A fascinating spoken word piece performed by
technoshaman,
Terence McKenna, set to other-worldly ambient grooves provided by
SpaceTime Continuum. Its an interesting rant that pulls in elements of
Chaos Theory,
Sociology,
Molecular Biology and
psychadelics. This CD is certainly one of the stranger pieces in my music collection. Here is a transcript (heisted from the net) of McKenna's preachings. Although this arguably falls under
People who argue, using terms they refuse to define, its still quite fun and occasionally thought provoking... Without further ado:
SpaceTime Continuum
with Terence McKenna
ALIEN DREAMTIME
Alien Dreamtime was a multi media event recorded live on February
26th/27th 1993 at the Transmission theater, San Francisco, Ca. A video of
this event produced by Rose-X media house is available through City of
Tribes Communications 63 Fountain st, SF, Ca 94114. The didgeridoo is
played with the greatest respect for all the aboriginal people of
Australia and the spirit of all first world people. All tracks published
by Space Monkey.
All right... tonight, for your edification and amusement... three raves, two
interregnums. Visions by Rose X. Didgeredoo, Stephen Kent. And sound by
Space Time. Words and ideas by Terence McKenna. Rap one:
The Archaic Revival.
History is ending, because the dominator culture has led the human species
into a blind alley. And as the inevitable chaostrophe 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 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 20th century is not modernism. The secret faith of the 20th
century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the Paleolithic, and
that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock
and 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 chose 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 were going in the universe. And that true story is that the ego is a
product of pathology and that when
psilocybin is regularly part of the
human experience, the ego is suppressed. And the suppression 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 feeling 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 Niagaras 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 having sex. It means that you never figured out
what it was all about. The mystery is in the body, and the way the body
works itself into nature. What the archaic revival means is shamanism,
ecstasy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the
people, and the three enemies of the people are monotheism, monogamy, and
monotony. And if you get them on the run, you have the dominators
sweating, folks. Because that means that youre getting it all reconnected,
and get 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 were 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 thats the idea, that were figuring out how to reset the
compass of the self, through community, through ecstatic dance, through
psychedelics, intelligence-- intelligence... this is what we have to have
to make the forward escape into hyperspace.
I'm gonna take five here, and uh, well be back and chat some more...
Alien Love
Hello... so, that was like an introduction, ha ha! 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 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. Hofmann's, I figured
there were no
surprises. So the only question I asked was how long does it last? And he
said, About five minutes. So, I did it. And...
There was uh, something like a flower. Like a chrysanthemum in orange and
yellow that 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 soffited
indirect lighting and the crawling hallucinations along the domed wall),
what was happening was that there were a lot of beings in there, a lot of
what I call self-transforming machine elves. Sort of like jeweled
basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they had faces they
would've been grinning at me, 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 themselves with
Mandaean alphabetical structures. They looked like the concrescence of
linguistic intentionality put through a kind of hyperdimensional 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? And 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 explanation 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 tikes interrupted me and said, Don't think about
it. Don't think about who we are-- think about doing what were doing. Do
it! Do it now. Do it!
Speaking in Tongues
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 tikes jumping in and out of my chest (they liked 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:
Eeeoo ded hwauopsy mectoph, mectagin dupwoxin, moi phoi wops eppepepekin
gitto phepsy demego doi aga din a doich demoi aga donc heedey obectdee
doohueana.
(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, you know, 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 make of it, whatever you
wish!
Eh moi dea doi phegenheggo...
And one of the things that I learned about
DMT, was that, if you 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 theres a button somewhere inside
each and every one of us that gives you a look into the other side. And
thats the button that resets the compass that tells you where you want to
sail. Good luck!
Timewave Zero
Hello, all right. Have you ever noticed how, um, 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 that some people call it a bad
hair day or they say, Things are really weird recently. And I think we
never notice it and we never talk about it because were 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,
resonantly. 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, forvalent
carbon. And as time passed, there not only then, elemental 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
organisms, 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 concressent 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 and 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 awhile. Since the
discovery of fire, since the discovery of language, but now, and by now, I
mean for 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 philosophy. 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 microphysical domain; into the
macrophysical domain. We, who five million years were animals, can kindle
in our deserts and if necessary 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 its 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 denouement of human
history is about to occur and is about to be revealed as a universal
process of concressing 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 were 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 focused 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, thats 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 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, but that we cannot 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, that the disappearance of the ozone hole, the toxification of
the ocean, the clearing of the rainforests, 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 descent 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 in. Because I believe that
what we really contact through psychedelics is a kind of hyperspace, and
from that hyperspace, 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 youve 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 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-- if-- we have the dream. If we allow the
wave of novelty to propel us toward the creativity that is inimicable to
the human condition.
This is what were 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 that we need then,
is the forced evolution of language, and the way to do that is to go back
to 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, into the chakras
of the hierarchy of nature, turning ourselves over to the mind of the
Totally 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-millennium. 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 calendar as a club. We can make
the millennium 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. All these things are possible. If we can
understand the overarching metaphor which holds it all 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
elses being, you can't be led into thing fetishism and consumerism. The
message of psychedelics is that culture can be reengineered as a set of
emotional values, rather than products. This is terrifying news. And if
we are able to make this point, 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 violent 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 millennium 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. Its there-- go for it! And thank you!