT)molecule has the unique property of releasing the structured ego into the Overself. Each person who has that experience undergoes a mini-apocalypse, a mini-entry and mapping into hyperspace. For society to focus in this direction, nothing is necessary except for this experience to become an object of general concern.”