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.
Saturday, August 05, 2006
Terence McKenna--Live from The Fez
Synopsis:
McKenna’s talk was recorded at The Fez in New York City on June 20, 1993 and broadcast live on The Music Faucet, WFMU-FM, East Orange, NJ.
McKenna opens his talk by declaring “that history has failed, and Western civilization has failed, and dominator-primate politics has failed, object-fetish consumerism has failed, the national security government has failed.” McKenna’s solution for dealing with our cultural predicament is to “fall back upon ourselves, stop waiting for the revelation to come from CNN or Time Magazine, and start ignoring the idiotic laws that would dictate to us the kind of states of mind that we can entertain.” His recommendation is to “go to the rainforests, the aborigines, and check up--check in--on what we have always dismissed, which is the world of natural magic and wisdom obtained through intoxication.”
Given his theory that “history is ending” and that “as history accelerates, the rate of the ingression of novelty into three-dimensional space is asymptotically increasing,” McKenna speculates that “we're approaching the kind of symmetry break that occurred when life pulled its slimy bottom out of the sea and crawled onto the land. We are approaching the symmetry break where we shed the monkey, we shed the hardwired negative animal impulses that keep us chained to the Earth and deny us our dreams of completion.”
McKenna contends that “history is a kind of indicator of the nearby presence of a transcendental object” and that “as we approach the transcendental object, history will become more and more hallucinatory, more and more dreamlike, more and more surreal. Because we are so close now to this transcendental object, that is the inspiration for religion and vision and revelation, all you have to do to connect up to it is close your eyes, smoke a bomber, take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness, and the veil will be lifted, and you see, then, the plan. You see what all these historical vectors have been pointing towards. You see the transcendental object at the end of time--a cross between your own soul and the flying saucer of cheap science fiction. I mean--the city of Revelations, hanging at the end of the Twentieth Century like a beacon.”
According to McKenna, if we are “to recover an authentic experience of the transcendental and a fusion with Nature,” we should consider psychedelics as one way to do this since they appear to “dissolve boundaries and open the way to the Gaian mind.”
McKenna spends the remainder of the evening fielding questions from the audience. Asked about the distinction he makes between organic psychedelics and synthetic drugs, such as LSD, McKenna points out that “psilocybin and the tryptamines are much more reliable visionary activators.” He addresses a question concerning ritual and style of drug taking” by describing how he does psilocybin, a method he recommends to anyone interested in achieving “the psychedelic breakthrough.” Many more issues are addressed before the conversation concludes.
McKenna clearly regards “psychedelics as the only way to react fast enough to have an impact on the runaway momentum of historical error.” He rallies his audience at the end with a call to “Legalize the dream! Reclaim the human mind! Let's make dreams legal, let's make plants legal, let's legalize the imagination, empower hope, and begin to build the kind of world that we would feel alright about handing on to our children.”
McKenna’s talk was recorded at The Fez in New York City on June 20, 1993 and broadcast live on The Music Faucet, WFMU-FM, East Orange, NJ.
McKenna opens his talk by declaring “that history has failed, and Western civilization has failed, and dominator-primate politics has failed, object-fetish consumerism has failed, the national security government has failed.” McKenna’s solution for dealing with our cultural predicament is to “fall back upon ourselves, stop waiting for the revelation to come from CNN or Time Magazine, and start ignoring the idiotic laws that would dictate to us the kind of states of mind that we can entertain.” His recommendation is to “go to the rainforests, the aborigines, and check up--check in--on what we have always dismissed, which is the world of natural magic and wisdom obtained through intoxication.”
Given his theory that “history is ending” and that “as history accelerates, the rate of the ingression of novelty into three-dimensional space is asymptotically increasing,” McKenna speculates that “we're approaching the kind of symmetry break that occurred when life pulled its slimy bottom out of the sea and crawled onto the land. We are approaching the symmetry break where we shed the monkey, we shed the hardwired negative animal impulses that keep us chained to the Earth and deny us our dreams of completion.”
McKenna contends that “history is a kind of indicator of the nearby presence of a transcendental object” and that “as we approach the transcendental object, history will become more and more hallucinatory, more and more dreamlike, more and more surreal. Because we are so close now to this transcendental object, that is the inspiration for religion and vision and revelation, all you have to do to connect up to it is close your eyes, smoke a bomber, take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness, and the veil will be lifted, and you see, then, the plan. You see what all these historical vectors have been pointing towards. You see the transcendental object at the end of time--a cross between your own soul and the flying saucer of cheap science fiction. I mean--the city of Revelations, hanging at the end of the Twentieth Century like a beacon.”
According to McKenna, if we are “to recover an authentic experience of the transcendental and a fusion with Nature,” we should consider psychedelics as one way to do this since they appear to “dissolve boundaries and open the way to the Gaian mind.”
McKenna spends the remainder of the evening fielding questions from the audience. Asked about the distinction he makes between organic psychedelics and synthetic drugs, such as LSD, McKenna points out that “psilocybin and the tryptamines are much more reliable visionary activators.” He addresses a question concerning ritual and style of drug taking” by describing how he does psilocybin, a method he recommends to anyone interested in achieving “the psychedelic breakthrough.” Many more issues are addressed before the conversation concludes.
McKenna clearly regards “psychedelics as the only way to react fast enough to have an impact on the runaway momentum of historical error.” He rallies his audience at the end with a call to “Legalize the dream! Reclaim the human mind! Let's make dreams legal, let's make plants legal, let's legalize the imagination, empower hope, and begin to build the kind of world that we would feel alright about handing on to our children.”
Friday, August 04, 2006
High Times Interviews Terence McKenna
Synopsis:
High Times Magazine, April 1992
In this interview, conducted by David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen, McKenna responds to questions concerning his interest in shamanism and the exploration of consciousness, the social role that he sees himself playing, and the ways in which New Age philosophy differ from his notion of an archaic revival. He is asked to comment on “Francis Crick's theory of directed panspermia, the hypothesis that all life on this planet and its directed evolution has been seeded, or perhaps fertilized, by spores designed by a higher intelligence” and about “the role that psilocybin mushrooms play in the process of human evolution.”
When asked to comment about his assertion “that in certain states of consciousness you're able to create a kind of visual resonance and manipulate a 'topological manifold' using sound vibrations,” he indicates that it is his belief “that we're on the cusp of some kind of evolutionary transition in the language-forming area, going from a language that is heard, to a language that is seen, through a shift in interior processing. The language will still be made of sound, but it will be processed as the carrier of the visual impression.” He points out that the shamans in the Amazon have been engaged in this use of language for a long time through the songs they sing.
Asked to speculate on a future in which humanity has mastered space technology and time travel, McKenna suggests that “things like fractal mathematics, superconductivity, and nanotechnology offer new and novel approaches to the realization of these old dreams.”
On the topic of lucid dreaming, McKenna reports that he has had dreams in which he smokes DMT, and is transported into an altered state. He believes that “the psychedelics, the near death experience, the lucid dreaming, the meditational reveries ... all of these things are pieces of a puzzle about how to create a new cultural dimension that we can all live in a little more sanely than we're living in these dimensions.”
Responding to questions about Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of the morphogenetic field and whether “morphic resonance could be regarded as a possible explanation for the phenomena of spirits and other metaphysical entities,” McKenna states that not only are such ideas plausible, but also that “some kind of theory like that is clearly becoming necessary” in order to explain “how out of the class of possible things, some things actually happen.” Asked to comment on the new class of designer psychedelics and the fact that there are no morphogenetic fields associated with these drugs, McKenna contrasts his “spooked-out” ketamine experience to that of the mushroom. He says, “If you take mushrooms, you know, you're climbing on board a starship manned by every shaman who ever did it in front of you, and this is quite a crew, and they've really pulled some stunts over the millennia, and it's all there, the tapes, to be played, but the designer things should be very cautiously dealt with.”
Several more intriguing questions offer McKenna an opportunity to elucidate his views about the human imagination, super computers, cycles of history, future predictions, the mathematical rules that stand behind visual appearances, the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants, and the meshing of his ideas with fellow “Psychedelic Compressionists” Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Frank Barr.
High Times Magazine, April 1992
In this interview, conducted by David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen, McKenna responds to questions concerning his interest in shamanism and the exploration of consciousness, the social role that he sees himself playing, and the ways in which New Age philosophy differ from his notion of an archaic revival. He is asked to comment on “Francis Crick's theory of directed panspermia, the hypothesis that all life on this planet and its directed evolution has been seeded, or perhaps fertilized, by spores designed by a higher intelligence” and about “the role that psilocybin mushrooms play in the process of human evolution.”
When asked to comment about his assertion “that in certain states of consciousness you're able to create a kind of visual resonance and manipulate a 'topological manifold' using sound vibrations,” he indicates that it is his belief “that we're on the cusp of some kind of evolutionary transition in the language-forming area, going from a language that is heard, to a language that is seen, through a shift in interior processing. The language will still be made of sound, but it will be processed as the carrier of the visual impression.” He points out that the shamans in the Amazon have been engaged in this use of language for a long time through the songs they sing.
Asked to speculate on a future in which humanity has mastered space technology and time travel, McKenna suggests that “things like fractal mathematics, superconductivity, and nanotechnology offer new and novel approaches to the realization of these old dreams.”
On the topic of lucid dreaming, McKenna reports that he has had dreams in which he smokes DMT, and is transported into an altered state. He believes that “the psychedelics, the near death experience, the lucid dreaming, the meditational reveries ... all of these things are pieces of a puzzle about how to create a new cultural dimension that we can all live in a little more sanely than we're living in these dimensions.”
Responding to questions about Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of the morphogenetic field and whether “morphic resonance could be regarded as a possible explanation for the phenomena of spirits and other metaphysical entities,” McKenna states that not only are such ideas plausible, but also that “some kind of theory like that is clearly becoming necessary” in order to explain “how out of the class of possible things, some things actually happen.” Asked to comment on the new class of designer psychedelics and the fact that there are no morphogenetic fields associated with these drugs, McKenna contrasts his “spooked-out” ketamine experience to that of the mushroom. He says, “If you take mushrooms, you know, you're climbing on board a starship manned by every shaman who ever did it in front of you, and this is quite a crew, and they've really pulled some stunts over the millennia, and it's all there, the tapes, to be played, but the designer things should be very cautiously dealt with.”
Several more intriguing questions offer McKenna an opportunity to elucidate his views about the human imagination, super computers, cycles of history, future predictions, the mathematical rules that stand behind visual appearances, the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants, and the meshing of his ideas with fellow “Psychedelic Compressionists” Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Frank Barr.
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Understanding and the Imagination in the Light of Nature
Synopsis:
Los Angeles, California, October 17, 1987
McKenna’s talk is given to benefit Botanical Dimensions, a 20-acre botanical garden in
According to McKenna, “the answer to self-empowerment lies in the psychedelic experience” and that “people who do not confront the presence of the hallucinogenic possibility, are turning their back on their birthright.” He believes that psychedelics can unify us, introduce us to the trans-linguistic intention.”
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Revisiting Alan Watts
I remember the day I bought two books by Alan Watts--The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are and This Is It: and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience--and one by Ram Dass entitled Be Here Now. It was on a spring afternoon in 1970 during my freshman year at Rutgers University. I dropped the books onto the grass and sat down beneath a tree to examine their contents. In those early days of college I was interested in exploring ultimate philosophical, psychological and theological questions. You know the ones--What is the nature of reality? Does God exist? Who am I? What is the purpose of existence? I'm sure there were others. I was also intrigued by what I'd read about LSD and heard from friends who had dropped acid.
As I sat with my back propped against that tree in the middle of the green commons during a break between classes--my mind steeped in the ideas of Plato and the ancient Greek philosophers, in the discoveries of Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell, in Spinoza's ontological argument--the world appeared brimming with beauty, mystery and wonder. I recall flipping through the pages of Ram Dass's odd, square-shaped book, the mandala on the cover radiating the message REMEMBER BE HERE NOW. Both Ram Dass and Alan Watts promised a distinctively Western slant on the Eastern metaphysical philosophies I was studying at the time. Moreover, they promised to make the ancient Vedic scriptures more comprehensible to a mind shaped, and at times numbed, by a seventeen year sojourn in the New Brunswick public school system. The authors also offered their own personal take on the psychedelic experience and its mystical implications. I had already read The Tibetan Book of the Dead and was familiar with the work of Timothy Leary. I shared a small off campus bungalow with two friends. I was ripe for experimentation, a vessel ready to be filled with a divine Gnosis.
More than 36 years have passed, a more or less orderly procession of days, from that spring afternoon under the blue sky of of my boyhood home, and the memory of that period in my life is strong still, and resurfaces in my reflections. As I sit in front of my laptop on the porch of a house built on a narrow spit of land between the Atlantic Ocean and Barnagat Bay, observing people pass by on their way to and from the beach and listening to the sounds of summer traffic, I know that the airwaves are filled with a stream of continuosly updated war reports transmitted via satellite feeds and broadcast day and night on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX. The news reminds me of the same televised madness of the Vietnam war beamed into our homes some 36 years ago. Tonight I'll walk to the beach, sit upon the sand, gaze off into the night, listen to the waves break against the shore, and REMEMBER BE HERE NOW.
For more on Alan Watts and Ram Dass, visit the following links:
Alan Watts: Lectures and Essays
The New Alchemy (An essay from This is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, by Alan Watts. This essay was written in 1960.)
A Psychedelic Experience - Fact or Fantasy? (This essay by Alan Watts appeared in LSD, The Consciousness-Expanding Drug, edited by David Solomon, 1964.)
Breaking On Through Again (Ram Dass wraps his expanded mind around the last of the truly taboo subjects--death and dying)
Ram Dass Interviewed
As I sat with my back propped against that tree in the middle of the green commons during a break between classes--my mind steeped in the ideas of Plato and the ancient Greek philosophers, in the discoveries of Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell, in Spinoza's ontological argument--the world appeared brimming with beauty, mystery and wonder. I recall flipping through the pages of Ram Dass's odd, square-shaped book, the mandala on the cover radiating the message REMEMBER BE HERE NOW. Both Ram Dass and Alan Watts promised a distinctively Western slant on the Eastern metaphysical philosophies I was studying at the time. Moreover, they promised to make the ancient Vedic scriptures more comprehensible to a mind shaped, and at times numbed, by a seventeen year sojourn in the New Brunswick public school system. The authors also offered their own personal take on the psychedelic experience and its mystical implications. I had already read The Tibetan Book of the Dead and was familiar with the work of Timothy Leary. I shared a small off campus bungalow with two friends. I was ripe for experimentation, a vessel ready to be filled with a divine Gnosis.
More than 36 years have passed, a more or less orderly procession of days, from that spring afternoon under the blue sky of of my boyhood home, and the memory of that period in my life is strong still, and resurfaces in my reflections. As I sit in front of my laptop on the porch of a house built on a narrow spit of land between the Atlantic Ocean and Barnagat Bay, observing people pass by on their way to and from the beach and listening to the sounds of summer traffic, I know that the airwaves are filled with a stream of continuosly updated war reports transmitted via satellite feeds and broadcast day and night on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX. The news reminds me of the same televised madness of the Vietnam war beamed into our homes some 36 years ago. Tonight I'll walk to the beach, sit upon the sand, gaze off into the night, listen to the waves break against the shore, and REMEMBER BE HERE NOW.
For more on Alan Watts and Ram Dass, visit the following links:
Alan Watts: Lectures and Essays
The New Alchemy (An essay from This is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, by Alan Watts. This essay was written in 1960.)
A Psychedelic Experience - Fact or Fantasy? (This essay by Alan Watts appeared in LSD, The Consciousness-Expanding Drug, edited by David Solomon, 1964.)
Breaking On Through Again (Ram Dass wraps his expanded mind around the last of the truly taboo subjects--death and dying)
Ram Dass Interviewed
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Our Collective Psychosis
Paul Levy presents a fascinating psychological analysis of George Bush as a manifestation of our Shadow that has been projected onto the world stage. Will an awareness of the externalized unconscious content of our collective psyche precipitate a global awakening?
Read a collection of Paul's articles on his web site Awaken in the Dream.
Carol S. Wolman, MD, Board Certified in Psychiatry, has this to say about Paul Levy's new book:
Listen to Paul Levy discuss his ideas in an interview with Fintan Dunne.
Read a collection of Paul's articles on his web site Awaken in the Dream.
Carol S. Wolman, MD, Board Certified in Psychiatry, has this to say about Paul Levy's new book:
“The Jungian analysis by Paul Levy, of Bush and the culture which maintains him, reaches deep into the American psyche. It should be studied and digested by everyone. If the citizenry would recognize that Bush’s egomania is acting out a national illness, we would all be saner. If the US could integrate the “shadow” which Bush projects upon the “the axis of evil,” perhaps we could achieve world peace and start to solve global problems. A MUST READ."
Listen to Paul Levy discuss his ideas in an interview with Fintan Dunne.
Monday, July 31, 2006
Results of John Hopkins Psilocybin Study
On Tuesday, July 11, 2006, a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and Council on Spiritual Practices (CSP)-funded research team from John Hopkins University published in Psychopharmacology the first modern-day continuation of the Good Friday Experiment, finding that psilocybin is likely to induce spiritual experiences in most subjects. A former NIDA director and a former deputy director of ONDCP supported the results of the study in associated commentaries published with the article, but the current NIDA director issued a statement distancing NIDA from the study. Read about this amazing psychedelic research development as reported by the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, and ABC News, which features a salient quote from MAPS President Rick Doblin.
Sunday, July 30, 2006
New Maps of Hyperspace
Berkeley Institute for the Study of Consciousness, 1984
Read the complete text.
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.”
Read the complete text.
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.”
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness
Lilly/Goswami Conference on Consciousness and Quantum Physics at Esalen, December 1983
Synopsis:
McKenna contends that tryptophan-derived hallucinogens, such as DMT, psilocybin, and ayahuasca, induce psychophysical processes that arise at the quantum mechanical level of consciousness associated with dream states and hallucinations. He is particularly interested in the intensity of the hallucinations and the concentration of activity in the visual cortex that these naturally occurring compounds evoke. Since these compounds work directly on language centers in the brain, McKenna proposes that it is possible for one to enter into dialogue with the experience and attempt to map the territory as he himself has done. After all, if one accepts McKenna’s notion that psilocybin and DMT invoke the Logos, what endeavor is more worth undertaking than the exploration and understanding of this strange domain of mind.
McKenna goes on to describe the impact his experiments with these mind-altering substances have had on him and the ways in which his thinking has been shaped by his experiences. He describes the "effects" that smoking DMT have had on him in order to “invite the attention of experimentalists, whether they be shamans or scientists” to the bizarre phenomena experienced in this state. McKenna contends that psilocybin mushrooms produce the same effects that DMT does, “the same confrontation with an alien intelligence and extremely bizarre translinguistic information complexes.”
Having established the basic premises for his argument, McKenna propounds a number of theories that “cast into doubt all of humanity's historical assumptions.” One such theory, presented in Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, is that the Stropharia cubensis mushroom did not evolve on earth, but reached Earth from some distant part of the galaxy through the process of spore-dispersal. He offers the idea that “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.”
One of McKenna’s most strongly held convictions is that “history is the shockwave of eschatology,” and that there is a transcendental object at the end of time that acts as a strange attractor, “drawing all human becoming toward it.” His “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.”
McKenna is not sure “why the phenomenon of tryptamine ecstasy has not been looked at by scientists, thrill seekers, or anyone else, but he recommends it to our attention.” He concludes by noting that “the tragedy of our cultural situation is that we have no shamanic tradition.” Since we no longer live in the kind of “archaic societies where shamanism is a thriving institution,” the exploration of these plants' effects can only be spoken of “as a phenomenon.” He claims not to know what we can do with this phenomenon, but he has a “feeling the potential is great.”
Synopsis:
McKenna contends that tryptophan-derived hallucinogens, such as DMT, psilocybin, and ayahuasca, induce psychophysical processes that arise at the quantum mechanical level of consciousness associated with dream states and hallucinations. He is particularly interested in the intensity of the hallucinations and the concentration of activity in the visual cortex that these naturally occurring compounds evoke. Since these compounds work directly on language centers in the brain, McKenna proposes that it is possible for one to enter into dialogue with the experience and attempt to map the territory as he himself has done. After all, if one accepts McKenna’s notion that psilocybin and DMT invoke the Logos, what endeavor is more worth undertaking than the exploration and understanding of this strange domain of mind.
McKenna goes on to describe the impact his experiments with these mind-altering substances have had on him and the ways in which his thinking has been shaped by his experiences. He describes the "effects" that smoking DMT have had on him in order to “invite the attention of experimentalists, whether they be shamans or scientists” to the bizarre phenomena experienced in this state. McKenna contends that psilocybin mushrooms produce the same effects that DMT does, “the same confrontation with an alien intelligence and extremely bizarre translinguistic information complexes.”
Having established the basic premises for his argument, McKenna propounds a number of theories that “cast into doubt all of humanity's historical assumptions.” One such theory, presented in Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, is that the Stropharia cubensis mushroom did not evolve on earth, but reached Earth from some distant part of the galaxy through the process of spore-dispersal. He offers the idea that “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.”
One of McKenna’s most strongly held convictions is that “history is the shockwave of eschatology,” and that there is a transcendental object at the end of time that acts as a strange attractor, “drawing all human becoming toward it.” His “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.”
McKenna is not sure “why the phenomenon of tryptamine ecstasy has not been looked at by scientists, thrill seekers, or anyone else, but he recommends it to our attention.” He concludes by noting that “the tragedy of our cultural situation is that we have no shamanic tradition.” Since we no longer live in the kind of “archaic societies where shamanism is a thriving institution,” the exploration of these plants' effects can only be spoken of “as a phenomenon.” He claims not to know what we can do with this phenomenon, but he has a “feeling the potential is great.”
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