Edge Material

"Somewhere there's an alchemical text which says 'The highest mountains, the widest deserts, the oldest books, there you will find the stone', and what I would like to suggest to you is that of all the methods, tools, points of view, ideologies, and so forth that you will meet when you begin your catalogue of the edge material, the psychedelic dimension is the ne plus ultra of that dimension. Most spiritual seeking is done with the accelerator pressed to the floor. Once you encounter psychedelics you have found the answer. Now the name of the game changes. No longer the ever-eager ingenue hanging on the guru's latest iron whim. Now you have to face the answer. It's not a matter of blithely seeking, it's a matter of screwing your courage to the sticking point, because the tool has been placed into your hand that will work, that will deliver the goods. You know, people tend to complain there's no adventure left in the world, the world is devoid of challenge. I say to you: five grams in silent darkness in the confine of your own apartment on a rainy Sunday evening and you'll feel that Ferdinand Magellan should take a back seat."

The above quotation was taken from Terence McKenna's Camden Centre Talk, which he delivered on May 6th, 1992. I agree with Terence that the major issue is "screwing your courage to the sticking point" and facing the answer. One does not open the doors of perception without some trepidation.

The fact that the government virtually outlawed all research involving psychedelic substances raises troubling questions about who really controls consciousness. Despite draconian drug policies, research has continued outside the confines of the United States among indiginous peoples whose traditional use of sacramental psychedelic substances stretch back millennia. The shaman, according to Eliade, is the technicion of the sacred, the one who could communicate with the spirit world on behalf of the community in his role as healer and seer. It is this unfamiliar world of the shaman to which western researchers have been introduced that offers a challenge to the rationalistic assumptions we've lived by for centuries. There is a growing body of evidence compiled by anthropologists, physicists, neurologists, mystics, and theologians that argues for a radical shift in our understanding of reality.

Terence says: "It's almost as though what the psychedelics are attempting to do for sociology and psychology is what was achieved by quantum physics from matter in the 1920s and '30s. Matter, during that period, was re-analyzed and found to be not tiny hard billiard ball-like particles whizzing through space carrying spin and electric charge, but that there was another level, a lower layer, and that other level, that other description, revealed an interactive wave system where individual points of concrescence are merely statistical rather than real, everything dissolves into a kind of soup of multi-leveled, multi-dimensional connectedness, and this is what the psychedelic experience is."

According to Terence, "It's humbling, it's transformative, it's astonishing to realise that shamans all over the world for time uncountable have been accessing this appalling, complex, ontologically challenging, scientifically impossible, reality. This means that culturally we are living out some kind of schizophrenic delusion, because we live our lives totally ignorant of these possibilities, or perhaps only glimpsing them at the edge of anesthesia, or something like that, unless, of course, we have the courage to be counter-cultural heads. But even then many people confine themselves in the private world of their own reflection because social pressure and, indeed, social legislation make it very touchy to talk about these things. But I say to you, this is part of the human birthright. This is as much a part of the game as birth, sex and dying."

So what role does the shaman play in contemporary western society where the use of psychedelic substances is illegal and punishable by years of incarceration? I regard him as an archetype of transformation, a true medicine man. Shamanic studies have now become part of the curriculum and a focus of intellectual debate. At the very least, the shaman is now receiving more scholarly attention. His role in the west has been persona non grata.

A final thought by Terence: "We tend, you see, to always imagine the challenge rests with someone else. We have been made spectators to life by a disempowering view of ourselves carried to us by science and mass media. You know, you're supposed to identify with Madonna or Elvis or somebody, but the richness -- the inner richness --of one's own being, because it cannot be bought and sold, is deemed worthless by the culture. We actually live in a de-humanising culture and, as you know, the consequences of a couple of thousand years of this kind of alienation are that now we face the potential death of the planet. We have invented a sin for which there isn't even a word in English that I am aware of, it's the sin of stealing the future from your own children."

I couldn't agree more.

The Thought Stream

McKenna's ideas about novelty and the timewave form the connective thread that has helped to alleviate my existential angst. Is there a credible future scenerio that does not end in planetary destruction or mass extinction events? Even though I take solace in Robinson Jeffers' poetry and share his vision of nature's enduring beauty and mankind's incomprehensible penchant for destruction, I'd sure like some assurance that things will turn out fine in the end, that humanity will somehow pass the ultimate survival test, find redemption, achieve illumination, and experience transcendence. That's the hope, no matter how unrealistic or improbable.

I'm sure what appeals to me about McKenna's ideas is his fundamental optimism. Maintaining a sense of humor also helps keep things in perspective, however bizarre things may seem to be. Once you begin to raise questions about the nature of consensus reality, you open up a philosophical can of worms, with all the attendent conundrums and paradoxes, and must deal with squirmy, elusive truths that are not easily grasped.

McKenna still offers the most lucid explanation of our human predicament that I've been able to find. Listen to “A Few Conclusions About Life” for Terence's take on where we're headed.

Shamans of the Amazon

Take a look at this 8 minute clip from a longer documentary by Dean Jefferys entitled Shamans of the Amazon. The clip contains footage of an ayahuasca ceremony, some wise words spoken by the shamans, and commentary by Terence McKenna.

The documentary is based on a personal account of Jefferys' experience in the jungle of Ecuador. The video describes DMT's traditional use amongst some Amazonian tribes. You won't find this documentary on Netflix, unfortunately.

Jefferys' films are an outgrowth and an expression of his political and environmental activism. By his own count, he has been arrested over 20 times for following his beliefs. In 1985, Jefferys dropped a 'paint bomb' from his ultra light aircraft onto the deck of the nuclear warship USS Buchanan as it made its way up Sydney Harbour. In 1991, he served as a human shield in the Gulf peace camp in Iraq during the Gulf War.

Kaua'i

Mai ka lae o ke kumukahi Ha'ule iho mai nei, ka Wai Ola

(From the brow of the supreme source, droops/ falls/ descends, here to the core of all, the spiritual energy of life)

This was my first glimpse of Kamokila village. I was standing on the road across from 'Opaeka'a Falls on a Sunday afternoon, snapping pictures, on this, our last day on Kaua'i. My wife and I were taking a red-eye flight out of Lihue at 11:30 pm.

We had been exploring a string of heiaus, or temples, leading from the mouth of the Wailua to the river's source at the top of Wai'ale'ale'. We had taken the road as far as it would go to the site of a Hindu temple. On our way down, we decided to stop at the traditional Hawaiian village nestled in the valley below.

We had circumnavigated the entire island by that time. We had toured the Na Pali coastline, watched humpbacks rise from the sea, gone horseback riding up mountain trails in the rain, strolled windswept beaches strewn with driftwood. There was no lack of things to do or places to see. Take a look at Kauai: Mile by Mile, an excellent online guidebook, for a more detailed description of the island.

Now I was standing in this paradisal village, talking to Palani and his friend about the sacredness of this spot. Both of these young men are deep into Huna, an ancient shamanic practice, so our connection was immediate. Palani is a gifted storyteller intent on preserving his heritage and continuing the traditional practices of his people. His family has lived here for generations. He was explaining to me how some of the more powerful shamans are able to trap time by constructing rock structures in alignment with elemental forces. This spot, he said, was a portal. He refered to it as "the stronghold."

When I returned home, I discovered that an Ayahuasca Shamanism Conference, Retreat & Visionary Gathering is being held in the Amazonian rainforest this July. I was excited to find out that Dennis McKenna and Jeremy Narby are two of the facilitators attending this nine day gathering. I feel certain that this is the next step I must take, so after registering online, I'll need to procure a passport and book a flight to Lima, Peru. Expect a full account of the experience when I return.

Another shamanic connection is the work being done by Bill Donohue at the Hidden Meanings Conference Center in Forked River, NJ. He and I have discussed at some length the relation of DMT to the visionary experiences found in the Bible. Visit the Hidden Meanings web site for a wealth of mind-expanding information, including several videos of Bill's lectures.

Mai ka lae o ke kumukahi Ha'ule iho mai nei, ka Wai Ola.

Barack Obama (Size Does Matter)

I received the photo on the left, along with the following message, in my email box a few days ago:

Senator Barack Obama, Governor Bill Richardson, Senator Hillary Clinton and Ruth Harkin stand during the national anthem.

Barack Hussein Obama's photo (that's his real name)......the article said he REFUSED TO NOT ONLY PUT HIS HAND ON HIS HEART DURING THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE, BUT REFUSED TO SAY THE PLEDGE.....how in the hell can a man like this expect to be our next Commander-in-Chief????

A quick Google search turned up this page.

What strikes me most about the photo is the body language and proportions of the people arranged on the stage, not the scurillous suspicions raised in the message about Obama's fidelity to the country, a point I'll return to later.

First, let's deconstruct the elements that make up the photograph and see what we can discover.

Obama certainly appears to be the most relaxed of the four: shirt sleeves rolled below his elbows, fingers hooked together in front of his crotch, body centered, shoulders square, gaze focused. He is the tallest figure in the photo and stands in front of and just outside the frame of the American flag. He is firmly positioned at the forefront of the group.

Richardson, to me, looks like a deer caught in the glare of the headlights. His body is positioned in full frontal view of the camera, his head and torso surrounded by white stars against a blue background. From the camera's perspective, he appears half a head shorter than Obama. He's wearing blue jeans, cowboy boots, and an off-the-rack sports jacket. Despite the causual attire, he appears a bit uncomfortable to me. His mismatched clothing sends a discordant message, in contrast to Obama's better assembled, more collected look. Clothes may not make the man, but they can certainly help to define him.

Hillary is a shrunken figure, compared to the two male candidates, due to the camera angle. Her head is well below the level of Richardson's shoulder. The outward positioning of her body is similar to Richardson's, but her head is turned to the right. Unlike Richardson, the fingers of the hand placed over her heart are closed and her left arm is flat against the side of her body. Her outfit is fairly nondescript. She stands with her nose pressed against the blue square of stars that seems to rest on her right shoulder. She's the incongruous element at the center the composition, emphasizing the gross distortions in body size of each person in the shot.

Ruth Harkin is the least consequential person in the photo, and the most ill-at-ease. Her neck is bent, throwing her head out of alignment with her body. The flesh of her arms is exposed and her pants are too short to cover her bare ankles. The acute angle of her arm brings her right hand closer to her neck than her heart. She is clutching a paper in her left hand. She is the most isolated figure in the picture, analogous to the white chair on the far right--separate from the group and greatly diminished in size.

The photograph definitely casts Obama as a larger-than-life figure, standing a full half-head taller than Richardson. The flag, used as backdrop, proves to be an interesting measuring device that symbolically reveals the stature of the candidates.

The following video clip of the event offers an entirely different perspective from that of the photograph.

As far as the email comment goes, I think that anyone who can resist falling into the conventional postures most people automatically assume when in the public arena, would make an excellent commander-in-chief. I hope the next American president will be able to rise above national and partison interests and adopt a truly global perspective on world events. I think Obama has shown the greatest capacity to move in that direction.

Is there anyone in the field brave enough (or foolish enough, depending on your perspective) not to pledge allegience to God or to country? Such a gesture would be the kiss of death to any candidate. Obama is much too savvy for that.



Here is another email about Obama currently in circulation. Dirty politics, as usual.

Video: CNN Tackles Muslim and Pledge of Allegiance Smears of Barack Obama

The candidate who follows the dictates of his own conscience, who resists political posturing and pandering, wins my vote.

I'm intrigued by the symbolic content underlying the campaigns. I'm paying attention, trying to decode the deeper message, carried away on the powerful currents of this time cycle. It's all a matter of perspective:

There is a tide in the affairs of men.

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3, 218–224

The Oversoul as Saucer

(An excerpt from the talking book True Hallucinations by Terence McKenna.)

Read the complete text of chapters 20 and 21.

UFO Spotted Over Stephenville, Texas

UFO Sighting
Stephenville, Texas
Jan. 15, 2008

Steve Allen reported seeing an object that was a mile long and half a mile wide: "People wonder what in the world it is because this is the Bible Belt, and everyone is afraid it's the end of times. It was positively, absolutely nothing from these parts."

View the full CBS News report.

CNN's coverage of the Stephenville, Texas U.F.O. sighting.

Additional eyewitness accounts.


Fox News -- Stephenville, Texas UFO Report - AP Footage

The Shift

Are you ready for an evolutionary leap? Can this be the moment? Watch the video and join the movement. Find out more about The Shift of the Ages.

Moral Courage

In the midst of the 2008 political campaign, Dennis Kucinich offers a path forward that merits widespread public attention. A Kucinich supporter explains what we are up against in America this election cycle, why Kucinich's message needs to be heard, and the reason she finds his example of moral courage so inspiring. She makes the point that "if we don't wake up and realize what's going on, the corporate media will decide who the next president will be." Listen to what else she has to say in this video.



In the following video, Dennis Kucinich draws a correlation between domestic violence and world peace based on his own life experience. If we recognize the cultural dynamics of war, we can do something to change the type of thinking that produces war.



Kucinich challenges us to not only imagine, but to create, a new world based on principles of peace and nonviolence by integrating these principles into our everyday lives.



Take a look at the latest weekly update (1/21/08) from the Kucinich campaign.

TerranceMcKennaLand

I experimented with a new search engine named FileDonkey the other day, to see if I could unearth any new information posted online about McKenna.

TIMEWAVEZERO2012 is a Yahoo! group founded on March, 18, 2001 that consists of 1453 members. Read messages 253-256 to understand the reason for the club's formation and join the discussion.

TerranceMcKennaLand is perhaps the best resource if you're looking for total immersion. This site contains a large and well organized collection of video and audio files.

Watch the video clip Reality Hacking for McKenna's take on the primacy of language (encoded information) as the determinant of our reality.

Next week I will be traveling to Kauai for a week of exploration. I will try to keep in mind McKenna's sage advice: to push the weird edges of the phenomenal world.

Equine Assisted Psychotherapy

I just finished a three-day EAGALA training program held in Phoenix, Arizona on January 11-13. Attendees learned how to conduct an equine assisted psychotherapy session by participating in a variety of hands-on activities involving horses.

The therapy team is made up of three members: a horse, an equine specialist, and a mental health professional. The team assists a client or clients in addressing their emotional and behavioral issues by designing an activity that requires the clients to interact with one or more horses. The main job of the licensed therapist and the equine specialist is to carefully observe what happens during the session. The horse plays a pivitol role as a member of the therapy team by simply being a horse allowed to interact freely with the clients. Whatever surfaces during the session can be attributed to the physical presence of the horses as part of the group. The horse is the guide.

The photo shows the result of a role-playing activity called Extended Appendages. The participants, playing the roles of dysfunctional family members, attempt to harness one of two horses loose in a round pen. One of the fictional clients, a mother having difficulty communicating with her two teenage daughters, was chosen to be the "brain" who instructed the "two arms" (her estranged daughters) what to do.

Following the session, the clients "check in" with the therapists to process what went on, noting the ways in which the horses reacted to them. Using non-directive questioning techniques, the therapists state what they saw the horses doing and create metaphorical connections to the dynamic occuring within the family. In this way, the clients are confronted with their "issues" and challenged to discover their own solutions to the problems they are experiencing at home. As you might imagine, lots of personal "stuff" comes out during the session.

I will be blogging more about the shamanic connections to this type of work in subsequent posts.

Psychedelic Society

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.

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.

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

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.

http://acim.home.att.net/manual_contents.html

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.”

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.

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 Hawaii, which is dedicated to preserving tropical plants that are in danger of extinction, as well as the knowledge of their medicinal or herbal or shamanic usage. He begins by addressing “one of the centerpiece themes of aboriginal shamanism: the felt presence of some kind of alien intelligence.”

McKenna’s initial confrontation with “the felt presence of the other” occurred in the fall of 1967 after smoking DMT for the first time and came to him as “an astonishing personal surprise.” He likens the experience to “being struck by noetic lightning.” Afterwards, he set himself the goal of understanding this bizarre experience for which “there is no place in our world,” but that feels “overwhelmingly, existentially real.”

McKenna identifies “the psychedelic experience as it emerges out of nature” as the blind spot in Western culture. He theorizes that “as human societies interact with the psychedelic experience in nature, they inevitably secrete the institution of shamanism. Like a pearl around a sand grain, a nexus point, a loci of inter-dimensional data-flow, which is really what it is. Under certain conditions, which have to do with molecules that have evolved in these species which have a weirdly quasi-symbiotic relationship to our species, you strike through the veil. Melville said, ‘if you would strike, strike through the mask.’ And that's what's done, you strike through the mask of the coordinates of apparent reality. And then, something is there which to me is a miracle.”

He goes on to describe how his attempts to understand this experience led him to Nepal and later to Tibet to study pre-Buddhist shamanism. He eventually winds up living in the remote jungles of Indonesia, collecting butterflies, totally immersed in “the real fact of the rain forest; the real fact of organic nature.” It was in this jungle that he came to understand how “nature is communication and how nature ultimately resolves itself into a self-reflecting, syntactical metasystem, right down to the DNA.”

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.”

McKenna concludes his talk by reasserting his contention that “Nature is the great teacher” and by positing an emerging paradigm of the spirit whose components include “an empowering of direct experience, a return to the feminine, and a legitimizing of the presence of the vaster regions of the unconscious.” Psychedelic plants can help prepare us for the great adventure ahead.

Following his talk, McKenna answers questions from the audience about his theory of the timewave and provides a reading of our current situation in the historical process.

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

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:

“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.

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.