Forty years ago, flower power blossomed in San Francisco and spread its seed across America. The mantra of sex, drugs, rock and roll became a popular chant and the dream of peace, love, and community took root in the land. The dream did not die. It's part of a generation's collective experience. The fractal energy of that idealistic moment in time resonates in me this summer. I'm wearing a set of headphones, plugged into my laptap, listening to "Darkness Darkness" by the Youngbloods, and I'm happy these sweet tones of light can spread so magically through the darkness that seems to shroud our world today. I'm reminded of what Jimi Hendrix said during that summer of love: "When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace." Just how to call that peaceful world into being remains an unanswered question. The fractal resonance I'm sensing this afternoon is no doubt part of the Timewave that washes over us moment by moment, carrying us into an unknown but somehow familiar space where peace is not only possible but finally actualized.
Watch the video in which McKenna talks about a psychedelic society.
Terence McKenna speaks about what is taking place today in an interview conducted by Jay Levin in May 1988 entitled In Praise of Psychedelics. I'm including an exchange that offers interesting insights into the times in which we're living and the direction in which we're headed.
JL: You think you've gotten from your visions some sense of the nature of where we are going, but is there, in fact, a "choice point," a moment when the individual--or the species collectively--has to make a choice about this direction rather than that? Or is it simply that there is a direction of history in which we are naturally going?
TM: The thing is, reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we're embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion. Twentieth-century history is not simply a fluke or an anomaly--it is the culmination of a process that has been in motion for as long as the planet has been in existence. We are not alienated and outside of nature; we are somehow the cutting edge of it. And this vast output of buildings and highways and all the things that characterize the modern world is actually a feature of the natural world. Similarly, the evolution of technical intelligence on the surface of the planet, while new, is not unnatural.
Human beings are therefore the natural agents for a compression that is building up in the temporal world toward transition into some higher dimension of existance. History is going to end. This iss the astonishing conclusion that I draw out of the psychedelic experience. And all the scenarios of history's ending that haunt human thinking on the matter, ranging from the Apocalypse of john down to the latest prophecies of the flying saucer cults, are attempts to grasp or come to grips with an intuition of transcendental departure from business as usual.
Looking at present cultural trends and extrapolating them, it's reasonable to suggest that by the end of the Mayan calendar--which is in 2012 A.D.--we will be unrecognizable to ourselves, that what we take to be our creations, computers and technology, asre actually another level of ourselves. And that when we have worked out this peregrination through the profane labyrinth of history, we will recover what we knew in the beginning: the archaic union with nature that was seamless, unmediated by language, unmediated by notions of self and other, of life and death, of civilization and nature. These are all dualisms that are temporary and provisional within the labyrinth of history. This Archaic Revival means that all our religions were pale imitations of the Mystery itself. then people will say, "Now I understand! Now I understand why the pyramids, why the fall of Rome, why Auschwitz, why the H-bomb." All these things are signposts on the way to the transcendental object. And once we reach it, meaning will flood the entire human experience.
JL: But to see people so transformed, so back in tune with nature on a mass level, would mean we were collectively prepared to put such low-consciousness matters as planetary pollution or the Arab-Israeli struggle behind us virtually overnight. For that to happen, wouldn't there have to be some kind of transcendent event? A visit from a flying saucer? Nuclear warfare? I don't know, I'm trying to remain a rationalist.
TM: It seems highly improbable that such a thing would occur. However, look at something like the phenomenon of language in our species. How probable was that before it existed? It represents some kind of intersection of the monkey species with a transcendental force of some sort. And yet, once it came into existence, it is seen to be inherent in our biological organization.
JL: Nothing in your drug experiences has shown you what that single shamanic event might be?
TM: I think it could be something like this: The transcendental object, which has been well described since the sixteenth century, is the union of spirit and matter. The transcendental object is matter that behaves like thought, and it is a doorway into the imagination. This is so important, because it anticipates a life lived entirely in the imagination.
Now you ask, "How could such a thing be?" Well, as just one hypothesis: Suppose a way were found to integrate human and machine intelligence to create a culture in which humans and machines were psychologically indistinguishable. This would allow us to influence the dimensions of that interaction. If we're creating another dimension, it might as well be paradise. So what today we contemplate as a transcendental object may be a salable technology by 2012.
JL: In other words, you're saying that the transcendent event might conceivabley be the creation by 2012 of a computer program that we would interact with to bring us to a heightened state of existence? Maybe one created by a genius computer programmer and metaphyysician will tripping on psilocybin?
TM: Yes, a computer program. The two concepts, drugs and computers, are migrating toward each other. If you add in the concept of "person" and say these three concepts--drugs, computer, and person--are migrating toward each other, then you realize that the monkey body is still holding a lot of our linguistic structure in place. But if the monkey body were to be dissolved, then we would be much more likely to define ourselves as pure information. I think this is what is happening--that beyond 2012 everybody becomes everything. All possibilities are realized, even possibilities that are mutually exclusive. Because the resolution and the realization of these possibilities occurs in a different kind of space--"nanotechnological" or psychological space, or a true hyperdimension. It's very hard to imagine what it will be like, because we simply do not have the metaphors and the experience to cognize what we are moving toward.
JL: Can you conceptualize--or visualize--the nature of a computer program that would facilitate this higher-consciousness process?
TM: Well, I have actually developed a piece of software that I call Timewave Zero. It's a fractal wave, a mechanical description of time that shows that all times are actually interference patterns created by other times interacting with each other and that all of these times originate from a single end state. Advanced versions of this kind of program could be created in the twenty-four years we have left until 2012.
This isn't something human beings have to decide to do--this is something that is happening! The trick is to figure out what's going to happen that allows you to relate. The psychedelics help to do this because they anticipate the transcendental object. All religions anticipate the transcendental object. All great spiritual personalities, somehow, anticipate and embody the transcendental object. This is no longer centuries or millennia away. It is right here, right now. It is what explains the precipitous drop into novelty that the twentieth century represents. The twentieth century does not make any sense whatsoever unless it ends in a complete transformation of the species. And the nuclear death and the life-affirming factors are so inextricably intertwined tthat it will remain a horse race right up until the last moment.
In one of my lectures, I asked, "What mushroom is it that blooms at the end of human history? Is it the mushroom of Teller and Fermi and Oppenheimer, or is it the mushroom of Albert Hoffman and Gordon Wasson and Richard Evans Shultes and Timothy Leary?" I believe that it will be very hard for people who are not insiders to figure out where to place their bets. But the very fact that you and I can have this conversation is proof of the nearness of this event. People couldn't say these things even thirty years ago--no one would understand. You know, in testing high-performance aircraft there's an expression "stretching the envelop," meaning pushing the performance capabilities to the absolute outer limits. This is what the twentieth century is doing to the planet and the human organism. We are stretching the envelop as we approach, not the sound barrier but the...call it the "mind barrier," the "social barrier." We will not disintegrate when we reach it and fall out of the sky. Instead, if we have designed our social spacecraft correctly, we will slip right on through into an infinite realm of potential human becoming.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Daniel Pinchbeck
Daniel Pinchbeck will be conducting a three day workshop (6/1/07-6/3/07) entitled Prophecy and Transformation: 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY.
The following links will give you some sense of Pinchbeck's ideas:
Speaking Shamanic with Daniel Pinchbeck
Post Modern Prophecy: Urgent Myths for Urgent Times (A dialog between Daniel Pinchbeck and Douglas Rushkoff)
(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)
Evolver: An Interview With Daniel Pinchbeck (Part 1 and Part 2)
Daniel Pinchbeck and the New Psychedelic Elite (Rolling Stone interview)
Video clips of Steven Colbert's interview (Part 1 and Part 2) with Daniel Pinchbeck
Here is a quotation from Pinchbeck's book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, that I find intriguing:
In the book of Job written several centuries before the New Testament, Yaweh subject his “faithful servant,” Job, to a harrowing series of tests, after excepting a wager from Satan that Job’s faith can be broken. “Job is no more the outward occasion for an inward process of dialectic in God,” wrote Jung. Like a scientist performing some cruel experiment on bacilli in a test tube, Yaweh kills Job’s family, removes his land, riddles him with disease, and inflicts every imaginable form of ruin upon him. Job, however, remains steadfast. At the same time, he is determined to understand the reason for his plight. According to Jung, Job is the first man to comprehend the split inside Yaweh – that the God-image is an antimony, comprising both the dark god of cruelty and the benevolent deity of love and justice; “in light of this realization his knowledge attains a divine numinosity.” Confronted by archetypal injustice, Job insists on equalizing compassion, and eventually receives it, as his status in the world is restored.
Despite his overpowering might, the creator fears the judgment of his creature. “Yaweh projects onto Job a skeptic’s face which is hateful to him because it is his own, and which gazes at him with an uncanny and critical eye,” Jung noted. From the perspective of the God-image, Job had attained a higher state of knowledge than Yaweh through his trvails, and this required a compensatory sacrifice, enacted, a few hundred years later, through the incarnation of Christ.
Jung realized that God intended to fully incarnate in the collective body of humanity, and that this time was quickly approaching. From his psychoanalytic and personal work and theoretical musings, he proposed that the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost was unfolding into a “quaternity,” adding a fourth element that had been suppressed from the Western psyche. “The enigma of squaring the circle” was one representation of this quaternity, “an age-old and presumably pre-historic symbol, always associated with the idea of a world-creating deity.” This aspect of divinity, now returning and requiring assimilation into consciousness, was the Devil, who had been dissociated from the Western psyche at the beginning of the Judeo-Christian aeon. Along with the Devil, the fourth element also represented natural wisdom, personified by the Gnostic deity Sophia, long exiled and excised from the canonical texts.
Since the creator is an antimony, a totality of inner opposites, his creatures reflect this schism. To descend into humanity, God must choose “the creaturely man filled with darkness – the natural man who is tainted with original sin,” Jung wrote. “The guilty man is eminently suitable and is therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world, and refuses to pay his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room.” The uniting of opposites, the reconciliation of dark and light contained in the God-image, can only take place within the consciously realized “guilty man,” not the sanctimonious, ascetic, or self-righteous one – anyone who denies their shadow will only project it in some new form.
*Other quotations from Pinchbeck's work.
The following links will give you some sense of Pinchbeck's ideas:
Speaking Shamanic with Daniel Pinchbeck
Post Modern Prophecy: Urgent Myths for Urgent Times (A dialog between Daniel Pinchbeck and Douglas Rushkoff)
(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)
Evolver: An Interview With Daniel Pinchbeck (Part 1 and Part 2)
Daniel Pinchbeck and the New Psychedelic Elite (Rolling Stone interview)
Video clips of Steven Colbert's interview (Part 1 and Part 2) with Daniel Pinchbeck
Here is a quotation from Pinchbeck's book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, that I find intriguing:
In the book of Job written several centuries before the New Testament, Yaweh subject his “faithful servant,” Job, to a harrowing series of tests, after excepting a wager from Satan that Job’s faith can be broken. “Job is no more the outward occasion for an inward process of dialectic in God,” wrote Jung. Like a scientist performing some cruel experiment on bacilli in a test tube, Yaweh kills Job’s family, removes his land, riddles him with disease, and inflicts every imaginable form of ruin upon him. Job, however, remains steadfast. At the same time, he is determined to understand the reason for his plight. According to Jung, Job is the first man to comprehend the split inside Yaweh – that the God-image is an antimony, comprising both the dark god of cruelty and the benevolent deity of love and justice; “in light of this realization his knowledge attains a divine numinosity.” Confronted by archetypal injustice, Job insists on equalizing compassion, and eventually receives it, as his status in the world is restored.
Despite his overpowering might, the creator fears the judgment of his creature. “Yaweh projects onto Job a skeptic’s face which is hateful to him because it is his own, and which gazes at him with an uncanny and critical eye,” Jung noted. From the perspective of the God-image, Job had attained a higher state of knowledge than Yaweh through his trvails, and this required a compensatory sacrifice, enacted, a few hundred years later, through the incarnation of Christ.
Jung realized that God intended to fully incarnate in the collective body of humanity, and that this time was quickly approaching. From his psychoanalytic and personal work and theoretical musings, he proposed that the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost was unfolding into a “quaternity,” adding a fourth element that had been suppressed from the Western psyche. “The enigma of squaring the circle” was one representation of this quaternity, “an age-old and presumably pre-historic symbol, always associated with the idea of a world-creating deity.” This aspect of divinity, now returning and requiring assimilation into consciousness, was the Devil, who had been dissociated from the Western psyche at the beginning of the Judeo-Christian aeon. Along with the Devil, the fourth element also represented natural wisdom, personified by the Gnostic deity Sophia, long exiled and excised from the canonical texts.
Since the creator is an antimony, a totality of inner opposites, his creatures reflect this schism. To descend into humanity, God must choose “the creaturely man filled with darkness – the natural man who is tainted with original sin,” Jung wrote. “The guilty man is eminently suitable and is therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world, and refuses to pay his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room.” The uniting of opposites, the reconciliation of dark and light contained in the God-image, can only take place within the consciously realized “guilty man,” not the sanctimonious, ascetic, or self-righteous one – anyone who denies their shadow will only project it in some new form.
*Other quotations from Pinchbeck's work.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
A Course in Miracles
Food for thought. Come to your own conclusions. As a teacher who now plies his craft outside the confines of classroom walls, these words make sense to me:
A Course in Miracles
Manual for Teachers
Introduction
To teach is to demonstrate. There are only two thought systems, and you demonstrate that you believe one or the other is true all the time. From your demonstration others learn, and so do you. The question is not whether you will teach, for in that there is no choice. The purpose of the course might be said to provide you with a means of choosing what you want to teach on the basis of what you want to learn. You cannot give to someone else, but only to yourself, and this you learn through teaching. Teaching is but a call to witnesses to attest to what you believe. It is a method of conversion. This is not done by words alone. Any situation must be to you a chance to teach others what you are, and what they are to you. No more than that, but also never less.
The curriculum you set up is therefore determined exclusively by what you think you are, and what you believe the relationship of others is to you. In the formal teaching situation, these questions may be totally unrelated to what you think you are teaching. Yet it is impossible not to use the content of any situation on behalf of what you really teach, and therefore really learn. To this the verbal content of your teaching is quite irrelevant. It may coincide with it, or it may not. It is the teaching underlying what you say that teaches you. Teaching but reinforces what you believe about yourself. Its fundamental purpose is to diminish self-doubt. This does not mean that the self you are trying to protect is real. But it does mean that the self you think is real is what you teach.
This is inevitable. There is no escape from it. How could it be otherwise? Everyone who follows the world's curriculum, and everyone here does follow it until he changes his mind, teaches solely to convince himself that he is what he is not. Herein is the purpose of the world. What else, then, would its curriculum be? Into this hopeless and closed learning situation, which teaches nothing but despair and death, God sends His teachers. And as they teach His lessons of joy and hope, their learning finally becomes complete.
A Course in Miracles
Manual for Teachers
Introduction
The role of teaching and learning is actually reversed in the thinking of the world. The reversal is characteristic. It seems as if the teacher and the learner are separated, the teacher giving something to the learner rather than to himself. Further, the act of teaching is regarded as a special activity, in which one engages only a relatively small proportion of one's time. The course, on the other hand, emphasizes that to teach is to learn, so that teacher and learner are the same. It also emphasizes that teaching is a constant process; it goes on every moment of the day, and continues into sleeping thoughts as well.
To teach is to demonstrate. There are only two thought systems, and you demonstrate that you believe one or the other is true all the time. From your demonstration others learn, and so do you. The question is not whether you will teach, for in that there is no choice. The purpose of the course might be said to provide you with a means of choosing what you want to teach on the basis of what you want to learn. You cannot give to someone else, but only to yourself, and this you learn through teaching. Teaching is but a call to witnesses to attest to what you believe. It is a method of conversion. This is not done by words alone. Any situation must be to you a chance to teach others what you are, and what they are to you. No more than that, but also never less.
The curriculum you set up is therefore determined exclusively by what you think you are, and what you believe the relationship of others is to you. In the formal teaching situation, these questions may be totally unrelated to what you think you are teaching. Yet it is impossible not to use the content of any situation on behalf of what you really teach, and therefore really learn. To this the verbal content of your teaching is quite irrelevant. It may coincide with it, or it may not. It is the teaching underlying what you say that teaches you. Teaching but reinforces what you believe about yourself. Its fundamental purpose is to diminish self-doubt. This does not mean that the self you are trying to protect is real. But it does mean that the self you think is real is what you teach.
This is inevitable. There is no escape from it. How could it be otherwise? Everyone who follows the world's curriculum, and everyone here does follow it until he changes his mind, teaches solely to convince himself that he is what he is not. Herein is the purpose of the world. What else, then, would its curriculum be? Into this hopeless and closed learning situation, which teaches nothing but despair and death, God sends His teachers. And as they teach His lessons of joy and hope, their learning finally becomes complete.
Except for God's teachers there would be little hope of salvation, for the world of sin would seem forever real. The self-deceiving must deceive, for they must teach deception. And what else is hell? This is a manual for the teachers of God. They are not perfect, or they would not be here. Yet it is their mission to become perfect here, and so they teach perfection over and over, in many, many ways, until they have learned it. And then they are seen no more, although their thoughts remain a source of strength and truth forever. Who are they? How are they chosen? What do they do? How can they work out their own salvation and the salvation of the world? This manual attempts to answer these questions.
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