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Space Time Continuum with Terence McKenna
Alien Dreamtime was a multimedia event recorded live on Feb 27th 1993
AD Web sampler at City of Tribes
All right.. Tonight for your edification and amusement,
three raves, two interegnums. Visions by Rose-X. Didjeridu: Steven
Kent, and sound by Spacetime. Words and ideas by Terence McKenna. Rap 1,
The Archaic Revival.
History is ending because the
dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the
inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers.
Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past
looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we
ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of
the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies,
before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and
monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us
because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret
faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the
paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind
is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains
of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the
animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring
creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows
that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the
past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of
history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this
because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the
community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a
new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in
the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology,
and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is
supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators,
the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner
worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience -
and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the
dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate
experience, but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out
of the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace
what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN
THE BODY, there are Niagras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are
part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave
without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever
having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The
mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature. What the
Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the
defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people
are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have
the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all
reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of
separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all
connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're
calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of
the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert
of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be
set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self
through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality,
intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward
escape into hyperspace.
Hello... So like that was an
introduction, now for some preaching to the choir on the subject of how come
it is that the further in you go the bigger it gets. I remember the very, very
first time that I smoked DMT. It was sort of a benchmark you might say, and I
remember that this friend of mine that always got there first visited me with
this little glass pipe and this stuff which looked like orange mothballs. And
since I was a graduate of Dr. Hoffman's I figured there were no surprises. So
the only question I asked is, 'How long does it last?' and he said, 'About
five minutes.' So I did it and... (long pause, audience cheers) there was a
something, like a flower, like a chrysanthemum in orange and yellow that was
sort of spinning, spinning, and then it was like I was pushed from behind and
I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place that didn't seem like a
state of mind, it seemed like another place. And what was going on in this
place aside from the tastefully socketed indirect lighting, and the crawling
geometric hallucinations along the domed walls, what was happening was that
there were a lot of ahh.. beings in there, what I call self-transforming
machine elves. Sort of like jewelled basketballs all dribbling their way
toward me. And if they'd had faces they would have been grinning, but they
didn't have faces. And they assured me that they loved me and they told me not
to be amazed; not to give way to astonishment. And so I watched them, even
though I wondered if maybe I hadn't really done it this time, and what they
were doing was they were making objects come into existence by singing them
into existence. Objects which looked like Faberge eggs from Mars morphing
them- selves with mandiean(sp) alphabetical structures. They looked like the
concrescence of liguistic intentionality put through a kind of
hyper-dimensional transform into three-dimensional space. And these little
machines offered themselves to me. And I realized when I looked at them that
if I could bring just one of these little trinkets back, nothing would ever be
quite the same again. And I wondered, Where Am I? And What Is Going On? It
occurred to me that these must be holographic viral projections from an
autonomous continuum that was somehow intersecting my own, and then I thought
a more elegant explaination would be to take it at face value and realize that
I had broken into an ecology of souls. And that somehow I was getting a peek
over the other side. Somehow I was finding out that thing that you cheerfully
assume you can't find out. But it felt like I was finding out. And it felt..
and then I can't remember what it felt like because the little
self-transforming tykes interrupted me and said, 'Don't think about it. Don't
think about who you are. Think about doing what we're doing. Do it. Do it now.
DO IT!!'
And what they meant was use
your voice to make an object. And as I understood, I felt a bubble kind of
grow inside of me. And I watched these little elf tykes jumping in and out of
my chest; they like to do that to reassure you. And they said, 'Do it.' And I
felt language rise up in me that was unhooked from english, and I began to
speak.. like this, 'Ehh yo ca dem wa, etc.. .. or words to that effect. And I
wondered then what it all meant and why it felt so good if it didn't mean
anything. And I thought about it, a few years actually, and I decided that
meaning and language are two different things. And that what the alien voice
in the psychedelic experience wants to reveal is the syntactical nature of
reality. That the real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and
that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it
whatever you wish. (More unintelligible tongue here..) And one of the things
that I learned about DMT was that if you've ever had it, even just once, then
you can have a dream, and in this dream somebody will pull out a little glass
pipe, and then it will happen! It will happen just like the real thing.
Because there's a button somewhere inside each and every one of us that gives
you a look into the other side. And that's the button that resets the compass
that tells you where you want to sail. Good luck...
Hello.. alright. Have you ever
noticed how ahh, there's this quality to reality which comes and goes, and
kind of ebbs and flows and nobody ever mentions it or has a name for it except
some people call it a 'bad hair day' or some people say 'Things are really
weird recently.' And I think we never notice it and we never talk about it
because we're embedded in a culture that expects us to believe that all times
are the same, and that your bank account doesn't fluctuate except according to
the vicissitudes of your own existence. In other words, every moment is
expected to be the same and yet this isn't what we experience. And so what I
noticed was that running through reality is the ebb and
flow of novelty. And some days, and some years, and some centuries are
very novel indeed, and some ain't. And they come and go on all scales
differently, interweaving, resonating. And this is what time seems to be. And
Science has overlooked this, this most salient of facts about nature: that
nature is a novelty conserving engine. And that from the very first moments of
that most improbable big bang, novelty has been conserved because in the very
beginning there was only an ocean of energy pouring into the universe. There
were no planets, no stars, no molecules, no atoms, no magnetic fields; there
was only an ocean of free electrons. And then time passed and the universe
cooled and novel structures crystallized out of disorder. First, atoms; atoms
of hydrogen and helium aggregating into stars. And at the center of those
stars the temperature and the pressure created something which had never been
seen before which was fusion. And fusion cooking in the hearts of stars
brought forth more novelty: heavy elements - iron, carbon, four-valent carbon.
And as time passed there were not only then elementary systems but because of
the presence of carbon and the lower temperatures in the universe, molecular
structures. And out of molecules come simple subsets of organism. The genetic
machinery for transcripting information, aggregating into membranes, always
binding novelty, always condensing time, always building and conserving upon
complexity, and always faster and faster and faster. And then we come to
ourselves. And where do WE fit into all of this. Five million years ago we
were an animal of some sort. Where will we be five million years from tonight?
What we represent is not a sideshow, or an epiphenomenon, or an ancillary
something-or-other on the edge of nowhere. What WE represent is the nexus of
concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying
itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years.
There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind
your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified complexified
structure in the known universe. We are the cutting edge of organismic
transformation of matter in this cosmos. And this has been going on for a
while; since the discovery of fire, since the discovery of language. But now,
and by now I mean in the last 10,000 years, we've been into something new. Not
genetic information, not genetic mutation, not natural selection, but
epigenetic activity: writing, theatre, poetry, dance, art, tattooing, body
piercing and philisophy. And these things have accelerated the ingression into
novelty so that we have become an idea excreting force in nature that builds
temples, builds cities, builds machines, social engines, plans, and spreads
over the Earth, into space, into the micro-physical domain, into the
micro-physical domain. We, who five million years ago were animals, can kindle
in our deserts and if necesary upon the cities of our enemies the very energy
which lights the stars at night. Now, something peculiar is going on here.
Something is calling us out of nature and sculpting us in it's own image. And
the confrontation with this something is now not so far away. This is what the
impending apparent end of everything actually means. It means that the
de-no-ma(?) of human history is about to occur and is about to be revealed as
a universal process of compressing and expressing novelty that is now going to
become so intensified that it is going to flow over into another dimension.
You can feel it. You can feel it in your own dreams. You can feel it in
your own trips. You can feel that we're approaching the cusp of a catastrophe,
and that beyond that cusp we are unrecognizable to ourselves. The wave of
novelty that has rolled unbroken since the birth of the universe has now
focussed and coalesced itself in our species. And if it seems unlikely to you
that the world is about to transform itself, then think of it this way: think
of a pond, and think of how if the surface of the pond begins to boil - that's
the signal that some enormous protean form is about to break the surface of
the pond and reveal itself. Human history IS the boiling of the pond surface
of ordinary biology. We are flesh which has been caught in the grip of some
kind of an attractor that lies ahead of us in time, and that is sculpting us
to its ends; speaking to us through psychedelics, through visions, through
culture, and technology, consciousness. The language forming capacity in our
species is propelling itself forward as though it were going to shed the
monkey body and leap into some extra-surreal space that surrounds us, but that
we can not currently see. Even the people who run the planet, the World Bank,
the IMF, you name it, they know that history is ending. They know by the
reports which cross their desks: the disappearance of the ozone hole [?], the
toxification of the ocean, the clearing of the rain forests. What this means
is that the womb of the planet has reached its finite limits, and that the
human species has now, without choice, begun the decent down the birth canal
of collective transformation toward something right around the corner and
nearly completely unimaginable. And this is where the psychedelic shaman comes
is because I believe that what we really contact through psychedelics is a
kind of hyperspace. And from that hyperspace we look down on..., we look down
on both the past and the future, and we anticipate the end. And a shaman is
someone who has seen the end, and therefore is a trickster, because you don't
worry if you've seen the end. If you know how it comes out you go back and you
take your place in the play, and you let it all roll on without anxiety. This
is what boundary dissolution means. It means nothing less than the
anticipation of the end state of human history. A return to the archaic mode.
A rediscovery of the orgiastic freedom of the African grasslands of 20,000
years ago. A techno-escape forward into a future that looks more like the past
than the future because materialism, consumerism, product-fetishism, all of
these things will be eliminated and technology will become nanotechnology and
disappear from our physical presence. If we have the dream, if we allow the
wave of novelty to propel us toward the creativity that is inimitable to the
human condition. That's what we're talking about here: psychedelics as a
catalyst to the human imagination, psychedelics as a catalyst for language;
because what cannot be said, cannot be created by the community. So what we
need then is the forced evolution of language. And the way to do that is to go
back to the agents that created language in the very first place. And that
means the psychedelic plants, the Gaian Logos, and the mysterious, beckoning,
extraterrestrial minds beyond. Hooking ourselves back up in to the chakras of
the hierarchy of nature, turning ourselves over to the mind of the total other
that created us and brought us forth out of animal organization. We are
somehow part of the planetary destiny. How well we do determines how well the
experiment of life on Earth does, because we have become the cutting edge of
that experiment, we define it, and we hold in our hands the power to make or
to break it.
This is not a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse. This is not a
pseudo-millenium. This is the real thing folks. This is not a test. This is
the last chance before things become so dissipated that there is no chance for
cohesiveness. We can use the calender as a club. We can make the millenium an
occasion for establishing an authentic human civilization, overcoming the
dominator paradigm, dissolving boundaries through psychedelics, recreating a
sexuality not based on monotheism, monogamy and monotony. We.. All these
things are possible if we can understand the overarching metaphor which holds
it together which is the celebration of mind as play, the celebration of love
as a genuine social value in the community. This is what they have suppressed
so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they
understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's
being you can't be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism. The message of
psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values
rather than products. This is terrifying news. And if we are able to make this
point then we can pull back, we can pull back and we can transcend. Nine times
in the last million years the ice has ground south from the poles pushing
human populations ahead of it and those people didn't fuck up. Why should we
then? We are all survivors. We are the inheritors of a million years of
striving for the unspeakable. And now with the engines of technology in our
hands we ought to be able to reach out and actually exteriorize the human soul
at the end of time, invoke it into existence like a UFO and open the violet
doorway into hyperspace and walk through it, out of profane history and into
the world beyond the grave, beyond shamanism, beyond the end of history, into
the galactic millenium that has beckoned to us for millions of years across
space and time. THIS IS THE MOMENT. A planet brings forth an opportunity like
this only once in its lifetime, and we are ready, and we are poised. And as a
community we are ready to move into it, to claim it, to make it our own.